I'm sad that some enthusiastic well meaning lefties often associate Peterson with the extreme right. If anything, this man is radically centrist. It's just that he debunks extreme right wing arguments in 5 sentences instead of the 2 hour long talks he uses to address what he calls neo-marxism.
I think people like him might very well help keep disgruntled young men away from the extreme right, by offering a moderate alternative.
We should celebrate that long, balanced arguments get so much mainstream attention, even if we don't agree with them.
> I think people like him might very well help keep disgruntled young men away from the extreme right, by offering a more moderate alternative.
That's probably exactly right. People gather around ideologies that have advocates. They don't look at two extremes and say, "hm, they each have valid points, maybe I'm somewhere between these two", they say, "hm, this one thing side X says is something I really like so they must think most like me. Even though I don't particularly agree with a lot of the rest of what they say, and even if I disagree with side Y less overall, I belong in tribe X".
Moderation/centrism thus also needs advocates if we want a proper balance.
> I think people like him might very well help keep disgruntled young men away from the extreme right, by offering a moderate alternative.
I hope he does the same thing with people who are flirting with the extreme left. I hope many of them follow his advice and are smart enough to read and understand The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks.
We have serious problems in Western society, but the extreme "solutions" suggested by both of these parties will result in a complete and utter disaster for everyone. Even worse, we are even already seeing some of the effects of some of these "solutions" in action.
It’s when he refers to so-called “cultural marxism” taking over universities and political correctness being a huge problem that sets off warning bells for me.
Yeah, he's a celeb on the derp-right because he goes hard on postmodernism and third/fourth wave feminism. That doesn't mean he agrees with the derp-right or the PUA contingent that have latched onto him.
I think he gets postmodernism wrong and frankly, so do a lot of postmodernists. I see postmodernism as "Defense Against the Dark Arts". The postmodernist's tool kit -- the silly word games, denial of reality, and so forth -- are all borrowed from the right, and from capitalist society (in particular advertising and PR). And they play silly word games, talk in circles, and deny reality because they're preparing their students for a world in which the enemy have made that the norm for discourse. So when the postmodernist says "there is no reality" what they're really saying is the reality you know, and the rules for perceiving and inferring that reality, have been compromised. When Foucault says there's really no such thing as science, what he means is that science itself has been compromised, and you can't use science against the enemy because the enemy already controls it and will turn around and use it against you.
But I like Peterson's style -- bombastic without being antagonistic, and highly principled -- and about the psychology bits he has some really interesting things to say.
I think a lot of why people like him is he speaks so CLEARLY, whether you agree with him or not you thoroughly understand his position, and he usually has some thought-provoking reasons for everything he says or does.
I think people are starved for somebody who can be persuasive and calm, not relying on hyperbole or name-calling to make their points, and he shows everybody a way they can do that.
Have you ever listened to him for one hour? He never answers a direct question, it's always wordsalad(no wonder people don't understand him) , he has a few interesting concepts which he repeats constantly
His claim to fame is misunderstanding a discrimination law about transgenders. Which is all you need to know about him.
To me, it's a shame (and a sign of where media and culture are, right now) that the drama around pronouns and feminism are what people are jumping at with him. His teachings on the ideas of self identity, motivation, and the redefinition of religion as a system of archetypes and hierarchy are far more interesting and grounded in fact.
Maybe it's because he jump-started his popularity by picking on transgender kids, using the flimsiest possible pretext.
It shouldn't come as a surprise he has nothing of value to say about (identity) politics, because on that topic he doesn't have any expertise. He's just another guy with poorly conceived opinions. On the other hand he has been a clinical psychologist for 20 years and so (surprise!) he has accumulated some valuable insights along the way.
My first exposure to Peterson were through his YouTube talks on depression. It's a family disease in his case since he, his father and daughter all suffered from severe depression. His YouTube video with his daughter about how they were able to get help with medication was very interesting. I am very glad he seems to have recovered and has gone on to make an impact in other areas.
I personally love Noam Chomsky, but he’s not easy to watch speak (very motonous sounding) and his books are also mostly fact-laden. I think he’s toned down his heavy academic style a bit in his newer publications. Still his knowledge and wisdom are second to none IMO
This is somewhat offtopic, but Chomsky speaks that way to stop his detractors from talking about his style. If he's too loud, too animated, too flashy, people will focus on him as a person as opposed to his ideas. His solution is to be as bland as possible, in the hope this forces people to engage with the substance and nothing else.
