Plagiarism

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Agnes:
Hi Robin.
Robin:
Hi Agnes. We have come again to talk about whatever topics we end up talking about! We can’t predict that very well. But we’ve decided on an introductory question that I’m going to ask you, which is what’s so good about plagiarism? I hear you’re a big fan!
Agnes:
[Laughs] Uh, no. I’m not. What I am is somebody who is skeptical that the norms against plagiarism grip anything real in the whole bedrock, by contrast with some of our other norms which I think are tracking like genuine value.
Robin:
Well I’m sure you are aware of the usual reasons academics would give against plagiarism. So do you want to summarize them to criticize them? Or should I? Or…
Agnes:
Well, maybe one thing I’ll say is, it is striking to note the place of these norms within academia. Like if you want to debate stuff with academics, right, you could debate almost any topic: You could ask, you know, is it okay to kill babies? Or, you know, maybe torture is sometimes okay. That would be like a topic where you can get people to take both sides. And interestingly, I found the one thing all academics will agree on is how terrible plagiarism is. It’s our kind of like moral code. So I agree with you, it plays in especially…
Robin:
Okay, but that’s not what the argument for it is.
Agnes:
No. That’s not the argument for it—
Robin:
In essence, it’s—
Agnes:
I’m just agreeing that they cherish it. So now you give me the argument.
Robin:
So for example, I’ve considered being a columnist or a pundit. I look at what pundits write and I notice that they don’t try to situate what they say in the context of other things other people said. And so they often repeat things. The columnist today might say the same thing as a columnist did 70 years ago in some other city. And they’re fine with that, and they don’t even care to notice. Right? It’s just about having something compelling for their audience.
And that academia has this norm of doing things to accumulate. We’re not just trying to say things that our audience might like, we’re trying to build this edifice of all these things we’ve learned. And in order to do that, what we need is for each person to say a new thing and try to convince us it is a new thing, and therefore to put it in context of old things that are nearby and to explain how their thing is new. And if we expect that people consistently do that, then we can try to believe more that we are making new things, and therefore we’re accumulating and building something that lasts and becomes bigger rather than just cycling around in the space of the same topics and the same things anybody’s ever said.
Agnes:
Yeah, so I agree with you that there are norms as to how you should conduct research in academia. And I agree with you that quite often citations are useful for the reader. But I think the norms against plagiarism extend far beyond that. And so one thing you could do is you could compare somebody who writes a paper, but he just doesn’t do a good job reading the literature—I often find this in my own field, someone will not have read like half of the important papers, right?
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
And people will be annoyed by that. But they will not react similarly to someone who just copies an idea—that occasions outrage as opposed to merely a kind of shoddy job with respect to these research norms. So I think that plagiarism— The norms about plagiarism are not, in the first instance, designed to further intellectual inquiry, they are more about an honor. Right? So people want credit.
And academics in particular don’t—unlike pundits—don’t make a lot of money from their ideas, right? So they have to make something else from their ideas. And I mean, they have a salary, right, but for many academics that doesn’t feel sufficient to them. They feel— academics feel underpaid. And so they want to be paid in the currency of honor. And you know, being cited is part of how they get paid in that currency. It’s also part of how they get promoted—it’s like there’s a whole system around that. So I tend to think the plagiarism norms function more directly as part of that honor system than issues of research.
Robin:
Well, can’t we just call it a credit system?
Agnes:
Yes, it’s credit. Right. But the reason you want the credit is either honor or you want to parlay the honor into a higher salary or something.
Robin:
But in a great many institutions in society, credit is important. That is, we want to allocate resources according to some sort of outcomes, and a key issue is credit for them. So like in a business, if there was a new product and it’s successful, then we want to know, Well, who was responsible for introducing this new product, and whoever can successfully correctly take the credit should correctly be given credit in that business, right?
Agnes:
Why is that important that they’d be given the credit because they came up with it?
Robin:
Because it was work. So but you know, so we can think about accounting systems in general: Like in most companies, you have cost accounting primarily, you primarily see the cost of buildings and the cost of materials and people’s time and things like that. And you’re trying to make sure you know where all the costs were and when.
Then you know, not just so you can help minimize costs by rearranging it, but also to look out for cheating—for people stealing, right? Accounting is to prevent theft, in part. But in most businesses they actually do a relatively poor job of giving accounting for work to develop ideas, and like a new product.
And so you might hope that there was a better accounting system for the work that goes to create a good idea, because then you— because you might fear that somebody who can get away with it—and often managers can simply take credit for the good ideas that happen and disavow credit for the bad ideas, and then, you know, arbitrarily look good according to this accounting system, but not actually be good, right? The more that the accounting system fails to credit or account for things that are actually there, the less it’s useful as a guide to decision.
Agnes:
I mean, so if I were an economist I might say, Well, what seems to me to matter would be like, do you have sufficient incentives for people to produce these ideas? And maybe you need to give them this credit, right, in order to incentivize the production of the ideas?
Robin:
Indeed.
Agnes:
One thing is like, if what you’re getting is a lot of idea production but other people taking credit for it, apparently you don’t need those incentives, right? Apparently people are still producing ideas!
Robin:
But they just got too little production.
Agnes:
Right, so you can get more production if you give more credit.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
So I am not— I think that’s right. So it may well be that at least in certain contexts, having plagiarizing norms is— anti-plagiarism norms— is sort of an efficient way of organizing a certain kind of activity. So I think in particular, for instance papers, right? Students have to write papers, and then they get graded on those papers, right? And if they plagiarized and wrote someone else’s paper, that would be cheating, right? And then that kind of screws up your whole system.
Robin:
You can’t evaluate them, because they didn’t—
Agnes:
Right. And so— and I think— So I think that you could say that it’s sort of problematic that way. That would be analogous to how— Suppose you had a take-home exam and they were only supposed to take one day for it, but someone found a way to take two days for it, right?
Robin:
Right. Got it early, perhaps.
Agnes:
So that’s like— That’s cheating in the sense that you sort of set up—you create a set of rules, and the set of rules are designed so that they give people the proper incentives, right, to get your result. And then some people are sort of cheating.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
And so if you want to say insofar as plagiarism is cheating—well, you know, just as you taking an extra day on the test would be cheating, right?—then sure, it might be wrong in that way if you happen to arbitrarily set up your system with this rule, and when people break the rule it's a problem. But that’s why I said it’s not because they don’t have a moral—
Robin:
But wait—it’s not arbitrary. I mean a 24-hour exam isn’t arbitrary. I mean, there’s a reason why you said 24 hours per exam. And that means it’s not an arbitrary rule.
