I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist
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> He runs the Self Publishing Formula course and podcast, he talks at the 20BooksTo50K conference in Vegas, and he’s part of a new initiative called Fuse Publishing. He’s a pretty big deal in self-publishing, so what he does reflects on self-publishing as a whole.
Like instagram "buy my course to learn how I got rich" finance-influencers, the same old quip seemingly applies to self-publishing..: don't trust the success of anyone who talks a lot about how successful they are.
This isn’t one of those get-rich-quick schemes. But guess what? I did!
From what I remember the city of Portland at least had such a dirth of units being offered for section 8 due to many landlords having had their units trashed or otherwise fearful of the general bad press about section 8 tenants that there’s not a lot landlords willing to participate in the program leading to a lack of supply.
The upside for landlords though is that the govt pays the rent and it’s often a higher amount than one might get otherwise. There are of course downsides.
Seems an awful lot like he’s trying to give himself a better image by editing his own wikipedia page! Smells conman
My mother-in-law wanted us to go with her to a seminar hosted/ sponsored/ affiliated with one of the house flippers on TV.
They of course talked about their course on how to do it.
And they talked about how "nearly 8,000 people have done this!" and that if you did, too, you'd have access to their financing which, "has given our members over $100M to buy houses to flip! Some of them have flipped 20+ homes with us!" Cue oohs and ahhs.
Because $100M seems a lot. Until you're talking houses. Because in most areas in the country, even a workable flipper house is still going to be $100K, at a minimum. And $100M only buys you 1,000 houses.
Hmm. 8,000 people have paid $5,999 to do your course. And you've flipped 1,000 houses, some people doing 20+ each. That means that realistically, less than one-in-ten of the people who paid for your course ever flip a house.
So yeah, they made a not shabby amount on the costs and interests of those loans...
... and $48M "teaching" people to get rich by flipping homes.
Always good advice. Someone sent me one of those day trader Bros that constantly shows their Lambo and I immediately saw warning lights. I had to tell my buddy that he didn't get the Lambo trading...he got it off suckers who think there's a magical formula for average Joe to make millions with nearly zero risk.
Or, hypothetically, he could have rented it for cheaper and then bought an actual one with the money from the suckers.
It's amazing how some people can pull a long con.
Fake it till you make it.
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[0]: https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=tai+lop...
Why not just use it on himself instead? This guy has paid money out of the kindness of his heart to make sure the public knows about this bulletproof money making technique.
Some will show you their revenue, "I'm a six figure author!" But frequently hide how much they spend on ads or editing. Or try to hide that they're making ~$50k on courses/affiliate sales and their net is... ~$50k. Writing is a net zero income for them and most of it is just used to sell courses/products.
What bothers me most is that promotion is so important for solo entrepreneurs, that some people will placate the grifters in return for exposure. It's hard to call people out. We end up in a place where everyone is selling to everyone else.
This example, for instance, is just a phrase and a cliche at that:
“A majestic wrought iron gate brought in from a Southern plantation”
The accuser can't even get little details like the number of books sold versus downloaded.
I've sat on academic committees judging plagiarism and I would not consider these examples to be an obvious case. Not by any means.
Writers are allowed to write "It was a dark and a stormy night" over again.
Maybe the author liked the expression "fur-trimmed Afghans" - maybe he had the other author's book in front of him maybe he read it the previous day who knows?
As long as he is not copying whole pages verbatim and the end product is enjoyable this is not actionable.
There are plenty of authors who might be good plotters but stink at character development and vice versa.
But it stretches credulity when you start applying that to phrases like "the gaudy harlequinade of youth much in evidence", "The man settled behind the rifle. He felt the tension in the trigger, found his stockweld and slid up to the eyepiece, staring into it and seeing the ridge and the trees and the vegetation through the mil-dot-rich reticle.", or "the misty slopes of the massif of the Montagne de Charbon stretched above the treeline".
Originality is the art of hiding your sources, which has become utterly impossible nowadays with the search engines.
If he had studied after the 2010s, he would have paraphrased a bit more to confuse google
Even reusing your own work between classes was an example of plagiarism.
Plagiarism, at least as presented to me, is a very strict standard.
As a high school student, this is still true. People literally get suspended/expelled for plagiarism.
