A death, a plagiarism scandal and a quest for revenge: the tale of Otto Z | Hacker News Reader

A death, a plagiarism scandal and a quest for revenge: the tale of Otto Z

theguardian.com

69 pointsHooke27 comments

No spoilers here, that is a worthy read, I never saw the turns coming.

Seems like all of this stems from a very cavalier attitude towards making accusations from the self-proclaimed "plagiarism hunter". There seem to have been a whole bunch of alarm bells regarding the book itself, so it's surprising he didn't look further into it before publishing his allegations.

> At the library, the elderly archivist told him they didn’t carry it. After consulting her databases, she informed him that no other library in the world did, either.

> [...]

> Weber’s research turned up no other references to her groundbreaking conference.

> [...]

> When he received a pdf of the red book he was supposed to have plagiarised, he was struck by how many glaring errors it contained – and how many people had overlooked them.

> [...]

> Despite his vow, Stefan Weber has not retired from plagiarism hunting, but he has sworn to never again work with “grey literature”

Seems it's not the first time either, as Weber was convicted in 2024 of defamation due to "false and malicious allegations on Weber's blog".

Yes, Weber was definitely a very large part of the problem here and there are many red flags attached to his character to begin with.

Being this hot for dirt is never good in an investigator, but he was masterfully set up by Otto. Not sticking to that very expensive vow makes him a strong negative. Anybody can make mistakes, but not like that and if you recognize the magnitude of your error and publicly commit to something like that you should stick to it. Otto exposed not only himself but also exposed Weber, and in a way Weber is the bigger problem. Otto to me seems mentally not well.

> Carbon dating corroborated these claims – […] was produced no earlier than 2015

I was not aware that carbon dating could be this accurate.

I also found that part weird. I can't find in Wikipedia a clear date. Gemini says that the minimum is "100-300 years" but I followed all the citations but couldn't find the source of that range.

My guess it that they used another isotope with a shorter half life (or is another case of forensic snake oil, that would be a interesting second twist in this case).

> Accelerator mass spectroscopy (AMS) radiocarbon measurements were performed on starch extracts and cellulose fibers from 50 paper samples with known production year from 1950 to 2018. For most of the paper samples, the measured 14 C concentration values in the starch extracts were highly correlated with the data of the 14 C bomb peak calibration curve. The differences between the calibrated ages and the actual harvest years of the starch-containing plants were only up to 3 years.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35195289/

Thanks. Even more details https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_pulse

Nuclear testing in the middle of the twentieth century threw up lots of carbon-14 in the atmosphere. It has been slowly washing out since then. Because we have measured the amount of carbon-14 every year, we can use the amount of carbon-14 in it to simply look up (approximately) what year some plant material grew up in. This version of carbon-14 dating has nothing to do with the nuclear-decay-based carbon-14 dating that most people are familiar with, which acts over thousands of years.

Proof that nonfiction is wilder than fiction.

> nonfiction is wilder than fiction

Yup. Among other reasons, in this case due to the very much nonfictional consequences you’d expect in a “real world” story like this: Had Graw been convicted and stripped of his titles, basically anyone found guilty using evidence from one of his investigations/autopsies, even decades later, could attempt to appeal their case and very likely, this would have completely flooded the courts.

For this reason, this was a huge case here in Munich, and the prosecutors’ office, from what the public could read in newspapers, was very anxious about the outcome all throughout like 2024 to 2026, IIRC.

It would have created an absolutely unholy mess with plenty of collateral damage. This guy really deserved everything he got at the same time I wonder about his mental state. You have to be more than just a little bit disconnected from reality to do this sort of thing without a thought for the consequences. Now you almost have to wonder what other skeletons there are in that cupboard waiting to be uncovered.

Funny because it reads almost exactly as a Ferdinand von Schirach story

I usually like this kind of long read format. But in this case it would need to be a bit longer. Even if it details it from two narrative viewpoints, the ending is missing. The motive, the explanation

This was before AI and certainly must have been quite an effort to pull off plausibly. Imagine what is possible now.

Invent an alternative history in an afternoon or two and gaslight the gullible into your version of reality. I wait for the day where a company is ordered to hand out their communication to a court and instead of doing so hands out an AI invented but plausible one.

I would not doubt at all that that has already happened. Lawyers have already been caught with AI output:

https://www.cityam.com/lawyer-struck-off-for-using-fake-ai-e...

I feel like the guardian shouldn't be messing up the oxford comma like that.

The Oxford comma is optional according to the Guardian style guide: https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-style-guide-o

That may be, but it still hurts readability. It also immediately stuck out to me

So you are saying it _was_ an option and the editor just has bad taste

Ironically the "Oxford comma" is American.

The Guardian is English, I am surprised they tolerate it

Are you sure?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma says: "The serial comma is most often attributed to Horace Hart, the printer and controller of the Oxford University Press from 1893 to 1915." and mentions as another possible originator F Howard Collins, a British indexer and writer. Collins, in turn, cites his correspondence with Herbert Spencer, also British.

Conspiracy theorists, unlike normal people, find it easy to believe that people will expend enormous effort to create an illusion. I'd like to take this opportunity to say we told you so.

The question isn't "does it happen", the question is "how common is it?". If a normal person is dealing someone who seems to have an "everything is always a conspiracy" worldview - then "that stuff doesn't happen" can be both an assertion that the non-normal is nuts, and that the very frustrated normal just wants them to shut up and go away.

As a prior, I'd assume that the conspiracist is probably more willing to "make that stuff happen". Sometimes, the accusation is the confession.

I'd argue that it's the anti-conspiracy theories, that are just as common and almost as insidious. For example, the idea that the intelligence agencies aren't aware of what their government representatives are doing in the background, and can't/don't influence it. There are literally thousands of individuals who work in the same town with the same people with, their very jobs are to discover and keep secrets, and they are almost all presumably capable. Means, motive, and opportunity. And yet, supposedly of the many thousands, none of them has ever done it without express permission from a judge. It would take a massive conspiracy of group think for it not to happen.

There was no conspiracy here - just the work of one lone man.

Nobody will deny the existence of individual liars and charlatans.

In the case, the purported conspiracy was that the powerful forensic pathologist was protected by a shadowy elite

One person acting alone is not a conspiracy. It takes two to both tango, as well as conspire.

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