8 ms·

French physicist and media star loses doctorate after plagiarism investigation

144 points by bookofjoe 5mo ago

nobrains 5mo ago
Its the same guy who tweeted a photo of a pepperoni claiming it to be a star
adalacelove 5mo ago
It reads like those nightmares where you need to pass final exams again. I guess nowadays it is much simpler to correlate some text with prior work, more so with LLMs. It is like those doping cases where several years later we are able to detect a previously unknown sustance in an old sample.
Aurornis 5mo ago
> found instances of plagiarism on 20% of its pages, Guémart says, with fragments copied from intellectuals including author Albert Camus, physicist Louis de Broglie, and even some members of his thesis committee. Plagiarizing from people on your own thesis committee is a wild move. I can't read enough French to understand every detail, but the plagiarism report shows that he was rephrasing all of the sentences rather than copying verbatim: https://v42.arretsurimages.net/fichiers/documents/2024-08-02-Arret-sur-Images-Etienne-Klein-These-Plagiats-Recension.pdf https://v42.arretsurimages.net/fichiers/documents/2024-08-02... He wrote the thesis at a time when it was impossible to identify lightly rephrased statements across a wide body of works. Now we can dump all of these documents into an LLM and have similar sentences surfaced for human review very quickly. At the same time, it's no longer necessary to pick sentences from other people's work and change the phrasing. You can take someone else's paper, feed it into an LLM, and tell it to rewrite it for you. Easier than ever before to launder text.
- andy99 5mo ago
  Personally I think writing with an LLM is at least as bad as stitching together phrases from others. The article doesn’t really expand upon what having fragments copied from others means. Even if it fits the letter of the definition, on a phd thesis that may or may not be a big deal. If he’s passing off the ideas of others as his, or faking his research by using the results of others or making them up, then that’s really bad. If he’s just using phrases / wording from others to get his original points across, it looks bad but I don’t see it as a huge deal, especially 30 years out from the phd. A PhD is supposed to be original research, if the originality or integrity is in question that’s one thing, the rest is much more pedantic, even if technically wrong.
  - Aurornis 5mo ago
    > The article doesn’t really expand upon what having fragments copied from others means. They link to the document that shows the plagiarized sections side by side with their sources https://v42.arretsurimages.net/fichiers/documents/2024-08-02-Arret-sur-Images-Etienne-Klein-These-Plagiats-Recension.pdf https://v42.arretsurimages.net/fichiers/documents/2024-08-02... I don't read enough French (especially at PhD thesis level!) to parse everything, but even I can see phrasings copied from the source documents in a lot of the examples. Some of them weren't even paraphrasing, they were lifting the exact distinctive word choices.
    - bambax 5mo ago
      He has a lot of wild defense arguments; one of my favorites is: at some point in his life he lost the ability to speak; to recover his voice he trained it by reading aloud some books over and over, so much so that the content of these books became part of his own brain / of himself. (Another one, unrelated, but also wild, argues that people who attack him are in fact against science itself, that they want to go back to the Middle Ages, etc.) It's very obvious he pieced together interesting ideas from others to pass them as his own. And it worked very well, he has radio shows and TV shows and whatnot. And he still has a lot of supporters!
      - kergonath 5mo ago
        > It's very obvious he pieced together interesting ideas from others to pass them as his own. And it worked very well, he has radio shows and TV shows and whatnot. And he still has a lot of supporters! Also, being able to get ideas, synthesise them and present them in a way palatable for mainstream audiences is a useful skill and an important role in society. It’s just not research.
- seydor 5mo ago
  It was a philosophy thesis, what's new in philosophy the past century
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - csh0 5mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_and_Necessity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_and_Necessity
  - foldr 5mo ago
    If anything from 1926 onwards is fair game, then tons of work in the foundations of mathematics. And if you're willing to be slightly more more generous with your time-frame: Russel's paradox.
  - jltsiren 5mo ago
    Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), A Theory of Justice (Rawls), and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn) have all been pretty influential.
- bambax 5mo ago
  > Plagiarizing from people on your own thesis committee is a wild move. Fun fact: he's using this to prove he didn't do anything wrong, as in "see? the people on my thesis committee didn't care I copied their own work, why should anyone else?" The truth is, people on "thesis committee" don't read thesis. Some do. The director usually does, if he has the time. But many don't; they glance at the intro and conclusion and call it a day. > He wrote the thesis at a time when it was impossible to identify lightly rephrased statements across a wide body of works. Now we can dump all of these documents into an LLM and have similar sentences surfaced for human review very quickly He also uses this to say it's unfair to punish him now with tools that didn't exist when he did the crime, which I find quite rich. If you murdered someone before DNA testing was available, that doesn't exonerate you in any way.
  - colechristensen 5mo ago
    Academia is very broken if even your thesis committee is A) not interested in reading your thesis and B) can't even be bothered to when it is ostensibly their job. What exactly is the point of dedicating years of your life to create something exactly nobody is going to read?
    - foldr 5mo ago
      It varies a lot by field, but in many (not all) scientific fields, a PhD thesis is largely a formality these days. Your publication record is what counts. The days where you could get a tenure track faculty position just on the strength of a PhD thesis are long gone.
      - a-dub 5mo ago
        that's how i understand it. it's a portfolio with front matter, back matter, the papers that got published with some connective tissue between them and maybe some discussion of the things that didn't work out and why.
      - wbl 5mo ago
        Depends on the subfields. CS is by publication, number theory varies ("my students can find a stapler" to the dissertation has revolutionary result not published elsewhere)
- dmbche 5mo ago
  No no he was copy pasting! In the Arret sur image article you can read a whole sentences plagiarized where the author just changed "En effet" to "Toutefois" (for example) at the begining of the quote.
  - dmfdmf 5mo ago
    FYI, En effet = Indeed. Toutefois = However. I had to translate so I thought I'd share.
- xtracto 5mo ago
  I don't understand who would plagiarize for their PhD thesis. In a PhD thesis one of the main things you want is to "blame it" on others so that you don't have to "justify" the text. The more references you have, the better, and the less questioning you have (those are peer reviewed published references after all).
- contubernio 5mo ago
  Rephrasing is worse than literal copying from a procedural point of view because it demonstrates intent and obviates a defense of mere incompetence.
  - DoctorOetker 5mo ago
    Exactly: it takes more brain cycles to paraphrase, then to simply attribute the quotes appropriately, this did not happen unintentionally.
- nradov 5mo ago
  Hopefully someone will eventually run plagiarism detection tools on every single doctoral and master's degree thesis ever submitted at every university worldwide. We need to make an example of those who committed academic fraud by ruining their careers.
- Glyptodon 5mo ago
  TBH this sounds harder to parse than I expected as there are various situations where rephrasing things is acceptable. I think historically allusion and rephrase, particularly of common and well known things, without citation I think was much more common, but now academics often err in the direction of finding citations for the sky being blue or water wet. And I do trust that it very much went beyond the pale given the university revoking a degree.
  - crdrost 5mo ago
    We must be very clear that this is very light rephrasing. Just to put it side-by-side in a form that will absolutely not work on mobile but might work if you're on desktop, here's a "two-column form" of an example plagiarism from the thesis: [ THESIS ] [SOURCE] les équations de la physique engendrent, les équations de la physique engendrent, en plus des solutions correspondant aux en plus des solutions correspondant aux phénomènes, des solutions sans aucune phénomènes, des solutions sans aucune signification physique directe. signification physique directe (certaines solutions sont rejetées, par exemple, parce qu'elles violent la causalité usuelle). La correspondance entre les mathématiques et la physique n'est donc pas biunivoque et naturelle. Ceci laisse donc planer un doute sur une sorte Un doute très sérieux plane donc sur l'idee d'un isomorphisme entre le language mathé- d'isomorphisme entre le langage (mathé- matique et la nature. Quant matique) et la nature. [...] à l'explication platonicienne de la L'explication platonicienne de la réussite des mathématiques réussite des mathématiques peut être divisée en deux thèses. La première pourrait être qualifiée de « platonisme faible » (celui qui peut être trouvé dans des dialogues tels que la République). elle consiste à admettre que les mathématiques Selon cette conception, les mathématiques constituent un langage intermédiaire qui constituent un langage intermédiaire qui permet de passer du monde sensible au monde permet de passer du sensible aux monde des Idées, qui forme la réalité profonde des Idées qui constitue la réalité profonde des choses. Si les mathématiques sont des choses. Les mathématiques sont efficaces, dira un platonicien, c'est efficaces ici parce qu'elles permettent de viser les parce qu'elles offrent unmoyen de viser les structures profondes du monde. véritables structures du monde.
