Background

A guy by the name of Elliot Temple (‘curi’) runs a philosophy discussion forum. It was formerly known as ‘Fallible Ideas’ (FI) and is now called the ‘Critical Fallibilism’ discussion group. I started talking to Temple in late 2018 and was active in the FI group until early 2019. Over time, many of the people who had joined FI, including me, ended up quitting. I found the group to be toxic; I think many others felt the same way. As a result of our leaving, Temple published a creepy ‘List of Fallible Ideas Evaders’ on 2019-09-02, compiled by his long-time associate Alan Forrester, about members who “quit/evaded/lied/etc.” (Temple later renamed the list after some backlash.)

Some of those “evaders” still wanted to discuss their shared interests – among them philosophy, epistemology, artificial intelligence, really anything related to topics physicist David Deutsch has written about. Two former members, Bruce Nielson and Aaron Stupple, created a new group called ‘The Four Strands’ (4S, a reference to a concept of Deutsch’s) that had an email group, a Slack server, and a Discord server. I joined. The group was private and invite-only – messages were not visible to non-members.

To protect them from retaliation, let me point out that neither Nielson nor Stupple knew that I’d write this article. Although publication without prior coordination risks catching them off guard, it prevents feeding into Temple’s conspiracy theory about a “harassment campaign” against him. I hope Nielson and Stupple understand.

There’s a public record of Temple and other FI members talking about us in their Discord server. Temple’s long-time associate and FI member Justin Mallone has published the corresponding logs; you can access them all and see for yourself here, explanation here. The quotes below are from file ‘off-topic complete.txt’, starting at line 698. ‘TheRat’ as well as ‘Freeze’ (aka ‘Fallible Freeze’) were members of both FI and 4S at the time; ‘curi’, as I’ve said, is Temple (it’s an online identity he’s been using for years, including for the name of his personal website at curi.us):

[27-Dec-19 02:19 AM] TheRat#7635
Well they [the 4S people] are not intersted [sic] in critical discussion with FI specifically

[...]

[27-Dec-19 02:19 AM] curi#0644
and why is that? none of them explain

[...]

[27-Dec-19 02:20 AM] Freeze#0215
They have slack and a google group

[...]

[27-Dec-19 02:21 AM] TheRat#7635
I've had productive discussions with some of them but they asked for privacy

[...]

[27-Dec-19 02:22 AM] curi#0644
also surely they could publicly write their reasons for privacy

This is proof Temple knew as of December 2019 at the latest that we wanted privacy and, apart from a couple of exceptions, that we did not want to speak with FI people. He’s an FI person.

This knowledge did not stop him from trying to get access to our group. On the contrary, he made several attempts. His complaint that we didn’t publicly write our reasons for privacy implies that he thought our desire for privacy was illegitimate unless justified, and unless approved by him. But we didn’t have to justify our desire for privacy, nor did we need his approval.

First attempt to get in: asking directly

At first, Temple repeatedly requested access directly. On 2020-01-18, he asked Nielson for access: “[M]ay I join the Four Strands groups (it's a slack and a google group, right?)?” Temple says¹ he also separately DM’ed Nielson on Twitter the next day, ie 2020-01-19, to which, he says, Nielson did not reply. That same day, Temple emailed me, asking, among other things: “[M]ay I join the Four Strands groups?”

These requests sounded innocent enough – Temple was presumably hoping we had not read the above chat log yet, and I hadn’t. Regardless, I didn’t want him in our groups, and knew the others probably wouldn’t, either. I also knew from experience that engaging in any way would probably draw me in further and encourage more unwanted communication, so I didn’t respond. Temple should have interpreted our refusal to grant access as confirmation of what TheRat had told him: that we wanted privacy and to be left alone.

The hack

Social engineering is using manipulation, influence and deception to get a person, a trusted insider within an organization, to comply with a request, and the request is usually to release information or to perform some sort of action item that benefits [the] attacker.

What happened next shocked us. On 2020-01-21, an anonymous, faceless Twitter user by the name of ‘ReasonAndScienceFan’ (RSF) hacked into 4S using a fairly sophisticated social-engineering attack. I do want to be clear at the outset that, for reasons I explain below, I don’t believe RSF was Temple. However, it’s worth investigating RSF because it’s clear from their actions and communications as well as their sudden appearance and equally sudden disappearance that their account’s only purpose was to gain access to our group.

