I removed some inactive people from the FI Basecamp in order to revert it to the free plan. Sorry; it’s nothing personal.

There were a few reasons:

I realized I cannot make the Basecamp large, given the ongoing harassment against my community (including vandalizing the Basecamp once), because Basecamp doesn’t have adequate security features. It’s designed for working with trusted co-workers.

People weren’t using the project management features.

curi.us is a better discussion forum IMO. It has publicly-viewable permalinks and some markdown support. If you want to have a discussion, please use that.

I decided it'd be better to restrict it now, rather than have more people join then restrict it later.

You can download an archive of all the content at:

https://curi.us/files/fi-basecamp-2021-04-04.zip

I’ll share an updated archive in the future with new posts so that everyone can read them.

I'm planning a new, better forum, although currently I'm making videos explaining The Beginning of Infinity. For updates on my new stuff, subscribe to my newsletter:

https://fallibleideas.com/newsletter

I helped David Deutsch with his book, The Beginning of Infinity, for seven years. Soon after the book was done, he dropped me, and he's now hostile enough to personally take a leading role on harassing me by lying about me in writing.

It has just now occured to me that he may have been using me to get help with his book. Now I'm unsure. I had never thought of this until a couple days ago. But academics getting younger people to do some work for them, which they can take credit for, is a common story. BoI wasn't like getting a younger co-author for a paper who you can actually get to do most of the writing. DD absolutely wrote BoI himself. But I did help a really unusually large amount, as DD requested. I wrote over 200 pages to help DD with BoI, which is an entire book worth of writing. And no one else helped similarly (nor could they have – DD wanted some of my unique skills, abilities, knowledge and perspective).

Part of why this occured to me is that DD got Chiara Marletto to co-author some Constructor Theory writing with him (and also to write multiple other papers, also about DD's ideas, without DD). He's getting a younger postdoctoral researcher to do a lot of work that he isn't doing himself. And when you see two people with significantly different social status as co-authors on a paper, in general that means the lower status person did most of the work. If the higher status person had done most of the work, he wouldn't have given anyone co-author credit. You see this all the time with professors taking too much credit for the work of their grad students (either the grad student helps and gets little credit, or the grad student does most of it and gets his or her name on it and everyone assumes the professor did most of the smart stuff and guided the work, which is often inaccurate).

Note: People often use others without having full conscious knowledge of what they're doing. I think that's much more likely than DD doing using me while having clear, conscious knowledge of exactly what he was doing.

I learned a lot from interacting with DD. But I also had a reasonable expectation of more help from him in the future which never materialized. And my expectations were not just my own reasonable assumptions/guesses; for example, DD told me that one day he would write a forward for my book.

Here's some info about what I did for BoI:

For more info on how I helped with BoI, see also the first few minutes of this video and this praise DD said about me.

waneagony asks on my YouTube video Induction | Analyzing The Beginning of Infinity, part 5:

Could you explain some using the Astra Zeneca COVID vaccine as an example of induction being used (or not) and it being wrong (if so)?

Like more cases of blood clots seem to have been found among ppl that have taken the AZ vaccine.

I think comparing to see if there is an over representation of clots if one suspects reported cases to be high is ok. How one compares in a good way is an issue I think. Don’t know how to think about this well to avoid problems (don’t know if science is good at these things). I guess statistical significance is usually used here in science.

Claiming that clots are due to vaccine without an explanation is induction I think. ~pattern finding. There could be many other patterns that develop post vaccine that are highly (e.g. statistically significant) different between these groups too.

I’m not sure how, but I feel confused on this issue. I think we can discover that something bad is more prevalent post the vaccine in a legit way in the group that has taken the vaccine and I think it is valid to take precautions. But how do we know it’s because of the vaccine and not some other reason like just random or whatever? Could you explain a good way of thinking about this issue? Here, on the other yt channel, a post, a podcast, other, whichever would be appreciated.

