This is part of a series of posts explaining the harassment against me. This post shares background info about my conflict with David Deutsch. I’ve tried to address the problem privately but he’s refused to even attempt private problem solving or common preference finding.

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The closest thing to a reason that David Deutsch (DD) ever gave me for turning against me was that he was upset about the TCS archives issue. I never considered that explanation to be very good. In short, he didn’t want them published and I agreed not to publish them. Would he really end ten years of friendship and productive discussions over that!?

I’ll explain what happened, then after that I’ll give additional facts, quotes, details and sources.

Taking Children Seriously (TCS) was a parenting and educational philosophy co-founded by DD and Sarah Fitz-Claridge (SFC) around 1992. They, I and others believed that TCS had very important ideas which all parents should learn and which could dramatically improve the world.

TCS List was a public email discussion group that started in 1994. The archives were tens of thousands of emails posted in the past. I joined in 2001. In 2002, DD and I both wanted to share the discussion archives with millions of parents so that they could learn to treat their children better.

For years there were automated, public archives which were searchable and downloadable. There were instructions on how to do this. Everyone was warned not to post anything private. But eventually AOL limited and/or removed archives for all their groups. In my understanding, that was because they didn’t want to store the data or spend money on the groups, and that change was a precursor to the groups being poorly maintained for years and then eventually being shut down entirely. So the archives needed to be reposted elsewhere.

In 2007, SFC and Kevin (SFC’s tech guy) wanted the archives to be posted on a public website and were working on making that happen. They publicly announced this and Kevin told me that the only obstacle was the software work necessary to make it nice.

Because SFC and Kevin were not very involved with TCS anymore starting around 2003, and didn’t get much done, I got a copy of the full archives for myself. I wanted to read it and I was also interested in sharing it with the world because no one else was getting that task done. I got my full copy of the archives from Lulie, who got it from Kevin. Before that, I had archives starting in 2002 (all the emails since I joined the group), plus some additional, incomplete, older archives that I’d gotten from several other people.

I believed the only obstacle to sharing the archives was getting the data and making a website for them. I believed sharing the archives was just restoring the previous status quo – getting TCS back to where it was before AOL changed their archive software.

At some point between 2002 and 2010, DD changed his mind about sharing archives. He no longer wanted them shared. But he didn’t tell me (or I think anyone else, at the time) that he had changed his mind. DD belatedly let me know there was an issue after I was already in the process of sharing the full archives. He could easily have told me earlier because we were talking regularly and he knew what I was doing (I didn’t go behind his back about any of this).

In 2010, DD told me that sharing the archives would be bad, and that he’d explain why after he was done writing his book, The Beginning of Infinity. So, to accommodate him, I waited for over a year. Then DD still didn’t want to explain and got upset with me for expecting him to explain. If he didn’t want to explain, he should have said that in the first place instead of asking me to wait and then, after I waited, saying that he wouldn’t explain. He bait and switched me but wouldn’t acknowledge having done that. He is the one who offered to explain and proposed a timeline. I had an expectation that he would explain because he voluntarily chose to create that expectation.

Despite that, I was willing to drop the matter, not receive an explanation, and not share the archives. I clearly communicated that I was willing to defer to DD. DD knew that but said it was inadequate. He didn’t want me to defer to him or do him a favor. He wanted me to see for myself that sharing the archives was bad. He wanted my judgment to match his. But that would have required him arguing his case and persuading me. Since he wouldn’t do that, I kept disagreeing with him. I still agreed with the earlier DD who wanted the archives published, since he’d never explained why he changed his mind. DD demanded that I somehow persuade myself and come up with reasons that he was now right; I did try doing that but I failed to reach his newer conclusion.

The case for publishing the archives was simple. They had lots of good, important, original ideas in them which people could learn from and use to treat children better. Plus there was no TCS book or organized body of writing teaching TCS, so learning TCS without the archives was unrealistic due to the lack of other material. DD didn’t provide a rebuttal to that, and as far as I could tell he still believed that was true.

DD did make some brief attempts to argue a few points about why sharing the archives would be bad. They were nothing like the thorough discussions we’d had on many other topics. Previously, DD had successfully persuaded me of many things. I gave counter-arguments about the archives and I wasn’t even close to persuaded. I had a bunch of arguments that I thought were great points that DD never tried to answer.

Why did DD want me not to post the archives? He said it could damage his career if people saw and disliked his TCS ideas. I wasn’t convinced by that argument for multiple reasons. I didn’t think that sharing good ideas would damage his career just because some people would mistakenly think the ideas were bad. Also, it was his responsibility to consider that before co-founding TCS and publishing ideas. He had also published TCS ideas in the paper journal and on multiple websites and was making no effort to take those things down or to retract any of the public advice he’d told thousands of parents they would be immoral not to follow. I didn’t see the point of inconsistently trying to suppress some TCS information while a bunch of other similar information was available.

The Autonomy Respecting Relationships (ARR) group had public, searchable, downloadable archives available dating back to 2001 because ARR had been using Yahoo Groups since 2001 and Yahoo’s archives still worked. ARR was a spinoff of TCS which DD had posted a bunch of unpopular ideas at (like attacks on monogamy and marriage), but DD showed no interest in taking down the ARR archives. He didn’t even try to explain the discrepancy. The FoR Yahoo group also had around a decade of archives available and DD didn’t seem to mind that either.

I’m unclear on why DD thought sharing the TCS email archives would cause a significant additional problem given the other info available. And he’s a public intellectual who co-founded TCS around age 40. Wanting and trying to unpublish his ideas and take them back, and get a clean slate when he’s around age 60, is bizarre and violates the reasonable expectations of the people who not only were trying to use his ideas in their lives, but whom he had pressured as coercive parents if they didn’t listen to him. And he didn’t actually retract anything or say he changed his mind about any of the ideas (I still don’t think he did change his mind about the ideas). He told me he wanted to share more TCS info later, which implied he still thought the ideas were valuable.

You shouldn’t share parenting advice for 20 years, get thousands of people to change their parenting, tell them they will having ongoing help, support and advice, and then try to take away the advice that was already given. Merely ceasing to share further advice was already seriously letting down a bunch of parents and their children – it betrayed their trust and violated their reasonable expectations – but DD and SFC never acknowledged or apologized for that. Preventing people from accessing the TCS archives made that betrayal worse.

I don’t see why DD’s preferences about his career should create obligations for other people not to create mirrors or archives of public discussions.

As best I know, DD agreed with me that sharing the archives wouldn’t violate his rights. So I wasn’t convinced that sharing the archives would be bad. I thought it’d be good for the world and also good for DD. But I was still willing to do what DD wanted due to our friendship and my respect for his intellectual accomplishments.

DD used his reputation as a public intellectual to spread TCS and give it legitimacy. People took it more seriously because there was a smart author involved and writing for it, not just some mom. But if you’re going to put your name behind it and use your public intellectual status to promote it, then you ought to act accordingly: it’s stuff you said in your capacity as a public intellectual, and it is therefore public (plus he literally said it publicly, in writing, with public archives that only disappeared for technical reasons). Trying to hide ideas DD promoted using his book is fairly similar to if he’d tried to hide the contents of his book itself after it was published and had sold tens of thousands of copies.

Conclusion: So DD got very upset with me, and stopped associating with me, because (maybe) of my not agreeing with his reasoning about limiting the spread of TCS ideas to the world. He didn’t tell me his reasoning in much detail and I still did what he wanted, but he demanded intellectual agreement – he wanted me not only to do and not do certain actions, but also to have and not have certain thoughts. I let him control my actions regarding the TCS archives but not my thoughts. That’s the story. I’ve never found it very convincing. I figured there must have been some other issues that played a significant role in the end of our association. DD has never spoken clearly about the matter, but as best I can tell, he claims that the TCS archives issue was the main reason that he stopped talking with me (which then led, eventually, to his leadership role in a harassment campaign against me).

Details and Sources

This is a chat log between me and DD from 2002:

Curi42 (4:50:37 PM): sarah mentioned putting all the old TCS posts on a CD to sell. that'd rock
OxfordPhysicist (4:51:56 PM): Yes. They'd have to be sorted first. And then there's the permissions problem. But yes, it's a great idea.

Here’s Kevin posting publicly on TCS list, in Dec 2007:

We have nearly complete archives now, and hope to make them readable on the TCS web site in the not too distant future.

We are still missing posts from October 16 to 23, 1995.

The TCS list started in Nov 1994 and Kevin gathered emails back to the very start. It was a public group that anyone could join, for free, with no screening. Joining the group was automatically handled by software without a human even having to click “approve”.

The TCS list had rules against posting any private information. They urged people to discuss hypothetical examples only and never to share info about their kids. Moderators enforced this sometimes (moderation was never consistent and people were warned that a post appearing on the group did not mean that a moderator had bothered to review it). They created a way to post anonymously and people were told to speak hypothetically even their anonymous posts. It was always made clear that the list was public, that you shouldn’t share anything that could embarrass your kid later, and that many people had private discussions by emailing other posters off-list. SFC even said that there were a lot more private off-list discussions than public discussions, and encouraged people to consider whether they should be posting something publicly or having a private conversation instead.

The TCS list software kept automatic, publicly-searchable archives starting in at least 1996 when they used AOL. SFC shared instructions about how to search or download the old posts. The plan to share the archives were merely an attempt to restore software features that had already existed.

When SFC moved the TCS list away from AOL software in 2008, her announcement said:

Please note that the content of the list will be public, and assume that whatever you write could end up reaching an audience of billions.

On Yahoo, like AOL, there were automatic, public archives and SFC’s welcome message said:

Bear in mind that this list is public and please take care to avoid violating privacy or writing anything that might embarrass your child when he or she is running for President of the United States or whatever. Please note that we reserve the right to move posts from the TCS list to the TCS website.

So not only did the list have public, searchable archives on the Yahoo website, they also explicitly warned everyone that they might repost anything to another website. And they warned people to write like they would have billions of readers in the future, and like whatever they say could affect their child’s career decades later.

Similarly, the TCS website said in 2008 (my emphasis):

Please be aware that anything you post on the TCS list is public and will be permanently available on the internet. Take great care not to write anything that might embarrass your child later when he or she is running for President of the United States or whatever. In many cases parents themselves have later regretted bitterly having posted something. You will not be able to delete something you post later, so do not post unless you are in a calm state of mind. Delay posting for as long as it takes for you to be in a calm state of mind. That way you will be less likely to regret having posted later.

As was pretty well known at the time, deleting or editing posts was never possible with email lists because all members receive their own copy of emails and you can’t delete other people’s data from their personal computers.

That webpage had different text in 2007 before moving to Yahoo. It said (my emphasis):

When you have subscribed to the List, you can retrieve the archives, which provide a rich source of information about the List, about TCS and about subjects about which you may have questions.

Unfortunately, that was out of date. In 2007, you could no longer retrieve the full archives (or maybe any at all) because AOL had removed features from their service. But it shows the intention to have the archives available.

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See also: The History of Taking Children Seriously and Harassment Summary. (DD’s fans have been severely harassing me and my fans for years, and instead of asking them to stop, DD lied to attack me, thereby encouraging more harassment.)

This is part of a series of posts explaining the harassment against me which has been going on for years. The harassment is coming from David Deutsch (DD) and his community. This post provides info about DD’s motives and the historical context. I’ve tried to address the problem privately but they’ve refused to attempt any private problem solving.

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This complete chat log between me (curi) and David Deutsch (oxfordphysicist) spans 4 minutes on the afternoon of 2011-10-04 (bold highlighting added now):

curi:
hiiiiiiiiii

curi:
szasz :D

oxfordphysicist:
You're entirely mistaken. I'm terrified, and will be unable to work for at least a day now. And who knows how long after that. Receiving an e-mail from you is sheer fear and revulsion before I even look at it.

curi:
i think you're mistaken and i do not want to do anything without coming to some resolution

curi:
i am attempting to follow my understanding of tcs methods. you aren't following them. perhaps we disagree about what tcs says to do.

