The curious case of fake NASA geniuses
This is such a sad story. The TL;DR version is that people outside the cities of India seek to improve their standing in life by asserting scientific prowess and lying about their achievements. In the US a similar effect can be seen by people cheating on standardized tests, and faking their &quot;origin story&quot; to get accepted into &quot;good&quot; Universities.<p>What is sad is that people <i>could</i> be doing the work that their lying implies but they don&#x27;t. And that seems tied to the expectations set for them which value &quot;scores&quot; over &quot;ability.&quot;<p>My daughter in grade school conspired with a friend to cheat on a test. I found out about it and was really angry with her. We sat down and I tried to patiently explain that I didn&#x27;t care if she got B&#x27;s and C&#x27;s and D&#x27;s if she had actually worked to learn the material. And if the material wasn&#x27;t understandable to come to me and we would brainstorm and implement ideas that would try to break through that impenetrability. That experience helped shut down misconceptions that my &quot;pride&quot; in my kids was because they scored highly on tests, and replaced it with an understanding that what I was proud of was how much they had learned and how much effort they put into that understanding.<p>That leads to the second thing which saddens me about this article is that the &quot;problem&quot; of praising scores over abilities and effort is with the parents and not the children. An outreach program to parents is unlikely to succeed if they are of the mindset &quot;Well the other parents are going to cheat and their children will get the top spots while my child tries to get their honestly? No way, I&#x27;m not a sucker.&quot;