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David Deutsch and Sarah Fitz-Claridge Publish Misquotes

This post originally focused primarily on Fitz-Claridge, but I found a bunch of scholarship errors, like misquotes, from Deutsch too. For details, see the two updates at the bottom of this post and the comments below the post which share a bunch more research about misquotes. Deutsch's lack of integrity and rationality when it comes to getting quotes right and making his books accurate also provides background context for our current conflict, which has involved Deutsch lying about me regarding a documented, factual matter. His repeated errors in his books help explain how he could make an error like that, and help clarify what kind of person he actually is. (I added this note at the top, and edited the post title, on 2021-06-23 and 2021-06-25. The original title was "Sarah Fitz-Claridge is a Terrible Intellectual".)


Sarah Fitz-Claridge (SFC) co-founded Taking Children Seriously (TCS) with David Deutsch (DD). I found an egregious misquote of Popper on the TCS website. There's no name on the specific page, but I'm familiar enough with TCS to guess that SFC wrote it. In this article, I assume SFC is the author. Regardless, it's on the official TCS website so SFC and DD are both responsible for this error, since they are the founders and they put their names on TCS.

This (falsified) quote of Popper is from "The TCS FAQ" regarding "TCS and Karl Popper" (sources: archive.org and my mirror):

The inductivist or Lamarkian approach operates with the idea of instruction from without, or from the environment. But the critical or Darwinian approach only allows instruction from within - from within the structure itself.

...I contend that there is no such thing as instruction from without the structure. We do not discover new facts or new effects by copying them, or by inferring them inductively from observation, or by any other method of instruction by the environment. We use, rather, the method of trial and the elimination of error. As Ernst Gombrich says, "making comes before matching": the active production of a new trial structure comes before its exposure to eliminating tests."

- pages 7-9, The Myth of the Framework

This quote is bizarrely falsified. I noticed the issue because it says it's from pages 7-9, but it's too short to span three pages. So I checked what Popper actually wrote.

The first paragraph is OK. For the second paragraph, here's the first sentence Popper actually wrote:

In fact, I contend that there is no such thing as instruction from without the structure, or the passive reception of a flow of information that impresses itself on our sense organs.

SFC's ellipsis removed the two words at the start, which is OK. Then where Popper had a comma, SFC changed it to a period with no indication of an edit, which is completely unacceptable. Worse, she then put additional text in the same paragraph which is not in that paragraph in the book. She took some sentences from page 9, from a different section of the book (V not IV), from partway through a completely different paragraph, and stuck them here after half a sentence from from an earlier paragraph which she quoted as being a full sentence.

This isn't even close to how quotes work. You can't just grab quotes from different places in the book and put them together to make a paragraph.

And it's even worse because she presents it as two paragraphs, so it's not like she was leaving out all paragraph breaks. Including a paragraph break makes it even more unexpected that a different paragraph break would be left out. Similarly, she used an ellipsis, which makes it much more surprising and misleading that one is missing somewhere else.

Misquoting seems to be some sort of pattern with SFC and DD. I'm currently working on a video about a misquote in The Beginning of Infinity that I found. SFC and DD are close associates with lots of similarities, e.g. they are both liars.

Immediately after the misquote, SFC writes something else really problematic:

While Popper almost always made such remarks in the context of original discovery rather than learning, the implications for education are inescapable. I should stress that applying Popper's philosophy of science to the growth of knowledge in children applies only when the children are learning science. Our position is much broader, namely that Popper's general idea of how a human being acquires knowledge – by creating it afresh through criticism and the elimination of error – applies equally to non-scientific types of knowledge such as moral knowledge, and to unconscious and inexplicit forms of knowledge. Thus we see ourselves as trying to extend Popperian epistemology into areas where, by its inner logic, it applies, but where Popper himself resolutely refused to apply it.

Popper didn't resolutely refuse to apply his ideas outside of science, nor did he think his theory of knowledge only applied to science. He made this clear repeatedly in many books. He talked about knowledge in contexts like poetry or courts, not just science. Here's an example in Conjectures and Refutations (my italics) where Popper directly says that his theory works for knowledge in general, not just science:

Although I shall confine my discussion to the growth of knowledge in science, my remarks are applicable without much change, I believe, to the growth of pre-scientific knowledge also—that is to say, to the general way in which men, and even animals, acquire new factual knowledge about the world. The method of learning by trial and error—of learning from our mistakes—seems to be fundamentally the same whether it is practised by lower or by higher animals, by chimpanzees or by men of science. My interest is not merely in the theory of scientific knowledge, but rather in the theory of knowledge in general.

Is SFC a liar who wants to praise DD and give him credit for discovering what Popper already published, or did she never actually read much Popper, or did she read it without understanding it? And what's going on with DD putting his name on egregious errors like these?

Also, in the misquote above, SFC showed Popper talking about "instruction" (education), so claiming he didn't know his ideas applied to education is bizarre. Popper also wrote in Unended Quest a quote that SFC and DD both knew about:

I dreamt of one day founding a school in which young people could learn without boredom, and would be stimulated to pose problems and discuss them; a school in which no unwanted answers to unasked questions would have to be listened to; in which one did not study for the sake of passing examinations.

Conjectures and Refutations also says:

Since there were logical reasons behind this procedure [Popper's theory that we learn by conjectures and refutations], I thought that it would apply in the field of science also

In other words, Popper had a general theory of learning first, and then applied it to science. He thought it should apply to everything including science.

And in the preface of The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Popper wrote (italics in original):

The central problem of epistemology has always been and still is the problem of the growth of knowledge. And the growth of knowledge can be studied best by studying the growth of scientific knowledge.

And later in that preface:

Although I agree that scientific knowledge is merely a development of ordinary knowledge or common-sense knowledge, I contend that the most important and most exciting problems of epistemology must remain completely invisible to those who confine themselves to analysing ordinary or common-sense knowledge or its formulation in ordinary language.

Popper wanted to study scientific knowledge in addition to ordinary knowledge, not instead of ordinary knowledge. He thought science made a great example that shouldn't be ignored. But he wasn't trying to figure out how scientists learn things as a special case. He wanted to understand the general issue of the growth of knowledge, and that's what he was trying to explain, and that's what his epistemology does explain. He didn't accidentally create a general-purpose evolutionary epistemology that says we learn by conjectures and refutations or, equivalently, by trial and error. He knew that you can come up with guesses and criticism whether you're doing science or not.

David Deutsch put his name on these errors. And the bizarre claims about Popper inflated his reputation and gave him undeserved credit. It wasn't a random or neutral error; it was heavily biased in his favor.


Update 2021-06-23: "Dec" pointed out that the same misquote is in BoI too (it's slightly different but has the same main error and is also badly wrong). So DD is even more directly responsible for making this error himself.

While I'm updating, DD wrote in BoI:

As the physicist Richard Feynman said, ‘Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.’

That's a misquote. And I just found another issue. DD wrote in BoI:

As Popper put it, ‘We can let our theories die in our place.’

That's not a full sentence in the original, so that's bad. DD is making it look like a full sentence. The "we" is lowercase in the original.

"Dec" also suggested that I screwed up by not catching the error when I edited BoI. I agree that I could have done better. I was less suspicious then and BoI didn't have the pages 7-9 clue. But I was not a co-author or co-founder of the book, and it was never my job to check for that kind of issue. I helped with the book but I was not paid, I had no official duties or requirements, and the contents of the book are not my responsibility.

In general, I sent DD suggestions and then he decided what to do. The majority of my suggestions were not discussed, so in most cases I don't even know if DD made a change or not. I never went back and compared versions to see which changes he made. The only changes I know he made due to my suggestions are the ones we actually talked about. So you can imagine that I do not feel responsible for the text of the book. I made lots of suggestions that DD didn't take, and most of my suggestions were either small or non-specific (like making a conceptual point but not suggesting exact wording). I didn't write any substantial sections of text in the book. I'm not sure if even one whole sentence of mine is in the book as I wrote it. I did not choose or control what was done with the book.

And I was not tasked with checking sources or doing this sort of research. And I never edited a copy of the book containing both the misquote and the bibliography. DD sent me draft chapters, and then full book drafts, without a bibliography included. He then sent me a bibliography draft after I was done editing, when the book was almost done. He finalized the bibliography at the last minute. Two days after showing me a draft bibliography, he sent me a version that had already been copy-edited, which I did not edit.

The first bibliography draft I saw did not contain In Search of a Better World, which is where Popper wrote "Now we can let our theories die in our place." DD only added that book to the bibliography after I said it had two great chapters and suggested that he read the table of contents and consider it. I'm confident that he didn't know he needed it as a quote source.

And DD misquoted in an article he wrote: https://nautil.us/issue/7/waste/not-merely-the-finest-tv-documentary-series-ever-made

As Karl Popper put it, we humans can “let our ideas die in our place.”

