6 ms·

> 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

• colechristensen 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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)
      • mswphd 4mo ago
        CS can (but not frequently) have the revolutionary result you mention as well. A candidate Fully Homomorphic Encryption scheme was first detailed in Craig Gentry's thesis, for example. That being said, this is much less common than a 1. literal stapler thesis, or 2. cleaned up version of a stapler thesis (e.g. rewrite of several previous publications to give broader context etc)
        • wbl 4mo ago
          Cryptography is closer to math than most CS disciplines institutionally.
          • mswphd 4mo ago
            that's broadly true, but there are some areas of CS that are at least as close (say at a minimum PL theory). it's also less math heavy than e.g. complexity theory (though that's admittedly smaller). It can also be less math-heavy than learning theory. This all depends on the type of cryptography as well, especially since it can depend on the region (american cryptography is more theoretical than european cryptography, for example).
  • Calavar 4mo ago
    The value of a PhD thesis is the personal intellectual growth you get from putting it together. The end product isn't really the point. There's a lot to be said about publishing in academia being broken and how nearly all the value comes from 10% of publications, while the rest are garbage spewed out for reasons orthogonal to the advancement knowledge. However, IMHO, none of that really applies to PhD theses.
    • gowld 4mo ago
      What if you don't grow intellectually and just slap together a PhD thesis that no one reads?
      • bombcar 4mo ago
        Then you've benefited nothing beyond the paper and the letters. It's really the "cheat yourself" problem, except we put some value on that paper and those letters.
    • TFNA 4mo ago
      > The value of a PhD thesis is the personal intellectual growth you get from putting it together. The end product isn't really the point. This definitely varies by field. For example, there are some branches of linguistics where the big, important new monographs that move the field forward are often PhD theses (though typically the defended diss manuscript will get some very light rewriting and polishing before it appears from a publisher). After that, a scholar's publications over his/her career might be less ambitious and focused more on minutiae.
  • swatcoder 4mo ago
    Early work in any trade is mostly junk, and academia no exception. But the process of creating that work, engaged throughought that process with those purported to be more practiced, is usually pretty good at seeding enough expertise and confidence that you might be able to proceed more independently and with real novelty, or might at least be prepared to share the trade with others new to it. That's the point of those years, and so it's more than a little ironic that AI is being used to undermine a practicing expert while simultaneously eroding the traditional process for becoming one by making it so easy to just generate slop and engage with hallucinations than to actually practice writing deep work or engaging with primary sources.
    • colechristensen 4mo ago
      The whole idea of a PhD is acknowledging that a person has made a meaningful contribution. It is not "early work" but the end of early work. The masterpiece: the piece of work that proves a subject has mastered their craft. If you're still producing junk you haven't earned your PhD.
      • foldr 4mo ago
        That’s how people outside academia see PhDs. Inside academia, everyone has a PhD and it doesn’t really mean very much. It can take decades to really become an expert in a field, and a PhD program usually lasts around 5 years (in the US).
        • colechristensen 4mo ago
          >everyone has a PhD and it doesn’t really mean very much Then academia is broken and the universities that operate like this should be dismantled (not to mention the accreditation organizations) What's actually happening is people chasing items on a CV instead of actual knowledge is rotting the core of universities.
          • foldr 4mo ago
            Who does or doesn't have a PhD isn't terribly important in the scheme of things. Inside academia, the job market is highly competitive, and no-one is getting a job just on the strength of a cookie-cutter PhD thesis. Outside academia, it mostly makes no difference to anything whether you have a PhD or not. If we apply your criteria, I'm not sure if any universities would be left.
  • gus_massa 4mo ago
    Most PhD have a few papers before finishing the dissertation. Many times the dissertation is made of a few paper by the author glued together. The papers usually chain, so it's instead of introduction1 -> main1 -> conclussion1 introduction2 -> main2 -> conclussion2 introduction3 -> main3 -> conclussion3 the thesis is something like long introduction -> easy example -> main1 -> main2 -> main3 -> main of preprint -> long conclussion
    • AlotOfReading 4mo ago
      Thesis by publication is only one way, and not even the most common in many fields. I can't access the actual text of this thesis, but the abstract sounds more like a monograph and I don't see any author publications before the thesis that would lead me to think otherwise.
      • maleldil 4mo ago
        What gus_massa was describing doesn't sound like thesis by publication. TBP usually uses the papers verbatim with some added material to make them cohesive to the overall thesis argument. What they described is more like repurposing existing material in a thesis format, which is indeed very common.
