This is a history of Taking Children Seriously (TCS), particularly the online community leaders: Sarah Fitz-Claridge (SFC), David Deutsch (DD) and Elliot Temple (ET).

TCS was founded in 1992 by SFC and DD. (SFC was Sarah Lawrence at the time but changed her name in 2003.) It started with a paper journal. When ET joined in 2001, the community had TCS list (an email discussion group with around 1,000 members), a website with articles, and a chatroom.

SFC, a mother of two, did most of the recruiting. She met with homeschoolers and libertarians, networked and gave speeches internationally, and posted at many online parenting and homeschooling groups. TCS advocates frequently got banned from other online groups but did get the word out first.

DD, a theoretical physicist, did most of the intellectual theorizing. He had made significant contributions related to quantum computation and learned about Karl Popper’s Critical Rationalism (CR) philosophy. He and SFC were libertarians with ideas like individual freedom, minimal or no government, and laissez-faire capitalism.

DD’s books are The Fabric of Reality (FoR, 1997) and The Beginning of Infinity (BoI, 2011). They discuss science and CR philosophy. DD also wrote hundreds of blog posts about politics between 2003 and 2008.

A main idea of TCS is that CR – a philosophy about how to create knowledge – applies to parenting and education. DD thought we must understand how learning works in order to know how to treat children. There are no reasonable philosophical positions which imply that punishments are educational. And if punishments aren’t educational, then they’re cruel and abusive, and “coercive” as TCS calls it.

TCS was also based on (classical) liberal values like peace, freedom, cooperation, individual rights and opposing tyrannical authority (be it a king, parent or teacher). Karl Popper shared these values, although he was no libertarian.

CR says all people learn by brainstorming, critical thinking and critical discussion. TCS concluded that even young children, even babies, think and learn this way. People learn on their own initiative with help from others, not as buckets which educators can pour knowledge into like water. Learners are the leaders of their own learning.

TCS’s big claim was that children could be raised well without doing anything to them that they disliked. It’s always possible to find “common preferences” – win/win solutions that everyone prefers. The main obstacle to this kind of rational problem solving is the irrationalities that adults have. Irrationalities aren’t inborn, they come from coercion, so don’t coerce your child and he won’t become irrational.

TCS Activities Timeline

SFC wrote around 1,000 TCS list posts (emails), mostly from 1994-2002. DD wrote around 2,000, mostly from 1996-2002. ET wrote around 3,700, mostly from 2002-2012, though he hasn’t stopped writing about TCS and still answers questions and posts.

SFC secretly began building a separate community unrelated to TCS which she launched in 2003. This partially explains why she reduced her involvement with TCS. Year after year, SFC hid these other activities, while leading people to expect more TCS activity soon and misleading people about her interests and priorities. She avoided transitioning to a new community leader, and blocked messages sharing alternative TCS resources, which left many TCS-attempting parents with little support and fewer resources than they reasonably expected.

SFC stopped creating the TCS Journal in 2000 after 32 issues. She never announced that it ended and left the webpage up where people could pay money to sign up. People were still confused about the matter years later and SFC still didn’t clarify, while still advertising herself as the TCS journal editor.

In late 2002, SFC deleted the TCS IRC chatroom that she’d started in 2000. She said she didn’t know how to run it well and received too many complaints. Rather than solve the problem, she shut it down.

In 2003, SFC discontinued the TCS website. She let the domain name expire without putting a notice on the site telling people about the new site, redirecting traffic, or leaving it up as an archive. She created a new site which had a worse layout and she never even finished transferring over all the old articles. The new site was never very active and SFC mostly stopped work on it after only 3 months. There was an occasional update later, e.g. there were 4 posts in 2004. After trying to be active for one month in 2005, the updates stopped entirely in 2006.

In 2006, SFC announced moving the TCS list from AOL to the new website. People were supposed to be automatically transferred but the new group had no posts and people kept using AOL. This was never explained. Then in 2008, SFC moved TCS list to Yahoo Groups and intentionally didn’t automatically transfer anyone. The result was reducing membership down to around 50 people from a past high over 1,000.

After these disasters, ET created the TCS Google Group in 2009 and Fallible Ideas website in 2010 which included articles about CR and TCS. ET’s TCS list had around double the membership of SFC’s and many more discussions. It became the primary TCS list while SFC’s group went inactive. Meanwhile, at DD’s request, ET also made the BoI Google Group and BoI website in 2011.

ET also became the owner of the Autonomy Respecting Relationships (ARR) forum in 2010 or 2011 after running the group as moderator for over a year. ARR was started by SFC and DD as a way to apply TCS ideas to romantic relationships. Major ARR ideas included that standard romantic relationship patterns are irrational and hurt people, and that freedom implies polyamory instead of monogamy. ET, however, criticized polyamory as well as monogamy.

Elliot Temple Joins TCS

ET read DD’s book, FoR, in 2001, then read DD’s TCS articles and joined the email group and chatroom. DD regularly talked with TCS community members on IRC and on the email group. ET quickly got much of DD’s attention due to energetic curiosity and quickly learning and arguing in favor of CR and TCS ideas. Over the next decade, ET and DD had around 5,000 hours of discussions (the majority were one-on-one, not on the public groups). In 2002, ET started a private email discussion group named curi where DD frequently participated. In 2003, ET started his blog, Curiosity.

After only a few months, ET became TCS’s most active advocate. He was more interested, and wrote more, than anyone else. He’d debate anyone about anything (like DD, ET was interested in ideas broadly, not just parenting), and whenever he had trouble winning an argument, he brought the issue to DD for advice. That way, ET learned how DD would argue each issue and address each challenge. DD heavily influenced ET’s views and arguments. For example, DD converted ET from left to right wing, persuaded him of capitalist and libertarian ideas, and got ET reading Ayn Rand. DD also persuaded ET to favor George W. Bush and the Iraq War politically, to support Israel, and to reject environmentalist ideas like recycling and global warming.

