I found many misquotes in The Beginning of Infinity:
I also posted an unendorsement of DD’s books:
I no longer want to actively promote them or recommend them to people.
There’s something weird about the misquotes to me.
DD is smart and works in a hard field and works on hard problems (right?). Why mess up something so elementary?
Check your premises.
If quoting really is easy, why do lots of authors (including smart ones) mess it up?
Also you have a hidden premise something like: messing up quoting is bad - all downside, no upside. So DD would definitely want to avoid it.
Maybe cuz they care more about social climbing than about doing even easy stuff that doesn’t help with social climbing?
If that hypothesis were true, you would expect to see better quoting from non-social-climbing authors.
Ah but maybe if e.g. DD makes a change to a quote that makes it sound nicer or better then that is an upside, and perhaps he values such upsides over accuracy.
Dec reports that DD misquoted Turing in DD’s 1985 physics paper.
lol @ peer review? :(
I wonder if that’s one of the ones he won an award for.
I blogged about the misquote. DD got the cite wrong too.
I got a (bad) response from the journal where Deutsch published the Turing misquote. I wrote a major update to my post criticizing their reply Curiosity – Deutsch Misquoted Turing
And I wrote a reply email to them: