The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Jordan Peterson and the Rise? of Psuedo-Intellectualism
Dark_Side
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I think a thread on this topic might be fertile ground for discussion. I put a question mark behind rise, because I believe combatting pseudoscience has been a known problem in philosophy for decades.
Jordan Peterson has been getting made fun of quite a bit lately on social media and I stumbled across this rather ruthless take down of him by Nathan J. Robinson for Current Affairs magazine in 2018. In it, the writer calls out Peterson for what he is, a fraudulent simpleton who gives basic Dad advice dressed up with a comical salad of big words and complicated syntax. The writer further posits that the entire point of how Peterson writes is designed to be so difficult to parse that you can't really pin him to any opinion at all.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve
I've never read his book, Maps of Meaning, but from excerpts I've seen, it reads like some drug addled conservative remake of Burroughs's Naked Lunch. The author shows dozens of comments from fans exclaiming how smart and brilliant it is, even though its filled with the crazy scribblings of a mad man. And this seems like a problem with a capital P for society. Peterson and others like him seem to provide a universal theory of right wing fascism; a ramshackle, clumsy papering over of all the illogical fallacies of conservative thought, that can be made to mean anything for the people who quote him.
At the end of the essay, after posting a excerpt of Peterson rambling to an audience for a lifetime on how to feed a toddler, the author tries to explain why Peterson is so popular:
I think it's fairly accepted now that Peterson in particular, is often a gateway into the Youtube hole of red pill, incels, and right wing facsism for users. I know that I personally have to prune his creepy skeleton face from my Youtube feed weekly. Obviously many things have changed in social media, and Peterson's life since this was published in 2018; but it's a good question, do we have a responsibility to try and provide an alternative message to young men and other disenfranchised groups? Or is the popularity of polarizing morons like Peterson, Shapiro, Rogan, and etc., simply the result of them being amplified by social media algorithms? Is there any way to combat the rampant disinformation out there?
Jordan Peterson has been getting made fun of quite a bit lately on social media and I stumbled across this rather ruthless take down of him by Nathan J. Robinson for Current Affairs magazine in 2018. In it, the writer calls out Peterson for what he is, a fraudulent simpleton who gives basic Dad advice dressed up with a comical salad of big words and complicated syntax. The writer further posits that the entire point of how Peterson writes is designed to be so difficult to parse that you can't really pin him to any opinion at all.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve
But, having examined Peterson’s work closely, I think the “misinterpretation” of Peterson is only partially a result of leftists reading him through an ideological prism. A more important reason why Peterson is “misinterpreted” is that he is so consistently vague and vacillating that it’s impossible to tell what he is “actually saying.” People can have such angry arguments about Peterson, seeing him as everything from a fascist apologist to an Enlightenment liberal, because his vacuous words are a kind of Rorschach test onto which countless interpretations can be projected.
I've never read his book, Maps of Meaning, but from excerpts I've seen, it reads like some drug addled conservative remake of Burroughs's Naked Lunch. The author shows dozens of comments from fans exclaiming how smart and brilliant it is, even though its filled with the crazy scribblings of a mad man. And this seems like a problem with a capital P for society. Peterson and others like him seem to provide a universal theory of right wing fascism; a ramshackle, clumsy papering over of all the illogical fallacies of conservative thought, that can be made to mean anything for the people who quote him.
At the end of the essay, after posting a excerpt of Peterson rambling to an audience for a lifetime on how to feed a toddler, the author tries to explain why Peterson is so popular:
Having safely established that Jordan Peterson is an intellectual fraud who uses a lot of words to say almost nothing, we can now turn back to the original question: how can a man incapable of relaying the content of a children’s book become the most influential thinker of his moment? My first instinct is simply to sigh that the world is tragic and absurd, and there is apparently no height to which confident fools cannot ascend. But there are better explanations available. Peterson is popular partly because he criticizes social justice activists in a way many people find satisfying, and some of those criticisms have merit. He is popular partly because he offers adrift young men a sense of heroic purpose, and offers angry young men rationalizations for their hatreds. And he is popular partly because academia and the left have failed spectacularly at helping make the world intelligible to ordinary people, and giving them a clear and compelling political vision.
