Timeline of Dennis Hackethal Using My Ideas without Crediting Me

[Elliot]

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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://curi.us/2603-timeline-of-dennis-hackethal-using-my-ideas-without-crediting-me

[Eternity]

@Elliot

But he didn’t credit me for my ideas. Instead, he falsely attributed my ideas to Karl Popper, which denies me credit, implies that I plagiarized Popper, confuses people about Popper’s views and implies that other people, like Popperian author David Deutsch, misunderstood Popper.

(I’m not trying to post anything super researched/perfect/super thought out. I do try to take care in what I say, but I don’t want to waste time on researching forever here).

Something that I think is weird too is that, afaik, Popper is a known intellectual. He’s discussed in academic circles. You can even find videos of him being discussed by mainstream intellectuals(?)/content creators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X8Xfl0JdTQ. I think its kinda funny(?) that Hackethal doesn’t recognize this/fails to notice how different your views are from CR. I also wonder how well he thinks this gaslighting(?) thing could work. Actually related to that: how big is Hackethal in the grand scheme of things? If I got into Popper now is there a good chance I’d come across him?

Oh, I just realized: one reason why what Hackethal doing could be quite successful is that people don’t read. Hackethal says CR says this. Most people who are somewhat interested in CR may just stop at reading his stuff, especially if he presents himself as this amazing expert (though I wonder if he encourages people to not read Popper).

@Elliot

I believe it’s because he saw himself as a very smart expert, and he wanted to be my friend and colleague, but he felt rejected by me.

but also

@Elliot

Hackethal came to me as a student.

I guess he saw himself as someone who didn’t have much to learn and (possibly) got frustrated at the large gap. I know I initially thought I could “somehow” catch up with Elliot superfast by being his student because I read some Rand and stuff. Though when I realized how large my gap with Elliot was, I thought it was cool. Maybe Hackethal thought it wasn’t? Then again I think it helps that I’m relatively young (idk how old Hackethal is) and have pretty much no notable accomplishments to boost my ego with.

@Elliot

I wrote a post saying it plagiarized me and David Deutsch.

Did Deutsch address this/care? Hmm. Probably not? Since I remember you sharing that Hackethal has worked with Deutsch in some capacity. I think it was translation work?

@Elliot

Previously he’d told me, about himself, “It’s really hard to offend me.”

Two things: I think people lie about that to seem better than they are. The other thing is that people have certain things they get less offended by and then conflate that with not being easy to offend (maybe thats fair? idk). As a simple example, some people can take simple feedback at work but they wouldn’t like feedback on their weight or something.

@Elliot

he and his lawyers just went silent

I wonder if that has to do with your capacity to fight back. Presumably a part of him knows a lot of what hes doing is bullshit. He probably doesn’t want to risk anything getting exposed from you fighting back. Relatedly: I wonder if he’s (lawyers) have truly gone silent. I wonder what his financial situation is. If he’s rich, I can see him totally being able to bully you without, I think, much to worry about (though things can still get exposed).

[Elliot]

@Eternity

@Elliot

I wrote a post saying it plagiarized me and David Deutsch.

Did Deutsch address this/care? Hmm. Probably not? Since I remember you sharing that Hackethal has worked with Deutsch in some capacity. I think it was translation work?

I haven’t seen Deutsch comment about it publicly, but my best guess is that Deutsch sent Hackethal an email about it, and some chat messages or a call wouldn’t surprise me. Hackethal has not disclosed what Deutsch said to him about it, if anything. Hackethal did stop selling the book on Amazon for a while, then start selling a new edition that added ~200 additional citations for Deutsch (the string “Deutsch” went from being in the book 20 times to 246). So maybe Deutsch did care and handled it privately. I definitely wouldn’t feel confident guessing that Deutsch didn’t care. It seems plausible that it was Deutsch’s complaint, not mine, which caused Hackethal to change the book, but I don’t know and he hasn’t said why he changed the book or what changes he made.

I also don’t know when the translation work began. It could have begun before Hackethal’s book was published. I don’t know. Hackethal hasn’t shared basic timeline information like when he started writing his book or started translating BoI.