

Proust Wasn’t a Neuroscientist. Neither was Jonah Lehrer - nir
http://nymag.com/news/features/jonah-lehrer-2012-11/index1.html#print

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gruseom
It's not surprising that it was Bob Dylan fans who caught Lehrer fabricating.
The stuff he was saying about Dylan was obviously off – equally ignorant and
glib. I remember listening to Terry Gross interviewing him well before the
scandal and being shocked at what bullshit he was peddling.

Fabrication and plagiarism are what got him fired, and I suppose it has to be
that way, but there's an unpleasant corollary: had he been a more careful or
even just a less prolific bullshitter, he would still be a celebrated star of
science writing.

~~~
diego
Can you elaborate on the bullshit part from the interview? I'm curious. I read
the book (Imagine) and I enjoyed it. It wasn't particularly deep, but I didn't
catch anything that wasn't consistent with what I already knew about the
topic.

~~~
gruseom
It seems I can't answer your question without ranting. Sorry about that.

I was referring to what Lehrer said about Bob Dylan and "Like a Rolling
Stone". His narrative about Dylan's biography and his creative process was
totally off – not consistent with what even a casual fan like myself has
picked up over the years. It wasn't just a little odd here and there, it was
screamingly wrong. The idea that Dylan got stuck between "Bringing it all back
home" (March 1965) and "Highway 61 Revisited" (Aug 1965) is laughable – that
was the middle of the greatest creative rampage of his career, his annus
mirabilis. Everybody knows that that manic phase peaked in "Blonde on Blonde"
(1966) and the crash happened afterward. Lehrer's fairy tale about how Dylan
was going to quit music (!) but it turned out he just needed to take a little
rest and then, boom, a creative outpouring and out came "Like a Rolling
Stone", was silly. Dylan had been pouring out material in that way for years.
Lehrer's thing about how there had been only two kinds of pop song and Dylan
finally put them together in "Like a Rolling Stone" is cringeworthy, the kind
of thing you would tolerate in a precocious adolescent until you could take
him off to one side and tell him to knock it off and learn something. Then
there were howlers like claiming that while writing the song Dylan coined the
term "juiced" to mean "drunk". That was as ignorant as Gladwell's "igon
values" but worse, since it indicates a readiness to make shit up to fit your
narrative.

My point is that these things weren't just wrong, they were obvious
concoctions. And someone who would bullshit that much about one thing would
clearly bullshit about anything. If he hadn't fabricated quotes and
plagiarized, that would still be the case. And it's not like people didn't
call him on it, even before he got caught on the no-nos [1].

What bugs me, and I'm almost done, is that Lehrer's editors and patrons were
quite happy for him to propagate this kind of thing. Not in a "sure it's crap
but we need material" way, but in a "take a look at this! he's a wunderkind!"
way. Had he not gotten grandiosely sloppy, he'd not only still be doing it,
he'd still be widely praised for doing it. He'd be in that elite group of
repeat guests on Fresh Air, maybe even the super-elite who are allowed to say
"thank you" when Terry says "Welcome back to Fresh Air". So to me this was a
little like a criminal who eventually got busted on a technicality.

[1] [http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-
arts/magazine/103912/bo...](http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-
arts/magazine/103912/bob-dylan-jonah-lehrer-creativity). To say something
positive: yay to Isaac Chotiner for being the one who nailed this stuff on its
essential crappiness rather than its accidental transgressions. Plus he wrote
a good piece about P.G. Wodehouse:
[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/06/the-
esca...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/06/the-
escapist/308989/), so I'm going to watch for him in the future. Perhaps the
New Yorker could hire him :)

~~~
tptacek
Worth noting here that the original New Yorker article Gladwell wrote had
"eigenvalue", not "igon value"; the incorrect spelling occurred in a reprint
of the same article. Not dispositive, of course!

~~~
wglb
However.