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This is the most negative thing DD ever said to me. It struck me as totally out of character. In retrospect, given how his character seems totally changed today, I think he may have been hiding his character from me for years. I think, originally, he may have been trying to hide his flaws in a noble, honorable way to shield me from them and let me interact with the best parts of himself. That’s the kind of thing he advocates parents do for their children, and he acted like a father-figure to me in some (but not other) ways.

For context, “You're entirely mistaken.” refers to some emails we’d exchanged that day about the TCS archives. He meant that my claims about the TCS archives, in those emails, were mistaken. I explained the TCS archives conflict here.

The message was a surprise to me. You can see the friendly tone of my messages beforehand. DD didn’t gradually lead up to it. He held some things in and then let them out abruptly like this.

DD still talked with me a lot after this, repeatedly initiated contact, and never said something similar again later.

This is by far the closest DD ever came to making a no contact request (which is notable because he lied about me breaking several of those that he never made). At the time, I took this as probably being a no contact request even though it was phrased as providing information rather than making an explicit request.

Note: Based on our personal history, DD knew how to make explicit requests to me, and knew that I would see that this logically wasn’t one. This may sound unreasonably pedantic, but DD and I were both like that, and literalness was a standard part of our communications. DD had actually set up this dynamic himself: He’d told me repeatedly that if he wanted something he would ask, and that I shouldn’t try to guess what he wanted and act on those guesses. He convinced me that it was better for him if I just listened to direct requests and avoided trying to guess other ways to accommodate him. He also had me use lots of explicit requests with him, which he could then say yes or no to at his option. I think I got over 50% ‘yes’ answers, but lots of ‘no’ answers too, which is unusual – in most relationships people try to avoid asking for stuff without being over 90% confident they’ll get a ‘yes’ answer. That’s how DD wanted our relationship to work (it benefited him if I asked 5 short things that I’m not confident he’ll say ‘yes’ to, and got only 1 ‘yes’, because he didn’t want to miss out on that opportunity and giving a few quick negative answers is a cheap price to pay in effort if no one gets their feelings hurt, plus even a declined request can be interesting and worthwhile to read).

Since I thought it was probably a no contact request, I stopped contacting DD. This prevented me from attempting to discuss and solve some of our problems, or doing common preference finding, as I wanted to. But I was trying to respect DD’s wishes.

What happened next?

DD kept emailing me privately, like normal (less frequently, especially since I never replied or started any discussions anymore, but he was initiating contact and emailing me stuff instead of trying to avoid contact). He acted kinda like he’d never sent the message about fear and revulsion. He didn’t act like he’d issued a no contact request. His actions were compatible with nothing having happened and us being too busy converse like normal.

In total, after the message about fear and revulsion, DD sent me 81 personal emails (plus other emails on discussion groups). Many were friendly emails that were purely optional. He had no reason to send them other than wanting to have a conversation with me. E.g. he did not have to, but did, have a long email conversation with me about schizophrenia.

After 52 days of not responding to any of DD’s emails or discussing the problem in any way, and waiting, and him not acknowledging what happened, I became concerned that I was being cold to him and ignoring him. I worried that my coldness could confuse or hurt him, especially since he hadn’t literally requested that I stop sending emails. I was also concerned since he hadn’t suggested any plan to fix anything and didn’t seem to be initiating any problem solving, and didn’t appear to intend to do problem solving later (since he was just going on with normal communications). I decided to clarify. I sent him a short email on 2012-11-25:

Do you still want me not to send you emails? Should I wait more? I'm unclear on what to do and realize that waiting could itself be taken negatively (as cold, distant).

I think 7.5 weeks was a long time to wait with someone I’d been talking with for years, often daily (in our total relationship, DD sent me roughly 4,000 private emails and spent thousands of hours chatting and engaging with me; I’ve estimated that the total amount of words he wrote to me is more than ten times the length of his book, The Fabric of Reality). That shows how much I was trying to respect his wishes. And it turned out that I was right to send the email. DD didn’t complain about it or treat it as a violation of a request.

DD’s response to my clarification request did not acknowledge ever wanting me not to send him emails, or ever sending the IM from 52 days earlier. He didn’t respond directly at all or answer my questions, but instead reinitiated conversation and invited me to try to persuade him of something by email. So we moved on and had more email discussions. He never suggested that he’d made a no contact request that I should be following. He sent 81 emails after the negative IM because he was still having contact with me. DD’s rate of sending me emails reached near zero in late 2012, around a year after his worrying IM. He stopped sending more emails without any announcement. I gave him a lot of space and tried not to push him about it, and was disappointed when he didn’t come around over time. I also realized that the opportunity to discuss the issues more had been missed (as I think DD wanted).

I now interpret DD’s harsh IM as asking me to back off temporarily, for an unspecified amount of time. And I backed off more than long enough, so that was that. He was alerting me to a problem and wanted some space, which I gave him.

I was still concerned after this incident and was more careful about sending DD anything. Some of the underlying problems were still there. But I don’t think it was ever actually a no contact request, just a serious complaint meant to raise a problem. Even if it had been a no contact request, DD retracted it by not reiterating it, by talking about something else when I asked for clarification of whether it was OK to contact him, by sending me 81 more emails, by acting like he never said it, by being friendly with me after it, and by never complaining that I was doing something wrong by emailing him again. So, to the best of my knowledge, I didn’t violate DD’s wishes about that specific matter.

One of the lessons here is that DD is an emotional, irrational, fragile person who loses days of work over his strong feelings. And he has strong feelings about things he hasn’t read – so his feelings do not depend on the merits of the arguments being made or how reasonable they are. That’s important context that helps explain his involvement in harassment against me.

This is part of a series of posts explaining the ongoing harassment against me from David Deutsch and his associates and fans. To provide background information, I’m sharing some of the most negative things DD ever said to me, which I think reveal some irrationality on his part and reveal some ways that he doesn’t follow his own philosophy principles.

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This is an email David Deutsch (DD) sent me on 2011-09-30 (the nested quotes, displayed indented with a black line to the left, were written by me):

you've shown disinterest in explaining these topics for months if not years. e.g. WRT the tcs archives. and lately (several years) have not in general pursued conversations to a conclusion (like deduction, hard to vary, qualia, value of mises, gold standard, burke, tcs archives). so i'd be concerned about the short term strategy lasting a long time.

In regard to hard-to-vary and qualia, the discussions have paused because we have not managed to crystallise a clear statement of what the disagreement is. Both disagreements are rooted in subtle and interesting differences in world view, such that whenever we have gone into details we find agreement, yet stepping back to the overall issue we find strong disagreement. This is a commonplace occurrence among philosophically-minded people. Philosophy is hard. Making progress would require further discoveries, which there is no guarantee of making. I expect there are important things in there to be discovered (by both of us) but it is a fatal mistake to allow an unsolved problem to become a black hole absorbing all one's time and attention, paralysing progress on other problems. This is what you are blaming me for not doing.

The other issues have stalled for a less benign reason. It is that you have developed a repertoire of argumentative tactics which, when applied (you do not always apply them), effectively prevent you from being persuaded of anything. With each particular item on which this has happened (including deduction, Mises, gold standard), I have stopped when I have run out of ideas for how to present the relevant idea to you in a way that gets round the tactics. Just tactics. Nothing to do with content, and I say this independently of whether I'm right or wrong on the issues. These are all issues on which neither of us has any axe to grind anyway.

Currently you are insisting on a reinterpretation of (what seems to me) the plain meaning of a Godwin passage, in order to deny that Godwin expected that in future people would give away most of their wealth. This is a debate that I haven't yet given up on, but the next step, if I pursue it, will require me to explain how you're misinterpreting the word 'if', and I can already think of half a dozen ways you will find to avoid the implication, and I'm guessing you'll succeed in constructing an effective baffle, so I'll have been wasting my time.

And now, in addition to the above-mentioned patterns of argument, your tactics have escalated to include accusing me of fabricating quotes, and having a variety of other personal failings on account of not dropping, and in the TCS-archive case sacrificing, everything else in order to solve things for you.

please advise.

I can't advise on that because I don't know the answer. As for the other things you asked about, I have some ideas about what you should do in order to achieve success and happiness, but it's rather pointless to address those while you consider yourself to have grievances.

I replied:

you've shown disinterest in explaining these topics for months if not years. e.g. WRT the tcs archives. and lately (several years) have not in general pursued conversations to a conclusion (like deduction, hard to vary, qualia, value of mises, gold standard, burke, tcs archives). so i'd be concerned about the short term strategy lasting a long time.

In regard to hard-to-vary and qualia, the discussions have paused because we have not managed to crystallise a clear statement of what the disagreement is.

i disagree.

Both disagreements are rooted in subtle and interesting differences in world view, such that whenever we have gone into details we find agreement, yet stepping back to the overall issue we find strong disagreement. This is a commonplace occurrence among philosophically-minded people. Philosophy is hard. Making progress would require further discoveries, which there is no guarantee of making.

i don't think this is it. i will explain why if you want.

I expect there are important things in there to be discovered (by both of us) but it is a fatal mistake to allow an unsolved problem to become a black hole absorbing all one's time and attention, paralysing progress on other problems. This is what you are blaming me for not doing.

i do not think i am blaming you.

it's not even clear to me what you think was blaming, or why. i made some factually oriented statements which, based on your reply (including below), i think you agree with. i said you had shown disinterest and you gave two reasons for disinterest.

The other issues have stalled for a less benign reason. It is that you have developed a repertoire of argumentative tactics which, when applied (you do not always apply them), effectively prevent you from being persuaded of anything. With each particular item on which this has happened (including deduction, Mises, gold standard), I have stopped when I have run out of ideas for how to present the relevant idea to you in a way that gets round the tactics. Just tactics. Nothing to do with content, and I say this independently of whether I'm right or wrong on the issues. These are all issues on which neither of us has any axe to grind anyway.

so, you have adopted a negative meta/psychological view of me, and that is why you dropped those topics without explanation.

thank you for clarifying that.

but what can we do about it?

i think your description (reminiscent of claims made by kolya, about you as well as me) is false. would you like to hear why?

you think it's true. would you like to persuade me of it?

if neither, then what do you think should happen?

Currently you are insisting on a reinterpretation of (what seems to me) the plain meaning of a Godwin passage, in order to deny that Godwin expected that in future people would give away most of their wealth.

changing a key word of your claim (share -> give away) seems like a mistake to me.

This is a debate that I haven't yet given up on, but the next step, if I pursue it, will require me to explain how you're misinterpreting the word 'if', and I can already think of half a dozen ways you will find to avoid the implication, and I'm guessing you'll succeed in constructing an effective baffle, so I'll have been wasting my time.

so, it's the meta/psychological view governing your interaction again.

i don't see why you would debate the "if" part. i said that if one reads on then he finds that the "if" clause is godwin's view, and i accepted it as his view. so, all you could accomplish is to convince me the shorter quote is compelling in isolation. doing so would not have any direct relevance to the discussion.

I said that equalization can be achieved in more than one way, not necessarily by sharing. Why doesn't your intended reply focus on this main point i made?

And now, in addition to the above-mentioned patterns of argument, your tactics have escalated to include accusing me of fabricating quotes,

I did not make that accusation.

this came up previously (w/ your wording "made stuff up"). i explained that you had misinterpreted my meaning. you didn't ask for clarification or debate anything, but now you have repeated this claim as before, seemingly disregarding my reply. why?

and having a variety of other personal failings on account of not dropping, and in the TCS-archive case sacrificing, everything else in order to solve things for you.

i don't understand your seeming strategy here of interpreting criticism -- offered in confusion more than anything else -- as unpleasant accusations.

please advise.

I can't advise on that because I don't know the answer. As for the other things you asked about, I have some ideas about what you should do in order to achieve success and happiness, but it's rather pointless to address those while you consider yourself to have grievances.

what grievances? i do not have grievances.

I think my response email covers a lot of the issues well. I’ll comment further on something I think is particularly important.

This was the end of the conversation; DD didn’t reply to my email. His choice not to reply conflicts with his philosophy that says problems are soluble and advocates common preference finding. For context, keep in mind that we had been friends for ten years and that DD has written thousands of emails to me. The issue wasn’t the time it’d take to write a reply. The issue was that DD was in the process of ending our friendship and his email above gives some info about how and why he did that.