No, Popper wrote "theories" not "ideas". Does DD try to quote Popper from memory!? Why does he use different wordings at different times for the same quote? Why doesn't he copy/paste it out of a book? Something's really wrong here. I'd suggest that, going forward, DD should give a source when presenting a quote. I think he should stop writing books and articles containing quotes without sources. I suggest that no one should trust any quote DD gives, anywhere, unless he gives a source and you check the source yourself. (Be careful with anyone giving an unsourced quote, but especially with people who have a track record of getting quotes wrong like DD does.)

On a related note, in 2011 DD got upset with me for questioning a Godwin quote he sent me in a private email which I couldn't find when searching the book. It turned out that he was quoting the first edition and I was searching the third edition. He hadn't given a specific source. I was right to question it and DD should have praised my scholarship instead of getting upset about being questioned. I guess it makes sense that the kind of person who gets upset about being challenged about quoting would also be the kind of person to make quoting errors. Negative emotional reactions to critical questioning are really bad for error correction.


Update 2, 2021-06-23:

I found another quoting error. The TCS website quoted Popper as writing "Lamarkian" when he actually wrote "Lamarckian". ("ck" not just "k").

I also found the misspelling posted by SFC, and still up today, on her personal website.

That page quotes differently than the TCS page, but also wrong. SFC quotes Popper as writing "flow of information which impresses itself" but in the book he wrote "that" not "which". She just wrote a different word and called it a quote.

And SFC attributes the quote to "The Myth of the Framework, pp. 8-9", but the quote starts on page 7 just like the TCS website said.

Also, DD's associate, Chiara Marletto, misquoted Popper:

https://www.edge.org/conversation/chiara-marletto-on-extinction

As Karl Popper put it, we can "let our ideas die in our place."

No, he wrote "theories" not "ideas".

These people need to learn how quote exactly instead of changing words and other details. If you don't know how to give an exact quote, don't give a quote. Stick to paraphrases until you learn what a quote is and how to do it. There's something really wrong with these people – DD and his associates – who keep making different quoting errors in different places. They aren't just copy/pasting the same error over and over. They keep separately creating different errors.


Elliot Temple on June 22, 2021

Messages (53)

"Dec" informed me that the misquote is also in BoI. My reply is below. And this link has what he said plus my reply.

https://conjecturesandrefutations.com/2021/05/31/comments-about-steele-on-lying/#comment-21968

---

Dec, I wasn't aware that the same misquote was in BoI. I will update my post and also probably write another post about it or talk about it in a video. (BTW/FYI it's not quite identical in BoI, and my first text search didn't find it, but it's similar and also very badly wrong). Despite your flaming me, I appreciate the information. That is the kind of thing I want to know about. If you have more similar information, you can email it to me or share it at my CF forum (I didn't receive a notification about your comments, but fortunately someone told me).

I'm not a co-author or co-founder of BoI, was never tasked with checking quotes for DD. I believed that DD was a good scholar and was not as suspicious back then (plus DD didn't give the pages 7-9 clue that I picked up on).

I don't think MotF has multiple editions (I haven't checked thoroughly), and the pages SFC gave matched my paper copy that I checked, as well as the PDF copy I checked, and the same words were in the book, so I was confident SFC misquoted without further research.

I didn't remember this quote because I haven't reread BoI recently, except for part of chapter 1, which I found a misquote in. Specifically:

> As the physicist Richard Feynman said, ‘Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.’

That is a fake quote that is being spread on the internet, and has now been cited in some books that attribute it to as quoted in BoI. It's similar to stuff Feynman actually said and I think I know where it comes from (someone paraphrased without quote marks or source, but made it sound like he was giving a quote). I also found a book that gives the quote and then has a footnote saying the author couldn't find a source ... but he put it in his book anyway (wtf!?). I will be sharing info about this but wanted to briefly mentioning now due to relevance.


curi at 1:51 PM on June 23, 2021 | #1 | reply | quote

I wrote more:

https://conjecturesandrefutations.com/2021/05/31/comments-about-steele-on-lying/

my comment went in a moderation queue so that's a link to the page, not the specific comment. it should show up there later.

---

ugh, so, BoI says:

> As Popper put it, ‘We can let our theories die in our place.’

That is not the start of a sentence in the original (In Search of a Better World), so that's problematic. And DD doesn't source it. And he writes the same quote differently elsewhere:

https://nautil.us/issue/7/waste/not-merely-the-finest-tv-documentary-series-ever-made

> As Karl Popper put it, we humans can “let our ideas die in our place.”

Popper didn't put it that way. The change is "ideas" instead of "theories". What is going on? Does DD try to quote this from memory? BTW, I criticized DD's memory at https://curi.us/2425-david-deutschs-denial

Popper wrote something similar in MotF, but DD's text doesn't match it. He also said something similar in a speech: https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/popper/natural_selection_and_the_emergence_of_mind.html

And in an old unpublished article that the BoI evolution of culture material was based on, DD wrote:

> As Popper puts it, we “let our ideas die in our place”.

so that's wrong too. But in turned into "theories" in BoI and at https://nautil.us/issue/2/uncertainty/why-its-good-to-be-wrong but what is going on that DD misquoted in that old article that he tried to publish and in the first Nautilus article I linked above but not the second one.

And BoI doesn't source its quote and only has an accurate (other than it not being the start of a sentence) source (In Search of a Better World) in the bibliography by luck. I know this because I told DD to consider that book for the bibliography after he showed me an earlier draft without it. He only added it to the bibliography because he liked the material covered in the book more than some alternative Popper books, not because he needed it as a quote source.


curi at 2:29 PM on June 23, 2021 | #2 | reply | quote

I added an update at the bottom of this blog post.


curi at 3:04 PM on June 23, 2021 | #3 | reply | quote

I made minor edits to my update and also added another paragraph at the end:

> On a related note, in 2011 DD got upset with me for questioning a Godwin quote he sent me in a private email which I couldn't find when searching the book. It turned out that he was quoting the first edition and I was searching the third edition. He hadn't given a source. I was right to question it and DD should have praised my scholarship instead of getting upset about being questioned. I guess it makes sense that the kind of person who gets upset about being challenged about quoting would also be the kind of person to make quoting errors. Negative emotional reactions to critical questioning is really bad for error correction.

The Godwin quote issue DD got upset about is the same one in

https://curi.us/2439-david-deutschs-irrationality

where I quote DD writing:

> And now, in addition to the above-mentioned patterns of argument, your tactics have escalated to include accusing me of fabricating quotes,


curi at 3:17 PM on June 23, 2021 | #4 | reply | quote

#4 I fixed "is" to "are" in the last sentence and added the word "specific" before "source". Also, to be clear, I did not accuse DD of fabricating a Godwin quote. However, I am now accusing him of misquoting Popper and Feynman.


curi at 3:22 PM on June 23, 2021 | #5 | reply | quote

Think DD will fix stuff and add my name at https://www.thebeginningofinfinity.com/book/errata/#errata ?


curi at 3:25 PM on June 23, 2021 | #6 | reply | quote

Here is DD's associate, Chiara Marletto, misquoting Popper with no source:

https://www.edge.org/conversation/chiara-marletto-on-extinction

> As Karl Popper put it, we can "let our ideas die in our place."


curi at 3:30 PM on June 23, 2021 | #7 | reply | quote

I added a second update about more quoting errors.


curi at 4:09 PM on June 23, 2021 | #8 | reply | quote

DD's misquote in BoI is missing the italics Popper used and moves the ellipsis to a worse place that doesn't make sense.


curi at 4:29 PM on June 23, 2021 | #9 | reply | quote

Here's SFC misquoting Godwin being wrong about slavery:

https://www.fitz-claridge.com/quotations/ (it's there right now, but here's a mirror in case she stealth edits it: https://archive.is/rIcM3 )

> “The condition of a … slave in the West-Indies, is in many respects preferable to that of the youthful son of a free-born European. The slave is purchased upon a view of mercantile speculation; and, when he has finished his daily portion of labour, his master concerns himself no further about him. But the watchful care of the parent is endless. The youth is never free from the danger of grating interference.”

>

> William Godwin, 1797, 1823, The Enquirer, Part I: Essay VIII: Of the happiness of youth, p. 60

This quote is awful. Godwin clearly didn't understand how bad slavery was (which was bad even in 1797, but more understandable then than it is for SFC today).

The ellipsis is not replacing any full words. SFC turned "negro-slave" into "... slave" which is not a standard use of ellipses. It's also an attempt to sanitize the quote by hiding that Godwin was talking about "negro[es]".

And the book says "of its grating" not "of grating". It seems like SFC types quotes in carelessly. Someone like that really shouldn't have a webpage of (alleged) quotations... And note that SFC misquotes while giving sources (many of the quotes on that page are sourced to specific page numbers).

