Dennis Hackethal’s Blog
My blog about philosophy, coding, and anything else that interests me.
What You Should Know About Elliot Temple
As some of my readers may know, a guy by the name of Elliot Temple has been publishing several false and potentially career-ruining accusations against me since 2020. The overarching one is that I have been participating in what he calls an ‘harassment campaign’ – effectively a conspiracy to harass him. I have not, and I can’t imagine any such conspiracy exists at all.
Last year, I saw an opportunity to extend an olive branch and reached out to Temple to see if we could reconcile. That led to disaster; he ignored my suggestion to do mediation and eventually stopped responding altogether. Next, my lawyers had to send Temple a cease and desist for defamation (then he suddenly wanted mediation). When they offered him a mutual non-disparagement agreement, he declined. At the time of writing, he still hasn’t stopped defaming me.
New evidence has come to light showing that the defamation is even worse than I originally thought, and that Temple is monitoring my success to bring up past complaints with my followers to tear me back down anytime. This forces me to have something on hand to direct people to. So I’m publishing a four-piece exposé about:
- The enormous extent of Temple’s defamation of me
- His and his group’s overwhelming toxicity
- His blatant intellectual hypocrisy, and
- His serious violation of my and others’ privacy.
Like Temple, I’m issuing a no-contact request, to him and his associates. You are not to contact me, directly or through others, via any channels, anonymously or otherwise, about anything. In addition, you are banned from having and/or making accounts, and/or generating content on, my websites. Don’t look for loopholes – interpret this no-contact request in the widest way possible. For example, don’t communicate with me anonymously, thinking I won’t know it’s you. Don’t cause third parties to talk to me. Again, this is a general no-contact request about any topic. (Temple hasn’t initiated contact in a long time, but I’m being extra clear because I once sent him a no-contact request and he conveniently interpreted it as pertaining only to a specific issue, then contacted me again and even caused several others to dogpile me.) Proactively take steps to stay out of my life and not remind me of you. That includes stopping disparaging me.
I don’t want to remain in an adversarial relationship with Temple. But continued defamation leaves me no choice but to keep responding until the defamation stops. He must now unilaterally comply with the terms from the proposed non-disparagement agreement for me to consider this issue resolved. I won’t interpret removals as an admission of guilt. I’ll just be happy I can move on.
My lawyers have placed Temple on a spoliation hold and are keeping an eye on his and his associates’ websites. As I’ve said, new evidence has come to light showing that the defamation was even worse than I thought. I ask that people come forward with additional evidence of defamation, public or private, recent or past, whether by Temple directly or others repeating or linking to his claims. Contact me privately at dh@dennishackethal.com if you have any leads. Your help is appreciated.
Update: Since Temple still has not complied with the proposed non-disparagement agreement even though it would cost him nothing, I have decided to help fund others’ legal efforts against him. If you have a legal complaint against Temple (some people have already told me they do), contact me and I may, upon review and at my discretion, give you money to pursue it.
References
This post makes 5 references to:
- Post ‘Elliot Temple Violated Our Privacy’
- Post ‘Elliot Temple’s Defamation Tactics’
- Post ‘Elliot Temple’s Hypocrisy’
- Post ‘Elliot Temple’s Legacy of Harm’
- Post ‘Elliot Temple’s Toxic Group’
There are 15 references to this post in:
- Post ‘(Potential) Errors in The Beginning of Infinity’
- Post ‘Animal-Sentience FAQ’
- Post ‘Chat with Damian about Abortion’
- Post ‘Choosing between Theories’
- Post ‘Elliot Temple’s Defamation Tactics’
- Post ‘Elliot Temple’s Legacy of Harm’
- Post ‘Example of Not Outthinking the Question’
- Post ‘Fallibility Table’
- Post ‘Fun Criterion vs Whim Worship’
- Post ‘Sleepwalking’
- Post ‘Uncontroversial’
- Post ‘Views on Animal Sentience in The Beginning of Infinity’
- Comment #2332 on post ‘Fallibility Table’
- Comment #3688 on post ‘Criticism of David Deutsch’s ‘Taking Children Seriously and fallibilism’’
- Comment #3690 on post ‘Crypto-Fallibilism’
What people are saying
Google seems to penalize my blog so I have republished the exposé on a dedicated site: thegreatestphilosopher.wordpress.com
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how come there aren't any pictures of temple online? like why doesn't he ever show himself. i wanna know what he looks like :P
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I don’t know why there are no pictures of him online. He looks pretty unremarkable though. White guy, dark brown hair, brown eyes. I have pictures 📸 📸
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dennis have you seen elliott's new posts about you? and can we see the pictures of him?