DD was unwilling to discuss any approaches to problem solving regarding the negative meta/psychological view of me that he’d formed. Further, he’d never given me an example. He’d apparently formed negative, undiscussed opinions, for years, and hidden that from me. He disliked some things I said, regarded them as irrational tactics, but never told me even one, so I had no way to stop doing the things he disliked, change my mind or improve. Nor was there any way to correct him if he were mistaken. I still, today, don’t know which things I said that he thinks were irrational tactics, let alone any arguments explaining how my statements were irrational tactics. I’d understand more if he stopped discussing when he though someone was being irrational, but he kept having lots of discussions with me for years while hiding relevant information from me.

If your approach to debate is to decide that the other person is irrational and give up on debate – and to refuse to discuss what the other person did wrong with any examples or arguments – then you are irrational and you are closed to debate. (This is an idea DD taught me, and which he’s repeatedly advocated in writing.)

DD wasn’t taking his fallibility seriously. In his email, he said that he might be mistaken about the object level disagreements, but didn’t acknowledge that he could be mistaken about his meta claims (that I’m irrational and that some of my statements were irrational tactics). DD doesn’t seem to view meta claims as ideas he has which may be false. He treats meta ideas as a special category that shouldn’t be discussed, and that viewpoint prevents error correction of his meta ideas. (DD repeatedly, and in writing, advocated not having meta discussion. That is an idea he said, not my speculation.)

So DD forms off-topic, meta, psychological views of people (his dislike for meta discussion doesn’t prevent him from thinking it and attaching importance to those thoughts). Then he refuses to explain or discuss them, but still assumes they’re true and acts on them. He won’t have meta discussion (sometimes). But he will have meta ideas and let them control and ruin the object level discussion, and then just give up on the object level discussion with no attempt at problem solving because he doesn’t want to critically discuss his unargued beliefs about other people being irrational, having bad psychology, etc. This is a way of destroying the means of correcting errors, not a way of making unbounded progress by truth-seeking.

There were plenty of other times that DD did engage in meta discussion with me. He isn’t consistent about it and never explained a delineation between good or acceptable meta and bad meta. Trying to avoid meta discussions was a recurring theme with DD and also an (inconsistent) moderation policy on TCS list, but he never acknowledged that he wasn’t really against all meta discussion. If he’d acknowledged that, he’d have had to make some statement about which meta discussion he had a problem with and why that sub-category is different and bad, but he didn’t have a good answer to that (I brought it up several times).

This particular comment from DD’s email is particularly notable:

I have stopped when I have run out of ideas for how to present the relevant idea to you in a way that gets round the tactics

Not only did DD never say that he thought any particular statement was a tactic or point out anything wrong with it, he also stopped discussing when he ran out of ideas for how to persuade me. He viewed discussion in terms of coming up with ways to change my mind. But he didn’t take seriously that I might be right about some of the topics. He dropped topics until he had ideas for new arguments, but wasn’t open to listening to my arguments. He didn’t come up with ideas for how to be persuaded and continue discussions when he had some of those. He approached discussion in a one-sided way that didn’t leave scope for him to learn. At least that’s according to his own statement – though actually in practice he sometimes did better than that. He did sometimes listen to me rationally, learn things from me, accept my arguments and change his mind, etc.

You may wish to forgive DD for assuming he’s right because he’s way smarter than most people. That attitude contradicts his philosophy and there’s another problem with it. He had thousands of hours of discussions with me and told me that he respected my intelligence and considered me one of the smartest people he’d ever talked with. He hid his condescending, one-sided, biased approach to discussion from me for ten years of discussions (or maybe he was better in earlier discussions and changed at some point without telling me – I don’t know). He communicated to me that he was taking me seriously. He asked for, and got, huge amounts of my time. That context is nothing like having a short chat with a fan that he doesn’t know. Assuming you’re right briefly with a low social status stranger is problematic, especially given DD’s fallibilist philosophy, but at least that would be conventional arrogance. DD’s condescension to someone after being close intellectual associates for a decade, and very strongly praising their thinking, learning and rationality is worse than that. It indicates that DD assumes he’s right when dealing with everyone – he’s just a poor fallibilist. Or maybe he just assumes he’s right when an issue comes up that he’s biased or emotional about, and it isn’t about the other person or what they say.

In conclusion, DD is irrational and doesn’t live up to the philosophy he advocates. He was dishonest with me for a long time, and the stuff he was hiding built up to major problems which were finally, belatedly revealed in a few harsh incidents like the email above, and then he stopped talking with me. He didn't want to solve problems as we went along and communicate openly about them, nor solve them later either, and he misled me about that for a decade. All this helps explain how his bad and irrational behavior regarding the harassment campaign could be possible.

I've found, over and over, that issues I'm thinking about were already covered in Ayn Rand's books, particularly Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Rand knew so much about people, social dynamics and morality.

Lately, I've been thinking about the harassment against me and my community. One of the things I've been surprised by is how the CritRats, like David Deutsch and Lulie Tanett, can be OK with having a serious criminal, Andy B, in their community.

In The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, Gail Wynand says to Howard Roark (my emphasis):

“I think your second-handers understand this, try as they might not to admit it to themselves. Notice how they’ll accept anything except a man who stands alone. They recognize him at once. By instinct. There’s a special, insidious kind of hatred for him. They forgive criminals. They admire dictators. Crime and violence are a tie. A form of mutual dependence. They need ties. They’ve got to force their miserable little personalities on every single person they meet. The independent man kills them—because they don’t exist within him and that’s the only form of existence they know. Notice the malignant kind of resentment against any idea that propounds independence. Notice the malice toward an independent man. Look back at your own life, Howard, and at the people you’ve met. They know. They’re afraid. You’re a reproach.”

That makes sense. Andy B is like a parasite. He has nothing to do on his own, independently. He's not a creator. Besides Deutsch, the other CritRats are like that too. They don't create. They don't think independently. They put up a public pretense at being intellectuals, but it's all a fake show they put on for others. I think most of them know it and feel bad about their inability to be productive; certainly Lulie does. So they have a major spiritual similarity to Andy B. Deutsch is second-handed too, but unlike the rest of them he has also accomplished things as a creator.

I've become very suspicious of any fan of The Beginning of Infinity (BoI), who says it's great, but who has not read The Fabric of Reality (FoR). I've seen a repeated pattern where people who haven't read FoR are shallow fans of BoI who don't know much about Critical Rationalism (CR). Overall, BoI is more popular than FoR, but is attracting worse fans than FoR did. Anyone who has read both and likes BoI way more is also highly suspicious and likely didn't understand much from either book. I don't think "BoI is way better than FoR" is a reasonable opinion. Anyone who goes around recommending BoI, but who recommends FoR much less or not at all, is probably a bad thinker.

Also, Deutsch's books should be read visually (which makes it a lot easier to catch more details, take your time and only advance to the next paragraph when you're ready, reread things, etc.). Be very suspicious of the understanding of anyone who's read them only as audio books. (Deutsch is irresponsibly selling audio books with no warning that understanding his ideas from an audio book is unrealistic. It's an unsuitable format for a first reading of his difficult, wordy books that contain many long, convoluted sentences. Audio books are fine for a casual second reading to review the book a bit while knowing you're missing a lot. They're also fine for a blind person who is very experienced with audio books, listens at a much slower speed than they usually listen to books at, and regularly rewinds to hear parts again. But a sighted person who starts with the audio book is almost certainly fooling themselves rather than actually understanding much.)

BoI is doing a much better job than FoR of attracting social climbers who talk about the book as a way of bragging. BoI is more popular, and it's a bit easier than FoR to read in a shallow way and think you liked it without learning much. BoI also has more things that can be used as slogans or sound bites.

If you haven't read either book, FoR should be read before BoI. I strongly recommend reading them in the order they were written. FoR does a better job of introducing and explaining CR ideas for new readers. FoR also does a much better job at introducing the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics. Deutsch put his most important things to say in his first book and didn't repeat them all in his second book (which would be fine, except that he doesn't tell anyone to read the books in order).

FoR is a deeper book with more technical details. It goes into more depth on some specific topics rather than focusing as much as BoI on being of general interest. It is a popular science book meant for the general reader, but some sections are less useful for most readers. In particular, the two chapters (11 and 12) about the physics of time can be skipped. The last chapter (14), about the end of the universe, is also skippable, especially the omega point discussion.

FoR talks about four strands, CR, evolution, quantum physics and computation. The key chapters in FoR to learn about CR and evolution are 1, 3-4 and 7-8. The CR and evolution strands are the more useful and easier to understand for almost everyone.

But if you're trying to learn about philosophy, I don't recommend starting with Deutsch's books. I used to recommend them more, but most people find them too difficult to learn anything substantial from, especially as a starting place. Most people who like them, and think they're learning something, didn't actually understand much.

Some good places to start learning are my Critical Fallibilism website and Eli Goldratt's books (especially The Goal, It's Not Luck, and The Choice). After that, you'd have a better chance to actually learn from FoR, though I'd recommend first reading chapters 1 and 2 of Philosophy: Who Needs It by Ayn Rand and reading Understanding Objectivism by Leonard Peikoff (which talks about how to learn a philosophy).

Also, if you don't already read books regularly, you may be more successful by first getting into reading and then trying to read FoR later when reading a book is already a common, easy and enjoyable activity for you. Many people should start by trying to form a habit of reading regularly, and enjoying it, using fun books like novels. I like Robert Heinlein best for sci-fi (start with his juveniles) and Brandon Sanderson for fantasy. My reading recommendations in the previous paragraph are much easier to read than Deutsch's books, and might actually work for newer readers, though they're significantly harder reading than Harry Potter. Also, you may want to start getting into reading more with audio books or text to speech, and that's fine and works well for many people, but at some point you should transition to also getting comfortable with visual reading, which you'll need for reading authors like Deutsch or Popper.

This post originally focused primarily on Fitz-Claridge, but I found a bunch of scholarship errors, like misquotes, from Deutsch too. For details, see the two updates at the bottom of this post and the comments below the post which share a bunch more research about misquotes. Deutsch's lack of integrity and rationality when it comes to getting quotes right and making his books accurate also provides background context for our current conflict, which has involved Deutsch lying about me regarding a documented, factual matter. His repeated errors in his books help explain how he could make an error like that, and help clarify what kind of person he actually is. (I added this note at the top, and edited the post title, on 2021-06-23 and 2021-06-25. The original title was "Sarah Fitz-Claridge is a Terrible Intellectual".)

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Sarah Fitz-Claridge (SFC) co-founded Taking Children Seriously (TCS) with David Deutsch (DD). I found an egregious misquote of Popper on the TCS website. There's no name on the specific page, but I'm familiar enough with TCS to guess that SFC wrote it. In this article, I assume SFC is the author. Regardless, it's on the official TCS website so SFC and DD are both responsible for this error, since they are the founders and they put their names on TCS.

This (falsified) quote of Popper is from "The TCS FAQ" regarding "TCS and Karl Popper" (sources: archive.org and my mirror):

The inductivist or Lamarkian approach operates with the idea of instruction from without, or from the environment. But the critical or Darwinian approach only allows instruction from within - from within the structure itself.

...I contend that there is no such thing as instruction from without the structure. We do not discover new facts or new effects by copying them, or by inferring them inductively from observation, or by any other method of instruction by the environment. We use, rather, the method of trial and the elimination of error. As Ernst Gombrich says, "making comes before matching": the active production of a new trial structure comes before its exposure to eliminating tests."

- pages 7-9, The Myth of the Framework

This quote is bizarrely falsified. I noticed the issue because it says it's from pages 7-9, but it's too short to span three pages. So I checked what Popper actually wrote.

The first paragraph is OK. For the second paragraph, here's the first sentence Popper actually wrote:

In fact, I contend that there is no such thing as instruction from without the structure, or the passive reception of a flow of information that impresses itself on our sense organs.

