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Philosopher. Fan of Ayn Rand, Karl Popper & Eli Goldratt.

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Harassment Summary

I (and other members of the Fallible Ideas community) have been subjected to severe harassment over the last 2.5 years, including illegal actions like DDoSing and threatening IRL harm. The harassment includes hundreds of comments from over 100 IP addresses and over 20 false identities (some maintained for months). It’s coming from the CritRat community led by David Deutsch (DD), who used to be my mentor and colleague. They’ve said they’re harassing because they see me as DD’s enemy. DD left our community (after years of participation) and formed a new community (CritRat) which is harassing his former community which he has a grudge against. When asked to request that his fans stop harassing, DD not only refused but lied to attack me, which encourages further harassment (in my understanding, that lie is illegal: libel and defamation).

I’m writing a series of posts to explain what’s going on, including what harassment happened, what the evidence is, and why I place blame on Deutsch. I’m doing this publicly because Deutsch and his associates have refused to discuss it privately. They’ve also refused to say they are opposed to harassment or that they want the culprits to stop. Many of them are publicly friendly with the biggest harasser, Andy B.

Start Here

David Deutsch

Andy B

Conceptual Explanations

Updates

David Deutsch Background Information & Context

Other

The harassment problem has not ended. Nothing has been fixed so far. DD and others have not made any attempts to improve the situation. Comments on this website remain disabled due to the harassment problem. It's an active issue that is affecting my life on a daily basis.

I hope people who read this will ask DD and other CritRats to answer for this, and will bring up the issue to DD and his community. Please don't harass them, but do raise the issue, ask challenging questions, and share critical opinions.

I've shared a lot of information, but I know I can never completely cover everything people might want to know. I'm open to questions about these issues from people who are making a genuine effort to understand and who already read some of the articles. You can email me at curi@curi.us or post at my forum. And if any CritRat is willing to discuss the harassment problem, please email me (CritRats unwilling to discuss the problem should not contact me).

Elliot Temple on March 24, 2021

Messages (20)

I updated this post with more links and organized them into categories.

curi at 11:35 AM on May 22, 2021 | #2 | reply | quote

added

> The harassment problem has not ended. Nothing has been fixed so far. DD and others have not made any attempts to improve the situation. Comments on this website remain disabled due to the harassment problem. *It's an active issue that is affecting my life on a daily basis.*

at the bottom of the post

curi at 4:04 PM on May 30, 2021 | #3 | reply | quote

added call to action:

> I hope people who read this will ask DD to answer for this, and will bring up the issue to him and to his community. Please don't harass them, but do raise the issue, ask challenging questions, and share critical opinions.

curi at 10:53 AM on June 4, 2021 | #4 | reply | quote

This new, anonymous twitter account appears to be a CritRat (most of his tweets are with CritRats) who is purposely trolling Elliot by using the name of Elliot's philosophy, Critical Fallibilism, for his account name, CFallibilism.

https://twitter.com/CFallibilism

Elliot has been using the term for a while, and the account was created in June 2021 after https://criticalfallibilism.com was launched.

Anonymous at 5:21 PM on June 14, 2021 | #5 | reply | quote

Added 2 more posts and reorganized the links a bit with the new "David Deutsch Background Information & Context" section.

curi at 12:22 PM on June 25, 2021 | #6 | reply | quote

added *What Happened with David Deutsch* and *Lulie Defended Me*

curi at 12:47 PM on June 28, 2021 | #7 | reply | quote

added more posts.

btw some ppl seem to think "ofc he's mad; you wrote a bunch of negative posts about him" but they aren't thinking about the timeline. harassment came first, then i tried to talk with DD privately, then later I wrote stuff, mostly after DD defamed me. the harassment problem has been ongoing for years and won't stop regardless of what i do or don't do, and I prefer to tell my story and give people the opportunity to understand and judge.

curi at 12:20 PM on July 3, 2021 | #8 | reply | quote

added more posts.

i'd still prefer deescalation. i wish any CritRats would get in touch with me about conflict resolution.

curi at 2:37 PM on July 4, 2021 | #9 | reply | quote

This is a good example of what promoting harassment looks like. The Lead Product Manager from Blizzard is in a similar role to DD. (Except that DD actually personally did harassment by lying to smear me – that both encourages harassment and *is* harassment.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCKDV6zIoNw

curi at 4:38 PM on July 5, 2021 | #10 | reply | quote

#10 i liked his criticism of the argument that it was just the guy's personal account (by bringing up that the status of his account on twitter is based on his professional role).

