Dennis Hackethal created a website, Veritula, based on my philosophy, Critical Fallibilism (CF). He explains and uses CF ideas but, instead of crediting the ideas to me or CF, he credits them (without evidence or citations) to Karl Popper's philosophy, Critical Rationalism. This is quintuply problematic:

• He's using my ideas without giving me credit.
• He's implicitly accusing me of plagiarizing Karl Popper.
• He's spreading misinformation about what Popper's views were.
• The misinformation attributes ideas to Popper that many people see as weird, bad or false.
• He's implying that David Deutsch and other Popperians misunderstood Popper, without giving evidence, quotations or citations.

Extensively using CF ideas and misattributing them to Popper is worse than plagiarism. In addition to using my ideas without crediting me (the same harm plagiarism does), he's also implying that I'm a plagiarist, implying that other people misunderstood Popper, confusing people about Popper's views, and falsely attributing unpopular ideas to Popper (extra harms that merely plagiarizing me wouldn't cause).

Creating CF took over 10,000 hours of largely unpaid effort while I worked other jobs, outside of philosophy, to support myself. I share CF ideas hoping people will learn from them or critique them. While CF isn't very popular, if someone actually likes my ideas enough to study them, I don't want to be plagiarized or misattributed.

I wrote an article using Popper quotes to show that CF's distinctive ideas aren't plagiarized from Popper. Popper actually contradicted them.

This article presents evidence that Hackethal is using CF ideas, without crediting CF, by comparing Hackethal quotes with my essays. Previously, Hackethal hired me to help teach him about philosophy, so I also provide quotes from teaching calls and documents.

Some examples I provide are important on their own. Others wouldn't be a big deal alone but contribute to a broader pattern.

Context

In 2020, I accused Hackethal's book of plagiarizing me. Years later, he made long, error-filled blog posts and videos attacking me. He's threatened me with a lawsuit and offered to give other people money to help them sue me. He falsely tells people I'm a cult leader. He's published photos of me while calling me dangerous. He's hired private investigators. He spends a lot of time reading my writing and he won't leave me alone. I created a timeline.

The strangest part of the timeline is a four year gap between events. I thought Hackethal had moved on, but then he started attacking me much more vigorously than before over old issues.

Although Hackethal has been trying to ruin my reputation, I only responded minimally seven months ago. I've let many lies go unchallenged. I didn't understand why he started doing it four years later, and I didn't want to engage. Now I see a potential motive: it benefits him if it looks like my criticisms of Veritula are just revenge for his attacks on me. It benefits him to discredit me so that people don't listen to me. If people have a dismissive attitude to me, then he can get away with using my ideas without crediting me. Creating a big, messy fight between us can distract people from his plagiarizing me in A Window on Intelligence: The Philosophy of People, Software, and Evolution – and Its Implications and doing even worse with Veritula. Please remember that I said nothing for the last seven months; I have a thick skin and this post is an evidence-based attempt to set the record straight.

Technically Not Plagiarism?

Plagiarism means taking credit for other people's ideas. Hackethal is using my ideas but crediting them to a third party, which may be a way to avoid additional plagiarism accusations on a technicality.

The 1913 version of Webster's Dictionary defines "plagiarize" as "To steal or purloin from the writings of another; to appropriate without due acknowledgement (the ideas or expressions of another)." Using CF ideas without crediting CF qualifies under this definition of plagiarism. But other dictionaries require that the plagiarist takes credit themself.

Sometime after I accused his book of plagiarism, Hackethal "avoided Temple’s blog for years". He says he was trying to prevent accidental plagiarism. It's also a good way to prevent intentional plagiarism or misattributing my ideas to Popper. But then he decided to start reading my essays again (he doesn't say why). Then he started attacking me and made Veritula.

Veritula Uses CF Ideas without Crediting CF

Blockquotes are from Hackethal's How Does Veritula Work? (mirror). Italics are in the originals; bold is added for this article unless indicated.

Veritula is a programmatic implementation of Popper’s epistemology. [bold in original]

It [isn't Popper's epistemology](#). As we'll see below, it implements CF ideas like decisive criticism, binary evaluations of ideas, and debate trees.

Because decision-making is a special case of, ie follows the same logic as, truth-seeking, such trees can be used for decision-making, too.

The idea of using epistemology for decision-making is found on the Critical Fallibilism homepage and in my Yes or No Philosophy, Introduction to Critical Fallibilism, Multi-Factor Decision Making Math, Introduction to Theory of Constraints ("This is related to decision making in general."), Critical Fallibilism and Theory of Constraints in One Analyzed Paragraph and Academic Literature for Multi-Factor Decision Making.

If an idea, as written, has no pending criticisms, it’s rational to adopt it and irrational to reject it. What reason could you have to reject it? If it has no pending criticisms, then either 1) no reasons to reject it (ie, criticisms) have been suggested or 2) all suggested reasons have been addressed already.

If an idea, as written, does have pending criticisms, it’s irrational to adopt it and rational to reject it – by reference to those criticisms. What reason could you have to ignore the pending criticisms and adopt it anyway?

Now, [the idea] is considered unproblematic again, since [its criticism, which has now been counter-criticized] is problematic and thus can’t be a decisive criticism anymore.

‘Has pending criticisms’ vs ‘has no pending criticisms’

Veritula therefore also enables you to hold irrational people accountable: if an idea has pending criticisms, the rational approach is to either abandon it or to save it by revising it or addressing all pending criticisms.

Don’t worry about which ideas are better than others. [...] Only go by whether an idea has outstanding criticisms. [source, mirror]

Introduction to Critical Fallibilism: "CF says all ideas should be evaluated in a digital (specifically binary) way as non-refuted (has no known errors) or refuted (has a known error)."

Critical Fallibilism homepage: "Critical Fallibilism (CF) is a rational philosophy which explains how to evaluate ideas using decisive, critical arguments and accept only ideas with zero refutations (no known errors)."

Compared to some recent CF essays, Hackethal slightly rewords some points and uses synonyms ("outstanding criticism", "pending criticism", "unproblematic"). I've used those terms too, e.g. "outstanding criticism" is in Rationally Resolving Conflicts of Ideas, Judging Experts by the Objective State of the Debate, Paths Forward or Prediction Markets? and my discussion with Aubrey de Grey.

More important than the wording is the concept. Hackethal is talking about evaluating ideas in a binary way as non-refuted or refuted. He's basing refutation on even one non-refuted criticism. This is one of CF's main ideas which will be discussed more throughout this article. It's still the same idea even if you call non-refuted criticisms "pending" and call refuted ideas "problematic".

Hackethal also used CF's exact term "decisive criticism". He may be so immersed in studying CF that he doesn't realize how unique this term is to CF. Google searching "decisive criticism", the top two results, AI summary and sidebar (AI sources) are all CF material:

Would I give each idea a slider where people can say how ‘good’ the idea is? What values would I give the slider? Would the worst value be -1,000 and the best +1,000? How would users know to assign 500 vs 550? Would a ‘weak’ criticism get a score of 500 and a ‘strong’ one 1,000? What if tomorrow somebody finds an even ‘stronger’ one, does that mean I’d need to extend the slider beyond 1,000? Do I include arbitrary decimal/real numbers? Is an idea’s score reduced by the sum of its criticisms’ scores? If an idea has score 0, what does that mean – undecided? If it has -500, does that mean I should reject it ‘more strongly’ than if it had only -100? And so on.

Criticizing score systems is a main point of CF. It's found in my Introduction to Critical Fallibilism, Yes or No Philosophy and Score Systems, Yes or No Philosophy (paid educational product), Yes or No Philosophy Summary (which has links to many other relevant essays), and Multi-Factor Decision Making Math.

In my understanding, Popper’s epistemology [...] does not assign strengths or weaknesses.

It's a core CF idea, repeated in many essays, to not evaluate how strong or weak ideas are. E.g. Introduction to Critical Fallibilism: "CF’s most important original idea is the rejection of strong and weak arguments." This is what my Yes or No Philosophy material is about.

It's [false that Popper avoided strength and weakness](#) like CF does.

If [the proponent of an idea] fails to address even a single criticism, the idea remains problematic and should be rejected.

If you can think of neither a revision of [an idea] nor counter-criticism to [a criticism of that idea], your only option is to accept that [that idea] has been (tentatively) defeated. You should therefore abandon it, which means: stop acting in accordance with it, considering it to be unproblematic, etc.

And (from Hackethal's Twitter):

4. Re decisiveness of criticism [bold in original]

[...] any criticism, no matter how small, is decisive if left unaddressed.

I've covered the issue of not discounting "small" criticism repeatedly, e.g. in Ignoring “Small” Errors and “Small” Errors, Frauds and Violences.

The main idea in these quotes is that criticism is decisive: it only takes one (non-refuted) criticism to refute an idea so that we should reject it. This is a core CF idea repeated in many essays, e.g. Introduction to Critical Fallibilism: "Criticisms should be decisive, rather than merely saying an idea isn't great. That means you don't accept both the criticism and its target because they’re incompatible".

I also discussed this with Hackethal on a call. And there was also a section titled "All Criticisms Are Decisive" in a confidential CF document I sent Hackethal in 2019. I'll provide details in the "Teaching Calls" and " Confidential Documents" sections below.

Any criticism no matter how small destroys its target decisively if unaddressed. Whether or not its decisive is determined by whether or not there are any counter-criticisms, not by assigning some strength score (a remnant of justificationism). A criticism is decisive as long as there are no counter-criticisms. In the absence of counter-criticisms, how could it not be decisive? [source, mirror]

This uses my decisive criticism idea again and my point about "small" criticism. It also refers to the "target" of a criticism. I used that "target" language in Introduction to Critical Fallibilism.

I said that scores are a form of justificationism in Kialo and Indecisive Arguments and other essays.

Also, decisiveness and refutation status are different things. A criticism is decisive if it contradicts its target so they can't both be correct. A criticism refutes a target if it's both decisive and non-refuted. A successful counter-criticism makes a criticism refuted, not indecisive. While Hackethal is recognizably copying CF, he's also introducing some errors.

That’s a fair concern if you’re talking about duplicate criticisms, which public intellectuals do field. The solution here is to publicly write a counter-criticism once and then refer to it again later.

I called this a "library of criticism" in Yes or No Philosophy. Hackethal calls Veritula a "dictionary for ideas". The "dictionary" keeps track of ideas and lets people refer to them again later so that they don't "have same [sic] discussions over and over again". My "library of criticism" also let people "refer" to "counter-criticisms [and regular criticisms] ... again later".

I've also talked about this repeatedly in my many essays ("Thinkers should write reusable answers to arguments") on Paths Forward ("You can reuse answers that were already written down in the past, by you or others." and "Most bad ideas get pretty repetitive. People will keep bringing up the same points over and over. That’s fine. They don’t know better. You can deal with it by answering the issue once, then after that refer people to your existing answer.").

If you’re talking about new criticisms, however, I think you should address and not dismiss them.

