[flagged]
I think discussing whether he's liberal or conservative is a wishy-washy subject and I'm on shaky ground when discussing whether he's right about the left, but in the interest of having a dialogue I do have some retorts about some of the other things you've mentioned.
Re: men superior to women in intellect and rationality - only thing I've seen him state to this effect was describe the distribution of IQs and commenting that the average is the same, however the lowest and highest IQ individuals tend to be male, however women are more packed around the average. I wouldn't describe this as sexist or male-chauvinistic, he's discussing results of studies. From the same observations you'll find that there's more 75-th percentile women than men. When I formulate my conclusion this way, am I now being sexist towards men?
Re: white people being more intelligent than black - if you agree that IQ measures intelligence at least in some capacity, then the results of whites on avg. having a higher IQ than blacks, and Asians and Jews higher than whites, speak for themselves. It might be an inconvenient and unfortunate reality, but you can't fix or mitigate this problem if you just sweep it under the rug. On the other hand, whenever I watch highlights of the NBA, the CRUSHING majority(like 99%) of the athletes there are black/mixed race. So is NBA racist for presenting all of the most athletic players as black? Should we also not talk about how white basketball players are underperforming in physical aspects in the NBA as it's racist?
I haven't kept that much track about the cultural stuff he said nor am I educated enough in the subject so I can't agree or disagree with you there, however I wouldn't call him a conman. His lessons of personal responsibility and guidelines on how to improve and add structure to your life seem sound. I suspect that his advice resonates more with people of a certain temperament than others, which is why I often hear that his advice is useless, despite there being thousands(maybe millions?) of people that have said that his advice has helped them out of a very tough spot.
I disagree with this conclusion any way - I believe that IQ testing quickly loses any kind of predictive power when applied to different backgrounds, and many implicit and even explicit biases quickly show up. I also find it hard to believe that a society where women:men ratios in any profession are 20:1 or 1:20 can be characterized as the free-est in the world on this issue. More likely, there are great social and historical pressures trending in this direction, and the state is simply doing nothing to try to reverse this injustice. Looking at former communist countries, that are generally not even close to having any kind of women in STEM programs that could be considered to bias results, the women:men ratio in STEM fields is something like 30:70.
Re: IQ and "race" - I don't think so. You may accept that IQ has some correlation with what we understand by intelligence in regular usage, but that doesn't mean in any way that you can meaningfully compare people for IQ across arbitrary divides such as "race", especially when "race" is highly correlated with things such as poverty, teacher attitudes, social attitudes etc. And I keep saying "race" and not race because there is no scientific basis for our notions of race - they are arbitrary social constructs based on skin color and culture (for some examples: are Italians and Irish people white? 50 years ago, they were considered a different race; or, what is the race of the child of a mixed black-skin & white-skin couple? Is Kamala Harris black or white? What about her children? Are they white? black? semitic? south-asian? How many studies of IQ vs race on similar populations actually look at any kind of genetic evidence, vs just skin color?)
I will admit that "conman" was a bit rough and an exaggeration. Still, he is definitely using some conman-style tactics to sell his opinions outside his area of expertise. I am not talking about the area of psychology, which includes his self-help work, but about his political discourse.
[0] The Cathy Newman Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcjxSThD54
[1] Jordan B Peterson: Why so many Male Engineers and Female Nurses? (3 minute video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7uZOAzVRgU
It might be difficult to predict the success of somebody via IQ if you compare two individuals from radically different socio-economic backgrounds, but you can compare two individuals with different IQs from similar socio-economic backgrounds and statistically IQ is a very good predictor of success.
With regards to men-to-women ratios, Peterson pointed out that countries that have the free-est social expectations(e.g. Scandinavian countries) have the most diverse differences between men and women. From my personal experience going to a university in the UK and studying CS, I could count maybe 3-5 women out of a cohort of 350+ students. I don't think you can accuse the UK of actively discouraging women from joining these fields, quite the opposite. So why don't they choose these high paying fields in such progressive countries such as UK?
I do agree with you that "race" has no strict scientific basis. I'm not sure how those studies qualified races, so that's something I'll need to look up.
