I tracked down my impostor
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Narcissists Online: http://www.issendai.com/psychology/narcissism/narcissists-on...
What to Remember When Dealing with a Narcissist: http://www.issendai.com/psychology/narcissism/narcissists-wh...
People who do this sort of stuff have narcissistic traits at minimum, which of course is an armchair diagnosis. But, these people really do not need to meet the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder. All you need to know is that they are people who will harm you in some incredibly hurtful way, because they have contempt for you being yourself.
Some of these people have antisocial traits, and are malignant narcissists. Some of them outright have both narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder.
Regardless, these people tend to masquerade as "entrepreneurs", "researchers", "thinkers", "doers", or as "authors", when their entire works are just plagiarized material from others. People make entire livings off of such grifts and it becomes a central identity, if not their only identity. Of course, it is always about getting the next award or accolade, even though it is "empty" to them because they have intrinsically low self-esteem and an unbelievably fragile ego. But, of course they would never want you to know that.
And activists.
sometimes there are misunderstandings and some in the circle may have the impression that there is some masquerading going on
sooner or later, I guess, things naturally clarify as time flows and the views are prettier
The individual I mention is known to wear a custom "code t-shirt" of the program (aka "product") that she claims to be her original work, to conferences and meetups. The t-shirt along with the code itself has the /exact same specific variable names/ that I provided via email to a colleague years ago. She is also seen wearing this t-shirt in several media publications. She also publishes "research" based on this "work" in peer-reviewed journal articles. It really is quite disgusting.
I was comenting on the parent of my comment, not on your comment, and I was talking, clearly, in a general sense, in a quite specific situation that is absolutely different then your experience
That fragile ego basically means narcissists are afraid of humiliation. On top that, mentally everything is build around shoring up my ego to compensate for the low self esteem. My ego. Not someone else's ego. I'd have to do some really weird mental gymnastics to be satisfied with copying someone else's work, that would just lower my ego even more. I guess it's doable if I straight up believe I'm that other person? But now we're talking about something really special and uncommon. Not just a narcissist anymore. The narcissistic self deception is involuntary, I can't just say "well, I know I'm copying the work of that person, but now I believe that's me." It doesn't work like that.
The person doing this clearly knew there was considerable risk of getting caught and being exposed. That's someone that doesn't give a fuck about the social consequences.
So you were closer with the malignants, but it's probably just a sociopath (ASPD). A lot more rare in general and more willing to take risks.
Self-aware narcissists are pretty rare too. Can you e-mail me? Info in profile.
They'll often mirror or turn it back on you and there's not much you can say at that point ("I'm a narcissist? No! You are a narcissist!"). It's a tricky disorder.
https://www.reddit.com/r/narcissism/comments/mde5fh/biweekly...
It's my post/sub. You're free to dig in my history and/or DM me.
And of course there are plenty more self aware narcissists to hang out with as well.
Very interesting. Thanks for posting it.
Pointing at who seems to be an insane man and calling him a “narcissist” is like pointing at a Chrome window and saying “this folder on Desktop” and okay grandma I get it but that is technically wrong. OP is just explaining the situation.
The Internet when I grew up was abundant of horror stories around encounter with insane person, and there were definitely multiple different modes of failure, like charging towards the storyteller with a knife in hand, the person leaving the identity behind as if it was nothing, storyteller being the unreliable narrator, etc etc. Usually the best response seemed to be either to display a skill that the imposter can’t replicate, or applying hard rules that allows no alternate interpretations so that they cannot elongate the drama.
I don’t know which cliche suggests which diagnosis and armchair diagnosis is at best useless, but it is true that there are types, and if OP thinks it’s not the same type as his own, that is at least an anecdatapoint.
e: ok I didn’t read the top comment. Clinical distinction don’t matter, you just have to know how to defend against. And it’s documented. That is right. I’ll keep this comment as a shame to myself.
(Also, no need to think of it as a shame game. It's more interesting to learn something.)
Let's put it this way. If you're mistaken, then I don't understand it either, so hopefully someone will explain.