    • IAmBroom 4mo ago
      Haven written a Master's dissertation, I think your typo of conclussion for conclusion (suggesting a head injury is needed to slog through it) is perfect.
  • psychoslave 4mo ago
    Reproducing elitist social structure?
  • complex_pi 4mo ago
    Academia is very broken. That's it actually. It's a long time that the incentive and job structure make universities a very toxic environment. Professors are basically running a 40 years race (about from bachelor or master graduation to retirement). It is still amazing that some good comes out of it.
  • rjzzleep 4mo ago
    It's very broken, and I'm not sure if it's possible to write everything original given that you're expected to repeat 2/3rds of past research to fill pages when you write your thesis. For a master thesis that was at least 100 pages. For a PhD nowadays each one of those is published as a book. At least it was like that in my engineering department.
  • cge 4mo ago
    For both me (physics) and my wife (history), in the American system, both at strong universities, most of our committee members read most of of our dissertations. For her, in a field where thesis by publication is not standard (your thesis is typically revised into your first book), her committee at the defense focused on questions and comments based on the committee's reading of the thesis more than on the actual defense presentation, which is apparently also normal in the field. In part, I expect that's because the thesis is expected to be built into something important post-PhD, and comments are seen as helpful in that process. For me, it wasn't quite so apparent at the defense, and I don't know that all members read the final thesis carefully, but most of them had already seen me publish or present most of the research previously, often multiple times. I also know that some (and not just my advisor) did read the final thesis very closely. My thesis was only partially thesis by publication, however, which may have influenced this; it does now have a fair number of citations in its own right, which is somewhat unusual for the theses in the field, and potentially seen as awkward (it means there's significant work in the thesis that I never published elsewhere). As a caveat, the American system (before current crises) does feel like it can have a two-tier system of PhD students who are expected to remain in academia (we both were) and ones who are not, even at strong universities. Expectations, and attention given, can vary considerably. The American system also tends to have larger and more closely involved committees than, for example, the UK/Irish system. However, for the form of plagiarism discussed here: if someone had sentences from papers I published years ago interspersed in their work, and they weren't particularly notable sentences, I'm not confident I would notice. Depending on citations and what the sentences were, I'm not even sure I'd mind much, for example, if they were essentially copying a model definition.
  • orwin 4mo ago
    It's a philosophy thesis, and unlike STEM or soft sciences (history, linguistics...), they are very light on fact which make them very dry. The will read the introduction, conclusion (which can have more words than a physic thesis), the main thesis that interest them the most, and count on their collegue to read the other main thesis. Also, very dry, so it's easy to loose focus, and you can read a rephrasing of your own thesis as a "he has the same ideas" (also, if you do that, please reference the author?) I find a few of the example damning (hje should totally have added a citation and build his argument around it). Most less so, and i understand that a reader could not catch them.
  • maleldil 4mo ago
    What you create is the research along the way, which usually gets published. The dissertation is just a document that examiners read.
• jtbayly 4mo ago
  A lot of "plagiarism" is not plagiarism. Feed stuff you wrote into those tools and it will call you a plagiarist every day because you wrote something similar to the person you learned it from. I don't know about this case, but a lot of these kinds of cases truly are witch-hunts. It's not at all like the reproducibility crisis and faked data and images.
  • contubernio 4mo ago
    The very few cases that result in sanctions are generally horrendously flagrant. With another professor I caught a flagrant case in a student thesis and we faced attacks from the university administration because the student had a stellar transcript (also not the positive signal some might think). Punishment was almost inexistent. It's difficult for me to imagine what it would take to get a doctoral thesis revoked.
    • goodluckchuck 4mo ago
      Different leadership. If some in your experience erred on the side of leniency, then it stands to reason that others might err just as egregiously in the opposite direction. In fact, your anecdote suggests erring is the norm. We should thus expect punishments to be inappropriate in one direction or another. An appropriate punishment seems rather unlikely.
      • breezybottom 4mo ago
        No, that doesn't stand to reason at all.
      • Wolfbeta 4mo ago
        I too enjoy creating bell curves from a single datum.
      • contubernio 4mo ago
        The anecdote is meant to illustrate not to substitute a full data set. Universities and other similar large institutions usually err systematically in one direction - that which protects the institution.
• thaumasiotes 4mo ago
  > 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. What crime?
• mysterydip 4mo ago
  “Creepy old man says police should release him on account of Scooby Doo not existing at the time he decided to dress up as a ghost”