Criticism of Jordan Peterson thread v3

[Supereem]

PragerU is a propaganda video producer funded by fracking money to spoonfeed conservative talking points to the masses.

They generally repeat a similar model where actual truths are blended into misinterpretations, tortured cherry picked data that doesn't support their argument when looking at the larger data set, and outright lies. Then they hit you with a conclusion supported by an argument with some true but multiple false premises which is therefore a bogus conclusion.

This is fairly standard for propaganda. It is more believable to a greater number of people if it has some truth, especially if the average person has trouble distinguishing the truth from the lies.


If Joeseph Goebbels were alive today you can bet your money that he'd be making internet videos the same way.

Post some examples

 

[Higus]

Have you read his books?

Do you need to taste cat shit before you decide if its something you want to consume?
I've seen/read him in interviews. I doubt I'd spend time reading an entire book of his, let alone buy one.

 

[Supereem]

To be clear, I think he's smarter than average and has been successful finding and exploiting a niche market, but he's not anywhere near a genius. Making a SJW look foolish is the intellectual challenge equivalent of clubbing a baby seal. That he's considered an intellectual by so many people is a sad comment on the times.

How are you defining genius here?

 

[Bamboozled]

Did you have real arguments that had merit?

Because I've literally had a room mate openly interject in a Poetry class that was starting a month long unit on Dickinson "Emily Dickinson sucks, can't we focus on a better poet?"

The evil liberal professor was overjoyed that a student was talking in an otherwise morgue like 8 am poetry class.

"How so?"


"She's winy and self centered, I find her prose drab, but most of all I find that nothing we've read from inspires any greater understanding of life. Her art fails to motivate any emotion beyond the desire to close the book on her boring works."

"Well, those are legitimate grievances but what poet from the same time period would you prefer to focus on?"

"Tennyson. See, The Higher Pantheism"


"Tennyson is actually my favorite poet" replies the professor.




I don't know where you went to school but I've never seen a professor deny people speech unless it was out of format (ie 45 min lecture followed by 15 minute Q and A when that one student just keeps interupting the lecture section and can't wait for Q&A).

Every professor I've ever had in college practically danced a jig when a student challenged them academically. It was like the highlight of their week.


If you had one social sciences professor who had no interest in the science aspect, well there's a lot of imperfect people in the world.




Also, your above comment is literally written in the form of "that's your unreliable anecdote, I'm not going to post objective data so here is my anecdote without data points".

So here, have another anecdote.

Every professor I had in four years of undergrad and four years of graduate school LOVED students critically challenging the course material with scientific arguments.

I certainly felt that they were worth while. Like I said, I wish I had kept my written work down to show. I don't really know what else you're expecting. I will say the most memorable instance in class was when we were talking about prison statistics and how there is somehow a systemic issue. Despite the fact I could bring up arrest and call statistics to crime that correlated to the existing prison data.

There were some teachers who did enjoy questioning. One I had an early anthropology class. Mainly dealing with some of the assumptions we made with evolution. I wasn't even denying it, but he seemed to enjoy that I read the work well enough to understand its shortcomings.

 

[jimmas99]

 

[Takes_Two_To_Tango]

Do you need to taste cat shit before you decide if its something you want to consume?
I've seen/read him in interviews. I doubt I'd spend time reading an entire book of his, let alone buy one.

Who do you find are intellectuals?

 

[Phisher]

...and he's doubling down on the climate denial. Apparently, The Economist is engaging in "political correctness" by writing an article about wildfires with scientific sources.





The responses to this tweet are hilarious.

 

[franklinstower]

...and he's doubling down on the climate denial. Apparently, The Economist is engaging in "political correctness" by writing an article about wildfires with scientific sources.





The responses to this tweet are hilarious.

This is the thing I find most interesting about how we speak of reason and logic as as a society. We speak of it like it is a very reliable way to go about thinking about the world. It is.

However the glaring problem with it is that logic and reason are seldom what we use to actually come to conclusions.... Peterson can think and have the opinions he does. I do not begrudge him those. But since I happen to know a lot about Christianity in particular it is really easy to see how his opinion on many political issues and social issues drives how he goes about perceiving Christianity.

So even though he is above average in the IQ department I dont think he is likely to be right about issues as often as someone who is less intelligent but more honest with themselves about bias and or who is less invested in certain perspectives.

I find all of this very facinating.

 

[M3t4tr0n]

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

Did you have real arguments that had merit?

Because I've literally had a room mate openly interject in a Poetry class that was starting a month long unit on Dickinson "Emily Dickinson sucks, can't we focus on a better poet?"

The evil liberal professor was overjoyed that a student was talking in an otherwise morgue like 8 am poetry class.

"How so?"


"She's winy and self centered, I find her prose drab, but most of all I find that nothing we've read from inspires any greater understanding of life. Her art fails to motivate any emotion beyond the desire to close the book on her boring works."

"Well, those are legitimate grievances but what poet from the same time period would you prefer to focus on?"

"Tennyson. See, The Higher Pantheism"


"Tennyson is actually my favorite poet" replies the professor.




I don't know where you went to school but I've never seen a professor deny people speech unless it was out of format (ie 45 min lecture followed by 15 minute Q and A when that one student just keeps interupting the lecture section and can't wait for Q&A).

Every professor I've ever had in college practically danced a jig when a student challenged them academically. It was like the highlight of their week.


If you had one social sciences professor who had no interest in the science aspect, well there's a lot of imperfect people in the world.




Also, your above comment is literally written in the form of "that's your unreliable anecdote, I'm not going to post objective data so here is my anecdote without data points".

So here, have another anecdote.

Every professor I had in four years of undergrad and four years of graduate school LOVED students critically challenging the course material with scientific arguments.

I can comment a little bit on this. I dated a grad student in English for 5 years and took part in some of her academic activities, participated in her friend circle, etc. all in the same city where Lindsay Shepherd is having her issues.

I would say overall my experience was very similar to yours, however there's reason to believe that this state of affairs was set to change.

The key point has to do with the behaviour of the graduate students in different contexts. In my own undergraduate English courses, passionate disagreement was absolutely encouraged. In general professors and TAs at that level appreciate students who are actively engaged, BUT these students are not commonly at a level where their analysis of a text is informed enough to be truly compelling, so a true dissenting opinion from a lit crit perspective is just not going to happen. Now there are always a few cases where the breakthrough to the foundational assumptions does happen, but the TA is motivated to move past it quickly because (1) she can't spend the whole class in discussion with a single student, (2) she can't be questioning herself while simultaneously maintaining authority over the classroom, and (3) chances are the "dissenting" position of the current intellectual environment is not interesting to her anyway. To the dissenting student, it's understandable that this behaviour could seem like a cowardly dodge, though there are multiple converging reasons for it. In a lot of cases the little freedom-fighter is just an overconfident moron anyway.

Now switch to the graduate level class (I only attended a few of these, though I heard second-hand about almost all of them, so my perspective is limited). This particular program was very clique-y and very competitive. I imagine this is fairly generalizable since gainful Arts professorships are few and far between and grad programs tend to include a lot of quirky, high-intellect people who prefer to stick tightly together in small numbers. In this setting a student's criticism is expected to be fairly informed, and the easiest way to project an image of "informed" under extreme pressure is to take the instructor's (well-developed) position and add a bit of your own individuality to it and run with it. Developing a new position from scratch is much more work and contradiction with others puts you in a dangerous social position. Now you might counter that different students would take on the arguments of different professors, which would result in some diversity, but this wasn't the experience I observed. The old-guard (symbolized in this case, coincidentally, by the Tennyson prof) was old and on its way out. Students of the new ideology put up with him to get their grades and moved the hell on. Anyone heard defending his positions elsewhere was teased and dismissed. I myself saw a few (white, male) students leave the program partly because they were no longer inspired by the direction their work was being pushed in and partly because the social consequences of resisting that direction made an already miserable experience even worse.