First you need explanations of what’s going on. Here’s a simplified explanatory model (scientists have better ones):

• Blood has clotting agents to protect against losing too much blood from cuts
• When foreign materials are in the blood, they may incorrectly trigger internal clotting, which can do significant harm by blocking veins or arteries
• Some foreign materials cause clots and some don’t
• We know some materials are safe, some dangerous, and others unknown
• AZ vax is in the unknown category and we’re trying to figure out if it causes clots or not

Now imagine some simplified evidence: the blood clot rate with AZ vax goes from 0.01% to 75%.

Our guesses include “AZ vax causes clotting” and “AZ vax doesn’t cause clotting”. We need to try to criticize them.

Why did clotting jump to 75% if AZ vax doesn’t cause clotting? This argument criticizes the “doesn’t cause clotting” guess unless someone can provide some kind of rebuttal.

What if clotting jumped from 0.01% base rate to 1%? Might that be random bad luck? What if it was 5%? 10%? To answer that we need to know some things like the variance for blood clotting in general and the sample size of the trial. And we need to do some math. Statisticians have some ideas about how to do that math. We then take the math and use it in our critical arguments. E.g. “According to standard stats, a 1% clot rate in a trial of 50 people could easily just be bad luck. Therefore, I won’t reject the guess that the AZ vax is safe, unless you have some further criticism.” (My numbers are just made up btw. Not especially realistic.) Instead of “standard stats” you might name a particular model or theory in stats that you’re using, and there might be alternatives that get different results, in which case you’d have to use critical arguments regarding what model should be used or how multiple models should be used (e.g. you might be able to explain why a stats model is bad in general, or doesn’t fit this scenario well).

But if it’s 10% blood clots in the trial, then you say “According to standard stats, there’s only a 0.000001% chance that those blood clots would happen by random bad luck. So we should regard the AZ vax as dangerous.” That argument would be open to criticism and counter-argument. A critic could dispute any of the numbers used (e.g. maybe the measurements of the rate of blood clots in the general population were done incorrectly or are old and contradicted by more recent data and may have changed over time), or dispute the statistical model itself, or dispute some premise/requirement that’s required for the statistical model to apply, or dispute the math calculations and point out an error, or dispute the original explanatory model about how blood clots work, or could propose some other cause of the blood clots besides the AZ vax which could be solved in some way (e.g.: “everyone in the trial was in a room with Dr. Johnson who kept coughing up blood, and I’ve tested his blood and found it has Bozark’s Disease which can easily be passed on in an airborne manner in tiny quantities and then cause blood clots in others. so we should do another trial with a step where we screen everyone for Bozark’s Disease and I’m expecting we’ll see no increase in blood clots compared to the general population”).

PS I did not look up anything about the AZ vax issue for writing the above and was just trying to speak about general principles. My loose impression from Twitter is that the AZ vax is probably safe and that the regulators focus on “risk we allow it and it hurts people” without comparing to or caring about “risk we delay it and the vax delay hurts people”. They want to make sure it’s super safe, which is a bad idea when delaying it is uncontroversially super unsafe.

PPS Scientists knowing more details makes a big difference (here’s an overview, which is not representative of all the technical details scientists know). Like they can consider which materials are in the AZ vax and whether some of those have already been tested previously. The vax has a virus with some DNA in it. Maybe that virus has already been used for other stuff before and we’re confident it wouldn’t cause blood clots. So then we’d have to consider if the DNA is somehow getting out of the virus within the blood stream, or what happens when a white blood cell surrounds the virus and what’s left over or excreted from that process. And we’d want to consider what happens once the virus gets in the cell, whether the DNA could end up in the blood stream, whether the mrna created by the cell due to the DNA instructions could end up in the blood stream, whether something that’s within a cell but not directly in the blood stream can cause clotting just by changing the shape or surface of the cell, etc. And scientists already know a lot about those things, and understand explanations about how they work, and also know which types of materials generally do and don’t cause blood clots, and why, and what specific mechanisms form blood clots (like what chemical reactions happen, what different things in the body are involved, etc.) Often this explanatory knowledge and mental model of how this stuff works gives you a pretty good idea that it won’t cause blood clots – or in the alternative that it might and we need to carefully watch out for clotting – before you have any data at all. Maybe you can imagine how knowing a ton of detail about the stuff in this para would be 1) not data 2) very useful (possibly more useful than having a bunch of data. like imagine you could pick one: look at a bunch of data and stats about the AZ vax trials, or actually know all the kinds of stuff from this paragraph in tons of detail so you know how everything works. i think the second one would be better. the data without really knowing what i’m talking about would be less useful than knowing what i’m talking about. (i know what i’m talking about re the epistemology but not so much re the biology and medicine stuff. ideally a person would know epistemology and biology/medicine and also some stats and would have the full data. then they could judge better.))

