Time for everybody's favorite segment of this blog: Health Update!
(Don't worry I'll be brief.)
I'm continuing to rehab my bum shoulder. It's still nagging at me. It's extremely frustrating, but so far I've been good about not letting my frustration get the better of me. That's partly why it hurts in the first place. When I first noticed it, I had just gotten into a good exercise routine and was so annoyed by the thought of an injury stopping me that I just pretended like it wasn't there. I didn't alter my routine and kept putting pressure on my shoulder even though it hurt. That was very stupid and it surely made it worse. Had I just babied it for a few weeks or a few months -- whatever it took. It probably would be better now. But I didn't. So now I get to spend five hours of should-be free time and $60 in co-payments every week at physical therapy. That's my punishment.
Today, however, I tried a new thing -- dry needling -- to relieve some of the tightness in my shoulder, as the therapist is convinced that taut muscles are a big part of my discomfort. (She's funny; she's like 24 years old and was pressuring me to do it without acting like she was pressuring me, so all here conversations started like, "Hey, have you read that material I gave you on dry needling? Because it's totally up to you, but what I was thinking was if you want to give it a try then it might be a good idea -- no pressure or anything -- totally up to you, but if you wanted to -- it's your choice...") I think it worked. I would sum up dry needling thus: It's much less fun than dry humping, but much more satisfying.
I was hesitant to try it, because it's a lot like acupuncture, and acupuncture kinda seems like bullshit to me, but as I said the therapist was really pushing for it, so I agreed, and I must admit, my shoulder felt a lot better when it was over. It might be the placebo effect, but I'm a firm believer in the efficacy of the placebo effect, so that's totally cool with me. And actually I don't not believe in acupuncture, per se, I just find the people who are pushing it are also the people who will tell you all about "toxins" and how bad GMOs are and how Western medicine is all just a giant scam to enrich the pharmaceutical industry. But I'm basing this entirely off three people who post on FaceBook, so it's not exactly a huge sample. And even if this is an accurate portrayal of acupuncture believers, I shouldn't be dismissive of a message just because I find the messenger annoying. I did that with yoga, and now I love yoga. Maybe it will be the same with dry needling.
Anyway...
I've been really into stories of plagiarists and phonies of late. It started with the crossword puzzle plagiarism scandal a few weeks ago (broken down nicely into layman's terms by Matt Gaffney in Slate). That one hit really close to home. Every time I make a crossword puzzle, I search all the online databases to make sure as best I can that nobody else has done something similar. It's funny too because when I get what I think is a good idea, my first impulse is "somebody else must have done this already." And then if I find out nobody has, which is frequently the case, my next thought is, "I have to do this as soon as possible before somebody scoops me." So I rush through it, which is almost certainly unnecessary, because everybody else as their own thoughts that they are thinking and they probably aren't the same as mine. But apparently I'm not the only person who does this. I heard an interview with Larry David, and he said this happened to him when he came up with the "survivor" joke, so it happens really successful people too. (When I was linking to that YouTube clip, I also watched this one, which is hilarious. I didn't even realize it was Bob Odenkirk the first time I saw it. Warning: very NSFW.)
Then I came across this FiveThirtyEight story about a researcher named David Brockman who was trying to replicate a groundbreaking social science study by a different researcher named Michael Lacour, but instead he (Brockman) came to the conclusion that Lacour's data was fraudulently generated. I found this very interesting, in part because I heard about the original study on an episode of This American Life (the study was about the effectiveness of changing people's minds about gay rights issue by having gay people talk to them one-on-one), but also in part because, like with the Crossword puzzle story, it hit close to home.
I spent about a decade of my life in postgraduate programs. I've published a half dozen or so academic papers and written a dissertation that is over 1,000 pages with all the data included. I totally get the impulse to falsify your results. It's very stressful when you can't get your experiments (or in my case algorithms) to do what you want them to do. It does cross your mind, frequently, how easy it would be to message things -- just a little bit. But it's really only easy in the short term. That's the thing about cooking the books: Not only is it unethical, but it is also difficult and stressful in the long-run. I've never done it, but I did accidentally transpose two digits in an input datum in my thesis work (like instead of being 123.76 it was 123.67), and this gave me a result something like 0.01% better than I should have gotten. It's a minuscule difference, and still a random researcher from a different university noticed it and contacted me about it! Now, it was obviously an honest mistake (the rest of my data backed this up) and a tiny one at that -- the equivalent of a typo in a novel -- but it was still upsetting and embarrassing. I can't imagine trying to carry on with the burden of knowing that your crowning achievement is total bullshit. How could you carry on with your normal life? Wouldn't the worry that somebody is going to expose you, consume all your thoughts and take over your life? It would for me. And likely for good reason. People are smart. Somebody probably will expose you eventually.
