[HN Gopher] Update on the fake story about the river laborers pa...
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Update on the fake story about the river laborers paying people to
whip them
Author : luu
Score : 76 points
Date : 2022-10-29 17:51 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
| lolinder wrote:
| > This one's notable in that it puts an entire passage in quotes,
| but it turns out the passage was not in Cheung (1983) at all--not
| on page 8 or anywhere else in that article--it actually came from
| a collection from 1998 of old Harvard Business School exam
| questions.
|
| One of my pet peeves is the chain of citations that will
| inevitably spawn from this. No author can be bothered to go find
| the original source and just cite that, so this inaccurate (and
| since retracted) quote will end up propagating itself for decades
| if not centuries, with each author citing the work that _they_
| got the story from. Eventually, hundreds of years from now,
| someone will be crazy enough to try to work their way down the
| chain to track down the original, only to discover it isn 't
| there.
|
| For an excellent and humorous example, see CGP Grey's search for
| the original Tiffany: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qEV9qoup2mQ
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| It wasn't clear to me if the exam questions were the source or
| just where the author stopped tracking.
| aaron695 wrote:
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Likely Ignorant tech proposal to this problem:
|
| When a paper contains an "invalid reference", flag that paper
| in a database. Expose a service that allows you to share a list
| of references and receive any flags and the reasons. You can
| then more carefully scrutinize the papers you're citing that
| might have referencing issues.
|
| Bonus: display an entire reference tree and show branches with
| issues. Not that an issue invalidates a branch, but it might
| bring into question the integrity of the branch, especially if
| the reference in question is so key to the claims.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's an amusing fable about democracy or something. We
| collectively agree to pay those who fine/punish/whip us
| individually.
| jessaustin wrote:
| No economist ever got fired for advancing the interests of
| capital.
| rongopo wrote:
| This sounds like a joke but actually it's very interesting and
| important point.
| nimbius wrote:
| from the same folks that brought you quiet quitting, the death of
| wfh, privatized healthcare is the best in the whole wide world,
| and trickle down economics comes the tale of how awesome it is to
| be a slave on a boat.
| convolvatron wrote:
| not just awesome, you have enough money to hire a life-coach!
| heynowheynow wrote:
| pimlottc wrote:
| There's a version of this as a joke Asterix and Cleopatra, from
| 1969... I'm sure it goes back much older than that.
| hammock wrote:
| IncRnd wrote:
| I thought the same thing prior to reading the article.
| Stamp01 wrote:
| There's this school of thought where difficult or
| counterintuitive concepts aren't adequately explained without a
| folksy anecdote. Obviously, I prefer hard data over folksy
| anecdotes, but I'm starting to think the folksy anecdote is a
| sideshow to distract from poor data or a lack of data to back up
| a claim.
|
| Ever since I was made aware of Betteridge's law of headlines, and
| I started noticing it was correct based on my own experiences, I
| more or less refuse to read anything with a question as the
| title. I'm sure I'm missing a few good things with this practice,
| but I'm saving a lot of time missing out on wastes of time.
| Enough so that I consider it a net benefit.
|
| Similarly, from now on, I'm going to be immediately suspicious of
| all claims that are served up with a side of folksy anecdotes.
|
| The whole thing seems like a fallacy by appeal to "common sense".
| hackeraccount wrote:
| Reminds me of nothing so much as the oft repeated line that if
| you toss a frog in boiling water it'll jump out but if you slowly
| raise the temperature it'll allow itself to be boiled alive.
|
| The truth of either illustration is wholly beyond the point; if
| you have a problem with the point you might as well limit
| yourself to that rather then take the view that anecdotes need to
| be refuted.
| ouid wrote:
| if you throw a frog in boiling water it will die immediately.
| If, instead, you heat up that water slowly, the frog will
| eventually be unable to maintain homeostasis and will leave,
| just like you would if it got too hot.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| The frog story is an effective anecdote because even if it
| isn't true it is extremely plausible. The whipping story is
| casually racist and by advocating for the most extreme and
| unbelievable end of a spectrum of possible iterations of an
| idea it serves rather to discredit it rather than promoting it
| by inspiring disgust and disbelief.
