MaryRosh

John Lott keeps trying to use sock puppets to scrub his wikipedia page of criticism. Unfortunately other wikipedia users undo his changes, he makes them again and he gets into an edit war. He's used his socks to try to alter the page many many times. (See round 1 round 2 round 3). This weekend there was another edit war. One anonymous user changed the page to Lott's preferred version. Just six minutes later a user with IP address 69.141.3.180 changed it back. Three minutes later it was changed back to Lott's version. Battle was joined with edits coming every three or four minutes,…
New Scientist has an article on sock puppets (subscription required): IF YOU thought sock puppets were made merely for the amusement of small children, think again. In cyberspace, a sock puppet is a vandal's alter ego, an additional account that they use to pose as a different user and tamper with facts and dishonestly promote alternative viewpoints. The article ends with: And one academic was caught using a sock puppet to review his own book and to pose as one of his students. It's not just small children that sock puppets keep amused. They don't mention the name of this academic, but we…
The edit war on the Wikipedia article on John Lott has continued. Lott has now tried changing the page to his preferred version almost 50 times. The trouble he has encountered is that since his changes are so unreasonable at least half a dozen people have been undoing them. So, if you were Lott and it looked like you were outnumbered, what would you do? Yes that's right, create an army of sock puppets: Timewarp, Alt37, Purtilo, Sniper1, Serinity, Henry1776, Stotts and Gordinier. These accounts have just been created and pretty well all they have done there is change the page into Lott's…
The John Lott article at Wikipedia was unprotected and the edit war has restarted. Lott is using a sockpuppet called Timewarp to try to make massive changes to the article. Some of the additions he wants to make are interesting: Although Lott has published in academic journals regarding education, voting behavior of politicians, industrial organization, labor markets, judicial confirmations, and crime, his research is hard to consistently tag as liberal or conservative. For example, some research argues for environmental penalties on firms. Hmmm, that sounds familiar. Here's Mary Rosh I…
All kinds of action over at the Wikipedia page on John Lott, with someone using the handle "Timewarp" starting an edit war that has led to the page being temporarily protected from changes to encourage Timewarp to discuss the changes he wants. Timewarp has denied being John Lott, but sure sounds a lot like him.
Last year an anonymous person from the American Enterprise Institute repeatedly tried and failed to remove all criticism of Lott from hiswikipedia page. He eventually admitted to being Lott and claimed that the "posting contains a huge number of inaccuracies and outright lies". Over the past few weeks a sequence of more subtle changes were made to the Lott article from several different IPs. For example, this change was made by Mr 38.118.73.78: Before After Lott's actions were discovered when weblogger Julian Sanchez noticed that the IP address Lott used to reply to an email was the same…
Last year blogger Xrlq href="http://xrlq.com/2004/03/17/hat-of-the-day-stim-lamberts-xrlq/" rel="nofollow">dismissed my criticism of Lott as "paranoid rantings" and "gratuitous attacks on Lott personally", calling me "Dim", "Timwit", "Timbecile", "a jerk" and "Dim Lambert". This year I noted that Lott had signed his name to a review of Freakonomics using the same Amazon account that he used for a five-star review his own book. Over the years the account name had changed from JL to washingtonian2 to economist123. Xrlq href="http://xrlq.com/2005/05/11/lottsa-personalities/" rel="nofollow…
Back in 2003 I reported on The Case of the File from the Future, where Lott tried to destroy some incriminating evidence, but did it so ineptly that he made things worse for himself. Well, he's done it again. After I posted the story of Economist123 and his book reviews, "Tom H" (one of Lott's sock puppets) popped up to argue that Economist123 was not John Lott and had just happened to repost a John Lott review. Unlikely, but just possible, so, at 12:06 I pointed out another damning piece of evidence: So, Tom H, you claim that Economist123 is just somebody else who reposted Lott's review…
You've met Mary Rosh and maximcl and Washingtonian. Now meet Bob H and Tom H and Sam and Kevin H and Too bad Tim is not very accurate and Gregg. Yes, Lott created a whole army of sockpuppets that he uses to post comments on my blog. At first he would use just one sock to make a point or dispute something I wrote. But after a while he would deploy multiple socks in the same thread to back each other up. For example, in this thread where "Too bad Tim is not very accurate", Gregg and Kevin H backed each other up with statements like: "Too bad Tim is not very accurate" nails lambert. And…
If you use a pseudonym to post a five-star review of your book: More Guns, Less Crime by John LottImportant accurate info that Opponents constantly distort, November 8, 2001 Reviewer: Economist123 - See all my reviews This is by far the most comprehensive study ever done on guns. It provides extensive evidence on waiting periods, the Brady Act, one-gun-a-month rules, concealed handgun laws. For some gun laws this is the only study available and it is important to note how many academics have tired to challenge his work on concealed handgun laws and failed and that no one has even bothered…
To all the people arriving here via a search for "Washingtonian blog": The following table is provided as a public service so that you can keep your pseudonymous posters straight: Pseudonym Real name Writes about Blog link News story Mary Rosh John R Lott Jr How wonderful John Lott is here link Washingtonian John R Lott Jr How wonderful John Lott is here   Washingtonienne Jessica Cutler Her sex life here link In completely unrelated John Lott news, Kieran Healy is promoting Lott as a commencement speaker.
