Michael Crichton

Her blog's URLs are date-stamped, and the phantom hits match that pattern too closely for coincidence: a model invents a post, hands a reader the link, and the link goes nowhere. She frames it as Michael Crichton's "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect": catching a source's confident errors on a topic you know, then trusting it on everything else.

A well-known HN security engineer dismissed her argument as relitigating a two-year-old debate. A second blogger said the same pattern hits her own site, her name attached to things she never wrote.

The "small penis rule" traces to a 1998 NYT piece: authors deter libel suits by attaching a demeaning detail to a thinly-veiled character. Michael Crichton allegedly used it on a critic; a law professor argues it's mostly ineffective.

The thread reframes it — the point is exaggerating low-status traits, not anatomy — and questions the logic, before a former estates lawyer drops the will-drafting version of the exact same trap.