Jonah Lehrer’s Journalistic Misdeeds at Wired.com

I used to follow him. Since I last looked he seems to have been on a deleting spree. Sucks because I really enjoyed his writing.

"In a third post from mid-2011 titled "Basketball and Jazz," one of Lehrer's paragraphs closely paralleled one written by Newsweek science writer Sharon Begley some three years earlier.

"Lehrer:

"The rebounding experiment went like this: 10 basketball players, 10 coaches and 10 sportswriters, plus a group of complete basketball novices, watched video clips of a player attempting a free throw. (You can watch the videos here.) Not surprisingly, the professional athletes were far better at predicting whether or not the shot would go in. While they got it right more than two-thirds of the time, the non-playing experts (i.e., the coaches and writers) only got it right about 40 percent of the time.

"Newsweek:

"In the experiment, 10 basketball players, 10 coaches and 10 sportswriters (considered non-playing experts), and novices all watched a video clip of someone attempting a free throw. The players were better at predicting whether the shot would go in: they got it right in two-thirds of the shots they saw, compared to 40 percent right for novices and 44 percent for coaches and writers.

"Tellingly, Begley misstated the number of participants in the study. (There were only 5 coaches and 5 sportswriters, not 10 of each. In addition, there were also 10 people in the novice group who were neither coaches nor sportswriters.) Lehrer made the exact same mistake in precisely the same manner."

When Lehrer reproduces someone else's mistake, you know he isn't looking up or verifying the facts himself. The honorable thing to do in a blog would be simply to link to Begley's piece and say, "Sharon Begley wrote an interesting article a few years ago about a study on this issue."

P.S. I posted an article to HN earlier about the initial discovery of Lehrer making up quotations in articles in other publications.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4370417

I had also seen him "recycle" earlier writings of his in paid publications, because once one of his articles was submitted here to HN, and I thought, "Hey, I've read this before." Indeed I had, in the previous publication where he had first written on the same subject a couple years earlier.

First their story about abuse at Apple factories in China turned out to be piece of fiction. Now all this with their contributor Jonah Lehrer.

Mike Daisey is an interesting case, and someone who published a lot on the story he fabricated in a lot of different outlets. This American Life were the ones were simply the ones who confronted Daisey directly and publicly. Jonah Lehrer, the extent to which he was a contributor to TAL, was certainly not a frequent contributor (in fact I don't remember which of their episodes he's been on at all), but he is much more associated with his magazine work.

Actually i checked This American Life's site. They don't have Jonah Lehrer listed at all (although they do have a colleague of mine listed twice under misspellings of her name): http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/contributor