And of course DD’s decision not to retract his defamatory, illegal lie is intentional. If he was just an irresponsible and an emotional mess, who didn’t want to defame me, he could undo that harassing action that he personally did. But he won’t.
And it’s a really nasty lie to say that I repeatedly violated his no contact requests. Like the lie that I threatened violence, it’s capable of getting people to ghost me, ignore all my arguments, and refuse to engage in any sort of problem solving with me. One of DD’s narratives is that I’m doing all this as a tactic to try to get his attention, and that if anyone responds to me and engages with the problem at all then they’re helping me win.
The violence thing was such bad faith. From memory, I said roughly “I don’t want to destroy your social status”.
And he’s like “in german ‘destroy’ sounds like violence, so I felt unsafe, thought you were threatening me with IRL harm, said nothing to you, never asked any other English speakers about it, and then months later told ~50 people some of whom dislike you, including Andy B, that you threatened me with violence without giving them the quote to judge for themselves”. Then he did a minimal retraction (and that thread was used to attack me more, and he as a moderator or civilized person did nothing to push back on that) and he refused to apologize. I think he only retracted it at all because he knew what he did was illegal.
BTW I have much worse information I could post about DD. I just don’t know that doing that will help anything…
Yes. I think, like moral condemnation, people want an authority (often their emotions) to tell them who they should care about. They want to see a well known victim group being targeted by a well known perpetrator type to validate them getting involved.
I do not like that I’m saying that seriously.
I’m reminded of Gail Wynand.
From The Fountainhead:
The first campaign of the Banner was an appeal for money for a charitable cause. Displayed side by side, with an equal amount of space, the Banner ran two stories: one about a struggling young scientist, starving in a garret, working on a great invention; the other about a chambermaid, the sweetheart of an executed murderer, awaiting the birth of her illegitimate child. One story was illustrated with scientific diagrams; the other–with the picture of a loose-mouthed girl wearing a tragic expression and disarranged clothes. The Banner asked its readers to help both these unfortunates. It received nine dollars and forty-five cents for the young scientist; it received one thousand and seventy-seven dollars for the unwed mother. Gail Wynand called a meeting of his staff. He put down on the table the paper carrying both stories and the money collected for both funds.
“Is there anyone here who doesn’t understand?” he asked. No one answered. He said:
"Now you all know the kind of paper the Banner is to be.
There’s a way of getting the crowd to be sympathetic on a larger scale. But it’s not a good one.
I think he’s also being evasive here, pretending he doesn’t have a significant following.
Oh yeah I like that scene. That’s a good comparison. Illustrating my case with a bunch of 2,500 word articles is maybe even worse (at getting sympathy from those kind of people) than scientific diagrams…
Also the part where I’m giving up lots of potential programming income to work on great philosophical inventions … is so unsympathetic to most people that I haven’t even tried to mention it much.
Imagine you emailed a company CEO to ask if they have PFAS in their product. PFAS are type of toxic chemical that is in many products without being disclosed, and is often added somewhere in the supply chain. And the CEO replied:
“I’m not aware of anyone I know covertly adding PFAS to our product.”
David Deutsch was so in favor of processed foods but he was wrong and didn’t actually have good reasoning. He had such confidence in scientists, doctors, the giant corporations that make our food, etc. I think he believed that if there was a real problem, someone would notice and sound the alarm and be listened to. And all the people whining about alleged problems are just dumb or biased (or in rare cases unlucky) – if they were actually right then the mainstream would listen more. (DD failed to recognize the severe lack of Paths Forward.)
I think it’s related to his social climbing – having a mostly positive attitudes towards the institutions he wants to climb with. He focused his criticism too much in a few specific areas (e.g. parenting) instead of getting a clear view of the bigger picture of what society is like and what problems it has. I think it’s also related to his biased, tribalist libertarianism where he puts so much blame on the government and very little on corporations (when in reality both have tons of huge flaws).
His advice to me (and many others) about food was harmful. He was so dismissive of the idea that hotdogs (an ultra processed food) or sugar could be bad for you. He was also a liar/hypocrite because he told me he started eating broccoli, despite disliking it, as he got older, to try to improve his health – he didn’t consistently live by his theories that he told others to live by and he didn’t publicly admit that.
Part of it was also bias in favor of giving children whatever they want including “junk food”.
DD was also very confident of the “calories in, calories out” (CICO) model which I think was rationalism – it seems logical and in some sense it’d be hard for that model to be wrong. But, as with nutrition, he didn’t actually research the topic and didn’t know what he was talking about. In practice CICO is a pretty bad model because a lot of calories that go into your mouth don’t get digested and also our measurements of the calories in foods are bad and also our measurements of the calories we use in our lives are bad too.
1 Like