Dennis Hackethal's Website, Veritula, Is Worse than Plagiarism

Elliot Temple
,
1
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://curi.us/2604-dennis-hackethals-website-veritula-is-worse-than-plagiarism
1 Like
Dennis Hackethal Threatened to Sue Me; Now He's Blogging about Me
2

If you want to help, or have relevant information about Hackethal, message me.

3

I think that what is happening to you regarding what Dennis Hackethal is doing is really awful. I am sorry this is happening to you.

1 Like
4

Dm? Or just in the forum?

Extensively using CF ideas and misattributing them to Popper is worse than plagiarism.

It surprises me that a person can take someone else’s ideas without giving credit to the source and also attribute them to somebody else. Is there not a way Hackethal can get in trouble for this? Like is there like an authority to tell? Or is this like an issue that requires legal action?

While CF isn’t very popular, if someone actually likes my ideas enough to study them, I don’t want to be plagiarized or misattributed.

That makes sense, like just cuz CF isn’t that popular that doesn’t mean it’s ok to steal your ideas and plagiarize them and misatrribute them. I don’t like that someone is taking advantage of you just cuz you’re not popular enough to stop them.

5

Message = DM. You can also just post your comments in the Hackethal forum topics.

Who? He isn’t affiliated with a university, isn’t publishing in a journal, and doesn’t have a traditional book publisher.

People can judge him.

As long as you don’t violate copyright, then plagiarism and false attribution are generally legal, just unethical. (Other things like cyberharassment and defamation could have lawsuit potential, but getting help from the legal system can be very expensive.)

6

There is contingency fee in the US that some lawyers offer. Meaning one only pays if one wins. But I haven’t researched it much and I guess that’s only the layer fee. There might still be other costs during a lawsuit that one has to pay win or lose.

7

Lawyers typically only work on contingency when there’s a significant chance of winning a large amount of money. I don’t think Hackethal is a rich enough target, and even if he had e.g. a million dollars, how would you establish a million dollars of damages in court?

8

Quoting from the article:

Sometime after I accused his book of plagiarism, Hackethal “avoided Temple’s blog for years”. He says he was trying to prevent accidental plagiarism.

He’s way too steeped in Temple’s writing to accidentally commit plagiarism.

When I commented about Temple on a Substack post, Dennis Hackethal replied that “Your writing style parrots Temple so much,” demonstrating that Hackethal has read Elliot Temple’s work extensively—so extensively that he has detailed knowledge not only of Temple’s ideas but of Temple’s writing style. Hackethal also demonstrated this in other ways, e.g., by writing that I “display the same ‘hey I just want to know if I’m wrong’” attitude as Temple.

In other words, Hackethal is so deeply steeped in/familiar with Temple’s work that he has an intuitive feel for what Temple’s style, attitude, ideas, etc., are—and so he knows exactly what to give credit for if he genuinely wanted to avoid plagiarism. The idea that “he was trying to prevent accidental plagiarism” is honestly beyond ludicrous to me. There’s absolutely no excuse for him to not credit Temple—and his plagiarism is definitely not “accidental”.

Temple documents way more examples of this sort of thing in his “Other Copying” section of the article.

“CF’s most important original idea is the rejection of strong and weak arguments.” This is what my Yes or No Philosophy material is about.

I bought a copy of Temple’s “Yes or No Philosophy” product on Gumroad on June 9, 2020 (I just checked the receipt I was emailed), so I can confirm firsthand that Temple’s ideas—which Hackethal is now intentionally plagiarizing—predate Veritula by many years!

In the article, Temple quotes Hackethal:

That’s a fair concern if you’re talking about duplicate criticisms, which public intellectuals do field. The solution here is to publicly write a counter-criticism once and then refer to it again later.

In the article, Temple responds:

I called this a “library of criticism” in Yes or No Philosophy. Hackethal calls Veritula a “dictionary for ideas”. The “dictionary” keeps track of ideas and lets people refer to them again later so that they don’t “have same [sic] discussions over and over again”. My “library of criticism” also let people “refer” to “counter-criticisms [and regular criticisms] … again later”.

I saw that “library of criticism” idea in Temple’s “Yes or No Philosophy” product and liked it a lot. Hackethal renaming/rewording it as a “dictionary for ideas” reminds me of a school kid using a thesaurus to change words in an attempt to avoid triggering plagiarism checkers.

I’ve also talked about this repeatedly in my many essays (“Thinkers should write reusable answers to arguments”) on Paths Forward (“You can reuse answers that were already written down in the past, by you or others.” and “Most bad ideas get pretty repetitive. People will keep bringing up the same points over and over. That’s fine. They don’t know better. You can deal with it by answering the issue once, then after that refer people to your existing answer.”).

