The death of a public intellectual
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I think author understanding of the world is not wrong, but his approach - definitely. He expects to find some "wise man" who would have answers on all the world problems, sort of a panacea-man, which is clearly not a smart approach.
If someone was an expert for covid-related topics, why would you even watch this peron videos analysing Ukraine war? That makes zero sense.
So I do this, a lot. Rogan is a good example I struggle with. I regularly go I wonder what Joe Rogan thinks about this, on subjects I know he doesn’t know shit about or is just plain wrong about. It isn’t relegated to just Rogan.
Musk was another awful one when you first get into him.
This has to be a form of non-sexual attraction I think. I’m not gay, but how is this not gay? Like, what the fuck, am I in love with these people?
I almost have to shake my head and snap out of it.
Edit:
I’ll add that I’ve gotten extremely good at filtering his guests but still weak to filtering him (it’s kinda like still having feelings for your first). Anytime he puts on a comedian I always go “yeah whatever, who cares what some random comedian thinks about ______”, but I wasn’t able to do that with Rogan. No sir, I listen with both ears as he describes like … nuclear fusion.
My favorite analogy is that parasocial relationships are the Doritos of socialization: appealing. delicious, addictive, can temporarily keep hunger at bay—but fundamentally not satiating, lacking in essential nutrients, and unhealthy when they displace their original natural & more nutritious alternatives.
These relationships are on both sides (e.g AOC on the left).
It's kind of inescapable in modern politics, because it's effective at getting people elected and/or making money. It's not the worst way to get elected; certainly better than relying on narrow donor class money. Just .. recognize the limitations of it.
So instead of being a Rogan stan for those weird years in High School, you are grown ass 30 year year old Stan who’s been stanning for 5 years now minimum.
Adults today don’t know how to snap out of the high school shit they easily snapped out of after high school. It’s like we’re in a high school that never ends.
I think the issue with being an adult is that you often think you've outgrown childish inclinations. In actuality, I find adults will act childishly and then assume, because they are adults, their behavior must be mature and taken seriously.
Until I dropped social media, I was getting Rogan links all the time.
I didn't think this was in any way confusing or surprising, and never thought this had anything to do with love.
Isn't this the position of most people?
Plenty of couples started with "oh he's so cute and funny" / "I love listening to her jokes", and few years later found themselves retelling those stories to a wide audience, at their wedding.
"I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric."
(if you've never read the whole thing, it's worth it, far beyond the list)
I don't understand asking non-experts their opinion on basically anything.
And that's what these people are. They provide a comforting sense of moral certainty and judgement; they define enemies, usually a nebulous Them; they're satisfying to listen to; and they publish on a schedule to reinforce the little ritual of listening to them. You've heard the adhan and you are called.
> This has to be a form of non-sexual attraction I think. I’m not gay, but how is this not gay? Like, what the fuck, am I in love with these people?
People have somehow lost all the words for communicating relationships between people that aren't sexual. Although the "fan" relationship can get pretty weird at times. It's interesting to hear from someone who's liminal enough to realize that they're inside the experience but also knows what's wrong with it. Thank you for this post.
> I wonder what Joe Rogan thinks about this, on subjects I know he doesn’t know shit about or is just plain wrong about
See also "Gell-Mann amnesia" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect
You see someone make sense of a complex topic, be able to cut through bullshit and appearances, you can use that as a "character witness". Maybe that person has solid thought processes and may get other complex issues right too. There are a few people who I see to be often proven right.
Clearly there is a middle ground, we should not blindly follow some authority, but some skills generalize, and some people may be worth listening to on general topics, and not just the ultra-specialized experts.
That people do pay attention to the Tomas Pueyos of the world is a problem - but not because it's impossible not to, just because they're doing it!
Scientific people who are outside of a field that has institutional scientific blindness problems are absolutely allowed to call out that bullshit when we see it. We don’t get upset when a non chiropractor says that chiropractors are hucksters. I should not be lumped in with Covid deniers for pointing out that most disease experts massive undervalued and underutilized air ventilation techniques (an example technique would be doing regular activities, like classes, outside)
Meanwhile I saw a friend of mine who actually is an immunology PhD get driven off Twitter in 2020 by angry mobs.
Is considering oneself an omniscient Oracle the right approach?
> If you have access to the opinion of people who devoted their whole lives to the field in question, why would you seek it from an influencer that perhaps gained fame from being an authority in a couple of non-related fields?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(social_sciences)
For myself, the domain(s) that the "influencer" has skills within is crucially important, as certain domains encompass or intersect with almost all others.
This is an interesting comment section from certain specific perspectives, but if one lacks the necessary background you could miss out on the show entirely.
But do they really cut through bullshit and appearances? The individuals that the author has mentioned are mostly oversimplifying the world.
> Maybe that person has solid thought processes and may get other complex issues right too.
That's the issue here - treating real world issues as a though experiment. It creates solutions that are very appealing to people who perceive themselves as thinkers. The ideas are usually simple, round, fair, based on some fairness coming from nature or math, but they completely discard the complexity of the problem. As soon as you start adding corner cases it solution fails.
You can see that as well in software engineering - if only we could simplify the problem we're trying to solve, the solution would be so clean!
> But dear reader see this pattern for what it is... every 6 months I find someone new to obsess over... Without fail, each one of comes to disappoint.
Serial obsessive fixation seems a problem right there in itself. There's a deep need that isn't being satisfied. What is it?
> says something that completely violates the narrative. How fascinating.
A rebel! One validated by popular opinion no less!
The problem is, no matter how many rebellious public intellectuals we binge on, it will not take one any closer to being that rebellious and fascinating person. Escape from such a cycle is to jump directly to being that which you wish to be. Do not pass "Go". Do not collect $200.
Find what is so odious in this "narrative" of which you speak, and loudly denounce it!
But beware, if you like to have friends. Instead of being the cool, interesting person at the party, who knows all the latest, internet-celebrity-validated talking points, you will be the bus loony in the anorak who people avoid. Trust me, I've lived it for 40 years. With some guile you can go to ground disguised as university professor for a while.
I do feel that the author has some interesting personality trait - but I'm not sure if he's in the minority.
After writing my comment I have realised that maybe it's why I never understood the appeal of Twitter. I have never had any "gurus" or "authorities" that I'd universally respect. I could never understand why would I follow some individual on twitter - why would I care? When I read that the author says he follows that "person" so deeply, watching their videos for hours, I completely can not relate. Neither on logical nor emotional level.
I might dig into a topic, let's say, siege of Berlin during II WW, but I'd be focusing on the topic and the source / author will be completely irrelevant. I'll even probably select various ones, as I enjoy challenging my own perspective.
Not me. What I would like to follow is a topic that interests me, with discourse predominantly populated by subject matter experts. "User-based" follow systems like Twitter only make sense insamuch as the user sticks to their expertise, and as soon as they start veering away into new topics their comments are just as likely to be noise as the average schmuck, and I don't know why I would want to waste my time deliberately consuming noise.
What you describe wanting, is what academic journals are. Subject matter experts discussing that subject matter with one another. Social media is not for you, and that's fine.
What other people are describing, is more like, an author writes a book you enjoy; so you read another book of theirs. There is enjoyment in their prose style and personal voice, and so they seek out more of the same.
And maybe the first book was a scifi or mystery novel, and the next book you find by that author is a non-fiction history of egypt, or a genetics textbook. You will likely still enjoy reading that book.
Sometimes that author can even be an expert on all such topics; Issac Asimov existed, after all. But when people are reading for entertainment, they'll be less picky.
Not really. I'd rather follow a site with news in topics that are of my interests (e.g. https://electrek.co/) than some short-form messages of an individual. If these tweets would be containing links to their blog then I'd rather check the blog occasionally.
Because if someone puts out good tweets at a reasonable frequency, then following them means you will have good tweets in your feed at a reasonable frequency.
