second that
I tracked down my impostor
221–230 of 248 posts
Re: I tracked down my impostor
#222I have been a victim of this, and it is still an ongoing matter. If you don't want to find yourself a victim of these kinds of people, then you better keep these two links as a reference, and always take them to heart: Narcissists Online: http://www.issendai.com/psychology/narcissism/narcissists-on... What to Remember When Dealing with a Narcissist: http://www.issendai.com/psychology/narcissism/narcissists-wh... Peop…
I was also a victim of this. At my first engineering job, I came up with a novel way to handle project estimation for a very large company, using a combination of basic statistical techniques (hierarchical linear regression, markov chains). It replaced an existing terrible model by the resident PhD in statistics, which was doing a very simple 2 degree fitted curve. Anyways, this person seemed to really dislike our te…
About 15 years ago I worked on a command line shell that was adding a remoting feature which would allow you to execute a shell command on a remote machine. When the first cut of this came out, it seemed like it worked fine, but I decided to try it across a high latency connection - specifically setting up an inbound connection to the public internet and routing it from our office in the US to a proxy in Hong Kong and back. It performed about like a connection over a 300 baud modem. So I spent a weekend furiously creating a private build that reduced the number of handshakes and added streaming compression that ultimately increased the throughput by something like a factor of 20. On Monday I shared this work with the extended engineering team, and...crickets. I was just a tester after all, you know. The perf was improved after that, but nobody acknowledged the real world testing I'd done, much less the analysis and POC dev work. But flash forward a few years, and my career has progressed. Suddenly I am a manager in a performance review meeting where the promotion of someone I used to work with was up for discussion. I sat across the table from the person's boss when he capped off his argument for promotion with (paraphrasing), "and let's all remember, this is the genius who figured out we needed to add compression to our remoting stream."
Re: I tracked down my impostor
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had an run-in with a plagiarism checker in undergrad (USA, 2008). A professor ran a research paper I had submitted through a plagiarism checker and it came back a 100% match. (I had researched and written the paper myself.) It led to a very awkward meeting which started with him saying "I think we both know why you're here" and me having no idea why I was there. Luckily it ended with him resubmitting the paper to t…
What was the cause of the false positive?
The professor submitted one of his own papers by mistake?
Re: I tracked down my impostor
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am very certain he did, whether we have a name for it or not.
But the only definition we have for mental illness is whether your situation falls under some category that we have a name for. It’s a slippery (and fuzzy) enough slope having designations for illnesses that encompass a huge portion of the human condition (see Rosenhan). Much worse if we also include things that don’t have entries in the DSM. It would be trivial enough to say that anyone you have even mild distaste f…
We don't have to go down that slippery slope. It is not plausible that the specific issue here is something that encompasses a huge portion of the human condition. Alternatively, if it is a manifestation of something that is, but at a much lower level than with this individual, there are prominent things in the DSM for which this is also the case.
Re: I tracked down my impostor
#225> Some of the work should have been spotted by plagiarism checkers I've been in postgraduate academia and industry, and been involved in multiple conferences at different levels. I'm not aware of anyone ever running a plagiarism detector on any submitted work at all. Do other people do this? Should the people I work with have been doing it?
I keep waiting for someone to find a plagiarism checker retained a copy of their work and sue for copyright infringement.
[deleted]
Re: I tracked down my impostor
#226I have been a victim of this, and it is still an ongoing matter. If you don't want to find yourself a victim of these kinds of people, then you better keep these two links as a reference, and always take them to heart: Narcissists Online: http://www.issendai.com/psychology/narcissism/narcissists-on... What to Remember When Dealing with a Narcissist: http://www.issendai.com/psychology/narcissism/narcissists-wh... Peop…
Our neighbor started doing this with my dad. My dad was a school teacher and didn't have any sort of content to plagiarize. The man started buying the same clothing as my father, the same surfboard, same car, dyed his hair the same color and got the same haircut, got fake glasses in the same style and even started copying his mannerisms. It was bizarre. We moved shortly after it started for unrelated reasons but it w…
I bet PhD programs attract narcissists like flies to ...
In a way, a PhD could be seen as the ultimate intellectual validation.
Re: I tracked down my impostor
#227overactive mirroring neurons? j/k, I'm sure this pathology is very complex.
Re: I tracked down my impostor
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Academia is one where the chickens won’t come home to roost - as in you won’t actually be called to DO what you’re impostering to be able to do. Fake being a surgeon and they’ll assign you to surgery, etc.
There have been several cases of people posing as doctors without any qualifications ("catch me if you can" is a movie about a famous case for example).
This is an interesting talk by Frank Abagnale (the real life person the story was based on) at Google.
Re: I tracked down my impostor
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
My daughter is in 5th grade, attending school virtually due to the pandemic, and she has all her submitted assignments automatically verified by plagiarism checkers. In fact, she's encouraged to use online plagiarism checkers herself before submission to avoid false positives.
It's been a minute since I was in 5th grade. I'm trying to remember what kind of assignments I would have had where I could have plagiarized something that would not have been immediately obvious to the teacher.
Of course it would have been unheard of when I was in 5th grade because our assignments weren't even computer readable. In my day, we were expected to copy articles from the World Book Encyclopedia, and they were graded on neatness.
But my kids both recently graduated from high school. There is a tendency for teachers of each grade to prepare kids for subsequent grades. I can imagine hearing: "They will have to do this in sixth grade, so we're preparing them now" without questioning why it's done in any grade. This makes the curriculum seem more "advanced."
I actually don't think my kids had to use turnitin. At least, I never heard about it. A bigger concern is writing stuff that might be reviewed by employers, law enforcement, and so forth, or subjected to some kind of automated analysis in the future. They've heard about the social credit score. They're all familiar with the lesson: "Don't write anything that you would not want to see on the front page of the newspaper."
I'm lucky that anything I ever wrote in school is now in the bit bucket.
Re: I tracked down my impostor
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe we should have. This was well over a decade ago now. It wasn't something we could easily prove either. We just had strong suspicions based on the timing and his behavior.
It wouldn't surprise me at all. One of the things that we check for during technical DD is to ensure that all of the IP the company claims as theirs really is theirs. Large dumps of code into a repo just after incorporation or just after a new hire are pretty suspicious and require an explanation, such an explanation isn't always available. Good team leads / code reviewers / laywers can be real assets because they wi…
In case any case any readers don’t know who “Fabrice” is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard