Don't really have an opinion on the guy myself, only saw a few short videos on subjects I don't even recall, but gotta say he is good at getting attention from all sides it seems.
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
Jordan Peterson - The "Intellectual" We Deserve
- Thread starter Deleted member 25709
- Start date
- Status
Inflammatory egotistical arseholes are like that - see trump
Yeah that's fair enough and definitely something they should clear up. Glad you came around on it though!
This Jordan peterson craze won't last until the end of the year, he seems unhinged as fuck. I genuinely don't think he's coping well with his popularity.
FTR, from what I've seen in practice, a "left libertarian" is someone who talks about how sad they are about social issues such as racism and sexism, but when pressed on how we should solve them, the answer is that they will solve themselves if we ignore them and women and minorities just tried harder. It's people who unironically suggest the free market fix for inequality. It's a political ideology for young men who want to feel progressive, but don't want to feel inconvenienced. "Sucks for you, but I got mine, so..."
So yeah, easy to see why those who identify themselves as such would follow Peterson. It's your number one source for self-proclaimed leftists who bitch and moan about SJWs.
So yeah, easy to see why those who identify themselves as such would follow Peterson. It's your number one source for self-proclaimed leftists who bitch and moan about SJWs.
It will be interesting to see. If he wasn't so relatively influential it might almost fascinating... it still kinda is.
Come the fuck on. How can anyone take this guy seriously.
Yup. Doug Lane, the publisher of Zero Books and a Marxist, booked him for an interview on his podcast. Peterson then went on Joe Rogan and claimed that Marxists just won't debate him. Afterwards, the interview with Doug was cancelled without explanation and he has been trying ever since to rebook but Peterson isn't interested. I guess he's too busy going on right wing shows where he knows he won't be questioned too hard. Especially over embarrassing things like his false claims to tribe membership.
Uh, that sounds like a regular libertarian.
Left libertarians, from my experience at least, are people who are what right-wingers typically think of democrats. Both socially and economically left-leaning.
Being left-anything doesn't really jive with small government philosophy though. At the end of the day, we still need legislation and protections for all sorts of social and economic progressivism. IMO being left-leaning and libertarian are diametrically opposed philosophies.
Can't remember if this has been posted Sam Seder talks with Nathan J Robinson about his article and hey do a very polite very thought discussion on Peterson, his rhetorical tricks, the need for academics to kinda take on Peterson, and a lot more. It's a lengthy discussion about 36 minutes but it's really good. It also tackles where Cathy Newman faltered in her interview (while also acknowledging how you almost have to say "so you're saying" to Peterson because of how cagey he is with his speech)
It's just an excellent deconstruction of Peterson. Touches on some of the things I've said in this thread and a lot of things I haven't
If it doesn't start at the time stamp go to 14:30
If you want something a lit bit more irreverent
This is also excellent, what Peter does here is actually highlights that to really discover just what Jordan Peterson is saying behind his flowery prose you have to almost connect different talks and find the ideological throughway. I think Peter does a pretty good job but it is definitely a much less serious presentation and kinda evokes a more youtubian character and snark (which is fun don't get me wrong but it's just maybe not what I would send to anyone who I am trying to lure away from Peterson). This really touches on Peterson's frankly retrograde views on women that he'll never outright say but the implications are clear to anyone paying attention and plausibly deniable to anyone who wants to intentionally obfuscate. There's a very telling line when Peterson is describing successful women, the first thing he says about them is not that they are smart, hard working, dedicated, et... but that they are often attractive, first thing out of the gate successful women are often attractive.
I still think it is pretty excellent and as someone who enjoys both deconstructing the man and laughing at his absurdity I enjoy the energetic tone.
Last edited:
Think for yourself instead of taking this weird reduction at face value.
Peterson uses the lobster as an example to illustrate how ancient dominance hierarchies are. He tells about how the lobster has a brain function that tracks status and releases serotonin accordingly and uses it as a gateway to his first self-help rule: stand up straight with your shoulders back.
