Michael Mitchell: Archive

If information is ubiquitous and easily accessible, is biological (😂) knowledge less valuable? Plagiarism isn't necessarily wrong because it's cheating, or even because it's deceptive, it's wrong because it's theft, and theft is wrong because it's unearned, and the unearned is wrong because that's just how reality works. Shit has to be earned -- i.e., theft is always unearned, but not everything unearned is theft. (Gifts and loans and nature itself, for instance.) In the context of academic plagiarism, not only do the ends not justify the means, the means don't even achieve them. It leads to false intelligence in students and false evaluations by teachers and the false success of schools, but if the goal is merely to learn something -- rather than to get a degree or make your school (business) look good or whatever -- to simply acquire knowledge of a subject, then... welcome to the fucking Internet.