20 Comments

The fake Beasley sure is glamorous, though, much like pictures of my mom from the late 1940s and early 50s.

Combine the spread of AI with lots of motivated reasoning from every point on the political spectrum, and we’re going to end up with most of history being falsified.

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Thanks for tracking this down. Hey, you know, one woman is as good as another, right? This is why I can't abide books without footnotes. I make it a mission to track things down if something seems off, and without footnotes, it is really difficult and sometimes impossible. I am glad I live in a town with a University library, which makes it much easier.

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This reminds me of my WW2 unit research. I got a local magazine through the door repeating the same old half-story, with misspelled names, that I'm frustrated with. It all tracks back to either Wikipedia or another popular website. Meanwhile, no one reads what I publish about it. So it just goes on.

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Why does the real picture look like Joe pesci in a hat.

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Crazy

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You are so right, not only about academia building a false narrative on a single quote, but also apparently in medicine. Wasn’t the entire “OxyContin is nonaddictive” claim started by Purdue Pharma extracting a quote from a letter published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1980, rather than from any rigorous testing?

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This story reminds me of another frequently mislabeled photo. An image of Robert Rochon Taylor (1899-1957; prominent black Chicago banker and Valerie Jarrett's grandfather) somehow became associated with Robert Rayford (1953-1969; poor black kid who died of AIDS long before it was common).

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I’d heard of Rayford (isn’t there debate about HIV that early?). Didn’t know they were using the wrong pic

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IIRC Rayford's case is accepted as actual HIV without much controversy. Some of the cases claimed in late 1950s Africa are more dubious.

Regarding the pic, this article has an interesting little bit of backstory ( https://www.thebody.com/article/embracing-what-we-know-and-dont-know-robert-rayford ) although it's not clear how the 2018 op-ed referenced came to include it.

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Just now googled both women inventors and guess whose picture pops up at the top? Fascinating!

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That’s one reason why people were once taught to cite original sources.

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I think we've always been somewhat ahistorical. Until relatively modern times when historical dramas in color with some degree of modern sensibilities, the idea of the past was inseparable from B&W. And even as we might be able to remember highlight dates, they exist in isolation totally disconnected from what else was going on then.

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Such a pretty woman in the photo. She has the Agent Carter look.

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Elizabeth Short

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Surprised that nobody has mentioned this yet, but she looks strangely close to The Black Dahlia. The curls and the lipstick. The far off stare. Uncanny

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Yeah that's what I was thinking.

And in the tiny thumbnail on my phone, I also thought, "Oh, Patsy Cline!"

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Excellent points! This reminds me of Ancestry family trees where some (perhaps most) members cite other members’ trees as their source for facts. It is very frustrating. Citing Original records/sources should be common practice. It’s just common sense, as you say.

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I know who that is. It's every woman 😃

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I had a similar experience when I was trying to understand protein purification. Every reference led to a prior that culminated in a paper in 1970 that said “enzyme was purified from hog kidneys using standard techniques”, and I gave up.

It was only when I talked to a sales rep 7 years later that I understood the basic method of protein purification.

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