More concretely, reading the list of how to defend against narcissism, it felt like lots of people tend to have some of these traits, but usually not all of them. If it's a partial match, how should you interpret it? Is there some sort of narcissistic meter that goes up as you accumulate points?
It seems hard to define.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-cruel-moraliser-uses-a-halo-t...
I disagree that the label is "moralist". The essay outlines various types of moralism, which I think is important to distinct them. Such as vain vs cruel and pure vs impure moralism.
However, regardless of all that, there are two important questions to ask when dealing with moralism. First, what's the motivation? Second, what's the method of implementation? A cruel moralist is motivated by self-validation in moral superiority, and a vain moralist is motivated by group-validation (vanity) that uses moralism as a tool (their method of implementation).
In this case, it is vanity that is the motivation, but narcissism in how they go about doing it. Moralism is neither a motivation, nor a method of execution.
Anyways, this person seemed to really dislike our team and what we had accomplished, and was constantly trying to road block us for a long time. Then out of the blue, he asked us to come and explain it to him. I thought he was reconciling, and we showed him all the details and spent a while so he could understand. We provided him the implementation as well. Then 3-4 weeks later, he quit to go work at Apple. It seemed like he'd stolen our work to improve his career.
Good team leads / code reviewers / laywers can be real assets because they will stop such a thing before it gets to the stage of doing significant damage to the company.
If you have a 1000x programmer on your team you may have a problem (or you've hired Fabrice).
Copyright lawsuits have one interesting property: the statue of limitations starts when you first became aware of the infringement, not when the deed was done. So you may still have a case, even today, because technically you are still unaware that the infringement happened, it may have happened, but you have no proof. If such proof ever surfaces then that would be the point in time to trigger the suit, and such proof can be obtained through the weirdest channels.
I once became aware a company had been started by an ex employee based on a large body of code that I wrote, and through sheer chance I found a tiny sliver of really hard proof. That's what set the ball rolling.
Welcome to the club. As one that has been building entire enterprise platforms and adding unique features and functions for decades my vast experiences reflect that there will never be a shortage of people looking to claim others work as their own, even steal it to start another company as this happens very frequently yet just does not get as much attention as it should I believe. I have experienced this at every level even down to one claiming to have built and architected an entire company's systems which was entirely my own effort. I also have direct experience with developers stealing I.P. and starting "new" companies, being discovered, sued, losing the suit and then having their wages garnished for millions in restitution. This is sure to happen more and more as technology is built into all devices needed or not and thus business opportunities increase allowing others to apply those stolen ideas. There are A LOT of narcissist egotists out there and I would encourage everyone to avoid them at all costs as they are toxic to business.
Interestingly enough, he was a PHD student.
In a way, a PhD could be seen as the ultimate intellectual validation.
I'm not sure how serious I should take this site. Most things they bring forth are valid for the majority of discussions when they enter the heat phase. Some other aspects naturally grow with more experience in throwaway discussions. But I don't wanna think that because of this everyone online is a Narcissist.
And what the heck is with those mixed overly specific topics on this site? Is this someones private homepage?
EDIT: Or the imposter gave the interview and added a mark up ;)
In a science or engineering class, it might be everything above 40%.
A test which has a significant fraction of scores at the right side of the distribution has saturated the range: there are differences in comprehension and mastery between one 100% and another, which aren't being measured by the test.
The platonic form of a perfect test would have exactly one student per class who got every question correct, but that's impossible to reach except by luck. So a teacher is stuck between writing a test which is too difficult for everyone, and one which is too easy for a substantial fraction of the class. They should pick the first over the second.
While that can feel frustrating (I know, I've been there!) it's likely that you in fact learned the material better than you would have in a class where your level of mastery allowed you to score perfectly for an A+ and in the mid 80s for a B.
No, the teacher is not stuck here. It is rarely the purpose of an academic test to plot students on a wide distribution. That’s just something fun for teachers to do to look for exceptional students.
If the purpose of a test is to determine if an individual student passes some bar of understanding, then there is absolutely no reason to make it extremely difficult and then give A’s to those who got >50% correct.
