In 2020, I accused Dennis Hackethal of plagiarizing me (and plagiarizing David Deutsch) in his book A Window on Intelligence: The Philosophy of People, Software, and Evolution – and Its Implications (2020). I tried to resolve the matter with him by email even though he published the book without giving me any advance warning. Regarding a part I said plagiarized me, he responded: "it looks like you did tell me that [sentence], in which case the right thing to do is to credit you". He then asked me to send him many issues at once, I did, and he stopped responding without denying plagiarism or communicating any objections to my post. Until 2024, I thought he knew he was guilty and was strategically ignoring me.

In 2024, Hackethal denied plagiarizing me, but he gave no evidence or reasoning. It was just an unargued assertion. In 2025, he gave some reasoning about why he thinks he didn't plagiarize me. (Timeline.)

His 2025 reasoning focuses mainly on straw manning and misquoting my criteria for what plagiarism is, then claiming I'm a hypocrite who is also a plagiarist by those false criteria. He inaccurately summarizes what my accusations say. He doesn't focus on defending his book.

This post will discuss DARVO and Hackethal's defenses against plagiarism. I tried to comment on everything resembling a defense of his book, but he mostly attacked me instead of defending his own actions.

What Is Plagiarism?

Hackethal presents inaccurate information about what I think plagiarism is and he doesn't specify what he thinks it is. I'll clarify:

Plagiarism is taking credit for ideas or knowledge that you got from a source rather than creating yourself.

Or, as I put it in 2020 when criticizing Hackethal's book:

The New Oxford American Dictionary defines plagiarism as:

The Macmillan English Dictionary defines plagiarism as:

The Oxford English Dictionary defines plagiarize as:

These all say pretty much the same thing. I think it's important to understand that any type of knowledge can be plagiarized, even if it's not in words or doesn't resemble a scientific theory.

DARVO

Yellow blockquotes are from Hackethal and omit links. Italics are in the originals but bold is added.

If I seem nitpicky as you read on, keep in mind that I’m not applying my own standard but his [Temple's] – I don’t consider the examples I give actual plagiarism, and neither should you. I merely want to prove his hypocrisy.

Hackethal's approach is called DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. First he denied plagiarizing me. Then, instead of analyzing his book and trying to defend it, he attacked me. He tried to shift the narrative to reverse who is the victim and who is the offender.

Hackethal's response to evidence of his wrongdoing is to go on offense. Instead of defending his book passages, he says that some of my blog and forum posts don't name David Deutsch while discussing his ideas. But those informal posts don't take credit for Deutsch's ideas. Deutsch was mentoring me while I wrote many of them and, to the best of my knowledge, he thought they were fine (we discussed my posts hundreds of times, he didn't raise concerns, and he often expressed praise, approval and encouragement). Leaving out a citation in an informal context is different than taking credit for inventing an idea. If a reader doesn't know where you got an idea, but doesn't think you invented it, that isn't plagiarism. And I did credit Deutsch hundreds of times.

I don’t consider the examples I give [of Elliot Temple's writing] actual plagiarism, and neither should you.

Hackethal later called me a plagiarist on Twitter with no evidence, reasoning, details or link. If he doesn't think these examples are actual plagiarism, then why is he calling me a plagiarist? When you call someone a plagiarist you should give examples and reasoning. This seems like more DARVO: he's calling me a plagiarist, with zero evidence, because I called him one (with evidence).

Permission to Plagiarize?

One of Hackethal's defenses is that, in one case, I allegedly gave him permission to use some of my ideas without crediting me:

‘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 don't know what the first sentence is a quotation of, if anything.

Hackethal's footnote 4 admits that I publicly mentioned the permission in a video. He knows I wasn't trying to hide it.

Hackethal's footnote 3 says:

After helpfully suggesting an improvement to one of Temple’s blog posts, I asked him on 2019-01-30 whether I could use my own translation of his programming examples into another language in my writing. I asked: “With your permission, I’d like to use these examples […] in my paper.” He replied that same day: “Sure.” Temple does not credit me for the improvement, by the way. More hypocrisy. ↩

These quotes are accurate but they don't say what Hackethal seems to think they say. He didn't ask for, nor receive, permission to use my examples without credit. He also didn't ask for, nor receive, permission to use them in a book. If you want someone to be your ghostwriter, you have to ask for that explicitly, and probably pay them. A reasonable person would interpret his question as asking for permission to quote or paraphrase me with credit.

There are cases where asking for permission is unnecessary but people still do it. Asking can be a courtesy. And written permission is a better defense against copyright complaints than fair use.

I thought Hackethal was asking for those two normal reasons (courtesy and greater security against copyright complaints). It didn't even occur to me that he was asking for permission to put the material in his paper with no citation or credit. That would be unusual and it would be unethical even with my permission.

Even if someone gives you permission to use their work without crediting them, e.g. you hire someone to write your essay for school, that is still plagiarism. Permission and fair use are both defenses against copyright infringement but they aren't defenses against plagiarism.

Hackethal doesn't seem to understand plagiarism, or know what is or isn't plagiarism. That makes his denials of plagiarism pretty worthless. It sounds like he would intentionally use ideas without crediting his source – plagiarize – if he thought he had permission. And he apparently thought he had permission from me.

Also, the reason I didn't credit Hackethal for the improvement he suggested is because it wasn't an important, original idea. He suggested changing one tiny detail in order to prevent a potential pedantic complaint. I generally don't credit people for correcting my typos or making small wording suggestions. This is standard practice followed by other authors. For example, I made nine suggestions for Jordan Peterson's book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Peterson thanked me by email and said the book would be changed "asap", but he didn't publicly credit me. That's fine because my contributions were small.

Plagiarism Checkers

I also ran my book through an online plagiarism checker before publication, which came up empty – more evidence that I’m considerate

This is a bad argument. Those checkers are well known to provide lots of false negatives and false positives.

Even if he had done his best to check for plagiarism before publication, his actions after becoming aware of the problem are more important. He didn't say "Sorry, the online checker I used missed it. I'll fix it ASAP." His completely different behavior is what prompted me to publish a blog post.

Also, since Hackethal knew he had recently learned directly from me about topics covered in his book, and he knew my name wasn't in the book, he should have reviewed my material and our interaction history to check for potential plagiarism instead of just using a generic online checker.

When he hired me to teach him or asked for free help on my forum, he didn't disclose that he was writing a book (or planning to write one soon? he still hasn't shared the timeline). He also didn't share any draft material before publication to let me comment, didn't send me a courtesy copy, and didn't even notify me when the book was published.

Cryptomnesia

Even though I avoided Temple’s blog for years to prevent cryptomnesia,

Why did Hackethal stop avoiding my blog? Why did he start reading it again then use ideas that are on my blog for Veritula? He doesn't say. He should stay away. He seems to be admitting that he made an intentional decision to read my blog in the time period leading up to creating Veritula.

Cryptomnesia is when you remember ideas but you mistakenly think they're new thoughts, not memories. This can lead to accidental plagiarism. If Hackethal accidentally plagiarized, he could have apologized and fixed his book. Instead, he refused to discuss the matter, which is why I went public and blogged about it.

Also, he hasn't admitted to any cryptomnesia or accidental plagiarism. This doesn't work as a defense if you don't claim that it happened. He continues to deny me credit on purpose, and repeatedly attacks me, instead of saying he had a memory error and fixing it.

Can Teaching, Organizing or Presenting Be Plagiarized?

I didn’t plagiarize Temple on any of these points [related to Nick Bostrom]. 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.)

Teaching methods and ways of organizing or explaining ideas can be plagiarized because they can involve important, original knowledge. In general, any type of knowledge can be plagiarized.

For example, LearnCraft Spanish has a teaching method where they start with prepositions, conjunctions and grammar. They delay teaching nouns, verbs and adjectives until later. That's unusual. Their method also involves mixing English and Spanish words in the same sentence. Although they didn't invent Spanish, someone could still plagiarize their way of teaching Spanish.

If you write a book teaching calculus, you could easily plagiarize your calculus teacher. That's different than writing a book about another topic, e.g. physics, which uses calculus and expects readers to already know it.

Hackethal's book doesn't merely use ideas I taught him; it focuses on teaching or explaining philosophy ideas, and they're often the same ideas I taught Hackethal being explained in similar ways with similar words to how I explained them to him.

Also, in general, secondary sources can be plagiarized. Suppose Emily reads a lot but doesn't come up with any innovative new ideas. She writes a book sharing 50 interesting ideas from 50 different thinkers she read. She cites every idea correctly. Now Jacob comes along and reads Emily's book. He writes a book with the same 50 ideas and copies Emily's 50 citations but doesn't cite Emily. He has plagiarized Emily because he used her ideas and creative work without crediting her. She did thoughtful work to gather and present those ideas, and Jacob copied her results without citing his source. Her selection of 50 ideas had knowledge from her creativity and research, and that knowledge can be plagiarized. Jacob is pretending to have done research that he didn't do but Emily did; he's taking credit for her accomplishments.

Hackethal seems to be admitting ("Someone can reasonably claim to have been plagiarized only when they came up with the ideas in question.") that he would leave out citations for secondary sources, intentionally, because he (incorrectly) thinks that can't be plagiarism. Hackethal's denials of plagiarism don't mean much if he doesn't understand what plagiarism is.

Academics have written about secondary source plagiarism (1, 2, 3, 4), also called bypass plagiarism (5, 6). It's plagiarism to get a quote or fact from a secondary source, then copy the primary source citation from the secondary source without citing the secondary source (unless you get a copy of the primary source, read it yourself, and use material directly from it without using anything from the secondary source). And secondary sources frequently contain new knowledge that isn't in the primary source (e.g. additional analysis), so taking credit for that knowledge without citing the secondary source is also plagiarism, even if one acquires, reads and cites the primary source.

Hackethal seems to think that me not wanting to be secondary-source-plagiarized is unreasonable: "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." He's basically admitting that he would leave out citations to me on purpose because he thinks plagiarism only applies to some types of knowledge but not others. He thinks citing me when I am his source is an "unreasonable" request, whereas many academics would call not citing me "plagiarism". (To be clear, using me as an uncredited secondary source is only one of the concerns. He also appears to have used me as an uncredited primary source by using my original philosophical ideas about decisive arguments and binary evaluations for Veritula.)

AGI Alignment and Slavery

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. [no links omitted]

Hackethal says he got an idea (that he didn't cite a source for) from Deutsch, not me. He's debating who he plagiarized, not whether he plagiarized. His claim is that he never plagiarized anyone, so this defense is illogical.

While I did credit Deutsch in my unscripted video, I was skeptical then, and remain skeptical now, that Hackethal got this from Deutsch.

The issue isn't when Deutsch had the idea, but when and where he shared it, and where Hackethal got it. Hackethal often argues about irrelevant points (like when Deutsch privately thought of an idea), which may confuse readers about what the issues are.

The size of my audience is also irrelevant to whether Hackethal got the idea from me or Deutsch. Hackethal is in my audience. It doesn't matter if lots of other people didn't learn something from me if Hackethal did.

Having a small audience makes me more vulnerable to plagiarism since few people reading Hackethal's writing would be able to recognize when it plagiarizes me.

Hackethal participated in multiple discussions about these topics at my community before Deutsch published the 2019 tweet that Hackethal linked. As to the 2015 podcast, Hackethal couldn't have learned it then because Deutsch didn't say it there. Hackethal is (yet again) making false statements about his own sources.

In the podcast, Deutsch said that "shackling the AIs [AGIs] so that they won’t be able to get away from us and have different ideas" could lead to a "slave revolt". That doesn't explain the issue enough for someone to learn it. And it doesn't directly say AGIs are slaves, just ambiguously implies it for one extreme scenario (total suppression of different ideas and autonomy). Deutsch didn't say or imply that friendly AGI efforts in general are attempts at enslavement (they typically aim to prohibit some dangerous ideas, not prohibit all different ideas – the AGI being really smart and coming up with new and different scientific theories is actually part of the goal).

