Japan is a classic example. You can drop your wallet there and someone will send it to you with all the cash intact. It makes you realize how much overhead it causes when you need to guard against cheaters and thieves.
I was an undergrad at Caltech in the late 80s and likewise it never even occurred to us to cheat on take-home exams. Maybe things have changed.
People did plenty of collaboration on homework sets. Some of the harder ones were almost impossible unless you did, like those 20 page Phys98 homework sets...
Academic integrity committees at prestigious schools are horribly lax. They want these types of issues to go away quietly.
I have a friend who in college had another student take his test from the "complete" pile, erase my friend's name, and put on his own instead. It was only through blind luck that my friend figured it out. He, the TA, and the professor reported it – with smoking gun proof – but nothing happened.
The same laxness applies to academic research integrity. Universities rarely punish academics who are discovered to falsify data.
Not even prestigious ones. The school needs to sound like it has strong penalties against cheating, so there are really strict-sounding policies ("zero in the course"). But also, so many students cheat that actually enforcing these policies uniformly would hurt your graduation stats, make unhappy customers (students + parents), and hurt your revenue if you actually expel them. So the equilibrium is that the burden of reporting cheating is foisted upon professors, and it is understood -- though never explicitly communicated -- that academic integrity proceedings will be a huge administrative pain for you, the professor, and it is in your interest not to initiate them.
The outcome is predictable: unless there is a scandal of massive proportions, the issues just..."go away" on their own. With some discretion for the professor to either just look the other way, or ding the student enough to feel vindicated, but not so much as to actually hurt the university's interests.
The "compromise" that my university found was that if you were caught cheating in Science & Engineering school, you were given (informally) an ultimatum: either this can be escalated to the official channels, and you may be expelled (or perhaps nothing would come of it), or you can go be someone else's problem and transfer to a different subject. Typically the business school, because they're not big on ethics anyway.
As a TA, I once stumbled upon a bunch of students who had been copying each other's labs, because one student was brazen enough to turn in a printout with a the gmail header information across the top, indicating it had been received from another student. So I looked at that student's page, and noticed that they had somehow completely screwed up their rounding, and used way too many significant figures, which I recognized from another student's assignment. Digging through the pile, I found others that had rearranged stuff enough that I probably would have missed them if not for their exceptionally dull friend.
All told, 9 students had turned in the same exact assignment. 8 took up the offer to drop the course and switch majors, 1 faced the music, took their zero in the course, but did stick with the program.
> So the equilibrium is that the burden of reporting cheating is foisted upon professors, and it is understood -- though never explicitly communicated -- that academic integrity proceedings will be a huge administrative pain for you, the professor, and it is in your interest not to initiate them.
Not only that, but if you accuse a student of cheating and they are expelled, you have fundamentally altered their life forever. Talk about a burden.
It is not reasonable to expect a calculus professor to routinely decide if they want to derail someone’s entire future because, for whatever reason (a whole other discussion), they tried to cheat on an assignment. A lot of systems don’t have multiple strikes or are otherwise deeply flawed (as well as routinely shown to be ineffective). If you cheat and are caught, you are expelled. There is no sense of proportion or nuance to those kinds of systems and to ask faculty and students to voluntarily enforce that for your school is a ridiculous expectation.
If you’re asking me if there are situations where a student should be expelled because of cheating, the answer is yes. But I would say there are a lot of factors that have to be considered. It certainly can’t be one size fits all, which a number of institutions do. Otherwise it is not “justice” in the slightest. It’s taking a “tough on crime” approach to young adults in school enforced by their educators and peers, which is…well, let’s say “not effective.” At the end of the day these are institutions for learning. Plenty of people make huge mistakes, including massive breaches of trust, then learn their lesson and become better people for it. Giving a 0 on an assignment is often sufficient if we’re being honest. In a lot of cases that dig such a deep hole that your grade will never recover. If you want punitive measures, and one that hits where it hurts in a way that is relevant to the act of cheating, it doesn’t get much more appropriate than that. Not to mention the educator is going to watch them like a hawk for the rest of the semester.
