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Here is the thing that this market hints at, eloquently explained: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/seems-like-targeting
She gets punished because she did a bad thing and is in the spotlight. If she would not have been in the spotlight, the bad thing would not be punished.

This resolution is premature. The dust has not settled and two committees have already decided not to impose a punishment. Moreover, Gay's academic peers, in the field of political science, overwhelmingly question the charges. I would argue that the only opinion that truly matters is that of specialists well-acquainted with the subject, relevant literature, and Gay's works under scrutiny. Some instances of Gay's alleged plagiarism seem to involve statements of common knowledge, while others reproduce the text of laws and legal terms. This underscores the need for a specialist opinion to determine whether plagiarism has indeed occurred. And I would trust Harvard's decision because letting a plagiarized Ph.D. dissertation stand has detrimental (monetary) effects on the university brand, beyond any partisanship.

[note that I delegated resolution authority on this to the moderators, so I'm speaking as a creator of future similar markets here, not as the person justifying this resolution]

I personally generally like the idea of waiting to resolve for the 'dust to settle'. But

Moreover, Gay's academic peers, in the field of political science, overwhelmingly question the charges

This has not at all been my anecdotal impression - various academics I follow on twitter, including people who are usually partisan leftists, are saying that the plagarism is serious and would often/usually be punished. Can you elaborate, maybe?

Some instances of Gay's alleged plagiarism seem to involve statements of common knowledge, while others reproduce the text of laws and legal terms

Yes, some instances of alleged plagiarism were not important. Specifically, Rufo's original tweets were terrible. But others, for instsance, the passages uncovered by Sibarium, were pretty bad, and weren't any of those.

And I would trust Harvard's decision because letting a plagiarized Ph.D. dissertation stand has detrimental (monetary) effects on the university brand, beyond any partisanship.

I mean, she resigned.

@jacksonpolack To be clear, I am not sure that Gay has not plagiarized. Only that the resolution is premature. I am very much influenced by a recent Nature article and the repeated calls for a serious "transparent and independent investigation".

Yes, let us look at Sibarium https://x.com/aaronsibarium/status/1741981079056052273?s=20

He has six "extreme and clear-cut examples". One and two are texts of law, three is a definition, four and five are identical research questions, and six could be common knowledge (already stated multiple times by various authors). I am probably wrong, but that's my point: there is a need for someone with knowledge of the field and the literature (a political scientist writing in the field) to read the paper and give a verdict. Is there anyone like that? I've heard of Gary King and Ryan Enos from Harvard or Alvin Tillery, but they are not convinced.

Finally, it is in the interest of Harvard to investigate and rescind the Ph.D. (if plagiarized). Otherwise, there will be concrete proof that their diplomas are dodgy, which is more detrimental in the long run than a dodgy president, soon forgotten.

I think these are the ones you'd want to argue with

The paragraphs—from a paper Palmquist and Voss had presented a year earlier, in 1996—do not appear in quotation marks. One is unmodified but for a handful of words, and Gay does not cite Palmquist or Voss anywhere in her dissertation.

Jackson asked for a Moderator to review this market and attempt to resolve it. He just asked for one, not an entire council, so I guess you get me.

I reviewed several dozen comments on the market and scanned a few of the linked articles. By the time I got through reading I Vote on Plagiarism Cases at Harvard College. Gay’s Getting off Easy, I felt pretty confident in a Yes resolution.

I see a number of No holders in the comments with doubts related to the criteria, and also a bit of an argument along the lines of "I have a suspicion some of this falls into everyone-does-that, so it might not be so bad."

Let's review the criteria one more time just to confirm:

A YES resolution would require her to have done something that Harvard would often punish, something that's bad in principle but isn't ever punished wouldn't count

I have enough trust in the publication/editors that the linked op-ed clarifies this strongly enough for me. I don't think they would have ran the story if it was not at least mostly based on facts.

A YES resolution requires this to be the kind of thing that's, independent of patisan affiliation, worth having a news story about

It's a university president of a major university known all around the world. It doesn't matter what partisan affiliation is happening, it would have been a news story.

If what Claudine did is something half of all PhD students do and get away with, this resolves NO.

I know this came up in the comment section, but I have two rebuttals:

1. Plagiarism detection of exact copying, in 2023, seems relatively straightforward. I have confidence that if it was something half of all PhD students did, we would know. What I have heard, is that students sometimes have to rewrite things they have written before, to avoid plagiarizing their own work.

2. This is not necessarily mutually exclusive with the Yes criteria above. I think the Yes criteria are met. If someone in the next week can convince me that half of all PhD students do this and get away with it, I'll happily resolve N/A instead.

I feel quite comfortable resolving this to Yes.

The children of the world join hands and cry out: "Click resolve and yes."