Deutsch's 2019 tweet, after Hackethal learned about these topics from me, says "Trying to shackle an AGI's thinking is slavery." That's ambiguous (what constitutes a shackle?) and isn't explained enough for anyone to learn much about this complex, difficult, unintuitive topic. Deutsch acknowledges that and his tweet also says he explained the issue in his essay in the book Possible Minds, but I checked and he didn't explain it there. By the way, I actually discussed Possible Minds with Hackethal, who was a beginner who needed a lot of help to try to understand material from that book.

Hackethal claims to have learned about AGI alignment and slavery from Deutsch's 2015 podcast appearance. I already discussed that Deutsch didn't share the idea then. But also, in a 2019 post at my forum titled "Friendly AI [AGI]", Hackethal began "Elliot and I talked about this and decided it would be interesting to start a thread about it and see what other people think." There is written documentation about how and where Hackethal learned this stuff.

In our conversation, Hackethal made it clear he hadn't learned it in 2015 or at any time prior to 2019 because he disagreed with it (or didn't understand the topic enough to know what his claims meant): "As I currently understand it, the AI [AGI] is an explainer, but has no capacity for emotions." In a response I said "I think [the AGI would] have preferences – it wouldn't want to do some things. And it'd want to be paid for work it does, not work for free. It'd be a person." Hackethal replied making it clear to me that he didn't understand enslaving an AGI was possible: "Again, you speak in terms of preferences and wants, which are all emotions." He didn't think an AGI could want or not want to do some actions, or could want to be paid for its work. He didn't see AGIs as being full people that are the same as human beings (I also brought up to him that AGIs could have teachers just like human children do). You can't enslave something that doesn't prefer anything over anything else – that's like "enslaving" a rock, grass, or an NPC in a present-day video game like World of Warcraft.

Unlike me, Deutsch, Hackethal's book or Hackethal's current view, Hackethal in 2019 thought animals had features that AGIs wouldn't: "Many animals have preferences". I responded with links to some of my material that disagreed with him about animals. He used some of that material, which I shared in that email, in his book. Other people also responded arguing with him. It looks like we changed his mind, particularly me (I made many essays and videos about this, which influenced the other posters too).

A year after these conversations, Hackethal published a book where he now agreed with and explained theories he'd argued against and/or been ignorant of when he joined my community. Unlike Deutsch, I covered the topics extensively in public. Hackethal claims citing me would be unnecessary even if he did learn these things from me because I learned some of these ideas in private conversations with Deutsch. Even if that were correct, Hackethal should still cite the source he got ideas from, even if it's a secondary source, and he could also cite Deutsch or share speculations about Deutsch. Hackethal doesn't actually know what was said in my private conversations with Deutsch: he doesn't know what I learned from Deutsch, what Deutsch learned from me, and what Deutsch and I disagree about. Instead of basing citation decisions on speculations about other people's private conversations, you're supposed to cite the sources that you actually used (and optionally add additional notes, comments or cites if you think they're relevant). It sounds like Hackethal knows he learned these ideas from me and he's making bad excuses for intentionally not citing me.

Since none of the sources Hackethal brought up regarding AGI alignment actually teach the idea, they seem to be excuses made up after the fact, not where he really learned it, which I still think was from me. But even if Hackethal somehow learned it from Deutsch (or someone else he didn't cite), that would still be plagiarism, since he gave these Deutsch sources in his February 2025 blog post, not his March 2020 book.

Smears

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.

Plagiarism involves taking credit for inventing ideas, not just using them without credit. Hackethal doesn't seem to understand the difference. Suppose I write "If you find any errors in my essay, please send me corrections." Then I'm using fallibilism, an idea which I learned about from Karl Popper and David Deutsch, but it's OK not to cite when I write that sentence. Although my sentence doesn't credit them, it wouldn't be plagiarism because it doesn't take credit for inventing fallibilism.

Overall, Hackethal wrote a lot about plagiarism but barely any of it even tried to defend his book. He made many false claims about my opinions. He put words in my mouth in order to attack me. He had the opportunity to discuss with me what I consider plagiarism and why but he declined. He could have learned about plagiarism by Googling it or he could have done a better job reading what I said about it. Instead, he's smearing me by lying about what I think. This is a way to attack me and avoid saying what he thinks plagiarism is or how he evaluates what is or isn't plagiarism.

Instead of analyzing his book using a standard of plagiarism he believes is correct, he analyzed my blog using a standard of plagiarism he believes is incorrect. This falsely implied that my criticisms of his book used the incorrect standard that he misattributed to me.

He also wrote tens of thousands of words about me on other topics besides plagiarism. The pattern there is also DARVO: he mostly attacks me instead of trying to defend his own actions.

Also, Hackethal's many examples of my writing that "Temple would consider actual plagiarism" are absurd. I'll briefly discuss two:

I discussed ideas from the book The Beginning of Infinity in a post to the The Beginning of Infinity forum (reposted to my blog with attribution). The credit is in the forum name. Hackethal says I would consider that plagiarism, but I wouldn't.

Another of Hackethal's examples is that I used Ayn Rand's concept of an "active mind" in a post which names Rand approximately 21 times, quotes four passages where she talked about "active mind", and cites those quotes to "Ayn Rand's Philosophical Detection, from Philosophy: Who Needs It". Hackethal falsely claims that I would consider that plagiarism. I'm not joking. His examples are that bad. (Thank you Jarrod for pointing this out.)

Copyright

I said Hackethal's book violated my copyright. It was only a small amount of text, but it did violate my rights and provide two particularly clear examples of plagiarism (because he used my words instead of just my ideas). It wasn't a major copyright concern (if he had credited me, then I would have considered it fair use), but he keeps falsely telling people that I'm unreasonably picky and aggressive about copyright.

What was his defense of his book? He said the copyright complaint only applied to a small amount of his book and he attacked me at length. Instead of giving a view of copyright which he thinks is correct and evaluating his book using that view, he instead evaluated my writing using a view of copyright which he thinks is incorrect. He falsely attributed the incorrect view of copyright to me and called me a hypocrite.

Context

Hackethal wrote a book which says it offers a "bold new explanation" and "unparalleled insight". In this context, readers will reasonably assume ideas the book explains (which aren't common knowledge) were invented by Hackethal unless he credits someone else.

I wrote blog posts. I was open about being inspired by David Deutsch, who I talked about frequently. I wrote about Deutsch's ideas, and other ideas, for many years, without claiming to have important new ideas of my own. This is normal. Many bloggers don't have important new ideas. They're just trying to think and write about interesting topics. That can be worthwhile even without bold new explanations or unparalleled insight.

In that kind of blogging context, if an idea is mentioned without a citation, readers may not assume the blogger invented it. It depends. If explaining an idea is the main focus of a post, then the blogger should generally say where they got it, but even if they don't, readers may not assume it's original if there are no claims to originality. With Critical Fallibilism, I often clearly state when I think something is an important new idea that I developed.

I have also written forum posts, emails, Reddit comments, Tweets, Facebook messages, and so on. Do I cite everything in those informal contexts? No. If you're writing a YouTube comment, the context is so informal that people might not even believe you if you said you were sharing an important, original idea.

Not providing a source and taking credit for something are different. A book, a blog or a social media comment are different contexts. Readers judge by context what people are taking credit for. In books, especially books that claim to be sharing important, original ideas, readers tend to see any idea which is explained but not cited (and isn't common knowledge) as the author's idea.

Other context matters too, like treating different sources differently. If some thinkers gets many cites, and others don't, why is there a double standard? Having a lot of cites for some thinkers implies to readers that you're using citations, which makes the other cites being left out more misleading than it would be if there were no cites.

Another part of context is how an author would respond to questions. If someone asks me whether I invented fallibilism, I'll say that no, I learned about it from Popper and Deutsch. Although I sometimes talk about fallibilism in informal contexts without citing anyone, I don't intend to take credit for it. By contrast, Hackethal hasn't responded to my complaints by clarifying that he got a bunch of ideas from me (instead he attacked me). In addition to not putting various cites in his book, he also doesn't provide them when people ask. He seems to be intentionally claiming to have originated some ideas, which is different than merely neglecting to include some citations.

Hackethal wrote in a more formal context than me, said his book had a lot of important, original ideas (making that the default expectation for ideas the book presents without citations which aren't common knowledge), cited a lot of other ideas, and used significantly different citation policies for different sources. Then, when concerns were raised, he still refused to tell people that he learned a lot of it from me. And then Hackethal did similar behavior again, making it potentially a pattern. These contextual factors are different for Hackethal's book compared with my blog posts (and his complaints about my blog posts, like the "active mind" complaint, are ridiculous anyway).

Misquoting

When Hackethal writes about me, he makes many false statements. When I check his sources, I often find errors. You can't trust anything he presents as factual, even when he gives quotes and sources. This analysis is intended as an example to illustrate how none of his passages or claims are trustworthy.

When criticizing others, including me, 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”. [no links omitted]

The first quote is correct. But the rest are taken out of context and presented misleadingly. He chops up my writing. Some of his paraphrases are wrong. He quotes from four separate sections of my essay but presents it as my stance on plagiarism, as if all the other quotes are my elaboration on the first quote, but they aren't. He presents me as making generic claims about principles when most of what he quotes is actually commentary on specific cases.

He [Temple] explains his stance [on plagiarism in general] 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.”

These quotes are from a different section. They aren't elaboration of my stance on plagiarism. I wrote about one book's treatment of one thinker, not any originator:

Hackethal misquoted me by changing my comment about how a specific book should have treated Deutsch to a universal claim about how all writing should treat all originators of ideas. When I comment on specific cases, I take into account evidence and context, and I wouldn't necessarily reach the same conclusion about a different case.

Another way of looking at it is that Hackethal is presenting of my arguments as my complete, exhaustive reasoning, when they aren't and I never said they were. He even does that when I indicate incompleteness using clear words like "for example", as we'll get to soon.

He [Temple] says [as part of his general stance on plagiarism] the name of the originator of an idea should be “in the main text” and “not just in the [end]note […].”

These quotes come from a different essay section and aren't an elaboration on the definition of plagiarism that Hackethal put them after.

I commented on a specific passage involving Hans Hass. I didn't present a general rule that applies to all writing, as Hackethal misled his readers to believe. That's why I put it in a different section, not the section where I stated my general stance on plagiarism.

“[I]ntentional malice is clear” to him when an originator is not credited “even once”.

Hackethal misquotes me as saying you can always conclude malice when one specific piece of evidence (zero credit) is present. What I actually wrote was:

I said a particular individual's malice was clear due to multiple pieces of evidence. I said "for example" and gave two pieces of evidence (name not present even once and many ideas from the same person present). I said I'd give more details later because this is from yet another section of my essay, the introduction.

Hackethal left out the "for example", my second piece of evidence, and that more details were given later. My second piece of evidence was also grammatically and logically linked to the first, not independent, which makes leaving it out even worse. He misquoted me by inserting an inaccurate paraphrase between two partial sentence quotes and leaving out key information from the same sentence.

To summarize, Hackethal quoted from four sections of my essay and falsely presents them as coming from one section with all the later quotes elaborating on the first one. He misquoted me as making generic claims when I talked about specific individuals and passages. His selective quoting and inaccurate paraphrasing hides what I actually said by leaving out names of specific individuals, changing specific claims to universal claims, and omitting key words like "for example".

Interestingly, these types of misquotes would be evaluated as correct quotations by Hackethal's Quote Checker tool. His approach to evaluating quotes pedantically focuses on changes to letters or whitespace, but it misses changes of meaning. He doesn't check whether quotes are introduced accurately or taken out of context. He doesn't check whether paraphrases inside square brackets or in quotation-adjacent text are accurate. Those things can't be checked mechanically; it takes creativity to evaluate them well. Hackethal focuses on issues that can be checked mechanically with simple software, but misquoting meanings is more important than misquoting wordings. Hackethal is also pedantic enough to call valid style choices misquotes, like not putting ellipses at the start or end of some quotes where they're optional. Hackethal presents himself as caring a lot about quotation accuracy, and he usually gets wordings right, but he often gets meanings wrong.