This is also in my original Paths Forward essay: "If there are good ideas already written down (or in any format which allows reuse), then you can save lots of time. If there aren’t (reusable) answers yet, then the issues people are raising are worth taking some time to answer properly."

My Paths Forward Summary makes this point too: "In general, either an issue has been answered before or else it’s worth the time for someone to answer it."

Discussion trees

This is a distinctive CF term. Maybe Hackethal has studied CF so much that it seems like a normal term to him, not a recognizable part of CF. On Google, searching for discussion trees, the only relevant result is my essay Discussion Trees; the rest of the results are for decision trees. And searching discussion tree, Google automatically gives results for decision tree.

Since there can be many criticisms (which are also just ideas) and deeply nested counter-criticisms, the result is a tree structure. For example, as a discussion progresses, one of its trees might look like this:

Comments that aren’t criticisms – eg follow-up questions or otherwise neutral comments – are considered ancillary ideas. Unlike criticisms, ancillary ideas do not invert their respective parents’ statuses. They are neutral.

The idea of comment or question nodes is in my Discussion Trees essay: "A node can be e.g. a statement, claim, argument, explanation, question or comment."

The idea that the comments are neutral, rather than refuting their parent, is also in my essay: "Positive arguments, inconclusive negative arguments and explanatory comments are never decisive arguments." and "Decisive arguments shouldn’t be ignored. They’re mandatory to address. Other nodes don’t necessarily have to be dealt with."

The idea that criticisms refute their parent node is also in my essay: "Decisive (also called conclusive or essential) arguments argue that the parent is incorrect." and "If a decisive argument node or group is resolved as correct, then its parent must be resolved as incorrect."

My essay emphasizes distinguishing between neutral and non-neutral nodes: "Figuring out which arguments are decisive or not, and focusing on making and resolving decisive arguments, is the most effective way to reach a conclusion." I emphasize this distinction so much that I suggest deleting all indecisive nodes as an option: "You can convert a discussion tree to a strict debate tree by deleting all indecisive parts. More informally, you can include indecisive arguments and commentary in a debate tree as long as the decisive and indecisive parts are clearly labelled".

Again, criticisms are also just ideas, so the same is true for criticisms.

This is in my essay Artificial General Intelligence Speculations. I also told it to Hackethal on a call. I'll provide a quote from the call in the "Teaching Calls" section below.

Veritula implements a recursive epistemology. For a criticism to be pending, it can’t have any pending criticisms itself, and so on, in a deeply nested fashion.

That's how CF says criticism works. I described that system in my Discussion Trees essay. I've also talked about recursion in epistemology repeatedly, e.g. in Resolving Conflicting Ideas. I also talked with Hackethal about recursion on a call when he paid me to teach him about philosophy.

[Veritula] does not tell you what to think – it teaches you how to think.

Introduction to Critical Fallibilism: "Overall, CF helps explain how reasoning works. It provides tools and methods you can use to think better. It’s more about how to think than what to think. It enables you to think better rather than telling you what beliefs to have." While this isn't an original idea, it adds to the pattern where Hackethal keeps saying the same things as me.

Visions of Grandeur

Tom Nassis, who presumably didn't know Veritula misattributes CF's ideas to Popper, said: "Veritula deserves to scale to the size of Wikipedia." Hackethal replied (mirror):

I agree that Veritula deserves to scale to something huge.

Hackethal believes the CF ideas he's using, without crediting me, are extremely good, important and valuable. He's a fan of CF who has been trying to persuade people that CF is right while David Deutsch and Popper are wrong. But he calls it Popper being right and Deutsch wrong, and he pretends that CF doesn't exist. Actually, Popper's ideas were different than CF.

Quoting Benjamin Davies, Hackethal wrote (mirror):

I would also consider financially supporting someone who gave me good reason to think they had the vision, the motivation, and the technical skill to create it.

I’m interested. Let’s continue this discussion privately for now. Email me:

Hackethal is using my ideas to pretend to have a vision. He's trying to secure financial support for himself using my vision and my ability to develop good new philosophical ideas.

On his blog, Hackethal wrote:

somebody [in person at a Popperian event] suggested I start a movement called ‘Hackethalism’. I rather like that name

Some people apparently now believe he has great, original philosophical ideas. Which ideas are "Hackethalism"? If they're my ideas, we have a problem. If they're other ideas, which ones and where are they published? I've never seen Hackethal write significant, original ideas.

I fear that he wants to get rich and famous by taking my ideas and naming them after himself. It's flattering if he likes my ideas so much that he wants to put his name on them, but that's not OK. Renaming Critical Fallibilism to "Hackethalism" would go beyond normal plagiarism.

Naming it "Hackethalism" also contradicts his other strategy of attributing the ideas to Popper (which I refuted). Logically, CF's ideas can't, at the same time, be Popper's ideas that he wrote decades ago and also be new ideas called "Hackethalism".

Other Copying

Hackethal made an anti-misquotes website. Opposing misquotes was an ongoing campaign of mine for many years before Hackethal started writing similarly about it. When participating in my community, Hackethal was exposed to my ideas about quotations in multiple emails and chats before he started studying my work from a distance. On 2019-02-11, as a forum moderator, I brought up an issue with Hackethal's quoting to him because, like most newer members, he violated the group policies.

Hackethal also copies me in small ways, e.g. coloring italics red. For many years I've changed the color of italics in my articles so they visually stand out more. This can't be plagiarism since Hackethal doesn't claim credit for inventing the idea. I don't think colored italics are my original idea, but I think Hackethal probably copied the idea from me.

Hackethal probably also copied the way I write a lot in my own blog comments section following up on my own posts. It's an unusual thing to do. Copying it isn't plagiarism since Hackethal doesn't take credit for the idea. And I'm not claiming it's my original idea. But I do think he got it from me. It adds to the pattern of him studying and copying me.

Hackethal wrote on Veritula, "We can criticize theories for being arbitrary (which is another word for ‘easy to vary’)." Before The Beginning of Infinity was published, I argued to David Deutsch that "easy to vary" was the same issue as being arbitrary. I've made this point publicly too.

In Hackethal's Where's David Deutsch's Accountability? (mirror), we find more evidence that he's studied my writing. It seems inspired by me. It uses a lot of my approach to criticism and my style. It's his best post that I've seen. It has some good criticism of Deutsch. It isn't plagiarism and giving credit for general inspiration isn't mandatory (though it's often good, to and people often do it). While the post uses some of my methods, it doesn't explain those methods or otherwise try to take credit for inventing them. The substantive points critiquing Deutsch are adequately original to avoid plagiarism even though they're similar to points I've made. The use of Atlas Shrugged quotes is similar to my writing – I've used similar quotes from the same book for similar purposes before – but it doesn't cross a line by itself. It adds to the overall pattern and helps show how much Hackethal has learned from me. I've had multiple people comment about how some of his writing sounds extremely similar to mine (for both style and content).

I also have two examples from the comment section on that post, both written by Hackethal:

why hasn’t he [Deutsch] made any meaningful progress in the past ~15 years, possibly 25?

The 15 year end of the range comes from a simple analysis: Deutsch's book The Beginning of Infinity (BoI) involved progress but he hasn't done anything major since then. While I've said this, someone else could realistically come up with the same idea themselves.

But what's going on with the 25 year end of the range? That's saying Deutsch stopped making progress long before publishing BoI. How would Hackethal know that? It's an unusual thing to claim without insider knowledge. I knew Deutsch personally during that time period and helped with BoI (Hackethal did not). I've publicly commented about Deutsch knowing most of the ideas in BoI long before publication and not being very productive in the decade before publication. Am I Hackethal's source for this? I don't know of another public source for this claim besides me.

And think of how much more progress Deutsch could make if he was more methodical and did fewer, easier things!

This isn't plagiarism. It doesn't take credit for my ideas. It doesn't even explain the idea it's talking about. Someone else saying it might mean something different. But I interpret it as Hackethal talking about one of my ideas that I've discussed many times, but without citing me. I think it shows how immersed in my work he is that he writes short, vague references to my ideas, without giving links, and he seems to expect people to understand what he's saying.

Hackethal spent months in my community, hired me to teach him, and wrote around 50,000 words about me (including many quotes of obscure stuff I said, not just in essays but even in old chatroom archives). He's known about my work for seven years and seems to have studied it extensively. I don't think him writing about the same ideas as me, including my original ideas, is a coincidence.

Teaching Calls

In 2018 and 2019, Hackethal hired me to help him learn philosophy. He did not hire me to ghost write for him. I've never sold ghost writing services. He didn't ask for, nor receive, permission to use any of my ideas without crediting me.

During our 2019-01-27 call, we discussed Critical Fallibilism (specifically some of the core ideas that I also call "Yes or No Philosophy"). "David" refers to David Deutsch. This is edited slightly to delete some "umm", "like", ungrammatical repetition, and minor interjections like "yeah". Quotes:

Hackethal knows, and said on a call with me, that evaluating ideas in a binary way is my solution.

Hackethal knows that I developed new ideas like Yes or No Philosophy to address shortcomings in Popper's and Deutsch's philosophies.

During our 2018-12-24 call, I told Hackethal that criticisms are just ideas:

Confidential Documents

As part of the paid teaching, I sent Hackethal a 59 page CONFIDENTIAL DRAFT Critical Fallibilism Website.pdf. Perhaps I was too naive and trusting, although I already had already published other writing about most of the ideas in the document. I challenged critical preferences in 2010, then wrote other essays, then released my Yes or No Philosophy product in 2017. I taught my Critical Fallibilism course in 2020 and launched the Critical Fallibilism website in 2021. Hackethal launched Veritula in 2024.

Here are quotes from CONFIDENTIAL DRAFT Critical Fallibilism Website.pdf (I fixed the link because the website moved):

I also sent Hackethal Call 2 Notes.pdf (6 pages) which included this (I fixed the link):

Resources

Read and watch these to learn more about plagiarism:

Articles:

• Plagiarism Struggles (by social sciences professor Brian Martin)
• Brian Martin's publications on plagiarism and scientific fraud
• Avoiding plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and other questionable writing practices: A guide to ethical writing (by psychology professor Miguel Roig)
• Plagiarism in Publications: All about Being Fair! (by medical professor Neeraj Lalwani)

Videos:

• Plagiarism and You(Tube)  (4 hours about online creator plagiarism)
• What is Plagiarism and How Do I Avoid it? (8 minute introduction)
• What Is Plagiarism? (3 minute introduction)
• Avoiding Plagiarism: Writing With Integrity (35 minutes aimed at university students)
• Plagiarism Examples from Former Students (25 minutes)

Conclusion

Hackethal uses Critical Fallibilism ideas extensively without crediting me, particularly for Veritula. This is similar to how I previously accused his book of plagiarizing me.

Falsely saying CF ideas come from Popper (with no evidence, quotes or citations) does harm. Like plagiarism, it uses my ideas without crediting me. It also implies I plagiarized Popper. It confuses people about what Popper's views were and attributes unpopular ideas to him. It implies that Popper experts like David Deutsch and David Miller misunderstood Popper (Hackethal is implying that their books are bad.) It's worse than plagiarism.