Due to the close association and agreement on so many issues, people, including one of DD’s close friends, accused ET of being DD’s puppet. However, the agreement was achieved by rational discussion, not puppetry. ET argued with DD more than anyone else and persistently followed up on disagreements. It took ET around five years of learning to become skilled enough to win any significant arguments with DD, at which point some disagreements started forming as ET developed more of his own ideas.

ET began providing detailed feedback and editing for BoI in 2004, which continued until publication in 2011. DD and ET routinely discussed topics related to the book. In total, ET wrote around 250 pages specifically to help with BoI, which is enough material to fill a book. That’s why the acknowledgments say “especially Elliot Temple”.

ET was also recognized favorably by SFC. For example, in 2006, ET, SFC and another speaker gave a TCS seminar to a paying audience in SFC’s home. In 2003, SFC tried to persuade ET to “becom[e] a regular contributor to the TCS blog/web site”. She said more articles from ET would help with her goal to “make it more difficult for people to bitch about TCS the way they are now.” SFC had some mixed feelings, stating “In the past, I have sometimes found your posts a bit too harsh and dismissive and lacking explanation, but I have noticed you have written some beautiful posts which are both true and also kind and non-alienating.” Overall, SFC saw ET positively and wanted him to be more involved with TCS including writing official articles because, also, “I really love your writing.” Similarly, in 2005, SFC was also asking ET for more TCS writing: “If you would like to write articles for the site, and if you would like to contribute to a new FAQ for it, that would be splendid!”

TCS Affects Lives

Thousands of people took an interest in TCS. As with many communities, especially controversial ones, the majority quit for one reason or another. Some had major disagreements with TCS from the start. Others liked TCS initially but had major disagreements when they learned more. And others liked TCS but drifted away without planning to – they just never really got around to doing much. But hundreds of people made TCS a major part of their life. TCS affected how many children were treated.

SFC led people to believe that TCS was an important, growing movement that they could join and then get ongoing help and advice. People thought TCS came with resources and support, at least articles, a chatroom and the email group. But then SFC and DD stopped writing articles, SFC discontinued the chatroom and journal, and SFC reduced her TCS list to complete silence. This harmed people who were struggling to live by TCS ideas, as well as preventing other people from joining TCS.

These problems were made much worse by the lack of announcements, clarity, transition plan, etc. The original TCS founders didn’t take responsibility for the movement, what they led people to expect from them, and the consequences of their actions for people’s lives. Instead they broadly kept up public appearances years after ceasing most TCS activity.

The continued availability of TCS materials, and discussion places where people can ask questions, is due pretty much entirely to ET. But ET has done more to take over DD’s intellectual role than SFC’s community leader role, so it’s not a full replacement. And SFC sabotaged the transition to ET’s leadership by preventing many people from finding out that the new resources existed. Even some of the more involved TCS parents were left not knowing what happened or how to continue with TCS.

SFC knowingly poured time and effort into a different, unrelated, non-TCS community, in secret, while misleading the TCS parents that had trusted her. These actions go beyond explanations like merely neglect, failure or incompetence.

DD Quits

DD gradually left TCS for several reasons. First, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, many TCS members sided with the terrorists by making anti-American comments. The political conflict divided the TCS community. Most parents open to TCS were left wing, while DD and his intellectual associates were right wing.

By the end of 2002, DD didn’t write public posts as frequently, although he actively discussed with ET and others. From there, DD’s public posting gradually declined, but it took a decade to stop. Meanwhile, DD often watched ET debate in favor of DD’s ideas, like TCS, and encouraged and advised ET behind the scenes.

As time went on, DD pushed back the publication deadline for BoI but eventually had to face it. In the several years leading up to the 2011 publication, he became increasingly busy and talked with everyone less. He even had to cut a few planned chapters from the book in order to finish.

Although DD hoped and planned for things to return to normal after the book was done, they never did. Instead, he quit every discussion forum, stopped talking about TCS, and decided to focus more on his new physics idea, Constructor Theory.

After gradually distancing himself, DD stopped collaborating with ET and most other active community members around the end of 2011. DD never gave a clear explanation of why, never wrote an article arguing his case, never announced anything had changed, and never even tried to claim that ET had changed in any significant way. It was DD, not ET, who had changed. DD was disillusioned by how little TCS had changed the world, and how few people had learned his ideas. DD wanted to try to get along with the mainstream more, while ET continued developing non-mainstream ideas like TCS and CR.

Looking Back At TCS

From day one, TCS had always offended many people and attracted hateful comments for its unconventional ideas. DD hoped it would spread and gain traction over time, and it did some, but less than DD wanted. Meanwhile SFC ended the journal, chatroom and original website, reduced TCS List membership by 95%, and stopped creating content or recruiting.

ET kept TCS alive as a philosophical theory with some resources to help, but the number of participating parents dropped over time. Eventually, there was little discussion about parents trying to use TCS in their life.

To see quotes from the harsh, offensive side of early TCS, as led by SFC and DD, see this post and the comments under it.

The TCS list grew initially. But SFC said that whenever the list got over 1,000 members, a bunch of people would unsubscribe when there was an active topic causing them to receive lots of emails. Many of the people SFC recruited were not interested enough in TCS to direct the emails to a folder outside their inbox, and just left instead.

The TCS list was moderated. SFC and her buddies blocked whatever posts they wanted, quite frequently and aggressively. It was common for posters to regularly have some their posts blocked and keep participating anyway, though some people left when they weren’t allowed to speak freely. Consequently, SFC had control over the content of the list. If the content alienated people, that was her choice.