As you can see, RSF joined Twitter only in January 2020 – meaning the account was brand new, presumably created that same day, which is suspicious. Their very first tweet was from that day, too. They chose the words ‘reason’ and ‘science’ in their name to appeal to members of 4S – the group was, in part, about those topics. The same goes for the profile picture reminiscent of some scientific phenomenon (it’s just this stock photo).

RSF created social proof by retweeting accounts 4S people were interested in, following 4S people (some of whom followed back, creating further social proof), and tweeting with them (ditto). RSF requested help and specifically asked three key people, two of them 4S members, where to discuss “CR”. That stands for ‘critical rationalism’, a philosophy developed by Karl Popper, whom most if not all 4S members were fans of publicly and discussed regularly. RSF got one of them, Brett Hall, to mention 4S, which not only gave RSF further social proof because, having tens of thousands of followers, Hall is a key person in the CR space; it also allowed RSF to pretend not to have known about our group. Eventually, RSF tricked Nielson into granting access:

Nielson speaks of one “group”, singular. RSF corrects him, wanting access to “all the groups” (emphasis mine).

I’ve been a software engineer for over a decade. I used to work at Apple for several years, where I learned from some of the best software engineers in the world. In addition, I’ve worked in cybersecurity. When I saw those tweets, I immediately recognized what RSF was doing. This attack is, again, called social engineering; it’s a type of computer hack. There’s a popular misconception that hackers sit in a basement all day and have terrible social skills. That isn’t true – hackers hone and practice their social skills because the biggest weakness of any computer system, and thus any hacker’s primary target, is the people guarding that system. Social engineers essentially prey on people’s kindness and general willingness to help. Kevin Mitnick’s book Ghost in the Wires is a good read on this topic – as former most-wanted hacker in the world and expert social engineer, he explains in detail how social engineering works and how socially skilled such hackers are.

Only moments after Nielson shared an invite link to the 4S Discord server with RSF, Temple showed up in that same server – even before RSF did, as I was told back then. Here’s a screenshot of our Discord activity log (recall that ‘curi’ is Temple’; I’m releasing this screenshot pace Nielson, who shared it with me at the time):

The activity is sorted from more recent to less recent – read it from bottom to top. The timestamps should be Mountain Time; “Last Tuesday” refers to 2020-01-21, ie still that same day. Nielson created invite ‘n6nGtY’ at 7:25PM and shared it with RSF. Temple joined immediately thereafter. The log doesn’t show join events, but given that Temple’s first logged activity is from 7:34PM, he must have joined before then. I also see that one of our members acknowledges his joining in the chat at 7:32PM, meaning Temple joined within eight minutes at the latest.

Having requested but not gotten our permission, and explicitly having been told about our desire for privacy, Temple should have known not to join. Since he had felt the need to ask for permission a couple of days prior, he still should have felt the need now. A conscientious, respectful person would have notified us that he had gotten an invite and waited to receive express permission before using it. Temple showed no such regard for our consent.

Worse, as you can see from the above screenshot, immediately upon joining, Temple created more invites, at 7:34PM. I can find no public mention of the first one, ‘2sBHUA’, and I did search FI’s entire Discord archives for it, too. He presumably kept it for himself, as a backdoor should he ever need it. People who gain unauthorized access to a system commonly install backdoors: admins might spot intruders and kick them out, but if the admins don’t notice the backdoor, the same intruders can use it later to get back in. (Once again, Mitnick’s Ghost in the Wires explains this strategy in detail.) So Temple, himself a software engineer, must have anticipated getting kicked out and counted on us not noticing his backdoor. The other invite, ‘tmEsZCD’, he shared publicly with his mob of associates (proof below), who promptly raided our Discord server (user “DISTRIBUTED BIT#0242” from the above screenshot was one of them, another was “MINGMECHA#9318” – you can see for yourself that they were FI members in the Discord logs). From ‘fi complete.txt’, starting at line 230,245 (timestamps should be Eastern Time, meaning 9:34PM Eastern is the same as 7:34PM Mountain):

