Most striking to me was that her tone, body-language, and words all seemed to broadcast this message: "To those at home, my guest is a villain. We all know it. I'm going to get to the bottom of this, get him to confess his crimes, and maybe get some insight into the mind of a bad person."
Again, I don't know anything about this interviewer or Britain's channel 4, so I don't know if this sort of thing is just their standard format.
Seeing this kind of misleading behavior, and the excessive message telegraphing, is a commonplace occurrence now. If you dare question it, you risk being fired.
The good news is, the last few months, I've started to see more moderate coworkers finally stand up to this type of person and say: "No. You can't keep dominating the social conversation. You're not the majority, your ideas are just one of many, experts are authorities for a reason, and yes, there are systemic problems, but using clickbait to whine about it isn't solving problems".
Peterson: "Since they are human beings, women are mortal."
Interviewer: "So you're saying that all women should be murdered."
That is only a slight exaggeration of what she was doing. He would say something, then she would respond with "So you're saying...(some hot-button statement totally unrelated to what he actually said)".
I give him a lot of credit for remaining calm through that.
Peterson clearly enjoyed that intellectually challenging interview.
These misinterpretations allow Peterson clearly state what his position is and what it is not.
I think Cathy Newman did a good job with that interview. She could do it even better if she was a little bit less aggressive with interrupting Peterson. She still had to interrupt him though in order to maintain good interview pace (but interrupt a little bit less).
Note that most likely Cathy Newman finds Peterson's views on that topic - interesting. That is why she invited him to do that interview and promote his book.
There are some incredibly hot button emotional issues under the surface here. It's very hard for most people to talk about any of this without going nuts.
After thinking about it, I'm glad she aligned herself with Peterson's most vitriolic critics, because it gave him a chance to address that vitriol head-on, and he did so successfully. Hopefully it served to draw some of those with polarized or ill-informed impressions of Peterson towards moderation.
I'm skeptical the host was actually as vicious as she made herself to be, that may have simply been a role she adopted for the interview.
If you want a site dedicated to this sort of disputation, there are other places to find that, and room for new forums as well.
There's a class of users who only want to fight these same fights over and over again, they're a minority, they're not using HN in its intended spirit, and they shouldn't have the ability to fundamentally alter it for the users who do.
This actually goes for all news, not just HN. Accessing it through a feed reader makes it possible to see other interesting behaviour, e.g. news outlets quickly correcting article headings or actually deleting articles. It shows you the headings in the order of publication and leaves any ranking up to you.
Of course this only works as long as news outlets publish an RSS (or Atom) stream and as long as that stream is not censored.
I took a class on critical thinking in university and I think it was one of the most important classes I took. I find myself breaking down a lot of what I read in the news and elsewhere and finding that it doesn't hold up to basic analysis. Unfortunately I don't think I was ever taught how to effectively turn that analysis back on myself (or perhaps an attempt was made but my teenage self ignored it).
Regarding the interview, I think it is best summarized by the lobster exchange towards the end. I was disappointed, as I would like to see Peterson challenged by someone who has done their research.
[0] Indeed, the linked article has arguments which fall into this category in places.
I was disappointed because I would like to see him defend his positions against someone with well-prepared criticisms. Admittedly I don't go seeking out Peterson content so perhaps there are plenty of those sorts of discussions floating around (if you know of any I would appreciate a link). It's not that I necessarily think he's wrong, I just appreciate the occasional probing, aggressive interview -- provided it's well-executed (which this one was not).
I no longer think it is possible to engage in dialog with people who think dialog is not possible. The punch-a-nazi meme, its acceptance across my social circles (including HN), the our-violence-is-speech-their-speech-is-violence talking points, etc. have pushed me to some very shocking and depressing conclusions.
I don't really understand why SJW groups don't sue people for their racist/"nazist" remarks, other than it's expensive.
There are some famous cases https://www.cnet.com/news/taking-trolls-to-court-lawsuit-tar... , but probably SJWs want instant gratification, hence the punching.
That doesn't make it acceptable, mostly because it's not even funny. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpyBPwCmfn0 )
> I no longer think it is possible to engage in dialog with people who think dialog is not possible.
Yes, some people seem to be completely lost.
I don't like the careless negativity about non-european people that you see on the alt-right, but I see much more casual negativity towards europeans on the left that goes uncommented on. Broadly I'm coming to agree with Greg Johnson: the best way for peoples to get along is for each people to have their own sovereign country, and I don't think that has to come from a place of viciousness. I view european people the same as I view the japanese, israelis or nigerians: they deserve their own countries and spaces to live the way they see fit.
Voluntary segregation works to a degree, but the nation state model breaks down fast when you consider different groups within. Just look at the problems in Israel with the Ultra Orthodox people, they are hard liners on many issues (women's rights for example).
And what does European mean in the context of the US? Should they just pack up and come home and give the land back to the various native tribes?
Because currently the Nazi problem (white supremacy, racism, fixed gender roles, fixed family structure, fixed sexual orientation - but let's simply focus on the racism thing) is that radical progressives rattle the cage because they see the systemic injustice against natives/others. And reservations (giving [not taking, in this case] land to people) haven't solved shit, they're still hopeless addicts (alcohol/opioids/etc).