Temple also talked about it in a Gumroad product of his which I bought on June 20, 2020 (likewise predating Veritula by many years) called “Podcast: Getting Your Life and Thinking In Order” (though that particular Gumroad product appears to not be for sale anymore). I just revisited that product/podcast to double check that I’m remembering correctly. Skimming through it very quickly I found this at 48:04 of the podcast (transcribing the quote myself, my bold):

… so it’s never too overwhelming or stressful. And people worry that this is so time consuming and it looks time consuming to them because they’re behind but when you stay on top of things and you make reusable stuff—if your stuff is actually good enough quality that you can reuse it, that saves you so much time. If you can actually, you know, link someone to something you wrote 10 years ago and say here’s my answer to that question and I already wrote it. If you can just do that whenever you want about everything because you already wrote down what you think about all sorts of stuff and you have answers to so many questions already written down it’s not that hard to keep up anymore. Because you have all the resources created … like answers to questions and criticism already written down, already ready to go.

I think Temple talks about it way more too, but even just a quick skim found that quote! So it’s definitely an idea Temple talked about in many places long before Veritula. There’s no excuse for Hackethal to plagiarize it. I’m not sure how Hackethal thinks he can get away with it.

Creating CF took over 10,000 hours of largely unpaid effort while I worked other jobs, outside of philosophy, to support myself. I share CF ideas hoping people will learn from them or critique them. While CF isn’t very popular, if someone actually likes my ideas enough to study them, I don’t want to be plagiarized or misattributed.

I think that’s wonderfully admirable and I think that the absolute least(!) Hackethal could’ve done is give Temple credit. Really, I think he should’ve offered to financially support Temple too if he could. But he’s doing the opposite:

He’s trying to secure financial support for himself using my vision and my ability to develop good new philosophical ideas.

:open_mouth:. Beyond appalling.

Hackethal believes the CF ideas he’s using, without crediting me, are extremely good, important and valuable.

I also think CF ideas are “extremely good, important and valuable” and that the world would be a much, much better place if they became widespread. I’d hate for CF ideas to be misattributed to some mediocre, social-climbing plagiarist.

Some people apparently now believe he has great, original philosophical ideas.

I think it’d be good if some people on this forum (or other fans of Temple, or anyone who knows the truth) politely informed/warned the people who post on Veritula (or who Hackethal talks with on social media) about Hackethal’s plagiarism. I’d want to know the truth if I were misled like that.

It took me over twenty years to develop CF to what it is today. Hackethal is misappropriating my life’s work as a shortcut. Instead of developing original ideas, which is hard, he found someone who isn’t famous (me) and is using their ideas without crediting them.

:cry:

1 Like
9

Yeah, this is bad, and this is coming from someone (me) who has read every article of Dennis’ about Elliot.

10

What did you think of those articles and why?

11

People on Veritula or anywhere like on social media?

Do you own a copyright for CF? Did Hackethal infringe your copyright? You didnt really bring up copyright in the article so im guessing no. Idk a lot about copyright btw.

12

First off, I’ll say, you’ve made a lot of progress over the last few years, and on this forum, you’ve changed for the better in a lot of ways imo. I enjoy being on here, and the idea that it is a cult is laughable.

He wrote like six articles, they were all pretty long, (and he was pretty light on taking any personal accountability of things he did wrong btw, which I didn’t respect), but from what I remember, here are the main criticisms of you that stuck out to me as being decent points :

  1. He gave evidence of times you were mean. After reading some of those, I understood why people might have left the forum if it was an ongoing thing.
  2. He gave examples of ‘tactics’ you used in email exchanges. This stuck out to me because I remember you writing about Deutsch saying you used them as well, but he wouldn’t explain what they were. Maybe Deutsch was talking about similar tactics that Dennis said you used? Dennis at least tried to explain some of them.
  3. He brought up freedom of association a few times, which I think is valid. There were examples he gave where the vibe seemed to be that you maybe felt entitled to people’s time, and that they owed you an explanation for things like creating their own discussion group, and then you made your way into their group or Discord even though it seems you knew they didn’t want you in it.
  4. He gave a few examples of you not living up to your own strict standards when it comes to copyright and plagiarism (which in no way excuses what Dennis has done, especially in regards to the Veritula website).