[21-Jan-20 09:34 PM] curi#0644
https://discord.gg/tmEsZCD

This link is the second invite Temple had created. Note the part “tmEsZCD” at the end as well as the time he sent the message, both of which confirm the authenticity of the above screenshot and how quickly Temple joined the 4S Discord server. We were unaware that members could create invites. The link enabled anyone to join our server; since Temple’s chat was public, he effectively exposed our private group to the public. Per the above screenshot, Nielson kicked Temple out at 7:42PM Mountain (9:42PM Eastern), which Temple and others talked about in the FI Discord only five minutes later:

[21-Jan-20 09:47 PM] Deleted User#0000
Whats that?

[21-Jan-20 09:47 PM] curi#0644
ppl who slander FI and try to undermine it what a splinter community

[21-Jan-20 09:51 PM] Freeze#0215
did you leave or were you kicked?

[21-Jan-20 09:51 PM] curi#0644
kicked

[21-Jan-20 09:52 PM] curi#0644
i asked bruce and dennis if i could join the forum the other day and didn't get a response yet

[21-Jan-20 09:52 PM] curi#0644
someone sent me the discord invite link just now

Temple writes he was “kicked” from our Discord, meaning he accessed it in the first place, by his own admission, which further confirms the authenticity of the above screenshot. Temple’s last two statements are meant to create the impression that he isn’t doing anything questionable – he innocently asked for access and just hasn’t gotten a response “yet”, so how could he know what he’s doing is wrong? Note the implicit attempt to shift accountability from him to Nielson and me – effectively claiming that it would have been on us to deny him access explicitly (and then, presumably, explain our reasoning to his satisfaction) for him to know not to join. But then why did he find it necessary to ask permission in the first place? And since he did, why not wait for our permission now? Because he didn’t ask out of respect for our privacy, but because our messages were invisible to him. He wanted to get around that technical restriction somehow. And why join a community that he claims “slander[s]” and “undermine[s]” his? If there’s animosity, he already knows we wouldn’t voluntarily give him access anyway.

Then there’s the word “someone” in “someone sent me the discord invite link just now” – Nielson told me back then that RSF denied having shared their invite. (Which is strange: being brand new to our group, RSF could have tried to claim that they didn’t know not to invite others.) Temple tries to shift accountability yet again: he implies that his joining is really the responsibility of that “someone”. The part “just now” further confirms how quickly Temple joined our server, by his own admission. And why does Temple share a new invite with his associates, lying to them by passing it off as the one he had used to join? He doesn’t explicitly tell them it’s the same invite, but he lets them believe that it is.

After Temple showed up in our Discord unannounced, there was constant dread. But despite his skeevy, underhanded actions, he found humor in the situation:

[21-Jan-20 09:52 PM] Freeze#0215
TheRat playing it off as if you left because you didn't want to debate him

[21-Jan-20 09:52 PM] curi#0644
heh

Again, these quotes are all public, which shows how shameless Temple is. Skipping some, he announces a blog post about 4S:

[21-Jan-20 09:52 PM] curi#0644
i'm writing a blog post related to their shadow community that won't debate or explain and is trying to split a small CR community into factions without attempting problem solving first

Clearly, having our own, separate group bothered Temple, which is why he derided us as a “shadow community”. He seemed to view us as competitors, and he did publish that blog post, in which he again accused us of balkanizing the community. Our mere existence bothered him.

Last year, I asked Temple how he infiltrated our group. He evaded the question. I do want to be clear though, again, that I don’t think Temple was RSF. That would make no sense: if Temple had wanted to join 4S in secret, he would have remained hidden behind RSF’s fake identity to gain and keep long-term access to all our groups and keep reading our messages over the coming months. I don’t know who RSF was. They made a Gmail address, which I believe requires a phone number, so a subpoena for Google’s records may reveal their identity. My lawyers, whom I’ve had to hire because Temple has been defaming me for years, have placed him on a spoliation hold, so maybe I’ll get more information that way at some point. But we do know that, once RSF had gained access to our group, they disappeared from Twitter just as quickly as they had appeared: their last tweet is from 2020-01-21, ie the day of the hack, stating they “would like to join all the groups”. Clearly, the account’s sole purpose was to gain access to 4S. I did an OSINT investigation into the account and they’re essentially a ghost. Hiring two private investigators didn’t result in any promising leads, either. On the advice of my lawyers, I have reported the hack to the authorities.

