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Comment by JasonFruit | Hacker News Reader

His Wikipedia article [0] is not as skeptical of his abilities and qualifications as I would have expected. Neither is that of the Vidocq Society [1]. Articles on controversial living people are hard to manage, but the Wikipedia articles and the NY Magazine article present opposite views of Walter, and I suspect they're both a bit distorted.

    [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Walter_(psychologist)
    [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidocq_Society

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Controversial dead people are also hard to manage by Wikipedia, just read the article about Alister Crowley, portrayed as an intellectual of the "dark arts" and not just another charlatan taking advantage of gullible people, which he was.

I mean, regardless of what you think about his scruples, he was the single most influential occultist of the 20th century (barring maybe LaVey), and calling him "just another charlatan" kind of ignores the things that actually make him notable. Like calling Houdini "just another street magician".

When I go to Wikipedia I'm far more interested in truth than historical relevance, both are important in its own but I -and many like me- are far more interested in what has been proven and disproven, in how something snaps with our current understanding of reality, history is mostly just a log of the foolishness of mankind, which I don't deny has some anthropological value but it's not my principal aim when I'm visiting Wikipedia, it would have saved me a lot of time if the first paragraph of Crowley's entry said he was a famous 20th century charlatan, but it doesn't, so a lot of mental processing power has to be wasted by me and every other reader of that long article to reach a judgement as easy to fact check such as water being wet.

There's a lot to disagree with there, and I do. I'm very frequently interested in what makes a person or event important to others in the past, and I'm not able to sustain your confidence that 2023 has it all figured out, where every year prior did not.

I never said that it all figured it out, thats an strawman fallacy; at most I implied that we know slightly better than decades before.

The sources in that article don't seem to check out. All the ones I've checked directly contradict the claims of the article, make obvious factual errors (e.g. referring to a Dr. Richard Walter), or seem to be paraphrasing other sources. "Criminal profiling: an introduction to behavioral evidence analysis" mentions Walter in a chapter entitled "Criminal Profiling and Forensic Fraud" and describes his perjuries at length. Yet the Wikipedia article cites it as evidence that he is "one of the creators of modern criminal profiling".

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