Amazon has now deleted the first two of the three Lott reviews of Targeting Guns and edited the third one to remove the praise of Lott. However, while they deleted two, I found three more of his self-reviews. I've put all of his reviews together on this page. It's an impressive body of work, with eighteen five-star reviews of his own books and ten anonymous pans of rival's books. Two of the newly discovered reviews aren't very interesting---they just repeat stuff about how wonderful Lott's book is, but this one is almost poignant:Powerful book that sets the…
After finding some clues on Amazon's Canadian site that revealed three more of Lott's reviews, I decided to check their other sites. On their German site I found the review below. This review seems to have also been deleted when the Mary Rosh review was deleted. I think that was because this review was posted anonymously from Mary Rosh's Amazon account (it's from Philadelphia, just like Mary's one). and when Amazon deleted all of Mary Rosh's reviews they also deleted the anonymous ones. Very well written, solid researched book, 30. Januar 2000 Rezensentin/…
When I saw the story about the Amazon.ca unmasking anonymous reviewers, I took myself over there to see what I could find. Well, they had fixed the glitch, but I noticed that for some reviews, the location given for the reviewer was different on the Canadian site. This difference lets me more more certain that Lott has reviewed his own books, and also helped me find three more Lott self-reviews. Amazon's Canadian and US sites treat the location of the reviewer differently. On the US site, all the reviews by a reviewer have the same location---the one given for the most…
When I looked at the reviews of More Guns, Less Crime I wasn't sure that this review was written by Lott: If you are interested in the facts, read this book, July 10, 2000 Reviewer: A reader from Miami, Florida A couple of friends of mine have been nagging me to read this book for a couple of years. When the second edition came out I finally gave in and got it (for $9.60 I couldn't argue that the price was too high). Anyway, I am only sorry that I didn't read this book earlier. As an academic and a person who has been somewhat anti-gun, I had two reactions to the book... The only reason…
Apparently, authors have been using reviews at Amazon.com to anonymously praise their own books and pan rival books. Who knew? It seems a glitch at Amazon's Canadian site revealed the names of all the anonymous reviewers. And yes, I checked and it's fixed now. I also checked Google's cache and archive.org. If you have looked at Lott's book at Amazon's Canadian site in the past week, then check your browser's disk cache---it might contain something interesting. I was actually looking at the reviews at Amazon's main site last week, because Greg Kopp had posted in…
Some commentators have not been persuaded that the reviews by "A reader from Swarthmore, PA USA" were really by Lott. Fine. I rummaged around in Google's cache and found older versions of the reviews of the books by Kevin Hassett, Robert Ehrlich and Cook and Ludwig. In those versions the location of the reviewer is not Swarthmore (Lott's home), but Washington, DC (Lott's workplace). Why did it change? I experimented by reviewing the nearest book to my computer (Game Programming Gems 2) and changing my location from Maroubra to Sydney. Not only was my location given as…
Links from Chris Mooney, Atrios and Buzzflash. Ted Barlow wonders what John Lott has to do to get fired from the AEI. "Sadly, No!" helpfully suggests that with two more personalities Lott can start a boy band. John Quiggin asks "why so few individual conservatives and libertarians have dumped Lott". Kevin Drum says that Lott was stupid for continuing with the sock puppetry after he got caught once. In fact, Lott didn't even pause. On Jan 22 he confessed to using the Mary Rosh sock and wrote "I shouldn't have used it". On Jan 23 his other sock was back posting…
Mark Kleiman has some apposite words from Master K'ung for Lott, while Chris Mooney calls me a "super sleuth". I'm just in it for the scooby snacks.
Everyone has something about Lott's latest untruth that I mentioned yesterday. Mark Kleiman says Isn't there anyone in the management of the American Enterprise Institute with a modicum of institutional self-respect? Brad Delong replies: If they had any institutional self-respect, why would they keep James "Dow 36,000" Glassman and Kevin "We're Not Joking: Dow 36,000 by 2003" Hassett? Why would they keep Charles "I Don't Know What a Correlation Is" Murray? It's not just John "I've Taken My Own Courses, and I Can Report I'm Really a Great Teacher" Lott.…