Conclusion

Hackethal still hasn't really attempted to defend his book against my 2020 plagiarism accusations. He didn't quote and analyze his book passages and talk about where he got the ideas. He didn't put up blog posts explaining which ideas I originated. He didn't attempt to thoughtfully discuss what plagiarism is. Instead, he used a DARVO strategy and attacked me as a hypocrite using misquoted straw man claims about what I supposedly consider plagiarism.

Hackethal also still hasn't provided basic timeline information like when he started planning or writing his book. He's been unhelpful regarding my concerns.

Why do I still care about this issue from years ago? Hackethal extensively attacked me in 2025, including this plagiarism DARVO. He said he won't stop, doesn't appear to have stopped, and also has been encouraging others to attack me too (including blatant defamation). He also non-consensually published photos of me which I didn't give him, which he didn't take, and which weren't available online before he published them. He's still selling the problematic book and he started using my Critical Fallibilism ideas for his Veritula website without crediting me. Also, illogically, Hackethal and some of his associates have been going around the internet falsely telling people that I'm a plagiarist (even though his own blog post claims I'm not a plagiarist, merely a hypocrite). Hackethal and his fans have recently followed me and my fans to multiple third party websites to disrupt our conversations that weren't about him.

Hackethal now has fans who think he has innovative ideas but I don't. In some cases I invented the idea and in other cases I invented a way of explaining the idea but not the idea itself (which Hackethal also didn't invent). Instead of telling people the truth, he's gone to great lengths trying to discredit me. One of his fans (who I'm not naming as a courtesy, but I'd be happy to name and credit if he requests attribution), recently told me the following:

This person incorrectly believes that I didn't originate any significant ideas while Hackethal did. He believes that if I did good work then I'd get credit. He doesn't seem to understand that I already developed new philosophy ideas  and Hackethal is writing about my original ideas without crediting me. Hackethal hired me to teach him on paid calls and now people think he, not I, originated ideas I taught him.

Also, I asked that fan "Are you willing to discuss what’s true?" at which point he responded "Please do not email me again about this." This shows the sort of hostility and irrationality that Hackethal has been working to create. No one from his side has ever been willing to attempt to have a reasonable discussion to resolve any of the conflict.

With misquotes, my primary concern is whether the meaning is accurate, not whether a tab was changed to four spaces. With plagiarism, my primary concern is that Hackethal is misleading people, not the exact number, wording and location of citations. Hackethal's dozens of false claims about pedantic details can distract from the issues that matter most.

KPop Demon Hunters (KDH, 2025) is Netflix's most watched original film with over 300,000,000 views. It's got great animation, colorful visuals, music, singing, dancing, and sword fights with demons. Despite the violence, it generally tries to be family-friendly, wholesome and suitable for children. It's rated PG, which approximately means suitable for most 10 year olds to watch alone or for many 6 year olds to watch with their parents.

This post is about the some of DKH's themes and how they relate to real life. What values does it promote? People, especially children, are influenced by films. KDH includes moralizing, as films meant to appeal to children often do. I also connect the issues to rationality.

This post contains only mild spoilers. If you haven't watched the movie yet, I actually think it'd be a good idea to read my post before instead of after watching. That way, you can keep in mind my comments while watching. (This post should also make sense if you never watch the movie.)

KDH says to be nice to people who are different, to misfits, and to people with flaws. Basically, be tolerant. This is a common, popular theme in other media, and KDH got extremely popular using it as a main theme. KDH is fairly light on dialog, and certainly doesn't lecture the audience, so it doesn't have a lot of space to share ideas. This theme is one of the few things they included in a film that was very well optimized to be very popular. I think it must have outcompeted many other potential themes the writers could have used, and it contributed to KDH's popularity. I think people like this theme a lot.

Why do people like it? Because it seems nice, moral, good. Note that although KDH doesn't talk about it, the theme applies to racism, sexism, ageism, anti-queer prejudice and anti-fat prejudice. Those are areas where people differ which our culture says not to be mean about. More broadly, being nice to people who are different is part of how our society is peaceful instead of violent. In a more intolerant, mean society, hate crimes would be more common, whereas tolerance of differences can help people get along better and reduce crime.

The tolerance theme suggests everyone can and should get along. A lot of people (especially young people) have (non-medical) anxiety about fitting in, getting along with others, being accepted. Many people struggle with this in the workplace and even more struggle with it in school.

I find it interesting that people love this theme while not doing it very well. Being mean and dismissive of people for being different remains widespread despite all the messaging saying not to. Somehow, many people don't listen to the message while also liking the message. Maybe they like to pretend to listen to it – to pretend to be nicer than they are. Or maybe they're trying to listen but they're bad at it. Or a mix.

People being different is pretty much the only thing people are dismissed for. What else would you reject someone for? People are intolerant of disagreement, not agreement. People are intolerant of differences, not sameness (with some special exceptions like copying someone's outfit or cultural appropriation).

If people simply lacked skill at tolerance, you might expect some experts to be great at it. People who study rationality or psychology might excel at it. But I don't think they do. In my experience with intellectuals who've studied something relevant, they're not really better or worse than the average KDH viewer at tolerance of different ideas. I haven't found intellectuals particularly more or less open to intellectual discussion and different ideas than non-intellectuals. Maybe intellectuals are better than average at not being racist, but I'm not sure about that either. Some clever people end up kind of racist because they're impressed by clever, logical arguments for racism-adjacent ideas, and they arrogantly think they're just being scientific or something, but actually they're pretty racist in a way that a less intellectual person might avoid. And intellectuals may be more likely than average to be misogynists, since I think men are overrepresented as both intellectuals and misogynists.

KDH's tolerance theme can be viewed as saying to be nice to everyone, be accepting of everyone, stop being dismissive of anyone. But that's unrealistic. People have limited time and attention. They can't spend time being nice to everyone. They'd be too busy. They have to select some friends over others. They are fans of some people but not others. They don't have to be mean to anyone, but not everyone can be super popular like the pop star heroes of KDH. This difficulty may explain some of the shortcomings in people's tolerance. I think it's even connected with violence because being dismissive of people leads to unfamiliarity not respect, which I think does serve to help enable violence.

Popularity is, to some extent, a zero sum game. There is a limited amount of attention that people can pay to others. Some people getting a lot of attention doesn't increase the total amount of attention available. Attention is a scarce resource. When some people get a lot of attention, there can't be an equitable distribution of attention. The world doesn't have to be equitable, but there's a clash of themes here. On the one hand, fandom of pop stars is presented positively, and on the other hand it says to be nice to everyone, and forgive flaws, not be dismissive. But fandom is a system where some people are liked more than others. Some people are liked less, dismissed more, viewed as less impressive, less good, less worthy compared to the stars. Being less receptive to what John has to say than to what a pop star says is a form of dismissiveness, of judging, of being less accepting of some people than others. For many people, many celebrities feel "familiar" and like part of their "in group" or "tribe", which means there's less attention left over for neighbors, classmates and coworkers who therefore feel more unfamiliar and distant and aren't treated as nicely.

So of course people aren't great at actually being nice and accepting in the way KDH says to. Even in KDH itself, there are conflicting themes. KDH normalizes a small number of people being ultra-popular while ignoring that some people in the huge audience can also sing well but will never get similar recognition for their talent. And either that's unfair or else the less popular people have less merit in which case being dismissive of them in some ways is valid.

KDH normalizes being accepting of flaws from ultra-popular people. It illustrates that. It doesn't illustrate any regular fans in the crowd having flaws and being accepted anyway. It doesn't even illustrate people in the crowd with no notable flaws being important, interesting or talented, or getting much attention.

KDH shows a main character, who is extremely talented and popular, having anxiety. I think it's partly meant to normalize such struggles for everyone. Even those people you look up to struggle. But then it turns out she is good enough, is enough, didn't need to have so much anxiety. OK but does that apply to a high school student with no fans, no talents, no skills, no direction in life, no special merit at anything? Does it apply to a young adult with a mundane job? Is everyone already good enough, or just impressive people? The movie only illustrates the theme with impressive people being good enough despite some flaws. It doesn't really show anything about regular people being important, or how to like them at all, let alone like them despite flaws.

The issue of limited attention and dismissiveness has broad importance beyond issues of fitting in to social groups and having friends or a spouse. It also comes up with intellectuals who dismiss a lot of critics instead of debating them. Most of those intellectuals aren't popular and aren't overwhelmed with too many critics who want to debate them. A few very popular intellectuals can't engage with all (or even 1% of) their fans, but most intellectuals aren't popular.

The issue of being nice to people who don't fit in should apply to intellectual misfits. But I don't think most viewers see it that way. They aren't like "Oh, KDH is saying I should be less dismissive of astrology." And the actual right answer here is nuanced. You can't spend time researching every bad idea; there are far too many.

A important consideration is that if everyone dismisses the same stuff, instead of using independent judgment, then some ideas get a lot of attention while others get none. A million intellectuals have time to investigate over a million ideas. My view is that people should pay more attention to which ideas are have already received engagement. In other words, if someone wrote down a refutation of an idea (and is handling followup questions and criticisms about their refutation), then I don't need to investigate it myself since it's already being handled. But if no one is looking at an idea, I should be more open to it. If lots of people had this attitude, then the coverage of ideas that get attention could be better instead of being overly focused on a small number of popular ideas (paralleling how a small number of pop stars get a ton of attention while a lot of other music gets ignored, some of which is actually good).

I think there's something interesting about people who live in a society with tons of meanness and dismissiveness watching yet another movie saying not to do that, and liking it, while knowing that people are going to keep doing it anyway. A lot of the people who like the movie will do the thing the movie says not to do, but instead of being offended they just nod along and agree then don't act accordingly.

If you're interested in intellectual tolerance, see my Debate Policies Introduction.

In Disciplined Minds, Jeff Schmidt presents a concept called "assignable curiosity". It means that authorities can tell people what to be curious about, e.g. telling a scientist what topics to research or not. Their curiosity follows assignments instead of being natural. People paying for creative, intellectual work (governments, corporations) often want it to serve them and be directed at the topics of their choice, rather than being freely-directed truth-seeking inquiry. They want the intellectuals who work for them to somewhat be rational, curious, questioning people and somewhat be biased, obedient people. Schmidt writes:

I argue that the hidden root of much career dissatisfaction is the professionals lack of control over the “political” component of his or her creative work. Explaining this component is a major focus of this book. Today’s disillusioned professionals entered their fields expecting to do work that would “make a difference” in the world and add meaning to their lives. In this book I show that, in fact, professional education and employment push people to accept a role in which they do not make a significant difference, a politically subordinate role. I describe how the intellectual boot camp known as graduate or professional school, with its cold-blooded expulsions and creeping indoctrination, systematically grinds down the student’s spirit and ultimately produces obedient thinkers—highly educated employees who do their assigned work without questioning its goals. I call upon students and professionals to engage in just such questioning, not only for their own happiness, but for society’s sake as well.

Assignable curiosity reminded me of something I've observed with video games: many players feel good and validated when succeeding at easy games. Game designers can be unquestioned authorities, similar to exam designers. Players usually don't set their own goals or keep in mind that most games are intentionally designed for players to win without getting frustrated. One thing that made exam and game design decisions more visible to me was ambiguous test questions, which led to me mentally modeling exam makers in order to guess what they meant. I've also done hobby game design where I can edit the numbers at will for how much damage a boss does.

Here are other quotes related to assignable curiosity:

Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography by Karl Popper (1976):

I dreamt of one day founding a school in which young people could learn without boredom, and would be stimulated to pose problems and discuss them; a school in which no unwanted answers to unasked questions would have to be listened to; in which one did not study for the sake of passing examinations.

Popper also wrote about how educators (or experiences or observations) cannot pour knowledge into the minds of students, like water into a bucket. He argued that people actively create their own knowledge, rather than passively receiving it (Objective Knowledge, ch. 2 and appendix 1).

How Children Fail by John Holt (1964):

Schools give every encouragement to producers, the kids whose idea is to get "right answers" by any and all means.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, (1970 for English):

Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat.

The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature by William Godwin (1797), essay IX, Of the Communication of Knowledge:

Liberty is one of the most desirable of all sublunary advantages. I would willingly therefore communicate knowledge, without infringing, or with as little as possible violence to, the volition and individual judgment of the person to be instructed.

