From Freddie deBoer, You Can and Should Blame Young People When They Act Like Lazy Cheaters, Actually. His article went massively viral, with 600 “likes,” so clearly it resonated with many people. But here, imho, he comes off as out of touch or a ladder-puller, having already succeeded at life and is now admonishing “today’s generation” when they want a taste of the success he has enjoyed, or for rejecting or pushing back against a rigged or lopsided game.
He writes:
It’s true: the conditions people are born into shape the range of choices available to them, the kid from the under-resourced district and the rich private school kid are not standing at the same starting line, and incentives are real and powerful and a society which builds a maze and then punishes the rats for taking the shortcut is a society engaged in an elaborate exercise in bad faith. All of that’s true! The problem is that none of it implies that the individual student who chose to cheat did not choose to cheat. And if we care about students, if we respect and honor them, then we respect and honor their capacity for acting as moral beings. It’s absolutely bizarre to me, the way that the people who claim to serve as advocates for students end up damning them with a kind of condescending excuse-making that any one of us would be insulted by.
He’s trying to have it both ways. He admits that some people enjoy unfair advantages–which is undeniably true–but then argues that respecting students’ autonomy requires holding them accountable for their choices, but, so what? He’s invoking a straw man that people don’t care about accountability, when no one is making that argument.
Accountability already exists. Every rejection letter after applying for a job is a reminder that you’re personally accountable for not being considered good enough. If there was a way to improve your odds of getting hired, would taking advantage of it be an abdication of responsibility? No. It would be an exercise of responsibility. Being accountable for outcomes doesn’t mean refusing every available advantage; it means doing what you can to achieve better outcomes, especially in an environment that’s harder and more lopsided than ever.
Is using AI cheating? Yes, if it’s not disclosed, I would agree, but again, so what? AI helps to level the playing field, allowing ordinary people the corpus of knowledge and expertise at one’s fingertips, and making people more productive. Companies already avail themselves of such productivity options, such as outsourcing, so why shouldn’t students? If companies were transparent they would disclose this, but it’s expected that companies want to save money. When a CEO cuts costs it’s celebrated by the share price going up and he’s awarded a promotion, but it’s bad when students cut the time and effort to do assignments? This strikes me as morally inconsistent.
Except for a minority who seek to pursue doctoral-level research, it’s implicitly understood that higher education is a charade or performative. These students, rightfully, know that these classes and assignments are of no applicability towards their future careers, but are the equivalent to checking the necessary boxes to earn the all-necessary credential to be considered “employable”. Higher ed for decades has lived off the largesse of the taxpayer and parents who write these huge checks. If AI helps makes this song and dance obsolete, this should be encouraged or celebrated.
I don’t know if there’s a name for a moral system that consistently rewards deception and punishes cooperation, but I can tell you that it leads to a collapsing society, and we’re living in one. If it makes you feel better, those most responsible certainly aren’t the teenagers.
Society is supposedly “collapsing” because professors’ jobs are threatened by AI, or that it devalues this charade? Yeah right. Predictions of societal collapse long predate AI. This is just the latest excuse by people who see that a world order that they have benefited from is being threatened. They then repackage their concern as a broader concern for society.
He continues:
A genuinely sophisticated person can hold two ideas at once: the system is unjust AND you, specifically, made a choice and the choice was wrong and you knew it was wrong, which is precisely why you lied about it afterward.
Again, this is a sort of framing that presupposes that we live in a just world. Rejecting this means being considered “unsophisticated,” which is another way of saying “dumb”. An ad hominem argument. If society cared about transparency there would not be so much opacity in hiring, where qualified applicants are passed up for arbitrary reasons or no reason. Or everything else in life where unelected gatekeepers decide who succeeds or not. AI is a tool that finally, to some extent, makes the game more fair, by making the opacity work against the gatekeepers in that they cannot readily tell what is AI-generated or not. I’m perfectly fine with students having to disclose that they lie–if everyone else are held to that standard too.
Today’s generation knows the system is broken or inherently unfair or “stacked”, and is only getting worse by every measure for those without the necessary connections or luck. Meanwhile, mediocrities continue to be promoted. I too can attest to this. It’s not laziness; the actual playing field is different or tilted. Stories abound on Reddit and Hacker News of qualified college grads being unable to find jobs, having sent out many resumes and not even landing an interview, let alone a job:
Clearly something has changed. This “laziness” accusation amounts to gaslighting–yes, a phase that has become overused to the point of amounting to an empty accusation–but letting these charges go unanswered means accepting a faulty framing that plays into an interpretation of the world that does not exist anymore (the so-called “just world” fallacy). Not everyone has the talents and success the author has been graced with, when merit mattered more.
I look at it like this: it’s harder than ever to succeed. It’s not cheating or laziness; rather, people are looking for any edge they can get to raise the already low odds. Yes, if good careers and recognition awaited the finish line upon graduating, or if merit were rewarded, then his argument would hold more water, but we don’t live in that world anymore assuming we ever did–but clearly we don’t anymore.