He also kept bringing up the “die in a fire” comment you made to Deutsch, which upset me because I like Deutsch. My guess is (let me know if I’ve gone too unbounded) one of the reasons you said it is because you were hurt by him emotionally, which I understand. I’d be hurt too and maybe even angry based on how you said he treated you. I’m sure there were other reasons you said it, but I brought that one up because I don’t remember you ever bringing it up, and I think rationalists sometimes don’t bring up emotions even though they can be important and provide important context. A bit of a side tangent, but I also think that’s part of why you did a 180 on recommending Deutsch’s books. You went from saying FoR and BoI were two of the four best books to read, to unendorsing them primarily because of misquotes. I know you take misquotes very seriously now, and noticing a lot of them might affect how good you think a book is, but I think emotions had more to do with it then you let on.

Another tangent is, I’ve become aware of the ways criticism can be used as a weapon. There are always errors, and if you’re good at noticing them, you can overwhelm people with criticism, especially if you go meta. Your ideas about debate policy and impasse chains solve some of those problems.

13

Another side note, but I don’t know of anyone else that would open themselves up to potential criticism to this extent. I think it’s brave and admirable.

14

I’ll respond more maybe soon, but a question: how much of this is your own independent judgement and analysis? Put another way: did you look at whatever evidence Hackethal gave independently from Hackethal and judge it? For example this:

I’m not aware of this comment, but I’m aware of a similar thing Hackethal mentioned and talked about. Elliot said something similar to a person who had a teaching role (I forget if they were actually teacher). Without giving additional context or anything, I think this whole commentary around telling someone to die in a fire is absurd. Can anyone explain to me what’s so awful here? Because I can’t wrap my head around it. Hackethals articles?/essays? talked about how telling someone to go die in a fire conjures up images of painful death in a fire. Does it? I’ve heard worse online and been completely indifferent (also I doubt most people are truly aware of how awful a fire death is, his whole point felt absurd to me).

What upset you? Also why do you like Deutsch? Do you still like Deutsch? Even after all the harassment happening to Elliot? Do you disagree that Elliot is being harassed?

~thats possible for people. a different take: he did a 180 because he realized how bad his mentor actually was. i haven’t read FoR and BoI, so idk much about them. do you? Elliot came to realize issues with what his mentor said. He also shared commentary about how the books aren’t as informative and he filled in gaps with personal discussions with Deutsch. It wasn’t just misquotes afaik.

what basis do you have for saying emotions are playing a bigger part than he’s letting on? can you argue against his criticisms of FoR and BoI and explain why you would, assumably, endorse them? (relatedly: Elliot has written about lying and introspection, he’s probably more aware than others about most of his thought processes around things, that doesn’t mean hes perfect but it is unfair to assume hes like most other people who are emotional about things)

Something I think worth noting:

Elliot asked what you think of these articles and while its fine to talk about what you looked and what you, I guess, agreed with, I do think its odd that you didn’t share issues with anything Hackethal said save for

Did you find issues with anything Hackethal said? Do you think nothing’s wrong with them?

1 Like
15

Thanks. Hackethal has banned dissent (related to me) on his websites and made it clear he won’t discuss the conflict with me or anyone who agrees with me.

I have been trying for six years to get anyone on the other side of the broader conflict (with Deutsch and his fans) to discuss the conflict. None of them have ever been willing to discuss it.

While I have some issues with your post, if you’re willing to discuss and try to clarify some issues and resolve some disagreements (not exit the conversation quickly) then I appreciate that.

While I disagree with a lot of details, I think my biggest concern is related to context. Hackethal’s big claims/conclusions are things like:

  1. CF is a dangerous cult.
  2. Temple initiated force against Hackethal.
  3. Temple deserves to be sued by multiple people.
  4. Temple is so toxic that it’s inappropriate for Deutsch or Hackethal to ask their communities to stop harassing Temple, or to stop having friendly conversations with or platforming harassers.
  5. Temple should be shunned and lose his philosophy career.
  6. Temple should delete everything he ever wrote related to Hackethal, apologize, then never speak about Hackethal again.

Keeping this context in mind, here are some of the claims you (Neo) brought up:

A. Temple said something rude about Deutsch.
B. Due to emotions, Temple has an overly negative view of Deutsch’s books.
C. Without hiding his identity, Temple clicked a Discord server invite link that he shouldn’t have.
D. Temple wanted to know why a small community was being splintered/schismed, discuss it, and attempt conflict resolution.
E. Temple sometimes uses rhetorical tactics.

Even if I concede A-E and many other things, I don’t think it would justify 1-6. Basically, I see many issues being raised as multiple orders of magnitude too small for the big, serious conclusions.

You (Neo) said 1 is laughable. So what conclusions do you think are at stake in a discussion of A-E? Do you think any of 2-6 are at stake, or are those false or laughable? Are there other stakes that you have in mind?

