Recently, Dennis Hackethal wrote five blog posts and some tweets disparaging me. Last year, his lawyers threatened me with a defamation lawsuit. They wanted me to take down everything I ever said about Hackethal, most of which is old (2018-2020). He'd never before said he wanted anything removed. They refused my offer to discuss or negotiate, ignored my offer to make corrections if they pointed out any mistakes in specific statements, and sent an all-or-nothing ultimatum with 20 demands (many unreasonable). I declined.

I wrote a long letter to Hackethal's lawyers which explained my position, reiterated my offer to negotiate, and pointed out some of their errors. I received no response. Then Hackethal started publicly attacking me eight months later (and attacking multiple other people who've had online discussions with me). Although the issues are mostly around five years old, the attacks contain a lot of new information that he didn't say before. He says that he won't discuss or negotiate and the only way he'll stop attacking me is if I unilaterally give in to all of his demands. He's rejected diplomacy, and barely communicated, for five years now.

It's legal to make true statements (or to express opinions). I've given reasoning and evidence for my statements. I've offered to correct errors but Hackethal hasn't told me errors with specific statements. Hackethal is also accusing me of saying things that I don't think I said. I'm willing to make clarifications but he hasn't asked for any. He wants me to take down statements without him ever having to give specific reasons that they're false. He's attacking my free speech rights.

Hackethal's Complaints

One of Hackethal's main complaints is that, in 2020, I wrote a negative review of his book, which I said plagiarized me. I emailed him about my concerns before publishing them. Regarding an example I thought was plagiarism, he replied: "So yes, it looks like you did tell me that, in which case the right thing to do is to credit you." He asked me to send him the rest of my issues with his book as one long email, so I sent many issues at once (5,000 words), but he said he didn't have time to read my email. Then he stopped answering my emails and didn't communicate with me again for four years. He offered no objection or criticism about my claims, he didn't ask me not to post them, he didn't say he thought they were false or illegal, and he didn't want to discuss them, so I published them. I thought he believed in free speech and critical discussion. I didn't know that he wanted my post taken down until I received a letter from his lawyers four years later. I still haven't received specific information pointing out a false statement in my post.

Hackethal's lengthy blog posts (over 36,000 words, around 100 pages) bring up many other complaints of varying relevance. Some were already covered in my main letter to his lawyers, which he hasn't answered. Some have little to do with his legal rights. For example, he accuses me of making mistakes with 15 quotations (but he's wrong 15 times).

I addressed more of Hackethal's complaints here. I'm not trying to respond to everything he said (I only skimmed most of it). I'm focusing on issues I think are important.

20 Demands

In my letters to Hackethal's lawyers, I offered to negotiate and separately offered to correct errors in my posts without asking for anything in return. I also said I was open to rewording my claims to be gentler. They said they wouldn't discuss it, never tried to tell me errors in specific statements, and gave me an ultimatum: accept their list of 20 demands (with no option to change any of them or add any demands of my own) or they might sue me. I declined.

Some of the 20 terms are unreasonable. For example, they demand that I remove "each and every published statement that Temple has made about Hackethal" including "both public and private publication". That includes removing statements which aren't even alleged to be defamatory.

Another term demands that I publish a retraction, exactly as they wrote it, while presenting it as my own words and keeping the terms confidential. Putting a post on my blog that I didn't write, and pretending I did write it, would be plagiarism. Ironically, Dennis Hackethal demanded that I plagiarize the words "[...] Dennis is not a plagiarist [...]". I don't think he understands what plagiarism is.

Another term said the terms would be treated as though I had equal 50% participation in writing them. But they didn't let me participate in writing the terms.

Another term demanded that I waive my legal rights regarding anything Hackethal's done in the past, including any illegal actions he's done that I don't know about.

Here's how Hackethal presents this in his primary blog post:

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.

