362 karma · joined June 10, 2017
Same advice applies for Republicans/right-leaning people.
I'm going to echo a sibling comment and say that Americans have indeed gone rabid with this politicisation of everything and turning your neighbours into enemies.
No need for "conservative influencers" to get this, it's such a simple publicity trick a child can come up with it.
Where have you guys been living? What news have you been watching? You realise that the same actions are done by the US and, to a lesser extent and limited by their capabilities, their allies.
US developed an unprecedented malware capable of sabotaging airgapped nuclear facilities. And clearly US disinformation campaigns can't be faulted too since you people seem to think that Russia is really a threat at this point to the US.
[0] - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_A...
You'd have to be very silly to say that the life of someone in the lowest rung of the working ladder nowadays(e.g. a McDonalds worker) is not better than the life of a peasant in feudalistic times.
If you haven't read LD I highly recommend it even if you're not a fan of the Frontier setting - it's so much more. When reading it, the picture I got of each character was so vivid that I felt that they were my personal acquaintances. You celebrate when they triumph, and share their pain when they lose. I still think of Gus and Woodrow almost as friends of mine just because of how well I've got to know them and the connection you form throughout reading the book. The overarching story is a rollercoaster of an epic adventure. The only thing that bothers me about it is how it's not a household name.
RIP Larry.
If the author wants to make a statement about personal experience of sexism or harassment in the modern science-workplace - that's fine. Don't shoehorn Feynman into it just to drive clicks and pretend to get offended on behalf of someone else just because of their delicate sensibilities.
Also, studies have shown that in more gender role laissez-faire societies there's actually a greater difference between genders, which your GDR study inadvertently corroborates.
>If this cultural shift is a concern due to its effect on society and its norms, then Peterson would be a counter-productive solution, since this sort of person being considered an intellectual worth following is a step down from these very same norms. It's like putting out a house fire with a flamethrower. The problem is the breakdown in informed discourse.
Peterson DOES encourage informed discourse. Unlike some public figures that are wont to use strawman arguments and/or voice their opinions in an echo chamber, I've seen Peterson go on almost hostile interviews, keeping calm and giving accurate and measured answers to their questions whilst ignoring their jabs(see Cathy Newman or Vice interviews for example). And as was mentioned before, he's also known to change his opinion if he's convinced that he was wrong - now you show me another public figure that's willing to do that, not too many of those from what I've seen.
>The result is that the money and attention of people concerned about cultural shifts is then funneled into the pockets of people like Peterson or Shapiro or whomever, with some pretty unenviable results.
I can't speak about Shapiro since I haven't watched him or his stuff, but I have no problem with Peterson getting money or attention from his lectures, interviews, or books. I cannot find what harm his material can cause either.
>You end up in a situation where people talk of rediscovering traditional norms and opposing them to new norms, without actually understanding what the traditional norms are or engaging with them beyond vague social-media ready descriptions. What could have been effective or at least thoughtful conservatism paradoxically turns into a post-modern parody of itself, with plenty of references to the aesthetic aspect (flags, slogans, freedom of speech etc.) without the substance that originally generated those symbols. And this substance and world lying outside of the Petersons and Shapiros starts to shrink because they monopolize the attention of people who would have otherwise engaged with deeper material and applied it in productive ways.
I think it's healthy to be at least A LITTLE bit sceptical of new norms. Our society was pretty much the same for at least thousands of years and in a few decades we're changing things up very drastically. Are you that sure that it's not going to cause issues that can have dire consequences in the future? I'm not.
I'd like to reiterate again that I don't think Peterson is as conservative as you seem to be implying, he doesn't want everybody being under Sharia-like social rules of Christian propriety. He does seem to lean towards traditional family values, which I don't think is a bad thing. Otherwise he seems to champion personal freedom, especially against any form of tyranny.
With regards to him not understanding traditional norms I'd like to disagree. If you can show me some examples of where he does that please do.
I think that's a reasonable point. I'd still maintain that his message is useful and his ideas are, imo, interesting and illuminating. I haven't thought of JP-televangelists comparison before so I'd need some time to mull it over. But in my personal experience I listened to Peterson for a while, internalised what I thought was useful and moved on. Whether televangelists have the same effect - I don't know.
>Consider the following: during the Žižek debate, it became clear that not only was the Communist Manifesto the only Marxist text he had read, but he could not accurately recall some of its main points. And it's a really short pamphlet! That means that Peterson had expounded at length on Marxism, made it a central point of his critique and philosophical brand, while having almost no knowledge or understanding of it. Even with the most charitable interpretation, that goes way beyond just occasionally making mistakes due to a discursive style.
I wish I had more knowledge on Marxism/leftists school of thoughts right now to have a more interesting discussion on this, but I don't. It does look bad on Peterson that he was so ill prepared for that debate.