There are also other relevant stakes like whether Hackethal’s articles are an initiation of force against me, whether Hackethal’s book plagiarized me, the Veritula issues, etc. I think your positions on those issues are important context (which you gave some information about but not a full statement). I don’t know if you think A-E have much relevance to my big claims against Hackethal (I think they don’t).

3 Likes
16

I have a lot of thoughts about this topic. First I will reply to some stuff in your post, then I will make some broader comments on the situation.

For what it’s worth, I think Elliot’s post above mine is probably more important. I’m engaging with your specific comments because I find the topic interesting. But I agree with Elliot that there is a big gulf between Hackethal’s issues with Elliot and the issues you’ve mentioned.

I have a different take on this. One more quote that is relevant…

I tend to agree.

The phrase “die in a fire” was a common aggressive phrase on the internet in the mid-to-late 00s. Especially when phrased as the initials DIAF, which is typically what Elliot wrote during that time.

It’s not a particularly nice thing to say, but Hackethal’s framing where it is this shocking graphic description is really absurd. It’s a very socially unaware hyper-literal interpretation (more on this later).

In context, the way Elliot used DIAF was like a harsher version of “go to hell” or “go fuck yourself” or “fuck off” or similar. I think a modern equivalent might be “KYS”/”Keep Yourself Safe”/”Kill YourSelf” — these are harsh, mean ways to tell someone to fuck off. They are unpleasant and gross, and likely seem especially so to outsiders, but in context on the internet in the vast majority of cases nobody is sincerely telling anyone to kill themselves. It’s a mean thing to say to express strong dislike/disagreement.

If you play an online game and win and then in the lobby afterwards the loser says “kys” then you could reasonably call them a sore loser or an asshole. But I don’t think it would be reasonable to go on a diatribe about how those initials mean “kill yourself” and the person is specifically trying to conjure traumatic images of you hanging yourself or something. That is a stretch. They’re just annoyed with you and being an asshole.

Regarding whether Elliot said DIAF because he was emotionally upset with DD… that’s possible. I don’t know. But in my view Elliot was more comfortable using harsh and mean language back then in general, as can be seen in various places e.g. old TCS posts, old blog entries, etc.

I suspect this was for multiple reasons. I think that attitude was modeled by his mentor (who he told to DIAF), it was endemic in online gaming communities that I’m guessing he participated in, and it broadly tied into Elliot’s stated views at the time regarding things like violating social norms, free speech, etc.

So now that I’ve covered the DIAF comment, I want to circle back to your list.

Note: I just used the site’s tool to Quote your list but for some reason it converted your list to bullet points, and won’t let me change it back to numbers. I’m going to manually add the numbers back in below in case I want to reference.

I think that of all of Hackethal’s complaints, the complaint that Elliot is (or was) mean is the most reasonable. Though also ironic (more on that later).

I think that for a lot of Elliot’s time on forums, lists, and his blog, he has behaved in ways that could reasonably be interpreted as mean. For one thing, I think that giving lots of unbounded criticism is something that the vast majority of people will interpret as being mean. Even people who profess to be philosophers and claim to love criticism.

In addition to that broad point, there were specific ways he communicated that I think could be interpreted as mean. One example would be criticizing someone to everyone else in the group, rather than to the person being criticized. This went alongside meta criticisms which many people also don’t appreciate. So for example, at some point during an argument Elliot might start talking about the person he’s criticizing instead of to them, e.g. “Jane is saying she wants to know what she’s mistaken about, but what’s actually going on is she is getting defensive and angry” — stuff like that. And I think most people in Jane’s shoes would get even more upset at that point, even if everything he said was totally accurate.

He also came across as very confident, or arrogant, in some discussions. He would say if he thought someone’s ideas were stupid or shit or other harsh phrasings. He would often tell people that if they did not do X thing he thought was important, they were making huge mistakes and ruining their life. That’s not something most people appreciate being told.

In general, my interpretation of Elliot’s behavior is that he broadly had the attitude: most social norms (including e.g. “politeness”) are bullshit memes, criticism is a gift people ought to be thankful for, everyone should be free to say what they think, and you should always be willing to argue your case to a conclusive outcome. That is already a recipe for a lot of incidental meanness, and I don’t think I am presenting a complete picture yet — I believe that DD contributed to Elliot’s “mean” style significantly in ways that I don’t even fully understand (more on this later.)

