Arguing with a racist moron [split topic]

[TrenterPercenter]

Doesn't he say women would be much happier if we all got married and popped out kids?

Yes that and stop wearing make up to be provocative; it's all just typical Christian rightwing conservatism.  He actually has very little to say regarding women's mental health btw; he believes we are separate beasts with genetically separate psychological dispositions.

[AllisonSays]

Peterson is incredibly close to institutional norms, like, incredibly. He's the least heterodox heterodox figurehead of all time, even among traditionalists. Take away the red panic and bathroom panic stuff, and he believes what everyone else does: life is about personal meaning, you can't learn what you haven't experienced, stories are almost supernaturally important, universal discourses are inherently oppressive, identity formation is where freedom manifests etc. He claims not to be a relativist but he absolutely is. Everything is layers of encoded cultural differences and its symbology. 

If anything libs rage at him so much because he reveals exactly how conservative and orthodox their belief systems are. If you can just slap "...and that's why transgender students shouldn't use the same break area as everyone else!" on a set of beliefs its not a great set of beliefs.

Bring back the School of Suspicion.

Absolutely! Totally agree. It's so insipid, which makes the aesthetic or pose of radicalism some Petersonites adopt really funny. He's basically just a Live Laugh Love sign.

[Retinend]

I'm a weird fucking person because I was a fan of Peterson back when it was just his "Maps of Meanings" lectures online and he hadn't yet released his bombshell "professor against PC" video. It was downhill from there. My "woke" moment was realising that his Vice interview showed him up for the pundit he had become and it was a pundit for something horrible. So, mia culpa, I am a Jordan Peterson fan. It literally applies to me.

If people are getting from him what I got from him then I'd not wince saying it. I've begun to realise that when people criticise him they aren't criticising the validity of what he taught me via those aforementioned lectures, but I still feel a debt of gratitude to the man, all the same.

So I wince when people really outright dismiss the squeaky-voiced Canadan psychiatrist/phsychology professor. Because I feel somewhat endebted to him. But still, for perspective, I feel even more endebted to the left-wing Robert Sapolsky for making his "Behaviour" lectures available online. It's not political for me at all, which sounds almost incomprehensible I suppose, given his subsequent shenanigans. Peterson, not Sapolsky, obviously.

I'd still recommend any of the uploads he did of "Maps of Meaning" because you will understand why people find him compelling without dealing with anything political. Don't get me wrong: He was always political leading up to 2016 but 2016 tipped him over the edge. Before that he was just a normal, in fact hyper-competent, individual fairly unknown but well-liked academic at Harvard. 

The fact is that "Jordan Peterson Fan" is not worth taking literally any more. I am a fan of what he was a long time ago. He is responsible for unleashing a wave of weirdly intense born again christians and odiously provincial "traditionalists" and, at worst, those who go on to becomes fans of Peterson's cracked-out looking older brother (but not really): Michael E Jones, and his young acolyte, Nick Fuentes. Alt Right types, I mean.

[TrenterPercenter]

His politics aside; what would you say in a psychological sense you got from him?  I'm curious....


Sapolsky is brilliant imo btw.

[Retinend]

Sure. So, off the top of my head, he did this one good lecture discussing his belief in the importance of quantification. Some psychological "entities" for lack of a better word that I can't think of right now, e.g. Jung's personality types, are used for years and years out of tradition, not actually able to stand the test of hard data. I refer to predictive validity, i.e. whether time bears out obvious predictions you would make for the personality types you posit.

It's as a consequence of this belief of his that he favours the "Big Five" personality model and as far as I can tell it's the ...main one? I don't know that for a fact. Maybe someone can tell me. He has personally published academic studies shoring up the model. But in any case, his lectures on each of the big five personality traits were fascinating for me, because you could start recognising those traits on a scale with people that you know. And it was reconciling to know that the differences between people could be explained so well, in such an elegant model, with such well-shored-up numbers behind them.

I would also like to mention that he helped me understand what Heidegger was saying, when previously it had seemed very opaque and contrarian to me. Where Heidegger liked the metaphor of the hammer (materially existent but living in your mind as a utenstil for action that moves your life forwards) Peterson translates it into the metaphor of the automobile: imagine driving down the motorway and your engine gives out. The car has effectively ceased to be, because all its utility has gone - yet the fact is that the car has changed very little, in material terms between when it was driving and when it now isn't.

Sapolsky is brilliant imo btw.

He's a bit of an unsung hero.

[Paul Calf]

But Maps of Meaning is gibberish. It's hokum. Peterson is a total chancer. He's only one step up from the ridiculous Parapsychology departments that shame universities like North Carolina and Liverpool.

