[HN Gopher] The Case of the Fake Sherlock
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The Case of the Fake Sherlock
Author : danso
Score : 81 points
Date : 2023-04-11 22:25 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (nymag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nymag.com)
| shellac wrote:
| I spent 2/3rds of the article assuming 'Nick McGuffin' was a
| deliberately absurd pseudonym used to protect the real victim of
| this charlatan.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Dude was on national TV. Kinda feels like the cat's out of the
| bag for his privacy when you can just Google the murder
| victim's name.
|
| That said, yeah his name does _sound_ incredibly fake
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| yes, me too
| tunesmith wrote:
| It's crazy, isn't it? A McGuffin is the thing that everyone
| chases that doesn't really have anything to do with the plot,
| it's just the thing everyone is after.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| His Wikipedia article [0] is not as skeptical of his abilities
| and qualifications as I would have expected. Neither is that of
| the Vidocq Society [1]. Articles on controversial living people
| are hard to manage, but the Wikipedia articles and the NY
| Magazine article present opposite views of Walter, and I suspect
| they're both a bit distorted. [0]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Walter_(psychologist)
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidocq_Society
| mattigames wrote:
| Controversial dead people are also hard to manage by Wikipedia,
| just read the article about Alister Crowley, portrayed as an
| intellectual of the "dark arts" and not just another charlatan
| taking advantage of gullible people, which he was.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| I mean, regardless of what you think about his scruples, he
| was the single most influential occultist of the 20th century
| (barring maybe LaVey), and calling him "just another
| charlatan" kind of ignores the things that actually make him
| notable. Like calling Houdini "just another street magician".
| mattigames wrote:
| When I go to Wikipedia I'm far more interested in truth
| than historical relevance, both are important in its own
| but I -and many like me- are far more interested in what
| has been proven and disproven, in how something snaps with
| our current understanding of reality, history is mostly
| just a log of the foolishness of mankind, which I don't
| deny has some anthropological value but it's not my
| principal aim when I'm visiting Wikipedia, it would have
| saved me a lot of time if the first paragraph of Crowley's
| entry said he was a famous 20th century charlatan, but it
| doesn't, so a lot of mental processing power has to be
| wasted by me and every other reader of that long article to
| reach a judgement as easy to fact check such as water being
| wet.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| There's a lot to disagree with there, and I do. I'm very
| frequently interested in what makes a person or event
| important to others in the past, and I'm not able to
| sustain your confidence that 2023 has it all figured out,
| where every year prior did not.
| [deleted]
| DaveHerbert wrote:
| I'm the author of the story. Happy to answer any questions about
| the piece.
| devindotcom wrote:
| How's NY mag to work with editorially?
| DaveHerbert wrote:
| I highly recommend the experience. They have fantastic
| editors, and the fact-checking team is among the strongest
| and most thorough that I've ever worked with.
| jqgatsby wrote:
| Do you know if any attempt is being made to find the real
| killer by comparing the DNA evidence from the victim's shoes to
| genealogy databases?
| jlg97 wrote:
| Incredible piece, what exactly was Richard Walter doing in that
| 10 year gap do you think? Prison time??
| DaveHerbert wrote:
| It's an intriguing question. We still don't know.
| etchalon wrote:
| How'd you discover Walter, and what led you to write a story
| about him?
| itcrowd wrote:
| A bit of a tangent, but I do wonder how you figured out this
| story was front page on HN?
|
| Thanks for the long read. Worth it!
| ribs wrote:
| I notice that this user's name is in green. Does that mean it's
| been verified in some way?
| dpifke wrote:
| There's a link at the bottom of every page page which answers
| this, as well as other frequently asked questions:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
|
| (It's also the first hit for me if I Google [Hacker News
| green username].)
| geocrasher wrote:
| I believe it has to do with the fact that it was just
| registered today
| bombcar wrote:
| Green means a new user - if you're verified your name appears
| as everyone else's but it will say "dang"
| geocrasher wrote:
| A few times in the article you mentioned Walter's narcissism.
| How much of his behavior do you associate with narcissism
| versus that which can be explained by other means?
