Leveling the Playing Fields
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Humans have been cheating for at least, oh, 40,000 years. Whether fire or stone, wheel or bone, leather or feather, humans developed the habit just after a series of random evolutionary genetic miracles over billions of years gave them brains, eyes, and a spine—all the tools they needed to conquer the world by hook or crook. Use every advantage or go extinct. Fairness be damned in the competition for survival.
Before the emergence of cognition, humans were dark horses in the race compared to the ant. What happened? Humans cheated. They planted. They sharpened. They spoke to one another. They ganged up. Soon they were inventing new ways to cheat, inventing gods who responded to sycophantic supplicants by bestowing, say, invisible cloaks to hide their identity. Now, these humans pose an existential threat to leaf cutters trying simply to farm their fungus.
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User: Bruno Latour argues that the Copernican insight is just the beginning of a revolution. Though it upset religion, it jumpstarted science. Humanity would have to wait for Galileo and the telescope to chart the movement of the heavenly bodies for the significance of mathematics to be realized. With questions of movement came questions of physics. Comment.
Smith4: Bruno Latour's perspective reflects the idea that seminal discoveries or insights, such as the Copernican Revolution, serve as catalysts for broader and more profound transformative processes in scientific understanding and method. The Copernican insight—which posited that the Earth orbits the Sun, rather than the other way around—was indeed revolutionary, as it fundamentally challenged the geocentric universe model that had been predominant, particularly within the context of the religious and philosophical views of the time.
According to Latour, this astronomical insight was just the start of a deeper revolution. It not only confronted the religious doctrine of the day but also laid the groundwork for the scientific revolution, which would fully blossom with figures like Galileo. Galileo's observations and systematic study of the movement of celestial bodies utilizing the telescope—which was cutting-edge technology at the time—exemplified the burgeoning reliance on empirical evidence and experimentation in science.
With Galileo's work, the significance of mathematics as not merely a tool for abstract reasoning but as an essential language to describe, predict, and understand the physical world became evident. His contribution to the early development of kinematics and dynamics marked the birth of physics as a discipline—one that would not just describe but also quantify motions and forces.
In summary, Latour recognizes the interconnectedness of scientific advancements. While Copernicus provided a transformative insight, it was Galileo's application of mathematics and his empirical approach to understanding the heavens that truly catalyzed the scientific revolution. His work signifies the critical juncture at which observations moved beyond description to the realm of prediction and mechanistic understanding, laying a foundation for modern physics.
(OpenAI Discussion December 2023)
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So what does the Copernican insight have to do with cheating? For one thing, Copernicus answered his own personal life question through the only means available to him and for that matter the only means available to every one of us if we really want to know, the sweat of his brow. Imagine you had been born to figure out whether the Earth or the Sun is the center of the universe? How can you cheat on such a question? So by double modus ponens, cheating isn’t an option if the question is one only you can answer. It’s you or nobody.
For another, he could have cheated, but at the cost of an Ivan Ilych moment in hospice. He’d faced hardship from the loss of his father at ten years old. He’d been taken in by an uncle, who happened to occupy an ecclesiastical position and took charge of the boy’s education. He could have taken the easy way out and lived a predictable life with far fewer hassles staying in his lane in the church. No one would have called him a cheat if he’d decided the question was too hard, he should have picked an easier topic, he wouldn’t have to do all that work.
In 1496, several decades after Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press flooded the Western world with books of ancient writings dormant for over a thousand years, Copernicus entered the Universe of Bologna to study canon law, having been educated for an ecclesiastical career at the University of Cracow. Like most universities under the influence of unprecedented access to ancient wisdom, Cracow offered coursework in mathematics, astronomy, and astrology. Lured by his rational nature to the intrinsic satisfaction of empirical evidence, Copernicus became more curious about heavenly bodies than about heaven. For the next sixteen years, however, he was drawn into administrative and political ecclesiastical mazes that chewed up his time. Finally in 1510 he published a paper and passed on his insight to the future.
“In 1539 a young mathematician named Georg Joachim Rheticus (1514–1574) from the University of Wittenberg came to study with Copernicus. Rheticus brought Copernicus books in mathematics, in part to show Copernicus the quality of printing that was available in the German-speaking cities. He published an introduction to Copernicus’s ideas, the Narratio prima (First Report). Most importantly, he convinced Copernicus to publish On the Revolutions. Rheticus oversaw most of the printing of the book, and on 24 May 1543 Copernicus held a copy of the finished work on his deathbed” (Stanford’s Plato, 2023, Rabin, Sheila, "Nicolaus Copernicus", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2023/entries/copernicus/>).
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Cheating in school often seems cut and dried. We all know a cheat sheeter, a hacker changing a grade on a transcript, a wandering gaze on someone else’s paper. How could such behavior occur in secular temples devoted to nurturing young minds for their own good? Who would dare flaunt the time-honored code of ethics so carefully inscribed in academic policy documents?
To speak so sarcastically about such a sacred issue has gotten me in trouble over the years; I learned to keep my mouth shut unless I was speaking to teachers who knew me. In a study Sandy Murphy and I did on reading and sense-making in eighth grade history classes twenty years ago, we asked students to think aloud about what they were doing when they read silently in class from a textbook to complete the day’s assignment. Routinely in one classroom, the instructor led a PreReading activity, assigned the day’s reading via page numbers on the board, and required students to write answers to the study questions at the end of the section. He spent the period putting checks and minuses on papers from the previous period. We taped four students periodically over the course of year doing directed think alouds telling us how they went about completing the day’s reading and writing task.
One student who earned As in the class created an effective and efficient strategy which resulted in her getting check pluses on her daily papers, acing the multiple choice chapter tests later on, and still having time left in the history period to begin her math homework, which in her mind was much more important. She read the first question, picked out key words, and scanned the first paragraph or so to spot those words. Once she located them, she slowed to read to find the answer, which she could copy into a written response. The second question corresponded with the second paragraph or chunk, and so on. At no point did she read the passage to comprehend a point with examples, a story with a setting, or whatever structure the text was using.
One startling section from a think-aloud served as part of a presentation Sandy and I gave at an AERA conference. This student was usually quite proficient with her strategy, but on one particular question-answer mini-task it failed. She was not able to locate the key words transferred from the question and held in short term memory to make the match with words in the chapter section. She scanned down the text and grew impatient. Then, as if it were the most logical approach, she began reading backwards, up the text, whispering words and phrases in reverse order, until she found what she was looking for.
Individuals are responsible for doing their own work under their own power in order to gain or lose a reward or a badge, but they cannot be coerced nor threatened nor bribed to do it in the spirit the task was prescribed. No one could accuse this reader of cheating. This process-product ambiguity is embedded not only in academic work, but in jobs people do in the workplace. The assumption of autonomous effort for variable rewards is the foundation of capitalism in a democratic society. In this sense, cheating of the reading backwards variety is a profoundly anti-social behavior that goes on all the time and is rewarded. Where would Copernicus have ended up reading backwards?
Stanford has been studying cheating for a while now and recently published a report comparing the prevalence of incidence of cheating in high schools before and after ChatGPT. The url for the study is here. The finding in headline form below comes from CNN:
“The university, which conducted an anonymous survey among students at 40 US high schools, found about 60% to 70% of students have engaged in cheating behavior in the last month, a number that is the same or even decreased slightly since the debut of ChatGPT, according to the researchers,” (CNN, Dec 2023).
Interesting study and connection to history, Terry. Playing the game of school seems like a prerequisite for academic success.