You might also get a lot of terrible tweets in your feed, but that's fine, that's how Twitter works, you just scroll past the terrible stuff.
It's not a million miles of subscribing to a newspaper. You don't expect every piece to be good, but as long as there are a few good things every week, it may be worth it.
It's an odd word.
What I found is that almost every random bore at the pub has a wealth of interesting stuff to say. You just have to tease it out. You have to work at conversations. It's a bit of a lost art imho.
The first step is always to get the topic off the mainstream (stop exchanging platitudes) by showing an interest in some marginal personal remark. Doesn't work for everyone of course. And some people just don't want to.
Living in Finland I learned the art of just being quiet around others and that "interesting company" can be hanging out without words, say just appreciating a walk together.
Conversations (on the surface level) have become narrow.
It's the pursuit to reveal a very specific meaning, and the connections around it. It won't go anywhere.. people will want freedom from it.
Both of your examples have a very strong technical component, either understanding the underlying biology/epidemiology or understanding war theory and practice. It is indeed unlikely that someone is an expert in both.
But many important topics have far fewer, if any, objective truths attached to it. In the case of covid restrictions, opinions should obviously be founded on science, but science can only inform our moral choices, not make them for us. Is the damage done to developing minds worth locking down schools if it reduces the spread of covid? Can there be a state/societal mandate to force people to stay in their homes, or even to get vaccinated?
You can come to very different conclusions based on how your worldview is constructed, and I think the sign of a true intellectual is that they can coherently describe theirs, and make other intellectuals understand it, even if they are diametrically opposed to it.
Maybe that's the issue with me. The more I learn, over years, the more cautious I become about forming an opinion. It's very rare that things are black or white, I can see it being all very grey. So if I see someone describing, with full confidence, that this is good and that is bad, without all that load of middle-tones, it just makes me feel that they either are not too smart or do not have good intentions.
> You can come to very different conclusions based on how your worldview is constructed, and I think the sign of a true intellectual is that they can coherently describe theirs, and make other intellectuals understand it, even if they are diametrically opposed to it.
I can see the appeal here. What I do not understand is, why would you approach that person as an authority?
Yes, it's much easier to paint the whole world one color than trying to paint it in two colors: you'd have to make distinctions and that's quite hard. But on the other hand, if two colors are not enough to paint the whole world, surely one color is even less enough?
Yep. Naturally, there is a weird social pressure to have an opinion now even if it ends up being just wrong later. Somehow just waiting is not acceptable. You need to take a stance and declare yourself as team A or team B ( or more ), which only adds to the further tribalization of our discourse.
When I was a teen I saw the world as black and white.
When I got in college I knew they are all grey.
And now I understand there are different shades of grey. Most of time we have no enough information to tell, but sometimes it's worth to look closely to distinguish them.
Opinions are not based on knowledge or certainty.. they're opinions.
I miss when opinions were a thing you said to get the 'nothing' out and a probative suggestion that started conversations.
Locking opinion down to knowledge and certainty is essentially non-sensical in English.
The old saying was 'opinions are like assholes, everyone's got one'. Perfectly encapsulates how serious opinions are.... not at all serious, by design.
Because that was how you began life.
Your parents (and later/lesser, primary school teachers) were the source of answers on nearly everything.
There’s probably something quite natural about transferring a belief of being competent/knowledgeable in one area into some expectation of the same in another area. It's the underpinning of the "appeal to authority" logical fallacy.
It certainly works in the opposite direction: someone whom you know to pontificate out their backside on one topic, that expectation holds for the next, randomly chosen topic as well.
It's the adage of "when you only have a hammer everything looks like a nail."
Intelligent people have a full toolbox to analyze things with but domain experts tend to only have increasingly large hammers.
Citation needed. This sounds like a Rationalist power fantasy which doesn't fit my experience of the world at all.
it does make sense, you can understand multiple things. especially after researching it.
The people with the knowledge/experience are often busy doing real world stuff
For others, producing that content is the "best" thing they can do with their time, but ironically that means you probably don't want to listen to them
I should start a list of red flags in my notes. “Inflammation” comes to mind as well as any sort of explanation that invokes evolutionary biology or neuroscience.
Anyway, basically what I'm saying is, if the CO2 levels go above 500ppm in my room, I get extreme brain fog.
In my view its an entirely reasonable thing: you encounter a person who can articulate a coherent ideology, method, system (etc.) which is entirely new to you. You use that person as a means of learning this system; and when you've learnt it all, you move on.
The key thing is you arrive at a critical point where you have seen their pov and can criticise it; and that you dont end up in a cult-like following of their ideas.
This cultishness is everywhere in academia, see, eg., all the departments that are "Kantian" or "Wittigensteinian" --- people forever trapped in the work of one author. I am very suspicious of "History of"-type disciplines for this reason.
I dont see this as having to do with social media, but if at all, maybe it accelerates it. I certainly think you need much more than 6mo with any substantive person.
You can see it on youtube for channels to be setup on a sole concept and then the creator drives it home forever.
This man talks like ChatGPT when asked to clad a text of the most basic ideas, frequently completely missing the point, into sophisticated-sounding language.
The other names tell me nothing; but having the former in the list kept me from looking up the latter.
[1] https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-d...
However, I couldn't get through Beyond Order at all; I had to drop it fairly early. I think I still like the Peterson from 5-ish years ago. How he currently is, and how he has _mostly_ been for the past 2 years or so does not align with me anymore.
Might be the fame, aging, the need to build an audience, or the rehab process. Who knows.
Peterson has helped me. That being said, Peterson is someone with a few good ideas that encompass a singular limited view of the world. It doesn't help with military maneuvers (or the world political theater at large), or dietary choices, or a host of other topics. It's not necessary for someone to have deep thinking applied to every topic, but that's an assumed, pre-requisite of an intellectual. Someone who is smart and has something valuable to say, primarily because it has been a focus in their lives, have repeatedly been asked to voice opinions. These opinions are inappropriately over-valued in the modern zeitgeist.
Asking Peterson about AI is silly. eg I wouldn't ask John Ousterhout, who is looking to formalize a process for creating "great programmers", about how to maximize my tax deductions.
Peterson is / was a drug addict that gives mediocre-at-best self-help advice, who also goes around whining about wokeness and saying hateful things, while somehow keeping a large audience and grifting them for millions of dollars. As far as public figures go, it's fairly typical for such a person to invite antipathy.
That is a very severe understatement. He was so badly addicted to benzos (for years) that he ended up going to Russia to have himself put into a weeks-long medically-induced coma to go cold-turkey, which resulted in brain damage. (He insisted on that course of action, which Western doctors refused to go along with, for obvious reasons).
That left him unable to walk or speak properly for months and he still hasn't and probably will never fully recover. Just watch videos of him from a few years ago and compare them to videos from recently.
I get that benzos is being studied as a potential treatment for depression, but he was doing massive quantities, and not as part of a pharmaceutical trial.
Edit: also, "slow well-publicized descent unto madness and suicide on a wave of intellectual dishonesty by public psychological expert and academic" or something using a combinatorial variation inclusive of all those words would be just peachy
https://newrepublic.com/article/156829/happened-jordan-peter...
Peterson was addicted to benzodiazepines, in specific he mentioned klonopin in his interview with New Republic.
Edit: also, does he say it was antidepressants? Anyone got the transcripts of podcast episodes where Jordan Peterson lies about being addicted to benzodiazepines/benzos and instead suggests they were antidepressants? I wish Klonopin was an anti-depressant yo, although im also glad thats absurd and truly not the case for my own sake
Edit: help your man Peterson out? Did you purposefully lie or understate the publicly known and available information regarding the nature of his addiction? Was he maybe cleaning his room so thoroughly to find lost drugs Junkie Jesus style? I wanna believe you but my brain can't just lay down its arms and allow this kinda explicit foolishness or deception.
I thought it addressed it fairly directly:
* gives mediocre-at-best self-help advice * goes around whining about wokenes * saying hateful things
I suppose we should add add that he claims to speak authoritatively about subjects well out of the areas of his expertise.
