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Jordan Peterson

Any of you guys follow Jordan Peterson ?

INT21.
I have only heard of him in passing....sort of a 'right wing mystic'......if such a thing is possible.
;)
 
Nothing mystical.

he's a behavioral psychologist.

INT21
 
I'll have to save any depth in my reply for later but I just wanted to add that Jordan Peterson is a beast, i like that guy a lot. I only found him recently with the rising hype, so he didn't influence any of my initial ideas or research but I have found his articulation of archetypes and evolutionary psychology to be invaluable. Great supplementary material to Jung and other classics. definitely not right wing though, right-wingers just tend to like him more.
 
And lord knows we need another 'behavioral psychologist' telling us all how we should behave.
;)

Your casual dismissal of an esoteric scholar is a bit disheartening. These are basically throw-away insults rather than critiques of the research. i would not be so confident as you are until i had given the material proper analysis. But i understand that your statement is a bit tongue-in-cheek all the same:cool2:
 
Back on the 'finding religion' thread I mentioned Jordan Peterson.

Many of his YouTube videos are motivational in nature, and they are very good. Not to everyone's taste maybe.

His theme is that you just need to get out there and do it. whatever 'it' is. And stop making excuses to yourself for not doing it.

I was drawn back to this when I was pondering what I was going to do about my car, having wrecked the engine through my own stupidity.
 
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I’m puzzled as to why you’re dragging Jordan Peterson into this instead of Haynes. While Peterson is an excellent psychologist and has researched his subject thoroughly (I can definitely recommend his analysis on the deep symbolism behind Disney’s Pinocchio) and may know a lot about Freud and Jung, I suspect he knows little about the timing chains on used cars.
 
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Any of you guys follow Jordan Peterson ?

INT21.

I’ve watched a few f his videos on you tube. He appears to have a sound grasp of some aspects of psychology. Which he parlays as truisms into realms in which he has no clue. in short, a semi intelligent charlatan telling angry people the chip on their shoulder is ok. Not worth my time.
 
He appears to have a sound grasp of some aspects of psychology.

After graduating from Fairview High School in 1979, Peterson entered the Grande Prairie Regional College to study political science and English literature.[2] He later transferred to theUniversity of Alberta, where he completed his B.A. in political science in 1982.[23] Afterwards, he took a year off to visit Europe. There he began studying psychological origins of the Cold War, 20th-century European totalitarianism,[2][24] and the works of Carl Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,[17] and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.[24] He then returned to the University of Alberta and received a B.A. in psychology in 1984.[25] In 1985, he moved toMontreal to attend McGill University. He earned his Ph.D. inclinical psychology under the supervision of Robert O. Pihl in 1991, and remained as a post-doctoral fellow at McGill's Douglas Hospital until June 1993, working with Pihl and Maurice Dongier.[2][26]
 
I’ve watched a few f his videos on you tube. He appears to have a sound grasp of some aspects of psychology. Which he parlays as truisms into realms in which he has no clue. in short, a semi intelligent charlatan telling angry people the chip on their shoulder is ok. Not worth my time.

I admire Petersen in so far as he takes on the intersectionals and the crazed PC mob. I say that as a Bisexual Socialist and Anti-Fascist.

I don't necessarily agree with his socio-economic politics though. Some of his political vids have been posted here as if they were an extension of his fight against the loons, they're not. He has centre-right views on a range of economic matters and his views on women and the family are at best old-fashioned and allow his critics cover to misrepresent his positions on academic independence.

So I'll defend him in the good fight against censorship in academia, the media and the arts but cruticise his broader politics.
 
I admire Petersen in so far as he takes on the intersectionals and the crazed PC mob. I say that as a Bisexual Socialist and Anti-Fascist.

I don't necessarily agree with his socio-economic politics though. Some of his political vids have been posted here as if they were an extension of his fight against the loons, they're not. He has centre-right views on a range of economic matters and his views on women and the family are at best old-fashioned and allow his critics cover to misrepresent his positions on academic independence.

So I'll defend him in the good fight against censorship in academia, the media and the arts but criticise his broader politics.

He is an interesting fellow and his advantage is that he’s spent a lot of years formally studying psychology and also working as a clinical psychologist. It may irk many who think their opinion is right, but JP generally has the evidence and experience of helping people to know when he’s right. A lay person or journalist may not like it, but he, generally speaking, is in a far better position to judge what is good for people, than many who disagree with him are.

He is strongly against tyrannies of all forms, whether they be on the far left OR the far right. Like most people who read widely and have studied the behaviour of groups, how tyranny rises and forms and what constitutes ‘evil’ behaviour, he appears to understand the most stable way, is that we all have freedom to express views and beliefs, that these do not necessarily come without consequence, and that this along with strong democracy is the best defence against tyranny of any form or ideology.

I do think he uses academic definitions which allow others to misrepresent his argument. If one was, for example, to say a ‘normal’ woman will tend to be more ‘agreeable’ (as a trait) than a 'normal' man, and that this difference might then be reflected in choice of career and/or behaviour, many bridle without a moment's reflection.

However, if one was to look at the definition of normal as “within one standard deviation either side of the median score of said trait” then this is perfectly correct. This doesn’t mean anyone is ‘abnormal’ (in the pejorative sense) if they are outside that range or there is necessarily anything wrong with a really ‘agreeable’ man or a really 'un-agreeable’ woman.

As it happens, the median scores for ‘agreeableness’ between men (as a population) and women (as a population) are about half a standard deviation apart. However, there is a major difference between allowing anyone to follow their chosen life path without prejudice, i.e. equality of opportunity, and forcing some kind of gender based equality of outcome, because that suits someone’s world-view.

Of course both genders should be allowed to freely choose the career they want. Because there are definite trait differences between men and women across a population, this may mean that some roles are predominantly filled by men and some roles are predominantly filled by women. Pressuring men to work in psychology or women to work on oil-rigs, in order to ‘prove’ some notion of equality is ill-informed, a form of petty tyranny and doomed to failure.

[I used the above careers as exemplars only, they may be wrong in and of themselves for all I know.]

JP also promotes the idea that social hierarchies are a normal facet of human behaviour (although I think he would be wise to abandon his lobster exemplar round about now). As I understand it, he suggests that the societal problems are not caused by hierarchies per se, but by hierarchies NOT based predominantly on merit. For example, those hierarchies transmitted by birth, or by ‘being at the right school’. The former is normal, the latter, although ‘normal if allowed to flourish’, is not a good thing. It is the latter that represses, not the formation of hierarchies in and of themselves.

[So for example, there is nothing wrong with me have a manager who is better at that job that me, but everything wrong with someone incompetent holding that role 'just because they're the boss's cousin'].

This (in conjunction with other normal human traits) can look like a slightly to the right of centre old fashioned view if you really really believe we’re all born equal ‘blank slates’. If you wish to believe this, be my guest, but there’s no science in the world that supports this belief.

One might as well believe the 'proper upbringing' will make us all Einstein’s or blond-haired and blue eyed ‘if only it was done right’.

If (in the UK) all the braying social justice warriors would get together and mount a sustained campaign to introduce some kind of proportional representation, they’d do far more good for the common man and those in minority groups, as they’d be far more likely to see such minority groups represented in government, certainly more than in the existing lop-sided bi-partisan old boys club that’s stifling equality of opportunity in the UK.
 
[So for example, there is nothing wrong with me have a manager who is better at that job that me, but everything wrong with someone incompetent holding that role 'just because they're the boss's cousin'].

This (in conjunction with other normal human traits) can look like a slightly to the right of centre old fashioned view if you really really believe we’re all born equal ‘blank slates’. If you wish to believe this, be my guest, but there’s no science in the world that supports this belief.

One might as well believe the 'proper upbringing' will make us all Einstein’s or blond-haired and blue eyed ‘if only it was done right’.

If (in the UK) all the braying social justice warriors would get together and mount a sustained campaign to introduce some kind of proportional representation, they’d do far more good for the common man and those in minority groups, as they’d be far more likely to see such minority groups represented in government, certainly more than in the existing lop-sided bi-partisan old boys club that’s stifling equality of opportunity in the UK.

I agree with the above but his actual economic politics are to the right of the spectrum in so far as he would support policies that are more likely to be held by Conservative parties. There is nothing unscientific about opposing those policies of his. Nor is there anything unscientific about him supporting them. I just favour more of a social security safety net. That's just a political disagreement. He's not The Messiah (or a naughty boy) just someone with great ideas on some topics.

I also support merit based hierarchies provided it's recognised that the playing field isn't always level. Some start off with better economic advantages and their parents can send them to private schools, get grinds etc. Ways must be found to ensure that bright students coming from under-resourced schools also have a chance of accessing third level education, that doesn't mean getting rid of exams though.