It's weird how much of her old writing SFC is hiding but she leaves this up which is one of her more cancellable errors. Why would she post something about slavery being preferable!? And then leave *that* up while hiding most of what she said in the past?


curi at 4:42 PM on June 23, 2021 | #10 | reply | quote

I also found https://nabeelqu.co/post-popper which appears to have copied the "The inductivist or Lamarkian approach" misquote from a paper copy of BoI and typoed "Lamarkian" (which is correctly "Lamarckian" in BoI). I emailed him to let him know about the misquote. The article says "Thanks to David Deutsch and Karl Wilzen for commenting on drafts of this."


curi at 4:48 PM on June 23, 2021 | #11 | reply | quote

Should DD's professional, paid copy editor have checked the quotes? I'm not sure if that was part of his job.

Looking up what copy editors do:

https://www.thebalancecareers.com/what-is-a-copy-editor-2316051

> Verify factual correctness of information, such as dates and statistics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_editing

> Copy editing (also known as copyediting and manuscript editing) is the process of revising written material to improve readability and fitness, as well as ensuring that text is free of grammatical and factual errors.

That sounds like maybe the copy editor should verify that quotes are factually accurate. But I don't know if it's really his job or not. I don't know if people think of saying "Book X said Y", when it didn't, as the sort of factual error that a copy editor should check. Or if the copy editor is just supposed to find errors for facts like saying the earth is a certain number of miles from the sun and giving the wrong number.

If it's not his job, shouldn't the publisher have hired someone to check the quotes? Do popular science books just not get any kind of professional fact checking? I know lots of them have errors but I had thought that was incompetence rather than just not even trying.

BTW, if you look at https://www.thebeginningofinfinity.com/book/errata/#errata you will see that BoI's copy editor missed some errors that were within his job description to catch.

Also FYI DD kept an unusually large amount of control over the book. In my understanding, DD was sent every edit that the copy editor wanted to make, and reviewed them and decided what changes to approve or not, or how to word corrections. I think DD basically insisted on having full control over the exact wording of everything in his book. (DD showed me some of his communications with his copy editor.)


curi at 5:07 PM on June 23, 2021 | #12 | reply | quote

Using one random spot check, Dec discovered that DD misquoted Hoftstadter. That makes 4 quoting errors in BoI that I know of just from some spot checking. I don't think I've checked a quote and had it be OK yet... There are likely other quoting errors in DD's books.

https://conjecturesandrefutations.com/2021/05/31/comments-about-steele-on-lying/#comment-21971


curi at 5:12 PM on June 23, 2021 | #13 | reply | quote

DD has called himself footnotes to Popper and tried to pretend that he's super humble. But the TCS FAQ (above in the blog post) is not the only thing giving him too much credit and Popper too little.

For the general public, DD presents himself as humble. But in a serious paper he tries to take a lot of credit for himself:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135521981530023X

> An important consequence of this explanatory conception of science is that experimental results consistent with a theory *T* do not constitute support for *T*. That is because they are merely explicanda. A new explicandum may make a theory more problematic, but it can never solve existing problems involving a theory (except by making rival theories problematic – see Section 3). The asymmetry between refutation (tentative) and support (non-existent) in scientific methodology is better understood in this way, by regarding theories as explanations, than through Popper's (*op. cit.*) own argument from the logic of predictions, appealing to what has been called the ‘arrow of modus ponens’. Scientific theories are only approximately modelled as *propositions*, but they are precisely *explanations*.

Popper knew about explanations and wrote a lot about them. DD isn't actually providing a new and distinct approach.

The Popper argument he refers to is one Popper made, and the stuff DD is saying is significantly different than it. But that's a very unfair comparison because *that wasn't Poppper's only argument.* Popper *also* made other arguments more similar to DD's decades before DD. DD's aggrandizing himself by comparing his take on epistemology to one specific, unfair Popper argument to make it seem like he's much more original than he actually is.

In addition to the other arguments Popper made, he also knew about the asymmetry that refutation is tentative while support is non-existent. DD isn't adding something by saying that, but DD makes it sound like that's his own idea.

You can search C&R for words like "tentative", "explanation", "support", etc. I'll give one example:

> For a scientific theory—an explanatory theory—is, if anything, an attempt to solve a scientific problem, that is to say, a problem concerned or connected with the discovery of an explanation.[6]

So, contrary to DD's 2015 paper, Popper did regard theories as explanations. And DD presents Popper incorrectly for the specific purpose of crediting himself with more originality than he had. This subtly and substantively tricks people, and it's made worse by how humble he pretends to be, so people will look for this kind of thing less. Here's a source on his dishonest humility: https://twitter.com/DavidDeutschOxf/status/760266821643726848 I think, for various reasons, that he does this on purpose. Lots of his fans think he's better than Popper, and SFC/TCS encouraged people to think that, but he doesn't want to say it himself for social climbing reasons.


curi at 6:13 PM on June 23, 2021 | #14 | reply | quote

Checking some quotes in FoR:

>> I think that I have solved a major philosophical problem: the problem of induction.

> Karl Popper

Correct, though DD starts his quote mid sentence. It's from OK p. 1. OK is in the FoR bibliography.

> When Popper speaks of ‘rival theories’ to a given theory, he does not mean the set of all logically possible rivals: he means only the actual rivals, those proposed in the course of a rational controversy.

Correct. It's in C&R once which is in FoR's bibliography. Popper wrote:

> The situation could also be described as follows. Our task is the testing, the critical examination, of two (or more) rival theories. We solve it by trying to refute them—either the one or the other—until we come to a decision. In mathematics (but only in mathematics) such decisions are generally final: invalid proofs that escape detection are rare.

I checked my paper copy of C&R ch. 8 and it does have a period after "follows", not a colon, which seems wrong. (I thought it might be an OCR error.)

Since "rival theories" appears in OK zero times, C&R once, and MotF once, I suspect DD might have been guessing it was a quote from memory instead of having in mind specific text that he was quoting. I suspect DD thought Popper said it lots of times so he was referring to that instead of to specific text, but if DD thought that he was wrong (considering only the Popper books in the FoR bibliography, which I think is appropriate).

OK, after writing that I checked some other Popper books too. "rival theories" is in RASc once, LScD zero times, WoP zero times, and OSE zero times.

>> Although history has no meaning, we can give it a meaning.

> Karl Popper (The Open Society
 and Its Enemies, Vol. 2, p. 278)

What Popper wrote was:

> Although history has no ends, we can impose these ends of ours upon it; and although history has no meaning, we can give it a meaning.

DD started mid sentence and changed the capitalization without brackets, which I consider problematic. (I think he would have done that to the first quote above too, but in that case he started his quote on "I" which was capitalized in the original.)

> More seriously, very few philosophers agree with Popper's claim that there is no longer a ‘problem of induction’ because we do not in fact obtain or justify theories from observations, but proceed by explanatory conjectures and refutations instead.

“problem of induction” is in C&R 18 times.

> Popper even said that ‘no theory of knowledge should attempt to explain why we are successful in our attempts to explain things’ (*Objective Knowledge* p. 23).

Popper wrote:

> More precisely, *no theory of knowledge should attempt to explain why we are successful in our attempts to explain things*.

So that’s OK except that DD omitted Popper’s italics.

---

OK so not too bad on the Popper quotes but I noticed that DD didn’t quote Popper very much. (Above I went through most, possibly all, of the Popper quotes in FoR.)

In chapter 3 of FoR, DD presents 3 diagrams (3.1, 3.2, 3.3) about how learning works. The diagrams are clearly specifically based on Popper’s diagrams in *Objective Knowledge* (first on page 119, and used in the book repeatedly as an ongoing, memorable theme, which is in the index too). Popper calls it a “schema” and DD uses the word “scheme” five times in chapter 3.

DD took Popper’s diagram and modified it a bit while keeping the same main idea.

DD did not give Popper credit for this. This looks to me like **plagiarism**.

Chapter 3 is the most Popperian chapter in the book, yet Popper’s name appears in chapter 3 only two times. They are:

> Fortunately, the prevailing theory of scientific knowledge, which in its modern form is due largely to the philosopher Karl Popper (and which is one of my four ‘main strands’ of explanation of the fabric of reality), can indeed be regarded as a theory of explanations in this sense. It regards science as a *problem-solving* process.

and

> For this reason, Popper has called his theory that knowledge can grow only by conjecture and refutation, in the manner of Figure 3.3, an *evolutionary epistemology.*

These two quotes do not give the reader even a hint that DD’s diagrams are copied and modified out of Popper’s book. And they also seem more generally inadequate for letting the reader know how much of the information in chapter 3 is from Popper.

I knew for many years that DD’s diagrams in FoR ch. 3 were based on Popper’s in OK. I had strongly connected the two things in my head. But I didn’t realize until now that DD hadn’t given Popper credit.