I don't know how it happens but Peterson seems to always be engaged by the most logically challenged and intellectually dishonest individuals society has to offer. The recent channel 4 interview is the prime example of this. Now maybe it was all for show but the interviewer was utterly incapable of stringing even a few ideas together and at one point in the interview her mind visibly began to short circuit attempting to do so.
It would be fun to see a debate with someone very different than him but actually someone who has arguments and date to back it up not just blind ideology.
I knew of Peterson but never read his work nor heard him speak.
This interview could be an important piece for university level discussion. I think it summarizes problems among the media and intellectuals like Peterson.
And, wow, I just watched this and it is horrendously cringeworthy. Seems like the presenter was expecting someone soft in the head (like an MP/politician), and approached the interview in that modern British fashion, which didn't work out well at all. It's really awkward to see somebody be that badly intellectually outclassed, but then it was Channel 4...
On the other hand, coming back to OP, there's something encouraging about a critical thinker having "star appeal". I think that's the best way to describe Dr Peterson, as you don't have to agree with him, but it is easy to follow his lucid trains-of-thought, and he is at least consistent.
Watch: Cathy Newman’s catastrophic interview with Jordan Peterson
I don't really know who he is other than seeing his name popup on Youtube regularly however I do note that his supporters always use that sort of language, often watch X destroy Y in an interview.
There seem to be minorities at the extremes shouting past each other whilst the rest of us get on with our lives and wonder what all the fuss is about.
The main thing I picked up from the interview was the level of precision Peterson uses in thinking and discussing things - which I'd expect from a university professor. I might disagree with him on a few things, but I prefer to deal with such people.
The interviewer, however, was barely coherent and couldn't deal with that level of precision. And she kept bouncing all over the place. She was totally unprepared and kept flipping to tangents and not drilling down into one topic...
So to proclaim her as the typical embodiment of 'feminism' and use this as 'the perfect example' of why feminism (or whatever you want to project onto this) is fundamentally garbage... really only reveals your prejudices. At a surface level, the quality of the discussion or conversation was poor, so this video clip really is of low informational value.
I had a conservative friend who did this sort of thing - I'd try to get into the details of examining something (to try and get at the limits of a position or what caveats there are) and he'd do the same BS as the interviewer (though not as badly), oversimplifying things and deriving blanket principles from contrived examples. I guess that is the difference between philosophers and ideologues.
So I don't talk to him anymore - I got tired of the hassle and I'm tired of listening to how feminism is destroying society. It isn't. Society is morphing and change always upsets conservatives, because they are so fundamentally terrified of everything they can't control. Given how things are really going to go out of whack in the next few decades due to all the unstoppable changes coming, they are going to have to keep up or go extinct.
I can think of perhaps no better example than this interview of why I like Peterson.
He's criticized as "on the right" because he disagrees with feminism, neoliberalism, and marxism (it's more cultural marxism, which he calls neomarxism). That is a reactionary label, and it doesn't fit, which is precisely the problem with modern politics.
A decade, maybe 15 years ago, Peterson would've been right in the middle of the liberal camp. So would people like Dave Rubin. Today though, the modern left is falling in line with these feminist and marxist ideas even though they fundamentally contradict his long held liberal principles. People like me who aren't in some extreme position are described as malicious by these ideologies. I know it's nonsense because I can actually see what's in my head, and what they claim is true about me and about an entire class of people based on gender or race, is utterly false. The obvious response is "that's nonsense", but of course we're talking about people who are throwing labels of "racist" and "sexist" at anyone who dares disagree, so that's not a good enough response. We must be defensive, yet the irony of saying someone is bad because they're male or because they're white and then using those labels seems to be a little out of reach.
Watch this interview. Nearly every response she makes to him "so you're saying" is trying to ascribe some feminist or marxist ideal of how the world works to what he's said, and he simply repeats what he says. He goes to great lengths to explain his issues with these ideologies in various lectures, but you can see it here as a prime example, condensed into a comical and pathetic 30 minute interview. Everything wrong with today's left. It's not liberal anymore, she tried so hard to make him look like the bad guy, like he has bad evil wrong thoughts.
