What is the moral status of an honest man who steals once in a while?

Elliot Temple (‘curi’) is a writer who has accused several people, including David Deutsch, Rami Rustom, and, in an extremely hostile article, me, of plagiarism, copyright infringement, and having produced misquotes. Let’s look at his own track record.

Plagiarism

When criticizing others, Temple’s stance on plagiarism is: “Plagiarism is taking credit for ideas or writing that isn’t yours.” He says the name of the originator of an idea should be “in the main text” and “not just in the [end]note […].” He explains his stance further: “The appropriate action is to credit [the originator] by name in the main text every time one of [their] major ideas is introduced, at minimum.” He does not define “major”. “[I]ntentional malice is clear” to him when an originator is not credited “even once”.

In addition, Temple suspects ‘plagiarism’ when you so much as write about a topic he has written about. (Note that I use double quotation marks only for literal quotations, single quotation marks for scare quotes and everything else.) He comments on my article about the ‘Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness’, which he has also written about: “Why is Dennis commenting on this specific thing that only 12 scientists signed, over a decade later? Because I commented on it and he doesn't have ideas of his own.” I do not recall knowing that Temple had had thoughts on this declaration, or having known that his article existed let alone having read it, before I published mine. Similarly, Temple writes: “Dennis Hackethal is such a plagiarist.” Skipping some: “He also wrote criticism of Ayn Rand which probably-not-coincidentally is one of the main topics I've criticized her about. He uses some arguments I've made at https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/objectivism-vs-the-myth-of-the-framework” (Bold emphasis removed.) He does not say which arguments he thinks I’ve used, let alone where to find them. I am not familiar with his stance on this matter. Those are my own, original ideas.

Temple also complains about merely behaving similarly to him, such as “writing comments on [one’s] own blog posts (including old ones), which [he does] a ton but which is not typical.”

He notices that I put a period after a closing quotation mark that was preceded by a question mark (?”.) and wonders if I got that punctuation style from him.

He thinks my usage of the mere phrase ‘The misconception that…’ is plagiarized from Deutsch because both Deutsch and I use it in similar ways (see here, where Temple says “Holy shit! That’s such plagiarism!”).

Temple even considers giving credit evidence of ‘plagiarism’. He reads my blog and writes:

Hackethal starting to sometimes give me credit, by name, seems like an implicit admission that he was in the wrong re his plagiarized book.

If you make edits to address complaints without referencing them, Temple considers that more ‘plagiarism’:

[…] Dennis Hackethal […] used my post complaining about the plagiarism to help him figure out some edits to make (without giving me credit – further plagiarism) […].

Temple concludes that “Dennis is just beyond normal decency in our society. […] This is like bottom 1% behavior. Like 99 out of 100 people are more decent than Dennis is.”

Although Temple opposes social dynamics because they “clash[] with rationality”, he believes in using them to his advantage when fighting ‘plagiarists’. He wants to monitor my success into the indefinite future to tear me back down by bringing up his ‘plagiarism’ complaint with my followers. While publicly discussing his complaint with his associates, he writes (recall that ‘curi’ is Temple):

[01-Apr-20 02:21 PM] curi#0644
how is this going to work out well for [Hackethal]? he'll never be able to make a career out of this in which he associates with people with integrity.

[…]

[01-Apr-20 02:30 PM] curi#0644
and like reputable ppl hate mud fights

[01-Apr-20 02:30 PM] curi#0644
even if they don't exactly take my side

[01-Apr-20 02:30 PM] curi#0644
they don't wanna get dragged into dirt, will see it as problem [sic] etc

[01-Apr-20 02:31 PM] curi#0644
will be hard to network with them

[01-Apr-20 02:32 PM] curi#0644
if he gets anywhere, ppl will do background checks or he'll have opponents with mics who want negative info about him

[…]

[01-Apr-20 02:32 PM] curi#0644
i can always bring it back up at any time when his subreddit has 10k subscribers or whatever

[…]

[01-Apr-20 02:32 PM] curi#0644
which really isn't much work

[…]

[01-Apr-20 02:32 PM] curi#0644
if he gets anywhere

[…]

[01-Apr-20 02:32 PM] curi#0644
in social climbing, fans, etc

[…]

[01-Apr-20 02:33 PM] curi#0644
this doesn't go away over time

That last sentence really means he won’t let his complaint go away over time. And he immediately delivers on his promise by instructing people to “reconsider” “a business or personal relationship” with me and stating that “all civilized people should shun” me.

In short, Temple has strict standards for what he considers ‘plagiarism’. He is vengeful and spiteful and believes in publicly shaming ‘plagiarists’, decreasing their ability to earn a living, and shunning them from civilization.

Temple does not apply the same standard to himself and his own writings. In a (fictional?) dialog on his blog, he writes:

Elliot: […] I learn things from you, and I won't hesitate to pass them on when good chances present themselves.
Caeli: Will you tell people that the ideas came from me?
Elliot: Probably not. It’s hard to keep track of where my ideas come from, and it’s not very important anyway. We should judge ideas based on their merits, not their author.
Caeli: But I want to get credit, so people know I have good ideas.
Elliot: Don’t worry about that. […]

For himself, Temple says tracking the origin of ideas is both difficult and unimportant. He also says one shouldn’t want credit. Around ten years later, he acknowledges that accusations of plagiarism can be used to control people:

i think plagiarism is an over-hyped sin. schools really hate it because they're trying to control people who don't want to be there.

But in that same post, he claims someone else didn’t credit him, and then, suddenly, “it *is* important to give appropriate credit for work, though.” Yet he closes the post by admitting “i [Temple] don't give credit all the time in individual posts.” That’s an understatement, as I will prove below. In any case, these quotes show that he is aware of his hypocrisy and that he leaves out credit intentionally (as opposed to accidentally or due to incompetence or cryptomnesia). He seems to draw some distinction between missing credit and plagiarism – yet when someone else tried to draw that same distinction in response to Temple’s accusations against me, Temple rejected it, (mis)quoting the “New Oxford Dictionary” (really the New Oxford American Dictionary) definition of plagiarism as “the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own”.

Even though I avoided Temple’s blog for years to prevent cryptomnesia, I quickly found instances of what he would consider ‘plagiarism’ if others did it, especially to him. These are just examples and in no way meant to be exhaustive. If I seem nitpicky as you read on, keep in mind that I’m not applying my own standard but his – I don’t consider the examples I give actual plagiarism, and neither should you. I merely want to prove his hypocrisy.