Nobody would care in a business meeting if you copied a random graph without citation or included data in a pitch deck. Reusing a presentation or publishing an article several times in trade publications with a bit of tweaking is pretty normal.
How does ownership of ideas work again? And I don't mean citing sources when required, but the tracking and commodification of roots of experience external to existence in understanding.
You've got to be trained in mental gymnastics to jump through those logical hoops.
Specially ideas. Which cannot be copyrighted (yet).
Somebody show cage Michael Tomasello right now. Open any of his books and you’ll see a series of self-plagiarism sentences.
I now think he’s just a genius because he’s investigated his field in depth
But happily it is not a concept outside academia.
Schools may have codes of conduct that implicitly or explicitly prohibit turning in the same paper for multiple classes. A publishing contract may specify that an article is original.
As others have mentioned though reusing both your own and other product descriptions, explainers, slides/data, etc. especially within a single company is pretty normal and accepted.
This just looks like a sloppy writer saving time on understanding typical California mansion layouts and features or how snipers set up or British music in the 1990s or what Juarez is like by minimally revising the first Google result he found to generate the descriptive passage. But how a sniper sets up might not be the only bit he's taken from a book about a sniper, and a couple of evocative bits of description in a parody article not the only bits he's taken from Bond.
The thorn is that evidence of effective literature doesn't exist as an objective truth, but it often looks like sales. Writers who spend their careers being honest, thoughtful, and meticulous don't publish 20 books in two years, and they often don't make as much money as the Mark Dawsons. The business of being someone who manufactures and sells works of fiction in today's world is not radically different than ever in history, and it signals not the collapse, but the return of writing under our new publication and distribution models.
Pulps are not new, like light novels, themed writing periodicals, or any other historical light published media. They took a break for about 20 years as things moved online, and they've experienced a resurgence as web serials, ebooks, and KPD partners. I'm not surprised or offended by any of that, or the Mark Dawsons, even if I have no interest in their products. But then again, I'm not vested in the old models and afraid of disruption.
I have some experience of using the automated tools and I think people get a false sense of confidence from them, both in the sense of "this was definately copied from X" (rather than a shared original source) and "this is morally wrong, because the computer said so".
The example of the music description for example. It's obviously lifted from that source. The rephrasing doesn't really make sense, which I feel is a bigger crime than lifting a sentence about a music scene from a factual music source to use in a novel.
So I guess it depends on how plagiarism is defined and perhaps how we define it should be revisited, but whether it be Christine Gay, Neri Oxman, or Mark Dawson, by that standard they are all caught red handed plagiarists.
On the other hand, only in cases of egregious and intentional plagiarism was it considered a major failing.
Writing isn't coding, this is not the same a just copying some snippet from stackoverflow.
But then again I'm not a writer or expert on this, so I don't know how serious this is compared to a thesis or something where this would already cost you your title.
Academics are expected to use citations, not primarily because reusing a 5-word phrase would in itself be problematic, but because it's important for other scientists to be able to trace the idea back to its original context.
Novelists on the other hand can't just include a footnote reference at the end of each sentence. And borrowing bits and pieces from other artists is completely normal, even desirable, in many arts. It's how the art form evolves.
I haven't read any of this author's books nor have I read the books he is supposed to have lifted these phrases from. So I don't really have an opinion on this particular case.
I guess it would depend on whether he has reused more than some isolated sequences of words from a particular novel. What makes a novel unique for me is mostly the story and the characters.
Not OP. Just food for thought.
And then media jumped on the wagon and started checking everyone. A second minister is now also in trouble after not only having plagiarized, but then invented source interviews (aka science fraud).
Or, "I'm Charlie Stross, and I tell lies for money. That is, I'm a science fiction writer" - https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-cr...
Ed. I checked and both Sandra Borch and Ingvild Kjerkol seem to have been active in party politics from an early age. Exactly fits the mold of groomed career politicians.
Isn't the assumption supposed to be that anything I haven't cited is my idea? What does it matter if it's not the first time I had the idea? It's not less mine because I still have it.
I could sort of understand if I had published it somewhere and somehow given rights to it to another party, but this was just some random college philosophy paper.
If I can't grant myself rights to my work, then who can?
If you're not doing that then I would assume it's fine?
You can quote any previous work, others and/or your own, but you must highlight/identify it as such.
I'm not defending the usage, I'm simply explaining how the term is now used. Language mutates, origins are lost, and usage evolves.
