Pedro Franco writes:
I just saw that the noted Oliver Sacks has had what seems a very damning article published in the New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/12/15/oliver-sacks-put-himself-into-his-case-studies-what-was-the-cost). Here’s a couple of selected tidbits:
In a letter to one of his three brothers, Marcus, Sacks enclosed a copy of “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” which was published in 1985, calling it a book of “fairy tales.”
The case study is presented as an ode to the power of understanding a patient’s life as a narrative, not as a collection of symptoms. But in the transcripts of their conversations—at least the ones saved from the year that followed, as well as Sacks’s journals from that period—Rebecca never joins a theatre group or emerges from her despair.
Obviously very damning quotes. Another stab at the “scientist as a hero” myth to boot.
What’s been interesting to me are the reactions. Both Tyler Cowen (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/12/which-published-results-can-you-trust.html) and Steven Pinker (https://www.facebook.com/Stevenpinkerpage/posts/a-lesson-from-the-debunking-of-oliver-sacks-and-other-nonreplicable-findings-tru/1431125978383100/) stress the importance of looking at literatures over individual papers/books, obviously sound advice. And yet.
As other comments on the Marginal Revolution post and you’ve stressed so much, that’s not enough. Whole literatures have been decimated in the replication crisis and to emphasise just the literature review process, even when applied on a large scale, seems incorrect to me. Unfortunately, there seems no solution except, you know, doing the hard work of thinking and reading and things.
Anyway. I thought you might want to jump in, as this “consensus” advice, although better than just despairing, doesn’t sit right with me. And, I’m guessing, doesn’t sit right with you either.
Finally, both Pinker and Cowen reference a Bryan Caplan post referencing a Noah Smith post (https://www.econlib.org/no-paper-is-that-good/) which, ironically, does seem to suggest a better advice akin to what I wrote above.
My first reaction is that I’m a huge Oliver Sacks fan. The article, by Rachel Aviv, is fascinating.
Here’s one bit:
Mort Doran, a surgeon with Tourette’s syndrome whom Sacks profiled in “Anthropologist,” told me that he was happy with the way Sacks had rendered his life. He said that only one detail was inaccurate–Sacks had written that the brick wall of Doran’s kitchen was marked from Doran hitting it during Tourette’s episodes. “I thought, Why would he embellish that? And then I thought, Maybe that’s just what writers do.” Doran never mentioned the error to Sacks. He was grateful that Sacks “had the gravitas to put it out there to the rest of the world and say, ‘These people aren’t all nuts or deluded. They’re real people.’”
I’m surprised that Doran is so mellow. If someone interviewed me and reported that a wall in my kitchen was marked from me hitting it, I’d be really annoyed!
Also this:
In his journal, reflecting on his work with Tourette’s patients, Sacks described his desire to help their illness “reach fruition,” so that they would become floridly symptomatic. “With my help and almost my collusion, they can extract the maximum possible from their sickness—maximum of knowledge, insight, courage,” he wrote. “Thus I will FIRST help them to get ill, to experience their illness with maximum intensity; and then, only then, will I help them get well!”
Maybe we don’t want to “get well,” dude!
Overall, though, after reading the Aviv article, I remain very positive about Sacks. OK, not quite so much as before, and I do wish he’d clearly labeled in his books what was real and what was invention, but I’m still a fan.
Yes, it seems that he made stuff up, but he still seemed to be describing real things, unlike people like Wansink and Ariely who made up data (or had the misfortune to keep doing research projects with data-faking colleagues), or people like the beauty-and-sex ratio guy or the ovulation-and-voting researchers who did the equivalent of going through piles of random numbers in order to tell stories with no real evidential basis, or etc etc etc. I still feel like I got a lot out of the Oliver Sacks books that I’ve read.
And, yeah, he was barbaric on Tourette’s syndrome, but those were barbaric attitudes expressed privately, in his journal. Sacks in his public writings on the topic was reasonable and civilized. So I think he deserves credit for channeling some of his worst impulses into his diary and keeping them out of his books.
Overall, I remain a fan of Oliver Sacks.
P.S. As a separate matter, I’m not convinced by the above-linked post by psychologist Steven Pinker, given that Pinker doesn’t seem to distinguish between criticism of unreplicable published research and what he’s elsewhere called “social media hate mobs” (see part 3 of this post). Also, elsewhere he expressed a naive (in my opinion) take on pure crap social psychology research (in this case, the ridiculously bad ovulation-and-voting study).