I’m not even going to bother elaborating on how absurd it is to compare murder and cheating on a homework assignment or whatever.
I know a guy who TA'ed at Stanford in the 1970's. He said his professor told him to give students “gentleman’s B’s” even when their work was not fully up to par, because many of them would eventually become part of the country’s future elite and power structure.
I've talked to instructors who've just given up. They know the students use AI. More and more of them do every year. The instructors can spot it easily, but if they brought them all into the academic dishonesty process, the department would grind to a halt. So they just let it go. They are all paying tuition, and they'll all get the credential they paid for.
I sympathize with the instructors to an extent, but the reality is that LLMs will be a pervasive part of life going forward. Schools need to completely reinvent their curriculum around that new reality. It's going to be a painful process for instructors accustomed to the old way of teaching.
A more accurate phrasing is: It's significantly less likely that one learns the portion of the work they offload to an LLM.
A random anecdote is that most of the people I know who went very far in theoretical math are relatively poor at basic mental arithmetic, because they always think in the abstract and offload addition and multiplication to the calculator. It doesn't mean they can't do it, they just aren't as practiced or as fast at it.
The difference is that at one point they could do basic arithmetic. They went through the fundamentals/building blocks to get where they are currently. Getting weaker at something is not the same as never having to put in the effort to learn it in the first place. Just because they’re not particularly good at it anymore doesn’t mean they don’t understand how arithmetic fundamentally works (which would be incredibly concerning). They can look at a problem on a piece of paper and completely understand what it means.
Also, they are leaning on a calculator, a specific tool with a proven use that literally everyone knows how to use. LLM’s are glorified beta tests where the VC-backed companies are begging the rest of us to figure out the billion dollar application for them. It doesn’t even remotely compare from a utility standpoint. I don’t need to promise you what a calculator will eventually do when it gets better or convince you of their usefulness. It is self evident and consistent
Just like how you significantly increased the difficulty of exams in "open book" exams in the past where the only way to pass the open book exam was to know the material well, you similarly need to increase the difficulty of other work where it won't matter if you have an LLM, because you won't pass without knowing your shit either!
The problem is that only works at the advanced courses. However people need to learn the basics before they reach that level, specially when they are starting and are in many regards below the LLM's baseline.
Need to type? Computer labs (“test taking labs” idk) are back baby. Simple machines, no Internet.
Pretty sure that solves 90% of the testing problem. If somebody is overly reliant on LLM’s and refuses to learn, they’ll pay with their grades on the big assignments. Bummer for teachers who don’t love blue books, but I’m sure it’s a hell of a lot better than trying to sniff out LLMs and constantly mistrusting your students.
> Academic integrity committees at prestigious schools are horribly lax. They want these types of issues to go away quietly.
Yes, because the working model is that the students are there because they want to learn. And they are paying for the professors to teach them. If they cheat in classes, they are really just cheating themselves, and this should be no concern to the staff.
I would argue they are also cheating other students in their chosen field, and any future employers who place high value on prestige of applicants’ university, no?
If the only tangible, marketable value of graduating from a prestigious school was the raw knowledge and skill, I would agree with you. But it’s not.
Having worked with people who clearly got preferential treatment in hiring based on their school’s prestige, over more capable applicants from lower-tier schools, I absolutely lose respect for staff at universities who turn a blind eye to cheating.
And people respect certifications, if the trust in those pieces of paper disappears, then like you said, the trust in people with those certs disappears too. I used to think it was just about the knowledge but its not.
> If they cheat in classes, they are really just cheating themselves, and this should be no concern to the staff.
This is quite plainly not the case. If curve grading is used, cheating directly harms other students who aren't cheating. If curve grading isn't used, the university may end up handing out high grades like candy, and that's a problem for the university.
Higher grades can translate to better career outcomes even if undeserved. If it were clear that this wasn't the case, nobody would cheat in the first place.
Yeah because isnt it just about money and relationships? They have relationships to those student's families and need the networks. They realize too that its more about the credentials and networks and money comes in if that support those over academic honesty.