And the ironic thing about this guy Lacour's study is that it probably would have been an interesting and meaningful study even if he did it honestly. Maybe Ira Glass isn't talking about it, but it sounds as if he did develop some intriguing methods and ideas about the effectiveness of persuasion by canvassing. If he plays it straight, he probably gets respect and citations within his field. Instead his reputation has irreparably marred.
Which brings me to my final topic: Jonah Lehrer. This story is four years old, but somehow I just stumbled onto it in the last few days. Actually I know how: I heard Jon Ronson, author of the book So You've Been Publicly Shamed on a podcast, and he writes in depth about Lehrer. If you don't know Lehrer's story, the short of it is that he was a wunderkind science writer, who wrote three best-sellers, and then it was discovered that he had fabricated/plagiarized a bunch of stuff and so the publishers withdrew two of them. Once this came to light -- over falsified Bob Dylan quotes of all things -- he had an incredibly hard fall from grace. Ronson makes the point in his book that we were too hard on Lehrer -- too torch-and-pitchforky. But this piece in Slate by Daniel Engbar says the opposite. And after reading it, I staunchly agree with Engbar. (To be fair, I haven't read Ronson's passages on Lehrer in full.)
Anyway, I have a lot more thoughts on this. But my time is just about out, and there is no point rehashing an old story that others can speak to more informatively and eloquently than me anyway. But I do recommend reading the stories about Lehrer to which I linked above. Those links have other links, and it's a pretty interesting rabbit hole to venture down, if you, like me, missed it the first go-round.
Alright, I have to go. But before I do, in the interest of full disclosure, here is a disclaimer the legal team here at Crocodile DG asked me to put up.
(Don't worry I'll be brief.)
I'm continuing to rehab my bum shoulder. It's still nagging at me. It's extremely frustrating, but so far I've been good about not letting my frustration get the better of me. That's partly why it hurts in the first place. When I first noticed it, I had just gotten into a good exercise routine and was so annoyed by the thought of an injury stopping me that I just pretended like it wasn't there. I didn't alter my routine and kept putting pressure on my shoulder even though it hurt. That was very stupid and it surely made it worse. Had I just babied it for a few weeks or a few months -- whatever it took. It probably would be better now. But I didn't. So now I get to spend five hours of should-be free time and $60 in co-payments every week at physical therapy. That's my punishment.
Today, however, I tried a new thing -- dry needling -- to relieve some of the tightness in my shoulder, as the therapist is convinced that taut muscles are a big part of my discomfort. (She's funny; she's like 24 years old and was pressuring me to do it without acting like she was pressuring me, so all here conversations started like, "Hey, have you read that material I gave you on dry needling? Because it's totally up to you, but what I was thinking was if you want to give it a try then it might be a good idea -- no pressure or anything -- totally up to you, but if you wanted to -- it's your choice...") I think it worked. I would sum up dry needling thus: It's much less fun than dry humping, but much more satisfying.
I was hesitant to try it, because it's a lot like acupuncture, and acupuncture kinda seems like bullshit to me, but as I said the therapist was really pushing for it, so I agreed, and I must admit, my shoulder felt a lot better when it was over. It might be the placebo effect, but I'm a firm believer in the efficacy of the placebo effect, so that's totally cool with me. And actually I don't not believe in acupuncture, per se, I just find the people who are pushing it are also the people who will tell you all about "toxins" and how bad GMOs are and how Western medicine is all just a giant scam to enrich the pharmaceutical industry. But I'm basing this entirely off three people who post on FaceBook, so it's not exactly a huge sample. And even if this is an accurate portrayal of acupuncture believers, I shouldn't be dismissive of a message just because I find the messenger annoying. I did that with yoga, and now I love yoga. Maybe it will be the same with dry needling.
Anyway...
[Rosie Ruiz was the winner of the 1980 Boston Marathon -- until it was revealed that she probably rode public transportation for a long portion of it. I thought it was funny that one reason people suspected she was a phony is that her legs were too flabby to be a world-class runner. Yeah, check out those thunder-thighs! (That's sarcasm, by the way.)]
I've been really into stories of plagiarists and phonies of late. It started with the crossword puzzle plagiarism scandal a few weeks ago (broken down nicely into layman's terms by Matt Gaffney in Slate). That one hit really close to home. Every time I make a crossword puzzle, I search all the online databases to make sure as best I can that nobody else has done something similar. It's funny too because when I get what I think is a good idea, my first impulse is "somebody else must have done this already." And then if I find out nobody has, which is frequently the case, my next thought is, "I have to do this as soon as possible before somebody scoops me." So I rush through it, which is almost certainly unnecessary, because everybody else as their own thoughts that they are thinking and they probably aren't the same as mine. But apparently I'm not the only person who does this. I heard an interview with Larry David, and he said this happened to him when he came up with the "survivor" joke, so it happens really successful people too. (When I was linking to that YouTube clip, I also watched this one, which is hilarious. I didn't even realize it was Bob Odenkirk the first time I saw it. Warning: very NSFW.)