At his groups, ET always emphasized free speech instead of controlling what you were allowed to say. He thought this better fit the total-freedom-and-libertarianism-and-maybe-even-anarcho-capitalism type principles of TCS and its founders.

Conflict Between DD and ET

When he quit TCS, DD also quit associating with TCS’s new leader, ET, as well as with active participants in the TCS community. ET wanted to do problem solving. What about CR, common preferences, and win/win solutions? ET wanted to fix things but DD refused.

At the end of 2012, over a year after DD had become unfriendly and withdrawn the help and support he’d led ET to expect going forward, DD had refused many olive branches from ET. ET wrote I Changed My Mind About David Deutsch. This carefully worded piece left out most details to respect DD’s privacy because DD didn’t want the problems discussed and debated openly. Every statement was written so that it could easily be defended and explained if private facts were included in the discussion. DD saw the article prior to publication and made no objection then or later. Others in the community supported the article or didn’t mind; there was no opposition to it because people had seen DD change and leave over the years. ET thought the article was necessary because he’d been such a fan and promoter of DD, so he thought he should update people when he changed his mind about stuff he’d told them. ET was taking responsibility for the advice he’d given other people, as he believed SFC and DD should have but did not.

Although preferring to mostly leave DD alone, ET also wrote David Deutsch Interview Undermines His Philosophy in 2017, Accepting vs. Preferring Theories – Reply to David Deutsch in 2018, and David Deutsch Smears Ayn Rand in 2019. ET thought it was important to defend the ideas he’d learned from DD, even against DD himself. Again DD had no objections, publicly or privately. DD didn’t want to defend or explain his opinions or offer any rebuttal. Although critical discussion and rational truth seeking are major parts of the CR and TCS philosophies, DD didn’t do them nor explain why he wasn’t doing them and how that was compatible with his philosophy. ET’s claims remain uncontested. Meanwhile, DD never said anything negative about ET, leaving him to continue running the BoI, TCS and ARR groups and explain philosophies like TCS and CR to the world.

SFC Destroys FoR Group

Alan Forrester (AF) ran the FoR discussion group, about DD’s book, for a decade. He has a CR blog. Although AF ran the FoR group alone, SFC was the original group creator and never gave AF ownership. This allowed SFC to do whatever she wanted with the group, regardless of AF’s opinions or consent.

After 10 years with no posts or involvement by SFC, she suddenly took over FoR in order to ban ET as revenge for the I Changed My Mind About David Deutsch post. (AF agreed with ET regarding the philosophical issues that ET and DD disagreed about, and didn’t want ET banned.) Then SFC immediately neglected the group and soon everyone stopped using it. She’d been uninvolved because she wasn’t interested in FoR ideas and because she was still involved with her secret, unrelated community; being motivated to ban someone didn’t change that situation.

Just like when SFC neglected the TCS Yahoo Group, everyone interested in discussion moved over to one of ET’s groups. In that case, they went to ET’s TCS group. In this case, they went to the BoI group: since DD’s second book was out now, fans of the first book naturally were interested in the second book too, which covered similar topics.

SFC didn’t attempt problem solving, consent or common preference finding with ET, AF or the FoR group membership. She violated the standard group policy of giving warnings before banning people. And she said nothing indicating that DD himself had any problem with ET’s article. It seemed to be her own personal vendetta, and she didn’t care that she was primarily punishing AF and the FoR discussion group members, not ET who owned the BoI group anyway.

DD and ET had always had a relationship based heavily on explicit communication: if you want something, request it; if you prefer something, say so. DD knew he could make requests of ET and had wide latitude to get whatever he wanted. Several times, DD had asked ET to refrain from saying something or take something down. But this time, DD made no request and expressed no preference, knowing that ET would take that as a go ahead signal. DD, to this day, hasn’t said anything negative about ET or ET’s critical articles.

Fallible Ideas Group

In 2013, ET merged several discussion groups into one, the Fallible Ideas (FI) discussion group. Although the older groups were left unchanged, ET simply asked people to switch and every active poster voluntarily started posting on FI. This smooth transition stands out in contrast with SFC’s disastrous move of the TCS group.

ET merged the groups because the topics are all related. They’re all about understanding good philosophy and applying it. And, over time, under his leadership, the groups had become more philosophically sophisticated. For example, it had become unusual for posters to be unfamiliar with DD’s books. With a smaller membership that was more knowledgeable about all the ideas, and had more consistent ideas, having a single forum made sense.

Thus, the FI group is the continuation of the TCS group from 1994, as well as the ARR, FoR, BoI groups. The FI group also merged some more minor groups: TCS Society (a companion to the TCS group for political discussion), Rational Politics (a newer group by Justin Mallone, which ET and DD participated at), and an Ayn Rand discussion group (by ET).

Where Are They Now?

DD has gone on to work on Constructor Theory. He also became a member of the Royal Society in 2008. DD and SFC seem to no longer like to talk about TCS or be associated with it, but don’t make clear statements or requests about the matter. ET has withheld the older TCS archives posts from the public at DD’s request, even though DD has not provided any public statement about his reasons.

SFC stopped being involved with philosophy, TCS or ARR. She still hasn’t explained what happened or apologized to any parents.

SFC’s two children were friends with DD too, and one was also a friend of ET. They are adults today but never got very involved with TCS or CR. No other child with any sort of TCS upbringing became very involved either.

ET has gone on to improve CR with new ideas like Yes or No Philosophy, Paths Forward, Overreaching, Impasse Chains, Using Intellectual Processes to Combat Bias and Rationally Resolving Conflicts of Ideas. As of today (2020), ET still posts regularly to the FI discussion group and has been a consistent, active poster continuously for 18 years, and he’s branched out to videos and podcasts.