Again; I desire to excite a given individual to the acquisition of knowledge. The only possible method in which I can excite a sensitive being to the performance of a voluntary action, is by the exhibition of motive.

Motives are of two sorts, intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motives are those which arise from the inherent nature of the thing recommended. Extrinsic motives are those which have no constant and unalterable connection with the thing recommended, but are combined with it by accident, or at the pleasure of some individual.

Thus, I may recommend some species of knowledge by a display of the advantages which will necessarily attend upon its acquisition, or flow from its possession. Or, on the other hand, I may recommend it despotically, by allurements or menaces, by shewing that the pursuit of it will be attended with my approbation, and that the neglect of it will be regarded by me with displeasure.

School exams, with negative consequences for poor grades, are an example of extrinsic motivation, which Godwin would call despotic. And he applied these ideas to parenting practices outside of schools. Godwin was also one of the first anarchists, his wife was one of the first feminists, and his daughter is famous for writing Frankenstein.

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto (1991):

Schools were designed by Horace Mann and by Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and by Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and by some other men to be instruments for the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

My largest hesitation with this sort of claim is how much it focuses blame on school. In Disciplined Minds, Schmidt says government and industry are flawed too. I think parenting practices are also flawed. I see broad cultural problems. I do find it plausible that some elites had bad intentions when setting up the modern school system, as they certainly did with American Indian residential schools.

Bound To Be Free: home-based education as a positive alternative to paying the hidden costs of 'free' education by Jan Fortune-Wood (2001) advocates non-coercive parenting and education. Chapter 2 argues that tax-funded schools have "a specific agenda of conformity" and serve the interests of governments. No amount of funding will ever make them as good as education that "children initiate and control". The homogeneity and compulsion of school is incompatible with children following their own curiosity.

Guessing the Teacher's Password by Eliezer Yudkowsky (2007 essay) contrasts trying to learn about reality with trying to guess what answer a teacher wants.

After threatening to sue me and writing five blog posts about me, Dennis Hackethal published another blog post, some long blog comments (some could be posts but he put them in the comment section) and multiple videos attacking me. It's over 10,000 more words and 1.5 hours of video. He also sent me eight rude tweets in a row even though I'm blocking him on Twitter (he used a second account to get around the block). The tweets taunted me and said "I plan to make many more videos about you". He won't leave me alone, won't discuss our conflict, and isn't interested in deescalation. He also doxed me. He's trying to bully me into removing everything I ever said about him from the internet, which is one of his twenty non-negotiable demands.

Despite this, I tried ignoring him again. After his lawsuit threat, I ignored him for eight months and refrained from blogging about it. After his blog posts about me, I responded minimally, then ignored him for six months despite his many followup attacks. Then, in addition to continuing to attack me and recently hassling my fan when he tried to discuss my philosophy ideas online (unrelated to Hackethal), Hackethal made a website, Veritula, which uses Critical Fallibilism ideas without crediting me. Unfortunately, I don't think ignoring Hackethal is a viable option. He won't leave me alone.

For context, please note that he asked me not to respond to his posts. He said he wouldn't discuss and that he would consider it mistreatment of him if I or any of my associates wrote responses to his accusations on our own websites. My silence was not in response to him wanting to discuss the conflict, which he said he wouldn't do. Silence is what he asked for (but has no right to).

This post will respond to multiple issues in a series of fairly independent sections. One of my main themes is that Hackethal's factual claims are often false and often contradict his own sources, so don't believe his statements without analyzing the evidence yourself, even if they appear well-sourced.

These are mostly points I could have made six months ago, but I tried to deescalate instead, which didn't work.

False Claims

There's a pattern where Hackethal's statements about me and what happened are misleading, factually false, or involve logical errors. Here's a representative example.

In my 2024-05-28 letter to Hackethal's lawyers, which I didn't get a reply to, I wrote:

I find it implausible that Hackethal is genuinely concerned about potential harm to his reputation from my posts given what he's been posting online under his real name. For example, after sending the cease and desist letter, he blogged:

"Men should check a woman’s average weight for the past five years (eg social-media pics)."

"Husband and wife are not ‘partners’. The wife is the husband’s support system. He leads, she follows."

"From a man’s perspective, a girl with piercings and tattoos doesn’t look like a wife or mother; she looks like a girl you have sex with and then get rid of."

"When a woman asks you what you do for a living, she wants to gauge how much money you make. You should be able to counter the question with: how much do you charge for submission?"

"It’s not fair for a severely overweight woman to expect her man to be loyal."

These quotes are from May 21, 2024 on Hackethal's blog at [redacted]. They show that he's not making a serious attempt to build a positive reputation as an innovative philosopher.

Eight months later, Hackethal blogged a response (link omitted, and I didn't use the word "proof" so those must be scare quotes):

In his correspondence with my lawyers, Temple said he found it implausible that I was concerned with my reputation. As ‘proof’, he gave out-of-context quotes from an article where I paraphrase controversial things someone else has said. I even give an explicit disclaimer at the top of the article saying “I don’t agree with everything [that person] says […]” (emphasis in the original!). Temple conveniently didn’t mention either of these facts and presented quotes as if they were my views. That’s lazy and dishonest.

Here's the disclaimer (bold added):

Kevin Samuels was an image consultant with a successful YouTube channel about dating and relationships. I don’t agree with everything he says, particularly his advocacy for the corporal punishment of children, but he has provided valuable advice about relationships to men and women alike. I’ve listened to and analyzed several dozens of his episodes, and discussed many as well. Here are my key takeaways from his show.

I thought Hackethal disagreed with Samuels about corporal punishment and some other topics, but agreed with a lot of Samuels' views on women and relationships. In particular, I thought that Hackethal agreed with his own "key takeaways" from Samuel's "valuable advice". He also called them "Key Insights" in his post title. And he's posted similar opinions on Reddit. So who is being misleading or "dishonest"?

Factual Errors

Here's another illustration of how (un)trustworthy Hackethal is. He wrote (bold added, link to his Quote Checker website removed):

[Elliot] 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.

The Law Stack Exchange page in question isn't just about misquotes. The word "defamation" is on the page 18 times.

Please don't believe things just because he states them as facts and provides source links. His claims often contradict his sources.

Hackethal Hassled Justin Mallone

I'm not Hackethal's only target. He's attempted to bully Justin Mallone on Twitter and YouTube. Here's Mallone's final comment (with reformatting):

I initially was honestly annoyed at YouTube's moderation and wanted to give you [Dennis Hackethal] an opportunity to post your thoughts and have tried to engage with you a bit. Based on your replies here, I now think that was a mistake. You seem to be engaging in bad faith. I do not believe you are represented [by a lawyer]. I think you are bluffing. I do not think any person operating with legal advice would conduct themselves in the manner you are conducting yourself. I also do not think any reputable law firm would have any association with you. You also appear to be trying to weaponize "no contact requests" (which you appear not to understand) to let you post things without having to deal with replies. I will be deleting your YouTube comment and blocking you. Please do not contact me personally again. If you do indeed have lawyers, you can have them communicate for you.

Also, I think you are being abusive and unfair towards Elliot and should frankly get over criticism you didn't like that happened half a decade ago and move on with your life. The fact that you're stalking my forum visits is creepy as hell, btw.

People curious about this dispute should try reading Elliot's perspective instead of taking Dennis' vitriol on faith.

Plagiarism

Hackethal wrote:

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.

I don't know what he's referring to. In the context of refusing to have back-and-forth communication where I can ask questions, it's unreasonable for Hackethal to say things like this without providing details or evidence.

I'm not trying to be difficult. I've tried to think of what he could mean and I've asked others if they know. Because the plagiarism topic is particularly important, I'll respond to my best guess about what he means. Note that he said he addressed it five years ago, so he can't be referring to anything in his recent blog posts.

My guess is that Hackethal means he addressed my plagiarism complaint by creating a second edition of his book, A Window on Intelligence.

Hackethal's position is, in the words of his lawyers: "Mr. Hackethal has never plagiarized anyone." The second edition of his book is irrelevant to this (unless it contains plagiarism). If the first edition contained plagiarism, then Hackethal did ever plagiarize someone.

My blog post was about the first edition. No changes in the second edition could make my statements about the first edition false.

Hackethal hasn't updated his book's website to say there is a second edition. As far as I know, he hasn't announced it or tried to notify the public about it. He hasn't said what changes it contains or why he made it. He hasn't apologized for the first edition or retracted anything.

I bought the book on Kindle but my ebook wasn't updated to the second edition when that came out in 2020. I couldn't even buy the book again to get the update because I already owned it. When I received a cease and desist letter in 2024, I still didn't have access to the second edition. After Hackethal started blogging about me in 2025, I checked again and he'd finally sent the update to Kindle customers like me, four or five years late.

Quoting Defamation

Suppose I'm a journalist or blogger. An anonymous source sends me a tip: a celebrity is a chainsaw murderer. I publish an article accusing him of chainsaw murder. It turns out he's not a murderer. He sues me for defamation. Who will win? He will.

Now suppose I get the same tip but I'm a little more careful. I publish an article quoting an anonymous email accusing the celebrity of chainsaw murder. I don't make any accusations myself; I just truthfully, accurately share quotations. The celebrity sues me for defamation. Who will win? He will.

In the scenario, I did no fact checking or due diligence. I recklessly and/or negligently published a damaging, false claim. Quotation marks don't automatically make me innocent when I introduce the claim to the public or repeat it.

Hackethal published quotes attacking me, which he calls testimonials, mostly from anonymous sources. Some of the information is factually false. Hackethal's justification is:

But just so my readers know that these are real quotes from real people, let me state that I could easily produce the original texts in court one day, if ordered to.

Even if the quotes are accurate (someone else really said those things to Hackethal), it's still defamation. Before publishing those claims, Hackethal should have fact-checked them. He published them on his website so he's responsible for their correctness.

A common journalistic practice is to get two independent sources before publishing a claim. Hackethal didn't make reasonable efforts to ensure that the highly damaging statements he published were actually true. He's also refusing to communicate, so he won't retract them now or listen to corrections. His behavior is careless (or worse) and violates civil law.

Hackethal also published a wild email he (claims to have) received from an anonymous person. The email insults me and confesses to harassing me for years, which would be a crime if they weren't lying (they appear to be at least partially lying). Hackethal presented it as a quotation, but that doesn't mean he didn't do anything wrong by publishing it. He doesn't appear to have done fact checking before publishing. The confession basically says they did all the harassment, therefore everyone else is innocent. It provides no evidence and ignores the times people harassed me using their real names.

I reiterate my request that Hackethal retract defamatory materials about me, including quotations. I'd be willing to provide additional details and report more factual errors if Hackethal were willing to receive information and do removals or corrections.

No Contact

Hackethal wrote in a blog comment:

In addition to posting new defamatory articles about me, he [Temple] has also broken my no-contact request. As a result, I now consider his no-contact request null and void.

I don't know what he's referring to. I didn't contact him before he posted that. (I did later CC him on an email to his lawyers, who still have said nothing to me for over a year.) My best guess is he's referring to me writing blog posts responding to his posts about me. I don't think demanding people stop defending themselves on their own blogs is how no contact requests work, but that is what his request's wording appears to say.

Note: Hackethal was welcome to send me emails related to our dispute. He wasn't welcome to contact me in other ways, such as off-topic emails or switching Twitter accounts to send me more rude tweets. As far as my no contact request is concerned, of course he's allowed to blog about me because that isn't contact; the problem with his blog posts is that they're defamatory cyber bullying and contain factual falsehoods. However, after escalations like doxing, I have a new policy for Hackethal: he's no longer welcome to contact me at all. His lawyers can contact me if necessary. I'm also willing to communicate with other people, besides Hackethal, to attempt conflict resolution.

Hackethal also commented:

Elliot has yet to respond to [multiple things Hackethal wrote] (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.)

and

[Elliot's] been evading several issues such as plagiarism, disregard for copyright, invasion of privacy, etc. Like, he hasn’t commented on them at all.