It’s easy to make fun of Pinker cos he puts himself out there (see here) but overall I appreciate his willingness to engage with the world. So I’m not saying he’s a bad guy or that nothing he says should be trusted, just that it’s hard to know what to think when he starts writing about scientific skepticism.
Somewhere I remember reading that it was revealed that Farley Mowat was never a field biologist studying wolves… that one hurt. i loved both the book and the movie of “Never Cry Wolf” but it was apparently entirely fiction? And yet it told a fundamentally real story about wolves in the ecosystem… Someone set me straight on this, am I misremembering?
I loved the book too, and I was shocked when I learned that it wasn’t actual reportage. Yet everything I’ve read about wolves (and I also got to meet a domesticated one in person, such a privilege) since then has been consistent with what he wrote. Like you, this leaves me a little confused.
Daniel –
I loved that biok also.si much so thst these many years later I still remember a quote from the book: “I never let the facts get in the way of the truth!”
It’s not entirely clear which part was embellished wrt the marks on the wall: if it’s only the marks (rather than the hitting), then that seems fairly minor; if he never struck the wall at all, that’s a much larger fabrication.
“why has Doran been so mellow”?
I experienced the rage of having my stories distorted. Someone interviewed me for a book on my grandfather, and I got the book mailed to me.
Upon reading the book, I got so angry about how he distorted what I told him, that I went to the nearest garbage can and threw the book there.
Once his life story and experience gave generally been honestly described, the wall tale is irrelevant.
But an interesting data line about the author here! ;)
I think there are significant second-order effects here. As you point out, data faking in science makes life harder for honest researchers, as their results never come close to those of the fakers.
I think the same is true for nonfiction writers. The fakers have better stories, better anecdotes, etc. Their writing is generally much better than that of the real and honest nonfiction writers. So that creates an incentive to cheat.
My impression is that nonfiction writing went through a mini “replication crisis” of its own. There were some famous books that turned out to be fake and people are now much more suspect.
Dmitri:
I agree with your general point, and, as such, I’d expect that hearing that Sacks faked his stories would make me angry at Sacks. That was my main reason for writing the above post, to try to explore why, surprisingly, I’m still a fan of Sacks.
“Obviously very damning quotes.”
What quotes? There is just the third-hand “fairy tales” and we don’t even get the full sentence.
The New Yorker article is paywalled. If you google “Oliver Sacks criticism” you don’t’ get much of anything.
I’m a big Oliver Sacks fan, and if he fabricated a bunch of stuff, I would sadly adjust my opinion of him. But there is nothing here for me to go on.
Matt:
You can probably find a copy of that issue of the New Yorker at your local library. As I wrote above, I’m still a fan of Sacks. But it does seem that he made up some stuff and claimed it was true. The fabrication does change opinion of him in a negative direction, but my overall view of him remains positive.
Matt: I don’t see a paywall. Maybe try incognito mode. The URL which worked for me is
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/12/15/oliver-sacks-put-himself-into-his-case-studies-what-was-the-cost
Here is an archived version which is freely accessible: https://archive.is/20260106042637/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/12/15/oliver-sacks-put-himself-into-his-case-studies-what-was-the-cost
Booo! Double Booo!
Sacks may partly humanize unusual conditions, but he also uses his patients as a modern freak show for his own profit.
As someone who has spent a career doing research related to individuals with disabilities, I find his work incredibly offensive in almost every way.
Now to “discover” much of it is fiction (knock me over with a feather) just adds to my enragement.
I’m sorry, but I don’t know how you could read his books and consider them a “freak show”. Veracity aside (and, having read the article, it seems the stories are substantially true, even if a few details are embellished), Sacks goes out of his way to portray his subjects as sympathetic.
Sacks was a great writer who should d efinitely be looked at seriously. Fact checking is always good. It’s fine to critique, but his books, book reviews and articles were never presented as reproducible research. A former neighbor of mine was a colleague of his. He was known at the hospital as not the greatest clinician, but someone who was very good at talking to patients. I think that comes through in his writing.
Decades ago, my family was interviewed by Oliver Sacks. Mostly, I just remember him lining up his pens end to end. My mom remembers him mistaking our cat for two cats because he saw her from two different angles, and she (my mom, not my cat 🙂) had talked with another person that he had interviewed, who noted that he had mixed up the descriptions of her home and Sacks’ own. That problem, though, was caught by a fact checker working on his behalf. (Whether he hired the fact checker or the publisher did, I don’t know.)
From what my mom and this other person can tell, he doesn’t seem to make up things out of malice or an intent to exaggerate, but rather because he accidentally gets things mixed up.