You may choose to quote dictionary definitions, but dictionaries document usage, and of necessity can never be fully up-to-date with more recent changes. This is especially true when the terms are being interpreted within a specific context. In many academic environments "self-plagiarism" is an adaptation of the original concept to indicate that students cannot repeatedly submit the same work over and over again. They will say something like "Work for this accreditation must be new and original" and then use the term "self-plagiarism" to describe when that stipulation is breached.
As I say, language evolves. People even say "The proof is in the pudding" and "I could care less". These are idioms that convey meaning as an entirety and are not to be interpreted according to the meaning of the words therein.
Similarly, now in some contexts "self-plagiarism" is a term used to describe recycling one's own work. Sometimes it's fine, sometimes it's not.
Love it, like it, or loathe it, the term exists and describes "A Thing(tm)".
I'd assume it would have had to be somebody pretty important, for their fiat to have such weight. I'd like to know who it was.
It's a concept that needs a name, and when a name turns up it often spreads quickly with no obvious source.
Assume you write a bachelor thesis on topic X. Then, move universities (or professors, whatever), and write more or less the same thesis again to get a masters degree.
That’s self plagiarism.
This doesn't sound true if you're copying your own work surely? If that's the case it must by definition be work that you did, right?
Any two entities can agree to any set of terms they want. If a school says you have to sign a code of conduct to go there, and it prohibits submitting the same work for more than one course, fine. If someone breaks that rule, accuse them of violating the code of conduct.
But that's not plagiarism. "Self-plagiarism" is a contradiction in terms.
It's also important to understand that many of the lessons we are taught in school about attribution are deliberately over-emphasized by instructors, in order to impart good citation habits. If frightening students to death about "self-plagiarism" causes them to be unnecessarily forthright in citing their own work, even outside the classroom context, instructors are mostly fine with that.
The issue with self plagiarism isn't that you are quoting your own previous work (you are free to do that), it's because you're not tagging it as a citation and thereby passing it off as new.
As many as it meets the requirements for.
Heck, I submitted the exact same "tell us about a significant experience in your life" story to every single university I applied for.
And I guarantee the teachers are duplicating lessons or parts of lessons when they teach related classes. Have you ever seen a professor cite, "Me, the first time I taught this class"?
That's just being smart and efficient. I see absolutely nothing wrong with any of these examples.
>As many as it meets the requirements for.
What I'm trying to tell you is that it normally won't meet the requirements a second time. It's usually part of the university's examination regulations that a paper has to be original. Everything else is seen as an attempt of scientific deception that consequently can and will be treated as a violation of regulations.
But I have to admit I'm not sure if that's a universal rule, or just where I'm from. I suspect we might be having some kind of cultural divide at play here. May I ask what part of the world you're in?
If I had taken two classes that both requested an essay on the symbolism of Plato's cave, I'd be stoked I already had one at the ready. Wouldn't even occur to me that there was some problem with it. But even that isn't what happened in my original post that prompted the question.
I'm in the U.S., and I was pursuing my degree at a university people have heard of in New England (but not the one that probably first comes to mind, especially about this topic lately).
But I think my example would not be acceptable for a student. You may not re-use a paragraph you wrote, even if you cite it. Double submission is often treated similarly to plagiarism.
My main point is that what is and isn’t plagiarism is contested, outside of high school and undergraduate students.
Why not? That's the part I (top level commenter) have never understood.
Why am I limited to having or expressing my ideas in one venue only, and only once? Why don't I have unlimited right to use my own thoughts as often as I care to?
The implication is that it's large paragraphs of solid work stolen from a fellow researcher in the field. But it could just as easily mean 22% of her text was scattered with cliches, idioms and excerpts from legislation (or other standard texts) if someone with an agenda was interpreting the results.
Nor do the tools have a human level understanding of what has or has not been cited properly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Borch_and_Ingvild_Kjerk...
The 'talk' page of that article is completely empty and not a single one of the citations is in English. For all intents and purposes you're taking everything written there on pure faith because the chance that some uninterested observer has double-checked all of those citations is basically zero.
"A man does not look behind the door unless he has stood there himself." - W.E.B. Du Bois
The 1857 book "A polyglot of foreign proverbs : comprising French, Italian, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and Danish, with English translations and a general index" has that quote in the index, on page 413 at https://archive.org/details/b24867664/page/412/mode/2up?q=%2... .
