Certainty is, by standard dictionary definition, knowing for 100% sure that it's absolutely impossible that you could have made a mistake. This contradicts fallibilism which says you can't get a 100% guarantee that any thought process contains no mistakes.

The practical consequences of certainty are things like refusing to debate, not listening to suggestions or criticism, rejecting new scientific theories, being passive-minded or dogmatic, treating forward-thinkers and outliers badly, and even executing heretics.

Fallibilism isn't skepticism. Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff, who clearly aren't skeptics, advocated fallibilism (they didn't do as good a job of advocating it as Karl Popper, but they did say it's correct and make their important claims compatible with it). Fallibilism is compatible with reaching conclusions, taking actions, and not being hesitant, wishy-washy, or endlessly unsure. We can make mistakes, and we should take that into account when deciding how to deal with life, but it shouldn't stop us from doing things. Fallibilism should lead to doing things in robust, resilient ways with margins of error, openness to suggestions and criticism if someone sees a mistake. It should lead to valuing free speech, debate, transparency, objectivity, and ongoing, active attempts to think and learn better.

The desire for certainty and skepticism are linked together. A major cause of skepticism is seeking infallible certainty but being disappointed by failing to get it. If you seek 100% certainty as a requirement of knowledge, then you will get a bad outcome: you'll fail and give up on knowledge or you'll think you succeeded and close your mind to debate and criticism. Accepting fallibilism helps avoid skepticism. This is why Ayn Rand said omniscience is not the standard of knowledge: you don't need perfection or certainty to have knowledge, and setting the criteria for knowledge so impossibly high will result in you thinking nothing is knowledge. Karl Popper had a similar opinion that infallibility is not a requirement for knowledge; there's nothing wrong with fallible or conjectural knowledge and in fact that is what all the scientific success in human history used (since infallibility is impossible, science must always have used fallible knowledge).

Why debate, or listen to a critic, if you're convinced that it's absolutely impossible that you're wrong? You already know in advance that he's wrong and you're right. Either you won't debate or you will view debates as public performances where the wrong and bad people can be corrected, attacked, mocked, or something else where you never consider listening to them and it's never a rational debate where you are open to being corrected yourself.

Certainty, as defined above, is rejected by both Critical Rationalism and Objectivism. Confusingly, Objectivism provided a different, non-standard definition of "certainty", which fits the dictionary poorly, and said that we can have that other type of certainty that doesn't contradict fallibilism. Objectivist-certainty, also called "contextual certainty", means reaching a conclusion while doing your best, and feeling confident enough to take actions using your conclusion, but knowing that you may change your mind if there's ever any new information, new evidence, new ideas, new arguments, new discoveries, etc.

Objectivist-certainty is called "knowledge", "conjectural knowledge", "fallible knowledge" or "tentative knowledge" in Critical Rationalism. Critical Rationalism, like Objectivism, says that infallibility or the standard dictionary definition of "certainty" is not a requirement to have knowledge.

Who is into infallibilism and standard-dictionary-certainty? Some academic philosophers who define knowledge as "justified, true belief" or similar. According to them, anything that turns out to be mistaken was never knowledge. The only way to have knowledge is to have absolute certainty that something is true, and that you'll never change your mind no matter what, otherwise maybe it isn't really knowledge. Popper and Rand both rejected this viewpoint.

Uncertainty

Why is it uncertain that I'm seeing a cat over there which exists? Because sometimes physicists, ontologists, epistemologists, vision researchers, logicians, or zoologists come up with a new discovery that requires rethinking a lot of what we thought we knew. Also, human sight and memory are both fallible, people hallucinate or get confused, people sometimes make mistakes about whether they are awake or dreaming, aliens with advanced technologies could interfere, or we could be living in a simulation and the computer programming controlling the simulation could interfere. These things aren't literally impossible.

