Punished Felix
Punished Felix 10 hours ago (edited)
Reposting here for transparency's sake. Entymology_nerd's response to me. One mistake I do make in this email is that in the private text message he sends me (I did not share it out of anonymity's sake) he does mention that he shared a specific quote from the book in question. However, it does not explain how he released a video about cartesian dualism without even apparently knowing if the book discussed it? I'll be honest I could be paranoid about the AI situation but I find it extremely strange that these extremely loose and vague connections just happen to resemble my work very closely. He seems to think that it is not unique that accelerationism would be analyzed through a critique of cartesian dualism but this is simply not true. I don't even make this critique and I believe that without further evidence we can't rule out the possibility that my work has somehow been absorbed by a larger machine. I also don't think its appropriate to take down my video even if I am wrong since ultimately if he demonstrates I am wrong I can issue a correction.
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Omg, the trend of him constantly sounding passive aggressive towards everyone in text continues.
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I am so confused by "I literally cite all my sources on all my videos" Like sure, direct references get a mention, but that's not citing sources. What about all that synthesis? He doesn't cite that
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I used to be a fan of his content (until today), since what he made videos on I thought he was actually obsessed with and I found it mildly interesting😭 it doesn’t make sense why he would respond like this to such a serious claim, boasting about his history and knowledge when it’s not even the point at hand, before requesting you take down your video LMAO Thank you for bringing this situation to light, and if he actually is plagarizing his work then I hope he can change fr I wish you the best of luck with what steps you may take🔥🙏
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Your "AI summarizer" theory seems strong. It'll be interesting to see how he responds to that, seeing as it removes the need for him to know who you are (which seems to be his strongest defense). If these ideas really are his own, he should be able to recreate the steps that led him to make those connections. If he just pulled it from an AI summary, the synthesis has already been made by someone else (without being properly sourced by the AI), so he'd probably find it very difficult to trace the progession of his ideas. I expect that he'll say something about having lost track of the original sources due to never referencing them directly. That by itself would already be bad form, but if he continues without changing his practices after this, it'll be a major red flag indicating that there's some variety of willful plagiarism happening.
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I’d also add that there have been several cases of Indigenous, Black and other people who point out his misinformation on claims he makes about linguistics that he makes completely unsourced and to my knowledge he does not take down or correct these videos. This is a big part of why proper citation is also important. It doesn’t just make the flow of where you’re getting information from transparent, it also protects you from situations like this. Frankly I have a hard time believing someone would be able to produce this volume of researched material at this rate which is why it makes more sense to suspect plagiarism, AI scraping, mis or disinformation or a combination of the three. You can’t make a major part of your platform branding yourself as an academic, obfuscate where your sources for your claims are coming from, then act defensive if people suspect dishonesty of some kind.
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He would have never responded to you without you making a video first lol. And I don't like how his response is mostly to morally judge you, and tell you to take down your "inflammatory video" fecking ridiculous! He obviously doesn't want this to propagate, which wouldn't be a problem if he held to good practices. But he hasn't, and I hope it bites him.
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it feels wrong to be the guy that says “i know a guy who knows a guy” but i remember this story my friend told me, he knows a lot of people in the linguistics community (he does a lot of spelling bees and has made it to scripps finals once), says he knows a dude that went to harvard, did linguistics, and met etymology nerd and said he was “a brat” this is just an anecdote though and i literally have no proof if this is true to so please don’t quote me on this 😭
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“idgaf about the definition of plagiarism”
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Just commenting to boost ya G:p
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Personally just feels like a one of those Uber coincidences Like how Joel Haver talked about making a skit and being told he stole it from another person they never seen.
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Even if he's innocent he's sure acting like an ass so I will probably unfollow cause eugh, this doesn't paint him as a nice guy
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I’m not smart enough to parse this whole situation out but at very minimum, it seems like EN is overreacting. So what if a tiny channel says “This guy MIGHT have plagiarized me”? If you’re innocent, then the truth will be hashed out in due time. Plagiarism can sometimes take time to prove or disprove. It seems kinda imperious to just make demands of you like that idk.
