Hard to fathom what he's thinking.
It's a mark of a genuine irredeemable asshole. Loads of people do criminal shit, but the ones who look you in the eye and deny it when you have them dead to rights are the ones you don't worry about being gentle with.
I love that the journalist hadn't even anticipated that he was going to pull this kind of lie,* and had only installed the browser extension in the (possibly naive) hope that LaCour was going to issue his promised statement.
*I also don't understand why on earth he told THAT lie. Like, if "that version of the CV hasn't been on my website for at least a year," does that mean that LaCour thinks lies have a statute of limitations? "Oh, don't worry about that statement -- it's more than 12 months old! Who cares if it's true!"
Possibly there's a statute of limitations on criminal fraud that he's worried about and is only one year?
But probably he's just throwing chaff in hopes of gaining time.
And anyway, apparently the statute of limitation for fraud run from the discovery of the fraud. So says the law firm of Googling Shit.
I think you're attributing too much rationality and knowledge to him.
Lawyers Guns and Money linked to this very reasoned analysis of a SECOND possibly faked paper, and I have to say that if this guy's analysis is true, then I suspect the thought pattern behind the fakery is one that I find pretty familiar. It's somebody who doesn't think that anyone else is really doing the work either -- they think that because they find something complicated, or overwhelming, that everybody else must be humming a few bars and faking it too. They convince themselves their lies are normal, and that they are low-stakes, because nobody else will want to rock the boat because they're all lying too.
I had a former colleague who had this mentality. As far as I know she never outright faked anything, but just last week we had an issue where a reporter called up wanting a source for a number she had trumpeted. No source could be found. Having worked with her for several years, I strongly suspect that this was case of her doing back-of-the-envelope math to generate an estimate, and failing to document her calculations. But who knows? She certainly showed frequent evidence of cognitive laziness* and endless shortcuts when we worked together.
*I don't use this word lightly; it took me three years to decide this was what was going on with her.
it took me three years to decide
Oh, who's the lazy one?
Seriously? I didn't have the power to fire her, and I was trying not to jump to conclusions and be unfair, just because she wasn't good at the kinds of things I'm good at.
Also, I don't know that I would have been able to manage the cognitive dissonance of rewriting her work -- which was my job -- if I had acknowledged that it was deliberate laziness on her part. I have very little ability to conceal my contempt once I've made a judgment like that.
O.K. I read that linked article. I think I met that guy once. He's really writing the for slow crowd in back who don't pay close attention. One minor quibble. I don't doubt the other paper was likely fraudulent in whole or part, but I doubt LaCour didn't know the Chi-Squared distribution. I think he just got too lazy to insert the right character.
Wow, that's brazen. What a bold deceiver!
At this point, I'm sure he is acting out of sheer desperation, and therefore reacting to new developments (and fresh inquiries) without really thinking it through (how does the internet work? e.g., as SP points out).
I certainly didn't know you could do something as simple as a browser extension to monitor a web page for changes.
I'm a little annoyed that my lazy proxy that people who put the time into making nice-looking, easily-interpretable plots are usually doing solid work is so very wrong in this case.
The fact that he's reached the point where he's just reacting to things in a blind panic kind of makes me want to give him a call pretending to be a reporter and start asking him questions about problems with his papers/history/CV/etc. that I've just made up out of nothing to see what happens. If you're already in "deny everything cover it up!" mode there's fewer cognitive resources to devote to "wait did I actually do that unethical thing he's asking about?" and something relatively complicated but plausible might slip right through.
You should call and pretend to be from the gas company. And then after talking about gas company things for five minutes, ask about his papers.
If he has to go to court, he should hire Stephen Glass.
14: You should knock on his door, all loaded up with Watchtower pamphlets, and pretend to be canvassing on behalf of the Jehovah's Witnesses. If he doesn't agree to convert, his research methodology is a fraud!
This reminds me. For Halloween this year, I'm going as sexy IRB member.
You know, I get enough stress just feeling like an imposter. Being an actual imposter must be maddening.
I wonder if actual impostors get impostor syndrome at all. Witt's theory in 7 seems plausible, and I'm not sure someone who assumes everyone else is faking it would experience much anxiety about faking it themselves.
sexy IRB member
Not enough brain bleach in the world.
20: the other day I was trying to develop a grand unified theory of imposter syndrome, the peter principle, and the dunning-kruger effect.
"This has more than minimal risks so you're no longer eligible for expedited review."
"She's here to serve as a witness to your informed consent."
a grand unified theory of imposter syndrome, the peter principle, and the dunning-kruger effect.
Is that when someone gets promoted to a point where they don't know enough to recognize that they are an imposter?
Balls
Posted by Ogged
on 05.27.15
Read to the end. LaCour is going to brazen ...
In other words, he has brass balls.
"Like the key points of the Belmont Report, the facts of our love will be put into slides that thousands of people have to review every two years."
An ex-gf had a colleague like in 7. A really extraordinarily stupid person, who - through a combination of constant, brazen lying and having a convincing way of looking you in the eye and nodding confidently while you explained something - got as far as a PhD programme in a technical field, in a global top ten uni before she got caught out on one thing, and then quickly got caught out on everything else. She was eventually asked to leave, refused to do so for a while, until her funding got revoked and she had little choice. Anway, yeah, these types aren't living in the same universe as the rest of us.
someone gets promoted to a point where they don't know enough to recognize that they are an imposter
George W. Bush comes to mind.
10: I was thinking the same. The Chi-squared distribution is covered in very basic intro stats, and if you know enough to make your computer sprinkle normally distributed noise over some data, then you certainly know about that.
Is George Mason University not a very good university? I don't know much about it.
Anyway, maybe he has graduate students who don't know what it is.
22: like the sociopaths, chimps, losers explanation of firms?
Chumps, I guess, though chimps kind of works.
18: This just opens up a whole new range of costumes, doesn't it? I mean, I was planning to go as Young Professor X, but now - Sexy Sponsored Projects Administrator! Sexy Translational Research Coordinator! Sexy Biostatistics Director! Sexy Environmental Health And Safety Officer!
The LaCour thing freaks me out - I keep envisioning it as a science version of "Paul's Case".
The sheer brazenness of it reminds me of the Schon affair.
Sexy Sponsored Projects Administrator!
I've seen that one.
32 - It's a weird beast, a public university in Virginia that sucks up a lot of Koch Brothers funding and has an even-more-libertarian-than-expected economics department.
7: The paper could be faked, but I didn't find the evidence very compelling. Moby's explanation that he was too lazy to look up the character for chi is more plausible. The rule of thumb he gives about confidence intervals is sort-of true, but it's the weakest possible rule of thumb -- it wouldn't be at all surprising to see it violated on real data.
I'm not sure someone who assumes everyone else is faking it would experience much anxiety about faking it themselves.
This seems plausible, and up to a point resembles a valuable insight. It's similar in a way to the realization that in an adversary proceeding your opponent has as much reason to be afraid of you as you have of your opponent. In the Salt River episode in The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, Grant recounts that he was beside himself with fear and anxiety before what he expected to be his first battle in command, only to find his opponent had hastily retreated. Grant says he was never afraid in the same way after that, although anxious of course.
There's a night-and-day distinction between a lawyer who realizes he could be better-prepared and a researcher faking data, which is making a knowingly false statement. But someone morbidly conscientious, or a perfectionist given to procrastination out of fear could benefit from that some of that brazenness; it seems a special charm bestowed on the obtuse. They're not anxious about issues they haven't even spotted.
It's similar in a way to the realization that in an adversary proceeding your opponent has as much reason to be afraid of you as you have of your opponent.
Nescis, mi fili, quantilla sapientia mundus regnatur?, as my dad told me before I went off to university.
Is George Mason University not a very good university
I saw Weezer play the GMU basketball arena. It was pretty underwhelming, but, then, it was the Green Album tour, so what do you expect.
Is George Mason University not a very good university?
I only ever hear about them in the context of some libertarian BS or other. So my guess would be 1) not all that good, and 2) well funded by right wing creeps (see 39 above).
GMU also caters to a different type of student body. It's a commuter campus, lots of adults returning to get a needed credential. It means much less attention to "campus life" type stuff combined with not much research/graduate programs. They seem to have normally functioning if poorly ranked department in my field. I think of it like a four year version of community college, not in a pejorative way.