Agnes:
It’s totally arbitrary. I give people different kinds of exams, and some of them let them take as much time as they want, and some of them I arbitrarily decided if we’re going to take one day for the exam.
Robin:
So here I mean, this is less about exams and more about sort of social credit—that is, I am at least more interested in the plagiarism norms as applied to a larger intellectual community rather than students taking their exams. So the obvious rule would be whatever the rule your teacher has for your exam, if you break that rule then you’re breaking the class’s rule.
Agnes:
Exactly. That’s why—
Robin:
So that’s not a general plagiarism rule. That’s just a rule about a class.
Agnes:
Exactly.
Robin:
Right. But we do, in more sense, have a larger social norm at least in larger areas of intellectual work, that you know, if you have an idea you’re presenting as new but it is not new, and not only is it not new, you know it’s not new because you know where you got it from, and you’re not crediting where you got it from, then that seems to be an illicit claiming of credit. So, and because we often do give credit. So I mean, a lot of essays or something talk about ideas, and they credit people for those ideas. And people are very interested in making sure those credits are correct.
Agnes:
Right. I think of that interest as being listened. That is— So I mean one thing is, you can’t fit the word plagiarism— it comes from the Latin plagium, which is a net, and it means kidnapping. If I could kidnap someone else’s idea, right, it’s like, Well this is my idea. And I think the paradigm of an example of something that cannot be yours is an idea. Like it’s historical fact that you— maybe you were the first one to think it. Maybe. I don’t know that anyone has ever had really good reason to believe that, because of course someone else could have thought it and just not told anyone. Right?
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
But okay, so really what it is, is like—
Robin:
First one to publish—
Agnes:
—you’re the first one to claim credit for it right? In a way there’s something weirdly circular about that. It’s like I get credit because I was the first one to claim credit for this. Or the first one to publish it, whatever. Right? And to me that’s like a fiction, right? This— and so that’s why I brought up the example of the cost—
Robin:
I mean so you know, there’s patent and copyright lawyers in law—
Agnes:
Yes.
Robin:
—and they also follow this plagiarism norm.
Agnes:
Well, they have— I mean so I think, you know, with respect to— We do have legal sanctions for more specific categories. And those categories are about things like other people being able to make money off of your idea, right. So if I wanted to…
Robin:
Which means we have to label it your idea first, right?
Agnes:
Right. Absolutely. But so I think that…
Robin:
So your idea is a thing there. It’s not just a thing in an intellectual sort, it’s another thing in the law of patent and copyright law.
Agnes:
Well what we can say is just, We have a law that if other people try to make money off of this idea, then you get to get money from them or whatever, right?
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
That’s what the law is, right? And I mean, we can make laws to kind of punish behavior, any kind of behavior we want, right? And so we can decide we’ll all be better off if we punish such and such a behavior.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
Right? Probably, if you drive on the left side of the road in the United States, you’re going to be punished by law, right? We have a law, you have to drive on the right side of the road, right? And so if you punish— If you drive on the left side of the road, you’ll be punished. But is there something intrinsically wrong with driving on the left? No, it’s fine to drive. It’s just, if other people do it—
Robin:
No, it’s not fine to drive on the left side when everybody else was driving on the right side!
Agnes:
Right. And so you might say like, that’s sort of, you know, that’s why I brought up the thing about the students, right? So there’s a game that we play, right? We’re all playing a certain credit game.
Robin:
Yes.
Agnes:
And it’s quite possible that that game creates good incentives. Right? So it might create incentives for people to come up to, let’s say, share their ideas. (Because if I’m right, maybe I don’t want to say “come up with” ideas, right?) So let’s say “share” their ideas. It might create those incentives. Right? And so it’s a game that we’re playing, so other people are playing; you should play along. I’m fine with that, right? But if we contrast it to our previous topic, honesty—
Robin:
Yeah.
Agnes:
—right, so I think honesty is important. It’s actually objectively valuable. And we have honesty norms because they’re tracking the moral reality. Plagiarism norms is more like you get one day for the paper, or you drive on the right side of the road, or whatever: We set up some convention and then you’re not playing fair if you don’t follow the rules.
Robin:
So what this conversation is really about is the context-dependence or social context of norms. That is, we agree that some norms are tied to very specific social contexts, and they make sense in those contexts. And it’s less clear that you would want to follow them outside those contexts. And other norms we have are very broadly shared, like don’t murder or lie, and of course even these very broadly shared norms have various exceptions and conditions and, you know, metrics regarding them. And those often vary somewhat by context.
So for example, it’s okay to kill people in war but not okay to murder them otherwise. But like, what’s a war? You know, is a political civil war a war, or is it a civil war if it’s declared? Or is it just— Do you protest, is that allowed to be civil war? I mean, right, there’d be all these, you know, more context-dependent conditions even about murder.
But you know, the fundamental story is, Well in any one society you have some set of norms. And, you know, there’s first the question, Should people follow the existing norms in the society they’re in? And you can certainly make the case for specific norms and societies and say, No, you shouldn’t follow that norm. That’s just bad. And you know, that’ll make the norm go away—if it does, fine, because that’s a bad norm. And other societies we might say, Well there’s a norm, and if everybody keeps following this norm then you should too, because, you know, it’s better than not having a norm.
But if there’s a better way— place where you could get to some alternative set of norms, and that would— we should try to coordinate to move there. And so you know, social innovation in institutions is all about, you know, thinking about these alternatives. And I might say, Well look, we have an existing set of plagiarism norms. If you’ve got a new set of norms that you want to propose that we consider, I’m open to that.
It’ll still be some work to try to get us to switch over, and it might not be a good idea to just— individually, people to like copy stuff and not tell people as the way that we approve of the switching the norm. That might seem a little unfair, right? But still, I mean, you know, is your complaint just that this isn’t a universal norm proven to be valuable in all possible contexts, or that you have another particular set of norms we should think of switching to?
Agnes:
So I don’t have another set that we should switch to. And maybe my case would be more persuasive if I did. But I do have a kind of reason for thinking that these norms are like mere arbitrary conventions rather than tracking a reality. And by the way, I feel the same way, for instance, about privacy norms. So what— and what I think about both of these cases, I think you should follow them. Like, I think I should follow these norms.
Because I think in general we have sort of implicit agreements with all the people around us to behave in ways that, roughly speaking, abide by the norms that we’re all under even if we don’t agree with them, until we can change people’s minds about them. So, but the steps of changing people’s minds, that’s like a lot of steps, probably more than my lifetime.
