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Viswanathan-gate

Let me get this straight. Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarizes a series of passages from Megan McCafferty's teen novels  "Sloppy Seconds" and "Second Helpings" for her debut novel: "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life." After the story breaks, McCafferty's publisher starts huffing and puffing and threatening legal action, Viswanathan apologizes and goes on the Today show, her publisher Little Brown (which is incidentally my publisher too) withdraws her book from the market, Harvard launches an "investigation" and Viswanathan gets pummeled by a hundred angry columnists, pundits and bloggers.

Can someone tell me why? This is teen-literature. It's genre fiction. These are novels based on novels based on novels, in which every convention of character and plot has been trotted out a thousand times before. If I wrote a detective story, set in 1930's Los Angeles, about a cynical, hard-bitten private eye, with a drop dead gorgeous secretary and a series of lonely housewife clients, would anyone bat an eye? Of course not. It may be a stolen premise. But we accept that within the category of genre fiction a certain amount of borrowing of themes and plots and ideas is acceptable—even laudable. I buy lots of spy novels, not because they diverge from the spy novel model, but because they conform to it. I want my spy to have a troubled home life, and an inpenetrable gaze and to be handy with a revolver. But once we have conceded that in genre fiction its okay to borrow themes, why do we get so upset when genre novelists borrow something a good deal less substantial—namely phrases and sentences? Surely an idea is more consequential than a sentence.

I wrote about some of these issue in my New Yorker piece on plagiarism a year and a half ago. gladwell.com/2004/2004_11_25_a_borrowed.html.  I was plagiarized, and, after thinking about it, decided that I wasn't particularly upset.

Here's the relevant passage:

. . . this is the second problem with plagiarism. It is not merely extremist. It has also become disconnected from the broader question of what does and does not inhibit creativity. We accept the right of one writer to engage in a full-scale knockoff of another—think how many serial-killer novels have been cloned from "The Silence of the Lambs." Yet, when Kathy Acker incorporated parts of a Harold Robbins sex scene verbatim in a satiric novel, she was denounced as a plagiarist (and threatened with a lawsuit). When I worked at a newspaper, we were routinely dispatched to "match" a story from the Times: to do a new version of someone else's idea. But had we "matched" any of the Times' words—even the most banal of phrases—it could have been a firing offense. The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.

When Doris Kearns Goodwin borrowed, without attribution, from a history of the Kennedys for her history of the Kennedys, that's serious. She's a scholar. And we have an expection of scholarship that it is supposed to reflect original thought. We have no such expection for genre novels, Harlequin romances, slasher films, pornos, or, say, the diaries of teenagers.

It is worth reading, I think, the actual passages that Viswanathan is supposed to have taken from McCafferty. Let's just say this isn't the first twenty lines of Paradise Lost. My question is whether it is possible to write a teen-lit novel without these sentences:

From page 7 of McCafferty’s first novel: “Bridget is my age and lives across the street. For the first twelve years of my life, these qualifications were all I needed in a best friend. But that was before Bridget’s braces came off and her boyfriend Burke got on, before Hope and I met in our seventh-grade honors classes.

From page 14 of Viswanathan’s novel: “Priscilla was my age and lived two blocks away. For the first fifteen years of my life, those were the only qualifications I needed in a best friend. We had first bonded over our mutual fascination with the abacus in a playgroup for gifted kids. But that was before freshman year, when Priscilla’s glasses came off, and the first in a long string of boyfriends got on.”

Calling this plagiarism is the equivalent of crying "copy" in a crowded Kinkos.

The Duke Case

I don’t have any opinion on the guilt or innocence of Duke lacrosse players charged with raping a exotic dancer.  But I do think the incident affords a small opportunity to think about the value of eyewitness testimony.  The accuser, who is black, identified two players alleged to have assaulted her after looking over photographs of all of the white players on the lacrosse squad.   On the basis of that identification, the players were indicted by a grand jury.  So far, the accuser’s testimony is the most powerful fact in the prosecution’s arsenal.  The question is: how much credence should we give that identification?