Temple claims that I plagiarized ideas from David “Deutsch’s books, with zero credit, includ[ing]: problems are soluble, problems are inevitable, the jump to universality, reach, and criteria for reality”, and that I used some of Deutsch’s “exact phrase[s]” (bold emphasis removed). How does Temple fare with regard to the same ideas if we apply his strict standard?

Having worked with Deutsch for over two years to translate his book The Beginning of Infinity (BoI, originally published in 2011), I am well versed in many of Deutsch’s ideas. I recognize immediately when someone uses them without credit. We can easily find examples of Temple’s ‘plagiarism’ of Deutsch by doing a Google search specifically for literal strings on Temple’s website. For example: ‘site:curi.us “problems are soluble”’. Note that this approach returns pages where he uses “exact phrase[s]”, so at this point we’re not even looking for ‘sneaky’ instances where he uses the same concepts but in his own words.

Among the results, we find that Temple dedicates an entire article to problems being soluble, titled ‘All Problems Are Soluble’, a key concept from BoI, but doesn’t mention Deutsch in it once. Verifying this is easy: after opening the link, we run a word search (cmd + f) for the words ‘Deutsch’, ‘David’, and ‘DD’, and come up empty each time. All Temple gives is the name of an email list that happens to coincide with the title of Deutsch’s book: “I originally wrote this for the beginning of infinity email list […].” But not all readers will know that this name refers to a book, let alone that Deutsch wrote it and came up with this specific idea. By Temple’s own standard, not crediting Deutsch “even once” means Temple had “intentional malice” toward Deutsch. (That’s nothing compared to Temple telling Deutsch to go “DIAF” (‘die in a fire’) in 2014 and again in 2016.) Note that I may, at times, leave out sundry ‘plagiarism’ of an idea, eg in comments such as this one – again, my list isn’t meant to be exhaustive.

Using a similar search, we find that Temple ‘plagiarizes’ “problems are inevitable” here, where he writes: “In general, problems are inevitable […]”. He does not mention Deutsch anywhere in the entire article. Here, Temple writes “Problems are inevitable.”, but does not attribute the idea to Deutsch. Same here, where Temple again writes “Problems are inevitable.”, and once again fails to credit Deutsch. That problems are both soluble and inevitable is a core tenet of Deutsch’s work on philosophical optimism and a central theme of his book – so central, in fact, that Deutsch literally included graphics of both phrases carved in stone in chapter 3. The exact phrase ‘problems are inevitable’ appears in the book 13 times; ‘problems are soluble’ 15 times. These ideas count as “major” by any reasonable definition.

Temple ‘plagiarizes’ “the jump to universality” as well. The idea is, again, original to Deutsch; it is “[t]he tendency of gradually improving systems to undergo a sudden large increase in functionality, becoming universal in some domain.” (BoI chapter 6 glossary) For example, there is a jump in functionality from special-purpose computers to general-purpose/universal ones, as Deutsch explains. Temple ‘plagiarizes’ the idea of the jump to universality here when he writes that “[t]here are non-linear jumps in performance when learning. It’s like jumps to universality.” (Bold emphasis removed; as an aside, jumps are non-linear by definition, so saying “non-linear jumps” is redundant.) Temple again ‘plagiarizes’ the idea, making zero mention of Deutsch or even BoI anywhere:

There’s a jump to universality. Take a very limited thing, and add one new feature, and all of a sudden it gains universality! E.g. our previous computer was trivial with only NOT, and universal when we added AND. The same new feature which allowed it to perform addition also allowed it to perform trigonometry, calculus, and matrix math.

That’s only one example from that article – in it, Temple uses the exact phrase ‘jump to universality’ three times. Only halfway through the article does Temple give vague credit for the idea of “universal knowledge creators”, but he only links to the Amazon page for BoI.¹ He does not even mention its title let alone Deutsch’s name. Readers could easily miss that the jump to universality is Deutsch’s idea. And Temple got the idea from Deutsch. Temple said my providing links to his content wasn’t enough – yet apparently, when he gives more obscure links than that, it’s fine.

From a cursory reading, there’s lots more ‘plagiarism’ of other ideas original to Deutsch in that same article that I’m not even investigating further for now, eg his highly original concept of “anti-rational memes” (aka ‘static’ memes, BoI chapter 15) and his stance on animal intelligence. In public, Deutsch has been vague about his thoughts on animals; as a result, they’re particularly easy to ‘plagiarize’.

Continuing down Temple’s list, let’s investigate the concept of reach. Deutsch came up with the concept to mean “[t]he ability of some explanations to solve problems beyond those that they were created to solve.” (BoI chapter 1 glossary – the chapter is titled ‘The Reach of Explanations’.) Temple ‘plagiarizes’ the idea here when he writes: “This also gets into the issue of reach, where an idea you know about one thing may help lead to a new issue.” As usual, Temple does not credit Deutsch. Also, do you see the difference between Temple’s and Deutsch’s usage of the term? Temple says ‘reach’ means that an idea causes additional problems (“new issue”), but Deutsch intended ‘reach’ to mean that an idea solves additional problems (rather than create them). When Temple suspects others of getting borrowed ideas wrong, he does not just accuse them of ‘plagiarism’ but also of “distort[ing] the ideas […] enough to screw them up a bit while still leaving them recognizable as other people’s ideas”.

Temple again ‘plagiarizes’ the concept of reach here. This time, he gets the concept right: “Some measures help address many different human problems, as well as more important problems. Their reach is a sign of their objective value.” No credit given. He only vaguely writes at the bottom of the article, long after mentioning reach, that he “learned most of this from David Deutsch personally.” Temple wouldn’t accept that lack of specificity (“this”) from others. He would demand credit “every time one of [his] major ideas is introduced, at minimum”, as previously quoted.

He ‘plagiarizes’ the concept of reach a third time here. Although he mentions “BoI” at the top of the article, he only invokes the concept several paragraphs further down, without credit, where readers won’t know that it originated with Deutsch.