It is also worth noting here that most of the above pertains to ways people might reasonably interpret Elliot. I am not necessarily assuming I know Elliot’s intent at the time (except the part where I try to summarize his attitude). If he claimed he never tried to be mean in the entire history of his blog, I might be skeptical but I’d entertain that possibility. And it would not necessarily contradict anything I said here.

I don’t feel like rereading Hackethal’s posts right now. If this is a corollary of 1 and the tactics are just ways of being mean, I believe it to the extent I already said. If the tactics refer to something else, I am a bit more skeptical.

I think this one is a bit complicated and messy. I think there are grains of truth to this idea but I think it’s hard to fully separate out two elements in tension: people being bad at having boundaries, and Elliot being pushy about other peoples’ time or attention.

I have been off-and-on involved in Elliot’s public communities for a long time. I have seen many people disengage, and I have disengaged myself at times. I am not aware of any instance where someone clearly and explicitly said “leave me alone” and then Elliot continued to contact them. If there is an example of him ever doing this in the past, I think in the present day he would disavow that action and not defend it.

In all the cases I’m aware of, the situation was much less explicit. It typically involved people who themselves felt conflicted — they did not want to fully disengage. They saw value in the community, or in Elliot specifically, or in the idea of the community, but they also found various aspects of engagement unpleasant. Maybe because of the meanness discussed in 1, but also maybe because they just struggled to hear legitimate criticism and got upset. Or other reasons.

So often people would go silent with no commentary, just ghosting. From what I have seen/can remember, in those cases Elliot might continue to talk about them if something they wrote was relevant, or as a post-mortem, or similar. He might continue to talk to them within the existing platforms, e.g. address them in an email on an email list or a post on a forum.

Another thing he might do is engage with them somewhere else in an appropriate forum. For example, if they stop posting in his community, and begin posting in a different public philosophy/rationality community, he might engage with them there. I am not aware of him doing this in an inappropriate forum — I don’t think he is following people to cooking forums to argue about philosophy.

So, are these behaviors violations of freedom of association? I’m skeptical, but it’s complicated.

When you make a public group, that group is… open to the public. As far as I know none of these groups were made with explicit “No curis allowed” signs out front. So even if he could guess they might find his presence uncomfortable… does that mean he is obligated to stay away? I’m not too sure about that.

I think a huge factor in these conflicts might also be the ego or self-image of the people who want to stop talking to Elliot. They don’t want to say “stop talking to me." They especially don’t want to say, in public, “Elliot Temple is not allowed to join our community” because that makes them look weak. It makes them seem afraid of what Elliot has to say, and they typically present themselves as being open to debate, pro-criticism, etc.

So they want to be able to ignore Elliot and pretend he does not exist, and then have him cooperate with that and help them do so. They want him to take the hint and go die in a fire — oh, I meant to say “go fuck off.” I don’t really think he has an obligation to cooperate with that, though.

So is it a bit rude to not go along with that? A social faux pas? Maybe. That’s plausible (more on this later). But I don’t think he’s violating anyone’s rights with the above behavior.

And especially more recently, now that Hackethal and others have become quite explicitly adversarial, I don’t think he owes them any particular charity at all. I think they’ve been far ruder.

Do you disagree?

Yeah this seems like a purely self-serving attempt to obfuscate Hackethal’s own explicit plagiarism. I think what’s happening here is that Hackethal thinks Elliot is hyper pedantic for no reason about these issues, and so literally any error in quoting, any failure to cite what might have inspired an idea in any way, all count as misquoting/plagiarism. I’m pretty sure Hackethal thinks that Elliot somehow achieves moral or philosophical superiority by being extra pedantic about quoting, so Hackethal thinks that if he can be even more pedantic about it, that makes him superior.

For example: Quote Checker · ‘Elliot Temple (‘curi’) misquotes David Deutsch again’ by Dennis Hackethal

The “misquote” is that Elliot turned the quoted items into a bulleted list (while preserving 100% of the quoted material). This doesn’t seem like a legitimate issue to me. It seems like a pedantic attempt to “gotcha” someone that Hackethal views as a pedant.

—

It’s Later Now

I kept saying “more on this later” and now “later” has arrived. I have two additional related thoughts.

The first thing I wanted to touch on is speculation of a personal nature. Feel free to disregard this, as it is basically armchair psychoanalysis. But basically… to the extent Hackethal’s complaints were ever true, I suspect a major factor of this is neurodivergence.

I think Elliot exhibits some common autistic traits. I don’t mean this as an insult, just an observation (I think I also exhibit some common autistic traits). But many of the underlying issues throughout this entire post trace back to this idea.

