Yesterday, I read an article about chat bots and the way in which they are forcing professors to change what they do in the classroom. I started thinking in a variety of ways about the subject and while I was doing that I received the following email from a reader of this blog.
Karl Marx, in his book "Capital," introduces the concept of "mystification" as a specific form of deception that is used by capitalists to obscure the true nature of economic processes and relationships. This deception, according to Marx, serves to justify the exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class and to conceal the source of capitalist profits.
Mystification, as described by Marx, differs from garden-variety stupidity, ignorance, and superstition in several ways. First, mystification is not simply a matter of individuals being unaware of certain facts or having false beliefs. Rather, it is a systematic and intentional manipulation of knowledge and information that serves to maintain the power and privilege of a particular social class.
Second, mystification is not limited to the realm of religion or superstition, but is a pervasive feature of capitalist society. It can be found in the way economic processes are presented, in the way commodities are marketed, and in the way the labor process is organized.
Third, mystification is not a passive state of mind, but an active process that requires the participation of both the ruling class and the working class. The ruling class uses various means, such as religion, ideology, and the media, to impose its own perspective on reality, while the working class, due to its lack of access to the means of production and to knowledge, is forced to accept this perspective as the only one possible.
Finally, Marx argues that mystification is not eternal, but that it can be overcome through the collective action of the working class. As the working class becomes more aware of the true nature of economic relationships and the source of capitalist profits, it can take action to overthrow the capitalist system and establish a more just and equitable society.
Mystification arises from specific social relations and economic processes, rather than from individual deficiencies or shortcomings.Mystification is perpetuated and reinforced by the dominant social and economic institutions and practices, rather than being a product of individual beliefs or behaviors.Mystification serves the interests of the dominant class, rather than being a neutral or benign phenomenon.Mystification can be dismantled and overcome through a critical understanding of the social and economic processes that produce it, rather than simply being a personal or psychological problem to be overcome.
Mystification is a systemic and intentional process that is built into the structure of capitalist society, whereas stupidity, ignorance, and superstition are individual and accidental phenomena.Mystification serves the interests of the ruling class by disguising the exploitation of the working class, whereas stupidity, ignorance, and superstition do not have a clear class bias.Mystification is a form of deception that is used to maintain the existing social relations, whereas stupidity, ignorance, and superstition are forms of misunderstanding that may or may not be used to maintain existing social relations.Mystification is a product of the alienation of labor under capitalism, whereas stupidity, ignorance, and superstition are not directly linked to alienation of labor.
Mystification is a deliberate and intentional process, whereas stupidity, ignorance, and superstition are not.Mystification is a product of the capitalist system and its institutions, whereas stupidity, ignorance, and superstition are not necessarily so.Mystification serves the interests of the ruling class by maintaining their power and control, whereas stupidity, ignorance, and superstition do not necessarily serve any specific interests.Mystification produces a false consciousness among the working class, leading them to accept their own exploitation and oppression, whereas stupidity, ignorance, and superstition do not necessarily have this effect.
Take a look at this and think about it. Later on today I will have a variety of things to say about the subject.
35 comments:
Very concerning.
These answers may not be good enough to earn an A grade, but they seem adequate enough to earn a B. Does this technology spell the death knell of essay assignments and grades based on them? I suppose requiring that students sign an oath at the beginning of a class that they will not utilize this technology will have some effect, but there will always be some students who are willing to cheat, e.g, a young Marjorie Taylor Greene or Donald Trump.
What about the application of this technology in law? It seems to me that if an artificially generated legal brief succeeds in citing all of the relevant case precedents, then so be it. If it fails to cited the relevant case precedents, then an attorney worth his/her salt should be able to rebut it effectively. The legal research cite that I use, Casetext, does offer such a service, but I would never rely on it to produce a brief as persuasive as one I could write myself.
In my experience as a teacher/professor almost everyone will cheat if they think they can get away with it. A small percentage of people genuinely value learning and intellectual achievement and prefer to do their own academic work: probably most, if not all, of the regular commenters in this blog belong to that small group of weirdos, but the average person has zero interest in the life of the mind.
By the way, plagiarism is not limited to rightwing Republicans such as Trump and Greene. Joe Biden plagiarized a speech from British labor leader Neil Kennock and Theodore Sorensen
wrote most of JFK's award winning book, Profiles in Courage.