SFC's ellipsis removed the two words at the start, which is OK. Then where Popper had a comma, SFC changed it to a period with no indication of an edit, which is completely unacceptable. Worse, she then put additional text in the same paragraph which is not in that paragraph in the book. She took some sentences from page 9, from a different section of the book (V not IV), from partway through a completely different paragraph, and stuck them here after half a sentence from from an earlier paragraph which she quoted as being a full sentence.

This isn't even close to how quotes work. You can't just grab quotes from different places in the book and put them together to make a paragraph.

And it's even worse because she presents it as two paragraphs, so it's not like she was leaving out all paragraph breaks. Including a paragraph break makes it even more unexpected that a different paragraph break would be left out. Similarly, she used an ellipsis, which makes it much more surprising and misleading that one is missing somewhere else.

Misquoting seems to be some sort of pattern with SFC and DD. I'm currently working on a video about a misquote in The Beginning of Infinity that I found. SFC and DD are close associates with lots of similarities, e.g. they are both liars.

Immediately after the misquote, SFC writes something else really problematic:

While Popper almost always made such remarks in the context of original discovery rather than learning, the implications for education are inescapable. I should stress that applying Popper's philosophy of science to the growth of knowledge in children applies only when the children are learning science. Our position is much broader, namely that Popper's general idea of how a human being acquires knowledge – by creating it afresh through criticism and the elimination of error – applies equally to non-scientific types of knowledge such as moral knowledge, and to unconscious and inexplicit forms of knowledge. Thus we see ourselves as trying to extend Popperian epistemology into areas where, by its inner logic, it applies, but where Popper himself resolutely refused to apply it.

Popper didn't resolutely refuse to apply his ideas outside of science, nor did he think his theory of knowledge only applied to science. He made this clear repeatedly in many books. He talked about knowledge in contexts like poetry or courts, not just science. Here's an example in Conjectures and Refutations (my italics) where Popper directly says that his theory works for knowledge in general, not just science:

Although I shall confine my discussion to the growth of knowledge in science, my remarks are applicable without much change, I believe, to the growth of pre-scientific knowledge also—that is to say, to the general way in which men, and even animals, acquire new factual knowledge about the world. The method of learning by trial and error—of learning from our mistakes—seems to be fundamentally the same whether it is practised by lower or by higher animals, by chimpanzees or by men of science. My interest is not merely in the theory of scientific knowledge, but rather in the theory of knowledge in general.

Is SFC a liar who wants to praise DD and give him credit for discovering what Popper already published, or did she never actually read much Popper, or did she read it without understanding it? And what's going on with DD putting his name on egregious errors like these?

Also, in the misquote above, SFC showed Popper talking about "instruction" (education), so claiming he didn't know his ideas applied to education is bizarre. Popper also wrote in Unended Quest a quote that SFC and DD both knew about:

I dreamt of one day founding a school in which young people could learn without boredom, and would be stimulated to pose problems and discuss them; a school in which no unwanted answers to unasked questions would have to be listened to; in which one did not study for the sake of passing examinations.

Conjectures and Refutations also says:

Since there were logical reasons behind this procedure [Popper's theory that we learn by conjectures and refutations], I thought that it would apply in the field of science also

In other words, Popper had a general theory of learning first, and then applied it to science. He thought it should apply to everything including science.

And in the preface of The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Popper wrote (italics in original):

The central problem of epistemology has always been and still is the problem of the growth of knowledge. And the growth of knowledge can be studied best by studying the growth of scientific knowledge.

And later in that preface:

Although I agree that scientific knowledge is merely a development of ordinary knowledge or common-sense knowledge, I contend that the most important and most exciting problems of epistemology must remain completely invisible to those who confine themselves to analysing ordinary or common-sense knowledge or its formulation in ordinary language.

Popper wanted to study scientific knowledge in addition to ordinary knowledge, not instead of ordinary knowledge. He thought science made a great example that shouldn't be ignored. But he wasn't trying to figure out how scientists learn things as a special case. He wanted to understand the general issue of the growth of knowledge, and that's what he was trying to explain, and that's what his epistemology does explain. He didn't accidentally create a general-purpose evolutionary epistemology that says we learn by conjectures and refutations or, equivalently, by trial and error. He knew that you can come up with guesses and criticism whether you're doing science or not.

David Deutsch put his name on these errors. And the bizarre claims about Popper inflated his reputation and gave him undeserved credit. It wasn't a random or neutral error; it was heavily biased in his favor.

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Update 2021-06-23: "Dec" pointed out that the same misquote is in BoI too (it's slightly different but has the same main error and is also badly wrong). So DD is even more directly responsible for making this error himself.

While I'm updating, DD wrote in BoI:

As the physicist Richard Feynman said, ‘Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.’

That's a misquote. And I just found another issue. DD wrote in BoI:

As Popper put it, ‘We can let our theories die in our place.’

That's not a full sentence in the original, so that's bad. DD is making it look like a full sentence. The "we" is lowercase in the original.

"Dec" also suggested that I screwed up by not catching the error when I edited BoI. I agree that I could have done better. I was less suspicious then and BoI didn't have the pages 7-9 clue. But I was not a co-author or co-founder of the book, and it was never my job to check for that kind of issue. I helped with the book but I was not paid, I had no official duties or requirements, and the contents of the book are not my responsibility.

In general, I sent DD suggestions and then he decided what to do. The majority of my suggestions were not discussed, so in most cases I don't even know if DD made a change or not. I never went back and compared versions to see which changes he made. The only changes I know he made due to my suggestions are the ones we actually talked about. So you can imagine that I do not feel responsible for the text of the book. I made lots of suggestions that DD didn't take, and most of my suggestions were either small or non-specific (like making a conceptual point but not suggesting exact wording). I didn't write any substantial sections of text in the book. I'm not sure if even one whole sentence of mine is in the book as I wrote it. I did not choose or control what was done with the book.

And I was not tasked with checking sources or doing this sort of research. And I never edited a copy of the book containing both the misquote and the bibliography. DD sent me draft chapters, and then full book drafts, without a bibliography included. He then sent me a bibliography draft after I was done editing, when the book was almost done. He finalized the bibliography at the last minute. Two days after showing me a draft bibliography, he sent me a version that had already been copy-edited, which I did not edit.

The first bibliography draft I saw did not contain In Search of a Better World, which is where Popper wrote "Now we can let our theories die in our place." DD only added that book to the bibliography after I said it had two great chapters and suggested that he read the table of contents and consider it. I'm confident that he didn't know he needed it as a quote source.

And DD misquoted in an article he wrote: https://nautil.us/issue/7/waste/not-merely-the-finest-tv-documentary-series-ever-made

As Karl Popper put it, we humans can “let our ideas die in our place.”

No, Popper wrote "theories" not "ideas". Does DD try to quote Popper from memory!? Why does he use different wordings at different times for the same quote? Why doesn't he copy/paste it out of a book? Something's really wrong here. I'd suggest that, going forward, DD should give a source when presenting a quote. I think he should stop writing books and articles containing quotes without sources. I suggest that no one should trust any quote DD gives, anywhere, unless he gives a source and you check the source yourself. (Be careful with anyone giving an unsourced quote, but especially with people who have a track record of getting quotes wrong like DD does.)

On a related note, in 2011 DD got upset with me for questioning a Godwin quote he sent me in a private email which I couldn't find when searching the book. It turned out that he was quoting the first edition and I was searching the third edition. He hadn't given a specific source. I was right to question it and DD should have praised my scholarship instead of getting upset about being questioned. I guess it makes sense that the kind of person who gets upset about being challenged about quoting would also be the kind of person to make quoting errors. Negative emotional reactions to critical questioning are really bad for error correction.

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Update 2, 2021-06-23:

I found another quoting error. The TCS website quoted Popper as writing "Lamarkian" when he actually wrote "Lamarckian". ("ck" not just "k").

I also found the misspelling posted by SFC, and still up today, on her personal website.

That page quotes differently than the TCS page, but also wrong. SFC quotes Popper as writing "flow of information which impresses itself" but in the book he wrote "that" not "which". She just wrote a different word and called it a quote.

And SFC attributes the quote to "The Myth of the Framework, pp. 8-9", but the quote starts on page 7 just like the TCS website said.

Also, DD's associate, Chiara Marletto, misquoted Popper:

https://www.edge.org/conversation/chiara-marletto-on-extinction

As Karl Popper put it, we can "let our ideas die in our place."

No, he wrote "theories" not "ideas".

These people need to learn how quote exactly instead of changing words and other details. If you don't know how to give an exact quote, don't give a quote. Stick to paraphrases until you learn what a quote is and how to do it. There's something really wrong with these people – DD and his associates – who keep making different quoting errors in different places. They aren't just copy/pasting the same error over and over. They keep separately creating different errors.

This is part of a series of posts explaining the harassment against me which has been going on for years now. The harassment is coming from David Deutsch and his community. I’ve tried to address the problem privately but they’ve refused to attempt any problem solving. This post provides more context about the situation. It explains David’s psychology, what he’s upset about, and why he went from being my friend to being hostile to me.

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David Deutsch and Lulie Tanett have been abusing my respect for their privacy to mislead people into believing we never had much of a relationship. (They may be saying some other things privately that I don’t know about. Regardless, they’re so publicly cold to me now that people are often skeptical that we ever knew each other well or were friends for many years.)

This needs to be corrected because they gossip and lie about me to damage my reputation and create a toxic hate group which has been harassing the FI community. (Lulie, back when she was more mixed instead of cold, actually confessed to me about violating my privacy and gossiping about me. David was caught lying about me. They both publicly speak with my largest stalker/harasser, Andy B.) Over the years of my patience and assuming good faith, they’ve escalated things so the harassment is severe and breaks laws.

David and Lulie both independently told me what actually happened: at some point, David started feeling bad whenever I wrote criticism related to him.

I didn’t share this before because I’ve been trying to protect David. I finally gave up on protecting him after not only over two years of serious harassment, and David and his entire social network ghosting me and anyone who agrees with me (which prevents problem solving about the harassment), but also specifically after David personally lied about me where I could see the exact text instead of having to speculate about his actions.

Lulie’s Story

Lulie told me about David’s negative feelings in late 2015 and/or early 2016 while visiting me in person. I don’t have exact quotes because we had a lot of discussions in voice. She said that every time I wrote any kind of critical public reply to one of David’s public statements, he’d feel awful and it’d make things much worse and alienate him more. She wanted David and I to be friends again, and she hadn’t turned against me yet at that time.

Note: Lulie resisted David’s anti-Elliot pressure for years before eventually giving in to a father-figure whom she’d known since around age two. David advocates non-coercive parenting but heavily coerced and pressured her to turn against me. That was after previously heavily encouraging her to have an intellectual relationship with me, and strongly encouraging me to have an intellectual relationship with her. David told each of us that we’d benefit a lot from discussing philosophy with the other. It was awful to take that away from her after pushing her into it.

Lulie’s career as an intellectual – which so far hasn’t produced anything significant – has been controlled by David a lot. He has significant responsibility for her ongoing unhappiness, lack of productivity (she can’t regularly write articles, read books or make videos), and inability to make money to support herself.

David told Lulie that conversing with me was one of the best things she could do that could get her unstuck and help her become a productive philosopher. He tried to help her succeed at that. But later he put work into preventing her from conversing with me. But while David was taking me away from her, she still thought I was important to her intellectual progress, and he never gave her convincing reasons why that had changed.

Lulie told me that she was scared that David would dump her like he dumped me, and stop speaking to her, helping her with money, or helping her career (and she has no other career prospects besides trying to be the intellectual that David wants). She told me that David promised not to dump her, and said everything was fine, but that she didn’t trust him and was under extreme duress. She said she was unable to rationally discuss the matter with me due to the pressure from David.

Background Information for David’s Story

David told me about his negative feelings on 2011-10-04. He said he felt bad about my arguments before reading them, regardless of what I said. He didn’t want to deal with criticism and disagreement anymore.

Why did David have negative feelings? David told me that too. It’s a bit of a long story.

Originally, from 2001-2007 or so, David persuaded me about the vast majority of issues that came up. If I had a different view than him, we’d discuss it. I’d think about it a lot, and, using help from his arguments, I’d change my mind.