Robin:
Well, there’s one way to change people’s minds about a norm is simply just stop following it and stop enforcing it.
Agnes:
Right. But if you individually stop following it, in many cases what you’re doing is violating the norm, and so you’re violating an agreement that you have with people. And I think you shouldn’t do that. You should persuade them to adopt a different one.
Robin:
I mean sometimes, like you have laws that are on the books for a long time and then people stop enforcing them. And you might say, Well, this isn’t an agreement I’ve had; this law’s just been on the books for a long time. And then you know, for example, you know, it’s been a long time since anybody enforced laws against adultery, right? And you might say that’s still a norm you’d want to obey, but it’s not a law anymore. Or there’s a lot of other sort of laws in the books and there’s lots of places you can look these things up, sort of arbitrary laws, right?
Agnes:
Yeah. I mean—
Robin:
So you might say, Don’t feel too bad about breaking the law that’s been on the books for a while, but nobody’s been enforcing it for a while.
Agnes:
Yeah, I’m not talking about laws. So I’m talking more generally about norms. And I guess I— You know, I do think everyone has to have some sense of sort of, What is their social contract with the people around them, right? But what— My thought is, your social contract isn’t limited to the set of norms you personally endorse, right?
Robin:
Sure.
Agnes:
It’s gonna— There’s gonna be a larger set. How to define the space of that larger set—because then there’s going to be stuff that’s still further out where you think people are dumb that they’re all following this norm.
Robin:
But the easiest change to make from the status quo is to simply take an existing law and delete it and not replace it with anything. And a simple path to that is that you and other people just start ignoring that norm, and not enforcing it and not sanctioning anybody who does enforce it. And that’s a thing that’s happened a lot.
Agnes:
Right.
Robin:
In the past.
Agnes:
Right. And— But I’m not…
Robin:
So the question is, do you think if we just deleted the plagiarism norm but didn’t replace it with something else, would that world be better?
Agnes:
There’s one respect in which it would be better. I don’t know that it would be better overall. So you know, it’s a bit like the SAT or something, right? Like you might think there are bad things about the SAT, and you might be— have opposition to it, right? But then there are also costs to getting rid of the SAT because we’re relying on these other things, right? That might be even worse trackers of—
Robin:
Exactly.
Agnes:
—whatever. So if your question for me is like, Do you think this is a— You know, that the system minus this norm would work better than the system with this norm? I don’t know the answer, but maybe not. But I think that like, you know, it’s sort of like you can get into a situation where you are relying— You have like a system with these sort of junky parts or something, right? But the junky parts are needed for the whole. And then you would have to rethink the whole in a pretty radical way in order to improve the situation. And I’m not doing any of that— I know you kind of want me to do it! [Laughs]
But what I want to do is just explore why I think one of the parts is junky. And because I think that people— That’s why I brought up the example of how you can talk about how maybe terror— torture is okay, but you can’t talk about how plagiarism might be okay, is that we have sort of sanctified or made sacred a norm that isn’t a real intellectual norm, in my view. It isn’t like honesty or truthfulness or inquisitiveness or rationality, or any of those things. It’s just like driving on the right side of the road. And if suddenly we had no norm about which side of the road you drove on, that would not be an improved world!
But it’s specifically the reason why I want to say that’s the case is that intellectual things are a very, very special category of things. Namely, there are things where you can share them with other people and you don’t have any less because you shared it. In fact in a way sometimes you have more when you share them. And that’s like true of very few things out there. Even sunsets, you know, it can be that there’s a crowd at the park.
Robin:
Okay, but you could say that’s also true of credit. The claim of credit is a claim about who who did something first. And you can state that claim, and it’s a factual statement, and I can share that claim with you and still share it with somebody else.
Agnes:
So I think what the credit system does is it takes something whose distinctive character and kind of sacred value is precisely that of being the very opposite of zero-sum and turns it into a zero-sum game.
Robin:
You could say the same about music. The thing about music is I play you a song and now you can play the song to somebody else. But then unless we have copyrighted music exactly as a way to allow people to own his— I mean you could say the same about a story: I tell you the story, you can tell the story somewhere else, but we have copyright in stories. So—
Agnes:
Right, so I think we have things like copyright that— As I understand it, it is kind of instrumental, it functions instrumentally in the incentive system that you want people to be creating music and be able to make money from it.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
Right? And you want people to be able to make money from their stories. And, but it may be that we— Maybe we could do all of that without those incentives, right? Like with other incentives. I mean, I get you’ll need some incentives or other to make money. And— but— So, as I didn’t want to deny that the, you know, these things have this role, in academia—especially in the, you know, just crediting of ideas, especially in cases where what’s primarily sought there is honor—like there is a point at which it seems to mostly be about just wanting to mint a new currency or something, the currency of all—
Robin:
Well, it’s not new anymore. It’s pretty old by now.
Agnes:
Right. I’m—
Robin:
You’re imagining some counterfactual world long ago where it didn’t exist, but we’ve minted many new things over the last few centuries that are no longer in currency.
Agnes:
No, I just mean relative to the world in which it doesn’t exist, right? Like in the case of copyright, what you’re doing is playing into the financial system, right? I grant that something similar also happens with academia, because your number of publications or whatever to get you—
Robin:
Yes. That’s saying something.
Agnes:
—but there is I think at least a sort of conceit in academia, right, that your goals and that your fundamental understanding of your project is that you’re trying to pursue the truth, and that you want to know things and understand things and like, you will take—
Robin:
But giving credit doesn’t conflict with that. I mean they’re not false claims, these kinds of credit.
Agnes:
Right, no, it doesn’t conflict with that. But it isn’t part of it in any way except in the part that you have to stay alive and you want honor. Right? And so the point is just that it’s not an intellectual norm, it’s a sort of norm for how we take the intellectual and situate it in some way, in the..
Robin:
I think you’re making a move here that’s still similar to a move you made in our last podcast.
Agnes:
Okay.
Robin:
And it’s a relatively general point, and it’s a point of distinction, perhaps, between economists and philosophers, which is why it might be worth pursuing here. So you know, we economists will just tend to sort of flatten a whole range of considerations into all, like, available things that we could manipulate in order to get whatever ends you have, and not think of any of them as more fundamental than the others.