This may be regarded as splitting hairs, but Theodore Sorensen’s ghost-writing part (perhaps all?) of Profiles In Courage does not constitute plagiarism, since Sorensen gave Kennedy permission to take credit for the writing, whereas in the case of plagiarism, it is passing someone else’s writing off as one’s own, without attribution or permission. Is the former less serious or duplicitous than the latter? I will leave that for others to judge.
To Marc:
A scenario: Source A says to student B: "I wrote an essay on the topic you were assigned. Feel free to submit it to your professor as your own." Student B does so.
Is this a case of plagiarism? Clearly it is.... even though B has A's permission to take credit for the work B submitted.
So, did Kennedy plagiarize Sorensen's work? Strictly speaking, yes, I suppose.... though in the publishing world it is called "ghostwriting."
David,
In the scenario you offer, student B is clearly plagiarizing student A’s work, even though A gave B permission to do so, because B did not provide any attribution to A in the essay s/he turned in.
The case of Profiles in Courage, however, is a bit more complicated, because Kennedy did give attribution to Sorensen in the preface as his writing associate. There is evidence, in addition, that Kennedy edited a good part of the final edition. So, when Maxwell Perkins edited F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, Ernest Hemingway’s and Thomas Wolfe’s novels, did Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Wolfe plagiarize Perkins’s writing?
Here's a more complicated case. I know of a college student who included in a term paper paraphrases of passages from a peer reviewed published article, and included attribution to the original author in the footnotes. The professor accused the student of plagiarism, on the basis that the paraphrasing too closely resembled the original language, and the student had not placed the paraphrase in quotations marks. The student objected and appealed the professor’s failure grade – and lost.
I wonder if there's a way to have schools for people who want to actually learn versus schools for people who want a degree- college is basically a long party before getting a real job
Howard: From what I've seen, colleges often have ways for people to observe courses without being enrolled and/or without being able to earn credit for them. Sometimes there are non-degree, ungraded, "continuing education" programs (not free, but less expensive than being a student); other times it's as simple as asking a professor you're on friendly terms with if they'll allow you informally to sit in on a course or check out their syllabus. (I don't think that's a faux pas - I did it a couple times myself.)
s.w.: Interesting, and sad. I only taught a handful of courses, but the impression I got was that there was also a third category of students, having characteristics of the other two; they'd slack off and screw around if they could (I had a large number of students decline to watch an in-class movie for massive extra credit), and they probably didn't remember anything from the course once it was over, but it seemed they'd stop short of cheating. Perhaps it was because they took a certain amount of pride in their work, perhaps it was because they found it "wrong" or dishonest/disrespectful to the professor, or perhaps it was because they didn't have the resourcefulness or were scared of the risk. But yeah, there's definitely a pervasive apathy and unseriousness, especially now that everyone has their electronic "note-taking" devices.
Michael, Descartes and Hobbes learned about the world from books, but also going out into the world- there's something to be said about becoming a Jack Tar or joining the Peace Corp, or just hanging out and getting into trouble- I'm not so sure college is a good idea for the large lot of students- maybe revamping the Academy would be a good idea- there is a latent purpose of an institution and a genuine purpose- I don't think most students can imagine what people are like or the world, in a way that is saddening and maddening and a mystery- the smartest guy I know who hangs out at my library dropped out of Stuyvesant at 12- he's not a role model but he did not lose his mind or sell his soul to higher education
Re: JFK and Profiles in Courage.
I've read the relevant parts of Frederik Logevall's recent biography _JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956_. JFK's role in both the research and writing of Profiles in Courage was very substantial. Kennedy, acc to Logevall, did a lot more than edit the final version. He was drafting chapters. He was recuperating from back surgery and he'd work on the drafts sitting in bed, if I recall Logevall correctly. Yes, Sorensen's role was important, but it's not accurate, I think, to call Profiles ghostwritten in the traditional sense of that word. And it is absolutely not a case of plagiarism.
The problem is that, as I recall, when the book was first released, Sorensen's role was not mentioned at all and Kennedy used his writing of the book and winning the Pulitzer Prize to bill himself as a great intellectual during his presidential campaign.
Maybe Kennedy was not a plagiarist in the classic sense of the word, but he was clearly a phoney.
s.w.