If Hackethal changed his mind about what he said during our call ("so evaluating ideas in a binary way, that's your solution", "So Yes or No Philosophy is your philosophy that addresses shortcomings in both Popper's and Deutsch's philosophies?"), he should have explained that and argued his case using Popper citations. Attributing those ideas to Popper without evidence is unfair to me, Popper, and other Popperians.

It took me over twenty years to develop CF to what it is today. Hackethal is misappropriating my life's work as a shortcut. Instead of developing original ideas, which is hard, he found someone who isn't famous (me) and is using their ideas without crediting them.

Dennis Hackethal created a website, Veritula, based on my Critical Fallibilism (CF) philosophy, where he writes frequently about CF ideas. But he didn't credit me for my ideas. Instead, he falsely attributed my ideas to Karl Popper, which denies me credit, implies that I plagiarized Popper, confuses people about Popper's views and implies that other people, like Popperian author David Deutsch, misunderstood Popper. He's also written long attacks on me and made legal threats. Here's a timeline:

In 2018, Hackethal came to me as a student. He paid for me to personally teach him on calls. He joined my email discussion forum and chatroom. He tried to learn philosophy from me.

In 2019, Hackethal formed a lasting grudge against me. I believe it's because he saw himself as a very smart expert, and he wanted to be my friend and colleague, but he felt rejected by me. I removed him from a non-public chatroom because he was getting upset and I thought he would do better with slower-paced email discussions.

In 2020, Hackethal self-published a book, A Window on Intelligence: The Philosophy of People, Software, and Evolution – and Its Implications. I wrote a post saying it plagiarized me and David Deutsch. He hadn't disclosed that he was writing a book. I saw him as a beginner who was many years away from being able to write a good book, and the book didn't change my mind about that.

In 2020, regarding a sentence I said was plagiarized, Hackethal said "So yes, it looks like you did tell me that, in which case the right thing to do is to credit you.", then he refused to discuss more. Although I sent him a pre-publication draft of my blog post about plagiarism, he offered no objection to what I wrote, didn't deny plagiarizing me, and implied that he didn't care what I said and could get away with ignoring my complaints. Previously he'd told me, about himself, "It’s really hard to offend me." He also said he valued free speech and strong criticism.

In 2020, someone DDoSed my website shortly after I sent Hackethal the draft accusing him of plagiarism, before I published it.

In 2024, he stopped ignoring me. From his lawyers, I found out that he was really upset. He claimed I had wronged him. His lawyers tried to bully me into signing a 20-term contract requiring me to take down my plagiarism accusation and never say anything negative about Hackethal. They said his book didn't contain plagiarism but were unwilling to discuss it. They asked me to a sign a contract that would prohibit me from pointing it out if he ever plagiarized me in the future, but which had no terms to discourage plagiarism. I declined but offered to negotiate. He wouldn't negotiate or participate in mediation, but also didn't follow through on his threat to sue me; he and his lawyers just went silent.

In 2024, Hackethal created a website, Veritula, which I believe uses my Critical Fallibilism ideas without crediting me.

In 2025, eight months after having his lawyers ghost me, he publicly escalated, even though I hadn't written about him for years. He published long blog posts attacking and lying about me (over 35,000 words).

I didn't respond immediately to the blog attacks and Hackethal complained about the lack of response and kept attacking me. Then I responded and he complained that I had responded and kept attacking me. Then I didn't respond for seven months and he kept attacking me.

After rereading old chat logs where I said I don't share my photo online because I want privacy, he published photos of me (which he did not get from me) while calling me dangerous.

I didn't notice Veritula existed until after Hackethal attacked me in 2025. In recent weeks, Hackethal has written a lot more on Veritula without crediting me.

After my 2020 blog post about Hackethal's book, I didn't write a blog post about him again until early 2025 when I responded to his posts attacking me. Then, although he was trying to ruin my reputation, I tried to go back to ignoring him.

I'm responding now because I believe Veritula is extensively using my best ideas without crediting me. Also, showing restraint and being silent about many provocations failed to deescalate the situation.

I was surprised when Hackethal started attacking me after a four year break. Now I can see a potential purpose to the attacks: discrediting me makes it easier to use my ideas without attributing them to me. Turning people against me can prevent them from listening to my concerns. Slinging mud can muddy the waters and distract from intellectual issues like attribution.

Hackethal says I'm a cult leader, but he won't stay away from my philosophy ideas, which he seems to think are the world's best. He hired me to help him learn philosophy. I believe he's using CF ideas (without crediting CF) for Veritula in preference to Popper's or Deutsch's ideas. He had a grudge against me before my first public complaint about him, and he still has it six years later; he needs to get over it, leave me alone, stop studying my philosophy articles, and cite his sources.

More posts related to Hackethal:

• Dennis Hackethal's Website, Veritula, Is Worse than Plagiarism
• Dennis Hackethal Falsely Implied That Critical Fallibilism Plagiarizes Karl Popper
• Dennis Hackethal, Plagiarist
• Dennis Hackethal Threatened to Sue Me; Now He's Blogging about Me
• Responses to Dennis Hackethal about Crime and Threats
• Andy B Harassment and Four Strands
• Review of My Quotation Accuracy

This article is inspired by Brian Moon's article The Poverty of Memes (2025) (read on Medium or as a PDF). Moon's article criticizes David Deutsch's meme theory (found in The Beginning of Infinity (BoI) (2011)) for being refuted in advance by Karl Popper's critiques in The Poverty of Historicism (PoH) (1944).

Due to Moon's article, I've reviewed PoH and compared it with BoI.

Moon has also criticized Deutsch's meme theory for closely following ideas from Jewish mysticism. That could make Deutsch's claims more mystical or religious and less secular, scientific or rational than Deutsch claimed. It could also make them less original than he presented them as. I don't know enough about Jewish mysticism to evaluate that critique. I thought it was worth mentioning because the same person, Moon, had some good points regarding PoH.

Deutsch's Historicism

BoI 15 (numbers indicate BoI chapters or PoH sections):

I shall call such societies ‘static societies’: societies changing on a timescale unnoticed by the inhabitants.

BoI 1:

But, on the timescale of individual lifetimes, they [our ancestors for most of human history] almost never made any [progress].

BoI 1:

Improvements happened so rarely that most people never experienced one. Ideas were static for long periods.

PoH 33 (my bold):

Contrasting their ‘dynamic’ thinking with the ‘static’ thinking of all previous generations, they [modern historicists] believe that their own advance has been made possible by the fact that we are now ‘living in a revolution’ which has so much accelerated the speed of our development that social change can be now directly experienced within a single lifetime.

Deutsch is the type of historicist that Popper criticized. Deutsch talked repeatedly, without citing Popper, about progress being rare enough that it was rare on the timescale of one lifetime, so most people didn't directly experience progress.

The revolution Deutsch thinks we're living in is the "scientific revolution" (BoI introduction, BoI 1) which Deutsch says is "part of a wider intellectual revolution, the Enlightenment" (BoI 1). Deutsch emphasizes that he considers the Enlightenment a revolution: "Thus the Enlightenment was a revolution in how people sought knowledge" (BoI 1).

As to static and dynamic thinking, BoI 15 has "Static Societies" and "Dynamic Societies" as section headings. They're major themes. Deutsch thinks most humans were static thinkers, while he and some other recent thinkers are dynamic thinkers who live in a period of highly accelerated progress due to a revolution.

Deutsch presented these ideas as original. He didn't tell his readers that Popper wrote about static and dynamic societies and about experiencing progress within a single lifetime. I thought those were Deutsch's original ideas and was surprised to find them in PoH (where Popper presents many of the ideas, including the static and dynamic terminology, as restating what historicists have said, not as original). PoH also connects evolution to societies, just as Deutsch's meme theory does.

PoH 22:

Two characteristic representatives of this alliance [between historicism and utopianism] are Plato and Marx. Plato, a pessimist, believed that all change—or almost all change—is decay; this was his law of historical development. Accordingly, his Utopian blueprint aims at arresting all change;[24] it is what would nowadays be called ‘static’. Marx, on the other hand, was an optimist, and possibly (like Spencer) an adherent of a historicist moral theory. Accordingly, his Utopian blueprint was one of a developing or ‘dynamic’ rather than of an arrested society.

Here we see again that Deutsch's static and dynamic society concepts and terminology are unoriginal.

PoH 27:

Professor Toynbee ... expresses ... ‘Civilizations are not static conditions of society but dynamic movements of an evolutionary kind. They not only cannot stand still, but they cannot reverse their direction without breaking down their own law of motion … ‘.[11] Here we have nearly all the elements usually found in statements of position (b) [being able to discern tendencies or directions in evolutionary processes]: the idea of social dynamics (as opposed to social statics); of evolutionary movements of societies (under the influence of social forces);

Here we see talk of static and dynamic conditions of societies and evolution of societies. Keep in mind that whenever Deutsch talks about memes, he's talking about evolution.

It's interesting Deutsch used ideas from PoH that Popper was criticizing, not agreeing with. Deutsch didn't explain why he disagrees with Popper or provide a critique of PoH, though.

Laws of History

PoH Introduction:

This approach which I propose first to explain, and only later to criticize, I call ‘historicism’. It is often encountered in discussions on the method of the social sciences; and it is often used without critical reflection, or even taken for granted. What I mean by ‘historicism’ will be explained at length in this study. It will be enough if I say here that I mean by ‘historicism’ an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the ‘rhythms’ or the ‘patterns’, the ‘laws’ or the ‘trends’ that underlie the evolution of history. Since I am convinced that such historicist doctrines of method are at bottom responsible for the unsatisfactory state of the theoretical social sciences (other than economic theory), my presentation of these doctrines is certainly not unbiased. But I have tried hard to make a case in favour of historicism in order to give point to my subsequent criticism.

In basic summary, the main point of PoH is to criticize the idea of laws of history, which would be like laws of physics which history has to follow. Laws of history would control issues like how societies develop and change or stay the same.

BoI 15:

For a society to be static, something else must be happening as well. One thing my story did not take into account is that static societies have customs and laws – taboos – that prevent their memes from changing. They enforce the enactment of the existing memes, forbid the enactment of variants, and suppress criticism of the status quo.

Deutsch says all static societies enforce taboos, customs and laws, make members enact memes without variation, and suppress criticism of the status quo. And Deutsch claims there are only two possible types of society, with static societies being the much more common type in human history, so he's making claims here about most human societies that have ever existed. This is talking about laws of history that most societies have to follow. It's historicism.

BoI 15 (my bold):

That is why the enforcement of the status quo is only ever a secondary method of preventing change – a mopping-up operation. The primary method is always – and can only be – to disable the source of new ideas, namely human creativity. So static societies always have traditions of bringing up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties. That ensures that most of the new ideas that would have been capable of changing the society are never thought of in the first place.

This is another law of history: a grand speculation about what most humans have done throughout history along with claims that history couldn't happen any other way. Deutsch says "always" and "can only be" – he emphasizes that he's saying no alternatives are possible.