So we might say, you know, the intellectual world, we have a thing we want out of that: We want some sort of intellectual progress in the long run. We’d like it to be true. We’d like it to be tracking, you know, useful things. We'd like it to be shareable. We would like it to be relatively easy to understand. We’d like it to be modular so we can connect things together. There’s a whole bunch of things we would like out of the intellectual project. You know, all else equal we’d like other people to participate, right? I mean, we’d like a participatory intellectual world, all else equal, right?
So we have a whole bunch of things we want. And then we have a whole bunch of levers we can turn to manipulate the world to get this thing— these things we want. And we economists just put them all in those same two buckets, and don’t say, you know, of all the things we could do, some might be more effective, some might be harder to monitor, some might be more context-dependent. Some might, you know, be things that would change the scale. But we’re just optimistically gonna say, Let’s just think about all the things we could do, and try to do them as best we can to get the outcomes we want.
And so I hear you saying, Well sure, this plagiarism rule helps us get the outcomes we want, but it’s not fundamentally connected to the thing. And we go, What’s the difference between fundamental versus not fundamental? There’s just all these things we want, and there’s all these things we do to get them, and why isn’t that just all there is?
Agnes:
We don’t agree on what the goals are. That is, I don’t think, for instance, in our last conversation you said—
Robin:
Right. We don’t have to agree on what the goals are in order for this framework to make sense.
Agnes:
Right. But what I’m saying is that those disagreements are not incidental. So I don’t think that the goal of a university is intellectual progress. I don’t think progress is a coherent goal. A goal has to be an endpoint and progress isn’t an endpoint. So it’s a conceptually incoherent thing to have as your goal.
Robin:
Oh, come on.
Agnes:
I think the goal of a university is knowing, right? And that goal is instantiated. It’s not just a matter of the additions to knowledge that you’re giving. It’s the knowing of the people in the university, it’s happening at— It’s not something that is always going to happen in the future. It’s something that’s happening in the present. And so the people who are knowing things—people who are the students who are coming to know things, the teachers who are activating their knowledge—all of that is achieving and realizing the goal of the university.
Robin:
So but I see you as picking this thing as a bundle, and the way I was trying to describe it is there are many goals that we share and don’t all agree on. And this common enterprise we share is trying to in many ways accomplish all of them to varying degrees. And in some sense we want to accomplish all of them to varying degrees to the extent we can. And there isn’t the goal, there’s just the many goals.
Agnes:
But I think it’s not an accident that you gave intellectual progress as the goal, or as a goal— even if we just change it to a goal, it was the only goal you cited, right? So it may be that some goals, a lot of the work is— comes in coming to see them as a goal. That is, there’s sort of, let’s say, some goals are more expensive and some are cheaper.
Robin:
Sure.
Agnes:
Right? And there’s a kind of psychological and personal investment that you need in order to get certain goals in view. And I think in particular a lot of the goals of the university are hard to have in view, and we lose hold of them all the time, and we get redirected on to other goals that are not as good, like, How many publications do I have, and how much honor do I have, etc.
And so what these plagiarism—the plagiarism rules might be necessary, and they might sort of function, but what they are doing is distracting us from our fundamental project, and from understanding that fundamental project as a non-zero-sum project.
Robin:
So it’s definitely true in many areas of human behavior that you have some fundamental goals, and then you create subgoals, and you only really want to achieve the subgoals because you think they promote the more fundamental goals. So you definitely need to distinguish that. And yes, sometimes we get distracted by subgoals, and not pay enough attention to other goals.
And sometimes we don’t even know exactly which is which, because we just intuit the practice. And we are presented various subgoals and trained how to achieve the subgoals, and not even understand how these subgoals might be related to the larger goals that we could more directly endorse.
So it’s definitely true that, you know, in many areas of the world people sort of did— they lose track of what matters. And they, you know, have some local metric, and, you know, that’s not the fundamental thing. And that’s the sort of standard problem with incentives: Economists will say, you know, you give a bunch of people the incentive to achieve these subgoals, and they do, that doesn’t mean the fundamental goals are achieved, right? Fine.
But still, you know, there are these fundamental goals and there are many of them, and we don’t agree on them. But I certainly think, you know, I’m happy to endorse the goal you mentioned as a goal, but I’m just not willing to consider it exclusive as the only goal among the many goals that, you know, these institutions see themselves as trying to achieve, or should.
Agnes:
But in a way I think we’d be fine. I mean, I think— Here’s one way to put this agreement. Say one of the things that universities currently seek to do is to allocate credit for ideas.
Robin:
Yes.
Agnes:
That’s one of their goals. And—
Robin:
But it may be a subgoal.
Agnes:
Right, right, right, exactly. Well, that’s my point is, so I see that goal as very strictly a subgoal. Namely, if there were some more efficient way of achieving the fundamental goals we could get rid of that. And it could be that nobody gets credit and nothing is wrong with that, or that’s a good world.
Robin:
Okay, so I mean, if we get personal: I have these grand visions for reforming intellectual worlds, and they are mainly for the purpose of intellectual progress. And if we have time we could go into my defending that that’s a coherent thing and a valuable thing. But I think many of our readers will get that enough that I don’t have to belabor it right now.
But there— I have to admit, upon examining universities and academia, it achieves other goals that I’m less thrilled with. And I think actually the dominant goal, the dominant function of academia in society is to let people affiliate with impressive people—credentialed, impressive people. So students want to go to a university, and people say, Ooh, that’s a good university, you must be a good student. And for that they want professors to be credentialed as impressive people, and they don’t actually care what intellectual progress they’ve made. Or even how— what they know. What they care is that their given credential is impressive.
It’s, an elite reporter wants to call up a professor to interview them. Why? Because they put that name and university as the line next to the quote. It’ll be more impressive to the readers who like to read articles with impressive quotes. And funders like to give money to impressive projects and people, and you know, and affiliate with institutions. And when people say, What did you do with the money? They say, Well, we gave it to Harvard. And these people— look at all these news articles about them! And people say, “Yes!”
And honestly, it is a thing people want. And if— and our institutions are actually achieving it pretty well, in terms of letting people affiliate with credential impressiveness and become impressive by association. And it works! It’s not, you know, producing necessarily— And this can be done even if nobody really knows that much, and if they never accumulate more knowledge. And even if they lie! I mean, they can still be impressive in lying. And so this, this can all work.
So I feel like, okay, I have to compromise and say, Yeah, okay, that’s a purpose people want, then yes, we— our institution should achieve that. But I also want intellectual progress. So I’m open to trying to find better institutions which could both give them this thing they want that I don’t want so much, and also produce the stuff I like. And so if I’m going to be a practical reformer, I have to come up with solutions that try to give many of the people the things they’re getting out of these institutions.
