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Comment by JackMorgan | Hacker News Reader

Jordan Peterson, Lex Friedman, and Joe Rogan are conservative, right-wing entertainers. They are not widely accepted as intellectuals, but rather as entertaining lecturers and interviewers who are quite biased.

That the author would consider them public intellectuals is fascinating and speaks to their worldview and media consumption habits.

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"They are not widely accepted as intellectuals"

A neutral Wikipedia editor would mark your "widely accepted" by a "by whom?" remark.

At the very least, Peterson is an intellectual. He is not my cup of tea, but he worked both at Harvard and at Toronto U as a teacher, and I suspect that you just can't stomach his politics. I would certainly like to see you debating him in his field.

> A neutral Wikipedia editor would mark your "widely accepted" by a "by whom?" remark.

The fact that they used the phrase "widely accepted as" already indicates that they're commiting the appeal to authority fallacy.

This is an unhinged take. Jordan Peterson and Lex Fridman are clearly intellectuals. Rogan is debatable - he’s more entertainer but he is also certainly more intellectual than those who are normally given that label, because he listens to a diverse set of views, and has more balanced and mature opinions on many topics as a result. The bigger issue isn’t Rogan being labeled that way - it’s all the “traditional” intellectuals who don’t deserve that label or the authority that goes with it.

Joe Rogan is not a fucking intellectual. Regardless of what you think of him he’s the first to tell you he’s just some idiot. Just because he has a lot of listeners and is willing to host just about anyone talking about anything doesn’t make him an intellectual. Talk about an unhinged take.

I suppose it depends on how you define "intellectual". If you define it as someone who can talk for hours on end, and make a success out of it, then I'd say that's pretty smart. He's a comedian too (not seen any of his shows), which to my understanding requires quick thinking - something that most people don't have.

He's whole "I'm an idiot" thing is just a character he plays. You don't get to be a success like that by being an actual idiot.

If you mean intellectual to be "book smart", then yes I agree with you.

Since when is Lex Fridman considered a conservative right-wing? Did something actually change or is this a new label from lefters because he interviewed Trump?

Here’s an article where the author concludes that while he’s not an ideologue, he does have an unbalanced cadre of guests: https://web.archive.org/web/20230117220803/https://www.curre...

Is it not that the tech sector is regarded as right skewed?

His guest list does cater to right wing listeners, and he absolutely does not meaningfully pushback on his guests, more often than not allowing them to make claims and accepting those claims at face value without any proof or follow on questions of substance

As an outsider (I'm a european engineer with barely any personal connections to the US tech scene) I have the feeling that a significant fraction of Friedman's audience are just more right-leaning at the moment. And Fridman caters to this audience. You know, the kind of people who follow Musk during his current Trump era.

As an outsider to Europe, but living in the EU, and seeing USA and the EU neutrally, I would say the EU as a whole is intellectually skewed a little bit to the left.

These labels and attacks that you see rampant in this HN discussion are a type of response that is common among dedicated leftists (even in past history like China’s cultural revolution). And HN has a lot of left leaning users since they are often in the Bay Area. What’s behind this response is tendency to not tolerate anyone dissenting from their ideological positions even a little bit, and so they respond with whatever attack they can make - including labels or accusations or fake outrage.

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