—Bible/"God"
This is incredibly wrong and convenient. He was addicted to benzos—not anti-depressants. Benzos are anti-anxiety drugs but it is more helpful to think about them as"alcohol in a pill". Peterson is, in a sense, not distinct from an alcoholic.
I'm not one to shit on drug addicts, hell, pot-kettle. But Peterson rubs me the wrong way because of his audacity in acting as if he is above the "usual" drug addict and that he can cheaply sell you the keys in the form of clichéd advice and can sell you better shit if you privately pay him to consult with him when he has to go all the way to fucking Russia to recieve "adequate treatment".
I just can't even with this guy. Like, Im not gonna say he has zero helpful ideas but they are tainted with the nonsense that helps nobody but himself.
Edit: i would like to find out the length of the supposef addiction as well. I just hate when people lie about this shit or polish it up when such stories should be unvarnished and relatively congruent with that which is known objectively or publiy particularly in such a public facing individual.
Edit: he also has the perfect justification so its interesting if his accounts depart from a more objective one in a way that is palpable
Edit: imma help you out here. If you wanna call out something I actually said, use the > and write it
Your comment makes no sense, I never spoke to that which you raise unpredictably and unanswerably so (if thats even a real word)?
"You should be a monster, an absolute monster, and then you should learn how to control it."
https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/17168812447500333...
Or you could just be a decent person. It's not that hard.
"The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence."
https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/17150743954154250...
Counterexamples: Trump, Elon Musk's tenure at Twitter, Boris Johnson. Clearly the current system is not purely a meritocracy. This is also a completely vague statement, so plenty of room for weasling. What exactly does "predicated on competence" mean? I once read that someone fairly famous wrote "Be precise In Your Speech". Oh yeah, that was Peterson.
Women deeply want men who are competent and powerful. And I don’t mean power in that they can exert tyrannical control over others. That’s not power. That’s just corruption.
https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/17136892453603086...
Misogynistic crap. Women are not some undifferentiated glob. Some women don't even have any sexual interest in men!
Also retweeting climate change denial etc.
My experience and history shows that women definitely tend to be more attracted to men who are competent and powerful. There is nothing misogynist about that statement. That statement does not imply that all women are the same, it's a description of a pattern that has a semblance of truth.
When he starts talking stupid, am I to defer to his "public intellectual" status and not only turn off my brain and logic and common sense and/or suspend judgment forever or would that still be ok and would you respond well to an invitation to join me in doing so?
Edit: how many stupid things or over how long a period of uninterrupted time does it take for you to at least reexamine your views? Like this advocacy is as illogical as it is manipulatively and fiercely incorrect on a factual and qualitative basis jointly :/
"Nothing you just said disputes any of what Peterson has said. ... try[ing] to discredit him without actually addressing or disputing anything he's said shows you just have an axe to grind with no substance."
Nothing there about his status as a public intellectual.
2. "Anybody can pick a few random quotes out of context and dispute them." These are tweets he sent on Twitter, not replies to other people. There is no more context. There is a high density of this crap on his twitter feed. At the time I looked, the quoted tweets were in position 4, 8, and 17 on his feed. I could have disputed more of them but those were the easiest to address.
3. There is a difference in between "women definitely tend to be more attracted" and "Women deeply want". If Peterson meant the former he should take his own advice and be more precise in his choice of words. Similarly if I've misinterpreted his other tweets, that's on him for not providing more context. He's not new to this game. (And this is, apparently, one of his rhetorical tactics. There is link in another comment to "bait and switch".)
Peterson Family Update June 2020 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzRbEMzr0k8
Peterson was taking doctor prescribed medication during a time when his wife was dying of cancer and like many in the US (opioid crisis) he got hooked on them.
He is now off of them. If anything this should be celebrated, not denigrated.
Like or dislike Peterson, it's important that we get our facts straight and avoid editorializing for the sake of manipulating readers.
I think the ragey criticisms are baited by him dancing around far right positions while otherwise talking pretty normal stuff. Anger based criticisms end up lying to make their point and then make Peterson more popular as a result.
A while back, when I was just beginning therapy, my therapist recommended I take an online personality test, which unbeknownst to me, was authored by Jordan Peterson. After I took the test, it gave 5-7 paragraphs explaining what each individual personality trait meant. Pretty boilerplate, but for some traits, when you got further down the explanations, it started feeling less and less like a personality test.
For example, for the "agreeableness" trait, it would talk about how it was testing how "compliant, nurturing, kind, naively trusting and conciliatory" the person is, and that it generally found women scored higher. Sure, I can believe you've found that during your surveys.
But then you scroll down a little more, and it starts saying things like "This difference in agreeableness between men and women is largest in countries such as Norway and Sweden, where the most has been done to ensure equality of outcome between the sexes. This provides strong evidence that biological factors rather than the environment and learning account for the dissimilarity."
Uh... Why are we talking about Norway and Sweden suddenly? Scroll down a little more, and it makes more sense: "Agreeable people, [...], are more likely to enter professions associated with people, such as teaching and nursing, which are dominated by women. This is true even in the Scandinavian countries, where attempts to produce gender-equal societies has reached a maximum."
Ah. So what we have here is, regardless of whether you agree it's true or not, a political agenda masquerading as a personality test. It's purpose is to argue Peterson's vocal political belief that the gender pay gap is not an issue, because women are biologically better at being nurses instead of engineers. His proof? Just look at those Scandinavians, they have completely solved sexism (citation needed) and still see this gap!
Peterson may have genuinely good self help books and lectures, but the issue is it's not for the purpose of actually helping people. It's to push people closer to his world view, to agreeing with his political agenda. If you truly gained something from reading his books or watching his lectures, don't let me take that away from you. But be mindful of when his self help veers towards political beliefs.
I'm not sure it's a political belief per se so much as a refutation of the implicit assumption that the gender pay gap is entirely the result of sexism and more likely the result of other factors, not least of which are the traits and proclivities of either sex.
I'm not prepared to debate whether or not his argument on the topic is legitimate, but it is something that he has elaborated on and supported with some data.
You can make that argument without having it bleed into situations that are expected to be apolitical.
When someone says 2+2=4 is that political?
Don Quixote and tilting at windmills comes to mind.
Is not a verifiable fact. It's just a political opinion, used in conjunction with a verifiable fact, to smuggle a political argument into a 'scientific' personality test.
He is providing, if not a counter-narrative, then at least a narrative orthogonal to those other people favor.
What he does is say something designed to look like a dog whistle to get people upset. Then when challenged on it, he say something reasonable to pull in fans. Then he says something else which is designed to be misunderstood, and repeats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKwSDqJAum8&t=244s explains it, and shows an actual example of how Peterson does it. This example had Peterson using the phrase "enforced monogamy" without context, causing people to assume that he wanted laws to enforce monogamy. Then, when challenged, he said, "Oh, no, what I meant was SOCIALLY enforced monogamy. All that I'm saying is that monogamy is a good thing!" Score 1 for Peterson. And people left sore about it are now primed to react doubly at whatever piece of bait he presents next.
And the "dog whistle" thing you mentioned is conceptually that, accusing someone of saying something they didn't exactly say. I hate this concept. How would someone even proove that something they said wasn't a "dog whistle"?
But by the time you've built yourself a major brand based on doing this over and over again, your repeated protestations about "just being misunderstood" wear thin.
There is a legitimate grey area in the middle.
If you are arguing for A, and you are versed in basic argumentation (as anyone in Peterson's situation is), it is reasonable to expect that you understand the landscape of the argument. As such, if you know that this will be used to discredit your argument, it is incumbent on you to say, "I am arguing for A. I define A as such. With that definition, I am not arguing for D or that A implies D." ___
As for dog whistles, you avoid having that problem by explicitly condemning the groups that use the dog whistle (if you indeed believe that group is wrong -- e.g. explicitly denouncing white nationalists), and by adjusting your argument to avoid any semblance of dog whistles as you learn about them.