You know, I want to reform college, I probably have to give 20-year-olds a place where they can go meet other 20-year-olds and party, because a lot of 20-year-olds like that, right? If you’re going to reform college and you’re not going to give 20-year-olds that, a lot of them aren’t going to pick it.
Agnes:
So I think it’s a really interesting meta question, which way are you going to be more persuasive: One where you’re sort of willing to compromise, and you say, Look, you have these goals that are totally stupid and I see as completely valueless, but I get that you’re super into them in some kind of impressiveness fetish that you have. And I’m going to give you some of your trash thing so that I can get my good thing, and then we’ll both have gotten something, right? So that’s like one kind of speech act, right?
And I don’t know if you’ve ever tried this kind of speech with like one of your children, or a close friend, or wife, but I find that this is not actually very persuasive to people, and that actually, as a matter of fact, if I go to people and I say, Let me just tell you why a lot of the plagiarism norms, and a lot of the ideas you have about credit that you might even hold sacred and treat as really important—that they’re actually not as good as you think they are. But you tell me. You prove it to me. Show me that they’re good. Right? It’s not actually obvious to me that that second route is less persuasive.
Robin:
So I haven’t heard that from you yet. I mean, I’ve heard like we can’t prove that it’s needed in all contexts. But I haven’t heard you tell me the negative consequences of the plagiarism norm, right?
Agnes:
Yeah, so—
Robin:
What goes— What do you see going wrong?
Agnes:
It’s that you’re turning something whose fundamental and distinctive value is in being non-zero-sum into a zero-sum game, and thereby cheapening it and making it more like all the other things that are worse than it.
Robin:
But you could make that argument about music.
Agnes:
Yes. And I think, like, if we can find another way to do it with the music, that would be good too. I think a lot of people aren’t that comfortable with art and music being sold in certain ways, and there being such restrictions on them.
Robin:
So to an economist this sounds an awful lot like a common complaint, which is you economists are polluting our pure, high minded stuff with your damn selfish incentives.
Agnes:
Yes. So I mean— and—
Robin:
You economists ought to understand that, Sure, there’s lots of selfish people in the world, and they need incentives, but we pure people over here, if you would just leave us alone we would do our pure idealistic thing and we don’t need incentives over here. They just get in the way because we’re good people. [Laughs]
Agnes:
I never said the other people need them either. Right? But I do think that it matters what— Look, even economists are going to, whatever, not tend to pay their children to do stuff. And so like it’s all— There’s all the question of where do you bring in the incentives? And I’m giving you a reason why in this particular domain…
Robin:
All I hear is the pollution reason, that somehow incentives are polluting the purity of the zero-sumness— of the non-zero-sumness.
Agnes:
So, well the other part of the argument is that the— If you take the non-zero-sum point of view and then try to get into view, What is of value there? Right? About the kind of sharing of knowledge and having a community in which knowledge is shared? That value is, it’s like hard to track with your mind, it’s hard to get a grip on, unlike the idea of progress or adding stuff, which is much easier to track, right?
So even within the university there’s a bunch of goals, right? Often we can get into view improvement as a goal, that’s an easier thing than to get into view just instantiating a value, that second thing is harder. Just like, you know, coming up with a new piece of music or whatever, it’s easy to see that as valuable versus enjoying an existing piece of it. That’s harder.
So my point is that there’s— It’s expensive to value this thing, right? And so I think often when people are talking about purity, and worries about purifying/sullying something, the way you should— what you should translate that into is, here’s a goal that we have trouble seeing as valuable. And we only get it into view like maybe like three minutes of every day. And one thing we’re constantly trying to do is get it more and better into view, and we’re willing to like pay a lot to get that goal into view, we’re willing to make other sacrifices. And when I say you’re sullying it, what I mean is you’re making it difficult for me to get that goal into view.
Robin:
So professors have offices and they have jobs, and to a first approximation those are zero-sum. Like you have your office, nobody else can have your office. You have your job, somebody else doesn’t have your job. So by letting professors have offices and jobs, we are sullying with— this high-minded pursuit of this zero-sum element of allocating offices and jobs. Surely, therefore, professors shouldn’t have jobs or offices.
Agnes:
So I mean, I think like, if you want to say… There might be circumstances under which I’d be amenable to that argument, but I—
Robin:
But not usually!
Agnes:
I’m not usually, and so I think that it, you know, it matters that what we’re doing here is we’re saying like not only do the professors need some way of sort of like living their lives, while they perceive this value…
Robin:
But do they really need offices for that? I mean, they would still be alive if they didn’t have offices.
Agnes:
Well no, but I mean, they need to, you know— The activity of thought is a physical activity, right?
Robin:
You can do it at home! Why do they need to go in the office?
Agnes:
So you need to have a place. You might be, and many professors do, but if you have several kids at home like I do, this can be a challenge. So…
Robin:
But that’s a context-dependent, contingent consideration, right? Just like plagiarism is.
Agnes:
Right. So I guess my thought is that it’s like, suppose we… I mean, it seems to be the more relevant, let’s say, challenge case would be, we have awards for professors, right? Where like you’re the— you— well, you can—
Robin:
Or publications? Why should these things be published? Why don’t they just all go sit on an archive server, and why should we distinguish some papers as published? There’s a limited number of slots in the top journals. Why should we make that a zero-sum element in academia, where only some papers get to be in the top journals?
Agnes:
Yeah, I don’t think that’s great either. I mean, you know, if there’s a system where we can— and I think in some fields it’s moving towards a system of just kind of, you know…
Robin:
No, actually, I mean there are fields where most people get their access to the papers through the servers, but they all still have the award element in the journals, right?
Agnes:
Right, right.
Robin:
And so prestige is allocated through the journals.
Agnes:
And so like, you know, I guess the way that I would see all of this is it’s a kind of concession, right?
Robin:
Yes. Yes! And that’s what economists do: We say like, You had your ideal image of things but you forgot people being selfish and mean sometimes—
Agnes:
Right.
Robin:
—so we need institutions that are a concession to people’s selfishness.
Agnes:
In a way I’m fine with that, it’s just that what I want to do is to distinguish that sometimes we go all the way to creating norms, right, to do that kind of work. But there are other norms we have that are real norms, where they’re not concessions—they’re actually ways of tracking the value itself. And I think of honesty as being such a norm.
