Topic Summary: Link to TCS criticism.
Goal: Sharing.
CF relevance: It’s about TCS.
Do you want unbounded criticism?
OK but I’m just sharing a link so the critical discussion would be about the articles, not directed at me. I’ll say my opinion of the link though, so potentially someone could criticize that: I think the articles make some good points. If the articles are actually bad, then I’m mistaken.
To me some of the articles seem similar to stuff Elliot has (recently) written about TCS. I doubt that’s coincidence.
If Elliot didn’t write the articles, I’d guess there are some plagiarism / lack of proper credit problems with them.
This post is worrying to me.
I have some things to say that are similar to things that Elliot has said about TCS. It’s not a “coincidence”. I have followed TCS for a long time, I have read Elliot’s writing on TCS over the years, and I am writing about it now partly because TCS has started to become active again over the last couple of years.
I don’t think that the things I have to say are plagiarizing Elliot, even though some of them are similar to things Elliot has said. I am not sure what you think is plagiarism in that blog: you didn’t state any specifics.
It is also worrying to me that you are speculating on the identity of an anon. I am an anon. I don’t want people speculating on my identity. I understand that I might not be able to stop CritRats or current TCSers from speculating on my identity, if I say something that bothers them. They might try to guess who I am and try to smear me in some way. But I don’t want people on this forum to be speculating on my identity: I want to be able to write here, including in unbounded, without people naming who they think I may or may not be, who I sound like, etc.
I have also noticed in the past that people who say something that sounds kind of like Elliot’s opinion will often be accused of being Elliot sock-puppets. This has been happening for many years. It is odd, and I think it is used in a way to delegitimize Elliot’s views: they are so bad/weird that obviously no other real person could think similar things. I don’t know if that’s what you mean here, but I could see CritRats or TCS people saying that any good/ difficult-to-answer TCS criticism is obviously Elliot sock-puppets, so needn’t be engaged with or taken seriously (and in fact, should probably just be ghosted and not replied to at all, as they are currently doing with Elliot).
To be clear, that is not allowed on this forum. @Lebowski’s post violated the rules.
The new TCS website has a forum section. It says it’s moderated to prevent spam. They have let posts go up which were clearly not spam then deleted them later. There’s no free speech or genuine critical discussion there, nor anything close, and they don’t have honest rules. Presumably the comment sections on the articles are handled the same way.
Regarding TCS being bad, I agree and I wrote some thoughts on how I didn’t notice earlier.
I apologize. I was focused on the fact that Elliot has been the victim of plagiarism in the past, and how that was bad.
I think I should stop trying to say things for the purpose of defending Elliot, especially about subjects I don’t understand very well like plagiarism.
I also need to consider side effects of what I write more. I often say things with a particular goal in mind and mostly consider whether or not what I say will achieve that goal. I would not have written a post with the goal of speculating on the identity of an anon. But I failed to consider if my post might have that effect.
I’ve been thinking and writing (privately) about TCS criticism recently. If anyone has any criticism or praise of TCS to share, it’d be a good time right now while I’m actively thinking about the topic. I’d like to see other people’s opinions about TCS and what they agree and disagree about. This is meant for people who are already familiar with TCS. I’m not trying to encourage anyone to go learn about TCS now because I think it could be a bad influence.
I don’t know if it’s too late now, but I have some to say.
Btw i don’t if it’s better to go to tcs website and find quotes and comment on them:
I was trying to go back and find something I remembered reading on TCS: The Taking Children Seriously List but only remember reading The Final Prejudice. I don’t know if I should sift through more articles cuz im getting a bad feeling about reading them.
What type of capacity? I’m not sure I’m understanding this sentence?
Caveats: It’s been a long time and I haven’t thought about TCS much in years. I never made a strong distinction between what TCS said and what ET said in the years I was discussing TCS, and the intervening years may have blurred the distinction further. Perhaps I originally misunderstood or am currently misremembering the positions I’m commenting on. My comments are just high level topics - there is more I could say if there’s interest in one or more of these.
I remember having the following major disagreements with TCS:
TCS’s model of human brains & minds. TCS treated human brains & minds as ~same as a computer just with different software. A computer is a good and sometimes useful but imperfect analogy for the human brain; similarly for software and the human mind. Using the computer analogy when it wasn’t actually useful or appropriate lead TCS to promote problematic downstream ideas like that child brains/minds are the same as adult brains/minds except that they have different knowledge, and the conception of coercion as conflicting active idea threads.
TCS’s moral model of conception. TCS treated the act of creating a child as a tort by the parent upon the child - because the child did not consent to the act of his/her creation. I remember this being somewhat inexplicit at least in terms of TCS actually calling it a tort. Rather it being a tort was an unstated but necessary logical predecessor to TCS’s positions about what parents owe their children and what TCS says to do when there’s an apparent conflict between the parent and child they don’t know how to resolve. TCS’s model of conception as a tort was not in line with how most parents and children see it nor (in my estimation) the reality of the situation. Conclusions that would be fair in the context of TCS’s tort were decidedly unfair in its absence. As an aside, some years later I encountered a group stating explicitly (and following more fully to conclusion) what I believe TCS’s model for the act of conception always was. They are known as “antinatalists”: Antinatalism - Wikipedia [NOTE: I do not endorse antinatalism].