Yes, it's more work, but this is the landscape of public discourse. Consider that minorities like Muslims have had to do this to the point of absurdity. (E.g. someone does not support the indiscriminate bombing of Palestinian hospitals and the withholding of substantial relief aid to Gaza, but that does not mean they support Hamas or its taking of hostages.)
There are very strong proofs that a hospital was hit by a failed rocket launch of a gazan militia against Israel. Plus Hamas and other militias keep their weapons under schools hospitals and mosques. When ever Israel bomb these sites it first gives notice to evacuate. It's in no way indescriminate. As opposed to a surprise raid against civilians in they're homes butchering their families, mothers before children, babies beheaded before their mothers and children tied up and burnt alive. Perhaps that is why ppl decrying the bombing of gaza while not mentioning what Hamas did get such strong condemnations
The point of the argument is to say that someone who espouses A does not immediately support B, and used a contemporary example.
I could have as easily said, "someone who does not support the bombing and murder of 8,000 Gaza residents by Israel or the withholding of aid does not immediately support the hostage taking of 230 hostages by Hamas." Would that be a less controversial opinion for you?
This is a war, the first strike was the senseless butchery I described. The ideology that drew that strike calls for annihilation of all Jews. And yet, Israel doesn't indescriminatly murders civilians. Israel called all civilians to leave the bombarded area, Hamas called them to stay. you have no idea how many of those dead are combatants, So how is saying "murder of 8000" not controversial?
Israel has no obligation under any international law, or any moral obligation to give aid as long as the hostages are not released. Remember these hostages are as young as 9 MONTHS. Hamas have not let the red cross see them. A person who says what you wrote indirectly supports Hamas by spreading their morally corrupt narrative.
"Holy shit... what? What's... the 'right sort'?"
Get your panties out of a twist, liberals, I just mean I like to eat animal meat.
See? These liberals want to force us all to be vegans.
That's the basic dance going on.
To whit, Norse pagan iconography is a very common in white supremacist imagery. So while I find the Norse pagan imagery interesting and compelling, I can't just hang it on my wall without preparing to defend myself against accusations of being a neo-Nazi. Is it my fault? Is it the accusers fault? No, obviously, it's the Nazis fault; they're the ones that tied a neutral-by-way-of-antiquity symbol to ethnic cleansing.
Does Peterson see what he says as a dog whistle? Impossible to say, but also irrelevant: there are extremists who believe that what he says is in fact a dog whistle, and just like the Norse Pagan imagery, the awfulness of their beliefs taints Petersons beliefs by association. And it turns out that Peterson doesn't have much control over that usage, even if he had a problem with it: the dog whistle is in the promulgation of his ideas by others, not his expression of those ideas.
Just to be clear, I do think Peterson's observations (re: gender roles, amongst others) are just wrong on their face. But that's out of scope for this post.
I hope for better times when we can take what people say at face value and stop second-guessing what they supposedly mean.
And what's insidious about it is that to some extent, people do it just because they know it winds up liberals. Hell, there's a picture of 16-year old me making the sign that way, specifically because the photographer told us not to. That was 25 years ago, so I'm not sure if the symbol had been overloaded at that time. I certainly had no idea about that extra connotation.
Its never clear in isolation if a person using the symbol semi-covertly is doing so because they want to confuse liberals, or to advertise to neo-nazis. Its the same as wearing a red shoelaces in certain parts of Los Angeles. Are you doing it because you're a Blood? Or because you think it goes well with your outfit? What if its both? And if you're not in the context where that extra connotation matters, then no one assumes that there might be that extra connotation. You see the exact same sort of bonkers nitpicking from e.g. QAnon about how every little thing is just code for "this politician is involved in the child sex trade, and want others in the child sex trade to know". Sometimes the accusation of dog-whistling is just bonkers. But I have also seen neo-nazi militias advertising in neutral spaces, and the only reason I was tipped off is because they called themselves the 1488th Civil Defense Militia or some such. As the saying goes, if you know, YOU KNOW.
There are also more explicit dog-whistles, where the word people want to use is deemed politically incorrect. Think "urban" when somebody really means "black" in the late 80s into the 90s.
"In 1981, former Republican Party strategist Lee Atwater, when giving an anonymous interview discussing former president Richard Nixon's Southern strategy, speculated that terms like "states' rights" were used for dog-whistling"
It's the off-internet equivalent of 'I'm just trolling, bro, why do you haff to be mad ;)'
What confuses the matter further is that some of his advice is actually common-sense good-advice. He's not famous or controversial for giving that common-sense good-advice, though.
The point of a controversy bait-and-switch is to draw attention and followers based on how reasonable you are. I already explained how it works above.
A motte-and-bailey fallacy, for those who don't know, is that you have two statements that you equivocate between. The motte is very easy to defend. The bailey is an attack. When you are attacking you switch to the bailey. When you are defending you switch to the motte. And then you switch back by pretending that your defense of the motte actually advanced your bailey.
I see this as different because you actually DO intend to convince people of the bailey if you can. And while in the controversy bait and switch you make it clear when you flip between positions, in the mott-and-bailey you equivocate and attempt to leave people confused.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGEDjd_Nqb4&t=262s is a different video from the same person demonstrating Jordan Peterson using a mott-and-bailey fallacy to advance his position.
As it is now I have to go searching for the interview in question if I want to check for myself if he actually did a bait-and-switch, as only evidence for the switch part is actually presented.
If the video featured proper citations, one for the bait and one for the switch, I might've been able to form an opinion, but alas, for now it is not meant to be.
However, in my experience, Drew goes out of his way to fairly represent people's positions. Based on that I would trust that he's fairly representing his understanding of what other people actually did. Drew's mistakes are far more likely to be from honest error than malice.
- Has published or co-authored over 100+ academic papers in multiple fields
- Has h-index of 41, i10-index of 77, with 21,000 citations [0]
- Taught at Harvard
- Tenured Professor at the largest University in Canada
- 20+ year clinical practice
- Best selling author with over 5 million copies sold
You don't have to like his ideas, but if this doesn't qualify as "intellectual" not sure what else does.
Saying someone is right because they are a police officer is an appeal to authority.
Saying someone is relevant because they have worked and made contributions to a field over the course of many years, and have had those findings integrated with the findings of others is a matter of practical management of complexity.
By the way, abusing terms is another sign for fake intellectuals...
However, having established real authority, he then uses it to convey ideas which are less supported. https://youtu.be/eKwSDqJAum8?si=WKNMLmu8Y8OO7kwn&t=631 calls this a "science sandwich", and it is a good description. So, for instance, he'll have a series of lectures. Some are real science. Such as how the big 5 personality characteristics correlate with political alignment. Others are pseudoscience. Such as using Jungian archetypes to push his politics. He doesn't differentiate, and audiences who have accepted his authority ALSO don't differentiate.
https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7547741/vitamin-c-myth-pauling
How would you define this though? People couldn't even agree whether gpt-3 talks intelligently or not.
We can still call Gochnaur [0] a baseball player even if he wasn't any good at it.
They're lamenting the fact that no matter the person, every person whose ideas they find fascinating becomes less fascinating the longer they consume their content.
They blame it on the fact that every subsequent idea is less researched and thought out than the one before because there is simply not enough time for them to have thought it out properly.
And it reminds me of something I heard once: 'Your first book/song/album/painting is the result of your entire life up to that point, your next is done in significantly less time.' Basically, until you actually provide a result, you have all the time you want to craft it exactly how you want it. But once you have a following, they will demand more from you and now you have an implied deadline.
The big tell: is "being a public intellectual" all they have? Do they have no experiences with the real world to temper flighty, assumption-based beliefs? Bad news. Even Zeno of Citium saw the world as a merchant while Stoicism was cooking in his head. You can't create or benefit from philosophy isolated from people who challenge your assumptions.
