Thanks for expressing it so clearly. I was trying to write down the problems and this sums it up.
I wrote a post on my site about supporting @curi wrt the ongoing harassment â support in the sense that Iâm denouncing the treatment curiâs received. Since the post is critical of DD, I thought itâd be right to post about it here.
Iâm open to feedback/crits regarding it. There is some more context about the post in this comment on curi.us: https://curi.us/2476-david-deutsch-harassment-update#5. I shared a bit about personal interactions there (which is mentioned in this topics OP, mb should have put that here instead).
copy of the post on my site (for quoting or whatever)
Summary
I Support Elliot Temple (regarding ongoing harassment from CritRats; a group lead by DD)
For a summary of the harassment against Elliot and other members of the Fallible Ideas community, see https://curi.us/2412-harassment-summary.
For the full context of this post, see David Deutsch Harassment Update (curi.us), including the comments of that post.
Fan support regarding this major problem would be appreciated.
â Source: https://curi.us/2434-harassment-sucks; published May 22 2021
I support Elliot Temple. Elliot is right, this is a major problem.
The harassers (a small number of CritRats close to DD) are unwilling to take steps to deescalate the situation. They are unwilling to take even the most reasonable of steps to at least coexist in peace. AFAICT, one of Elliotâs main goals is to be left alone (by CritRats) so that he can pursue his philosophy work. Elliotâs actions are consistent with that goal.
Here is an outline of David Deutschâs position. DD âwas ETâs mentor, colleague and close friend for over 10 yearsâ. He is the leader of a community; they donât have an official name, usually theyâre referred to by the name CritRats. âCritRatâ is a contraction of Critical Rationalism, the name of Popperâs philosophy. This informal group, including DD, tolerate the harassment (or worse).
If you were DD and had written The Beginning of Infinity, a book that claims:
[âŚ] success at making factual, scientific discoveries entails a commitment to all sorts of values that are necessary for making progress. The individual scientist has to value truth, and good explanations, and be open to ideas and to change. The scientific community, and to some extent the civilization as a whole, has to value tolerance, integrity and openness of debate.
â BoI Ch 5, p121 (emphasis mine)
If you had written that, given numerous reports that repeated harassment was being done in your name, do you think it would be reasonable to, say, write a tweet along the following lines? Iâve recently heard allegations of harassment targeting Elliot Temple by a small number of my fans. I unequivocally denounce harassment, against Elliot or anyone else. Itâs immoral and, if it is happening, it needs to stop. A tweet like this is not much; it doesnât even acknowledge that a problem exists (just that if it does exist, it should stop). Is that not a reasonable minimum to expect from a philosopher?
DD doesnât post to forums or blogs anymore, AFAIK. He does post to twitter, though. Not one of DDâs 10.9k+ tweets mentions âHarassmentâ. At what point does this kind of avoidance become negligent? At what point does the issue become bad enough that the leader of the community has a responsibility to make at least some gesture speaking out against bad behavior?
Earlier this year, Elliot had to disable open comments on his blog (âafter 18 years and over 20,000 commentsâ[1]) due to the harassment.
When that happened, Elliot provided me with an account (as Iâm sure he did for other members of the CF/FI community). Why is this important to say publicly?
[Anonymous:] When critrats inevitably discuss this thread in private, I wonder if theyâll consider the restraint youâve shown (over years). I mean, those quotes at the end are all at least 10 years old. A decade.
[Elliot:] I fear theyâll just say youâre my sock puppet and ignore your point. What proof is there that I ever gave anyone else an account?
Iâm not a sockpuppet â thatâs obvious to anyone even vaguely familiar with my history.
DDâs tacit approval[2] of harassment is unacceptable. It should stop. Offending CritRats should stop. Itâs not okay.
(note: these footnotes are from the collapsed post above this sentence)
https://curi.us/2469-video-talking-about-david-deutsch-and-andy-b-problems âŠď¸
Itâs actually worse than just tacit approval. From https://curi.us/2476-david-deutsch-harassment-update
I found out from multiple community members that DD personally contacted them (over 5 years ago) and tried to recruit them to his side and turn them against me. DD did this in writing and Iâve received documentation.
I havenât seen that evidence, but I trust that Elliot is being honest. Throughout the ongoing harassment, Elliot has repeatedly shown restraint and respect, and I have no reason to doubt his account of the situation. Iâve also witnessed the harassment first hand â in that instance LessWrong moderators acknowledged curi (Elliot) was being harassed when they banned both him and the sockpuppet. âŠď¸
Itâs actually worse than just tacit approval. From Curiosity â David Deutsch Harassment Update for September 2021
It was already known to be worse, particularly from Curiosity â David Deutsch Lied About Me and also e.g. Curiosity â David Deutsch Tweets with my Cyberstalker and Harasser, Andy B
Similarly, I found the Twitter of one of the new YouTube harassers. I donât think heâs ever contacted me before. Who does he tweet with a lot? DD and Andy B, both of whom publicly reply to him a lot. Then he goes and harasses me. Their community culture is very toxic, and the hidden stuff is much worse than the public stuff. Itâs bad enough to get random people to join in the harassment campaign.