This helps show a pattern with #14 where DD takes undeserved credit for Popperian ideas to fans he never tells (with specifics) how much he got from Popper.


curi at 6:14 PM on June 23, 2021 | #15 | reply | quote

I just skimmed the Kuhn stuff in FoR and didn't find any quotes of Kuhn. Now I don't trust DD's claims about what Kuhn said. ugh.

It's hard to find quotes in FoR to check. I tried searching for a start single quote character but found tons of things that aren't quotes of external books and, in a few minutes, no quotes to check. I did find an example of text in quotes that I don't think should be in quotes.

> It [a predictive oracle] tells us the result of any possible experiment if we ask it in the right language (i.e. if we do the experiment), though in some cases it is impractical for us to ‘enter a description of the experiment’ in the  required form (i.e. to build and operate the apparatus). But it provides no explanations.

I don't think "enter a description of the experiment" should be in quotes.

I think FoR doesn't use many quotes.


curi at 6:23 PM on June 23, 2021 | #16 | reply | quote

BoI:

> Before Blackmore and others realized the significance of memes in human evolution, all sorts of root causes had been suggested [...] And, as I have mentioned, sexual selection is always a candidate for explaining rapid evolution. Then there is the ‘Machiavellian hypothesis’ that human intelligence evolved in order to predict the behaviour of others, and to fool them. There is also the hypothesis that human intelligence is an enhanced version of the apes’ aping adaptation – which, as I have argued, could not be true. Nevertheless, Blackmore’s ‘meme machine’ idea, that human brains evolved in order to replicate memes, must be true.

At first I read ‘Machiavellian hypothesis’ as a quote of Blackmore. If so, it's a misquote. But on review, it's unclear what it's supposed to be a quote from. Here's what Blackmore writes about it in *The Meme Machine*:

> An influential version of social theory is the ‘Machiavellian Intelligence’ hypothesis (Byrne and Whiten 1988; Whiten and Byrne 1997).

and she uses the term "Machiavellian Intelligence" 10 times, including:

> Byrne, R. W. and Whiten, A. (eds.) (1988). Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes and Humans. Oxford University Press.

> Whiten, A. and Byrne, R. W. (1997). Machiavellian Intelligence: II. Extensions and Evaluations. Cambridge University Press.

and in the index:

> Machiavellian Intelligence 74, 75–6, 95–6, 104, 229

And the wikipedia page is called "Machiavellian intelligence"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machiavellian_intelligence

When I search the web for "Machiavellian hypothesis" I find the wikipedia page for "Machiavellian intelligence" and a paper titled "The dynamics of Machiavellian intelligence" before finding a blog post that uses the term "Machiavellian hypothesis" but which is a poem that I think is talking about something else. It looks like "Machiavellian hypothesis" has been used before but not much.

It looks like DD misnamed the theory he was referring to and put his error in quote marks. I don't think he had any particular quote in mind. He was probably misremembering what Blackmore wrote and using quote marks without checking that he had the words right.


curi at 6:36 PM on June 23, 2021 | #17 | reply | quote

Dec found another misquote in BoI:

https://conjecturesandrefutations.com/2021/05/31/comments-about-steele-on-lying/#comment-21973

> Check out the Michelson quote on page 198. Looks like the last sentence in the quote is itself a quote by Michelson but Deutsch omits the quote marks, making it appear as though that sentence is Michelson’s own words. Whose words Michelson is quoting is unclear (Rayleigh’s?).

So I checked what BoI says:

>> The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote . . . Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.

> Albert Michelson, address at the opening of the Ryerson Physical Laboratory, University of Chicago, 1894

Then I checked the source, *Light Waves and Their Uses*, which says:

> The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote. Nevertheless, it has been found that there are apparent exceptions to most of these laws, and this is particularly true when the observations are pushed to a limit, i. e., whenever the circumstances of experiment are such that extreme cases can be examined. Such examination almost surely leads, not to the overthrow of the law, but to the discovery of other facts and laws whose action produces the apparent exceptions.

>

> As instances of such discoveries, which are in most cases due to the increasing order of accuracy made possible by improvements in measuring instruments, may be mentioned : first, the departure of actual gases from the simple laws of the so-called perfect gas, one of the practical results being the liquefaction of air and all known gases; second, the discovery of the velocity of light by astronomical means, depending on the accuracy of telescopes and of astronomical clocks ; third, the determination of distances of stars and the orbits of double stars, which depend on measurements of the order of accuracy of one-tenth of a second an angle which may be represented as that which a pin's head subtends at a distance of a mile. But perhaps the most striking of such instances are the discovery of a new planet by observations of the small irregularities noticed by Leverier in the motions of the planet Uranus, and the more recent brilliant discovery by Lord Rayleigh of a new element in the atmosphere through the minute but unexplained anomalies found in weighing a given volume of nitrogen. Many other instances might be cited, but these will suffice to justify the statement that "our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals." It follows that every means which facilitates accuracy in measurement is a possible factor in a future discovery, and this will, I trust, be a sufficient excuse for bringing to your notice the various methods and results which form the subject-matter of these lectures.

(This is from an electronic copy of the book and could have errors. E.g. I don’t know if the spaces before the colon and semi-colon are actually in the original or not.)

I don’t like that DD combined two paragraphs into one with an ellipsis. DD also used an ellipsis poorly when he wrote “from within the structure itself …” in the worst Popper misquote. When you put an ellipsis after a period, you should end up with four dots, not three, and you shouldn’t replace the period in the original with a space. DD did the same error again here. The original text has a period after “remote”. DD makes it look like he’s omitting words mid sentence when he isn’t.

The word “sixth” only appears one other time in the book which isn’t related, so the nested quote:

> the statement that "our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."

isn’t directly referring to something said earlier in the book.

Reading those two paragraphs over, I think Michelson was just talking about a hypothetical statement that someone could say and that he believed.

DD should quote it with a real source, not a speech but no particular book or other record of that speech, especially considering that DD’s quote doesn’t match the easiest to find book primary source. If DD’s source is *Light Waves and Their Uses* then he misquoted by omitting the nested quote marks. If it’s something else, it’s hard to find. You can find it without quote marks on webpages pretty easily but that’s not an acceptable source.

DD also capitalized “Our” like it’s the start of a sentence, but it isn’t and it’s lowercased in the book. So that’s wrong. It’s similar to DD’s:

> As Popper put it, ‘We can let our theories die in our place.’

which I don’t think is OK because “We” is not the start of a sentence in Popper’s book and is lowercased there. It’s a standard practice (that I don’t think should be used in a book like BoI) to change capitalization without brackets *for the purpose of matching your sentence*. E.g. if you start your own sentence with a quote, you’re allowed to capitalize the first word in the quote. But here DD doesn’t require a capital letter at that spot in his sentence, so he shouldn’t be changing it without brackets to indicate the change.

It’s misleading this way because people will read it as a complete sentence when it’s not.

The Michelson quote in BoI is similarly misleading. People will read BoI’s text as saying that “Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.” is a complete sentence present in the original, but it’s not.

And this DD misquote appears to be spreading, just like the Feynman misquote. You can see it at:

https://nintil.com/is-useful-physics-over/

I’m pretty confident that blog post is getting the Michelson quote from BoI because the words match, the speech source wording is the same (the punctuation is not), the Feynman quote right above it is also from BoI, the publication date is 2018, and the blog post mentions Deutsch and that the author has blog read BoI. Also the blog post version says “dis - coveries” like he copy/pasted it from a PDF and then didn’t read what he pasted and fix it. I emailed the blog author about the error.

So what did I do next? Check the Feynman quote of course. It’s a misquote too.

BoI:

>> I think there will certainly not be novelty, say for a thousand years. This thing cannot keep going on so that we are always going to discover more and more new laws. If we do, it will become boring that there are so many levels one underneath the other . . . We are very lucky to live in an age in which we are still making discoveries. It is like the discovery of America – you only discover it once.

> The Character of Physical Law (1965)

But *The Character of Physical Law* says:

> What of the future of this adventure? What will happen ultimately? We are going along guessing the laws; how many laws are we going to have to guess? I do not know. Some of my colleagues say that this fundamental aspect of our science will go on; but I think there will certainly not be perpetual novelty, say for a thousand years. This thing cannot keep on going so that we are always going to discover more and more new laws. If we do, it will become boring that there are so many levels one underneath the other. It seems to me that what can happen in the future is either that all the laws become known – that is, if you had enough laws you could compute consequences and they would always agree with experiment, which would be the end of the line – or it may happen that the experiments get harder and harder to make, more and more expensive, so you get 99.9 per cent of the phenomena, but there is always some phenomenon which has just been discovered, which is very hard to measure, and which disagrees; and as soon as you have the explanation of that one there is always another one, and it gets slower and slower and more and more uninteresting. That is another way it may end. But I think it has to end in one way or another.