Max talked about return on investment for learning. E.g. at 1% improvement per day, you can double your skill in 70 days. It’s around 2 years for 0.1%. If you always spend half your time learning instead of working, then your productivity (stuff accomplished per day) will be ahead once you double your skill.

I want to talk about some problems with that linear skill model. I think it’s misleading and understates the value of learning.

Learning Is Non-Linear

There are non-linear jumps in performance when learning. It’s like jumps to universality. There are discontinuities.

Put another way, some learning crosses an important breakpoint and results in a major jump in performance. And some doesn’t.

If you don’t make some kind of significant breakthrough, Max’s simplified model may overestimate the effectiveness of learning. But a single breakthrough can be worth a ton of effort.

Error

Also, people often fail at things. One of the results of learning is more ability to succeed rather than fail. Learning more can often make the difference between success and failure. There are lots of things you just can’t do successfully unless you learn enough. Learning reduces errors.

Not a Matter of Speed

David Deutsch said:

The thing that people call intelligence in everyday life — like the ability of some people like Einstein or Feynman to see their way through to a solution to a problem while other people can't — simply doesn't take the form that the person you regard as 'unintelligent' would take a year to do something that Einstein could do in a week; it's not a matter of speed. What we really mean is the person can't understand at all what Einstein can understand.

This is related to non-linearity again. You can’t just take 100 people who did less learning and have them do the same work as 1 guy who learned enough to be 100x as effective. Even if you set aside the overhead for coordination between the 100 people, it still doesn’t work. You can’t replace an Einstein or Feynman with even a million ordinary people and get the same work accomplished.

The 100 people have some advantages too. Learning doesn’t give you a big effectiveness gain at all work. The advantages from learning are unequally distributed. This is often mitigated by helpers. A genius can hire help or work at a company with a bunch of other manpower.

But if you imagine the genius alone on a desert island, and then imagine a second desert island with 100 average people, you’ll see some advantages and disadvantages for each island. (The desert island scenario prevents the genius from having any helpers.)

Conclusion

IMO, it’s pretty hard to go wrong investing in learning if:

• your learning is effective
• you’re reasonably young
• you’re learning general purpose stuff

Learning stuff that’s only useful for a few purposes is more risky. You might stop using it later. And failing to learn or getting stuck or learning wrong ideas are common problems. And you probably shouldn’t learn to code and try to switch careers when you’re 90.

Learning effectiveness is the condition that concerns me the most. Lots of times people try to learn stuff and it doesn’t work. This is especially true for more general purpose stuff like philosophy. Learning really specific skills is more reliably successful. But most people aren’t very successful at learning about epistemology. (That’s a problem I’ve been working on.)

I'm making a video series explaining, discussing, analyzing and teaching David Deutsch's book The Beginning of Infinity (which I helped edit for 7 years).

View the YouTube Playlist

It's on a new YouTube Channel (Critical Fallibilism) so you'll need to subscribe (and click the bell and select "All") even if you're already subscribed to my curi channel.

Use the comments below to discuss the videos or the book.

My Critical Fallibilism Course videos are now available. Buy on Gumroad ($880).

