i stopped at a park and sat on a bench for 15min today and there were parents and little kids

they did a lot of awful things in that short time

like 6-8 different parents came by. there's like a daycare or something next to the park

i got there at 1pm

one thing i noticed is sometimes parents hold their kid's hand while walking

and i saw a kid trip a bit

and i realized holding hands wasn't affecting parent's balance or stride

but it WAS affecting the kid's

to have his hand held upward and immobile

and also to try to match parent's pace

and i thought parent contributed to the tripping

and prolly thinks kid needs hand held to yank him up to prevent falls

but i think parent causes more falls

another parent said kid could only go down slide once and then they had to go

so kid delayed. a lot. and banged on the slide. and sat on top.

and parent got impatient asked him to come again before he'd even gone down once. and parent gave the reason that his brother was in the car waiting.

which is so nasty to put the two siblings at odds against each other. to create a conflict btwn them, where the brother is the excuse for why he can't use the slide

and the amount of time before the left, i figure the kid could have gone down the slide 5 times if he was reasonably quick

but the parent told him once, so he did it really slow

if the parent had said "you can slide 3 times if you are quick"

they might have left faster and with a happier kid

it's so wasteful to drag it out enough time for 5 slides, with parent resenting it, and kid resenting only getting to slide once. so inefficient.

there were 3 trikes someone had left at the park. it's in a good neighborhood, small park, bit isolated, low theft risk.

a mom praised the hell out of a dad who she found out was the owner

she gushed about how big a difference the trikes made. later she said she had one on her porch she never remembers to bring.

it was very like boring smalltalk, very low content, very gushy and exaggerated

but also note the trikes are a big deal for the kids – that she'll gush about – and she just keeps forgetting to bring one she already has. that's how much she actually cares about about kids. not enough to make the effort to remember.

and she said something about 3 trikes being a good number. i was thinking if it was only one then some parents would prefer zero trikes instead of one to avoid kids fighting over it. they'd rather have no resources so kids don't expect anything than some resources kids really want and have to deal with resource allocation. (and these people have plenty of money and other resources to provide plenty for the kids. they all present as being well off financially and it's not a neighborhood for poor people. they just, in various ways, choose not to provide their kids with resources.)

then later i saw a little girl, like 3, was on a small plastic trike. and her mom tried to help her peddle but it wasn't working. she pushed along with her feet on the ground. the mother just gave up and ignored it. she was obviously way too big for it. her knees were bent heavily for her to sit on it.

while the mother was standing 2 feet away but ignoring her, the girl, on her own, noticed the 3 trikes the other guy had left at the park. they were metal and larger. they fit her better. she went to one. the mother followed.

and then she put her doll in the seat and then realized it blocked her from sitting on it herself, and tried to figure out what to do

sigh. and the mother was not helping or offering to hold the doll or suggesting how to handle it

and the gender roles. none of the guys had this problem. they would play. the girl is taught priorities that get in her way.

the girl is taught to treat a doll like it's special and important and fragile

which is inconvenient

so she manages to get on the trike and hold the doll in her lap. and her mom pushes it around for her some. it had a poll sticking up the back the mother could push. kid didn't figure out how to peddle and mom didn't even try to help with that this time.

with the first trike the mom was physically grabbing the kid's feet and putting them on the pedals

and then spun the pedals with her hands when kid had feet on ground like a demonstration

i think she was very bad at explaining it and was not a patient helper

anyway mom says something about time to go, pushes the trike onto the grass instead of stone, stops pushing it, leaves kid stuck and not moving, and stands there

i thought she did it on purpose to end the activity but later found out she didn't have much trouble pushing the trike on the grass, it still rolled fine

but kid had to wait a while. mom talked to someone else or looked at her phone or just stood there, idk, but kid wasn't moving for a minute

and for some reason mom got the doll

and dropped it into a little basket on the back of the trike that was like 2 inches above the ground

mom was unaware or uncaring that her daughter cared about the doll, and treated it very carefully

which i knew from watching her with the doll for 20 seconds a few minutes earlier

and then what next? mom just looks away or ignores kid, doesn't pay attention

and kid tries to reach back and arrange doll better in basket

and spends like 30s trying to get doll more comfortable and properly taken care of for the ride

and mom isn't helping or paying any attention or realizing she just fucking dropped the doll like 1 foot into the basket, carelessly, that kid is trying to treat like a fragile baby

then mom pushed her on the grass some more then made her leave

all the parents were pressuring their kids to leave and no one stayed for long

my friend commented, "Ppl think my sister is weird cuz she asks toddlers for permission to like pick them up"

it's so sad how the parents consistently aren't interested in helping their kid get plenty of trips down the slide, get his fill of the park.

and it's so sad how parents mostly just don't pay attention to what their kid is doing. they can't help much because they don't pay attention. they say "we're going soon" and then talk with another parent and look away and then a few minutes later say "we really gotta go now" without even checking or caring what their kid is in the middle of. they mostly don't play with their kids. they don't try to understand what their kids are thinking. they don't try to help with it. they just don't care or pay much attention.

the one mom did help push the trike. but she wasn't paying any attention to the great care and attentiveness with which her daughter treated her doll. and i'll bet the kid has been loving that doll for months and treating it much the same and mom just doesn't care or have any respect for her kid's wishes and goals. and she just stopped in the middle of pushing the trike for a while for no apparent reason and then kid was stuck sitting still for a while. and she's not a good enough helper to help her kid peddle a trike. and she doesn't care or have the patience to keep trying. she just grabbed her kid's feet, placed them, didn't seem aware the trike was way too small for the kid (knees super bent), and then promptly gave up. kid will have to learn how to use a trike later from some other kid who knows how to use one. or maybe figure it out herself if she gets the opportunity to spend more time with a trike instead of being made to leave. or maybe, being a female, she'll just go through life being bad at that kind of thing because if a girl apparently "doesn't like trikes" parents think that's normal and ok and ignore it instead of figuring there's a problem to help with. but if a boy isn't playing with trikes, a lot more parents would figure something is wrong and help him solve the problem instead of just thinking it's a matter of taste. stuff like that, which isn't very blatant, is how a lot of gender role stuff ends up happening.

my friend also commented:

and it's so sad how parents mostly just don't pay attention to what their kid is doing. they can't help much because they don't pay attention.

when ppl do try to “help”, they mostly just interrupt with their kid is doing

they aren’t paying attention to what the kid is trying to do

so they interrupt and are like “here, do this”

but that won’t even help with what the kid is trying to do

like, say kid is trying to make swing twist around

parent will kind of see what kid is doing, but will think they are just incompetent at swinging

so if they try to “help” it will be either by pushing kid on swing, or trying to make them pump their legs

or maybe they know kid is trying to twist swing around, but they just think that is the wrong way to use the swing. so they are trying to make him use it right

i think both things happen

i don't entirely get how people are so blind to this stuff. you watch anyone interest with kids for a few minutes and you see horrors. they consistently don't pay attention to what their children or doing or why. they consistently don't try to understand. they consistently suck at helping or explaining anything, or don't even try to.

and they try to control their kid and make him leave. with no idea what kid is doing, they have no idea how important staying more is. they don't care. they don't try to figure out if it's worth staying because kid is in the middle of something great. they just have a very limited amount of patience for kid to delay them and they don't care about the park.

some reason people are blind to these horrors:

• they don't think of children as people
• they see it all the time so it just looks normal to them
• they make excuses like parenting is tiring enough without actually paying attention to your kid and his activities and having to help
• they don't respect children "playing", don't regard it as important or having anything to do with learning or education
• they're not very nice to anyone in their lives, including themselves. this isn't all kid-specific
• they treat people by categories (e.g. "child") rather than worrying about specifics like what that individual child cares about

it's so fucking simple though. your kid treasures a doll. you don't just drop it. the parent is just doing generic actions without knowing about her kid as an individual.

if your kid wants to use a slide, that's great. he likes it. this thing exists, people built it, and then other people enjoy it. they didn't have to build it but they did. and here it is. and your kid didn't have to find things in life he likes but he did. liking things and thinking things are good is not automatic. people take it for granted but it's wonderful and takes some positive human spirit and thinking. and then people grow up and don't actually like much stuff, or feel much joy, or have many interests, and they wonder why their lives are so empty. it's because their parents crushed their interests young and had no respect for their joy and preferences.

then people cover up their empty adult lives with a bunch of lies and make excuses for their parents and then do it to their own kids. they pretend getting drunk and partying and having sex are interests, when they're really just doing it because they have no idea what to do with their lives and that's what society offers. some pretend their profession is an interest. some pretend to like video games but play "casually" – meaning without really thinking about it much, just to kill time like watching TV. (some people don't even want to watch TV at higher speeds because then they'd just need to watch more shows to take up the same time slots in their life. they don't actually care about what they watch, and aren't interested in seeing more, they are just killing time.)

I was asked:

How did people find out about how to find Common Preferences and TCS [Taking Children Seriously] stuff?

Here are two of the big ideas that went into TCS:

• Karl Popper's philosophy, which is about how people learn.
• Liberalism, which is about how people deal with each other.

Liberalism includes some of the world's most important ideas. Many thinkers and writers have tried to advocate it. And its opponents often try to steal its concepts. Some liberal ideas are peace, freedom, progress and cooperation. Today, everyone says those are great – even the people who actually hate peace, freedom, progress or cooperation.

Liberalism talks about how peace, freedom, progress and cooperation imply capitalism and free trade.

Most liberal thinking focuses on politics. It looks at topics like government, laws, rulers, production, wealth, commerce, and fighting (including big stuff like wars and genocides, and also little stuff like robberies or assaults).

Liberal ideas also have a place in families. Families need peace and cooperation, not fighting. People in families need freedom and want to make progress in their lives.

Liberalism has criticisms of authority. Families usually have the parents as the authorities over the children. And sometimes the "man of the house" is the authority over his wife, too.

So part of where TCS comes from is taking liberal ideas, and understanding them well, and applying them to families.

Popper focused the most on how learning works in science. But his ideas apply to all learning. And he knew that. But he didn't write much about children or students learning. He didn't write much about education.

TCS took Popper's ideas and worked out what they mean for education and parenting. We looked at what the implications are.

Popper's ideas contradict authority. They don't fit with having authorities.

Popperian philosophy says to judge ideas by what the idea says, not by who said it. So if the child says an idea, it doesn't matter who said it, it's just an idea. You have to look at whether the idea is good, not whether a child or parent said it.