Laws of physics say what must happen with no alternative (gravity isn't optional). "Law" is defined as "a statement of fact, deduced from observation, to the effect that a particular natural or scientific phenomenon always occurs if certain conditions are present" (New Oxford American Dictionary). Deutsch is saying the same things always occur in human societies if certain conditions are present (the conditions are a static society, not a dynamic society). This is an example of what Popper criticized as historicism.

Context

I helped Deutsch with BoI by discussing the issues with him for years and writing around 200 pages of comments on drafts. I read PoH many years ago. I failed to recognize how much PoH criticized BoI's ideas. I also failed to recognize that some of Deutsch's ideas and terminology, which I thought were original, were actually in PoH (though often being criticized by Popper, not advocated). Deutsch had completed an article on meme theory in 1994, years before I met him, which wasn't published, but I have it and it makes similar claims to BoI. I played no role in Deutsch originally coming up with his meme theory.

For more details, see Moon's article, read PoH to see Popper's criticisms of historicism, and/or read BoI (especially 1, 15, 16, 17) to see what Deutsch said. PoH is 149 pages long, so it's a short, quick read compared to most of Popper's books.

I first posted this on the Progress Forum but the forum has low activity and I got no responses.

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Hi, I'm a philosopher specializing in epistemology and rationality. I learned about Karl Popper's Critical Rationalism from my mentor David Deutsch and I helped with his book The Beginning of Infinity. That gives a sense of the general point of view I'm coming from. I have two main things to suggest which are mostly independent but synergize well.

I developed improvements on Critical Rationalism, which I named Critical Fallibilism, which center around evaluating ideas in a binary way using decisive arguments rather than weighing arguments or evidence (which, like induction, doesn't actually work).

And I developed a plan for how to make progress in the world: encourage all public intellectuals to have written debate policies which specify in advance what debates they will accept and how they will behave in those debates. The goal is to have a merit-based system by using political philosophy concepts like rule of law (we write laws down in advance) and transparency. This challenges the current system focused on social climbing, not merit, where intellectuals frequently arbitrary ignore challenging ideas and outliers, follow inexplicit biases, and have little accountability. Because many intellectuals told their fans they're rational, the fans may be interested in holding them to it and seeing them debate in ways where they risk losing.

The underlying philosophical issue is that debates enable error correction, whereas refusing to debate is a way to stay wrong even when living people know corrections to your errors that they're willing to share (also, refusing to debate doesn't correct other people's errors in cases where you're right). Debate can happen via essays, forums and other formats, not just stage debates. Debate policies are a specific case of a broader concept, rationality policies, which are important for combatting bias. Giving people rationality tips and then saying to do their best, unconstrained by specific predetermined policies, isn't effective enough for addressing bias.

People sometimes claim they can't debate because it'd take too much time, but this is typically an excuse: yes there are valid concerns around time and good strategies are needed, but instead of trying to figure out how to make it work, I've seen many people rush to the conclusion that it can't work. They don't seem to actually want to make debate work, hear the strategies for saving time I've developed, or try to create any strategies of their own. Overall, I don't think there are enough rational intellectuals in the world with high social status, so I propose a popular movement.

These two ideas complement each other because decisive arguments allow debates to reach conclusions (currently most debates are inconclusive) and debates allow philosophy ideas to be impactful instead of ignored.

I don't know if people here would be interested in learning about these ideas or debating them. I found, for example, that the Effective Altruism community was unwilling to discuss these ideas or have organized debates about anything (including veganism, AGI and other issues they emphasize). I wrote a lot of criticism and analysis about EA but despite all the stuff they say about rationality and wanting criticism, they largely ignored my criticism. An issue that comes up with many communities or schools of thought is that people don't take personal responsibility for answering questions or criticisms because they think someone else can do it, and there can be hundreds of people thinking that and then no one actually answers a critic. Similarly, people will often say things like "There are lots of essays that refute Popper." and then dismiss Popper without specifying any essay in particular that they endorse and will take any responsibility for errors in.

I haven't read Aaron Stupple's book, The Sovereign Child: How a Forgotten Philosophy Can Liberate Kids and Their Parents, because he and others aren't open to debate and criticism. (If any fan of the book wants to debate me, email me at curi@curi.us Also if any fan of the book posts a rational debate policy, please let me know.)

A book about Taking Children Seriously (TCS) does interest me as someone who was very involved with the TCS movement (founded by David Deutsch and Sarah Fitz-Claridge), even though I now have disagreements with TCS. But, based on a brief review, it's not actually a TCS book. Stupple repeatedly contradicts TCS and doesn't seem familiar with what TCS said.

Taking children seriously means not mediating their relationship with food. A parent simply cannot know how a child should eat, because they cannot know their hunger patterns and cravings or how different foods taste and feel to them.

TCS said to share your best theories with your children about food and everything else. It said children need tons of advice and discussion, not to rely on their own knowledge. It wasn't a hands-off parenting philosophy. It didn't assume children or parents know best; it said everyone is fallible and critical discussion is needed (just like Karl Popper said about learning and problem solving in general).

Stupple repeatedly presents a false dichotomy between authoritarian parenting (food rules and restrictions) and permissive parenting (giving children free reign). TCS rejected the authoritarian/permissive spectrum as a whole, saying that the spectrum itself was an error.

What would I do about my kid’s weight? First of all, I’d wait until it appears as a problem before addressing it.

Waiting to address problems after they happen, instead of discussing them in advance and trying to avoid them, has nothing to do with TCS. If your child doesn't want to be fat and you wait until he's already fat before helping, then according to TCS you failed your child.

The truth is that there is a lot of time to wait and see if a pattern of eating is causing a problem. My five-year-old son has been eating ice cream almost exclusively for the past few months, and, if anything, he’s on the thin side. Before ice cream, his staple was Oreo cookies, but he seems to have grown tired of them. He eats ice cream as a meal, and he goes many hours between servings, not because we limit him, but presumably because he only likes to eat a limited amount at a time. Over the course of a day, he consumes a typical amount of calories. Contrary to popular opinion, free rein simply does not guarantee excessive eating of sweets or any other kind of food.

By giving him free rein, he has learned how to feed himself—he gets the ice cream out of the freezer that sits below our fridge and spoons out his own serving. Everything about the food that he eats is mediated by him, uncomplicated by judgment, expectations, or rules.

If my kid did start to become overweight, I’m not sure I would do anything about it out of fear that he would think I disapprove of how he eats. Tension with meals and snacks adds up over time, and there’s no guarantee that it would be worthwhile. I’ve seen parents nag their overweight kids to no discernible effect except misery and humiliation. Instead of doing something, I’d wait until my kid himself expressed dissatisfaction with his weight. Once my kid identified that he had a problem, by his lights, and made it clear that my support was welcome, only then would I help him problem-solve by exploring the problem situation and guessing possible solutions. Every step of the way, I would take extra care to make it clear that I’m only here to help him manage his weight and eating issues the way he wants.

I don't agree with focusing on weight and calories without being concerned with nutrition. And I don't agree with thinking a diet is fine because a child isn't fat yet at age five. But I don't want to debate health, just parenting methodology.

Waiting for your child to bring up a problem himself is neglect. Children don't understand lots of things. TCS made an effort not to be neglectful, e.g. by saying to share your best theories with your child and saying parents should talk with and help children a lot. Whether TCS did enough to avoid neglect is debatable. But Stupple isn't even trying to avoid neglect like TCS did. He seems afraid of discussing things with his child.

The reason for the neglect is clearly to avoid authoritarianism and other types adversarial parent/child relationships like nagging. Stupple is caught up in the permissive/authoritarian false dichotomy that TCS critiqued. He doesn't see how to avoid permissive neglect without being authoritarian. Basically, he tries to avoid interacting with his child because his interactions are too authoritarian. TCS said parents need to engage with their children a lot without being authoritarian – do it in a fallibilist, helpful way where you don't impose your goals on your child – not be hands-off parents.

I make an effort to prepare meals that they like, including wasting a bit of food and remaking meals that are rejected, but only to a point. Eventually, I’d throw in the towel and tell a picky eater that they’re on their own—though I make sure to keep a store of foods that they tend to prefer.

This swings in the authoritarian direction on the permissive/authoritarian spectrum that TCS rejected. TCS does not allow parents to "throw in the towel". They must find common preferences. They aren't ever supposed to give up on that and tell their kid they're "on their own".

It's actually widespread that permissive parents mix in some authoritarianism and authoritarian parents mix in some permissiveness.

This portal to his interests [YouTube] isn’t just entertaining and edifying for him; it is incredibly helpful to us. When my wife and I are trying to get work done around the house, he doesn’t bug us to focus on him. When we visit friends who don’t have age-matched kids he could play with, he entertains himself with his iPad. When I need to disrupt whatever he’s doing to run an errand, he is happy to oblige as long as he can watch something in the car. And when he wants to stay up late, he is content to watch his tablet while the rest of the family sleeps. YouTube obviates countless opportunities for family discord.

Yes, TCS advocated unlimited screen time. But TCS also said a lot of other things, e.g. that you should offer children both. Like if you're ever trying to bribe your child to do something, consider if the child would prefer to have both: receive the bribe and still not do the thing he doesn't want to do.

So, would child like to not be disruptively dragged along on errands and also watch unlimited YouTube? Why should he have to pick one or the other? Why can't he have both?

Would child like to stay up late, have an iPad, and also have his parent awake and available to help with stuff? Would child like to have an iPad and also get attention from his parents when he wants something even if they're doing housework? Would child prefer to have the iPad and also not go to the homes of his parents' friends where he has nothing else to do besides iPad and the adults don't play with him?

TCS says to make all that happen for your child, or find other solutions your child likes even more, or find common preferences. Disrupting your child's activities to run errands, and not wanting to be "bugged" by your child, and taking your child to places that have no benefit to him, is just the kind of thing TCS harshly criticized.

The only way a TCS parent should bring his child along on an errand is by persuading his child that going on the errand is good for the child to the point that the child would request the errand, and want a compelling reason for not doing it, even if the parent didn't feel like going. If child is really persuaded, you should be able to say "Actually, I changed my mind, let's not do that." and have child object and want to be persuaded it's bad before he'll agree not to do it.

Similarly, a TCS parent should stay up with his child, or find another common preference, unless his child would say something like "Hey, why are you staying up? Didn't we agree that is a bad idea?" If child wouldn't object to parent staying up, then child hasn't been persuaded that parent going to bed before child is best, and child would presumably prefer company and help. If child is staying up late alone, it's often a sign he doesn't like his parents a lot, doesn't find them helpful enough, or doesn't know how to manage his sleep cycle and needs help.

TCS also tried to avoid neglect with its unlimited screen time advocacy. TCS said to talk to your children about what they see on TV (that was was before the rise of YouTube). Discuss it with them. Critique bad themes. Help them understand it and think critically about it. This is especially important with YouTube, more than TV, due to bizarre, disturbing videos designed so the algorithm will show them to children using autoplay.