Editor’s note: I made a serious effort to get the facts and dates right. If anyone believes any fact is in error, please let me know.

More info:

• SFC’s short history of the early days of TCS (2005)
• ET explaining TCS (2011)
• ET explaining ARR (2011)
• ET’s Fallible Ideas article about TCS (2016)
• ET’s Fallible Ideas articles (2010). See especially What is Coercion?,  Avoiding Coercion, Parenting and Reason,  Parenting and Tradition, and Parenting and Fallibility.
• ET’s 2015 article on common preferences
• ET’s 2002 article on common preferences on the original TCS website
• ET’s articles on the newer TCS website: Positive Interpretations, Feeling Bad, and Junk Food Worries (2005-6)
• ET’s parenting and education blog category (mostly 2003-9, newer posts are mostly uncategorized)
• ET’s discussion group archive downloads (includes TCS starting from 2002).

If you liked this, or want to learn more about TCS, sign up for the Fallible Ideas newsletter and join the Fallible Ideas discussion group.

The Final Prejudice by David Deutsch (DD) was first published in the Taking Children Seriously Journal issue #18, in 1995. It criticizes society’s ageism (bias against children) using a 1992 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode (Rascals, season 6, episode 7) as an extended example. (Bias against the elderly is also ageism, and is a serious issue, but isn’t discussed here.) Having now watched the episode, I disagree with the article.

As context: I reread the article as part of my review of my past history with DD. I’ve been trying to understand why he’s now lying about me and encouraging years of severe harassment from his fans, how he changed, whether I misunderstood him in the past, whether I did anything wrong, etc. Previously, I thought DD must have gotten worse at logic and argument in order to write his smear of Ayn Rand. But I now see that, before I even met him, he was already capable of those errors. He could write good stuff sometimes, but writing some bad stuff isn’t a change. A pattern I’ve identified is that DD’s thinking quality drops when he’s biased. He has a strong bias to see children as especially mistreated.

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In the Star Trek (sci-fi) TV episode, Captain Picard and three others are in a transporter accident. It somehow changes their physical bodies to around what they were at age 12. DD argues that the scenario with adults minds in child bodies shows how prejudiced people are against children.

I’ll go through DD’s article and comment on many points.

The Ship's Doctor, Beverly Crusher, runs some tests and determines that the bodies of the Captain and the others are the bodies of twelve-year-olds, but their minds are entirely unaffected. She explains the results of her tests to the First Officer, Commander William Riker. The striking thing about this scene is that the Captain is right there, next to her, but she is not reporting to him. She is talking about him, but over him, as though he were not present at all. This sort of casual discourtesy towards children is familiar enough. But this is not a child. It is the Captain of the Enterprise. Her commanding officer.

Riker was the highest ranking officer who wasn’t in a new body. He was acting as Captain at the time. Crusher should report to him about what happened to Picard and say whether or not the entity in front of them is the Picard or not. Riker should (and I’d guess legally does) command the ship until either he sees the Captain as usual or he receives information about special circumstances. So I disagree with DD’s allegation of ageism.

Also, in Star Trek, changes of who is in command are often (though not consistently) stated out loud instead of being assumed, which seems reasonable. That’s a little like Japanese train operators using a point-and-call system – communicating more reduces errors.

In every other Star Trek episode that deals with shape changes, or with unusually-shaped sentient beings, the overriding consideration is: it's the mind that counts.

But it’s the mind that counts in this episode. After the ship and all the regular adults are captured by Ferengi slavers, Picard and the other shape-changed people use their minds to successfully save the ship and crew. They’re able to do problem solving just as effectively as in other episodes. And they even get some effective help from the ship’s actual children. The show depicts the shape-changed people as mentally competent and as largely unhindered by their weaker, smaller bodies. They’re effective like regular adults.

A person is a mind, not a body. That is the attitude we have come to expect from those good people of the 24th century, to whom racism and all similar prejudices are incomprehensible historical aberrations.

No, they run into prejudices all the time, which are a major cause of their military conflicts with other species like the Klingons or Romulans. A fan wiki describes the Romulan’s “Relationships with other species” like this:

So, no, that sort of prejudice would not be incomprehensible to the Enterprise crew. It’s not a historical aberration to them.

The Captain gives Riker an order. When Riker replies, we immediately see that there is something embarrassed and tentative about his manner. He hesitates before adding the word “sir”.

The hesitation is tiny and Riker’s manner may be explained by something other than ageism. He was asked about what happened to the shuttle and was talking about how it was destroyed and his Captain nearly died. He personally cares about his Captain and turned down being Captain of his own ship in order to keep working with Picard, so Picard’s near-death would be emotional for Riker.

Riker may also have hesitated because it’s an unusual situation and he’s not used to it yet. If Picard was in the body of a Ferengi or a lower ranking adult, Riker might also have hesitated. As the second highest ranking officer on the ship, he isn’t used to saying “sir” to most people.

What is going on here? The Captain of a Starship is not being taken seriously by his own subordinates.

Riker does take him seriously: reports to him, follows his orders, etc. Also later, when Picard pretends that Riker is his father and hugs him (to fool their captors), Riker finds that awkward because he does remember that it’s his captain, not a child.

Yet when it becomes clear that Captain Picard intends to get on with his job of running the Enterprise, Dr Crusher immediately tries to stop him, on the pretext of needing to conduct further tests. He tells her that she can continue testing the other three, and leaves the Sick Bay, whereupon Dr Crusher and Counsellor Deanna Troi exchange glances, like worried parents.

The glances they exchange could be more about the captain's typical stubbornness than anything parental. As context, Picard irritated Dr. Crusher in five episodes by trying to avoid his annual physical (medical examination).