The TLR is that Arts education can be great and receptive to truly diverse discussion, but in my experience graduate programs tend toward ideological bubbles by design and cannot be trusted to produce truthful or even broadly useful output. I think Peterson over-states his case when he projects to full-blown Marxism but I agree that I wouldn't want my own children to waste time and money or risk losing faith in their intellect in such an environment.

 

[M3t4tr0n]

Hello buckos

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

This thread is second only to the Meme Thread in terms of consistent stupidity.

Oh god, please no one tell Cint about Jordan Peterson.

Can you imagine Peterson with the Confederate flag tattoo'd on his butt?

With Cint on the case, you might not have to.

 

[emax]

For the record, I was also disappointed that he was entertaining climate skepticism the way he has and sharing work by Lomborg, Lindzgren and others. Some of their work may be valid but I think he may have largely been looking to stir up hornet's nests or couldn't fight the temptation to trigger Marxists resentful of innovation or something. I went through a brief period of thinking he's am intellectual superhero but I'm past that and while I still consider his 12 Rules For Life type of work to be, well, life changing, including on a deeply personal level, I certainly don't see him as infallible outside his most powerful areas.
And I found it kind of crazy that he'd look to invite more trouble with the climate stuff on top of the trouble he's already gotten in. It may be that his skepticism comes from the vehement anti human progress and anti capitalism/anti industriousness of certain climate activists but I hope he can elaborate on it exactly. Placing human public thinkers and intellectuals, even those doing truly great and life saving work, on too high a pedestal can be destructive because all heroes can let us down on occasion.

...and he's doubling down on the climate denial. Apparently, The Economist is engaging in "political correctness" by writing an article about wildfires with scientific sources.





The responses to this tweet are hilarious.

Having said all of that, this is absolutely pitiful. That twitter account is one of the most pathetic things I've ever seen in my life. That account is among many that spends its days picking out select clips, sometimes only 30 seconds or so, or paragraphs or other small snippets of Dr Peterson and cerain colleagues, with Sam Harris being another notable example, and distorts them to make a case they have no scholarly abilities. These accounts think mythical white male status is the sole reason Dr Peterson came from workign class Alberta to tenured prof at a Duke/Michigan level place. The Intellectual We Deserve author seems to feel that way about Dr Peterson as well as Sam Harris and even figures such as Stephen Pinker. Pathetic all around.

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

Also, just so people know that Peterson's position on Christianity and the Bible isn't completely crazy (in particular the archetypal style of analysis), I'd like to refer to Northrop Frye.

Frye is one of the most well-respected literary critics ever to come out of Canada, and he did a lot of writing about the Bible's relationship to the understanding of literature in the West. I can't say where exactly he agrees and disagrees with Peterson, but he definitely saw something transcendent (from a literary perspective, not a religious one) about this text.

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature

It may be nonsense from a strictly scientific or positivistic perspective, but Peterson goes all over the map methodologically so that shouldn't be a surprise.

 

[emax]

Also, just so people know that Peterson's position on Christianity and the Bible isn't completely crazy (in particular the archetypal style of analysis), I'd like to refer to Northrop Frye.

Frye is one of the most well-respected literary critics ever to come out of Canada, and he did a lot of writing about the Bible's relationship to the understanding of literature in the West. I can't say where exactly he agrees and disagrees with Peterson, but he definitely saw something transcendent (from a literary perspective, not a religious one) about this text.

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature

It may be nonsense from a strictly scientific or positivistic perspective, but Peterson goes all over the map methodologically so that shouldn't be a surprise.