It's irrelevant to my point whether TCS was right or wrong. It's irrelevant whether TCS was wise or placed overly large demands on parents. What's relevant is simply that TCS was vastly different than what Stupple is talking about.

Stupple has one of the most common, basic misconceptions about TCS which was addressed over and over and over again, year after year. He confused TCS with permissive parenting. He's focused on avoiding taking any potentially coercive actions, not on helping his children, whereas TCS says to do both.

And, like many other permissive parents, he allowed authoritarianism to creep in too. He sees child going various places to accommodate the parent as necessary, which is exactly the type of assumption TCS loved to question. He is helpful only to a point, then throws in the towel and tells his children they're on their own, whereas TCS said to find common preferences. Running out of patience like that is typical authoritarianism where the parent tries to get his way nicely and, if that doesn't work, he gets his way not so nicely.

The process of human knowledge growth may be most evident in science, where the conjectures are better known as hypotheses, the criticisms as experiments. It’s no surprise that Popper began as a philosopher of science and only later realized that his description of scientific knowledge growth generalizes to all domains, such as art, politics, and morality.

As Deutsch explained in The Fabric of Reality, and said Popper also knew, most criticism in science isn't experimental tests. Ideas have to survive lots of other criticism before we put in all the effort to do experiments. Contradicting this, Stupple suggested that all scientific criticisms are experiments, not a small minority. So, besides not understanding TCS, Stupple also doesn't understand Critical Rationalism.

The part about Popper only realizing later that his epistemology applies beyond science is also wrong. Quoting Popper's autobiography, Unended Quest (my bold):

In Logik der Forschung I tried to show that our knowledge grows through trial and error-elimination, and that the main difference between its prescientific and its scientific growth is that on the scientific level we consciously search for our errors: the conscious adoption of the critical method becomes the main instrument of growth. It seems that already at that time I was well aware that the critical method—or the critical approach—consists, generally, in the search for difficulties or contradictions and their tentative resolution, and that this approach could be carried far beyond science, for which critical tests are characteristic.

I wonder what Popper books Stupple owns, what he's actually read, and how he uses them for research. When I saw his claim, based on my familiarity with Popper, I was immediately suspicious enough to check it. Then I quickly found a relevant quote. I would expect any Popper expert to be suspicious of that particular claim and to fact check it before publishing it.

The recommendations in this book don’t come from “the research.” They don’t come from my experience or from a sense of what’s right. Rather, they come from a theory of knowledge, or what is known in philosophy as epistemology.

This context makes it extra important if Stupple gets Popper wrong.

I only spent a few minutes skimming to find the quotes I've used. Basically everything I read was wrong. I assume the book is like that throughout.

To help make sure I'm not cherrypicking, I decided to select a paragraph randomly and analyze it too. Here it is, added to my essay before I even read it:

When we pull off win–wins, like making teeth brushing fun or re-creating the wall-drawing experience in a way that is easy to clean up, we not only avoid the Foul Four, but we create practically the opposite. Instead of becoming a gatekeeper and adversary, the parent becomes an agent of fun. We become someone our kids want to have around because, instead of blocking their interests, we aid them in fostering their interests and make their world more open and exciting.

I tried to search the book to find out what the "Foul Four" are but I couldn't find any brief statement. I did find the claim "Conclusion: The Foul Four Are Unavoidable" so I'm unclear on why this paragraph says they can be avoided.

More importantly, according to TCS, trying to make tooth-brushing fun is coercive and bad. If your child doesn't want to brush his teeth, TCS says that he shouldn't brush his teeth; don't try to find ways to get him to do it even though he doesn't want to. Trying to get children to do things they don't want to by making those things more fun is exactly the kind of parenting behavior TCS routinely criticized. TCS said to put your energy into helping your child with goals he actually has, not into finding ways to gently get him to follow your agenda.

I searched my emails for tooth brushing fun and the first thing I found was Sarah Fitz-Claridge, in 1999, responding to an idea about making tooth brushing "fun" that "kids love" which included "fun" reminders for optional, voluntary tooth-brushing:

If they want to they will do it anyway. You wouldn't remind your house guests to brush their teeth, would you? So why remind your children? It has that fishy smell of coercion to me. And although fish might be good for you, coercion isn't.

And no, the answer is not to start letting it be known that you are brushing your teeth now. If your children have all the information you have about tooth decay, they are (or should be) making their own informed judgements and decisions about issues in connection with their teeth. If you have not given them all the information you think they might want about dental health, then do so! Children are not born knowing about tooth decay!

The advice most people give their children about tooth decay is much exaggerated, and many myths are propagated. Be very careful to be accurate, rather than telling your children the usual lies about rotting teeth. Remember, for example, that some teeth are so strong that they simply don't get cavities, no matter how rarely they are brushed, while other teeth will get a cavity even if the child brushes every time she eats and never eats anything traditionally thought to cause tooth decay. And don't tell your children that sugar is a tooth rotter whereas other carbohystrates [sic] aren't, because that is false, at least according to my wonderful dentist. And don't show your children your mother-in-law's false teeth in the glass and tell them that is what will happen to them if they don't brush. It isn't. Technology has moved on considerably since the days when that might have been a real possibility. It is now possible to have false teeth bonded in the bone tissue permanantly [sic], and it need not cost a fortune either, so don't tell that that it will! I could go on...

But anyway, even if all the lies parents tell their children about tooth decay etc were true, remember, mental health is more important than dental health!

What Beckah is advocating might not be coercive, but the chances are, it is, or they would already have been brushing their teeth without any need to be reminded.

Did Stupple read any TCS posts about tooth brushing before writing about it in his book? Note that besides accusing a parent of probably coercing their children with their fun approach to tooth brushing, Fitz-Claridge also said that you should share information with children (like I was talking about above).

I disagree with Fitz-Claridge about how cavities work, how good modern dentistry is, etc. But the correctness of her claims is irrelevant to whether Stupple is misrepresenting TCS.

After writing this, I found the tooth brushing win-win solution Stupple referred to:

Let me walk you through how this [problem solving with win-win solutions] works with the teeth-brushing example.

Why does a kid not want to brush their teeth? Maybe they don’t like the taste of the toothpaste or the feel of the brush. The parent can try sampling different toothpastes and brushes. They could make a special trip to the store and let the kid pick out several varieties to take home and try out. Maybe the kid would like their own electric toothbrush. Lots of kids love having ownership of their own tools and using them like adults. Having their own teeth-brushing kit could be a way to emulate Mom and Dad before going to bed. A pleasant atmosphere, without fear or anxiety or compulsion, opens the door to games and other fun options to add to or modify the teeth-brushing experience. My wife and I make a big deal about how good our breath smells after we brush. We huff in each other’s faces after brushing and then playact being overwhelmed by the amazing smell. Our kids love to join in and dazzle us with their minty fresh breath.

It's hard for me to stress enough how not TCS this is to people unfamiliar with TCS who may find this more reasonable than TCS. I have disagreements with TCS now but I do know what it said due to my many years of involvement. In the TCS view, this is a parent with an agenda trying everything he can think of to get his way while never considering that maybe he's mistaken and his child is right. TCS sees this as an archetypical example of irrational, infallibilist "gentle" parenting, where the parent is focused on getting their way without using punishments. TCS wasn't about merely rejecting punishment; it rejected the underlying assumption that the parent knows best and the child is inferior. TCS would say the parent is giving his child misinformation about breath smells and how adults actually view tooth brushing. TCS would see it more as lying not fun. Parent is manipulating child because he failed to make persuasive, rational arguments. When you can't get your way with reason, you should consider that you may be mistaken instead of using something other than reason to try to get your way.

---

What happened? How could the book be so wrong and not demonstrate basic familiarity with TCS?

I think the key question, which Stupple does not answer, is how exactly did he learn about TCS? What research did he do? The founders abandoned TCS around 20 years before the book came out (leaving many parents without the support they were promised).

TCS used to have conference talks, a paper journal, an email discussion list, an IRC chatroom, an in-person community especially in the UK. That's gone. So when, where and how could Stupple have learned TCS? Reading the website isn't enough. Did he just discuss it with other newcomers like Logan Chipkin who also didn't participate in the TCS community? Did he get a copy of the TCS discussion archives and read over 40,000 posts? Did he read even just the 2,800 posts written by TCS founders? Has Stupple read any of the TCS journals? Did he interview any TCSers from the original TCS community?

Also, he wrote a parenting book without any experience parenting children older than six. He hasn't seen the long term results of his parenting. I don't think he's talked with a bunch of TCS mothers with older children. Besides writing a book, he works as a doctor; he's not the primary caregiver for his children. The book is armchair philosophy.

There was no TCS community for Stupple to join. Most of the resources are gone. It's not his fault that he wasn't in a good position to learn TCS. Deutsch strongly objected to my plan to publish the TCS discussion archives on a website and make TCS knowledge available to everyone. He wanted to bury TCS. I also wanted to continue hosting TCS email discussions but Fitz-Claridge worked to stop me. She wanted to bury TCS. But then what is Stupple doing writing a book allegedly about TCS, when he doesn't know what TCS says? It's one thing to try some ideas you read a few essays about online; it's another to base a book on that. And why are the TCS founders helping promote this, rather than distancing themselves from a book which contradicts and spreads misinformation about TCS?

The Boyfriend's Introduction to Feminism by Gideon W. Stone is a free ebook. It's a quick read: it has a funny, conversational writing style and it's around 100 pages. The author is a man and the book is aimed particularly at young men.

I wanted to share comments, including criticism. As usual, I like critical analysis and believe critical thinking is important to learning and to humanity's intellectual progress.

This is not a book summary or book review. This post is not meant as a substitute for reading the book; it's best as a supplement to go along with reading the book.

Overall, I liked the book enough that I recommended it to a couple men who I thought it could help.

Patriarchy

Beneath it all, patriarchy rests on three bedrock ideas:

1) Humans have two genders, 'men' and 'women'.

2) We can reliably tell men from women by their biological, psychological, and social traits.

3) Men are superior to women.

I think patriarchy advantages men relative to women (but overall it disadvantages everyone compared to a better, more equal system). The claim that men are superior is one of the excuses or justifications for biasing things in their favor, but I'm not convinced it's a core idea. Similarly, with American slavery, whites claimed to be superior to blacks, but I think enslaving blacks for the benefit of whites was the core issue, and claiming superiority was one of many justifications or excuses.

Here's a different definition I found on Reddit recently:

The Patriarchy is "a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it."

The focus on power or advantages makes more sense to me than focusing on the claim of superiority. I do like Stone pointing out the premise of there being two reliably identifiable genders. Also, Stone argues that it should be "patriarchy" not "the patriarchy" and I think he has a good point there:

You might notice I used ‘patriarchy’ instead of ‘the patriarchy’. A lot of people read ‘the patriarchy’ as ‘THE PATRIARCHY, LLC’ – as if we have a chairman and bimonthly meetings and a social committee to plan our Secret Santa. Just plain ‘patriarchy’ makes it sound more abstract but also broader in scope, which it is.

Patriarchy is a social institution – that is, a durable set of ideas that shape our relationships with each other.  Other institutions include religion, marriage, and Thanksgiving. We don’t usually talk about ‘the religion’, ‘the marriage’, ‘the Thanksgiving’ – so it also makes more sense to talk about just ‘patriarchy’ and not ‘the patriarchy’.

Another reason to avoid the ‘the’ is that the rules of patriarchy can change from society to society, from vicious and obvious (Afghanistan) to subtle and insidious (some European countries). They are all related, but they are not all the same. There are lots of different patriarchies, all of which are patriarchy.

The point that there are multiple different patriarchies in different countries makes total sense to me. It also makes sense that avoiding the "the" is better regarding the misconception that patriarchy is centrally planned or explicitly organized.

Patriarchy, like racism, consists of social norms, traditions, memes, biases, ideas.

Later in the book:

The word 'patriarchy' literally means 'rule by fathers'.

and

Feminist writers adopted ‘patriarchy’ to refer to power dynamics in modern society more broadly.

Both of these statements emphasize power and advantage (ruling is a way of being powerful and advantaged), not the claim that men are superior.

Male Feminists

A lot of people say a man cannot be a feminist. Even some feminists say men can only be allies. But men have been feminists for generations.

I'm not sure about this. Certainly he's right in some sense: men can have feminist ideas. But I think there are valid concerns around men taking too much of the spotlight in the feminist movement and around male feminists not being genuine at higher rates than female feminists not being genuine.

A lot of men who claim to be feminists actually turn out to be misogynists. This is less of a problem with women. Some male "feminists" abuse and exploit their girlfriend or wife who was overly trusting because she thought their feminism made them safe.

And when male feminists get a lot of attention, there can be problems. Men haven't gone through women's experiences and often do a worse, biased or incomplete job at advocacy because they don't understand well enough what being on the receiving end of misogyny is like.

Male feminists also more commonly betray the movement in some way, so having them as leaders can be risky. Sometimes they subtly undermine some feminist claims or agree with some aspects of patriarchy (female feminists may do that too, but I think there's a valid concern about male feminists doing it more).

Male feminists can get extra attention because they're male. Using male privilege to outcompete women for attention is anti-feminist. A male feminist should take active steps to deal with this in some way, not just passively let it happen without acknowledgment and with the implication that he earned all his fans through merit.

Women should have power and leadership positions sometimes, and the feminist movement should be a place which enables that and supports women.

I do acknowledge Stone's point that policing the gender of feminists is in conflict with the feminist ideal of equality and a society that isn't focused on gender. But I still have concerns.

Here I am, a man, drawing attention to a feminist book written by a man who says men can be full feminists. I do personally read about feminism from women more than from men. I think Stone does a good job of speaking to men, which could help some people in my audience (which skews towards young men, although that's unintentional and I'd prefer an even gender split for my readership). But despite the good things about the book, I wanted to challenge Stone some on this topic. The book didn't do much to explain, acknowledge or address these concerns with male feminists (in fairness, I should mention that one of the major goals of the book was to keep it short).

I also want to say that I'm not an expert on feminism and I might not be bringing up the most important points. I'm not trying to be a feminist leader. This is a side topic for me. I'm interested in feminism and I think I learned enough to write some blog posts. But I care more about topics like epistemology, rationality and debate methodology, and I put more work into studying those topics. I hope that my general skill as a thinker and writer lets me bring up some worthwhile points and explain them well.

Inclusivity

If you decide you are a feminist... you are a feminist. One of the weird but nice things about feminism is that once you’re in, you’re in. Nobody can kick you out.

I disagree with this. I think whether you're a feminist depends on what ideas you have. You can say you're a feminist but be lying. You can believe you're a feminist but be fooling yourself. Being a feminist requires having certain ideas or attitudes. If you're a man who exploits your wife's labor, weaponizes your incompetence, and pressures her into sex, then you aren't a proper feminist. If you would rape women if you knew you could get away with it, and you think all men are like that (and always will be), you're not a feminist.

I do think there's something positive about having an inclusive attitude, especially in literature, as long as it doesn't involve toning down criticism of misogyny.

But being inclusive can be a problem at in-person meetups or in some types of online spaces (that emphasize supporting women, not debating) because misogynist men who think they're feminists can be disruptive. Having arrogant, clueless men show up is a practical problem. There's a hard issue here about balancing inclusivity and equality with also having some spaces that are safe from misogynist men. (Misogynist women can be disruptive too, but create fewer, milder practical problems in some scenarios.)

Misogyny Is the Default

It is a common misconception that only elite men are part of The Patriarchy. Almost everybody is part of patriarchy. It's not enough to say, 'I'm not in charge of anything!’ It's not enough to say, 'Oh, I don't really believe men are better than women!’ Unless we confront how these ideas color our entire worldview, we're also part of patriarchy....

It is hard not to participate in patriarchy. We have a hard time imagining anything different, because every part of our society and culture is tainted by patriarchy, going back thousands of years. Patriarchy took over before humans invented writing, so we have to literally dig up and piece together evidence there was ever anything else.

Stone claims that primates generally don't have patriarchies and that humans weren't patriarchal in the past. He says Europe got patriarchy around 7,000 years ago from nomadic invaders from central Asia. He thinks, before that, Europe was more peaceful with women leading families. I have no idea if his historical claims are well-researched or not but I thought they were interesting enough to mention. I didn't know there were specific historical claims like that about the origins of patriarchy that I could look up.

Choices

... patriarchy also denies men choices – like sitting down to pee, or seeing a therapist, or being emotionally available for our children, or anything that might be considered ‘girly shit.’ ...

When men are denied choices, they sometimes assume that means male privilege is illusory.... patriarchy does not protect young men, but tells us that needing protection is feminine....

Some people argue that because men get harmed, society does not value men. Yes: welcome to patriarchy. Patriarchy harms men while claiming it helps them. For example, men are more likely than women to commit suicide. Of course, a key tenet of patriarchy is that a man who needs help is weak. ‘Real men’ know that therapy is basically the same as a Gestapo interrogation, and would rather take their secrets to the grave. Men kill themselves rather than get help, because patriarchy told them they were better off dead.

Getting rid of patriarchy begins with seeing through the lies and learning to think about our lives honestly. And that goes for women, too: most women end up supporting patriarchy because it's easier to go along than fight back. It is easier to think and behave the way other people do, than to try to think and behave differently.

I liked this section.

Another example I saw recently of a choice denied to men is enunciating (more information). Straight men use a smaller range of vowel sounds. Enunciating sounds gay. (I wonder if this is related to presenting as using low effort. Our culture has a lot of stigma against trying too hard.)

Citation Error

Some of the best evidence for the social construction of gender is the fact that different societies have different social constructs. In fact, plenty of cultures have recognized more than 2 genders, anywhere from 3 to 7.[42] These societies were stable for long periods of time, which suggests that any number we assign to genders is arbitrary. Genders are not traits that humans discover; they are categories humans create.

Footnote 42 cites 10 Societies That Recognize More Than Two Genders. In the article, I found lots of examples with 3 genders, one with 5, and one with 6, but none with 7.

Equal Victimhood?

With words like ‘big’ and ‘strong’ Lovell tells us we ought to look aggressive, too. Feminists have written tons about how beauty standards harm women, but in 2001 a study reported “nearly as many men as women are unhappy with how they look”; the authors noted the problem had been growing the last 25 years.

This suggests that beauty standards impact men and women about equally. I don't agree. I think they harm women more, as you might expect in a patriarchy.

Protectors

Car crashes are one of the leading causes of death of Americans, especially children. About 1 in 5 child deaths is from a car crash. If men are protectors, then extremely safe cars – like the 2024 Honda Accord – should be extremely masculine. They protect people extremely well. But no: men show off their masculinity in desperately loud track cars and trucks with kid-killer lifts.

lol :(

Easy Toxic Masculinity

You can think of those expectations as a box. Masculinity has walls; outside the box are all the things men are not supposed to do or be. Some men fit inside the box just fine. Like Lovell, they find it easy to be that kind of man. But many of us do not.

Lovell is a man who wrote a popular pro-masculinity book which Stone criticizes.

I think it's an error to assume Lovell finds it easy to by the sort of aggressive man he advocates being. He might be unhappy and conflicted. Who knows? Why assume someone likes their objectively bad lifestyle or finds it a good, easy fit for them?

Lovell shares an anecdote in his book. His son was bleeding and crying, so Lovell intentionally cut himself with a knife and bled in front of his crying son to shut his son up and "teach" him "masculinity". I wouldn't expect Lovell or his son or anyone else to find that kind of lifestyle or gender performances happy or easy to fit inside of.

Other Comments

I like how Stone says feminism is good for men, not a compromise or sacrifice that noble men make to benefit women. He basically says there is no conflict of interest between men and women. He says equality is better for everyone. This fits my pre-existing classical liberal principles. For an example of how patriarchy harms men, Stone talks about how, in Afghanistan, after removing women from public life, powerful men started sexually abusing boys.

I don't like the recurring negative references to anal sex throughout the book, which I read as standard masculine homophobia, in the guise of joking, with the goal of connecting with his target audience. Whatever Stone's personal attitudes to homosexuality, I think those jokes will appeal primarily to readers with some level of homophobia. Relevantly, I did like and agree with the material near the beginning about how jokes do matter and don't excuse bad attitudes.

I also didn't like the section about age of consent laws, which I found confusing, and I don't think it addressed grooming adequately. (I know keeping it short was a major goal.)

I'd like it if the book challenged men more for their bad behavior. But a gentle introduction has value too. Hopefully the book can persuade some men to read more afterwards. The book barely talked about unequal domestic labor or workplace sexual harassment, which are topics where I think many men need to be challenged and educated to do better.

When people don't agree about how to cooperate, coordinate or get along, they may try problem solving. If problem solving fails or someone declines to try problem solving, then typically they should leave each other alone on that issue. If the issue is big enough, there are multiple disputes, or someone wants to, then they can leave each other alone entirely.

If there are obligations involved, like a contract, people should commonly either minimally follow the obligations or figure out a way to end the obligations early. If the obligations have only small importance or a weak level of commitment, then they should often just be dropped.

What does it mean to leave each other alone? This is determined by cultural norms. Society decides what people leaving each other alone is, or respecting the rights of others, or acting peacefully, etc. These things can change over time. Political philosophers can develop theories about how these things should work and sometimes influence society.

Our society says leaving people alone means respecting their rights and keeping to yourself. Don't use violence, violate property rights, break laws, break contracts, or commit fraud. Focus on your own life, your own actions, your own property, and your own voluntary interactions with others for mutual benefit. When a potential interaction lacks mutual consent then it shouldn't happen. There are tricky cases, like noise made on your own property or in public may carry onto someone else's property, and society has some ideas (which all adults should have some familiarity with) about what is too loud during the day or at night at what kind of location (it's different at a residential neighborhood or a factory with a night shift).

