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Comment by elbigbad | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know who Yancy is but they have some complete lack of shame to steal someone else’s idea almost word for word and prepend their name to it. I don’t know what I could muster that absolute “I don’t care at all what people think of me” if I tried, and I have here and there I just don’t have it in me.

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Found it in 3 seconds flat. RTFA and Carry On:

https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-int...

You mean Liu Cixin, that Yancy mentions in the first sentence of his essay about Dark Forest of Internet, or someone else?

Cixin Liu of course. Now let me tell you about “elbigbad’s Theory of Relativity” (hat tip to Einstein who had a hand in its development). More modernly phrased: “‘You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take’ -Wayne Gretzky” - Michael Scott

The right analogy would be "elbigbad's Theory of Relativity of the Web", wouldn't it? Not quite so bad.

The problem is that the article was called "The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet", not "Yancy Dark Forest". IMHO it's like "Ultraviolet catastrophe of book collecting" or "Gravity well of Tinder" : general scientific theory /hipothesis used as metaphor of a thing. Of course Dark Forest is not as well known as previously mentioned theories (although it was mentioned by Kurzsgesat, so who knows), but the whole thing is clearly explained in the essay, and the author is clearly stating what Dark Forest is and who created it. Also, the original comment probably mentioned it as Yancy Dark Forest, as "The Dark... Of the Internet" written by Yancy, not as "Yancy totally original idea".

He (Yancey) doesn't:

https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-int...

> In his sci-fi trilogy The Three Body Problem, author Liu Cixin presents the dark forest theory of the universe. (...)

Liu Cixin certainly didn’t create the concept! It’s a long standing conjecture that he wrote a novel about and provided a new name for. Whoever “Yancy” is has done nothing wrong- certainly nothing more than Liu. They even attribute to Liu in the first sentence! No reason for outrage here.

And apply it to The Internet instead of the galaxy, with due credit given.

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