I still disagree with him using conman-style tactics per se, but I will admit that I was a bit disappointed in SOME stuff that he was saying outside of his areas of expertise. Not because I thought he was wrong, but because for me his explanations of psychology set such a high standard that anything less would be overshadowed. I find that he has a very "conversational" approach at discovering new ideas - he'll sort of discuss different aspects as he goes and almost arrive at conclusions right in front of the audience. The drawback to this approach is that sometimes he might be wrong about some things - I think that's okay.
Case in point - in his debate with Zizek, iirc he quickly got shotdown by Zizek because he was pretty much out of his depth, and Peterson admitted that he was wrong. A lot of his detractors point this out as a coup de grace for Peterson, but I find it refreshing to see somebody who makes mistakes in the search of answers, but admits they were wrong and perhaps corrects themselves(not sure about the last part, I haven't kept up with his most recent stuff).
His ideas on Christianity and Jungian psychology are not novel. His self-help material is exactly the same fare dressed up differently. The combination of psychology, biology, and myth to redefine masculinity is not novel; Campbell and Evola and probably a wide range of previous writers treaded that ground. He doesn't bring anything insightful to the interpretation of Solzhenitsyn. His interpretation of postmodernism is an incoherent mishmash designed for Patreon support. It goes way beyond a person just making mistakes in the search for answers. His approach is conversational in the same way a Reddit thread is conversational.
If you are interested in those topics, you are better off reading Oakeshott, Nozick, Sowell, Scruton, actual Jungian books, actual theologians, actually delve into the precise ideas of postmodernism and Marxism and what the actual arguments are. After this, Peterson will seem incredibly boring.
I think it's a fair argument against him, but it is not Campbell or Evola who managed to get into the spotlight and spread those ideas to millions, but Peterson. Perhaps it could be argued that it's his captivating presentational style or ability to package things well are his USP?
Thank you for the reading list, I do want to delve deeper into this stuff.
Consider the following: during the Žižek debate, it became clear that not only was the Communist Manifesto the only Marxist text he had read, but he could not accurately recall some of its main points. And it's a really short pamphlet! That means that Peterson had expounded at length on Marxism, made it a central point of his critique and philosophical brand, while having almost no knowledge or understanding of it. Even with the most charitable interpretation, that goes way beyond just occasionally making mistakes due to a discursive style.
Imagine a charismatic professor with a large audience and who has talked at length about the worth of various programming concepts. Now imagine that it turns out the professor can't pass Fizz Buzz. Following that, his fans defend him by saying that he's a captivating explainer who is only sometimes wrong, and that the size of his audience and fantastic delivery is proof of his worth as a leading expert on computer science and programming. Wouldn't that set off alarm bells in your mind?
I think that's a reasonable point. I'd still maintain that his message is useful and his ideas are, imo, interesting and illuminating. I haven't thought of JP-televangelists comparison before so I'd need some time to mull it over. But in my personal experience I listened to Peterson for a while, internalised what I thought was useful and moved on. Whether televangelists have the same effect - I don't know.
>Consider the following: during the Žižek debate, it became clear that not only was the Communist Manifesto the only Marxist text he had read, but he could not accurately recall some of its main points. And it's a really short pamphlet! That means that Peterson had expounded at length on Marxism, made it a central point of his critique and philosophical brand, while having almost no knowledge or understanding of it. Even with the most charitable interpretation, that goes way beyond just occasionally making mistakes due to a discursive style.
I wish I had more knowledge on Marxism/leftists school of thoughts right now to have a more interesting discussion on this, but I don't. It does look bad on Peterson that he was so ill prepared for that debate.
Having said that, we cannot not say that there isn't a cultural shift happening in the academia and in our societies at large. Traditional cultural norms are being thrown out and in some extreme cases even shamed(not saying that's a 100% bad thing, but imo such things must not be done rashly), instead of bringing equality there are some attempts of inversing the inequality, and people are getting cancelled/silenced/fired/deplatformed in some cases simply for having a different opinion. Whether this is Marxism or not is really irrelevant, what's important is that we note these changes and act to mitigate them, and I believe this is what Peterson was referring to as "cultural Marxists". It might be embarrassing if he got the name wrong, but it doesn't change WHAT he's talking about.