- thinking_cactus 5mo ago
  Honestly, (not knowing about this case specifics) I don't think even copying Camus or de Broglie passages (not an entire text of course) is much of a problem to be honest. At one point some things become more or less common sense or public domain. I think this would be rather than plagiarism "citation misbehavior" -- i.e. failing to cite or mention previous work. Like, not every math geometry paper needs to cite Euclid, you can just talk about triangles; or even copying passages from say the parallel postulate or whatnot, when actually delivering something novel, should not count as fraud or plagiarism, simply failing to cite a historical source, in my opinion. Also, I believe citation is usually limited to prior written work. I don't think citing personal communications is mandatory, but at least for me lots of ideas come up in personal communications, random discussions, etc.. I think actually we should give more credit in this case, but it shows that attributing fraud for failing to cite may be a little too harsh. Again, I don't know if that's the case here, or if his thesis is just some pastiche or prior work without any significant or original contribution.
- crdrost 5mo ago
  It's worth pointing out that his M.O. was apparently to sometimes tweak the beginning of a sentence and then word-for-word copy some chunk from this source, some from that source, maybe tweak the ending to create a lead-in to the following sentence... but this is not just "oh some figures of speech lodged in my subconscious" -- this is like "whole sentences were mashed up together." Just some Google Translate of some of the plagiarized paragraphs, the thesis "The Unity of Physics" has: > The idea that the diversity of reality is underpinned by a deeper unity is as old as thought itself. Great mythologies recount it, early philosophers affirm it, and modern science has taken up the same agenda by first unifying concepts of motion, matter, and space. Indeed, the desire for intelligibility can arguably not do without the idea of the One. However, simply attributing such a tendency to human nature does not validate its realizations. The proclaimed unity may well prove false—stemming merely from incantation, decree, or fantasy—while exerting a purely dogmatic fascination. Yet, if thought were to discover—amidst the shifting mirrors of phenomena—eternal relationships capable of encapsulating them, one could certainly speak of a joy of the mind. While not necessarily an essential framework of thought, the desire for unity corresponds to a nostalgia, a craving for the absolute, an ontological impatience. Yet, the moment it is expressed, it clashes with the irreducible dispersion of things. From this arises a rift between the desiring mind and the disappointing world. At the close of the century, the increasingly assertive power of physical theories—with their all-encompassing nature and unifying aim—prompts us to examine the foundations of the physicists' quest for unity, to define its limits, and to consider its current prospects. This is claimed to be a mashup of paragraphs from three different sources, first, the sentence starting "However..." is said to hail from Jean-Michel Besnier's "Theories of Knowledge", > Could the "monist" tendency inherent in the act of knowing be suggested any more clearly? Yet, simply positing such a tendency within human nature is obviously not enough to validate its realizations. Indeed, that unity may well prove illusory, stemming from sheer fantasy while exerting a purely dogmatic fascination. That is precisely why critical philosophy sets out to distinguish between the scientific and... Followed by a bit of Camus' "Myth of Sisyphus," > If man were to recognize that the universe, too, can love and suffer, he would be reconciled. If thought were to discover, within the shifting mirrors of phenomena, eternal relationships capable of summarizing them—and of summarizing themselves in a single principle—one could speak of a happiness of the spirit of which the myth of the blessed would be but a ludicrous counterfeit. This longing for unity, this craving for the absolute, illustrates the essential movement of the human drama. Yet the fact that this longing exists does not imply that it must be immediately appeased. The last sentence of Sisyphus was changed except for the "Yet" to what appeared to be an original sentence or two in the thesis, "Yet ... irreducible dispersion of things. From this arises a rift between the desiring mind and the disappointing world" -- but only to immediately jump into a third line from Parrochia's "Grand Revolutions of the 20th Century," > The increasingly assertive power of modern physical theories—along with their all-encompassing nature and unifying aim—now enables the scientist to occupy, to some extent, the role held by the philosopher from antiquity through the classical age. This is by no means the least significant consequence of the revolution we have experienced... My very very initial read of this style, I would almost guess that he paid someone else -- someone who did not have a science education -- to write his thesis for him. And probably if that were true, then he had to provide the sources, "I like this sentence from here, that one from there, you see I highlighted this paragraph of this paper -- I'll highlight and you just paste everything together into one big whole and I'll look through the word processor and tweak a couple of sentence beginnings and endings to make everything look nice for the committee and probably only one person on the committee really reads a bit of it but let's be honest that they're all busy with their own research." With that sort of origin, that's how you get the "blind copying without rephrasing" type of thing (The person who's copying doesn't trust their technical chops to rephrase anything! "What if I choose the wrong word and it has another meaning in science and I embarrass myself?" -- so they go verbatim, "this made sense to someone who was well educated in the sciences, it can't be too embarrassing") with a little bit of tweaks between the chunks. The really incredible thing about the plagiarism report is the 16 copié-collé/copy-paste sections AFTER this one, where it's just like "Yep, he stole whole pages at a time from his sources in just this way."
- lukan 5mo ago
  Is it confirmed, that it was intentional? That is his defence: "Having read many books throughout his career, he may have “assimilated” them and “not always consciously” used them in his own writing, he said." I have never published anything in academic context, but I did write a lot and I often found that phrases of the same topic I read before creep into my own writing, so I could see this happening to me without intention. "the plagiarism report shows that he was rephrasing all of the sentences rather than copying verbatim" On the other hand, this is in fact the standard defence when someone is accused of plagiarism. But sometimes it might actually be correct? (No idea here, my french ain't good enough either) In general the reaction seems out of proportion to me, I much rather would like to have focus on actual fraud in science. I sometimes read this blog for example and there seem to be other things going on with less attention. https://forbetterscience.com/ https://forbetterscience.com/
- bitwize 5mo ago
  You are committing plagiarism any time you express anyone else's idea without proper attribution in an academic paper. This is, or was, drilled into the head of every college freshman in America. Such instances should be relatively straightforward to identify regardless of closeness of phrasing.
moralestapia 5mo ago
I'm glad to see this as a start. As much as ~60-70% of current academia leaders have bogus credentials and engage in plagiarism (from their colleagues, students, etc...). It's just terrible, we live in a modern dark ages because of this.
- AaronAPU 5mo ago
  It’s like this everywhere all at once. The bullshitters have won at natural selection.
- pixel_popping 5mo ago
  Literally, but of course when there is a news about it, suddenly it's "surprising", it's like when people find out about the Olympic games that their favorite athlete is leveraging steroids, hormones, drugs and so-on and act surprised (sure, even a 16-year old at the gym is using steroids but the one that is "at the top" doesn't? Absurdity), it's tiring to see, obviously virtually everyone is using PEDs there, the same way as virtually every student cheat to an extent. Cheating in life isn't necessarily that bad, if you are at the end of your studies and it's either you pass by cheating, either you don't, then the only logical thing to do is to cheat, who would go in more debt and potentially ruin their live doing otherwise, and WHY?
alphabeta3r56 5mo ago
I don't know whether his popular science work is plagiarized or not but about his thesis, it seems somewhat stupid To punish him So many things in physics have to be written in a very specific manner , to convey the meaning of the precise concepts being used. in such cases, it is a very common practice to copy the sentences used before, in order to ensure that everyone understands the meaning in a precise manner. So then to call it plagiarism doesn't make any sense