Here's some people to get you started:
On Malik (some interesting photography too): https://om.co/
Anil Dash (appreciates a good Prince pun): https://www.anildash.com/
Judith Butler, just about anything they put out in public.
bell hooks (deceased, but has a lot worth reading)
Adam Savage (lots of good life advice in Q&As): https://www.youtube.com/@tested
Wil Wheaton (yeah I know, but he hit a new gear once he got past alcohol and started really dealing with his childhood trauma): https://wilwheaton.net/
Michael Rosenbaum (played a solid Lex Luthor and now does great interviews): https://www.youtube.com/@InsideOfYouPodcast
Connor Trinneer and Dominic Keating (from Enterprise to interview show): https://www.youtube.com/@ShuttlepodShow/
Rebecca Solnit (Men Explain Things To Me, widely awarded)
Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me, MacArthur Fellow)
Ibrahim X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist, MacArthur Fellow)
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_IpV9rrcGc (it's a 2 minute video and totally worth it!)
edit: Having read all...this, I think I'll still go with the free book, courtesy of my library.
You could claim he mis-spoke but c'mon, here's a guy who wrote a book about racism, his full time gig is lecturing primarly around the topic of racism in a University and appears all over the place speaking about it. If he cannot give a straight-up coherent definition of racism off the cuff then there is something seriously wrong. My guess is that this compeletely inadequate definition he gave truly reflects how he thinks and frames the topic of racism and articulating it so briefly it highlights how ridiculous it is.
You may disagree with this interpretation and that's fine but claiming the clip is biased is weak because the clip itself is complete, no editing/cutting and contains 1 very simple question and a complete albeit incoherent answer. Indeed the video contains added text but ignore that, just focus on what he (Kendi) says. That should suffice to support my previous comment.
Competely agree, what's jarring is that he is replying to a simple question asking to define something that is literally the focal point of his intellectual career. It is possible that he just messed up and said something that as you say was 'complete nonsense'. But for me a simple accident is not the most likely reason given the context.
"Surely this isn't the first time he's been asked this question on camera if it's such an important part of his persona. Why this clip? If he consistently defines it poorly, that's one thing. I can't take what could be his worst attempt to define it as normal."
Fair enough, can you source any other examples of him defining racism?
The suggested book is in my TBR list now. I haven't made a claim one way or the other, so I have nothing to cite or source. I really have no clue about the guy other than this one clip and the book recommendation, so I'm going to go with the medium where he has room to run and an editor challenging him on what really is a complex topic.
"What is racism?" could fill a book. And hey, what do you know, someone wrote one.
Agree, it is a complex topic but anyone that suggests that Martin Luthar King Jr. was racist because he claimed that "he would like to be judged not by the colour of my skin but the contents of my character" like Robin DiAngelo has (and Kendi falls into this category because he describes [and defines!!!] racism in the same way that DiAngelo does) is not worth the time in my humble opinion. There is a potentially unlimited number of books to read and we all have limited amount of time so some sort of filter is required. And anyone that thinks in a way that leads them to believe that Martin Luther King Jr. was racist is way off and not worth it.
The reason I'm saying this and why I referenced "post modernist" in my original quote is that these people (Kendi, DiAngelo) are defining racism in a way where the intent of the perpetrator of perceived racism is omitted and ignored. This is why I believe the Kendi definition in the video is no accident, he's trying to define it in way such that the intent of individual or group does not come into the equation. Whether you intend to be racist or not does not matter, you are racist by definition if you have the right (or wrong) colour skin.
Post modernism provides the theoretical underpinning of this claim as this school of though claims that objectivity does not exist, it is a phantom and a harmful one at that. There is merely a collection of different subjective experiences and beliefs and my subjective interpretation is as good as anyone elses. So if I interpret your action as racist then according to post modernist doctrine by definition it is racist, regardless of whether you intend to be or not.
Can't you see the problem here? Can't you see the potential problems that wide spread adoptation of such ideas on racism outlined above that are esposed by Kendi, DiAngelo and others would have on society and how it provides an awful basis for the successful collaboration of large and diverse number of people? Defining people by their race, what's more, trying to solve the problem of racism by focusing more on ones race making it the center of your being is in my opinion a political, social, moral and philosophical deadend. Go ahead and read the book but in my opinion it is a waste of time and possibly even worse than that.
He's also currently embroiled in controversy. His own peers allege gross mismanagement of his $40 million in funds, producing almost no research and loaning university funds to family members to purchase luxury real estate.
Like, compare this to ableism-- disabled people often are not allowed to get married because, in order to receive support in society as a disabled person, disabled people are not allowed to have anywhere near the personal worth of an able-bodied person. There's no way this came about completely without some fucked up ideas about disabled people. I also see no way to discuss how this policy came about without bringing up a society-wide acceptance on the lack of worth disabled people "should" be allowed to have.
The person who asked the question states that he listened to the talk and did not hear any definition of racism. This is why he asked the question. If you're really curious you can listen to the whole talk (2). Not that I would recommend listening to the whole thing.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/25/opinion/columnists/kendi-...
Kendi's grand plan involves an unelected review board with full veto power over any law or policy (no more separation of powers) made at any level of government (no more federalism!).
Could someone more sympathetic to these views help me out with what I'm missing?
"I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World" by Kai Cheng Thom
Really tackles the issues with non-nuanced public discussion on political topics in an eye-opening way.
Paolo Freire: Pedagogy of the Oppressed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed)
Stephen Fry. His documentary about bipolar disorder, for instance.
A little bit better heuristic is if the person can publicly admit they have been wrong about something and change their mind.
I have been more and more disappointed by analytical analysis, in other words "wiseacring" of all kinds of intellectuals, so I have started to believe the problem is more in the analytical approach itself, and less in the person doing the analysis.
I am gravitating towards people who talk from experience, not from analysis. I expect them also to not appear to be reactive, talking from fear. An example of a person talking from fear would be a kind of junior developer who can never admit they are wrong, and who tries to cover up their mistakes.
It seems that everyone has their own whipping boy "public intellectual" in mind that once loudly said a thing that they disagreed with, and this is the opportunity to really stick it to them for that audacity.
Here's my hot take: consume what you want, just don't let it consume you. All of these people have probably said something worth mulling over, whether you ultimately end up agreeing with them or not. Learn what you can and then move on.
But even the best public intellectuals only have a few novel, high quality ideas a year. Most have only a few during their whole career. If someone only writes a book when they have something to say (a rarity for professional authors, more common amongst people who don't like writing). That book probably contains a few, maybe only one, novel idea. That's the case for books, what about tweets or videos?
Entertainers and public intellectuals compete for the same bandwidth. They show up in the same feeds. In order to compete, the intellectuals have to lower their standards, and the result is that many public intellectuals are only in the intellectual business 1/100 of the time, and in the hot takes business the other 99/100.
There is a very simple litmus test to tell which are likely to fade, versus which aren't. How certain are they?
https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/d... reports on a long-term study about pundits. Basically they can be divided into two groups:
1. Hedgehogs. Have one overarching theory that they are certain of.
2. Foxes. Can pick and choose from a variety of sources.
Both groups are smart, informed, and interesting. But when you follow them for a long time, a clear pattern emerges.
- Foxes do much better at making future predictions that come true.
- Hedgehogs become far more popular pundits, and generally wind up getting paid far better. Most pundits with popular shows are hedgehogs.
Why? My theory is that we listen to pundits because it is comfortable to outsource our thinking to them. We find that comfortable if they are smart, well-informed, and certain. It is easy for us to think, "Well if this smart and well-informed guy is so certain, I'd surely agree if I did the work. So now I don't have to bother."
There is a problem here. We become certain when it is easy for us to think a thing true, and hard for us to think it might be false. We feel that the evidence is truly overwhelming. It may be overwhelming. But it is more likely that we're simply being intellectually dishonest. So we actively choose intellectually dishonest pundits who agree with our presumptions, and then become sure that they are right. We enjoy listening to them. But, being intellectually dishonest, they are probably wrong. And now we're emotionally committed to their brand of insanity!