Robin:
Okay, so I see you then as thinking that even though we humans are not the angels we’d like to think ourselves are, and sometimes we’re selfish and sometimes we’re biased and mean, there are these counterfactual creatures that we like to imagine. And for those creatures, they would need norms: the norms would be useful for those creatures, and those creatures would have high-minded tasks, and they would have names for things, and rules that would help them achieve their tasks. And we actual humans should try to talk in those terms.
Agnes:
Yeah, so maybe the— One way to put it is like you have this idea of we’re not the angels we like to think of ourselves as, as though thinking of oneself as an angel were such an easy thing to do and so readily available to people. And I think, No, the challenge is to think of yourself as an angel. That’s like the goal, right? But like, a lot of the time our thinking is just occupied with lowly things. And we’re trying to move into that more angelic move to become better, right?
And so like, but of course at the same time as we try to move into the more angelic mode and actually try to think of ourselves— try to think our way to becoming more like the angels, and less thinking like them, we also have to make concessions along the way because we have to survive long enough to get to that other side. Right?
And so yes, I think it would be fair to say there are the norms that the angels would still hold on to even once they’re angels, and then there are the ones where they’re like ladders that we hope to throw away one day. And all I’m saying is that these plagiarism ones are more like ladders that we have to throw away.
And so I think there are real consequences here about your emotional response, right, to the violation of the norm. Because I think if the norm is merely a thing to like coordinate our baser natures with this other thing, right, then it’s still bad if people violate it. It’s bad basically because they’re cheating. Right? And you should be annoyed with them in the way that you are annoyed at cheaters.
But I think a lot of people— the way they feel about somebody, you know, claiming credit for their idea or something goes even deeper than… Like they feel like, you know, something profound was stolen from them that was rightly theirs in a kind of moralistic sense. People get very indignant about it. And my thought is like, there was never anything that was yours. We just decided to play this game as though the thing was yours.
Robin:
But now you’re saying people should not feel morally indignant about violations of rules that would not need to exist if people were the angels we might wish they were.
Agnes:
I’m saying we should feel as indignant as we would if somebody takes an extra day with their exam. But we should understand that— it as being that kind of rule.
Robin:
But I think— I mean there’s large and small violations, right? So if everybody were angels, nobody would speed because they’d all judge the proper speed to be safe. We only have speeding rules because people are selfish and they speed when they can get away with it, but some speeding rules are bigger than others.
But you can be morally indignant at somebody speeding. That seems perfectly reasonable. They’re speeding on the road, and they’re getting away with it, they’re endangering people. Why can’t I be indignant?
Agnes:
Sure, I think you can. And I think that in general what people do is they get indignant over rule violations. Because that indignation is, it’s like an internalized form of policing, right? So it’s like, I’m— By getting indignant at you, I in some sense at least have the feeling that I’m enforcing the law. Your speeding in another car makes me it easy to have them.
Robin:
Yes. Well, if it makes you inclined to actually enforce it more, should the opportunity arise, when the blood boils—
Agnes:
Right.
Robin:
When situations come up to call them on it or complain about it, or maybe pull over and call a cop or something, you might be more likely to do it.
Agnes:
Right. But I think that like… And I mean, maybe the plagiarism case is an interesting case, because you know it’s one thing when somebody violates the rules and thus cheats, right? And you might be angry at them because you were playing by the rules, right? And then it’s another thing if you feel that you were personally wronged, right? And the plagiarism case is an overlap of those two things: If you plagiarize me, that I had this idea, that’s like my idea, right?
Robin:
Well if you come and steal my parked car, you know, or if you steal somebody else’s car, I can be indignant in your stealing their car or my car, because it’s part of the system of property. And I say property is an arbitrary system that we have only because we’re not angels. But hey, we’re not angels. We need property. So, you stole my car!
Agnes:
Right, right. And I mean I guess I think that like, you know, it does make sense that people are indignant over rule violations, and then are more indignant when the rule violation disadvantages them in particular.
Robin:
Of course.
Agnes:
Actually I’m not 100% sure that does make sense. Now that I think about it, it’s certainly what happens.
Robin:
Yeah.
Agnes:
If you’re really indignant over a rule violation—
Robin:
Well, it’s a division of labor—I mean if something goes wrong, if the person most harmed doesn’t complain, why should the rest of us complain? We might want to at least see that they’re not happy. Because sometimes there’s rules and they’re violated, but the person doesn’t mind it being violated, so why should the rest of us? So that’s often a rule of thumb about violations: You know, does the person involved want to complain? Say an assault, right? If I hit you and you mind, then you can complain about assault. But sometimes people get hit and they don’t mind, and the rest of us aren’t going to go enforce assault rules against them; we’re gonna say, Well, this is the person who got hit, they will.
Agnes:
That’s interesting. So I mean it seems like what we want is not necessarily people following the rules, but people following the rules in all the cases where somebody won’t— will complain if they don’t follow the rules.
Robin:
Sure. Well, like for example trespassing, right? You know, what is trespassing? When somebody is on your property and you didn’t let them on your property. If you let them on your property it’s not trespassing.
Agnes:
Well that’s a special case because then they haven’t broken a rule. But I mean, you might—
Robin:
But didn’t you make the rule exactly that you do something and they mind?
Agnes:
But that isn’t the, like…
Robin:
I mean, we can phrase the rule itself that way: Assault is where you hit somebody and they mind.
Agnes:
Well, I don’t think we could phrase it— it would be too self referential if we phrase it “Assault is if you hit somebody and then they like legally complain,” because they could mind, for instance, but want not to say anything or something, right? So you can’t deal with minding— like, is it only assault if they complained about its being assault? You know, kind of like it’s money if you think it’s money. I don’t think we want the law to be that self-referential. It was, we wanted the crime to be like punching someone unprovoked, or I don’t know, what is assault, hitting someone.
Robin:
So clearly rape is an example of like consent is an excuse.
Agnes:
Right—right. I mean, well, in that case, but that’s like—
Robin:
Just like trespassing.
Agnes:
Right. But that’s— I think that’s a different case. Because for instance you could consent to sex with someone and then later mind, or something. So the minding and the consenting are like the same thing, right? And so in general I think that, like with trespassing, like it can be you didn’t give them permission to be on your land, right? And they are trespassing. And in fact the last five times someone did it you complained, but this time it turns out you don’t care. They’re wearing a nice dress and you’re just enjoying watching them walk across your lawn. Right? And so it’s odd that you—
Robin:
Okay, but I think we’re getting distracted from the more fundamental point here which is just about, you want to make a distinction between rules we have which are an accommodation to our lesser natures, and see those as lesser rules than the rules we have which we would want to adopt even if we were the most ideal creatures, or more ideal creatures that we can imagine.