I find his complaint about me not responding enough to him bizarre given that:

1. He's openly, explicitly refusing to discuss our conflict with me.
2. He issued a no contact request to me.
3. I already wrote a response letter over a year ago and I'm still waiting for a reply.
4. He doesn't like any of my responses.
5. When I do respond, he claims it's illegal defamation without giving useful specifics. That discourages responding, especially considering that he's threatened to sue me.

He also complained about me not providing links to his exposé. I generally try not to link to rights-violating content. Also, as I read it, his no contact request said not to link to him, so he seems to be contradicting himself by wanting a link. And it's not difficult to find his posts.

Breaking People

Hackethal says I've bragged about being able to "break" people (meaning writing enough criticism that people don't want to talk anymore). That's false: I didn't brag about that; I lamented it. That's a bad outcome that I try to avoid. People sometimes ask me to share all the criticism that I can, with no limits, and I sometimes respond by warning them against that and refusing to do it. I used to be more trusting of people who said they liked and wanted criticism, but I've become more skeptical.

For example, Hackethal wrote (mirror):

Elliot Temple is a bad, dangerous person who repeatedly verbally abused Deutsch, delights in ‘breaking’ people (his words, not mine), invades their privacy, lies to ruin their reputation, and more.

I never said that I delight in breaking people. It would be bad enough to accuse me of that, but falsely saying that I admitted it, and that it's my words, is really nasty. This is another example of how you shouldn't trust what Hackethal says.

Doxing

Dennis Hackethal doxed me. I don't share my photo online. He published photos of me.

Quotes and Sources

Hackethal frequently uses source links to make his claims look true. The source links often go to very long posts, not to anything specific. If you make a non-specific claim like "John is toxic", then a non-specific link to a long post on the general theme of John's toxicity is appropriate. In that case, the linked post has multiple relevant parts and the majority of it is relevant. If you make a specific claim, like that John said X or did Y, then a specific source is needed, not a link to an entire long post that may or may not contain a small, relevant section somewhere in the long post.

When Hackethal gives a quotation, it may be accurate but then he may make incorrect statements about what the quote said or uses flawed logic to draw incorrect conclusions from the quote. If you do a close reading to compare the quotes to the commentary on the quotes you can find major discrepancies. Similarly, when he paraphrases a quote he just gave, or paraphrases a source link, the paraphrase is often inaccurate.

The errors are frequent enough that many people would see it as unreasonable and be caught off guard because they don't expect a writer to be that unreasonable, especially when the general format (quotations and frequent source links) looks good and the author writes in a reasonably formal, educated style. I've given several examples of errors in this post but they're just a few representative examples and I wanted to warn people that there are many more.

Testimonials

Hackethal posted anonymous testimonials attacking me. He admits to editing them. He doesn't even claim to have gotten the approval of the authors for the edits (or to post the originals, for that matter). Most of the quotes appear to be people venting, not speaking for publication. He removed 5 quotes from the post without explanation. Why? Did someone complain? Does Hackethal post multiple quotes from one person but present them so readers would think they're from different people?

When a business posts testimonials, people expect that each testimonial is from a different person who isn't associated with the business (not an employee, friend, family member, etc). I find the quotes suspicious and doubt he really got that many different people, who aren't his buddies, who actually had a significant amount of experience with me, to say these things.

Also, the testimonials follow a broad pattern: Hackethal usually doesn't directly attack my actual words or actions. Instead, he focuses on people's opinions, his summaries of what he thinks happened, and other secondary issues. He says my forum community is toxic, but instead of backing that up with a bunch of quotes of me being toxic, he tries to back it up with anonymous quotes of people claiming I was toxic many years ago. The quotes don't give dates but generally seem to be referring to stuff from before the Critical Fallibilism forum existed.

Monitoring

Hackethal wrote:

Elliot vowed to monitor my success into the indefinite future to ruin my reputation by bringing up past complaints

Hackethal keeps repeating claims along these lines, so I want to make a clear statement addressing this: I did not vow to monitor Hackethal, ruin his reputation, or bring up past complaints. I have not been and am not currently monitoring his success. My goal is to protect myself, not to ruin his reputation. If he would leave me alone, then I would leave him alone.

Hackethal says he had to attack me because I would never leave him alone, so he started attacking me after I hadn't attacked him for four years. He claims to be attacking me, not because I attacked him, but because I might attack him in the future, and he has to deal with that potential threat from him misreading an old chat message. But I think this is an excuse; I don't think clarifying this point will stop Hackethal's attacks.

I blogged about him in 2020 and he escalated to lawyers in 2024 after I'd been ignoring him for 4 years. Although he was continuously selling a book that wronged me, and he refused to discuss my concerns, I tried to move on. Then when I was threatened by his lawyers, I tried to be reasonable. I offered to make some changes and to negotiate. When they wouldn't discuss the conflict, I left Hackethal alone again instead of blogging critiques of his unreasonable legal threats, but he was unwilling to leave me alone and started blogging about me in 2025.

He's done more things which I have serious complaints about (that so far I haven't blogged about) but I didn't even notice until he got my attention. I wasn't monitoring him and only reviewed his activities after the legal threats and again after the exposé. I didn't even notice the exposé about me immediately, nor the Veritula website, because I wasn't monitoring him.

Where does the monitoring claim come from? He's been reading old chat logs from my Discord server. He wasn't a member but got a copy of what was said. He's spent many hours digging through my online history to try to find dirt and stuff to be mad about (and not found much).

Regarding the old chat log, he misread, misunderstood or made logical errors regarding what was said. This fits the pattern of how he's dealt with other things.

The chat is from before my 2020 blog post accusing Hackethal of plagiarism. I'd emailed Hackethal about the issue and he hadn't responded yet. I was considering how ignoring my complaint would or wouldn't work as a strategy for him. I thought that if he ignored me, then got popular, then even if I did nothing at the time, his fans could notice or I could say something later. So I didn't see how ignoring the issue would be a good strategy for him. Having plagiarized in a book doesn't just go away and become a non-issue automatically after some years pass; just ignoring the problem doesn't solve it. There was no "vow", just a comment that I didn't think ignoring my complaint was a viable longterm strategy for Hackethal. (At the time, I thought people cared about plagiarism, but now I think I was mistaken. If people are already someone's fan and biased in their favor, they often won't care about plagiarism or many other problems. Most people don't take sides in disputes based on facts and logic.)

A few days later I blogged my complaint about the plagiarism and tried to move on with no monitoring. I didn't write a blog post about Hackethal again until 2025 after his blog posts about me.

In retrospect, I seem to have been basically correct: Hackethal tried to ignore the issue for years but he was unsatisfied with the results. But all that took was one blog post, not any additional actions or monitoring. In retrospect, he should have discussed that matter with me over email before I put up my blog post, rather than trying to ignore my complaint. What can he do now? I suggest that Hackethal stop trying to ignore the issue and instead write a response to my plagiarism accusation which refutes my accusations passage by passage. Or if he can't refute my criticism, and can't ignore it, then he should apologize, negotiate and try to fix and make up for his mistakes.

Hackethal has written over 50,000 words about me. He attacked me at length. But I don't think that's helping his reputation. And in all that text, he still didn't attempt to go through each passage I brought up and address it. Instead of defending his own actions, he focused on counter-attacking against me. Instead of using rational persuasion to show his innocence, he's trying to attack me to pressure me into silence.

Also, he says he avoided reading my blog for years to help prevent potential plagiarism of me. But then at some point he started reading my blog again. When and why? Why won't he just leave me alone and stop monitoring my philosophy work? Not reading my blog to try to avoid plagiarizing my new ideas was a good plan that he should have continued.

Recruiting

In November 2025, Hackethal wrote:

Elliot is now contacting members from my forum and trying to recruit them to his, hoping they won’t know he’s already been called out on his tactics.

This is false. I didn't do that ("trying to recruit" or "hoping"). I think this is another good example of how inaccurate many of Hackethal's claims are. To illustrate, here's a message I sent to one of my Twitter followers who has posted on Veritula (Hackethal's forum):

Hi, I thought you'd want to know that Veritula is not actually a programmatic implementation of Popper's epistemology. It uses ideas I created, so if you like them you can learn more from my essays. See: criticalfallibilism.com/dennis-hackethal-falsely-implied-that-critical-fallibilism-plagiarizes-karl-popper/

I wasn't "trying to recruit" for my forum. I didn't mention my forum. I was concerned with receiving credit for Critical Fallibilism (CF) ideas, and refuting misinformation, not with gaining a forum member.

While Hackethal presents himself as not wanting to face competition from my forum, I suspect the bigger issue is that he doesn't want people to read detailed evidence (including many quotations) that Veritula falsely attributes CF ideas to Popper.

Rather than "hoping" that people haven't seen Hackethal's attacks against me (which have little relevance to my arguments and evidence about Veritula), I have been hoping for years to discuss the conflict. I hope that people who have seen Hackethal's call outs against me will either agree with me or be willing to discuss.

It's also hypocritical for Hackethal to make this complaint after he contacted people in my audience (which he didn't disclose).

Timeline

I first talked with Hackethal in December 2018. He stopped participating at my community in April 2019. I published a blog post about harassment from Andy B in February 2020 which brought up relevant people including Hackethal (who had falsely told people that I had "insinuated violence" towards him). I published a blog post attacking Hackethal for plagiarism in April 2020 after he refused to discuss the matter by email. After that, my posts complaining about harassment focused mostly on David Deutsch, and Hackethal was barely mentioned.

There were no other major events between us until 2024 when he emailed me. That conversation wasn't productive because I didn't know why he emailed me or what he wanted. Nothing major happened in those emails. Then his lawyers contacted me and I finally found out what he wants: for me to delete everything I ever said about him and never mention him again (which would apply even if he plagiarizes me in the future). After I wrote a detailed letter to his lawyers, they stopped responding. My offers to negotiate, discuss or correct any errors in my posts were ignored or declined. They raised the concern that I had called Hackethal a criminal; I said I didn't intend to do that and I offered to remove any statements calling him a criminal if they pointed the statements out, but they ignored me. I couldn't remove the statements by myself because I didn't know of any statements that said it, and I found none after multiple rereads and searches. After his lawyers stopped responding, I didn't blog any complaints and tried to move on. But eight months later, in 2025, Hackethal started attacking me on his blog and on social media. And he has continued attacking me to this day.

See also my Timeline of Dennis Hackethal Using My Ideas without Crediting Me.

Conclusion

Hackethal is a bully who is attacking me online. He has no right to demand that I stop saying anything negative about him, such as criticizing how his book treated me or writing posts like this one which respond to what he said about me. He only has a right to demand that I don't lie about him and I correct factual errors about him, but he has not even tried to report any specific errors for me to fix. He's trying to treat disagreeing with him as illegal defamation, with no need for him to give arguments or evidence.

He's never written a point-by-point rebuttal to my plagiarism criticisms. If I'm wrong about the specific passages I criticized, he could give counter-arguments that discuss those passages.

He plagiarized me, doxed me and threatened me with a nuisance lawsuit. He's attacking me and says he'll continue until I give in. He keeps calling me a cult leader. He says he won't discuss or negotiate. He's trying to silence me because I gave him a negative book review in 2020, or because he didn't like some online discussions we had in 2019, or I don't know why; I don't think his behavior or explanations make sense.

Even setting aside the free speech and bullying issues, giving in would let him use my philosophy ideas without crediting me, as he is now doing with Veritula. I want to end this conflict and be left alone but I don't see any viable options as long as he's so unreasonable.

Also, this short video may help explain Hackethal.

I wrote this post to explain the situation to reasonable people and to defend myself against some attacks as a representative sample. He's trying to harm my reputation and my philosophy career. If Hackethal contacts you about me, please send me what he says. 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 created a website, Veritula, based on my philosophy, Critical Fallibilism (CF). He explains and uses CF ideas but, instead of crediting the ideas to me or CF, he credits them (without evidence or citations) to Karl Popper's philosophy, Critical Rationalism. This is quintuply problematic:

• He's using my ideas without giving me credit.
• He's implicitly accusing me of plagiarizing Karl Popper.
• He's spreading misinformation about what Popper's views were.
• The misinformation attributes ideas to Popper that many people see as weird, bad or false.
• He's implying that David Deutsch and other Popperians misunderstood Popper, without giving evidence, quotations or citations.