Popperian philosophy says that people have to think in order to learn. The learner has to do most of the work. You can't pour ideas into someone's head like water into a bucket. The learner has to figure stuff out.

Popperian philosophy says that finding and fixing mistakes is really important. People make mistakes. So we should look for them and fix them. And to find and fix mistakes we need criticism. Criticism means trying to point out mistakes. Lots of people don't like criticism, but it's really helpful. Parents should be happy to get criticism from their kids, but usually they aren't.

If someone understood liberalism and Popper really well, and then they thought carefully about education and parenting, they could come up with some ideas similar to TCS. Maybe not all the details, but a lot. It'd be really different than regular parenting. But people don't do that, instead they hurt their children's ability to learn.

Having one child is hard enough. Having more will lead to more mistakes and problems.

Sharing is overrated and it's generally better if people have their own property with no strong pressure/expectations to share it. They can share when it's convenient, but when it's a problem then stop sharing. And the borrower can be happy to borrow things sometimes, but realize sometimes other people's stuff won't be available. This is the same as how two adults friends would typically treat each other.

Sharing space is problematic too, not just possessions. It's typical for adults who share spaces to either have conflicts about the spaces. The main things that prevent this are being flexible and conflict-avoiding rather than picky, and having shared culturally-standard expectations about how the space is used (e.g. most adults in our culture have a similar concept of what to do and not do in a kitchen space or bedroom space).

Sharing rooms is typical in our society. Even if everyone has their own room, they still will share a living room, dining room, kitchen, etc. Usually parents mostly get what they want regarding shared rooms and children have to defer. That's somewhat bizarre because parents are the ones who are much better at dealing with problems, finding alternative ways to get stuff they want, etc. Parents are better at delaying an activity until later and dealing with life over a longer time horizon, and have way more other options, so usually they ought to be the ones deferring about the use of shared spaces (unless child is happy to defer in this case). What about two children sharing a space? That's hard and our society causes that difficult situation to happen far more than necessary – then complains that children get upset too much, squabble too much, etc

Children are people and ought to be treated like full people. So they ought to be able to choose their friends, rather than being required to be extra close friends with their siblings. This is often problematic in terms of various resources like money or parental attention to multiple children in different places all wanting help, now, with their separate projects.

Once you have a situation with several children trying to get along with each other (no other choice), sharing stuff, etc, then what has to be done is help them learn skills to deal with this situation. These are difficult skills – most adults have lots of problems with skills like these. It sucks to pressure children to learn these particular skills at a young age or else have ongoing conflicts with their family. It'd be better, in general, if children learned to deal with siblings after they learn how to deal with people more at arms length (which is an easier place to start). Yet getting along with siblings can be learned and children can be resilient to all kinds of difficult situations.

Children can forgive and deal with a lot – people massively underestimate this because other stuff is going wrong (coercive parenting, coercive schooling, treating the child like he's sub-human, etc) which is using up most of the child's coping and problem-solving ability. If parents would act less like irrational, cruel rulers then that'd free up tons of child's creativity, energy, good will, etc, to be used on smaller problems like learning how to deal with siblings.

When dealing with sibling problems it's important to keep in mind the perspective I've outlined. That's not just being negative, it's part of the solution. The key to fighting with siblings less is to lower expectations – recognize it's a tough situation and be less ambitious about what one expects from it. Just like if you live in a poor family, it helps a lot if the children recognize they are poor, recognize that's bad and hard, and calibrate their expectations accordingly. Children in poor families can be happy if they learn skills like sometimes being OK with not getting to buy something. Children with siblings can be happy if they learn skills like sometimes being OK with giving up a shared space or shared possession. Children can learn standard coping strategies for how to do this – e.g. have a list of activities they like which they can switch to which use a minimal amount of space, are flexible about where they can be done, and don't require any shared possessions. For example, if each child has their own phone/iPad/laptop then they can watch movies, watch youtube, listen to audio books, etc – and those activities will always be options they can fall back on to avoid a conflict over a shared space.

There are lots of other things to learn that also help. Like how to communicate one's preferences and make clear statements about what outcomes one is OK or not-OK with.

I think a lot of problems in multiple-children families are because everyone involved thinks having multiple children in a family is normal or good, and they don't see the problem with it. So they aren't putting effort into coping with it. They think it should work better than it does work, and their unrealistic expectations lead to ongoing fights.

people should take pre-existing values and traditions about liberalism and reason seriously, and apply those to all their relationships (friends, coworkers, parent-child, etc).

you value the pursuit of happiness? why won’t you help your kid pursue his happiness, now?

you value freedom, and each person choosing his own way in life? why, exactly, should there be an exception for children? whatever you answer, be super clear about the limits of the exception, and how the same reasoning won’t apply in other cases.

you think children are stupid and need to be controlled by their betters? what’s the difference between this and other authoritarian views? why is this authoritarianism more rational or less cruel? why does it apply by age rather than by IQ test or by having psychologist-kings interview everyone and decide who is competent to run their own lives?

why do you think it’s OK to take your child’s phone away as a punishment? is it his property, or not? do you respect property rights, or not? if you think your answer is that your child is not a property owner, you’re just lending him stuff, then why do you think that’s a good model for dealing with children but property ownership is a good model for the rest of society?

how do you think about voluntarily persuading others and what your options are if they disagree? why don’t you apply similar thinking about consent, persuasion and voluntary action to dealing with your child?

This is an incomplete list of some of unacceptable, uncivilized parenting behavior. These are pretty normal in our culture, but should be viewed with horror. They're pretty blatantly intolerable to a reasonable, classically-liberal-minded person.

• Making children do things they don't want to (e.g. making a baby go in a carseat when their crying indicates they don't want to, or enforcing an unwanted bedtime, or making a child brush his teeth or take a bath when he'd rather not, or making a child go to school). In general anything that causes crying or "tantrums" indicates the parent is doing something wrong.

• Punishments.

• Anything that relies on parent being bigger/stronger than child, such as spanking or carrying a child from one location to another when child doesn't want to be moved (which is literally assault and kidnapping – it should be a crime).

• Rules that child doesn't like.

• The parent putting his foot down or doing "nicer" pressures and manipulations to get his way. Frowning, having a stressed voice, or being selectively less energetically helpful/friendly/cheerful can be pressuring and controlling. (E.g. parent is "too tired" to do an activity child wants, but would suddenly be available if child wanted to do a different activity that parent cares about more.)

• Screen time limits.

• Not getting a baby an iPad and helping them get apps and use it (by around 6 months old, for people who can afford one).

• Having multiple children. (Parenting one child well is hard enough. Having more kids is much harder. That guarantees more mistakes in the treatment of the first child. Knowingly, intentionally guaranteeing to treat one's first child worse is a betrayal).

• Posting baby pictures online (privacy violation).

• Skipping vaccines (scarily trendy lately and literally killing kids), or denying children anesthetics for shots.

• Circumcision (genital mutilation).

• Having child to evaluated by a psychiatrist or giving him psych drugs, or letting a school do this. ("Mental illness" is a myth, and psychiatry is an attempt to "scientifically" legitimize the use of violence against non-criminal non-conformists without following the rule of law. People today are imprisoned without getting a trial, with psychiatry as the excuse. Psychiatric drugs literally cause brain damage – as their primary effect, not a side effect.)

• Giving children (oral) herpes (sometimes called "cold sores"). Herpes is widespread and uncurable, and is often spread by people kissing babies without adequate medical knowledge or herpes testing.

• Not prioritizing what child wants. The parent's proper role is as a helper to enable the child to get what he wants, not to control the child. That means e.g. helping child get sugar and other foods he likes, and "violent" games and movies he wants.

Read about more details.

Ask questions or add to the list, in the comments below!

Deliberateness is a tricky issue, whether it comes to hurting kids, making mistakes, or breaking promises. Parents do all kinds of stuff kids hate and still think they "meant well" – including sometimes literally beating their kid up. If I honestly meant well, was I "deliberately" hurting my kid? What if I think I meant well, but I was lying to myself?

Parents often consciously and intentionally choose actions which hurt their kids. Their goal isn't to hurt their kid, but they know he will find it painful to have his phone taken away for a month, and they take the phone anyway.

Why do parents hurt their kids?

• They think it's justice (kid did something bad).
• They think it's educational (makes it memorable, seems to "work" in that kid stops doing the things the parent yells/hits/punishes about).
• They think it's good for the kid somehow, possibly because a positive outweighs the negative. E.g. leaving a baby alone in a crib to cry himself to sleep is a negative, but some people think it's a larger positive for the child to learn to sleep in his own room. They don't know that the child stops crying because he learns his parent won't help him, so the child gives up on problem solving and happiness (in some ways, not all ways).
• Habit.
• Carelessness.
• Accident.
• Anger (they will say they didn't deliberately choose to be angry).
• Not having much control over what one does/says/feels in one's life in general.
• Doing common, normal parenting behaviors without thinking about whether they are hurtful.

None of these involve consciously thinking, "I will now hurt my kid, on purpose, just for the sake of hurting him." (That would clearly be deliberate.)

Regardless of deliberateness, the child is still hurt. Whether or not the parent is morally guilty, it's an ongoing, recurring problem that needs to be addressed so that the child stops getting hurt.

This is a history of Taking Children Seriously (TCS), particularly the online community leaders: Sarah Fitz-Claridge (SFC), David Deutsch (DD) and Elliot Temple (ET).

TCS was founded in 1992 by SFC and DD. (SFC was Sarah Lawrence at the time but changed her name in 2003.) It started with a paper journal. When ET joined in 2001, the community had TCS list (an email discussion group with around 1,000 members), a website with articles, and a chatroom.

SFC, a mother of two, did most of the recruiting. She met with homeschoolers and libertarians, networked and gave speeches internationally, and posted at many online parenting and homeschooling groups. TCS advocates frequently got banned from other online groups but did get the word out first.

DD, a theoretical physicist, did most of the intellectual theorizing. He had made significant contributions related to quantum computation and learned about Karl Popper’s Critical Rationalism (CR) philosophy. He and SFC were libertarians with ideas like individual freedom, minimal or no government, and laissez-faire capitalism.

DD’s books are The Fabric of Reality (FoR, 1997) and The Beginning of Infinity (BoI, 2011). They discuss science and CR philosophy. DD also wrote hundreds of blog posts about politics between 2003 and 2008.