If a 4S group member had leaked a pre-existing invite, they would have had plausible deniability by pointing at all the other group members as potential suspects. Given that RSF still made an anonymous Twitter account to get an invite, we can conclude that they were not a group member and did not already have access to any existing invites.

For a while, I thought RSF might have been a troll who wanted to escalate the conflict, make it look like² Temple was RSF and hacked into 4S, and then watch as both sides fought. Maybe RSF set up a honeypot too juicy for Temple to resist and fed Temple more downloaded messages later on. As you can see from one of the Twitter screenshots above, RSF was specific about wanting access to all our groups, including our email group. He may have gotten email access: two days after the hack, on 2020-01-23, Temple confronted me with a quote from our email group, and later published it. But if RSF really did set up a honeypot that Temple fell into unwittingly, and even if RSF did feed Temple our messages, why didn’t Temple just tell me that when I asked him about it? What did he have to hide? And why did RSF join the Discord themself? If they had wanted to look like Temple, they would not have joined at all.

Regardless, even if RSF lied to Nielson about not having given Temple the Discord invite, even if RSF did try to trick Temple into joining our Discord, given what had occurred before, Temple still should have known to ask whether it was okay for him to join. He knew the answer would have been ‘no’, or might as well have been, but didn’t care. Whoever RSF was, Temple has no plausible deniability here, especially after making more invites for himself and others. Clearly, his innocent-sounding request “[M]ay I join the Four Strands groups?” was in bad faith from the start.

I was told at the time that, after RSF got kicked from our Discord, they kept chatting privately with Nielson for a bit. As Mitnick writes:

Chatting is the kind of extra little friendly touch that leaves people with a good feeling and makes after-the-fact suspicions that much less likely.

Nielson declined my request to see the messages he had exchanged with RSF, citing a desire to respect their privacy. (Compare Nielson’s regard for consent with Temple’s lack thereof.)

Despite being kicked from our Discord server, which is an unambiguous ‘you’re not welcome here’, Temple still wouldn’t stop his attempts to infiltrate our group.

Next attempt: mounting pressure

A day after his infiltration of our Discord server, on 2020-02-22, Temple sent Nielson and me another unsolicited email. He claimed that one of our group members, Andy B, was an “aggressor” who had harassed him and made several anonymous accounts. (Maybe Temple mentioned this to preemptively address RSF’s Twitter account, which Temple provably knew about since he commented on RSF’s Twitter thread the next day – then again, Temple does not list that account among the many he claims are the same person.) Nielson and I had no idea what Temple was talking about and did not respond.

Two days later, Temple publicly and explicitly prepared to violate others’ privacy as long as it’s technically legal. He asked Justin Mallone (‘JustinCEO’), who seems to be a lawyer (file ‘slow complete.txt’, starting at line 6,721):

[24-Jan-20 10:23 PM] curi#0644
in what circumstances is violating people's privacy illegal/force? @JustinCEO

Is Temple just worried about his own privacy? No, he seeks license to violate others’ privacy, in his own words; specifically the privacy of the members of 4S, given his previous accusation of “slander”:

[24-Jan-20 10:24 PM] curi#0644
e.g. if someone praises FI in a private-by-convention chatroom, and then later slanders FI, and I share it, i'm not using force or violating a law, right? it's just a courtesy to not share, there's no contract, no signatures, and no material harm (it's not like sharing his invention or his affair).