So, Temple accused me of plagiarizing Deutsch’s ideas “problems are soluble, problems are inevitable, the jump to universality, reach, and criteria for reality”, all “major” and “highly original and distinctive ideas”, when he had already ‘plagiarized’ them himself using “exact phrase[s]”. (Most of the links I’ve quoted so far are older than my book, but some are more recent.) The only idea from that list which Temple does not seem to have ‘plagiarized’ is Deutsch’s criteria for reality.²

‘Maybe Deutsch gave Temple permission to use those ideas.’ Maybe, but I had Temple’s permission to use examples of his to explain a concept in my writing, yet he claimed I plagiarized it.³ He conveniently doesn’t mention that in his article.⁴ That’s dishonest – see my discussion of honesty below. The fact that I asked for permission shows that I’m considerate, but if he mentions that, people might not believe his plagiarism narrative about me. (I also ran my book through an online plagiarism checker before publication, which came up empty – more evidence that I’m considerate, as is my more recent avoiding Temple’s blog to avoid cryptomnesia, as mentioned above. Comedians sometimes do this, too: they won’t watch each other’s acts so they don’t accidentally borrow something later on without realizing it’s borrowed.)

None of these instances of Temple’s ‘plagiarism’ should surprise us. He admitted to me and others in a group chat on 2019-04-28 that he often mentions Deutsch’s ideas without credit. Why? He said there are too many of them – implying, in effect, that if Deutsch didn’t want to be plagiarized, he shouldn’t be so original. (Even though Temple committed a serious violation of my and others’ privacy, I am still respecting his by not sharing those messages. But if he disputes my paraphrase or retaliates, I will interpret that as him wanting this to be a public matter and giving me permission to share everything he told me, as he once wrote about me. My lawyers tell me I’m under no obligation to keep those messages private anyway.) Temple only makes those exceptions for himself – as I’ve quoted, he expects others to give credit “every time”. Temple didn’t even use the word ‘plagiarize’ to describe what he does with Deutsch’s ideas – he only said he doesn’t mention them. But when others do it, he considers it plagiarism.

‘But your quotes so far are small bits from various links spanning years.’ He wouldn’t let that fly. But okay, let’s look at a single article full of ‘plagiarism’, titled ‘What Is Intelligence?’ He published it in January 2023, almost three years after he accused me. The article starts:

Intelligence is a universal knowledge creation system. It uses the only known method of knowledge creation: evolution. Knowledge is information adapted to a purpose.

These ideas are different from mainstream thoughts around intelligence and knowledge. Most people think knowledge is derived from observations. So, what Temple writes is all new and original to him, right? No. There are at least three instances of ‘plagiarism’ in these first three sentences alone. For the first one, I have previously pointed out Temple vaguely attributing the concept of “universal knowledge creators” to BoI. So then he should attribute it now, too (but more clearly than before).

That evolution is the only known method of knowledge creation is a key insight by 20th-century philosopher Karl Popper. It’s not just a “major” idea – in the history of philosophy, it was arguably the idea of the century. Popper writes:

[T]he growth of our knowledge is the result of a process closely resembling what Darwin called ‘natural selection’; that is, the natural selection of hypotheses: our knowledge consists, at every moment, of those hypotheses which have shown their (comparative) fitness by surviving so far in their struggle for existence; a competitive struggle which eliminates those hypotheses which are unfit.
   This interpretation may be applied to animal knowledge, pre-scientific knowledge, and to scientific knowledge. What is peculiar to scientific knowledge is this: that the struggle for existence is made harder by the conscious and systematic criticism of our theories. Thus, while animal knowledge and pre-scientific knowledge grow mainly through the elimination of those holding the unfit hypotheses, scientific criticism often makes our theories perish in our stead, eliminating our mistaken beliefs before such beliefs lead to our own elimination.

Popper’s epistemology, which he called critical rationalism (CR), has been a major influence on Temple. Popper is careful to signal that he originated this epistemology (“I wish to propose”). He explains it in several places, not just in the above quote, but I’m confident Temple has read this particular passage – not just because I know from conversations with him that he’s read many Popper books, but also because he cites this book many times and has even written something strikingly similar to a remark of Popper’s about metaphors, from the same book. Temple writes: “Popperian epistemology says we literally learn by evolution. It is not a metaphor or analogy.” (Bold emphasis in the original.) Temple does not give a full, proper citation. Compare his words to Popper’s:

This statement of the situation is meant to describe how knowledge really grows. It is not meant metaphorically, though of course it makes use of metaphors. The theory of knowledge which I wish to propose is a largely Darwinian theory of the growth of knowledge. From the amoeba to Einstein, the growth of knowledge is always the same: we try to solve our problems, and to obtain, by a process of elimination, something approaching adequacy in our tentative solutions.

Continuing in Temple’s article ‘What Is Intelligence?’, he writes that “[k]nowledge is information adapted to a purpose”, which is another idea he borrows from CR without credit. He should know better since he bothered to credit it here, where he writes: “Knowledge in the CR view is *adapted information*.”

Temple also writes in ‘What Is Intelligence?’:

The replicators that evolve are called ideas. They are varied and selected too.

How are they selected? By criticism. Criticisms are themselves ideas which can be criticized.

That criticism plays the role of selection in the evolution of ideas is also ‘plagiarized’ from Popper, who, as quoted above, spoke of a “natural selection of hypotheses” and a “process of elimination”, and said that “the struggle” of theories “for existence is made harder by the conscious and systematic criticism of our theories.”

Skipping some, Temple writes:

How do I know this? I regard it as the best available theory given current knowledge. I don’t know a refutation of it and I don’t know of any viable alternative.

A more honest answer would have been: ‘I read it in a Popper book.’ But because Temple doesn’t say that, the reader may easily think these thoughts are original to him. Phrases in the first person such as “I regard” can cement that mistaken impression. The above quote is also an application of CR – looking for refutations and viable alternatives and then adopting the best surviving theory – so Popper deserves credit for that, too, but doesn’t receive it. Temple continues:

Interpretations of information (such as observations or sense data) are ideas too.

This insight is well-known among Popperians but not widely understood by the general public. It opposes the standard, widespread epistemologies of empiricism and inductivism, as Popper did. It’s usually phrased in such terms as ‘all observation is theory-laden’ or ‘theory-impregnated’. For instance, Popper writes in a subheading:

All Knowledge is Theory-Impregnated, Including our Observations

Popper also writes:

[T]he alleged data are […] interpretations which incorporate theories and prejudices and which, like theories, are impregnated with conjectural expectations; […] there can be no pure perception, no pure datum; exactly as there can be no pure observational language, since all languages are impregnated with theories and myths.

