Responding to Elliot’s post here :
Responding to Justin :
I vaguely remembered some CritRats (who tend to plagiarize me) being involved with a note taking type app (tho i think it might have been Roam Research). So after a couple quick searches I found this:
https://www.remnote.com/about
I recognized the name of one of the founders because he’s the same CritRat who recently tried to promote CritRat stuff on my BoI google group , then didn’t speak to me at all when I told him there was a problem. He makes stuff like DD fan websites and Substacks but mislabels them as being about Critical Rationalism in general not about DD’s ideas even though they have stuff like TCS ideas and it’s really bad to communicate to people that TCS is part of Popper’s philosophy.
Dang, I had no idea about the CritRat connection. I didn’t think too much about where the similarity to Elliot’s writing might have come from specifically, but I was definite thinking of a more “innocent” explanation than plagiarism and CritRat involvement
There’s something really screwy about a person who makes a DD fansite but is unwilling to speak to an enemy of DD who wants peace and negotiation, but also has a bunch of material online that attacks DD like https://beginningofinfinity.com If you were trying to grow a DD-based movement, wouldn’t you want to talk to someone about removing that hate site that is harming DD’s reputation and turning people away from your community? Why would you just entirely refuse to speak to them and not even try when they are making themselves look good, and you look bad, by emphasizing that they want to talk and problem solve while your side absolutely refuses?
I try to imagine myself being a HUGE fan of some guy, Joe, and then I’m trying to make a fan community and movement and stuff, and then I find out Joe has enemies. So I’d want to debate them or something, not refuse to ever speak to them (especially if i’m doing a rationality movement…). Then imagine I found out the enemies accuse Joe of some very bad stuff. I’d want to investigate to see if it’s true. And even if I didn’t care about that, I’d at least want them to stfu b/c them saying that is a problem for my goals. So if they were saying “we want peace and to talk” I’d at least give that a shot. I struggle to put myself in the shoes of someone who wouldn’t do that. It just seems fully unreasonable.
This analysis reminds of me Ideal
Anyway, a bunch of CritRats read me without admitting it and others read me while openly admitting it but still hating me. The RemNote founder guy is a very active CritRat who is involved with people who definitely read and hate me. So it’s likely that the RemNote founder read some of my stuff related to what his company does or at least some of his buddies read it and talked about in places he’d hear it. The RemNote founder currently has a webpage advising people to follow (via blog and social media) my biggest plagiarist.
While some similar ideas do exist elsewhere, plagiarism seems pretty likely here given the high chance that the founder or his buddies specifically read me talking about this stuff, the repeated history of plagiarism of me from that specific community that the RemNote founder is part of, and how the way it’s said is overly similar to some stuff I’ve said enough that Justin noticed. Another sign it’s related to me is there are multiple different ideas brought up, each of which you could find somewhere else by itself, but which aren’t usually brought up together as I do.
It appears likely that RemNote people are trying to monetize stuff involving my ideas while giving me zero credit and also appealing to the authority of basing things on recent neuroscience research. (“RemNote combines recent research in neuroscience and psychology with cutting-edge web technology to build the #1 knowledge management platform.” from RemNote )
That all sounds plausible.
Although I don’t really know anything about the software, I’d advise against using RemNote for two reasons. First, they have a bad person for a founder. Second, even bigger companies often have terrible internal privacy controls. You should assume the CritRat founder could access anything you put in their cloud, especially if he sees a name like mine or @JustinCEO ’s that he recognizes and might want to spy on. He also might hire other CritRats who could then probably also access your private data.
I’m going to give this serious consideration. Most of my RemNote notes are pretty unexciting anyways (I’ve even shared some of them e.g. here ) and for stuff where I was more concerned about privacy, I used their local-machine-only, non-cloud-syncing database feature. I haven’t found anything else with RemNote’s particular combination of features, so I’m kind of mixed on not using it entirely at the moment (I’m in the middle of taking some notes on Aristotle with it), but I’m definitely feeling encouraged to make more strenuous efforts to find an alternative.
