Guy excoriates social justice as liberal authoritarianism, calls progressive activists bitter, resentful, weak/unmasculine/developmentally stunted. But alt-right authoritarians are ok, it's too bad they're so antisemitic sometimes but ya gotta take the good with the bad.

Basically.

He's an expert in the psychology of authoritarianism, an intelligent and forceful speaker with many interesting things to say. He's even right about most of them. But he uses his skills to exclusively attack what he perceives as left-wing authoritarianism, while voluntarily effusing himself in right-wing authoritarianism. If he didn't want to associate with the alt-right, all he'd have to do is volunteer his professional opinion about them, too. He vaguely did, in an early interview he gave to The Rebel, but the more he becomes an alt-right darling the more he becomes their useful idiot. I'm just as sure he has thought about this as I am that he isn't even mad about it.

I mean, he's not a total piece of ****. He does do and say things to help de-radicalize people. And that's good, insofar as he's taking the alt-right and making them alt-lite. That's kinda what makes him worth analyzing, to dissect what's okay and what's not okay about his views and advocacy.

What's weird is how they quote him like he's some kind of savant. Like how on 4chan in general they half jokingly post Sam Harris memes implying he is the smartest man on the planet simply because he's said negative things about Islam.

I guess if the end result is that they end up deferring to them in general, tacitly conceding that their ignorant populism is lacking something intellectually, and if alt. right people start reading philosophy and psychology for its own sake and not just for ideology, well that just seems like the best one could hope for.

Or is it? I agree with Jon`C that Jordan Peterson is well aware that he could distance himself from right wing authoritarianism, but chooses not to. I wonder if he is self-conscious enough to avoid making himself a target of their animus, or even doesn't seem to mind their adoration (more denzians to help fight the leftist Goliath that scarred his psyche, perhaps?). I think he too easily became their darling without thinking it through (or he was receptive to it all along) to go back now.

To be honest, I'd much rather have Prime Minister Jordan Peterson than Prime Minister Andrew Scheer. Despite the inexplicable legitimacy of the latter, I suspect the former is more intelligent, more progressive, and actually less of a neo-nazi.

Or, we can just treat it like his fans do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4c-jOdPTN8#t=19m52s

OMG HE'S A NAZI HE ADVOCATED VIOLENCE TOTALITARIAN! TOTALITARIAN! TOTALITARIAN! TOTALITARIAN! TOTALITARIAN!

Interesting how Andrew Scheer's Wikipedia article says he identifies as feminist. I don't believe an American conservative could so easily get away with that kind of talk. OTOH, that big grin of his somewhat frightens me.

[Quote=Jordan Peterson]
I am hoping that with concerted effort it will be possible to identify the corrupted and ideologically-possessed university disciplines across campuses world-wide and to drive down their new enrolment by 75% over the next five years. As of now a website is being designed to help students (and their parents) identify postmodern cult courses from course descriptions, so that those who would rather be educated than indoctrinated can make a choice (and, I suppose, for those who wish the opposite to make a choice as well). Stay posted
[/Quote]

Lol so he wants to drive down enrollment by 75%. Though I'm guessing he's just talking about particular departments rather than the entire university?

These dangerous totalitarians are so dangerous we need an academic pogrom to remove them from power!

The sad thing is this still just comes across as some kind of petty academic struggle, but one in which he has somehow managed to enlist populist support for.

If I ever thought activism was dangerous to institutionalize within universities, I don't doubt for a second that activists against universities, from the outside, could be far more disastrous. Also, Jordan Peterson is clearly far more unhinged than the people he is attacking ever were.

I just hope that his words don't ever inspire violence toward a professor.

I've never heard of this guy before today, but he sounds like someone who once may have had nuanced opinions, but then chose to dispense with subtlety as soon as he realized he was developing an audience on Twitter, and realized that more provocation and less even-handedness got him more followers. It must happen all the time that intellectuals develop their positions based on the audience that happens to consolidate around them.

Why else would a man like this wear suspenders?

I don't disagree with everything this guy says, but I don't understand why someone would want this guy to be their champion, or why someone would be attracted to this guy as a media personality. Same with Ben Shapiro (who I only mention because I just happened to watch the first five minutes of this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kteHW6t4G0g).