It shows you what the next level is, reminds you that there's more depth to the subject than you can master in 12 weeks.
As long as you get the letter grade you deserve in the end, why not have an interesting challenge along the way?
Because of its wide applicability to business environments overall, the course was mandatory for some non-CS students. And boy, they hated it.
So, we've slowly grown from 80%->90%->95%.
Joking aside, I agree. There is so many things you could achieve while successfully impersonating someone. Seems like the best you can do in academia is to ruin someone's career. In this case it seemed fortunately "harmless" though.
Fake being a surgeon and they’ll assign you to surgery, etc.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/451/
Judging by some of the revelations in other business it seems not exceptional for people to add things to their cv's they've never done. And it's much less likely to ever come out, because people are less likely to check (and it might also be more difficult to check)
Maybe in some cases you can link together some open source projects and pretend you did a lot of work.
There is nothing very special or original about his tattoos. Just about everyone has tattoos that look like this nowadays. Anyone can walk in and select these out of a flash book.
This is like complaining that someone is wearing the same t-shirt.
Yes, I realize the imposter is mimicking other aspects of his personality, but I see a dozen copies of this guy walking around every day.
Do an image search for "more knuckle tattoo" and "hand rose tattoo" you'll see tons.
The dedication to impersonating Dr. Lodder is why it's concerning. The imposter wasn't just submitting Lodder's work as his own; he _permanently altered his body_ to appear more like Lodder.
That might be a coincidence though. He didn't submit only Lodder's work & bio, but also that of others in tattoo studies.
From the article: We discovered he’d also taken magazine articles I’d written and added footnotes to them, stolen catalogue essays I’d authored, and taken other people’s work from old books and paraphrased it.
He might steal work from everyone but because Hipsters All Look The Same, Matt Lodder feels like that guy is copying his personality when they've just read the same magazines and books and then selected the same tattoos out of the catalogue.
They're apparently so excited that they can slag off an academic for having tattoos that are, in their minds, Not All That, that they are excusing themselves from the difficult work of reading TFA.
"Yes, I realize the imposter is mimicking other aspects of his personality"
... like, umm, copying vast tracts of his academic work?
I was only commenting on his tattoos, which are unoriginal and a dime a dozen. The imposter getting those same tattoos is - in this day and age - equivalent to having an identical wardrobe.
Yes, in addition to the actually bizarre and creepy copying of the academic work.
Yes, the "similarity' of the tattoos is just a completely unconnected coincidence to the weird academic stalking and no-one could possibly see any kind of link between the two.
[1] - https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp4gx/professor-catfished-b...
I posted a comment on HN in response to some article about Emacs. Later that day I saw someone had copied my comment word for word in reply to the same article on Reddit.
I still have no idea why someone would do that. I thought at first it was some kind of karma farming operation but the post history of the Reddit user didn't really fit that profile. Plus,it seems like r/emacs would be a really poor choice for that.
I've always been curious to know why someone would do something like this. It's interesting to read about it happening on a way larger scale.
I don't know about that so much. I'm seeing a lot more straight up spam on reddit that looks easy to spot, but I think reddit gave up or something...
I don't think you've tried to bot reddit.
There are a couple of bots (I hope) on Stack Overflow that re-post answers to other questions that are vaguely related based on keywords or tags. They usually didn't make sense in the question context, but were upvoted by people for some reason.
It's a fundamental way to learn.
E.g., suppose people tell me I'm a real funny person. Let me test that.
1. I remember a joke from a professional funny person widely considered to be one of the best.
2. I tell that joke to the people who told me I'm a real funny person.
3. I measure the laughter I get.
If the laughter is different-- e.g., if the people tell me this is by far the funniest thing I've ever said, then I know I've got a lot more to learn about jokes. On the other hand, if it's the same amount of laughter I usually get, perhaps I've got a real talent here.
Of course, it could be these are just close friends and they are primed to think anything I say is funny. Nevertheless, just the act of telling that joke as if it were my own gives me the experience of the timing and emphasis of that comic. It's a gain of knowledge.