This issue is very fraught with bias.

(note that this is unrelated to this market's yes/no resolution)

I've seen a bunch of claims on twitter that what Gay did wasn't really that bad or out of the norm - "5 over the speed limit" - and that it's been overemphasized for partisan reasons. I'm curious if anyone here holds a view similar to that, and wants to discuss that with me (who disagrees, and thinks it was pretty bad). I think it might be interesting to stake like M$250-25k each, paid out to the other party if (in your judgement) your position changes signiicantly, but if you just want to chat about it that's great too.

Okay now that she's resigned there might not be a dispute. Anyone (i.e. a single person) object to a YES resolution by me?

@jacksonpolack I don't think resignation is admitting fault here. Her job as the president is raising money. She can't effectively do that because of all the controversies. I don't think that's the same thing as her violating any policies.

I think if we want to get to the plagiarism issue we have to wait until she is out of the spotlight and see if there is any action against here.

@Ap

Look at the column on the right.

Also this, yesterday evening:

https://x.com/aaronsibarium/status/1741981079056052273?s=20

How many reports do you need to be convinced?

@NicoDelon I'm not saying she didn't plagiarize I'm saying the criteria says:
"A YES resolution would require her to have done something that Harvard would often punish, something that's bad in principle but isn't ever punished wouldn't count."
She had published her thesis a couple of decades ago but no complaint until she got on the spotlight. This shows that the offense would likely go unpunished in most cases (it would have gone unpunished for her had she not showed up to the congress)
Even so, we can see now that the allegations are out there if they are punished.

@Ap https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/31/honor-council-member-gay/

@jacksonpolack Plz put "No" out of their misery.

Okay, that counts as a dispute so some mods will be making the decision here.

I'm really quite confident this is a YES though.

published a couple of decades earlier, no complaint until she got the spotlight

The wording was often punish, not always punish, and I see a lot of claims from people close to Harvard that what she did (specifically the later allegations, not Rufo's original dumb claim). Is there any evidence that this isn't often punished other than her case itself?

Also, would anyone not have bet on this if I didn't have the mod resolve clause? I was the largest NO holder, and I'd imo definitely have still resolved YES without it. I'm not sure if it's worth doing for a sense of fairness vs not worth doing for friction. (Although even if without the clause, I'm generally going to be happy to wait a bit for things to settle before resolving if someone asks)

@jacksonpolack Eh I retract my dispute. It's your show to run so if you feel like it is a yes, resolve. I'll just leave a few articles here and if you are still convinced it's a yes, you have my permission to ignore my dispute.

1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-021-04140-5 "The result revealed that 18% (95% CI: 12–25%) of articles have instances of plagiarism."

2. 10 years prior to that and only medical literature in Croatia: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-011-9347-2
"Plagiarism was suspected in manuscripts with more than 10% of the text derived from other sources." 10% is a really large criteria and they find 14% of the papers were suspected to have plagiarized under this criteria

3. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-014-9600-6
In a metaanalysis of surveys from academics 30% said they knew a colleague that committed plagiarism (numbers are much lower for them saying they committed it)

basically, you can do a literature search and see that plagiarism narrowly defined is a bit problem in academia and the numbers are so large that there is no way all of these people are getting punished/fired from their job. Whether it is "half of phd students" or not I don't know but it is a large fraction of academics.

I'm not saying Gay did not plagiarize but to me it does seem like if a random grad student did what she did, no one would have noticed (and in fact no one did)


Again, your show to run, so if you think this is a yes go for it. at this point my position is not worth anything anways.

@Ap I'm also in the NO camp because I feel like she got punished because she's in the spotlight, it's the controversy. Not the substance of what she did being so different from what all other students do. But will agree it's jacksons show to run and many people disagree with me.

@Ap yeah I was thinking the same as you, not that I spent that much time thinking about this at all. I just looked at the examples dredged up by the NY Post, or some rag like that, and decided it was technically plagiarism but of the more anodyne variety as far as I'm concerned (occasional lack of paraphrase and quote attribution, rather than stealing whole ideas outright, which I would have considered to be more material of a breach). Maybe there is a more rigorous comparison of Gay versus some random sampling of others who were either reprimanded or not for their violations, but haven't seen it. Bottom line is can't be mad at a market resolution when it's clear it's based on vibes.

@AlQuinn People at Harvard writing in The Crimson that Harvard students get punished for what she did and she got off easy is as explicit a statement as you can get. Do you all just intentionally ignore the damning statements to focus on the anodyne ones?

@Fedor The market clearly disagrees.