It's no wonder the situation regarding diversity at Google is so precarious, and this Damore lawsuit is just one of many to come if this mentality continues. I like Peterson because he opposes it and for good reason, not just in such as simplistic manner as ridicule and memes as you see from the right.
Having been raised in fundamentalist Christianity, Peterson always sets off preliminary warning bells for me:
The enemy is all around you.
Access to secret "true" knowledge.
The world is corrupt.
A plan that if you follow correctly will lead to good things.
An enemy that alternates between specific and generalistic states.
Everything has to be framed through a set of ideological points at all times, which are reiterated in the otherwise minorist points of life.
That is not to say that he definitively is something of that kith or kin to that, necessarily. Just that I see several public figures these days that come out of one branch of science, platforming their knowledge of one field to the world of knowledge at large, and espousing thinking --- right down to phraseology, at times --- I have heard too often from sources these same individuals would claim to violently disagree with. Taking on Peterson's own postulations related to the co-evolution of the biological and memetic aspects of humanity (which in general I would agree with): I think the push to a what would otherwise be called a 'religious sensibility' can be --- and often is --- clothed in scientific language.
A warning bell for me is that (in my experience) his fans almost uniformly recommend watching or listening to recordings of Peterson himself speaking. Not transcripts, not articles, not a canon of closely aligned materials by his grad students. The power to convey these truths evidently resides in Peterson and Peterson alone. That suggests to me something closer to a cult of personality than anything like a robust theory.
I'm biased, though, because I find his lectures really difficult to follow. At least in the ones I've watched, he exhibits an oddly rambling style of speech that seems optimized more for some kind of narrative rhythm than for clearly conveying semantic content. He's very good at making it feel like every word is important, but then when I go back and try to figure out the actual statement being made it's like whole sentences just sort of fold in on themselves until nothing is left.
I have similar background and negative experiences, but I don't get the alarm bells but rather makes me appreciate some things I was being reached when young and also sad that the my fundamentalists parents weren't more like him. I'm am atheist as it gets but the Bible studies by him are fascinating. I remember the Bible stories very well but never thought about them in that light.
> In 2016 he made a stand against the Canadian government’s introduction of a law that aimed to make it a crime not to address people by their preferred gender pronouns (regardless of chromosomes).
I'm pretty sure that's a gross misrepresentation of that law. From the little I know about it, I think it was more about adding "using the wrong pronoun" as a possible aggravating circumstance to consider when somebody is already being harassed:
> The bill adds prohibitions against discrimination on the basis of gender identity and gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act, amends the criminal code to extend protections against hate speech and allows judges to take into consideration when sentencing whether a crime was motivated by hatred of the victim’s gender identity or expression.
No, the widely accepted interpretation of that law is that, if I have a coworker who wants to be called xe/xem/xyr/xyrs/xemself, I have to comply or face punishment, since not be accommodating of this can be construed as harassment. Ideologues want to dismiss everyone who is against this law as transphobic, but this is demonstrably not true, one can be accepting of the human rights of trans people while simultaneously disagreeing with the extend of protections and privileges granted to them.
I think what most people ultimately take issue with, is that this law was evidently ideologically motivated and it felt like no logical arguments could ever be discussed.
His conflict started with the Ontario Human Rights Commission policy which clearly includes gender pronouns. That is often getting mixed up with when he also spoke out against C 16 later, with different arguments.
I think you are right that just in C 16 there is nothing about compelled speech. My understanding of his position is that it's part of a slippery slope, and the interpretation of discrimination or hate speech could easily extend to using the wrong gender pronouns.
[+] [-] skrebbel|8 years ago|reply
I think people like him might very well help keep disgruntled young men away from the extreme right, by offering a moderate alternative.
We should celebrate that long, balanced arguments get so much mainstream attention, even if we don't agree with them.
[+] [-] naasking|8 years ago|reply
That's probably exactly right. People gather around ideologies that have advocates. They don't look at two extremes and say, "hm, they each have valid points, maybe I'm somewhere between these two", they say, "hm, this one thing side X says is something I really like so they must think most like me. Even though I don't particularly agree with a lot of the rest of what they say, and even if I disagree with side Y less overall, I belong in tribe X".