[Zetetic]

Sure. So, off the top of my head, he did this one good lecture discussing his belief in the importance of quantification. Some psychological "entities" for lack of a better word that I can't think of right now, e.g. Jung's personality types, are used for years and years out of tradition, not actually able to stand the test of hard data. I refer to predictive validity, i.e. whether time bears out obvious predictions you would make for the personality types you posit.

This is a bit like a medical or nursing professor telling you that humoural theory is out of vogue because of the shortcoming that it's nearly completely useless.

Good to know, but also not terribly special. A bit worrying that they bring it up, maybe. I'd hazard a a guess that this is first half-an-hour of any undergraduate psychology course. (Edit: Maybe first lesson of Psychology A-level for all I know.)

It's as a consequence of this belief of his that he favours the "Big Five" personality model and as far as I can tell it's the ...main one? I don't know that for a fact. Maybe someone can tell me.

Yeah, OCEAN/Big Five remains the most popular personality model because it's not completely shit, is sufficiently parsimonious to be usable and there are some short self-report assessment tools available with tolerable licensing conditions.

Edit: And network effects at this point. Other models that are at least as powerful and usable exist, but of course you can't trivially map these on to OCEAN factors and so if you want to link your work to anyone else's, you're kind of stuck with Big Five. (I don't think this is necessarily a permanent state of affairs, but it's hard to shift now, after almost half-a-century.)

He has personally published academic studies shoring up the model.

I'd hazard a guess that anyone working in individual differences or personality has probably published something linking Big Five traits to something else (where 'linking' means "scraped p < 0.05 if we think just the right amount about the statistics we're doing").

Edit: From what I can remember, his most significant contribution here is trying to come up with a Big Five self-report assessment that was less open to deliberate response biases.

And it was reconciling to know that the differences between people could be explained so well, in such an elegant model, with such well-shored-up numbers behind them.

I'd quickly note that:
- Big Five isn't terribly powerful at an individual level (although what this might tell us that there are very few situations where "personality" is as important as the situation itself and everything else that someone brings with them that we don't put under "personality")
- All models produced like this are 'elegant'. That's because factor analysis + an assumption of orthogonality is built to give you elegant models. (Then you fit words onto the factors and try to import back to folk psychology without causing a great deal of misunderstanding in the process.)

[Zetetic]

My feeling is "Fuck me, it's a shame if Jordan Peterson is the figurehead of current personality research".

[Retinend]

Well I think you're coming at my post from the perspective of someone who knows all this stuff already, Zetetic. I didn't know about it at the time. What's more, I'm referring to his 101 course in psychology, so your criticism about it being something you'd learn in an 101 course in psychology is moot.

"All models are elegant" I disagree, since I was using "elegant" in a judgmental sense. I was asked what I got out of his lectures so I said that it taught me an elegant model; not that Peterson deserves all credit for the model per se.

I don't think Maps of Meaning is gibberish - at least, though perhaps containing its fair share of gibberish, the core ideas in it were valuable for me and my life, in their way. I discovered the book after discovering the lectures, so for me I didn't care about the weird gibberishy parts of the book - the core ideas were useful to me. Other parts were simply interesting, or accorded with what I already knew in interesting ways.

[Zetetic]

Well I think you're coming at my post from the perspective of someone who knows all this stuff already, Zetetic. I didn't know about it at the time. What's more, I'm referring to his 101 course in psychology, so your criticism about it being something you'd learn in an 101 course in psychology is moot.

Understood - my view is that Peterson doesn't really deserve any particular credit for being able to deliver such material when it's the bare minimum you'd expect.

[chveik]

since you can find the same ideas in the most basic 'introduction to psychology' books or lectures (with the added bonus that you won't have to go through all the self-help bullshit), you really don't have to feel some sort of intellectual debt to Peterson.

[Paul Calf]

I would be extremely cautious of the 'core ideas' of someone who is either so arrogant or so naive or so clumsy as to include this in a published work with their name on it:



From whatever angle you're approaching, this has to look bad.

[Paul Calf]

How many teenagers have wasted hours poring over this, reading meaning into it where no valuable lesson exists? They might as well buy a copy of Tao Te Ching.

[Buelligan]

since you can find the same ideas in the most basic 'introduction to psychology' books or lectures (with the added bonus that you won't have to go through all the self-help bullshit), you really don't have to feel some sort of intellectual debt to Peterson.

What if he taught you to suck an egg?  Eh?

[Retinend]

I would be extremely cautious of the 'core ideas' of someone who is either so arrogant or so naive or so clumsy as to include this in a published work with their name on it:



From whatever angle you're approaching, this has to look bad.

