Subject: Re: two more on ethics From: "Martin C. Tangora" Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 15:12:23 -0600 Bill Richter is too optimistic here. "None of us plagiarize." I know of two egregious cases in algebraic topology. One was plagiarism pure and simple. The other was a senior professor, A, visiting a younger mathematician, B, and giving an ultimatum that A must be added as a co-author to a paper by B. In this case the conditions were actually much worse than just senior over junior, but I don't want to give more details because it might violate privacy. Are such situations covered by the ethics policy papers? Here's hoping that those two cases came to my attention because I knew all four individuals, and that they are perhaps not everyday occurrences. >>Subject: Re: three on ethics >>From: Bill Richter >>Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 22:05:28 -0600 >> >> From: "Claude Schochet" >> Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 >> >> c) The Guidelines were written with an eye towards establishing a >> standard that might be referred to when a truly awful ethics breach >> occurred- e.g. a PhD advisor stealing results from a student and >> then writing poison pen letters of recommendation for the >> student. Subtle questions such as Bill mentions were way beyond the >> scope of the document. >> >>That would be an important point: the AMS ethical guidelines don't >>cover our heated issues. None of us plagiarize. So maybe we're all >>ethical, because our ethics only cover extreme breaches. _____________________________________________________________ Subject: Re: two more on ethics From: Bill Richter Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 19:51:24 -0600 From: David J Green Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 15:46:11 +0100 (MET) A credit / recognition system that acts as a disincentive to either [insight or proofs] is flawed. See the July 1993 and April 1994 issues, available at www.ams.org/bull/bull-pre1996.html Thanks, David! I didn't know where this AMS stuff was on-line. From Quinn & Jaffee's article, p. 8, which I see I've misquoted for years: "(3) A dead area is often created when full credit is claimed by vigorous theorizers: there is little incentive for cleaning up the debris that blocks further progress." That's pretty much my issue right there. I see they continue this: "The ``dead area'' problem concerns credit and rewards. Mathematical researchers traditionally do not give credit twice for the same results. But this means that when a theorist claims credit, it is difficult for rigorous workers to justify the investment of labor required to make it reliable. There is a big difference between ``filling in the details of a theorem by $X$'' and ``verifying a conjecture of $X$''. Rigorous mathematicians tend to flee the shadow of a big claim. The pattern is that the missing work is filled in, often much later, using techniques and corollaries of work on separate topics for which uncontested credit is available." I like the problem right after (3) as well: "(4) Students and young researchers are misled." Note that Quinn & Jaffee have next to nothing to say about ethics. There's just one sentence at the end: "One might say that it is mathematically unethical not to maintain the distinctions between casual reasoning and proof. However, we have described practices and guidelines which, if carefully implemented, should give a positive context for speculation in mathematics. "