Author Topic: Jordan Peterson debate channel 4  (Read 5077 times)

Jubal

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Re: Jordan Peterson debate channel 4
« Reply #15 on: March 16, 2018, 11:40:09 PM »
This is one of the better (pretty harsh, but effective IMO)  takedowns of Peters on I've seen. Worth a read as something of a counter-point to his work:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve
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Pentagathus

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Re: Jordan Peterson debate channel 4
« Reply #16 on: March 17, 2018, 01:40:53 PM »
Yeah there's a lot of truth to that, I'm not sure how much of Peterson's appeal is actually due to his own work and how much is just because he's kind of re-introducing the work of philosophers like Nietzsche.
I haven't read into maps of meaning, mostly because of the writing style that this article criticises rather well, but I have seen some of those diagrams within context, and they do actually make sense when they are (some of them at least, not sure they all do. Actually I'd be quite surprised if they all do).


Also whilst that article is correct in that it's very easy to interpret Peterson's writing in a number of ways the writer takes a lot of quotes and again presents them with no context, thus making the interpretation a whole lot more open. And they simply make some mistakes imo, for example:
“People do not care whether or not they succeed; they care about whether or not they fail.”  Which is apparently different.
There is a pretty obvious distinction between caring about success and failure, success cannot occur unless one makes an attempt so succeed, whereas failure can only occur if one makes an attempt to succeed. So if it is true that people care more about failure than success you would expect that people would be less likely to make ambitious attempts than if the opposite is true. Obviously there's a debate to be had about how useful that generalisation is, or whether it is even true but that's a different question.

Personally I think Peterson's self help kind of stuff is very useful and it seems to be insightful, but I do find it very unfortunate that it blends into his political views so heavily. An emphasis on individual responsibility and self improvement is great for individuals (and yes society is ultimately made up of individuals) but I don't think completely ignoring groups at a societal level is a great idea. I do agree with him politically in the sense that we need to be more open to discussing a whole lot of topics and that we actually need to take a more detailed analytical approach to identifying the causes behind phenomena such as the gender pay gap, the disparity between representation of certain ethnicities within management roles etc, however I'd say the purpose of doing that would be so you actually can "fix" these problems to some extent (and I don't think that's possible without actually understanding the underlying causes).
Btw if anyone is interested in an example of genuine and rational social justice warriors I would point to Heather Heying and Brett Weinstein as great examples, surprisingly enough they actually agree with Peterson in many ways.

Jubal

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Re: Jordan Peterson debate channel 4
« Reply #17 on: March 18, 2018, 12:15:12 PM »
Yeah, I mean, I guess there's a fairly solid argument that people are just more likely to actually accept self-help stuff if it's not put plainly and is coming from a professorial authority figure like Peterson.

As I've said in the past, my feeling is that the vast, vast majority of people who tend to get labelled "Social Justice Warriors" are just political campaigners taking perfectly normal/rational leftwing or liberal standpoints on whatever campaign issues they care about. I mean, I'm pretty sure I've had the label bowled at me in the past, and I don't think I'm exactly irrational or frothing at the mouth about my views, as well as being a pretty staunch individualist. The sorts of free speech issues that Peterson purports to be super worried about just don't come into activism most of the time, and the university campus isn't nearly so pivotal as a base/battleground for activism as I think a lot of the billions of articles churned out on this stuff would tend to make out.

The idea of which topics we can/can't discuss is an interesting one. I do think it might be no bad thing to expand the window of topics that are considered acceptable for debate, but I think the fact that Peterson is able to put his views out on a lot of issues like the gender pay gap actually shows that those areas are considered broadly acceptable for public debate. I don't think there are many of Peterson's views that major news sources and institutions (as opposed to a small handful of protestors, which is perfectly normal in a democracy) are interested in silencing. It seems to me that at least as many of the topics genuinely considered beyond the pale of public debate are positions held by the left as ones from the right. As one example, in the last decade the BBC's Question Time has literally never had a member of the European Parliament on it who wasn't from either UKIP or the Conservatives: even before the EU referendum, European federalism (and I wouldn't identify myself as a federalist, but I don't think it's a massively irrational position to hold) was never espoused on the country's largest current affairs debate show. I guess I find it frustrating when conservative-leaning philosophers get to go on national TV and write in high readership newspapers to complain about being silenced, when from my perspective they're getting a lot more hearing for their views than many of the ideas espoused on my wing of politics.
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