Having said that, we cannot not say that there isn't a cultural shift happening in the academia and in our societies at large. Traditional cultural norms are being thrown out and in some extreme cases even shamed(not saying that's a 100% bad thing, but imo such things must not be done rashly), instead of bringing equality there are some attempts of inversing the inequality, and people are getting cancelled/silenced/fired/deplatformed in some cases simply for having a different opinion. Whether this is Marxism or not is really irrelevant, what's important is that we note these changes and act to mitigate them, and I believe this is what Peterson was referring to as "cultural Marxists". It might be embarrassing if he got the name wrong, but it doesn't change WHAT he's talking about.
Yes, it seems even the most progressive countries haven't eliminated all pressure yet. And that might be for the best, but that's besides the point.
>In my own university days in the CS department, there was a marked difference between the number of men and women, but nowhere near what you're saying: it was more like 10 women for every 20 men, maybe a little less. I've had several female professors, including the head of the Polytechnic institute and the head of the CS department. In my job today, I am on a team of 4 men and 3 women (all programmers), working on a project with a female project lead, and probably overall 30 men and 6 women in Dev, and 50 men and 14 women if you include QA (who also do Python-based automated testing). This is on a project deep in the world of computer networking, not some soft field. And the team is about half in Romania, half in India - not exactly countries known for their courageous tearing down of social norms.
Peterson and the study that he referenced specifically did point out that the less pressured men and women are to follow a path the more pronounced the differences become. So far your anecdote, as well as my own from previously living in an ex-USSR country, confirm this. Why this is so - I have no idea but I find it fascinating.
>Well, if he's saying that women are more fit to be nurses and men are more fit to be engineers, than I feel justified in saying that he's implying women are less suited than men for intellectual labor (not necessarily dumber, but at least less likely to enjoy it). That may not be his intention (though I believe it may well be), but he also doesn't go out of his way to disclaim it.
Whilst Peterson never specifically said that men are more fit to be engineers than women, I do agree that what he HAS said is analogous to that. However, I believe his views on that came from evidence and not from a sexist point-of-view that women are inferior. The inverse of that is that women are better at child-rearing and people-facing roles, a statement which I think is on average just as true as the one about men and engineers. Is it then misandrist to say that men are, on average, not as good at raising children? I wouldn't say so personally.
>My strong belief is that it's a problem of education and social pressures. Even in Romania (to be clear, I keep bringing it up because it's the country where I have the most experience), where women do choose these fields in much bigger numbers for whatever reasons, there are deep biases against women's ability in this field. Female colleagues were more likely to be a professor's target for ridicule, or simply receive lower grades on exams for the same mistakes. They would be less likely to be given as positive examples, and less likely to be encouraged towards this field.
I do trust what you say about this 100% when it pertains to Romania, but let me assure you that in the UK even a minor complaint of sexist harassment of any kind will very likely result in a rapid and unexpected vacancy in the company. Sometimes it can be even unfair, but that's besides the point again. In fact, in my experience whenever I see women in engineering fields, I'd see guys pretty much bend over backwards to be nice and supportive of them. So much so that it'd seem saccharine and the women would be either put off by this treatment(perhaps another pressure that dissuades women from the field? I doubt it but it could play a role I suppose, especially if the guys are doing it in the hopes of "surreptitiously" getting in their pants) or have everything so baby-proofed for them that they'd have no challenge because everything would be done for them.
>Even if comparing between two similar-income American (non-recent immigrants) families in the same city in America, one with black skin and the other with white skin, there is some SMALL chance that there are inherent biases, either internal or in the test, that may affect the validity of results. And from what I've read, many such comparisons are far, far from this close. Some famous books on the topic, such as "The Bell Curve", include horribly, obviously biased studies, such as comparing the IQs of white and black kids as measured by apartheid South Africa!
I agree that it can be an apples to oranges comparison. This conversation did make aware of how ignorant I was of the actual methodology of that IQ between races study, so that's something I'll have to look up. That "Bell Curve" thing is shocking! A good reminder how "science" can be manipulated by using a bad methodology to push results to confirm a bias and then touting it as the empirical truth. What I like to call the "I F**ING LOVE SCIENCE" brand of science.
I think it's a fair argument against him, but it is not Campbell or Evola who managed to get into the spotlight and spread those ideas to millions, but Peterson. Perhaps it could be argued that it's his captivating presentational style or ability to package things well are his USP?
Thank you for the reading list, I do want to delve deeper into this stuff.
It might be difficult to predict the success of somebody via IQ if you compare two individuals from radically different socio-economic backgrounds, but you can compare two individuals with different IQs from similar socio-economic backgrounds and statistically IQ is a very good predictor of success.
With regards to men-to-women ratios, Peterson pointed out that countries that have the free-est social expectations(e.g. Scandinavian countries) have the most diverse differences between men and women. From my personal experience going to a university in the UK and studying CS, I could count maybe 3-5 women out of a cohort of 350+ students. I don't think you can accuse the UK of actively discouraging women from joining these fields, quite the opposite. So why don't they choose these high paying fields in such progressive countries such as UK?
I do agree with you that "race" has no strict scientific basis. I'm not sure how those studies qualified races, so that's something I'll need to look up.
I still disagree with him using conman-style tactics per se, but I will admit that I was a bit disappointed in SOME stuff that he was saying outside of his areas of expertise. Not because I thought he was wrong, but because for me his explanations of psychology set such a high standard that anything less would be overshadowed. I find that he has a very "conversational" approach at discovering new ideas - he'll sort of discuss different aspects as he goes and almost arrive at conclusions right in front of the audience. The drawback to this approach is that sometimes he might be wrong about some things - I think that's okay.
Case in point - in his debate with Zizek, iirc he quickly got shotdown by Zizek because he was pretty much out of his depth, and Peterson admitted that he was wrong. A lot of his detractors point this out as a coup de grace for Peterson, but I find it refreshing to see somebody who makes mistakes in the search of answers, but admits they were wrong and perhaps corrects themselves(not sure about the last part, I haven't kept up with his most recent stuff).
I think discussing whether he's liberal or conservative is a wishy-washy subject and I'm on shaky ground when discussing whether he's right about the left, but in the interest of having a dialogue I do have some retorts about some of the other things you've mentioned.
Re: men superior to women in intellect and rationality - only thing I've seen him state to this effect was describe the distribution of IQs and commenting that the average is the same, however the lowest and highest IQ individuals tend to be male, however women are more packed around the average. I wouldn't describe this as sexist or male-chauvinistic, he's discussing results of studies. From the same observations you'll find that there's more 75-th percentile women than men. When I formulate my conclusion this way, am I now being sexist towards men?
Re: white people being more intelligent than black - if you agree that IQ measures intelligence at least in some capacity, then the results of whites on avg. having a higher IQ than blacks, and Asians and Jews higher than whites, speak for themselves. It might be an inconvenient and unfortunate reality, but you can't fix or mitigate this problem if you just sweep it under the rug. On the other hand, whenever I watch highlights of the NBA, the CRUSHING majority(like 99%) of the athletes there are black/mixed race. So is NBA racist for presenting all of the most athletic players as black? Should we also not talk about how white basketball players are underperforming in physical aspects in the NBA as it's racist?
I haven't kept that much track about the cultural stuff he said nor am I educated enough in the subject so I can't agree or disagree with you there, however I wouldn't call him a conman. His lessons of personal responsibility and guidelines on how to improve and add structure to your life seem sound. I suspect that his advice resonates more with people of a certain temperament than others, which is why I often hear that his advice is useless, despite there being thousands(maybe millions?) of people that have said that his advice has helped them out of a very tough spot.
I'm curious if anyone actually found cover letters to be useful in applying for jobs/reviewing applicants or is it just another pointless jumping through hoops that's unlikely to improve one's outcome of getting hired?
On the whole, I agree with you that at the very least the battery and RAM should be easily replaceable. I just happen to also think that the increase in weight/bulk is worthwhile tradeoff for the option for me to decide when I want to stop using the machine, not the manufacturer.
I've recently purchased a used T530, which was the last model to feature a removable battery, removable CPU, unsoldered RAM, etc etc(for the pedants - yes, later models still had some of these features, but none of them had all of them). It's a fantastic machine that runs everyday tasks without a hitch and with having the option to easily repair it I hope it will last at least another 10 years. The only disadvantage I have compared to the newer T490 model that I use is that it's about 1kg heavier.
I think it's reasonable that some consumers would prefer a lighter and thinner machine, even if that includes sacrificing modularity/repairibility, but I doubt those make up the majority and most are just apathetic and willing to go the way of disposable consumerism that corporations are pushing to drive profits further.
With programming they built this whole myth that "coding is easy, bro, trust me, you don't even need to know maths" and then people approach it with an according attitude. Once they actually progress from doing CodeAcademy courses to more real-world-like programming they hit a wall, programming turning out to be hard doesn't fit their mental model of it being easy, they decide it's not for them and leave it.
On the other hand, it could be argued that people who need to be convinced to overcome difficulties in progressing in a skill are not suited for it, but I'd still say that the world could do with more honesty so people can calibrate their expectations appropriately.
Do you have any suggestions on what I could read to better understand the issue at hand and get a better idea of what I'm trying to talk about? Perhaps a good book on the history of ancient humans?