Psychologists don’t particularly like eye witness testimony. Elizabeth Loftus has done a lot of really interesting work exposing its various frailties.   Juries and laypeople (and prosecution attorneys) tend to have a great deal more faith in someone’s ability to pick a suspect out of a lineup than they should.   In Blink, I mentioned the research of Jonathan Schooler on lineups: he’s showed that merely requiring people to write down a physical description of the suspect before viewing the lineup radical impairs their ability to pick out the correct person.

But the Duke case is an example of another, even more problematic aspect of eyewitness identifications, and that is that we aren’t particular good at making them across races.   There is a huge amount of psychological research in their area, pioneered by Roy Malpass at the University of Texas at El Paso.   A few years ago, John Brigham and Christian Meissner did a big meta-analysis of all of the cross-racial identification studies and concluded that given the task of picking someone out of a lineup, the average person is something like 1.4 times more likely to correctly identify an own-race face than a different-race face, and 1.6 times more likely to incorrectly identify a different race face.   These are not trivial error rates. Clearly we need to treat cross-racial identifications with a special level of caution.  (Here’s the link to the UTEP eyewitness laboratory:   eyewitness.utep.edu/race.html)

The problem seems to be that when we encounter someone from a different group we process them at the group level.   We code the face in our memory under the category black or white, and not under the category of someone with, say, an oval face and brown eyes and a prominent chin.   Race, in other words, trumps other visual features that would be more helpful in distinguishing one person from another.   Why do we do this?   One idea is simply that it’s a result of lack of familiarity:   that the more we “know” a racial type, the more sophisticated our encoding becomes. Another idea is that it’s a manifestation of in-group/out-group bias.   The thing about coding by group and not by facial feature is that it’s a lot faster.   And from an evolutionary standpoint, you’d want to use quicker processing methodologies in dealing with those who come from unfamiliar—and potentially unfriendly—groups.   The bottom line is that the adage that “all blacks look the same” to whites (and all whites look the same blacks) has some real foundation.

This has been a huge issue for years in white identifications of black suspects. I would venture to guess that there are thousands of African Americans in prison right now for crimes they didn’t commit, largely because whites have far too much faith in their ability to tell one black face from another.   Now, in the Duke case, we have a black identification of white suspects.   The shoe is on the other foot. It will be interesting to see whether the legal system is any more willing to acknowledge the real limitations of eye-witness identifications when it is suspects from the racial majority who are on the receiving end of the bias, not the other way around.

Forensic analysis redux

I take it, from  many of the comments on my last post, that virtually no one bought my idea for loosing the forensic economists on sports records.  So let's try again. Hopefully round two will be a bit more convincing.

       It seems to me that there are two problems here. First, from everything we know it is very difficult for the drug police to catch cheaters. Bonds and Tim Montgomery and Marion Jones got caught because Trevor Graham ratted on them, not because the steriod police were on top of the problem. We have no idea how many other people out there are using chemicals that we simply don't yet have a test to detect.  Second--and here I strongly disagree with some readers--peformance enhancing drugs work. They confer an enormous advantage. They allow an athlete to train so much harder than he or she  otherwise could that they can turn mediocre athletes into very good athletes, and very good athletes into legends. "Game of Shadows" makes, I think, an overwhelming case that drugs allowed Bonds to essentially double his annual home run output, and turned Tim Montomgery from an also-ran into a world record holder.

     Given these two facts, what do you do? That's why I think you have to bring in the forensic economists.  Is this a perfect solution? Of course not. It does introduce a subjective element. It is also possible that we will occasionally see real genius and mistakenly call it cheating. But no administrative system is flawless. Juries send innocent people to jail all the time. But we put up with that because the alternative--no legal system--is a lot worse. What if--in sports like baseball and track and field and swimming--we had a record-review board. We assembled a panel of experts who reviewed the circumstances under which the record was set, physiological evidence from the athlete himself or herself, and statistical evidence about the plausibility of the performance. Beamon would pass. FloJo would not. Bonds would not--and nor, I would wager, would McGwire or Sosa. The point is that we have to do something, otherwise records will cease to mean anything at all.