Extensively using CF ideas and misattributing them to Popper is worse than plagiarism. In addition to using my ideas without crediting me (the same harm plagiarism does), he's also implying that I'm a plagiarist, implying that other people misunderstood Popper, confusing people about Popper's views, and falsely attributing unpopular ideas to Popper (extra harms that merely plagiarizing me wouldn't cause).

Creating CF took over 10,000 hours of largely unpaid effort while I worked other jobs, outside of philosophy, to support myself. I share CF ideas hoping people will learn from them or critique them. While CF isn't very popular, if someone actually likes my ideas enough to study them, I don't want to be plagiarized or misattributed.

I wrote an article using Popper quotes to show that CF's distinctive ideas aren't plagiarized from Popper. Popper actually contradicted them.

This article presents evidence that Hackethal is using CF ideas, without crediting CF, by comparing Hackethal quotes with my essays. Previously, Hackethal hired me to help teach him about philosophy, so I also provide quotes from teaching calls and documents.

Some examples I provide are important on their own. Others wouldn't be a big deal alone but contribute to a broader pattern.

Context

In 2020, I accused Hackethal's book of plagiarizing me. Years later, he made long, error-filled blog posts and videos attacking me. He's threatened me with a lawsuit and offered to give other people money to help them sue me. He falsely tells people I'm a cult leader. He's published photos of me while calling me dangerous. He's hired private investigators. He spends a lot of time reading my writing and he won't leave me alone. I created a timeline.

The strangest part of the timeline is a four year gap between events. I thought Hackethal had moved on, but then he started attacking me much more vigorously than before over old issues.

Although Hackethal has been trying to ruin my reputation, I only responded minimally seven months ago. I've let many lies go unchallenged. I didn't understand why he started doing it four years later, and I didn't want to engage. Now I see a potential motive: it benefits him if it looks like my criticisms of Veritula are just revenge for his attacks on me. It benefits him to discredit me so that people don't listen to me. If people have a dismissive attitude to me, then he can get away with using my ideas without crediting me. Creating a big, messy fight between us can distract people from his plagiarizing me in A Window on Intelligence: The Philosophy of People, Software, and Evolution – and Its Implications and doing even worse with Veritula. Please remember that I said nothing for the last seven months; I have a thick skin and this post is an evidence-based attempt to set the record straight.

Technically Not Plagiarism?

Plagiarism means taking credit for other people's ideas. Hackethal is using my ideas but crediting them to a third party, which may be a way to avoid additional plagiarism accusations on a technicality.

The 1913 version of Webster's Dictionary defines "plagiarize" as "To steal or purloin from the writings of another; to appropriate without due acknowledgement (the ideas or expressions of another)." Using CF ideas without crediting CF qualifies under this definition of plagiarism. But other dictionaries require that the plagiarist takes credit themself.

Sometime after I accused his book of plagiarism, Hackethal "avoided Temple’s blog for years". He says he was trying to prevent accidental plagiarism. It's also a good way to prevent intentional plagiarism or misattributing my ideas to Popper. But then he decided to start reading my essays again (he doesn't say why). Then he started attacking me and made Veritula.

Veritula Uses CF Ideas without Crediting CF

Blockquotes are from Hackethal's How Does Veritula Work? (mirror). Italics are in the originals; bold is added for this article unless indicated.

Veritula is a programmatic implementation of Popper’s epistemology. [bold in original]

It [isn't Popper's epistemology](#). As we'll see below, it implements CF ideas like decisive criticism, binary evaluations of ideas, and debate trees.

Because decision-making is a special case of, ie follows the same logic as, truth-seeking, such trees can be used for decision-making, too.

The idea of using epistemology for decision-making is found on the Critical Fallibilism homepage and in my Yes or No Philosophy, Introduction to Critical Fallibilism, Multi-Factor Decision Making Math, Introduction to Theory of Constraints ("This is related to decision making in general."), Critical Fallibilism and Theory of Constraints in One Analyzed Paragraph and Academic Literature for Multi-Factor Decision Making.

If an idea, as written, has no pending criticisms, it’s rational to adopt it and irrational to reject it. What reason could you have to reject it? If it has no pending criticisms, then either 1) no reasons to reject it (ie, criticisms) have been suggested or 2) all suggested reasons have been addressed already.

If an idea, as written, does have pending criticisms, it’s irrational to adopt it and rational to reject it – by reference to those criticisms. What reason could you have to ignore the pending criticisms and adopt it anyway?

Now, [the idea] is considered unproblematic again, since [its criticism, which has now been counter-criticized] is problematic and thus can’t be a decisive criticism anymore.

‘Has pending criticisms’ vs ‘has no pending criticisms’

Veritula therefore also enables you to hold irrational people accountable: if an idea has pending criticisms, the rational approach is to either abandon it or to save it by revising it or addressing all pending criticisms.

Don’t worry about which ideas are better than others. [...] Only go by whether an idea has outstanding criticisms. [source, mirror]

Introduction to Critical Fallibilism: "CF says all ideas should be evaluated in a digital (specifically binary) way as non-refuted (has no known errors) or refuted (has a known error)."

Critical Fallibilism homepage: "Critical Fallibilism (CF) is a rational philosophy which explains how to evaluate ideas using decisive, critical arguments and accept only ideas with zero refutations (no known errors)."

Compared to some recent CF essays, Hackethal slightly rewords some points and uses synonyms ("outstanding criticism", "pending criticism", "unproblematic"). I've used those terms too, e.g. "outstanding criticism" is in Rationally Resolving Conflicts of Ideas, Judging Experts by the Objective State of the Debate, Paths Forward or Prediction Markets? and my discussion with Aubrey de Grey.

More important than the wording is the concept. Hackethal is talking about evaluating ideas in a binary way as non-refuted or refuted. He's basing refutation on even one non-refuted criticism. This is one of CF's main ideas which will be discussed more throughout this article. It's still the same idea even if you call non-refuted criticisms "pending" and call refuted ideas "problematic".

Hackethal also used CF's exact term "decisive criticism". He may be so immersed in studying CF that he doesn't realize how unique this term is to CF. Google searching "decisive criticism", the top two results, AI summary and sidebar (AI sources) are all CF material:

Would I give each idea a slider where people can say how ‘good’ the idea is? What values would I give the slider? Would the worst value be -1,000 and the best +1,000? How would users know to assign 500 vs 550? Would a ‘weak’ criticism get a score of 500 and a ‘strong’ one 1,000? What if tomorrow somebody finds an even ‘stronger’ one, does that mean I’d need to extend the slider beyond 1,000? Do I include arbitrary decimal/real numbers? Is an idea’s score reduced by the sum of its criticisms’ scores? If an idea has score 0, what does that mean – undecided? If it has -500, does that mean I should reject it ‘more strongly’ than if it had only -100? And so on.

Criticizing score systems is a main point of CF. It's found in my Introduction to Critical Fallibilism, Yes or No Philosophy and Score Systems, Yes or No Philosophy (paid educational product), Yes or No Philosophy Summary (which has links to many other relevant essays), and Multi-Factor Decision Making Math.

In my understanding, Popper’s epistemology [...] does not assign strengths or weaknesses.

It's a core CF idea, repeated in many essays, to not evaluate how strong or weak ideas are. E.g. Introduction to Critical Fallibilism: "CF’s most important original idea is the rejection of strong and weak arguments." This is what my Yes or No Philosophy material is about.

It's [false that Popper avoided strength and weakness](#) like CF does.

If [the proponent of an idea] fails to address even a single criticism, the idea remains problematic and should be rejected.

If you can think of neither a revision of [an idea] nor counter-criticism to [a criticism of that idea], your only option is to accept that [that idea] has been (tentatively) defeated. You should therefore abandon it, which means: stop acting in accordance with it, considering it to be unproblematic, etc.

And (from Hackethal's Twitter):

4. Re decisiveness of criticism [bold in original]

[...] any criticism, no matter how small, is decisive if left unaddressed.

I've covered the issue of not discounting "small" criticism repeatedly, e.g. in Ignoring “Small” Errors and “Small” Errors, Frauds and Violences.

The main idea in these quotes is that criticism is decisive: it only takes one (non-refuted) criticism to refute an idea so that we should reject it. This is a core CF idea repeated in many essays, e.g. Introduction to Critical Fallibilism: "Criticisms should be decisive, rather than merely saying an idea isn't great. That means you don't accept both the criticism and its target because they’re incompatible".

I also discussed this with Hackethal on a call. And there was also a section titled "All Criticisms Are Decisive" in a confidential CF document I sent Hackethal in 2019. I'll provide details in the "Teaching Calls" and " Confidential Documents" sections below.

Any criticism no matter how small destroys its target decisively if unaddressed. Whether or not its decisive is determined by whether or not there are any counter-criticisms, not by assigning some strength score (a remnant of justificationism). A criticism is decisive as long as there are no counter-criticisms. In the absence of counter-criticisms, how could it not be decisive? [source, mirror]

This uses my decisive criticism idea again and my point about "small" criticism. It also refers to the "target" of a criticism. I used that "target" language in Introduction to Critical Fallibilism.

I said that scores are a form of justificationism in Kialo and Indecisive Arguments and other essays.

Also, decisiveness and refutation status are different things. A criticism is decisive if it contradicts its target so they can't both be correct. A criticism refutes a target if it's both decisive and non-refuted. A successful counter-criticism makes a criticism refuted, not indecisive. While Hackethal is recognizably copying CF, he's also introducing some errors.

That’s a fair concern if you’re talking about duplicate criticisms, which public intellectuals do field. The solution here is to publicly write a counter-criticism once and then refer to it again later.

I called this a "library of criticism" in Yes or No Philosophy. Hackethal calls Veritula a "dictionary for ideas". The "dictionary" keeps track of ideas and lets people refer to them again later so that they don't "have same [sic] discussions over and over again". My "library of criticism" also let people "refer" to "counter-criticisms [and regular criticisms] ... again later".

I've also talked about this repeatedly in my many essays ("Thinkers should write reusable answers to arguments") on Paths Forward ("You can reuse answers that were already written down in the past, by you or others." and "Most bad ideas get pretty repetitive. People will keep bringing up the same points over and over. That’s fine. They don’t know better. You can deal with it by answering the issue once, then after that refer people to your existing answer.").

If you’re talking about new criticisms, however, I think you should address and not dismiss them.

This is also in my original Paths Forward essay: "If there are good ideas already written down (or in any format which allows reuse), then you can save lots of time. If there aren’t (reusable) answers yet, then the issues people are raising are worth taking some time to answer properly."

My Paths Forward Summary makes this point too: "In general, either an issue has been answered before or else it’s worth the time for someone to answer it."

Discussion trees

This is a distinctive CF term. Maybe Hackethal has studied CF so much that it seems like a normal term to him, not a recognizable part of CF. On Google, searching for discussion trees, the only relevant result is my essay Discussion Trees; the rest of the results are for decision trees. And searching discussion tree, Google automatically gives results for decision tree.

Since there can be many criticisms (which are also just ideas) and deeply nested counter-criticisms, the result is a tree structure. For example, as a discussion progresses, one of its trees might look like this:

Comments that aren’t criticisms – eg follow-up questions or otherwise neutral comments – are considered ancillary ideas. Unlike criticisms, ancillary ideas do not invert their respective parents’ statuses. They are neutral.

The idea of comment or question nodes is in my Discussion Trees essay: "A node can be e.g. a statement, claim, argument, explanation, question or comment."

The idea that the comments are neutral, rather than refuting their parent, is also in my essay: "Positive arguments, inconclusive negative arguments and explanatory comments are never decisive arguments." and "Decisive arguments shouldn’t be ignored. They’re mandatory to address. Other nodes don’t necessarily have to be dealt with."

The idea that criticisms refute their parent node is also in my essay: "Decisive (also called conclusive or essential) arguments argue that the parent is incorrect." and "If a decisive argument node or group is resolved as correct, then its parent must be resolved as incorrect."

