GardenBanter.co.uk - View Single Post

19-08-2003, 05:02 PM

In article ,
wrote:

On 19 Aug 2003 12:39:33 GMT, (Bill Oliver) opined:

That's not an answer.

But that's OK, Tom, *you* were the one who thought it so important
to roll out where I worked and what my credentials are -- and
paghat is still obsessing over it. *You* were the one who
made the effort to track down where I worked and one of my
degrees. *You* clearly think it's an important factor in
evaluating someone's opinion.

I know many people with degrees who are social idiots. Literally.

Why, then, are you so afraid to reveal the same thing about
yourself? I mean, if it's an important thing when evaluating
*my* opinion, the same *must* be true of you.

C'mon, Tom, let's have a little disclosure here.

What are you hiding? Why are you being so coy?

Who is your employer?

What are your scientific credentials?

billo

You are starting to sound very creepy.

I was a medical & health sciences editor for a few years & had to render
the poor writings & hastily-concocted-at-deadline's-end data for folks
like billo, working my magic to make their gibberish come out as
publishable articles, or revising the articles again after journal editors
demanded alterations. So I recognize the insecurity of a type of
self-glorified technician of limited achievement in a publish-or-perish
environment. It was never the competent researchers who felt only someone
with their same degree could even read the stuff (while yet expecting some
twelve-bucks-an-hour editor to make sense of it for them). And like Billo
giving fallacio to Monsanto's hired guns, it was exclusively the worst
doctors in the health sciences complex, the least published, the least
respected, the most depressed, the most worried about where they'd be
working when the present gig ran out, who ranted & raved at the editors
even though these dumbasses' poor publication recorsd were strictly their
own & nothing we could do would make them easily publishable. These were
the kinds of writing-impaired researchers the health science editors were
horrified to see coming with another pile of inept scribblings for us to
condense & organize & render at least comprehensible.

Occasionally we had genuine gibberish, could only GUESS what they intended
to be saying, so we just rewrote the stuff as our own ideas, & you know
what, no one could tell the difference. The worst case was when a
department head had her class students interview prostituttes, then she
brought the raw data to me to turn into publishable manuscripts. The
doctor didn't even provide a rough draft, just the interviews her students
obtained. I'd heard about this "researcher" from another editor but
thought it was an exaggeration. I did write one entire article, then I
quit, as I didn't want to waste my own creative energies as a ghost
writer. For over a year after, I was harrassed at home with offers to
write more articles on the side, but by then I had my own book contracts &
wasn't tempted.

Once when a grant deadline approached & might not be renewed if nothing
could be shown to have been done in the previous year, about three days of
work was done, some nice stains made & photographed, while I wrote a
proposal full of claims about what was done in the past year & what would
be furthered in the coming year. I helped a technician "prove" a "fact"
about cancer cells that was not actually in evidence, & the head physician
in the department put his name to it. The resulting report with scarsely a
single truth in it got the grant was renewed, & not one more day of work
was done on that project for many months to follow. But about a year
later, a manuscript was given into my hands to edit, & I recognized long
patches of it as my own grant proposal! The same crapola we
all-but-made-up in haste for the grant renewal was now on its way to
publication in a medical journal.

That's the environment of general ineptitude & laziness & cheating that so
easily becomes, among Monsanto hired guns, complete & intentional
fabrication of data, with plenty of the billo types cheering on the
fakery, as few of 'em any longer know the difference.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/