[angry_octet]

A recording of a car crash: discovering on live radio/podcast that the central tenet of your book is wrong, and amateurishly so.

Naomi Wolf 'death recorded' on BBC[1], skip to 5:51. After this the book was pulped and she had some sort of psychotic break during COVID and allied with ultra-right and COVID denialist loonies.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-48639663

[globnomulous]

This is astonishing. How could a person go to the lengths of writing an entire book without ever looking up this sort of thing?

[somenameforme]

The term she mistook for meaning a death/execution had been recorded was "death recorded". So it's a mistake that could be made similarly to how one might confidently assume that a "public school" is a school which is a school that is either government funded or open to anybody in the local area.

More generally I think people are inappropriately confident in general. When you go through history just about every century prior people believed many things that the next century would come to see as plainly false. People in modern times seemed to have stopped believing this was true, yet it's likely that people during every given century also stopped believing such was true, because what you believe "now" is always assumed to be correct. Nobody wants to believe they hold false beliefs, even though there's a practically 100% certainty that all of us do, and in quite healthy quantities.

[NooneAtAll3]

...what is public school then?

[somenameforme]

A fee charging privately operated institution that does not receive public funding. [1] Brits have a way with words.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdom)

[t-3]

The US still somewhat has a similar distinction with public and private colleges. Private vs public funding rather than private vs public admission.

[ted_dunning]

A similar distinction with opposite polarity, however.

A public school in Britain does not receive public funding.

A public school in the US is entirely publicly funded.

[peterfirefly]

When rich people started having their kids educated with children of other rich people instead of at home by tutors.

[inigyou]

You have to be confident by default or you'll never get anything done. I always find myself stuck in analysis paralysis and then I look back at something like the history of Minecraft and realise he wrote the whole game (minus content additions) from scratch in only about two years, and all the updates I remember not liking were just another Tuesday for him as there had been similar updates every few weeks during that entire time period.

Like, I bought the game just before the Nether was added, and I thought that was not a very good feature, but just a few weeks before that, he'd added monster spawners, and just a few weeks before that, he'd added redstone, and a few weeks before that, minecarts, and a few weeks before that, signs, and a few weeks before that, the world wasn't infinite yet. Just another few months back, and the game didn't have an inventory. That guy had the opposite mindset of me and he got shit done.

[RossBencina]

> You have to be confident by default or you'll never get anything done.

Crippling doubt can happen. Blind confidence has its own hazards. You only need to be confident that you can proceed, in spite of having provisional, incomplete knowledge. "But if you grip to your beliefs too tightly, you will not recognise The Truth when it comes knocking on your door." (forget who said that)

[brohee]

The most astonishing thing is that she still holds the PhD whose thesis was the basis of the book. A stain on Oxford reputation.

[bryanrasmussen]

When I read your comment I completely give myself over to the understanding that you mean she wrote a whole and continuous book, without ever researching whether you meant a book about uncastrated male animals. Imagine my surprise when I go the radio to discuss your comment and a zoologist calls up to correct my understanding of a common English phrase.

[globnomulous]

Sorry, I don't follow. Did I make a dumb mistake and fail to notice? Am I a total hypocrite?

[zahlman]

Is the video available not through a proprietary player?

> After this the book was pulped and she had some sort of psychotic break during COVID and allied with ultra-right and COVID denialist loonies.

That's quite an extreme shift considering she had previously been a leading figure in third-wave feminism and an OWS activist.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

The other Naomi, Naomi Klein, wrote an entire book that uses Wolf's "transformation" as a structural scaffold to explore the rise of the new right/MAGA etc. etc. It's called "Doppelganger".

[inigyou]

Which electronics youtuber Naomi got disappeared in China for showing bad parts of china? Was that a third Naomi?

[jasonjayr]

Naomi Wu aka Sexy Cyborg - she did a lot of electronics work, and showcasing tech

[AndrewKemendo]

I couldn’t get the video to work. Here’s the relevant clip I found on youtube.

https://youtu.be/3uRCcEoGWxs

[murphyslaw]

BBC iPlayer is not available outside the UK.

[saagarjha]

It worked fine for me in the US

[onraglanroad]

It probably works fine in New England due to a dodgy regex.

[pjc50]

Some people are just contrarians who want their ideas to be the most outlandish.

This is a real problem if you're one of the people involved in something like OWS who wants to see effective change, not just making a circus about yourself.

[peterfirefly]

Why? She went from crazy (that you sympathize with) to crazy (that you don't sympathize with). She was always crazy.

[angry_octet]

I think the crazy magnitude increased massively. If you subscribe to the horseshoe model, the change in bearing wasn't that large.

[peterfirefly]

You underestimate the craziness of Occupy Wall Street and other leftist causes.

Laura Loomer is another crazy person who went from extremely crazy to just... untrustworthy but not totally crazy on Ukraine. I still think she is crazy underneath, though.

[onraglanroad]

It doesn't seem too egregious an error to assume "death recorded" means they were executed, rather than the opposite where death was recorded as the verdict but not actually executed.

Not checking newspaper reports of the period is lazy though and exactly the kind of thing I'd expect a journalist to do and therefore be the one to discover the flaw.

[angry_octet]

If you're not a historian it wouldn't be an egregious error.

[anitil]

I wasn't sure if I would be able to listen again - it's so hard to hear.

[peterfirefly]

I just listened to it. I think she handled it remarkably well.

[angry_octet]

She had poise in the moment.