It's utterly harmless stuff.
It's kinda amusing that no matter how much context you give, including the full one and complete excerpts of his own words, JP defenders will still accuse you of taking him out of context. I could copy paste one of his books in its entirety here and they would still do that.
That you think it's only about suggesting you stand up straight is kinda funny because"
The lobster thing is entirely part of his argument that hierarchies are natural (and not social), it's another one of his biological determinism, evo psych explanation for the status quo, ie it's not society that elevates certain groups above other it's natural.
That's not harmless, it's frankly insidious. It completely fits into Peterson's over arching advice that no one should try and change society (because it's changing hierarchies that are ordained by nature), it's part and parcel with his hyper individualistic belief structure.
The great advice from JBP:
"Stand up straight with your shoulders back and resist the postmodern neomarxists who will destroy Western Civilization"
"Stand up straight with your shoulders back and resist the postmodern neomarxists who will destroy Western Civilization"
Because he's picking something that suits his biological determinism, the state of the world, and the state of power is natural. It's reverse argumentation.... He came up the answer and found the thing that "proved it"
The lobster is literally his counter-argument to people talking about white privilege and patriarchy and what not. Which is just another feather in the cap of JP is very very very funny until you remember he's taken seriously.
We are thinking for ourselves, hence many people's rejection of his work/platitudes. However, he provides such a thick level of bullshitery that it requires experts of many fields spending time debunking him as he fails to answer anything directly and succinctly
It's like one step away from The Bell Curve. Hierarchies exist between individuals, but how does that explain the inequality between social groups? It literally doesn't. Even if it did, why shouldn't we try to achieve social justice? It's a bunch of bullshit meant to maintain structural inequalities and give the dominant groups a reason not to do shit and to admonish anyone who does.
Hierarchies have been proven to be evolutionarily success for many species to thrive and so the concept shouldn't be dismissed out of hand due to unjust inequalities that attempt to justify themselves through a hierarchy system. You can make the case for evolving towards a hierarchy that's free of unjust inequalities (i.e. merit based, free of systemic discrimination/bias, equal opportunity, but still maintaining power structures of leadership).
However I agree that Peterson seems to be using this concept primarily to praise naturalistic gender roles, and seems to think that those naturalistic roles are beneficial to the general psychology (and thus, life) of that particular gender.... which is dumb. We have no reason to think naturalistic psychological traits produce a satisfactory outcome in today's far-removed-from-natural-evolution society, nor do we know the extent to which social norms are propping up/exaggerating those traits making it unclear if they're independently beneficial/equitable. These traits don't play the same beneficial roles they used to back when humanity was mostly tribal, and in many cases end up conflicting with the attempt at equality within a clearly biased capitalistic system. He even admits as much when he says he counsels women on how to be "more aggressive" to get raises, because their naturalistic traits apparently aren't beneficial toward making money, which is clearly an inequality problem.
So he admits naturalistic traits fail for women in capitalistic markets, but says they should rely on them anyway for peace of mind. Makes very little sense.
Oh I don't think hierarchies are all unnatural, I was just rejecting his lobster argument for the exact reason you are, his usage of it to argue that our societal status quo on gender hierarchies and roles are natural and thus right.
The mechanisms for lobster social interactions are not evolutionarily conserved beyond the release of serotonin... Where the social function is certainly not conserved (Because serotonin responses in lobsters and humans evolved independently, which should be obvious when you consider the enormously different behavioral responses different animals have to serotonin).
That's why using an animal with a common ancestor from the Cambrian is not a good model for human behavior. Basic biological mechanisms are conserved with little change, but large-scale responses to those mechanisms, especially behavior, are extremely plastic. That's because complex organisms have had to adapt the basic machinery to an enormous variety of different niches, and that means changing anything not required for basic survival.