If you believe someone refuses to leave you alone, what should you do? If it's a minor issue, ignore it. If communication seems potentially productive, you can tell them your concern. If it's a big issue, you can talk to the police or a lawyer (for most disputes, which don't involve serious crimes, you should communicate before taking this step, even if you doubt it will work). Instead of vigilante justice, people can use independent third parties to make judgments about conflicts. Why? Because you might be mistaken, the other guy might be mistaken, you might both be biased, and society doesn't trust either of you to decide who is right or what the right outcome for the conflict is.

If your conflict is with a coworker, you can talk to them about it, talk to your manager or your human resources department about it, ignore it, transfer to another department or change jobs. If your conflict is with a spouse, you could talk with them about it, ignore it, talk to a couples therapist about it, or get a divorce. If the conflict is with a neighbor, you could communicate about it, ignore it, talk to an authority (police, lawyer, court, landlord, home owner's association), or move. The pattern here is you can try to communicate and do problem solving, ignore the issue, talk to a third party, or separate from the person you're in conflict with. In each case, taking matters into your own hands and directly fighting with the person is generally unacceptable.

It may feel unfair that a person has taken aggressive actions against you but you are not supposed to fight back. What is the reasoning for this? In many cases, the situation is symmetric: he thinks that you've been aggressive towards him while he's done nothing wrong. If everyone who thought someone else was being aggressive started fighting with them on purpose, that would lead to a lot of fighting and escalation. People would pick fights over misunderstandings or after they themselves did something wrong.

Note that fighting back in non-violent ways can be socially acceptable, like using passive aggressive comments, gossip, or office politics. That's somewhat discouraged but also widespread, normal and often allowed. In general, you can fight back using actions like gossip that would be socially acceptable even if you weren't a victim and didn't have defense as a justification. But you shouldn't fight back with actions like punching that are unacceptable in general. There are special exceptions like you're allowed to punch to defend yourself from a home invader because there isn't time to wait for the police to come.

Parenting

Parent and child can't just leave each other alone so there's a harder case there. Leaving each other alone in other cases can be difficult too, e.g. people don't want to change jobs, homes or spouses to avoid a conflict.

My former mentor David Deutsch developed a non-coercive parenting philosophy, Taking Children Seriously (TCS), which has errors. TCS says parents and children should do problem solving and seek solutions they're all happy with. They should reach agreement and act with consent. They should use creativity and communication instead of fighting. They should address root causes not just immediate problems. But what if they try really hard and fail to agree about something? As a last resort which should happen rarely, TCS tells parents to defer to their children:

where there is no common preference found, the parent must self-sacrifice ... Occasional failures, or even frequent minor failures, to find solutions, are probably inevitable, and we endorse parental self-sacrifice as the best way of making them less harmful and less frequent.

TCS thought this was a principled stance. I now think it goes against the standard principles that govern other scenarios. If people fail to agree and also fail to leave each other alone, in general they should defer to the judgment of an independent third party who isn't involved in the conflict.

TCS wanted parents to defer to children because parents chose to have children in the first place, which allegedly makes a parent the root cause of the problem. Also, if a parent is being unreasonable then the parent should defer. But if the child is being unreasonable, then TCS says that is due to the bad parenting in the past, so again it is the parent's fault and the child is the innocent victim who should be protected by the parent letting the child have their way.

What would a reasonable, independent third party in our society say about a conflict between a parent and a child? They would first look at the nature of the conflict. Does the conflict involve someone being inappropriately controlling and invasive in someone else's life? For example, if the child is telling the parent to switch careers to be a musician, because the child likes music, that isn't respectful of the parent's autonomy and right to make their own decisions about their own life. If the parent is an accountant and wants to stay an accountant, that's fine. On the other hand, if the parent wants his child to work in a sweat shop, the third party would say that the parent has no right to ask for such a thing and would take the child's side.

What if the conflict involves a legitimate area of mutual concern? Then in general an independent third party would side with the parent. Why? Many reasons. Parents are smarter, wiser, more rational, more knowledgeable, more experienced and more likely to be right. TCS disputes some of this, and I'm also unimpressed by this reasoning because parents are fallible and children are sometimes right.

Good parents tend to do socially acceptable things or persuade their children. So third parties tend to side with them about conflicts because they know what third parties would agree with and are already doing that. If both society and your child disagree with something, and it's your child's business too not your own personal matter, then you generally shouldn't do it.

Also, the parent is responsible for parenting outcomes, and control and decision making authority should be with the person who will be blamed for bad outcomes. Even TCS didn't think responsibility could or should be transferred to children.

Also, the child is a dependent who doesn't know how to run his own life, so it makes sense for the person in charge of making the child's life work out would also need to sometimes make some decisions to achieve that.

Also, sometimes the child wants things the parent doesn't know how to accomplish or even considers impossible. So then how can the parent defer to the child? This comes up less in the other direction because adults generally have a decent understanding of what is possible or realistic. A child might want a pet unicorn, a visit to mars, a birthday party that costs a million dollars, to meet a celebrity, to do something unsafe, or to go to a business that is currently closed (young children may lack a good understanding of time and schedules and may be impatient and want things now).

Parents can ask for unreasonable things that are too invasive too. It's reasonable for a parent to ask a child to spend time on his math homework and ask a child to try, but it's unreasonable for a parent to demand that the child understand math really well and become a top mathematician who does original research. The child doesn't know how to do that, so even if he wants and tries to obey his parent, it still won't work. An independent third party would likely see the issue with demanding great mathematical ability and disagree with the parent.

In general, these points are more relevant for 5 year olds than 15 year olds (and even more relevant for 1 year olds). If your child is 15 and you can't get along with him, maybe you should give him food, housing, transportation and a bit of money for 3 more years without being too pushy or interfering too much. Wanting him to graduate high school and stay away from drugs and crime would be normal but you don't need to micromanage a teenager who is unreceptive. An independent third party is much more likely to tell you to stop trying to control your teenager than your 5 year old.

In general, actually asking an independent third party to make a judgment is uncommon. And asking someone can be unreliable: people's opinions vary so you won't won't necessarily get you an accurate answer about mainstream opinion. And standard opinions can vary by region and sub-culture (e.g. by religion or ethnicity), so there are issues with asking the right type of third party (sometimes you should ask someone who is the same religion as you, but sometimes you ought to follow the mainstream opinion for your city, region or country). These principles for dealing with conflicts are often reasonably easy to use but are sometimes difficult to use.

Most adults know what standard opinions society has and can follow them without actually having a judge, jury, mutual friend or Reddit thread tell them what's normal. Even adults who are angry at each other can often mostly agree about what is socially acceptable without asking anyone else. And adults can often challenge each other when they think someone is getting the mainstream opinion wrong. When dealing with children, adults should double check themselves more than they usually do: ask friends more, do more internet searches, and ask AI chatbots more. Children often can't correct adults effectively, so adults should do more error correction on their own initiative.

Spheres of Legitimate Authority

Society has ideas about what is each person's sphere of legitimate authority where they get to have control and make decisions. Infants have a small sphere of legitimate authority, but it does include some things like infants may get hungry and want to be fed and parents are supposed to listen and feed them (and if a parent didn't do that, an independent third party would side with the infant). As children get older, their sphere of legitimate authority increases. They start owning property which they can make some decisions about. They start being responsible for some things in their life and therefore also getting some decision making authority. They become more familiar with their culture, more knowledgeable about what is acceptable behavior, more able to predict what judgments independent third parties would make, and more able to think like an adult. They get incrementally closer to independence.

When people are in conflict and fail to agree, if the conflict involves someone's sphere of legitimate authority, then the other person should back off. If the conflict involves an area of legitimate mutual concern, then the situation is harder. Parents and their children, especially young children, have a lot of areas of legitimate mutual concern where they need to get along somehow. E.g. if an adult doesn't brush his teeth, that is his business, not your business. But if a child doesn't brush his teeth, that is the parent's business too because the parent will have to pay for the dentist and also because society expects parents to educate their children on how to live a decent life which includes reasonable dental hygiene.

Conclusion

So I think TCS was wrong. "Parent defers to the child" is the wrong answer. "Child defers to the parent" is also wrong: following general principles, they should both defer to an independent third party.

Conflicts between adults tend to get bad when someone is mistaken about what society's mainstream view or purposefully going against it, or when society would actually consider it a complex situation where multiple opinions have a lot of supporters. Parenting can be hard because children often don't know about or ignore society's opinions, so a parent and child are often less able to use cultural norms as a mutually acceptable default answer than two adults are.

What if a cultural norm is mistaken? Should people still defer to it? If they both think it's mistaken, and they can agree about that, then they can do their own thing with mutual consent (as long as they aren't violating anyone else's rights). And even if people sometimes defer to mistaken ideas, overall progress and error correction remain possible. Cultural norms can improve over time. Anyone may work to try to improve them. I don't think we currently have a great system for improving cultural norms or for other intellectual progress, but progress can and does happen. I've developed some ideas about how to improve the system, e.g. public intellectuals could have Paths Forward and debate policies.

Is deferring to a third party, society or mainstream opinion a good system when people disagree? It's not great for figuring out what's true, but it's pretty good for keeping society peaceful: preventing violence and rights violations. If a disagreement is purely intellectual, people can just agree to disagree, have a debate, call each other idiots, or leave each other alone. The hard problems are when there is a potential for serious fighting and rights violations, in which case it's hard to come up with anything better than having people outside of the dispute decide on the outcome (and, for high stakes issues, to decide primarily in accordance with laws that were written down in advance). Many disputes deescalate because the participants already have a lot of mainstream opinions or know what the mainstream opinions are, and actual third party juries or judges can be used when necessary.

My former mentor David Deutsch taught me an idea that victims of injustices should be made whole by the person or group who wronged them. If someone violates the non-aggression principle, they should pay for all the harm they caused so that no one innocent is worse off than before. Victims should be restored to their original condition before they were victimized. You can consider "If someone offered me $X to accept Y happening to me, would I accept?" If the answer is no, then damages for Y are above $X. Payouts should be enough that victims are indifferent to the injustice never having happened or receiving the payout.

Deutsch took this principle of restitution much more strictly and literally than society usually does. His view is most similar to libertarians. He's trying to be pure and principled, but it actually conflicts with other principles. I now think Deutsch's strong approach to victim compensation is wrong and dangerous, so I've tried to question, unpack and critique it.

Disclaimer: My understanding of Deutsch's view comes primarily from discussions and posts from over 10 years ago. I don't follow his social media much lately. If he's changed his mind, I'm not aware of it.

Analyzing the Principle

According to Deutsch's position, the legal system frequently under-compensates victims, often by hundreds of thousands of dollars. For example, if someone is mugged at gunpoint, they would be asked, "Would you have been willing to be mugged at gunpoint for a million dollars? Keep in mind it'd be a real mugging with a real gun and an unpredictable outcome. Even though you survived your mugging, take into account the risk of death when answering this question." If the answer is "no" then they should receive at least a million dollars in compensation for being mugged. (How can it be determined if they're being honest or how much compensation is really fair? There's no real way to know. But Deutsch was concerned with the principle more than practical details like methods of accurately determining damages.)