I went to a school that actually tried to enforce it, and unfortunately it ended up being enforced wildly disproportionately along racial lines. My school had a very simple rule: if you were caught cheating, you were expelled. No strikes, no exceptions.
That is a massive burden to put on an educator.
Getting expelled from your university is a very serious, mandated fork in the road for anyone it happens to. So what do they do? If they relate to/empathize with the person, they try to handle it without reporting it. If they don’t, they reported and “let the system handle it.”
As any reasonable person would expect, white people were not reported and marginalized groups were. Privileged groups also got exceptions (the football team had a massive cheating scandal that should have expelled about 15 players, and the professor reported it! But mumble mumble uhh they learned their lesson).
After over a century they finally ended the system recently and honestly? Good. I appreciated what they were attempting to do, but it didn’t work.
You could just... make punishments more proportionate? If people are regularly circumventing your punishment system because they feel it's too harsh, maybe take that as a sign.
The elimination of personal racism in towns of less than 1,500 people in rural georgia isn’t a prerequisite to be skeptical of the claim that a university, which is subject to tremendous legal scrutiny and liability, is treating people differently based on race with regard to rule enforcement.
Especially so when you’re invoking the specter of racially discriminatory enforcement as a reason against rules that would be highly beneficial for everyone. You can’t invoke unproven allegations of racism to argue against having rules and enforcing them. That’s just a red herring for people who don’t like rules.
I’m an alum now, not a student, but even college students can submit a FOIA request. Additionally, the school can look in to it if it wants. The possibilities are near-endless for getting this kind of info. There’s also the simple fact that it’s not like it’s a secret when someone is expelled.
I don’t understand why you think it’s so impossible for people to prove this problem exists. For starters, they could simply survey the faculty and ask them how they handle cheating at the school to better understand how it’s reported. Which they did, and it was very revealing. Most did not feel comfortable reporting. They literally told the school. So out the gate you had less than half the faculty even participating, which immediately changes who is impacted (I.e. incredibly unfair enforcement). Before we’re even getting into race and other factors students are basically subject to a near-coin flip over whether or not their professors even report it. Then you have to take the professor’s own potential biases into account, since it’s basically all on them (and peers to a lesser degree. Do I need to explain 18-21 year olds can exercise poor social judgment and/or may not want to ruin someone’s life? Or worse, want to?) voluntarily report this.
Additionally, you could see the breakdown by race (and more) of people that were expelled. The numbers made no sense if you wanted to assert the system was fair - less than 20% of those reported or expelled were white at a school over 80% white. For emphasis: This was the case both for reporting them and verdict. It was common knowledge and over the years there had been several attempts by students to shut the one strike/expulsion only system down. There were also big gender discrepancies, with men being accused and expelled way more than women. Do you believe that claim?
The real issue here is why you immediately come from a place of “that’s impossible,” when it’s something that’s not actually very difficult to prove. That’s literally why it was removed. It was demonstrably discriminatory. Either way, this isn’t complicated and the data isn’t and wasn’t exactly hard to come by. So now it’s gone and the school is better for it.
I didn’t say it was “impossible.” I just asked you for your evidence. Do you have evidence similarly situated individuals were treated differently? Do you have evidence of events of cheating going unreported? I’m not saying you’re wrong about your ultimate conclusion. I’m asking about the type of evidence you believe is sufficient to support that conclusion.
The fact that most teachers were uncomfortable reporting might suggest enforcement was self selecting, but what makes you think it was the particularly racist teachers self selecting into enforcement? And under Title VI, which is what your allegation amounts to, disparate impact isn’t a valid theory of of discrimination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_v._Sandoval.
Again, strict rules against cheating are societally critical. Petty corruption and cheating is a huge tax on a society, and countries like Singapore and China have greatly improved the lives of ordinary people by taking draconian measures to stamp it out. So you have a very heavy burden if you’re arguing against such rules based on allegations of racial bias.
Why is multiple county and school district-wide segregation policies "personal racism" but as soon as it goes to a university it becomes "institutional"?
