SurveyFail rears its ugly head again.

[krait]

Raise your hand if you remember SurveyFail, a fandom-wide fiasco featuring two idiots trying to profit from the generosity of fen (the old FanLib story!).

Apparently, they managed to cobble together a book in spite of all fandom could throw at them, and now the Freakonomics blog is promoting it... and apparently either believes these guys are genuine, or they don't care a jot whether they're genuine or not -- the description of their book is entirely flattering and does not mention any credibility issues whatsoever; in fact, it reads like a copy/paste of the back cover.

Oh, and they're hosting a Q&A for the authors. *wicked smirk*

A number of people have already expressed their articulate and/or scathing opinions of this; I've added my own to the pile.

Comments

[parhelion]

This does not surprise me at all given the extreme fail by the Freakanomics guys when it came to climate change. They seem to lose all sense of proper scholarship when their collective world views are too severely challenged, and it takes such mental work for those sorts of folks to understand our part of the fan community.

Well. At least my social status as a rebellious bohemian is thus maintained by fannishness, so I can skip consuming the vast amounts of booze and/or drugs that would only make me bilious these days.