Deutsch references this idea many times in BoI, eg writing “[a]ll observation is theory-laden” (chapter 2, chapter 8). Unlike Temple, Deutsch gives credit: “All observations are, as Popper put it, theory-laden […]” (chapter 1), and even adds a footnote stating that the “term was coined by the philosopher Norwood Russell Hanson.”

Temple does credit Popper for the idea in a different article (though without a full citation and without crediting Hanson for the term ‘theory-laden’). Temple writes:

Karl Popper emphasized that all observation is theory-laden, meaning that all our scientific evidence has to be interpreted and if we get the interpretation wrong then our scientific conclusions will be wrong. Science doesn’t operate on raw data.

Why credit the same idea only in some places but not others?

Skipping some in ‘What Is Intelligence?’, Temple continues:

Do [sic] to limited conscious attention and limited short-term memory, one of the main things we do is take a few ideas and combine them into one new idea. That’s called integration. We take what used to be several mental units and create a new, single mental unit which has a lot of the value of its components. But it’s just one thing so it costs less attention than the previous multiple things. By repeating this process, we can get advanced ideas.

“That’s called integration” is a vague hint that this isn’t an original idea (as opposed to, say, ‘I call that integration’). But that hint could easily be lost on the reader. Temple is describing an objectivist concept. He borrows the parts about requiring attention (he implies effort), and combining ideas to create new ideas, from objectivist epistemology, down to the word “unit”, without any credit. Compare Temple’s writing to these two original sources:

Integration is a cardinal function of man’s consciousness on all the levels of his cognitive development. First, his brain brings order into his sensory chaos by integrating sense data into percepts; this integration is performed automatically; it requires effort, but no conscious volition. His next step is the integration of percepts into concepts, as he learns to speak. Thereafter, his cognitive development consists in integrating concepts into wider and ever wider concepts, expanding the range of his mind. This stage is fully volitional and demands an unremitting effort.

And:

A concept is a mental integration of two or more units which are isolated according to a specific characteristic(s) and united by a specific definition. . . . [In concept-formation], the uniting involved is not a mere sum, but an integration, i.e., a blending of the units into a single, new mental entity which is used thereafter as a single unit of thought (but which can be broken into its component units whenever required).

Temple is a fan of Rand’s. Before borrowing her ideas without credit, he lauded her as “the greatest philosopher” (italics in the original) – so then how can missing credit be an indicator of malice? He also writes he “loves Ayn Rand” and: “I'm an Objectivist. I've extensively studied and discussed Objectivism, including over 50 readings of books by Ayn Rand.” So he has plausibly read these passages. And he owns Rand’s Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, which I quote above.

Temple ends his article ‘What Is Intelligence?’ shortly thereafter. It only has 652 words (13 paragraphs), so he ‘plagiarized’ a significant portion of it; the ‘plagiarism’ density is high. My guess is that the only original idea in the article is one about the brain being “like a huge factory” and the conscious mind having to “delegate a ton of stuff to the subconscious [through practice] after figuring out how to do it.” Then again, pretty much anyone who has learned to drive a car already knows that practice offloads knowledge to the subconscious. It seems like Temple mostly wrote a summary piece about some of the best available theories around intelligence, drew inspiration from several different sources, and then neglected to credit them. He doesn’t mention Popper, Deutsch, or Rand once, let alone any specific works of theirs, even though he makes them do all the heavy lifting.

Speaking of Rand, there’s another passage in a previously quoted article in which Temple writes:

the more you learn and think and actually start to make some progress with reason, the harder it is to just be a collection of special cases. the more you start to learn and apply some principles and try to be more consistent.

Compare that paragraph with this passage by Rand, an advocate of principled thinking:

What [the] subconscious [of an anti-conceptual, concrete-bound person] stores and automatizes is not ideas, but an indiscriminate accumulation of sundry concretes, random facts, and unidentified feelings, piled into unlabeled mental file folders.

Coincidence? Maybe.

Here’s another article Temple wrote, titled ‘Common Preferences’, published in December 2015. It’s about resolving conflicts. He says compromises are bad because they involve giving up something you want. Instead, according to Temple, you should find common preferences – solutions all parties to a conflict wholeheartedly prefer to their initial positions. He says “[c]ommon preferences mean that everyone (fully) prefers the same thing” (bold emphasis mine) and adds that people shouldn’t always stick with “their initial preference […]” (bold emphasis in the original). Those are new and useful insights because people typically go for compromise, as Temple himself points out. The concept of common preferences has great potential to improve people’s lives. Readers could easily think it’s his original idea, but that’s not the case. David Deutsch and Sarah Fitz-Claridge came up with the idea as part of their educational philosophy Taking Children Seriously (TCS). They published an article on 2003-07-16 titled ‘Common Preferences and Non-coercion’ on the TCS website. Among other things, it has the definition Temple took: “Common preferences are policies that all parties after a successfully resolved disagreement prefer to their initial positions […]” (bold emphasis added). On top of these glaring similarities, it’s easy to prove that Temple got the idea from that article because he commented on it one day after publication. But in his own article, he doesn’t credit Deutsch, Fitz-Claridge, or TCS once.

Temple later updated his article about common preferences. He added a disclaimer at the top about TCS, Deutsch, and Fitz-Claridge, stating, among other things, that “their articles are misleading […].” Clearly, when he first wrote the article, he somehow assumed that readers would know the idea didn’t originate with him; they would somehow infer this… how exactly? It isn’t clear. But visitors to websites often read pages in isolation, and he would never accept that lack of specificity from someone borrowing his ideas. He ‘plagiarizes’ the concept of common preferences again here.

Still in the article about common preferences, Temple writes:

It doesn't make sense to want (prefer) things that won't work. It doesn't make sense for people to inflexibly have contradictory wants. It doesn't make sense for people to want the impossible (in contradiction to physics/nature).

Compare this passage to Rand’s:

[One should not] believe that it is […] possible for man to achieve his goals, regardless of whether they contradict the facts of reality or not.

And:

[A rational man] knows that the contradictory is the impossible, that a contradiction cannot be achieved in reality […]. Therefore, he does not permit himself to hold contradictory values, to pursue contradictory goals […].

