Plagiarism versus the new online reality

Memiwanzi recently touches on the origin of the word plagiarism but in this one case, the meaning is far more interesting than the etymology to me.

Ah plagiarism and its related demon, intellectual property rights. With the digital age, "plagiarism" becomes terribly confusing morally and intellectually, if not effectively meaningless. Some intellectual issues follow:

1. Define "copy". Copying can be whole or in part, so at what point can the act of copying be sensibly called "plagiarism"? How can such a fuzzy delineation be made methodical and fair?

2. Define "author". On the net, what does "author" really mean if, say, someone remixes a preexisting song? What if the derivative work of another gains more social value than the original work of an original author? And then should one be paid for derivative works too? How derivative is "too derivative" though?

3. Define the basic moral issue with "plagiarism". Is plagiarism an issue about recognition of authorship, financial compensation, social appreciation, a combination of the above, or something else? Or is this more broadly about the fair compensation of any contributor (anonymous or otherwise, online or off) by means of any "currency" (based on financial value or some other value) according to the overall "value" of the contribution (evaluated by any kind of value or group of values)?

4. A new participatory economy? How might the pre-digital-age free-market model adapt to the new reality of open information exchange where "copying" is a gradient concept, "value" includes non-financial metrics, and where collective contribution and exchange blur the lines of an agent with her environment?

To resolve this pesky issue of plagiarism, we need a new digital economy that:
A) upholds the netizen's inherent right to copy and paste information.
B) recognizes doubly that mere copying adds no participatory value to the system.
C) sufficiently rewards contribution according to its measure of originality and overall social worth.
D) destroys any meaningful gain (in time and money) from stealing another person's work.

Cage Innoye has many interesting insights on just such an economy at his blog Diverse Philosophy. Whatever their exact details may be, competent solutions demand less laws and a more developed value theory.

Blogger can't seem to handle long comments

Before some readers think it's my fault, I just need to make yet another Google-hates-us-all post concerning the bloated bureaucracy's inability to handle long comment posts in its Blogger sites. You may have seen the dreaded user-hostile Google error if your posts were too long. Strangely, when I reach this error page, it turns out that the comment had posted anyways! I recommend to commenters who experience this issue to first check whether your comment has posted despite the error on my page. (Remember to refresh the page.) Another very handy trick is to first highlight the entire message you're about to send (press Ctrl-A), then copy it (press Ctrl-C) so that if Google does eat your time-consuming message, you can still repaste it (by pressing Ctrl-V) into the commentbox again or by saving it in a file for a later attempt. Keeping messages brief and to-the-point is always well-advised of course. Sorry about this but my hands are tied here.

Google has sat on their ass for at least two months on this important issue while commenters keep voicing the problem. Which is why I assert...

Google hates us all. <;o(

Google is officially random. (And yes, my blog is back...)

Today, possibly around noon or so, my blog was removed. It turns out that Blogger, owned by Google, decided that it was a neat idea to block access to my Gmail account and my blogger account at the same time, while also blocking everyone else's access to my blog that I've been faithfully contributing to for years. A damaging message was placed on it to the effect of "This blog has been removed." Obviously, it's not... now.

At the time all Google told me is that it was due to a "violation". Violation of what? From me? How on earth?? I maintain a mundane linguistics blog. How did this become too X-rated to handle all of a sudden? Sufficed to say, my heart dropped and I was completely floored that Google's system could really be this asinine. Yet it is. And it gets even more suspect as I was to soon discover.

I was given only two options to remedy the situation. The first thing I tried was to use their contact form. But let's face it. We all know that the Google Team would take their sweet time responding because I, you and everyone else is just a number in their overblown bureaucracy. By that point, all my readers would be completely gone and my blog effectively destroyed just by some retarded technicality. And keep in mind, Google was just not telling me what the "violation" was! Why the secret?

I was leery of the second option that Google provided. Supposedly, my account could be "immediately" unblocked if I simply provided them one teensy thing: my cellphone number. Excuse me? That's really getting personal. I don't hand my cellphone to everybody because I don't want jerks phoning me or advertisers harassing me with their wares. But Google had me by the balls and was essentially holding my blog and email account for randsome until I divulged my personal info which may or may not be compromised in the future. I caved in, shelled out the number, and magically, the block was lifted and my blog restored.

