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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

#161

Post by hnarn »

Zandikar wrote: post #3

Normally I'd complain about linking to reddit, but there's a level of rigor here that I think is worthy of attention and discussion. I'm not a mod or anything, but I've seen blog posts here with less effort and citation than this hit the front page all the time. It's also about a month old according to the reddit timestamps, so the discussion isn't really ongoing there (Though of course this hitting HN could revive i…

Strictly speaking, linking to reddit isn’t necessary since it was archived around a month ago when it was published: http://archive.today/8gOZB

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

#162

Post by jackhalford »

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.

I didn’t know about him, I couldn’t find a wikipedia page for him but I found this: https://medium.com/@grantcardone/wikipedia-has-alternative-f...

Seems an awful lot like he’s trying to give himself a better image by editing his own wikipedia page! Smells conman

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

#163

Post by FireBeyond »

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.

There's a lot of reliance on people's basic inabilities to do math.

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.

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

#164

Post by FireBeyond »

sireat wrote: post #155
dmurray wrote: post #45

This is plagiarism by any academic or artistic standard, but as a commercial or legal matter, this level of copying doesn't come close to copyright infringement. And no one should want it to.

Indeed it shows that the author is a hack and would flunk out of an academic program but taking phrases from other authors is inevitable. 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 verba…

Two or three words - your examples - I can agree with.

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".

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

#165

Post by w0de0 »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #113
w0de0 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The modern equivalent of pulp fiction…” is pulp fiction. It isn’t some antique term connoting a dross sui generis (as that’s an oxymoron). Pablum is literacy’s unalterable, insuperable attendant.

If we're going to be pedantic: No. 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…

The medium doesn't matter: it's metonymy, pars pro toto. Pulp fiction remains pulp fiction despite literal pulp's retirement.

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

#166

Post by drited »

gumby wrote: post #159
drited wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you jump to the conclusion that they didn't read and internalise it after they copied it? That would be stupid and most on here are not stupid.

Then it’s not copying, is it? It’s using SO as a reference site, like any other reference, which is a perfectly sensible thing to do.

Ctrl C plus ctrl V is copying. Why assume that no verification, testing or checking came after that though?

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

#167

Post by gigatexal »

FireBeyond wrote: post #163
gigatexal wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a lot of reliance on people's basic inabilities to do math. 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…

Yeah … such courses should be illegal. Though they wouldn’t have to be made illegal if some people had some sense of shame or any moral compasses. Instead they prey on the uninformed and the gullible

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

#168

Post by gigatexal »

plagiarist wrote: post #132
ufocia wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that Section 8 housing has to meet some minimum standards. Are they really that minimal?

I don't have a fantastic recollection of the article I saw, but either the standards were or the enforcement was all but nonexistent.

I’ve a single condo rental in Portland. It’s the home my wife and I bought when we got married but rent out now cuz we’re in Germany. It’s rented at less than market because of many reasons none having to do with the state of the home — it’s the nicest place I’ve ever seen — but mostly my ignorance in being a landlord. That being said we try to be the best landlords we can. We fix things ASAP and try to make it like we’d like it if we were renting there.

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.

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

#169

Post by asadotzler »

sirspacey wrote: post #156
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!

Here’s an alternative POV that could be illuminating: 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 busine…

Because everyone you know does it doesn't mean it isn't scumbaggery.

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

#170

Post by asadotzler »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #10

I have no idea about publishing or book writing or anything, so please enlighten me, but how much of that is plagiarism and how much of that is what would be called "fair use" in other domains? 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…

There is no fair use carve out for stealing sentences from other books to put in your books to sell for a profit.

If he wasn't selling it, maybe.

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