Temple has read this source, too: he lists it in his book recommendations. There are similar thoughts in Rand’s ‘The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made’ in her book Philosophy: Who Needs It, which he has also read. In addition, some readers might recognize the idea of common preferences as having originated with TCS, but then they might falsely attribute Rand’s ideas to TCS as well, or vice versa, since Temple credits neither in the same article. But Temple also breaks significantly with TCS, without indication, when he writes “[i]t doesn't make sense for people to want the impossible (in contradiction to physics/nature)”, whereas TCS says that building a spaceship that can travel faster than the speed of light “would be an example of something that might be be [sic] desirable, but is impossible.” How can Temple answer for this mess of distortions and misattributions, as he would consider it?

Temple ‘plagiarizes’ Popper, again, this time on the problem of explanation:

BTW, what is an explanation? Loosely it's the kind of statement which answers why or how.

He got this directly from Popper, only two pages after the passage he previously ‘plagiarized’:

In seeking pure knowledge our aim is, quite simply, to understand, to answer how-questions and why-questions. These are questions which are answered by giving an explanation.

Temple mentions Popper elsewhere in his article but does not attribute this idea to him – I did check each instance of the string ‘Popper’, and the surrounding sentences, to make sure. Again, Temple would demand more specificity from others. (If you’re looking for original content around the problem of explanation, read my article about it.)

While investigating Temple’s ‘plagiarism’ of the concept of common preferences, I noticed that he ‘plagiarizes’ physicist Richard Feynman, too. In 2007, Temple writes: “Science is about how to not fool ourselves.” That’s one of the core ideas from Feynman’s 1974 commencement address at Caltech, titled ‘Cargo Cult Science’. Feynman speaks of a “long history of learning how to not fool ourselves” and says that the “first principle [of science] is that you must not fool yourself […]”. The address is reproduced in the 1985 book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Temple gives zero credit. Is this striking similarity just a coincidence? Did he develop this idea independently? No, he has read that book: he invokes the concept of a cargo cult in an article from 2003, and he lists the title “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feymnan!” (sic) among his book recommendations. In this context, there’s also potentially an issue of copyright – more on that below.

I took the opportunity to read Feynman’s entire commencement address and noticed striking similarities to Temple’s piece about honesty and integrity, titled ‘Lying’. The piece is not dated, but the earliest archived version is from 2020. In it, Temple writes: “People often claim that all lies are conscious and intentional.” This is the conventional view of lying. He says this view is “incorrect” because, by that logic, it would be “almost impossible to lie to yourself”, which is something people do. So he contrasts it with his own view: “A lie is a communication (or a belief, for lying to yourself) which you should know is false.” Conversely, Temples argues that honesty is about “making a reasonable effort to be truthful […]”. In other words, honesty requires being conscientious, careful, in representing the truth. I agree. I think this definition of honesty is better than the conventional one. I have been referencing it on my blog, crediting Temple. But did he come up with it?

I’ll expand on one of my previous Feynman quotes. He writes:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

Next, Feynman elaborates on his distinction between scientific and conventional honesty:

I would like to add something that’s not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you’re not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We’ll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is [not just] not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

Feynman says there’s a conventional kind of honesty – the type where you don’t fool others, don’t cheat on your wife, ie don’t intentionally lie to people. This (inversely) maps onto what Temple says about the conventional conception of lying. In addition, Feynman argues that, to be honest with others, you first have to learn to be honest with yourself. If you fool yourself, you lie to others as a result. He also implies that the idea of honesty requiring honesty with oneself is unconventional, just as Temple states explicitly. And Feynman argues that honesty involves being “careful”, conscientious. He later mentions a specific scientist whose methodology he considers honest and describes him as “being very careful”. Compare these thoughts to Temple’s:

If you lie to yourself, you’ll inevitably lie to others too, as you repeat some of your self-lies to them.

This is basically the inverse of Feynman’s statement: “After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists.” Temple also writes:

Lying to others requires having dishonest ways of thinking in your head. You will use them to lie to yourself too.

Doesn’t that sound remarkably similar to Feynman?

Feynman draws a connection between honesty and integrity and being careful/conscientious/thorough in various passages, for instance:

[There’s] a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards.

And:

[I]t’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.

Temple argues the same, except that “this kind of care” (my quote, not his) is missing for honesty in general, not just in science. Feynman also writes:

[T]his long history of learning how to not fool ourselves—of having utter scientific integrity—is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of.

Temple likewise draws this connection between honesty and integrity:

[Not making a reasonable effort to be truthful] means you lack integrity, you’re dishonest, you’re lying.

And:

Reasonable steps to respect the truth are actually the key part of integrity.

In fairness to Temple, he does start his article with a quote by Ayn Rand that connects honesty and integrity, so maybe he got the connection from her – or maybe from both her and Feynman. However, things get strangely similar again on the topic of implications. Feynman gives the example of advertising, among others:

Last night I heard that Wesson oil doesn’t soak through food. Well, that’s true. It’s not dishonest [in the conventional sense]; but the thing I’m talking about is not just a matter of not being dishonest, it’s a matter of scientific integrity, which is another level. The fact that should be added to that advertising statement is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a certain temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will—including Wesson oil. So it’s the implication which has been conveyed, not the fact, which is true, and the difference is what we have to deal with.

In other words, the advertisement is literally true but lacking scientific integrity because it implies that only Wesson oil doesn’t soak through food; that it’s better than competitors in this regard. The advertisement is not careful enough to communicate the truth; it lies by implication. Temple’s definition of lying fits the lack of conscientiousness from this example to a T.

Temple dedicates a section to the same issue of implications, titled ‘Communicating Implications’, where he writes:

People without integrity pretend they aren’t lying if they only imply lies. Nonsense.

Temple also writes:

Hair-splitters, word-lawyers and pedants claim that if the literal content of their communication is true, they can’t possibly be liars. They refuse to take responsibility for what they imply and leave their listener to guess. But communication always involves implications and guesses, so an honest speaker must take responsibility for trying to communicate correctly. You can’t say everything perfectly, but you can do your honest best to give people the right idea instead of the wrong idea.

Similarly, Feynman writes:

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can—if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong—to explain it.

