Category: Books
In Defense of Plagiarism
Google plagiarism and you will find definitions like “stealing someone else’s ideas” or “literary theft.” Here the emphasis is on the stealing–it’s the original author who is being harmed. I prefer the definition of plagiarism given by Wikipedia, plagiarism is the *fraudulent* use of other people’s words or ideas. Fraudulent emphasizes that it’s the reader who is being cheated, not the original creator. You can use someone else’s words without being fraudulent. We all do this. If you copy a definition or description of a technical procedure from a textbook or manual you are using someone else’s words but it’s not fraudulent because the reader doesn’t assume that you are trying to take credit for the ideas.
In contrast, a student who passes an essay off as their own when it was written by someone else is engaging in a kind of fraud but the “crime” has little to do with harming the original author. A student who uses AI to write an essay is engaging in fraud, for example, but the problem is obviously not theft from OpenAI. Indeed, in another context the same use of AI would not be fraudulent. If I use AI to help write this post, it’s not fraudulent because the primary purpose of this post is not, as it is with a student essay, to warrant the abilities of the author but rather to convey ideas to the reader. How those ideas came to be expressed in words is secondary and sometimes even irrelevant.
Indeed, using some else’s words and ideas is often how the world progresses. Plagiarism is a type of intellectual property law and I have long argued that IP law has grown too strong. Patents, for example, are often too broad and copyright is too long. Similarly, I was very much in support of Ed Sheeran in the ridiculous copyright case that ate of years of his life. Sheeran used ideas that had previously been used by many others but even if he had sampled, sampling is not a terrible crime. If I write, ‘he went on a wild goose chase’ or ‘it’s a brave new world’ need I credit the author? If an economics professor says ‘a price is a signal wrapped up in an incentive’, well a little credit to Cowen and Tabarrok would be nice, but sooner or later might this phrase not enter the vernacular? Crediting authors of unique wordplay should have a time limit, after which such wordplay becomes part of the common pool of expressions available for all. Crediting authors of boilerplate shouldn’t even be required.
The reason plagiarism has come to be defined more by “literary theft” than by the “fraudulent use of other’s people’s ideas and words” is that it’s much easier to prove when someone else’s words have been copied than it is to prove fraudulent use. A computer can scan the text of millions of documents to discover “plagiarism” but the computer has a harder time saying what is fraudulent. I argued earlier, that if I used AI to write this post it wouldn’t be fraudulent. But what if Marginal Revolution won a Pulitzer for twenty years of high quality writing and this post were give as an example? Well, its a judgement call.
In short, the focus of any charge of plagiarism should not be on whether someone else’s words have been used. The use of other’s people’s words is a necessary condition for plagiarism but it’s not sufficient. The focus should be on whether readers have been harmed by a fraudulent use of other people’s ideas and words. Focusing on the latter will dispense with many charges of plagiarism.
My excellent Conversation with Marilynne Robinson
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Marilynne Robinson is one of America’s best and best-known novelists and essayists, whose award-winning works like Housekeeping and Gilead explore themes of faith, grace, and the intricacies of human nature. Beyond her writing, Robinson’s 25-year tenure at the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop allowed her to shape and inspire the new generations of writers. Her latest book, Reading Genesis, displays her scholarly prowess, analyzing the biblical text not only through the lens of religious doctrine but also appreciating it as a literary masterpiece.
She joined Tyler to discuss betrayal and brotherhood in the Hebrew Bible, the relatable qualities of major biblical figures, how to contend with the Bible’s seeming contradictions, the true purpose of Levitical laws, whether we’ve transcended the need for ritual sacrifice, the role of the Antichrist, the level of biblical knowledge among students, her preferred Bible translation, whether The Winter’s Tale makes sense, the evolution of Calvin’s reputation and influence, why academics are overwhelmingly secular, the success of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, why she wrote a book on nuclear pollution, what she’ll do next, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: As a Calvinist, too, would not, in general, dismiss the Old Testament, what do you make of a book such as Leviticus? It’s highly legalistic, highly ritualistic. Some Christians read Leviticus and become a split Christian Jew almost. Other Christians more or less dismiss the book. How does it fit into your worldview?
ROBINSON: I think that when you read Herodotus, where he describes these little civilizations that are scattered over his world — he describes them in terms of what they eat or prohibit, or they paint themselves red, or they shave half their head. There are all these very arbitrary distinctions that people make in order to identify with one clan over against another.