I mean, I'm totally on board both with some of the analysis, and what they say is the cure: they're essentially arguing that certain anti-realist* excesses on the left are problematic because they're illberal, and that the cure is more liberalism. Sure, right on. But for some reason, these guys gross me out. But I'd follow Chris Hayes into battle for making the same arguments. I guess when it comes to public intellectuals there's a lot of marketing (dress, personality traits, tone of speech, etc) that accompanies the transmission of the ideas that makes someone like me find Chris Hayes more compelling than these guys. (Not to mention, the arguments Chris Hayes is clearly coming from a center-left bent, and these guys are coming from the right/center-right... I mean, find me a clip of Chris Hayes denying that the pay gap exists and expecting to be patted on the back for "speaking truth to power". lol)

*By anti-realist I mean, for example, the idea that "narratives" and "world views" rooted in identity are constitutive of how the world appears to us, which meana it's impossible for anyone to transcend the limited perspective our identities, and for all of us to live in a world of shared, common facts. Subsequently, the highest thing to aspire to is a world in which we each live "our truths".

He's not, but in Canada you at least have to say you are. Canadians understand such things differently.

He's talking about specific courses. Actually, he's talking about his plan to launch a website that hosted a list of professors and courses teaching quote-unquote "cultural marxism" (a nazi fiction), ostensibly so that concerned students could avoid taking those courses, but I believe he canceled his plans after realizing the website would mostly be used by teenagers to send rape threats to gender studies professors.

At the same time, I'm quite sympathetic to some of his points. We're talking about young people with still-developing minds, immersed in an environment where they are separated from their emotional support structure, deprived of sleep, deprived of privacy, fed poorly, punished for sharing the wrong ideas, and rewarded for showing deference to the anointed. Academia is cultish, it really is, and I don't think it's unreasonable to be vigilant against base indoctrination when the audience is so susceptible to it.

So, like, maybe instead of being a bunch of whiny snowflakes demanding that nobody ever teach anything that might ever change an opinion, maybe you should spend that effort making university a less harrowing experience? Maybe schedule courses sensibly? Put department courses all in the same building, and book likely elective courses at the beginnings and ends of the day? Serve actual food on campus instead Aramark's recycled prison food? Or, like, if you think most undergraduate students aren't mature enough to reason for themselves about the material being taught, then maybe those courses should be senior-level, rather than introductory courses for programs with the absolute lowest entry and continuation requirements? It's almost like there's this whole continuum of possible answers for this problem, if it even is a problem, but all thought started and stopped with "I will make a list of people and give it to racist teenagers".

I think it's because he thinks the content of the ideas are corrosive to freedom (as he understands freedom). Evidently, according to Peterson, the "Cultural Marxists" (as he calls them) don't think of themselves as providing one way of looking at the world amongst many; theydon't have a "live and let live" attitude towards people they disagree with. Rather, he sees them as being quite hostile their intellectual opponents. So he argues: their ideas are part of an ideology associated with a political movement that's trying to secure power -- not only at the level of university bureaucracies, but in provincial/state, and federal bureaucracies too -- by dispossessing others of their power, through excluding people who disagree, and casting them as deviant, or immoral. In other words, he sees them as being engaged in the precise type of power struggle I was talking before regarding Reid's posts (i.e., he accuses them of trying to destroy the conditions that make it possible for their opponents to oppose them): they're trying to establish new norms about what is permissible to say in public and what isn't, and their avowed goal is to change the balance of power, in favor of people like themselves, and at the expense of people like Peterson and his followers. And part of that dispossession is indoctrinating them when they take sociology 101. For Peterson, the students don't even stand a chance at resisting this indoctrination.

In short, I think the reasons why those fixes don't occur to him is because the thing that's driving him isn't concern that students are impressionable. I think, rather, that he sees "Cultural Marxists" as utopianist infiltrators who're undermining the basis of liberal society.

Ironically, were it someone else, Jordan Peterson would be an excellent person to ask.

I’m not an expert, but my guess is that he is confirming a lot of their subtle and closely held biases. Not the bigotry, at least not overtly, but smaller biases, especially about their own development and outlook.