BTW, guys, beware: TCS, ARR and other DD ideas have serious errors. Iâd advise against trying to do TCS or ARR without a lot of critical discussion first.
2 Likes
Wtf is wrong with people?
Consumed by irrational hatred (while not even admitting involvement in an ongoing conflict that could or should be somehow addressed)? Dunno.
Various relevant stuff in this video (mostly in the second half; not the Billy Mitchell lawsuit):
Includes:
- persistent, targeted harassment including spreading lies (including about his wife and son)
- ignoring the harassment for months or years, but it persisted and escalated anyway to do real harm
- harassers going to third parties to lie to them to prevent them from associating or collaborating with the target
- someone who realized their discord community was toxic, and that it was a real problem (he wanted to clean it up and disavow bad ideas, unlike CritRats. he was even going to apologize and shut down the discord but apparently got publicly cancelled 2 days before doing that)
Another story about an extended harassment campaign. The motive is unclear.
David Deutsch had Dennis Hackethal translate BoI into German.
Deutsch did a public video interview with Hackethal and put it on his own YouTube channel. Heâs purposefully, publicly associating himself with another harasser of Elliot.
Looks like when Deutsch stopped tweeting with Hackethal or publicly promoting him on Twitter, that was intentional subterfuge for the purpose of hiding his association with the harassment campaign.
Yes, if you would be nice to your in-group, and mean to a predictable out-group in a snide kind of way that people could laugh along with, you would have a much bigger fanbase. People like to watch their side win arguments and âsmackdownâ the other side.
I think itâs interesting because people accuse you of being mean, but you are actually nicer than average. David Deutsch wrote really mean emails on TCS list, where he made fun of people and didnât actually explain the TCS ideas he thought that they were not following, and his fans liked that. They thought he was good and smart and putting people in their place. He would write snide, cryptic emails, and then not even reply to follow up questions, but for some reason people are OK with that.
You actually put effort into having conversations with people who want to talk to you, and are willing to actually have extended conversations where you try to reach conclusions. You put effort into actually explaining your ideas to people, and explaining your disagreements.
Being unwilling to explain disagreements (as the guy in the video was, and as DD was in his emails) is actually a sign that you donât respect the other person. You donât expect them to actually be convinced by reason and arguments.
Pointing out disagreements and trying to explain issues is a sign that you actually respect that the person you are talking to has access to thought and reason, and could think about what you are saying and could actually learn and understand your ideas and arguments. But for some reason people just see it as âmeanâ. They think it would somehow be less mean to be so disrespectful of someone that you never even bother to tell them that you disagree with them, even when they are literally on your forum for the purpose of learning, understanding, or discussing your ideas.
I think I personally didnât understand it.
In my experience, DD had extended conversations to try to reach agreement with me (until, years later, when he stopped). But he wasnât doing that with other people, and he mostly only did it privately.
At the time, I thought other people would be able to get conversations if they wanted them more, talked more, tried more, etc., but I now doubt this.
For example, when reviewing some old chat logs, I saw how I repeatedly tried to get DD to talk with my especially smart friend and he basically wouldnât (did a little bit sometimes, but was resistant to it). Imagine if my friend wanted DDâs attention but didnât even have my help to e.g. set up 3way chatrooms. Theyâd have had like no chance at all and gotten like no chats with DD, rather than just a little that only happened because I wanted it to.
I didnât understand DDâs disinterest in talking with another smart person. Didnât he want more smart people to talk with, like me? I knew about what friends and colleagues he had, and that he didnât have other smart people to have good conversations with (high social status will not get you that).
DD stopping having extended conversations with me corresponded well to when he stopped winning in them.
Continuing the discussion from Applying Yes or No Philosophy with @lmf
Did you post about the problems with TCS anywhere?
Not a lot. There is a bit mixed into my explanations of my history with DD, of DDâs social climbing, of the harassment problems, etc. BTW, since I think youâre an Objectivist, I think this will interest you: Curiosity â David Deutsch Smears Ayn Rand
I have an unfinished draft criticizing a DD TCS article but some of the criticism is parochial (more about DD and what he wrote than principles). There are several issues with writing much TCS criticism, including:
- Hardly anyone knows anything about TCS, so first Iâd have to explain TCS before I criticize it, or almost no one would understand it.
- Hardly anyone cares about TCS, or wants to learn some errors in order to read criticism of those errors.
- There are no pro-TCS people who will debate or address arguments.
- Writing explanations of CF is more important to me.
- DD and the others do not want criticism of TCS/FoR/BoI/etc. They interpret criticism of TCS as aggression. That kind of thing motivates them to violate my rights.