When it comes to being old-fashioned it's the way that Peterson expresses himself, I suspect in the heat of debate he sometimes becomes deliberately offensive which may well endear him to the small percentage of his fans who are misogynists (who make a disproportionate amount of noise) but only annoys his progressive adherents and prevents him from winning over a broader audience. He makes the mistake of combating his opponent rather than fighting for his ideas.

Like Peterson I oppose Identity Politics but I don't agree with him about politics in general.
 
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There he began studying psychological origins of the Cold War, 20th-century European totalitarianism,[2][24] and the works of Carl Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,[17]
What does this mean? He read a few books? Did Toronto Life corroborate this, or are they just going on what their subject told them? I ask, because there is a new edition of Gulag Archipelago coming out soon with a foreword by your man there, and frankly I think I'd be better qualified than he is for that job. And that's not taking account of the vast majority of my erstwhile colleagues in Russian Studies.
 
What does this mean? He read a few books? Did Toronto Life corroborate this, or are they just going on what their subject told them? I ask, because there is a new edition of Gulag Archipelago coming out soon with a foreword by your man there, and frankly I think I'd be better qualified than he is for that job. And that's not taking account of the vast majority of my erstwhile colleagues in Russian Studies.

I see your point, and I have no explanation as to why Peterson seems to be the 'thinker du jour' in any general sense.

There's been a sudden surge in references to Jordan Peterson over the last couple of months, and I moved the Peterson tangents out of the threads they'd polluted into a thread dedicated to him and his theories. This consolidation will minimize the targeting burden if (or should I say when ... ?) the Peterson chatter becomes sufficiently 'political' to justify eradication.
 
What does this mean? He read a few books? Did Toronto Life corroborate this, or are they just going on what their subject told them? I ask, because there is a new edition of Gulag Archipelago coming out soon with a foreword by your man there, and frankly I think I'd be better qualified than he is for that job. And that's not taking account of the vast majority of my erstwhile colleagues in Russian Studies.

The work of Nietzsche and Jung are really heavy influences on Maps of Meaning, his main academic publication--scarcely a few pages pass without one or both of them being cited. I think I'm correct in saying that lectures on both of them have featured in one of the courses he taught at the University of Toronto. I watched a piece of the Minority Report (a left-wing politics show, which I like) in which they basically took an amusingly occult diagram from that book and ridiculed it as being 'all made up' with no discussion at all of context or meaning. I'm quite prepared to criticise the man and his ideas, but I've dipped enough to see that while he might not be a paradigm-shattering genius, he is certainly a 'proper academic' with interesting things to say.

No idea about Solzhenitsyn at all--and it's Wikipedia, so it could be a fanboy jumping in.
 
Personally, this is my favourite of the admittedly wacky illustrations.
Screen Shot 2018-12-27 at 01.29.43.png
 
I will be interested in what he has to say about the future where very few people (compared to the overall population) actually are needed to run the World. And they are rather more of a hindrance than a help. The rest will, in effect, be parasites. Unemployed parasites with nothing to do and plenty of time to dwell on that fact.

The combination of automation, AI and overpopulation will very soon bring us to the point where decisions will have to be made.

INT21
 
I'm not a fan - I think he panders to and profits from a far-right fan base, then abdicates responsibility by saying 'oh me, I'm not right wing, no way - I can't help it if I strike a chord with those people'.
 
I can agree with Peterson's attitude towards being anti-postmodernism, and against politically correct culture, but he really has no business critiquing environmentalism, as he lacks the scientific background to adequately deal with the meteorology involved. His argument that there is too much ideology involved in the environmental movement would only be valid if the concerns weren't raised by meteorologists long before they became a popular cause. I happen to know that the problems of both ozone depletion and global warming were being discussed by meteorologists back in the early 1970s, by some very staid old academic gentlemen who were genuinely worried about our collective future as a species if we didn't act. We did reasonably well on the issue of chloroflurocarbons, but have largely failed to deal with the CO2 problem thus far.
 
I see your point, and I have no explanation as to why Peterson seems to be the 'thinker du jour' in any general sense.

There's been a sudden surge in references to Jordan Peterson over the last couple of months, and I moved the Peterson tangents out of the threads they'd polluted into a thread dedicated to him and his theories. This consolidation will minimize the targeting burden if (or should I say when ... ?) the Peterson chatter becomes sufficiently 'political' to justify eradication.