That process is an order of magnitude faster on Reddit with control-v. Who know, maybe it even makes that person a bit more cynical about "karma" points. If so, they've at least become a less naive person.
When I was young, all my jokes were from somewhere else (101 funny jokes!) and people thought they were funny. My problem was remembering them.
Nowadays everybody has seen all the good ones ("Bring me my brown pants!")
So now the problem with telling jokes from a "professional funny person" is that if you've heard it before, chances are others have too and you're getting polite laughter.
Subs can limit posts to users with some minimal karma or age. Typically this still permits comment, though harvesting comment karma is then incentivised.
Automoderator, a rule-driven automated moderation tool, can actively interact with posts and comments based on various criteria, including automatically holding or removing posts or comments, messaging submitters, and other actions. This is heavily used on highly-active subs, and pretty well documented.
There’s no easy way to identify comments on the Internet as stolen, so with enough dedication it’ll be possible to create a system that generate profiles with years worth of life by just mishmashing elements. That will help bots pass spam filter developer on top of existing filter itself.
Accounts that will likely get big offers will have a large number of followers, mod large subreddits or targeted subreddits.
Having an active account before the 2016 Russia thing is also worth something. When you want to spread misinformation or do shill marketing, it helps a lot to see any of the following when checking a user's Reddit profile:
- the user didn't register a month ago.
- the user didn't register just to talk exclusively on this subject/product.
- the user registered before Russia's IRA became active on Reddit.
- the user didn't stop exclusively participating in porn or sports subreddits just to make this comment.
- the user is writing enough quality comments that they don't feel compelled to delete most, if not all, of them.
- the user is not making contradictory claims (there is a famous example of someone claiming to be a cis woman in computers who had clearly cis male comments in several cis male oriented subreddits, one of them called something like "semen rentension". They were called out.
- the user posts in subreddits that are on good terms with the subreddit we found their suspicious comment in.
Source: I'm a Reddit moderator and work at a marketing startup.
I wonder at all the indirect ways though. Maybe the account is enhanced to a reasonable reputation and is "banked" for later. Maybe there are levels of reputation that unlock abilities either on or off the site.
Or maybe some people are addicted to those silly internet points.
I'm surprised HN has a visible "score". I remember other sites would cap it at some value, basically reputation: excellent.
I feel that company scrapes sites continuity, trying to elevate their discussions—- which are basically a mad three word race to the fart joke.
Someone submitted the article (edited to sound more academic) to a journal - and with extra authors added. The journal almost published it, but they didn't because at the last minute one of their reviewers felt they recognized the content as having been published before.
I think the moral of the story is that some people are up to no good and we'll never understand why.
Is this some bizarre coincidence?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26605151
This is a compelling idea, but I think they wouldn’t be so obvious about it.
I would also read any MSM news in English that came out about the general topic. I would often find pieces of my research inserted into these articles, by different outlets and different authors. Never any credit given. Sometimes the entire article was centered around something I'd uncovered, and published 4-5 days after posting it in my blog.
He should have contacted the Police immediately. What if a crime was committed nearby where the impostor was located under false identity, and he was later taken into custody instead? I don't know if it qualifies as a crime, but assuming someone else's identity can lead to very dangerous consequences.
But if it's not a movie or music, I guess it might not matter so much.
(on the other hand, the police probably has better things to do)
That's some dedication.. on the flip side it's hard not to feel sorry for someone being so dumb.
Especially in those parts of social sciences that are very essay-heavy and don't deal with disprovable claims and experiments, the difference between "that's total nonsense" and "another intelligent contribution by a fellow scholar" might be mostly knowing the author.
They could transition into postmodern studies and use the Postmodern Generator [1] to get their new stuff.
Perfect Blue vibes!
It took many attempts to get him to attribute my project (in accordance with its license) although he was caught repeating this type of behavior later on.
I've been in postgraduate academia and industry, and been involved in multiple conferences at different levels. I'm not aware of anyone ever running a plagiarism detector on any submitted work at all. Do other people do this? Should the people I work with have been doing it?