- stymaar 5mo ago
  He doesn't have a PhD in physics but in philosophy of Sciences. So he didn't plagiarize physics but philosophy.
- Planktonne 5mo ago
  1. The committee that examined his work in depth didn't reach the same conclusion as you 2. If you need to use the exact same phrase as someone else, then you should cite them
psychoslave 5mo ago
>clearly gives a strong impression of cronyism God damn¹, Louis XIV’s country that inspired La société du spectacle to Guy Debord is actually a great place to make a career as a courtesan, who would have guess. Guillotine images in streets are also on the rise: I can no longer make the smallest road trip without seeing some plastered all around. Looks like neither the wanna shine as elite in the bonnes gens side nor the drive me to unsustainable pauperized state in the crowd can refrain from their extreme propensities. ¹ https://www.capmemo.fr/sciences-humaines/983-le-mariage-de-figaro-je-sais-god-dam-scene-5.html https://www.capmemo.fr/sciences-humaines/983-le-mariage-de-f... ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
maxall4 5mo ago
This is rather reminiscent of the Bogdanov affair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair
- esafak 5mo ago
  Apparently anti-vaxxers who both died of "fake news" COVID.
  - ttoinou 5mo ago
    They had no impact / influence on COVID skeptic debates in France though
    - himinlomax 5mo ago
      They died of it too early for that.
      - ttoinou 5mo ago
        Thus they can't really represent french anti vaxxers. If you have to judge people by the most stupid of them, then the pro-vaxxers surely contain much more people and more stupid than anti vaxxers
  - alexey-salmin 5mo ago
    Bokonon tells us, incidentally, that members of a duprass always die within a week of each other.
- krackers 5mo ago
  How does the wiki page not mention their living infamy as a meme https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/bogdanoff-twins https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/bogdanoff-twins
cronyism2026 5mo ago
It is more frequent than you think. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14614 https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14614
- pixel_popping 5mo ago
  It's literally the norm.
wiether 5mo ago
> One of France’s most famous science communicators Never heard of him
- utopiah 5mo ago
  He's quite popular in France in particular thanks to https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/la-conversation-scientifique https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/la-convers...
  - wiether 5mo ago
    Should have added context to my message but I'm French and lived in France all my life. If his supposed popularity is coming from a spot on France Culture, I understand why I'm not familiar with him or his work
    - utopiah 5mo ago
      I don't want to legitimatize anything but he has been on France Inter, RTL, TF1, France 5, France 3, Canal+, LCI, LCP, Arte, etc. Are you suggesting he isn't actually popular or rather than you do not listen to France Culture or yet something else? I'm a bit confused as it's quite easy to check that he is indeed famous (again, not claiming it has any consequence on this work) in France related to popularizing science. I would bet, but feel free to ask around, that most people interested in scientific popularization know of him, but please do ask around, I'd be curious if it's just in my social circles.
      - wiether 5mo ago
        I don't listen to France Culture or any other radio station for that matter ; only FIP. And I don't watch TV so it won't help either. After posting my first comment I actually did asked, first at work and later to friends/family ; the only positive answer was from someone who listen to France Inter daily. Otherwise they said they never heard of the guy. Actually it's an interesting topic because it's far from the first time that I see some journalist talking about "someone famous", and yet I never heard of them. It seems that there's actually no real "mainstream medias" like it used to be when I grew up, where the vast majority of people were watching the 20h everyday. Talking to adults in their 20s is quite illuminating. Things we could consider "mainstream" are unknown to them. They don't even know they exists.
ttoinou 5mo ago
Ironic especially given he spent the last 6 years going on all french public debate spaces to uniquely talk about "ultracrépidarianisme" / Dunning–Kruger effect and tell everyone they should listen to the real Scientists (like him, of course) and not the people-not-approved-by-media-and-state
TheJCDenton 5mo ago
[dead]
jklinger410 5mo ago
More blood will be spilled of unsuspecting academics before the credulity of the science industrial complex can be restored.
Barbing 5mo ago
>Having read many books throughout his career, he may have “assimilated” them and “not always consciously” used them in his own writing, he said. Borg?
- savq 5mo ago
  ¡Borges! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Quixote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q...
leephillips 5mo ago
Too bad Harvard doesn’t have similarly high standards.
- ksd482 5mo ago
  Can you elaborate ? Recently a Harvard president, Claudine Gay was sacked. Also Francesca Gino was also punished for her (alleged still ? ) fabrication of data. So what's the problem ?
  - TMWNN 5mo ago
    > Recently a Harvard president, Claudine Gay was sacked. But Gay's PhD was not revoked.
  - leephillips 5mo ago
    The problem is that Claudine Gay was not sacked, she was allowed to resign as president and is still, at this moment, a professor at Harvard. Here is her faculty web page: https://aaas.fas.harvard.edu/people/claudine-gay https://aaas.fas.harvard.edu/people/claudine-gay So Harvard employs, as a full professor, someone whose Ph.D. thesis contained loads of plagiarism (I’ve seen the evidence, it’s not contestable). A similar offense on the part of the students who sit in her classroom, according to Harvard’s own rules, could lead to expulsion. EDIT: Also, as pointed out in a comment below, Prof. Gay’s Ph.D. is from Harvard. It was not revoked.
    - ksd482 5mo ago
      I wonder in the case of Francesca Gino, how much of that was driven by Harvard. I remember it was technically initiated by the Harvard business school, but it was probably triggered by data colada launching their own investigation. This speaks to your point.
      - leephillips 5mo ago
        Unfortunately I’m not familiar with this case.
morninglight 5mo ago
The French can be profoundly petty. This smells like an act of personal / political revenge. Klein has a long standing as one of France's best-known scientists and a gifted popularizer of science. If a crime was committed then it is clearly his thesis committee that should be punished. Shall we now impute dishonor on all those whose past writing cannot pass an AI examination? Do we start with Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, George Gamow, Michio Kaku, ...? In any case, we need to hurry. You may not care, but there is some jackass in France who is losing sleep.
autoexec 5mo ago
The university should suffer consequences as well since their thesis committee completely failed to do their job, especially those who didn't even notice they were the people whose work was being plagiarized. Since it's been demonstrated that you can successfully copy/paste your way to a PhD at this university this calls into question the validity of every other PhD obtained there.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
aag 5mo ago
“You may note however that the university has not issued any statement refuting the information reported in the press.”
lejeanvaljean 5mo ago
Knowing the political ideas of some journalists from "Arrêt sur Images", I would like that they also criticize other people than someone named "Klein".
- phtrivier 5mo ago
  I assume you're seing hints of antisemitism here (which is a real topic for French far left, don't get me wrong.) That being said, I suspect people in ASI can read Liberation, so they would know that Etienne Klein comes from a Catholic family [1]. Names can be tricky : the founder of the site is called Schneidermann... and yet he had troubles with Israel nationals... [2] [1] https://www.liberation.fr/futurs/2016/10/23/etienne-klein-il-y-a-tant-de-temps_1523799/ https://www.liberation.fr/futurs/2016/10/23/etienne-klein-il... [2] https://www.franceinfo.fr/faits-divers/police/la-police-appelee-chez-le-journaliste-daniel-schneidermann-victime-d-un-canular_956087.html#xtor=CS2-765- https://www.franceinfo.fr/faits-divers/police/la-police-appe...
- ElDji 5mo ago
  The managing director and founder of "Arrêt sur Images" is Daniel Scheidernmann.
MinimalAction 5mo ago
Given the advent of LLMs, I don't know if plagiarism is ever a thing anymore. Nobody is stupid enough to include verbatim unless citing those works. Feed into an LLM to get a paraphrased version conveying the same meaning. It is worrisome that the scientific machinery as it stands needs an overhaul in LLM era.
- hombre_fatal 5mo ago
  Plagiarism was always a stupidity/laziness charge though. People too lazy to reword the thing they’re copying and too dumb to realize they’d get caught. If anything, the charge has even more gravity now since now you were too lazy to use an LLM. Kinda like when you see bad English in an Amazon product listing and wonder if you even want to buy from a company who was too lazy to use a free LLM to fix up the copy. If the ecosystem required copy and paste to discover copied ideas, then it was doomed long ago and it’s a good thing that the AI era finally forces real process change.
  - MinimalAction 5mo ago