In Deutsch's approach, damages for all sorts of injustices can be very high and also include all costs of lawyers, therapists, courts, etc. Damages include your time dealing with everything, including your time spent helping catch the aggressor, choosing your lawyer, talking with your lawyer, travel time to visit your lawyer, travel time to buy a note pad to take notes while talking with your lawyer, time in court, the gas for your car, etc., all costs.

Today, if you buy a false-advertised product on Amazon which doesn't function as advertised (e.g. you buy something metal but receive a plastic product), you'll get a refund and free return shipping. According to Deutsch's view, you should also be paid for your wasted time, for not having a working product sooner, and potentially for feeling frustrated, unsafe and violated. If someone had offered you $20,000 to find out the world is worse than you thought, so that you become disillusioned and cynical, maybe you would have declined. And if the product was important to your child's fancy birthday party that you said was going to be super amazing and perfect (so your child will be very upset and disappointed if it goes wrong), and you can't get a working product in time, there could be big damages.

Victims are required to make reasonable efforts to minimize the harm they suffer, so at some size of damages the victim ought to have bought backup products to reduce risk or bought the product early enough to still have time to buy another. How big do the damages have to be before the victim should have been more careful? $1k, 10k, $100k or what? It's very hard to know, which is a problem with this approach: it doesn't provide enough predictability or enough ease for people to agree on how large damages are. Ideally, everyone ought to be able to pretty easily know in advance what legal outcomes to expect for various actions. Our current legal system isn't great at providing predictability but Deutsch's alternative would be less predictable. E.g. a negligent Amazon seller today knows they're just going to have to pay for a full refund and either let the customer keep the item or pay for return shipping, but they won't have to pay thousands of additional dollars just for sending the wrong product. They'll have to pay a lot more only if they do something especially bad like contaminate their products with lead. This isn't a perfect system but it's more predictable and has significantly lower amounts of victim compensation than Deutsch's system.

A strong approach to making victims whole focuses too much on figuring out who to blame and assigning all the large costs and harms to be their responsibility. It doesn't adequately address people's fallibility. Mistakes happen. Also there are disagreements about fault. And focusing on who to blame is often the wrong way to approach problem solving.

The allegedly principled approach to making victims whole also allows disproportionate responses, e.g. it can justify using guns and violence to get a million dollars back for one gunpoint mugging that took $20. This sort of escalation can easily lead to escalations by the other side who now thinks they're the victim.

Because a strong making whole doctrine tends to assign blame for all the damages from a conflict to one side and none to the other side, it can embolden both sides to use very aggressive, destructive methods since they believe the other side ought to pay the full bill for everything. Also, the damages are often already high enough that they would be unable to pay if they were determined to be the aggressor, so there's little incentive to avoid additional damages even if they know they might be at fault. And the difficulty of figuring out who is the victim can lead to multiple parties thinking they're the victim and then acting very aggressively to "defend" themselves.

It's really problematic for a huge bill of damages to be accumulating while there's uncertainty, unpredictability or disagreement about who will be liable for the bill. It's also really problematic to accumulate such big damages when it will never be paid because whoever is at fault isn't rich enough.

Deutsch taught me that collateral damage should be blamed on the original aggressor (as long as the defender used minimum necessary force to fully defend himself from harms and be made whole, or less). So you can have two sides shooting at each other, who both think they're the victim, and some third party (who everyone agrees is fully innocent) may be shot. Deutsch's view is that whoever is actually the aggressor is responsible for that, but even if fault is eventually determined in a clear way that everyone agrees on, that won't heal the gunshot wound or make the aggressor rich enough to pay for the damage.

It's also problematic when victims give up on justice because the aggressor doesn't have enough money to pay for their lawsuit (so even if they win and are entitled to be paid for their legal costs, they won't be paid). And it's also problematic when the victim wins in court and the aggressor files for bankruptcy (or otherwise doesn't pay because he can't) and the victim is never paid back for the original injustice and also has now lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawyer's fees.

Suppose you're accused of aggression and asked to pay $5,000. If you admit your guilt and pay now it'll be done. But if you deny your guilt and go to court and lose, it could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars for your lawyers, hundreds of thousands of dollars for the other guy's lawyers, and also hundreds of thousands of dollars in court costs in a libertarian society (today, in the US, the court costs will mostly be paid by tax payers). So to defend your $5,000 you might have to risk losing a million dollars and going bankrupt (and a libertarian society with these principles might not allow bankruptcy). So it's much safer to just pay. But the incentive to pay, even when in the right, encourages false, exaggerated or otherwise problematic accusations.

Should court be cheaper? Yes. But doing a good job of reaching a conclusion about complex cases is hard and expensive. These issues would be mitigated some by more efficient courts but wouldn't fundamentally change.

What if you and someone else both made mistakes and both harmed each other some? So sure maybe you did $5,000 of harm to him, but also he did $8,000 of harm to you. Now he demands $5,000 in compensation, and it's true that you did harm him that much, but it isn't true that you should owe him that much taking into account everything that happened. Then what? If you fight in court to avoid paying $5,000, seek $8,000, or seek $3,000 by having both your and his claims handled in one case, that is all risky. It could cost you over $100,000 in legal fees, which you'll never get back if you win and he's poor. And what if you lose and have to pay his legal fees too? What if the court finds that actually you harmed him $500 more than he harmed you? Your evaluation of the harms was incorrect by $3500 which just barely makes you the more guilty party, so then you have to pay over $100,000 for his lawyers and can't ask him to pay for your lawyers, just because you should have owed him $500 in the first place but figuring that out was expensive. I think this is a bad system that's worse than the status quo.

Trying to be made fully whole also ignores the 80/20 rule. Basically, getting pretty good or good enough outcomes is often cheap but getting perfect outcomes is often super expensive and inefficient. For example, after an injustice, 20 therapy sessions might get you back to being reasonably functional and happy, while 500 therapy sessions still might not get you back to 100% unbothered.

Communication

Sometimes people think someone is an aggressor but they don't tell that person. They think it's obvious that he's violating their rights, and he should know, does know, and did it on purpose, so they don't communicate. Often, people don't know about your complaint, don't know there's a problem without being told, and don't see it the same way as you. If you start "defending" yourself without first telling the person about the problem, that's frequently actually aggression by you.

Sometimes people ghost others and expect them to know the reason and take the hint. Ghosting isn't communication, is inherently ambiguous, and often doesn't work well as a first resort.

There are cases where you shouldn't communicate and should go straight the police, like when you're the victim of a violent crime. But for anything that's more of a petty issue, you should probably communicate before forming a grudge or taking any action that would be aggressive if it wasn't justified defense.

Israel and Palestine

Deutsch often used this idea of making victims fully whole in his analysis of issues. For example, he applied it to Israel and Palestine. Based on many conversations, here's what I think he'd say today, which I disagree with (I've put my own comments in parentheses): Israel is the innocent victim of Hamas' October 7, 2023 attack. Israel is justified in defensively dropping thousands of bombs and killing thousands of people until Israel has used enough violence to be made whole (which will never happen) or Hamas is entirely destroyed or fully surrenders (at which point bombing more is pointless). Excessive defensive violence (more than needed to prevent any future attacks and be made whole) isn't allowed but massively disproportionate violence, including using nuclear weapons, is justified as long as Israel still isn't 100% whole and safe. The only ethical question about using nuclear weapons is whether using them in a specific case will help Israel get closer to being made whole or would be counter-productive. If the Palestinians don't like being collateral damage, Deutsch would tell them to demand Hamas make them whole or to attack and destroy Hamas so Israel stops bombing.

Parenting

Deutsch also brought this attitude to his parenting philosophy, Taking Children Seriously (TCS). I think it's a flaw in TCS (see my Fundamental Philosophical Errors in Taking Children Seriously for more).

TCS looks at things kind of like this: When the parent and child have a conflict and get stuck and fail to resolve the conflict, whose fault is it? Either the parent is being unreasonable or the child is being unreasonable. If the child is being unreasonable, that is due to the parent's past mistakes for being coercive or not helping the child well enough to become reasonable. So either way it's the parent's fault. So the child is the innocent victim and ought to be protected from harm and made whole with compensation. So, while the ideal is to find a solution everyone is happy with, the backup plan is for the parent to at least protect the child, make up for whatever past injustices they can, and avoid victimizing the child further. I disagree with this analysis.

TCS tends to put large burdens on parents and assign them huge obligations to their children. I think this is connected with the strong doctrine of making victims 100% whole, which Deutsch believed and taught me, but which I now think is a bad doctrine.

Justice

What is the correct approach to justice? That's a hard question which I won't try to answer here. I do think a more proportional, limited approach to responding to injustice is better and more compatible with fallibility. Having extremely high stakes hinge on getting a judgment of initial fault right, and extremely high risk if you made a judgment error (or if a judge or jury makes a mistake), is a bad approach from the perspective of taking fallibilism seriously (which TCS and Deutsch claimed to do). Fallibilists should care a lot about having more predictable outcomes that are pretty easy to understand and agree on and which don't bankrupt people when they make mistakes. Peace-loving people should also care about preventing conflicts and total damages from escalating.

Extreme cases with intentional and very serious mistakes, like Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, can be handled more aggressively like with bankruptcy and jail. But I think Deutsch is wrong to take a lot of cases that are handled more leniently today and say those cases should be handled much more harshly with much larger victim compensation. I do think in general our society could compensate victims better, and there's room for improvement, but having huge, unpredictable damages in far more scenarios wouldn't be an improvement. And it's dangerous how Deutsch's principle encourages people to do large escalations and think they're justified. Deutsch doesn't require victims go through the courts or police nearly as much as today's society does. He instead says they would be justified in principle to do various "defensive" actions, including disproportionate escalations, so he's encouraging various types of vigilante "justice".

Deutsch's principles also view inappropriate, unjustified lawsuits or police reports as a form of aggression which justifies defensive actions and compensation to make the victim 100% whole. I think he's right to view using the police or courts as a type of force which must be justified as defensive force or else it's aggression. Non-libertarians sometimes downplay the seriousness of socially-legitimized government force. However, even when it's genuinely defensive, I think it's generally still a bad idea to use the police or courts when it's a disproportionate escalation.

Conclusion

Everyone, especially fallibilists, should try to be robust and resilient. They shouldn't have a rigid sense of justice where they can't tolerate the slightest loss. They should approach life in a way where they can handle some bad luck, some unresolved disputes, and even some injustices or receiving only partial compensation. They should recognize that getting along with other people is hard and other people have different ideas about what behaviors are reasonable, acceptable, defensive or aggressive. Social harmony requires significant tolerance of different perspectives on justice, aggression and rights. Thinking you're a victim doesn't justify massively disproportionate escalations. A better more fallibilist principle is don't escalate much. One or two small escalations can be OK sometimes though it's usually a bad idea, but one large escalation or many small escalations are almost always terrible decisions. People often need to let things go or deescalate, and if the matter is so serious that they consider that impossible, then they should generally go to the police or courts instead of pursuing vigilante justice (but people should be hesitant to do that because those government systems can do a lot of harm and be very expensive, so using them can be a disproportionate escalation).