Agnes:
Yeah, I think the thing that I’m reacting to maybe most fundamentally is like the place that plagiarism plays like on syllabi and stuff. It is sort of presented as though it were the fundamental academic value and norm and like, we’re extremely—
Robin:
I mean, fundamental is different than strong, right?
Agnes:
Yeah, but like—
Robin:
I mean, certainly nobody thinks it’s the fundamental value.
Agnes:
I mean, I think that it— For instance there’s a lot of stuff you can do wrong in a class, but it’s plagiarizing that will like get you kicked out of school.
Robin:
I think that’s because it’s relatively easy to enforce; that is, it’s a nice clear line. But there’s a lot— most of the other things are relatively ambiguous.
Agnes:
I mean, I don’t know what you think of as being hard to enforce. I’ve had situations— I had a student once who was so disruptive in class, he would come in and out of the classroom maybe 50 times over the course of a class, he would sit with his back to me, he would talk during class. Okay, I, you know, I was like, This is creating a big problem for my class, right?
Robin:
But we haven’t drawn a line about how many times you’re allowed to walk in and out of the class. So we didn’t draw a rule based on that disruption.
Agnes:
It can be extremely—
Robin:
It’s hard to draw that line.
Agnes:
It can be extremely hard to say what what counts as plagiarism or not. There’s very fine lines about sort of copying, copying wording, how much do you copy, what if you have other stuff in there, is something totally plagiarized. Like there’s definitely cases where it’s much easier for me to recognize the bad behavior than it is for me to recognize something as plagiarism.
Robin:
So I mean, if I stand back and just look at academia in all its glory and misery, and I say, like, What’s wrong with this thing, and like, what should be better? This just doesn’t seem to meet near— anywhere near the top of the things that I could see wrong. This seems like, you know, picking a complaint about a certain way people talk about plagiarism. You don’t object to the rule itself because you don’t have another one to replace it with and you’re not so sure you want to take it away, even just to squash it—you just like dislike how much reverence people are giving to it.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
And you know, I would say, Well, you know, come up with something else that we should give preference or relevance to, or a bigger change, and that seems much more productive. You know, I have some suggestions like that and you may too, but I mean, wouldn’t it be more productive to just ask, What are the biggest things that are wrong with academia?
Agnes:
I think that anything that helps you understand things better is productive. And I’m not— Like you’re always looking for like the most leverage or something for a given thing. But I’m not always doing that. And I think the reason I’m not doing it is that quite often the leverage comes in a place that is unexpected for me. And so I can start thinking about something and then I get leverage that I didn’t expect.
So, but the thing that you’re supposed to get out of thinking about this is that if we have kind of wrongly centralized a particular value, we’re over-punishing it, we’re over-coordinating on this—like we’re acting like this is what binds us together. That is both encouraging us not to notice the more fundamental things that bind us together, and in fact, this particular sort of value, and this idea of credit, is one that makes it hard to get what are the most fundamental values into view.
Robin:
But I feel like your talking about it here is doing the distraction. That is, I think most academics don’t think much about plagiarism exactly because they share it, so it seems so obvious to them. So it doesn’t actually distract them much. An hour talking about it now will be making them think more about plagiarism than they ever did in the last ten years, because they don’t think about it much.
Agnes:
No, I don’t think it’s bad to think about it. I think it’s bad to unthinkingly see it as a profound sin.
Robin:
But you’ve made me think a little bit more, and at the moment I go, you know, I like our plagiarism rules!
Agnes:
[Laughs]
Robin:
Just like, they seem fine to me! I don’t see the problem with them.
Agnes:
Well maybe I shouldn’t have talked about it with you, then! [Laughs]
Robin:
I mean, I could point to other things I think are bigger things to think about. Like most fundamentally, the fundamental mechanism we have in academia is we credential some people as good, and then we ask them to choose who the other good people are. That is, that the most fundamental mechanism is peer review of various sorts, but you know, that’s the core mechanism in academia. That’s how we decide who gets what jobs, who gets what grants, who gets what, you know, journal publications, etc.
Agnes:
I think the core mechanism in academia is teaching because that’s how people learn stuff. And what we’re about is knowing.
Robin:
Okay, but we need a mechanism by which, when people compete, we decide who wins.
Agnes:
What I’m saying is that’s a bad framework for thinking about like the intellectual realm in general. And it’s exactly that kind of framework that centralizing plagiarism sort of suggests.
Robin:
So I mean, I would say the larger question is, we have these goals we want to achieve, and we have, say, a budget—either the NSF or something—and we have to decide how to allocate this budget in order to achieve our goals. That would be the economic framing of the question.
And we have not just a money budget, we have prestige budgets of various sorts to hand out. And, you know, many different people and institutions say, If you give the money to us, or the prestige to us, we will do this teaching, or we will do this research, and we will do this accrediting and credentialing. And the fundamental question is, Who do we believe? Who do we trust? We can’t just—do we do it at random?
And so I would say the fundamental mechanism by which we answer this question, Who do we give the resources to to achieve these ends that we want to achieve?, is this peer-review mechanism. That is we we find the people who have been by consensus considered the most prestigious or the most knowledgeable, etc., on their topic, and we say, Who do you think the money should go to? Who do you think the job should go to? Or, How do you think students should be taught?
All of these different key questions about what exactly to do are answered fundamentally by asking the most prestigious people what do they think, and then we just do what they say. That’s pretty much how the whole thing goes. And so once you even say this out loud, I think it should be obvious the kind of things that could go wrong with a system like this. And I think that’s one of the most fundamental things to ask about academia, is, Does that go wrong? How often does it go wrong? Can we think of something better?
Agnes:
So like one of the words that shows up a lot when you talk is like prestige, and impress, and you said, you know, people are trying to affiliate with impressive people—
Robin:
Credentialed impressive people.
Agnes:
—and credential and reputation, right? And so all those words are kind of like words that are, I would say secondary words. Like they’re all words that it’s like, there’s the appearance of x, right? So being impressive is being able to appear as though you were x. Maybe knowledgeable, right? It depends on what you’re impressive for. So my thought is, you have never reached the fundamental level of analysis about something if you’re using any of those words.
