A miracle happened again in Poland. This time, not over Vistula, but in editorials and cabinets — a 17 - year - old became a superb scientist, an icon of young science, and a national pride. At least that's how it came from articles, awards and awards. The problem is that this miracle was like our full country from a dictatorship — and Just a small touch.To break up.
A 17-year-old screwed the president and the main sewer media? The communicative was perfect: Cornelia Wieczorek – young, capable, working with abroad, groundbreaking projects. It sounded like a ready-made script for inspiring material for Sunday and even better Polish version of the movie "The Rebel by Choice". And that is precisely how she was treated — as a savant-ready man. No 1 has thought about specified mundane things as checking out publications, contacting institutions or average “whether this is at all related”. Why, if past carries itself?
The media did what they do best: rewrite 1 from another, add a fewer adjectives and publish. 1 editorial board believed the other, the another third, until everyone yet believed everyone. At 1 point, the fact that something was published became evidence that it was real. The classics of the genre: since everyone writes, it should be true.
You went on stage, too. The President’s Office, which, as can be concluded, found that if something looks good on the Internet, it is suitable for distinction. After all, why verify if there's a narrative? The paper will accept everything, and the order — as you can see — will. It is hard not to get the impression that the procedure looked something like this: "sounds good, we sign". On 10 March this year, president Karol Nawrocki awarded Cornelia Evening with the Silver Cross of Merit "for outstanding achievements in the field of inventiveness, for technological and social activity".
And so the 17-year-old went through the full strategy like an open door. The media honored her, the institutions confirmed, the state honored her. It was only individual outside who asked any trivial questions, and abruptly it turned out that there was no cooperation behind “international cooperation”, no publications behind “research” and no “breakthroughs” — at most a very creative explanation of reality and attributing to yourself the accomplishment of others or a team.
Two weeks ago, anonymous net users on Reddita and Wykopa decided to verify the “achievements” of Evening. It fell like a home of cards:
- No technological publications. Google Scholar, PubMed, DOI – nothing. No contributions.
- Collaboration with the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience – in the authoritative email consequence the institute denied that Cornelia had always worked there,
- ‘Working in Cambridge’ – it is not the University of Cambridge, it is the Cambridge Centre for global Research, a private company offering paid educational programs for young people, whose name is referred to the city, not the university,
- Rhizobotic fertilizer for which she received her laurels – is simply a squad task whose leader was her friend Diana Serjant,
- A skin cancer detection app – the originator was Cornelia's friend Leon Krupa.
Similar critical content can besides be found on Facebook.
The crucial thing is not even that individual colorizes something or even brazenly steals someone’s achievement. People have always embellished their successes, and that's not news. It is truly awesome how many institutions where powerful money is made have been drawn into this without the slightest resistance. Time, Forbes, NatGeo, TVP, Onetu, WP, Electoral Newspapers, which usually like to teach about standards, abruptly forgot what verification is for. On the another hand, the President's Office, which is giving distant the awards, seemingly considered that an audit was just a Google search engine.
It wasn't a sophisticated operation. There was no complex manipulation, deepfakes, or abroad services. All it took was a good communicative and a strategy that likes to repeat it more than to test it. If there's something to be admired, it's the cleverness of a 17-year-old woman, who truly turned out to be outstanding – she screwed all the pompous editors and political stand-ups like Zbigniew Bogucki from KPRP.
And possibly this is the most honest conclusion: the problem is not that individual tried to sale an attractive version of themselves. The problem is how many have willingly bought it — without a receipt and without checking what is actually inside.
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