I was temporarily assigned once to an office where the staff attorneys started the day with a meeting. The first day I noticed a very well-dressed and self-confident young woman describing her cases, and thought to myself "I wish I could be that confident."
Well, in few weeks we found she'd never been to court, nor done any work in the files. In the meantime she'd just disappeared. We scrambled madly to try to repair the damage, which I found oddly dis-inhibiting. Someone else having made the errors, I could act confidently.
I don't think of hers as a case of brazenness, but of desperately keeping up appearances. She must have been terrified.
libertarian BS
Specifically, the Mercatus Center and Tyler Cowan.
This post needs a sound track, or rather, a theme song. And I have just the one (NSFW, unless you put the volume down low):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ3tqIukBKg
This could be another upcoming scandal:
I'm thinking less the 'accessory to murder' angle and more 'sounds too good to be true' angle.
I'm getting more worried about these things. Traditionally we don't suspect our colleagues of perpetrating frauds that extend as far as "entire fictional research study" or "entire fictional CV", because such frauds are easy to detect if people try to replicate them, so people don't do it unless they are crazy and/or narcissists.
But as the paths nowadays for trainees are "publish solid but unexciting study, see academic career end" vs. "publish exciting study, become established in academic career", with the latter path being off-limits to most people because their data is not exciting, we'll see more people resort to this.
Aren't there one or more movies with the plot of someone shows up to job X and confidently pretends they belong even though they were never qualified/hired in the first place?
I'm not as worried because I don't think the incentives are that bad. Or rather that they are that good for faking. It's not like banking where you can commit a fraud and figure on keeping at least a good portion of the profits if you get caught five years later. It takes years to build an academic career even in the best of circumstances and if you get caught you don't really get to keep anything of worth.
51: Oh I don't know: speaking professionally, I'd think that "Librul professor was accessory to gang murder" has a certain appeal to some segments of the market.
Aaagh. Somebody just wrote a reply to one of our articles that a) points out a really stupid error we did make and b) asks us if we considered a question that is direct restatement of the fucking title of the article.
The error was just a type, nothing huge.
Is it possible that some universities in China don't distinguish between comments on articles and actual articles when they count a faculty member's publications? Because that would explain this guy's publication record.
That sounds not just possible but likely.
Maybe I'm missing information by never reading an actual physical journal where I might notice such things.
Also, the overly polite and formal indication of respect for the authors? Not necessarily ironic?
Science has retracted over La Cour's objections.
47: I bet the fucker writes his papers in Word.
65: If you look at the paper in question, as linked from the site linked in the OP, you'll see that it was either written with LaTeX or someone went to a lot of effort to make Word use Computer Modern and otherwise generally resembled LaTeX output.
So if a paper looks like it was done in LaTeX, it's likely to be fraudulent.
Whereas I've been told before that if I don't use the default LaTeX font, my papers look unprofessional. You can't win.
writes his papers in Word.
*sob*
53: Does Catch Me If You Can count? For what it's worth, it's based loosely on real events.
56: Sooo... sounds mildly annoying, then? I'm having a hard time seeing a problem here. Except maybe keeping your reply to (b) polite.
72.2: Mostly just mildly annoying, yes.
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying?
60,61
Yes. Also, promotion is very quantified. You have to have X number of publications in X-tier journals, and I think there's a conversion system, e.g. where 1 publication in a top tier journal is worth 2 in a second tier journal, or whatever the concrete numbers are.
63
That's likely to be respect, or at least an idea that one has to adhere to a formal register in academic communication. Very unlikely to be ironic, if the writer is a non-native English speaker from mainland China.
68
I didn't know comic sans serif came with the default Latex package.
Speaking of, I had to explain how to do interlinear glosses in Latex to an elderly linguist the other day. He wanted to know 1) how I was able to write in a non-roman alphabet, and 2) if I could export it into word.
The immortal classic of American cinema, Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead.
Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead
YES. Also, The Secret of My Success.
75: Thank you. I noticed he (she?) had letters in journals I knew of and articles mostly in ones I hadn't.