- DD and SFC have taken down multiple websites and articles. Itâs problematic to comment on stuff that the authors are trying to unpublish (though without admitting it). I have saved archives of some things and live mirrors online for others, but they donât want this stuff shared, read or talked about. They wonât clearly say a policy though and sometimes act like itâs all public and being actively shared (SFC did some podcasts and talks about TCS recently and acted like TCS had been continuously active, under her leadership, since the 90s, which is false. And around the same time she was giving talks she took down all content from her main TCS website and said that it would be back soon, but itâs still all gone with no replacement from her. I think itâs been gone for over 6 months now).
- Some things which are not available online â particularly TCS journal articles â are problematic to share due to copyright.
I remain partially pro-TCS â I still agree with some of the ideas and values. But, in short, I think TCS tried to offer a shortcut to unearned results.
The shortcut was that the parent doesnât have to learn enough to fix their irrationalities, they just have to shield their child from the irrationalities by e.g. not frowning, punishing or coercing the child, and then allegedly the irrationalities will not hurt the child. Thatâs unrealistic/naive, plus children learn ideas from their society and the parents need to know a ton about all that stuff to help the child think about it well.
The only way to actually get good parenting results is to develop lots of knowledge. The more you know, the better you can do. I think people need learn a lot of philosophy, and many other things, to really high standards, in addition to learning stuff specifically about parenting (or else just be kinda normal â donât try to do something special if you donât know a ton).
TCS actually told people they didnât need to read Popper, and actually didnât even need to read Deutschâs books, in order to be great parents. Thatâs trying to offer shortcuts to non-intellectuals and get them to trust the leaders, like SFC and DD, who (allegedly) know the details from the books. Itâs bad to organize it so people canât think for themselves and have to trust the experts. (EDIT: And then those experts abandoned people in the middle of their kidsâ childhoods and stopped advising. And they didnât admit to quitting, left people confused, offered no recommendations about where else to get help, and actively suppressed sharing information about resources that still existed â e.g. some people never found out that I had made a new TCS email group where they could still get answers to questions.)
children can learn language, so therefore they are universal explainers, so therefore they are morally equivalent to adults who happen to not know much
That much I basically agree with.
There were something like 60,000 TCS emails. DD wrote around 2,000 and sent each to a public group of ~1000 people (who all got copies emailed to them to be saved indefinitely on their own computers) on a listserv with archives (and instructions in the welcome message about how to download all the archived emails, including how new members could get all emails from before they joined. new members could join automatically with no screening). Nevertheless, he doesnât want anyone to read those emails. Or at least not anyone who dislikes them. DD believes, basically, that the general public would disagree with him so much theyâd never listen to him about anything again and itâd ruin his career. He didnât explain why he changed his mind (that was not his belief when writing the emails). I do think some of his emails were extremely bad and would offend virtually everyone for good reason. I donât believe DD is prepared to retract any of that material though â he didnât change his mind about his claims. I think he still thinks heâs right and that other people are wrong and too irrational to listen. I have chosen, so far, to refrain from summarizing, quoting or otherwise emphasizing and spreading the worst things that DD (and a bunch of others) posted.
Anyway, there was a lot of writing. I think youâre not familiar with what TCS was actually like, so a lot of criticism of TCS wouldnât mean much to you.
[Good guess. I am an Objectivist. And Iâve seen that post before: itâs actually how I found CF]
I just reread it. I really like it. Iâm proud of it. I think the analysis and argument quality is great.
But I couldnât write it like that today. I couldnât be that nice to DD and say stuff like that about his skill and knowledge. Iâve lowered my opinion of him a lot.
I finished and posted my draft article criticizing a TCS article:
I also wrote a brief update on the harassment:
Another major incorrect theme in TCS was to treat everything like an emergency (but without framing it that way). DD and SFC routinely responded to âHow do I deal with X?â with solutions that work great ⌠if itâs a one time emergency. And this let them posture as super pro-child since theyâd talk about going way out of your way to help with the childâs problem. But these solutions were not reasonable things to use several times a day for months. They often cost money in addition to other parental resources like time and energy. And itâs good to use those in outlier situations to help your kid. But it doesnât work to use a lot of resources every time your kid gets upset if this is coming up 5+ times a day (which is a common parental experience). TCS encouraged âdrop everything and spare no expense to be as nice to the child as possibleâ by telling people that your kid being upset is a major disaster called âcoercionâ that can do longterm damage to your childâs rationality. And it was basically always easy for DD or SFC to outwit posters by suggesting a way to use even more resources to help the child than the parent had used or thought of using. So they could always come off as thinking of creative extra-pro-child solutions that the people they were advising had not thought of (allegedly due to ageism and hangups). But those solutions werenât actually good. And parents who resisted those solutions were mocked.
Somewhat related is Ayn Randâs article The Ethics of Emergencies.