This is misleading. He doesn't say that I declined an all-or-nothing list of 20 demands. He doesn't say that I offered to negotiate but they declined. It's factually false that I "wanted mediation". Considering that Hackethal hadn’t tried asking me for any removals, I disagree that his lawyers "had to" send me a letter. And he doesn't say that the agreement contained no terms to prevent plagiarism. Criticizing plagiarism is disparagement but plagiarizing me isn't disparagement. Plagiarism is generally legal, so my main defensive option is to write about it, but the agreement would silence me while allowing Hackethal to plagiarize me. So I advise against trusting what Hackethal says about me and these events.

Defamation

Hackethal threatened to sue me for defamation. To win that lawsuit, he'd have to show multiple things including that my statements are false, are damaging, and aren't matters of opinion.

Are my statements false? When I first published my statements about plagiarism, I included details, quotes, evidence and arguments. Hackethal hasn't tried to tell me refutations of my statements. He seems to think I should withdraw my statements without ever seeing evidence or arguments showing that they're false. Laws have been written to protect the free speech of critics. Law professor David Hudson's article Defamation and the First Amendment says "Generally, the plaintiff [which would be Hackethal] bears the burden of proof of establishing falsity."

Are some of my statements about matters of opinion? You can imagine a hypothetical scenario where potential plagiarism is in a borderline gray area where reasonable people could disagree about whether it is or isn't plagiarism. For reasonably debatable issues and open controversies where there's no definitively correct answer, people are free to form their own opinions about the correct conclusion, since their opinion can't be proven false. For Hackethal to win in court, Hudson says "The statements in question must be objectively verifiable as false statements of fact. This means the statements must be provable as false."

Rejecting Diplomacy

Hackethal's blog says he will keep taking actions against me until I unilaterally agree to his 20 demands. He says he won't talk with me or negotiate.

He also offered to give other people money to pursue legal complaints against me. If anyone has a complaint, please email me instead of escalating to lawyers before attempting conflict resolution.

Hackethal issued a no contact request to me and anyone associated with me. He says "Don’t cause third parties to talk to me." which suggests that no one may attempt diplomacy with anyone he knows, and suggests none of us may write blog posts related to this conflict because those could lead to someone saying something to him. His broad wording also implies that I'm unwelcome to contact his lawyers, who ghosted me anyway.

Was Hackethal ever willing to have a diplomatic discussion? In 2024, he emailed me saying he wanted conflict resolution. I sent him six emails in that conversation but couldn't get him to summarize his side of the story. He refused to respond to my blog posts from 2020 explaining my side of the story. He told me for the first time that he was unhappy with my book review but I couldn't get useful details. He said that "irrespective of what has happened" he hoped "we can move on, get the acrimony behind us" – so I was surprised when, a month later, his lawyers contacted me. It turns out he was already researching lawsuits a month before that conversation, so I'm skeptical that the conversation was in good faith.

Error Correction

I've always been willing to discuss complaints and correct errors on my websites. People can just email me. Hackethal hired lawyers instead of telling me what he wanted, and now he's trying to harm my reputation rather than discuss our conflict.

It seems unfair for him to try to pressure me into taking down claims while he's refusing to discuss whether they're true. If my claims are true (or are reasonable opinions), then I should be allowed to say them. If someone did plagiarize me, then I should be able to explain my side of the story. If I think someone is a jerk to me, I should be able to complain (using truths and reasonable opinions).

I'm also reluctant to edit old posts without Hackethal's consent because I don't know what wordings he'd prefer and he's shown no interest in wording changes (instead demanding full removal). He's actually complained about a "softer", less opinionated wording.

Hackethal doesn't have an error correction policy like mine, stopped responding to me when I tried to tell him errors in 2020, and now has told me not to contact him (which includes not reporting errors to him). This post pointed out a few of his errors, and I'd be willing to point out more errors if he were open to discussion and error correction. I believe his posts are defamatory and I request they be taken down (or thoroughly corrected).

Call For Help

If anyone wants to help me deal with Hackethal, contribute to my legal defense fund, or provide relevant information, please email me at [email protected]

Dennis Hackethal posted five blog posts attacking me. Here's my main response. I didn't read much of them because they're very long (over 36,000 words, around 100 pages) and unpleasant. I skimmed some and saw errors and insults. However, someone showed me two important parts, related to crime and threats, that Hackethal should have told me but didn't. So I'll address those parts.

