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How to become a great impostor

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Re: How to become a great impostor

#31

Post by goshx »

At first I thought: there are quite a few impostors at the time, it must have been very easy to fool others without access to more information like what the internet provides today.

Then I got to the part where the author talks about the use of the “six ways to influence people”, and I realized those tricks are still used very effectively today. Some success “formulas” come to mind.

It’d be great if the same author could write an article about another fascinating character that I got to learn about from someone that met him in person right before the Japanese poisoned him: Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln

Re: How to become a great impostor

#32

Post by mirimir »

wruza wrote: post #25
FabHK wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> given a couple months, I could pose as just about any sort of expert. Intriguing, and I wonder whether it's true. Probably in social settings for a while, but hopefully not eg through a job interview. (related xkcd, "Impostor": https://www.xkcd.com/451/ )

>xkcd I just read the article on Deconstruction and... either I am a complete philosophy/humanitary idiot or that entire area is full of con artists who just spit smart words out their mouth to bring their bread at the table. Regardless of that, I never respected anyone who doesn’t use formal definitions in serious analysis. I hated (disrespected) philosophy at school and I do it now even more, seeing how they chew t…

Well, there is the infamous Sokal paper:[0]

Alan D. Sokal (1996) Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Social Text #46/47, pp. 217-252 (spring/summer 1996).

And then SciGen, of course.[1]

0) https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgre...

1) https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/

Re: How to become a great impostor

#33

Post by smogcutter »

wruza wrote: post #25
FabHK wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> given a couple months, I could pose as just about any sort of expert. Intriguing, and I wonder whether it's true. Probably in social settings for a while, but hopefully not eg through a job interview. (related xkcd, "Impostor": https://www.xkcd.com/451/ )

>xkcd I just read the article on Deconstruction and... either I am a complete philosophy/humanitary idiot or that entire area is full of con artists who just spit smart words out their mouth to bring their bread at the table. Regardless of that, I never respected anyone who doesn’t use formal definitions in serious analysis. I hated (disrespected) philosophy at school and I do it now even more, seeing how they chew t…

> I never respected anyone who doesn’t use formal definitions in serious analysis.

Read Popper for a hint at how misguided this is outside hard science.

Re: How to become a great impostor

#34

Post by lowdose »

smogcutter wrote: post #33
wruza wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>xkcd I just read the article on Deconstruction and... either I am a complete philosophy/humanitary idiot or that entire area is full of con artists who just spit smart words out their mouth to bring their bread at the table. Regardless of that, I never respected anyone who doesn’t use formal definitions in serious analysis. I hated (disrespected) philosophy at school and I do it now even more, seeing how they chew t…

> I never respected anyone who doesn’t use formal definitions in serious analysis. Read Popper for a hint at how misguided this is outside hard science.

Isn't Popper required reading material at every decent university?

Re: How to become a great impostor

#35

Post by travisjungroth »

mieseratte wrote: post #29
gshdg wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you might think that a doctor who does a surgery like this every day, has done so for years, and for whom brushing up would thus be redundant is the doctor you want. Granted, that requires that it be a reasonably common surgery and that you trust that the doctor gives sufficient consideration to non-surgical treatments instead of pushing patients towards surgery. Perhaps a decent analogy would be a dentist capping…

You’re inserting things into the question that weren’t there and tearing it down. Nothing was said about a “routine performance” which is certainly common enough today to that it is worth asking but is not always the case and not always common through time. Regardless, it is never a bad thing to be overly cautious and redundant. I once heard it said that if necessity is the mother of invention, redundancy is the moth…

They’re exploring an ambiguity in the question. No need to tear them down.

I feel similarly. If I’m getting a common heart surgery, I’d like to go with someone who does it every day. Reading a textbook is a negative signal that they do this frequently. (A checklist, on the other hand, is not and I’d be happy to see it used).

If I’m getting some rare surgery or there’s a complication, then seeing the doctor read a textbook makes sense. They can be very experienced overall, but not in this exact case.

Re: How to become a great impostor

#36

Post by mhb »

mieseratte wrote: post #16
KineticLensman wrote: post #10

I've heard it said that the art of being a great consultant is knowing which book to read just before a meeting with the client

This reminds me of a classroom debate from school: If you, the day before a major surgery, saw your doctor reading through a medical textbook on the topic of your surgery, would you be more or less confident in their abilities? Some said they wouldn’t trust the doctor, as they held some notion that the doctor should just know these by virtue of their being a doctor. That if they don’t it is a sign of their ill prepar…

One argument in favor could be that it is helpful in the same way as a checklist.

Re: How to become a great impostor

#37

Post by bitxbitxbitcoin »

j1elo wrote: post #20
Fnoord wrote: post #18

Ah, the story of Demara. I read about him in the book "The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It... Every Time" by Maria Konnikova [1]. Recommended read. My interest isn't so much becoming a great imposter; it is rather how to defend myself and my loved ones against cons. Ie. how to recognize them. A fiction series about con men which I appreciated is Sneaky Pete [2] and the Spanish series La Casa De Papel (Money Heist…

In Spain it's a fun meme how most foreign movie titles were translated into spanish, totally changing the meaning or simply destroying the original intent of the name. You could argue some clever titles are not easy to translate, but God knows there was no need to translate "Die Hard" to "Jungla de cristal" (glass jungle). That practice was more prevalent 10-20 years ago, though. The thing is that now, for one, it ha…

I'm pretty sure someone at Netflix did this intentionally while doing Denver's laugh.

Re: How to become a great impostor

#38

Post by cannonedhamster »

atemerev wrote: post #24

Well, he didn’t do anything wrong, and even delivered some good things in many of the roles he was in, which is more than can be said about many authentic persons with all proper credentials. I don’t know why he was blamed and convicted. I think there are many other pretenders like him everywhere, less prominent, but still more or less successful and well hidden. As long as you are not using your acting talents for c…

He committed identity theft, desertion, petty theft, and probably a few more. Those are real crimes with real victims. Not to mention the people that received substandard medical care that could have killed them. Don't gloss over crime just because the guy has a good story.

Re: How to become a great impostor

#39

Post by threwawasy1228 »

wruza wrote: post #25
FabHK wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> given a couple months, I could pose as just about any sort of expert. Intriguing, and I wonder whether it's true. Probably in social settings for a while, but hopefully not eg through a job interview. (related xkcd, "Impostor": https://www.xkcd.com/451/ )

>xkcd I just read the article on Deconstruction and... either I am a complete philosophy/humanitary idiot or that entire area is full of con artists who just spit smart words out their mouth to bring their bread at the table. Regardless of that, I never respected anyone who doesn’t use formal definitions in serious analysis. I hated (disrespected) philosophy at school and I do it now even more, seeing how they chew t…

It is actually kind of funny, I know what deconstruction is, and I would call the two quoted paragraphs pretty clear. They don't do a horrible job of describing what it is.

I think it just takes being steeped in the jargon of the field to read that. But, it is a pretty ok explanation. If you think this is somehow bad, I would argue you should try to read any of the wikipedia pages on homotopy type theory without background knowledge and tell me if those read like gibberish to you as well.

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