If this cultural shift is a concern due to its effect on society and its norms, then Peterson would be a counter-productive solution, since this sort of person being considered an intellectual worth following is a step down from these very same norms. It's like putting out a house fire with a flamethrower. The problem is the breakdown in informed discourse.
The result is that the money and attention of people concerned about cultural shifts is then funneled into the pockets of people like Peterson or Shapiro or whomever, with some pretty unenviable results. You end up in a situation where people talk of rediscovering traditional norms and opposing them to new norms, without actually understanding what the traditional norms are or engaging with them beyond vague social-media ready descriptions. What could have been effective or at least thoughtful conservatism paradoxically turns into a post-modern parody of itself, with plenty of references to the aesthetic aspect (flags, slogans, freedom of speech etc.) without the substance that originally generated those symbols. And this substance and world lying outside of the Petersons and Shapiros starts to shrink because they monopolize the attention of people who would have otherwise engaged with deeper material and applied it in productive ways.
>If this cultural shift is a concern due to its effect on society and its norms, then Peterson would be a counter-productive solution, since this sort of person being considered an intellectual worth following is a step down from these very same norms. It's like putting out a house fire with a flamethrower. The problem is the breakdown in informed discourse.
Peterson DOES encourage informed discourse. Unlike some public figures that are wont to use strawman arguments and/or voice their opinions in an echo chamber, I've seen Peterson go on almost hostile interviews, keeping calm and giving accurate and measured answers to their questions whilst ignoring their jabs(see Cathy Newman or Vice interviews for example). And as was mentioned before, he's also known to change his opinion if he's convinced that he was wrong - now you show me another public figure that's willing to do that, not too many of those from what I've seen.
>The result is that the money and attention of people concerned about cultural shifts is then funneled into the pockets of people like Peterson or Shapiro or whomever, with some pretty unenviable results.
I can't speak about Shapiro since I haven't watched him or his stuff, but I have no problem with Peterson getting money or attention from his lectures, interviews, or books. I cannot find what harm his material can cause either.
>You end up in a situation where people talk of rediscovering traditional norms and opposing them to new norms, without actually understanding what the traditional norms are or engaging with them beyond vague social-media ready descriptions. What could have been effective or at least thoughtful conservatism paradoxically turns into a post-modern parody of itself, with plenty of references to the aesthetic aspect (flags, slogans, freedom of speech etc.) without the substance that originally generated those symbols. And this substance and world lying outside of the Petersons and Shapiros starts to shrink because they monopolize the attention of people who would have otherwise engaged with deeper material and applied it in productive ways.
I think it's healthy to be at least A LITTLE bit sceptical of new norms. Our society was pretty much the same for at least thousands of years and in a few decades we're changing things up very drastically. Are you that sure that it's not going to cause issues that can have dire consequences in the future? I'm not.
I'd like to reiterate again that I don't think Peterson is as conservative as you seem to be implying, he doesn't want everybody being under Sharia-like social rules of Christian propriety. He does seem to lean towards traditional family values, which I don't think is a bad thing. Otherwise he seems to champion personal freedom, especially against any form of tyranny.
With regards to him not understanding traditional norms I'd like to disagree. If you can show me some examples of where he does that please do.
Cultural shifts linked to specific left-wing ideas underway in various parts of society → concern based on the idea of the foundations of society being weakened or changed too quickly as a result → public figure comments against the former shift in an accessible and engaging way → fanbase forms around public figure, who is then held in high esteem for their work → criticism of the figure is primarily interpreted as censorship and deplatforming
The above would be the simplified and idealized description of Peterson or another such figure from one of their supporters. The following is what I believe is happening instead:
breakdown in discourse over time for various factors → ideologies spring up based on their online marketability and accessibility instead of their depth → the change oriented/left-wing version turns into intensified identity politics that moves away from economic concerns → the conservative oriented version turns into a decaf, pretend version of what it used to be → media personalities from each camp do battle online with debates that are essentially entertainment only but are interpreted as discourse by fans on either side
From this we can see that a supporter of Peterson would see the Newman interview as an example of bravery and intellectual strength, whereas from the second framework it would look like another addition to the huge frothing pile of low-quality infotainment. This is what I meant by using a flamethrower on a flaming house. Peterson himself and others like him contribute to the alteration of traditional norms instead of defending them. Or to be more precise, the fact that they are the figures being listened to is the mechanism that accelerates this decline. This is what I meant with the Fizz Buzz analogy: Peterson and co. would have been laughed out of the room by earlier generations of conservatives for not having basic knowledge of the issues they argue about, and these would in turn have been horrified by the idea that a speaker's accessibility and popularity would be seen as a justification of their worth.
