YouTube thinkfluencer Siraj Raval admits he plagiarized boffins' neural qubit papers – as ESA axes his workshop Internet celeb Siraj Raval’s reputation continues spiraling downward – after he admitted plagiarizing real scientists' work to produce a paper on neural qubits. Raval – who has 700,000 YouTube subscribers and 70,000 Twitter followers – was last month accused of scamming hundreds of students, who subscribed to his online …
The sad thing is that using other people's work with proper & generous attribution would have had far more value to him than presenting himself as a guru.
True. He seems to have a knack for pulling complex topics and material from lots of sources into easy to ingest instructional videos (looks like, from the attention he's garnered from even Industry Professionals, as I've not seen any of his vids).
But an Editing job doesn't carry the same media attention.
"But are also still popular for this exact reason."
Yes.
Taking other people's work and explaining it in an easier to understand way that more people can engage with... Is called teaching.
Taking other people's work and passing it off as your own... Is called being a shithead.
No amount of attribution could compensate stealing 90% of someone's paper to build yours. Citation and reproduction must amount to a tiny fraction of a paper to be considered publishable. This guy just copies eveything and calls himself a self-taught genius.
On a different -but related- matter, if you look at his twitter most of the comments by asshats defending him are from Indian Youtuber wannabes. They are the ones calling him "senpai" "sensei" and so on. This guys is clearly "inspiring" them not to progress in ML, but in building a bullcrap career.
>The sad thing is that using other people's work with proper & generous attribution would have had far more value to him than presenting himself as a guru.
Perhaps - but then again there are precedents which suggest he might end up on the back of a 1 bitcoin note in 250 years or so.
Seems Mr Raval is apologetic because his plagiarism was caught.
Thats sad. Schedule and timelines cant be an excuse
The speed has reduced now that its time for reckoning.
He may bounce or may never bounce back.
For certain he would have reached places if he kept on an ethical straitjacket.
I find nothing strange about that, the more you dig, the more you dig up, and this applies to, methinks, everybody (which is not an excuse for him, but getting it in perspective). Take Trump, he's not a particularly (...) (...), he's just shamelessly open about it, versus all those fine specimen of humankind that preach, shrilly, one thing, and do, quietly, another. Until they slip and their less favourable image comes to the surface, and everybody's goes tsk-tsk, oh dear, I'd never thought!
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Congratulations on transforming an article about a YouTube guy into your personal political ranting playground.
Carry on.
Oh, and Obama asked a foreign country to look into Trump ? Citation please. I have not particularly appreciated any of the recent American presidents, but I'm pretty sure that Trump is the only president in the world who has ever asked a foreign country to investigate a political opponent.
On the other hand, it is now getting more and more widely recognised that the YouTube algorithm is a slave-driver, and if you don't work yourself beyond the point of being able to produce decent content, you will be punished by being made irrelevant in the listings.
Whole multi-person production teams spend months to create a couple of hours of television, and YouTube is pushing solo producers to knock out around an hour of video per week to get a basic income. Of course corners get cut.
I'm not defending Raval here, though -- he chose how to react to the pressure. If he'd exited YouTube with his reputation at a high point, he could probably have got himself a fairly decent job. Instead he tried to continue in an unsustainable market.
"he could probably have got himself a fairly decent job"
Assuming he's smart enough for a real job.
It's one thing to bullshit a bunch of people on YouTube, especially when you're charismatic.
It's quite a different thing to try bullshitting the person paying your salary.
This guy seems to me to be yet another smoke and mirrors social media star, for whom I can find only eulogistic and seemingly self-authored bio on the web. He apparently has a degree in computer science and is also a "traveler, musician, postmodernist, and scuba diver" (courtesy of O'Reilly). Which is all very nice, but irrelevant to his evident limited knowledge in the field of quantum computing.
His 2016 O'Reilly book on blockchain has also been royally slated in Amazon reviews, but it's clear that "online influencers" can rise above such things - at least for a while. This current debacle rather reminds me of the time Stephen Fry tried to explain how the internet worked (with reference to atomic clocks). The big difference though is the Stephen Fry wasn't charging $199 per head for the privilege.
I'm probably old-fashioned, but I consider the fundamental prerequisite for being a teacher is to actually know the subject. The second is to acknowledge one's sources and not pretend to expertise one doesn't have (particularly for profit or prestige).
Does this guy know anything for real, or is he just faking it?These days you can just find a scientific paper online, make an extraction of the main points and make a youtube lesson out of it. ..... NanoMeter
Just to cite two well enough known examples to El Regers, is the modus operandi/vivendi any different from that supported and eulogised by media when introduced by a Boris or a Maybot?
Two puppets also into having their strings pulled highlighting the actions followed by others ...... and masses of morons delight in it. It is a funny old, mad, mad, mad and getting madder world, aint it.
Well, if this is really a field of scientific research, rather than some rather desperate attempt to tie 2 overhyped technology trends together, then I would suspect that anyone stupid enough to think that they could get in on the act by throwing 200 bucks at an "Internet celeb and YouiTube Thinkfluencer" for a hastily cobbled together bit of plagiarism would not have much of a successful future in those technologies anyway.
its quite expensive a service, and its false positive rate was pretty high, at least when i was in charge of integrating into the course work submission for a pretty big uk university best part of 10 years ago. It was more useful as a tool for spotting shared and recycled course work from previous years courses than finding badly/non attributed sources
"and its false positive rate was pretty high"
When Turnitin was first introduced to the maths department, of course someone would decide to break it. It turns out that by replacing whitespaces by non-breaking spaces, you can take a page of text from another source any obtain any percentage plagiarised you want.
Of course, our students are not clever enough to actually do that.
The sad thing is that we absolutely need educators who are able to present advanced research to the masses in an intelligible way. It's completely fine repeating the work of others as long as you don't claim you did the work yourself. You can even become famous in your own right by doing science vulgarization (Isaac Asimov comes to mind). Just pay respect when it's due, and give proper attribution.
"limited to 500 pupils to guarantee he’d have time to provide sufficient support for everyone"
how about 25 if you want to have time to provide sufficient support for everyone, for a generous value of "sufficient"
I'd say 15 would be best, and that is based on my experience teaching evening classes, where I had in one group only 15 students and you actually could communicate with them, instead of talking _at them_ the way it happened with larger numbers.
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