Also, you simply don't have any 100% positive proof, and if you tried to you'd run into problems not only with logic and proof but also with physics. If you write the proof down on paper then (as David Deutsch explained in The Fabric of Reality) the correctness of the proof depends on your understanding of the physics of pen and paper. Even if you avoid writing, your understanding of the physics of brains could be mistaken, as could various aspects of your understanding of minds.

Would I raise any of those objections if you said you exist and contain water, you're reading this on a computer that exists and contains silicon, the computer is on a desk that exists and is made primarily of wood, and you can see your cat in the room with you, etc? No. I'd agree with you. I simply don't 100% rule out that anyone could ever come up with a reasonable disagreement. I would be open to debating the topic if someone disagreed.

Can people make bad faith claims and waste time in debates? Yes. There are many ways to recognize and defend against that (though it remains a difficult problem sometimes and better strategies could be developed). The effective ways to deal with it don't require refusing to consider any criticism on certain topics where you feel certain. And the lack of certainty stuff is rarely what trolls actually bring up – it's too abstract, technical, unintuitive to many audience members, and unlikely to emotionally trigger most people.

Knowledge

What is knowledge? It's a subset of information or data. Information is basically anything that could be measured. A grain of sand or drop of water contains vast amounts of information because it contains vast numbers of atoms that could be measured in multiple different ways. Most information isn't knowledge. Knowledge is useful, it has purpose, it's goal-oriented, it solves problems, stuff like that. This is basically the standard dictionary meaning of "knowledge" (but not the "justified, true belief" meaning favored by some philosophers). Some dictionary definitions require that knowledge be contained in a mind, but others allow it to be in books, on computer disks, etc. The concept of being able to write down your knowledge and read it again later makes common sense, fits some dictionaries, and is the Critical Rationalist view.

Note: The definition of “information” that I’m using is in widespread use and has made it into dictionaries now but it's not the standard historical definition, which is more like “facts” or “knowledge”. The more modern definition of "information" that I’m using is more specific and includes non-knowledge. It’s connected with modern developments in physics, math, computer science, information theory and biology. People needed a word for, among other things, the information stored in computer disks or in genes.

I don't think a good, exact, technical, formal definition of knowledge is known. But that's OK. We don't need that to discuss knowledge or do science, and we might even be able to invent artificial general intelligence without it.

What can be accomplished with fallible, uncertain knowledge and no rigorous definition of exactly which information is and isn't knowledge? Everything scientists and philosophers have ever accomplished in human history, since they were all fallible and none of them had a way better definition of knowledge.

According to Critical Rationalism, the only known way of creating knowledge is through evolution. However, it seems problematic to define knowledge in terms of the output of evolution because maybe one day a different way of creating knowledge could be discovered. Humanity has had very poor results trying to come up with other knowledge creation methods so far, but that doesn't mean there are no others.

The physicist and Critical Rationalist David Deutsch hypothesized that knowledge is large structures in the multiverse whereas non-knowledge information forms much smaller multiverse structures. Even if this is correct, it isn't actionable: we can't see the whole multiverse and observe structure sizes. And it doesn't give an exact delineation of how large the structures have to be to count as knowledge, which is similar to me not giving an exact statement of how useful information has to be to count as knowledge.

Critical Rationalists view knowledge as something we keep trying to improve so an exact definition of the minimum cutoff doesn't necessarily seem very useful. We want ongoing progress, not to reach the bare minimum then stop. And we don't spend our time arguing that something isn't useful enough to count as "knowledge"; we aren't trying to do that type of gatekeeping. If anyone thinks an idea is knowledge, then it's above the cutoff; it can be discussed, debated, criticized, improved on, etc. The point of the cutoff is just to clarify that a grain of sand isn't full of knowledge; the cutoff isn't meant to be used against human beings. If people have dumb ideas, we criticize them as incorrect rather than trying to deny they meet the definition of "knowledge".

Are incorrect ideas knowledge? Broadly, yes. People try to come up with good, useful ideas, and while they make mistakes, that doesn't mean there is no knowledge present. Non-knowledge can be thought of like white noise, random junk data or arbitrary information. If a human thought something was a good idea, then it's not going to be anything like random noise; it will actually have a lot of order, structure, correctness and usefulness to it even if it's quite badly wrong with lots of big mistakes.

