Hacker News Reader

Comment by jolux | Hacker News Reader

Jordan Peterson, the "Canadian psychology professor" you mention, agree or disagree with him, clearly has political motivations and is explicitly politically active. He's an entirely different case from this.

View on HN

No doubt Peterson makes a lot of political videos, but he never said or did anything remotely deserving of having his channel shut down. I mean, just as an example, you can find a lot of blatant Holocaust denial and Nazi propaganda channels that are active and have been active for years.

Definitely, and I didn't say he deserved it, I was just saying he seems more political than this guy.

How is that relevant to the story of whether or not it's appropriate for Google, or indeed any large service provider (Cloudflare), to take their account offline?

Because one of them fits in a narrative of Google being politically censorious and the other doesn't. I don't know exactly what caused it but Peterson definitely tests boundaries a lot more than this guy. It's no insult, I'm sure he would say the same of himself.

Even if this was an accident of some algorithm, that no person at Google had any idea this would happen, it is still problematic. Algorithms and data sets can be biased just as much as people are. It's a wake-up call for all of us who entrust too much of our digital lives with Google. It's putting all our eggs in one basket.

I entirely agree, the only thing I use Google for is search and I stay logged out. Not perfect but their search is still the best for me.

Why do you feel the need to put quotes around Peterson's title?

Probably because he disagrees with his views, and surely no true professor would say something he disagrees with.

I just thought it was interesting you (edit: you're not parent, I meant parent) didn't call him out by name, and I wanted to make the connection explicit.

Despite being successful for an academic, he's not exactly a famous psych prof at the level of say, Steven Pinker. Before politics collided with his work this year he didn't seem to be politically active at all, either.

It might have changed a bit after Joe Rogan's podcast but to be honest, most people outside of Canada probably have no idea who Jordan Peterson is.

Most people, no, but he's immensely popular with a certain section of the right. Nonetheless I was a bit confused because you seemed to be implying that Peterson is just another apolitical academic who caught the short end of the deep learning stick, when there's a lot more evidence that his ban could have been politically motivated. I don't understand why I'm getting downvoted for that.

I think you're right. It was probably politically motivated, at least indirectly. It was more likely due to coordinated flagging efforts rather than a human at Google deciding to ban the account.

He's getting a lot of support from the right, the center (e.g. Joe Rogan) and from many on the left such as Sam Harris as well. In all cases, it seems to be for free speech issues. He seems to hold a deep opposition to political extremes, though it's hard to tell what he favors other than free speech since his videos meander into mythology and literature so much.

He had identified himself as classical liberal.

Apologies, I misread that you were just quoting his language.

It's a direct quote from the GP, that's an entirely reasonable use of quotation marks

Yeah, Peterson is clearly politically active. For those who don't know, he rose from complete obscurity because he opposed an anti-transgender-discrimination bill in Canada. His argument was that it was a serious threat to free speech and would force him to use pronouns he didn't want to use, despite nothing like that being on the bill and despite numerous respectable legal scholars informing him that you could never get in trouble for not using a person's preferred pronoun because of this bill.

But because of his "brave" fight against the bill, he's become a hero to alt-right and other people worried about transgendered people forcing everyone to use pronouns, and this is a lucrative market to attract. So lucrative that he now gets over $40,000 a month through Patreon alone for his classes, where he praises Carl jung, criticises post-modernism, the supposed infiltration of Marxism into culture and ideas like White Privilege and Cultural Appropriation

He's also a regularly featured on r/badphilosophy(https://www.reddit.com/r/badphilosophy/comments/64rg9i/jorda...) while there is a good discussion about him on r/AskPhilosophy(https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/673zy2/dr_jo...).

>the supposed infiltration of Marxism into culture and ideas like White Privilege and Cultural Appropriation

You can't argue that "white privilege" hasn't infiltrated culture. An alarming amount of people have openly disparaged white people when talking to me, even though I am white myself.

If you're not white, it's almost socially acceptable to say "fuck white people" in cities like SF, NYC, and Chicago. I think it's horrible and I think Peterson is right.

Maybe that's the case, but I don't think white privilege and cultural appropriation are inherently Marxist ideas. A lot of Marxists actually reject them as revisionist attempts to bring liberal individualism and individual blame into class politics.

If you're not white, it's almost socially acceptable to say "fuck white people" in cities like SF, NYC, and Chicago

I'm sure Google, CloudFlare, PayPal etc will be shutting down that blatant hate speech too.

Those companies shouldn't be monitoring ideologies and morality.

If they want to do that, it's their right. But I will purposefully avoid companies that ban any hate speech. I've already cut ties with Google and it feels great.

Even in Columbus, OH this is acceptable and common. People would say this relatively frequently at a startup I worked at (where nearly everyone was white, except a couple Asians), in addition to making really lame “white people” jokes. The only person to ever call anyone out for this was our black chef. Probably because his views on race were based in realty instead of some dystopian political fashion. Well, that, and I think anyone else saying anything about it would have been immediately accused of being racist and probably given some sort of formal warning.

> despite numerous respectable legal scholars informing him that you could never get in trouble for not using a person's preferred pronoun because of this bill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnIAAkSNtqo

As mentioned, his employer's lawyers did think so. The Adversarial Model (legal system) doesn't consider that some parties come to other conclusions. It would be ill-advised to listen to "experts" that are not part of a case, taking the advice of pundits* or other unconnected parties is not compelling evidence of legal finding.

*It's primarily in the US, that the mass media promotes education pundits as corroboration in legal matters.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com