And I don’t think wanting to run more tests or being concerned is a pretext. They don’t know what’s going on yet at that point in the episode.

When the Captain reaches the Bridge and issues orders, Lieutenant Worf and the others can barely bring themselves to comply. The Captain reminds them that he is still the Captain. Still they hesitate, until Riker's nod of confirmation pushes them into uneasy obedience. The crew know that the Captain's mind is unaffected, but they are simply unable to take him seriously in a child's body.

That’s not what happened. No ship-wide announcement was made. There is no indication that Worf or others are aware that this is their Captain or that his mind is unaffected. So they properly look to the most senior recognizable person and follow his lead.

You should not follow the orders of an entity you aren’t confident is your superior officer just on its own say-so that it’s not an imposter, body snatcher, or anything else bad. And Picard, (reasonably) failing to fully adjust to the situation immediately, didn’t explain it to them very well. He kinda assumed they would follow his orders instead of recognizing that he’d need to give a brief speech first to cover the key points of what happened. So instead of explaining things clearly, he starts giving orders then starts explaining in a disorganized, incomplete way. So hesitant reactions from the crew make sense.

Dr Crusher arrives on the bridge and asks, in a worried voice, to see the Captain privately in his ready-room. […] Dr Crusher, looking every bit the concerned parent […]

Crusher and Picard are close friends (there are hints of romantic interest). In other episodes, she often calls him “Jean-Luc” and they’ve eaten breakfast together. She could be worried about him as a friend. It doesn’t have to be an ageism issue.

Outrageously, [Crusher] wants to persuade [Picard] to relinquish command. She cobbles together the excuse that his condition could possibly at some time in the future affect his mind.

It’s an extraordinary medical event that no one has any familiarity with. They’ve had only a few hours to figure out what’s going on. It’s reasonable not to be confident about what will happen over time. At the time she says this, they don’t yet know know what caused it, whether he’ll age normally or be frozen in this body, or whether there is anything unusual still going on. Further tests and caution make sense instead of putting 100% confidence in their initial medical findings regarding his current but not future state.

And I think the Captain should relinquish command temporarily even if his mind is completely reliable. Why? Because he’s in a body he’s unfamiliar with. His inexperience using his smaller muscles, shorter height, etc., could be a matter of life and death in a combat situation or when handling dangerous materials. He needs some retraining before he’s ready for field work. (He could do desk work in the new body just fine, but his Captain’s job sometimes involves combat and physical stress without warning.)

Also, the crew would have to adjust to taking orders from a different body and voice. They might react slower than usual, which could be dangerous. Is that a transition that’s normally done mid-mission? I’m not sure what the standard policies are, but it could be reasonable if switching officers was normally only done at home base between missions. If you can’t have your regular captain, there are clear advantages to switching to a new leader who everyone is already familiar with instead of to an unfamiliar leader.

Further, Dr. Crusher has the power to order the Captain to go to bed instead of commanding the starship. She gave that order in Angel One (season 1, episode 13) when Picard had a virus causing a respiratory ailment. He obeys and gives command to Lieutenant Geordi La Forge. When Picard is in a child’s body, she chooses not to order him to step down. Instead, they have this conversation:

She knows he can still think effectively and appeals to his reasoning. Then he voluntarily gives Riker command.

they accept aliens, such as Vulcans, as Starship Captains … there is one shape - one shape only - that disqualifies a person from receiving the respect of his fellow human beings. And that is the shape of a human child.

DD is making a thinking error. There isn’t one shape only. The shape of a Vulcan child is another shape that they’d be biased against. Shapes like a bed, a poop, a cartoon character, a spider, a snake, a turd sandwich or a giant douche could be others.

Also, Ensign Ro isn’t human, and wasn’t transformed into the shape of a human child. She’s Bajoran.

And DD is simply factually wrong about what the Star Trek show is like. People are routinely biased based on species. Bias about gender also comes up.

A fan wiki summarizes some of the species-based wars (note: it calls other species “races” – and actually Humans, Klingons, Vulcans and Romulans can inter-breed, though that doesn’t make sense to me):

In other words, conflict between species is one of the main themes in Star Trek. And species are viewed as groups (so a conflict with “the Cardassians” is possible because that species is viewed primarily as one group). And that’s just a sample from one time period. It’s hard to imagine that, given all the wars between species, people would have no prejudice about species (“shape”) as DD claims.

Prejudice within the Federation is actually common. Each starship has a crew of primarily one species, not a representative mix of all species in the Federation. With traits people aren’t biased about, a starship crew should be roughly a random sample from the population in the Federation (which includes multiple species). But the species in Star Trek tend to associate primarily with their own kind and to crew ships with primarily one species. Overall, I think in the Star Trek world, the species mix less than humans historically did. In other words, they’re more prejudiced about species than past humans were about race, ethnicity, nationality or religion.

And the show has repeatedly depicted specific prejudices. For example, Worf is a Klingon who was adopted by humans and raised on Earth. In Family (season 4, episode 2), he says:

Thinking humans can’t understand some Klingon ideas is prejudiced. And later he attributes lateness to the human species:

O’Brien replies:

That’s a human character making a blatantly sexist remark. Examples of prejudice are easy to find throughout the show.

Worf actually shows mixed loyalties – between the Enterprise and his species – in Heart of Glory (season 1, episode 19). In that episode, Worf also says that Klingons don’t take hostages (because hostage-taking is cowardly). So he attributes personality characteristics and moral values to a species.

Overall, the show writers view the biological traits of a species as affecting personality, ideas, and most of life. The writers make differences and conflicts between species a major focus of the whole show. DD’s claims about everyone in Star Trek fully respecting everyone else, except children, are ridiculous.