In this sense the problem is, that people have too little minds, they lack the big picture. Some people (SJWs) see the injustice and want to go and cuddle the addicts, and blame the people who are better off; whereas other people (alt-right) point at the addicts and have the audacity to sincerely ask "how much money do we want to pour into them?", while of course both groups missing the point that there's a reason why they are worse off.
Accepting that yeah, it'd be good for the natives as a group to "move on" psychologically - even if very strictly speaking it's their right to hold a nihilistic apocalyptic view of the world (after all, their world ended more than a hundred years ago [the last skirmish happened almost exactly 100 years ago in 1918 January]), or accepting that maybe there really was no dog whistling in the H&M jungle monkey hoodie, all of these, of course, doesn't address the current situation of easy to describe groups (like "inner city blacks") having serious problems, and the seemingly paradoxical treatment (give them enough welfare, so they can wither away their lives on cheap drugs).
Indeed, the rationally obvious strategy is to set up a nice and fair triage process and let that decide how much effort/resource should be allocated to solving/treating the problems of various regions, groups, substance abuse patterns, different manifestations of poverty and lack of social mobility. This way it might turn out that solving the problem of Appalachian (mainly white trash) abusing prescription drugs has a higher priority than solving inner city poverty. Or more likely it'll turn out that both need attention, both need resources, both present some high cost-benefit ways to reduce the problems, yet neither are completely solvable withing a generation, nor are either somehow morally more important than the other, but they are both severely worsened by ideologically muddy approach by previous (federal, state and local) administrations and power structures (such as perceived and real admission difference of universities between the aforementioned disadvantaged groups).
What do you see as the way forward if dialog can't happen?
Peaceful separation is my hope. But it is a faint hope.
Practitioners of this form of argument intentionally mis-represent the other side to form a strawman argument. This works exceptionally well on Twitter, where someone quote-tweets their adversary, intentionally warping their words with the intention to shame. Some people have called this tactic "dunking on" their opponent.
Those tactics work very poorly in this 1-to-1 format, in part because of the longform nature, but mostly because one can't instantly appeal to an outside audience for likes/retweets.
We are very lucky to have Jordan Peterson, one of those very few people, to speak for free speech.
She seems to think certain groups of people are entitled to success they haven't earned, because there is some nefarious and ill-defined force oppressing them.
Peterson handled it well and made some great points about the roles of competence, sacrifice and disagreeableness in work success.
Broadly speaking, social justice advocates, or at least those described in the article, and caricatured by the Channel 4 interview, do have a universal value, namely equality of outcome.
The truly destructive force, again shown in that interview, is that logic is not universally valued. If equality of outcome can be obtained while posturing and arguing strawmen, then go for it.
Neither scenario is appealing.
Is that normal or is this post being moderated or brigaded?
edit: And now it's gone completely from the list with 74 points...
edit 2: Ok now it's back... wtf mods make up your mind about what we're allowed to see
edit 3: All the comments in this thread are getting brigaded down.
Also, my link to the interview in this thread as top level comment was initially getting downvotes, and now it's positive. I'm not sure what an honest reason could be for downvoting a link to the interview that the article is referencing.
Personally I view both as two sides of the same coin. Both the alt-right and the social justice left are totalitarian, intolerant, and intellectually shallow. I find their argumentative styles, emotional reactivity, and style of engagement with the larger culture to be strikingly similar to the point that I see them as different manifestations of some underlying social or psychological disorder.
I actually used "vouch" on this one, which I rarely do, because it's interesting and a bit more substantial than the usual fare.
Truth is the world is complex. We're dealing with multi-variate problems to use JBP's term. The societal benefits of free speech and open dialog are harmed by polarization. Reductionist generalizations pollute truth with doubt. Our societal discussions should be liquid and multi-dimensional.
I do definitely see him as an apologist for aspects of the status quo. That being said that does not mean I'm a fan of all his detractors. There's a totalitarian strain of liberalism I don't much like either.
Also... his Twitter feed contains enough alt-right material for me to see him as at least sympathetic.
To your first point, to make that leap would be to conflate "is" and "ought". Yes, many people do make that error, but you can't accuse him of doing it when others do.
To be a conservative is to tend toward deriving "ought" from "is," or at least skepticism toward attempts to change the status quo.
Doing so equates to the same fallacy that intelligent design adherents make, which is that since evolution yields ugly, selfish behavior, it must be wrong, or at least we should keep our mouths shut abou tit. Peterson is just pointing out how things are, not how we should design our policies.
I think he should probably be more responsible in qualifying his statements to prevent his simple minded followers from jumping to the wrong conclusions, but that's about as strong of an indictment as I think one could make against him, at least in this context.
Peterson is doing great work. I hope he can handle the pressure.
Of the post civil war USSR I can recall one thing that was common. One could only have a successful career provided that they was “clean”: non educated parents, no bourgeois relatives in the past, relatives helping build the communism (e.g. in charge of mass executions).
So, the “clear” understanding of what’s good and what’s evil together with the moral superiority make justice trivial.
P.S. Throwaway for obvious reasons.
If you would like to experience what the atmosphere was like living in the Soviet Union, a good book to read is Peterson's often recommended "The Gulag archipelago".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOP0HQUTSo0 This video has a pretty good summary of the story.