Objectivism also often views incorrect ideas as knowledge because they were correct in some limited context. Criticizing ideas changes the context but doesn't make them wrong in their original context that doesn't include the new information in the criticism. This is important to how imperfect people who make mistakes can make progress anyway. If each mistake totally invalidated each idea, then science would never have gotten anywhere because making scientific progress only using perfect ideas is way too unrealistic and infallibilist.

Is human knowledge ever true, correct or perfect? There is nothing that says it can't be. We can't absolutely, infallibly prove we're right and made no mistakes. But sometimes we may have made no mistakes. However, even if we had an idea that is the absolute perfect truth with zero errors, we would have no way to know that with certainty. We may be correct sometimes but we don't infallibly know which times those are. Karl Popper talked about the ancient philosopher Xenophanes making this point thousands of years ago.

---

Many people have contributed to the ideas discussed here including Karl Popper, Elliot Temple, David Deutsch, Claude Shannon (information theory), Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff, Xenophanes and Socrates.

David Deutsch wrote an article (originals) about conspiracy theories and we had conversations about them. It's an interesting topic which is worth analyzing not just dismissing. I now think he was right about some of the logic of his analysis, but wrong about how it applies to the world. Deutsch says:

A conspiracy theory is

• an explanation of observed events in current affairs and history … which
• alleges that those events were planned and caused in secret by powerful (or allegedly powerful) conspirators, who thereby…
• benefit at the expense of others, and who therefore…
• lie, and suppress evidence, about their secret actions, and…
• lie about the motives for their public actions.

How would Deutsch apply this to some examples? Based on a decade of experience conversing with him, I think he'd say Diddy parties and Epstein Island could not exist. They should be rejected as conspiracy theories. (That would have been his position before everything came out, not now.)

Why?

The Diddy parties and Epstein Island claims are explanations about secret actions by powerful people. They benefitted at the expense of others, lied about the events, suppressed evidenced, and lied about their motives.

Here is the kind of logical analysis I think Deutsch argued for and believes:

1. Diddy parties or Epstein Island couldn't have been kept secret enough. There's no way to vet every new guest well enough to know they don't have a conscience. There's no way to prevent lower level workers (assistants, delivery people, pilots, etc.) from finding out, and some of them will have a conscience. Some people who disapprove will find out that Diddy or Epstein is lying.
2. It'd just take one whistleblower going to the media to stop Diddy or Epstein. That would result in many news stories and court convictions.

I agree with part 1, but I think part 2 is wrong. I think Deutsch's arguments about the difficulty of keeping conspiracies fully secret were largely good. However, I think he was wrong about the consequences of partial secrecy.

Diddy and Epstein couldn't be open and honest. Lying and trying to keep their secrets was necessary. If they just said the full truth of what they were doing in media interviews, they would have quickly gone to jail. But they couldn't fully keep their secrets. Deutsch was right that keeping conspiracies fully secret is really hard and generally unrealistic. However, partial or even open secrets can actually be pretty effective.

Dealing with Leaks

As a powerful person, you have many options for dealing with anyone who tries to expose you.

You can retaliate against whistleblowers, e.g. firing them or worse.

You can intimidate potential whistleblowers. You can publicly smear them and then some of your fans will probably send them threats.

Whistleblowers have a harder time exposing stuff when they only have partial evidence, not the full picture, so partially successful secrecy still helps.

Whistleblowers often have less status, credibility, power and influence than you. They have less ability to get media attention, they have less trust, if it's just your word against theirs you'll probably win.

You can call in favors with the legal authorities to get charges dismissed, get rulings in your favor, or get charges brought against your enemies.

You can hire great lawyers and PR firms.

You can hire private investigators to find dirt on whistleblowers, then use the dirt against them.