WTF IS GOING ON?!!!!

Checking into my gmail, I noticed a message in my account that I never wrote. Now I had the disturbing answer. Apparently some jackass hacker from Russia had cracked into Google's servers and used numerous accounts just to spam some stupid site of theirs to each victim's contact emails. Swell! So basically, my worst fears realized: Google, not being able to keep my email, my blog account or even its own server secure now has my cellphone number to be abused too. Hooray!

I'm so turned off with Google at this point, I mean war. I'm thinking of ways to wean myself off of Google products quickly and Wordpress is looking good now. I'll be looking into that shortly. I expect better handling of the problem than this from a legitimate "service" but it seems that nowdays "service" has become a jaded term designating its complete opposite. Freedom is slavery; war is peace; service is random.

A tasty bucket of 'chicking'

John Wells recently stood up to a distractive commenter on John Wells's phonetic blog:

"Sometimes the comments on this blog get sidetracked into topics that have nothing to do with the subject of the blog posting to which they are appended. So it was on 28 November, when David Marjanović was surprised 'that anyone would seriously say anything other than [ˈt͡ʃɪkŋ̩]' for chicken."

The insincerity of pronouncing "chicken" as "chicking" is obvious to most simply by the word-final en. In fact, the statement is so transparently false that we might naturally start wondering if this is a sign of a highly intelligent yet obnoxious troll with a specialty in subtle academic confrontation.

Yet this "David Marjanović" insists he's a graduate student in paleobiology and spends his time on Wikipedia earning Barnstar rewards to prove it while informing us of his taste for fine mint chocolate chip ice-cream. Earlier on my blog, he came to the defense of the dubious North Caucasian hypothesis in a comment that takes up several pages. At the time, I found the length of his commentary just a tad odd but I rolled with it, answering his many concerns, fake or not, at least for the benefit of other readers if not for him. In hindsight, one has to wonder about the intentions of someone who starts it all off with:

"First of all, as a biologist, it baffles me to no end that historical linguists talk about 'proof', 'unproven hypotheses' and suchlike."

Meanwhile on Language Hat, after commenter marie-lucie completely fabricated statements I never made just for lulz, David chimed in to dish out some of his own self-defacing sadism:

"No wonder. [Glen Gordon]'s so aggressive he's probably literally incapable of getting a paper published."

This of course has "self-talk" written all over it. In all of these instances, he is accompanied by other trolls (see sockpuppet for more information). It would appear that all it took was a skepticism of both Wikipedia and long-range reconstructions to provide him with a motive for this mean-spirited behaviour. The "aggressive" label he uses here is becoming cliché now after so many trolls have been using it to shut down opposition. Enough.


UPDATE
(13 December 2009) Another Language Hat troll came to the rescue of marie-lucie. He informed me that the "offending" blog entry in question is Some observations concerning Woodard's The Ancient Languages of Europe and pertains to my "shame" in calling the Etruscan f a "bilabial fricative". Oh dear, we'll have to tell Larissa Bonfante, a noted Etruscan specialist, that she's an idiot too then. {chuckle} Or maybe we can just stick the sad troll's meaningless letter in the garbage can along with his overzealous schadenfreude and add relevant footnotes with required reading for those sincerely interested in the Etruscan language.

Comments on the Etusco-Latin tupi/tōfus connection

As probably some can tell by my previous explanation of the rules of this blog, I recently received a comment that irritates me for the reasons already mentioned: stubborn to facts, condemning the very act of speculation even when facts are present, and being all-in-all too stubborn to look up viewpoints that are contrary to one's own. The internet is not just a valuable tool of self-expression but a powerful tool for research. This is why I can't understand those who will take the time to comment but never take the same amount of time to do their homework. Evidently further facts need to be known by some readers here.

First, here's a portion of the aggravating comment I received in response to the connections made between Latin tōfus and Etruscan tupi but which I promptly deleted for being unnecessarily ornary and also thoroughly invalid:

"Between you claiming (with no proof) that word X is Etruscan and an ancient Roman claiming an Etruscan origin for word Y, the latter is naturally more trusted, more reliable. Let's take this way, how many scholars quote you for words claimed of Etruscan origins and how many scholars quote, let's say, Varro?"

