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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2444 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 25, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Is community drama Friday Fun?

Rationalist-adjacent blogger Dinomight is accusing rationalist-adjacent Twitter poaster Cremieux of plaigerizing his post on aspertame into a popular Twitter thread. This has now escalated to wall-of-text denounciations, involving characters such as LessWrong admins and our old friend TracingWoodgrains.

I saw this unfold "live" and was mostly annoyed the meta-level "controversy" kept popping up in my For You. Some of the "best" Twitter threads are just a dozen tweets and screencaps of random books/papers tied together to make some coherent point that you can nonetheless swipe through in 5 minutes. Is such content plagiarism? I find the notion itself absurd; this isn't academic writing. If the content is primarily sourced from one particular author they should obviously be linked to (which he was), but even this is a selfish desire: if their writing is interesting, I'll want to follow them! I read Cremiuex's thread, and I skimmed the blog post he allegedly "plagiarized", and I prefer Cremieux's rendition, but it doesn't matter, because if Cremiuex hadn't tweeted it, I wouldn't have ever found the source blog, or author.

Trawling the web and packaging up good ideas other people have had into a format that is easily digestible (and visible!) is a public service in my book. Cremiuex's thread was around 1000 words, the first blog post linked was around 3000 (maybe 2700 if we exclude some of the tables/formatting?) Even if Cremiuex didn't verify any of the figures or include anything from the other sources he linked (I am not invested enough in this saga to check) this degree of editorializing is sufficient to evade the label of "low effort content theft" in my opinion.

"This guy on Twitter plagiarized 1/3 of my blogpost then linked to my site, woe is me." Come on.

I sort of agree with you. Fundamentally, this is inconsequential internet bullshit. I probably wouldn’t have made the post if I hadn’t seen Cremieux bragging about how much money he makes from these threads during the controversy.

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