If you're using a model to illustrate that dominance hierarchies in nature... Well, we know they exist. So do eusociality, cannibalism, etc. That doesn't actually tell us about the evolution of human behavior, because humans evolved with completely different life cycles, habitats, basic anatomy, and several hundred million years of genetics from lobsters.
On a side note: Dominance hierarchies are not called "biological hierarchies", because "biological hierarchy" is generally used to refer to the hierarchy of biological structures in order of complexity.
Last edited:
He's not saying it's right, he's saying it probes that hierarchies of competence are ancient and not socially constructed human inventions.
Later on in the book he even describes the natural fallacy, so "natural = good" is not Petersons worldview.
Well, Peterson claims that the status tracking/serotonin is true for humans too at least. I don't know if he is correct on that one, but it would be really easy for his opponents to tear him down on that if it was not so..
I'm open to being wrong though.
Except it's abundantly clear he does think the old age status quo of men and women is good.
Again you have to take this lobster thing within the greater context of the totality of his arguments and implications.
It's not harmless. He's conflating the "is" for an "ought". He is teaching morons to cherry pick "bio facts" that support their preconceptions of their place in the world. Picking lobsters is arbitrary. As that biologist was quoted saying a few pages back, "we are just as closely related to eusocial insects as we are lobsters".
I see it more in the overal context of: not everything can be answered by social constructivism. Don't deny nature.
Yes, he does think the status quo is good. But the way I see it: that's pragmatic.
He's been tweeting a lot about Humanprogress.org with it's statistics on how the current system of Capitalism has been mostly a force for good in reducing for example, poverty. He's in the camp of Steven Pinker.
Petersons argument on that front is: we are doing the best we have ever done. Radical change to that must be viewes with utmost skepticism. He's an anti-Utopian thinker.
So his views on traditional roles for men and women boil down to: women must be able to choose a career if they desire so, but it's also fine if they desire to be a mother first. Currently, society seems to shifted too much to the former as desirable.
Why not pick anglerfish? The male is tiny and parasitic and becomes a vestigial organ of the female in a form of sexual symbiosis. He is led to the female by sense of smell and biological imperative no doubt influenced by seratonin receptors. So why isn't this a good model for human bahavior? BECAUSE ANGLER FISH AND LOBSTERS ARENT HUMANS.
Dude's a bargain-bin William F. Buckley, right down to the imitatable accent. The only difference is 1) Buckley wore his vileness and retrograde views on his sleeves instead of trying to slyly obfuscate them, and 2) for all his flaws, he was an actual intellectual, who had no problem debating people he knew he might lose to.
Those are at least often quoted from actual intellectuals, though.
He's someone who thinks the 60s and 70s protests were bad he outright has contempt for the CRM, the anti-war protests, the women's rights protests
He actively wants regression.
He's not pragmatic, don't give me that nonsense. He just doesn't need society to change for him to have a good life so he couldn't give two shits about those who society holds down
He calls every change radical change, he literally promotes not changing, that's what clean your room means, fix yourself before you try and fix society and since you can never be finished fixing yourself don't touch society. It's the most unbelievably privileged position to take.
Last edited:
From just some light reading, more serotonin in lobsters makes them more aggressive, but it's not true for humans. Less serotonin can make humans more moody. And he talks about apes later on in the chapter? For a supposed intellectual, picking a crustacean that is very far removed from human evolution as his go-to example is not very smart.
No, later on in the book with a different topic. The lobster is basically picked to get inspiration from (victorious lobsters walk straight, losers slouch). And he points out a few simillarities between the human and lobster brain. At no point does he say: therefore lobsterbrain = human brain or that kind of shit.
But I think this is becoming a bit fruitless. I like discussion about Petersons views and I think we can continue to do so because I admit I have been a bit too charmed by this man's passion.
But I would like to ask everyone contributing to stick to literal Peterson quotes and stuff, not "this is what he's actually saying" presented as an actual quote or accurate summary.
