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The Case of the Fake Sherlock
- boomboomsubban 4y agoIf he was starting his career now, he'd make a podcast and convince millions he's the modern day Sherlock Holmes.
- a_bonobo 4y agoHow many 'thought leaders', 'public experts', podcasters are purely experts at being experts, with no experience or knowledge behind it? I can think of a few public voices, especially in AI right now, who have nothing to say but the ears of thousands
- galaxyLogic 4y agoIf the current lawsuit Dominion vs. Fox News tells us anything it is that providers of "information" provide the kind of "information" their listeners want to hear.
- JadeNB 4y ago> If the current lawsuit Dominion vs. Fox News tells us anything it is that providers of "information" provide the kind of "information" their listeners want to hear. I think over-generalizing can be very dangerous here. The lawsuit itself, of course, tells us nothing; just about anyone can sue just about anyone for just about anything. But the evidence tells us that Fox News provides the kind of "information" their listeners want to hear. And of course, to some extent, indeed every provider will tailor what they want to say to their audience—that's part of good communication. But to assume that therefore all information providers display the same bias as Fox News did—or even that Fox News themselves always display the same sort of bias that they did in this case (although I tend to believe that they do)—is probably over-generalizing.
- galaxyLogic 4y agoI'm just saying don't blame just the providers of incorrect information, blame also the viewers who want to hear it.
- sandworm101 4y ago>> podcasters are purely experts at being experts, with no experience or knowledge behind it? If you are an actual expert in such things, you don't have the time to be doing podcasts.
- JadeNB 4y ago> If you are an actual expert in such things, you don't have the time to be doing podcasts. I'm not sure about podcasting, but this is false for blogging. As a mathematician, the first example that springs to mind is Terry Tao's extraordinary blog https://terrytao.wordpress.com https://terrytao.wordpress.com , and it's one of the best, but there are tons of others.
- rsav 4y ago> Walter refused several requests for an interview. “You have earned one’s distrust that merits severing any contact with you in the future,” he wrote me, veering into strange pronoun usage. “Under no circumstances would himself cooperate in your suspicious activities.” Sharply written articles like this are a rare treat.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- shellac 4y agoI spent 2/3rds of the article assuming 'Nick McGuffin' was a deliberately absurd pseudonym used to protect the real victim of this charlatan.
- jonnycomputer 4y agoyes, me too
- entropicdrifter 4y agoDude was on national TV. Kinda feels like the cat's out of the bag for his privacy when you can just Google the murder victim's name. That said, yeah his name does sound incredibly fake
- tunesmith 4y agoIt's crazy, isn't it? A McGuffin is the thing that everyone chases that doesn't really have anything to do with the plot, it's just the thing everyone is after.
- JasonFruit 4y agoHis Wikipedia article [0] is not as skeptical of his abilities and qualifications as I would have expected. Neither is that of the Vidocq Society [1]. Articles on controversial living people are hard to manage, but the Wikipedia articles and the NY Magazine article present opposite views of Walter, and I suspect they're both a bit distorted. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Walter_(psychologist) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidocq_Society
- mattigames 4y agoControversial dead people are also hard to manage by Wikipedia, just read the article about Alister Crowley, portrayed as an intellectual of the "dark arts" and not just another charlatan taking advantage of gullible people, which he was.
- LordDragonfang 4y agoI mean, regardless of what you think about his scruples, he was the single most influential occultist of the 20th century (barring maybe LaVey), and calling him "just another charlatan" kind of ignores the things that actually make him notable. Like calling Houdini "just another street magician".
- mattigames 4y agoWhen I go to Wikipedia I'm far more interested in truth than historical relevance, both are important in its own but I -and many like me- are far more interested in what has been proven and disproven, in how something snaps with our current understanding of reality, history is mostly just a log of the foolishness of mankind, which I don't deny has some anthropological value but it's not my principal aim when I'm visiting Wikipedia, it would have saved me a lot of time if the first paragraph of Crowley's entry said he was a famous 20th century charlatan, but it doesn't, so a lot of mental processing power has to be wasted by me and every other reader of that long article to reach a judgement as easy to fact check such as water being wet.
- steviedotboston 4y agovery disappointed this wasn't about the macintosh software
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- DaveHerbert 4y agoI'm the author of the story. Happy to answer any questions about the piece.
- jlg97 4y agoIncredible piece, what exactly was Richard Walter doing in that 10 year gap do you think? Prison time??
- DaveHerbert 4y agoIt's an intriguing question. We still don't know.
- etchalon 4y agoHow'd you discover Walter, and what led you to write a story about him?
- ribs 4y agoI notice that this user’s name is in green. Does that mean it’s been verified in some way?
- geocrasher 4y agoI believe it has to do with the fact that it was just registered today
- dpifke 4y agoThere's a link at the bottom of every page page which answers this, as well as other frequently asked questions: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html (It's also the first hit for me if I Google [Hacker News green username].)
- bombcar 4y agoGreen means a new user - if you’re verified your name appears as everyone else’s but it will say “dang”
- 4y ago
- tpoacher 4y agoNot sure how to feel about this article. It's not just presentation of boring facts; it vividly goes out of its way to ensure you feel it in your guts just how much this person deserves your hate. It feels like a superbly written character assassination, but of a blatantly guilty and despicable person (if he wasn't before, he certainly is now - and that's kinda the point of the article). I'm left wondering whether I should be approving of it or be disgusted by it. (in an 'if you tortured and killed Hitler using an elegant but brutal torture chamber, does that make you the good guy or the bad guy' manner).
- Sniffnoy 4y ago> Officials at the organization acknowledged in internal memos that Walter had padded his résumé, but they decided to reveal as little as possible about their internal deliberations. “We do have to worry about public appearances,” Don Harper Mills, a pathologist who was chairman of the ethics committee, wrote to his colleagues. This sort of thing seems to be extremely common and it's immensely frustrating. More specifically, the phenomenon I mean is avoiding expelling fraudsters from one's organization on the basis that people, rather than thinking "oh it's good how this organization has high standards for its members and expels frauds, so other members are likely good", will instead think "oh this organization had a fraudster in it, other members are likely also frauds". The question then is, how can we get to an equilibrium where the former way of thinking is the norm, so that expelling frauds will be encouraged...?