For example, post-secondary continuation is often a major source of long-running social stresses, whether you attended or not. Someone who chose not to go to university when they were younger may regret it, someone who did attend but couldn’t get a job in their field might feel like a failure. Then a credentialed, successful academic comes along, and basically calls university a garbage brainwashing camp for radical leftists. That sounds good, doesn’t it? Sounds like you weren’t missing much by not going. Sounds like you didn’t fail to find a job, you were really a victim of a con. It’s not your problem anymore, it’s their problem.

It’s the fact that he’s putting words to what they’re feeling. It’s the fact that he’s smart, and credible, and most importantly agrees with them. That’s why I think they like him.

Yep!

[quote=Millennial Woes, Wikipedia article]
Woes attended a London art college in Tooting in the mid-2000s, an experience he describes as 'dizzying' due to the ethnic diversity of the school and district. After a period of clinical depression, unemployment and underemployment, he launched his YouTube channel at the end of 2013,[15]. Vice had labeled his platform a "popular alt-right YouTube channel" towards the end of 2016,[16] with around 18,000 subscribers and 2.4 million views.[17]
[/quote]

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

The guy has literally made videos about how attending art school essentially ruined his life, and is the reason why he lives in his dad's basement making weird spooky videos of himself by cigarette light.

I actually discovered Peterson recently. I enjoy watching him talk. He's collected but engaging, and quite persuasive. This clip is great, for instance. The reporter keeps baiting him throughout and it's not working.

About that interview: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/putting-monsterpaint-onjordan-peterson/550859/?utm_source=atltw

His position was more persuasive when I read transcripts than when I watched the video.

That article just goes through a lot of the interview and points out what anyone paying attention can see from the video itself.

It does! And makes some conclusions at the end.

Activist journist interviews an academic in order to put words in his mouth.

I only read the transcript, but from my recollection of watching CNN, almost any kind of television on cable news that makes even the slightest attempt to be controversial is going to be hot garbage. In fact it's embarrassing to watch just how poorly researched these so-called reporters are. They seem to spend most of their time egging on their interviewee into surrendering some controversial soundbite so they can catch it on tape and then play it over and over.

Yeah. I'm just confused as to why he was more persuasive to you via the transcript and commentary than on the actual video. I read that piece and I can't say what it brought to the table that wasn't readily there to pick up on, and watching the video you see how the actual interaction with all its conversational cues went down. All the article concluded was that these dialogues need to happen and misrepresenting opposing positions is bad for everyone. Duh, right?

Unless you're simply saying that Peterson's way of expressing himself didn't persuade you at all and buried some of his more persuasive arguments that you then discovered more readily from the transcript.

I'm not looking to attack you over this, that would be silly, I'm just confused.

It's easier to evaluate their arguments on their own terms when the arguments are written down, rather than when watching the video where their rhetoric, their tone, and non-verbal ways in which they're competing with each other distract from the content of their ideas by eliciting an emotional response. Similarly, I find it can be easier to grasp precisely what Trump actually says it his speeches when I read transcripts than when I watch videos of his speeches. It's easier to look past his charisma and the manic and transgressive qualities of his speech, which all can make it seem as if he's saying something other than what he's actually said.

Yeah it's pretty obvious, I agree. I did think it was valuable, though, for the author to point out something more specific that has become pervasive in our media environment, namely, to summarize other people's nuanced and qualified opinions in a way that make them seem as one-sided and offensive as possible, in order to inspire outrage. That's, like, all of Twitter... But, yeah I agree that pointing something like that out didn't make me consider changing my political affiliations or anything like that. :p

so, i'm sitting in on computer science courses, and currently in front of me are a row of undergraduates who are all checking up on bitcoin trading exchanges, e.g. blockfolio and, yes, bitfinex.

it's inescapable. and a sign that this is likely to blow up: bitcoin is an entire market of speculative trading.

Average #resister

Not to mention the spillover into other markets. People are now speculating on mid to high range GPUs because they're useful for mining Etherium. I estimate that 1080s are still undervalued by about 100% at current card and eth prices, so as bad as GPU speculation currently is there's a lot of room for it to get worse.

