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Jonah Lehrer Resigns From The New Yorker After Making Up Quotes

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Re: Jonah Lehrer Resigns From The New Yorker After Making Up Quotes

#41

Post by alecco »

danso wrote: post #37
tptacek wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, being a "corporate shill" is not "quite more serious" than fabricating quotes.

It depends what the magnitude of the transgression is, and whether you are a journalist or non-journalist. If you are a journalist, the faking of a quote, even if it's something as benign as, "Sally Smith, an 8-year-old from Chicago, said, 'I really love the clowns. They mak eme smile'" is punishable by the (journalistic) death penalty. No one was harmed, especially if 'Sally Smith' was herself made up, yet such a wr…

  > To a non-journalist (who, in this case, is anti-fossil-fuel)
Was that necessary? BTW, I am not against use of fossil fuels. Misdirected ad-hominem.

Re: Jonah Lehrer Resigns From The New Yorker After Making Up Quotes

#42

Post by spindritf »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #22
alecco wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the same time Gladwell (another New Yorker writer) was exposed for being a corporate shill, something quite more serious. Nothing happened.

To what are you referring? And how did this fly completely out of my radar?

I think this is it http://shameproject.com/profile/malcolm-gladwell-2/

Re: Jonah Lehrer Resigns From The New Yorker After Making Up Quotes

#43

Post by cynicalkane »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #35
tptacek wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, being a "corporate shill" is not "quite more serious" than fabricating quotes.

Fabricating quotes is doing a sloppy, lazy job of defending one's position. Selling one's position, on the other hand, is clearly more serious.

This sounds like a defense of "truthiness" to me. A position not defensible with facts is an indefensible position. If you look at the media you find those corners of the media with an atmosphere of truthiness are those that produce the most harmful positions.

Re: Jonah Lehrer Resigns From The New Yorker After Making Up Quotes

#44

Post by crazygringo »

alecco wrote: post #15
tptacek wrote: post #5

Just in case you're skimming: this comes at the end of a bit of a saga for Lehrer, who had also been discovered "plagiarizing himself", recycling significant chunks of previously-published work in new New Yorker pieces. No doubt there's been a fine-toothed comb running through everything he's done since that first story broke.

At the same time Gladwell (another New Yorker writer) was exposed for being a corporate shill, something quite more serious. Nothing happened.

I've never heard of this until now. Reading the article people have mentioned below:

http://exiledonline.com/malcolm-gladwell-unmasked-a-look-int...

Well, it's a really badly written article, full of "association" but I can't really find anything damning, just a bunch of innuendo, which could be invented about most any sufficiently prolific journalist.

I've read a lot of Gladwell's writing -- the only main theme I can find is that he just tends to write articles that fly in the face of received wisdom. That's his whole shtick. He plays devil's advocate.

So obviously, if he defends unpopular positions, you can read into that all you want, but I don't see any real evidence that it's ideological or driven by corporate support. It's just his writing style, and you can probably find just as many counter-examples.

Re: Jonah Lehrer Resigns From The New Yorker After Making Up Quotes

#45

Post by vacri »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #35
tptacek wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, being a "corporate shill" is not "quite more serious" than fabricating quotes.

Fabricating quotes is doing a sloppy, lazy job of defending one's position. Selling one's position, on the other hand, is clearly more serious.

"making stuff up" is worse than "constructing a biased argument"

Re: Jonah Lehrer Resigns From The New Yorker After Making Up Quotes

#46

Post by aheilbut »

dmazin wrote: post #18

My favorite part of this mess is that Jad Abumrad (one of the two guys behind Radiolab which, I think, is extremely messy with its science) called the initial ousting of Lehrer when he recycled passages a "cheap moral crusade."[1] [1]: https://twitter.com/jadabumrad/status/218042197826732033

His link to Aaron Sorkin's recycled dialogue is hilarious. (Fortunately Sorkin writes fiction.)

Re: Jonah Lehrer Resigns From The New Yorker After Making Up Quotes

#47

Post by danvideo »

aaronsw wrote: post #25
hammock wrote: post #6

The full AP story has more info at the bottom. http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iEB7lzn2h8... Among Lehrer's inventions was a quote that first appeared in the famous documentary from the mid-1960s, "Don't Look Back," in which Dylan tells a reporter about his songs that "I just write them. There's no great message." In "Imagine," Lehrer adds a third sentence — "Stop asking me to explain" — that does n…

The details are here: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/107779/jon...

Tablet's been on and offline all day, I'd imagine from server overload--- Michael Moynihan, the author, was the one who originally broke the story with his investigations.

Re: Jonah Lehrer Resigns From The New Yorker After Making Up Quotes

#48

Post by awj »

Alex3917 wrote: post #31
tptacek wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, being a "corporate shill" is not "quite more serious" than fabricating quotes.

"No, being a 'corporate shill' is not 'quite more serious' than fabricating quotes." How do you figure? Do you actually think that corporate shills cause less harm to society than people fabricating a few (largely inconsequential) quotes?

> Do you actually think that corporate shills cause less harm to society than people fabricating a few (largely inconsequential) quotes?

If I'm allowed to parenthetically assume that the shilling also is "largely inconsequential", then yes, it causes less harm.

Re: Jonah Lehrer Resigns From The New Yorker After Making Up Quotes

#49

Post by awj »

astrodust wrote: post #27
ChuckMcM wrote: post #2

Sad. Too many people operate with the motto 'its not illegal if you don't get caught'. It nearly always turns out badly for them.

Jonah Lehrer famously said "I'll never get caught, you can't catch me." and "If I get caught I'll eat my shoe." At least, that's what I've just made up and attributed to him.

"You are skirting dangerously close to creating a meme here." -- Jonah Lehrer

Re: Jonah Lehrer Resigns From The New Yorker After Making Up Quotes

#50

Post by msredmond »

danso wrote: post #13
ajross wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea. But I'm all but certain they'll turn out to be perfectly banal, expected things that Dylan certainly "could have" said. People don't invent or plagiarize blogbuster news. The cheat on the dumb stuff that no one will bother to check. Not to defend Lehrer exactly, but this is a kind of situation where hackers don't have a lot of experience to draw on to aid interpretation. It's not possible to "cheat" y…

This is a great point. I'm a working programmer and journalist...In the latter profession, there is no greater, clear-cut sin than making things up. The second is to not plagiarize...but what constitutes plagiarism can differ among different opinion-holders. I can't think of a ethical parallel in programming. I mean, there's copying of proprietary code but that's also a criminal violation. Plagiarism and fabrication…

"The point is that even though these transgressions seem minor in quantity, for a professional journalist to have justified committing them requires either a total burst of sudden professional insanity...or a long, undiscovered history of other transgressions." <<+100 -- as a journalist, i think this is the most insightful comment on this thread. I suspect even more will come out.
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