Dennis Hackethal’s Blog
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My blog about philosophy, coding, and anything else that interests me.
I’ve changed the example quote in #2629 from…
…to…
…so that the misquote doesn’t omit the word “is” and is only missing ellipses.
Elliot and Justin laughing about Elliot’s blog post ruining my reputation on search engines forever:
From fi complete.txt starting at line 249,337. A bit further down:
Further down:
So funny! “It’s just a man’s name, right?”
I’ve been trying something similar for my armpits. Instead of applying deodorant, I now scrub my armpits with soap using these exfoliating gloves when I shower. After I dry off, I apply Cerave SA cream.
Following this routine, my armpits do not smell. (They didn’t smell when I used deodorant either, but deodorant often made my armpits itchy.)
However, unlike the routine I use for my feet, I need to both scrub and apply the cream. Just doing one or the other does not eliminate odor in my armpits. (For my feet, scrubbing is not necessary.)
I looked a bit into the reason why armpits smell. Wikipedia says:
In short, certain body odor is caused by bacterial fermentation of waste products contained in sweat. Bacteria feed on those waste products and also on dead skin. The skin has a protective acid mantle but it gets disrupted by some soaps, allowing these bacteria to thrive.
My guess is that the salicylic acid in the Cerave cream combats odor by restoring the requisite acidity levels in both armpits and on feet. Scrubbing helps remove dead skin, further reducing the environment bacteria thrive in.
The Wikipedia article also says that deodorants usually contain alcohol, which temporarily kills bacteria. I’m guessing contact with alcohol can irritate the skin, which is why my armpits get itchy sometimes when I use deodorant. I’ve also tried antiperspirants, but those make my skin even itchier.
Using SA cream to restore the requisite acidity levels seems better to me since it prevents the growth of bacteria in the first place (rather than kill them after the fact) and does not irritate my skin.
The root cause, however, seems to be the disruption of the acidity levels by alkaline soaps. (It’s a bit strange how some companies sell both soap and deodorant.) I will be looking into different kinds of soap to see if that reduces the need to apply deodorant or SA cream.
I don’t believe Elliot mentions in his new articles that I have long addressed his complaint about ‘plagiarism’. (Five years ago!) By not mentioning that, he misleads his readers yet again.
Well, if your thoughts re copyright are true, Elliot should have just correctly quoted the article he had originally linked instead of adding a link to the older one.
The word “for” threw me off a bit there. To be clear, I did the addressing. Elliot did the complaining.
But yes, great catch overall.
Elliot has misquoted David Deutsch again:
I did receive your email. Thank you for expressing your sympathy and sorry for not replying sooner – a lot of people have been reaching out and I forgot after all the craziness from the past few weeks. My bad.
You say you don’t have access to that email address anymore. If you send me a quick email from a new address along with some proof it’s you (eg by briefly echoing some of your previous claims), I’ll try to prioritize responding to you.
Here are Elliot’s new posts about me:
I think they are full of dishonesty and errors – too many to respond to each individually.
One thing that stands out to me is that he doesn’t link to my exposé once. He doesn’t want his readers to see it. He’s hiding things and introducing severe bias. One should expect some bias in any adversarial communication, but to preemptively address that possibility, I frequently and openly link to his posts throughout the exposé so that my readers get a fuller picture and come to their own conclusion.
Elliot never mentions that things have changed in a major way since I reached out to him. For example, he never says that I have since found out that he lied about me when he falsely accused me of a federal crime by omitting exonerating evidence he had that I didn’t have. Nor does he mention that I have since found out that he plans to monitor my career into the indefinite future to bring up past complaints with my followers and tear me down anytime. Not mentioning either is misleading, dishonest, paints my exposé as an unreasonable response, and enables him to pretend not to understand why I wrote it. It also enables him to pretend that his “negotiating position” need not change.
Elliot’s new articles also confirm many points from my exposé. He says he hasn’t read it in full because it’s “very long” and “unpleasant” (the lack of self-awareness is astounding). Not having read it, he’s liable to prove my points in his response. He’s also escalating the conflict in ways that could be easily prevented if he just read my thoughts on how to resolve the entrenchment he has caused. (Those thoughts also preemptively explain the reasons I won’t talk to him, which he has known since, and even predicted, before he met me. He is pretending not to be aware of those reasons so he can, again, paint me as unreasonable.)
An example of Elliot proving my point is that I had already predicted that he would try to word-lawyer his way around defamation. (What I didn’t predict is that he’d turn it around on me by condescending to me and claiming I had poor reading comprehension and poor logic skills.) Here’s another example. He writes:
But he provides lots of evidence of why talking to him directly would be a bad idea. For example, he quotes an email of mine from 2020 in which I showed myself cooperative in response to his plagiarism complaint. What does he do? He paints it as an admission of plagiarism. He also writes, in reference to my reaching out to him last year to see if we could reconcile:
In other words, I offered cooperation and peace, which he is now holding against me, implying I contradicted myself by hiring lawyers to deal with defamation. (Contrary to his claims, I did tell him to stop defaming me before I hired lawyers, which implies taking down defamatory statements, but he’s pretending not to understand that by complaining I had “never before said [I] wanted anything removed.” Even if that were true, it would be reminiscent of this tweet.)
Here’s another way in which Elliot has twisted my words. He writes that I suggest “that silence, neutrality and not taking sides would be acceptable responses” to violent threats. I never made such a suggestion. He references a specific section of my exposé, so this time he can’t claim ignorance – he must have read it. I said it was unreasonable of Elliot to expect people to take his side in his conflict with a guy named ‘Andy B’ after Elliot pressured them to, especially given the context of him having psychologically broken them. He’s implying that I would tacitly endorse violence. Nonsense.
It doesn’t really matter what you say, Elliot will find a way to twist it and use it against you. It’s as if he took Karl Popper’s insight that one cannot speak in such a way as to never be misunderstood, and then Elliot turned it into a universal weapon against his interlocutors.
My exposé has a whole section on how Elliot has twisted my words in the past. He has twisted other people’s words, too. So I strongly advise people against communicating with him directly. If mine and others’ experience is any indication, you will pay for it dearly. Basically, talking to Elliot is like talking to cops: you should never do it without a lawyer present, and anything you say can and will be used against you. My lawyers also explained to me at the time that you enjoy stronger legal protection when you let your lawyers speak for you because the opposing party cannot use your lawyers’ words against you in court as easily as they can use your own. The opposing party might still try, but at least you’re protected. (I’m not a lawyer; nothing I say is ever legal advice.)
In fact, Elliot does try to twist my lawyers’ words, too. He writes:
Do you see the trick? They had sent him a standard, mutual non-disparagement agreement that would have applied to him as much as it would have applied to me. The purpose of that clause was to create a contractual basis for letting bygones be bygones. Yet he found a way to make it look as though I was hiding criminal activity so he couldn’t talk about it!
Also in the context of the mutual non-disparagement agreement, Elliot complains about “removing statements which aren't even alleged to be defamatory.” It’s called a mutual non-disparagement agreement, not a mutual non-defamation agreement. People don’t require mutual non-defamation agreements because they are already legally obligated not to defame each other.
Elliot also writes, in the context of a proposed retraction text:
The second sentence is ironic. First, there’s Elliot’s blatant hypocrisy in matters of plagiarism, which by itself is reason enough his readers shouldn’t listen to his stance on plagiarism (or any text he references in support of it) until he addresses that hypocrisy. Second, by his logic, Saturday Night Live couldn’t hire any joke writers; all manner of ghostwriting would be plagiarism. Once again, Elliot is finding reasons to be difficult.
Likewise in the context of his allegation of plagiarism, Elliot writes:
I wrote over 8,000 words on the topic of plagiarism alone but Elliot refuses to read them.
Two things especially stand out to me in Elliot’s new articles: his James Taggart-like compulsion to evade responsibility (again proving my point) and his dishonest attempts to look cooperative and reasonable at my expense. In my post on Elliot’s defamation tactics, I underestimated one specific tactic he uses. He writes: “Hackethal doesn't have an error correction policy like mine […]”. Basically what he’s saying is: ‘look, all you gotta do is prove that my claims about you are false and I will correct them.’ Sounds reasonable, right? The problem is, assertions such as his defamatory DOS claim are so difficult to prove false because they are arbitrary in the first place. (He once claimed that someone had hacked/DOS’ed his website to prevent the publication of an upcoming blog post of his about me. He had announced that blog post in a public chatroom, yet he falsely claimed he had announced it to me privately. That made it look as though only I or someone I told could have known about it. In reality, due to his public announcement, anyone could be the hacker, and so his accusation that it was me is arbitrary. He knows this, of course, yet he still expects me to prove it false before he will take his claims down. And I’ve written at length about what’s wrong with his claims, but then he won’t read that.)
By putting the onus on the other party to prove him false, rather than on himself not to lie and not to make arbitrary claims in the first place, the other party faces an uphill battle. They may even feel disarmed because they could fall for his lie that he is open to reason. They may feel as though their inability to persuade him is on them, but that’s not true. This trick allows Elliot to appear fully reasonable and rational on the surface to third parties while actually being exceptionally difficult to deal with. The trick is also related to his aversion to responsibility because, again, he puts the onus for error correction on his interlocutor. In the context of defamation, it’s also hypocritical because he doesn’t apply the same standard to himself when he accuses others of having defamed him.
Headings such as “Responses to Dennis Hackethal about Crime and Threats” and “I Didn't Call Dennis Hackethal a Criminal” plant the false idea that I am somehow connected to crime in readers’ minds, while simultaneously affording Elliot plausible deniability because he can claim he is not saying there is any connection. This is just another nasty trick.
There is one specific error I want Elliot to be aware of. He claims I reached out to him in bad faith last year because I “was already researching lawsuits a month before that conversation […]”. I wanted to find lawsuits stemming from misquotes so that I could market my tool Quote Checker as helping people avoid such lawsuits because Quote Checker helps them quote properly. My legal complaints against Elliot have to do with defamation, not misquotes, and the link he gives is clearly about misquotes, not defamation, so there’s no reason for him to draw this false connection. I reached out in good faith.
My lawyers have reviewed Elliot’s new articles and confirm they are defamatory per se (both as a whole and in specific parts, eg when he repeats allegation of plagiarism and implies I broke the law). I demand that Elliot take them down immediately. My lawyers also tell me that Elliot’s amateur analysis of defamation law is full of mistakes (proving my point once again, this time that he’s being irresponsible by not putting a disclaimer that he isn’t a lawyer and, once more, that he’s being hypocritical for applying a different standard to himself).
Elliot has yet to respond to his invasion of mine and others’ privacy, his defamatory lie about me (especially the part about omitting exonerating evidence), his hypocritical disregard for copyright, his abusive behavior, his ‘plagiarism’ (by his own standard), and much, much more (all of which he’s hiding by not linking to my exposé). (Wait for him to twist the part “has yet to respond” into me requesting more defamatory blog posts about me.)
By the way, Elliot is begging people for money now.
I have since investigated Elliot’s quotes further to see if I’ve made a mistake. He says ellipses at the beginning or end of quotes “are commonly discouraged.” (Though, as stated previously, he conveniently ‘forgets’ to differentiate between block quotes and inline quotes. He also admits himself that “[s]tyle guides have varied guidelines about this topic” (link removed), then misrepresents my view as stating “that you always need starting and ending ellipses when quotes start or end mid-sentence.” He hasn’t understood my view and is therefore arguing against it ineffectively.)
Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP), for instance, says to use ellipses for omissions at the beginnings and ends of sentences. (They say you “can” use them, but people commonly say ‘can’ to be polite in suggesting you should.)
It’s hard enough to get the original meaning across when you don’t alter the quote at all. Omissions should almost always be indicated, intentional or not. The only exception I make is when the quote is an inline quote that’s incorporated into the surrounding sentence in such a way that the reader can reasonably infer the omission, but even then certain nuances still apply, and several style guides agree with me on this, see below.
Regarding Elliot’s quote of the definition of ‘plagiarism’. The specific error I thought I had found (quoting “The” as “the”) may not have been an error after all. He still admits to it being a miscitation, though, because he cited (and still cites) the source as “New Oxford Dictionary”, and now he admits and agrees with me that it was the New Oxford American Dictionary. Also, as usual, he doesn’t indicate that the quotation omits parts at the end.
According to Temple’s own source on the topic of omissions, “MLA style encourages the use of ellipses at the end of a truncated quotation (even if it stands as a grammatically correct sentence) to show that it is not a full representation of the original sentence.” And “Chicago style endorses three spaced ellipses at the end of a ‘deliberately’ incomplete quoted sentence.” There’s also, again, IUP.
So, according to three style guides/sources, it’s still a misquote, though for a different reason, and it’s still a miscitation of the source title either way. I’ve updated the Quote Checker entry accordingly (original entry here), revised the main text above as well, and posted an update on Twitter.
I’m not being stricter on Temple than I have been on others in this regard, by the way. For example, I’ve criticized Alexey Guzey for similar misquotes in the past (ie not indicating omissions at beginnings/ends of quotes). I believe he’s seen these criticism and I’m not aware that he ever objected. My tool Quote Checker marks such errors the same for everyone.
To be clear, I don’t think Elliot’s misquote above is a huge deal. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a misquote, and the miscitation is still a miscitation. And the main purpose is to reveal Elliot’s hypocrisy in making a big deal out of others’ small errors while making exceptions for himself. Which he has only confirmed.
Correction: the exposé is around 37k words, not 27k. (Not including the recently added fifth article.)
The thing is, Justin could have made efforts to make this right without commenting substantively. I doubt removing his video and posting a quick retraction would count as a substantive comment. Even a brief ‘yeah you’re right, I really should have mentioned that exonerating evidence, that was my mistake’ would have gone a long way. Lawyer ethics were never an obstacle.
My Twitter interaction with Justin Mallone has come to an end. I wrote to him:
Justin’s final response to me (quote is based on optical character recognition, may contain mistakes):
Why is Justin, a supposed objectivist, invoking a secondhand standard? Elliot wrote a similarly secondhanded message to my lawyers (which they forwarded to me), so it sounds like there was some prior coordination between Elliot and Justin. Why would I pay my lawyers to give either of them any information?
In any case, they’re both lousy objectivists for invoking a secondhand standard. Continuing with Justin’s response:
He does not point out any errors in my understanding.
But he was the one saying he couldn’t substantively reply for ethical reasons, not because of my no-contact request (which I had temporarily lifted anyway specifically so that he could reply).
The lack of self-awareness is astounding. And I had just restored my original no-contact request to him, so it doesn’t make sense for him to block me. If anything, I should be blocking him. He’s not making any sense. Continuing:
If Justin thinks I’m bluffing about having legal representation, then that would free him up to speak substantively about these issues. So why issue a no-contact request instead?
Evidence? Reasoning?
He seems to have conveniently forgotten that Elliot vowed to monitor my success into the indefinite future to ruin my reputation by bringing up past complaints. Meaning I can’t just let this go because Elliot won’t let me. Elliot literally said “this doesn't go away over time” and “i can always bring it back up at any time”, as quoted in the main article above. I already tried moving on for years. I’ve also already described the deep entrenchment but Justin apparently won’t read that.
And falsely accusing me of a federal crime, as Elliot did, isn’t just criticism I “didn’t like”. Justin is minimizing a major wrong and presenting it as a subjective matter of taste when it’s actually about false statements of fact.
When Elliot monitored my Twitter activity, was that stalking, too?
He does not quote anything he thinks is vitriolic. Which is ironic because it means he wants people to take this statement on faith. And it doesn’t sound like Justin has read my exposé, but he has read Elliot’s articles. Why only read one and not the other? Doesn’t that guarantee bias?
Then he links to Elliot’s two most recent posts about me, but not to my exposé. I always encourage people to read both sides of the conflict to get the full picture and come to their own conclusion. Which is why I frequently link to Elliot’s site throughout my exposé, even though he defames me. (Elliot, on the other hand, never links to my exposé. That shows he’s hiding things and is acting in a way that’s less conducive to error correction.) Here are the two most recent articles by Elliot:
Contrary to what Justin indicated, he didn’t just delete my one comment, he deleted everyone’s comments on his video and turned commenting off entirely. (Again, lack of self-awareness/hypocrisy.)
Justin also added at the top of the video description: "UPDATE: If Dennis Hackethal sent you to this video as part of his attacks on Elliot Temple, please read my reply: https://x.com/j_mallone/status/1911229877811921244"
They’re not attacks. I’m defending myself. Justin hasn’t even tried to see this from my perspective. He thinks he’s combating bias but he’s actually introducing more bias by blocking comments entirely and only linking to Elliot’s side of the story. I don’t understand why he’s helping Elliot, especially after Elliot banned Justin from his forum. Is it to save face for having recorded his embarrassing video?
For documentation, as of 2025-04-06, Justin’s YouTube video had the following comments (aside from the one I mentioned in #2134 which he claimed YouTube deleted), in this order:
You can watch Justin’s video about me here.
During our exchange, Justin never addressed his hypocrisy/‘plagiarism’ (by his own standard) or his lying about me by omitting exonerating evidence.
1. Yes. 2. Maybe.
In addition to posting new defamatory articles about me, he has also broken my no-contact request. As a result, I now consider his no-contact request null and void.
I don’t think delaying one’s judgment in this regard is a good idea. It’s a common way for authoritarianism to override preferences. Like when people say, ‘I know you don’t like college now, but if you just push through, you will find that it was all worth it in the end.’ We use words like ‘push through’ for both ‘pushing through’ a difficult level in a video game and for ‘pushing through’ something one doesn’t want to do; they mean different things.
Self-coercion can (and should be) identified as it’s happening, not (only) retrospectively when it’s already too late.
Yeah working on a challenge you’re genuinely interested in overcoming is not self-coercion. Like struggling through a difficult level in a video game. That’s fun!
I’ve always liked the definition of coercion from the old TCS website. The definition applies as much to self-coercion. I believe I’ve mentioned it to you before but I paste it here since it’s relevant in this context for other readers:
An example of self-coercion is self-sacrifice.
The opposite of self-coercion would be to create a common preference with yourself, where ‘common’ means, as I see it, that no part of you is in conflict with another regarding a certain idea or impulse.
Although Justin blamed YouTube for removing his comment, it seems like it’s still his responsibility. They let channel owners determine how aggressively YouTube should hold comments:
Temple has since blocked the public from viewing user profiles on his forum:
I have since edited the post to include those screenshots. Both here and on Wordpress.
In the main article, I wrote about Temple’s sharing entire ebooks in a group chat:
Temple has since retaliated by publishing three nasty new blog posts about me. I’m a man of my word, so here are screenshots. First book he shared:
Second book he shared:
Header of the chat proving that this was a group chat with many members (making the distribution of entire books even worse than, say, in one-on-one DMs):
I’m also going to alert the publishers of Temple’s conduct in case they wish to explore legal avenues against him.
Cue Temple fake-complaining that I’m publishing these screenshots after he removed some things – or so he claims. Everything I’ve checked so far is still up, and he’s disparaging me more in his new posts. It’s the typical looking-cooperative-to-third-parties-while-being-a-major-pain-in-the-ass approach he’s taken in the past that will fool some people.
While researching the fallacy of the stolen concept, I’ve just stumbled upon this quote by Leonard Peikoff:
What Brett Hall and other cynics advocate seems like a version of this Cartesian mistake.
I don’t know why there are no pictures of him online. He looks pretty unremarkable though. White guy, dark brown hair, brown eyes. I have pictures 📸 📸
Something else just occurred to me: Temple’s response is lazy and low effort because that’s how social climbers signal superiority. (That’s stuff he learned from pick-up artists.) He pretends to oppose social dynamics but does selectively use them to his advantage, as I explain in the main article. That’s why he says I wrote “a large amount about” him (and then readers compare that to the little he wrote and think he has more status).
More hypocrisy.
I emailed Alan Forrester on March 8th:
No response. I followed up on March 10th:
Crickets. I will comment again if he responds.
And join the Discord as RSF after he joined under his own name? Nah.
Temple wrote a lazy and dishonest response about his misquotes. I call it lazy because he doesn’t respond to each criticism one by one. I call it dishonest because, among other things, he pretends not to understand the difference between block quotes and inline quotes (unless he’s not pretending, which in some ways would be even worse).
Temple writes (link changed to archive):
Between the lines, his readers are supposed to take away: ‘I, Temple, am OG on misquotes, and Hackethal is just ripping me off. I was there first, so I know best – believe me over him. I have authority, not Hackethal.’ (This claim is similar to his allegations that my book ‘plagiarized’ him while simultaneously messing up his ideas.) But Temple didn’t inspire me. I have cared about quoting accuracy ever since middle school, where my teachers placed great emphasis on proper quoting and explained the rules. Also, in the main article above, I explained my points of disagreement with Temple, namely that “I’d phrase the issue less in terms of control, and I don’t compare misquoting to deadnaming.” But Temple conveniently doesn’t quote that part or even link to it.
He uses straw men like “... misquotes ...”, where such specific ellipses aren’t something I ever argued are needed for inline quotes unless leaving them out is misleading in content. (Almost all of Temple’s misquotes that I have documented are block quotes.) I write (archive), in response to one of his misquotes of me:
Temple’s response? “On [Hackethal’s] website he recommends following style guides, seemingly unaware that they disagree with him.” Once again, he doesn’t provide a quote or even a link – I have multiple websites and his readers won’t know where to look. (Even if I had only one website, not linking to the specific page he’s referencing would be problematic.) Maybe he’s referring to the Quote Checker ‘Rationale’ page, where I write about indicating changes properly: “There are different style guides out there, such as Chicago and MLA, and the specifics will depend on which style guide you choose.” In any case, I specifically reference the disagreement in the block quote above. Ignoring this, Temple links to an article saying that (emphasis mine) “ellipses are discouraged at the end of a quoted sentence unless they are necessary for reader comprehension.” That statement agrees with my stance. And again, block quotes are different – the article Temple links to only goes into inline quotes, which is convenient since, again, almost all of Temple’s misquotes are block quotes. When you incorporate an inline quote in the middle of your own sentence, it’s usually clear that you’re omitting things, and thus no ellipses are necessary. I often use inline quotes without ellipses myself throughout the exposé, which I have trouble believing Temple just happened to miss. Yet he writes that he doesn’t “know of any [style guides] that agree with Hackethal's view that you always need starting and ending ellipses when quotes start or end mid-sentence.” That isn’t my stance.
Temple also writes:
Once again, no link to the source of that quoted word. It’s presumably this tweet.
He is also being hypocritical in his response, which isn’t surprising at this point. Given all of the evidence of his pedantry which I present in the main article above, the fact that he calls me “pedantic” shows a severe lack of self-awareness. Then there is, again, the implicit accusation of plagiarism despite his pages upon pages of ‘plagiarism’ (by his own standard) on his own blog, which again shows a lack of self-awareness. Also, the same article he links to says to “begin a truncated quoted sentence as you would any other quotation: Capitalize the first word if it is a proper noun or if the quotation stands alone as a complete sentence.” This is a rule Temple repeatedly fails to meet (see eg here, here, and here). He cites standards proving his misquotes while disagreeing that he misquoted.
Ironically, the article Temple links to also references MLA and Chicago both recommending ellipses at the end of a quote (even an inline quote) – and I reference both style guides on Quote Checker, as quoted above. Even style guides that “typically” oppose ellipses at the beginning or end of block quotes say you need them “where the sentence could otherwise be misinterpreted.” Like when he produced this egregious misquote of me, leaving out a big part that changes the meaning. Temple says himself that one should “us[e] ellipses for omitted words.” And, in that article, he doesn’t exclude beginnings and ends of quotes. Now he conveniently does.
Imagine if Temple wrote:
And then someone else quoted Temple as having said:
Then presumably, by Temple’s own (new?) standard, he would not consider that a misquote because he now doesn’t consider ellipses necessary at beginnings and ends of quotes? Come on. (He even gives a similar example himself here to explain that proper quoting goes beyond just following rules around accuracy, which include rules around the use of ellipses.)
He also writes:
It’s once again obscurantist to not include the link to the specific misquote he’s talking about here (presumably this one). Makes error correction harder, even though he postures as caring about correcting errors. When people hide stuff like that, you should be suspicious. Properly leaving out emphasis is easy: he could simply say he left it out. That wouldn’t mislead people “unfamiliar with internet norms and modern technology” since such indications have been convention for ages, including in old media like print books; nor would it be a huge addition (just saying ‘emphasis removed’ is fine). And nobody’s forcing Temple to write emails in plain text – he could have just used formatting. Blaming technology and others’ alleged incompetence is just another evasion of responsibility. And leaving emphasis out on purpose doesn’t make it okay in and of itself – on the contrary, that makes it worse because it shows that he deliberately breaks rules that he expects others to follow. I know that Temple thinks he doesn’t need to follow rules if he knows them and breaks them on purpose. (That’s more evasion of responsibility because it means he’s always in the clear: if he didn’t know the rule, how could he be expected to follow it? And if he knew it but broke it on purpose and breaking it on purpose makes it okay, then how can he be to blame in either case?) He indicates changes to emphasis a lot elsewhere, so why not just be consistent and do it here? And he criticizes Deutsch for modifying emphasis without indication. But then Temple misquotes Deutsch by, again, removing emphasis without indication, doing the exact same thing he accused Deutsch of doing. You can’t make this stuff up.