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1. Yes. 2. Maybe.
In addition to posting new defamatory articles about me, he has also broken my no-contact request. As a result, I now consider his no-contact request null and void.
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elliot is such a creep, clearly unhinged and dangerous person, you'd be doing the public a service by posting his pics
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Hi Dennis, I sent you a long email shedding light on the real origin of some of the "coordinated harassment" Elliot has complained about. Trying to be vague here. But just wondering if you received it or if it went into spam or something because I no longer have access to that email.
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Here are Elliot’s new posts about me:
I think they are full of dishonesty and errors – too many to respond to each individually.
One thing that stands out to me is that he doesn’t link to my exposé once. He doesn’t want his readers to see it. He’s hiding things and introducing severe bias. One should expect some bias in any adversarial communication, but to preemptively address that possibility, I frequently and openly link to his posts throughout the exposé so that my readers get a fuller picture and come to their own conclusion.
Elliot never mentions that things have changed in a major way since I reached out to him. For example, he never says that I have since found out that he lied about me when he falsely accused me of a federal crime by omitting exonerating evidence he had that I didn’t have. Nor does he mention that I have since found out that he plans to monitor my career into the indefinite future to bring up past complaints with my followers and tear me down anytime. Not mentioning either is misleading, dishonest, paints my exposé as an unreasonable response, and enables him to pretend not to understand why I wrote it. It also enables him to pretend that his “negotiating position” need not change.
Elliot’s new articles also confirm many points from my exposé. He says he hasn’t read it in full because it’s “very long” and “unpleasant” (the lack of self-awareness is astounding). Not having read it, he’s liable to prove my points in his response. He’s also escalating the conflict in ways that could be easily prevented if he just read my thoughts on how to resolve the entrenchment he has caused. (Those thoughts also preemptively explain the reasons I won’t talk to him, which he has known since, and even predicted, before he met me. He is pretending not to be aware of those reasons so he can, again, paint me as unreasonable.)
An example of Elliot proving my point is that I had already predicted that he would try to word-lawyer his way around defamation. (What I didn’t predict is that he’d turn it around on me by condescending to me and claiming I had poor reading comprehension and poor logic skills.) Here’s another example. He writes:
But he provides lots of evidence of why talking to him directly would be a bad idea. For example, he quotes an email of mine from 2020 in which I showed myself cooperative in response to his plagiarism complaint. What does he do? He paints it as an admission of plagiarism. He also writes, in reference to my reaching out to him last year to see if we could reconcile:
In other words, I offered cooperation and peace, which he is now holding against me, implying I contradicted myself by hiring lawyers to deal with defamation. (Contrary to his claims, I did tell him to stop defaming me before I hired lawyers, which implies taking down defamatory statements, but he’s pretending not to understand that by complaining I had “never before said [I] wanted anything removed.” Even if that were true, it would be reminiscent of this tweet.)
Here’s another way in which Elliot has twisted my words. He writes that I suggest “that silence, neutrality and not taking sides would be acceptable responses” to violent threats. I never made such a suggestion. He references a specific section of my exposé, so this time he can’t claim ignorance – he must have read it. I said it was unreasonable of Elliot to expect people to take his side in his conflict with a guy named ‘Andy B’ after Elliot pressured them to, especially given the context of him having psychologically broken them. He’s implying that I would tacitly endorse violence. Nonsense.
It doesn’t really matter what you say, Elliot will find a way to twist it and use it against you. It’s as if he took Karl Popper’s insight that one cannot speak in such a way as to never be misunderstood, and then Elliot turned it into a universal weapon against his interlocutors.
My exposé has a whole section on how Elliot has twisted my words in the past. He has twisted other people’s words, too. So I strongly advise people against communicating with him directly. If mine and others’ experience is any indication, you will pay for it dearly. Basically, talking to Elliot is like talking to cops: you should never do it without a lawyer present, and anything you say can and will be used against you. My lawyers also explained to me at the time that you enjoy stronger legal protection when you let your lawyers speak for you because the opposing party cannot use your lawyers’ words against you in court as easily as they can use your own. The opposing party might still try, but at least you’re protected. (I’m not a lawyer; nothing I say is ever legal advice.)
In fact, Elliot does try to twist my lawyers’ words, too. He writes:
Do you see the trick? They had sent him a standard, mutual non-disparagement agreement that would have applied to him as much as it would have applied to me. The purpose of that clause was to create a contractual basis for letting bygones be bygones. Yet he found a way to make it look as though I was hiding criminal activity so he couldn’t talk about it!
