Comment by pjscott | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjscott | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I was curious to see if he'd actually said that or if you were misrepresenting a more reasonable claim. I'm not familiar with Jordan Peterson but managed to find this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV2yvI4Id9Q

... in which he says that high-powered careers are very unpleasant due to hyper-competition among people who are exceptionally willing to tilt their work-life balance way toward work, and that most (but not all) of such people are men. Which doesn't sound like that unusual a claim, really: it's a fairly mainstream belief that women average more family-focused than men, and you only need a small difference in means between populations to get a big difference in representation at the far tails of a trait's probability distribution. (I would have preferred that he make the point with less bluster and more graphs, but that's just a matter of taste.)

Is that what you were alluding to, or does he somewhere else contradict this to make the crazy and very different claim that "only men have high enough motivation to be successful in competitive industries"?

Thanks for the link! This thing is hilarious!

About 7:00: "And you think when you're 19, 'cause you're so clueless when you're 19, you don't know a bloody thing, you think, "well, I'm not really sure I want children anyway". Like, oh, yeah, you can tell how well you have been educated. Jesus. Dismal. Dismal. Without fail.

"I've watched women go through their professional careers, many, many of them. It's a very rare woman who at the age of 30 who doesn't consider having a child her primary desire. And the ones that don't consider that, generally, in my observation, there's something that isn't quite right in the way that they're constituted or looking at the world.

"Sometimes you get women who are truly non-maternal, you know, by temperment. They have a masculine temper [-ment?], disagreeable, they're not particularly compassionate, they're not maternal, they're not that interested in kids. Fair enough, man. But there aren't that many of them and there's plenty who will not admit to themselves that that's what they most desperately want."

Right? He's like a caricature from the Mad Men era. No wonder so many of the MRA or whatever they are called love him.

The funny implied that interest in kids and being agreeable are kind same thing is not even funny. Where is that particular bs coming from?

No, that would be at least be a somewhat defensible claim. Peterson literally says some men have crazy high motivation and women don't. It's not from this video.

I saw it when one of my co workers started sending my Peterson vids. God, I wish I never heard of this guy.

Okay, I made the mistake of watching the linked video. At one point he claims the old boys' club doesn't exist at law firms. I mean...where did the term come from?

Lame that you'd say this without posting the source.

"At one point he claims the old boys' club doesn't exist at law firms."

Well, sure, you see, those hyper-competitive men who happen to like that sort of environment would never, ever, do anything dishonorable or unethical to reduce their competition. It's purely "market determined right to the core"[1].

[1] Yes, I went back to get the quote.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com