A main idea of TCS is that CR – a philosophy about how to create knowledge – applies to parenting and education. DD thought we must understand how learning works in order to know how to treat children. There are no reasonable philosophical positions which imply that punishments are educational. And if punishments aren’t educational, then they’re cruel and abusive, and “coercive” as TCS calls it.

TCS was also based on (classical) liberal values like peace, freedom, cooperation, individual rights and opposing tyrannical authority (be it a king, parent or teacher). Karl Popper shared these values, although he was no libertarian.

CR says all people learn by brainstorming, critical thinking and critical discussion. TCS concluded that even young children, even babies, think and learn this way. People learn on their own initiative with help from others, not as buckets which educators can pour knowledge into like water. Learners are the leaders of their own learning.

TCS’s big claim was that children could be raised well without doing anything to them that they disliked. It’s always possible to find “common preferences” – win/win solutions that everyone prefers. The main obstacle to this kind of rational problem solving is the irrationalities that adults have. Irrationalities aren’t inborn, they come from coercion, so don’t coerce your child and he won’t become irrational.

TCS Activities Timeline

SFC wrote around 1,000 TCS list posts (emails), mostly from 1994-2002. DD wrote around 2,000, mostly from 1996-2002. ET wrote around 3,700, mostly from 2002-2012, though he hasn’t stopped writing about TCS and still answers questions and posts.

SFC secretly began building a separate community unrelated to TCS which she launched in 2003. This partially explains why she reduced her involvement with TCS. Year after year, SFC hid these other activities, while leading people to expect more TCS activity soon and misleading people about her interests and priorities. She avoided transitioning to a new community leader, and blocked messages sharing alternative TCS resources, which left many TCS-attempting parents with little support and fewer resources than they reasonably expected.

SFC stopped creating the TCS Journal in 2000 after 32 issues. She never announced that it ended and left the webpage up where people could pay money to sign up. People were still confused about the matter years later and SFC still didn’t clarify, while still advertising herself as the TCS journal editor.

In late 2002, SFC deleted the TCS IRC chatroom that she’d started in 2000. She said she didn’t know how to run it well and received too many complaints. Rather than solve the problem, she shut it down.

In 2003, SFC discontinued the TCS website. She let the domain name expire without putting a notice on the site telling people about the new site, redirecting traffic, or leaving it up as an archive. She created a new site which had a worse layout and she never even finished transferring over all the old articles. The new site was never very active and SFC mostly stopped work on it after only 3 months. There was an occasional update later, e.g. there were 4 posts in 2004. After trying to be active for one month in 2005, the updates stopped entirely in 2006.

In 2006, SFC announced moving the TCS list from AOL to the new website. People were supposed to be automatically transferred but the new group had no posts and people kept using AOL. This was never explained. Then in 2008, SFC moved TCS list to Yahoo Groups and intentionally didn’t automatically transfer anyone. The result was reducing membership down to around 50 people from a past high over 1,000.

After these disasters, ET created the TCS Google Group in 2009 and Fallible Ideas website in 2010 which included articles about CR and TCS. ET’s TCS list had around double the membership of SFC’s and many more discussions. It became the primary TCS list while SFC’s group went inactive. Meanwhile, at DD’s request, ET also made the BoI Google Group and BoI website in 2011.

ET also became the owner of the Autonomy Respecting Relationships (ARR) forum in 2010 or 2011 after running the group as moderator for over a year. ARR was started by SFC and DD as a way to apply TCS ideas to romantic relationships. Major ARR ideas included that standard romantic relationship patterns are irrational and hurt people, and that freedom implies polyamory instead of monogamy. ET, however, criticized polyamory as well as monogamy.

Elliot Temple Joins TCS

ET read DD’s book, FoR, in 2001, then read DD’s TCS articles and joined the email group and chatroom. DD regularly talked with TCS community members on IRC and on the email group. ET quickly got much of DD’s attention due to energetic curiosity and quickly learning and arguing in favor of CR and TCS ideas. Over the next decade, ET and DD had around 5,000 hours of discussions (the majority were one-on-one, not on the public groups). In 2002, ET started a private email discussion group named curi where DD frequently participated. In 2003, ET started his blog, Curiosity.

After only a few months, ET became TCS’s most active advocate. He was more interested, and wrote more, than anyone else. He’d debate anyone about anything (like DD, ET was interested in ideas broadly, not just parenting), and whenever he had trouble winning an argument, he brought the issue to DD for advice. That way, ET learned how DD would argue each issue and address each challenge. DD heavily influenced ET’s views and arguments. For example, DD converted ET from left to right wing, persuaded him of capitalist and libertarian ideas, and got ET reading Ayn Rand. DD also persuaded ET to favor George W. Bush and the Iraq War politically, to support Israel, and to reject environmentalist ideas like recycling and global warming.

Due to the close association and agreement on so many issues, people, including one of DD’s close friends, accused ET of being DD’s puppet. However, the agreement was achieved by rational discussion, not puppetry. ET argued with DD more than anyone else and persistently followed up on disagreements. It took ET around five years of learning to become skilled enough to win any significant arguments with DD, at which point some disagreements started forming as ET developed more of his own ideas.

ET began providing detailed feedback and editing for BoI in 2004, which continued until publication in 2011. DD and ET routinely discussed topics related to the book. In total, ET wrote around 250 pages specifically to help with BoI, which is enough material to fill a book. That’s why the acknowledgments say “especially Elliot Temple”.

ET was also recognized favorably by SFC. For example, in 2006, ET, SFC and another speaker gave a TCS seminar to a paying audience in SFC’s home. In 2003, SFC tried to persuade ET to “becom[e] a regular contributor to the TCS blog/web site”. She said more articles from ET would help with her goal to “make it more difficult for people to bitch about TCS the way they are now.” SFC had some mixed feelings, stating “In the past, I have sometimes found your posts a bit too harsh and dismissive and lacking explanation, but I have noticed you have written some beautiful posts which are both true and also kind and non-alienating.” Overall, SFC saw ET positively and wanted him to be more involved with TCS including writing official articles because, also, “I really love your writing.” Similarly, in 2005, SFC was also asking ET for more TCS writing: “If you would like to write articles for the site, and if you would like to contribute to a new FAQ for it, that would be splendid!”

TCS Affects Lives

Thousands of people took an interest in TCS. As with many communities, especially controversial ones, the majority quit for one reason or another. Some had major disagreements with TCS from the start. Others liked TCS initially but had major disagreements when they learned more. And others liked TCS but drifted away without planning to – they just never really got around to doing much. But hundreds of people made TCS a major part of their life. TCS affected how many children were treated.

SFC led people to believe that TCS was an important, growing movement that they could join and then get ongoing help and advice. People thought TCS came with resources and support, at least articles, a chatroom and the email group. But then SFC and DD stopped writing articles, SFC discontinued the chatroom and journal, and SFC reduced her TCS list to complete silence. This harmed people who were struggling to live by TCS ideas, as well as preventing other people from joining TCS.

These problems were made much worse by the lack of announcements, clarity, transition plan, etc. The original TCS founders didn’t take responsibility for the movement, what they led people to expect from them, and the consequences of their actions for people’s lives. Instead they broadly kept up public appearances years after ceasing most TCS activity.

The continued availability of TCS materials, and discussion places where people can ask questions, is due pretty much entirely to ET. But ET has done more to take over DD’s intellectual role than SFC’s community leader role, so it’s not a full replacement. And SFC sabotaged the transition to ET’s leadership by preventing many people from finding out that the new resources existed. Even some of the more involved TCS parents were left not knowing what happened or how to continue with TCS.

SFC knowingly poured time and effort into a different, unrelated, non-TCS community, in secret, while misleading the TCS parents that had trusted her. These actions go beyond explanations like merely neglect, failure or incompetence.

DD Quits

DD gradually left TCS for several reasons. First, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, many TCS members sided with the terrorists by making anti-American comments. The political conflict divided the TCS community. Most parents open to TCS were left wing, while DD and his intellectual associates were right wing.

By the end of 2002, DD didn’t write public posts as frequently, although he actively discussed with ET and others. From there, DD’s public posting gradually declined, but it took a decade to stop. Meanwhile, DD often watched ET debate in favor of DD’s ideas, like TCS, and encouraged and advised ET behind the scenes.

As time went on, DD pushed back the publication deadline for BoI but eventually had to face it. In the several years leading up to the 2011 publication, he became increasingly busy and talked with everyone less. He even had to cut a few planned chapters from the book in order to finish.

Although DD hoped and planned for things to return to normal after the book was done, they never did. Instead, he quit every discussion forum, stopped talking about TCS, and decided to focus more on his new physics idea, Constructor Theory.

After gradually distancing himself, DD stopped collaborating with ET and most other active community members around the end of 2011. DD never gave a clear explanation of why, never wrote an article arguing his case, never announced anything had changed, and never even tried to claim that ET had changed in any significant way. It was DD, not ET, who had changed. DD was disillusioned by how little TCS had changed the world, and how few people had learned his ideas. DD wanted to try to get along with the mainstream more, while ET continued developing non-mainstream ideas like TCS and CR.

Looking Back At TCS

From day one, TCS had always offended many people and attracted hateful comments for its unconventional ideas. DD hoped it would spread and gain traction over time, and it did some, but less than DD wanted. Meanwhile SFC ended the journal, chatroom and original website, reduced TCS List membership by 95%, and stopped creating content or recruiting.

ET kept TCS alive as a philosophical theory with some resources to help, but the number of participating parents dropped over time. Eventually, there was little discussion about parents trying to use TCS in their life.

To see quotes from the harsh, offensive side of early TCS, as led by SFC and DD, see this post and the comments under it.

The TCS list grew initially. But SFC said that whenever the list got over 1,000 members, a bunch of people would unsubscribe when there was an active topic causing them to receive lots of emails. Many of the people SFC recruited were not interested enough in TCS to direct the emails to a folder outside their inbox, and just left instead.

The TCS list was moderated. SFC and her buddies blocked whatever posts they wanted, quite frequently and aggressively. It was common for posters to regularly have some their posts blocked and keep participating anyway, though some people left when they weren’t allowed to speak freely. Consequently, SFC had control over the content of the list. If the content alienated people, that was her choice.

At his groups, ET always emphasized free speech instead of controlling what you were allowed to say. He thought this better fit the total-freedom-and-libertarianism-and-maybe-even-anarcho-capitalism type principles of TCS and its founders.