On page 354 you can see it's described as a Danish proverb, https://archive.org/details/b24867664/page/354/mode/2up?q=do... : "Den leder ikke gierne bag Dören, som ei selv har staaet der. A man does not look behind the door unless he has stood there himself"
That phrase is indeed in the 1850 book "Danske Ordsprog, Tankesprog og Riimsprog", p153, #2385 at https://archive.org/details/danskeordsprogt00copegoog/page/n... .
FWIW, the 1897 book "Men in epigram" attributes that quote to Henri Du Bois.
If you think about copilot etc...that would produce the same pattern. Fragments being obviously matching existing work.
Not sure I'd go quite as far as calling an author a plagiarist on the basis of specific short fragments matching. It would need bit more of an overarching say plotline matching or similar.
Who here hasn't copied some code off stack overflow?
You could, I suppose, add a CC BY SA acknowledgement to both StackOverflow, and the person who posted the code for every snippet of code you copy from StackOverflow in license notifications in your own project. You must acknowledge both. But you know you won't.
Instead, you will rely on the goodwill of every corporate overlord who will ever own StackOverflow, or inherit its copyright assignments for one Mickey Mouse copyright lifetime. Which seems unwise given that the current corporate overlords don't seem to be trustworthy. And seems particularly unwise now that the Millennial internet is passing away.
There was some discussion about allowing authors to post code under a dual-use license when StackoverFlow first converted their terms of use to require CC BY SA licensing. But whenever I add dual-use license notifications to my StackOverflow posts, StackOverflow moderators keep editing it out without my permission!
If the answer links to code on another site, then that code isn't covered by the StackOverflow terms of use.
How do you know it’s correct for your need without actually reading and internalizing it? It might even be correct…but not compute what you thought it does.
Plugging code from SO into your program is like assuming that if your program compiles it must be correct.
I wish I could add a sarcasm marker but I see chunks of dumb code inserted in public repos, NPM, etc all the time.
I can only hope that my bank’s phone app has been subject to reasonable code review.
This is a clue that the current fashion of crying ChatGPT at every instance of bad writing is quite silly. Plagiarism, and bad writing in general, predate LLMs by centuries.
Pulp fiction was fiction written for the popular pulp magazines of the 1900s through roughly the 1960s. Those magazines don't really exist anymore. The "modern equivalent of pulp fiction" -- which is to say, the modern equivalent of writing for the pulps, writing to earn a quick buck -- is self-publishing low-effort fare on Kindle Unlimited or something similar. So the guy you were responding to made an apt comparison, IMO.
Interestingly, the pulps that are still hanging on -- like Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and like various other fiction magazines -- are today characterized by a very high standard of literary quality. On average, miles better than the self-published Kindle Unlimited stuff that rates highly (for some reason) on Amazon.
As such there should be absolutely no issue with somebody saying "modern equivalent of pulp fiction" -- because they're using the first definition. And it so happens that there is a perfect modern equivalent, which is essentially the author in OP's publishing style.
So if any of you are journalists - this may be a way to get new scoops!
What's more - self-plagiarism has been a huge topic in the university sector and the Minister has been quite strict towards students re-using text on exams without citation (to their own previous exams), with several cases going to the court.
[1] https://e24.no/norsk-oekonomi/i/wA1Kvo/saa-mye-av-sandra-bor...
[2] https://e24.no/naeringsliv/i/y6Wzw2/deler-av-forskningsminis...
Can you provide an example of an incident like this?
Whether this is "screwing up the quotes" or not depends on your perspective.
Perhaps UK law is different, but presumably this is just something that might make you unpopular among other authors and literary critics, not a civil or criminal matter.
1. How much of other people's work did Mark Dawson plagiarise in each of his books?
2. How much of other people's work would someone need to plagiarise before you consider it to be unethical?
We can't answer 1. just yet, but if you are going to make a judgement about him here, at least try to give your answer for 2. The first question is a question of fact and the second question is a question of subjectivity so it's important to separate them out.
Not to excuse anything but would be interesting to understand if some of this is potentially a result of using automated tools; I don't actually know what pulp writers use in their work.
The scumbaggery is endemic, not isolated to creative repurposing of other people's sentences!