You can sue whistleblowers for defamation even if what they're saying is true. It can be an awful experience for them even if they win in court. Defamation lawsuits, or cease and desist letters threatening them, or merely the person knowing you might sue without you ever saying anything, can all discourage people from speaking out.

You can also sue media companies for defamation, even if their statements were true. They know that and it makes them more cautious about what they'll publish.

You can offer people large amounts of money to sign non-disclosure agreements. You can give rewards and bribes to people who go along with you.

You can make signing non-disclosure agreements a condition of being hired and then sue any whistleblowing employees for violating their agreements.

You can say whistleblowers are lying. Say they're jealous or looking for attention. Say they're bitter over some other conflict, real or made up.

Due to mechanisms like these, plus the apathy of law enforcement, the media and the public, partial secrecy is often enough to get away with lying. Even if some people know you're lying and want to whistleblow, it may not matter much. Even if some social media creators and journalists make accusations, you can deny it and it might never get a lot of public or law enforcement attention.

If the complaints against you go viral online, you're more likely to get in serious trouble. But most good complaints don't go viral. There's so much competition for online attention. Only a few things can go viral out of many, many issues people are talking about. Once something goes viral, a lot of people will say it's awful who would have never lifted a finger to do anything about it before it was viral.

Apathy, Complacency and Complicity

Most members of the media, public and law enforcement don't care that much about lots horrific stuff. It’s partly because horrific stuff is pretty widespread – there are tons of huge problems in the world that compete for attention. It's partly because people are distracted by sports, celebrity gossip and many other things they pay attention to that are fun not depressing. There are also widespread biases like misogyny and racism that are relevant: people sympathize less with victims they're biased against.

Epstein didn't hide his secrets super well. Deutsch was right about the difficulty of total secrecy. Epstein had to deal with court cases. Victims went to the authorities. But he kept getting away with it for additional years anyway. It’s just not something our society will definitely fix as soon as we find out. A lot of bad things just aren't taken that seriously by our society, and therefore thinking they may be happening doesn’t actually require a fully successful conspiracy.

Our society often gives poor treatment to whistleblowers, tattle tales, narcs, squealers, complainers and victims.

I think it’s widespread that e.g. CEOs have secrets, lie about company policies, lie about their motives, and suppress evidence. They do a lot of the elements of a conspiracy. But they do it partially and imperfectly. It's way too hard for them to make sure no employees ever find out and every new executive is vetted to be a bad person before being promoted.

They rely on media and law enforcement being mediocre, the public being dumb or uninterested, their ability to pressure people and reward people, their social network, their PR firm, their lawyers and defamation lawsuit threats, and many other tactics that don't require full secrecy. Even if some people know they're lying, they can often get away with it indefinitely.

We keep finding out belatedly that powerful people had been secretly doing bad things for many years. But it was never really fully secret – it couldn’t be due to Deutsch’s logical analysis. Most people see the downsides of whistleblowing and don't try it, and the people who do try often fail and regret it.

After the truth is revealed, it's in the interests of complicit people, both powerful people and regular people, to say it was more secret than it was in order to deny being as complicit as they were. So a lot of things that come out were actually kept less secret than is generally believed.

Misbehaving Companies

You can read books or watch documentaries to learn about the misbehavior of companies like DuPont, Purdue Pharma, Pornhub, Philip Morris and other tobacco companies. Did any of them successfully have a fully secret conspiracy? No. Deutsch is right that that's too hard. They used partial secrecy and other tactics and that worked pretty well.

Even when the truth comes out, many of the people involved remain rich and out of prison. People seeing these outcomes may think it's worthwhile to do horrible, illegal things to make money because even if you get caught you have a good chance of staying out of jail and keeping a lot of money. Gentle outcomes also discourage whistleblowing: why go to the trouble when, even if most of the world believes you, justice is still unlikely?

Let's examine an example in more detail: Johnson and Johnson (J&J). They're currently trying, again, to have a subsidiary go bankrupt to get out of lawsuits from over 60,000 people claiming their baby powder contained asbestos and caused cancer.