Eventually, as I learned more, it became harder for David to change my mind. I started winning some arguments. And some arguments weren’t resolved. And there were fewer easy wins to focus our attention on, so the harder topics got more attention. David lost confidence in persuading me with followup discussions. He started thinking that if we discussed it a few more times, I’d probably still disagree with him.

The unresolved disagreements I’m talking about were intellectual issues, not personal problems. Some topics that we had a harder time agreeing about include: the nature of deduction, qualia, mirror neurons, “mental illness”, meta discussion, moral sanction, how anti-capitalist William Godwin was, pandering, and some details about justificationism.

A list of outstanding disagreements built up. David would only talk about them when he had a new idea about how to change my mind. That’s what he said. He didn’t think maybe I was right, as a fallibilist would. He instead tried different ways to change my mind. When one didn’t work, he’d drop the topic for weeks until he had a new idea for how to persuade me.

This violates and contradicts David’s own philosophy, which he wrote about his in books, wrote thousands of forum posts about, and had been teaching me about in private discussions. So it was confusing to me. I expected him to follow his own philosophy, and it was harder to understand because he was hiding information from me about what was going on (the things he told me, which I linked above, came late in our relationship, so I didn’t understand for years before that, and still had a hard time understanding it after he said a few sentences contradicting years of our prior relationship).

David’s philosophy says common preference finding and problem solving always work, and that they are part of how we grow knowledge and make progress. They’re truth seeking activities which are important to rationality and fallibilism, not merely ways to have better interpersonal relationships. It’s problematic and misleading that he teaches that while not even trying to do it. It wasn’t like we had a bunch of conversations attempting to find a common preference together, but failed. He hid some problems from me and, for those issues, he didn’t attempt that sort of open, cooperative problem-solving process. I’d understand more if he’d tried to do his philosophy ideas and it hadn’t worked out successfully, but in major ways he didn’t even attempt to live up to his own ideals.

How could David explain (to himself) his failure to persuade me about the intellectual topics we disagreed about? He started thinking I was irrational about those issues. He belatedly told me that too. But he never pointed out any example of my arguments, reasoning or actions being irrational. He never actually gave arguments about my alleged irrationality. He never e.g. pointed out a mistake I made and then analyzed the cause of the mistake to conclude that the underlying cause was irrationality. He didn’t quote example things I said that he thought were irrational and say why he thought those particular ones were irrational and explain or argue his viewpoint. He wasn’t doing the sort of truth seeking and problem solving that he says everyone should do.

He stopped wanting to deal with my arguments and reasoning because he wasn’t getting his way all the time. He started finding that when he argued with me, his arguments were less effective than before. Gradually, his arguments went from around 100% effective with me in 2001 to more like 25% effective in 2010 (which is still a very high effectiveness compared to what’s typical in the world today). I’d already changed my mind to agree with him about tons of stuff, and he was running out of easy wins.

David likes praise and he likes being a lecturer whom others listen to (he told me both of those things repeatedly, and he acted like they’re correct, too). He was not prepared to learn much from me and, on some issues, some of the time, be my student. He was done being a student a long time before we first met (in 2001, when he was age 48). This is notable because David’s philosophy says everyone should be life-longer learners, and that even beginners sometimes can teach experts something. David viewed me as one of the best philosophers alive – and the best one he could get discussions with – but still didn’t want to learn from me.

So it got to the point that when I wrote arguments, David would feel like he couldn’t win and he was blocked by all my (alleged) irrationalities, so the matter felt really hard to deal with. Each of my thoughts that he didn’t like was a new permanent problem because he didn’t know how to change my mind. My (alleged) irrationalities were undocumented and unexplained. David didn’t quote irrational statements by me and provide analysis. He just thought privately about what they were, in a disorganized way not a rigorous way, and then privately came up with tactics to deal with them. He didn’t want to talk about my (alleged) irrationalities because then I’d question his claims, using quotes and logic, which he started to regard as rhetorical tricks to excuse his failure to persuade me. He never bothered to try to objectively establish my errors in any clear cases, or to explain them to me enough that, if he were right, I could make changes to fix my problems. But simultaneously he still liked me better than other people and kept talking to me for years while pretending things were OK and that he was just stressed out by writing The Beginning of Infinity.

If he were right, why not explain it in three public examples in a way that would satisfy most neutral, unbiased, intelligent readers? That’s not much work considering that he wrote thousands of emails to me and spent literally thousands of hours interacting with me. He thought I was super smart and valued the relationship enough to spend so much time on, so why not try to persuade me? Even if it might not work, it’s worth trying. Plus he could have persuaded others who were in the discussion community at the time, rather than giving no arguments. Due to David not giving reasons, now most of the people from the discussion forums during that time period, who are familiar with events and formed an opinion, formed judgments in my favor not his.

David never wrote any such arguments. He didn’t even try. He left his discussion community, and lost some of his oldest fans, rather than argue his case. For example, David made no attempt to persuade the physicist and philosopher Alan Forrester, who had run the official Fabric of Reality discussion forum, who lives in the UK and met David in person multiple times, and whose name is in the acknowledgments of The Beginning of Infinity. Alan remains a friend of mine, still posts at my discussion forum, and has been a victim of the harassment. Alan emailed David to ask him to help stop the harassment that was affecting Alan too, but David refused to answer. Did Alan do something to deserve to be harassed? Is having philosophy discussions on my public forums enough for David to hate a former friend and want to see them hurt, even though David has never told Alan any reason that he shouldn’t discuss with me?

I think the reason David didn’t argue his case is simply that he couldn’t. He was wrong, didn’t have reasonable arguments to give. And he didn’t want to give bad arguments, get critical feedback, and change his own mind.

But why did David feel the need to blame me as irrational, instead of just agreeing to disagree? Because his philosophy says that all problems are soluble, common preferences can always be found, etc. So if problem solving isn’t working, that must mean one person is blocking it, being irrational, not acting in good faith, or something else awful. So David saw it as him or me. He had to blame me as irrational to avoid the alternative that it was his fault. If I wasn’t irrational, and he wasn’t doing truth seeking with me, then (in his view) that’d make him irrational for rejecting truth seeking and problem solving. Also, he had little respect for most intellectuals, and needed some reason to tell himself about why he was dropping one of his favorites whom he’d chosen to spend so much time on.

Unlike David, I did, eventually, write some things pointing out mistakes David made, which did persuade some people. However, I wasn’t very interested in persuading people about David’s flaws until recently. I could have written a lot more, but didn’t; but now after being a victim of years of harassment from David’s followers, and David smearing me, I want to tell my story and argue my case.

David made major life changes (leaving not only me but the whole TCS/ARR/FoR/BoI/curi/FI community he’d co-founded and then been a part of for two decades) based (I think) on my (alleged) irrationality (that he never tried to write down in a clear, objective way). I was going along with life as normal. I thought about David’s flaws some because it affected my life when he reduced then ended our conversations, and broke some promises and obligations to me. But I didn’t write a lot about it. I would have written more about it had David actually wanted to discuss it, but I knew that, at that point, he didn’t like to read or think about my arguments; he didn’t want them and he didn’t want anyone to read them for fear that people might agree with me. So I tried to mostly just give him space. This is part of why I didn’t make videos explaining BoI sooner.

Many people have felt like they can’t win debates with me. Some blame their own ignorance and incompetence. Some call me an idiot or sophist. Some say debate is hard and it’s understandable if no one is persuaded. David was not in a position to consider me dumb – he couldn’t convince himself of that narrative after spending years believing I was extraordinarily smart, clever, logical, open-minded, active-minded and fast-learning, which was why he was friends with me. Since he couldn’t find any kind of simple or factual errors to blame, and couldn’t plausibly blame me being dumb, he needed to come up with something else to put the blame on me, in his mind, for his inability to win some arguments with me. So he decided that I’m irrational (without ever explaining how or why that happened, since he’d previously thought I was especially rational. BTW, years after David became cold to me, Lulie told me that she thinks I’m more rational than him. She knew both of us personally so was in a position to judge based on personal conduct, not just our writing.).

Also, David put work into getting me not to worry about social cues with him. Sometimes people give social hints that they don’t like something or want to be left alone, and perceive it as aggressive or mean if those social hints/cues aren’t followed. David didn’t want our relationship to work that way.

David wanted me to rely on him making explicit requests, and on me asking for explicit permission for some things (mostly about sharing stuff he told me). He communicated that he didn’t want me to follow social cues from him. He repeatedly said not to worry about potentially annoying him, wasting his time, contacting him too much, bothering him, etc, and that he would choose what to engage with and what to spend time on. He said he’d take care of himself and he didn’t want me making guesses about what would be in his best interest. He didn’t want me to withhold communications based on my ideas about what he wanted; he wanted to manage the situation himself.

The main reason this came up is that I asked about it repeatedly in the first few years I knew him. I asked about it because I met David as a fan of his book not as a peer, and I figured he had important stuff to be doing, like writing his next book, instead of talking with me so much. I didn’t want to overstep. But he wanted me to be comfortable with him, treat him as a friend, and not worry about bothering him or taking up his time. (Also, social cues never count as no contact requests. Lots of people miss social cues, especially online, and at worst missing those cues is kinda rude, not abusive.)

Also David basically taught me that paying attention to social cues is irrational and we should interact based on explicit statements, talking things out, reasoning in words, etc. That’s also one of the things his TCS philosophy taught. TCS got a lot of pushback because it had that attitude even for pre-verbal children, who it sees as merely small adults who are fully capable of long abstract discussions about problem solving. (I don’t agree with that.)

That’s the context. Now here’s my best understanding of the main issue:

David’s Story

After years of feeling bad about what I said and building up an “Elliot is irrational; that’s why my arguments don’t work” narrative in his mind, David started confusing his feelings with facts. He started thinking that, since he felt bad, I was abusing him in some way. This is how he got to the mental state where he lies that I’m a several-no-contact-request violating abuser. It feels like that to him. He felt like he didn’t want things, and then he observed me continuing to do them anyway, despite his unstated (and purposefully hidden from me) feelings (and probably despite some social cues that he’d trained me not to pay attention to). And he felt bad about being asked to clearly state what he didn’t want, so that just added to the perceived abuse. It felt bad to him to try to formulate in words what he didn’t want and why because it was hard for him to come up with reasonable words that didn’t blame himself. He felt abused, so people started picking up on his attitude, and it evolved over time to a harassment campaign and to him getting facts wrong. That’s because the emotion-driven narrative was primary to him. That’s a pattern with David and his close associates like his TCS co-founder Sarah, who did something similar more than once.

By disagreeing with and debating David, I was following his philosophy that he taught me. I wasn’t disrespecting his authority. From the beginning, I hadn’t changed my mind until I was satisfied (by his arguments and/or by what I thought of myself). But when I disagreed with him in the later years, he assumed that meant I was wrong, stubborn or irrational. He tried to talk to me about issues only when he thought of a new way to convince me he was right. So he wasn’t following the philosophy he taught me.

David’s fallibilist philosophy says to consider it equally possible that I could be right instead of him. His philosophy says that “get the lower status person to see why the expert is right” is an irrational way to approach disagreement. He’s often said that Karl Popper taught us that we must not recategorize disagreements as something else (like disobedience, disrespect, a student not knowing their place, dishonesty, bad faith, etc.). I was following what David taught me, not pushing one of my own ideas on him.

David said that, most of the time, children don’t disagree with their parents (people overestimate how disagreeable children are because they focus a lot of attention on the disagreements). Children selectively disagree in cases where the parent’s idea doesn’t make sense to them. So although parents are usually right, if you look at only the cases where children disagree and object, then children are right a significant portion of the time. (Also, often both the parent and child are partly wrong. Neither one has a perfect view, so the parent can be mostly right but still need to make some adjustments to address a problem the child saw.) The same logic applies to e.g. an expert teaching a novice. The expert is usually right, but if you only look at the times the novice listens to the expert first and then still disagrees afterward, then the novice has a decent chance of being right. The cases where you’re wrong are, on average, the hardest ones to teach to others and get them to agree with. But David didn’t take seriously that I might be right about our intellectual disagreements. He wasn’t interested in reconsidering his own ideas in light of my arguments. And that was long after I was no longer a novice, and he’d called me a “colleague” and made a bunch of changes to drafts of his book on my advice. In retrospect, it seems that a lot of his interest in my arguments was about knowing what obstacles to address to persuade me, rather than actually being interested in learning the ideas I was saying. But approaching discussion that way is, according to David’s philosophy, extremely irrational.