In no uncertain terms, this naive person is evaluating statements based on popularity (ie. 'how many times they are quoted')! And notice the word "trusted". Does that mean "trusted by European society"? "Trusted by elites"? "Trusted by published scholars approved only by a handful of reknowned institutions"? "Trusted by democractic vote"? Trusted by whom? And why should we care about the trust of others when rationally evaluating for ourselves the validity of claims? Ugh, blind credentialism at its worse. Surely Varro et alia aren't trusted a priori based on valid Logic since all statements must be evaluated regardless of their source to avoid one of the most common and ugly pitfalls of reasoning referred to as argumentatum ad hominem (literally 'argument towards the person') or simply ad hominem. How can a competent reader ignore the myriad of tall tales woven by these same classical authors regarding eponymous ethnic origins and wild legends incorporating both gods and men? Ceteris paribus, authors (regardless of who they are or when they lived) can be both correct or incorrect. At face value we can't tell. So source is patently irrelevant no matter how artfully a heckler stands on his head. Nice try though. DELETE!

A related argument, invalid for the same reasons, I had already allowed through to my commentbox:

"No offense, I find far more reliable the glosses of ancient Latin authors who might have even heard Etruscan in their lifetime than the speculations of a modern blogger based on formal resemblances."

Offense or no offense, the statement is patently ridiculous for several reasons. It makes me frankly a little annoyed that the reader apparently fails to realize something he could have looked up for himself. The most important fact is that the relationship of Latin tōfus and Etruscan tupi cannot be labeled a "modern blogger speculation" at all since blogs hadn't been invented yet ** in 1932 when Fiesel's article entitled Etruskisch tupi and lateinisch tofus had been published in Studi Etruschi **! Yes, folks. This blogger speculation has been around for at least 77 years! Again, nice try but no cigar.

As far as I've personally read, this interesting connection remains unresolved which is why I find it's important to talk about it. Speculation-haters be damned. If only certain commenters stopped feeling the need to cast stones at new ideas when ironically unwilling to look up the absurdity of their own statements and views, but then maybe that would take a bit of the spice out of scholarly life. Can't have the good without the bad, I'm afraid.

Blogger lynchmobs - Get out the pitchforks!

Given recent comments, let's overtly explain what my intentions are as a blogger and how I moderate my blog against the general intrusions of internet nonsense. Paleoglot discusses comparative linguistics (most often on Proto-IE and ancient Aegean languages), but I will often speculate about things that are of interest to me based on existing facts. Please note the following:

• Fact-based speculation and random speculation are not the same nor on a par.
• Healthy fact-based skepticism is not equal to toxic absolutive skepticism based on petty feeling.
• Speculation is not a danger to Reason for those with minds sophisticated enough to separate fact from fantasy.
• In fact, without speculation, we lack a vital step in the learning process since speculation helps us reflect on the implications of new information.
• We must have clear reasons for our objections, not just for our personal conclusions.
• I reserve the right to delete comments that I deem unconstructive (whether abusive, factless or downright nutty).
• I don't distinguish trolls from genuine but stubbornly ignorant persons - both are unworthy to have voice in an academic forum. (ie. This isn't a kindergarten.)

There are no quicker ways to make my trigger-happy finger delete your comment, besides being insulting to other commenters, than to have people repeat facts and references over and over, chastise me for merely blogging/speculating/expressing, or reducing one's rebuttals to vacuous denials of facts presented without further substantiation.

Effective moderation, anonymity and the "good faith" fallacy

Let's make this clear and concise. Contrary to dismayingly popular belief, "good faith" is not a logical principle whatsoever. The tip-off is the two completely subjective words that this obnoxious term is composed of: "good" and "faith".