At the point of Leviticus, which of course, is an accumulation of many texts over a very long time, no doubt, but nevertheless, to think of it as being Moses — he is trying to create a defined, distinctive human community. By making arbitrary distinctions between people so that you’re not simply replicating notions of what is available or feasible or whatever, but actually asking them to adopt prohibitions of food — that’s a very common distinguishing thing in Herodotus and in contemporary life.
So, the arbitrariness of the laws is not a fault. It is a way of establishing identification of one group as separate from other groups.
COWEN: So, you read it as a narrative of how human communities are created, but you still would take a reading of, say, Sermon on the Mount that the Mosaic law has been lifted? Or it’s still in place?
ROBINSON: Oh, it’s not still in place. We’ve been given other means by which to create identity. Moses was doing something distinctive in a certain period of the evolution of Israel as a people. He didn’t want them to be Egyptians. He didn’t want them to subscribe to the prevailing culture, which was idolatrous, and so on. He’s doing Plato in The Republic. He’s saying, “This is how we develop the idea of a community.”
Having said that, then there are certain other things like “Thou shall not kill,” or whatever, that become characterizing laws. Jesus very often says, when someone says to him, “How can I be saved?” He says, “You know the commandments.” It’s not as if God is an alien figure from the point of view of Christ, whom we take to be his son.
Interesting throughout.
*Build, Baby, Build*, by Bryan Caplan
Here is my blurb for the book:
“Bryan Caplan is a pioneer in the use of graphic novels to expound economic concepts. His new book Build, Baby, Build is thus a landmark in economic education, how to present economic ideas, and the integration of economic analysis and graphic visuals. If you want to learn the economics, ethics, and political economy of YIMBY— namely the freedom to build this is the very best place to start.”
And from Bryan:
Please forgive my laughable arrogance, but I assure you that BBB is the most fascinating book on housing regulation ever written. In fact, I assure you that there will never be a more fascinating book on housing regulation!
While objective self-interest impels you to buy the book as soon as it releases, it would be a huge favor to me if you would take the extra step of pre-ordering right away from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, Apple Books, or anywhere else. Why? Because all pre-orders count as “first-week sales” for national best-seller lists — and I’m aiming high.
Here is the book’s home page. It is really very good.
What I’ve been reading
1. Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. I agree with many of the anti-therapy arguments in this book, but still I feel that “bad therapy” is a second-order phenomenon, not the initial cause of the growing mental health problems of America’s young people. Furthermore, the analysis (much like Jon Haidt’s recent work) should be more tightly framed in the context of the “most interventions really don’t matter that much” results in social science at the very general level.
2. Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Life of Frantz Fanon. Well-written and well-organized, this checks all the boxes for what I would want from a Fanon biography. Here is an Adam Shatz NYT Op-Ed on Fanon.
3. Nabila Ramdani, Fixing France: How to Repair a Broken Republic. What is wrong with France, from a French-Algerian point of view. The book is full of substance, and there aren’t enough “stand alone books on countries,” so this is a good one whether or not you agree with all of the observations.
4. Michael Bliss, The Discovery of Insulin. “Tassting the urine was the doctors’ original test for diabetes.” An excellent biomedical history, noting that the key breakthrough came in Toronto in the 1920s.
And the AEI Press has reprinted the 1951 Edward Banfield classic Government Project.
Rainer Zitelmann has a new book out How Nations Escape Poverty: Vietnam, Poland, and the Origins of Prosperity.
Lewis E. Lehrman has published his autobiography The Sum of It All. He was one of the important figures behind the Reagan Revolution, in addition to his longstanding presence amongst New York elites.
Daniel Gross on the printing press and GPT
In a way, everyone’s been wondering, trying to analogize ChatGPT with the printing press, but in reality it’s almost the opposite.
The entire thing is happening in the inverse of that, where the printing press was a technology to disseminate information through a book basically and convince people to do things, and the kind of anti-book is the LLM agent, which summarizes things very succinctly. If anything, it awakens people to the fact that they have been complicit in a religion for a very long time, because it very neatly summarizes these things for you and puts everything in latent space and suddenly you realize, “Wait a minute, this veganism concept is very connected to this other concept.” It’s a kind of Reformation in reverse, in a way, where everyone has suddenly woken up to the fact that there’s a lot of things that are wrong…
So yeah, it takes away all the subtlety from any kind of ideology and just puts it right on your face and yeah, people are having a reaction to it.
That is from the Ben Thompson (gated) interview with Daniel and Nat Friedman, self-recommending.