     Incidentally, in  "Baseball Between The Numbers," by the Baseball Prospectus team, there is a very nice essay by Nate Silver doing exactly this: using forensic tools to try and gauge the extent of steriod cheating in major league baseball. It's worth a read. Silver concludes, interestingly, that the overall amount of cheating seems to be quite small, and confined largely (at this point) to mediocre players trying to get a little edge, not superstars trying to become mega-superstars. I find that very reassuring, not just because it says that Bonds is  an anomaly, but because it reminds us of just how useful statistical analysis can be.

Game of Shadows

I’ve been reading (like everyone else) “Game of Shadows,” the book about Barry Bonds and steroids and the BALCO scandal. It’s quite a remarkable feat of reporting. What striking about it is something that you might not notice unless you’ve journalist—which is the absence of obvious lawyering. If you ever write something even remotely critical of someone, the lawyers invariably go through it, and before you know it your prose is strewn with “apparently” and “allegedly,” and “according to” and so-so “denies. . .” There’s almost none of that in “Game of Shadows,” which is amazing considering the book accuses, in devastating detail, several of the biggest names in sports—Barry Bonds, Gary Sheffield, Tim Montgomery and Marion Jones, among others—of being serious steroid users. The two writers—Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams—must have had really impeccable sourcing. When the book first came out, and several baseball writers predicted that Bonds’ reputation was destroyed and his chances are getting in the Hall of Fame seriously damaged, I thought they were overstating things. Now I’m not so sure. “Game of Shadows” is a death sentence for Bonds. More to the point, it’s impossible to read the book and accept that Bonds has a right either to the single season home-run record or, assuming he keeps playing, the career home run mark.

So what should we do? I think we need to set the bar a little higher for record-setters. Justin Wolfers, an economist at Penn, just did a study analyzing college basketball scores, concluding that there is ample statistical evidence for point-shaving in about five percent of college games. Steven Levitt (I know, I know. I’m obsessed with him) has done the same kind of work on student test scores. Forensic economics look at large data sets and draw surprisingly sophisticated inferences about behavior and intention. I think we should loose the forensic economists on all record-setters, and require that athletes pass a statistical plausibility test in the wake of their achievements.   

Obvious example:

Florence Griffiths Joyner, in 1988. Before that year, her best times in the hundred meters and the two hundred meters were, respectively, 10.96 and 21.96. In 1988, at the advanced (for a sprinter) age of 28, a suddenly huskier FloJo ran 10.49 and 21.34, times that no runner since has even come close to equaling. At the time, people in the track world just rolled their eyes. But since FloJo never failed a drug test, there was nothing they could do. Well, there is something we can do. We can bring in the forensic economists—and any statistical analysis of the career marks of world class sprinters would have told us that marginally world-class 28 year old do not, in the absence of some kind of help, suddenly turn into the greatest runners the world has ever seen.

Bonds falls into the same category. From the moment he started his late career surge, everyone who knew anything about baseball suspected mischief. “Game of Shadows” points out that Bonds had the second, ninth and tenth greatest offensive season in baseball history at the ages of 36, 37, and 39 respectively—and the average age of everyone else on that list (Gehrig, Foxx, Ruth and Hornsby) is 27. No one—no one—turns himself into one of the greatest hitters of all time in his late 30’s. His home run record should have been denied as statistically implausible.

Will raising the bar this way mean we occasionally deny a genuine record? It’s certainly possible. Bob Beamon jumped 29 ft, 2.5 inches at the Mexico City Olympics, and had never jumped more than 27 ft, 3 inches before that, and never again jumped more than 27 feet. No one has ever doubted that Beamon was clean. But it’s a totally weird performance. On the other hand, it was at altitude. Because of the difficulty in hitting the board, long jump performances are highly variable. And the effect of drug enhancement is sufficiently long-lived, that a single anomalous performance in an otherwise quiet career is more statistically plausible than a string of closely-linked anomalous performances in an otherwise quiet career. FloJo had a fantastic year in 1988, which is why she raised so many eyebrows. She wasn’t Beamon. She was Bonds. I think if we’re smart about it, we can learn to distinguish the fluke performances from the phony performances.

One obvious objection to this idea is that we have a tradition of presuming people innocent until proven guilty, and prima facia statistical tests violate that. But the presumption of innocence is a legal principle. We’re dealing with sports records here, and it seems reasonable, particularly in this day and age of advanced athletic chemistry, to ask a bit more of record holders.