This Oliver Sacks story is NUTS. Really significant. An absolute catastrophe for the Humanities. Or rather several brand names in the contemporary prestige public humanities.
You think LLMs hallucinate?
Wait until you see what humans have been doing at The New Yorker!
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Now we find even many of Oliver Sacks’s case studies were fabrications.
People think I am exaggerating, but the amount of fraud and misconduct in science is beyond comprehension. It goes far beyond what the most trenchant critics say publicly. (In private, they shock even me.)
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I just always assumed Oliver Sacks was bullshitting — if you write enough about talking to people you can usually spot the fabricated, hyped, exaggerated — too perfect narratives, too cinematic, too clean cut hero/goat.