>

> We are very lucky to live in an age in which we are still making discoveries. It is like the discovery of America – you only discover it once. The age in which we live is the age in which we are discovering the fundamental laws of nature, and that day will never come again. It is very exciting, it is marvellous, but this excitement will have to go. Of course in the future there will be other interests. There will be the interest of the connection of one level of phenomena to another – phenomena in biology and so on, or, if you are talking about exploration, exploring other planets, but there will not still be the same things that we are doing now.

To begin with, *DD has changed “perpetual novelty” to “novelty”* so it’s just a straight misquote.

The original says “keep on going” but DD quotes it as “keep going on” so that’s another unambiguous misquote. He just plain *changed the wording*.

DD also misused an ellipsis again after a complete sentence. And the “We are very lucky” part is from a separate paragraph, so it’s problematic that DD presented it as being later in the same paragraph.

The blog post with both quotes has the same misquote of Feynman. So he copied the misquote out of BoI without saying where he got it.

What sort of writing process creates errors like these? I know DD is a poor typist which could be a contributing factor. It’s weird that he never learned to type well considering that he’s an author and that he’s also written a lot more by email and IM than in his books. He spends a ton of time on computers and seems irrational about learning to type better. The point is, it’s harder to type in quotes for a book correctly if you aren’t fully comfortable touch-typing, so you have to keep looking between three places: the book, the screen and your keyboard. And typing errors are distracting and take attention away from making sure the words are right. But regardless of how much trouble typing you have, the misquotes are fully inexcusable. DD should have reviewed each quote, word by word, after typing it in. Also, he told me that he sometimes types quotes in from paper books.

Alternatively, he could have gotten most or all of the quotes from electronic books and copy/pasted. That’d prevent typing issues and also make up for his apparent inability to read word-by-word to see if sentences are identical or not. However, you have to be careful to only use legitimate sources, not random webpages. And you have to check for errors in the conversion from paper book to electronic version. I suspect some of his misquotes are due to grabbing quotes off webpages without worrying about primary sources, particularly the misquote about Feynman and fooling yourself.

I’m going to have to unendorse DD’s books or at least add a lot of caveats (I do still think they have value), and apologize for my error of not previously realizing how bad DD’s scholarship is.


curi at 1:19 AM on June 24, 2021 | #18 | reply | quote

I suspect DD will claim that his ellipsis use and capitalization edits are stylistic choices and don't count as errors. He might claim the Michelson omission of quote marks and capitalization is a stylistic choice since it's originally from a speech and the verbal speech could be interpreted as having implied quote marks around that part or not, though I don't think that'd be a reasonable position, and I don't think changing capitalization in the middle of a quotation after an ellipsis is acceptable though I fear DD would claim that's a style choice too. I suspect DD just got the Michelson quote from a bad source instead of making some kind of intentional decision about it. Even ignoring all those issues, there are a bunch of serious errors in BoI, and the barely mentioning Popper in FoR ch. 3 is also disturbing to me, both generally and specifically re the schemas.


curi at 1:37 AM on June 24, 2021 | #19 | reply | quote

BoI:

> Horgan wrote that he had originally believed science to be ‘open-ended, even infinite’.

Correct. Found it at http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/random043/97001185.html

But later that paragraph, BoI says:

> He [Horgan] believed that what distinguishes science from unscientific fields such as literary criticism, philosophy or art is that science has the ability to ‘resolve questions’ objectively (by comparing theories with reality), while other fields can produce only multiple, mutually incompatible interpretations of any issue.

Searching the same page I’d just found for “resolve” I see:

> The more frustrated I became with the ironic outlook of literature and literary criticism, the more I began to appreciate the crisp, no-nonsense approach of science. Scientists have the ability to pose questions and resolve them in a way that critics, philosophers, historians cannot. Theories are tested experimentally, compared to reality, and those found wanting are rejected.

So either the text “resolve questions” is somewhere else in the book or this is a misquote. It’s suspicious how well this fits what DD said, and how near it is to the other quote, but without DD’s quote actually being accurate. So I’m getting the full book to check.

---

OK I checked. Horgan wrote the text “resolve questions” one time way later in the book:

> More detailed observations of our cosmos will not necessarily resolve questions about the Hubble constant or other issues.

I don’t think DD is referring to this sentence because then his comments don’t fit the text. Either way, DD is wrong. He’s either misquoting something while giving an accurate description of what Horgan said, or else DD’s two word quote is described incorrectly.

This misquote looks potentially intentional to me. How do you typo a two word quote? How do you copy/paste it from the internet? Did someone else misquote Horgan on a webpage and then DD copied two words from their misquote? Seems doubtful considering I couldn’t find any such misquotes with some quick web searches, such as:

> horgan "resolve questions" "literature and literary criticism"

which got zero results on Google. And:

> horgan "resolve questions" literature literary criticism

which has an unauthorized copy of BoI as the top search result and no sign of any Horgan misquotations.

It looks like maybe DD read the Horgan text and then just changed the wording for his convenience and used quote marks, and thought that was OK because he wasn’t changing the meaning. If he’d written “resolve them [questions]” or “resolve [questions]” it’d be an accurate quote. But “resolve questions” is wrong.

Note that DD does use square brackets for quotes elsewhere in BoI:

> As Dawkins has pointed out:

>

> > A gene pool is carved and whittled through generations of ancestral natural selection to fit [a particular] environment. In theory a knowledgeable zoologist, presented with the complete transcript of a genome [the set of all the genes of an organism], should be able to reconstruct the environmental circumstances that did the carving. In this sense the DNA is a coded description of ancestral environments.

> In Art Wolfe, The Living Wild, ed. Michelle A. Gilders (2000)

And

> Hence, as many critics have since noticed, if we substitute ‘ultimate designer’ for ‘watch’ in Paley’s text above, we force Paley to ‘the [inevitable] inference . . . that the ultimate designer must have had a maker’.

And

> As Hawking once put it, ‘Television sets could come out [of a naked singularity].’

And

> Stephen Hawking recently advised this, in his television series Into the Universe. He argued, ‘If [extraterrestrials] ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.’

And

> For example, in ‘Reflections on my Critics’ the philosopher Thomas Kuhn wrote:

>

> > There is [a step] which many philosophers of science wish to take and which I refuse. They wish, that is, to compare [scientific] theories as representations of nature, as statements about ‘what is really out there’.

> Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (1979)

And

> Representative Roger Q. Mills of Texas complained in 1882, ‘I thought . . . that mathematics was a divine science. I thought that mathematics was the only science that spoke to inspiration and was infallible in its utterances [but] here is a new system of mathematics that demonstrates the truth to be false.’ In 1901 Representative John E. Littlefield, whose own seat in Maine was under threat from the Alabama paradox, said, ‘God help the State of Maine when mathematics reach for her and undertake to strike her down.’

And

>> ‘This is Earth. Not the eternal and only home of mankind, but only a starting point of an infinite adventure. All you need do is make the decision [to end your static society]. It is yours to make.’

> > [With that decision] came the end, the final end of Eternity. – And the beginning of Infinity.

> Isaac Asimov, The End of Eternity (1955)

And

> The ideal that explanatory science strives for is nicely described by the quotation from Wheeler with which I began this chapter: ‘Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it – in a decade, a century, or a millennium – we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise? [my italics].’

Which shows DD cares about italicization of quotes as a general BoI policy, so the Myth of the Framework quote was wrong to omit Popper’s italics with no note.

Considering DD knows how to use square brackets, I don’t see how he could think it was OK to edit the Horgan quote without using square brackets. But I don’t have any good guess about how that would happen by accident. I know based on how many misquotes are in BoI that DD was careless in general, but I still don’t really know what happened here. It seems like he was just inconsistent. He edited quotes repeatedly, and sometimes put square brackets for the edits, and sometimes didn’t bother. So I suspect editing the quote was intentional. Forgetting to put square brackets could have beens some sort of incompetent accident though.

It’s ridiculous that you can find quoting errors just by searching two word phrases like this. They quotation errors aren’t confined to more substantial quotes. I think a lot of people wouldn’t even check a two word quote like that.

Now I’ve got a lot of other quotes to look through, plus I found a couple more quotes in FoR by searching for square brackets. Actually, I’m now asking Alan and Justin to check some quotes.


curi at 10:58 AM on June 24, 2021 | #20 | reply | quote

> The issue of what exactly needs to be explained in an ‘appearance of design’ was first addressed by the clergyman William Paley, the finest exponent of the argument from design. In 1802, before Darwin was born, he published the following thought experiment in his book *Natural Theology*.

I searched the book (both Oxford and Cambridge university press versions). The text “appearance of design” isn’t in *Natural Theology*.