These 8 videos (16.5 hours) teach my philosophy, Critical Fallibilism, which builds on Critical Rationalism (by Karl Popper and secondarily David Deutsch), Objectivism (by Ayn Rand and secondarily Leonard Peikoff) and Theory of Constraints (by Eli Goldratt). The course is primarily my original material and focuses on teaching tools for thinking effectively. Topics covered include:

• IGCs (idea, goal, context triples, and using IGC charts for decision making and judging ideas)
• Qualitative or quantitative
• Discrete (often binary) or continuous
• Breakpoints
• Sub-goals, combo goals, final goals
• Criticism (explaining why an idea fails at a goal in a context)
• Only act on non-refuted IGCs
• Library of criticism
• Methods to get one non-refuted IGC
• Dealing with conflicts of ideas by considering what to do, from neutral perspective, given an unknown
• High & low attention goals (near or not near a breakpoint)
• High & low attention ideas (mastery, autopilot)
• Critical Rationalism (connections to Critical Fallibilism)
• Evolution
• Objectivism (connections to Critical Fallibilism)
• Theory of Constraints (connections to Critical Fallibilism)
• Focus
• Excess capacity, buffers, margins of error
• Variance
• Bottlenecks, constraints, limiting factors
• Silver bullets
• Local & Global Optima (crossing relevant breakpoints)
• Throughput (does this (local) action cause an improvement at the big picture goal?)

I taught the course live over Zoom video conferencing to five students in November 2020. The format was two 2-hour sessions per week (8 total) with slides. I addressed student questions for each slide as we went along. It's a hybrid between lecture and discussion.

Justin was in the course and said "The ideas in this course - specifically IGCs and breakpoints - helped me think about everyday things like personal purchasing decisions more effectively. This is rational philosophy that you can use in your life!"

Max was in the course and said "the things i've learnt during my tutorials with curi and the CF course have been incredibly valuable."

This product includes 8 videos, 233 slides, and computer-generated subtitles and transcripts. They come as a .zip download with no DRM. I offer a 30-day money back guarantee. Just let me know if you aren't satisfied and I'll give you a full refund.

Buy on Gumroad ($880)

This is part of a series of posts explaining the harassment against me which has been going on for years.

---

Justin Mallone emailed David Deutsch (DD) to bring up the Andy B harassment encouraged by DD’s associates and fan community. DD replied (italics are mine, and you can view a screenshot of the email which includes what Justin said):

As I have told Elliot several times, I don't want to hear from him. That includes indirectly via you and many others. I don't know this Andy B he speaks of. I'm not aware of anyone I know sending DDoS attacks or anything else covertly to Elliot. I'm not the chief of anything. I'm not the leader of any group. Please go away.

David Deutsch

This is a lie about a factual matter. DD did not tell me several times that he didn’t want to hear from me. He never told me that. He hasn’t made a no contact request. I provide evidence below.

Note: I know that accusing someone of lying will bring strong reactions. If you're upset by this article, please try to be objective and look for factual or logical errors rather than assuming it's wrong. And remember that all I want is to be left alone and not have my rights violated. I would address this privately, but DD won’t discuss it with me, and I don’t know who else he lied to.

The lie about no contact requests is what DD says when he’s writing something he knows may be published. It’s also what he says to someone he believes is on my side acting as my proxy. This is DD on his best behavior addressing (for the first time ever that I’ve seen) his involvement in DDOSing, cyberstalking, multi-year harassment, etc. I presume he’s said similar or worse to people he thinks are on his side (there’s circumstantial evidence that he’s been doing that for 5+ years).

DD’s lie is damaging to my reputation. He’s smearing me as a person who violates no contact requests. I never did that.

Justin (another of the harassment victims) asked DD to write a tweet asking his followers to stop harassing. Not only did DD refuse, he also lied to attack the primary victim (me). DD presents me as a person who treats others immorally by violating reasonable and repeated no contact requests. DD turns things around by changing the topic from harassment against me to alleged harassment by me. That makes it sound like he thinks I’m in the wrong and I’m the one who needs to change behaviors. His email implies that he sees me, but not Andy B, as a problem, and that he doesn’t see the harassment against me as having gone too far. And the things DD denied are different than my actual claims, which is a rhetorical trick to make it sound like he’s disputing something when he’s actually avoiding the issue.

DD’s lie echos previous comments by the biggest harasser, Andy B, who claimed that I was ignoring direct requests to leave people alone or stop doing things (but he didn’t specify any requests and was just using it as a tactic to attack me). Andy B may have gotten that idea from DD or one of DD’s associates, but I don’t know specifically because none of them will speak about it.