    That makes a lot more sense when you put it that way. Nevertheless, it is ever more harder to prove something is legitimately one's own work. That is worrisome when it comes to science where credits matter more than for glory; job markets only value publication outputs which may have been cheaper to obtain with LLMs now and harder to distinguish what's yours and what's not.
mikgp 5mo ago
We need like an international plagiarism body to give you a stamp of approval when you write your dissertation so this doesn’t come back to bite you 20 years later. A lot of times when I read certain plagiarism examples (Claudine Gay for instance) Like plagiarism seems like it can happen for three reasons: 1. You intentionally tried to take someone else’s effort / ideas and make them your own. Real bad 2. You were lazy didn’t read enough to know to attribute correctly. Not great? 3. You were writing about a set of ideas that only have so many ways to express them. You really didn’t know. I’m not saying we should give plagiarism a pass but maybe a statute of limitations? It seems really hard to tell 20 years later. Because to a certain extent - is this a case of 1? Did he pass of effort as his own? Or, if he has attributed Camus would you say “fair ‘nough mate, wasn’t central to your innovation” Maybe we need to assess every paper ever written and figure out which percentage can be accused of plagiarism. Intuitively it seems like the number would be high.
- paytonjjones 5mo ago
  It's been a while so I may be misremembering, but my memory was that the Claudine Gay case was one I looked at expecting a nothingburger and instead found "Oh, this is actually meaningfully beyond-the-pale plagiarism". But yes, in general, I do think a LOT of academics could be accused of the milder forms of plagiarism if you scrutinized all of them.
anthk 5mo ago
The French since Derrida won't produce anything better than academic postmodernist nonsense slop but without needing the outputs from LLM degradation. OTOH, the VLC and FFMPEG/Qemu creators should be put first as the good examples on being a good French STEM people instead of the 99% of bullshitters at TF1 debating nonsense which IMHO they became largely irrelevant since Francis Bacon and Pascal. These kind of people are just deluded manchilds which can't accept how the universe works at all. They thing everything orbits about them and that's the recipe for disasters such as Sokal.
- ttoinou 5mo ago
  France is bacon but Francis is english These kind of people are just deluded manchilds which can't accept how the universe works at all. They thing everything orbits Correct. French people are universalist, egalitarian, utopian, theory building lover, often refusing facing reality, however those traits are exactly what helped them build among the best products and theories in STEM
paytonjjones 5mo ago
I can't read French, but having evaluated many of these plagiarism cases in the past, a lot of them truly are witch hunts. The plagiarism will be something like "Einstein presented a new theory: ___" and the ___ and several sections of the next few pages will be barely modified Einstein quotes. Should they have used quotation marks? Technically, yes. But using them breaks up the flow for the reader, and it's not like they are failing to give credit to Einstein. As an academic, I really would not care much if someone did this to my work so long as they mention and cite me generally.
- orwin 5mo ago
  It's not his physic thesis, it's his philosophy thesis. I think i will make a comment or ask dang to change the title to make it clear
  - paytonjjones 5mo ago
    That would be good but the same principle applies. A huge part of a thesis in any field is just summarizing existing work, and if represented as such along with referencing names, may technically be plagiarism but most academics do not see it as the "bad kind" of plagiarism.
  - NewsaHackO 5mo ago
    OK, that is relevant context, because the quotes that people are saying he plagiarized wouldn't make sense to count as plagiarism in a physics thesis. I was scratching my head, thinking of how he could have plagiarized Camus in a physics thesis that isn't just some turn of phrase.
- kergonath 5mo ago
  > I can't read French, but having evaluated many of these plagiarism cases in the past, a lot of them truly are witch hunts. It’s not the case here. > The plagiarism will be something like "Einstein presented a new theory: ___" and the ___ and several sections of the next few pages will be barely modified Einstein quotes. Again, that’s not the case here. There was no attribution, no reference, and no quotes, for entire paragraphs. About a third of the thesis overall. > As an academic, I really would not care much if someone did this to my work so long as they mention and cite me generally. Which is fine, but again not very relevant to this case.
jeremyscanvic 5mo ago
That's wild I didn't expected the plagiarism to be that blatant. Extra shocked as a French who enjoyed listening to many of his talks
logifail 5mo ago
[flagged]
utopiah 5mo ago
Ah yes... Etienne, very eloquent otherwise. /s For a bit of an equivalent more US tech people could appreciate, he's kind of the national local Lex Friedman. He initially focused on this domain but then gradually had more and more famous guests across any field where he didn't have the required expertise.
fencepost 5mo ago
I'm not digging into the report, but as a general problem particularly in some niche fields I worry about the "Melancholy Elephants" problem as written about by Spider Robinson back in the 80s. He was talking more about copyright, but I could easily see the same thing happening elsewhere.
jimnotgym 5mo ago
'with fragments copied from intellectuals including author Albert Camus, physicist Louis de Broglie, and even some members of his thesis committee.' I don't know much about how one gets a PhD, but I assumed it involved the thesis committee reading your thesis? They didn't notice their own work? Did they not notice? Is that because they copied it off sometime else!?!
orwin 5mo ago
@dang: is it possible to add a word to the title to make it less clickbaity? French physicist and media star loses +++philosophy+++ doctorate after plagiarism investigation
- dang 5mo ago
  Bit of a hard one as the limit is 80 chars. Is he actually a physicist, as the article says? If so, I don't see that the title is misleading. I suppose it could say "French physicist loses philosophy doctorate after plagiarism investigation" but it would probably lead to a different sort of confusion.
  - orwin 5mo ago
    He is an engineer in material physics (DEA is basically Master degree in engineering + 1 year of internship/certification).
throwfaraway135 5mo ago
The fixation on word level plagiarism is bullshit, tell me how much of the novelty is plagiarized.
neilv 5mo ago
1. What happens when schools start hiring faculty with dissertations full of LLM output that's essentially the same thing as the plagiarism that this person is alleged to have done? 2. Well, at least it's an option in their back pocket, if they ever need to get out of a regretted contract or tenure commitment. 3. The article mentioned "weekly radio show". While presumably not the case here, the idea of academic as public public influencer suggests that rogue politicians could use allegations of academic plagiarism (due to LLM) to neutralize an academic who is saying something they don't like, when funding levers can't be used. (Examples of topics for academic positions that some politicians might not like: climate change, race/ethic, sex/gender, geopolitic, safety scandal of campaign donor, planetary flatness.) (I'm guessing this attack might work, since academics tend to profess more (dare I say it) conservative ideas about integrity than the overall population, and the universities value their own reputations highly. And academics have some rules and hierarchies, and they enforce rules when a transgression is called out in a way that can't be ignored. So, even if the general population goes full AI acceptance of people putting their name as author on things that aren't their own work, you'll have a lot of academics holding their own to a higher standard. And they already have a belief that plagiarism is bad. Fabrication is another bad. Popular LLMs are currently spewing both heavily.)
p1dda 5mo ago
Neal degass Tyson comes to mind
henearkr 5mo ago
For anybody not willing to burden their text with full-on quotations, but to avoid such plagiarism claims: It can be as unobtrusive as putting a simple footnote after each of those paraphrased blocks of text, thus only appearing as tiny numbers in the text. If Klein had just done that, he would have escaped this kind of accusation, while not changing a single character of his books as they are currently written -- except for the tiny footnote numbers. The footnotes contents can also be gathered at the end of the book, and this is completely normal. And there is nothing wrong with a text full of footnotes. That's really the standard, actually, in books targeting advanced readers, such as students.
- DamnInteresting 5mo ago
  Most of the time it's also necessary to put quotation marks or similar formatting (e.g., box, pullquote, or indentation) on the cited text to make it clear a) that it is a citation; and b) where the citation begins and ends. If one does that, assuming citations are not the bulk of the work, one should be in the clear.
  - henearkr 5mo ago
    But this doesn't apply in Klein's case, as he rephrased, and this had some purpose as it increased the integration and logical coherence of the whole. If it is rephrased, you cannot just put quotation marks. But you still have to indicate the source of the rephrasing (especially when it is lightly rephrased) e.g. by a footnote.
sourcegrift 5mo ago
I only came here for the pasta and as of 122 comments nobody has posted it. Sadly one of the brothers is no more
bvan 5mo ago
In the era of AI this is quaint. They ain’t seen nothing yet.