The retraction says he admits that the grants were all fake, but not to the retraction of the article. That's real weird, he's already given away the game with that admission. Is he somehow trying to still get a degree out of this even though he will never get an academic job?
Re: Buttercup at 51: Wow, Alice Goffman is having a public Twitter meltdown (as of an hour ago). I'm feeling uncharitably gratified to have my grouchy suspicions confirmed.
I write papers in Word, and sometimes assemble figures in PowerPoint.
I am approaching the crossover point of having more papers than my age- is that significant?
And now the Twitter account is protected. Wonder if it was an imposter. I could be suffering from confirmation bias.
80
Wow, that was fast. No screenshots of twitter?
There are a few screenshots but I don't know if anyone captured the whole thing. Search Goffman on Twitter.
Holy crap, she approved me as a follower. She has deleted some of the most egregious stuff, but she's doubling down on how she's being attacked for having feelings. !!!
If this is really Goffman, she's digging a very big hole.
Witt! Motherisdues at googles mail if you save it. I still have t read the book because I'm such a skeptic, which is unfair
Don't be surprised she followed you. You're like half of the actual information on my feed.
Off-topic, and I apologize if this was already linked to today (I skimmed the other active threads and couldn't find any reference to it), but here's something that's certainly relevant to nosflow:
Boulder's bold boulder builder's boulder building banning by Boulder's blue rocks Boulder!
In 66 when I said "linked in the OP" I actually was thinking of Witt's link in 7. Oops!
91: I just saw that and also thought of nosflow.
Okay, ProPublica reporter with verified Twitter account has called Goffman, who says account is a fake.
I would say that setting up a fake Twitter account to have a fake meltdown as a pretend sociologist was the greatest waste of time of all time, but then I took a closer look at myself.
Twitter aside, issues raised here seem relevant: http://occupythesocial.com/post/120142584663/is-he-dead-alice
I wonder if she filled out the research confidentiality agreement properly and filed it with the sexy IRB.
What's Hastert's defense going to be? Maybe he'll say that he covered up someone's abuse, and wasn't himself the abuser, and boy is he sorry he didn't do more.
Maybe he'll hope for a pardon from President Huckabee.
In my experience everyone writes papers in Word. LaTeX is one of those things that's only normal on the internet, like people obsessing over knife sharpening, or making fun of how dumb non-atheists are. But I know a couple people (not in my field) whose papers have equations in them, and they use LaTeX.
R is a thing that internet people do that real people are starting to do.
91: UPDATED 3:00: Top Rock Cop's Rock-Block Stopped, Charges Crock, Will Be Dropped
I'd think that "Librul professor was accessory to gang murder" has a certain appeal to some segments of the market.
It seems tailor-made to appeal to the "librul academics are objectively pro-terrorist/pro-let's-destroy-America" crowd.
But that doesn't mean that what Goffman did (or what she said she did) is okay. Did she really drive the getaway car in an apparently failed murder plot? If so, that seems a bit felony-ish. Or did she merely fabricate a story of driving the getaway car in a failed murder plot, in order to give her account more street cred, more "authenticity"? If so, that seems a bit fraudulent, and must surely violate the established research protocols of her academic discipline.
I doubt the horns of the dilemma are all that sharp. On her account, there were two people in the car, and they can both plead the fifth. They could use the book against her, but just that? Seems like a stretch. And by pleading the fifth, she can avoid saying she lied, so she'll get some reprimand for being realer than real.
A tweeter notes that Hastert paying off an illegitimate child also fits the facts.
Which is more "for the record" than "I think it's more likely that."
That doesn't really fit with the stuff about "past misconduct against" the person he was paying off, though.
He could have falsely disclaimed paternity and told the kid to go away.
Maybe, but that doesn't seem like the kind of thing someone would agree to pay $3.5 million to cover up.
Driving a getaway car isn't actually that illegal, if you didn't know it was a getaway car until afterward.
I was reading a volume of criminology from the sixties that discussed that particular question, in the context of the participant-observer.
doesn't seem like the kind of thing someone would agree to pay $3.5 million
I agree.
if you didn't know it was a getaway car
In her account, she definitely knew.
They could use the book against her, but just that?