In 2018, Reuters published the article: Johnson & Johnson knew for decades that asbestos lurked in its Baby Powder. In 2020, J&J finally stopped selling that type of baby powder in the US. In 1999, J&J was sued by Darlene Coker, who was dying of cancer at age 52 and thought J&J's baby powder was the cause. J&J knew their product contained asbestos and had written documents saying so, but their lawyers managed to avoid handing over those documents when Coker's lawyer requested them.

A Reuters examination of many of those documents, as well as deposition and trial testimony, shows that from at least 1971 to the early 2000s, the company’s raw talc and finished powders sometimes tested positive for small amounts of asbestos, and that company executives, mine managers, scientists, doctors and lawyers fretted over the problem and how to address it while failing to disclose it to regulators or the public.

The documents also depict successful efforts to influence U.S. regulators’ plans to limit asbestos in cosmetic talc products and scientific research on the health effects of talc.

So lots of people knew. Lots of it was written down. But J&J kept selling a toxic, cancer-causing product it in the US for 50+ years after knowing about the problem. People outside the company had some knowledge of the problem decades ago but failed to get justice. And today it looks like J&J is dragging out the court proceedings for years while some of the victims die of the cancer J&J gave them. I think it's likely J&J will pay too little in damages and carry on as a successful, rich company, and few or none of the guilty individuals will go to jail.

J&J's actions are the kind of thing Deutsch would dismiss as a conspiracy theory that couldn't happen. He's right that it couldn't be kept fully secret, but wrong that full secrecy is required to get away with horrible actions.

Late Adopters

Most people don't have an "early adopter" mindset. They think if an idea was great or true, it'd already be popular. Someone else already would have noticed first. This comes up in many contexts.

With a new philosophy idea, most people won't seriously consider it until after it gains some popularity. Ideas have to be first be promoted by early adopters and then gradually gain more prestige and recognition before most people will listen.

With whistleblowing, people think "That company (or powerful person) couldn't be doing that; if they were, they'd go to jail". Because so many people think that way, it's hard to expose companies. The public is generally skeptical that really bad things could be happening. People's own families sometimes won't believe them about what their company is doing.

Journalists should have more of an early adopter mindset than most people. They're supposed to be investigating stuff that isn't yet known. So maybe 0.5% of people and 10% of investigative journalists think like early adopters. That would mean a whistleblower has to contact 7 different investigative journalists to exceed a 50% chance of finding one who would listen. (The odds improve if the story is extremely important and you have really solid evidence, but the odds are worse if it's more speculative, only fairly important, or you lack written documentation. Even if they believe you, most journalists won't care that your mid-sized employer is breaking some laws.)

And most people don't whistleblow because they themselves don't have an early adopter mindset. They think if things were really that bad at their company, some of the dozens of other employees would already have noticed and said something.

Having only partial information amplifies these issues. It's much easier not to whistleblow, or not to listen to a whistleblower, when you have a few concerning pieces of evidence, not the full details of everything. Employees often know CEOs are lying about a few things but don't know the full extent of the problems and lying.

Open Secrets

A great example of open secrets is Harvey Weinstein. He lied and hid evidence but didn't do a great job of keeping things secret. Many people knew about his sexual misbehavior. It was an open secret in Hollywood for many years before he got in trouble due to the #MeToo movement. Why didn't people speak out more? He was powerful and used his power to try to ruin the careers of his enemies. He could cost you a role in a movie. Another reason for keeping quiet was fear of being sued for defamation. Even if you're rich, famous and telling the truth, the threat of a frivolous defamation lawsuit still has a chilling effect on speech.

In 2005, Courtney Love overcame her fear of being sued for defamation and spoke out to the media about Harvey Weinstein, although only in a limited way. She knew more but she was afraid to say it openly. It's not like she was holding back from speaking more clearly because she liked Weinstein and wanted to protect him; I think it was fear. She was probably also afraid that he would harm her career by telling people not to hire her, but fear of a lawsuit is what she actually said out loud:

Comedy Central Reporter: Do you have any advice for a young girl moving to Hollywood?