Moderation/centrism thus also needs advocates if we want a proper balance.
[+] [-] mindcrash|8 years ago|reply
I hope he does the same thing with people who are flirting with the extreme left. I hope many of them follow his advice and are smart enough to read and understand The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks.
We have serious problems in Western society, but the extreme "solutions" suggested by both of these parties will result in a complete and utter disaster for everyone. Even worse, we are even already seeing some of the effects of some of these "solutions" in action.
[+] [-] Synaesthesia|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dogma1138|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bitwize|8 years ago|reply
I think he gets postmodernism wrong and frankly, so do a lot of postmodernists. I see postmodernism as "Defense Against the Dark Arts". The postmodernist's tool kit -- the silly word games, denial of reality, and so forth -- are all borrowed from the right, and from capitalist society (in particular advertising and PR). And they play silly word games, talk in circles, and deny reality because they're preparing their students for a world in which the enemy have made that the norm for discourse. So when the postmodernist says "there is no reality" what they're really saying is the reality you know, and the rules for perceiving and inferring that reality, have been compromised. When Foucault says there's really no such thing as science, what he means is that science itself has been compromised, and you can't use science against the enemy because the enemy already controls it and will turn around and use it against you.
But I like Peterson's style -- bombastic without being antagonistic, and highly principled -- and about the psychology bits he has some really interesting things to say.
[+] [-] err4nt|8 years ago|reply
I think people are starved for somebody who can be persuasive and calm, not relying on hyperbole or name-calling to make their points, and he shows everybody a way they can do that.
[+] [-] Fezzius|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petercooper|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] collyw|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gizmo|8 years ago|reply
It shouldn't come as a surprise he has nothing of value to say about (identity) politics, because on that topic he doesn't have any expertise. He's just another guy with poorly conceived opinions. On the other hand he has been a clinical psychologist for 20 years and so (surprise!) he has accumulated some valuable insights along the way.
[+] [-] bitoneill|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markdog12|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skrebbel|8 years ago|reply
Sure, she used her position as the one controlling the agenda well, quickly switching topics when pressed into a corner, but that's her job.
[+] [-] Synaesthesia|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gizmo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0x445442|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raguuu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scribu|8 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16188789
[+] [-] Dowwie|8 years ago|reply
I knew of Peterson but never read his work nor heard him speak.
This interview could be an important piece for university level discussion. I think it summarizes problems among the media and intellectuals like Peterson.
[+] [-] guitarbill|8 years ago|reply
And, wow, I just watched this and it is horrendously cringeworthy. Seems like the presenter was expecting someone soft in the head (like an MP/politician), and approached the interview in that modern British fashion, which didn't work out well at all. It's really awkward to see somebody be that badly intellectually outclassed, but then it was Channel 4...
On the other hand, coming back to OP, there's something encouraging about a critical thinker having "star appeal". I think that's the best way to describe Dr Peterson, as you don't have to agree with him, but it is easy to follow his lucid trains-of-thought, and he is at least consistent.
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|8 years ago|reply
I don't really know who he is other than seeing his name popup on Youtube regularly however I do note that his supporters always use that sort of language, often watch X destroy Y in an interview.
There seem to be minorities at the extremes shouting past each other whilst the rest of us get on with our lives and wonder what all the fuss is about.
[+] [-] dfraser992|8 years ago|reply
The interviewer, however, was barely coherent and couldn't deal with that level of precision. And she kept bouncing all over the place. She was totally unprepared and kept flipping to tangents and not drilling down into one topic...
So to proclaim her as the typical embodiment of 'feminism' and use this as 'the perfect example' of why feminism (or whatever you want to project onto this) is fundamentally garbage... really only reveals your prejudices. At a surface level, the quality of the discussion or conversation was poor, so this video clip really is of low informational value.
I had a conservative friend who did this sort of thing - I'd try to get into the details of examining something (to try and get at the limits of a position or what caveats there are) and he'd do the same BS as the interviewer (though not as badly), oversimplifying things and deriving blanket principles from contrived examples. I guess that is the difference between philosophers and ideologues.