I doubt she'll face criminal charges. Which is to say that I agree with you in terms of the legal issues. I was thinking more about the researcher ethics.
I would be surprised if it were anything *but* molestation.
Of course! I was just thinking of available dodges for him (not that the truth won't come out).
Am I understanding correctly that he paid somebody $3.5 million in $10,000 installments over four or five years? That's more than one payment a week.
I guess it looks like he was making installments of greater than $10,000 for the first couple of years and then reduced the amount of evade the reporting requirement.
Man, if Mom didn't have Alzheimer's, she'd be so happy to see Hastert indicted. She had a funny voting record of having voted against both Reagan and Hastert every time they ran for public office. She met him a few times and absolutely loathed him. ("Typical dumb coach" was I think what she said.)
As I see it the problem here is big government. He should have done more to loosen regulations back when he was in power, and then he wouldn't have this problem now.
If it is something truly gross, a possible silver lining would be seeing the "Hastert Rule" in the House of Representatives falling into ill-repute.
This article is confusing me. He paid $3.5 million total, but only $1.7 million to one particular person?
Isn't the oddest aspect of this the timing? If I was the blackmailer I would have threatened him when he was in Congress and then upped my demands once he became Speaker. Once he left office, he might be inclined to call the blackmailer's bluff. On the other hand, he made a lot more money as a lobbyist than he did as a politician -- so maybe they worked out a long-term deal.
124: I think it's saying that he had agreed to pay the person 3.5 million but had paid only 1.7 million so far.
At that rate, he'd never get his youthful crimes paid off quickly enough to enjoy any retirement crimes.
Blackmailer is an ugly word. Whether someone he abused or an illegitimate kid is getting money, that does not mean they're a blackmailer. The simplest explanation for the timing is that Hastert's identity got revealed to someone competent for the first time in the year 2009.
Knecht beat me to it. That's the kind of money you pay when you did something that doesn't have a statute of limitations.
Does it matter, legally, for the person receiving the money if Hastert was guilty or not? Telling somebody you'll report them for a crime unless they give you something is still blackmail.
128, 130: Yes, I'm not making a moral judgment -- I just think that this is what's called blackmail. What word would you use?
130: Out here it wouldn't. Our code specifically uses the language "(d) Accuse any person of a crime or expose him to hatred, contempt, or ridicule"
http://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title76/Chapter6/76-6-S406.html?v=C76-6-S406_1800010118000101
Somehow the FBI found and interviewed Individual A. That must be the source for the 3.5 figure, and the pattern of meetings and payments.
How A came to their attention/was discovered isn't clear yet.
133: Presumably they followed the money.
If the meetings were in person, as they may have been by the language of the indictment, they might have simply followed Hastert and discovered A that way. The Art. 31 pattern would have justified their surveillance.
135: Following the person with the money would work too.
By recording the serial numbers on bills? I suppose that would work, and is much easier now with scanning etc. But you'd need to know where to look to zero in.
Meet Denny Hastert, Bitcoin's next big supporter.
I think of blackmailers as people who have no stake other than information that could be damaging, and who are motivated solely by an interest in profit.
Someone who has been for example hurt and agrees to a private settlement rather than a public trial is not in my mid a blackmailer.
133. Searchable metadata for all US telephone calls might could possibly be handy here. Huh, so this metadata covers legislators too, but isn't used while they oversee security budgets. Interesting.
I never thought I would see the day when Republicans couldn't launder money.
140. He got busted when he no longer had power.
Someone who has been for example hurt and agrees to a private settlement rather than a public trial is not in my mid a blackmailer.
But this isn't (if what we think happened, happened) simply agreeing to a private settlement. It's agreeing not to report a serious crime to the police in exchange for compensation. While I don't want to take a had line against somebody who was victimized, from a public policy perspective I even less want a situation where anybody with enough money can continue to commit crimes that are never reported because they paid off their victims.
143: "Password" has always worked fine for me!
You need to have a number. "P4assw0rd" is better.
Pass phrases are harder to crack. "My voice is my passport" is my standby.
I once used '1234' as a PIN on my library card. Somebody started ordering books on it.
Yes, I have Lastpass Premium, it's pretty good and worth it for the mobile support. There are glitches on some websites where you need to enter by hand instead of autofill.