I’m not going to doxx myself in a futile effort to convince you systemic racism is real.
Again, the numbers spoke to the truth of the matter. White people were reported and expelled at a rate that was so much lower than their non-white and international peers that it defied credulity. Men were also accused and expelled at a rate far higher than women were - something tells me you won’t push back against that.
The school didn’t end an over century-old practice that was a major point of pride for them because of vibes. It ended because it was harming only certain groups and was not effective at curtailing cheating.
Over half the faculty literally admitted they don’t report/don’t feel comfortable reporting in an anonymous survey when this was being more rigorously interrogated. It’s easy to infer “therefore a lot of cheating goes unreported” from that.
Second question: Because cheating is handled by a specific group and sexual misconduct/assault is a criminal offense that gets you arrested (it’s also handled at the school level by a specific group). They aren’t the same thing and they aren’t combined in reporting. I can’t imagine any school combines those two but maybe there are outliers.
The number of students expelled for cheating at my school was a concrete, annual number that was public knowledge.
So many of you keep asking all these random questions trying to poke holes. If you don’t believe me, just move on. I am giving you all the specificity I’m going to give you. You either believe me or you don’t. I have nothing to gain by lying on HN about a school I attended decades ago. I am relaying something I have a lot of firsthand knowledge of. You can find value in it or not.
There was a clear, demonstrable problem with the way cheating was handled. They've altered it because of this. That’s the story.
Unless I missed something, no one ever addressed the original question, which is how we know the policy was enforced along racially discriminatory lines. This requires knowing the extent of cheating in various racial groups and the extent of enforcement in each group. No evidence of the former has been presented.
Even if most of the people who were disciplined are from URM groups, that doesn't prove racially-biased enforcement.
This is exactly right. Gone are the days when you could get a C+ average at Harvard and still land a good job or a spot in a prestigious law program – purely by virtue of having gone to Harvard.
Everyone is in competition now. Everyone has to prove their worth, all the time. It's more egalitarian but it also creates a lot of stress.
To get into a radiation tech program, there are 260 applicants, almost all with all As, for 20 slots at my local community college.
Maybe in the very first instant you’d think it’s merit based. But, EVERYONE is playing the game. Getting homework and tests from friends who already took the class, taking classes at several different schools to get the easier teachers, paying multiple times the tuition cost on tutors and other study aides (eg $2k+ for all the anatomy models), every demographic is using paid ChatGPT. We all know which teachers to take. We spend much of class strategizing like this.
Every single student. It’s just another game to play or you lose.
Real question: If people are that good at grinding (it is a legit skill), why don't they go for something better, like a 4-year university degree in STEM or medicine? They can make much more money.
Also, how do they decide which students to pick? And I would love to know the gender ratio.
Even among trades where you can move up the initial ranks simply by showing up sober and working once you get to the point where you want to level up by striking out on your own it's all the same shit. Instead of paying a tutor you're paying a consultant and/or an accountant to tell you the answer. Instead of the school or licensing board asking you questions where wrong answers will have an opportunity cost of many dollars it's the government.
I'm skeptical that it is really more egalitarian in practice, anyways.
There is still a lot of bias and in -group preferences present in hiring. Not to mention that most places will weight candidates who are recommended by employees higher than unconnected external applicants. That might be a reasonable filter but it unquestionably is not egalitarian
It's vastly more egalitarian than it was before- - that said, it's still a bit closed, but the manner in which it is closed is more related to 'hyper competition' than anything.
Admissions for elite schools is just crazy - they can't go purely by 'scores', they have gender/national/racial issues which are actual quite real, even if it becomes unfair - there is just no way to do it in the ultra egalitarian way in which some would want.
It's a very scarce resource and that's it.
If it were a 'common' thing - like local state college, then it takes a different form. But the acute nature of the situation really brings out some ugly dynamics.
If you posit that Altman suffers from main character syndrome (as many CEOs do), then he likely believes that he alone can lead OpenAI to success. In this case, doing whatever it takes to get himself back into the job is by definition justified. It's obviously worth stepping on a few toes if the success of the company is at stake.