First, what is "good"? We learn thoroughly from a proper knowledge of history and world issues that this question is silly because it can be different from culture to culture and period to period. It was okay to burn women accused of witchcraft once. Now, not so much. In Canada, we support the rights of women to vote and own property. In Afghanistan, not so much. No matter how conscientious and seemingly well-argued one's opinion of what is good, there will always be another who will oppose it with a differing point of view. So as practitioners of logic, it's pointless for us to dwell on what is "good" or "evil" since these are terms with more interpretations than there are people in the world, causing an unhealthy "infinite loop" in reasoning.

Then there is the term "faith". I don't have faith. I never will. I don't intend to (re)start either. During my childhood, I was indoctrinated to believe by my well-meaning fundamentalist parents that the earth could only be 6000 years, no matter what the purportedly evil scientific evidence, and that evolution was an intentful academic conspiracy meant to undermine the faithful worship of God. I just had to have faith to suspend all logic just waiting to bubble up from my severly oppressed brain. Been there, done that, never ever again. Like the term "good", there are more belief systems than the stars in the sky. "Faith" should never be uttered in logical, objective discussion and yet far too often it is by not just the woefully uneducated but even by persons with university degrees!

Now, if both "good" and "faith" are such irrational and meaningless terms, what then of the combined term "good faith" which is supposed to simply mean "compliance with standards of decency and honesty" (cf. Answers.com: good faith)... and which is in itself clearly another subjective term. The term usually ends up being redefined as a philosophy of belief that one should always **assume** that a person's intent is **good** unless **shown otherwise**. Three logical issues here involve idle assumption, the imposition of a subjective term "good", and the matter of when if ever it can be convincingly "shown otherwise" that a person's intent is "un-good". Rational-minded people will see the dilemma immediately in this nonsense since, if we cannot logically define what is "good", we will never be able to define what is "un-good" or "bad". Therefore, good faith is nothing more than a covert carte blanche for trolls to castrate all reasoning from mature communication and snuff out any flames of constructivity. As long as good faith is allowed to dictate, there are no limits to stupidity or maliciousness, both of which have the exact same deleterious effect anyways despite the common false dilemma.

If a blogger or forum moderator is mature and sensible enough, (s)he will recognize that logical debate must be governed by nothing else than logic itself, not something as puerile as good faith, blind faith or any other senseless kind of faith. When done unslothfully, negative elements despite the cowardly anonymity of the speaker can be sussed out of a debating group immediately, even before the potentially harmful comments are posted, by the consistency of their dyslogical statements that regularly employ any number of the well-known logical fallacies long ago exposed. No more idée-fixes or beating dead horses with circular arguments because we can gauge the presence of logic by logical means. This "pruning" by the blogger or forum moderator is not to be done out of emotion, as is far too often done, but only by conscious logical assessment. While it may seem "mean" to bleeding hearts, the result is that not only will angry trolls be silenced, but also silly children who have little yet to offer a mature debate in their forgivable ignorance, and the hopelessly insane who can never be reasoned with no matter what incontrovertible fact is presented. Alas, the effectiveness of one's moderation is fully incumbent on one's comprehension of logic, something which is not intuitive for most.

I believe that once we get active and take the extra effort to properly moderate the websites we go to the bother of creating and advertising in the first place, such websites will become a breath of fresh air in contrast to the immaturity of the surrounding internet where the one with the biggest mouth and smallest brain wins. I can only suspect that good faith has been so popularized as it has because of confused religious zealots who sincerely take great strides in believing that all people are somehow constructive and "good" despite all the facts otherwise, and the tragically lazy who can't be bothered to own up to their own online commitments at the expense of their readership.

And now for something more amusing...


Interesting quotes on the abuses of the "good faith" mantra
(and consequently why I don't respect it)

"The rule itself means that you are to... almost literally, take a lawn-mower to your brain. You are to assume that every edit by every user is done with the best interests of Wikipedia and 'truth' at heart. Each edit is to be assumed as though the editor is free from bias and that the edit is designed to advance the concept of learning and knowledge and all these fluffy flowery things that we SHOULD all value. This rule itself, however, shelters trolls and those who come with a point of view they wish to propagandize."
The Evil Vigilante, Musings on why Wikipedia fails (July 2007)

"Since the High Court overruled the General Medical Council and reinstated Professor Sir Roy Meadow it has been 12 days and counting. Yet the implications have not yet been fully understood. You can get away with being wrong, the judgment seems to say, as long as you were wrong in good faith. You should not be disciplined by your professional body, even if that body deems that you have broken its rules."
Times Online, In good faith? A bad excuse (March 2006)


"In other words, would any solitary human worthy of the name be recreationally cruel to a sick or weak person when he stood to gain nothing?"

"Internet trolls regularly tread on gouty toes. They trick vulnerable people with whom they have no quarrel; they upset those people; they humiliate them; they break their hearts; they mess with them. They do it for something Hume didn’t perfectly name: the lulz — the spiteful high."

"The troll behaviors that are classic on the Internet are actually more readily and narrowly defined — deliberately inciting hatred repeatedly so as to disrupt and annoy. It’s an absence of good faith; it’s opposition-defiance disorder sort of behaviour constantly challenging the rules just for the sake of challenging them, not for the higher cause of establishing the truth, or advocating a sincerely-held point of view."
The Medium, Trolling for Ethics: Mattathias Schwartz’s Awesome Piece on Internet Poltergeists (July 2008)

Now, after proving how inanely subjective the term is and the problems that it condones or even causes, who in their right mind would still utter the phrase "good faith"? Quite frankly no one. Only mentally lazy individuals (aka "troll enablers") or bona fide trolls, neither of which are of much use to academic debate or society. Stay true, fellow logicians.

How debate is done in the hive

Rasna is a forum giving non-blogging Etruscan enthusiasts a voice. Here I found some chitchat about me discussed only yesterday: Interesting Links,Books,Articles,Topics, etc etc on the mysteriousetruscans.com website. Delicious! Here's the basic run-down of the conversation:

turanclancloth:
"http://paleoglot.blogspot.com/search/label/etruscan ... I found this blog spot about Etruscans what you think of it?"

Tanaquil Lupus:
"He might pay some attention to his English while he's at it. He spelled 'Bear with me' as 'Bare with me,' [...] I have no idea from a brief glance what his credentials are and how valid or not his assertions."

Marce Camitlnas:
"Reasonably literate I guess, but the point is that he makes a few basic blunders. [...] Adolfo Zavaroni came up with pava meaning young man independently. I don't know if he's right or not, but he sounds very convinced of himself (warning bell number 1). His grammatical argument is sound as far as it goes, but given than there are 'weak' and 'strong' genitives in Etruscan, he's way too sure of his conclusion. I think he's pushing the envelope too far given that we don't really know how the genitive worked in practice. The other section that had me (even as a non etruscologist) slightly bemused: "Massimo Pallottino hypothesized in 1979 that Tarχies refers to Tages, a child divinity with the wisdom of an old man that popped up in the fields one day. I'm usually skeptical of what many of these Etruscologists say but I think I can swallow that idea nicely." [...] Terms such as 'blasphemous'^[1] tell me that it's not exactly a serious site."

As of now, this is where the rather depressing discussion has ended. Sigh. Dare I say, yet another classic example of internet hivemind^[2]: a mob of sheepish people hiding behind impersonal names, blending anonymously into the crowd to avoid the responsibility of reciprocal criticism. And then there's this disturbingly unremorseful attitude towards confessing how unknowledgeable they remain in a field they profess to love while still talking about it as though they were knowledgeable or interested. That's the kind of self-defeatist attitude of a pathological nihilist with strong feelings of low self-worth that I'm trying to shake everyone out of because the subtext of their words then scream out: "I'm cool because I'm a zero. I prefer to remain a shallow, happy-go-lucky child rather than take up responsibility for my self-respect, my self-directed education and my individuality. Rather, I will attack people for their own self-respect, self-directed education and strong sense of individuality to make them feel like a nameless nobody as I feel."^[3] We all have seen the latest tendencies in modern society to attack visible people as "arrogant", "bombastic" or "full of oneself" when in fact it's often the attackers themselves that aren't psychologically strong enough to step up to the plate and contribute something healthier to society. Warning bells? Right. I'd think the real so-called "warning bells" that Marce talks about would be the use of anonymous nicknames and cowardly ad hominems directed towards others without even a hint of informative value embedded within the jabs. You know, something that actually addresses what was said in full, rather than in teensy-weensy meme-sized bits of irrelevancy?