The text “appearance of design” is in BoI several times, sometimes in quote marks and sometimes not. It’s never very clear what, if anything, it’s a quote from. I think many readers of BoI would believe DD is quoting Paley.

> So, how did all that knowledge come to be embodied in those things? As I said, Paley could conceive of only one explanation. That was his first mistake:

>

> > The inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker . . . There cannot be design without a designer; contrivance without a contriver; order without choice; arrangement without anything capable of arranging; subserviency and relation to a purpose without that which could intend a purpose; means suitable to an end . . . without the end ever having been contemplated or the means accommodated to it. Arrangement, disposition of parts, subserviency of means to an end, relation of instruments to a use imply the presence of intelligence and mind.

In the Oxford University Press edition of *Natural Theology*, here’s the sentence similar to what DD has at the start of his quote with my bolding:

> This mechanism* being observed (it requires indeed an examination of the instrument, and perhaps some previous knowledge of the subject, to perceive and understand it; but being once, as we have said, observed and understood), **the inference, we think, is inevitable; that the watch must have had a maker;** that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.

(I don’t know if the * is an error in my electronic copy of the book or what. It could have e.g. been introduced when converting to a different file format. So I just left it in. That’s part of why I checked another edition of the book to compare. The * is not in the Cambridge version.)

DD capitalized the middle of a sentence again and changed the punctuation. So far DD has the same words in the same order, though.

The Cambridge version I have is an OCRed PDF facsimile with the old style ‘f’ instead of ’s’ in most cases. It has for just the key part:

> the inference, we think, is inevitable ; that the watch muft have had a maker ;

DD seems to think it’s OK for him to just edit punctuation in quotes instead of using what the source books use? It’s not.

Continuing on, in the Oxford version Paley writes:

> There cannot be design without a designer;* contrivance without a contriver; order without choice; arrangement, without any thing capable of arranging; subserviency and relation to a purpose, without that which could intend a purpose; means suitable to an end, and executing their office in accomplishing that end, without the end ever having been contemplated, or the means accommodated to it. Arrangement, disposition of parts, subserviency of means to an end, relation of instruments to an use, imply the presence of intelligence and mind.

Not only did DD change the punctuation, he also changed “any thing” to “anything”. It’s hard to compare the texts with my software “find” feature because I keep getting mismatches due to the many changes.

Also, the start of DD’s quote is from chapter 1 and this part is from chapter 2. DD presents it like it’s from the same paragraph. Ugh.

I checked the Cambridge version too. It’s like the Oxford version, not like DD’s version. It has “any thing” as two words.

DD’s second ellipsis skips less than a sentence, rather than skipping ahead to another chapter. He uses the same marker for really different meanings.

In the last section, DD changed “an use” to “a use” without square brackets to indicate an edit.

DD also screwed up a comma. In BoI’s “relation of instruments to a use imply the presence of intelligence and mind.” it doesn’t make sense to remove the comma before “imply”. DD seems to be trying to edit the punctuation to be better and more modern, but in this case he made the punctuation worse and made the quote harder to read.


curi at 11:45 AM on June 24, 2021 | #21 | reply | quote

> > Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it – in a decade, a century, or a millennium – we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?

> John Archibald Wheeler, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 480 (1986)

This is a major misquote. DD has significantly changed the wording. He left out words with not ellipsis and reordered other words. Here’s what Wheeler actually wrote:

https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1749-6632.1986.tb12434.x

> Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, so compelling that when–in a decade, a century, or a millennium–we grasp it, we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?

DD deleted “so compelling” and moved “we grasp it” before the dashed part.


curi at 11:56 AM on June 24, 2021 | #22 | reply | quote

#22 the quote at the start of my comment is from BoI


curi at 12:00 PM on June 24, 2021 | #23 | reply | quote

BoI:

> For example, in ‘Reflections on my Critics’ the philosopher Thomas Kuhn wrote:

>

> > There is [a step] which many philosophers of science wish to take and which I refuse. They wish, that is, to compare [scientific] theories as representations of nature, as statements about ‘what is really out there’.

> Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., *Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge* (1979)

Here’s the original text that Kuhn wrote:

> Nevertheless, there is another step, or kind of step, which many philosophers of science wish to take and which I refuse. They wish, that is, to compare theories as representations of nature, as statements about ‘what is really out there’.

SO it's OK.

DD quoted this in FoR too and gave the page number (265) then. Maybe that’s why he got a quote right in BoI: because he copied it from FoR. Whereas a lot of the new quotes in BoI are wrong.

It’s slightly different in FoR. The first word is lowercase in FoR (which I think is better) and the “[scientific]” insertion isn’t in FoR.


curi at 12:12 PM on June 24, 2021 | #24 | reply | quote

quotes

A quote from DD at the start of Chapter 18 of BoI:

> ‘This is Earth. Not the eternal and only home of mankind, but only a starting point of an infinite adventure. All you need do is make the decision [to end your static society]. It is yours to make.’

[With that decision] came the end, the final end of Eternity. – And the beginning of Infinity.

Isaac Asimov, The End of Eternity (1955)

The book sez:

> Noÿs said, “This is Earth. Not the eternal and only home of mankind, but only a starting point of an infinite adventure. All you need do is make the decision. It is yours to make. You and I and the contents of this cave will be protected by a physiotime field against the Change. Cooper will disappear along with his advertisement; Eternity will go and the Reality of my Century, but we will remain to have children and grandchildren, and mankind will remain to reach the stars.”

>

> He turned to look at her, and she was smiling at him. It was Noÿs as she had been, and his own heart beating as it had used to.

>

> He wasn’t even aware that he had made his decision until the grayness suddenly invaded all the sky as the hulk of the kettle disappeared from against it.

>

> With that disappearance, he knew, even as Noÿs moved slowly into his arms, came the end, the final end of Eternity.

>

> And the beginning of Infinity.

The quote is accurate, but I'm not sure whether the additions in square brackets are in the spirit of the original material. It looks like there is a difference in whether there is a paragraph break between the final two sentences, but that might be a result of different punctuation in different editions or something like that.

In chapter 9 of BoI, DD wrote:

> Stephen Hawking recently advised this, in his television series Into the Universe. He argued, ‘If [extraterrestrials] ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.’

The quote can be checked here:

https://youtu.be/CjiRb1sy0sQ?t=319

> So if aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.

and it is accurate.

In Chapter 8 of BoI, DD wrote:

> As Hawking once put it, ‘Television sets could come out [of a naked singularity].’

I have checked the following books written by Hawking, sometimes with coauthors: “The large scale structure of space-time”, “A Brief History of Time”, “The Grand Design”, “The Nature of Space and Time" and “The Universe in a Nutshell” and they don’t contain this quote or anything like it. Nor have I found the quote in searches except in searches that show this quote from BoI.


oh my god it's turpentine at 12:35 PM on June 24, 2021 | #25 | reply | quote

FoR:

> The Nobel prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg was in instrumentalist mood when he made the following extraordinary comment about Einstein's explanation of gravity:

>

> > The important thing is to be able to make predictions about images on the astronomers’ photographic plates, frequencies of spectral lines, and so on, and it simply doesn't matter whether we ascribe these predictions to the physical effects of gravitational fields on the motion of planets and photons [as in pre-Einsteinian physics] or to a curvature of space and time. (*Gravitation and Cosmology*, p. 147)

I checked *Gravitation and Cosmology*. This is correct. DD was a better quoter in FoR than BoI. The book I checked was a PDF with no OCR, but I found the quote easily because DD gave page numbers. There are lots of page numbers for quotes given in FoR, unlike in BoI.

FoR:

> Steven Weinberg thinks that ‘The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. But if there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself.’ (*The First Three Minutes*, p. 154.)

I checked the book. The words are OK here, but DD has combined sentences from two adjacent paragraphs without using an ellipsis. That’s bad.

FoR:

> As Jacob Bronowski put it:

>

> > The result was silence among Catholic scientists everywhere from then on ... The effect of the trial and of the imprisonment was to put a total stop to the scientific tradition in the Mediterranean. (*The Ascent of Man*, p. 218)

There’s a period after “on” in the original and DD skips several paragraphs ahead with that ellipsis. The words are right.

DD sources the quote to a single page, which is suspicious given how much text he skipped. So I found my paper copy of the book. The text actually does fit on p. 218 (it has large pages, and the first sentence is near the top and the second sentence near the bottom).

I did a word count and the ellipsis skipped 287 words. It may have only fit on the one page because there are two block quotes that use a smaller font.


curi at 12:48 PM on June 24, 2021 | #26 | reply | quote

BoI:

> As Dawkins has pointed out:

>

> > A gene pool is carved and whittled through generations of ancestral natural selection to fit [a particular] environment. In theory a knowledgeable zoologist, presented with the complete transcript of a genome [the set of all the genes of an organism], should be able to reconstruct the environmental circumstances that did the carving. In this sense the DNA is a coded description of ancestral environments.

