Hacker News Reader

Comment by JSavageOne | Hacker News Reader

Nothing you just said disputes any of what Peterson has said. The fact that you mention him being a "drug addict" (he was briefly addicted to anti-depressants after his wife got cancer) and then use words like "whining" to try to discredit him without actually addressing or disputing anything he's said shows you just have an axe to grind with no substance.

View on HN

>he was briefly addicted to anti-depressants

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.

Ketamine? Source needed. He said it was a benzodiazepine. A prescribed anti-anxiety drug, which in rare cases is documented to create the exact withdrawal problem he had.

It wouldnt be rare if all the cases were consistent with the duration of Peterson's access to + use of them—which is in turn a far more useful term ("access") to describe his relationship with drugs, in my seldom non-controversial opinion. Everyone bitches about their minor tranquilizer AFTER they're cutoff, smh [sighs]

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

I think you've mixed up ketamine and klonopin (clonazepam).

https://newrepublic.com/article/156829/happened-jordan-peter...

Peterson was addicted to benzodiazepines, in specific he mentioned klonopin in his interview with New Republic.

Klonopin (benzo) !== ketamine (dissociative). My conjecture is many would benefit more from that kind of treatment than the former. Benzos lead to physical and mental oblivion just like alcoholism does.

He was addicted for 18 months, but he was famous well before this. In any case none of this has any relevance to his status as a public intellectual.

Why is fame relevant at all to this discussion? What is this fixation with "his fame" as a sort of dialectical deus ex machina you keep using it to escape simple unfavorable discussion with respect to Mr. Peterson? (I used the word respect in the same sentence, see? We good?) Can he grab anyone's pussy also?

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.

> Nothing you just said disputes any of what Peterson has said

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.

Amazing, you've managed to meaningfully discredit thousands of hours of content and a couple books in a couple flippant sentences /s

> Join the club

—Bible/"God"

You originally said the commenter hadn't discredited anything that Peterson said. Now Peterson may have a substantial body that is sound and doesn't fall into the categories critiqued. I certainly don't suggest that he has never said anything of merit.

> was briefly addicted to anti-depressants

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

When Peterson needed the kind of therapy or care you fancy yourself receiving in him, he had to go to Russia. Please, take your time and take that in. Why didn't he just call his own hotline? Lol

You realize Peterson was famous well before that 18 month drug addiction, correct?

Where did I say otherwise and where did I say it was relevant at all? What are you contesting here, bud?

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)?

Just random stuff from Twitter, because I'm not going to waste my time on his books.

"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.

Anybody can pick a few random quotes out of context and dispute them. Keep in mind I'm not actually defending Peterson's views (I agree with some, disagree with others), I'm defending his status as a public intellectual.

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.

Is his status as a public intellectual immutable or irrevokable, ever? Or does his Ph.D + tenure position ahelter him from deserved pushback on his nonsense and grifting in perpetuity?

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 :/

Wouda been a good time to throw in an a priori maybe

1. I'm responding to

"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".)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com