Mallone ‘helpfully’ gives Temple the green light:

[25-Jan-20 06:40 AM] JustinCEO#3132
re: privacy, typically you have to disclose something that a reasonable person would find offensive (or be a peeping tom) or something like that

[25-Jan-20 06:41 AM] JustinCEO#3132
keywords here are "Invasion of privacy tort" and "public disclosure of private facts" and "false light"

[25-Jan-20 06:47 AM] JustinCEO#3132
if one is only disclosing people's position on intellectual matters like the goodness of FI, it seems tough to frame that as offensive

About a week later, on 2020-02-03, Temple followed through and published messages from both the 4S email group and Discord server. Two days prior, on 2020-02-01, Temple had sent Bruce and me yet another unsolicited email,³ pressuring us to take sides between him and the alleged “aggressor”. But we weren’t obligated to help Temple investigate. His communication was distressing. He also complained about our group:

If you wanted a “soft” group with less criticism, and more moderation of tone, and more focus on [artificial intelligence] but no politics – for example (I’m just sorta guessing at the ballpark of what you might want) – that would be a legitimate purpose for a group.

Temple understands that tone was a problem in his forum and that it’s a reason people left. (He would later add a channel called ‘Friendly’ to his forum – what does that tell you about the other channels?) He further implies that our group was illegitimate. In the same thread, he also writes:

You could have written rules and I could follow them if I want to post on your forum. There are many things that would be reasonable, but you haven’t explained what you’re doing [...]. [Y]ou could be e.g. an intellectual group […].

Recall that, at this point, Temple had not only disparaged us as “evaders” and accused us of balkanization – all in public – but he had already sneaked into our group, so expecting even more access is unreasonable. Yet he still reiterates his desire to join our group. Why, if it’s illegitimate and a member is an “aggressor”? Does he think insulting us will make us want to grant him access? Does he think his presence would make our group legitimate? Or was he just fishing for more of our messages? Presumably, since he sent this email after clearing his plan to violate our privacy with Mallone, so good-faith participation in our forum could not have been Temple’s intent. He also implies that we are being unreasonable (in effect, for wanting to be left alone), that we’re not an intellectual group (without him?), and that we owe him an explanation. That’s a possessive attitude: we have freedom of association and do not owe him any explanation. Coupled with his previous complaints that we hadn’t explained our reasons for privacy and why we weren’t interested in discussions with FI, there’s a clear pattern of Temple expecting people to explain their preferences to him.

In his email, Temple should have apologized for raiding our Discord server. But he didn’t mention that at all – it was like he was pretending it never happened. I’m not aware that he ever acknowledges his raid in any of his articles, either. He also accused us of “hiding […] content from” him – effectively reinterpreting our desire for privacy as being shady and not generous, implying entitlement to our content. But we weren’t obligated to share anything with him. In that same vein, he publicly accused us of “operat[ing] in the shadows” – again using our desire for privacy against us.

It may not seem like it, but Temple is socially competent. I know from discussions with him that he makes astute social observations and knows social rules but disregards them on purpose. He’s stated this himself. So these are no innocent mistakes. He knows he’s being pushy and crossing a boundary with his repeat requests and importuning on us.

One particular sentence from that same email stands out: “[W]e could co-exist.” People sometimes make psychological confessions without realizing it. Co-existence had always been my default assumption, and presumably Nielson’s and Stupple’s as well. Why wouldn’t we just co-exist? Temple’s bringing this up was jarring – it had never even occurred to me that this could be a problem. He seemed to want to grant us permission to exist if we engaged on his terms. With FI, he had so far had a de-facto monopoly on discussion groups in his particular niche. Presumably, he wanted to maintain that monopoly.

The associate

One day after Temple’s bizarre email, on 2020-02-02, Alan Forrester, Temple’s associate who had made that list of “evaders”, sent a request to join the 4S Google group:

We denied Forrester’s request for obvious reasons. Temple knew that we knew Forrester was an associate of his; that their attempts were coming off aggressive and invasive, adding to our distress.

Since ignoring Temple wasn’t working, on 2020-02-03, I responded to Temple’s email last quoted above. Among other things, I asked him not to contact me anymore:

Please stop emailing me.

But he wouldn’t stop emailing me. He emailed me several more times afterwards on other occasions, with additional complaints. He would later conveniently claim that he had interpreted my no-contact request as only pertaining to the particular matter he had emailed about.⁴ Once again, a conscientious, respectful person would have interpreted my request to be as widely applicable as possible. Also, people should know that my no-contact request actually precedes his from 2021-04-23 by over a year. His doesn’t even mention mine, nor does it mention that I hadn’t been contacting him. Not mentioning that is misleading.