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| I just wanted to say thanks for researching and writing such a
| carefully composed and in-depth piece. Your prose was both
| exceptionally clear and unusually concise for this kind of
| long-form piece.
|
| Often I'll find myself skimming over entire paragraphs of this
| sort of long-form investigative piece because the author will
| go off on a tangent or include overly personal or flowery
| unnecessary details like the shape of a stain on the wall
| during an interview. I understand the qualitative value of such
| window-dressing but personally find it to be distastefully
| biased and a time-wasteful way to fluff up an already long
| read.
|
| Having a long read like this that so fully focuses on the meat
| of the issue and its history is incredibly refreshing.
|
| In short, consider me a fan.
| DaveHerbert wrote:
| Thanks, I appreciate it.
| elliekelly wrote:
| If you're willing to answer a question a bit beyond the scope I
| have one that relates to your story but also to your experience
| as a journalist. It seems like grifters often rely on
| "reputation laundering" through reputable news & media. They
| get one small-time outlet to say they've done XYZ and then they
| finagle that into more coverage because the next outlet sees
| the prior one has reported the grifter has done XYZ so they
| report on it, too. And on the one hand it seems perfectly
| reasonable for a journalist to say well XYZ has been reported
| in all of these reliable publications so it must be true
| because otherwise someone would have caught it by now. But
| sometimes, as it seems happened with Richard Walter, it turns
| out they've all just sort of confirmed with one another but no
| one has _actually_ given XYZ a proper look.
|
| So I guess my question is to what extent do you think this
| happens because the fraudster deliberately manipulates/exploits
| the free publicity vs some reporters, for whatever reason,
| failing to do enough due diligence? Are there any sort of
| journalistic ethical obligations around "confirming" a fact
| with an infotainment type of outlet compared to a news outlet?
| Your story specifically mentions 20/20 as one of the first
| "big" news outlets that bolstered Walter's false reputation.
| (And even now that I'm thinking about it I'm not really sure
| whether that's meant to be news or not!)
|
| And I don't mean to single out journalists here. It's clear the
| legal profession bears significant blame for the reputation
| laundering he was allowed to do through his "expert" testimony.
| I only ask about the journalism angle specifically because you
| happen to be a journalist. I'd also love to hear the
| perspective of any litigators who might be inclined to weigh
| in.
| DaveHerbert wrote:
| Good questions. Journalists often rely on the previous
| reporting of their peers. If newspaper reporters, who work on
| tight deadlines, needed to fact check _every single_ word in
| a story, they 'd never publish anything. Instead, they check
| an old NYT story, confirm the details as previously reported,
| and move on.
|
| This reasonable instinct can also give way to a broader
| laziness in reporting, though. Existing narratives are
| repeated verbatim, and we forget to go back to the bare facts
| and ask "what really happened, here?"
|
| In this case, I saw the official narrative that the press had
| reported for 40 years. And then I saw scattered breadcrumbs
| that told a very different story about Richard Walter. I
| followed that trail, and here we are.
| rsav wrote:
| > Walter refused several requests for an interview. "You have
| earned one's distrust that merits severing any contact with you
| in the future," he wrote me, veering into strange pronoun usage.
| "Under no circumstances would himself cooperate in your
| suspicious activities."
|
| Sharply written articles like this are a rare treat.
| [deleted]
| steviedotboston wrote:
| very disappointed this wasn't about the macintosh software
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| If he was starting his career now, he'd make a podcast and
| convince millions he's the modern day Sherlock Holmes.
| a_bonobo wrote:
| How many 'thought leaders', 'public experts', podcasters are
| purely experts at being experts, with no experience or
| knowledge behind it? I can think of a few public voices,
| especially in AI right now, who have nothing to say but the
| ears of thousands
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> podcasters are purely experts at being experts, with no
| experience or knowledge behind it?
|
| If you are an actual expert in such things, you don't have
| the time to be doing podcasts.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > If you are an actual expert in such things, you don't
| have the time to be doing podcasts.
|
| I'm not sure about podcasting, but this is false for
| blogging. As a mathematician, the first example that
| springs to mind is Terry Tao's extraordinary blog
| https://terrytao.wordpress.com , and it's one of the best,
| but there are tons of others.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| If the current lawsuit Dominion vs. Fox News tells us
| anything it is that providers of "information" provide the
| kind of "information" their listeners want to hear.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > If the current lawsuit Dominion vs. Fox News tells us
| anything it is that providers of "information" provide the
| kind of "information" their listeners want to hear.
|
| I think over-generalizing can be very dangerous here. The
| lawsuit itself, of course, tells us nothing; just about
| anyone can sue just about anyone for just about anything.
| But the evidence tells us that Fox News provides the kind
| of "information" their listeners want to hear. And of
| course, to some extent, indeed every provider will tailor
| what they want to say to their audience--that's part of
| good communication. But to assume that therefore all
| information providers display the same bias as Fox News did
| --or even that Fox News themselves always display the same
| sort of bias that they did in this case (although I tend to
| believe that they do)--is probably over-generalizing.
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(page generated 2023-04-14 23:01 UTC)