I challenge DD to provide specifics of the "several times" he (allegedly) told me that he didn’t want to hear from me or made a no contact request. The vast majority of our communication was in writing. I have records of it and I believe DD does too. And I don’t think it’s an innocent mistake to say “several times” when it was zero times; he isn’t just off by a little bit (like saying 4 when it was 5).

Our Most Recent Communications

To see what’s true, let’s take a look at DD’s most recent communications to me. This list of emails is the full story because we stopped using other communication methods like IM before this. I’m going to limit what I share for both of our privacy. I will provide full information if DD disputes my account.

Note: This screenshot only includes personal emails. DD also sent discussion group replies, including Oct 2013 replies to me about impersonal topics on my private discussion group. That seems incompatible with the existence of an active no contact request.

Now let’s go through all the emails in the picture, from oldest to newest. The bulk are DD’s 26 emails in 6 days discussing schizophrenia with me, plus the related emails about Mental illness and szasz (an author who wrote The Myth of Mental Illness). DD initiated the discussion by sharing his comments on an article. He was starting a friendly debate on an issue he knew I partially disagreed about. We ending up discussing political theory. It was a discussion he chose to have for fun or learning, which he was under no pressure or obligation to participate in, so it indicates there wasn’t any no contact request active at that time. If all later emails also lack a no contact request, I think that should be convincing.

Next is the email Remove BOI post. That was sent to DD but meant for me, so he forwarded it. The later email THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY review copy request was the reverse: it was sent to me but meant for DD, so I forwarded it on to him (he replied with “Thanks.”). I created, owned and ran the BoI forum (and website) at DD’s request, so that’s why the email about removing a post (which had been sent by accident) should have gone to me.

The three ramit sethi email emails involved DD helping me edit a draft email to a public figure (Ramit Sethi teaches personal finance). Helping each other edit stuff was typical of our relationship, and isn’t what people do when they have no contact requests outstanding.

In why can popper publish it, but not you?, DD criticizes Popper. It doesn’t say anything about not wanting to hear from me.

demanding respect for one’s moral code is the most negative and complicated, but does not contain a no contact request. I had sent DD a quote from Atlas Shrugged, a book he was a fan of and which had influenced his thinking and philosophy. I commented, in full, “when you appear to be acting against a main theme of Atlas Shrugged, shouldn't you explain yourself?” Due to our many prior conversations, I thought DD would understand what I meant, though I may have been mistaken. DD’s response began:

You are saying that I ought to write you an essay, on the subject of your choice.

More generally, you keep demanding that I work for you. You keep claiming that I have an obligation to do so.

This was (as best I can understand it) a misinterpretation of my question. I meant that if public figures change their mind about ideas and advice they shared with thousands of people, I think they ought to keep their fans updated, e.g. with a retraction. You wouldn’t want people to keep using your ideas that you later discovered were errors. It’s like when a scientist publishes a result, and later discovers it’s false, then he ought to publish updated info.

Asking a critical, argumentative question is not a demand that DD work for me. It’s intellectual debate. DD could agree, disagree or not reply (he’d used all of those options many times in the past).

DD didn’t want me to demand that he work for me (I don’t think I did, nor do I think I was ever capable of bossing around my mentor who is an award-winning physicist, successful author and Royal Society member). That’s different than a no contact request. And in my judgment, wanting DD to stop lying about me, retract the lie(s) and tell his fans to stop harassing me is not violating his old request. Those are actions that any reasonable person would do. And I’m not trying to get DD to work to provide me with a positive value (such as an essay I’d enjoy); I just want my rights to stop being violated.

The last email to discuss is hello. In it, DD answers my question “are you interested in a solution?” (to whatever reason we weren’t talking much anymore, which wasn’t clearly specified) with “Yes.” I actually read the rest of the email in a negative way, but it didn’t say anything about not wanting to hear from me.

Conclusions

So, reviewing DD's communications, he repeatedly acted like he did want to hear from me, e.g. by conversing with me, and he didn’t request not to hear from me again once, let alone “several” times. My takeaway is that DD has lied to attack the same person that his fans are harassing.

I’ve shared this to try to undo some of the harm to my reputation that DD is doing by lying about me. See also the praise DD wrote about me, which I shared for a similar purpose.