Disliking, analyzing, and dissecting social norms like politeness is an obvious example. Also being seemingly pedantic about small details, and wanting statements to be taken literally without hidden subtext getting added in by others. In general, a common autistic trait is wanting explicit communication from people. Autistic people frequently struggle with being ghosted, because it is ambiguous. They are notoriously bad at “taking the hint” in many social interactions.

Autistic people also often model or mirror behavior of people they respect as a way of engaging with the world. So I think it is highly relevant that DD was a mentor of Elliot’s for so long. DD’s writing on e.g. the TCS list was often quite mean and violated common social norms around politeness.

This issue comes up all over the place. For example: Elliot says criticism is a gift, and then community members agree, and then he criticizes them a lot, and then they get mad and ghost him.

If you are either naturally good at social interaction, or you are also autistic but have studied social interaction as a special interest, that might be totally expected to you. Most people like the idea of being open to criticism, but the reality can be difficult and unpleasant. But if you are autistic and not specifically studied in this particular kind of social dynamic, it can be a very mystifying (and frustrating) experience. People are claiming one thing, then doing something else. So are they lying?

This is something I’ve seen Elliot claim in the past — people are lying (either to themselves or others) when they say they’re open to criticism. He has at times cited this as a major issue he runs into frequently. But what’s to be done? People also don’t like it when you accuse them of lying. So better to give them a chance, right? Plus, if he writes people off then he might legitimately miss out on a person who really does welcome criticism. So in trying to appease the people he doesn’t really want to talk to anyway, he could drive away the people he is actively seeking.

Over the years on lists, blog posts, and this forum I have seen Elliot grapple with the above problem many times. It’s not something he seems to take lightly. I think he sees it as a pretty major problem in trying to seriously discuss philosophy with people. I don’t think he considers it solved. And I think he has varied his methods of engagement many times trying to find ways to overcome this issue (for example: limiting unbounded criticism to the Unbounded section on this forum).

So… I think this is a significant cause of the “mean” behavior and other issues I’ve acknowledged above. However, this isn’t really a sufficient explanation for Hackethal’s issues with Elliot. Because the other thing I wanted to mention was:

Hackethal comes across to me as neurodivergent, too. He’s not just some normal guy who stumbled into this situation and got abused by Elliot’s abrasive style.

In fact, Hackethal’s writing style reminds me a lot of Elliot. Specifically, it reminds me of Elliot’s writing maybe 5-10 years ago (not exact, could be off by a bit). This is visible in his blog posts and also in his posts on reddit, veritula, etc.

He is mean in many of the ways I would say Elliot used to be mean. He is arrogant and aggressive in criticizing people and making very bold assertions. He’s often hyper-literal and socially unaware, just like Elliot often was.

And, notably, he does most of these things worse than Elliot did. Like with being pedantic about misquotes, it looks to me like he is trying to copy Elliot’s style without really understanding any of the reasons why Elliot might think or do things.

This is weird to me given how hostile he is. Why cargo cult someone that you hate? I guess it maybe makes sense if some of Elliot’s guesses are right, e.g. that he was mad Elliot did not welcome him as a friend, and he is now trying to take credit for Elliot’s ideas. It also might make sense if he shares some of Elliot’s autistic traits, and saw Elliot as a mentor, and modeled some of his behaviors off of Elliot.

But it’s still pretty bizarre given how much he claims Elliot’s style is toxic, vicious, cultish, etc. I would think that if he was sincere about those beliefs, he would have stopped reading Elliot’s writing, stop seeing Elliot as a mentor, and stop copying his style.

He hasn’t done that. Which suggests to me that his posts are not sincere criticisms, and are instead calculated attacks intended to damage or discredit Elliot.

3 Likes
17

Yes.

I think KYS is significantly worse but I don’t have a lot of exposure to people using KYS really casually, so it’s possible they’re reasonably equivalent.

Hackethal is acting like what I said was much worse than KYS, which comes off to me as more dishonest than out of touch.

I think it’s relevant that in this case and many of the others where Hackethal is trying to be hyper pedantic, he’s also wrong.

If you look at Hackethal’s source, it’s a PDF conversion of the original blog post and the points are tab indented. I believe tab indenting is a normal (bad) way for bullet point lists to be converted to PDF, and that it is in fact a bullet point list (displayed in a poor way) in Hackethal’s own source link.

It’s also clearly a bullet point list in this other PDF conversion.

And here it is in The Wayback Machine with bullet points: Conspiracy Theories – 1: The Basics I think that’s definitive. And it wasn’t that hard to check.

Hackethal doesn’t actually seem to do research and try to figure out what’s true before pedantically accusing me of being wrong (or he’s really bad at research, fact checking, logic, etc. But he links to archive.org frequently so I think he could have figured out to check their archive of this page if he wanted to.)

