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One peeve of mine is these sorts of folks complaining about the popularity of people like Jordan Peterson. Sure I agree that Peterson is confused, pseudo-profound, and misogynistic, but maybe if academics churned out more philosophy that spoke to the concerns of real people Peterson would have less of an audience. People like him are popular because academia produces only impenetrable walls of irrelevant jargon.

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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20375846 and marked it off-topic.

I think that is a perfectly reasonable and prudent approach (assuming those who are interested can still navigate to it) - this allows these important conversations to take place without disrupting the community mood in the main thread.

In the longer term, I believe strongly that with some effort (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20375985), perhaps HN might one day be the one place where such things could be discussed in an objective manner, and perhaps once we iron out the kinks in how that can be accomplished, the outside world might even be able to learn these skills and we could finally start to discuss these topics in a reasonable manner before time runs out (as seems to be the case with many of them, such as global warming).

Sincere thanks for allowing the discussion to take place.

EDIT: It seems others can't navigate to it from the main thread. Dang, if you read my reply (within the disconnected thread), I hope you can start to see why I believe this phenomenon is an important problem. Society is at a point of impasse on too many important issues. Our technological capabilities have been developing at a parabolic rate, but our cultural and language/communication developments have been largely static.

This imbalance is starting to become an existential threat on several different fronts, and I think it is time that people with "great" power should be starting to consider whether a moral obligation to at least try to do something comes with that power.

"maybe if academics churned out more philosophy that spoke to the concerns of real people Peterson would have less of an audience"

Someone did. His name is Wittgenstein. Folks just don't read him.

Also, real people def experience existential dread. Camus and Sartre are great reads for trying to come to terms with the possibility of infinite (but some infinities are larger than others!) freedom

Real people experience oppression, which is why most of the "postmodern neo-marxists" care so much about stopping it.

Real people experience ethical dilemmas, and would find a lot of utility in exploring the thoughts of Kant, JSM, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Arendt. Out of those, Kant is the only one whose sort of difficult to understand without knowing the jargon. Really this article is about how terrible contemporary French Philosophy given that the useless jargon seems only to be in their works (since Hegel anyway)

Kierkegaard doesn't use academic philosophy jargon, but he came up with his own, and the English translations of his work come off as cryptic and dense.

Is it necessarily the job of academics to have superficial appeal to the layman?

People don’t want philosophy; if they did then there are plenty of authors from Aristotle through the modern day. Existentialism is basically “how to survive in an arbitrary world that makes no sense”. It’s a fucking guidebook for the modern world built in the years before and after WW2.

People en masse want pop-philosophy that confirms their existing beliefs. Nobody reads JP to become a better person, they do it to feel better about being a shit person.

> Nobody reads JP to become a better person, they do it to feel better about being a shit person

Without wishing to get into yet another discussion about Peterson, I think that's a pretty textbook example of an intellectually dishonest attempt to simply pigeonhole someone you probably don't know all that much about into the "enemies" basket.

I've read and listened to JP to some extent - believe it or not, yes, as part as some kind of greater effort to better myself, as is much of my reading. I agree with some of what he thinks, and disagree with others, but I don't regret the time spent. If that makes me a "shit person" then frankly I think it's your worldview that is the problematic one.

> Nobody reads JP to become a better person, they do it to feel better about being a shit person.

I've just watched an interview with him where he says that, when he's out on the street in basically any city in the world, he's approached roughly once every ten minutes by someone thanking him for the help they got from his lectures and books. In many cases they say that, thanks to JP, they were able to lift themselves from shitty life situation (ex. abusive family, addiction, depression, aimlessness, anger etc.) and turn their lives around. I cannot reconcile that with your comment.

The stance that "the world is arbitrary and makes no sense" is itself far from uncontroversial! Indeed, the very term "modern world" suggests that our world (in contrast with the "pre-modern" one) does derive much of its comparative success from institutions and frameworks that work (at least to some extent) in ways that can be made some sense of and understood fairly well.

>Nobody reads JP to become a better person, they do it to feel better about being a shit person

I contest this, JP is among the many reasons why I've practically 'turbocharged' my life and transformed from a scrawny pretty toxic guy into an assertive, empathetic, can-do and intelligent dad-type guy.

>Nobody reads JP to become a better person, they do it to feel better about being a shit person.

Isn't that the case for any other pseudo-profound pop-philosophy as well, not just JP?

And isn't JP so popular exactly because the more mainstream academic trend is so laughable?

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