My essay emphasizes distinguishing between neutral and non-neutral nodes: "Figuring out which arguments are decisive or not, and focusing on making and resolving decisive arguments, is the most effective way to reach a conclusion." I emphasize this distinction so much that I suggest deleting all indecisive nodes as an option: "You can convert a discussion tree to a strict debate tree by deleting all indecisive parts. More informally, you can include indecisive arguments and commentary in a debate tree as long as the decisive and indecisive parts are clearly labelled".

Again, criticisms are also just ideas, so the same is true for criticisms.

This is in my essay Artificial General Intelligence Speculations. I also told it to Hackethal on a call. I'll provide a quote from the call in the "Teaching Calls" section below.

Veritula implements a recursive epistemology. For a criticism to be pending, it can’t have any pending criticisms itself, and so on, in a deeply nested fashion.

That's how CF says criticism works. I described that system in my Discussion Trees essay. I've also talked about recursion in epistemology repeatedly, e.g. in Resolving Conflicting Ideas. I also talked with Hackethal about recursion on a call when he paid me to teach him about philosophy.

[Veritula] does not tell you what to think – it teaches you how to think.

Introduction to Critical Fallibilism: "Overall, CF helps explain how reasoning works. It provides tools and methods you can use to think better. It’s more about how to think than what to think. It enables you to think better rather than telling you what beliefs to have." While this isn't an original idea, it adds to the pattern where Hackethal keeps saying the same things as me.

Visions of Grandeur

Tom Nassis, who presumably didn't know Veritula misattributes CF's ideas to Popper, said: "Veritula deserves to scale to the size of Wikipedia." Hackethal replied (mirror):

I agree that Veritula deserves to scale to something huge.

Hackethal believes the CF ideas he's using, without crediting me, are extremely good, important and valuable. He's a fan of CF who has been trying to persuade people that CF is right while David Deutsch and Popper are wrong. But he calls it Popper being right and Deutsch wrong, and he pretends that CF doesn't exist. Actually, Popper's ideas were different than CF.

Quoting Benjamin Davies, Hackethal wrote (mirror):

I would also consider financially supporting someone who gave me good reason to think they had the vision, the motivation, and the technical skill to create it.

I’m interested. Let’s continue this discussion privately for now. Email me:

Hackethal is using my ideas to pretend to have a vision. He's trying to secure financial support for himself using my vision and my ability to develop good new philosophical ideas.

On his blog, Hackethal wrote:

somebody [in person at a Popperian event] suggested I start a movement called ‘Hackethalism’. I rather like that name

Some people apparently now believe he has great, original philosophical ideas. Which ideas are "Hackethalism"? If they're my ideas, we have a problem. If they're other ideas, which ones and where are they published? I've never seen Hackethal write significant, original ideas.

I fear that he wants to get rich and famous by taking my ideas and naming them after himself. It's flattering if he likes my ideas so much that he wants to put his name on them, but that's not OK. Renaming Critical Fallibilism to "Hackethalism" would go beyond normal plagiarism.

Naming it "Hackethalism" also contradicts his other strategy of attributing the ideas to Popper (which I refuted). Logically, CF's ideas can't, at the same time, be Popper's ideas that he wrote decades ago and also be new ideas called "Hackethalism".

Other Copying

Hackethal made an anti-misquotes website. Opposing misquotes was an ongoing campaign of mine for many years before Hackethal started writing similarly about it. When participating in my community, Hackethal was exposed to my ideas about quotations in multiple emails and chats before he started studying my work from a distance. On 2019-02-11, as a forum moderator, I brought up an issue with Hackethal's quoting to him because, like most newer members, he violated the group policies.

Hackethal also copies me in small ways, e.g. coloring italics red. For many years I've changed the color of italics in my articles so they visually stand out more. This can't be plagiarism since Hackethal doesn't claim credit for inventing the idea. I don't think colored italics are my original idea, but I think Hackethal probably copied the idea from me.

Hackethal probably also copied the way I write a lot in my own blog comments section following up on my own posts. It's an unusual thing to do. Copying it isn't plagiarism since Hackethal doesn't take credit for the idea. And I'm not claiming it's my original idea. But I do think he got it from me. It adds to the pattern of him studying and copying me.

Hackethal wrote on Veritula, "We can criticize theories for being arbitrary (which is another word for ‘easy to vary’)." Before The Beginning of Infinity was published, I argued to David Deutsch that "easy to vary" was the same issue as being arbitrary. I've made this point publicly too.

In Hackethal's Where's David Deutsch's Accountability? (mirror), we find more evidence that he's studied my writing. It seems inspired by me. It uses a lot of my approach to criticism and my style. It's his best post that I've seen. It has some good criticism of Deutsch. It isn't plagiarism and giving credit for general inspiration isn't mandatory (though it's often good, to and people often do it). While the post uses some of my methods, it doesn't explain those methods or otherwise try to take credit for inventing them. The substantive points critiquing Deutsch are adequately original to avoid plagiarism even though they're similar to points I've made. The use of Atlas Shrugged quotes is similar to my writing – I've used similar quotes from the same book for similar purposes before – but it doesn't cross a line by itself. It adds to the overall pattern and helps show how much Hackethal has learned from me. I've had multiple people comment about how some of his writing sounds extremely similar to mine (for both style and content).

I also have two examples from the comment section on that post, both written by Hackethal:

why hasn’t he [Deutsch] made any meaningful progress in the past ~15 years, possibly 25?

The 15 year end of the range comes from a simple analysis: Deutsch's book The Beginning of Infinity (BoI) involved progress but he hasn't done anything major since then. While I've said this, someone else could realistically come up with the same idea themselves.

But what's going on with the 25 year end of the range? That's saying Deutsch stopped making progress long before publishing BoI. How would Hackethal know that? It's an unusual thing to claim without insider knowledge. I knew Deutsch personally during that time period and helped with BoI (Hackethal did not). I've publicly commented about Deutsch knowing most of the ideas in BoI long before publication and not being very productive in the decade before publication. Am I Hackethal's source for this? I don't know of another public source for this claim besides me.

And think of how much more progress Deutsch could make if he was more methodical and did fewer, easier things!

This isn't plagiarism. It doesn't take credit for my ideas. It doesn't even explain the idea it's talking about. Someone else saying it might mean something different. But I interpret it as Hackethal talking about one of my ideas that I've discussed many times, but without citing me. I think it shows how immersed in my work he is that he writes short, vague references to my ideas, without giving links, and he seems to expect people to understand what he's saying.

Hackethal spent months in my community, hired me to teach him, and wrote around 50,000 words about me (including many quotes of obscure stuff I said, not just in essays but even in old chatroom archives). He's known about my work for seven years and seems to have studied it extensively. I don't think him writing about the same ideas as me, including my original ideas, is a coincidence.

Teaching Calls

In 2018 and 2019, Hackethal hired me to help him learn philosophy. He did not hire me to ghost write for him. I've never sold ghost writing services. He didn't ask for, nor receive, permission to use any of my ideas without crediting me.

During our 2019-01-27 call, we discussed Critical Fallibilism (specifically some of the core ideas that I also call "Yes or No Philosophy"). "David" refers to David Deutsch. This is edited slightly to delete some "umm", "like", ungrammatical repetition, and minor interjections like "yeah". Quotes:

Hackethal knows, and said on a call with me, that evaluating ideas in a binary way is my solution.

Hackethal knows that I developed new ideas like Yes or No Philosophy to address shortcomings in Popper's and Deutsch's philosophies.

During our 2018-12-24 call, I told Hackethal that criticisms are just ideas:

Confidential Documents

As part of the paid teaching, I sent Hackethal a 59 page CONFIDENTIAL DRAFT Critical Fallibilism Website.pdf. Perhaps I was too naive and trusting, although I already had already published other writing about most of the ideas in the document. I challenged critical preferences in 2010, then wrote other essays, then released my Yes or No Philosophy product in 2017. I taught my Critical Fallibilism course in 2020 and launched the Critical Fallibilism website in 2021. Hackethal launched Veritula in 2024.

Here are quotes from CONFIDENTIAL DRAFT Critical Fallibilism Website.pdf (I fixed the link because the website moved):

I also sent Hackethal Call 2 Notes.pdf (6 pages) which included this (I fixed the link):

Resources

Read and watch these to learn more about plagiarism:

Articles:

• Plagiarism Struggles (by social sciences professor Brian Martin)
• Brian Martin's publications on plagiarism and scientific fraud
• Avoiding plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and other questionable writing practices: A guide to ethical writing (by psychology professor Miguel Roig)
• Plagiarism in Publications: All about Being Fair! (by medical professor Neeraj Lalwani)

Videos:

• Plagiarism and You(Tube)  (4 hours about online creator plagiarism)
• What is Plagiarism and How Do I Avoid it? (8 minute introduction)
• What Is Plagiarism? (3 minute introduction)
• Avoiding Plagiarism: Writing With Integrity (35 minutes aimed at university students)
• Plagiarism Examples from Former Students (25 minutes)

Conclusion

Hackethal uses Critical Fallibilism ideas extensively without crediting me, particularly for Veritula. This is similar to how I previously accused his book of plagiarizing me.

Falsely saying CF ideas come from Popper (with no evidence, quotes or citations) does harm. Like plagiarism, it uses my ideas without crediting me. It also implies I plagiarized Popper. It confuses people about what Popper's views were and attributes unpopular ideas to him. It implies that Popper experts like David Deutsch and David Miller misunderstood Popper (Hackethal is implying that their books are bad.) It's worse than plagiarism.

If Hackethal changed his mind about what he said during our call ("so evaluating ideas in a binary way, that's your solution", "So Yes or No Philosophy is your philosophy that addresses shortcomings in both Popper's and Deutsch's philosophies?"), he should have explained that and argued his case using Popper citations. Attributing those ideas to Popper without evidence is unfair to me, Popper, and other Popperians.

It took me over twenty years to develop CF to what it is today. Hackethal is misappropriating my life's work as a shortcut. Instead of developing original ideas, which is hard, he found someone who isn't famous (me) and is using their ideas without crediting them.

Dennis Hackethal created a website, Veritula, based on my Critical Fallibilism (CF) philosophy, where he writes frequently about CF ideas. But he didn't credit me for my ideas. Instead, he falsely attributed my ideas to Karl Popper, which denies me credit, implies that I plagiarized Popper, confuses people about Popper's views and implies that other people, like Popperian author David Deutsch, misunderstood Popper. He's also written long attacks on me and made legal threats. Here's a timeline:

In 2018, Hackethal came to me as a student. He paid for me to personally teach him on calls. He joined my email discussion forum and chatroom. He tried to learn philosophy from me.

In 2019, Hackethal formed a lasting grudge against me. I believe it's because he saw himself as a very smart expert, and he wanted to be my friend and colleague, but he felt rejected by me. I removed him from a non-public chatroom because he was getting upset and I thought he would do better with slower-paced email discussions.

In 2020, Hackethal self-published a book, A Window on Intelligence: The Philosophy of People, Software, and Evolution – and Its Implications. I wrote a post saying it plagiarized me and David Deutsch. He hadn't disclosed that he was writing a book. I saw him as a beginner who was many years away from being able to write a good book, and the book didn't change my mind about that.

In 2020, regarding a sentence I said was plagiarized, Hackethal said "So yes, it looks like you did tell me that, in which case the right thing to do is to credit you.", then he refused to discuss more. Although I sent him a pre-publication draft of my blog post about plagiarism, he offered no objection to what I wrote, didn't deny plagiarizing me, and implied that he didn't care what I said and could get away with ignoring my complaints. Previously he'd told me, about himself, "It’s really hard to offend me." He also said he valued free speech and strong criticism.

In 2020, someone DDoSed my website shortly after I sent Hackethal the draft accusing him of plagiarism, before I published it.

In 2024, he stopped ignoring me. From his lawyers, I found out that he was really upset. He claimed I had wronged him. His lawyers tried to bully me into signing a 20-term contract requiring me to take down my plagiarism accusation and never say anything negative about Hackethal. They said his book didn't contain plagiarism but were unwilling to discuss it. They asked me to a sign a contract that would prohibit me from pointing it out if he ever plagiarized me in the future, but which had no terms to discourage plagiarism. I declined but offered to negotiate. He wouldn't negotiate or participate in mediation, but also didn't follow through on his threat to sue me; he and his lawyers just went silent.