144 points by bookofjoe 5mo ago

Its the same guy who tweeted a photo of a pepperoni claiming it to be a star

It reads like those nightmares where you need to pass final exams again. I guess nowadays it is much simpler to correlate some text with prior work, more so with LLMs. It is like those doping cases where several years later we are able to detect a previously unknown sustance in an old sample.

Aurornis 5mo ago

> found instances of plagiarism on 20% of its pages, Guémart says, with fragments copied from intellectuals including author Albert Camus, physicist Louis de Broglie, and even some members of his thesis committee. Plagiarizing from people on your own thesis committee is a wild move. I can't read enough French to understand every detail, but the plagiarism report shows that he was rephrasing all of the sentences rather than copying verbatim: https://v42.arretsurimages.net/fichiers/documents/2024-08-02-Arret-sur-Images-Etienne-Klein-These-Plagiats-Recension.pdf https://v42.arretsurimages.net/fichiers/documents/2024-08-02... He wrote the thesis at a time when it was impossible to identify lightly rephrased statements across a wide body of works. Now we can dump all of these documents into an LLM and have similar sentences surfaced for human review very quickly. At the same time, it's no longer necessary to pick sentences from other people's work and change the phrasing. You can take someone else's paper, feed it into an LLM, and tell it to rewrite it for you. Easier than ever before to launder text.

andy99 5mo ago
Personally I think writing with an LLM is at least as bad as stitching together phrases from others. The article doesn’t really expand upon what having fragments copied from others means. Even if it fits the letter of the definition, on a phd thesis that may or may not be a big deal. If he’s passing off the ideas of others as his, or faking his research by using the results of others or making them up, then that’s really bad. If he’s just using phrases / wording from others to get his original points across, it looks bad but I don’t see it as a huge deal, especially 30 years out from the phd. A PhD is supposed to be original research, if the originality or integrity is in question that’s one thing, the rest is much more pedantic, even if technically wrong.
- Aurornis 5mo ago
  > The article doesn’t really expand upon what having fragments copied from others means. They link to the document that shows the plagiarized sections side by side with their sources https://v42.arretsurimages.net/fichiers/documents/2024-08-02-Arret-sur-Images-Etienne-Klein-These-Plagiats-Recension.pdf https://v42.arretsurimages.net/fichiers/documents/2024-08-02... I don't read enough French (especially at PhD thesis level!) to parse everything, but even I can see phrasings copied from the source documents in a lot of the examples. Some of them weren't even paraphrasing, they were lifting the exact distinctive word choices.
  - bambax 5mo ago
    He has a lot of wild defense arguments; one of my favorites is: at some point in his life he lost the ability to speak; to recover his voice he trained it by reading aloud some books over and over, so much so that the content of these books became part of his own brain / of himself. (Another one, unrelated, but also wild, argues that people who attack him are in fact against science itself, that they want to go back to the Middle Ages, etc.) It's very obvious he pieced together interesting ideas from others to pass them as his own. And it worked very well, he has radio shows and TV shows and whatnot. And he still has a lot of supporters!
    - kergonath 5mo ago
      > It's very obvious he pieced together interesting ideas from others to pass them as his own. And it worked very well, he has radio shows and TV shows and whatnot. And he still has a lot of supporters! Also, being able to get ideas, synthesise them and present them in a way palatable for mainstream audiences is a useful skill and an important role in society. It’s just not research.
seydor 5mo ago
It was a philosophy thesis, what's new in philosophy the past century
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- csh0 5mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_and_Necessity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_and_Necessity
- foldr 5mo ago
  If anything from 1926 onwards is fair game, then tons of work in the foundations of mathematics. And if you're willing to be slightly more more generous with your time-frame: Russel's paradox.
- jltsiren 5mo ago
  Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), A Theory of Justice (Rawls), and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn) have all been pretty influential.
bambax 5mo ago
> Plagiarizing from people on your own thesis committee is a wild move. Fun fact: he's using this to prove he didn't do anything wrong, as in "see? the people on my thesis committee didn't care I copied their own work, why should anyone else?" The truth is, people on "thesis committee" don't read thesis. Some do. The director usually does, if he has the time. But many don't; they glance at the intro and conclusion and call it a day. > He wrote the thesis at a time when it was impossible to identify lightly rephrased statements across a wide body of works. Now we can dump all of these documents into an LLM and have similar sentences surfaced for human review very quickly He also uses this to say it's unfair to punish him now with tools that didn't exist when he did the crime, which I find quite rich. If you murdered someone before DNA testing was available, that doesn't exonerate you in any way.
- colechristensen 5mo ago
  Academia is very broken if even your thesis committee is A) not interested in reading your thesis and B) can't even be bothered to when it is ostensibly their job. What exactly is the point of dedicating years of your life to create something exactly nobody is going to read?
  - foldr 5mo ago
    It varies a lot by field, but in many (not all) scientific fields, a PhD thesis is largely a formality these days. Your publication record is what counts. The days where you could get a tenure track faculty position just on the strength of a PhD thesis are long gone.
    - a-dub 5mo ago
      that's how i understand it. it's a portfolio with front matter, back matter, the papers that got published with some connective tissue between them and maybe some discussion of the things that didn't work out and why.
    - wbl 5mo ago
      Depends on the subfields. CS is by publication, number theory varies ("my students can find a stapler" to the dissertation has revolutionary result not published elsewhere)
dmbche 5mo ago
No no he was copy pasting! In the Arret sur image article you can read a whole sentences plagiarized where the author just changed "En effet" to "Toutefois" (for example) at the begining of the quote.
- dmfdmf 5mo ago
  FYI, En effet = Indeed. Toutefois = However. I had to translate so I thought I'd share.
xtracto 5mo ago
I don't understand who would plagiarize for their PhD thesis. In a PhD thesis one of the main things you want is to "blame it" on others so that you don't have to "justify" the text. The more references you have, the better, and the less questioning you have (those are peer reviewed published references after all).
contubernio 5mo ago
Rephrasing is worse than literal copying from a procedural point of view because it demonstrates intent and obviates a defense of mere incompetence.
- DoctorOetker 5mo ago
  Exactly: it takes more brain cycles to paraphrase, then to simply attribute the quotes appropriately, this did not happen unintentionally.
nradov 5mo ago
Hopefully someone will eventually run plagiarism detection tools on every single doctoral and master's degree thesis ever submitted at every university worldwide. We need to make an example of those who committed academic fraud by ruining their careers.
Glyptodon 5mo ago
TBH this sounds harder to parse than I expected as there are various situations where rephrasing things is acceptable. I think historically allusion and rephrase, particularly of common and well known things, without citation I think was much more common, but now academics often err in the direction of finding citations for the sky being blue or water wet. And I do trust that it very much went beyond the pale given the university revoking a degree.
- crdrost 5mo ago