Captain Picard himself was once kidnapped by the Borg, who transformed him into one of themselves (which involved surgically altering one side of his head) and assimilated his mind into their collective consciousness. He began to collaborate with them in their plan to conquer the galaxy. He ceased to be Captain Picard and became Locutus of Borg. Yet there again, it was his mind that counted. It was not his shape-change but his robotic mouthing of Borg slogans that told the crew, and the audience, that he was no longer the Captain. Later in the same episode, Lieutenant Commander Data managed to weaken the link between Picard and the Borg collective. Picard only needed to say one word ("sleep") in what was clearly his old character, for him to be accepted as himself again. He still looked like a Borg.

That’s not what happened. Picard says sleep multiple times and never fully sounds like himself. But Data is mind linked to Picard and also Deanna Troi, an empath, says the Captain is back. And even though they don’t think he’s a Borg anymore, they don’t put him back in charge of the ship. Plus:

So Picard spent decades not viewing himself as fully human, and thinking that what species he belongs to matters.

Also, DD is mistaken about “in the same episode”. The Borg storyline is split over two episodes in separate seasons (it was used as a cliffhanger).

Meanwhile the superhuman Guinan, who runs 10-Forward, the ship's bar, relaxation area, and alternative counselling service, is taking her rejuvenation in her stride. She too has been relieved of her duties. (Why, by the way? Is she now too young to be allowed in the bar?)

She ought to be careful with bars and alcohol. Her smaller body is now more vulnerable to alcohol (she’ll get drunker while drinking less than normal) in ways that aren’t intuitive to her. And working in a bar sometimes involves asking people to leave, commanding respect to break up fights, refusing to give people more alcohol, and other things she might struggle with in a new, unfamiliar and smaller body and with different voice tones than before.

Keiko O'Brien is another of the changed crew members. In their quarters, her husband Chief Miles O'Brien is having great difficulty coming to terms with her shape. When she tries to be close to him physically, an expression of revulsion crosses his face. When she brings him some coffee, he nervously tells her “Careful! That's hot!”

The coffee comment didn’t strike me as nervous and it chronologically came first (I think it was an exaggerated depiction of his habitual behavior towards children, not nerves). Plus, he offered her coffee first, which isn’t how one normally treats a child. Plus, he reminds her about how he likes his coffee, which seems to be about his difficulty remembering who she is, not her age.

In the scene, he’s uncomfortable before she touches him. He does get up and move away when she hugs his arm.

She questions him about whether their marriage is over and pressures him to accept her as his wife, immediately, in full, because she might not get her old body back. He says he’s uncomfortable with her being a little girl. He tries to avoid making any long term decisions right away. He hopes the scientists and doctors will soon fix it. I think he was being more reasonable than she was, but DD sees it the other way around.

It’s not a bad thing for adults to have negative reactions about having spouse-type physical contact with what appears to be a child. That’s not an ageist prejudice that people need to change. It’s an attitude which too many people ought to find harder to override, not easier.

And wouldn’t spouses be uncomfortable with touching after many shape changes, not just a shape change into the form of a child? What if his wife was in a male body? Should he be accused of homophobia for not adjusting immediately? What about if she had an alien body? Should he already be mentally prepared, in advance, to continue his marriage in all aspects with pretty much any alien body? Or what if his wife was in the body of another adult, human woman? That’d be problematic too.

DD is basically accusing a father of ageism for seeing pre-pubescent bodies as revolting to sexualize.

Meanwhile, DD’s TCS co-founder (SFC) was writing criticism of age of consent laws in the same journal and time period, which DD did not criticize, disagree with or object to. Actually, he expressed substantial agreement with it in his TCS emails. Plus, DD was often the brains behind SFC’s articles.

SFC even talked about meeting leading NAMBLA members and spending many hours posting on alt.sex.intergen (a usenet group for discussing intergenerational sex, often positively). SFC wrote:

SFC’s main complaint about NAMBLA is that they seemed like they might be good and pro-child – she thought she found a good lead on people who’d agree with her about TCS – but it turned out they were just as disrespectful towards children and “coercive” as other people. (SFC’s idea of being disrespectful towards children includes things like making them go to school, making them go to bed, making them brush their teeth, controlling their diet, having the “agenda” that your child learn to read, or otherwise not helping children get whatever they want.) She doesn’t see NAMBLA as being particularly awful (but they are awful!), just as failing to live up to her TCS ideals.

Under SFC’s and DD’s leadership, the TCS community was surprisingly hostile to ideas with partial overlap with TCS. There was hostility to homeschoolers, unschoolers, Sudbury Valley Schools, Summerhill, Montessori, Nonviolent Communication, Gatto, Holt, Parent Effectiveness Training, and much more. Why, then, did SFC spend so much time on NAMBLA and alt.sex.intergen? Why was she having relatively friendly discussions with people who prey on children? Meanwhile she got herself kicked off more mainstream parenting forums for calling the participants child abusers (because they’d e.g. make their kids go to school, go to bed, or brush their teeth).

I think this NAMBLA stuff is really bad. As someone who has written TCS articles (about other topics, not age of consent) and thinks TCS had some good ideas (and some bad ideas), I want to say that I disown, disavow and repudiate these ideas about age of consent laws and what SFC called “adult-child sexual relationships” (a.k.a. sexual abuse). Note: DD and SFC haven’t retracted these ideas and I don’t think they’ve changed their minds.

We call the same behaviour “pouting” when it is done by a twelve-year-old, and “contemplating one's situation” when it is done by an adult. Shame on us!

It’s not the same behavior. Contemplating means thinking deeply and productively about something. Pouting means being upset and moody without doing problem solving.

Adults do get accused of pouting, too. The biggest determiner is not age but demeanor. People look at behavior (including speech) for clues about what mental processes are going on inside someone’s head (like pouting, contemplating, plotting revenge, or something else).