We know it occurred to Feynman to apply his standard of scientific honesty to general life or he wouldn’t have juxtaposed it to “cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend” and so on. Did Temple take Feynman’s standard of scientific honesty and pass it off as a new, higher bar for honesty in general? I don’t know, but having read both pieces, there is so much overlap that I might as well have credited Feynman all those times I credited Temple. Read both and come to your own conclusion. I will update my articles, and I suggest others do the same with theirs if they have credited Temple in this context.

You can tell by the design and editing of Temple’s article that he made an effort to write well. It’s one of his showroom articles – this is Temple at his best. Not good enough to remember to credit Feynman though, it seems.

Here’s what might be one of the worst examples of Temple’s ‘plagiarism’. In his vitriolic article about my book, in a section calling me a “jerk”, Temple writes:

Lots of the reasoning DH [Dennis Hackethal] uses for attacking [Nick] Bostrom on AI alignment and slavery is plagiarized from ET [Elliot Temple]. DH also plagiarized the view of a new AGI [artificial general intelligence] as similar to a child needing an education. Comments like “If you build an AGI, you are a parent.” are taken from ET. (The AGI material is easily recognizable and distinctive while also being changed enough to screw it up). BTW, elsewhere DH also brings up parenting to talk about it being an area heavy with static memes, which is again something he got from ET.

I didn’t plagiarize Temple on any of these points. Someone can reasonably claim to have been plagiarized only when they came up with the ideas in question. Those aren’t Temple’s ideas. They’re Deutsch’s. Temple takes credit for Deutsch’s ideas, in an article about how one shouldn’t take credit for other people’s ideas! At first I thought maybe Temple wanted credit for telling me about those ideas (“got from”). That would be unreasonable, even if he did tell me. You don’t need to credit your high-school math teacher every time you write about calculus. (Calculus is so widely known that you wouldn’t need to credit anyone, even its originators, but that’s not the point – it’s that your math teacher didn’t come up with it. You could credit him as a courtesy for teaching you, but it’s not plagiarism if you don’t.) But then I saw that Temple claims in this video, in reference to alignment and slavery: “[T]hat’s my idea!” Then he backtracks a bit: “It’s implied by [Deutsch’s] ideas, but [he] didn’t publish it and I’m the one who told the world.” As for telling “the world”, consider that Temple’s video has 165 views almost five years later, which gives you an idea of how little of an audience he really has. Contrast that with Deutsch, who had, in fact, published the idea to around 21,000 followers in 2019, ie before I published my book. He also published it on Sam Harris’s podcast back in 2015, where I heard it years before I even knew Temple. And I know from personal conversations with Deutsch that he had that idea long before he appeared on Harris’s podcast.

Even though I made it perfectly clear in my book that Deutsch was a major inspiration for it, Temple says in that same article about me that Deutsch has had “a bunch of important and original ideas that aren’t very well known, so they are particularly good targets to plagiarize”. So then the same goes for his ‘plagiarism’ of Deutsch’s ideas, other lesser-known authors such as Popper, and especially for largely unknown authors such as Fitz-Claridge. Temple claims to be the “best living philosopher” – that’s a high bar, so maybe he feels a need to embellish a bit.

I have more examples of Temple’s use of others’ ideas without credit, but I think I’ve given enough. There are pages upon pages filled with what Temple would consider actual plagiarism, on his own blog and some of his other websites. He writes about honesty and integrity and postures as this super honest guy, even gives legal advice to others about copyright and plagiarism (though without a disclaimer stating that he isn’t a lawyer, which is irresponsible). But he doesn’t live up to his own standard of intellectual integrity. That’s hypocrisy, which is the opposite of integrity. It’s also dishonest and casts serious doubt on the motivation behind his criticisms of me and others.

So, what was his real motivation? He tells us himself. As context, around 2019/2020, he seemed to have a big issue with former members of his forum, including me, starting their own, separate group. He wanted to recruit people away from me and the new group to his forum. What better way to do so than to tar and feather a key member as a plagiarist? In his public group chat, file ‘fi-2 complete.txt’, he writes at the time (‘curi’ is Temple):

[01-Apr-20 02:38 PM] curi#0644
tell [Hackethal’s associates] that [his] plagiarism is a good time to jump ship and give talking to [my forum] a try […]

Also note all the snickering and outright laughing in his video comments on my book – it’s as if he was excited to have found reason to disparage me. Those aren’t the sounds of someone who feels genuinely wronged. Consider once more the chat logs quoted above where he seemed happy about how his accusation of plagiarism “doesn't go away over time” and how he “can always bring it back up at any time” and monitor my success. Presumably, those fantasies are, again, in service of recruiting people away from me and to his forum. I’m not the first one Temple has done this with – after getting banned from a forum run by objectivist philosopher Harry Binswanger in 2016, Temple published an article titled ‘Harry Binswanger Refuses To Think’. In it, Temple accuses Binswanger of all sorts of irrationality and tears him to shreds. And, not surprisingly, Temple “advise[s] members to find a better forum”, linking to his own. This behavior is part of a larger pattern Temple uses to recruit people to his forum.

Holding Temple to his own standard of plagiarism, we would now demand that he make “massive revisions [for his blog] to be ethical” and take it offline in the meantime, “otherwise [he] would be intentionally committing plagiarism during that time”. We’d tell him he should credit people with sufficient granularity in each article he revises. “The revisions would also need to be documented so people would know what was changed and could check whether that was acceptable; hiding the version history of [his blog] or being vague about the revisions would be unacceptable.” He has an open error-correction policy for his blog, after all. Like him, we’d remind readers that our list was by no means exhaustive, so if his changes were limited to our list he’d only be applying “band-aids”. We’d thus imply we might later check for more examples we could publish and then demand he fix those, too. If he asked us what changes we’d want him to make, then instead of interpreting that as him being cooperative, we’d say it’s not our job. Lastly, we would consider both his making changes and his refusal to do so problematic: the former for being an admission of guilt, the latter for inaction. If he did make changes based on our feedback, but without crediting us for said feedback, then like him, we’d consider that “further plagiarism”. In the meantime, we’d tar and feather him in public and tell people to shun him, just like when he called on “all civilized people [to] shun” me.

To be clear, I’m not actually advocating that anyone do this. Instead, I’m pointing out how over the top such a response would be. Ask yourself: would it be good-faith intellectual feedback or an attempt to coerce and control?