Then I came across this FiveThirtyEight story about a researcher named David Brockman who was trying to replicate a groundbreaking social science study by a different researcher named Michael Lacour, but instead he (Brockman) came to the conclusion that Lacour's data was fraudulently generated. I found this very interesting, in part because I heard about the original study on an episode of This American Life (the study was about the effectiveness of changing people's minds about gay rights issue by having gay people talk to them one-on-one), but also in part because, like with the Crossword puzzle story, it hit close to home.
[Remember Jayson Blair? He was that New York Times writer who was fired for making a bunch of shit up.]
I spent about a decade of my life in postgraduate programs. I've published a half dozen or so academic papers and written a dissertation that is over 1,000 pages with all the data included. I totally get the impulse to falsify your results. It's very stressful when you can't get your experiments (or in my case algorithms) to do what you want them to do. It does cross your mind, frequently, how easy it would be to message things -- just a little bit. But it's really only easy in the short term. That's the thing about cooking the books: Not only is it unethical, but it is also difficult and stressful in the long-run. I've never done it, but I did accidentally transpose two digits in an input datum in my thesis work (like instead of being 123.76 it was 123.67), and this gave me a result something like 0.01% better than I should have gotten. It's a minuscule difference, and still a random researcher from a different university noticed it and contacted me about it! Now, it was obviously an honest mistake (the rest of my data backed this up) and a tiny one at that -- the equivalent of a typo in a novel -- but it was still upsetting and embarrassing. I can't imagine trying to carry on with the burden of knowing that your crowning achievement is total bullshit. How could you carry on with your normal life? Wouldn't the worry that somebody is going to expose you, consume all your thoughts and take over your life? It would for me. And likely for good reason. People are smart. Somebody probably will expose you eventually.
And the ironic thing about this guy Lacour's study is that it probably would have been an interesting and meaningful study even if he did it honestly. Maybe Ira Glass isn't talking about it, but it sounds as if he did develop some intriguing methods and ideas about the effectiveness of persuasion by canvassing. If he plays it straight, he probably gets respect and citations within his field. Instead his reputation has irreparably marred.
Which brings me to my final topic: Jonah Lehrer. This story is four years old, but somehow I just stumbled onto it in the last few days. Actually I know how: I heard Jon Ronson, author of the book So You've Been Publicly Shamed on a podcast, and he writes in depth about Lehrer. If you don't know Lehrer's story, the short of it is that he was a wunderkind science writer, who wrote three best-sellers, and then it was discovered that he had fabricated/plagiarized a bunch of stuff and so the publishers withdrew two of them. Once this came to light -- over falsified Bob Dylan quotes of all things -- he had an incredibly hard fall from grace. Ronson makes the point in his book that we were too hard on Lehrer -- too torch-and-pitchforky. But this piece in Slate by Daniel Engbar says the opposite. And after reading it, I staunchly agree with Engbar. (To be fair, I haven't read Ronson's passages on Lehrer in full.)
[Mike Daisey made up a story about going to an Apple factory in China, and then presented it as if it was real.]
Anyway, I have a lot more thoughts on this. But my time is just about out, and there is no point rehashing an old story that others can speak to more informatively and eloquently than me anyway. But I do recommend reading the stories about Lehrer to which I linked above. Those links have other links, and it's a pretty interesting rabbit hole to venture down, if you, like me, missed it the first go-round.
Alright, I have to go. But before I do, in the interest of full disclosure, here is a disclaimer the legal team here at Crocodile DG asked me to put up.
This blog is for entertainment purposes only. It is not meant to be a completely accurate historical account. Sometimes the author quotes things verbatim that he could not possibly remember exactly. Sometimes he omits boring details and otherwise modifies the timeline of an event so that it makes a smoother narrative. Sometimes he writes things that are untrue to be funny. (If you don't have a good sense of humor, you might believe it literally.) It is even possible the author occasionally misremembers things, but it is unlikely, being that he can still tell you off the top of his head how many home runs John Kruk hit in 1987 (20 -- bang!). As the author is fond of saying: "Everything on this blog is 100% accurate. But 100 is in base-eight."Until next time...
[Update: I wrote this post last night, and then I woke up this morning and read the NY Times. What was the first story I saw? This one about a cheating triathlete. How fitting! It's a really good story.]
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