Just wanted to give my two cents since I think I helped stir up some of the chatter about JP around here. I would've commented sooner but I only just noticed that this thread was created out of the other.

I understand that his name will inevitably bring up the political connotations he has garnered, but I must say that I am bit surprised that most frequenters of this forum are largely unaware of his esoteric studies. Are any of you familiar with his debates with neuroscientist, Sam Harris? They discuss many different points, like archetypes and darwinism in the past and present. the discussions include debates on Free will, which is something that Sam Harris is known to contest. I very much enjoy the work of both Harris and Peterson, and I think there work is in a very, very similar grouping.


It is a real disservice to leave the discussion of Peterson to a solely political spectrum. This is not what he has studied throughout his career, his has just lately received a lot of attention because of his analysis of hot-button political topics.

But his actual scholastic career of evolutionary psychology is absolutely fascinating and very useful. As I said before, it is very Jungian and i consider Peterson to be a valuable contemporary in the field of existential psychology. Scholastically, his political discourse is really a side note.

However, I know that 99% of his media attention has been political, so I don't blame anyone for taking this perspective on it.

For me, I brought up Peterson purely to discuss his esoteric psychological analysis, which he has quite a lot of.

Has anyone here listened to his archetypal analysis of the Old Testament? I think it's like ten different lectures that clock in at over two hours. I listened to a little bit of them all, and listened entirely to about half of it.

DISCLAIMER: I really don't want to seem like too much of a JP groupie here. My job gives me the opportunity to listen to podcasts, audio-books, etc, so I have taken time to give Jordan Peterson a fair listen during this time. Since I like what I've heard, I looked a little further--so I could decide whether or not he was a source worth recommending to others. I highly recommend--political discourse aside.


I can agree with Peterson's attitude towards being anti-postmodernism, and against politically correct culture, but he really has no business critiquing environmentalism, as he lacks the scientific background to adequately deal with the meteorology involved. His argument that there is too much ideology involved in the environmental movement would only be valid if the concerns weren't raised by meteorologists long before they became a popular cause. I happen to know that the problems of both ozone depletion and global warming were being discussed by meteorologists back in the early 1970s, by some very staid old academic gentlemen who were genuinely worried about our collective future as a species if we didn't act. We did reasonably well on the issue of chloroflurocarbons, but have largely failed to deal with the CO2 problem thus far.

What is his stance on Environmentalism? I am unfamiliar
 
Here is a quote from his tenth biblical lecture. This is what I think of when I think of JP, not the political stuff. I dictated this quote a while back because I really loved the simple, off-the-cuff phrasing of such a poignant message.

“You’re screwed no matter what you do, and that actually frees you. You have Path-A that has catastrophes and you have Path-B that has catastrophes and you don’t get to have the No-Catastrophe path, but you get to pick which one, and that’s really something. Because if you know that there is terrible risk associated with everything that you do and don’t do, then you can afford to take some risks. And this is all within the arc [of the covenant] metaphor—I’m still making the case that, despite the fact that your life is essentially catastrophic, you can make a covenant with the highest ideal and that will take you through it the best way possible.”

 
I ask, because there is a new edition of Gulag Archipelago coming out soon with a foreword by your man there, and frankly I think I'd be better qualified than he is for that job.
He is very, very familiar with not just the work but Solzhenitsyn himself, and often cites the latter on a psycho-sociological level.

I like Peterson. I don't always agree with him politically, but I do think it is unfair to describe him as extremely right-wing: the fact that some on the right find things in his work which chime with their opinion should hold no more importance than the fact that he says things that chime with mine - it doesn't mean he holds identical values to mine, either.

As someone with a lifelong interest in archetypes, repeating narratives and their influence on human discourse I found Maps Of Meaning a startling work, and his 12 Rules are stimulating and sensible. He knows his stuff, can argue his case, and he's well worth the effort.
 
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I like Peterson. I don't always agree with him politically, but I do think it is unfair to describe him as extremely right-wing: the fact that some on the right find things in his work which chime with their opinion should say hold no more importance than the fact that he says things that chime with mine - it doesn't mean he holds identical values to mine, either.

As someone with a lifelong interest in archetypes, repeating narratives and their influence on human discourse I found Maps Of Meaning a startling work, and his 12 Rules are stimulating and sensible. He knows his stuff, can argue his case, and he's well worth the effort.

well said!

I think it's fair to say overall that Peterson has over-extended himself with his political commentary, but his niche research is very insightful.
 
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