*How Life Works*
The author is Philip Ball, and the subtitle is A User’s Guide to the New Biology. I thought this book was wonderful, one of the best popular science books I’ve read in a long time. I’m sure its contents are familiar to many MR readers, but for me it was a very good introduction to debunking Richard Dawkins-like “primacy of the gene” stories, rather seeing genes as part of a broader, fairly flexible biological ecosystem.
It is also a very good book for explaining just how much computation goes on in biological systems.
I learned the word “gastrulation.”
Have you ever wondered how the salamander grows its tail back in exactly the right way? It turns out we are not sure why:
These creatures maintain a reserve of pluripotent stem cells for such repair jobs. But making the missing part seems to entail an ability of the regenerating cells to “read” the overall body plan: to take a peek at the whole, ask what’s missing, and adapt accordingly to preserve morphological integrity. Levin believes that this information is delivered to the growing cells via bioelectric signaling. But there are other possibilities. To account for the ability of the zebrafish to regrow a truncated tail to exactly the shape it had oringlaly — stripe markings and all — cell biologist Stefano Di Talia believes that a memory of the target shape is somehow encoded within the cells throughout the tail. In effect, he suggests, the different cell growth rates needed to recapitatulate the missing part are recorded along the edge of the wound.
And I learned about “xenobots“, a new kind of living creature, sort of:
Levin and colleagues discovered xenobots from a “what if” experiment: they wondered what might happen if embryonic frog cells were “liberated” from the constraints imposed by making an embryonic frog body. “If we give them the opportunity to re-envision multicellularity,” he asked, “what is it they will build.”
I found much of interest in this book, definitely recommended. Here is one good review of the book.
What should I ask Fareed Zakaria?
Here is Fareed’s home page, here is Wikipedia:
Fareed Rafiq Zakaria…is an Indian-American journalist, political commentator, and author. He is the host of CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria GPS and writes a weekly paid column for The Washington Post. He has been a columnist for Newsweek, editor of Newsweek International, and an editor at large of Time.
He was managing editor of Foreign Affairs at age 28, briefly a wine columnist for Slate, and much more. His new book Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present is very classically liberal, and in my terms “Progress Studies”-oriented.
So what should I ask him?
How did Madrid become the capital of European liberalism?
But in the case of Madrid, the last 25 years have been a clear move towards higher degree of tax competitiveness, smart regulation, and an overall liberal policy in the economic sense. And then our society is fairly open and tolerant and recognized to be what we would broadly described as a free society, an open society.
And I guess that began to make sense 10 years ago, but it’s really started to make sense in the last several years. Following the pandemic, I think we had a great opportunity to show that mentality to the rest of the world because as everybody was shutting down, Madrid was Europe’s only open capital for very long in 2020 and 2021.
And I guess that raised a lot of eyebrows. And that is why a lot of people are moving to Madrid. People are voting with their feet. They want more of this. And that’s the Madrid way of liberalism that I discuss in this book. And to be honest, It’s not so common that you get to see 25 years of ongoing, non-stop free market reforms coupled together with an open, tolerant society…
Barcelona had been the icon of openness and the region that projected itself as a more European territory within our country and its economic power powerhouse as well. But sadly for Catalonia and happily for Madrid, there’s been a big change and a big shift to the point that this no longer applies. And it’s not been the case at all for the last few decades. I think the international level, of course, perceptions are harder to shift, but I don’t think anyone in Spain today will argue that Catalonia, as they have moved closer to the ideas of separatism and as nationalism has become a powerful figure in the regional politics, hasn’t been slowly becoming a more closed society.
That is from Diego Sánchez de la Cruz, interviewed by Rasheed Griffith, both podcast and transcript at the link. Interesting throughout, and Diego has a new book out Liberalismo a la madrileña.
Henrik Karlsson asks
What is a good book or film that charts the trajectory of a profoundly healthy and transformational relationship?
Twitter link here. Well people? Popular romances don’t count, try to get as close to “the canon” as you can.
I found this question difficult. GPT-4 listed a bunch of inappropriate, not actually so wholesome answers from Victorian literature, and then for a film cited Her (bravo to that actually, but still not a good answer). A Beautiful Mind made that movie list as well.
I rewatched Casablanca lately on a large screen, and concluded that Rick was wanting Ilsa to suffer as much as possible.
Can you do better?
