I think what's so fascinating about academia (really, university life in general) is the juxtaposition of intelligence with the cheating and fraudulent behavior that occurs.<p>I have never, ever cheated in school. I was really surprised when I went to college, with the amount of cheating that went on. A huge proportion of my class would take a shortcut. Get the answers to an assignment from a friend, cheat the clicker, plagiarize. A smaller subset were determined to never honestly do an assignment. Every assignment was approached, first and foremost, with a strategy for how to defraud it.<p>What's so interesting is that so many of these cheaters, the worst ones included, were extremely intelligent people. The most capable cheaters were as smart as the honest top of the class. (The slackers, who just wanted the degree, all muddled through with C's. Which is fine!). Academic fraud at the highest level, among tenured professors, is the most extreme possible case of this.<p>What gets me is that if you stop and think about fraud, about cheating, for literally a minute, you can only come to the conclusion that it's a huge disservice to absolutely everyone. It's obviously a disservice to the honest people in your cohort, because it robs them of advancement. It's a disservice to you, because you waste time cheating instead of learning -- which only leads to issues down the road, because you need the things you're learning about in school.<p>But I think most importantly, it's a joyless activity. Any pride you have in your work, passion for what you're doing, it's all permanently tainted by the fraud. One of the funnest, most enjoyable parts of life, in my mind, is getting really really good at something really really hard, and mastering it. These people are the absolute best. Tao Li, the stories in here [1], the Alzheimer's case. I mean I'm angry about these things of course, but more than anything, it's a pity/feeling bad for/disgust reaction. They wasted their whole lives on getting to the top of the field, only to suck all of the joy out of the achievement by cheating to get there.<p>These people are so clearly gifted. How is it that they cannot make this connection?<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39643437">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39643437</a>