In general, the posts have lots of stuff that Hackethal didn't say before. Instead of telling me his complaints, he refused to tell me even after I asked, then he blogged stuff that he wouldn't tell me. If there are other things I should know, I may have missed them, and Hackethal or his lawyers should email them to me.

I Didn't Call Dennis Hackethal a Criminal

Hackethal claims I called him a criminal. That was never my intention, and I don't think I did it. Hackethal's lawyers brought it up too but wouldn't tell me what statements they were referring to. I offered to take it down if they'd provide specifics, but they didn't. They did send me a list of 23 links with some quotes, but they didn't specify that they thought any of those statements called him a criminal. They said things like "Remove this article entirely [...]" and "Remove any mention of Mr Hackethal on that page [...]".

Now, on his blog, Hackethal has been specific. After reading the quotes he gave, I don't think any of them called him a criminal. I think he's making mistakes at reading comprehension and logic.

I've taken down the majority of the statements Hackethal pointed out for this topic because they aren't important enough to me to argue over (many were in blog comments, not posts) and I've only just now found out how he was (mis)reading them. If Hackethal had emailed me years ago, I would have addressed this then.

I left some statements up but I'm willing to make clarifying changes. However, I want Hackethal's consent so he doesn't try to sue me for rewordings that I did to try to satisfy him.

Misquotes

While reading quotes Hackethal gave, I noticed he misquoted me. I'll use variables to show the structure.

With two separate quotes, he quoted me as saying "A [...]" when I said "A or B", which is misleading.

He quoted me as saying "I only A due to [among other things] F." I actually wrote "I only A due to B and C (including D, E, and F)." F was a parenthetical sub-point of C, not my reason. And "among other things" means that more unmentioned things exist, but I didn't say that. It's an inaccurate paraphrase of the text it replaced, "B and C (including D, E, and".

So I warn people against trusting facts or quotes in Hackethal's posts.

Removals

I've also removed some other things that Hackethal has now complained about. He should have just told me his complaints instead of writing long attacks. One was a guest blog post about some people, including Hackethal, who stopped discussing with my community. The goal was to post mortem what happened and improve discussion, but Hackethal didn't like it. I also removed my comments about an old David Deutsch interview and a screenshot of a tweet to Deutsch.

Hackethal is sharing copies but I've removed the originals. With the guest blog post, in 2020, someone complained that it included email addresses (that people had used as their public forum usernames). Although I think attributing quotes to the usernames that publicly posted them is reasonable, and those usernames are publicly available on the Google Groups website, I removed them from the post. I've tried to be responsive to complaints. Today, Hackethal is sharing an old copy of the post from 2020 that includes email addresses, against the wishes of me and others. It seems kind of contradictory that he wants me to remove things but he shares old copies.

In my primary letter to Hackethal's lawyer, I tried to tell them about my negotiating position, including sharing information about what statements were and weren't important to me to keep up. But I received no reply and Hackethal's posts appear to largely ignore my letter.

Disavowing Threats

I didn't know this until now, but in 2021, a commenter on Hackethal's blog, "Connor", complained about Hackethal plagiarizing me, said something threatening about attacking Hackethal's face with a baseball bat, and said Hackethal should kill himself. As far as I know, I've never communicated with this Connor and they've never posted at any of my websites. Hackethal brings up questions about how I would handle this. I don't want my readers to do this, and I'd prefer if someone had told me sooner. Hackethal suggests that silence, neutrality and not taking sides would be acceptable responses from me, which may explain why he didn't report the harassment to me. I disagree with that viewpoint.

I disavow Connor's posts, and I ask my readers not to threaten anyone with violence. Connor is now banned from making accounts or writing anything at my websites. I'd also block Connor on social media if I saw him. Connor's comments are unacceptable and I regard anyone writing similar comments as working against me, not helping me.