I think, by appearing to be a pedant with a stupid, picky point, he fooled you into thinking his claims were actually true but merely dumb/irrelevant. But they’re also false in this case and others that he writes about with a similar style. I think a lot of his stuff is wrong or biased in multiple ways, and people are fooled by thinking it’s less thoroughly wrong than it is – like they find an error and think that’s the error and don’t realize there are a bunch more errors in the same thing. I think by being really unreasonable, he tricks people who assume someone wouldn’t be that unreasonable. You thought he was being quite unreasonable about the bullet point list, but he was actually being even more unreasonable than that!

The main solution I’ve developed for this problem is having a debate policy. If people actually want criticism they can use my policy. This gives them a chance without having to share a criticism with them. And my policy enables me to not respond to things without being a bad fallibilist, because there’s a backup error correction mechanism in case my non-response was an error.

Deutsch is more dishonest and manipulative than me. I’m more blunt and open about what I mean. But Deutsch is way meaner, both publicly and privately.

Not only did Deutsch set a bad example for me, he also told me his behavior was rational, not mean. I didn’t understand what was going on well because I find meanness unintuitive, confusing and hard to comprehend.

Deutsch once, unprompted, described bloody torture (literally) in graphic detail to me. He went on at length even though I didn’t engage at all. He fantasized about my young adult debate partner (who he knew was also an IRL friend of mine) being tortured to death (literally) at Guantanamo Bay for the sins of opposing the Iraq war and not wanting people to be tortured at Guantanamo Bay. Fortunately, I did a good job of ignoring it, not visualizing it, and I didn’t have nightmares about it, and I didn’t mirror that behavior.

After you text someone like that, you don’t get to complain about them using comparatively mild slang. And in fact Deutsch didn’t complain about the slang, so people should stop white knighting someone who didn’t ask for it and doesn’t need it (and for context there’s a long, complex relationship that they don’t know much about). That comment wasn’t an attempt to hurt Deutsch (it’s completely the wrong way to upset him) and I don’t think it did hurt him and I think it’s actually sort of weird and offensive (to Deutsch) how fragile some of Deutsch’s fans seem to think he is about that sort of thing. Like they think he’s some old boomer and they don’t give him credit for being chronically online.

18

Yeah, I would agree. I think KYS is worse, because it’s more vague and thus more actionable.

If you imagine someone being harassed online and bombarded with hate, if they get messaged “kill yourself” over and over that is going to take a bigger toll than if they were messaged “die in a fire” over and over. Kill yourself is broad and open-ended, they can supply their own details. Die in a fire is highly specific and mostly absurd, so it’s easier to shrug off.

But outside of niche cases of sustained harassment, both of them are largely just very mean/rude ways of saying “fuck off” IMO.

Yeah. I think his response to DIAF was an example of really over-the-top pearl clutching. There is an angle where it is a hyper-literal (autistic?) way of interpreting the words… divorcing it from the context of being a standard internet term and pretending it is a unique, evocative violent image instead. But I don’t think Hackethal is ignorant enough to really buy that as a genuine sentiment. I think he’s pretending to try to make it seem worse.

Oh!

Yeah I did not look into it in detail, that did not sound like a fun use of my time.

This is totally plausible. It seemed really dumb when I initially looked at it, and I stopped there. That was enough for me to make a decision about his quote checker

Right, that makes sense. My impression is also that you are more pessimistic about people and the world now than you were 5-10 years ago, when I recall seeing more writing about how to deal with people who lie/evade/ghost/etc. I think that if you were interested in spending lots of time actively reaching out to people and trying to convince them of stuff, the debate policy might not be sufficient? Not sure though, this is just a guess; the policy feels more reactive, like it solves this thing I mentioned:

Plus, if he writes people off then he might legitimately miss out on a person who really does welcome criticism. So in trying to appease the people he doesn’t really want to talk to anyway, he could drive away the people he is actively seeking.

If someone like that wanted to connect with you and engage in unbounded discussion and welcomed criticism, you’re not blocking them out. But if you were still “actively seeking” such people the debate policy may not help much? Unless it does in a way I’m not seeing, which is also plausible. But my guess is that it doesn’t, but that’s okay because you have pretty low hopes/expectations of finding such people anyway, so you’re maybe not actually “actively seeking” such people in the same way that you were 10 years ago.

Yeah that makes sense. I did not have a private relationship with DD but I saw his posts on the old lists and such, and I would agree based on my impression of him. He did not seem fragile in that way at all.