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(Just a heads up: I wound up going ADHD mode and I wrote a LOT so get a coffee or something, I think I've found tentatively bits of an explanation for what is going on here, and you may find some of them and some of the discussion interesting. I had to break it into parts because it was too long to post as one thing.) Coming from an academic background, his reaction seems pretty strange to me. While, on social media, I tend to shoot from the hip and keep my citation practices loose, I keep a working understanding of where any claims not original to me come from, and am usually able to retrieve something if asked. That said, if shooting from the hip, I do sometimes forget my paper trail, as I may be forming an opinion based on something I read years ago, or something that has been coarsely synthesized from several texts (none of which I remember and some of which may be misrepresented) in a way that would be inappropriate if I were trying to produce something for publication. I would find it believable that this was something he reconstructed from a coarse memory of some text, and went back to check to reassure himself of where he got his ideas. I don't find that suspicious in itself, as there's a difference between writing a serious essay you intend to be well-substantiated (what you do), and penning the video equivalent of a tweet (what he does)... although I'd admit there's a case to be made that even short slop video content should follow better citation practices. However, other details I find a little more questionable. What's most surprising to me is the boastfulness and defensiveness, and his general rudeness towards you. If I am called out for talking out my ass on social media, fair's fair, I'm probably going to spend some time reresearching my point and trying to either defend it, or let it go. The thing is, if it's true, as he claims (and I'd actually agree with this) that it's not all that big of a reach to relate transhumanism with dualism, then it shouldn't be difficult to provide supporting material. Being a cognitive scientist, I could probably do so off the cuff. For instance, we can take just a few classic citations (Chalmers, 1998; Harnad, 1990; Chemero, 2013; Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1999, and one of those ill-begotten essays citing Heidegger's hammer argument) to ground the discussion and make the claim that a mind is dependent (in a strong sense) on its embodiment condition, and the possibility of removal from it is not just implausible, but impossible, even nonsensical. One would have to further extend the argument supporting it with one of those places the embodiment people hurled the "Cartesian" slur at Putnam or Fodor or some other functionalist (e.g., Dreyfus, 1972, p. 178; and more recently Hemmo & Schenker, 2023, put the position in no uncertain terms). As a complete digression: people who consider themselves proponents of embodied cognitive science, particularly those who follow the Dreyfuses, make the (uncited) claim that functionalism is dualist with some frequency. There was a prof I argued with in undergrad who was quite insistent on it, and a friend of mine once referred to me as a "crypto-Cartesian" for affirming the reality of minds, but it's not clear to me exactly where the dualism claim originates. We can see that Dreyfus did not exactly say that functionalism is dualist (though I admit I did not do an exhaustive review of Dreyfus' bibliography before this post), and while it seems plausible that someone might say that the multiple-realizability of functionalism, and machine-functionalism in particular, implies some sort of world of representations distinct from its material realization (and Hemmo & Schenker seem to say so exactly), I can't really identify who my prof or my friend might have been referring to in 2017 when I was arguing with them. Nevertheless, they are not the only source in my personal life for this claim, and I should probably research it more seriously and find its originator. Nevertheless, while common, it is a false claim, as Putnam's version of multiple-realizability was shown (by himself) to be too radical to even make sense (Putnam, 1980), and all other approaches to functionalism must grapple expressly with how function is mapped to physical state in a disciplined way (Block, 2015), though I admittedly find psychofunctionalism (Block & Fodor, 1972) lacking to the point of actually suggesting a dualism, as the grounding terms are mental states, which seem to be primitive objects, themselves lacking a disciplined physical correspondence, and in any case the study of physical correspondences in contemporary approaches to functionalism is strict in order to permit a strictly physicalist ontology, and most modern functionalists would consider an entailment that their position rejects physicalism to require them to revise their theory rather than bite the bullet (this one I'm pulling out of my ass, I'm guessing based on vibes of what people I know would think). The criticism that functionalism is dualist can therefore really be only be made sort of loosely and offhandedly, e.g. with the suggestion that the mind is an object that can be spoken of coherently in a manner distinct from its embodiment condition entails a sort of essential separation of mind and body, which has dualist vibes even if it doesn't strictly entail a substance dualism (this is the form I often hear in practice anyway, often said in a much sloppier fashion).
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Honestly, mentioning going to graves is a little odd. Also, my roommate wanted to mention the video he did a while back about Derrida and how poorly that was reasoned, this use of cartesian dualism is strange. I don’t think it’s out of the question he’s thought of it himself, TBH I just think he’s a pseud.
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