Adults are accused of pouting less because they’ve learned to avoid some external behaviors that people interpret as pouting. They also have less reason to pout because they have more control over their lives, so they have more opportunities to act on solutions they think of.

I think children actually do pout more. Partly that’s because they have less knowledge about dealing with their emotions. Plus, children more often have to put up with a problem while being prevented from taking the actions they think would solve it. Contemplation is less useful when you lack the power to use the good ideas that you come up with. It can be really frustrating to think of solutions that other people arbitrarily disallow, so it’s understandable that most people don’t like doing that.

Guinan accuses her of “pouting”

What Guinan said was “What are you going to do? Go back to your room and pout?” That’s not an accusation that pouting is currently happening.

Later, the Doctor is discussing the Captain's medical condition. But again, not with the Captain: with the First Officer, in loco parentis! It seems that even in the 24th century, children still have no right to elementary privacy, and a doctor's primary duty is still not to the patient, but to the patient's parent (or in this case, ‘guardian’).

In other episodes, Dr. Crusher gives medical information to Picard or others without regard for the (adult) patient’s privacy. Whether that’s good or bad, it’s not a matter of ageism.

At the end, the four transformed individuals are “cured”. It is taken for granted that no one in their right mind would choose to be in a child's body – in our culture, anyway. And who can argue with that?

This isn’t true. One of the characters stays a child until after the episode ends. She says it’s not so bad and another character encourages her not to rush to turn back into being an adult, saying the transporter (cure) will still be available later.

This illustrates that DD gets basic facts wrong when he’s biased. That’s a serious flaw which requires readers be careful with anything DD says. It also helps explain his lying about me.

I saw the blog "Taking Children Seriously" Is Bad. I agree. I’ve thought of more and more flaws with TCS as time has gone on and I’ve written some criticism. I’ve also put warnings/disclaimers on some of my old TCS writing. Also the TCS founders are bad people who are responsible for a harassment campaign against me. Anyway, I wanted to share some thoughts on how/why I didn’t notice TCS’s flaws sooner.

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I think I misunderstood TCS for a bunch of reasons, but in a way where the version of TCS in my head was better than what David and Sarah meant. One thing that happened was DD said there was knowledge on some topics, and I believed him and tried to learn/understand it. Then I created some of it.

DD often let me talk a lot while making some comments, and he didn’t tell me when I was saying things that were new to him, which was misleading. I often thought I was figuring out things he already knew with some hints/help, when actually he was hiding his ignorance from me. The best example of this is my method for avoiding coercion, which was part of my attempt to learn (and organize and write down publicly) existing TCS knowledge, but was actually me creating new knowledge. And I’m not sure that to this day DD learned my avoiding coercion method or agrees with it or likes it. But without my method, how do you always find common preferences (quickly, not given unbounded time)? TCS has no real, substantive, usable answer. Just discuss and try, while trying to not be irrational and not coerce. TCS also lacks details for how to have a rational discussion. I’ve tried to understand/create rational methods more than TCS (or Popper) ever did with ideas like Paths Forward, Impasse Chains, decisive arguments, debate trees, and idea-goal-context decision making. TCS never had methods with that level of specificity and usefulness.

DD told me I was really good at drawing out explicit statements of knowledge he already had. But I think a lot of what happened is I brought up issues – via questions, criticism or explanations – which he hadn’t actually thought of. That prompted him to make new explicit statements to address my new ideas.

TCS had very broad, abstract claims like “problems are soluble”, as well as simple examples and naive advice. Examples of naive advice are that custody courts and child protective services aren’t very dangerous and you shouldn’t worry about them. Also saying that child predators are very rare and not really a concern even when saying that children are full adults in principle and advocating abolishing age of consent laws. Another example of the lack of substance in TCS advice was DD suggesting to tell teachers to let your child use the phone whenever he wants. If teachers (or babysitters, daycare workers, camp workers, etc.) would actually listen to that kind of request, that would be wonderful. But we don’t live in that world. And if we did, parents would be able to think of the idea “ask them to let my child use the phone whenever he wants” without DD’s help. It’s not a very clever idea; most parents could come up with that themselves (if they had the sort of goals where it’d be a good idea – most TCS-inclined parents would want their kid to be able to phone for help but some other parents wouldn’t actually want that).

Another thing that happened, from my perspective, is I won a lot of arguments. I criticized a lot of genuine errors. I thought that was important and useful, and would lead to progress. DD encouraged and liked it. It was useful practice for my own intellectual development. Before I found DD/TCS I was way above average at critical debate, logic, etc. But now I’ve improved a ton compared to my past self. The critical discussions had value for me but weren’t much use for changing the world. It didn’t help people much. They tended not to learn from criticism. And other people in the audience (besides whoever I was directly replying to) tended not to learn much even if they were making very similar mistakes to what I commented on, and they also tended not to learn much from my example about how to debate, think critically, get logic right, etc.

TCS seemed right and important to me because I used ideas related to it and won arguments. That made it seem to me like people were doing worse than TCS and TCS was a clear improvement. While TCS or any sort of gentle parenting has some improvements over mean parenting, I don’t think that was really the issue. I could have won a lot of arguments using other ideas too. The bigger issue is that people are bad at arguing, logic, learning and following ideas correctly, etc. So yeah they wouldn’t get even the basics of TCS right. In some sense, TCS didn’t seem to need more advanced or complex ideas because people weren’t learning and using the main ideas it did say. TCS is like “be way nicer to your kids guys” and then people post about how they’re mean to their kids and blind to it. They needed more practical help. They needed more guidance to actually learn ideas and integrate them into their lives. These are some of the things I’ve been working on with CF. TCS didn’t do that. It wasn’t actually very good.