The thing is, almost everyone comes up with rationalizations for why their particular misquotes weren’t a big deal. Temple does this like everyone else – he’s no better.
Temple also writes:
So then he should provide a screenshot or some other form of proof. And just because the Dictionary app misquotes another dictionary doesn’t mean Temple has no responsibility here (‘it’s not my fault, blame the Dictionary app!’). The proper way to do it is to give the original source and say ‘as quoted in…’. (Though, for what it’s worth, my Mac Dictionary app doesn’t reference the original source at all, yet Temple still claimed to know it somehow.) And if the error is so small, as Temple implies, then just fix it:
Temple has those bad attitudes himself. He’d rather dig his heels in than admit being wrong about some small, relatively unimportant errors (at least compared to his much worse wrongdoings, see below). This bad attitude gets in the way of progress. He’s being maximally difficult when he should know he’s in the wrong, presumably because he’s a control freak who wants to punish me for leaving his toxic group.
Beyond his response just being more proof of his hypocrisy, more generally, it’s telling that, of all the charges in the exposé that he could have chosen to respond to – his verbal abuse, the toxicity of his group generally, his invasion of others’ privacy, his extremely dishonest defamation of me, his ‘plagiarism’ (by his own standard) – he chose misquotes, clearly the most innocuous of any of these sins. Even if I were wrong about all of his misquotes, that would still leave a mountain of problems in intellectual matters alone. Nor does he link to my exposé of him, only to Quote Checker – but the exposé includes lots of background and reasoning that preemptively address his ‘arguments’ (eg his illegitimate modifications of song lyrics as discussed in the main article above) whereas Quote Checker is merely supplemental and could easily fool his readers if read in isolation. It’s not like Temple hasn’t read the exposé; he starts his article with: “In the last few months, Dennis Hackethal did an extensive review of my writing and wrote a large amount about me. One thing he did was look for misquotes.” The “large amount” refers to the exposé (almost 27,000 words) and he knows there are far more issues than just the misquotes because he refers to them as just “[o]ne thing” I wrote about.
Another thing that stood out to me about Temple’s response is that he uses three links; two go to live websites, but one of them goes to an archived version of his Quote Checker results. That’s convenient because if I make improvements or add details on Quote Checker, they won’t reflect in the archived link. But it’s clever because if I point that out, he can claim that I use archived links throughout my exposé, too. The difference is that I use them exclusively, not just when it suits me.
Temple writes: “[I]t's nice for an independent third party to spend unpaid hours validating [my work]. And [Hackethal is] hostile towards me, so I'm not worried that he's holding back criticism […].” So then he must have loved the rest of the exposé, right? Why not link to all that “nice” work so his readers get the full picture?
Temple accused Deutsch of misquoting to make the case that Deutsch isn’t a good intellectual and not as rational as people think. Consider Temple’s response confirmation of the same and hold him to the same standard he demands of others.
Last I checked, Elliot banned Justin from his forum a while back, but Justin still checks it every few days like a rejected puppy. (You can see the ‘last seen’ timestamp or whatever it’s called on Justin’s profile.)
Yes, he seems to have left the forum for good.
Yes lol.
Yeah, after he hid his Twitter profile for a few days.
Google seems to penalize my blog so I have republished the exposé on a dedicated site: thegreatestphilosopher.wordpress.com
I did have paths forward with him.
People are coming forward. One of them tells me they have had to go to therapy because of Elliot.
Justin significantly contributed to Elliot’s underestimating me, eg by suggesting back in 2020 in their Discord chat that I was lying about having hired a lawyer when Elliot accused me of plagiarism and DOS.
Elliot seemed positively befuddled that I hired lawyers again last year to defend myself against his defamation. He specifically brought up my having paid for lawyers in his correspondence with them.
It’s presumably because he underestimated me that he spoke freely about things that gave me an advantage knowing and carelessly provided plenty of evidence to use against him, eg in his YouTube video about me. (Elliot’s video, not Justin’s, but Justin also provided lots of evidence without realizing.)
I took that screenshot right after I submitted the comment. Immediately thereafter, I refreshed the page to see if the comment was showing. It was. Now it’s gone.
