You’re right, claiming a PhD will probably be found out quickly when the topic involves objectively falsifiable information. My school board example is better because those kind of falsehoods are much more difficult to detect. So I’m grateful the mods take a hard line when the liars are exposed.
I’ve never lied about anything about myself. Here or elsewhere. It’s an asshole thing to do.
If you are just making up garbage on purpose, you’re being an asshole. Don’t do that.
Saying you’re doing it to prevent doxxing is a bullshit excuse. To prevent that, just don’t provide personal info. I try to be cagey at times about some of my personal info because of that. But I don’t lie. I don’t misrepresent myself. Assholes do that. Don’t be an asshole.
I sort of feel like that article (who posted it – @hajario ?) has a really high likelihood of being Our Boy, Martin. At the very least, there’s no way that I’d bet against it being him.
For those with 15-ish minutes to spare, watch the video in the article. I can just see him on a comparable rant here.
If I had zero context for that article and video, incidentally, my first reaction would have been “Wow. What a totally entitled, narcissistic asshole !”
QED 
I’ll do what I see fit, thanks.
It’s really not.
If you can find examples where I made up things to win an argument or to show just how awesome I am, then you’d have grounds for calling me an asshole.
But obfuscating some details? That’s a whole 'nuther thing.
Yes, and it also distorts serious discussions, as TroutMan and others have noted. Myself, I don’t tend to feel personally betrayed or anything if an anonymous stranger on a messageboard turns out to have been lying about their life experience to impress people or just for the lulz, but when the lies are presented as something germane to the discussion topic, that just wastes everybody’s time.
“Obfuscating some details” isn’t what we’re talking about here. Making up who you are from whole cloth like MH did, that’s different.
We had an infamous case of this sort of thing over on Wikipedia, and it was a big deal. The New Yorker was even hoodwinked by it.
Absolutely it does.
Well, that’s what I presented, and you called me an asshole for it.
Yeah, but I still believe that, on a board that loves nothing so much as a good nitpick, the fakers will be quickly outed as such, and their credibility will be destroyed.
Sorry, I think I misinterpreted what you were saying then.
I would like to think so, but Martin lasted 18 years. I don’t know how long in particular he got away with his specific claims, but it doesn’t seem to be quick.
It’s especially difficult when you have two people both claiming to be an expert on a topic, each one claiming the other is full of it. Let’s say that one is making up garbage, and the other one is truly an expert. Unless you have a bunch of experts to verify each other via consensus it’s difficult to tell who is correct. Sure, you can pull out cites, but there are people who are skilled with search engines that can cherry pick enough verifiable information on a subject to make their argument plausible. Sometimes it’s not easy.
Anonymity does have its downsides.
Fair enough. No harm, no foul.
Which is another reason I’m against the rule against misrepresentation. If it’s going to take two decades to discover the fact (and how would you prove it, anyway?), then what’s the point?
Very true. Personally, I consider the Dope to be but one source. Anything that I need to know (or am very curious about), I try to verify those claims elsewhere. Which is why I absolutely adore our culture of giving cites.
What a piece of shit.
I mean, there are lies and lies. If i say i was elected to a school board, and this was my experience, that’s a material lie. If i say i live in upstate new York, and i really live in Pennsylvania, then… really, who cares. Just make sure you look up the details when you talk about your traffic laws and your liquor laws, as they are different in those two states.
I think the fact it’s difficult to expose them is precisely why we need harsh penalties. There needs to be real risk to it.
And I’m not sure why you’re opposed to getting rid of them anyway. In what way is this community improved by having people around whose credibility has been destroyed?
There are a fair number of people I wouldn’t really want around here, but I don’t support bullshit reasons for getting rid of them. The misrepresentation rule is vague and virtually unenforceable for most posters, so it is bullshit. The stolen valor argument is bullshit on the face of it. And I still don’t believe that much of anybody can speak with authority here without being challenged. So that’s bullshit, too.
Ban them for trolling if that’s what they’re doing, but don’t look for some gotcha in the rules.
Like most everyone else, there are details which could potentially out me, and I’ve stayed away from threads that could, or was just vague.
I just presumed that was the norm rather than make up false details.
Help me understand exactly what you’re talking about. Like, let’s say you have a degree in ME from Purdue, and you want to weigh in on a structural engineering thread. Do you:
A) Tell people you have an electrical engineering degree from Georgia Tech in order to obfuscate the details of your personal life, or
B) Just say “I have a mechanical engineering degree” and omit the irrelevant information that might personally identify you.
In all my years of posting on the internet it’s never occurred to me to change details of my life, versus just omitting information that I don’t want to share.
Well, IIRC most of what he posted wasn’t significantly about his own personal experience. Most of his autobiographical fabrications seem to have been essentially just a lazy way to sound more authoritative about a particular topic without having to provide actual cites and evidence.
You’re ducking the question. How does it improve our community to keep these people around? If there’s no answer to that, then it isn’t a “bullshit reason.”
I’m not ducking anything. If we’re only going to keep people around who “improve the community”, then that will change the entire culture here.
What was “vague” or “unenforceable” about the mods’ application of the misrepresentation rule to Martin_Hyde, for example?
If what you’re trying to say is that most instances of autobiographical fuzziness or inconsistency by posters would not be considered serious or indisputable enough to fall foul of the misrepresentation rule, ISTM that that’s a feature, not a bug.
I don’t want SDMB Auskunftspersonen snooping around in posters’ private lives searching for every tiny little inconsistency in their posted descriptions. But I want there to be a baseline rule that says that holding yourself out to be something you’re not, for the purpose of persuading people that you know what you’re talking about with reference to a particular subject, is not allowed. And when somebody evidently and egregiously violates that rule, there’s nothing “bullshit” about kicking them out.
You’re talking at cross-purposes. TroutMan is saying that there’s no need to repeal an existing rule about banning posters for a specific kind of misbehavior, since repealing it wouldn’t improve the community.
You’re saying that we should not implement a rule that any poster who doesn’t improve the community should be banned.
Those two statements are not mutually exclusive or in any way contradictory.
When you gave your opinion on stolen valor, you mentioned that you were in the military. Why would you do that if you didn’t think that it lent weight to your opinion?