Also in the context of the mutual non-disparagement agreement, Elliot complains about “removing statements which aren't even alleged to be defamatory.” It’s called a mutual non-disparagement agreement, not a mutual non-defamation agreement. People don’t require mutual non-defamation agreements because they are already legally obligated not to defame each other.
Elliot also writes, in the context of a proposed retraction text:
The second sentence is ironic. First, there’s Elliot’s blatant hypocrisy in matters of plagiarism, which by itself is reason enough his readers shouldn’t listen to his stance on plagiarism (or any text he references in support of it) until he addresses that hypocrisy. Second, by his logic, Saturday Night Live couldn’t hire any joke writers; all manner of ghostwriting would be plagiarism. Once again, Elliot is finding reasons to be difficult.
Likewise in the context of his allegation of plagiarism, Elliot writes:
I wrote over 8,000 words on the topic of plagiarism alone but Elliot refuses to read them.
Two things especially stand out to me in Elliot’s new articles: his James Taggart-like compulsion to evade responsibility (again proving my point) and his dishonest attempts to look cooperative and reasonable at my expense. In my post on Elliot’s defamation tactics, I underestimated one specific tactic he uses. He writes: “Hackethal doesn't have an error correction policy like mine […]”. Basically what he’s saying is: ‘look, all you gotta do is prove that my claims about you are false and I will correct them.’ Sounds reasonable, right? The problem is, assertions such as his defamatory DOS claim are so difficult to prove false because they are arbitrary in the first place. (He once claimed that someone had hacked/DOS’ed his website to prevent the publication of an upcoming blog post of his about me. He had announced that blog post in a public chatroom, yet he falsely claimed he had announced it to me privately. That made it look as though only I or someone I told could have known about it. In reality, due to his public announcement, anyone could be the hacker, and so his accusation that it was me is arbitrary. He knows this, of course, yet he still expects me to prove it false before he will take his claims down. And I’ve written at length about what’s wrong with his claims, but then he won’t read that.)
By putting the onus on the other party to prove him false, rather than on himself not to lie and not to make arbitrary claims in the first place, the other party faces an uphill battle. They may even feel disarmed because they could fall for his lie that he is open to reason. They may feel as though their inability to persuade him is on them, but that’s not true. This trick allows Elliot to appear fully reasonable and rational on the surface to third parties while actually being exceptionally difficult to deal with. The trick is also related to his aversion to responsibility because, again, he puts the onus for error correction on his interlocutor. In the context of defamation, it’s also hypocritical because he doesn’t apply the same standard to himself when he accuses others of having defamed him.
Headings such as “Responses to Dennis Hackethal about Crime and Threats” and “I Didn't Call Dennis Hackethal a Criminal” plant the false idea that I am somehow connected to crime in readers’ minds, while simultaneously affording Elliot plausible deniability because he can claim he is not saying there is any connection. This is just another nasty trick.
There is one specific error I want Elliot to be aware of. He claims I reached out to him in bad faith last year because I “was already researching lawsuits a month before that conversation […]”. I wanted to find lawsuits stemming from misquotes so that I could market my tool Quote Checker as helping people avoid such lawsuits because Quote Checker helps them quote properly. My legal complaints against Elliot have to do with defamation, not misquotes, and the link he gives is clearly about misquotes, not defamation, so there’s no reason for him to draw this false connection. I reached out in good faith.
My lawyers have reviewed Elliot’s new articles and confirm they are defamatory per se (both as a whole and in specific parts, eg when he repeats allegation of plagiarism and implies I broke the law). I demand that Elliot take them down immediately. My lawyers also tell me that Elliot’s amateur analysis of defamation law is full of mistakes (proving my point once again, this time that he’s being irresponsible by not putting a disclaimer that he isn’t a lawyer and, once more, that he’s being hypocritical for applying a different standard to himself).
Elliot has yet to respond to his invasion of mine and others’ privacy, his defamatory lie about me (especially the part about omitting exonerating evidence), his hypocritical disregard for copyright, his abusive behavior, his ‘plagiarism’ (by his own standard), and much, much more (all of which he’s hiding by not linking to my exposé). (Wait for him to twist the part “has yet to respond” into me requesting more defamatory blog posts about me.)
By the way, Elliot is begging people for money now.
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I did receive your email. Thank you for expressing your sympathy and sorry for not replying sooner – a lot of people have been reaching out and I forgot after all the craziness from the past few weeks. My bad.
You say you don’t have access to that email address anymore. If you send me a quick email from a new address along with some proof it’s you (eg by briefly echoing some of your previous claims), I’ll try to prioritize responding to you.