|
| When I read about the frog I suspend scientific analysis of the
| frog long enough to get the anecdote. When I read the whipping
| story I think wow British people are so racist, so disconnected
| from reality, and so stupid they believe that the people they
| subjugated in their land are such natural slaves that when not
| crushed under a British heel they pay to be likewise abused in
| their own lands.
|
| If you wanted to simultaneously smear the modern Brit and the
| modern American you could do no better than to let Michael
| Munger talk.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Nobody objects to Aesop's fables about a mouse talking to a
| lion. But I think it's fair to object to stories that are
| presented as fact. They attempt to implicitly derive
| credibility from the "this actually happened" aspect.
| watwut wrote:
| Maybe it is not besides the point, if the phenomenon does not
| exist.
| mkl95 wrote:
| This story is another example that societies where complex humour
| is rare can be manipulated to believe almost anything. There are
| many examples in the last few years, some of them with global
| consequences.
| jessaustin wrote:
| Humor has the same quality that PG describes in his discussion
| of programming languages, although PG only considers the
| language "power" continuum and perhaps there is more than one
| relevant dimension for humor. (I'm not sure about this
| multidimensionality; more consideration is required.) When one
| "gets" a joke, one also gets all simpler jokes of the same
| sort. When one doesn't get a joke, it is deeply offensive to
| suggest that the joke even exists.
|
| Of course you're right about the global consequences. Many
| people would rather that the world be destroyed in a nuclear
| conflagration, than that some politician they don't like had
| told a joke and they hadn't laughed. A few wise people long ago
| realized that everything is a joke; they also program in Lisp.
| rongopo wrote:
| I can't help it but I always find articles making fun of
| economist very interesting.
| onos wrote:
| The title suggests the story is known to be fake, but the body
| doesn't provide evidence of this.
|
| I don't like Gelman's arrogant style, and a number of his posts
| have struck me as sneering at some idea or method without any
| good counter argument provided. At this point my _prior_ is that
| everything he says should be taken with a grain is salt.
| JackFr wrote:
| The problem I find with the smug tone, is that to me, the story
| is eminently plausible.
|
| In college I played in a club rugby team. Everyone who was on
| the team had to pay dues, and one of the things the dues paid
| for was our coach. Now I understand the big differences between
| being whipped by an overseer and having a coach make you run
| wind sprints, but at the same time there is a similarity to
| outsourcing this unpleasant activity to an outsider who will do
| it at arms length.
| lolinder wrote:
| This is the explaination given by the originator of the story
| (from the article). As a parent, it's pretty clear to me that
| this was a story invented by a mom who didn't feel it was the
| right time to have a conversation about slave labor.
|
| > In 1970, Toronto's John McManus was my guest in Seattle. I
| chatted to him about what happened when I was a refugee in
| wartime Guangxi. The journey from Liuzhou to Guiping was by
| river, and there were men on the banks whose job was to drag
| the boat with ropes. There was also an overseer armed with a
| whip. According to my mother, the whipper was hired to do just
| that by the boatmen! My tale went the rounds, and it was seized
| by a number of neo-institutional economists. . . . However,
| this could be a story invented by my mother - the smartest
| person I have ever known - to entertain a boy of seven!
| onos wrote:
| Yes, Tldr his mom told him the story and he does not know if
| it's true.
| lolinder wrote:
| He doesn't come right out and say he thinks it _wasn 't_
| true, but it's pretty obvious from the quote that he doubts
| it.
|
| When the original teller doesn't believe his own story
| _and_ the story flies in the face of everything we know
| about human nature _and_ the story can be fully explained
| as a mom trying to shelter her son (which is very much
| human nature), I think we can go with "fake story" as the
| most likely hypothesis.
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(page generated 2022-10-29 23:00 UTC)