  We must be very clear that this is very light rephrasing. Just to put it side-by-side in a form that will absolutely not work on mobile but might work if you're on desktop, here's a "two-column form" of an example plagiarism from the thesis: [ THESIS ] [SOURCE] les équations de la physique engendrent, les équations de la physique engendrent, en plus des solutions correspondant aux en plus des solutions correspondant aux phénomènes, des solutions sans aucune phénomènes, des solutions sans aucune signification physique directe. signification physique directe (certaines solutions sont rejetées, par exemple, parce qu'elles violent la causalité usuelle). La correspondance entre les mathématiques et la physique n'est donc pas biunivoque et naturelle. Ceci laisse donc planer un doute sur une sorte Un doute très sérieux plane donc sur l'idee d'un isomorphisme entre le language mathé- d'isomorphisme entre le langage (mathé- matique et la nature. Quant matique) et la nature. [...] à l'explication platonicienne de la L'explication platonicienne de la réussite des mathématiques réussite des mathématiques peut être divisée en deux thèses. La première pourrait être qualifiée de « platonisme faible » (celui qui peut être trouvé dans des dialogues tels que la République). elle consiste à admettre que les mathématiques Selon cette conception, les mathématiques constituent un langage intermédiaire qui constituent un langage intermédiaire qui permet de passer du monde sensible au monde permet de passer du sensible aux monde des Idées, qui forme la réalité profonde des Idées qui constitue la réalité profonde des choses. Si les mathématiques sont des choses. Les mathématiques sont efficaces, dira un platonicien, c'est efficaces ici parce qu'elles permettent de viser les parce qu'elles offrent unmoyen de viser les structures profondes du monde. véritables structures du monde.
thinking_cactus 5mo ago
Honestly, (not knowing about this case specifics) I don't think even copying Camus or de Broglie passages (not an entire text of course) is much of a problem to be honest. At one point some things become more or less common sense or public domain. I think this would be rather than plagiarism "citation misbehavior" -- i.e. failing to cite or mention previous work. Like, not every math geometry paper needs to cite Euclid, you can just talk about triangles; or even copying passages from say the parallel postulate or whatnot, when actually delivering something novel, should not count as fraud or plagiarism, simply failing to cite a historical source, in my opinion. Also, I believe citation is usually limited to prior written work. I don't think citing personal communications is mandatory, but at least for me lots of ideas come up in personal communications, random discussions, etc.. I think actually we should give more credit in this case, but it shows that attributing fraud for failing to cite may be a little too harsh. Again, I don't know if that's the case here, or if his thesis is just some pastiche or prior work without any significant or original contribution.
crdrost 5mo ago
It's worth pointing out that his M.O. was apparently to sometimes tweak the beginning of a sentence and then word-for-word copy some chunk from this source, some from that source, maybe tweak the ending to create a lead-in to the following sentence... but this is not just "oh some figures of speech lodged in my subconscious" -- this is like "whole sentences were mashed up together." Just some Google Translate of some of the plagiarized paragraphs, the thesis "The Unity of Physics" has: > The idea that the diversity of reality is underpinned by a deeper unity is as old as thought itself. Great mythologies recount it, early philosophers affirm it, and modern science has taken up the same agenda by first unifying concepts of motion, matter, and space. Indeed, the desire for intelligibility can arguably not do without the idea of the One. However, simply attributing such a tendency to human nature does not validate its realizations. The proclaimed unity may well prove false—stemming merely from incantation, decree, or fantasy—while exerting a purely dogmatic fascination. Yet, if thought were to discover—amidst the shifting mirrors of phenomena—eternal relationships capable of encapsulating them, one could certainly speak of a joy of the mind. While not necessarily an essential framework of thought, the desire for unity corresponds to a nostalgia, a craving for the absolute, an ontological impatience. Yet, the moment it is expressed, it clashes with the irreducible dispersion of things. From this arises a rift between the desiring mind and the disappointing world. At the close of the century, the increasingly assertive power of physical theories—with their all-encompassing nature and unifying aim—prompts us to examine the foundations of the physicists' quest for unity, to define its limits, and to consider its current prospects. This is claimed to be a mashup of paragraphs from three different sources, first, the sentence starting "However..." is said to hail from Jean-Michel Besnier's "Theories of Knowledge", > Could the "monist" tendency inherent in the act of knowing be suggested any more clearly? Yet, simply positing such a tendency within human nature is obviously not enough to validate its realizations. Indeed, that unity may well prove illusory, stemming from sheer fantasy while exerting a purely dogmatic fascination. That is precisely why critical philosophy sets out to distinguish between the scientific and... Followed by a bit of Camus' "Myth of Sisyphus," > If man were to recognize that the universe, too, can love and suffer, he would be reconciled. If thought were to discover, within the shifting mirrors of phenomena, eternal relationships capable of summarizing them—and of summarizing themselves in a single principle—one could speak of a happiness of the spirit of which the myth of the blessed would be but a ludicrous counterfeit. This longing for unity, this craving for the absolute, illustrates the essential movement of the human drama. Yet the fact that this longing exists does not imply that it must be immediately appeased. The last sentence of Sisyphus was changed except for the "Yet" to what appeared to be an original sentence or two in the thesis, "Yet ... irreducible dispersion of things. From this arises a rift between the desiring mind and the disappointing world" -- but only to immediately jump into a third line from Parrochia's "Grand Revolutions of the 20th Century," > The increasingly assertive power of modern physical theories—along with their all-encompassing nature and unifying aim—now enables the scientist to occupy, to some extent, the role held by the philosopher from antiquity through the classical age. This is by no means the least significant consequence of the revolution we have experienced... My very very initial read of this style, I would almost guess that he paid someone else -- someone who did not have a science education -- to write his thesis for him. And probably if that were true, then he had to provide the sources, "I like this sentence from here, that one from there, you see I highlighted this paragraph of this paper -- I'll highlight and you just paste everything together into one big whole and I'll look through the word processor and tweak a couple of sentence beginnings and endings to make everything look nice for the committee and probably only one person on the committee really reads a bit of it but let's be honest that they're all busy with their own research." With that sort of origin, that's how you get the "blind copying without rephrasing" type of thing (The person who's copying doesn't trust their technical chops to rephrase anything! "What if I choose the wrong word and it has another meaning in science and I embarrass myself?" -- so they go verbatim, "this made sense to someone who was well educated in the sciences, it can't be too embarrassing") with a little bit of tweaks between the chunks. The really incredible thing about the plagiarism report is the 16 copié-collé/copy-paste sections AFTER this one, where it's just like "Yep, he stole whole pages at a time from his sources in just this way."
lukan 5mo ago
Is it confirmed, that it was intentional? That is his defence: "Having read many books throughout his career, he may have “assimilated” them and “not always consciously” used them in his own writing, he said." I have never published anything in academic context, but I did write a lot and I often found that phrases of the same topic I read before creep into my own writing, so I could see this happening to me without intention. "the plagiarism report shows that he was rephrasing all of the sentences rather than copying verbatim" On the other hand, this is in fact the standard defence when someone is accused of plagiarism. But sometimes it might actually be correct? (No idea here, my french ain't good enough either) In general the reaction seems out of proportion to me, I much rather would like to have focus on actual fraud in science. I sometimes read this blog for example and there seem to be other things going on with less attention. https://forbetterscience.com/ https://forbetterscience.com/
bitwize 5mo ago
You are committing plagiarism any time you express anyone else's idea without proper attribution in an academic paper. This is, or was, drilled into the head of every college freshman in America. Such instances should be relatively straightforward to identify regardless of closeness of phrasing.