It looks pretty silly if you take it out of context, I grant you. Personally I think there's a lot of value to the core ideas that can generate even such a silly picture. For context, he is representing a sort of "learning from mistakes" situation in the top left circle and he is representing a sort of "hero journey" in the top right. To me, I repeat, these have been useful ideas, but I wouldn't insist that everyone agree with me. I know to a lot of people it's all just a bunch of self-help nonsense but I like Jung and Campbell and that way of thinking.

How many teenagers have wasted hours poring over this, reading meaning into it where no valuable lesson exists? They might as well buy a copy of Tao Te Ching.

Why not pore[nb]this word looks weird[/nb] hours over the Tao Te Ching?

[Buelligan]

The word looks weird because one would normally say pore for hours rather than pore hours, pore hours is lazy.

That picture IMO is for people who are in love with their own erudition.  That's its value, to flag up those marks.

[chveik]

What if he taught you to suck an egg?  Eh?

wut?

[Buelligan]

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

[Video Game Fan 2000]

The Nathan J Robinson article about Peterson that republished those diagrams is a bigger embarassment than Peterson himself.

Of course Peterson was influential before the C-16 bill.  Anything to do with stories or narrative with a vaguely 'scientific' approach, no matter how superficial, just slap it on to whatever is remotely relevant. Don't bother checking the ideology of who what wrote it. Jobs a good 'un. Not surprised at all if people were seeing the name Jordan Peterson in actual clinical research for that reason alone.

[dissolute ocelot]

I would be extremely cautious of the 'core ideas' of someone who is either so arrogant or so naive or so clumsy as to include this in a published work with their name on it:



From whatever angle you're approaching, this has to look bad.

This is exactly the sort of shit Lacan used to draw. Surely Peterson isn't a Lacanian?

[Video Game Fan 2000]

How come no one ever says Bourdieu or Latour?

[Kermit the Frog]

Never heard of them

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Looks like once again its one rule about incomprehensible browbeating diagrams for some and another for the rest of us.

[Dex Sawash]

Never heard of them

Frotty Latour
https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=47151.0

[TrenterPercenter]

This is a bit like a medical or nursing professor telling you that humoural theory is out of vogue because of the shortcoming that it's nearly completely useless.

Good to know, but also not terribly special. A bit worrying that they bring it up, maybe. I'd hazard a a guess that this is first half-an-hour of any undergraduate psychology course. (Edit: Maybe first lesson of Psychology A-level for all I know.)

Yeah, OCEAN/Big Five remains the most popular personality model because it's not completely shit, is sufficiently parsimonious to be usable and there are some short self-report assessment tools available with tolerable licensing conditions.

Edit: And network effects at this point. Other models that are at least as powerful and usable exist, but of course you can't trivially map these on to OCEAN factors and so if you want to link your work to anyone else's, you're kind of stuck with Big Five. (I don't think this is necessarily a permanent state of affairs, but it's hard to shift now, after almost half-a-century.)
I'd hazard a guess that anyone working in individual differences or personality has probably published something linking Big Five traits to something else (where 'linking' means "scraped p < 0.05 if we think just the right amount about the statistics we're doing").

Edit: From what I can remember, his most significant contribution here is trying to come up with a Big Five self-report assessment that was less open to deliberate response biases.
I'd quickly note that:
- Big Five isn't terribly powerful at an individual level (although what this might tell us that there are very few situations where "personality" is as important as the situation itself and everything else that someone brings with them that we don't put under "personality")
- All models produced like this are 'elegant'. That's because factor analysis + an assumption of orthogonality is built to give you elegant models. (Then you fit words onto the factors and try to import back to folk psychology without causing a great deal of misunderstanding in the process.)

Can I just say this is very similar to what I was going to put in a reply last night but then I thought I'm really not going to spend the last waking (steady) hour of my day explaining why Peterson is anything to get excited about (unless you are a misogynist racist; not saying you are Retinend but that is what he is primarily good at; his psychology creds are not very interesting unless you are in the field of alcoholism and even then he is not that well considered).

[jobotic]

He knows about alcoholism? Didn't he have to take to a Russian bed for three months after half a cider (or something)?

[TrenterPercenter]

Yes he was a psychologist with a keen interested in alcoholism; but As mentioned he might not be very good at sticking to his own principles.....I mean "dedication to quantifiability".....yeah not him.

[Hello! Replies Hidden]

the first 15 minutes of this discusses Peterson being a gateway.

(Removed weird looking link that looks like an affiliate jobby; there's an alternative one on the next page -BAdmin)

[Kermit the Frog]

Not clicking that, looks weird

[Buelligan]

I think most people will need a speculum for that kind of gateway.