About an hour and 45 minutes ago, I commented on Justin Mallone’s video:
This comment has since disappeared.
Assuming Discord cuts off seconds, then best case it’s 7:32:59.999 repeated - 7:25:00, which is 8.
From ‘Is Sanctioned Force Still Force?’
Popper continues:
Doesn’t get any clearer than that. People can reach and speak truth.
Here’s another Popper quote (emphasis mine):
Clearly, Popper thought it was possible to state the truth. He doesn’t even say we never know whether we’ve stated the truth, he only says we “often” don’t know.
Maybe they meant Weinstein shunned academic peer review and copyrighted his own paper. (I think copyright is automatic but again, not a lawyer, what do I know.)
Upon consulting an attorney, I have removed the redaction and restored that comment to its original submission.
An example of close reading gone wrong from Ayn Rand’s ‘The Cult of Moral Grayness’:
This reverse order isn’t this deep insight Rand implies it is. It could just as well not meaning anything at all. ‘Black and white’ and ‘good and evil’ are pre-existing phrases that would sound weird if you reversed the order to ‘white and black’ or ‘evil and good’. That doesn’t mean people make some accidental confession by mapping ‘white’ onto ‘evil’ and ‘black’ onto ‘good’ just because they keep the standard order of two standard phrases. Not to mention that she used those two phrases – it’s not even like this is a quote from someone else.
The customer can take his complaint to an independent court. If he prevails, an enforcement agency hired by the judge can enforce the ruling.
Note that the question isn’t just who will enforce the contract but also what. As Logan and I wrote:
The enforcement mechanism described here is the discipline of constant dealings, as David Friedman explains. Repeat players have an incentive to honor their agreements. In addition, moral people will honor their agreements as a matter of principle. As a result, honesty is cheaper than dishonesty.
More generally put, I see no reason that a dispute between a customer and his enforcement agency wouldn’t follow the same logic as other disputes.
A contradiction. So not all ideas are false.
Another name for Caplan’s metaphysical mistake: pessimism.
Caplan makes a metaphysical mistake, a variation of the malevolent-universe premise: he thinks we live in a world where at some point in your life you have to do some minimum amount of toil to get what you want. That there is some law of nature that causes coercion.
That isn’t true. We don’t live in that world. It’s possible and desirable to enjoy every second of your life. We don’t currently know how to do that but it’s still possible in principle. And regardless, there’s no minimum amount of toil anyone has to go through.
His epistemological and moral mistakes are downstream of his metaphysical mistake:
Metaphysics ⇝ epistemology ⇝ morals
Like, if we lived in a world with some minimum required toil, then some things and some knowledge (he thinks knowledge of math specifically but it really doesn’t matter which) would only be achievable by coercion, ie self-coercion or external coercion, and if the child won’t coerce himself, then to save him from the worse result of not going through coercion (reduced career choices or whatever), as a ‘caring’ parent, Caplan would rather coerce his child and take on that guilt.
It’s not even true that you necessarily have fewer career choices if you don’t learn math. If your problem situation never requires math, and you keep solving your own problems, you still end up creating a lot of knowledge that opens doors for you that math might not have opened for you. You could open more doors that way than math would open for you.
A lot of mistakes follow automatically if you have the wrong metaphysics.
Writing this article reminded me of a situation I found myself in years ago. Not even sure I knew of TCS at the time. I was having dinner with a friend, his wife, and his two sons at their house. The older son was maybe 15 and was slowly beginning to think about his future after high school. The dad, my friend, said his son had to get a master’s degree – that was non negotiable. I still kick myself sometimes for not asking the son whether that’s what he wanted, too.
See also Ayn Rand’s thoughts re capital punishment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMnLR3UTD1U&t=129s
That reminds me, I once saw female dog trying to hump a male dog.
Somebody shared this video of a dog basically humping the air: https://x.com/pho_lil/status/1836042271491309836
Cat doesn’t recognize owner anymore after owner gets haircut: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DAA4BMgNa-G/
Cat thinks Lego structure is another cat: https://www.reddit.com/r/Awww/comments/1fg0435/can_someone_translate/
Dog kicks itself, gets ‘mad’/‘confused’: https://www.reddit.com/r/awwtf/comments/1fgghgi/who_kicked_him/