Unfortunately, she was wrong about this, as we learned almost a half a century later, when Derek Freeman, who actually spoke Samoan, went to Samoa and interviewed the now grown women who had been interviewed by Margaret Mead many years earlier.
Freeman's case is not so clear-cut. From Skeptic Magazine:
The Trashing of Margaret Mead: How Derek Freeman Fooled Us All on an Alleged Hoax
That's odd. The Wilson quote in aausch's post heavily implies that Freeman spoke Samoan and Mead didn't. But Paul Shankman's Skeptic article says
Mead was a competent fieldworker who spoke Samoan with a degree of fluency and who understood Samoan joking.
Hmm. Wonder who's right.
A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).
ETA: It would seem that rationality quotes are no longer desired. After several days this thread stands voted into the negatives. Wolud whoever chose to to downvote this below 0 would care to express their disapproval of the regular quotes tradition more explicitly? Or perhaps they may like to browse around for some alternative posts that they could downvote instead of this one? Or, since we're in the business of quotation, they could "come on if they think they're hard enough!"