Woah, really? In what market places is this happening?

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ethereum-effect-graphics-card-prices,34928.html

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/psa-do-not-buy-a-graphics-card-today-thanks-bitcoi/1100-6456292/

I watched about 15 minutes. Jordan Peterson does come across more reasonable and convincing than her, and a good portion of what he says is fine. That woman was being very aggro to him, and came across unreasonable. And was being dogmatic and making very uninteresting points.

I don't get why anyone would watch the whole thing, tbh. That whole thing was dreary, and incredibly uninsightful. You can't learn piss about anyone's views when it's just to ****ing people trying to talk over each other. I mean Jesus. Jordan's position was more nuanced but also vacuous: his only point was that "the narrative is more complicated". Well yeah, and if he only wanted to use that point out of some ideological purity to get to a better understanding of the issue than, it would be great.

But we all know secretly he actually wants to say the gender pay gap doesn't exist and it's all bull****, without saying it exactly like that.

So yeah, maybe you get a video of him talking to a person worth talking to I'll listen.

You could have just mentioned that it's cable news.

2016:



"That's nice Mr. Sanders, but did you know that Obama has created an economic war on women, and that ObamaCare kills jobs?"

Ann wants a job!!1 Don't wage an economic war on women..

OBAMA DID IT

How do we know that? He kept saying the pay gap exists but that discrimination against women is only one component of it. He kept saying that component gets exaggerated to put forth the idea that the pay gap is all about discrimination. He kept pointing out some of the other components of a complex issue. He was quite explicit with this view, while the interviewer kept trying to twist it into some kind of rash and boorish misogyny without confronting his actual arguments.

Because any social scientist worth their salt knows about overfitting.

Listen critically to what he said, Kroko. According to his interpretation of a multivariate analysis of the pay disparity, sex only explains a small amount of the difference. The majority of the difference is explained by other factors. Specifically, it's explained by behaving like women, and having the preferences of women. (In almost literally the same breath, he also suggested that such behavior and preference differences are innate, citing Norwegian employment data.)

It's like saying - black men aren't actually paid less, it's really a combination of factors like dark hair, curly hair, nostril size, propensity to sunburn, etc. and that if employers don't value people with large nostrils, or if they're in competition with people who can sunburn easily, those workers deserve to be paid less. Which is an utterly ridiculous position to hold. If someone told you that, you would accuse them of the worst sort of racism. And rightly so.

Edit: This is what overfitting means. It means having too many variables. In this case, being a woman correlates with acting like a woman, right? So long as, for instance, effeminate-behaving men suffer a similar loss in pay as typically-behaving women, a multivariate analysis would drastically overstate the role of behaving like women, and hide the involvement of gender entirely. This is the kind of model deficiency that social scientists would know well, including Jordan Peterson. You'd only make this kind of argument if you were trying to pull a fast one.

As for the journalist, I can't account for her behavior. That interview is probably the first time in human history that "multivariate" has been spoken on television. It's unlikely that she had the background to probe beyond a superficial "sounds like bull****" spidey sense, and even if she did, there's exactly zero chance that any significant percentage of her viewers would understand what she was saying if she tried.

Here, a long article about identity because we've been talking about that for a while: http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/strangled-by-identity

I don't think it's entirely analogous to that. The traits that he's saying are feminine are those that directly correlate to being less capable of securing higher wages. If someone is agreeable, they're less likely to be stubborn and demand that their boss pay them more, ultimately to their own detriment. But having curly hair doesn't make a person any more or less capable of negotiating higher wages for himself/herself. If someone was paid less because they had curly hair, I agree, of course it would be discrimination, because possessing that trait has nothing to do with one's ability to convince their boss to pay them more. But the argument here is that, in a free market economy, where people have to forcefully tell their employer that their labor is worth more than their bosses want to pay them, it's a disadvantage not to have a personality type that insists that they get paid more. It's not a matter of what one deserves, but what they are able to accomplish. And, according to Peterson's analysis (let's temporarily bracketing whether the analysis is correct or not) women disproportionately exhibit that trait, even if they don't possess it universally/by necessity.