It's quite possible that JFK shd have given Sorensen more credit in public. To that extent I'll agree.
The Logevall book makes a case, though, that JFK did have real intellectual interests. He sort of goofed off during his first yrs in college, but when he got more serious about his work he wrote a pretty good senior thesis.
Did JFK benefit from his father's wealth and connections? Definitely, in various ways. But he was not simply a young man interested only in carousing and women (though he was interested in women). He was interested in world affairs from quite early on.
LFC,
I'm sure that you know more about JFK than I do and I'll defer to your greater erudition on the subject.
It's time, I would say, to try to develop more balanced picture of JFK, neither the idealized intellectual, war hero and devoted husband that "we" (I was too young to vote)
elected president nor the complete fraud that many of us have come to see him as when we realized that his original public image was not to be trusted.
Some kind of synthesis is not only possible, but by this time "necessary".
Whatever one may think of Kennedy’s politics, or his amorous dalliances, he was by no means a “phony.” His senior thesis at Harvard, “Why England Slept,” was highly regarded, even by Churchill, and is available in its published form. Few college seniors could write a term paper which would deserve such recognition. Did he benefit from his father’s wealth? Of course, but he campaigned hard in his first electoral contest in 1946 to win his seat in the House, appearing at dawn at factory gates to speak with the blue collar workers. If you haven’t campaigned for elective office, you have no idea how grueling and demanding it is – I know, because I did it in Michigan in 1992 running for the Michigan House, losing in a predominantly Republican district.
And then there is his heroism during WWII, after PT 109 was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer. This is what he did (excerpt from the Wikipedia article):
“Kennedy gathered around the wreckage his surviving ten crew members to vote on whether to ‘fight or surrender’. Kennedy stated: ‘There's nothing in the book about a situation like this. A lot of you men have families and some of you have children. What do you want to do? I have nothing to lose.’ Shunning surrender, around 2:00 p.m. on August 2, the men swam towards Plum Pudding Island 3.5 miles (5.6 km) southwest of the remains of PT-109. Despite re-injuring his back in the collision, Kennedy towed a badly burned crewman through the water to the island with a life jacket strap clenched between his teeth. Kennedy made an additional two-mile swim the night of August 2, 1943, to Ferguson Passage to attempt to hail a passing American PT boat to expedite his crew's rescue and attempted to make the trip on a subsequent night, in a damaged canoe found on Naru Island where he had swum with Ensign George Ross to look for food.” (Footnotes omitted.)
This was no all-talk “phony.”
Marc,
Tell us about your experience campaigning.
As for Kennedy, he was so hyped that he's hard to take. I say he's a phony because I was young and believed in "our" leaders, and post JFK, I've never believed in a single fucking one of them again. Sure, relative to Reagan or Trump or Nixon, he was Mr. Authenticity, but compared to the hype, he was a phony.
I think s.w. is right to say that a balanced picture of JFK is needed. Actually one may already be available but it wd take work to put it together for oneself: you'd have to read both the more favorable biographies and the less favorable ones. Both types have been published. Logevall is on the more favorable side though he certainly also acknowledges JFK's flaws.
Regarding my experience campaigning, it was a very disappointing and time-consuming business. The main issue was abortion, and my opponent was pro-life. My mistake was not hiring a campaign manager. I practiced law during the day, and tried to run my campaign at night and on week-ends. I got inundated with flyer and campaign sign manufacturing advertisements. The finance reporting paperwork was drudgery, even though I knew it had to be done. My main selling point was that I had succeeded in getting the speed on a local street reduced from 50 mph to 35 mph, after a bicyclist had been killed. The City Council said it could not be done, that only the County had jurisdiction over the road and they were not interested in changing the speed limit. I found a Michigan statute that allowed the speed limit to be changed if the street ended in a park, which was the case on this local street. I brought this to the attention of the County Executive whose attorney was – Jennifer Granholm. She was very impressed that I had discovered the statute, so the County decided to run a speed study to determine the optimum speed. Now, one would think that speed limits would be determined by evaluating such things as the location of the road, how many private homes bordered the street, how many families had children, etc. But no, this is not the way it is done. They set up monitors to do a speed study for 1-2 months of the speeds of all the vehicles that drove down the street, and then determined what the average speed was – and that became the speed limit. Makes sense, no?