I put the word ‘plagiarism’ in scare quotes throughout this article because, as stated at the outset, the instances I’ve given aren’t examples of actual, malicious plagiarism. They’re technicalities and no big deal. As Temple says himself, it’s hard keeping track of sources. Especially those authors who are more interested in ideas than people may, at times, forget to give credit without intending any harm. Even the stuff about honesty/Feynman and the article about common preferences, though not ideal, still aren’t actual plagiarism – even though, in both cases, credit is missing completely. People take license and borrow ideas, both without credit and without malice, all the time. I never had any malice toward Temple. He even says himself that I am “not reducing [his] sales of anything by any significant number of dollars” (even though, as he claims, his ideas have a “real value” of “millions of dollars” “because of how good they are”). But for consistency, he should view himself as an actual plagiarist since he considers such technicalities actual plagiarism when others do them.

Copyright

Temple has a strict stance when it comes to his own copyright. He claims that I violated it in one sentence and one part sentence (!) in my book, in which I wrote “x is a universal y if it can do all the z’s all the other y’s can do” and “hard to vary given what constraint?”, respectively. In an email to me from 2020-04-01, he threatens to “file a copyright takedown claim with amazon”, along with other threats. (If he ever did file it, it was unsuccessful, as was the disparaging review he left on Amazon, which they removed without any encouragement on my part. They must have recognized immediately how outrageous Temple’s claims were.)

In his blog post about me, Temple tries to explain copyright:

Copyright protects the specific form of a work but not the ideas or concepts. It’s the thing that gets lots of YouTube videos taken down and people get sued over it. It’s a well known law in widespread use.

It is, again, irresponsible of Temple to explain legal concepts without putting a disclaimer that he isn’t a lawyer. And the word “form” is vague – it’s the expression of an idea in a tangible medium that copyright protects. I’m not a lawyer either, but I’ve consulted several lawyers over the years on matters of copyright. Here’s one of them:

Authors create copyrights when they express their ideas into or onto a tangible medium.

The purpose of copyright is to protect authors of creative works. If consumers could share every book, movie, or song with others for free, then artists would have no financial incentive to create said works in the first place. Imagine spending months or years writing a book, only for readers to share it with each other for free.

The quoted article explains a doctrine called fair use, which is a defense against an accusation of copyright infringement. For example, the above quote would fall under fair use because, among other reasons, I use it for commentary, I don’t use it for profit, and it’s a tiny part of the quoted work as a whole.

Having said that, how does Temple fare with respect to other people’s copyright?

Presumably, the reason Temple mentions YouTube is that he had his own run-in with YouTube’s copyright protection once. He writes:

I would like to tell them why I think it’s fair use, and hear why they think it isn’t. If they have good reasons, I could change my mind about posting the clip. If they have bad reasons, then I’d be less scared of a lawsuit, and I’d have the option to publish their reasons and make fun of them.

Temple expects others to take his copyright concerns seriously while considering making fun of and exposing their concerns.

Consider once more that Temple accused me of copyright infringement for essentially 1.5 sentences in my book. If we wanted to be just as nitpicky as him, we might take issue with his statement “ideas have consequences”, at least by Temple’s own standard. That is the verbatim tagline of Deutsch’s old blog, but Temple gives no source or even quotation marks. Deutsch also uses it in his book:

Ideas have consequences, and the ‘who should rule?’ approach to political philosophy is not just a mistake of academic analysis: […].

I cannot emphasize enough that I personally would find it ridiculous to consider these examples copyright violations, but I have to point out once more that Temple complained about the following, almost equally small part-sentence from my book: “hard to vary given what constraint?” And since Temple uses the concept of ideas having consequences without credit, he again commits what he would consider ‘plagiarism’.

The same goes for Deutsch’s phrases ‘problems are soluble’ and ‘problems are inevitable’. As I have shown in the section about ‘plagiarism’, Temple uses these phrases verbatim but without crediting Deutsch. To avoid making exceptions for himself, Temple would have to consider these instances to be issues of copyright as well.

In the previously mentioned article ‘All Problems Are Soluble’, Temple writes:

Here is what my dictionary has for problem: “a matter or situation regarded as unwelcome or harmful and needing to be dealt with and overcome”.

He does not mention the source. (Presumably, it’s this one since it matches that string of words exactly.) But if you quoted Temple without providing a source, you’d be in big trouble. He considers it “breaking the law” (!) when you quote a single sentence of his “without […] giving credit […]”. (No really, he literally describes it as “breaking the law” here. He takes additional issue with an absence of quotation marks but is clear in his choice of words that he’d still consider it “breaking the law” even if you did use quotation marks, as long as you didn’t credit him.) Over-the-top phrasing such as “breaking the law” could easily mislead uninformed readers into thinking that borrowing 1.5 sentences is a crime, which of course it isn’t. Now, there is such a thing as criminal copyright infringement. An example a lawyer gave me is knowingly and intentionally obtaining illegal copies of software, inflating the price, and then selling it on a Chinese website for millions of dollars. But borrowing mere sentences, even if true, is a thousand miles away from that kind of thing. Temple uses big phrases like “breaking the law” to make his nitpicky complaint sound important and legitimate.

Getting gradually less nitpicky, remember Feynman’s commencement address that I mentioned above? The one about cargo-cult science? In an article titled ‘Feynman on Education’, Temple links to someone else’s page featuring the full text of Feynman’s address. Temple’s source admits to violating copyright by stating their page is “HTML'ed from the book ‘Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!’” That’s presumably the reason the source has since been taken down. As I understand it – and this is just my opinion as a layman – linking to someone else’s copyright infringement can be contributory infringement. I won’t provide any links, for obvious reasons.

There’s more. On a since-deleted page on Temple’s forum, an anonymous commenter writes:

Another implicit admission that [Hackethal] was in the wrong is that the 2nd edition of his shitty book cites you by name many times.

Temple replies that same day, indicating that he had “not seen any second edition.” And he asks: “Would you send me an ebook of the second edition since I paid for the book?” That’s not how that works. Worse, sharing my ebook could potentially require a removal of the DRM. That stands for ‘digital rights management’ – it’s a technology restricting the sharing of copyrighted material. It’s a key mechanism to protect intellectual property. There’s also this video where Temple has a rich-text version of my book even though I never sold a rich-text version. (The timestamp from that link also shows that Temple has a bunch of other books in rich-text format, including major works such as Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.) I’m not an expert on DRM, but I’m told that converting a DRM-protected ebook to rich text requires circumventing the DRM – and since the resulting file is not DRM protected, any conversion of a DRM-protected file to a non-DRM protected file constitutes a circumvention anyway. And the support team from Amazon KDP, my book distributor, tells me that my book has had DRM protection enabled from day one. Temple says himself that he bought my book from Amazon because he bought it for his Kindle, for which books are sold by Amazon.