Besides the usual reasons it's bad, threatening violence is also bad regarding fallibilism and rationality. Violence can't be retracted like arguments. And what if you intimidated someone into silence who was actually correct? You'd stay incorrect. People like Connor are unsafe to have around: if he got into a debate on my forum he might post threats. When you see someone attack an out-group member over a disagreement, they're revealing that they may attack an in-group member over a disagreement too. That's a particular concern at communities with diversity of thought.

In the last few months, Dennis Hackethal did an extensive review of my writing and wrote a large amount about me. One thing he did was look for misquotes. His attitude to misquotes has similarities to mine. It looks like he may have been inspired by me, but he doesn't credit me and he's pedantic in ways I disagree with.

If I misquoted, I'd want to know. But I'm happy to report he was unable to find a single error in my quotations.

I thought I was doing a good job with my quotations, even in informal contexts, but it's nice for an independent third party to spend unpaid hours validating this. And he's hostile towards me, so I'm not worried that he's holding back criticism to be nice. However, a potential source of error for the review is that he doesn't understand misquotes very well (see below); maybe a smarter reviewer would have found errors.

He claimed to have found errors for 15 quotes and called my results "terrible", but none are actually errors. For each quote, he presented specific information about what errors he's alleging. He didn't claim that I got a single word wrong. Instead, he was pedantic.

Most of the "... misquotes ..." are just that I often don't put an ellipsis at the start or end of a quote (see how weird it looks earlier in this sentence?). That's an intentional style choice which is widely used. Style guides have varied guidelines about this topic, but I don't know of any that agree with Hackethal's view that you always need starting and ending ellipses when quotes start or end mid-sentence. Those ellipses are commonly discouraged. On his website he recommends following style guides, seemingly unaware that they disagree with him.

To be thorough, here are more details covering all the other alleged errors. Sometimes emails or PDFs have mid-sentence line breaks which I fix. Also, I once clearly labelled a quote of song lyrics as abridged and linked the full lyrics, but he's calling that an error because I didn't individually indicate every abridgment within the quote. And once, when writing in plain text, I didn't include italics in a quote because that isn't supported by the plain text format. I was writing an email to people who I expected to be unfamiliar with internet norms and modern technology, and I wanted to keep it short and avoid confusing them, so I did it that way on purpose. Also, I quoted a dictionary as saying "the" even though the website for a different dictionary says "The" with a capital letter (Hackethal apparently confused the dictionaries). I copy/pasted my quote from the Mac Dictionary app, which has a lower case letter; I didn't change the capitalization.

So the review of my use of quotations didn't find any mistakes, only intentional style choices (mostly omitting ellipses at the start or end of quotes).

Update 2025-03-18: An error has been brought to my attention which I've corrected. I wrote "on the dictionary's website it says "The" with a capital letter", but I was wrong. I didn't carefully double check all of Hackethal's claims and repeated one of his errors. I didn't notice that he linked a web definition from the wrong dictionary: The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. The webpage for the correct dictionary doesn't make the definition publicly available. The print version of New Oxford American Dictionary, like the Mac version and my quote, has lowercase "the". Thank you for the correction to my alert reader who says he wishes to remain anonymous out of fear of being targeted by Hackethal.

I just found a philosophy consulting request in my spam email folder.

If you've sent me a philosophy related email, for consulting or something else, and I haven't responded, then I may not have seen it. Sorry! Feel free to resend it. I've now whitelisted some key words like "philosophy", "Popper" and "consult", so this shouldn't happen again. You can include the word "philosophy" in your email on purpose to make sure it isn't marked spam.

I mostly have philosophy discussions on my public forum, but I frequently give at least one short response when people email me, so if you got ignored there's a good chance that was unintentional.

I responded to the Reddit post Concerns about plagiarism in an eBook I'd like to publish [MN]:

I'm going to try to keep this short and sweet...

I took extremely extensive notes (~70 pages) during an occupational licensure video course by a major education company.

I'd like to edit those notes down into a little eBook but am concerned about plagiarism and whatever legal repercussions that could bring.

I tried to put as much as reasonably possible into my own words, but some short definitions or explanations were just best kept as they were stated or presented in the video course.

I've put various sections of my notes through free plagiarism checkers and have scored >96% unique each time and haven't seen any links back to the major company that made the video course.

---

So... How concerned should I be about plagiarism?

If I give the eBook away for free on my business's website would that eliminate ALL risks from any potential plagiarism?

(I'd rather sell the eBook but am willing to go the free route if tiny plagiarisms could turn into a huge PITA)

Using exact phrases from the course is a copyright violation unless you follow the rules of “fair use”. A positive factor for fair use is creating a transformative work (which is unclear from your description). If your work could substitute for the original work, that’s a negative factor. Using it commercially (selling it or using it to promote a business) is another negative factor. Also, if you want to claim it’s fair use, you should put each exact phrase inside quotation marks and cite the source. You can find more information at https://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/can-i-sell-book-summary-like-cliff-notes-or-monarc-312496.html and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

If you do commentary, criticism or write your own original thoughts, that would help make this legal. If you just copy their work as a whole, that may be a copyright violation even if you reword most of it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphrasing_of_copyrighted_material

Reworded material can be plagiarism. If you don’t want to be a plagiarist, then your book should inform your readers that it’s a summary of the course and say what course it is from what company. If you present it as your own ideas, not as a derivative work, then it’s clearly plagiarism. Plagiarism is unethical not illegal.

Both fair use and plagiarism have legal risks. The lawyers at this large company may send you a cease and desist letter or file a lawsuit. They can do that even if you didn’t break a law. If you’re in the right legally, proving that in court would still be expensive and risky. Making your book free wouldn’t remove your risk; takedown demands are pretty common even for free stuff which is clearly legal.

Suppose you can influence government policy. You can make a suggestion that will actually be followed. It could be on any big, complex topic, like economic policy, COVID policy, military policy, etc. What will happen next?

Your policy will probably be stopped early or late. It will probably have changes made. There will probably be other policies implemented, at the same time, which conflict with it.

Most people who influence policy only do it once. Only a small group of elites get to influence many policies. This post isn't about those elites.

Most people who try to influence government policy never have a single success. But some are luckier and get to influence one thing, once.

If you do get listened to more than once, it might be for one thing now, and something else several years later.

If you only get to affect one thing, what kind of suggestion should you make?

Something that works well largely independently of what other policies the government implements. Something that's robust to changes so it'll still work OK even if other people change some parts of it. Something that's useful even if it's done for too short or long of a time period.

Also, you'll be judged by the outcome for the one idea you had that was used, even though a bunch of other factors were outside of your control, and the rest of your plan wasn't followed.

If you suggest a five-part plan, there's a major risk: people will listen to one part (if you're lucky), ignore the other four parts, and then blame you when it doesn't work out well. And if you tell them "don't do that part unless you do all the rest", first of all they may do it anyway and still blame you, but otherwise you're just not going to influence policy at all. If you make huge demands and want to control lots of things, and say it's all or nothing, you can expect to get nothing.

In other words, when suggesting government policy, there's a large incentive to propose local optima. You want proposals that work well in isolation and provide some sort of benefit regardless of what else is going on.

It's possible to choose local optima that you think will also contribute to global (overall) benefit, or not. Some people make a good faith effort to do that, and others don't. The people who don't have an advantage at finding local optima that they can get listened to about because they have a wider selection available and can optimize for other factors besides big picture benefit. The system, under this simplified model, does not incentivize caring about overall benefit. People might already care about that for other reasons.

When other people edit your policy, or do other policies simultaneously, they will usually try to avoid ruining the local benefits of the policy. They may fail, but they tend to have some awareness of the main, immediate point of the policy (otherwise they wouldn't listen to it at all). But the overall benefit is more likely to be ruined by changes or other policies.

This was a thought I had about why government policy, and political advocacy, suck so much.