So, I lost the election by some 6 percentage points, and Jennifer Granholm went on to be elected Attorney General of Michigan, then Governor for two terms – and now Secretary of Energy. If only, if only – I could have been a contender.
I have my doubts about Ross. Besides the possibility of bribery, Benjamin Wade had a better plan for dealing with the South. Given how things turned out it's hard to see impeachment as being worse. Robert Taft was a far right union busting rat bastard. By the 1950s several hundred individuals has served in the senate. I'm sure they could have found two better examples of courage.
Given his health and the medical state of the art at the time, Kennedy had no business running for president. Back in 1962 I was a fly on the wall at a briefing Rep. Ed Hiestand gave a very small group of right wing activists in Los Angeles. He started to say something about Kennedy, stopped, stammered a bit, and changed the subject. As he had no problem with the standard conservative complaints, I've since assumed it was health or women or both but different times.
Marc, did you have a primary opponent? Six points with no campaign manager isn't all that bad - do you recall the R/D difference? You needed a good manager and then who knows. The Right has us trained. Were you anti-life? Your opponent was anti-abortion, sad that the "pro-life" meme stuck in popular culture.
aalll,
I just realized why you mentioned Taft in your comment above. Taft was included as one of the profiles in courage based on his position in opposition to the Nuremburg trials, on the basis that since genocide had not yet been deemed a crime under international law, trying Nazis for their role in committing genocide constituted an ex post facto law and therefore violated due process. I agree with you that this hardly constitutes a profile in courage – do you have to be told that incarcerating and then gassing and incinerating people based on their religion or ethnicity is a crime before you can be prosecuted for doing it?
aaall,
I haven't read Profiles itself, but I have read Logevall's account of how it was composed and that's what I was referencing. (I have no interest in defending the selection of people that Kennedy and Sorensen chose to profile. Btw Logevall points out that Kennedy knew more U.S. history than Sorensen, who'd graduated with top marks from Univ of Nebraska and then from its law school, but who mentioned at some pt that he hadn't studied U.S. history since high school.)
Yes, JFK had health problems, specifically Addison's disease. I'm not up on the details nor am I sure that it greatly undermined his performance as President. It seems that he found a way to function, at least much of the time, despite it. But others prob know more about the medical issues than I do.
May be of interest:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/08/the-medical-ordeals-of-jfk/309469//
My sense is that Kennedy was pushing on a string health-wise.
Marc, I was indeed aware of Taft's position on the trials (dog bites man, far right Republican wants to cut fascists some slack, no surprise there!) but he was an all around bad actor who would have undone the entire New Deal if he had had the chance and did manage to kick start our present slide into authoritarianism in 1947 with his eponymous bill partially undoing the good resulting from the Wagner Act.
From the article which aalll linked to:
“Kennedy’s charismatic appeal rested heavily on the image of youthful energy and good health that he projected. This image was a myth. The real story, disconcerting though it would have been to contemplate at the time, is actually more heroic. It is a story of iron-willed fortitude in mastering the difficulties of chronic illness.”
The concerns about a presidential candidate concealing his/her medical problems, aside from the issue of deceit, center on the potential of being disabled in a time of crisis. The article indicates this was never a real concern for Kennedy, even during the Cuban Missile crisis, even though he did take medication for stress during that time period. Would anyone have preferred any other politician being President during the Great Depression or WWII other than FDR, despite his being crippled by polio, which he took great effort to conceal from the public by prohibiting pictures being taken of him using his crutches or braces?
I remember watching Kennedy during his press conferences. Though apparently highly medicated, he was always prepared, gave cogent answers, often marked by his unequaled keen wit. By the way, thinking of his press conferences, I did some research (ah, the wonders of the internet) to find out which President had the highest frequency of press conferences since 1900. The answer, surprisingly, is Calvin Coolidge, at 72.9 per year, with FDR coming in second, at 72.7. Since the end of WWII, the President with the highest press conference rate was George H. Bush, at 34.5 per year. See:
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/presidential-news-conferences
Correction:
Actually it is Truman who had the highest annual rate of news conferences since WWII, at 41.73.
Marc,
Thanks for telling us about your experience as a candidate.
Someone like you could get elected in a local election, city council for example, if they personify an issue which especially outrages or upsets most residents.
In a "normal" election without such an issue, no chance.