19

To add context, I wasn’t trying to become a full-time Dennis and Elliot conflict historian. I read the Dennis articles after reading some of your posts about him, because I was curious what the other side had to say. Also, I wanted to see if there was something I was missing about why the forum has less active posters than it used to, and whether it was safe to post here or not. I was not persuaded by Dennis’ arguments about you being dangerous or the forum being a cult, and while reading it I noticed Dennis was using a lot of scary and hyperbolic language that can function as a manipulation tactic, and your actions I understood him to be describing (A-E) didn’t justify his conclusions (1-6). Proportionality matters.

I’m guessing Dennis wouldn’t agree with your description of A-E, but I think I would agree more with your description of events and the seriousness of them than his.

I agree. When you asked about what I thought about the articles, I was just bringing up the main things that stuck out to me about them, based on what my focus was (trying to find out why people left the forum, etc). I was basically noticing certain actions as problematic without signing up for the entire maximal conclusions of Dennis’ articles, which is okay, but it was fair you asked me for more context and to clarify things, because my previous post wasn’t clear about a lot of things.

I think 1,2,3,5 & 6 are false. #4 packs several contentious ideas into one numbered item, so I won’t comment on whether it is false or laughable.

One I had in mind was something like “it’s reasonable and understandable for people to have left the forum in the past or no longer associate ” based on A-E, but again, I don’t think you’re like that anymore and have made a lot of progress.

I skimmed your “Dennis Hackethal, Plagiarist” earlier today since it had been a while since I read it. I’m not an expert on plagiarism and I’m pretty confused about what your definition of plagiarism is, but I think by normal academic/ publishing standards there are some bits that are at least plausible plagiarism (I even asked an LLM’s opinion on it)? Like the near verbatim sentence on universality and the verbatim “hard to vary given what constraint?” sentence.

As far as Veritula goes, it does look like it’s seriously misattributing a bunch of CF-specific machinery to Popper and effectively airbrushing you out of the picture, which is bad and a real ethics problem, unless he explains how they are Popper’s original ideas.

I don’t think A-E have much relevance to your big claims against Hackethal.

Another thing I did say on my previous post was “He gave a few examples of you not living up to your own strict standards when it comes to copyright and plagiarism”. I think that one would have some relevance to certain claims of yours against Hackethal, depending on what you would define as “big”.

1 Like
20

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. It looks like we’re aligned enough about the big picture and context to discuss some of the more specific issues you raised.

People can leave a forum for no reason. No A-E justifications are needed.

I’m working on a post covering that, so let’s discuss it more after I publish that. Here’s a preview from my draft:

What Is Plagiarism?

Hackethal presents inaccurate information about what I think plagiarism is and he doesn’t specify what he thinks it is. So I’ll clarify:

Plagiarism is taking credit for ideas or knowledge that you got from a source rather than creating yourself.

Or, as I put it in 2020 when criticizing Hackethal’s book:

Plagiarism is taking credit for ideas or writing that isn’t yours.

The New Oxford American Dictionary defines plagiarism as:

the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own

The Macmillan English Dictionary defines plagiarism as:

the process of taking another person’s work, ideas, or words, and using them as if they were your own.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines plagiarize as:

to take and use as one’s own the thoughts, writings, or inventions of another.

re plagiarism, I don’t think he did give any such examples. I think he straw manned. But let’s discuss after my post is up.

re copyright, is there some example where I allegedly violated someone else’s copyright in my writing? If so, would you DM it to me or explain it in your own words? If not, what’s the issue that’s relevant to my criticisms of Hackethal’s book?

I was hurt by Deutsch emotionally. I wasn’t trying to pretend otherwise. I think that particular statement was related to frustration and believing Deutsch was betraying the values his books advocate. I thought what he said in some public appearances was really bad.

A 180 is an abrupt change to an opposite view.

I did a slow 90. I went from recommending the books to not recommending them. But I didn’t recommend against them. And I gradually lowered my opinion of the books over a period of years.

Misquotes were just one reason of many.

The books still have good parts, but I don’t want to take responsibility for actively telling anyone to read them because of various flaws and because Deutsch is an unsafe person. I’d prefer people make their own decisions about those books.

Some of his examples are false. See Curiosity – Dennis Hackethal Is a Bully

If you fact check an example and still have concerns about it, how about you explain it in your own words and then I’ll respond.

Also, if you bring up an example that isn’t related to Veritula or plagiarism, consider putting it in another topic like:

Dennis Hackethal Threatened to Sue Me; Now He's Blogging about Me

Dennis Hackethal Is a Bully

1 Like