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Comment by kergonath | Hacker News Reader

That’s some dedication. And some nerve. I wonder why he’d try that in academia; there are probably other jobs in which his skills would be more useful.

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maybe it's was his form or version of performance art, or simply an experiment that took on a life of it's own? I wonder if that's what Die Antwoord is about.

Not sure - where can you get by with submitting another person's work?

Software Development?

But if the client has a specific requirement, nobody else will have coded the same thing.

Maybe in some cases you can link together some open source projects and pretend you did a lot of work.

Nice burn.

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.

Academia is one where the chickens won’t come home to roost - as in you won’t actually be called to DO what you’re impostering to be able to do.

Fake being a surgeon and they’ll assign you to surgery, etc.

You should listen to the “dr death” podcast [1]. Season one was actually terrifying and is, in fact, what happens when an imposter pretends to be a surgeon.

[1] https://wondery.com/shows/dr-death/

Psychiatry is a field where you can get away it. Zholia Alemi successfully masqueraded as a qualified psychiatrist for 23 years https://www.newsandstar.co.uk/news/17230748.doctor-faked-wil...

Gert Postel (a German mailman) also managed to be a fake psychiatrist for 17 years; it's a very unsettling story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gert_Postel https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gert_Postel

You can be a fake academic and build a career on plagiarism. However, stealing someone’s identity is dangerous, as academic fields tend to be quite small social networks, and someone is bound to notice. It’s also much more difficult to wiggle out of identity theft lawsuits than universities’ ethics rules.

It tells us something about psychiatry as a field. Imagine faking being a programmer or a physicist for 20 years: a trivial Fizz Buzz-like test would reveal the truth for the former, and the failure to reproduce research results—for the latter.

At massive (non-FAANG) companies, it's more common than you might think. Surprisingly.

Literary criticism in particular.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/451/

“Is anyone here a marine biologist?!”

Actually I say it's the other way around. In academia you're most likely to get caught. The communities are just to small for things to get unnoticed. You have many people reading everything related to the field, so people are likely to notice at some point. I'd say if the imposter would have gone for a PhD it would have come out at the latest.

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)

There have been several cases of people posing as doctors without any qualifications ("catch me if you can" is a movie about a famous case for example).

This is an interesting talk by Frank Abagnale (the real life person the story was based on) at Google.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsMydMDi3rI

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