TCS’s purported development vs. reality. TCS promoted itself as a fully developed, tested, implementable system for raising children. It wasn’t. TCS’s position was basically if you’re a parent it’s immoral not to TCS, and any failures were your own fault rather than failures due to problems with TCS. This was misleading and emotionally manipulative. I’ve seen ET comment extensively on this aspect of TCS in the intervening years and don’t think I have any current disagreements with his writing about it.
Thats my bad for using that word. I dont think i know what it means after looking it up. I think by capacity i mean like having all the knowledge to help them get as big conclusions as adults can
I disagree with 1. E.g. I still think brains are literally computers. That isn’t an analogy. They are physical objects which perform computations (and this isn’t some weird or picky point; computation is a brain’s primary purpose and brains perform lots of computation).
For 2, I agree there’s a big issue there. I’ve been thinking about similar issues recently. When parent and child have a hard conflict they get stuck on, TCS basically says either the parent is being unreasonable or the child is being unreasonable which is the parent’s fault due to previous coercion. So the parent is always to blame and the child is always the innocent victim who should be protected and compensated to make them 100% whole. TCS didn’t say it in these words. TCS did also talk about the parent’s choice to have a kid and create the whole situation, but even without that I think TCS would still have reached similar conclusions.
Also more broadly I think saying that anyone who violates the non-aggression principle owes their victim enough compensation to make them fully 100% whole (indifferent to the aggression having ever happened or not) is wrong. Deutsch had that position, explicitly for some other topics, and it was inexplicit in TCS which is part of why TCS tended to assign huge obligations to parents.
I agree about 3.
That’s right with regard to high level ideas of computation and computers. I understand that computation is broad enough that for example car automatic transmissions from the 1970s with no electronics do it. Human brains are even a step further - Turing complete computers - which iphones also are and car automatic transmissions aren’t. General ideas about computation or computers are not what my disagreement with TCS was about.
Rather, I think TCS analogized human brains with the specific thing that people commonly think about as computers: The manufactured electronic device that typically runs an OS like MacOS. A human brain is not literally that. There are important things human brains have in common with a Mac, and important ways human brains are different from a Mac. My contention is that TCS modeled human brains like Macs in some ways that brains are not actually like Macs, and in doing so it reached flawed conclusions. Maybe we still disagree about that or maybe not.
I think that TCS at least implied (and maybe outright stated sometimes) that if there is an unresolved conflict the parent basically ought to defer to the child. This was obfuscated some because the general advice was to never have unresolved conflict (just resolve all conflicts, stupid!)
You don’t specify which conclusions, so I may disagree with you or I may not.
But I think that even if the tort idea was true, it would not necessarily follow that the parent should defer to the child in all unresolved conflicts.
If the tort idea is true, then that means parent owes child something. But what parent owes is still unspecified. I don’t think the only possible answer to that is “everything.”
It is all very well to say that where there is no common preference found, the parent must self-sacrifice, but this TCS idea is neither a solution nor a sufficient condition for a solution to be found. Self-sacrifice is not intended to be something which happens day in, day out, in a TCS family. Occasional failures, or even frequent minor failures, to find solutions, are probably inevitable, and we endorse parental self-sacrifice as the best way of making them less harmful and less frequent. But daily occurrences of severe self-sacrifice are actually incompatible with the TCS style, just as coercion of the children is.
Occasional parental self-sacrifice is a stabilising, self-limiting thing, but if someone is sacrificing night after night, that situation is unstable.
That’s Sarah Fitz-Claridge in 1998. But also on the same page, she wrote in 2000 (link removed, bold added):
Since readers often seem bent on misunderstanding TCS as saying “defer to your child” if not “grovel on the floor for a little mercy from the evil monster child”, instead of seek common preferences , I thought it time for a repost or three. Self-sacrifice is coercive. TCS does not advocate self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice is not TCS. Self-sacrifice is hideous. To say that TCS advocates deferring to the child is to miss what TCS is in fact saying entirely. That bit on the web site appears to be causing such gross misunderstandings that I am thinking of removing it!
This does not say what to do instead of “defer to your child” in the event that common preference finding fails. It doesn’t provide some other plan besides not failing, which isn’t going to work every time. (TCS’s arguments that common preference finding is always possible means you can succeed each time, but you could still also fail, there’s no guarantee of success.) This absolutely does not switch TCS’s position to the conventional “child defers to parent” alternative. So I still read TCS as advocating parents defer to children for common preference finding failures, but also as not really wanting to openly admit that.
I agree. This is related to: even if the parent is to blame for some problem, even if something is the parent’s fault, that doesn’t tell you what to do now and does not imply the parent should defer, sacrifice or lose (because whose fault it is doesn’t tell you which ideas about what to do now are true or good, and anyway you shouldn’t judge ideas by their source).