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fraud
> 1. (law) The crime of stealing or otherwise illegally obtaining money by use of deception tactics.
> 2. Any act of deception carried out for the purpose of unfair, undeserved or unlawful gain.
> ...
There's no implication that he crossed out a number on a report before artificially enhancing it by increasing it by 400, is there?
I feel that both of these examples are reprehensible in this context, but that only one of them rises to the level of fraud.
(I mean: There are companies performing stock buybacks all the time for various reasons, and some of those reasons can include improving the market's perception of that stock's value.)
This happens in the US too (esp nonfiction, and political stuff).
To be financial successful as a writer (or any creative endeavor), if you do not have special access, you must either gain special access or get into the business of publishing yourself.
As noble as “gain access” may seem by comparison, it has very few seats on the ride & the power law seems to have the perverse effect of narrowing the number over time.
The business of publishing is & has always been substantially about manufacturing hype. You might get one generational talent at its start, but mostly you are selling the talent you have.
As much as we all seem to want opportunity to be earned on meritocracy alone, we don’t spread our attention that way and we certainly don’t distribute in any kind of premeditated way to ensure our values are applied to society. Perhaps algorithmic content distribution will change that one day, but so far it mostly hasn’t.
So for any new work, even for authors you know & love, to get sufficient revenue it has to grab significant attention in a brief period of time.
Underlying all hype machines is usually some kind of gameable metric of attention - views, endorsements, critical review.
All publishers have a formula for how they get some of it or they fail at their job. Publishers will be the first to tell you what they do isn’t enough because everyone does it.
“New York Times Best Seller” is a great example. Generally considered a fair standard of what is interesting, it mostly drifts off Amazon rankings with some mollifying factors.
Part of the durability of this system is that when one person has been found to hack those rankings, like here by purchasing 400 of their own books, it appears that they are a dishonest person gaming the system.
Every NYT Best Selling author I’ve met either personally orchestrated, or had it done for them, volume book sales to friend’s businesses & conferences to achieve the same affect.
Perhaps people who are insufficiently clever should be morally punished for the crime of showing us our own foibles.
But the “scumbaggery is endemic,” which is now one of my favorite sentences, is as easily cast as disapproval for a few people as it is a statement of how people in large groups choose what is interesting to talk about.
Either way, we’ve got no solution for society working the way we think it does vs working to exploit the way we think it does.
I thought the Internet might, but so far it seems better at distributing the latter than solving for the former.
Am a little surprised it hasn't been done yet tbh. Might be a fun project.
The post only refers to excerpts of long-winded descriptions of stuff, not to large plots or entire paragraphs plagiarized.
Is that very different from asking ChatGPT to generate a thorough description of a situation and using this? Would that be plagiarism too?
If he wasn't selling it, maybe.
I originally saw this posted on the writing subreddit[1]. Looks like it picked up more steam on the books subreddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/18n3wej/did_bestse...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/14/the-bi...
At the same time, I'm always suspicious by default of someone selling these kinds of things, even if they aren't obvious "I will make you rich" claims. If someone seems to be making more income from teaching people to do a thing than actually doing that thing, I get wary. Of course this has nuance as well - I would not be inherently suspicious of a university professor teaching full time. But a self-published author teaching you to run Facebook ads? Good educators _do_ exist in that space, but there needs to be a smell test there.
As for "doing your own thing", if you have a goal-oriented reason for doing something you can benefit from seeing how other people successfully did that thing. Sure, you can bumble along on your own "doing your own thing" and eventually luck out or figure it out (or maybe not), but often that tends to be a bad strategy.
It has the air of indicating that the content is potentially outdated, but the post is quite little less than a month old. If the content was a couple days newer would there be value in commenting “(2024)”?
Beyond that, everything on that page has explicit exact dates. It’s Reddit. We can read the actual date and not just the year ourselves.
(That person's comment was benign, in my opinion, because the mods are going to manually hide this subthread anyway—it's a minor and short-lived distraction. It's a pretty common interaction on HN: there's a meta-discussion about the HN submission itself, "please edit the title / please change the URL to this one / please whatever", and 'dang steps in and says "Thanks! Fixed", and then he kills the subthread because it's no longer relevant. I feel this status quo is basically okay?)
[0] Many examples, https://hn.algolia.com/?query=2023&dateStart=1704103200&date...