Thank you for your contributions to this thread. To be honest, I actually have some sympathies and solidarity with the concept of free college as advocated for by @franklinstower and others. But I think that for it to genuinely work, college would have to be a place to shape intellectuals, not serve the whims of indulgent administrators or be designed to serve students and faculty and make them feel good. It would need to be a place where all sorts of sociopolitical, theological and scientific ideas get dissected and shredded freely and rigorously (and you would probably need to have a lot fewer kids involved since we really do have too many people in college who simply have no business being there). It may be that Dr Peterson is blowing it out of proportion but the lack of genuine intellectual curiosity and rigor going on is a severe problem that could cause severe backlash of colleges were to be supported more.

 

[esdoornblad]

This is the thing I find most interesting about how we speak of reason and logic as as a society. We speak of it like it is a very reliable way to go about thinking about the world. It is.

However the glaring problem with it is that logic and reason are seldom what we use to actually come to conclusions.... Peterson can think and have the opinions he does. I do not begrudge him those. But since I happen to know a lot about Christianity in particular it is really easy to see how his opinion on many political issues and social issues drives how he goes about perceiving Christianity.

So even though he is above average in the IQ department I dont think he is likely to be right about issues as often as someone who is less intelligent but more honest with themselves about bias and or who is less invested in certain perspectives.

I find all of this very facinating.

We appear to have quite similar perspectives on the Jordan Peterson question, which may seem surprising since (if I recall correctly) you are a theist and I am an atheist. Unrelated to that, I wanted to make a point about logic, reason and correctness. What you say about logic/reason seldom being used to come to conclusions is an accurate observation. It's a realization that, for some, becomes more clear with age. Over time we see how common it is for a person to be very "correct" on some topics and completely off the rails on others. For those of us who are older, the realization that we too were once passionate yet mistaken about certain things is a useful reminder about how everyone is susceptible to cherry-picking and confirmation bias. In my opinion JP has an excellent core message, yet still says things about economics and religion that are pretty silly.

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

Thank you for your contributions to this thread. To be honest, I actually have some sympathies and solidarity with the concept of free college as advocated for by @franklinstower and others. But I think that for it to genuinely work, college would have to be a place to shape intellectuals, not serve the whims of indulgent administrators or be designed to serve students and faculty and make them feel good. It would need to be a place where all sorts of sociopolitical, theological and scientific ideas get dissected and shredded freely and rigorously (and you would probably need to have a lot fewer kids involved since we really do have too many people in college who simply have no business being there). It may be that Dr Peterson is blowing it out of proportion but the lack of genuine intellectual curiosity and rigor going on is a severe problem that could cause severe backlash of colleges were to be supported more.

Yea, I mean part of it is just the nature of the discipline itself. If your institution is dedicated to producing analyses that aren't obligated to converge on a single truth or develop practical applications, then the intellectual positions of your members will essentially be reduced to passing fads. That doesn't mean I think the different schools of literary criticism are meaningless or worthless, just that I don't expect them to compete with each other on any basis other than popularity (this is true even in some science departments: Max Planck has a famous quote about how a scientific theory triumphs not when everyone becomes convinced but rather when its opponents die out).

I'm not sure how you solve that problem structurally. I think Jonathan Haidt has done some work on ideological diversity on college campuses but I don't know off-hand what his recommendations are.

 

[Higus]

How are you defining genius here?

I'm going to give you an unsatisfying answer: I don't have a clear criteria that separates smart people from geniuses, but I can only say that the line does exist and that Peterson is below it.

 

[Bamboozled]

I'm confused on whys skepticism is being vilified. That's why we have advances in the sciences.

 

[helltoupee]

That is because you are an inherently dishonest person. I support national healthcare but it is clearly an equality of outcome structure. This statement displays in quite a direct way that you aren't just dishonest but are actively aware of your own dishonesty but continue to be dishonest because you feel it serves your purpose. Congratulations, you are everything everyone hates about the postmodernists.

National healthcare does not preclude that those with the means to do so, could not pay for better care.

National Healthcare is an entry point for everyone *to have access* to a base level of healthcare, ie., equal opportunity. It does not erect a ceiling to healthcare, which would be equal outcome.