After having read Glieck's Chaos years ago, I thought I would pick up "Tipping
Point" at the library. Before I got to the door, checking through a few pages,
I realized I would be physically unable to read the book, because it was just
_wrong_. In the way that trying to reason about free body diagrams without
having any math is going to be wrong. Or to do eigenvalues without
understanding arithmetic in the complex plane. Let alone _igon values_.

~~~
tptacek
I don't find this eigenvalue controversy all that interesting. Gladwell also
wrote a long New Yorker article about ketchup and the market for different
ketchups. I doubt Gladwell could, given the ingredients and a good kitchen,
make a passable ketchup. I still like the article.

If anything, the eigen/igon thing just tells me that unlike many popsci
writers, Gladwell is at least out there talking to people and trying to
report. Bear in mind that Gladwell makes no pretense to actually being a
scientist (unlike Lehrer). He's a journalist by training. I am given to
understand from a great conversation I had earlier this week that it is not
necessarily reasonable to assume that physicists have mastered linear algebra.
So, in that spirit, it is not reasonable to expect journalists to understand
linear algebra simply to report on quantitative finance.

~~~
gruseom
You're right on the details, yet the symbol remains compelling. I find this
interesting. When a symbol or meme takes hold and gets repeated, it's often
because it captures something real – not usually accurate or logical, but
resonant – about the thing. It's almost the default case for the details to be
all wrong and discredited, yet the image hovers in the truth field of the
thing it's about, often closer to the core than any accurate detail. "Igon
value" is an example. Maybe Gladwell never typed i-g-o-n, and you're probably
right to say so what if he did, yet there it sits in exactly the space of
glibness approaching charlatanry that (a lot of people argue) he inhabits.
It's almost as if there is a force of cultural justice that speaks in symbols,
not facts, yet finds its mark anyway. I've noticed this over and over. Some of
the best examples are political so I won't mention them here. But I'd like to
see an example of the phenomenon where the repetition of the meme really is
unjust.

As for Gladwell, he's a good storyteller, and part of what makes him
interesting is that he glides so smoothly between things that we expect to be
made up and things we trust to be factual. If Lehrer is a petty criminal then
Gladwell is a master art thief. Bet he'd like that analogy.

~~~
tptacek
When you write "yet there it sits in exactly the space of glibness approaching
charlatanry that (a lot of people argue) he inhabits", my inner Wikipedian
says "WP:WEASEL". I get the sense that you think he occupies that space, too,
and it'd be interesting to know why.

I don't intend to win a debate here. :)

~~~
gruseom
Sorry, but I don't have much of an opinion, just a vague impression that is
based on random snippets and could easily be wrong - hence the "a lot of
people argue".

(To avoid circularity I might add that, if the "igon value" thing really is
inapt, that would be a counterexample to my "cultural justice" theory, which
is okay since I only thought of it this morning.)

In general, I think storytelling and factual fidelity are at odds with one
another. They're incommensurable and can't even really be balanced. What we
most want is stories, but we also want them to be true, which is impossible,
so we do a lot of complicated ritual dances around that, and get angry when
someone breaks the dance rules.

------
fourmii
It's pretty disappointing, I love reading these popular science books. I guess
they're fun to read because they're entertaining, now I know how some of these
authors are making them entertaining...

This was a pretty interesting article in itself to read.

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droithomme
"Self-plagiarizing" isn't a real thing. It's complete nonsense to say you are
plagiarizing from yourself.

Shocking part is so many people are just falling for this argument without
thinking about it. As well as those who think about it, and to join in the
thrills of a witch hunt, justify to themselves that this self-plagiarization
is not just a real thing, but unethical behavior bordering on criminal.

Fabricating quotes and making up facts though is bad and justifies firing and
blacklisting. Both practices are unfortunately endemic within contemporary
publications, perhaps due to a lack of fact checkers at many publishers.

~~~
tptacek
The "victim" of plagiarism isn't the original author. It's the reader, who is
deceived into thinking they are reading original thoughts when they'd instead
be better served by the original source.

Nobody in the media is "just falling" for the idea of "self-plagiarizing"; in
virtually every place I've seen this issue covered, there's been extensive
scrutiny of the idea of "self-plagiarism" and where it ranks in the catalog of
literary sins.

This post is yet another example of the "middlebrow dismissal":

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4714217>

It is all well and good to grapple with the idea of whether and how "self-
plagiarizing" is a real offense. But to do so in a comment like yours,
dismissing it as herd thinking and witch hunting, is lazy and ill-informed.
Your comment has as its premise something that is actually the opposite of the
truth; ironically, it distracts from the real controversy of how big a deal
self-plagiarism is by pretending that there is no such controversy.