Robin:
So I disagree strongly in the sense that I’m saying, well, from the institution design point of view, from the person giving away money point of view, they will have to give away money on the basis of appearances because they will not see past appearances to fundamentals. So we have to design institutions in terms of appearances. That’s a fundamental constraint on institution design.
Agnes:
I mean, you know, one question then maybe is like— So like in this conversation I don’t believe we’re designing an institution. That is, I mean I suppose there’s a small chance that some people who, you know, decide things may listen to this podcast and then decide to change how they— But it’s like that’s very unlikely, right?
So in a way it’s odd that you want to adopt the framework of doing x when we’re not doing x. That is, my framework is we want to understand what is the university actually for, where it may be that adopting the institution design point of view doesn’t actually answer that question very well. And given that we’re not designing an institution, what about that framework?
Robin:
But you know, I’ve said the institution is for all the different things we might want to achieve with it. And it’s a practical question, which of them we can achieve? How much? And at what tradeoff with the other goals?
So I don’t think there is a fundamental question of what the institution is for. Institutions are never for particular things. They might happen to more often achieve a particular thing that people might more want them to achieve that particular thing, but fundamentally they are for whatever we want them to be for.
What is doctoring for? Well…
Agnes:
Health. That’s the answer, if there’s just an answer. [Laughs] And universities are for knowledge. So I guess I just think I have no idea what we’re doing with these institutions. If we’re like, we don’t see them as having any goals, how are we even improving them? We don’t even know what is improved?
Robin:
No, but we might just have a set of goals, all of which we would like to achieve with them, and one of them might be the biggest one. And that’s fine to focus our attention on that. But it is not a choice we have.
Agnes:
Right, I mean in a way for me, it’s odd to even be like, What are we doing? It’s like, well, we are talking, right? And now— you know—
Robin:
But you were taking the same frame with respect to plagiarism. You’re standing back and asking us to take a different attitude toward plagiarism, right?
Agnes:
But I guess I’m not saying that as from the point of view of like if I were a university administrator. I’m saying like as a professor who— That’s why I brought up the question of, you know, within courses: Because I do assign papers for courses, right? And so I have to think about the question, Am I going to allow my students to plagiarize the papers they write for me? And you know, like, I think, Well, there are gonna be educational harms if I do that. So I don’t want to allow that.
And then I have to think, Well, as a researcher, whatever, shall I plagiarize other people’s work? And then I think, No, there’s this this game that everyone’s playing and I gotta play along. Right? And so I’m thinking from my point of view as being in this system and my various goals, right? Where does plagiarism fit?
And I think even given all that conformity that I’ve just described—I think I want to conform to the system—there’s still like a move to be made in terms of seeing that these norms are a bit hollow, a bit artificial, a bit conventional. And in fact, they kind of—especially when I unthinkingly follow them and unthinkingly, you know, put them in a special category where students, for instance, get kicked out of school for violating them, what that does is incline me to become not attuned to the most fundamental, most important and most expensive-to-maintain-one’s-attention-on goals of the university.
Robin:
But surely what we want is for many people to change the perspective, not just me in particular or you in particular.
Agnes:
Well, people are listening to us—
Robin:
Hopefully.
Agnes:
—so maybe this will change their mind.
Robin:
But I mean, surely you—
Agnes:
You want to make them change their minds through institutions?
Robin:
I want you to accept the idea that when we think about our social practices and our institutions and our norms, that we are going to do both diagnosis and prognosis. And with— when we do diagnosis, we are not going to be very sure which particular prognosis exactly will be invoked for any one diagnosis. First, we want to just structure the situation and find the main things going on, and to, you know, categorize things correctly and identify the core processes.
And, but we want to do that with an eye toward identifying problems, because that’s why we have progress. Because progress is— would be figuring out how to solve the problems. And if there are no problems to solve, maybe there’s no point to thinking about it.
So, but solutions come in a wide range of difficulty. Some solutions can be implemented by any one person all by themselves, and nobody else; they don’t even need to consult their spouse or their department chair. Other solutions might require a whole department to coordinate together. Still other solutions might require a whole profession or journal together, or their university. Some might require a nation of the world to coordinate.
And of course, once we understand that some require larger coordination, all else equal, we will be less interested in those. Nevertheless if they have bigger potential gains we might eye them and still think maybe we’ll go for that.
And so fundamentally we just have to enter this process, you know, looking for diagnoses that would lend themselves to prognosis. And then when we have a clear enough diagnosis, we then start to consider specific solutions that might be offered. And then we will prefer the solutions that are easier to implement, of course, but we will also want to just think about solutions that are testable or easy to test.
So we might come up with a solution that would require a widespread adoption, but could be tested on a small scale. It wouldn’t be— have its full effect on small scale, but it could be shown to work on a small scale, then you might go to the larger community and say, How about we all do this? Like we tried to have an academic community where there was no credit, and this is how it went, and now maybe the rest of you should realize you don’t need credit as much as you thought because hey, it seemed to work here. And, you know, that’s the sort of thing you could consider.
So I would just suggest that we— you just enter the diagnosis phase in an open minded sense of like, We’re not sure what kinds of fixes we’re going to plan on suggesting, and sometimes we may decide the small— none of the small-scale fixes seem feasible, effective, and the only thing that will work will be larger-scale coordination. And at that point you could decide to dump it because it’s not worth continuing, or you might decide this is important enough that you would then start to explore the larger-scale solutions.
Agnes:
So your basic mindset and your basic framing of the situation is like problem-solving.
Robin:
Yes.
Agnes:
And I’m not antipathetic to that, but I don’t think it’s the only thing one can do with speech. And I’m not always sure that it’s the thing that makes the most sense to do in inquisitive conversations, but I don’t want to deny that it’s a thing you can do and it’s a valuable thing you can do.
So maybe it’s a little bit like your multiple goals thing—like you say you want me to accept a whole bunch of stuff. Just now you’re like I should accept all this stuff—and I want to say, Well, I may be willing to sort of accept it if I can also accept some other stuff. It’s not always clear to me that the biggest, most fundamental and most important social changes are going to happen in the kind of top-down way where the institution is going to get redesigned, right? Maybe sometimes, but like that’s itself a question.
Robin:
Sure.
Agnes:
But we should stop now. But just as a last word, can I have the last word?
Robin:
Just one word?
Agnes:
No.
Robin:
No.
Agnes:
The last sentence.
Robin:
Okay, last sentence.
Agnes:
Yeah, the last sentence is, I want to give a shout out to Brian Fry, from whom I plagiarized all of my views about plagiarism.
Robin:
Tada!