28 ms·
It hurts, to a small extent, the people who don't cheat. They have six fewer hours to work in, their work gets compared to work which was created under differen
by philh 11y ago
It hurts, to a small extent, the people who don't cheat. They have six fewer hours to work in, their work gets compared to work which was created under different (easier) conditions. Even if there's no curve, it increases your grade (in expectation), and that higher grade means slightly less (in expectation). It increases what's expected of people next year.
None of this is a large effect when a single person does it, but the same is true of taking notes into exams. Would you do that?
Zooming out slightly: if you think cheating doesn't hurt anyone, why do you think there are rules against it?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- philh 11y agoZooming back in, do you disagree with the mechanism I described, by which your cheating hurts people?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- philh 11y agoIf everyone drives a car, people on average are better off. If everyone cheats, people on average are worse off. That's a very different tradeoff.
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- philh 11y agoIn a ten-player game, (a) stealing one utilon from everyone else and getting 20 for yourself is one kind of selfish tradeoff; and (b) stealing one utilon from everyone else and getting 5 for yourself is another kind of selfish tradeoff; and (c) giving one utilon to everyone else while gaining 10 for yourself is also a kind of selfishness. Cheating is (b), driving is (a). (You seem to be arguing that driving is (b) - I disagree, but it's beside the point.) Capitalism mostly tries to encourage (c). We put some selfishness to work, yes; but we harness the selfishness of Henry Ford, and we punish the selfishness of Bernie Madoff.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- philh 11y agoThe quantity means that (a) makes the world worse off and (b) makes it better off. That seems like a pretty significant difference to me. > I never said my actions were capitalistic at all. I got that impression from one of your deleted comments. Perhaps it wasn't intentional. > If that makes me into an asshole and the world into a shithole, so be it. That's not a "so be it" outcome, that's an "oh crap, let's try to avoid that" outcome. As a society, we try to avoid that by punishing (a). You can do your part by not doing (a) even if you think you can get away with it. It's bedtime, so I'm tapping out now.
- oldmanjay 11y agoSociety isn't a group of people trying to get over on each other, but the small minority who thinks like you have given cause to authoritarians to treat all of us like we are you. It's a real shame you have to destroy to be happy, but at least you're proud of the fact that you want the world to be a shithole. We all need our pride!
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