In the end, you have people who nod in appreciation when Peterson "destroys" a reporter/student/heckler in a meme-worthy contest, but don't actually know much at all about the Western canon or the traditional values they claim allegiance to or even the ideas that they claim to oppose. They repeat the words but don't actually live these values, and this is a direct consequence of decaf intellectualism taking up all of that mental space. The conservatism is then ironically no longer conservative, in the sense that it no longer conserves the norms it references.
Well, there are two options: either this is right and there is a vast gulf between the workings of the male and female mind, or these countries are not as free of social expectations as they like to think they are. Not sure how the UK and Northern Europe compare, but a (female) friend who left Romania for Germany was shocked at how large the social pressure on women to give up working after having a child are. She has had multiple colleagues directly and indirectly pushing her into feeling like a bad mother for holding a full-time job while having a child at home.
In my own university days in the CS department, there was a marked difference between the number of men and women, but nowhere near what you're saying: it was more like 10 women for every 20 men, maybe a little less. I've had several female professors, including the head of the Polytechnic institute and the head of the CS department. In my job today, I am on a team of 4 men and 3 women (all programmers), working on a project with a female project lead, and probably overall 30 men and 6 women in Dev, and 50 men and 14 women if you include QA (who also do Python-based automated testing). This is on a project deep in the world of computer networking, not some soft field. And the team is about half in Romania, half in India - not exactly countries known for their courageous tearing down of social norms.
So again, I'm very skeptical of claims that a society where a major professions are overwhelmingly dominated by either men or women is "(one of) the most free societies in the world in terms of choice". It's possible, but I think it's far more likely that the studies claiming this were simply wrong, given the outcomes. Especially since I doubt nurses are significantly better viewed in Northern Europe in terms of job prestige and intellectual rigor than in other places.
> But surely the social consensus that engineers are more prestigious than nurses is on the society and not on Peterson.
Well, if he's saying that women are more fit to be nurses and men are more fit to be engineers, than I feel justified in saying that he's implying women are less suited than men for intellectual labor (not necessarily dumber, but at least less likely to enjoy it). That may not be his intention (though I believe it may well be), but he also doesn't go out of his way to disclaim it.
> So why don't they choose these high paying fields in such progressive countries such as UK?
My strong belief is that it's a problem of education and social pressures. Even in Romania (to be clear, I keep bringing it up because it's the country where I have the most experience), where women do choose these fields in much bigger numbers for whatever reasons, there are deep biases against women's ability in this field. Female colleagues were more likely to be a professor's target for ridicule, or simply receive lower grades on exams for the same mistakes. They would be less likely to be given as positive examples, and less likely to be encouraged towards this field.
> I find it refreshing to see somebody who makes mistakes in the search of answers, but admits they were wrong and perhaps corrects themselves
Yes, that is a quality I also appreciate in people and in Jordan Peterson in particular. I have also seen him change his opinion on the right to deny service to gay people during an interview (he was for this right initially on grounds of freedom of religion essentially, but then when presented with the fact that the same arguments were often used to deny black people service 50 years ago, he took a moment, thought about it, and admitted that his previous position was wrong and that people shouldn't be denied service based on their sexuality). I truly appreciate this, and it is quite a rare thing to see.
> but you can compare two individuals with different IQs from similar socio-economic backgrounds and statistically IQ is a very good predictor of success.
