I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by 15457345234 » Sun, Jan 21, 2024, 3:15 PM UTC

tkgally wrote: post #82

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there documentation of this 22% figure? 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.

Wikipedia has details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Borch_and_Ingvild_Kjerk...

Politics and Wikipedia don't mix

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.

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

#142

Post by smolder » Sun, Jan 21, 2024, 3:17 PM UTC

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #42

isoprophlex wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 2020, Dawson's book The Cleaner reached number 8 in the Hardback Fiction section of The Sunday Times' bestseller list after he purchased 400 copies of the book, seeing it to have previously been in position number 13 The scumbaggery is endemic, not isolated to creative repurposing of other people's sentences!

That sounds more serious. That's literally fraud, unlike taking random sentences you liked from other books, which is quite benign, in my opinion.

It's well known that best sellers lists are manipulated in this way, but there's not a lot you can do about it. If I just ask 400 friends to buy my book, and compensate them in home cooked meals and quality time, is that unfair manipulation? It's tough to draw a line.

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

#143

Post by mijoharas » Sun, Jan 21, 2024, 3:23 PM UTC

matthewdgreen wrote: post #107

haizhung wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1, my layman’s understanding of this was: 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.

The problem with that is that it’s academic dishonesty. You’re turning in work for academic credit that you didn’t do. Transfer the self-plagiarism situation to another context, say you self-publish a book and re-use some material from another book you wrote. The fact of self-plagiarism may still exist but in this new context it’s not clear that the harm does (whereas copying another writer’s words is still clearly h…

> You’re turning in work for academic credit that you didn’t do

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?

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

#144

Post by washadjeffmad » Sun, Jan 21, 2024, 3:25 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #125

dan-robertson wrote: post #14

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.

The more interesting question is whether he lifted entire plots from other books or just used the collage-of-website-text to fill specific details 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 p…

Understandably, many people are worried about the cheapening of their trades. Why go through the effort when you don't have to to meet a sniper and interview them for their training and experiences, or consult the world's foremost expert on niche period architecture (how we met? oh, it's quite a story) when you have the internet?

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.

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

#145

Post by ghaff » Sun, Jan 21, 2024, 3:31 PM UTC

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #138

iforgotpassword wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of seemingly random instances though, like the first ones which seem oddly specific, flowery descriptions. I'm having a hard time believing those phrases coincidentally came out the same. If we're to believe op who claims they only checked the first couple pages of each book which were free to access, this seems quite damning. Writing isn't coding, this is not the same a just copying some snippet from s…

I'm not a writer either and I know nothing about plagiarism, but it would seem harsh to judge a novelist by the same standard as an academic. 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 foo…

The context here though is someone who churns out a lot of books and seems to have a real pattern of lifting a lot of phrases and descriptions near-verbatim from other places. This isn't an author lifting some particularly evocative phrase that they liked.

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

#146

Post by washadjeffmad » Sun, Jan 21, 2024, 3:32 PM UTC

dash2 wrote: post #118

burnished wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that definition of plagiarism exists in schools (how broadly I couldn't say) but it's completely incoherent and unused in any other context.

The underlying concept is using other people's ideas as your own. It's coherent and there's good reason for using it in academia, and probably also in journalism and creative writing.

> other people's ideas

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.

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

#147

Post by drakonka » Sun, Jan 21, 2024, 3:41 PM UTC

holoduke wrote: post #20

I have really never understood how you can fall for people with how to get rich guides. Just do your own thing. Dont look at others too much. Rich wont make you happy anyway.

I think this one is a little more nuanced than that. I haven't bought any of Dawson's courses and definitely don't plan to now, but this is not a person advertising a "get-rich-quick" scheme. At least not from the impression I've gotten from his podcast. Plenty of people pay for courses, coaching, etc in the tech space. Some of those are scammy, and others are people just legitimately teaching you what they know and not making flowery promises about it. It's the same in other industries.

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.

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

#148

Post by ghaff » Sun, Jan 21, 2024, 3:46 PM UTC

j4yav wrote: post #111

spuz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two questions at play here: 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…

I guess it would be the point where it reaches copyright infringement, since plagiarism isn’t really a thing as far as I know outside of academia.

It can be a thing but certainly a less serious thing than in academia. And what's presented here seems kind of scuzzy but probably isn't causing a lot of genuine harm.

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

#149

Post by matthewdgreen » Sun, Jan 21, 2024, 3:58 PM UTC

mijoharas wrote: post #143

matthewdgreen wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that is that it’s academic dishonesty. You’re turning in work for academic credit that you didn’t do. Transfer the self-plagiarism situation to another context, say you self-publish a book and re-use some material from another book you wrote. The fact of self-plagiarism may still exist but in this new context it’s not clear that the harm does (whereas copying another writer’s words is still clearly h…

> You’re turning in work for academic credit that you didn’t do 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?

If I turn in the same project for two different courses without flagging it, that's considered a violation of many academic (teaching) integrity codes. Similarly if you hire me to write a bespoke piece of software (with copyright assigned to you) and I re-use code I've delivered to other clients, that could be considered a damaging violation of our contract. You could refer to both of these cases as "self-plagiarism", but that's just a phrase: the actual harm caused by it is very specific to the context it occurs in. (And any punishments/opprobrium we assign to it should be similarly context-dependent.)

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

#150

Post by shmeeed » Sun, Jan 21, 2024, 4:00 PM UTC

mijoharas wrote: post #143

matthewdgreen wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that is that it’s academic dishonesty. You’re turning in work for academic credit that you didn’t do. Transfer the self-plagiarism situation to another context, say you self-publish a book and re-use some material from another book you wrote. The fact of self-plagiarism may still exist but in this new context it’s not clear that the harm does (whereas copying another writer’s words is still clearly h…

> You’re turning in work for academic credit that you didn’t do 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?

Let's phrase it differently: how many times do you think one should be allowed to turn in the same piece of work for additional academic credit?

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.