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jlos

So you would not consider someone who has the following CV an intellectual?

- 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.

[0]: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=wL1F22UAAAAJ

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I agree with Chomsky's definition [1]: intellectual is a person who tries to talk intelligently in public about affairs that are relevant to the general public. Being a top scentist or a top sellng author does not neccessarily make you an intellectual.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Xf5H00ACws&t=2527s

> tries to talk intelligently

How would you define this though? People couldn't even agree whether gpt-3 talks intelligently or not.

The emphasis is on "tries", i.e. genuinely puts a mental effort (including research etc.) into forming an opinion.

Isn't this just an appeal to authority?

You have to use some metric to define 'intellectual' and those all seem like reasonable ones to me. I don't see why you'd consider most of those as appeals to authority. Teaching at Harvard and tenured Professor perhaps but the rest are appeals to experience.

Not sure that's a fallacy when the question is "is this guy a particular sort of authority". It's more like a validation of said authority.

No, it's a listing of demonstrated contributions.

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.

No. If the parent comment said "because Jorden Peterson has 20 years of experience, his opinion on topic X must be correct" then it's an appeal to authority. They didn't say that.

By the way, abusing terms is another sign for fake intellectuals...

As other comments said, this is not just an appeal to authority. He really is an authority.

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.

This is how we ended up think taking vitamin c helps with colds.

https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7547741/vitamin-c-myth-pauling

I don't want to come off too hard as directly defending Jordan Peterson--I maybe watched a video or two on YouTube a while back with him talking about something... I liked one and hated the other--but this overall description of someone who is just saying a lot of stuff without any boundary between what they really actually know and where they are so far off the rails they might as well be on a psychedelic trip also sounds like it could apply to the likes of Plato... whom I'd 100% label as an intellectual.

Plato studied “philosophy” which at the time aimed to provide a full explanation to everything in life. Later in history knowledge got more and more specialized. As time goes by, being able to do meaningful contributions to various fields becomes more difficult. It is considered for example, that Gauss was the last scientist to contribute to all branches of science and similarly John Von Neumann was the last mathematician who made meaningful contributions in all branches of sciences. So yeah, you could say for Plato there were no boundaries as the amount of knowledge that existed was small enough to be fully handled by a human .. and it’s likely not the case anymore.

No, it directly addresses the claim. Is X a 'public intellectual'? Here are n facts that indicate X is.

I’d argue that he has published 100+ academic papers on multiple sub-fields of psychology. Specifically on the “psychology of belief” so basically how believing “something” implies certain actions. The problem is p=>q doesn’t imply ~p => ~q

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