What should I ask Michael Nielsen?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. No description of Michael quite does him justice, but here is Wikipedia:
Michael Aaron Nielsen (born January 4, 1974) is a quantum physicist, science writer, and computer programming researcher living in San Francisco.
In 1998, Nielsen received his PhD in physics from the University of New Mexico. In 2004, he was recognized as Australia’s “youngest academic” and was awarded a Federation Fellowship at the University of Queensland. During this fellowship, he worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Caltech, and at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Alongside Isaac Chuang, Nielsen co-authored a popular textbook on quantum computing, which has been cited more than 52,000 times as of July 2023.
In 2007, Nielsen shifted his focus from quantum information and computation to “the development of new tools for scientific collaboration and publication”, including the Polymath project with Timothy Gowers, which aims to facilitate “massively collaborative mathematics.” Besides writing books and essays, he has also given talks about open science. He was a member of the Working Group on Open Data in Science at the Open Knowledge Foundation.
Nielsen is a strong advocate for open science and has written extensively on the subject, including in his book Reinventing Discovery, which was favorably reviewed in Nature and named one of the Financial Times’ best books of 2011.
In 2015 Nielsen published the online textbook Neural Networks and Deep Learning, and joined the Recurse Center as a Research Fellow. He has also been a Research Fellow at Y Combinator Research since 2017.
In 2019, Nielsen collaborated with Andy Matuschak to develop Quantum Computing for the Very Curious, a series of interactive essays explaining quantum computing and quantum mechanics. With Patrick Collison, he researched whether scientific progress is slowing down.
Here is Michael’s Notebook, well worth a browse and also a deeper read. Here is Michael on Twitter. So what should I ask him? (I’m going to ask him about Olaf Stapledon in any case, so no need to mention that.)
What should I ask Coleman Hughes?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, based in part around his new book The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America. On Coleman more generally, here is Wikipedia:
Coleman Cruz Hughes (born February 25, 1996) is an American writer and podcast host. He was a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a fellow and contributing editor at their City Journal, and he is the host of the podcast Conversations with Coleman.
Also from Wikipedia:
Hughes began studying violin at age three. He is a hobbyist rapper—in 2021 and 2022, he released several rap singles on YouTube and Spotify, using the moniker COLDXMAN, including a music video for a track titled “Blasphemy”, which appeared in January 2022. Hughes also plays jazz trombone with a Charles Mingus tribute band that plays regularly at the Jazz Standard in New York City.
I saw Coleman perform quite recently, and I can vouch for his musical excellence, including as a singer. So what should I ask Coleman?
My Conversation with the excellent Ami Vitale
Here is the audio, visual, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Ami Vitale is a renowned National Geographic photographer and documentarian with a deep commitment to wildlife conservation and environmental education. Her work, spanning over a hundred countries, includes spending a decade as a conflict photographer in places like Kosovo, Gaza, and Kashmir.
She joined Tyler to discuss why we should stay scary to pandas, whether we should bring back extinct species, the success of Kenyan wildlife management, the mental cost of a decade photographing war, what she thinks of the transition from film to digital, the ethical issues raised by Afghan Girl, the future of National Geographic, the heuristic guiding of where she’ll travel next, what she looks for in a young photographer, her next project, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: As you probably know, there’s a long-standing and recurring set of debates between animal welfare advocates and environmentalists. The animal welfare advocates typically have less sympathy for the predators because they, in turn, kill other animals. The environmentalists are more likely to think we should, in some way, leave nature alone as much as possible. Where do you stand on that debate?
VITALE: It depends. It’s hard to make a general sweeping statement on this because in some cases, I think that we do have to get involved. Also, the fact is, it’s humans in most cases who have really impacted the environment, and we do need to get engaged and work to restore that balance. I really fall on both sides of this. I will say, I do think that is, in some cases, what differentiates us because, as human beings, we have to kill to survive. Maybe that is where this — I feel like every story I work on has a different answer. Really, I don’t know. It depends what the situation is. Should we bring animals back to landscapes where they have not existed for millions of years? I fall in the line of no. Maybe I’m taking this in a totally different direction, but it’s really complicated, and there’s not one easy answer.
And:
COWEN: As you know, there are now social networks everywhere, for quite a while. Images everywhere, even before Midjourney. There are so many images that people are looking at. How does that change how you compose or think about photos?
VITALE: Well, it doesn’t at all. My job is to tell stories with images, and not just with images. My job as a storyteller — that has not changed. Nothing has changed in the sense of, we need more great storytellers, visual storytellers. With all of those social media, I think people are bored with just beautiful images. Or sometimes it feels like advertising, and it doesn’t captivate me.
