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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Liars, published by Kelsey Piper on April 5, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Yesterday the New Yorker published a detailed exploration of an 'expert on serial killers', Stéphane Bourgoin, who turned out to be comprehensively lying about his own past, the murder of his girlfriend (who appears to not exist), his credentials, how many serial killers he'd interviewed, etc., but who was taken seriously for many years, getting genuine privileged access to serial killers for interviews and to victims' families/support groups as a result of his lying. I find serial/compulsive/career liars fascinating. One of the best serial-liar stories that I ran into as a warning story for journalists is that of Stephen Glass, the 1990s New Republic writer who turned out to be comprehensively making up most of the juicy details of his articles, including forging handwritten transcripts of conversations that never happened to present to the magazine's fact-checkers.I mostly just read about this because it's fun, but I do think it has crystallized some things for me which are useful to have in mind even if you don't have fun reading about serial liars. (Takeaways are at the bottom if you want to skip to that.) The dynamics of how serial liars go unnoticed, and how the socially awkward information "hey, we think that guy is a fraud" gets propagated (or fails to get propagated) seem to me to also describe how other less clear-cut kinds of errors and misconduct go unnoticed.A recurring theme in the New Yorker article is that people knew this guy was full of crap, but weren't personally motivated to go try to correct all the ways he was full of crap. “Neither I nor any of our mutual friends at the time had heard the story of his murdered girlfriend, nor of his so-called F.B.I. training,” a colleague and friend of Bourgoin’s from the eighties told me. “It triggered rounds of knowing laughter among us, because we all knew it was absolutely bogus.” Bourgoin was telling enough lies that eventually one of them would surely ring wrong to someone, though by then he'd often moved on to a different audience and different lies. I ended up visualizing this as a sort of expanding ring of people who'd encountered Bourgoin's stories. With enough exposure to the stories, most people suspected something was fishy and started to withdraw, but by then Bourgoin had reached a larger audience and greater fame, speaking to new audiences for whom the warning signs hadn't yet started to accumulate. Eventually, he got taken down by an irritated group of internet amateurs who'd noticed all the ways in which he was dishonest and had the free time and spite to actually go around comprehensively proving it. This is a dynamic I've witnessed from the inside a couple of times. There's a Twitter personality called 'Lindyman' who had his fifteen minutes of internet fame last year, including a glowing New York Times profile. Much of his paid Substack content was plagiarized. A lot of people know this and had strong evidence for a while before someone demonstrated it publicly.I personally know someone who Lindyman plagiarized from, who seriously debated whether to write a blog post to the effect of 'Lindyman is a plagiarist', but ended up not doing so. It would've taken a lot of time and effort, and probably attracted the wrath of Lindyman's followers, and possibly led to several frustrating weeks of back and forth, and is that really worth it? And that's for plagiarism of large blocks of text, which is probably the single most provable and clear-cut kind of misbehavior, much harder to argue about than the lies Glass or Bourgoin put forward. Eventually someone got fed up and made the plagiarism public, but it'd been a running joke in certain circles for a while before then.There are more examples I'm aware of where a researc...