My impression is that Sorensen was a prose stylist, not a substantive advisor. He was the phrase-maker: "Ask now what your country can do for you...' etc.
All three Kennedys--John, Bobby, Ted--had first-rate staffs. I once heard someone say that they wouldn't qualify to be on their own staffs. They were not afraid of having bright people around them.
Here's some stuff from the Wikipedia article on Profiles in Courage
In addition to Kennedy's speechwriter Sorensen, Jacqueline Kennedy recruited her history instructor from Georgetown University, Jules Davids, to work on the project. Davids told a Kennedy biographer that he and Sorensen had researched and written drafts of most of the book. Kennedy's handwritten notes, which Senator Kennedy showed to reporters to prove his authorship, are now in the Kennedy Library, but are mostly preliminary notes about John Quincy Adams, a particular interest of Kennedy's, and are not a readable draft of the chapter on Adams. During the six-month period when the book was being written, Sorensen worked full-time on the project, sometimes twelve-hour days; Kennedy spent most of the same period traveling, campaigning, or hospitalized. Kennedy's preserved notes show that he kept up with the book's progress, but historian Garry Wills remarked that Kennedy's notes contain no draft of any stage of the manuscript, or of any substantial part of it.[16]
In Sorensen's 2008 autobiography, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History, he said he wrote "a first draft of most of the chapters" of Profiles in Courage and "helped choose the words of many of its sentences".[4][5] Sorensen also wrote: "While in Washington, I received from Florida almost daily instructions and requests by letter and telephone – books to send, memoranda to draft, sources to check, materials to assemble, and Dictaphone drafts or revisions of early chapters" (Sorensen, p. 146). Sorensen wrote that Kennedy "worked particularly hard and long on the first and last chapters, setting the tone and philosophy of the book". Kennedy "publicly acknowledged in his introduction to the book my extensive role in its composition" (p. 147). Sorensen claimed that in May 1957, Kennedy "unexpectedly and generously offered, and I happily accepted, a sum to be spread over several years, that I regarded as more than fair" for his work on the book. Indeed, this supported a long-standing recognition of the collaborative effort that Kennedy and Sorensen had developed since 1953.
So JFK, recuperating in Fla, was sending Sorensen "almost daily instructions and requests," as well as Dictaphone revisions and drafts, meaning as I see it, that the book was not ghostwritten but more like co-authored - and if it had been a book by two academics, say, neither of whom was famous, it wd have likely been billed as "by Sorensen and Kennedy."
The stuff about Kennedy sending revisions and drafts of early chapters from Fla comes, acc to the quoted Wikipedia excerpt, from Sorensen's memoirs. Seems like a credible source. While it may also be true that Kennedy's notes contain no drafts, that doesn't mean he didn't do any drafting. This is not unusual for a Wikipedia entry: it just throws a lot of stuff together and the reader has to evaluate and synthesize for himself or herself. For example, Garry Wills in _The Kennedy Imprisonment_ was likely going to have a particular slant on everything JFK did. (Btw I returned the Logevall book to the library a while ago so I can't quote from it.)
s. wallerstein,
But I could kiss babies too!
Marc,
I've never been elected to anything in my life and am a even worse candidate than you are.
LFC,
For sure, JFK collaborated on the book.
However, Sorensen received no credit, except a line in the preface, which, according to Wikipedia, appeared after in the first draft of the preface written by JFK, he received no mention at all and Sorensen complained at it.
JFK won the Pulitzer Prize for the book. He did not mention Sorensen at the time.
If that had occurred in an academic setting, a grad student writing a book, with a lot of good ideas from a famous professor who took full credit for the book, without the grad student getting any credit, we'd see a huge scandal.
By the way, the book was about especially virtuous political figures, which makes
JFK's taking full credit for the book even less admirable.
s. wallerstein,
Re your academic example, it actually happens all the time, especially with respect to medical research in which professors take credit for innovative research performed by graduate students. See:
https://newintrigue.com/2018/03/10/ghost-authoring-how-professors-steal-the-work-of-their-students/#:~:text=Academics%20are%20the%20first%20to,is%20bann
s. wallerstein,
You wouldn't kiss babies?
I'm the kind of person who if they kissed babies, would probably be arrested for child sexual abuse. So, no, I don't touch other people's children.
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