I look for a story and image, and I am just going to continue doing what I do because I think people are hungry for it. They want to know who is really going deep on stories and who they can trust. I think that that has never gone away, and it will never go away.
I am very happy to have guests who do things that not everyone else’s guests do.
The Gershwins on free trade (that was then, this is now)
In 1927, George and Ira Gershwin put on a musical satire about trade and war entitled Strike Up the Band. The plot centres around a middle-aged US cheesemaker, Horace J. Fletcher of Connecticut, who wants to corner the domestic dairy market. When Fletcher hears that the US government has just slapped a fifty per cent tariff on foreign-made cheese, he sees dollar signs. High tariffs mean his fellow citizens will have little choice but to ‘buy American’. What’s more, the tariff’s impact soon reaches beyond the national market to sour the country’s trade relationships.. Swiss cheesemakers are particularly sharp in their demands for retaliation. Fletcher surmises that a prolonged Swiss-American military conflict would provide the necessary fiscal and nationalistic incentives to maintain the costly tariff on foreign cheese in perpetuity.
To make his monopolistic dream of market control a reality, Fletcher sees to it that the tariff spat between the two countries leads to an all-out war. He first creates the Very Patriotic League to drum up support for the Alpine military adventure, as well as to weed out any ‘un-American’ agitation at home. The Very Patriotic League’s members, donning white hoods reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan, go about excising all things Swiss from the nativist nation. Not even the classic adventure The Swiss Family Robinson escapes notice: it gets rebranded The American Family Robinson. With domestic anti-war dissent quelled, Fletcher next orchestrates a military invasion of Switzerland. The farcical imperial intervention ends with a US victory. But just as the war with Switzerland winds down and a peaceful League of Cheese established, an ultimatum arrives from Russia objecting to a US tariff on caviar. And, it’s implied, the militant cycle repeats.
That is from the new and interesting Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World, by Marc-William Palen.
My TLS essay on the Clinton administration
Here is the link, I am reviewing a bad book on the Clinton administration (A Fabulous Failure, by Lichtenstein and Stern). Here is one excerpt:
Clinton-era welfare reform is another area where many commentators go astray, and Lichtenstein and Stein are no exception. The Clinton pronouncement “I have a plan to end welfare as we know it” has stuck in people’s minds. The reality is that, after Clinton-era welfare reforms, America spent more money on helping the poor. Welfare payments were attached to work requirements, but the states could redeploy federal money to programmes other than simple welfare payments, so funds for childcare, college scholarships, food stamps and tax credits for the poor all went up. The rate at which children fall into poverty has declined steadily. A significant Medicaid expansion followed under President Obama.
Yet the authors state that “The Era of Big Government is Over” in the section on welfare reform. If you squint you can see periodic references to the fact that Clinton-era welfare reform was not entirely radical, but nonetheless they write that this was “a drastic reform of the welfare system … that did in fact repudiate its New Deal heritage”. Calling the policy “an utterly misogynist step backward”, they note that Clinton’s “reputation as a heartless neoliberal was hereby well advanced within the ranks of progressive America”. Again, argument by adjective displaces the numbers.
And here is my summary judgment:
Too often the authors’ substantive arguments are presented in an “argument by adjective” form, relabelling events, institutions and individuals with negative adjectives or connotations, but without providing enough firm evidence. They write as if describing a policy reform as not having done enough for labour unions is per se a damning critique…
I can’t help but feel this work is largely directed at an internal Democratic Party dialogue. The basic premisses, or even the interpretations of the facts, don’t need to be argued for much. But good Democrats need to be told how to think about their own history. If strong labour unions are a sine qua non for social and economic progress, and if all good (and bad) things come together, how would the rest of history, including that of the Clinton administration, have to read? The notion that such stifling readings have become part of the problem, rather than the solution, does not appear in Nelson Lichtenstein’s and Judith Stein’s book.
I had turned down the previous invitation to review, because I didn’t think the book in question was good enough.
Claude of Anthropic does *GOAT*
Here is the new book bot, trained on Claude of course. Again, I call this a “generative book.”
Very powerful, and I am indebted to those who helped, including at Anthropic and also Jeff Holmes of Mercatus.
Here is the original web site and the original GPT-4 bot, which still is great. The full title is GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time, and Why Should We Care? An audiobook will be coming, can you guess who is reading it?