Anthropic asking hypothetical questions in an interview doesn't seem like a very good signal. Everybody knows what they're supposed to say. If they want an unfakeable signal they should make offers with no equity component.
CEOs are hired to run companies and make themselves, and their investors, wealthy. That is their prime directive and CEOs are the ultimate partisans.
If a CEO feels that bending the truth, or outright lying, will advance the prime directive – then that is what they will do. Applying adjectives like "honest" or "untrustworthy" to them is a category error. Altman will say whatever benefits OpenAI, full stop. Musk will say whatever benefits his interests, full stop.
CEOs can't be good or bad people in a moral sense, or have the best interests of society at heart. (Despite what they may try to convey.) Better to think of them as automatons carrying out well-defined, and ultimately simple, goals.
> You cannot be sure that anyone other than yourself is conscious. It is only basic human empathy that allows people to believe that.
In Bayesian terms what makes it reasonable to ascribe consciousness to other people is that (a) other people have an origin that is objectively very similar to your own (genetic origin, embryonic development, birth, gradual acculturation, education, etc.), and (b) you have a firsthand experience of your OWN consciousness.
It would be remarkable if the very small differences (relatively speaking) between you and other people were enough to destroy the experience of consciousness.
Generalizing, the farther you stray from a "common origin story", the more a leap of faith consciousness becomes. Needless to say an LLM is quite a different thing than a human being.
Judging from online reactions to robot testing (e.g., engineers kicking the Spot robot "dog" to test its balance), we humans trigger on some fairly superficial cues when deciding how much to empathize. People express more sympathy for the robot dog than they do for the chicken they ate for lunch – despite the fact that the chicken has a far better claim to consciousness than the robot.
This then is how I interpret "do not anthropomorphize": We should try to ignore the superficial cues when judging the similarity of other beings to ourselves.
Bitcoin attempted to replace cash, but failed because the transaction costs are orders of magnitude too high. The high cost of zero-trust makes it a desirable medium of exchange only for criminals and scammers.
In an effort to make Bitcoin a reasonable medium of exchange, various businesses arose to act as intermediaries/market makers. But this violates the trust-free model – and many of those intermediaries have proven to be outright scams. It turns out that trusting an intermediary to handle your cryptographically untraceable asset is not a wise thing to do.
So that leaves Bitcoin in a similar category as gold. You're either a paranoid type for whom the high cost of holding and transacting the asset is a price you're willing to pay for an asset that could survive a global meltdown. OR you extend trust to various intermediaries (gold ETFs, bitcoin ETFs for example) and treat it as just another tradable financial asset.
Bitcoin is undeniably the cleverest way anyone ever became a billionaire. Nakamoto's sole contribution was posting an anonymous 9 page whitepaper to the internet and voila, today he (or she, or it) is worth $80+ billion.
>Bitcoin attempted to replace cash, but failed because the transaction costs are orders of magnitude too high.
The current fees are less than 0.40$. It may be too high for a starbuck coffee, but that's way lower than the fees charged by a credit card provider if you are purchasing something over 50$. On a 2%+0.10$ structure, you only need to transfer around 15$ before your credit card fee is higher than the current average BTC tx fee.
More likely they would buy the assets of AI companies for pennies on the dollar. There could be a lot of H100s floating around at fire sale prices. Or they would acquire these companies for talent.
Google did this for several years in the early 2000s – snapping up talent and data center capacity from the casualties of the dotcom bust.
What will they do with all that H100s? They dont O&O any data centers. AFAIK, Apple uses GCP for iCloud.
Also, remember H100 will be ~years old. Sometimes I wonder whether the average HN crowd really thinks through things.
Apple has historically shown an unwillingness to deploy capital to "own" things. They partner with TSMC for manufactoring, they get their panels from Samsung, Google on Gemini ..
Vertically integrated doesnt mean they "make" everything, but instead partners build things to their specification.
Unless they change their tack, Apple is unlikely to go head to head against Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace because they only target their own ecosystem (macOS/iOS). For MS and Google these Apple-owned platforms are not their primary user base.
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