Courtney Love: Ummm... I'll get libeled if I say it... If Harvey Weinstein invites you to a private party in the Four Seasons, don't go.

What was the result of Love bravely speaking out? Weinstein lost his job in 2017 and was arrested in 2018. I don't think either journalists or law enforcement did a serious investigation in 2005 after Love's comment. Her old comment got attention after he got in trouble. And Love says she was banned from the CAA talent agency for speaking out, so she did face retaliation that harmed her career.

Fear of Frivolous Lawsuits

The bad behavior protected by potential and actual frivolous defamation lawsuits can be all kinds of things besides sexual harassment. The bad behavior could be using child labor, selling products that cause cancer, selling products that don't work, plagiarism or scientific data fraud. Alleged scammers can sue too. Chainalysis is being sued for $650 million for their "2023 Crypto Crime Report" which said YieldNodes is an "investment scam". YouTuber Coffeezilla is being sued by Logan Paul for calling CryptoZoo a "scam" (and providing reasoning and evidence). There are many more similar lawsuits, and there are far more lawsuit threats than actual lawsuits, and there would be even more threats and lawsuits if so many people weren't keeping quiet out of fear.

John Oliver is a comedian who does funny investigative journalism for HBO. He's supported by a staff including writers, researchers and lawyers. Unfortunately, you can't make a show like that without dealing with lawsuits. Any media organization that wants to share reasonable criticism of terrible companies and people has to be prepared for court. Here's a Reddit title: Here's Why It's a Bad Idea to Sue John Oliver | Oliver did an episode about coal executive Bob Murray. Murray sued. The suit was dismissed. Oliver did a follow-up about how destructive these lawsuits can be to the non-wealthy. It still cost HBO $200K in legal fees and their libel insurance tripled. Here's Oliver's follow-up episode about SLAPP lawsuits.

Donald Trump uses lawsuits because they cost his enemies money, make them miserable, and discourage legitimate free speech criticizing him. In 2006, he sued author Tim O'Brien for defamation for estimating Trump's net worth (using cited sources) well below Trump's own claims. The Atlantic's article Why Trump Won’t Stop Suing the Media and Losing says Trump admitted what he was doing:

As Trump told me in an interview in 2016, he knew he couldn’t win that suit (he didn’t) but brought it anyway to score a few points. “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and [O’Brien’s publisher] spent a whole lot more,” he said then. “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.”

Conclusion

Many real world scenarios approximate a conspiracy. People put effort into keeping stuff pretty secret. They lie about facts, hide evidence, and lie about their motives. They have to do that; being really open and honest would quickly land them in jail. Due to the logical issues Deutsch pointed out about conspiracies, they generally won’t succeed at total secrecy. But partial secrecy can be good enough because our society often lets powerful people (or privileged people, or sometimes just anyone) get away with lying and breaking laws as long as they aren't too open and blatant about it. There are many ways people discourage and retaliate against whistleblowing, manage media stories, or get favorable treatment from law enforcement. Defamation law makes it too easy for guilty people to sue truth tellers in a slow, expensive, stressful, time-consuming legal process that sometimes reaches the wrong verdict. These factors help make up for secrets being partially exposed. Fully secret conspiracies are often unnecessary for getting away with some pretty awful stuff.

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

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

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

Hackethal's Complaints

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

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

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

20 Demands

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next, my lawyers had to send Temple a cease and desist for defamation (then he suddenly wanted mediation). When they offered him a mutual non-disparagement agreement, he declined.

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

Defamation

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

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

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

Rejecting Diplomacy

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

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

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

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

Error Correction

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

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

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

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

Call For Help

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

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

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

I Didn't Call Dennis Hackethal a Criminal

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

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

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

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

Misquotes

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

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

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

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

Removals

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

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

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

Disavowing Threats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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