~~~
oh_sigh
I don't buy it. You're the author of the original source. If you write an
essay, and then realize there are some good parts, but most of it was too
confusing to follow, you are no longer allowed to use those good parts in a
new essay, which would be better for the reader?

~~~
tptacek
Of course you're allowed to do that; you simply have to be honest about what
you're doing. Similarly, when some other author writes a few good bits but
fails to make a point you feel is worthy, you're allowed to incorporate their
work and expand on it; you just have to be clear and direct about what you're
doing.

What's not OK is to pass off work from some other source as original or novel.

------
desireco42
Did any thought reading this..."Malcolm Gladwell"?

~~~
binxbolling
Just curious, but why did you feel the compulsion to comment on an article you
very clearly didn't even read?

~~~
btilly
Just curious, why would you draw such a horribly flawed inference?

I read the article closely, and I was also struck by the similarity of what he
was trying to what Malcolm Gladwell does. And the end of the article the
parallel is made very clearly.

~~~
tptacek
I had to resist making the same comment that you replied to, because I felt
like the article was at some pains to put Lehrer in the context of Gladwell. I
too assumed that anyone who could ask this question probably hadn't read the
article.

~~~
btilly
Some pains - sure.

But I would have been drawing the parallel anyways, and in fact was well
before the article twisted that way.

------
kiba
I like to read popular science book. Does that mean that I have to give up
reading popular science and read dreary academic papers?

~~~
nollidge
There's plenty of popular science books that are written by respected
scientists - Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Stephen Hawking - as well as
books that are effective summaries of accepted information by laypeople, such
as _The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks_ by Rebecca Skloot (which interweaves
the history with first-person narrative of the author's interactions with
Lacks's living relatives) or _The Big Bang_ by Simon Singh.

There's also lots of blogs written by laypeople or former researchers who
carefully distill and contextualize individual scientific papers, such as many
of the folks at Discover Magazine blogs (Phil Plait, Ed Yong).

Moreover, there's a larger problem of lay journalists, public, and many
university PR people treating every bit of research as a groundbreaking answer
to a huge question, when the reality is that each paper is merely a bit of
dialog in a massive conversation about the nature of our universe. This leads
the public to become rightfully distrusting of the massive overstatements, and
therefore tragically disinterested in the nuanced conversation behind it all.

So perhaps the single best thing to do is become part of the conversation!
Follow authors and bloggers on social media, talk to your friends in science,
furrow your brow at bombastic university press releases and seek the nuance.
This will lead you to the best books, articles, and science communicators out
there.

------
kiba
Is anybody wondering: What's Jonah Lehrer doing now?

~~~
braid
He's writing about his ordeal:

“I’m writing something about the mistake and affair myself, if only so I can
learn from the failing, and I’d prefer not to talk until my writing is done.”

<http://www.lamag.com/story.aspx?ID=1771992>

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tzs
OT: that was a good example of a print link that is not obnoxious. Unlike most
print links, it did not come up with a freakishly wide columns of diminutive
text, and had a clear way to get the non-print version so that one can read
the comments and other extras lost on the print version. More sites should
implement their print links like that.

~~~
spacemanaki
I kind of disagree, and think this is a poor implementation. "Print view" is a
feature that JavaScript lightbox-style dialogs should not be used to
implement. This one for instance, is totally broken on mobile (on Chrome on a
Nexus 7 at least, you cannot scroll to read it)

------
xaa
It's interesting how relatively minor fabrications like these earned Lehrer
complete ostracism, yet much huger distortions are told in the political arena
daily and no one bats an eye. To pick a random example, "there is no evidence
for climate change". I wonder why the double standard?

~~~
freshhawk
There is no economic incentive motivating a group of people to spend large
amounts of money to convince the public that Bob Dylan _did_ say those quotes.

Lehrer should have lied about things that have been politicized for economic
gain, like climate change, economics or medical science. Then when you get
called on it you have well funded groups with media clout ready to support
you.

I agree the double standard is ridiculous, but I don't find it surprising.