@NicoDelon If Harvard Crimson is a source then consider this as well:

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/31/editorial-gay-plagiarism-resign/

Aside from the perennial woke-speak in that editorial, I agree with its assessment of the severity of Gay's offense (again, based on the handful of specific examples I've actually seen documented). My further point is that I'm fine with a YES resolution on this question regardless since this comes down to a judgement call on how strictly we assume Gay should be judged, if we try to decouple the other issues with her tenure. I'm commenting because I genuinely don't know what a normal amount of sloppy attribution of sources is exceptional and would require punishment versus the hand-slap of just being told to go fix some sloppy work.

@jacksonpolack

A YES resolution would require her to have done something that Harvard would often punish, something that's bad in principle but isn't ever punished wouldn't count.

What if the plagiarism she done was something that Harvard would often punish if discovered, but that Harvard rarely ever finds such instances of plagiarism, because they're very small compared to normal?

I already posted an Op Ed by a former voting member of the Harvard College Honor Council who has stated that it was plagiarism by their guidelines and students have been punished and are still to this day punished for the very same things. Note that no one has refuted or provided a counter-argument to this particular members statements nor are their statements disputed by anyone else of similar stature.

This was as damming a statement as anyone can expect on this topic and whether you resolve this as YES or pick a committee (that will resolve this as YES) makes no difference. With all due respect its silly to keep dragging this. We all know what the outcome will be.

@AlQuinn It's not that it's the "Harvard Crimson" that makes it a powerful source, its that within the article I posted it's a former voting member of the Harvard College Honor Council that states unequivocally that what she did constitutes plagiarism and other students have, and continue to be, punished for it.

@RiskComplex it's one thing to say that this incident, given the scrutiny now being applied, is plagiarism by a strict reading of current policy; however, what's less clear to me is in practice how often plagiarism of this sort occurs and goes unpunished.

It's like speeding: yeah, almost everyone who drives technically breaks the law and speeds--and if asked for an official statement on the matter, officials will say it's punishable. But in practice, a reasonable amount of speeding is tolerated and effectively legal.

@AlQuinn At least to me it seems obvious that it is implied that we're talking about what happens when someone is brought to the council with these allegations, are they punishable or not. In the same way if I asked you if murder is punishable, you would say yes, and not say "well depends where you do it because in Chicago (or some other area with a > 50% amount of unsolved murders) the answer is probably no".

But again, if this needs to be put to a committee then lets do it already. I think the results would actually be entertaining.

@RiskComplex I already said I wouldn't object if this went YES given current info. I have a tiny amount of mana on this and I knew when I made the bet that I was a low information trader. I'm just genuinely uncertain about the current amount of sloppy low-grade plagiarism that might be happening in academia. I don't think that's a "silly" position, even though normally I'm extremely silly.

@AlQuinn I understand. To be clear - I didn't say your position is silly, I said that dragging this on is silly. We should resolve to YES or have a committee vote.

@RiskComplex I'm skeptical of any comments made directly related to this incident but lets look at harvard's record. Someone recently sent me this article

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/8/honor-council-withdrawals/

We see 47 instances of plagiarism. These are ad board referrals so as you can imagine many many instances go on reported. lets say plagiarism is on equal footing as cheating on an exam. and the numbers of each violation is roughly equal (cheating is bigger and there are a few other violations). There were 27 withdrawals which seems like the only serious punishment here so less than a third of instances of plagiarism were punished. (of course I'm making some assumptions here and this is student pop (presumably undegrads) not faculty/ grad student )

@Ap I'm happy to have a discussion but I think to release people's mana this shoudl probably be resolved as Yes and maybe can be reversed later

@Ap no point for a couple of us filibustering here. nor do we intend to do so.

@Ap I don't think the severity of the punishment matters for this question. If you look at the graph on the link you posted, 'no action' + 'scratch' (I don't know what scratch means but lets assume its in your favour of indicating that there was nothing wrong with the students actions) amounts to 27% of all cases. Meaning that >70% of the cases looked at were punished.

btw, if you do disagree that this should resolve YES, then that's perfectly ok and you should state so explicitly (I'm not saying you have or haven't - I haven't read through the entire thread) but in which case we have a reason to move to the next stage of resolving this. The rules are clear, if one person disagrees with the resolution then "a council of trustworthy manifold users to make a judgement".

Are you that person?

@RiskComplex

Fwiw, this is defined in the Harvard College Honor Council Annual Report

"Scratch - A finding that nothing wrong occurred, or that there are no grounds for action. A decision of scratch is recorded in the student’s file to signal that the Council found no fault."

Unfortunately those annual reports don't further break out plagiarism accusation outcomes, but the aggregate math is still compelling in terms of indicating likelihood of punishment.

@RiskComplex
Sure, I'm that person. lets do the council and get this over with.

regarding punishments
probation is """a notice from the College that future violations may lead to more serious consequences.""" Is this really a punishment?