Last attempt: convince someone on the inside

That same day, ie 2020-02-03, only hours after I emailed Temple my no-contact request, he asked Freeze for ‘help’. As I’ve mentioned, Freeze was a member of both 4S and FI; as such, they had visibility into 4S. They had our trust. Temple knew this and asked Freeze if he could borrow Freeze’s account to collect our messages (proof below). This is really shady and would have required Freeze to share their password with Temple. Freeze, presumably alarmed at Temple’s brazen disregard for our privacy, shared a screenshot of this request with us. Temple considers direct messages to confer “no reasonable expectation of privacy”,⁵ and, as he told Freeze, “write[s] them with the expectation the other guy may share”,⁶ so he has no cause for complaint that I include the screenshot here:

“Yesterday” refers to 2020-02-03; “scrape” basically means ‘download every last message’. The evidence speaks for itself – I don’t need to point out that this is coercive and invasive territory.

Summary

As you can see from the above screenshot, Freeze denied Temple access. That same day, Temple published quotes of some messages from our Discord (I didn’t verify the accuracy of those quotes) – apparently, those few minutes he had spent in our Discord server he was busy downloading messages. He also published emails in the main text of that same link, including at least one extremely misleading misquote and other examples of twisting people’s words, so don’t trust any of his writings. Some of the quotes are from after the hack (2020-01-29), so he must have retained some visibility into our group somehow. I am not aware that he ever credits a source. But since he asked Freeze for access on 2020-02-03, it seems that he had lost visibility by then, and definitely by 2020-04-03, which is when he publicly requested “[f]ull copies” of conversations from 4S. He claimed his website had been DoS’ed (a type of hack/attack), wanted to investigate, and falsely accused me. On 2021-08-08, someone named ‘Apricus’ posted to Temple’s forum: “[Nielson] messaged me saying he suspected me of sending out private stuff to you. I said I hadn’t done that since they asked me to stop […]” (emphasis added). Stopping implies they shared some “private stuff” to begin with. Further investigations into Apricus’s account may reveal their identity.

Overall, Temple tried several different ways to get access to the 4S groups: 1) by repeatedly asking directly, both friendly and not so friendly; 2) by using an invite he should have known not to use; 3) by asking a member of ours to share their account. That’s not to mention his associate Forrester’s attempt to get in and Temple’s ‘sundry’ attempts such as, again, requesting full copies by way of false accusations.

Despite his actions, Temple publicly accused us of harassing him! Keep the above in mind when evaluating his claims that there’s some conspiracy to harass him (what he calls an ‘harassment campaign’).

I said above that I gave Temple an opportunity to comment on his infiltration of 4S. Again, he chose not to. But shortly thereafter, out of nowhere, another anonymous person requested to join the 4S Google group from an unknown email address. Googling that address turns up nothing except a HackerOne account. The group has been inactive for years, hasn’t been advertised during that time as far as I know, and no one has requested access in a long time.

Elliot Temple is creepy and severely disregards privacy.

Timeline

2019-12-27: Temple is publicly informed that 4S has a Slack group and Google email group; that 4S wants privacy; that (apart from a couple of exceptions) 4S does not wish to speak to FI people (Temple is the leader of FI).
2020-01-18: Regardless, Temple repeatedly asks Nielson and separately Hackethal for access to 4S. Both refuse.
2020-01-21: Anonymous Twitter account RSF hacks into the 4S Discord, possibly email group as well. Moments later, Temple joins the 4S Discord, creates two additional invites, and publicly shares one of them. Several additional FI members raid 4S Discord.
2020-01-23: Temple confronts Hackethal with a quote from the 4S email group.
2020-01-24: Temple publicly plans additional violation of privacy and consults fellow FI member Justin Mallone about legality of doing so.
2020-02-02: Alan Forrester, Temple’s long-time associate, requests access to 4S. Access denied.
2020-02-03: Temple asks 4S member ‘Fallible Freeze’ to share his account to download entire 4S archives. Freeze refuses, repeating 4S’s desire for privacy. Temple publishes several 4S messages.