I worked with a guy like that. He produced an incredible amount of output, meticulously detailed and footnoted, but none of it seemed especially novel or even all that relevant to the task at hand. It turned out he was just doing a Google search for something relevant-ish, grabbing the first hit on Scholar, and copypasting the Related Work section verbatim
I’ve worked with people who weren’t quite up to snuff, or whose skills have deteriorated, but he was the only person I’ve ever worked with who was a complete fraud.
If you like the RCA tape cartrige — and who doesn’t? — then this video is for you. He gets deep into the subject. Very deep.
And then it ends with a couple of British muppets. I will let you find out why.
All with a pleasant northern accent.
He had a talent for turning extremely technical psycholinguistics debates into exciting narratives. But, even within psycholinguistics, he had a strong tendency to present cherry-picked data and half-arguments as if they consisted the entirety of the evidence.
His early stuff was worth reading, but only if you made sure to read the opposing counterarguments as well.