It gets even worse. On 2019-02-26, Temple shared an entire book, published that same year, to a group chat of his. He sent both the .epub (an ebook format) and rich-text format. Aside from him and me, the chat had 14 other members at the time. I asked him whether he had just sent the whole ebook and how he had done it since ebooks usually have protection against sharing. In response, he admitted to removing the DRM after buying the book on Kindle. If Temple had shared the ebook without stripping the DRM first, others might not have been able to open it. Sharing entire books is exactly the kind of thing both copyright and DRM are designed to prevent. If you don’t believe Temple would circumvent DRM, check the video I linked above where he provides plenty of evidence of his rich-text versions of my and others’ book(s).

On 2019-03-06, Temple sent a PDF of another book, this one from 1972, to the same group chat. A second member of the same chat shared another file of that same book with the group at the time. They appear to be a lawyer yet joked about this disregard for copyright. My lawyers, who have reviewed the relevant messages and background, tell me I’m under no obligation to keep any of those messages private. If Temple or the other group member dispute this account or retaliate in any way, then, as Temple once wrote about me, “I’ll interpret that dispute as [them] wanting this to be a public matter and granting permission to share everything [they] told me about it […].”

In short, Temple cries copyright violation if you borrow 1.5 sentences of his, yet he breaks DRM and distributes entire books.

Misquotes

To misquote means “to repeat something someone has said in a way that is not accurate […]”. A misquote changes something about the original utterance illegitimately. It can be the introduction of a typo, the fixing of a typo without indication, an omission without indication, and more. Even if a quote is accurate in form, it can still be a misquote in content, depending on context and presentation. Proper quoting is a vital part of scholarly integrity.

Temple takes proper quoting seriously – or so he says. Here’s his stance:

[One should] have strong norms against misquoting or some other types of errors related to having high intellectual standards (which I claim are important to truth seeking).

In an article he submitted to the Effective Altruism forum, titled ‘Misquoting Is Conceptually Similar to Deadnaming: A Suggestion to Improve EA Norms’, Temple says he’s “had strong opinions about misquoting for years […].” He submitted his article to convince people at the forum to adopt better norms around quoting. He writes:

Misquoting is different than sloppiness or imprecision in general. Misquoting puts words in someone else’s mouth without their consent. It takes away their choice of what words to say or not say, just like deadnaming takes away their choice of what name to use.

Skipping some, he explains that misquotes introduce bias:

Except for typos and genuine accidents, misquotes are usually changed in some way that benefits or favors the misquoter, not in random ways.

Temple knows how to indicate changes and omissions in quotes:

There are […] some special rules that allow changing quotes without them being considered inaccurate, e.g. using square brackets to indicate changes or notes, or using ellipses for omitted words.

He says he takes accurate quoting much more seriously than most:

[M]isquoting violates someone else’s consent and control over their personal domain. People see misquoting as being about the open debate over how precise people should be, but that is a secondary issue. They should have more empathy for people who want to control their own speech.

I largely agree, although I’d phrase the issue less in terms of control, and I don’t compare misquoting to deadnaming. Maybe Temple mentioned that to score points with social-justice warriors, I don’t know. My view is that quoting is an exact science and one shouldn’t put words in people’s mouths. However, I don’t think the people he has shamed for (allegedly) misquoting others deserved to be put on blast like that. And, as usual, Temple doesn’t live up to his own standard.

One should always indicate where one’s quote differs from the original text. For example, if the original text says…

Harry was hungry but decided not to eat.

…and you want to quote only the part about Harry being hungry but not his decision, then you indicate the omission using an ellipsis:

Harry was hungry […]

I do the same thing throughout this article. Temple says he is aware of this rule, as I’ve shown. It’s an easy rule, yet Temple often fails to apply it. I didn’t search for misquotes exhaustively – below are instances I could find quickly. I expect there to be many more.

He misquotes William Godwin here by leaving out a part sentence without indication. I am showing the differences below using a site called quote-checker.com, which I developed specifically to help detect misquotes and improve academic integrity.

He misquotes song lyrics by leaving out parts without indication. He says he “edited parts out to condense” but that disclaimer isn’t enough. One should indicate all omissions at their exact locations:

He misquotes my book several times in his hostile article about me. Same issue:

Temple also misquotes his correspondence with me:

He also published an egregious misquote of me that changes the meaning of what I had said significantly and makes me look like a scumbag. That was another issue of omission without indication. Temple says quoters should “change [a quote] if the person being quoted objects.” I object; unless he wants to provide more evidence of his hypocrisy, he should change it, along with an in-text explanation and retraction of the misquote, and review all his other quotes of me, too.

Missing indications of omissions are a pattern with Temple. Following his own explanation about bias, his misquotes bias his readers toward interpretations favorable of him and unfavorable of whomever he quotes. That’s dishonest.

Temple misquotes a transcript of Deutsch’s talk ‘The Mathematicians’ Misconception’ by removing italics/emphasis without indication, even though Temple had quoted roughly the same passage correctly a couple of months prior.

Ironically, Temple writes his misquote in the context of his allegation that Deutsch had misquoted Turing in a paper published by the Royal Society. Temple contacted them so they’d investigate the alleged misquotes, publish “an errata” (sic), and contact Deutsch about the matter. I made sure to check an older archive link to the transcript, from around the time Temple published his article, just in case the transcript had changed. Doubly ironically, in his article complaining about Deutsch’s misquote, Temple misquotes Turing. That’s another error of omission without indication:

Do you want to understand these quoting errors better? Do you want to learn how to quote properly and increase your intellectual integrity? Check out my tool Quote Checker and learn more about quoting properly here and here.

Conclusion

Temple violates his own standards in three core areas of scholarly integrity: credit, copyright, and quotes. He is in no position to criticize or shame people for failing to live up to his standards. All those articles of his about me and others are merely proof of his brazen hypocrisy, which casts serious doubt on the motivation behind his criticisms. From what he has written, his real motivation seems to be to control and eliminate his competition and recruit people to his forum.