Conflict Between DD and ET

When he quit TCS, DD also quit associating with TCS’s new leader, ET, as well as with active participants in the TCS community. ET wanted to do problem solving. What about CR, common preferences, and win/win solutions? ET wanted to fix things but DD refused.

At the end of 2012, over a year after DD had become unfriendly and withdrawn the help and support he’d led ET to expect going forward, DD had refused many olive branches from ET. ET wrote I Changed My Mind About David Deutsch. This carefully worded piece left out most details to respect DD’s privacy because DD didn’t want the problems discussed and debated openly. Every statement was written so that it could easily be defended and explained if private facts were included in the discussion. DD saw the article prior to publication and made no objection then or later. Others in the community supported the article or didn’t mind; there was no opposition to it because people had seen DD change and leave over the years. ET thought the article was necessary because he’d been such a fan and promoter of DD, so he thought he should update people when he changed his mind about stuff he’d told them. ET was taking responsibility for the advice he’d given other people, as he believed SFC and DD should have but did not.

Although preferring to mostly leave DD alone, ET also wrote David Deutsch Interview Undermines His Philosophy in 2017, Accepting vs. Preferring Theories – Reply to David Deutsch in 2018, and David Deutsch Smears Ayn Rand in 2019. ET thought it was important to defend the ideas he’d learned from DD, even against DD himself. Again DD had no objections, publicly or privately. DD didn’t want to defend or explain his opinions or offer any rebuttal. Although critical discussion and rational truth seeking are major parts of the CR and TCS philosophies, DD didn’t do them nor explain why he wasn’t doing them and how that was compatible with his philosophy. ET’s claims remain uncontested. Meanwhile, DD never said anything negative about ET, leaving him to continue running the BoI, TCS and ARR groups and explain philosophies like TCS and CR to the world.

SFC Destroys FoR Group

Alan Forrester (AF) ran the FoR discussion group, about DD’s book, for a decade. He has a CR blog. Although AF ran the FoR group alone, SFC was the original group creator and never gave AF ownership. This allowed SFC to do whatever she wanted with the group, regardless of AF’s opinions or consent.

After 10 years with no posts or involvement by SFC, she suddenly took over FoR in order to ban ET as revenge for the I Changed My Mind About David Deutsch post. (AF agreed with ET regarding the philosophical issues that ET and DD disagreed about, and didn’t want ET banned.) Then SFC immediately neglected the group and soon everyone stopped using it. She’d been uninvolved because she wasn’t interested in FoR ideas and because she was still involved with her secret, unrelated community; being motivated to ban someone didn’t change that situation.

Just like when SFC neglected the TCS Yahoo Group, everyone interested in discussion moved over to one of ET’s groups. In that case, they went to ET’s TCS group. In this case, they went to the BoI group: since DD’s second book was out now, fans of the first book naturally were interested in the second book too, which covered similar topics.

SFC didn’t attempt problem solving, consent or common preference finding with ET, AF or the FoR group membership. She violated the standard group policy of giving warnings before banning people. And she said nothing indicating that DD himself had any problem with ET’s article. It seemed to be her own personal vendetta, and she didn’t care that she was primarily punishing AF and the FoR discussion group members, not ET who owned the BoI group anyway.

DD and ET had always had a relationship based heavily on explicit communication: if you want something, request it; if you prefer something, say so. DD knew he could make requests of ET and had wide latitude to get whatever he wanted. Several times, DD had asked ET to refrain from saying something or take something down. But this time, DD made no request and expressed no preference, knowing that ET would take that as a go ahead signal. DD, to this day, hasn’t said anything negative about ET or ET’s critical articles.

Fallible Ideas Group

In 2013, ET merged several discussion groups into one, the Fallible Ideas (FI) discussion group. Although the older groups were left unchanged, ET simply asked people to switch and every active poster voluntarily started posting on FI. This smooth transition stands out in contrast with SFC’s disastrous move of the TCS group.

ET merged the groups because the topics are all related. They’re all about understanding good philosophy and applying it. And, over time, under his leadership, the groups had become more philosophically sophisticated. For example, it had become unusual for posters to be unfamiliar with DD’s books. With a smaller membership that was more knowledgeable about all the ideas, and had more consistent ideas, having a single forum made sense.

Thus, the FI group is the continuation of the TCS group from 1994, as well as the ARR, FoR, BoI groups. The FI group also merged some more minor groups: TCS Society (a companion to the TCS group for political discussion), Rational Politics (a newer group by Justin Mallone, which ET and DD participated at), and an Ayn Rand discussion group (by ET).

Where Are They Now?

DD has gone on to work on Constructor Theory. He also became a member of the Royal Society in 2008. DD and SFC seem to no longer like to talk about TCS or be associated with it, but don’t make clear statements or requests about the matter. ET has withheld the older TCS archives posts from the public at DD’s request, even though DD has not provided any public statement about his reasons.

SFC stopped being involved with philosophy, TCS or ARR. She still hasn’t explained what happened or apologized to any parents.

SFC’s two children were friends with DD too, and one was also a friend of ET. They are adults today but never got very involved with TCS or CR. No other child with any sort of TCS upbringing became very involved either.

ET has gone on to improve CR with new ideas like Yes or No Philosophy, Paths Forward, Overreaching, Impasse Chains, Using Intellectual Processes to Combat Bias and Rationally Resolving Conflicts of Ideas. As of today (2020), ET still posts regularly to the FI discussion group and has been a consistent, active poster continuously for 18 years, and he’s branched out to videos and podcasts.

Editor’s note: I made a serious effort to get the facts and dates right. If anyone believes any fact is in error, please let me know.

More info:

• SFC’s short history of the early days of TCS (2005)
• ET explaining TCS (2011)
• ET explaining ARR (2011)
• ET’s Fallible Ideas article about TCS (2016)
• ET’s Fallible Ideas articles (2010). See especially What is Coercion?,  Avoiding Coercion, Parenting and Reason,  Parenting and Tradition, and Parenting and Fallibility.
• ET’s 2015 article on common preferences
• ET’s 2002 article on common preferences on the original TCS website
• ET’s articles on the newer TCS website: Positive Interpretations, Feeling Bad, and Junk Food Worries (2005-6)
• ET’s parenting and education blog category (mostly 2003-9, newer posts are mostly uncategorized)
• ET’s discussion group archive downloads (includes TCS starting from 2002).

If you liked this, or want to learn more about TCS, sign up for the Fallible Ideas newsletter and join the Fallible Ideas discussion group.

The Final Prejudice by David Deutsch (DD) was first published in the Taking Children Seriously Journal issue #18, in 1995. It criticizes society’s ageism (bias against children) using a 1992 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode (Rascals, season 6, episode 7) as an extended example. (Bias against the elderly is also ageism, and is a serious issue, but isn’t discussed here.) Having now watched the episode, I disagree with the article.

As context: I reread the article as part of my review of my past history with DD. I’ve been trying to understand why he’s now lying about me and encouraging years of severe harassment from his fans, how he changed, whether I misunderstood him in the past, whether I did anything wrong, etc. Previously, I thought DD must have gotten worse at logic and argument in order to write his smear of Ayn Rand. But I now see that, before I even met him, he was already capable of those errors. He could write good stuff sometimes, but writing some bad stuff isn’t a change. A pattern I’ve identified is that DD’s thinking quality drops when he’s biased. He has a strong bias to see children as especially mistreated.

In the Star Trek (sci-fi) TV episode, Captain Picard and three others are in a transporter accident. It somehow changes their physical bodies to around what they were at age 12. DD argues that the scenario with adults minds in child bodies shows how prejudiced people are against children.

I’ll go through DD’s article and comment on many points.

The Ship's Doctor, Beverly Crusher, runs some tests and determines that the bodies of the Captain and the others are the bodies of twelve-year-olds, but their minds are entirely unaffected. She explains the results of her tests to the First Officer, Commander William Riker. The striking thing about this scene is that the Captain is right there, next to her, but she is not reporting to him. She is talking about him, but over him, as though he were not present at all. This sort of casual discourtesy towards children is familiar enough. But this is not a child. It is the Captain of the Enterprise. Her commanding officer.

Riker was the highest ranking officer who wasn’t in a new body. He was acting as Captain at the time. Crusher should report to him about what happened to Picard and say whether or not the entity in front of them is the Picard or not. Riker should (and I’d guess legally does) command the ship until either he sees the Captain as usual or he receives information about special circumstances. So I disagree with DD’s allegation of ageism.

Also, in Star Trek, changes of who is in command are often (though not consistently) stated out loud instead of being assumed, which seems reasonable. That’s a little like Japanese train operators using a point-and-call system – communicating more reduces errors.

In every other Star Trek episode that deals with shape changes, or with unusually-shaped sentient beings, the overriding consideration is: it's the mind that counts.

But it’s the mind that counts in this episode. After the ship and all the regular adults are captured by Ferengi slavers, Picard and the other shape-changed people use their minds to successfully save the ship and crew. They’re able to do problem solving just as effectively as in other episodes. And they even get some effective help from the ship’s actual children. The show depicts the shape-changed people as mentally competent and as largely unhindered by their weaker, smaller bodies. They’re effective like regular adults.

A person is a mind, not a body. That is the attitude we have come to expect from those good people of the 24th century, to whom racism and all similar prejudices are incomprehensible historical aberrations.

No, they run into prejudices all the time, which are a major cause of their military conflicts with other species like the Klingons or Romulans. A fan wiki describes the Romulan’s “Relationships with other species” like this:

So, no, that sort of prejudice would not be incomprehensible to the Enterprise crew. It’s not a historical aberration to them.

The Captain gives Riker an order. When Riker replies, we immediately see that there is something embarrassed and tentative about his manner. He hesitates before adding the word “sir”.

The hesitation is tiny and Riker’s manner may be explained by something other than ageism. He was asked about what happened to the shuttle and was talking about how it was destroyed and his Captain nearly died. He personally cares about his Captain and turned down being Captain of his own ship in order to keep working with Picard, so Picard’s near-death would be emotional for Riker.

Riker may also have hesitated because it’s an unusual situation and he’s not used to it yet. If Picard was in the body of a Ferengi or a lower ranking adult, Riker might also have hesitated. As the second highest ranking officer on the ship, he isn’t used to saying “sir” to most people.

What is going on here? The Captain of a Starship is not being taken seriously by his own subordinates.