moralestapia 5mo ago

I'm glad to see this as a start. As much as ~60-70% of current academia leaders have bogus credentials and engage in plagiarism (from their colleagues, students, etc...). It's just terrible, we live in a modern dark ages because of this.

AaronAPU 5mo ago
It’s like this everywhere all at once. The bullshitters have won at natural selection.
pixel_popping 5mo ago
Literally, but of course when there is a news about it, suddenly it's "surprising", it's like when people find out about the Olympic games that their favorite athlete is leveraging steroids, hormones, drugs and so-on and act surprised (sure, even a 16-year old at the gym is using steroids but the one that is "at the top" doesn't? Absurdity), it's tiring to see, obviously virtually everyone is using PEDs there, the same way as virtually every student cheat to an extent. Cheating in life isn't necessarily that bad, if you are at the end of your studies and it's either you pass by cheating, either you don't, then the only logical thing to do is to cheat, who would go in more debt and potentially ruin their live doing otherwise, and WHY?

alphabeta3r56 5mo ago

I don't know whether his popular science work is plagiarized or not but about his thesis, it seems somewhat stupid To punish him So many things in physics have to be written in a very specific manner , to convey the meaning of the precise concepts being used. in such cases, it is a very common practice to copy the sentences used before, in order to ensure that everyone understands the meaning in a precise manner. So then to call it plagiarism doesn't make any sense

stymaar 5mo ago
He doesn't have a PhD in physics but in philosophy of Sciences. So he didn't plagiarize physics but philosophy.
Planktonne 5mo ago
1. The committee that examined his work in depth didn't reach the same conclusion as you 2. If you need to use the exact same phrase as someone else, then you should cite them

psychoslave 5mo ago

>clearly gives a strong impression of cronyism God damn¹, Louis XIV’s country that inspired La société du spectacle to Guy Debord is actually a great place to make a career as a courtesan, who would have guess. Guillotine images in streets are also on the rise: I can no longer make the smallest road trip without seeing some plastered all around. Looks like neither the wanna shine as elite in the bonnes gens side nor the drive me to unsustainable pauperized state in the crowd can refrain from their extreme propensities. ¹ https://www.capmemo.fr/sciences-humaines/983-le-mariage-de-figaro-je-sais-god-dam-scene-5.html https://www.capmemo.fr/sciences-humaines/983-le-mariage-de-f... ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle

maxall4 5mo ago

This is rather reminiscent of the Bogdanov affair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair

esafak 5mo ago
Apparently anti-vaxxers who both died of "fake news" COVID.
- ttoinou 5mo ago
  They had no impact / influence on COVID skeptic debates in France though
  - himinlomax 5mo ago
    They died of it too early for that.
    - ttoinou 5mo ago
      Thus they can't really represent french anti vaxxers. If you have to judge people by the most stupid of them, then the pro-vaxxers surely contain much more people and more stupid than anti vaxxers
- alexey-salmin 5mo ago
  Bokonon tells us, incidentally, that members of a duprass always die within a week of each other.
krackers 5mo ago
How does the wiki page not mention their living infamy as a meme https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/bogdanoff-twins https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/bogdanoff-twins

cronyism2026 5mo ago

It is more frequent than you think. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14614 https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14614

pixel_popping 5mo ago
It's literally the norm.

wiether 5mo ago

> One of France’s most famous science communicators Never heard of him

utopiah 5mo ago
He's quite popular in France in particular thanks to https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/la-conversation-scientifique https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/la-convers...
- wiether 5mo ago
  Should have added context to my message but I'm French and lived in France all my life. If his supposed popularity is coming from a spot on France Culture, I understand why I'm not familiar with him or his work
  - utopiah 5mo ago
    I don't want to legitimatize anything but he has been on France Inter, RTL, TF1, France 5, France 3, Canal+, LCI, LCP, Arte, etc. Are you suggesting he isn't actually popular or rather than you do not listen to France Culture or yet something else? I'm a bit confused as it's quite easy to check that he is indeed famous (again, not claiming it has any consequence on this work) in France related to popularizing science. I would bet, but feel free to ask around, that most people interested in scientific popularization know of him, but please do ask around, I'd be curious if it's just in my social circles.
    - wiether 5mo ago
      I don't listen to France Culture or any other radio station for that matter ; only FIP. And I don't watch TV so it won't help either. After posting my first comment I actually did asked, first at work and later to friends/family ; the only positive answer was from someone who listen to France Inter daily. Otherwise they said they never heard of the guy. Actually it's an interesting topic because it's far from the first time that I see some journalist talking about "someone famous", and yet I never heard of them. It seems that there's actually no real "mainstream medias" like it used to be when I grew up, where the vast majority of people were watching the 20h everyday. Talking to adults in their 20s is quite illuminating. Things we could consider "mainstream" are unknown to them. They don't even know they exists.

ttoinou 5mo ago

Ironic especially given he spent the last 6 years going on all french public debate spaces to uniquely talk about "ultracrépidarianisme" / Dunning–Kruger effect and tell everyone they should listen to the real Scientists (like him, of course) and not the people-not-approved-by-media-and-state

TheJCDenton 5mo ago

[dead]

jklinger410 5mo ago

More blood will be spilled of unsuspecting academics before the credulity of the science industrial complex can be restored.

Barbing 5mo ago

>Having read many books throughout his career, he may have “assimilated” them and “not always consciously” used them in his own writing, he said. Borg?

savq 5mo ago
¡Borges! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Quixote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q...

leephillips 5mo ago

Too bad Harvard doesn’t have similarly high standards.

ksd482 5mo ago
Can you elaborate ? Recently a Harvard president, Claudine Gay was sacked. Also Francesca Gino was also punished for her (alleged still ? ) fabrication of data. So what's the problem ?
- TMWNN 5mo ago
  > Recently a Harvard president, Claudine Gay was sacked. But Gay's PhD was not revoked.
- leephillips 5mo ago
  The problem is that Claudine Gay was not sacked, she was allowed to resign as president and is still, at this moment, a professor at Harvard. Here is her faculty web page: https://aaas.fas.harvard.edu/people/claudine-gay https://aaas.fas.harvard.edu/people/claudine-gay So Harvard employs, as a full professor, someone whose Ph.D. thesis contained loads of plagiarism (I’ve seen the evidence, it’s not contestable). A similar offense on the part of the students who sit in her classroom, according to Harvard’s own rules, could lead to expulsion. EDIT: Also, as pointed out in a comment below, Prof. Gay’s Ph.D. is from Harvard. It was not revoked.
  - ksd482 5mo ago
    I wonder in the case of Francesca Gino, how much of that was driven by Harvard. I remember it was technically initiated by the Harvard business school, but it was probably triggered by data colada launching their own investigation. This speaks to your point.
    - leephillips 5mo ago
      Unfortunately I’m not familiar with this case.

morninglight 5mo ago

The French can be profoundly petty. This smells like an act of personal / political revenge. Klein has a long standing as one of France's best-known scientists and a gifted popularizer of science. If a crime was committed then it is clearly his thesis committee that should be punished. Shall we now impute dishonor on all those whose past writing cannot pass an AI examination? Do we start with Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, George Gamow, Michio Kaku, ...? In any case, we need to hurry. You may not care, but there is some jackass in France who is losing sleep.

autoexec 5mo ago

The university should suffer consequences as well since their thesis committee completely failed to do their job, especially those who didn't even notice they were the people whose work was being plagiarized. Since it's been demonstrated that you can successfully copy/paste your way to a PhD at this university this calls into question the validity of every other PhD obtained there.

deleted 5mo ago

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aag 5mo ago

“You may note however that the university has not issued any statement refuting the information reported in the press.”

lejeanvaljean 5mo ago

Knowing the political ideas of some journalists from "Arrêt sur Images", I would like that they also criticize other people than someone named "Klein".

phtrivier 5mo ago
I assume you're seing hints of antisemitism here (which is a real topic for French far left, don't get me wrong.) That being said, I suspect people in ASI can read Liberation, so they would know that Etienne Klein comes from a Catholic family [1]. Names can be tricky : the founder of the site is called Schneidermann... and yet he had troubles with Israel nationals... [2] [1] https://www.liberation.fr/futurs/2016/10/23/etienne-klein-il-y-a-tant-de-temps_1523799/ https://www.liberation.fr/futurs/2016/10/23/etienne-klein-il... [2] https://www.franceinfo.fr/faits-divers/police/la-police-appelee-chez-le-journaliste-daniel-schneidermann-victime-d-un-canular_956087.html#xtor=CS2-765- https://www.franceinfo.fr/faits-divers/police/la-police-appe...
ElDji 5mo ago
The managing director and founder of "Arrêt sur Images" is Daniel Scheidernmann.