But my kids both recently graduated from high school. There is a tendency for teachers of each grade to prepare kids for subsequent grades. I can imagine hearing: "They will have to do this in sixth grade, so we're preparing them now" without questioning why it's done in any grade. This makes the curriculum seem more "advanced."
I actually don't think my kids had to use turnitin. At least, I never heard about it. A bigger concern is writing stuff that might be reviewed by employers, law enforcement, and so forth, or subjected to some kind of automated analysis in the future. They've heard about the social credit score. They're all familiar with the lesson: "Don't write anything that you would not want to see on the front page of the newspaper."
I'm lucky that anything I ever wrote in school is now in the bit bucket.
In High School, I did a (very) short co-op copyrighting for a radio station. At the time I thought it was pretty ridiculous that I had to basically reword everything to mean the same thing, but differently. As a grown-up and seeing the same stories in different papers struck me as ultra-lazy, and then I realized why all that copyrighting had to be done.
There is some deeper irony in misspelling that particular word. Indeed the job title was copywriting. But the reason for the position in the first place was to avoid plagiarism and copyright issues.
According to a cursory search, I probably just invoked the wrath of a lot of righters and writers alike. I'm very picky when it comes to grammar and spelling, so I deserve what comes.
If someone wants to bring meritless flimsy accusations, I wouldn't want to help them do their homework in running down all the accidental matches found by their commercial provider, let alone rewrite my work in the process.
The parent commenter's experience suggests that teachers are not doing that; instead, they're encouraging people to rewrite non-plagiarised work so that it doesn't trigger partial matches.
That is my experience too: teachers don't want the hassle of figuring out what a false positive really means.
But it doesn't apply to conference papers as far as I know or journal articles either. (As in when submitting to a journal for publication).
[1] https://www.turnitin.com/blog/top-15-misconceptions-about-tu...
Luckily it ended with him resubmitting the paper to the checker and it coming back clean. (I got an A.)
I had this happen once, except it was because someone else in one of his other classes had the same name as me.
The one I heard was a variation of "does the person suffer due to the condition or cause harm to other people". That was a side course in university. I actually like that one a lot, since there's really not a clear line between an illness and just being different.
I guess thats why the old adage of never getting hand tattoos applies very well to copying identities.
That's one dedicated identity thief.
From the pictures of him and his colleague it seems that the people who study tattoos are into getting tattoos as well, I find it absolutely plausible that the guy got them separately. It's not like Letters On Fingers is such a new concept that everyone who does that copied him.
Even that type of flower as a hand tattoo isn't very common.
Somebody should create a registry where people can lay claim to their tattoo's originality. Add blockchain, call it TATS, instant hit.
You do know that it's about someone who plagiarized another person's academic papers as, apparently, his entire output as a Master's student?
It something impressive the lenghts these kind of people go with their lies and deception, keeping a straight face even when the lie is obvious.
I didn't know there's a special word for this - mythomaniac - I just figured these guys are somewhere on the psychopath/sociopath scale.
Edit: Trump put a slightly different twist on it, he lied as a show of power/dominance by lying about something which is immediately and obviously false, then observing that no one speaks up (i.e. submitting to his power).
Just FYI it's known as the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon or the Frequency illusion [1]
Do they really not use it at the Masters level? Or does TurnItIn just not scrape enough to catch this?
You need to meet him in person. He sounds like an awesome freak. There is way more to this story than just "plagiarism".
Not surprised I'm getting downvoted by people that support abusers.
These are news organizations that do at least a
modicum of fact-checking.
"Donald R. Wright, a historian of the West African slave trade, found that elders and griots in The Gambia could not provide detailed information on people living before the mid-19th century, but everyone had heard of Kunta Kinte. Haley had told his story to so many people, and his version of his family history had been assimilated into the oral traditions of The Gambia. Haley had created a case of circular reporting, in which people repeated his words back to him."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roots:_The_Saga_of_an_American...
And the tattoos I can't even begin to understand what the issue is. Walking down a busy street, I can't begin to count how many mimicked tattoos I see.