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I don’t believe Elliot mentions in his new articles that I have long addressed his complaint about ‘plagiarism’. (Five years ago!) By not mentioning that, he misleads his readers yet again.
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I received an email a while back (see #3421) from ‘n2ab’ taking credit for some of the harassment Elliot alleges.
However, contrary to Elliot’s claims, this person disavows any coordination or conspiracy (so I take it the subject line is in jest).
Looks like Elliot slandered not just me and David but even Andy, and Elliot has made more enemies than he thinks.
As always, I have no interest in getting involved in his conflicts with others. I’m publishing this email because it contains information the public should be aware of. I do fully expect that he will try to use it (and this stated expectation) against me somehow.
------- Forwarded Message -------
From: 2andyborandynot2b@tutamail.com <2andyborandynot2b@tutamail.com>
Date: On Friday, March 8th, 2025 at 5:06 AM
Subject: an "andy b" collaborator
To: Dh <dh@dennishackethal.com>
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He won’t link to my exposé and he’s been evading several issues such as plagiarism, disregard for copyright, invasion of privacy, etc. Like, he hasn’t commented on them at all. He just cherrypicks topics to respond to and hides the rest.
I am reminded of this insight by Ayn Rand:
More evidence that Elliot is a lousy objectivist and a hypocrite.
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word on the street is he repeatedly sexually assaulted a woman. people are also saying he had a romantic interest in lulie. they first met when she was 12 and he was 18. yikes
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I can confirm the age gap but do you have evidence for the other claims?
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I wrote in the context of Elliot’s twisting my words about Connor threatening me with violence:
His implication is particularly outrageous since I was the victim of said threat.
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Legal has cleared the publication of the pictures, so here you go. I have more but these should suffice for now.
The person who shared them with me had no part in my decision to publish them.
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oh shit thanks!!
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Recent court case where plaintiff wins defamation suit against:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2mnyj0ev2o
Contrary to what Temple suggested previously, the plaintiff won without having to prove a negative. The plaintiff won because the claims were baseless.
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Elliot Temple runs a cult. The community formerly known as Fallible Ideas is a cult.
The primary purpose of the cult is to reaffirm and spread Elliot's delusional, narcissistic, and self-proclaimed status as 'best living philosopher.' In short: idol worship.
Scientology labels people who leave their cult as 'suppressive persons.' They publish a list of 'enemies.' This is like Elliot's list of 'evaders.' It's also a list of escapees. Cults usually have long trails of escapees. Public shaming like this not only punishes dissenters but also intimidates current members, making it harder for them to leave for fear of being put on the list one day.
If you do leave Elliot's cult, expect to not just be publicly shamed but also to have your reputation further tarnished through false criminal accusations and accusations of professional misconduct, like he did with Dennis and others. He thinks you're guilty until proven innocent.
In addition, expect implicit threats to get you fired from your job, like he also did with Dennis.
Elliot will lie about you and make your life more difficult. He is extremely difficult and high maintenance. Whatever psychological control he exerted during your membership in his cult, he will try to continue, in addition to the reputational control.
Cult leaders raise money through donations. Elliot does that.
Using stuff people have told you in private against them in public is similar to Scientology's auditing process.
Here's a quote from Joe Rogan's podcast episode 908 with Leah Remini, former scientologist who says: 'Let's say you're a scientologist and then one day I didn't see you and I say, 'Hey, what happened to Joe? Why is he not in Scientology anymore?' They tell me whatever they want to tell me about you to discredit you. He's an enemy to the church, and here are the reasons why. And they could say anything, and they do say anything, that immediately makes me not want to talk to you ever again.' Joe: 'And then you become an enemy, really.' Leah: 'You're an enemy. And once you're an enemy, I cannot talk to you. I can't actually talk to you. The policy says that once you are declared or labeled a suppressive person, my association with you would then make me a suppressive person, and me an enemy. So I can't actually talk to you.' -> List of evaders, Justin Mallone being kicked out for 'fraternizing' with (talking to) alleged 'harassers' of Elliot.
Elliot and his cult members oppose romantic love. This is another way to isolate people. And when they say not to 'social climb' this may be another way to isolate them (really it just means 'don't make friends outside of FI because FI is the only place you can socialize rationally'). Isolating people is a common cult tactic.
Once you join Elliot's cult and buy into the belief that it uniquely embodies truth seeking and rationality, then leaving the cult (seems to) mean(s) turning your back on truth seeking, and you cannot allow yourself to do that because it would be irrational and the reason you joined the cult in the first place was to pursue rationality.