More broadly I now think TCS tried to put huge obligations on parents, and did a few other things, because its founders wanted to. I think they were biased people who backwards rationalized reasons for the conclusions they liked (and they’ve shown a pattern of repeatedly doing that on other topics besides parenting too). They presented stuff as impersonal principled abstract logic, which I think was misleading.
A minor example is that when I was into TCS I figured out that it generally, mostly implied that parents should only have one child (at a time). DD and SFC never critiqued this but also never advocated it. Why? I think because they just didn’t like it and didn’t want to make parents do that (whereas they did want to make parents stop spanking, yelling and frowning). Or because SFC already had more than one child. They weren’t actually following logical reasoning wherever it led like courageous, unbiased truth seekers.
TCS and some of their other stuff being so offensive helped make it seem like they were willing to follow rational argument to any conclusion no matter how offensive. But I think maybe they were just offensive people who held some offensive views but weren’t actually open to other offensive views that they weren’t biased for.
I don’t remember TCS ever explicitly saying what a parent owes, or even that parental debt was the right underlying concept. However parental debt is a part of mainstream traditional parenting and I don’t think TCS repudiated the idea that parents owe their kids something. The mainstream framework for parental debt is something along the lines of the parent having created a partnership with the child, the goal of which is the child being able to have something like a good/decent/acceptable life. In this partnership the parent owes the child the materials and actions required to enable such an outcome, and the child owes the parent an age-appropriate degree of deference until being prepared to exit the partnership (or being ejected from it sometime after the age of majority). Traditions vary but the key is mutuality - parent owes some thing(s) and child owes some thing(s).
I inferred that TCS had a different framework for parental debt because a tort was the only framework in which the concrete advice TCS gave to parents made sense to me. However it’s possible there was some other workable framework I didn’t (and don’t) understand.
The conclusion that parents should defer in unresolved conflicts is too abstract to explain how I arrived at a tort.
One concrete example I remember discussing heavily was tooth brushing. Common situation: after baby teeth fall out and adult teeth start coming in parent strongly wants kid to brush their teeth out of some combination of concern for the contribution of healthy teeth to kid’s good life and concern for cost of future dental work required to remediate current neglect. Kid doesn’t want to brush [regularly, or effectively, or at all]. Parent tries explaining why several times/ways, different toothpaste, etc. and kid still doesn’t want to brush.
Parent has good reason to expect that if parent makes child brush using traditionally accepted “coercive” techniques proportional to the situation - such as threats of or actual privilege denial (“brush or you can’t watch Spongebob”), child will have better tooth outcomes leading to a better life. Furthermore, when child is somewhat older child will actually prefer the outcome of having been made to brush to the outcome of not having been made to brush. It’s not 100%; other outcomes are possible, but this is a well known/common outcome and I don’t remember TCS disagreeing with that as a concrete assertion. Nevertheless, TCS’s position was that parent should defer to child’s current preference not to brush.
Traditional parenting’s position is the opposite - that parent should make child brush. Traditionally, to not do that is a (minor) parental negligence.
From this I concluded TCS must reject the traditional framework that parents owe (as a debt) their kids ex: coercive actions to achieve parent’s best estimate of child’s long-term interests, arising from parent-child partnership. To be fair, TCS made counter-arguments, such as coercive tooth brushing not actually being in the long-term interests of the child, longer term preferences not actually being more important to a good life than short-term interests, and stated later-life preferences not actually being reliable. I found none of the counter-arguments convincing because TCS’s position was that even if none of the counter-arguments were true the parent still ought not make the child brush. So while technically possible, the counter-arguments just seemed like rationalizations.
Further, TCS’s position was not simply that that the partnership is a fiction and child fully owns their life & choices and that by deferring to child’s current wish not to brush, when and if lack of brushing led to dental problems parent could simply walk away and allow child to suffer as a consequence child’s (lack of) action. That would be negligent, but at least consistent with the idea that child fully runs & owns their choices & life. TCS rejected that. Parent was still supposed to ex: pay for dental work later to fix the problems. How do you get that kind of parental debt outside of the traditional framework in which the debt arises out of the partnership? Absent some other kind of relationship, which was neither asserted nor apparent, tort is the way. And the statements TCS made about the situation were consistent with a tort and no other relationship I could think of: The parent failed to adequately explain the consequences of failing to brush to the satisfaction of the child. OK but why is that parent’s responsibility rather than child’s responsibility to understand the available explanations and situation? Because the parent created the situation in which teeth, and the need to either brush them or have them later rot, and the child’s need for an adequate explanation, exist. But that’s just part of being a human on planet earth! Child did not consent to being created as a human on planet earth - Parents did that without child’s consent.
I like what TCS says about children being full people whose lives are their own.
I like the name “Taking Children Seriously”. It doubles as a good rule of thumb, to take kids seriously. I think most adults, who have power, don’t agree with this. That’s why schools are starting to implement no cell phone policies, and most people don’t even blink.
Opposite ideas are not only affecting children, but adults as well. Like the UK Online Safety Act.