Both of my parents and my brother are lawyers, so I’ve been around the language and issues all my life. I think I could do a fairly decent job of faking it.
Since I work in a corporate environment, and have a really strong personal interest in finance, I could probably fake something in that area. I already get involved in personal finance and investment-related discussions on the board from a layman’s perspective, and in real life people do come to me for financial advice even though I don’t have a degree in that area.
I’m pretty sure I could fake being a secondary school teacher, but that’s so close to my actual profession that it barely counts (all I would really need to know that I don’t already know is some of the jargon, and I expect that varies between states anyway). I might be able to fake being a writer or editor if I did some research about the nuts and bolts of publishing. That’s about it.
Lawyers have a way of thinking and speaking that other lawyers recognize, and there are certain popular sentiments/ideas about the law that almost no lawyer, even piss-poor ones, entertains. So I think it would be hard to fool another lawyer, not sure how many savvy non-lawyers one could deceive if willing to devote the time and energy to avoid obvious blunders.
I imagine the same is true about any profession. I’ve picked up quite a bit of medical knowledge in years of working on medical cases, but I bet a doctor or nurse would know I wasn’t one right away.
As DMark said, there are plenty of lousy lawyers who would be easy to impersonate. In fact, in some cases the true challenge would be to present yourself as sufficiently clueless and arrogant! But you can make up for a lot so long as you make sure and cash your checks ASAP!
Actually, there’s is no secret to being a lawyer. IMO the whole “think like a lawyer” thing is overrated. Basically some concepts of duties, statutory and contractual interpretation, applicability of caselaw, and a few others. And there is a bunch of vocabulary. But that’s about it.
Nor can any generalities be made across lawyers other than that they all attended law school at some time in the past and passed a fraternal hazing process (bar exam). Not all lawyers practice, and those who do certainly have widely varying practices. I happen to be extremely expert in the extremely narrow area in which I practice. But you could identify any number of legal issues in which I would know far less than any number of nonlawyers who are familiar with that area.
Another thing lawyers tend to learn/develop, is the ability to fake it. Bottomline, a good portion of lawyering is trying to convince someone you have more knowledge/power than they do, or that your assessment of a situation is better than theirs. So if I cared to, even in the subject areas in which I’m pretty ignorant, I could probably conduct myself in a manner sufficient to have many/most folk think I knew far more than I actually do.
Final thought - which may or may not apply well to mesage boards - but one of the best ways to come across as knowledgeable is to keep your mouth shut as much as possible.
I think I could fake being a doctor, at least in a single particularly specialized area related to my real line of work (I couldn’t fake being a GP or a specialist in another area).
I also think I could fake being a professional stage actor, as I am close friends with a couple people in that business and have a pretty detailed idea of how their lives and careers work.
I don’t think anyone could get away with it for very long unless they maintain a pace of like one post per week. We are so diverse and opinionated that you can get into technical arguments even in your own profession and be made to look the idiot. To know enough to fake it about something you’ve never done? It would be really tough.
I suppose it depends on what fraction of the masses you need to fool to consider it a success. If someone claimed to be a physicist but clearly wasn’t, it is rather unlikely that I would bother calling them out since I try never to address credentials in technical discussions. If no one else calls them out either, have they been successful in their ruse?
The thinking like a lawyer thing is not necessarily a positive–I can almost always suss out the trial lawyers at a social gathering based on how annoying they are due to their thinking/conversational habits. Everyone else is just chatting and enjoying each other, the trial lawyer wants to make sure everyone understands all the facts and the conclusions to be drawn from the facts…even if the topic is washrags v. bath sponges or whether some celebrity has had a face lift.
And yes there are dumb lawyers, lawyers who only know enough of a tiny slice of the law to stay in a marginal business, and lawyers who don’t practice at all.
But I still think that a fake lawyer would likely be recognizable from reasoning in ways we have had trained out of us, or by asking questioons lawyers don’t ask-as a recent example, whether it’s ethical to represent a guilty person in a criminal matter, or whether a lawyer should withdraw if the lawyer despises the defendant so much he/she will botch the defense.
I think I could pull off correct answers on quite a few of the medical questions that I have no business answering (so don’t, although I’ve started quite a few answers and backed off). I’ve always had strong interests in medicine and the other sciences, and even if I had to google I think I could google on medical topics a lot faster than many people, because I know a lot of buzz-words and like to read about medical stuff. However, I am quite sure QtM would be able to crucify me without even thinking hard if he got suspicious about a supposed MD of mine.
Totally tangential, but oh my God you are right. I know. I’m married to one. She’s an otherwise quite loveable person, but it makes your routine unremarkable domestic disagreement a nightmare.
Everything is like she’s writing a brief. First, state the facts in such a way so that they frame the issue at hand in such a way that no other conclusion besides hers is even possible. Then move on. No more discussion of facts. You know the drill.
I’m pretty sure I’d be horrible at faking any profession. My real profession is difficult enough. Why in the world would I add an unnecessary burden to my life that I can’t benefit from financially? I just don’t get the possible motivation. I also can’t imagine that it’s any fun constantly building on a fake back-story.
It’s like guys who cheat on their wives. They twist themselves into pretzels attempting all manner of subterfuge to keep their extramarital dalliances a secret. It seems like an awful lot of work which, in the end, never seems worth it. Just as I have never known anyone who has cheated on their spouse who wasn’t eventually caught, I find it unlikely that one could pretend to a profession for very long before the threads of the mounting lies begin to snap.
I could pretend to be a musician. Played sax all through middle and high school, and a couple years in college. It’s been years since I touched it, though.
Obviously. Every fact must be accompanied by a greater number of caveats, qualifications, statements of statistical significance, and outright contradictions. Once these are stated, you can then move on to quibble over arcane details that cast further doubt on the given facts. In an argument, you’re lucky if you can eventually agree on some experiment that might not further complicate the facts.
Scientists can also be tedious in social gatherings…
I could fake being a doctor pretty well, having worked as a respiratory therapist for some 20 years. And lots of doctors are assholes, and I’ve got that down cold. So I could pull it off, though I have no idea why I would bother.