TCS actually had ideas that were against being organized or methodical, or intentionally following long term goals. It was more like “follow the fun” and “being untidy helps you be creative” which are just personal irrationalities and errors of DD and SFC, not principles with anything to do with Popperian epistemology. I did OK at learning and making progress despite the lack of structure, but most people didn’t, and I think I would have learned more and faster with more organization and structure. I’ve now imposed more structure on my life and organized things more and it is not self-coercive for me; I’m fine with it and find it useful. I understand that for DD it would be self-coercive, but many people can do it some without major downsides, and DD is wrong and should really work on fixing his flaws. TCS never told people to practice anything but practice is a key part of turning intellectual ideas into something that makes a difference in your daily life (rather than only affecting some decisions that you use conscious analysis for, which often leads to clashes between your conscious and subconscious if you don’t do any practice).

This article itself isn’t very organized, but that’s an intentional choice. I’d rather put organizing and editing effort into epistemology articles for the CF website than into this article. I want to write this article cheaply (in terms of resource use like effort). Similarly, I could write a lot of detailed criticism of TCS and of DD’s books, but I don’t want to because I have other things to do. I’ve made some intentional choices about what to prioritize. My CF site has the stuff I think is most important to put energy into. It avoids parenting, relationships and politics. I think stuff about rationality itself is more important because it’s needed to deal with those other topics well. On a related note, I would like to study math and physics, but I don’t, because I don’t want to take the energy away from my philosophy work. TCS discouraged that kind of resource budgeting choice. But I don’t feel bad or self-coerced about it. I think it’s a good choice. I don’t have time or energy to do everything that would be nice to do. Prioritizing is part of life. If you don’t prioritize in a conscious or intentional way, you’ll still end up doing some things and not others. The difference will be some more important things don’t get done. Unintentionally not doing some things because you run out of time and energy won’t lead to better outcomes than making some imperfect, intentional, conscious decisions.

It’s important not to fight with yourself and suppress your desires with willpower. It’s important not to consciously choose some priorities that your subconscious disagrees with. People don’t live up to this perfectly. It’s a good goal to try to do better at, but don’t get paralyzed or sad about it. Just don’t purposefully suppress with willpower and think that’s a good longterm strategy to never improve.

It’s pretty common to like something subconscious/emotionally/intuitively and also think it’s important. That’s an achievable, realistic thing. Not everyone is really conflicted about prioritizing whatever their main interest or profession is. Some people like something and prioritize it and that works well for them. It’s not really all that special that I like philosophy, and do it, and I’m OK with deprioritizing math and physics even though those would be fun too. I don’t think DD can do it though, which is part of why he started TCS but later abandoned it – he has poor control over his priorities and they’re unstable. In retrospect, when he wrote over 100 blog posts about politics for his blog Setting the World to Rights, that was a betrayal of TCS. He could and should have written 100 articles about parenting instead (or if he didn’t want to, then don’t found a parenting movement and recruit people to join it in the first place – choose the politics blog instead).

Also, by saying things were very abusive, monstrous, etc., TCS implied the current state of the world was better than it is. Saying TCS was practical and immediately achievable also implied the world is better than it is. I didn’t realize how screwed up the world is and TCS was wrong about it. The world being more screwed up makes TCS thinking less reasonable. (It doesn’t affect abstract principles but it affects applications.) While TCS said most of the world is better than reality, it said all other parenting is really bad. It’s actually pretty common for people to notice errors in their speciality, think it’s a big problem, and assume other specialties aren’t so screwed up. It’s been said that people reading a newspaper article about their profession often see that it’s full of glaring, basic errors … but then for some reason they believe the same newspaper on every other topic. TCS saw parenting errors but believed the same society was reasonable on other topics. (TCS got some of the errors wrong, but there are plenty of real errors in everything so when you decide to be a harsh critic you’ll often get some things right. Or put another way, everything has lots of room for improvement. If you just try to point out flaws, then it’s not so hard to be right some. If you try to suggest viable ways to improve things, that’s much harder, because your suggestions will contain flaws too.)

The best parts of TCS were short, abstract general principles. Their applications of those principles were not so good. The best principles were unoriginal and came from Popper (rationality stuff) or classical liberalism (freedom, cooperative relationships, mutual benefit, win/win solutions). They were open about getting ideas from those two sources. What was more original were the specific applications to parenting, but those weren’t so good… What happened is I learned TCS by trying to understand and apply the principles myself. I reinvented a lot of the applications while trying to figure out the details because TCS didn’t have enough details and because I cared much more about the principles than about parenting (so did DD, who, for that reason, should not have founded a parenting movement – it would have been better if he made a philosophy blog instead, as I have done). Anyway when I worked out applications of the principles myself I came up with a lot of different conclusions without realizing it. That’s a common thing people do when they read something and don’t discuss much, but I was discussing with DD all the time and he didn’t tell me that I was coming up with new and different ideas, and he didn’t express disagreement with the stuff I came up with, which was really misleading to me. An example is that I figured out that TCS implies having only one child (at a time), but DD and SFC didn’t say that and I doubt they believe it, but I don’t recall DD ever expressing disagreement with that idea. TCS also said a bunch of stuff about getting helpers, but what I figured out is its principles suggest that even having a co-parent is very problematic because it gets in the way of taking individual responsibility for a very hard, unconventional project you’re doing where you need full control and can’t rely on others to be rational participants. Not having a co-parent is also very problematic so there’s a hard problem there that TCS doesn’t address at all. (Having only one kid has some problems too, btw. There are downsides to address which TCS hasn’t tried to develop knowledge about.) Having little other help besides a co-parent is reasonably realistic though – much more so than having other helpers who are actually TCS. Thinking you could have lots of TCS helpers is also related to the incorrect adequate society mindset of TCS.