He's definitely an advocate of the status quo, in the sense that he doesn't think government should step in to impose certain outcomes on the market (obviously, a person can disagree with him, and argue that it should -- at no point, I think, does he explain why its fair that disagreeable people should be paid more, except, I believe for that bit about "experimenting" with corporate structures built on feminine principles. Obviously governments can enforce equal pay through the law, and that could very easily be better than the status quo he defends). But he's also not saying that women necessarily exhibit certain traits, only that they're statistically more likely to exhibit them. I think it's worth bearing that in mind, when considering to what extent what he says he discriminatory or misogynistic. (Obviously, it's fishy that he's classifying more passive traits as feminine, even if both men and women can possess them. There's evidently a harsh judgment being made that feminine traits are inherently weaker and less effective -- really, worse -- than masculine ones, and that effeminate men are craven, pathetic people, destined to by ruled by manipulative women, unless they man up.)



I'm not quite getting this. He acknowledges that part of the pay gap can be attributed to outright discrimination. So it doesn't entirely conceal the role that the mere fact of being a woman plays (rather than possessing "feminine traits"), and, subsequently, that discrimination plays. Isn't it feasible that behavioral traits could be partially responsible for the pay gap, even to a significant extent?

I do have to say, though, I do find his argument about equal opportunity vs. equal outcomes at the very least worth giving thought to, if it's not convincing, especially as it pertains to whichever Scandinavian countries he mentions (can't recall at the moment, but for whatever reason I don't remember it being Norway, but maybe it is). Maybe it seems obvious that people should have a right to self-sort and pursue whatever career they want, and, in certain fields, women may disproportionately pursue certain lines of work, and men may disproportionately pursue other lines of work. (Let's leave aside why they do it. I think Peterson would argue that the reasons have to do with innate gender differences, rather than social conditioning.) But I am uncomfortable with the idea that we should unconditionally pursue equality of outcome, and not merely equality of opportunity. It seems to me like a constraint on personal liberty that should be avoided. (Although if you disagree with Peterson, and take the position that social conditioning or social circumstances play a bigger role in preferences than innate traits, you'll likely think have a more robust sense of what equality of opportunity looks like than Peterson likely does.)

How do we know which way the wind blows? Jordan Peterson is alt-lite, and it's almost like a prerequisite of joining the alt-lite to believe the pay gap is a myth.

Maybe later I'll write a post on just how misleading "meritocracy" is, and reference the vast amount of studies showing just how deeply biases inform hiring practices.



Yeah. Conscious discrimination is not 100% the cause of the pay gap. Pretty much every sane person believes that. The more nuanced take is that it's still very prevalent and explains much of the gender pay gap. If the video was about being intellectually serious in any capacity, this would have been settled within the first few minutes. Which is why I think the woman was advancing the worse position, because she wasn't willing to budge on even the slightest degree of nuance.

I acknowledge that there are plenty of Democrat/liberal sort of people who can be dogmatic about the pay gap. OTOH, we shouldn't do what the alt-right does and cherry pick arguments based on what sounds best to us.

Also, what Jon`C said.

The classic line of "equality of opportunity but not outcome" is sort of a philosophy 101 type thought experiment, so it's valid in a vacuum, but I would not say it's a proper explanation for what we actually witness in the world. I pretty much agree that social conditioning plays a bigger role than any kind of innate preference in hiring, and I mean I agree that pursuing equality of outcome in a naive sense is not good, but the criticism here I would have of Peterson's position is exactly what I said above: it's sort of vacuous, because the degree it can be applied to real problems is super limited, because cases where people try to fight for something like that are fringe.

As above, permitting time I'll try to write a nice post explaining just how much unconscious bias people express in hiring. Like, in an ideal world, if we could build a "merit-bot" which could accurately detect people's merits, then sure, but in practice we impose beliefs and fill in gaps with our preformed beliefs, and it's this side of hiring that people (should) want to draw attention to.

I think it's actually quite concrete. What is the problem that any kind of reform is supposed to address? It may be the wrong goal, for example, to say that every industry should have a male-female ratio of employees in proportion to ratio of men to women in the general population.