Riker does take him seriously: reports to him, follows his orders, etc. Also later, when Picard pretends that Riker is his father and hugs him (to fool their captors), Riker finds that awkward because he does remember that it’s his captain, not a child.

Yet when it becomes clear that Captain Picard intends to get on with his job of running the Enterprise, Dr Crusher immediately tries to stop him, on the pretext of needing to conduct further tests. He tells her that she can continue testing the other three, and leaves the Sick Bay, whereupon Dr Crusher and Counsellor Deanna Troi exchange glances, like worried parents.

The glances they exchange could be more about the captain's typical stubbornness than anything parental. As context, Picard irritated Dr. Crusher in five episodes by trying to avoid his annual physical (medical examination).

And I don’t think wanting to run more tests or being concerned is a pretext. They don’t know what’s going on yet at that point in the episode.

When the Captain reaches the Bridge and issues orders, Lieutenant Worf and the others can barely bring themselves to comply. The Captain reminds them that he is still the Captain. Still they hesitate, until Riker's nod of confirmation pushes them into uneasy obedience. The crew know that the Captain's mind is unaffected, but they are simply unable to take him seriously in a child's body.

That’s not what happened. No ship-wide announcement was made. There is no indication that Worf or others are aware that this is their Captain or that his mind is unaffected. So they properly look to the most senior recognizable person and follow his lead.

You should not follow the orders of an entity you aren’t confident is your superior officer just on its own say-so that it’s not an imposter, body snatcher, or anything else bad. And Picard, (reasonably) failing to fully adjust to the situation immediately, didn’t explain it to them very well. He kinda assumed they would follow his orders instead of recognizing that he’d need to give a brief speech first to cover the key points of what happened. So instead of explaining things clearly, he starts giving orders then starts explaining in a disorganized, incomplete way. So hesitant reactions from the crew make sense.

Dr Crusher arrives on the bridge and asks, in a worried voice, to see the Captain privately in his ready-room. […] Dr Crusher, looking every bit the concerned parent […]

Crusher and Picard are close friends (there are hints of romantic interest). In other episodes, she often calls him “Jean-Luc” and they’ve eaten breakfast together. She could be worried about him as a friend. It doesn’t have to be an ageism issue.

Outrageously, [Crusher] wants to persuade [Picard] to relinquish command. She cobbles together the excuse that his condition could possibly at some time in the future affect his mind.

It’s an extraordinary medical event that no one has any familiarity with. They’ve had only a few hours to figure out what’s going on. It’s reasonable not to be confident about what will happen over time. At the time she says this, they don’t yet know know what caused it, whether he’ll age normally or be frozen in this body, or whether there is anything unusual still going on. Further tests and caution make sense instead of putting 100% confidence in their initial medical findings regarding his current but not future state.

And I think the Captain should relinquish command temporarily even if his mind is completely reliable. Why? Because he’s in a body he’s unfamiliar with. His inexperience using his smaller muscles, shorter height, etc., could be a matter of life and death in a combat situation or when handling dangerous materials. He needs some retraining before he’s ready for field work. (He could do desk work in the new body just fine, but his Captain’s job sometimes involves combat and physical stress without warning.)

Also, the crew would have to adjust to taking orders from a different body and voice. They might react slower than usual, which could be dangerous. Is that a transition that’s normally done mid-mission? I’m not sure what the standard policies are, but it could be reasonable if switching officers was normally only done at home base between missions. If you can’t have your regular captain, there are clear advantages to switching to a new leader who everyone is already familiar with instead of to an unfamiliar leader.

Further, Dr. Crusher has the power to order the Captain to go to bed instead of commanding the starship. She gave that order in Angel One (season 1, episode 13) when Picard had a virus causing a respiratory ailment. He obeys and gives command to Lieutenant Geordi La Forge. When Picard is in a child’s body, she chooses not to order him to step down. Instead, they have this conversation:

She knows he can still think effectively and appeals to his reasoning. Then he voluntarily gives Riker command.

they accept aliens, such as Vulcans, as Starship Captains … there is one shape - one shape only - that disqualifies a person from receiving the respect of his fellow human beings. And that is the shape of a human child.

DD is making a thinking error. There isn’t one shape only. The shape of a Vulcan child is another shape that they’d be biased against. Shapes like a bed, a poop, a cartoon character, a spider, a snake, a turd sandwich or a giant douche could be others.

Also, Ensign Ro isn’t human, and wasn’t transformed into the shape of a human child. She’s Bajoran.

And DD is simply factually wrong about what the Star Trek show is like. People are routinely biased based on species. Bias about gender also comes up.

A fan wiki summarizes some of the species-based wars (note: it calls other species “races” – and actually Humans, Klingons, Vulcans and Romulans can inter-breed, though that doesn’t make sense to me):

In other words, conflict between species is one of the main themes in Star Trek. And species are viewed as groups (so a conflict with “the Cardassians” is possible because that species is viewed primarily as one group). And that’s just a sample from one time period. It’s hard to imagine that, given all the wars between species, people would have no prejudice about species (“shape”) as DD claims.

Prejudice within the Federation is actually common. Each starship has a crew of primarily one species, not a representative mix of all species in the Federation. With traits people aren’t biased about, a starship crew should be roughly a random sample from the population in the Federation (which includes multiple species). But the species in Star Trek tend to associate primarily with their own kind and to crew ships with primarily one species. Overall, I think in the Star Trek world, the species mix less than humans historically did. In other words, they’re more prejudiced about species than past humans were about race, ethnicity, nationality or religion.

And the show has repeatedly depicted specific prejudices. For example, Worf is a Klingon who was adopted by humans and raised on Earth. In Family (season 4, episode 2), he says:

Thinking humans can’t understand some Klingon ideas is prejudiced. And later he attributes lateness to the human species:

O’Brien replies:

That’s a human character making a blatantly sexist remark. Examples of prejudice are easy to find throughout the show.

Worf actually shows mixed loyalties – between the Enterprise and his species – in Heart of Glory (season 1, episode 19). In that episode, Worf also says that Klingons don’t take hostages (because hostage-taking is cowardly). So he attributes personality characteristics and moral values to a species.

Overall, the show writers view the biological traits of a species as affecting personality, ideas, and most of life. The writers make differences and conflicts between species a major focus of the whole show. DD’s claims about everyone in Star Trek fully respecting everyone else, except children, are ridiculous.

Captain Picard himself was once kidnapped by the Borg, who transformed him into one of themselves (which involved surgically altering one side of his head) and assimilated his mind into their collective consciousness. He began to collaborate with them in their plan to conquer the galaxy. He ceased to be Captain Picard and became Locutus of Borg. Yet there again, it was his mind that counted. It was not his shape-change but his robotic mouthing of Borg slogans that told the crew, and the audience, that he was no longer the Captain. Later in the same episode, Lieutenant Commander Data managed to weaken the link between Picard and the Borg collective. Picard only needed to say one word ("sleep") in what was clearly his old character, for him to be accepted as himself again. He still looked like a Borg.

That’s not what happened. Picard says sleep multiple times and never fully sounds like himself. But Data is mind linked to Picard and also Deanna Troi, an empath, says the Captain is back. And even though they don’t think he’s a Borg anymore, they don’t put him back in charge of the ship. Plus:

So Picard spent decades not viewing himself as fully human, and thinking that what species he belongs to matters.

Also, DD is mistaken about “in the same episode”. The Borg storyline is split over two episodes in separate seasons (it was used as a cliffhanger).

Meanwhile the superhuman Guinan, who runs 10-Forward, the ship's bar, relaxation area, and alternative counselling service, is taking her rejuvenation in her stride. She too has been relieved of her duties. (Why, by the way? Is she now too young to be allowed in the bar?)

She ought to be careful with bars and alcohol. Her smaller body is now more vulnerable to alcohol (she’ll get drunker while drinking less than normal) in ways that aren’t intuitive to her. And working in a bar sometimes involves asking people to leave, commanding respect to break up fights, refusing to give people more alcohol, and other things she might struggle with in a new, unfamiliar and smaller body and with different voice tones than before.

Keiko O'Brien is another of the changed crew members. In their quarters, her husband Chief Miles O'Brien is having great difficulty coming to terms with her shape. When she tries to be close to him physically, an expression of revulsion crosses his face. When she brings him some coffee, he nervously tells her “Careful! That's hot!”

The coffee comment didn’t strike me as nervous and it chronologically came first (I think it was an exaggerated depiction of his habitual behavior towards children, not nerves). Plus, he offered her coffee first, which isn’t how one normally treats a child. Plus, he reminds her about how he likes his coffee, which seems to be about his difficulty remembering who she is, not her age.

In the scene, he’s uncomfortable before she touches him. He does get up and move away when she hugs his arm.

She questions him about whether their marriage is over and pressures him to accept her as his wife, immediately, in full, because she might not get her old body back. He says he’s uncomfortable with her being a little girl. He tries to avoid making any long term decisions right away. He hopes the scientists and doctors will soon fix it. I think he was being more reasonable than she was, but DD sees it the other way around.

It’s not a bad thing for adults to have negative reactions about having spouse-type physical contact with what appears to be a child. That’s not an ageist prejudice that people need to change. It’s an attitude which too many people ought to find harder to override, not easier.

And wouldn’t spouses be uncomfortable with touching after many shape changes, not just a shape change into the form of a child? What if his wife was in a male body? Should he be accused of homophobia for not adjusting immediately? What about if she had an alien body? Should he already be mentally prepared, in advance, to continue his marriage in all aspects with pretty much any alien body? Or what if his wife was in the body of another adult, human woman? That’d be problematic too.

DD is basically accusing a father of ageism for seeing pre-pubescent bodies as revolting to sexualize.

Meanwhile, DD’s TCS co-founder (SFC) was writing criticism of age of consent laws in the same journal and time period, which DD did not criticize, disagree with or object to. Actually, he expressed substantial agreement with it in his TCS emails. Plus, DD was often the brains behind SFC’s articles.

SFC even talked about meeting leading NAMBLA members and spending many hours posting on alt.sex.intergen (a usenet group for discussing intergenerational sex, often positively). SFC wrote:

SFC’s main complaint about NAMBLA is that they seemed like they might be good and pro-child – she thought she found a good lead on people who’d agree with her about TCS – but it turned out they were just as disrespectful towards children and “coercive” as other people. (SFC’s idea of being disrespectful towards children includes things like making them go to school, making them go to bed, making them brush their teeth, controlling their diet, having the “agenda” that your child learn to read, or otherwise not helping children get whatever they want.) She doesn’t see NAMBLA as being particularly awful (but they are awful!), just as failing to live up to her TCS ideals.