MinimalAction 5mo ago

Given the advent of LLMs, I don't know if plagiarism is ever a thing anymore. Nobody is stupid enough to include verbatim unless citing those works. Feed into an LLM to get a paraphrased version conveying the same meaning. It is worrisome that the scientific machinery as it stands needs an overhaul in LLM era.

hombre_fatal 5mo ago
Plagiarism was always a stupidity/laziness charge though. People too lazy to reword the thing they’re copying and too dumb to realize they’d get caught. If anything, the charge has even more gravity now since now you were too lazy to use an LLM. Kinda like when you see bad English in an Amazon product listing and wonder if you even want to buy from a company who was too lazy to use a free LLM to fix up the copy. If the ecosystem required copy and paste to discover copied ideas, then it was doomed long ago and it’s a good thing that the AI era finally forces real process change.
- MinimalAction 5mo ago
  That makes a lot more sense when you put it that way. Nevertheless, it is ever more harder to prove something is legitimately one's own work. That is worrisome when it comes to science where credits matter more than for glory; job markets only value publication outputs which may have been cheaper to obtain with LLMs now and harder to distinguish what's yours and what's not.

mikgp 5mo ago

We need like an international plagiarism body to give you a stamp of approval when you write your dissertation so this doesn’t come back to bite you 20 years later. A lot of times when I read certain plagiarism examples (Claudine Gay for instance) Like plagiarism seems like it can happen for three reasons: 1. You intentionally tried to take someone else’s effort / ideas and make them your own. Real bad 2. You were lazy didn’t read enough to know to attribute correctly. Not great? 3. You were writing about a set of ideas that only have so many ways to express them. You really didn’t know. I’m not saying we should give plagiarism a pass but maybe a statute of limitations? It seems really hard to tell 20 years later. Because to a certain extent - is this a case of 1? Did he pass of effort as his own? Or, if he has attributed Camus would you say “fair ‘nough mate, wasn’t central to your innovation” Maybe we need to assess every paper ever written and figure out which percentage can be accused of plagiarism. Intuitively it seems like the number would be high.

paytonjjones 5mo ago
It's been a while so I may be misremembering, but my memory was that the Claudine Gay case was one I looked at expecting a nothingburger and instead found "Oh, this is actually meaningfully beyond-the-pale plagiarism". But yes, in general, I do think a LOT of academics could be accused of the milder forms of plagiarism if you scrutinized all of them.

anthk 5mo ago

The French since Derrida won't produce anything better than academic postmodernist nonsense slop but without needing the outputs from LLM degradation. OTOH, the VLC and FFMPEG/Qemu creators should be put first as the good examples on being a good French STEM people instead of the 99% of bullshitters at TF1 debating nonsense which IMHO they became largely irrelevant since Francis Bacon and Pascal. These kind of people are just deluded manchilds which can't accept how the universe works at all. They thing everything orbits about them and that's the recipe for disasters such as Sokal.

ttoinou 5mo ago
France is bacon but Francis is english These kind of people are just deluded manchilds which can't accept how the universe works at all. They thing everything orbits Correct. French people are universalist, egalitarian, utopian, theory building lover, often refusing facing reality, however those traits are exactly what helped them build among the best products and theories in STEM

paytonjjones 5mo ago

I can't read French, but having evaluated many of these plagiarism cases in the past, a lot of them truly are witch hunts. The plagiarism will be something like "Einstein presented a new theory: ___" and the ___ and several sections of the next few pages will be barely modified Einstein quotes. Should they have used quotation marks? Technically, yes. But using them breaks up the flow for the reader, and it's not like they are failing to give credit to Einstein. As an academic, I really would not care much if someone did this to my work so long as they mention and cite me generally.

orwin 5mo ago
It's not his physic thesis, it's his philosophy thesis. I think i will make a comment or ask dang to change the title to make it clear
- paytonjjones 5mo ago
  That would be good but the same principle applies. A huge part of a thesis in any field is just summarizing existing work, and if represented as such along with referencing names, may technically be plagiarism but most academics do not see it as the "bad kind" of plagiarism.
- NewsaHackO 5mo ago
  OK, that is relevant context, because the quotes that people are saying he plagiarized wouldn't make sense to count as plagiarism in a physics thesis. I was scratching my head, thinking of how he could have plagiarized Camus in a physics thesis that isn't just some turn of phrase.
kergonath 5mo ago
> I can't read French, but having evaluated many of these plagiarism cases in the past, a lot of them truly are witch hunts. It’s not the case here. > The plagiarism will be something like "Einstein presented a new theory: ___" and the ___ and several sections of the next few pages will be barely modified Einstein quotes. Again, that’s not the case here. There was no attribution, no reference, and no quotes, for entire paragraphs. About a third of the thesis overall. > As an academic, I really would not care much if someone did this to my work so long as they mention and cite me generally. Which is fine, but again not very relevant to this case.

jeremyscanvic 5mo ago

That's wild I didn't expected the plagiarism to be that blatant. Extra shocked as a French who enjoyed listening to many of his talks

logifail 5mo ago

[flagged]

utopiah 5mo ago

Ah yes... Etienne, very eloquent otherwise. /s For a bit of an equivalent more US tech people could appreciate, he's kind of the national local Lex Friedman. He initially focused on this domain but then gradually had more and more famous guests across any field where he didn't have the required expertise.

fencepost 5mo ago

I'm not digging into the report, but as a general problem particularly in some niche fields I worry about the "Melancholy Elephants" problem as written about by Spider Robinson back in the 80s. He was talking more about copyright, but I could easily see the same thing happening elsewhere.

jimnotgym 5mo ago

'with fragments copied from intellectuals including author Albert Camus, physicist Louis de Broglie, and even some members of his thesis committee.' I don't know much about how one gets a PhD, but I assumed it involved the thesis committee reading your thesis? They didn't notice their own work? Did they not notice? Is that because they copied it off sometime else!?!

orwin 5mo ago

@dang: is it possible to add a word to the title to make it less clickbaity? French physicist and media star loses +++philosophy+++ doctorate after plagiarism investigation

dang 5mo ago
Bit of a hard one as the limit is 80 chars. Is he actually a physicist, as the article says? If so, I don't see that the title is misleading. I suppose it could say "French physicist loses philosophy doctorate after plagiarism investigation" but it would probably lead to a different sort of confusion.
- orwin 5mo ago
  He is an engineer in material physics (DEA is basically Master degree in engineering + 1 year of internship/certification).

throwfaraway135 5mo ago

The fixation on word level plagiarism is bullshit, tell me how much of the novelty is plagiarized.

neilv 5mo ago

1. What happens when schools start hiring faculty with dissertations full of LLM output that's essentially the same thing as the plagiarism that this person is alleged to have done? 2. Well, at least it's an option in their back pocket, if they ever need to get out of a regretted contract or tenure commitment. 3. The article mentioned "weekly radio show". While presumably not the case here, the idea of academic as public public influencer suggests that rogue politicians could use allegations of academic plagiarism (due to LLM) to neutralize an academic who is saying something they don't like, when funding levers can't be used. (Examples of topics for academic positions that some politicians might not like: climate change, race/ethic, sex/gender, geopolitic, safety scandal of campaign donor, planetary flatness.) (I'm guessing this attack might work, since academics tend to profess more (dare I say it) conservative ideas about integrity than the overall population, and the universities value their own reputations highly. And academics have some rules and hierarchies, and they enforce rules when a transgression is called out in a way that can't be ignored. So, even if the general population goes full AI acceptance of people putting their name as author on things that aren't their own work, you'll have a lot of academics holding their own to a higher standard. And they already have a belief that plagiarism is bad. Fabrication is another bad. Popular LLMs are currently spewing both heavily.)

p1dda 5mo ago

Neal degass Tyson comes to mind

henearkr 5mo ago

For anybody not willing to burden their text with full-on quotations, but to avoid such plagiarism claims: It can be as unobtrusive as putting a simple footnote after each of those paraphrased blocks of text, thus only appearing as tiny numbers in the text. If Klein had just done that, he would have escaped this kind of accusation, while not changing a single character of his books as they are currently written -- except for the tiny footnote numbers. The footnotes contents can also be gathered at the end of the book, and this is completely normal. And there is nothing wrong with a text full of footnotes. That's really the standard, actually, in books targeting advanced readers, such as students.

DamnInteresting 5mo ago
Most of the time it's also necessary to put quotation marks or similar formatting (e.g., box, pullquote, or indentation) on the cited text to make it clear a) that it is a citation; and b) where the citation begins and ends. If one does that, assuming citations are not the bulk of the work, one should be in the clear.
- henearkr 5mo ago
  But this doesn't apply in Klein's case, as he rephrased, and this had some purpose as it increased the integration and logical coherence of the whole. If it is rephrased, you cannot just put quotation marks. But you still have to indicate the source of the rephrasing (especially when it is lightly rephrased) e.g. by a footnote.

sourcegrift 5mo ago

I only came here for the pasta and as of 122 comments nobody has posted it. Sadly one of the brothers is no more

bvan 5mo ago

In the era of AI this is quaint. They ain’t seen nothing yet.