Yes, agreed - that's why I'm not necessarily against the idea that IQ is meaningful at least to some extent. I do think however that the moment you start comparing IQ results across populations, biases quickly creep in and it gets much harder to tell if the difference is caused by a difference in the underlying IQ or in the test itself. Even if comparing between two similar-income American (non-recent immigrants) families in the same city in America, one with black skin and the other with white skin, there is some SMALL chance that there are inherent biases, either internal or in the test, that may affect the validity of results. And from what I've read, many such comparisons are far, far from this close. Some famous books on the topic, such as "The Bell Curve", include horribly, obviously biased studies, such as comparing the IQs of white and black kids as measured by apartheid South Africa!
Yes, it seems even the most progressive countries haven't eliminated all pressure yet. And that might be for the best, but that's besides the point.
>In my own university days in the CS department, there was a marked difference between the number of men and women, but nowhere near what you're saying: it was more like 10 women for every 20 men, maybe a little less. I've had several female professors, including the head of the Polytechnic institute and the head of the CS department. In my job today, I am on a team of 4 men and 3 women (all programmers), working on a project with a female project lead, and probably overall 30 men and 6 women in Dev, and 50 men and 14 women if you include QA (who also do Python-based automated testing). This is on a project deep in the world of computer networking, not some soft field. And the team is about half in Romania, half in India - not exactly countries known for their courageous tearing down of social norms.
Peterson and the study that he referenced specifically did point out that the less pressured men and women are to follow a path the more pronounced the differences become. So far your anecdote, as well as my own from previously living in an ex-USSR country, confirm this. Why this is so - I have no idea but I find it fascinating.
>Well, if he's saying that women are more fit to be nurses and men are more fit to be engineers, than I feel justified in saying that he's implying women are less suited than men for intellectual labor (not necessarily dumber, but at least less likely to enjoy it). That may not be his intention (though I believe it may well be), but he also doesn't go out of his way to disclaim it.
Whilst Peterson never specifically said that men are more fit to be engineers than women, I do agree that what he HAS said is analogous to that. However, I believe his views on that came from evidence and not from a sexist point-of-view that women are inferior. The inverse of that is that women are better at child-rearing and people-facing roles, a statement which I think is on average just as true as the one about men and engineers. Is it then misandrist to say that men are, on average, not as good at raising children? I wouldn't say so personally.
>My strong belief is that it's a problem of education and social pressures. Even in Romania (to be clear, I keep bringing it up because it's the country where I have the most experience), where women do choose these fields in much bigger numbers for whatever reasons, there are deep biases against women's ability in this field. Female colleagues were more likely to be a professor's target for ridicule, or simply receive lower grades on exams for the same mistakes. They would be less likely to be given as positive examples, and less likely to be encouraged towards this field.
I do trust what you say about this 100% when it pertains to Romania, but let me assure you that in the UK even a minor complaint of sexist harassment of any kind will very likely result in a rapid and unexpected vacancy in the company. Sometimes it can be even unfair, but that's besides the point again. In fact, in my experience whenever I see women in engineering fields, I'd see guys pretty much bend over backwards to be nice and supportive of them. So much so that it'd seem saccharine and the women would be either put off by this treatment(perhaps another pressure that dissuades women from the field? I doubt it but it could play a role I suppose, especially if the guys are doing it in the hopes of "surreptitiously" getting in their pants) or have everything so baby-proofed for them that they'd have no challenge because everything would be done for them.
>Even if comparing between two similar-income American (non-recent immigrants) families in the same city in America, one with black skin and the other with white skin, there is some SMALL chance that there are inherent biases, either internal or in the test, that may affect the validity of results. And from what I've read, many such comparisons are far, far from this close. Some famous books on the topic, such as "The Bell Curve", include horribly, obviously biased studies, such as comparing the IQs of white and black kids as measured by apartheid South Africa!
I agree that it can be an apples to oranges comparison. This conversation did make aware of how ignorant I was of the actual methodology of that IQ between races study, so that's something I'll have to look up. That "Bell Curve" thing is shocking! A good reminder how "science" can be manipulated by using a bad methodology to push results to confirm a bias and then touting it as the empirical truth. What I like to call the "I F**ING LOVE SCIENCE" brand of science.