Under SFC’s and DD’s leadership, the TCS community was surprisingly hostile to ideas with partial overlap with TCS. There was hostility to homeschoolers, unschoolers, Sudbury Valley Schools, Summerhill, Montessori, Nonviolent Communication, Gatto, Holt, Parent Effectiveness Training, and much more. Why, then, did SFC spend so much time on NAMBLA and alt.sex.intergen? Why was she having relatively friendly discussions with people who prey on children? Meanwhile she got herself kicked off more mainstream parenting forums for calling the participants child abusers (because they’d e.g. make their kids go to school, go to bed, or brush their teeth).

I think this NAMBLA stuff is really bad. As someone who has written TCS articles (about other topics, not age of consent) and thinks TCS had some good ideas (and some bad ideas), I want to say that I disown, disavow and repudiate these ideas about age of consent laws and what SFC called “adult-child sexual relationships” (a.k.a. sexual abuse). Note: DD and SFC haven’t retracted these ideas and I don’t think they’ve changed their minds.

We call the same behaviour “pouting” when it is done by a twelve-year-old, and “contemplating one's situation” when it is done by an adult. Shame on us!

It’s not the same behavior. Contemplating means thinking deeply and productively about something. Pouting means being upset and moody without doing problem solving.

Adults do get accused of pouting, too. The biggest determiner is not age but demeanor. People look at behavior (including speech) for clues about what mental processes are going on inside someone’s head (like pouting, contemplating, plotting revenge, or something else).

Adults are accused of pouting less because they’ve learned to avoid some external behaviors that people interpret as pouting. They also have less reason to pout because they have more control over their lives, so they have more opportunities to act on solutions they think of.

I think children actually do pout more. Partly that’s because they have less knowledge about dealing with their emotions. Plus, children more often have to put up with a problem while being prevented from taking the actions they think would solve it. Contemplation is less useful when you lack the power to use the good ideas that you come up with. It can be really frustrating to think of solutions that other people arbitrarily disallow, so it’s understandable that most people don’t like doing that.

Guinan accuses her of “pouting”

What Guinan said was “What are you going to do? Go back to your room and pout?” That’s not an accusation that pouting is currently happening.

Later, the Doctor is discussing the Captain's medical condition. But again, not with the Captain: with the First Officer, in loco parentis! It seems that even in the 24th century, children still have no right to elementary privacy, and a doctor's primary duty is still not to the patient, but to the patient's parent (or in this case, ‘guardian’).

In other episodes, Dr. Crusher gives medical information to Picard or others without regard for the (adult) patient’s privacy. Whether that’s good or bad, it’s not a matter of ageism.

At the end, the four transformed individuals are “cured”. It is taken for granted that no one in their right mind would choose to be in a child's body – in our culture, anyway. And who can argue with that?

This isn’t true. One of the characters stays a child until after the episode ends. She says it’s not so bad and another character encourages her not to rush to turn back into being an adult, saying the transporter (cure) will still be available later.

This illustrates that DD gets basic facts wrong when he’s biased. That’s a serious flaw which requires readers be careful with anything DD says. It also helps explain his lying about me.

I saw the blog "Taking Children Seriously" Is Bad. I agree. I’ve thought of more and more flaws with TCS as time has gone on and I’ve written some criticism. I’ve also put warnings/disclaimers on some of my old TCS writing. Also the TCS founders are bad people who are responsible for a harassment campaign against me. Anyway, I wanted to share some thoughts on how/why I didn’t notice TCS’s flaws sooner.

I think I misunderstood TCS for a bunch of reasons, but in a way where the version of TCS in my head was better than what David and Sarah meant. One thing that happened was DD said there was knowledge on some topics, and I believed him and tried to learn/understand it. Then I created some of it.

DD often let me talk a lot while making some comments, and he didn’t tell me when I was saying things that were new to him, which was misleading. I often thought I was figuring out things he already knew with some hints/help, when actually he was hiding his ignorance from me. The best example of this is my method for avoiding coercion, which was part of my attempt to learn (and organize and write down publicly) existing TCS knowledge, but was actually me creating new knowledge. And I’m not sure that to this day DD learned my avoiding coercion method or agrees with it or likes it. But without my method, how do you always find common preferences (quickly, not given unbounded time)? TCS has no real, substantive, usable answer. Just discuss and try, while trying to not be irrational and not coerce. TCS also lacks details for how to have a rational discussion. I’ve tried to understand/create rational methods more than TCS (or Popper) ever did with ideas like Paths Forward, Impasse Chains, decisive arguments, debate trees, and idea-goal-context decision making. TCS never had methods with that level of specificity and usefulness.

DD told me I was really good at drawing out explicit statements of knowledge he already had. But I think a lot of what happened is I brought up issues – via questions, criticism or explanations – which he hadn’t actually thought of. That prompted him to make new explicit statements to address my new ideas.

TCS had very broad, abstract claims like “problems are soluble”, as well as simple examples and naive advice. Examples of naive advice are that custody courts and child protective services aren’t very dangerous and you shouldn’t worry about them. Also saying that child predators are very rare and not really a concern even when saying that children are full adults in principle and advocating abolishing age of consent laws. Another example of the lack of substance in TCS advice was DD suggesting to tell teachers to let your child use the phone whenever he wants. If teachers (or babysitters, daycare workers, camp workers, etc.) would actually listen to that kind of request, that would be wonderful. But we don’t live in that world. And if we did, parents would be able to think of the idea “ask them to let my child use the phone whenever he wants” without DD’s help. It’s not a very clever idea; most parents could come up with that themselves (if they had the sort of goals where it’d be a good idea – most TCS-inclined parents would want their kid to be able to phone for help but some other parents wouldn’t actually want that).

Another thing that happened, from my perspective, is I won a lot of arguments. I criticized a lot of genuine errors. I thought that was important and useful, and would lead to progress. DD encouraged and liked it. It was useful practice for my own intellectual development. Before I found DD/TCS I was way above average at critical debate, logic, etc. But now I’ve improved a ton compared to my past self. The critical discussions had value for me but weren’t much use for changing the world. It didn’t help people much. They tended not to learn from criticism. And other people in the audience (besides whoever I was directly replying to) tended not to learn much even if they were making very similar mistakes to what I commented on, and they also tended not to learn much from my example about how to debate, think critically, get logic right, etc.

TCS seemed right and important to me because I used ideas related to it and won arguments. That made it seem to me like people were doing worse than TCS and TCS was a clear improvement. While TCS or any sort of gentle parenting has some improvements over mean parenting, I don’t think that was really the issue. I could have won a lot of arguments using other ideas too. The bigger issue is that people are bad at arguing, logic, learning and following ideas correctly, etc. So yeah they wouldn’t get even the basics of TCS right. In some sense, TCS didn’t seem to need more advanced or complex ideas because people weren’t learning and using the main ideas it did say. TCS is like “be way nicer to your kids guys” and then people post about how they’re mean to their kids and blind to it. They needed more practical help. They needed more guidance to actually learn ideas and integrate them into their lives. These are some of the things I’ve been working on with CF. TCS didn’t do that. It wasn’t actually very good.

TCS actually had ideas that were against being organized or methodical, or intentionally following long term goals. It was more like “follow the fun” and “being untidy helps you be creative” which are just personal irrationalities and errors of DD and SFC, not principles with anything to do with Popperian epistemology. I did OK at learning and making progress despite the lack of structure, but most people didn’t, and I think I would have learned more and faster with more organization and structure. I’ve now imposed more structure on my life and organized things more and it is not self-coercive for me; I’m fine with it and find it useful. I understand that for DD it would be self-coercive, but many people can do it some without major downsides, and DD is wrong and should really work on fixing his flaws. TCS never told people to practice anything but practice is a key part of turning intellectual ideas into something that makes a difference in your daily life (rather than only affecting some decisions that you use conscious analysis for, which often leads to clashes between your conscious and subconscious if you don’t do any practice).

This article itself isn’t very organized, but that’s an intentional choice. I’d rather put organizing and editing effort into epistemology articles for the CF website than into this article. I want to write this article cheaply (in terms of resource use like effort). Similarly, I could write a lot of detailed criticism of TCS and of DD’s books, but I don’t want to because I have other things to do. I’ve made some intentional choices about what to prioritize. My CF site has the stuff I think is most important to put energy into. It avoids parenting, relationships and politics. I think stuff about rationality itself is more important because it’s needed to deal with those other topics well. On a related note, I would like to study math and physics, but I don’t, because I don’t want to take the energy away from my philosophy work. TCS discouraged that kind of resource budgeting choice. But I don’t feel bad or self-coerced about it. I think it’s a good choice. I don’t have time or energy to do everything that would be nice to do. Prioritizing is part of life. If you don’t prioritize in a conscious or intentional way, you’ll still end up doing some things and not others. The difference will be some more important things don’t get done. Unintentionally not doing some things because you run out of time and energy won’t lead to better outcomes than making some imperfect, intentional, conscious decisions.

It’s important not to fight with yourself and suppress your desires with willpower. It’s important not to consciously choose some priorities that your subconscious disagrees with. People don’t live up to this perfectly. It’s a good goal to try to do better at, but don’t get paralyzed or sad about it. Just don’t purposefully suppress with willpower and think that’s a good longterm strategy to never improve.

It’s pretty common to like something subconscious/emotionally/intuitively and also think it’s important. That’s an achievable, realistic thing. Not everyone is really conflicted about prioritizing whatever their main interest or profession is. Some people like something and prioritize it and that works well for them. It’s not really all that special that I like philosophy, and do it, and I’m OK with deprioritizing math and physics even though those would be fun too. I don’t think DD can do it though, which is part of why he started TCS but later abandoned it – he has poor control over his priorities and they’re unstable. In retrospect, when he wrote over 100 blog posts about politics for his blog Setting the World to Rights, that was a betrayal of TCS. He could and should have written 100 articles about parenting instead (or if he didn’t want to, then don’t found a parenting movement and recruit people to join it in the first place – choose the politics blog instead).

Also, by saying things were very abusive, monstrous, etc., TCS implied the current state of the world was better than it is. Saying TCS was practical and immediately achievable also implied the world is better than it is. I didn’t realize how screwed up the world is and TCS was wrong about it. The world being more screwed up makes TCS thinking less reasonable. (It doesn’t affect abstract principles but it affects applications.) While TCS said most of the world is better than reality, it said all other parenting is really bad. It’s actually pretty common for people to notice errors in their speciality, think it’s a big problem, and assume other specialties aren’t so screwed up. It’s been said that people reading a newspaper article about their profession often see that it’s full of glaring, basic errors … but then for some reason they believe the same newspaper on every other topic. TCS saw parenting errors but believed the same society was reasonable on other topics. (TCS got some of the errors wrong, but there are plenty of real errors in everything so when you decide to be a harsh critic you’ll often get some things right. Or put another way, everything has lots of room for improvement. If you just try to point out flaws, then it’s not so hard to be right some. If you try to suggest viable ways to improve things, that’s much harder, because your suggestions will contain flaws too.)

The best parts of TCS were short, abstract general principles. Their applications of those principles were not so good. The best principles were unoriginal and came from Popper (rationality stuff) or classical liberalism (freedom, cooperative relationships, mutual benefit, win/win solutions). They were open about getting ideas from those two sources. What was more original were the specific applications to parenting, but those weren’t so good… What happened is I learned TCS by trying to understand and apply the principles myself. I reinvented a lot of the applications while trying to figure out the details because TCS didn’t have enough details and because I cared much more about the principles than about parenting (so did DD, who, for that reason, should not have founded a parenting movement – it would have been better if he made a philosophy blog instead, as I have done). Anyway when I worked out applications of the principles myself I came up with a lot of different conclusions without realizing it. That’s a common thing people do when they read something and don’t discuss much, but I was discussing with DD all the time and he didn’t tell me that I was coming up with new and different ideas, and he didn’t express disagreement with the stuff I came up with, which was really misleading to me. An example is that I figured out that TCS implies having only one child (at a time), but DD and SFC didn’t say that and I doubt they believe it, but I don’t recall DD ever expressing disagreement with that idea. TCS also said a bunch of stuff about getting helpers, but what I figured out is its principles suggest that even having a co-parent is very problematic because it gets in the way of taking individual responsibility for a very hard, unconventional project you’re doing where you need full control and can’t rely on others to be rational participants. Not having a co-parent is also very problematic so there’s a hard problem there that TCS doesn’t address at all. (Having only one kid has some problems too, btw. There are downsides to address which TCS hasn’t tried to develop knowledge about.) Having little other help besides a co-parent is reasonably realistic though – much more so than having other helpers who are actually TCS. Thinking you could have lots of TCS helpers is also related to the incorrect adequate society mindset of TCS.

Taking Children Seriously (TCS) is a parenting philosophy by David Deutsch and Sarah Fitz-Claridge. It advocates a non-coercive, anti-authoritarian, fallibilist approach. It draws inspiration from Karl Popper's fallibilist epistemology and from libertarianism. Deutsch was my mentor. I learned a lot about TCS and was a fan. TCS was largely abandoned by its founders 20 years ago and became a pretty dead movement. Some recent attempts to revive it do not appear to be going well and I'm unaware of any TCS advocates who are open to debate today.

This essay discusses philosophical errors in TCS theory, some of which are related to Critical Fallibilism, the epistemology I developed to improve on Popper's Critical Rationalism. While I don't recommend people try to follow TCS parenting practices, I still think TCS is intellectually interesting, partly because of its connections with Critical Rationalism, and partly because I still agree that conventional parenting is flawed, irrational and mean. Like many reform movements, TCS was right about more of its social critiques than its solutions.

TCS Introduction

TCS interprets disputes between parents and children as disagreements about ideas rather than as disobedience, misbehavior, mistakes, human nature, sin or wickedness. TCS says the parent is fallible and may be wrong, and disagreements should be approached rationally with truth-seeking methods that are not biased in parents' favor. Punishment is a clearly irrational way to deal with disagreement; debate is more appropriate. A parent shouldn't be an authority with the final word who can get his way at any moment just because he says so and he's physically stronger.

TCS rejects forcing children to do anything they don't want to. TCS is highly critical of schools and recommends something along the lines of extreme, pure unschooling (which is like homeschooling but without a set curriculum or anything else resembling school). TCS also criticizes parenting behavior that's illegal to do to other adults, such as hitting someone or physically moving them to a different location against their will. TCS also had some weird, deeply problematic ideas, including about doing some things to children that are currently illegal, e.g. TCS favored abolishing age of consent laws. There are old TCS discussion emails, including by Deutsch, that are dismissive of the danger from child predators, but I think that attitude is factually mistaken.

TCS rejects the goal of passing on all of the parents' ideas to the children. Instead, it says children should be free to choose what to agree and disagree with. In this way, it's expected that each generation will reject and correct errors from the previous generation and humanity will rapidly improve. TCS had a tendency to think utopia was within reach in just one generation if people would listen. Anyone who rejected TCS was seen as standing in the way of a better world by intentionally choosing to be an irrational child abuser. Despite advocating more gentle parenting towards children, TCS was quite harsh with parents and would call them abusers for doing normal, conventional, socially acceptable actions. TCS even compared mainstream parents to slaveowners since they don't give their children total freedom, but that comparison is an error.

TCS advocates dispute resolution by common preference finding. The basic idea is to use creativity to find a solution that everyone is happy with, not coerced by. It's like seeking mutual consent plus more (begrudging consent isn't good enough). TCS's focus was on specifying what attributes a good solution would have (no one is coerced) and on arguing that that goal is possible not impossible, but TCS didn't give enough practical guidance (there was nothing like a common preference finding flowchart to follow). I did develop a common preference finding method myself (which I think is a good start but inadequate to enable most people to do it).

Coercion

TCS redefined the word "coercion" to mean:

the psychological state of enacting one idea or impulse while a conflicting impulse is still active in one's mind.

This is an inherently binary definition: either a person is in this state or they aren't. This definition doesn't specify any amounts or degrees. And TCS advocates sometimes denied that any coercion is less bad than any other coercion, which fits with a binary view. In line with that attitude, Deutsch responded (mirror) to an article about traumatic teen wilderness camps by denying that those camps are worse than other schools (even though the article talks about prosecutors filing over 100 charges of physical and sexual abuse for one of the camps).

One of the major, original ideas of my Critical Fallibilism (CF) is to evaluate ideas in a binary way, with criticisms either refuting or not refuting ideas. CF rejects credences, rejects the concept of arguments strengthening or weakening ideas by degrees, and rejects the approach of evaluating ideas by how good they are then reaching a conclusion based on which idea has the highest evaluation. CF puts a lot of effort into discussing what binary ideas are, how they're different than matters of degree, how to work with them effectively, how to avoid potential problems with them, how to get benefits from them, what degrees still can be used for, etc. It's a major change to approach epistemology in a binary way and it requires a lot of explanations and methods to make it work and replace everything that it's logically incompatible with.

TCS brought up but didn't answer some potentially confusing issues. If coercion is binary, then whipping a child isn't more coercive than yelling because there's no such thing as more coercive. So is whipping worse in some other ways? Should we be looking at other issues besides coercion? But TCS focuses heavily on coercion. If whipping isn't worse, what does that mean for how we live or how we judge parents? Whipping could be replaced with something worse, and yelling with something milder (TCS sometimes used frowning as an example of coercive parental behavior), and the same questions still apply.

When you approach an issue in a binary way, and it's counter-intuitive to most people, a lot of analysis and explanation is needed to help people make sense of it, which TCS didn't provide. TCS didn't say their coercion definition was binary, let alone explain how to deal with that. I searched over 49,000 TCS emails and only found two short conversations that discussed coercion being potentially binary. There was one in 2002 and I brought it up myself in 2004. TCS emails began in 1996 and the TCS founders never discussed coercion being binary.

Can CF's analysis of binary evaluations of ideas be used for TCS? I think it's relevant and useful, but you'd have to change it and add some new stuff to try to make it work for TCS. I haven't done that so I don't know how well it would work out. There are significant differences between binary evaluations of ideas as refuted or non-refuted and binary evaluations of states of mind as coerced or not coerced. A refutation means an idea fails at a goal, and we can consider multiple goals and give an idea multiple evaluations (one per goal), so within CF's binary approach we can differentiate one idea as better than another, even though they both have the same evaluation for one goal, because they have different evaluations for other goals. TCS's goal with coercion is total avoidance, whereas with CF it's fine if an idea is refuted for some goals: you can still use it for other goals. (In fact, for any idea, you can specify many goals which it fails at.)

Fallibility and Mutual Consent

TCS seeks mutual consent as a way of dealing with fallibility. People can be wrong. Even when you're really confident, you might be mistaken. If you ignore critics without their consent, you may be wrong and stay wrong even though a better idea is available.

Why does consent matter? If someone thinks they have an important correction of an error you're making, which they want to share, it's intellectually dangerous to ignore that. Consent means that someone agrees with you (they aren't a critic) or they are fine with you not changing your mind at this time (so e.g. they don't see their correction as important or don't want to make the effort to share it).

TCS correctly points out that children are people with ideas who may be correct when they disagree with their parents. TCS also has arguments about how children are selective about what they disagree with their parents about, and this selectivity can make up for their ignorance, allegedly giving children around a 50% rate of being correct when they disagree with their parents. It can of course be much higher or lower than 50% depending on the child and the parents. But the common assumption that the parent is right 99% of the time is unreasonable. Fallibility isn't just a technical point about edge cases; it's pretty common that parents are wrong when they disagree with their children. (I don't agree with the 50% claim but I do agree that parents are mistaken reasonably often.)

Note that the parent being mistaken doesn't mean the child is correct about what they want to do. It's often easier to be right about a criticism than a solution or proposal. It's often easier to point out errors than avoid errors. Just because a child correctly recognizes a flaw in a parent's idea doesn't mean the child's alternative idea is correct or better. It's common that the initial ideas of the parents and children are all incorrect.

Note: This section about fallibility uses my own way of explaining TCS. I think I made presentation improvements while staying accurate to TCS's claims.

Handling Fallibility

Seeking mutual consent runs into some difficulties. It can be too time consuming to answer every critic who wants your attention. And after you answer, they might still disagree and want more answers. They might have reasonable followup points, or they might be a beginner who is effectively seeking free tutoring disguised as critical debate, or they might be an unreasonable person who doesn't listen well.