Also, similar issues apply to giving advice to people on online forums. They will often listen to one thing, change it, and also do several things that conflict with it. Compared to with government policy, there's way more chance they listen to a few things instead of only one. But it's unlikely they'll actually listen to a plan as a whole and avoid breaking parts of it. And when they do a small portion of your advice, but mostly don't listen to you, they'll probably blame you for bad outcomes because they listened to you some. These issues even apply to merely writing blog posts that discuss abstract concepts: people may interpret you as saying some things are good or bad, or otherwise making some suggestions, and then listen to one or a few parts, change the stuff they listen to in ways you disagree with, screw up everything else, and then blame you when it doesn't work out. One way bloggers and other types of authors may try to deal with this is by saying fewer things, avoiding complexity, and basically just repeating a few simple talking points (repeating a limited number of simple talking points may remind you of political advocacy).

Here's my understanding of the recent OpenAI drama, with Sam Altman being fired then coming back (and the board of directors being mostly fired instead), and some thoughts about it:

OpenAI was created with a mission and certain rules. This was all stated clearly in writing. All employees and investors knew it, or would have known if they were paying any attention.

In short, the board of directors had all the power. And the mission was to help humanity, not make money.

The board of directors fired the CEO. They were rude about it. They didn't talk with him, employees or investors first. They probably thought: it doesn't matter how we do this, the rules say we get our way, so obviously we'll get our way. They may have thought being abrupt and sneaky would give people less opportunity to complain and object. Maybe they wanted to get it over with fast.

The board of directors may have been concerned about AI Safety: that the CEO was leading the company in a direction that might result in AIs wiping out humanity. This has been denied some, and I haven't followed all the details, but it still seems like maybe what happened. Regardless, I think it could have happened and the results would likely have been the same.

The board of directors lost.

You can't write rules about safe AI and then try to actually follow them and get your way when there are billions of dollars involved. Pressure will happen. It will be non-violent (usually, at least at first). This wasn't about death threats or beatings on the street. But big money is above written rules and contracts. Sometimes. Not always. Elon Musk tried to get out of his contract to buy Twitter but he failed (but note how that was big money against big money).

Part of the pressure was people like Matt Levine and John Gruber joining in on attacking and mocking the board. They took sides. They didn't directly and openly state that they were taking sides, but they did. A lot of journalists took sides too.

Another part of the pressure was the threat that most of the OpenAI employees would quit and go work for Microsoft and do the same stuff there, away from the OpenAI board.

Although I'm not one of the people who is concerned that this kind of software may kill us all, I don't think Matt Levine and the others know that it won't. They don't have an informed opinion about that. They don't have rational arguments about it, and they don't care about rational debate. So I sympathize with the AI doomers. It must be very worrying for them to see not only the antipathy their ideas get from fools who don't know better, but also to see that written rules will not protect them. Just having it in writing that "if X happens, we will pull the plug" does not mean the plug will be pulled. ("We'll just pull the plug if things start looking worrying." is one of the common bad arguments used against AI doomers.)

It's also relevant to me and my ideas like "what if we had written rules to govern our debates, and then people participating in debates followed those rules, just like how chess players follow the rules of chess". It's hard to make that work. People often break rules and break their word, even if there are high stakes and legally-enforceable written contracts (not that anyone necessarily broke a contract; but the contract didn't win; other types of pressure got the people with contractual rights to back down, so the contract was evidently not the most important factor).

The people who made OpenAI actually put stuff in writing like "yo, investors, you should think of your investment a lot like a donation, and if you don't like that then don't invest" and Microsoft and others were like "whatever, here's billions of dollars on those terms" and employees were like "hell yeah I want stock options – I want to work here for a high salary and also be an investor on those terms". And then the outside investors and employees were totally outraged when actions were taken that could lower the value of their investment and treat it a bit like a donation to a non-profit that doesn't have a profit-driven mission.

I think the board handled things poorly too. They certainly didn't do it how I would have. To me, it's an everyone sucks here, but a lot of people seem to just think the board sucks and don't really mind trampling over contracts and written rules when they think the victim sucks.

Although I don't agree with AI doom ideas, I think they do deserve to be taken seriously in rational debate, not mocked, ignored, and put under so much pressure that they lose when trying to assert their contractual rights.