The notion that Elliot embodies rationality and teaches the world rationality means he's (seemingly) saving the world. Likewise, scientologists believe Tom Cruise is 'single-handedly saving the planet' https://www.newsweek.com/why-tom-cruise-wont-leave-scientology-leah-remini-1830119 and that people who criticize him deserve punishment: 'So everything [Cruise] gets from Scientology and everything thats done to people who upset him is justified by that.'
People who have interacted with Elliot enough cannot think about him effectively. This manifests in two distinct ways. Some people end up unable to criticize him effectively (thus going along with whatever outrageous things he does or advocates); the thought of criticizing him causes revulsion (which is the reason people like Justin still defend Elliot even after he abused and ousted them). Others end up unable to entertain any of Elliot's ideas or even think about him at all without some feeling of revulsion. That quote of Deutsch's revulsion is an instance of this.
Cult members often cannot think effectively period. This why Alan Forrester, Justin Mallone and Lulie Tanett have never made any meaningful philosophical progress. Even less so since they left the cult. David Deutsch stopped making progress around the time he started associating with Elliot. Unlike Dennis, whose creativity was stifled while in Elliot's cult but who has made significant progress since leaving the cult. (Elliot hates this, which is why he shits on Dennis' book and translation of BoI, both achievements Dennis is proud of). This progress would have been impossible under Elliot because Elliot would have kept telling him he was 'overreaching', which is Elliot's favorite tool for controling people's minds and progress along with berating/overwhelming them with criticism.
Cult leaders have disciples/enablers/acolytes/henchmen. Like Alan Forrester and also Justin. Most of the people involved in a cult are victims, but if their involvement goes beyond some notable level, they take on guilt (like Allison Mack). Like when Alan compiled the list of 'evaders.' (Elliot published it but it was a guest post by Alan.)
Cults often have humiliation rituals. In addition to public humiliation, Elliot also does this 'internally' in his chats, where he encourages members of the cult to berate each other. He's done this with Kate Sams, Justin, Dennis and others. Victims are preemptively disarmed through the false notion that curiosity and rationality involve enduring unbounded criticism. This is similar to another cult, Erhard Seminars Training (EST). EST had notions of unbounded criticism similar to Elliot's: https://culteducation.com/group/908-est/6150-were-gonna-tear-you-down-and-put-you-back-together.html
Lulie Tanett was unable to think critically about Elliot for years and would block any criticism of him by others. Now that she has left the cult, she aimlessly stumbles to other cults like Landmark (an outgrowth of EST). This is a common pattern with people who leave a cult: they don't manage to stay away from cults altogether, they just end up trying different cults to fill some gap created by the previous ones.
Cults prey on vulnerable people like addicts. Synanon did that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synanon Addicts are easy to recruit and control. Elliot has written articles addressing addicts and claims to have knowledge that can help them.
One of the games Elliot runs is to provoke people, bring out the worst in them, then use their reaction against them as evidence that he was right about them. He provokes them, makes them lash out, then uses their reaction to portray them as aggressors. Nothing is ever his own fault, he is blameless, everyone is against him for some reason he just cannot seem to figure out (but easily could if he were being honest with himself). Like when Deutsch blocked Elliot on Twitter. Elliot didn't ask himself what he might have done to invite this reaction ('die in a fire' comes to mind). Instead he concluded that Deutsch blocked him because Elliot was better at epistemology. In other words, Elliot wasn't to blame: it was Deutsch's insecurity over Elliot's superiority that was to blame. Elliot hadn't fucked up, he was just too good. This is typical delusional narcissistic 'reasoning' and it's the reason no conflict with him can ever be fully resolved. He lacks the self awareness required for him to own up to his own mistakes. (He will sometimes go through the motions of recognizing past mistakes for performative reasons, because it's what good public intellectuals do, but even then he manages to use it against his opponents, like when he said he had interpreted an accusation of misquoting too uncritically: 'see, even my mistakes prove I'm really really good.')
This is one example of Elliot putting down others to prop himself up. He did the same or similar with Binswanger, Tew, Epstein, maybe de Grey (?). But he also uses his prior association with some of them for social proof (eg quotes from Deutsch and Epstein).
Another game Elliot runs is to turn other intellectuals' followers against them and recruit them to his cult. Dennis has written about this already but it's worth repeating.
Another game he runs is to control spaces. He did this pretty successfully with the BoI discussion group and also somewhat successfully with TCS, though unlike his control over BoI he never owned any TCS domains (afaik, thank god). He abused his role as tech admin of the BoI website to deface it with unhinged conspiracy theories, which is totally inappropriate and not the place to do it. (Still wrong to defame people on his own blog but even worse to do it on websites meant to promote them; not the appropriate venue even for legitimate criticism).
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