So I don't talk to him anymore - I got tired of the hassle and I'm tired of listening to how feminism is destroying society. It isn't. Society is morphing and change always upsets conservatives, because they are so fundamentally terrified of everything they can't control. Given how things are really going to go out of whack in the next few decades due to all the unstoppable changes coming, they are going to have to keep up or go extinct.
[+] [-] just2n|8 years ago|reply
He's criticized as "on the right" because he disagrees with feminism, neoliberalism, and marxism (it's more cultural marxism, which he calls neomarxism). That is a reactionary label, and it doesn't fit, which is precisely the problem with modern politics.
A decade, maybe 15 years ago, Peterson would've been right in the middle of the liberal camp. So would people like Dave Rubin. Today though, the modern left is falling in line with these feminist and marxist ideas even though they fundamentally contradict his long held liberal principles. People like me who aren't in some extreme position are described as malicious by these ideologies. I know it's nonsense because I can actually see what's in my head, and what they claim is true about me and about an entire class of people based on gender or race, is utterly false. The obvious response is "that's nonsense", but of course we're talking about people who are throwing labels of "racist" and "sexist" at anyone who dares disagree, so that's not a good enough response. We must be defensive, yet the irony of saying someone is bad because they're male or because they're white and then using those labels seems to be a little out of reach.
Watch this interview. Nearly every response she makes to him "so you're saying" is trying to ascribe some feminist or marxist ideal of how the world works to what he's said, and he simply repeats what he says. He goes to great lengths to explain his issues with these ideologies in various lectures, but you can see it here as a prime example, condensed into a comical and pathetic 30 minute interview. Everything wrong with today's left. It's not liberal anymore, she tried so hard to make him look like the bad guy, like he has bad evil wrong thoughts.
It's no wonder the situation regarding diversity at Google is so precarious, and this Damore lawsuit is just one of many to come if this mentality continues. I like Peterson because he opposes it and for good reason, not just in such as simplistic manner as ridicule and memes as you see from the right.
[+] [-] throwaway-hn123|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] apocalypstyx|8 years ago|reply
The enemy is all around you.
Access to secret "true" knowledge.
The world is corrupt.
A plan that if you follow correctly will lead to good things.
An enemy that alternates between specific and generalistic states.
Everything has to be framed through a set of ideological points at all times, which are reiterated in the otherwise minorist points of life.
That is not to say that he definitively is something of that kith or kin to that, necessarily. Just that I see several public figures these days that come out of one branch of science, platforming their knowledge of one field to the world of knowledge at large, and espousing thinking --- right down to phraseology, at times --- I have heard too often from sources these same individuals would claim to violently disagree with. Taking on Peterson's own postulations related to the co-evolution of the biological and memetic aspects of humanity (which in general I would agree with): I think the push to a what would otherwise be called a 'religious sensibility' can be --- and often is --- clothed in scientific language.
[+] [-] 0xcde4c3db|8 years ago|reply
I'm biased, though, because I find his lectures really difficult to follow. At least in the ones I've watched, he exhibits an oddly rambling style of speech that seems optimized more for some kind of narrative rhythm than for clearly conveying semantic content. He's very good at making it feel like every word is important, but then when I go back and try to figure out the actual statement being made it's like whole sentences just sort of fold in on themselves until nothing is left.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] raguuu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgdesign|8 years ago|reply
I'm pretty sure that's a gross misrepresentation of that law. From the little I know about it, I think it was more about adding "using the wrong pronoun" as a possible aggravating circumstance to consider when somebody is already being harassed:
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/canadian-lawmakers-p...
> The bill adds prohibitions against discrimination on the basis of gender identity and gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act, amends the criminal code to extend protections against hate speech and allows judges to take into consideration when sentencing whether a crime was motivated by hatred of the victim’s gender identity or expression.
[+] [-] larrykwg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jo909|8 years ago|reply
http://www.ohrc.on.ca/en/policy-preventing-discrimination-be...
I think you are right that just in C 16 there is nothing about compelled speech. My understanding of his position is that it's part of a slippery slope, and the interpretation of discrimination or hate speech could easily extend to using the wrong gender pronouns.
[+] [-] tomohawk|8 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F0A4rohauQ