I'm also kind of amazed how unprofessional people feel comfortable acting in public forums.

Anonymous at 7:04 PM on July 5, 2021 | #11 | reply | quote

DD's misquotes are non-random and they got significantly worse in BoI than FoR. Therefore it's not just being bad at typing.

It could involve a bias like he double checks quotes when they sound bad to him, but doesn't double check when they sound good to him. And also he's more likely to typo stuff in ways that sound good to him. And also he thinks certain types of edits, like changing punctuation, are OK.

There are so many wording changes it's hard to think they're all typos he missed due to bias in favor of changes that sound good to him. It seems like maybe he decided changing wordings in quotes is OK. But i don't know.

It seems like he had some kinda attitude change b/c in FoR a bunch of quotes have sources *with page numbers*, whereas IIRC he never gives page numbers in BoI.

DD ought to provide an explanation, himself, of what he thinks happened with all the misquotes, and what his current attitude is (e.g. does he think he screwed up and will they all be fixed in a second edition? or would he actually defend some of it?).

curi at 11:42 AM on July 6, 2021 | #12 | reply | quote

Added new last para to post saying ppl can ask me questions since i shared lots of info but ofc it's incomplete. And if any CritRat is actually willing to discuss the problem, plz email me. (So far none of them have been willing to discuss it, which is really bad.)

curi at 11:49 AM on July 6, 2021 | #13 | reply | quote

Took down BoI website in protest and added link for that.

Made forum megathread for discussing this stuff:

https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/david-deutsch-megathread/221

curi at 12:52 PM on July 8, 2021 | #14 | reply | quote

Another CritRat is blatantly plagiarizing Elliot:

https://barelymorethanatweet.com/2021/07/09/the-binary-logic-of-fallibility/

Guy is tweeting about how he's taking feedback from Andy B on the post.

See e.g. Elliot's:

https://www.yesornophilosophy.com

Anonymous at 11:14 AM on July 10, 2021 | #15 | reply | quote

#15 His Andy B association:

https://twitter.com/reason_wit_me/status/1413869138154508289

[From] Lucas Smalldon

@reason_wit_me

Thank you

@paligap17

and

@SeekingApatheia

for highlighting the confusing usage of "infinitely" in my original post. Update for clarity, below:

Original: "a fallible entity is infinitely error prone"

Updated: "a fallible entity is limitlessly error prone"

https://barelymorethanatweet.com/2021/07/09/the-binary-logic-of-fallibility/

Anonymous at 11:16 AM on July 10, 2021 | #16 | reply | quote

made video and added to post

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ByzhjPWl3k

curi at 1:41 AM on July 11, 2021 | #17 | reply | quote

https://fourstrands.org is currently linking to Andy's BoI subreddit on the sidebar.

Anonymous at 2:25 PM on July 11, 2021 | #18 | reply | quote

#18 fourstrands.org is by Bruce, one of the harassment leaders who is buddies with Andy B. DD himself recently chose to be hosted by Bruce and help promote Bruce:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_Cs5iNazB8

Anonymous at 2:31 PM on July 11, 2021 | #19 | reply | quote

#16 The plagiarist Lucas Smalldon (@reason_wit_me) is tweeting with Andy B a lot more:

Anonymous at 2:29 PM on July 12, 2021 | #20 | reply | quote

Added Reactions to Abuse Victims (from my forum) to the list of posts.

curi at 1:30 PM on January 1, 2022 | #21 | reply | quote

Want to discuss this? Join my forum.

(Due to multi-year, sustained harassment from David Deutsch and his fans, commenting here requires an account. Accounts are not publicly available. Discussion info.)