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I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

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Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#11

Post by philshem »

gigatexal wrote: post #7
isoprophlex wrote: post #4

Whoa, that's thorough. Damning, easily replicable, overwhelming evidence that this guy is indeed a fraud. > 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…

Oh these guys are so exhausting. My favorite was Grant Cardone — the real estate mogul who’s said he’d be ashamed if he made 400k a year. All of them and his ilk peddling this you can get rich fast stuff are disgusting.

    This isn’t one of those get-rich-quick schemes. But guess what? I did!
(An old TV ad that is etched into my memory)

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#14

Post by dan-robertson »

What strikes me from the examples in the OP is that this method of plagiarism doesn’t seem very easy. How would you produce this kind of thing? Eg maybe you read a lot and collect a large number of flowery phrases to use over time or maybe you just pinch phrases you like from whatever you read today. I guess I usually associate plagiarism with less effort than seems to have been required here.

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#15

Post by tompccs »

Not defending the practice, but this guy writes the modern equivalent of pulp fiction. I doubt his readers care much, and he has no publisher to tick off. So what it comes down to is whether or not the people he stole from have a strong case to sue him for copyright infringement.

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#16

Post by donatj »

taspeotis wrote: post #2

(2023)

I’ve never understood why people on Hacker News feel the need to make these year comments? Particularly in cases like this where it adds nothing at all to the conversation.

It has the air of indicating that the content is potentially outdated, but the post is quite little less than a month old.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.

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#17

Post by 7thaccount »

isoprophlex wrote: post #4

Whoa, that's thorough. Damning, easily replicable, overwhelming evidence that this guy is indeed a fraud. > 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…

>"don't trust the success of anyone who talks a lot about how successful they are"

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.

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#18

Post by hayleox »

gigatexal wrote: post #5

Rather compelling to me too. Let’s see what the author says in response.

This was first posted to Reddit on December 20. As best as I can tell, Dawson hasn't made any public reply. He hasn't tweeted since December 8 (https://twitter.com/pbackwriter). Here's someone else who was trying to find a reply two weeks ago: https://twitter.com/stevemosby/status/1743002959925883073

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#19

Post by ramraj07 »

karencarits wrote: post #9

Related: the Norwegian press is now examining the theses of Norwegian ministers and politicians after a Twitter/x user found plagiarism in the Master's thesis of the Minister of Science - she had to go on the hour and may lose her degree. Other ministers are now being scrutinized So if any of you are journalists - this may be a way to get new scoops!

Good. While this presenteistic witch hunt looks like a bit much, I feel finding and shaming plagiarists is a great idea. I’ve known a few from my academic life including some of the smartest people I worked with. Thus it’s no measure of intellectual frailty. Just a moral one. Any public figure is totally justified to be shamed for plagiarism IMO.
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