Let’s try a little (thought) experiment in verbal short-term memory. First, find a friend. Then, find a reasonably complex sentence about 45 words long …Now call your friend up on the phone, and have a discussion about the topic of the article. In the course of this conversation, slip in a verbatim performance of the selected sentence. Then ask your friend to write an essay on the topic of the discussion. … How likely is it that the selected sentence will find its way, word for word, into your friend’s essay?
In case you haven’t guessed, the question is rhetorical and the article (from LanguageLog, a great blog) is referring to Maureen Dowd’s plagiarism. It is a fallacy though to focus only on the probability of the scenario you are trying to reject. What matters is the relative probability of that scenario with the alternative scenario, namely that Maureen Dowd would bother (intentionally) lifting word for word a paragraph which is not particularly insightful or cleverly written from a popular blog at the risk of being called a plagiarizer.
When something happens that has two very unlikely explanations, picking one of those explanations is mostly driven by your priors.
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May 18, 2009 at 11:32 pm
Michael
I understand what you are saying and I agree that intentionally plagiarize would be very stupid in this context. To me there is a third scenario which is much more likely than either of the two which are mentioned, that she read the blog and when writing her article subconsciously regurgitated the sentence. She fabricated this story about her friend to make the whole thing appear more innocent than it really was. That is just my own prior beliefs speaking though.
May 19, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Jonathan
Without attempting to lead down a path that will get us to over analyze this to death, but shouldn’t our prior adjust according to the base-rate we choose? It certainly would be higher if we limit our base rate to editorial writers rather than average people. Certainly those who write editorials for a living must have a different relationship to language than an engineer or an average blog reader?
And certainly those who write editorials have a different relationship to plagiarism than the average blog reader as well? (Though the relationship could go in either direction here)
May 19, 2009 at 7:58 pm
ryan
i think the probability of the alternative hypothesis is a bit higher than you suggest, especially in a world of cut-and-paste convenience. she probably stepped away after pasting and forgot to change it.