# Misquotes by David Deutsch
**URL:** https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/misquotes-by-david-deutsch/219
**Category:** Elliot Temple
**Tags:** scholarship, beginning-of-infinity, david-deutsch, fabric-of-reality
**Created:** [July 4, 2021, 8:25pm UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/misquotes-by-david-deutsch/219 "2021-07-04T20:25:34Z")
**Posts on this page:** 9
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Elliot](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/Elliot)
#### Post date: [July 4, 2021, 8:25pm UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/misquotes-by-david-deutsch/219/1 "2021-07-04T20:25:35Z")
I found many misquotes in _The Beginning of Infinity_:
> **[Curiosity – Misquotes by David Deutsch](https://curi.us/2462-misquotes-by-david-deutsch)**
>
> I’ve discovered that David Deutsch (DD) is an unreliable quoter. His book The Beginning of Infinity (BoI) contains many serious quotation errors, and he has misquoted elsewhere too.
>
> For context, DD
I also posted an unendorsement of DD’s books:
> **[Curiosity – David Deutsch Books Unendorsement](https://curi.us/2464-david-deutsch-books-unendorsement)**
>
> I thought that even though David Deutsch (DD) and his fans were harassing me, his books were still good. But I hadn’t reread them for years. On review, The Beginning of Infinity contains lots of misq
I no longer want to actively promote them or recommend them to people.
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### Author:  [@JustinCEO](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/JustinCEO)
#### Post date: [July 7, 2021, 12:12am UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/misquotes-by-david-deutsch/219/2 "2021-07-07T00:12:21Z")
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?
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### Author:  [@Elliot](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/Elliot)
#### Post date: [July 7, 2021, 12:17am UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/misquotes-by-david-deutsch/219/3 "2021-07-07T00:17:00Z")
Check your premises.
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### Author:  [@JustinCEO](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/JustinCEO)
#### Post date: [July 7, 2021, 11:07pm UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/misquotes-by-david-deutsch/219/4 "2021-07-07T23:07:12Z")
> [@Elliot](#):
>
> Check your premises.
Ok!
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### Author:  [@Elliot](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/Elliot)
#### Post date: [July 8, 2021, 1:35am UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/misquotes-by-david-deutsch/219/5 "2021-07-08T01:35:48Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@JustinCEO](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/JustinCEO)
#### Post date: [July 8, 2021, 10:54pm UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/misquotes-by-david-deutsch/219/6 "2021-07-08T22:54:36Z")
> [@Elliot](#):
>
> If quoting really is easy, why do lots of authors (including smart ones) mess it up?
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.
> [@Elliot](#):
>
> 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.
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.
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### Author:  [@Elliot](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/Elliot)
#### Post date: [July 12, 2021, 6:18pm UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/misquotes-by-david-deutsch/219/7 "2021-07-12T18:18:34Z")
Dec [reports](https://conjecturesandrefutations.com/2021/07/06/checking-szasz-quotes/#comment-22009) 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.
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### Author:  [@Elliot](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/Elliot)
#### Post date: [July 12, 2021, 7:52pm UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/misquotes-by-david-deutsch/219/8 "2021-07-12T19:52:59Z")
I blogged about the misquote. DD got the cite wrong too.
> **[Curiosity – Deutsch Misquoted Turing](https://curi.us/2468-deutsch-misquoted-turing)**
>
> David Deutsch (DD) wrote in Quantum theory, the Church-Turing principle and the universal quantum computer (1985), p. 3:
>
>
> Church (1936) and Turing (1936) conjectured ... This is called the ‘Church-T
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### Author:  [@Elliot](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/Elliot)
#### Post date: [September 14, 2021, 9:44pm UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/misquotes-by-david-deutsch/219/9 "2021-09-14T21:44:05Z")
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](https://curi.us/2468-deutsch-misquoted-turing)
And I wrote a reply email to them:
> **[Curiosity – Academic Journals Are Unreasonable](https://curi.us/2477-academic-journals-are-unreasonable)**
>
> I wrote the below email to the Proceedings of the Royal Society (academic journal) as a followup to the issue of Deutsch misquoting Turing. They agreed that Deutsch's quote and citation were both i