The links I read made it sound like Goffman drove around helping a guy try to find someone to kill, but that no murder took place on those trips.
150, cont'd: It's obviously still bad, legally, ethically, morally, but getaway made me think it was going to be something else.
Is there a word that means schadenfreude, but with a solely positive valence? Delight in watching the scum of the earth get in trouble? If so between FIFA, the Duggars + Huckabee, and now Hastert, it's positive schadenfreudapalooza right now.
There are open source variants of KeyPass for all platforms, and you can use dropbox or something to sync the database.
Let's not rule out murder! Why not!
Does wandering around with a passenger who has a gun and is looking to kill somebody count as an accessory to attempted murder?
157: Yes, but this probably never comes up. The only way it would is if the driver decided to write a book boasting about it.
My guess is it's all going to come out as a fraud. It feels too much like a Venk|atesh copycat project, and people in the know have also said much of what she wrote was highly implausible. Who knows, maybe I'm just an asshole, but my spidey sense is tingling.
124: it's $3.5m total with federal matching funds.
It feels too much like a Venk|atesh copycat project
...which itself was a copycat of Jay MacLeod, whose project originated as an undergraduate honors thesis, thus permanently condemning subsequent generations of students in my college major to having their senior theses measured against his benchmark.
Fun compilation of rumors about Hastert from a decade ago:
"There are plenty of odd couple Congressmen who have roomed together on Capitol Hill, but I have never heard of a chief of staff who rooms with his boss. It is beyond unusual. But it must have its advantages. Anything they forget to tell each other at the office, they have until bedtime to catch up on. And then there's breakfast for anything they forgot to tell each other before falling asleep. And then there's all day at the office. Hastert and Palmer are together more than any other co-workers in the Congress."
http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-rumors-people-were-spreading-about.html
152: "Schadenfreudapal00za!" would make an excellent password. It's got a capital letter, at least one number and a special character. And easy to remember!
From link in 164:
WMR reported on old charges that swirled around Hastert when he was a high school wrestling coach at Yorkville High School in Yorkville, Illinois. Hastert decided to enter politics in 1980 after rumors surfaced about inappropriate contact with male high school students.
This is so crazy - he couldn't be a wrestling coach anymore because of rumors about "inappropriate contact with male high school students" -- so he ran for public office?
What? The standards are visibly much lower.
Screwing one underage person is a crime, screwing the country is a statistic.
Molest a little and they throw you in jail
Molest a lot and they make you Speaker.
Goffman's stuff about how she dressed to fit in with the guys and not code as female or whatever just seems way, way off. I was going to find an actual quote and send it as a guest post along with this article about the Wife Bonus Wealthy Primates woman because I think they're both fooling themselves and only themselves about their physical transformations and the implications of those new looks.
I don't know. I saw this documentary where nobody noticed a woman was beautiful because she was wearing glasses.
170: Did you read Goffman's book, Thorn? (if I'm remembering correctly, the last time we discussed it, you hadn't )
Do you think she made up everything?
I still haven't. I don't think she made everything up but I think she got things wrong in her interpretations and she probably made some of it up. I found the takedown Lemmy Caution linked to a few weeks back pretty convincing.
173: That takedown was tl;dr! Longer than the book, maybe! But just sampling bits of it, it does seem pretty devastating.
The parts where the timing doesn't match up seem pretty telling. But haven't any of her classmates gone on gawker to say they saw her at parties or something if she was actually a normal student? I haven't really been looking into it, just reading what I see go past.
Wait, is that whole thing in 173 unsigned?
I scrolled to the end to look for a signature. The fact that he (I assume) takes time to meticulously deconstruct her statements about feeling unattractive and call them racist suggests that the whole lengthy-takedown process was, uh, psychologically taxing.
I also couldn't help but get stuck on Ms. Goffman's description of why she thought the men on 6th Street did not find her attractive. She writes, "I couldn't live up to the 6th Street community's ideals of femininity: I wasn't 'thick' enough, I didn't dress the right way, I couldn't dance. I was not black" (pg. 248). First off, not all black people are "thick." There are black people of all shapes and sizes. And there are black people who like all shapes and sizes. Second, she says she didn't dress the right way (implying in a black way). But not all black people dress the same way. Moreover, she implies the 6th Street guys don't like her because she can't dance (again implying that black people can dance). However, not all black people can dance. And many black people don't care if their partner or sexual interest can dance. She also says they did not find her attractive because she was not black. However, plenty of black people find people of other races attractive. All of these are stereotypes that a student would learn are offensive in a Race 101 class.
The idea that "the 6th street community" has "ideals of femininity" is baseless, because black people... don't, and the offensive stereotype is that black men aren't hot for blond chicks? I totally believe that this critical process left this person without a drop of charity, and that any reflection like the quoted lines from Goffman is a pointless and unillustrative minefield for a white academic to walk in print... but this seems mostly like evidence of fatigue. (I am in turn inordinately annoyed by "Race 101." If this is a serious critique, at least come up with a name for an actual class.)
Yeah, sorry, there's stuff like that that's totally ridiculous and poorly written. It's the stuff about how she's inconsistent about how much time she spent doing this work and how people's ages and life stories jump in mutually exclusive ways that I thought seemed like a meaningful critique.
And I do have a problem with the way she described her looks and dress in connection to the project, but that quoted piece is totally not what I'd complain about!
In pictures, she looks a lot like a twelve-year-old for somebody who is past 30.
Right, Thorn, I'm sure a lot of the critique is sound, but do you have any idea where it came from? It just looks like plain text on the internet attacking this woman FROM ALL SIDES.
179: It must be rough to know in advance how many "Alice in Blunderland" headlines you're in for.
No idea at all. It was posted here and that's the only reason I ran across it.
It's definitely criminal* (and very possibly made up), but am I the only one who has a kind of mild admiration for Goffman for participating in the driver-of-the-car episode and then talking about it? First, as I understand it, the whole point of the book (which I haven't read) is that people in these neighborhoods or situations get ineluctably drawn into doing criminal acts, even when they don't necessarily want to, just because the burden of avoiding the law is so great. Second, you know, she's been living with these people and so when they have a major crisis and ask her to do something she doesn't wuss out like an above-it-all jerk.
Yes I also understand that this is against ethnographer's ethics, even though the people who come up with ethical rules for ethnographers are undoubtedly lame-os. And it's also totally possible that she just made up a lot of stuff in the book, including this, I'm not taking any position on that issue one way or another, and that would be wrong. Assuming that she was telling the truth, however, condemning her for the driver incident alone as Northwestern legal ethics guy in Slate wants to do seems like a stretch.
The "*" was supposed to be "*though probably not prosecutable"
I cannot be the only one picturing her as Natalie Portman raps.
Socks with sandals: objectively stupid. Anyway, I walked right past all this stuff while going to lunch.
So, this case might be something that I or a close co-worker is going to get stuck with. I am considering changing jobs. Or maybe my name. I could move out of state, they'd never find me, and I wouldn't have to talk to any of these people.
182: You're not the only one, no.
It's sort of Jared Diamondesque in that it makes her work more compelling to a lay audience which is no doubt extra annoying to those working in the field, but what are you going to do?
186: You could be the go-to person for eye gouging, if you want.
It's like you didn't even notice the disease-spreading biting.
That's just cut-and-paste work. Find an old case of biting that spread disease, replace "bats" or "rabid dog" with "public servant," and call it a day.
If it were me I'd view it as a rare opportunity to get a clinic in disease-spreading biting and eye gouging from a pro. Even if you never do that to someone in practice, won't you feel better knowing that you could? It's like learning karate.
Given one of the necessary skills you need to acquire for spreading disease by biting people is getting the relevant disease first, I'll pass.
I assume the training would cover how to be an asymptomatic carrier.
We wouldn't be representing The Fang, anyway (at least I'm pretty sure not). Just her supervisors. Most of whom haven't bitten anyone.
193: Mostly, I don't know anything yet. But the specific defendants that would be my problem don't seem to me to plausibly have had anything to do with the whole donnybrook.
Doesn't seem that way now, but wait until you find the emails about the "unofficial" eye-gouge-and-bite happy hours on Friday.
Reviewing the briefs is going to need theme music.