Let's make something clear. Who I am should be completely irrelevant to everyone. What my 'credentials' are logically take second-stage to the factual validity of what is being said as a whole. How badly I may be said to spell is irrelevant. How ESL my grammar may appear to language purists is also irrelevant. I speak only to express and share ideas for the benefit of others and to attract other like-minded inviduals as well. I want to encourage others to express their own ideas too. And I mean positive and constructive ideas that shouldn't have anything to do with personal politics. I always hope that people have the mental clarity to see that. When I appear to "attack" an academic, it is based squarely on what they say, not who they are as human beings.

Debate is not about a bunch of catty, uninformative, "Fox-News"-like blabber about occasional spelling mistakes, errors in academic trivia and how their knowledge in NewSpeak do's-and-don'ts (e.g. don't use "hypothesize" for anyone other than the originator of an idea no matter how far buried in the recesses of time, apparently) empowers them with a metaphysical prescience to evaluate in some small way who is 'serious' in an academic field in absence of mindful studiousness and profound contemplation of the (un)read material. This is a posterchild for what's wrong with all anonymous networking sites that only encourage flamewars like on Wikipedia, YouTube and Yahoogroups.

Of course, I'll seek and destroy these spelling errors mentioned, and will look up other errors in trivia factoids that I've committed, but it would be swell if people could rise to the challenge of being honestly passionate about their interests and having the consciousness to attack issues head on instead of dismissing people because of how they say something based on subjective criteria. I welcome criticism but only logical criticism. The kind that's a shade more profound than just singing one's ABCs or roaring to hear your echo in the void of inhuman cyberspace.


NOTES
^[1] Marce Camitlnas extracted a single usage of the word 'blasphemous' out of context from Pava and the boy hoax to weave his rhetoric. I specifically said: "I know I sound blasphemous [about my questioning status quo as a non-Etruscologist] but keep reading." Context, people, context.
^[2] This fascinating article named Hyper-Real Wikipedia and the Evolution of Mu-lacra delves into the problems of hivemind. One interesting insight: "Present day archeology and anthropology commit themselves to the study of past-human groups which had no substantial cultural changes for many thousands of years. Future such Mu-ologies will be so deeply embedded in these interweaving cyber-realities that history itself will have to be forgotten in order that the present have any identity." and "No-one within the cyber systems destined to encompass this world will be able to see anything but Mu-lacra-like concepts buzzing around their digital heads." Indeed. Now reread the conversation of that forum. Similarities? Notice the lack of diligent critique about anything other than minor details that have been so far presented in the forum by people who admit to knowing little to nothing about the subject they participate in but who nonetheless voice strong opinions about it. The internet makes this mad paradox possible. Sadly, most of these forums rehash the same issues over and over and over years later, even by the same people! Has the mere appearance of knowledge and learning already become more important than knowledge and learning itself? Beware.
^[3] As author Jaron Lanier's thoughts in Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism are expressed by Jock Brockman: "Where is this leading? Lanier calls attention to the 'so-called' Artificial Intelligence and the race to erase personality and be most Meta. In each case, there's a presumption that something like a distinct kin to individual human intelligence is either about to appear any minute, or has already appeared. The problem with that presumption is that people are all too willing to lower standards in order to make the purported newcomer appear smart. Just as people are willing to bend over backwards and make themselves stupid in order to make an AI interface appear smart (as happens when someone can interact with the notorious Microsoft paper clip,) so are they willing to become uncritical and dim in order to make Meta-aggregator sites appear to be coherent."

UPDATES
(Feb 16 2008) I've clarified Marce Camitlnas's misreading of my sentence in Pava and the boy hoax. He's A) misunderstood what "hypothesize" means, B) took my usage of "blasphemous" out of context and C) misread "Massimo Pallottino hypothesized in 1979 that Tarχies refers to Tages [...]" to mean that I somehow credit Pallottino "for the origins of the legend of Tages". Indeed it's from Cicero, but nonetheless Pallottino hypothesized a link between Latin Tages and attested Etruscan name Tarchies in 1979. Please, people, calm your little selves down and read first. Thanks.