The mainstream, conventional answer to this is to legitimize ignoring dissent when you judge that engaging with a critic isn't the best use of your time. You estimate which critics have the most promising points, if any, and ignore any person or idea that you want to ignore. This basically enables an unlimited amount of bias. I consider it one of the largest errors in our society which is systematically making all of science and academia much less productive or rational.

TCS's answer is, at least with your own children, to basically spend unlimited time and energy addressing disagreements. Just keep at it until you get mutual consent about what conclusion(s) to reach or what to do.

TCS and Deutsch didn't give clear guidance on how to handle fallibility regarding online debates with strangers. I personally tried to follow their principles by seeking mutual consent to end debates. I tried to be open to criticism from anyone. I tried not to unilaterally judge that a conversation should end. I tried not to be dismissive of ideas even if they sounded dumb to me because, as a fallibilist, I didn't want to risk being wrong about that decision to be dismissive. I even engaged with ideas that I'd already addressed in the past because I could potentially be mistaken that it's a repeat of a past idea, rather than a similar idea that's actually correct. Or even if some ideas are identical to ones I refuted in the past, this person could have an additional argument that the past person didn't which changes the final conclusion.

Although my debates were time consuming, overall I found them productive and I learned a lot. While I'm sure there was room for improvement, engaging in a lot of debate was valuable for me. However, after around ten years, the value of my debates started noticeably going down for me. Debates started getting too repetitive, both about the specific ideas (like hearing the same old pro-induction or anti-fallibility arguments again) and about the meta patterns (like people making logic errors, failing at reading comprehension, or quitting in the middle).

I developed a solution which I called Paths Forward. The basic idea is to have error correction mechanisms other than continuing to participate in a discussion. That let me decline or end more discussions because I knew that, even if I was wrong about the value of that discussion, there was still a way I could be corrected. Having backup plans for error correction enabled me to opt out of far more discussions without the typical risk of being and staying wrong. I've found this highly effective at protecting my time and energy. I've concluded that it's unnecessary for intellectuals to be bad fallibilists; they should have error correction mechanisms like a debate policy.

Error correction mechanisms, beyond the first one of using your good judgment, require some degree of autonomy or independence to be effective. They should be external things, generally written down in advance. They need the ability to overrule your judgment or exert control over you. If they couldn't, then they wouldn't be able to correct you when your judgment is mistaken. This is similar to a king giving up some arbitrary power to have written laws which even he must follow. Error correction mechanisms are powerful when you genuinely give up some power or authority.

For me, having error correction mechanisms is far less work than putting basically unlimited energy into critical discussions and debates. However, most intellectuals are used to arbitrarily ignoring whatever they want with no transparency. For them, this approach requires them to do more work (and give up some power), which many of them don't want to do. I got the effort required to be rational down from unbounded to maybe 10 hours a month, which I thought was a really good accomplishment. But most intellectuals spend 0 hours a month on being rational so 10 hours still sounds like too much work to them. Also, I think a lot of intellectuals avoid error correction mechanisms because they're making a lot of errors and would in fact be corrected, which they would find embarrassing and unpleasant (they don't consciously view it this way, but they intuitively avoid the sorts of debates they would lose).

The basic issue is how to say "no" without being an authoritarian, irrationalist or infallibilist. It's very important to have good answers to that. Being unable to say "no" is extremely harmful. Being authoritarian, irrationalist or infallibilist is also bad.

So the mainstream approach to fallibility is to be arrogant and have inadequate interest in error correction. And the TCS approach, at least with one's children and ambiguously with everything else, is to put unlimited energy into dealing with one's fallibility. TCS, by advocating mutual consent (or more) as the goal, is demanding people put more energy into error correction on any issue as long as a counterparty isn't satisfied. This is impractical. The mainstream is right to reject this. Neither side (TCS or mainstream) has any practical ideas for how to rationally handle fallibility and error correction in a limited, finite amount of effort. In that context, while I sympathize with TCS's aspirations, I think the mainstream view is better than TCS's view: arbitrarily rejecting error correction (with people encouraged to do their best to be rational and avoid bias, which isn't very effective) to protect people's autonomy is better than placing an unlimited burden on people.

As a fallibilist philosopher, I worked on solutions to the problem of dealing with fallibility well using limited effort. My solutions were developed primarily in the context of online debate between public intellectuals. I think significant modifications would be needed to apply them to parenting. But I think that's what should be done to create a good, new parenting philosophy: adapt CF's error correction mechanisms and develop new ones for interactions between parents and children. I don't expect the results of this project to be an incremental improvement on TCS. I expect it to create a new, separate approach to parenting that takes some inspiration from TCS (particularly the idea of applying Popperian fallibility to parenting). I haven't done this. I haven't worked out the details. Perhaps this project would fail for some reason. But I think I figured out a good lead for how to develop a good parenting philosophy.

Authority and Responsibility

In general, we pair authority with responsibility. If you were responsible for a decision made by someone else, it wouldn't make sense and would be unfair to you. Whoever has control over something is also the person responsible for the outcome. Imagine if a company hired two people: one whose job is to make decisions and another whose job is to be blamed if the decisions are bad. That wouldn't make sense and would be especially unpleasant for the person being blamed for things he had no control over.

TCS takes authority away from parents and tells them to defer to their children when they fail to resolve disagreements through rational discussion and mutual consent:

where there is no common preference found, the parent must self-sacrifice ... 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.

TCS also said parents shouldn't self-sacrifice, self-sacrifice is coercive, common preference finding should fail infrequently, people should not ask "What if?" or "Who should rule?" type questions, people should focus on solving underlying root cause problems instead of on solving the immediate problem, people should focus on problem solving not assigning blame, and that asking about what happens when finding a common preference fails shows that you have the wrong attitude and therefore will be unable to find many common preferences. This is confusing. TCS didn't have a good, clear answer here.

The law and society in general hold parents responsible for parenting outcomes. If a child doesn't brush his teeth and gets cavities, that is the parent's fault. If a naked toddler wanders outside in the snow and freezes to death, that is the parent's fault. If the child asked the parent to let him go in the snow with no supervision, and the child kept insisting and wouldn't listen to the parent's concerns, and the parent followed TCS's advice and deferred to the child, that is still the parent's responsibility even though TCS gave the child the authority to get his way and make the decision.

This isn't just the mainstream opinion. TCS also holds parents responsible. If you defer to your child and then he gets a bad outcome, TCS blames you (you should have given your child better advice and warnings, and been more persuasive).

You may think toddlers wandering around in the snow is absurd but TCS's founders communicated very clearly that TCS allows no exceptions and that parents must be open to common preference finding, and acknowledging that they may be mistaken, even in worse scenarios than that. Parents who said they definitely wouldn't let their kid do something really dangerous were called irrational, mocked, and pressured to keep an open mind and seek a common preference instead, and told to never ever use their authority to get their way if common preference finding fails.

Splitting up authority and responsibility, so that one person makes a decision and someone else is responsible for the consequences, is an error. It doesn't work in companies, families, or anywhere else. If you want a rational family, you need to help parents be more rational, not take away their authority (while having no way to take away their responsibility). While you can put some limits on parental power (and society does, e.g. laws against child abuse), parents need to learn to use their power rationally, not try to stop having the power that is paired with their responsibility as parents. Parental responsibility is a burden which parents took on and must use their power to handle well (and should gradually transfer as children grow up and approach independence).

To use their power rationally, parents must handle their fallibility well. They must know that they may be mistaken even when they feel confident that they're right. Neither arbitrarily dismissing disagreements nor putting unlimited energy into discussing disagreements is a good approach. So my abstract suggestion is that parents approach their fallibility with error correction mechanisms similar to how CF advises public intellectuals to have debate policies.

I think one reason TCS didn't want to give parents permission to ever use their authority without their child's consent was because TCS was too controlling towards parents. TCS's founders cared what parents did and pressured them to change their behavior to better suit the preferences of the TCS founders. This is problematic even when the TCS founders have good preferences (like that children shouldn't be spanked or yelled at). It doesn't adequately respect the freedom and autonomy of parents. It tries to transfer some authority from parents to TCS leaders without transferring corresponding responsibility.

Parents and Culture

TCS says parents and children together control children's outcomes. And children aren't born bad. Therefore, if parents changed their behavior and were great, their children would definitely turn out great, and if many parents followed TCS then society would soon be great.

I now think culture is more powerful and influential than parents in many ways, and that even great parents could easily raise mediocre children who accept lots of mainstream errors.

Parents can be more influential than culture by keeping their children extremely isolated, but they shouldn't. Merely homeschooling and being anti-social isn't even close to isolating enough. I mean more like being in a cult or living off-grid with the children not having internet access or any friends with internet access.

I think if you want a better world, you need to figure out how to deal with culture. TCS tried to be a shortcut to a rational world without figuring out how to help adults become rational, just by having adults change their parenting behavior so that the next generation would be rational. I don't think that shortcut can work.

This is related to another mistake TCS made, which was to view coercion as intentionally caused by other people. The idea was that if parents just stopped coercing on purpose then children wouldn't be coerced. I think self-coercion and unintentional coercion are both common and that cultural ideas can cause coercion.

Conclusion

TCS defined coercion in a binary way. TCS didn't recognize this, acknowledge the many difficulties with it, and provide appropriate explanations and analysis to address those difficulties. CF uses a binary approach to evaluating ideas, but it clearly says so, addresses many concerns, and offers a lot of analysis and explanation.

TCS's attitude to fallibilism puts a basically unlimited effort burden on parents (and potentially on everyone, throughout their entire lives, if they apply the principles universally). Putting such a big burden on parents is really harmful and I think this did harm a lot of parents without them recognizing what the source of the harm was. So I think my identification of this issue is important for people who were involved in TCS (and hopefully intellectually interesting for others). And dealing with fallibility is an important philosophical issue that I'd already worked on abstractly and regarding public intellectuals and debates. A middle ground is needed between unbounded effort to handle fallibility or legitimizing arbitrarily dismissing criticism and requiring zero effort. Working on handling fallibility with limited effort in the parenting context, including applying my work about error correction mechanisms to parenting, is a potential way to develop a successful rational parenting philosophy.

Transferring authority from parents to children, without transferring corresponding responsibility, doesn't work.

Culture can be more powerful than individuals including parents.

These are complex ideas and this essay has focused on high level summary. To understand in more detail, you could read my many other essays about TCS, epistemology, fallibility, Critical Rationalism, Critical Fallibilism, decisive arguments, Paths Forward, debate policies, debate methodology, error correction mechanisms, etc.