What?
So we can't put his quotes into the greater context of what he has said and written in the past because it makes him look like how he actually is?
We can't talk about how when he says "women have a 50% great chance of success" that it obviously has greater implications to what message he is trying to bring forward? How he constantly attacks women on topics while trying to bring forward "self help" for young men?
For real, give me a break.
well did he ever say if he agrees dads should have that option too?
I think you are misreading. Or maybe I am misreading, but some of the things posted here look like interpretations presented as actual Peterson quotes or really barebones, heavily biased and bastardized 2 sentence summaries that almost read like driveby posts. I don't think that's beneficial for discussion.
The first view isn't controversial at all unless you believe there's some broad conspiracy of radical feminists ostracizing women for having children.
I don't know how Peterson hopes to address falling birthrates in the West as he seems to oppose (nonwhite) immigration and, I assume, would also oppose public policies aimed at helping women who choose to have kids. If his position is that he can convince women back into assuming strict gender roles, then he doesn't seem to be having much success considering the makeup of his audience.
This is not accurate. Libertarian left generally is for policy action it's just about the degree of action. Also it is not an entirely "either or" dichotomy. Being very authoritarian left has netted some very ugly results historically.
Liberty versus authority. How much are you willing to control how people behave in your society? Do you "crack a few eggs" for the "greater good".That's really the question. Some people say a little bit. Some say we have to manage almost every aspect and facet of the society's lives to create equality.
I think smart targeted policies can help lift people out of poverty and oppression without intentionally bringing the general populous down and lowering everyone's quality of life.
Exactly. Where are all these radical feminists who are attacking moms and stay-at-home wives? Oh right, they don't exist.
I think it's interesting that Peterson bemoans the erosion of "traditional" gender roles (although I'd dispute those assumptions) and the decline of the nuclear family with a sole breadwinner and a primary caregiver. He has to somehow criticize and vilify these trends while carefully tip-toeing around the actual reasons young mothers (or fathers) can't afford to stay home.
Because he venerates capitalism and the status quo, he can't actually identify the issues here. Instead of grappling with the real financial necessity of a dual income household in the modern economy, he has to blame fictional feminists for shaming young mothers into the workplace against their better judgement. Instead of dealing with the fact that wages have stagnated for the past decade while costs have risen dramatically, he has to make vague suggestions about cultural Marxists corrupting the core of society. He can't critique a ballooning student debt load and housing price bubble because the market is never wrong, so there must be some other reason the quality of life for young adults is on the down slope.
In his worldview, capitalism can't be wrong, and systemic injustices don't exist, so the "breakdown" of the traditional family has to be laid at the feet of shadowy conspiracies and an insidious "other" that is subverting the natural order. It's such an obviously pained and distorted viewpoint that I don't know how anyone can take him seriously.
The status quo is not pragmatic, but it can be good for certain things. In regards to social justice, the status quo is bad. There are clear inequalities between groups that must be solved. Ignoring the problems will not make them go away. They will exacerbate. And while you're focused on your inward journey, you're not seeing everything else crumble around you.
Is the former bad? Who is saying that it's not fine for a woman to be a mother first?
Who the fuck looks to the lobster for inspiration? Do you know how odd that sounds? It's an invertebrate with more limbs than we have. It's far better to compare us to something more analogous like apes. Lobsters don't have shoulders. They live in water and don't always walk. They don't have spines to slouch with.
What similarities did he mention?
Yeah but why lobsters are valid and not bonobos?
Why not use parasites, they're very good at reproducing and bend an organism to their will after all.
He cherry picked lobsters because it supported his point. Simple, just like morons point at wolves as examples of ALPHA vs BETA male hierarchies. They pick something irrelevant and try and shoehorn it in as proof of something they started with. Peterson didn't study lobster brains for a decade and come to this conclusion. He went looking for material that 15 yr olds would fall for.
- Status