Try this rule of thumb out. Assume that a person who is certain, is probably wrong. And when you find yourself feeling certain, nurse that little doubt about how you REALLY know. It takes time, but consistently making this choice can change your life. For a start, you'll start actually thinking about things that you currently only think you're thinking about.
I think you'd class him as a fox, but perhaps he's more of a badger. Digs deep and wide into history to interpret the present and plot the future. Asks "what's similar and what's different, what's permanent and what's ephemeral?" Not afraid of being unpopular at the time. Some certainty is required when everyone is saying you're wrong, and is justified when ten years later they're saying that what you said ten years ago is obvious.
That said, while he's solid on geopolitics snd the larger systems we are subject to, I wouldn't listen to him about what's happening with dating or something like that.
But I agree that it is not a perfect distinction. For example, Malcolm Gladwell writes on such a variety of things and viewpoints that he can't be a hedgehog. But he pursues a good story over what what is true, and therefore isn't very reliable. By contrast Nate Silver really likes to go to his statistics toolset. But I would call him a fox.
However I think there is something to Tetlock's division. And I think my theory connecting certainty to lacking intellectual integrity has a lot to do with it.
I know it from Isaiah Berlin, but it looks like he took it from Archilochus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox
I got it from Tetlock, and didn't realize that his applying it to intellectuals wasn't original to him. I also previously knew about it from Archilochus.
Regardless, it is a useful insight. We usually shouldn't trust talking heads who seem certain. And the exemplar that I hold in my mind was Karl Rove's 2012 meltdown as he refused to question his certainty that Romney would win: https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2012/11/07/16458...
Ed: not for long.
HN is honestly doing a great job of this, but is a very different format than planned programming.
Perhaps the key is to watch both sides and formulate your own opinion. Maybe it's better to know the biases outright than to rely on someone else to find neutral viewpoints. Of course the problem with that is, a huge amount of the population has no interest in hearing multiple perspectives, and only wants the 'home teams' talking points.
Maybe you’ve pointed out a positive for these scientific journals.
https://theconversation.com/global
Initially, it was good. Then, it went downhill due to a relaxation of rigour; for every expert giving a scholarly overview, there was a junior academic pushing their particular line. On particularly polarising issue, outright gibberish slipped through (during Jeremy Corbyn's time as leader of the Labour party, for example). These days, there seems to be a scree of shallow articles about current hot topics.
Take this specific example of Peter Zeihan. He dares to get out of his areas of expertise and gets somethings wrong and some things very wrong. But much of his core analysis is extremely relevant and useful. He tends to start from population demographics and the raw material sources of industrial supply chains. There is a lot of interesting stuff there and much of what Peter Zeihan points out is quite right and well ahead of the curve. For example, he was talking about Chinese demographic shrinkage well before it started to make major economic and political impacts.
So the idea here is that because Peter Zeihan tries to go as far as he can with what he has and ends up in the weeds much of the time that all of his work can be dismissed as foolish wandering about in the weeds. But that is false. The core issues of demographics and industrial supply chain roots remain and have very large impacts that are not particularly well hidden from careful examination. This implies that the real challenge is not deciding if a public intellectual is truly great or disgracefully fallen, but rather defining which points they make are solid and where it is that their reasoning falls off.
Read books. Watch Harvard/Yale lectures on humanities. Write notes on them. Think for yourself and write essays on the those topics. Once you get comprehensive education, random YouTube celebrities will stop being deep and fascinating to you. Or at least you will have 30-40 other perspectives from renowned thinkers to complement your worldview.
Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but it seems to me that the Author expects to find a human that is to be right on their subject matter, all the time, and never goes beyond that narrow scope.
It's quite possible to be right in a carefully enclosed area, but you have to expand that area as much as possible to make it applicable to the modern world. Thus, mistakes (and the experienced gained from them) are part of the territory.
I see the authors quest as one bound to be fruitless in the long run.
I curate my information sources, and I readily accept their flaws. I know that Peter Zeihan sometimes gets out over his skis intellectually, but that's a part of his schtick. I know the general biases, strengths and weaknesses of those I pay attention to. I give them authority with my attention, they didn't get it from anywhere else. I believe everyone should take similar care.
Thats not the claim re public intellectuals - just that they have expertise and the ability to explain it. Don't straw-man yourself.
Say something boring and true and don't get attention.
Say something counter culture, evocative but ultimately wrong (or atleast not durable as an idea). Get attention.
Rinse. Repeate.
These are not intellectuals, let alone public ones. They are all American and follow a 'clickbait' model to public discourse. Seems like you repeatedly fall for it and enjoy doing so. Nothing here reflects any form of intellect.
Peterson and Zeihan are examples of this. Peterson has essentially monetized telling Americans what a dystopia Canada is, acting like some sort of reverse Handmaids Tale refugee, and Zeihan is the modern version of his mentor (and Straftor boss) George Friedman, whose primarily claim to fame is predicting an inevitable war between Japan and the US[1], on a crude theory of geographic determinism, "in the next two decades" in 1991. Zeihan has picked that baton up and replaced Japan with China.
I think this hyper reductive. You can watch all his lectures, at Harvard and others, online[0]. It's hard to look objectively at his life and not call it "serious intellectual work".
>"You can watch the incredibly popular lecture series "Personality and Its Transformations", "Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief", as well as his "The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories" lectures for free."
I won't pretend I ever watched more than a few minutes of any of this stuff, but isn't it a bunch of inane rambling about finding deep psychological meaning or universal truths in fairy tails? Nonsense along the lines of "Slimey the worm from sesame street represents the dragon, the great primordial evil which the warrior, the eternal hero, must slay to conqueror his fears..."
It's the kind of analysis that right/conservative people with 'pragmatic/common sense' self-perceived alignments would usually mock college professors for, except in Peterson's case it gets lapped up because he mixes it in with things like "communism is bad because it murdered millions of people" and "If you're feeling depressed you should try not living like a slob"
Agreed.
> but isn't it a bunch of inane rambling about finding deep psychological meaning or universal truths in fairy tails?
No, it's not. Some of it is illustrated through fables, but I don't think it's inane rambling, no.
I've only briefly heard him, but why is he so polarizing? He just seemed to say sort of "be a decent person and work hard".
</sarcasm>
It's 2023. This is a very controversial idea.
For example, after losing a court battle against the College of Psychologists of Ontario, he talked about it as such: "Don't bloody well lecture me ... some dimwit judge with a liberal bias did ... lecturing me about taking responsibility for what I say." I highly recommend watching the video. The tone is also part of the message: https://youtu.be/M5PESEbY_H0?t=74
Or when in December 2021, the Prime Minister of Canada tweeted this to encourage people to get a booster dose of the COVID-19 vaccine (keeping in mind that there were at no point any mandates for boosters, this was purely an attempt at advertising the fact that booster doses were available and recommended by the healthcare professionals):
> Justin Trudeau: "If you’re taking care of some last-minute Christmas shopping this week, here’s something else you can add to your list: a booster. If you’re eligible for one but haven’t gotten it yet, please, do so now. And if you don’t have your first or second dose, now’s the time to get it."
NJP replied to the tweet as such:
> NJP: "Up yours @JustinTrudeau. Seriously. You'd have to kill me first."
https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/14745955491774341...
I cannot imagine OJP saying any of these things with this tone and this level of imprudence. OJP was generally cerebral, intellectual, academic, deep, calm, polite. He was a well-respected academic through and through.
NJP, on the other hand, is irritable, imprudent, aggressive, abrasive, impulsive, rude. He is a sensationalist yelling pundit through and through.
Drugs tend to do that to people. Peterson and Musk are in their fully matured junkie persona phases.
