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Comment by darth_avocado | Hacker News Reader

Cheating always has been available as an option. AI just makes it faster. At Cal, you always had students who would still pursue doing things on their own even when not cheating led to lower grades. The reality of it all is that cheating catches up to you eventually and the later it does, the worse are the outcomes. If you cruised through high school by cheating, you’ll not survive college. If you cruised through college by cheating you’ll not survive your first job. If you cruised through your first job by cheating you’re not getting a promotion or a second one.

Half the class was cheating in Ion Stoica’s OS class even when the whole thing was supposed to be a group effort. Like how are you cheating when you’re already working in groups of 4?

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> If you cruised through high school by cheating, you’ll not survive college. If you cruised through college by cheating you’ll not survive your first job. If you cruised through your first job by cheating you’re not getting a promotion or a second one.

Love the optimism, but if you really believe the universe is this fair then you’re too young, too naive or too inexperienced (or any combination therein). The world is absolutely full of people who have cruised through all of that but still manage to get (and maintain) good high paying jobs all the time. “Failing upwards” is a commonly observed phenomenon everywhere, in pretty much every industry.

Truth is: none of that matters in the real world. What matters is how good you are at networking and bullshitting your way through life. Unfortunately for those of us that are terrible at bullshitting, this means a harder professional life no matter how much effort you put into it.

I think you’re conflating too many things here. Never claimed that the universe is fair nor do I claim that failing upwards isn’t a thing.

If you think bullshiting and networking are the only things that matter, then I believe it’s your pessimism that’s talking.

In a class of 100, if 50 decide to learn things and 50 decide to complete assignments using AI without learning, I’m willing to put money behind the idea that more people in the first group will do better in life. Of course there will be exceptions because there’s a lot more in life beyond competence, including luck that influences outcomes.

I know you chose 50/50 arbitrarily. But I think the real numbers are much worse. A few years ago, I stayed a couple nights at a hostel in a rural spot in Italy. I’m in my 50s, and most of the others there were Americans in their 20s, fairly recent grads. A dozen of us went out to dinner one night, and among the topics discussed was cheating in college. Only myself and one of the younger people said we did not cheat, the others all treated it as an expected part of the college experience. This isn’t exactly “data”, and perhaps there’s some sort of correlation between hostel-goer and cheater, but I was shocked at the numbers. And that was before LLM usage was common.

My read is it's pre- versus post-social media college experiences. There have always been a number of cheaters. But their blast radius of normalization was limited to their roommate or maybe even dorm floor. With social media, a single cheater at a single school can enable and normalize the practice for millions.

Have you been in a work place?

Being friends of the right people can totally give you all the promotions you need, even if all you do has negative value for the company.

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