David repeatedly and publicly wrote about and advocated this view on rationality (some of the things he said were extreme, unconventional and actually problematic, which I may write about later). And on 2011-03-15, David IMed me “One side-effect of infallibilism is that it redefines misunderstanding as treason.” He believe that basically disagreement (including from young children) should never be delegitimized as something else like treason, misbehavior, disobedience, “being difficult”, bad faith, stupidity, etc. Instead, fallibilists interpret basically all kinds of conflicts or problems between people as disagreements about ideas that can be dealt with using rationality. It’s unclear to me how exactly David decided that we didn’t have a discussable misunderstanding and that, instead, I was a traitor. He didn’t go through some kind of robust, visible, explicable process of determining that with me. It seems like he just believes what’s necessary to protect his feelings.

One of the underlying causes of this whole story is that David was extremely stressed by writing his book, The Beginning of Infinity (BoI). He was especially stressed by the deadline to finish, which he got extended (but he couldn’t keep getting extensions). Although he worked on the book for over a decade, he ran out of time at the end and had to leave out some planned chapters. He often used being busy and stressed by the book as an excuse for things (sometimes quite reasonably, other times less so). And one time he told me that he was acting irrationally due to the stress of trying to finish BoI. He said he expected to recover and treat me more normally again after BoI was published (but instead became colder and more hostile after his book was done). (This info was over multiple years, primarily in IMs.)

Conclusions

I guess I should have shared this years ago but I wanted to protect my former friend. So I suffered through years of abuse without even sharing much of my side of the story.

I wouldn’t talk about this if it was just David being a jerk, a bad friend, or a person who wasn’t personally as good as his philosophical ideals. But I don’t want to be trolled by a bunch of fake identities, be DDOSed, be lied about by a public figure, and suffer other abuse from his community. David is using false narratives about me to encourage ongoing severe harassment that needs to stop. He’s been getting revenge on me for his hurt feelings. I want to be left alone. I don’t want my rights violated.

PS: If you think I’m mistaken, please quote and respond critically to the single thing you’re most confident is an error. (Email curi@curi.us, use my forum, or post on your blog and email me the link. FYI, I will treat your email about this matter as public unless you get my explicit agreement, in advance, to keep something private.) Evidence, details or logical arguments would be appreciated. A calm, objective tone would be great too. If you want to argue with multiple things, that’s OK, but let’s do one at a time. Please start with any factual errors before trying to debate any points that are more in the realm of opinion. I’m under the general impression that some people in David’s community don’t believe me when I say things like this or even when I claim to have been harassed at all, but none of them have told me what they don’t believe or why, which makes it difficult to respond to and provide more convincing information. I have to guess at what people disagree with or doubt and try to address it preemptively, which is hard when I’m also trying to limit what I share for privacy reasons, and it’s also hard because most of the people don’t want to read long things.

This is part of a series of posts explaining the harassment against me which has been going on for years. The harassment is coming from David Deutsch and his fans and associates. This post provides historical context.

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David Deutsch (DD) said I had a “talent” for annoying irrational people. He said I was good at offending them, bringing up key issues that people were sensitive about, and being pushy (rather than conflict-avoiding) about intellectual debates.

I didn’t fully agree with DD about the details of this, but I did and do agree about the broad outline. Something along those lines is a reasonable statement.

DD said several times that he had a talent for not being bothered by my talent. (I’m not certain, from memory, that he used the specific word “talent” to refer to his ability to deal with my “talent”. And comments below about what DD said are paraphrases from memory.)

So it was really unfair of DD to secretly build up resentments, for years, over my “talent”, after assuring me multiple times that he didn’t mind it and he was fine. Yes I offended some people when debating them, but DD repeatedly reassured me that I could speak freely with him and that he was safe. He said it was safe for me to be myself, speak openly, and be maximally critical and argumentative. He said I didn’t need to put effort into being tactful with him, as I often do with others (it’s sometimes inadequate, but I generally do make some effort to be tactful).

DD told me that he was rational enough that I could make all the arguments I wanted, say ten criticisms about a single issue, ask whatever questions I wanted, etc., and it would be fine and never alienate him. He convinced me that this was true. It wasn’t. Maybe it was fine at first, perhaps for the first five years. But at some point it stopped being fine and he was dishonest with me and hid that problem from me (while continuing to talk with me a ton – and during those conversations I’d occasionally say things he didn’t like without knowing it and with no direct, negative feedback).

DD put work into getting me not to follow normal social rules when talking with him. He told me repeatedly to talk to him as much as I wanted and that he would take responsibility for choosing how much to engage with me. He said I didn’t need to throttle or limit my communications or worry about wasting his time. He wanted more messages from me and to have full control, on his end, over how much attention he paid to me.

Context makes it worse. I met DD as a much younger person than him and an immature intellectual. He had a lot of influence on me, and he played the wise expert role. I trusted him a lot, including his statements about how to treat him. But now I’m being criminally harassed because I believed what DD told me about his unbounded ability to hear truth-seeking arguments, criticisms, opinions, questions, requests, analysis, etc. He actually got really upset about my attempts at unbounded truth-seeking, did not point out any errors I was making, hid the problem which prevented me from trying to problem solve about it, and then finally stopped associating with me. But abandoning me and breaking some promises (e.g. to write an introduction for my book) wasn’t enough for him. He held onto a major grudge which is still severe enough, a decade later, to libel me and encourage criminal harassment.

The grudge seems to be largely because he intellectually fears me. I’m one of the only people who can effectively criticize and refute his ideas – including both big picture issues and also poking holes in his logic or wording – and he doesn’t want to look bad in public. He never once requested that I don’t publicly criticize his ideas (in the past, I was extremely willing to go along with his requests, and gave him a ton of leeway and consideration). But, in his mind, I believe he blames fear of my criticism for years of him not blogging or otherwise being productive and sharing ideas with the world. It’s an ongoing issue today. Because if he did write blog posts, I might refute them like this.

(That linked post is about a 2016 email he sent to a stranger who then posted it on Reddit. DD’s email was roughly equivalent to a blog post instead of being tweet-sized – that’s one of most recent substantive things he’s written that is publicly available – and it was actually really bad and I explained in writing how incompetent, biased and error-filled it was. If DD blogged, I’d notice more bad posts, and criticize some of them, and he knows that and doesn’t want that to happen. It threatens his ability to convince people that he’s one of the greatest thinkers ever and that his word is gospel. And he doesn’t want to actually defend that desired reputation by debating, partly because that’s hard and stressful, and partly because he knows he might lose. So not only has he been avoiding saying things that could be criticized, but he’s also been trying to withdraw some things he said in the past like his approximately 2000 TCS emails.)

Anyway, DD assured me that stuff (arguments, analysis and unbounded truth-seeking) was fine, I listened to him, but then it turned out it wasn’t fine. He was vulnerable to my “talent” after all and needed boundaries on criticism. He hid the problem from me for yearsa, tried to deal with it himself, and failed. That’s his fault and responsibility. But now I’m being harassed and smeared by him and his community over his screw up.

This is part of a series of posts explaining the harassment against me which has been going on for years. The aggressors are David Deutsch and his fan community. This post provides context about what type of person Deutsch is (a social climber), with quotes, which helps explain the harassment situation.

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In the Introduction to Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand wrote about the right and wrong ways to approach life and other people. The error of wanting to control too much about other people explains a lot about David Deutsch (DD). After the Rand quote, I’ll give quotes from DD showing how he has flaws that Rand was talking about. In the quotes, he talks about managing his reputation and controlling what other people think of him.

Her [Dagny Taggart’s] error—and the cause of her refusal to join the strike—is over-optimism and over-confidence (particularly this last). Over-optimism—in that she thinks men are better than they are, she doesn’t really understand them and is generous about it.

Over-confidence—in that she thinks she can do more than an individual actually can. She thinks she can run a railroad (or the world) single-handed, she can make people do what she wants or needs, what is right, by the sheer force of her own talent; not by forcing them, of course, not by enslaving them and giving orders—but by the sheer over-abundance of her own energy; she will show them how, she can teach them and persuade them, she is so able that they’ll catch it from her. (This is still faith in their rationality, in the omnipotence of reason. The mistake? Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.)

On these two points, Dagny is committing an important (but excusable and understandable) error in thinking, the kind of error individualists and creators often make. It is an error proceeding from the best in their nature and from a proper principle, but this principle is misapplied. . . .

The error is this: it is proper for a creator to be optimistic, in the deepest, most basic sense, since the creator believes in a benevolent universe and functions on that premise. But it is an error to extend that optimism to other specific men. First, it’s not necessary, the creator’s life and the nature of the universe do not require it, his life does not depend on others. Second, man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it’s up to him and only to him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be. The decision will affect only him; it is not (and cannot and should not be) the primary concern of any other human being.

Therefore, while a creator does and must worship Man (which means his own highest potentiality; which is his natural self-reverence), he must not make the mistake of thinking that this means the necessity to worship Mankind (as a collective). These are two entirely different conceptions, with entirely—(immensely and diametrically opposed)—different consequences.

Man, at his highest potentiality, is realized and fulfilled within each creator himself. . . .Whether the creator is alone, or finds only a handful of others like him, or is among the majority of mankind, is of no importance or consequence whatever; numbers have nothing to do with it. He alone or he and a few others like him are mankind, in the proper sense of being the proof of what man actually is, man at his best, the essential man, man at his highest possibility. (The rational being, who acts according to his nature.)

It should not matter to a creator whether anyone or a million or all the men around him fall short of the ideal of Man; let him live up to that ideal himself; this is all the “optimism” about Man that he needs. But this is a hard and subtle thing to realize—and it would be natural for Dagny always to make the mistake of believing others are better than they really are (or will become better, or she will teach them to become better or, actually, she so desperately wants them to be better)—and to be tied to the world by that hope.

It is proper for a creator to have an unlimited confidence in himself and his ability, to feel certain that he can get anything he wishes out of life, that he can accomplish anything he decides to accomplish, and that it’s up to him to do it. (He feels it because he is a man of reason . . .) [But] here is what he must keep clearly in mind: it is true that a creator can accomplish anything he wishes—if he functions according to the nature of man, the universe and his own proper morality, that is, if he does not place his wish primarily within others and does not attempt or desire anything that is of a collective nature, anything that concerns others primarily or requires primarily the exercise of the will of others. (This would be an immoral desire or attempt, contrary to his nature as a creator.) If he attempts that, he is out of a creator’s province and in that of the collectivist and the second-hander.

Therefore, he must never feel confident that he can do anything whatever to, by or through others. (He can’t—and he shouldn’t even wish to try it—and the mere attempt is improper.) He must not think that he can . . . somehow transfer his energy and his intelligence to them and make them fit for his purposes in that way. He must face other men as they are, recognizing them as essentially independent entities, by nature, and beyond his primary influence; [he must] deal with them only on his own, independent terms, deal with such as he judges can fit his purpose or live up to his standards (by themselves and of their own will, independently of him) and expect nothing from the others. . . .

Now, in Dagny’s case, her desperate desire is to run Taggart Transcontinental. She sees that there are no men suited to her purpose around her, no men of ability, independence and competence. She thinks she can run it with others, with the incompetent and the parasites, either by training them or merely by treating them as robots who will take her orders and function without personal initiative or responsibility; with herself, in effect, being the spark of initiative, the bearer of responsibility for a whole collective. This can’t be done. This is her crucial error.

This is where she fails.

David Deutsch (DD) wants to control his effect on the world and how the world sees him. He wants to have a large number of fans. He wants to do things to, by and through others. He doesn’t want to treat people as fully independent entities. He wants to tell people what to think. That’s too hard a task, which is one of the reasons it took him over a decade to write BoI.