This is probably what the article is referring to. Before the incident Peterson was a respected academic psychologist, but was widely criticized for his amateur legal analysis of C-16. He has since continued to ruin his reputation by making transphobic tweets about Elliot Page, body shaming the plus sized model Yumi Nu, climate change denial, and generally expressing right wing views on a range of issues.
We live in a world where even that statement is controversial.
There is a zeitgeist of re-engineering society. Peterson and his tired schtick of "just keep doing the things that were successful for previous generations" interferes. It is unwanted.
There is no certification or competency test for intellectuals. If you say you are one, then— like saying you are a “football fan”— you probably are one.
I say I am an intellectual because I want people to think I am always ready to talk about any philosophical topic. Also I wrote a book about living an intellectual life, so there is evidence I do want to use my mind to consider big questions. Not that evidence matters much.
I am American, too. Turns out some Americans enjoy living a life of mind.
"Without fail, each one of comes to dissapoint. They’re either a one trick pony, and every development in the world is analyzed through the same tired lens whether its applicable or not."
The problem is when Jordan Petersen starts to talk about other things than that, like politics, gender roles etc. There he repeats similar talking points I've seen on online forums for 20 years now, nothing new or interesting.
Edit: Sometimes downvotes amazes me. Did someone downvote this because I said Jordan Peterson said something good, or because I said he did something bad? Will never know. But I've noticed that balanced takes tend to get more downvoted since both sides downvotes them.
There is the guy you just described, who existed before his year(s?) long struggle with addiction, and then there is the apparently (to me at least) bitter, resentful and angry man who returned after.
Since his return, his expressions, language, positions (and even clothing) have taken on a darker, angrier tone and there's a lot less hope in what I've seen.
For me, this makes this individual different from some others who may fade away over some of issues cited in the article, but remain essentially the same person.
His personality and message changed after a deep and difficult struggle.
I'm not trying to criticize or defend the man, just raising the issue that he may be different from some others in the list.
Karl Marx was even more of a one trick pony than Peterson and, well, he's the most successful public intellectual of all time.
Jesus was 'the son of god' and yet he didn't have that much to say when it comes down to it. Really. When you compile all the things he said, without duplication, it would probably fit in a one hour podcast.
Now, take joe rogan's guest. Let's say Alex Honnold. He lives a really interesting life and one hour into the podcast he would be struggling for things to say.
Should you listen to these public intellectuals you mentioned? sure. But after one hour or so, thats really enough to get an abstraction.
Because when it comes down to it : There's really not much to say.
Unfortunately if you don’t believe in Christianity there is no book or philosopher that has told the whole “truth” about the universe, so any new kid on the block might indeed have many things to say
(Disclaimer: not a Christian. Constantly amazed at people who have faith)
From time to time I'm looking what's up with:
Nassim Taleb
Andrew Gelmam
Adam Tooze
Scott Aaronson
John Mearsheimer
Noam Chomsky
Bernard-Henri Lévy
Follow the field, not any individual. This need to have some special, unique insight, the hottest take, is death to understanding.
Unfollow all the players with a huge following. They stop producing quality.
Start by supporting underdogs, people who have a following, but small and growing.
Eventually they'll become bigger in terms of following. Then unfollow them.
I completely agree with your take: his demographics work was a new model of thought for me, and interesting to think about and apply. A lot of his extrapolation felt really off, though.
For Zeihan in particular I went a bit deeper in trying to figure out why a lot of his analysis didn't sit well with me. Part of it was the America-centricity - the superficial non-interest for Europe and other continents. The second part, though, was that I don't think he really considers that the people making these systems work also suffer if the systems collapse. At a societal level, we are motivated to keep our global systems maintained because they sustain our ways of life - not because somebody signed an agreement. The signing was just a means of getting it started.
Anyway, end rant, but I guess his ideas feel too far down the isolationist line. My analysis of which probably proves the OP's worshipping point. It's designed to pull you in.
The first part is where he takes a current event and contextualizes it with a bunch about the geography, demography and supply chain stuff, or maybe some history. I'd say he has an overall pretty high level of quality here, helped along by the fact that everyone's geography and demography is usually pretty stable from week to week.
In the second part, he takes everything from the first part and fits it into his career-long public storytelling project, where he's writing a thriller novel out loud 5 minutes at a time, set in the near future where Eurasia is now Mad Max except without all the gas, and pirates rule the seas. I happen to love Mad Max AND pirates, so I have fun, but I don't take it as seriously as the first part.
Of course reader mode is broken.
Decide what you want to do: Do you want to publish content, or visual art? Don't try doing both when you're not great at either.
Scientists often have something new to say at a frequency of years (if productive).
People on this site are quick to call something "enshittification" when there are some obvious cash-grabs by megacorps, but are reluctant to admit that the algorithm feeding you content is manipulating you in a similar way.
> And take note when one doesn’t fall, study them the hardest.
I did, and they subsequently got banned from every social network, and even their website isn't linkable from Facebook or X or YouTube.
Do we know how this was done before? Let’s say you are a hit broadcast network, and you have these new hit shows called Friends and Family Matters. What’s your plan as a broadcast company now?
Should the TV company organically wait to see what kind of TV shows audiences want to see? Or should they create 10 shows that copy Friends and Family Matters, each targeting a different demo (you know, like black people, or women).
So, if you want to build a loose network of content creators, with your fulcrum being like a Rogan for the general demographic, with a contrived character like a Friedman being the “nerd”. So the loop here is you cast a wide net with Rogan, then niche them down to your Jocko’s, Friedman’s, etc.
Rogan doesn’t disclose when he does Ad drops anymore either. So he’s a really bad actor at this point.
Like yeah Joe, you just talked about McDonalds for 10 minutes for free again on an episode with 10 million listeners huh? Oh, talking about the latest movie in theaters again? As if that’s not a 5 minute ‘hey McDonald’s, we can leave this 7 minutes in about how your Coca Cola tastes better than regular Coca Cola, or we can just edit it out. I’m sorry? Did we say edit out? What we meant was, how about like 30 million for 6 month campaign? No? Okay, see ya. No, we never recorded anything about McDonald’s soda tasting better.
Who wanted Lex Fridman there, and how did they achieve getting him there?
(I've only a passing knowledge of who that is, and haven't heard of Eric Weinstein at all)
Idk where the line between organic and inorganic is, but I highly doubt youtube sat down in a meeti g with Lex and said "youve been chosen, were gonna blow your channel up"
We know the reverse is definitely true, people actually do get deplatformed, so why is it unreasonable to think at least some winners have been picked?
But it's not about a single person. It's that these midwit pseudointellectuals (Peterson, Weinstein) can constantly get churned through the top of the algorithm. People like the guy who wrote this initial post, in turn, think that there are no political discussions going on deeper than dumbed down, often misused regurgitated political philosophy from much smarter thinkers of the past.
I really can't wrap my mind around how he managed to get so many high profile guests so fast, except to guess that his father's connections had a lot to do with it. Every part of his meteoric rise seems inorganic to me.
Those constitute "fallen".
Which wrongthinker are you referring to?
The culmulative effect of Jordan's lectures fits too neatly into the Screwtape Letters.
Man repeatedly falls for the worst "public intellectuals" (really, pretentious charlatans), discovers that they're not trustworthy, and runs to the internet screaming "THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL IS DEAD." nah brah, you just have bad tase.
Jordan Peterson -> an incoherent rambler. He's incapable of putting together straightforward premise1-premise2-premise3-->conclusion arguments. If you ask him "how's the weather?", you'll get an hour long brain spew about Ancient Rome, Napoleon, woke feminism, and the worst Holocaust takes you can imagine.
Eric Weinstein -> a narcissist mathematician who came up with a theory of everything, but refused to publish it because real physicists might criticize it and hurt his feelings. He wanted to be recognized as the new Einstein based solely on a video of a talk to a non-physicist audience. His podcasts are mostly rants against the Physics Deep State and Big Science, which he calls the "Distributed Idea Suppression Complex", because they're all in a big conspiracy to suppress his genius ideas.