In 2024, Hackethal created a website, Veritula, which I believe uses my Critical Fallibilism ideas without crediting me.

In 2025, eight months after having his lawyers ghost me, he publicly escalated, even though I hadn't written about him for years. He published long blog posts attacking and lying about me (over 35,000 words).

I didn't respond immediately to the blog attacks and Hackethal complained about the lack of response and kept attacking me. Then I responded and he complained that I had responded and kept attacking me. Then I didn't respond for seven months and he kept attacking me.

After rereading old chat logs where I said I don't share my photo online because I want privacy, he published photos of me (which he did not get from me) while calling me dangerous.

I didn't notice Veritula existed until after Hackethal attacked me in 2025. In recent weeks, Hackethal has written a lot more on Veritula without crediting me.

After my 2020 blog post about Hackethal's book, I didn't write a blog post about him again until early 2025 when I responded to his posts attacking me. Then, although he was trying to ruin my reputation, I tried to go back to ignoring him.

I'm responding now because I believe Veritula is extensively using my best ideas without crediting me. Also, showing restraint and being silent about many provocations failed to deescalate the situation.

I was surprised when Hackethal started attacking me after a four year break. Now I can see a potential purpose to the attacks: discrediting me makes it easier to use my ideas without attributing them to me. Turning people against me can prevent them from listening to my concerns. Slinging mud can muddy the waters and distract from intellectual issues like attribution.

Hackethal says I'm a cult leader, but he won't stay away from my philosophy ideas, which he seems to think are the world's best. He hired me to help him learn philosophy. I believe he's using CF ideas (without crediting CF) for Veritula in preference to Popper's or Deutsch's ideas. He had a grudge against me before my first public complaint about him, and he still has it six years later; he needs to get over it, leave me alone, stop studying my philosophy articles, and cite his sources.

More posts related to Hackethal:

• Dennis Hackethal's Website, Veritula, Is Worse than Plagiarism
• Dennis Hackethal Falsely Implied That Critical Fallibilism Plagiarizes Karl Popper
• Dennis Hackethal, Plagiarist
• Dennis Hackethal Threatened to Sue Me; Now He's Blogging about Me
• Responses to Dennis Hackethal about Crime and Threats
• Andy B Harassment and Four Strands
• Review of My Quotation Accuracy

This article is inspired by Brian Moon's article The Poverty of Memes (2025) (read on Medium or as a PDF). Moon's article criticizes David Deutsch's meme theory (found in The Beginning of Infinity (BoI) (2011)) for being refuted in advance by Karl Popper's critiques in The Poverty of Historicism (PoH) (1944).

Due to Moon's article, I've reviewed PoH and compared it with BoI.

Moon has also criticized Deutsch's meme theory for closely following ideas from Jewish mysticism. That could make Deutsch's claims more mystical or religious and less secular, scientific or rational than Deutsch claimed. It could also make them less original than he presented them as. I don't know enough about Jewish mysticism to evaluate that critique. I thought it was worth mentioning because the same person, Moon, had some good points regarding PoH.

Deutsch's Historicism

BoI 15 (numbers indicate BoI chapters or PoH sections):

I shall call such societies ‘static societies’: societies changing on a timescale unnoticed by the inhabitants.

BoI 1:

But, on the timescale of individual lifetimes, they [our ancestors for most of human history] almost never made any [progress].

BoI 1:

Improvements happened so rarely that most people never experienced one. Ideas were static for long periods.

PoH 33 (my bold):

Contrasting their ‘dynamic’ thinking with the ‘static’ thinking of all previous generations, they [modern historicists] believe that their own advance has been made possible by the fact that we are now ‘living in a revolution’ which has so much accelerated the speed of our development that social change can be now directly experienced within a single lifetime.

Deutsch is the type of historicist that Popper criticized. Deutsch talked repeatedly, without citing Popper, about progress being rare enough that it was rare on the timescale of one lifetime, so most people didn't directly experience progress.

The revolution Deutsch thinks we're living in is the "scientific revolution" (BoI introduction, BoI 1) which Deutsch says is "part of a wider intellectual revolution, the Enlightenment" (BoI 1). Deutsch emphasizes that he considers the Enlightenment a revolution: "Thus the Enlightenment was a revolution in how people sought knowledge" (BoI 1).

As to static and dynamic thinking, BoI 15 has "Static Societies" and "Dynamic Societies" as section headings. They're major themes. Deutsch thinks most humans were static thinkers, while he and some other recent thinkers are dynamic thinkers who live in a period of highly accelerated progress due to a revolution.

Deutsch presented these ideas as original. He didn't tell his readers that Popper wrote about static and dynamic societies and about experiencing progress within a single lifetime. I thought those were Deutsch's original ideas and was surprised to find them in PoH (where Popper presents many of the ideas, including the static and dynamic terminology, as restating what historicists have said, not as original). PoH also connects evolution to societies, just as Deutsch's meme theory does.

PoH 22:

Two characteristic representatives of this alliance [between historicism and utopianism] are Plato and Marx. Plato, a pessimist, believed that all change—or almost all change—is decay; this was his law of historical development. Accordingly, his Utopian blueprint aims at arresting all change;[24] it is what would nowadays be called ‘static’. Marx, on the other hand, was an optimist, and possibly (like Spencer) an adherent of a historicist moral theory. Accordingly, his Utopian blueprint was one of a developing or ‘dynamic’ rather than of an arrested society.

Here we see again that Deutsch's static and dynamic society concepts and terminology are unoriginal.

PoH 27:

Professor Toynbee ... expresses ... ‘Civilizations are not static conditions of society but dynamic movements of an evolutionary kind. They not only cannot stand still, but they cannot reverse their direction without breaking down their own law of motion … ‘.[11] Here we have nearly all the elements usually found in statements of position (b) [being able to discern tendencies or directions in evolutionary processes]: the idea of social dynamics (as opposed to social statics); of evolutionary movements of societies (under the influence of social forces);

Here we see talk of static and dynamic conditions of societies and evolution of societies. Keep in mind that whenever Deutsch talks about memes, he's talking about evolution.

It's interesting Deutsch used ideas from PoH that Popper was criticizing, not agreeing with. Deutsch didn't explain why he disagrees with Popper or provide a critique of PoH, though.

Laws of History

PoH Introduction:

This approach which I propose first to explain, and only later to criticize, I call ‘historicism’. It is often encountered in discussions on the method of the social sciences; and it is often used without critical reflection, or even taken for granted. What I mean by ‘historicism’ will be explained at length in this study. It will be enough if I say here that I mean by ‘historicism’ an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the ‘rhythms’ or the ‘patterns’, the ‘laws’ or the ‘trends’ that underlie the evolution of history. Since I am convinced that such historicist doctrines of method are at bottom responsible for the unsatisfactory state of the theoretical social sciences (other than economic theory), my presentation of these doctrines is certainly not unbiased. But I have tried hard to make a case in favour of historicism in order to give point to my subsequent criticism.

In basic summary, the main point of PoH is to criticize the idea of laws of history, which would be like laws of physics which history has to follow. Laws of history would control issues like how societies develop and change or stay the same.

BoI 15:

For a society to be static, something else must be happening as well. One thing my story did not take into account is that static societies have customs and laws – taboos – that prevent their memes from changing. They enforce the enactment of the existing memes, forbid the enactment of variants, and suppress criticism of the status quo.

Deutsch says all static societies enforce taboos, customs and laws, make members enact memes without variation, and suppress criticism of the status quo. And Deutsch claims there are only two possible types of society, with static societies being the much more common type in human history, so he's making claims here about most human societies that have ever existed. This is talking about laws of history that most societies have to follow. It's historicism.

BoI 15 (my bold):

That is why the enforcement of the status quo is only ever a secondary method of preventing change – a mopping-up operation. The primary method is always – and can only be – to disable the source of new ideas, namely human creativity. So static societies always have traditions of bringing up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties. That ensures that most of the new ideas that would have been capable of changing the society are never thought of in the first place.

This is another law of history: a grand speculation about what most humans have done throughout history along with claims that history couldn't happen any other way. Deutsch says "always" and "can only be" – he emphasizes that he's saying no alternatives are possible.

Laws of physics say what must happen with no alternative (gravity isn't optional). "Law" is defined as "a statement of fact, deduced from observation, to the effect that a particular natural or scientific phenomenon always occurs if certain conditions are present" (New Oxford American Dictionary). Deutsch is saying the same things always occur in human societies if certain conditions are present (the conditions are a static society, not a dynamic society). This is an example of what Popper criticized as historicism.

Context

I helped Deutsch with BoI by discussing the issues with him for years and writing around 200 pages of comments on drafts. I read PoH many years ago. I failed to recognize how much PoH criticized BoI's ideas. I also failed to recognize that some of Deutsch's ideas and terminology, which I thought were original, were actually in PoH (though often being criticized by Popper, not advocated). Deutsch had completed an article on meme theory in 1994, years before I met him, which wasn't published, but I have it and it makes similar claims to BoI. I played no role in Deutsch originally coming up with his meme theory.

For more details, see Moon's article, read PoH to see Popper's criticisms of historicism, and/or read BoI (especially 1, 15, 16, 17) to see what Deutsch said. PoH is 149 pages long, so it's a short, quick read compared to most of Popper's books.

I first posted this on the Progress Forum but the forum has low activity and I got no responses.

---

Hi, I'm a philosopher specializing in epistemology and rationality. I learned about Karl Popper's Critical Rationalism from my mentor David Deutsch and I helped with his book The Beginning of Infinity. That gives a sense of the general point of view I'm coming from. I have two main things to suggest which are mostly independent but synergize well.

I developed improvements on Critical Rationalism, which I named Critical Fallibilism, which center around evaluating ideas in a binary way using decisive arguments rather than weighing arguments or evidence (which, like induction, doesn't actually work).

And I developed a plan for how to make progress in the world: encourage all public intellectuals to have written debate policies which specify in advance what debates they will accept and how they will behave in those debates. The goal is to have a merit-based system by using political philosophy concepts like rule of law (we write laws down in advance) and transparency. This challenges the current system focused on social climbing, not merit, where intellectuals frequently arbitrary ignore challenging ideas and outliers, follow inexplicit biases, and have little accountability. Because many intellectuals told their fans they're rational, the fans may be interested in holding them to it and seeing them debate in ways where they risk losing.

The underlying philosophical issue is that debates enable error correction, whereas refusing to debate is a way to stay wrong even when living people know corrections to your errors that they're willing to share (also, refusing to debate doesn't correct other people's errors in cases where you're right). Debate can happen via essays, forums and other formats, not just stage debates. Debate policies are a specific case of a broader concept, rationality policies, which are important for combatting bias. Giving people rationality tips and then saying to do their best, unconstrained by specific predetermined policies, isn't effective enough for addressing bias.

People sometimes claim they can't debate because it'd take too much time, but this is typically an excuse: yes there are valid concerns around time and good strategies are needed, but instead of trying to figure out how to make it work, I've seen many people rush to the conclusion that it can't work. They don't seem to actually want to make debate work, hear the strategies for saving time I've developed, or try to create any strategies of their own. Overall, I don't think there are enough rational intellectuals in the world with high social status, so I propose a popular movement.

These two ideas complement each other because decisive arguments allow debates to reach conclusions (currently most debates are inconclusive) and debates allow philosophy ideas to be impactful instead of ignored.

I don't know if people here would be interested in learning about these ideas or debating them. I found, for example, that the Effective Altruism community was unwilling to discuss these ideas or have organized debates about anything (including veganism, AGI and other issues they emphasize). I wrote a lot of criticism and analysis about EA but despite all the stuff they say about rationality and wanting criticism, they largely ignored my criticism. An issue that comes up with many communities or schools of thought is that people don't take personal responsibility for answering questions or criticisms because they think someone else can do it, and there can be hundreds of people thinking that and then no one actually answers a critic. Similarly, people will often say things like "There are lots of essays that refute Popper." and then dismiss Popper without specifying any essay in particular that they endorse and will take any responsibility for errors in.