DD has had ideas like teaching people to be better parents – but without them having to learn Critical Rationalism (CR) themselves. Taking Children Seriously (TCS) said parents could just learn DD’s conclusions, based on his understanding of CR, without having to learn much about philosophy themselves. TCS reassured parents that reading even one Popper book was optional. (I give sources for this at the end of this post.) This made DD the bearer of responsibility for the whole collective, since he was the one with knowledge about CR and how to apply CR. But DD and his TCS co-founder, Sarah Fitz-Claridge (SFC), have also denied having responsibility for what happened to those parents and their children, and basically abandoned them.

DD hides what kind of person he is, so I expect people to initially doubt my claims about him. Getting you to doubt he’s a social climber is part of his reputation management. But DD has admitted these things to me privately, e.g. he emailed me on 2010-07-25 (my italics):

I myself do not want the [Taking Children Seriously] archives to be widely read (yet!) because I am strongly of the opinion that it would run a coach and horses through my plans to manage my reputation into the future so that I can have a beneficial effect on the world other than physics etc. It would cause no end of trouble for me in that regard.

DD didn’t think there was anything wrong with his roughly 2000 posts about TCS. He wanted them read later (hence the “yet!” comment). He hadn’t changed his mind about the ideas. He wasn’t even saying they needed to be rewritten or edited. He just wanted to control what effect he had on the world and control his reputation (that is, control what opinions other people had in their minds about him). So he wanted to hide his ideas that he thought were wonderful and important. He wants to be a mastermind manipulating the world for its benefit, just as TCS says a parent should try to not do to his child, and Rand said not to do in the quote above. (DD claimed to be a fan of Ayn Rand and strongly recommended her books to me.)

Similarly, on 2010-09-26:

17:16:00 curidotus: can you explain your reputation management theories a bit more?
17:17:12 oxfordphysicist: One reason I agreed to be in this new Institute is that it will extend the area over which I am regarded as entitled to pontificate in public and to be listened to.
17:17:47 curidotus: rather unFeynmanesque of you
17:18:12 oxfordphysicist: I want to keep extending that area until it covers some aspects of politics and one day even education theory.
17:18:28 curidotus: and since you don't belong to any think tank dedicated to contradicting feynman, you're not allowed to argue with that!
17:18:34 oxfordphysicist: Similarly I want to avoid doing things that reduce the area.

Note that I disagreed with DD and was arguing with him by mentioning how his attitude contradicted Feynman’s.

On 2010-10-01 (my italics):

16:52:37 oxfordphysicist: Today I met the other senior members [including Nick Bostrom] of the proposed new Future Technology Institute.
[…]
16:55:35 oxfordphysicist: Mostly we were all trying to impress the sponsor with our cleverness and depth. So nothing has actually happened yet.

That’s social climbing.

And within a few days of 2010-08-20:

oxfordphysicist:
[That] Might harm me by diverting discussion away from BoI issues onto TCS and STWTR issues which I am not yet ready to present to the general public.

It’s amazing how DD wants to control his reputation. He wrote hundreds of STWTR posts on a public blog. Then he wants to somehow take it back. He’s not ready to present it to the public!? But he already did present it to the public.

Similarly, TCS was already presented to the public and probably thousands of parents started trying to use it. Many people made some changes to their parenting on DD’s and SFC’s advice. They relied on DD and SFC for the ongoing support and advice that DD and SFC communicated would be available. You can’t (reasonably) withdraw a parenting philosophy that is already in use in many people’s lives that you shared on the public internet, in a bunch of conference speeches, and in a paper journal.

You especially can’t withdraw your parenting philosophy when you tell people they’re basically like evil dictators if they don’t do TCS. They compare non-TCS parents to slave owners and to husbands when beating your wife was legal. They tell parents that TCS is something they can and must do right now, today, to avoid destroying their children’s minds. And tell them they don’t need to learn philosophy and Popper – that’s optional, advanced extra stuff. If they don’t learn Popper themselves, then they are dependent on experts like DD and SFC, so withdrawing that expertise screws people over really badly.

And neither DD nor SFC has publicly admitted to withdrawing anything or quitting the community. They don’t acknowledge anything changed. But behind the scenes they do things like pressure me not to repost archives that became unavailable due to technical/computer/software type problems. It’s dishonest to to hide what’s going on from the community you’re trying to take resources away from. They never even admitted that they stopped making new parenting resources, but they did worse than that by trying to take away existing resources like the original TCS website and recently the second TCS website (that was harder to navigate and incomplete, and they promised more stuff that never came). And when they quit, they never directed anyone to any alternatives to move on to.

It was basically implied that the parenting resources to move on to were me and my community, since DD and SFC left their discussion community to my leadership. But they never directly said that (they just left without explanation and without any clear moment in time when they left). And SFC disliked me and put some effort into preventing TCS parents from finding out that a TCS discussion forum still existed, run by me. And now they’re involved with harassment against me and my community, even though it was the only significant resource left for TCS parents. For many years, I’ve been the only person letting TCS parents come ask questions and providing expert answers, and they seem mad about that because they want to be the expert leaders. They abandoned TCS, but still want the social prestige of being a founder and leader, but without the responsibility or work involved.

SFC has been doing some podcasts and talks about TCS recently with zero acknowledgement or explanation about being gone for over 15 years. It’s confusing because they simultaneously in some ways want to hide and disown TCS, and in other ways want to claim to always have been the experts and leaders like nothing changed. It doesn’t make sense. And it leaves me with no idea what actions I could take to please them so that they would stop the harassment campaign.

As TCS leaders, they’ve (primarily SFC, who played much more of a community manager role than DD, while DD played the wise intellectual role) repeatedly said things like that new wonderful TCS stuff was coming soon. SFC was still selling TCS journal subscriptions long after the last journal was published. When they switched from the tcs.ac website to takingchildrenseriously.com (and unnecessarily got rid of the old domain instead of leaving it alone or redirecting it), they told everyone they’d repost all the articles from the old website, but then they never did. And currently takingchildrenseriously.com has all content deleted, and SFC claims the site will be even better soon. Why couldn’t she leave the existing articles available until the new stuff was ready? Why take them down instead of leaving things alone? She took stuff down on purpose, for a reason she won’t tell the TCS community (she says she disagrees with some old stuff, but doesn’t say what, and maybe just disagrees with the tone). And why delete things at all? Why not just add new additional stuff. And when is the new stuff coming? She took down the existing stuff months ago.

On 2010-08-27, DD wrote (typos in original):

oxfordphysicist:
I dodn't mean only FoR List discussion. I mean -- say a TV producer has joined the FoR list as part of sizing me up for a 12 part series. Then he sees that someone regards me as having written thousands of TCS posts so he reads them and decides I;m a crank.

DD wants to control what other people think and do. TV producers must see DD’s resume exactly as he wants it, with no other information. He thinks his TCS posts could cost him a TV series, and therefore wants to prevent any parents – who are in the middle of a TCS parenting – from continuing to use or discuss it.

Also, DD did write around two thousand TCS posts. That’s a fact, not something that some people regard him as having done.

But DD won’t say publicly that he wants to hide the information that TV producers might dislike (which, admittedly, would defeat his goal of tricking the public including the TV producers). He just sabotages parents behind the scenes after founding a parenting movement at around age 38 and putting his intellectual reputation (e.g. as a book author) behind it. I think a lot of TCS parents don’t know what went wrong and probably blame themselves, and don’t know what DD and SFC did that was unreasonable.

You can’t start something well into adulthood, connect it to your career, and then expect to withdraw it. That’s so unreasonable. People listened to DD because he relied on the reputation from his career and book – they thought he was putting his reputation and career on the line and that he would be a strong, lasting advocate of the movement he started. But now he won’t take responsibility for what he said or responsibility for the role of giving radical, life-changing advice to parents that raises new problems that they need ongoing support, articles and discussion to help with.

By the way, despite getting his way about hiding the TCS archives, DD still hasn’t gotten any 12 part TV series in the last 10+ years since he was so pushy with me about it. Not even a 1 part series. (And is he grateful that I did what he wanted regarding the TCS archives? No. He now initiates force against me without saying why.)

In his article Is TCS Revolutionary?, DD had warned other people not to try to manage their reputations like he secretly does:

One thing that one does not do is hesitate to argue against those ideas and in favour of ideas that seem better. Darwin hesitated for twenty years before publishing The Origin of Species, partly out of fear that it would undermine the fabric of society. His fear may have been justified, but his hesitation was not. The reason is the very consideration that I am discussing in this article. Yes, Darwin's theory contributed to the decline of religion and perhaps, thereby, created a vacuum that has been filled by such things as totalitarian ideologies. But on the other hand, it also contributed enormously to scientific and philosophical progress, which has saved countless lives and enriched many more. For Darwin to know which of these effects would be stronger — to know whether postponing publication of his theory of evolution would do net good or harm — would require a supernatural knowledge of all the ideas, explicit and inexplicit, that existed in other minds, followed by a superhuman analysis of the myriad interactions between them that publication would initiate. To imagine that he could make a meaningful judgement in this matter, and that it was his place to second-guess the intellectual development of the entire world on the basis of such a judgement, was not just silly, it was crass utopianism.

When we were still speaking a lot, I asked DD about this passage and how he isn’t following his own advice. His excuse was that he has more than one thing to say and he needs to say them in the right order. He should have thought of that before he said the TCS stuff. He spent nearly 20 years saying TCS stuff and then tried to pretend he didn’t. Except in a weird, ambiguous way. SFC gave a talk on TCS recently, identified DD as a co-founder of TCS, and claims she will soon publish a book on TCS (20 years ago, she also claimed the book would be done soon, so who knows if or when it’ll ever come out). She also recently went on some podcasts to promote TCS. Are they trying to hide TCS or not? What do they actually want? It doesn’t make sense. Some of DD’s fans are still finding TCS and thinking they should do it, and SFC is encouraging that. Some of DD’s fans tell people about TCS in his Twitter topics, too, and put that in DD’s mentions (notifications).

DD told me basically that he wasted many years of his life sharing TCS ideas and participating in discussions because people don’t listen, don’t learn it right, and hate TCS. He broadly thinks people are too dumb (compared to him) to reason with. I think he’s in an awkward position of thinking TCS is true, and having nothing to retract, while also wanting to stop telling it to anyone he doesn’t intellectually respect (so nearly every living person). He thinks people who read about TCS mostly respond by hating him because they’re stupid and irrational, and he doesn’t want to deal with that anymore, but he doesn’t want to retract TCS either. Partly he won’t retract TCS because that would draw more attention to it, and also he doesn’t want to admit to having been wrong about something.

But SFC is promoting TCS in 2021, so what’s going on? Maybe DD doesn’t want her to, but is unwilling to make clear, direct requests to her because she’s an extremely emotional, irrational person who will get really upset and angry over nothing, let alone over a significant request. (My main source on that claim about SFC is talking with her child a lot, though I’ve seen some of it myself too, both in person and online.) SFC might not even know what DD wants. Or maybe DD got old enough that he gave up on doing other stuff. He did promise me that he’d write a book on TCS before he died (but after he finished his physics work). But if he’s decided he’s again ready to be associated with the movement he co-founded and put his reputation behind and hasn’t retracted … he hasn’t said that either. And if SFC is allowed to talk about TCS, what is he so mad at me about that he has his community harassing me? He claimed that he was upset with me for wanting to keep the TCS email discussion archives available for people to read (but not doing it, at his request). (He wanted not just obedience but agreement … but also didn’t want to discuss and debate the matter to change my mind. Much like how conventional parents sometimes treat their children, which TCS objects to.)

DD himself is tweeting about TCS issues in a confusing way that’s bad for social climbing. He isn’t explaining it. It seems like he just doesn’t have a coherent plan. For example (2021):

All compulsory education, "tough" or not, "love" or not, in camps or not, and whether it "traumatises" or not, is a violation of human rights.

That tweet was paired with a link to Troubled US teens left traumatised by tough love camps. DD was downplaying how bad those camps are. He hates all compulsory education so much that he apparently can’t differentiate that some instances are worse than others. When you compare compulsory education to slavery or dictatorship, you don’t leave much room to admit that some things are less bad than others. It’s like saying all compulsory education is all bad, with no shades of gray, and therefore downplaying the evil of compulsory education that’s worse than public schools (like the camps). And there are abusive parents who are worse than regular parents – DD would reply that they’re all abusive parents, but some parents get drunk and beat their children and some don’t, so they aren’t all the same.