What I want is simple. DD: stop lying about me, retract your lies, and tell your followers to stop harassing. Leave me alone.

I (and other members of the Fallible Ideas community) have been subjected to severe harassment over the last 2.5 years, including illegal actions like DDoSing and threatening IRL harm. The harassment includes hundreds of comments from over 100 IP addresses and over 20 false identities (some maintained for months). It’s coming from the CritRat community led by David Deutsch (DD), who used to be my mentor and colleague. They’ve said they’re harassing because they see me as DD’s enemy. DD left our community (after years of participation) and formed a new community (CritRat) which is harassing his former community which he has a grudge against. When asked to request that his fans stop harassing, DD not only refused but lied to attack me, which encourages further harassment (in my understanding, that lie is illegal: libel and defamation).

I’m writing a series of posts to explain what’s going on, including what harassment happened, what the evidence is, and why I place blame on Deutsch. I’m doing this publicly because Deutsch and his associates have refused to discuss it privately. They’ve also refused to say they are opposed to harassment or that they want the culprits to stop. Many of them are publicly friendly with the biggest harasser, Andy B.

Start Here

• Beginning of Infinity website explanation of harassment

David Deutsch

• Deutsch Lied about Me
• David Deutsch’s Gossip and Harassment Leadership
• Deutsch Tweets with my Cyberstalker and Harasser, Andy B
• Deutsch's Responsibility for Harassment (infographic)
• Deutsch's Denial
• Does Deutsch Know He's Lying?
• Beginning of Infinity Website Removed in Protest
• David Deutsch Megathread

Andy B

• Andy B's Campaign of Harassment (lots of additional info in comments)
• Connections Between Deutsch’s Associates and Andy B
• Andy B Harassment Update (lots of additional info in comments)

Conceptual Explanations

• Friend Groups, Social Legitimacy, Abusers and No Contact Requests
• Sam Harris on Defamation; Comments on Deutsch and Others Defaming Me
• Reactions to Abuse Victims

Updates

• Harassment Update for September 2021
• Harassment Update for November 2021
• Harassment Update for May 2022
• Harassment Update for February 2023

David Deutsch Background Information & Context

• What Happened with Deutsch
• Deutsch’s Fear and Revulsion
• Deutsch’s Irrationality
• Deutsch Wants to Control Others and His Reputation
• Deutsch Retrospective Thoughts
• What Happened with the TCS Archives
• Deutsch’s Past Praise for Me
• Biases Deutsch Taught Me
• Deutsch and My “Talent”
• Deutsch and Lulie Tanett Violated Reasonable Expectations
• Was Deutsch Using Me to Help with BoI?
• Misquotes by Deutsch (DD isn't the great scholar people think he is)
• Deutsch and Sarah Fitz-Claridge Publish Misquotes
• David Deutsch Smears Ayn Rand
• Analysis of David Deutsch’s The Final Prejudice

Other

• Video: Talking About David Deutsch and Andy B Harassment
• Lulie Tanett Defended Me
• Community Schism
• Community History
• Dennis Hackethal's Plagiarism (he’s a CritRat involved in libel and DDoSing)
• Logan Chipkin Trademark Problem (he's a CritRat)
• CritRats Are Obsessed with Me
• Callout Blog Posts Policy
• Harassment Sucks
• Sarah Fitz-Claridge Lied About Me
• Public curi.us Comments Disabled

The harassment problem has not ended. Nothing has been fixed so far. DD and others have not made any attempts to improve the situation. Comments on this website remain disabled due to the harassment problem. It's an active issue that is affecting my life on a daily basis.

I hope people who read this will ask DD and other CritRats to answer for this, and will bring up the issue to DD and his community. Please don't harass them, but do raise the issue, ask challenging questions, and share critical opinions.

I've shared a lot of information, but I know I can never completely cover everything people might want to know. I'm open to questions about these issues from people who are making a genuine effort to understand and who already read some of the articles. You can email me at [email protected] or post at my forum. And if any CritRat is willing to discuss the harassment problem, please email me (CritRats unwilling to discuss the problem should not contact me).