> In Art Wolfe, The Living Wild, ed. Michelle A. Gilders (2000)

Does anyone have access to this book? I don’t. I’d appreciate if someone checked this quote.


curi at 1:24 PM on June 24, 2021 | #27 | reply | quote

FoR:

> > Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,

> > So do our minutes hasten to their end;

> > Each changing place with that which goes before,

> > In sequent toil all forwards do contend.

> William Shakespeare (Sonnet 60)

This quote is OK.


curi at 1:27 PM on June 24, 2021 | #28 | reply | quote

From FoR:

> So it seems that, as Stephen Hawking put it, ‘The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting round a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.’

and from BoI:

> As the physicist Stephen Hawking put it, humans are ‘just a chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet that’s in orbit round a typical star on the outskirts of a typical galaxy’.

Why is DD using two different quotes for this? DD Hawking say it twice with different words? Does DD actually have two sources?

Both books give no source and don't have Hawking in the bibliography.

Wikiquote has:

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking

>> The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can't believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.

> Interview with Ken Campbell on Reality on the Rocks: Beyond Our Ken (1995)

That matches the FoR quote except that it has “around” while FoR has “round”.

I don’t have a copy of that TV show but I did find the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ja5YMZlRQU

And when I do web searches, I find some other people talking about Hawking saying that.

So I’m guessing the FoR quote is probably either accurate or close to accurate (one word different, and it might be ambiguous which word he said since it was said in voice).

The BoI quote on the other hand is highly suspicious. When I try to web search it, I mostly find results related to DD, including DD saying something very similar in a 2005 TED talk:

https://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_chemical_scum_that_dream_of_distant_quasars/transcript

> As Stephen Hawking famously said, we're just a chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet that's in orbit around a typical star, which is on the outskirts of a typical galaxy, and so on.

If it’s a famous quote, then it shouldn’t be hard to find stuff about it that isn’t related to DD.

I’m guessing that DD screwed up the quote quite badly for his TED talk (it’s hard to tell if it’s just poor memory, cuz first of all it’s irresponsible not to use notes or memory aids, and second of all he made it sound clever and nice by repeating “typical” 3 times so it’d be more rival, so he wasn’t just randomly screwing up words due to bad memory). And then DD based the quote in BoI on his own TED talk. And the version in FoR is the real quote, and the BoI and TED versions are misquotes.


curi at 1:49 PM on June 24, 2021 | #29 | reply | quote

#29 That Hawking quote doesn’t appear in the following books written or cowritten by Hawking: “The large scale structure of space-time”, “A Brief History of Time”, “The Grand Design”, “The Nature of Space and Time" and “The Universe in a Nutshell”.


oh my god it's turpentine at 1:51 PM on June 24, 2021 | #30 | reply | quote

BoI:

> As Hawking has said:

> > I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I’m an optimist. We will reach out to the stars.

> Daily Telegraph, 16 October 2001

This quote is accurate, see https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1359562/Colonies-in-space-may-be-only-hope-says-Hawking.html


curi at 1:51 PM on June 24, 2021 | #31 | reply | quote

FoR:

> Mystery is part of the very concept of time that we grow up with. St Augustine, for example, said:

> > What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not. (Confessions)

Here’s the text in *Confessions*:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3296/pg3296.txt

> What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not: yet I say boldly that I know, that if nothing passed away, time past were not; and if nothing were coming, a time to come were not; and if nothing were, time present were not.

So DD changed “know:” to “know;”, changed “that asketh” to “who asks”, and changed “not:” to “not.” Or maybe he accurately quoted a different translation and didn’t say which one he used, which is problematic. My quote is “Translated by E. B. Pusey (Edward Bouverie)”. But there are other English translations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_(Augustine)#English_translations


curi at 2:01 PM on June 24, 2021 | #32 | reply | quote

FoR:

> ...‘time can be thought of as a line (theoretically, of infinite length) on which is located, as a continuously moving point, the present moment. Anything ahead of the present moment is in the future, and anything behind it is in the past.’

>

> FIGURE 11.1 *The common-sense concept of time that is assumed in the English language (based on Quirk* et al., A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, *p.* 175).

I found the quote in the book except that it ends with a colon not a period. I don’t think that edit to the quote is OK without square brackets.

FoR:

> In *A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language*, Randolph Quirk and his co-authors explain the common-sense concept of time with the aid of the diagram shown in Figure 11.1. Each point on the line represents a particular, fixed moment. The triangle [triangle picture] indicates where the ‘continuously moving point, the present moment’, is located on the line.

I found the text “continuously moving point, the present moment” in the book as quoted.


curi at 2:21 PM on June 24, 2021 | #33 | reply | quote

#30

> That Hawking quote doesn’t appear in the following books written or cowritten by Hawking: “The large scale structure of space-time”, “A Brief History of Time”, “The Grand Design”, “The Nature of Space and Time" and “The Universe in a Nutshell”.

Which Hawking quote did you check? The BoI chemical scum quote? Or the FoR chemical scum quote or both?

Also, btw, do you try searching individual words or multiple short phrases? Searching the entire quote often doesn't work due to DD changing punctuation.


curi at 3:45 PM on June 24, 2021 | #34 | reply | quote

#18

> I know DD is a poor typist which could be a contributing factor. It’s weird that he never learned to type well considering that he’s an author and that he’s also written a lot more by email and IM than in his books. He spends a ton of time on computers and seems irrational about learning to type better. The point is, it’s harder to type in quotes for a book correctly if you aren’t fully comfortable touch-typing, so you have to keep looking between three places: the book, the screen and your keyboard. And typing errors are distracting and take attention away from making sure the words are right.

i watched a kind of mini-documentary thing featuring David Deutsch. link:

https://youtu.be/SDZ454K_lBY?t=657

the documentary was from 1995 according to the youtube description. The Fabric of Reality was released in 1997. he seems to be editing/writing FoR in parts of the video.

i noticed he was not touch typing in any of the clips of him typing, an author not touch typing seemed kind of surprising to me, especially one who does science stuff.

at the time marks: 10:58 11:18 it looks like he mostly uses both his middle fingers, and i think he might have even pressed the space bar with his index finger.

you can also notice how he looks down at his keyboard, then up at the monitor, then down at the keyboard, and up at the monitor again.

16:40 to 17:01 is more footage of him typing. he seems to use his thumb for the space bar in this clip, but he still has to look down at his keyboard and then up at his monitor a lot.


Anonymous at 4:03 PM on June 24, 2021 | #35 | reply | quote

from BoI chapter 13, Choices

> On the face of it, the issue seems no more than a technicality: in the US House of Representatives, how many seats should each state be allotted? This is known as the apportionment problem, because the US Constitution requires seats to be ‘apportioned among the several States . . . according to their respective Numbers [i.e. their populations]’.

I checked the version of the Constitution available on the National Archives website and this quote seemed fine


Justin Mallone at 4:16 PM on June 24, 2021 | #36 | reply | quote

From BoI chapter 13, Choices:

> Representative Roger Q. Mills of Texas complained in 1882, ‘I thought . . . that mathematics was a divine science. I thought that mathematics was the only science that spoke to inspiration and was infallible in its utterances [but] here is a new system of mathematics that demonstrates the truth to be false.’

The full quote, from the Congressional Record

(I wound up typing this out cuz the OCR was trash)

> I thought, Mr. Speaker, that mathematics was a divine science. I thought that mathematics was the only science that spoke by inspiration and was infallible in its utterances. I have been taught always that it demonstrated the truth. I have been told that there was nothing left for speculation in mathematics. I have been told that while in astronomy and philosophy and geometry and all other sciences there was something left for speculation, that mathematics, like the voice of Revelation, said when it spoke, "Thus saith the Lord."

> But here is a new system of mathematics that demonstrates the truth to be false.

The ellipsis seems okay.

DD changed "by inspiration" to "to inspiration".

DD skips a huge chunk of text without ellipsis and misleads the reader. Looking at his "[but]", which is placed in the middle of a sentence, uncapitalized, without an ellipsis on either side, I expected the thing changed to be something along the lines of "and yet, Mr. Speaker" - fluff that DD decided he wanted to shorten to a but. I did not expect there to be a big chunk of text, and then a new paragraph actually starting with a capitalized But.


Justin Mallone at 4:46 PM on June 24, 2021 | #37 | reply | quote

#37 The book "Fair Representation - Meeting the Ideal of One Man, One Vote" has the misquote of "to inspiration" though it provides the full quote I did. So if DD relied on that source, the "to inspiration" bit was understandable but the more serious issue with the misleading "[but]" was not.

Another quote in BOI appears in the Fair Representation book.