Chamath -> don't know him.
Peter Zeihan -> just another hyper-caffeinated prognosticator who claims to know the future.
I don't say this sarcastically or ironically... but isn't that one of the big things proper science actually does? Think about it for a moment, science is the business of suppressing all the stupid ideas humans have come up with over the centuries. And until it got started doing that, those ideas were everywhere, keeping everyone ignorant.
It has a somewhat careful methodology to this suppression. It designs experiments to falsify everything it can, conducts those experiments rigorously and exhaustively, until everyone is convinced that those ideas are wrong and the ideas are as dead as doornails.
But, if somehow it comes across one that is falsifiable but that can't be falsified by experiment, it moves on... plenty of other ideas to suppress.
Hell, science should adopt that moniker and run with it. Be proud of it. It's one of the things it gets right.
If that's his worst jab at science, he's just lazy and not very clever.
I can assure him that there is a whole world of serious thinkers and authors that have never appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast.
I've only listened to a few of his podcasts, because they're too long and meandering for me, so perhaps there is more meat in other episodes.
I also don't think he's a grifter in the same way that Peterson is. (I'm not familiar with the other people mentioned in the article.)
Ok I see the point. Thank you.
Also these days his video series tends to focus more on interviews with experts in their respective fields, rather than his own prescriptions and perspective. I think that's commendable and great.
Can't stand the smug certainty he throws off while describing some ridiculous molecular interaction that he clearly knows nothing about, because no one does.
Also, consider that there is more to know than you have time to learn, so be selective. Are you going to act on it? Is it going to give you pleasure?
It’s probably the most mature moment I had as a reader, to be able to look at any book and be comfortable judging the pacing/vibe of it with regard to me. If a book isn’t vibing with you (you feel like the author is forcing a hot take), then don’t read the book. It’s no different than a date, if the person creeps you out, bounce.
Nobody can contradict what you say in book form.
Two books on the shelf: One says the left stole the election here are the receipts to prove it, the other says the right lied about the election here are the receipts to prove it. Both presumably have an internally consistent narrative that attempts to convince you the story they are selling is THE story.
Not quite what I expected... I wonder, what was his original experience-based hot take?
No. This is such a common logical error that it has an old name: Argumentum ad Verecundiam (often shortened to Verecundiam, or Appeal to Authority in English.) Saying "I know this because authority X said so" - you don't know it at all. It has the epistemological status of outright faith.
What counts is the connection of statements to reality and their logical integrated cohesion as a whole. And that's regardless of the source.
Experts/Authorities are neither automatically right or wrong. No honest expert or authority ever demands that their statements be taken on faith. If they actually know what they're talking about, their statements can be logically defended and tied to reality. This is the standard that everyone should be held to.
Basically you test what you have and trust the description of the implementation. If it works you can trust the whole chain. This is of course not 100%, but it is about as reliable as it can get for an individual.
What you shouldn't do is assume that stuff that aren't 100% for sure are equally bad.
As an uninformed consumer at or the bottom of the chain, you cannot trust that an interface that works today, will work tomorrow, for you do not have access to all of the chaotic variables which constrain the interface.
So while I can't prove something is right by appeal to authority, it's a very practical way for me to swift though the unbounded mass of claims and information that I couldn't possibly verify or prove in my lifetime, not even to a 19th century level of scientific knowledge.
For example, I saw an onion cell once at a school microscope, but I have never seen a bacteria. So as far as I can independently prove, I live in times before the germ theory of disease - but that doesn't mean I shouldn't trust my doctor when he recommends vaccines and antibiotics. The entire antivaxx movement is just an attempt to challenge the medical authority by people who are not intellectually equipped to verify the scientific claims.
No, you don't need to personally verify all facts. But you need to be able to observe several indepedent validations. Yes, somewhere you have to take someone's word for fact, but multiple independent observations is a close approximation to the perfect scientific method. Related to that is the fact that science is not a democracy, and these observations have to be weighed against how they fit in our generally accepted worldview. Theory is more than just facts.
Every little detail of science has to be questioned, just not by everyone personally. Where that limit for healthy skepticism is drawn is not something can answer logically, but we can recognize if it is completely wrong.
There continue to be no shortcuts to truth.
Historians know that they can't take written sources at face value. For them, Caesar's account of the Gallic Wars is just another piece of evidence, not a Definite Proof of Everything That Was.
Caesar is not considered an infallible authority, but that has no bearing on the general consensus that Gallic Wars actually took place.
But as to the Gallic Wars happening at all? There is corroborating evidence. Other Romans wrote about it, often to damn it, and they treated the existence of the war as a fact. He brought tons of Gallic slaves back to Rome which would corroborate the most basic facts of the claim (e.g. that there had been wars with Gallic people) to other Romans who weren't there to personally witness it. Furthermore there is modern archeological evidence of battles and massacres which roughly line up with some of what Caesar claimed to have done.
So the logical error isn't an epistemological error in all cases - you can see it as someone trying to minimize some distance metric they are operating on between Reality As It Is and Reality As I Know It by making a single hop to someone who, it is believed, has already done a lot of work investigating the ground claims.
Once he got there, he systematically built up a new framework of thought and reasoning, and we got modern science and philosophy from it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito%2C_ergo_sum?wprov=sfla1
I think it would be cool if we taught kids how things work along with how they can prove it for themselves. Currently the only field which encourages you to prove things for yourself is maths, and proofs aren't even given that much importance.
Even with softer topics like history, I think it should be essential to include context explaining how we know these things to be true. On what evidence are these beliefs based on? What is the level of epistemic uncertainty of the information we're being given?
Could you give some example of what would you like to prove, from your college curriculum?
When I wrote that I was specifically thinking about chemistry. It's really been too long since I last studied the topic, so I can't remember any exact details. I just remember a vague sense of thinking "how did we figure this out in the first place?".
Part of the responsibility definitely falls on me, I should've been more inquisitive when I was younger. Maybe the professors would've been willing to explain if I'd been more self-confident and courageous to visit their office hours to inquire further.
Probably the only higher math course I took that I was excited to go to lecture every day.
No, you definitely do eventually. I remember plenty of that stuff from back in my advanced math days (even if I can't remember any of the math itself at this point), like the aha moments showing linear algebra work underpinning the memorization from calculus. It's just way up there in the coursework because the 100- and 200-level classes don't have the time to explain that stuff to 50-plus people and make sure any of them understand any of it.
That doesn't match my experience with college at all. I was admittedly a math major and possibly other departments do it differently, but most math courses I took put a lot of emphasis on proving stuff and proofs, and proving stuff was around 50% of the final exam in most courses.
How do you propose we give more detailed explanations and information for proving everything for yourself? Should college last a few hundred years instead of 4?
Did college not teach you how to access and parse through research papers and books? If you want a more full explanation and to prove things for yourself, why didn't you do so? When you were told, from authority, about the american antarctic base, why didn't you prove its existence by taking a boat there (repeated ad-nauseam for each location in the world)
Figuring out how to prove everything myself is impractical because I'm not an expert in every subfield. I think experts in various fields can write shortcuts and simple experiments which prove a lot of knowledge. It doesn't have to be perfect.
Like, colleges right now provide "shortcuts and simple experiments" to approximate knowledge that was gained with a much more rigorous path. Yet, you decry current college as not showing the full path, as taking shortcuts.
Now, you're saying that yes, we need such shortcuts, it doesn't have to be perfect, and it's a spectrum... all of which I agree with, and seems to be the opposite of what you said above.
What's the fundamental difference between what you describe and what colleges do? Or is it just a matter of execution quality?
Can you prove this assertion with math?
> And take note when one doesn’t fall, study them the hardest.
Here you go, all three of them (including Ludwig Von Mises too):
Hans-Hermann Hoppe on “For a New Liberty” by Murray Rothbard at 50
then it i was Eric Weinstein
You’re basis for truth (should be "Your")
Hasn't been corrected in ten months?