But DD isn’t explaining what he’s talking about, nor making available links to articles that explain it. His audience isn’t going to understand. Some people ask what he’s talking about and he mostly ignores them.

DD also tweeted (2021):

Compulsory education is bad.

Again he didn’t explain his position.

And he’s using force – compulsion – against me that pressures me to learn things I don’t want to learn, e.g. to become educated about the dumb tweets he writes. My self-defense has required learning a bunch of information I’d rather not about people like DD and Andy, as well as about things like website security and false identity detection.

And DD tweeted (2021):

A very bad law is about to be enacted. The very term 'junk food' is hate speech. The very term 'obesity' is a signal of scientism.

Defending children eating whatever they want, and saying all sorts of “junk food” are healthy, was a common DD/TCS claim. But why start tweeting it without explaining your position? He stopped admitting to believing this for years and now he wants to put it on his regular Twitter account, to his regular audience, without giving any reasoning? What’s the big reveal after years of silence? That’s his idea of reputation management? The only plan here is to be vague enough that most people won’t understand what he’s talking about and will hopefully ignore it, so he won’t get too much backlash. But where’s the upside? No one is going to learn something useful from tweets like this. If he was willing to alienate most people with strong, unpopular positions, without really even trying to explain it so reasonable people could see his point … then what was he doing for the last decade? What was he hiding this stuff for if he’s going to share it so recklessly?

Conclusion

DD is a reputation-managing social climber who tries to control what other people know and think about him. He screwed up by founding a movement people dislike, connecting it with his book and public intellectual career, using his author status to recruit and impress members, and writing thousands of posts about it over a period of many years. He also screwed up by writing hundreds of right-wing political blog posts, even though the intellectual elites he wants to socially climb with lean pretty strongly left-wing.

He wants to pretend he never said stuff, but he still thinks it’s true, and he has no coherent plan or policy for what to do about this situation. I think this results in frustration which sometimes builds up enough for DD to tweet a few vague things about his actual views (but they have to be vague because he doesn’t actually want to share his opinions clearly and face the public response, which he fears). He failed at his goals to manage his reputation and control the public’s opinions, and has no idea how to fix it, and his actions now don’t make sense.

And DD seems to blame me a significant amount, for no clear reason, but with concrete consequences: severe harassment for multiple years, and DD himself defamed me. Which is terrible strategy. If he would leave me alone, I wouldn’t be writing about his involvement with TCS, his social climbing, his mistreatment of me, and so on. But he absolutely refuses to discuss the matter privately, ask even once for his fans to stop harassing, or clean up his toxic community. The situation remains intolerable for me, and violates my rights, so I’m talking about it.

DD is second-handed. He cares what other people think and what ideas are in their heads – that’s what reputation is. He wants prestige and social status in the minds of others. He ought to reread Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, which addresses second-handedness as a main theme.

I think my negativity towards reputation management and social climbing is one of the major reasons that DD and I parted ways. Reputation management is also one of the reasons DD doesn’t publish very much writing. He wants to control things that are out of his control, and his writing can’t live up to that goal, so it’s never good enough.

TCS Says You Don’t Have to Read Popper

This section gives evidence for my earlier claim that TCS said reading Popper is optional, and explains how TCS was selling easy answers and shortcuts.

SFC wrote to TCS list on 2000-03-25 (my italics):

Popper, the man, had no connection with TCS. In fact, he did not discuss educational theory, and indeed, he wrote ghastly, non-TCS things about television. So don't worry if you don't want to read his books

Kevin Schoedel (a close associate of SFC) wrote from an official TCS email address (tcs@fma.com), which SFC announced and posted from herself, on 1996-07-20, to TCS list:

Reading those books [by Popper and Bartley about Popperian epistemology] will not necessarily give you the slightest clue about non-coercive educational theory … On the TCS list, I try to write in such a way that it can be understood without familiarity with Popper, as do others. Furthermore, I am pretty sure there are several individuals on this list who have never read Popper and yet understand what this is all about.

…

It is not necessary to have read Popper to understand non-coercive educational theory! But if you really want to read Popper ... But I still say reading this list, and asking all the questions thereby raised in your mind, would be more useful [than reading Popper] if the aim is to understand non-coercive educational theory.

Note that this advice came before DD had published a book, so people weren’t going to learn CR by reading DD instead. And after DD published The Fabric of Reality, reading that was considered optional for TCS parents, too.

I’m the person who started telling parents that they had to learn CR and become rational philosophers themselves in order to have a realistic chance of being great, non-coercive parents. But most of them didn’t want to do that; they’d been looking for the easy answers TCS had been selling.

Speaking of easy answers, TCS also told parents that they could be and stay irrational, and still do TCS correctly, as long as they didn’t intentionally hurt their children. TCS talks about shielding your children from your own irrationalities, which you don’t solve, by not coercing your children based on your irrationalities. And TCS said all coercion is intentional, so just don’t coerce on purpose and your own irrationality and ignorance won’t matter much.

SFC wrote to TCS list on 1996-03-18 saying that coercion is “almost invariably” “intentional”:

Acting on one theory while a conflicting theory remains active in one’s mind [which TCS calls “coercion”] is not a state that happens by chance. It is almost invariably a result of intentional coercion on the part of another person, whether at the time, or earlier in the person’s life. That is why we call this state “acting under coercion” and not something less judgemental-sounding.

TCS got popular with the message that your children will grow up fully rational as long as you aren’t mean to them on purpose, and that you don’t have to learn philosophy or read books in order to accomplish this.

TCS also pushed privacy and avoided sharing information about the results for any actual children. But as a longstanding member of the community, who has met or talked with a lot of TCS people, I can confidently say that TCS never worked as advertised for a single parent. Some TCS people did pretty well as parents, and some poorly, but the plan to never be intentionally mean, and thus raise fully rational children, wasn’t even close to working for a single person. It was a bit like a “get rich quick” scheme – it makes big promises that only require low effort, but it doesn’t actually work. A lot of people want easy answers and shortcuts, and David Deutsch put his name and intellectual reputation on this one, and made it sound philosophical to people who’d never read a philosophy book (and were told that they didn’t need to). That (plus SFC’s community organizing) was enough to attract a few thousand followers.

When the harassment started, I didn’t expect that David Deutsch (DD) or Lulie Tanett (LT) were involved. When I caught Andy B (linked together his many fake identities), I emailed DD and LT about it, and I thought they’d be helpful and reasonable. I expected a very different reaction than I got.

What DD and LT have done has surprised me. That actually made it harder to deal with. If I knew what they were like in the first place, I would have handled the situation differently. I went out of my way to give them lots of chances for private discussion. I responded slowly to the problems to give them many chances and months to see it’s a serious public issue and change their behavior. I didn’t go into this knowing what was actually going on. I shared information as I figured out new things and that’s made my explanations longer and more complex.

Why was I surprised? Well they just left without comment. They didn’t leave in an explicitly negative way. They never said they weren’t speaking to me. We didn’t part ways with a fight. Nothing in particular happened. Our conversation frequency dwindled over time. I initiated some problem solving, but I wasn’t pushy about it and gave them time and space. Months passed and at some point they didn’t come back. That’s all. That didn’t give me much reason to think they hated me or wanted me harmed.

There was no conversation where I had any reason to think it was the last one. By the time I knew things were over, they’d been over for months. (And by the time I knew DD and LT actually weren’t speaking to me – the current situation – I now estimate that they hadn’t been for multiple years. That’s something they did on their own, unilaterally, without informing me, and with no specific or clear cause.) They never even said bye. I thought we were still trying, gradually over time, and eventually I realized that they weren’t.

I thought our old friendships would still mean something when a criminal attacked. And it’s not like I had done anything wrong. I hadn’t wronged DD or LT. I hadn’t done some sort of mean action to hurt them. I hadn’t knowingly violated their consent. And they never complained “Hey wait, that wasn’t OK, you accidentally violated my consent”.

I thought crimes were a serious matter and that people would set aside petty stuff when crime was at stake. I didn’t know that DD and LT were so far gone not to do that and/or were never actually very anti-crime (just anti crimes against their own tribe).

I thought they were doing their own things, separate from me, and that when there was an emergency involving crime that would take precedence over whatever mild grudges or negative feelings had lasted through years of not interacting. Time heals all wounds, right? Why would they still be super mad – mad enough to have a tribalist attitude and side with crime – after years with no negative interactions?

The thing DD lied about is a key point. He lied that he told me several times that he didn’t want to hear from me. But he never told me that and I had no idea he felt that way. That’s key context. He’s lying that I’m violating his requests, when actually he was violating my reasonable expectations (which is misleading to observers) even before he overtly lied about me. I had a reasonable expectation that he would respond appropriately when his fan was committing crimes partially in DD’s name. (One of Andy B’s main complaints, and motivations for harassment, is that he sees me as DD’s enemy.) DD also wouldn’t respond when Dennis Hackethal plagiarized both of us, or when someone impersonated DD and wrote comments literally in DD’s name, or when Andy B created and owned the BoI subreddit (DD wouldn’t disown that or distance himself from it in any way).

I thought I was telling DD and LT about a serious problem in their community that was bad for them. I thought they’d want to ban him from their community and keep their distance from a dangerous person. Instead they embraced Andy B, tweet with him, and continue to have a toxic community culture that does things like lie, libel, and spread hateful gossip.

I thought DD cared about his career and reputation, and would want to stay out of the mud, and would appreciate the warning about the mud getting on him. I thought it was neglect not malice. I was wrong though. After nearly a decade of going our separate ways, DD seems willing to take substantial risks with his public reputation for the purpose of trying to hurt me. He can’t or won’t let anything go, nor specify what exactly he’s so upset about or what he wants or doesn’t want. (I literally don’t know what actions to take to please or appease him so that he’d stop the harassment campaign; he won’t say; maybe there are none.)

DD’s and LT’s behavior, like fully ghosting me about crimes connected with them, and tweeting with Andy B after he was caught, has been really shocking. It completely violated my expectations based on how we left things (as well as my expectations about basic human decency and civilized behavior from them).

I’ve been going back and reading old stuff because I was shocked by their behavior and I wanted to know what happened. Did they change a lot since we last spoke much, or did I miss something in the past? The answer, in short, is that I missed stuff in the past. The old discussions are full of warning signs about their irrationality that I can see now but missed before.

DD and LT are the only people involved in the harassment that I actually knew well. It makes some sense that I’m still on their mind. But I met Sarah a long time ago but never knew her very well, and she really shouldn’t still care about me. Most CritRats I knew less well than Sarah. Why would people I never knew at all, or never knew well, hold multi-year grudges and be super hateful? There’s something really wrong there (I think their community is really toxic). And to the extent I can get any reasons from them, they say stuff like that I’m rude and that I criticized their hero DD. So what? All public figures have rude detractors on the internet, who are mostly ignored or mocked a little bit, but generally no one cares much. Even if that were true about me, why would it even matter? The people who hate and harass me are revealing, by their behavior, that they think I’m super important. They act like my opinions will somehow determine DD’s fate. They treat me like DD’s peer, and like one of the few intellectuals in the world who matters. They seem to see me like a threat to DD, a high status power player with a big following, or else why would they care? If they don’t like me and think I don’t matter, they wouldn’t be so concerned with my opinions.

I’ve posted negative blog posts about (for example) Sam Harris, but none of his fans bother me about it. I don’t even get mild pushback (they don’t seem to notice or care), let alone harassment. If I actually went to Harris’ subreddit and criticized him there, I’d get negative reactions, but all I’d have to do is stop posting on his subreddit and they’d forget about me and leave me alone. Why? Because Harris has many critics and even haters, but most are not influential and most fans don’t regard them as important. If I had 100k YouTube followers and criticized Harris, it’d get more of a reaction, but I don’t have that. Yet DD’s community treats me like I have a few million YouTube followers, or whatever the equivalent is for blog readers.