BoI chapter 13:

> In 1901 Representative John E. Littlefield, whose own seat in Maine was under threat from the Alabama paradox, said, ‘God help the State of Maine when mathematics reach for her and undertake to strike her down.’

The original source of is the Congressional Record

The quote is:

> God help the State of Maine when mathematics reach for her and undertake to strike her down in this manner in connection with her representation on this floor -- more cruel even than the chairman of this great committee.

I think BoI should have provided some indication that a sentence was being truncated. I thought the quote was of a full sentence.


Justin Mallone at 5:12 PM on June 24, 2021 | #38 | reply | quote

> So if DD relied on that source

If he wants to rely on secondary sources, he could at least cite which ones he used. When you don't give a source, what is anyone to do but check the primary source?


Anonymous at 6:11 PM on June 24, 2021 | #39 | reply | quote

BoI has:

188: .’

88: ’.

DD is not consistent about putting punctuation before or after quotes. FoR is also inconsistent about it.

This makes sentence truncations more confusing/ambiguous.


curi at 6:12 PM on June 24, 2021 | #40 | reply | quote

#34 None of the books contain the word "scum" so neither quote appears in those books.


oh my god it's turpentine at 12:30 AM on June 25, 2021 | #41 | reply | quote

I replied to Dec:

https://conjecturesandrefutations.com/2021/05/31/comments-about-steele-on-lying/#comment-21977

People/society are bad at lots of things, for lots of reasons. Quoting is on the list but unfortunately I think we’ve got plenty of bigger problems.

Anyone who wants to actually help should focus primarily on self-improvement and learning first. (In my experience, most people refuse to do that, which is one of the bigger problems. Things they do instead include posturing as high status or wise, attacking the outgroup, seeking the unearned, trying to socially fit in, hiding information that could be criticized.) They can pursue self-progress at my CF forum and they can go through my existing educational info. I’m reposting my best past stuff at https://criticalfallibilism.com currently and will be sharing new CF info after that. I’m also open to debate at my forum, but I’ve found that serious debate is pretty much unavailable, which is another one of the bigger problems.


curi at 10:34 AM on June 25, 2021 | #42 | reply | quote

Both bloggers who I emailed about misquotes have not replied so far. I think most people just kinda don't care.

I remember when Harry Binswanger cited a Popper quote to *the wrong book* and did not care about his error. He's not just a professional intellectual and author. He is the person who compiled tons of Ayn Rand quotes for the lexicon. Which, come to think of it, I've shared without double checking the original, though generally in ways where the details don't matter (I just want to link someone to an Oist explanation of an issue).

http://aynrandlexicon.com

It does say that the book was begun under Rand's supervision at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002OSXD9G/

I know that the Robert Mayhew material on Rand is really bad scholarship. He biased it on purpose, did sanitizing, etc. E.g. don't trust https://www.amazon.com/Ayn-Rand-Answers-Best-Her-ebook/dp/B002OSXD78/

I'm not aware of errors in the lexicon though. And I've read some stuff in it recently without setting off my suspicious quote detection. Whereas when I started rereading BoI or saw that old TCS FAQ page about Popper, those *did* set off my suspicious quote detection.

The Ayn Rand Lexicon ought to get some review of its quoting. It's a lot of work though and I have other things to do and I just spent a ton of time researching DD quotes. Maybe later.


curi at 10:44 AM on June 25, 2021 | #43 | reply | quote

Justin, Alan and others, if you want to fact check some Ayn Rand Lexicon quotes and blog your results, I'd be interested.


curi at 10:48 AM on June 25, 2021 | #44 | reply | quote

The misquotes issue in general is so screwed up. How can people engage in substantive discussion and debate when they can’t even quote each other? How can they do Paths Forward, and take responsibility for other people’s writing, when they can’t remember what it said or quote it accurately? Being able to reliably quote correctly is kind of a prerequisite to a lot of discussion and intellectual progress stuff. And it doesn’t seem very hard. You don’t need to do creative philosophical thinking, or come up with something good to say, in order to make your quote exactly make the original.

Why are people so bad about quoting? I think it’s partly because people have voice-first attitudes to communication, ideas and thinking. They are more comfortable talking than writing. They prefer listening to reading. That’s foreign to me but I’m the weird minority for that issue. The point is, speech is less exact than text and people are bad at dealing with a different format and being more precise. They reuse lots of habits and policies from speech.

People also have bad attitudes to details and precision, are bad at integrity, are lazy, and are bad at doing much of anything with really high reliability. Those contribute to misquotes.

And people care way more about attacking the other tribe than fact checking their own tribe. They think only an enemy would fact check their quotes.

People generally form opinions and reach conclusions first, and then look for facts, data, cites and quotes to back up their claims. People often write books or articles first, then tack on citations later. That’s a very different process than researching an issue first, then figuring out your conclusion based on the information you find. When citations are superficially tacked on because you’re expected to have them, the quality suffers, and sometimes doing cites is outsourced to assistants whose reputation isn’t on the line and who don’t care much. And the main author’s reputation isn’t on the line very effectively either because the world doesn’t care much. We have enough trouble policing intentionally forged data and publishing “scientific” results that can’t be replicated.


curi at 12:41 PM on June 25, 2021 | #45 | reply | quote

#46

Reisman says:

> We cannot know if Ayn Rand was addressing a complexity in her position that was too subtle for Prof. Mayhew to follow and that he mistakenly inferred a contradiction of her published position when in fact there was none.

Yeah. This is a serious and plausible risk.

I wish they'd just release the raw stuff instead of trying to clean it up. Let people judge her statements and context for themselves rather than trying to sanitize and "correct" things in a way that produces bad and unscholarly material.

Maybe they are worried that people will take stuff out of context to do smear jobs. But they already do that anyways and will continue to do so.


Anonymous at 4:26 PM on June 26, 2021 | #47 | reply | quote

The author of https://nabeelqu.co/post-popper replied to my email and changed the quote to a correct one. I don't see any mention of the edit on the page, though. Also, I mentioned the possibility of discussing the substance of his article at the CF forum but he didn't express interest. That doesn't surprise me but still strikes me as kind of odd – why would you write an article like that but not be interested in discussing it? (He can't be getting very much good discussion of CR/BoI stuff elsewhere, because that doesn't exist.)

The other blgoger I emailed about a misquote still hasn't replied.


curi at 11:25 AM on June 27, 2021 | #48 | reply | quote

Sarah may have taken down her website in response to this post? Or perhaps it was more about this previous post: https://curi.us/2444-sarah-fitz-claridge-lied-about-me Or maybe they're just too incompetent to run websites?

https://www.fitz-claridge.com

All it says now is:

> Error establishing a database connection

Good thing curi made an archive.is link for Sarah's quotes page instead of relying on her website staying up.

OK I checked and Lulie's sites are also down. Maybe it's just their inability to run basic websites? These are down:

https://lulie.org

https://www.lulie.co.uk

http://www.reasonisfun.com

Also down:

https://www.takingchildrenseriously.com

These time out and load nothing, rather than reporting a database error.


Anonymous at 2:25 PM on July 1, 2021 | #49 | reply | quote

#49 https://www.thebeginningofinfinity.com is also down

Looks like incompetence.

http://www.daviddeutsch.org.uk is still up


Anonymous at 2:47 PM on July 1, 2021 | #50 | reply | quote

#50 It's the first of the month. Did they just not pay the web host..? And Sarah, Lulie, TCS and BoI are all on the same hosting account (or even same individual server?), which helps show how connected they are?

Sarah's secret naughty site is also down.


Anonymous at 2:53 PM on July 1, 2021 | #51 | reply | quote

The sites are back up, but the Godwin quote on Sarah's quotation page is gone.

Search "slave" on https://www.fitz-claridge.com/quotations/ and https://archive.is/rIcM3 to compare.

That shows that they read this blog and are aware of the case against them!


Anonymous at 3:52 PM on July 1, 2021 | #52 | reply | quote

#52 The quote Sarah took down is:

> “The condition of a … slave in the West-Indies, is in many respects preferable to that of the youthful son of a free-born European. The slave is purchased upon a view of mercantile speculation; and, when he has finished his daily portion of labour, his master concerns himself no further about him. But the watchful care of the parent is endless. The youth is never free from the danger of grating interference.”

>

> William Godwin, 1797, 1823, The Enquirer, Part I: Essay VIII: Of the happiness of youth, p. 60

It's discussed in https://curi.us/2455-david-deutsch-and-sarah-fitz-claridge-publish-misquotes#10

That proves they read not just the blog posts here but the comments too.


Anonymous at 3:54 PM on July 1, 2021 | #53 | reply | quote

Want to discuss this? Join my forum.

(Due to multi-year, sustained harassment from David Deutsch and his fans, commenting here requires an account. Accounts are not publicly available. Discussion info.)