
How to become a great impostor - onemind
https://theconversation.com/how-to-become-a-great-impostor-98798
======
KineticLensman
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

~~~
mieseratte
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 preparedness and lack of ability.

Others had no such issues, that it is legitimate and good that a doctor would
be adequately preparing for the surgery by studying.

If you think of things more towards the former, and you end up as a “last
minute, read a book” type, as I tend to be, you might wind up feeling like an
imposter.

~~~
gshdg
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 a cavity or doing a root
canal. They’ll do tens of thousands of these in a career. You don’t really
want to be the first or even the hundredth patient s/he does this work on. And
by the time they’ve done a thousand, looking it up would be silly.

~~~
mieseratte
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 mother of victory. That is how I view the question.

~~~
travisjungroth
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.

------
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

------
Fnoord
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) [3]

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25387895-the-
confidence-...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25387895-the-confidence-
game)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneaky_Pete](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneaky_Pete)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_Heist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_Heist)

~~~
j1elo
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 happened the other way around with ehm...
"Money Heist" what a boring and uninspired name! :-)

~~~
Fnoord
Yeah, that happens all the time. I'm Dutch native (hence familiar with Dutch
title getting translated), and I refer in my own language to La Casa De Papel
with the Spanish title. I only used the English title because people here
might recognize or use that term in applications such as Netflix. I understand
enough Spanish to understand the Spanish title and I very much prefer native
titles over translations but I do like it when behind it an understandable
translation is added (even if it isn't perfect).

I keep a log (plain text file, using Vim to edit it) of all movies and series
I've seen in my life. The way my log works:

Dutch -> remains Dutch as it is my primary native language.

English -> remains English as I understand it well enough.

All other -> Orig. title (English translation, regardless of how well I speak
or understand the language).

If I were to start over I'd do it properly with a CSV database or Excel but
yeah I didn't and merging 1500 lines I CBA.

------
crashbunny
Demara reminds me of the 90s show The Pretender, I'm going to assume Demara
was the inspiration. That show was lots of fun.

And there was an episode of M.A.S.H clearly inspired by Demara. Someone
impersonating a surgeon, getting caught then changing identities to a
chaplain.

------
127
I think the real revelation here is the absurdity of credentialism, and how
shallow it is in the end.

------
trm42
How does this story feel like to people who are suffering from impostor
syndrome?

------
exabrial
“Since his aim was to do good, anything he did to do it was justified. With
Demara the end always justifies the means.”

How many times in my life have I done such moral licensing?

------
FillardMillmore
As the old saying goes "Fake it til you make it". Its always seemed like a
dubious idiom to me but when reading stories like this one, there obviously
has to be some truth in the efficacy of the proposition.

~~~
mirimir
I switched fields between BS and PhD, and a major component was learning the
jargon. Perspective, conceptualizations, terminology, idioms, etc. Plus lots
of facts, of course.

I've changed fields a few more times, over the years. As my interests and
circumstances changed. Most recently, I worked as a ghostwriter and
consultant. I used to joke that, given a couple months, I could pose as just
about any sort of expert. And given the Internet, that's far easier than it
was a couple decades ago.

Anyway, it strikes me that learning how to learn is the main thing that you
get out of doing a PhD. Plus the credentials and professional network, of
course.

~~~
FabHK
> 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/](https://www.xkcd.com/451/) )

~~~
wruza
>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 the same crap for decades
instead of just doing something better. Even politics is better than that.

“in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful
coexistence of a vis-a-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the
two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper
hand": signified over signifier; intelligible over sensible; speech over
writing; activity over passivity, etc. The first task of deconstruction would
be to find and overturn these oppositions inside a text or a corpus of texts;
but the final objective of deconstruction is not to surpass all oppositions,
because it is assumed they are structurally necessary to produce sense. The
oppositions simply cannot be suspended once and for all. The hierarchy of dual
oppositions always reestablishes itself. Deconstruction only points to the
necessity of an unending analysis that can make explicit the decisions and
arbitrary violence intrinsic to all texts”

“To be effective, deconstruction needs to create new terms, not to synthesize
the concepts in opposition, but to mark their difference and eternal
interplay. This explains why Derrida always proposes new terms in his
deconstruction, not as a free play but as a pure necessity of analysis, to
better mark the intervals. Derrida called undecidables—that is, unities of
simulacrum—"false" verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer
be included within philosophical (binary) opposition, but which, however,
inhabit philosophical oppositions—resisting and organizing it—without ever
constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the
form of Hegelian dialectics (e.g., différance, archi-writing, pharmakon,
supplement, hymen, gram, spacing)”

I mean: words instead blanket a low-pitch synthesis and require most
priorities in it to shift from a detailed to an increasingly informal scene
which wraps by itself to form an atopological plane of understanding of the
undecidables. Are you think so?

~~~
smogcutter
> 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.

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

~~~
smogcutter
You’d hope.

~~~
wruza
Which particular book do you recommend, regarding my quote?

I also read what another commenter linked below, but cannot say what all that
really means. To formulate clearly, I understand what the text says piece by
piece, but fail to get the “correct” sense it was supposed to deliver. Maybe I
need some decomposition (sorry if it turns to be a silly joke, couldn’t resist
;)

~~~
smogcutter
Sorry, just saw this. The Open Society and its Enemies is the big winner for
Popper imo.

Short answer: it’s impossible.

Medium answer: the attempt itself is counterproductive and misunderstands how
we use language.

Long answer: aside from being impossible, the impulse is related to Platonic
essentialism, which is the philosophical spawning ground of authoritarianism
and has stifled honest inquiry for circa 2k years.

------
atemerev
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 crime, this might work.

~~~
cannonedhamster
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.

------
appleshore
His explanation about why he did it perfectly shows why he was so likable:
“Rascality, pure rascality.”

------
betolink
His main issue was that Instagram was not a thing back then.

~~~
ferros
It could be argued that Instagram is a benefit for impostors as it allows them
to present a fake track record/history using their timeline

~~~
close04
Internet and facial recognition made the world a lot smaller and the past a
lot harder to erase. And unsurprisingly the fact that you put something in
your social media timeline only has value until something casts suspicion over
it.

You don't need a trial to decide that the guy who claims _this and that_ is
the same guy from an older article being arrested for faking _this and that_.
The suspicion alone is enough to kill the con.

If you see your kid's pediatrician's picture in a police station on the other
side of the country, as a con-artist on the run, you will not care that their
Instachat account says "world's greatest doctor". And you probably won't even
dig too deep before dropping their service.

------
Theodores
The reliance on documents is interesting. If you are having to ask for proof
that someone has passed an exam or obtained a qualification then you have
already gone wrong to some extent. Most people never show school or university
result certificates ever during their working lives.

Just a name, accent and visual cues are enough if you are white with English
as first language. People might ask for paperwork as a formality but the job
is going to be yours if recruitment is difficult and there aren't any other
applicants. The more specialist the work then the more likely this is to be.
In tech this is particularly apparent.