I think it's fairly accepted now that Peterson in particular, is often a gateway into the Youtube hole of red pill, incels, and right wing facsism for users. I know that I personally have to prune his creepy skeleton face from my Youtube feed weekly. Obviously many things have changed in social media, and Peterson's life since this was published in 2018; but it's a good question, do we have a responsibility to try and provide an alternative message to young men and other disenfranchised groups? Or is the popularity of polarizing morons like Peterson, Shapiro, Rogan, and etc., simply the result of them being amplified by social media algorithms? Is there any way to combat the rampant disinformation out there?
Dark_Side on
+6
Posts
the best breakdowns I've found sum him up as a rebranding of Jungian archetypes for a new right wing audience. His insistence of branding everything bad as feminine matches up pretty well with with the misogyny of his audience
I feel like Robert Evans is getting close to that, but he very much doesn't want to be a figurehead in any way. A big part of the problem is that Peterson et al are grifters and thus are willing to compromise themselves in any way they can to make a buck and earn a follower.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
The point of my story is that Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter comprise a propoganda and brainwashing machine that would have mad Goebbels fall to his knees and weep and any plan to counter pseudo-intellectualism must contend with that.
Or maybe the left simply lionizes a different flavor of intellectual. Maybe the left is more likely to seek people who have big ideas on how to make the community/world better (AOC, Bernie, whatever). With Jordan Petersen, his audience seeks a “strong” man (in this instance, a PhD) to tell them that they are smart and in control of their own destiny.
There is certainly a preexisting partisan audience that relishes “owning” the other side with FACTS and LOGIC, and this is true on the left (/r/MurderedByAOC) and the right (Shapiro’s Gish Gallop and YouTube vids “owning the libs”).
(Twitter rando AFAIK, but the images are screenshots from a Reddit post, presented below in the spoiler.)
Steam | XBL
Partially because he appeals to idiots who think they are intellectuals, but mostly because he’s such a men’s rights shill he doesn’t stay contained to the US (or Canada I suppose) but wherever males think they are logical powerhouses of reason because they have testes. Pops up everywhere like some sort of instant Gish gallop, with a trillion facts you must counter or admit that you’re wrong about how right evolutionary psychology is on *random subject of the day*.
Robert Evans doesn't belong in the same sentence with those bullshit artists.
The user comment, being on the Peterson subreddit, is surprisingly good.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
Another one is the focus on cleanliness and organization. It’s an example of how brainwashers will, at first, include some things that are good and desirable mixed in with the bullshit.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskFeminists/comments/szeoqj/why_was_jordan_peterson_so_popular_still_is/hy3ix5d/
This comment also was enlightening:
I value my friendship for other reasons we just avoid politics now.
His daughter basically tried to murder him and he's a psycho peddling astrology to young men.
where would we be without men
I read two Ayn Rand books in college! I mean, I read fountainhead first and thought it was kinda cool cause it talked about architecture and buildings and stuff.
I read atlus shrugged next and it opened my mind
To how dumb all that shit she wrote was
???
But Jordan is an insane person. There's a passage in his book about a dream he had where his maternal grandmother rubs his face with a matte of pubic hair. He reads it aloud in the audiobook. He is an actual lunatic.
Supposedly, the all meat diet that nearly killed him was done at her behest.
I thought she gave him COVID while he was recovering be from his self-induced coma
That seems like the kind of thing that answers itself and is kinda insulting, really. The Left doesn’t need ideologues to sell them on pseudoscience and hate, as those are antithetical to being on the Left.
It’s like asking where the atheist version of Joel Osteen is: they don’t exist because no one needs them to exist.
Its basically cult tactics. they reel people in with mostly innocuous high-minded shit. Then once you're invested the brain poison starts
I haven’t read those but it sounds like the first one has the sugar to make it go down while the second one has the hard stuff.
Here’s a thought experiment: imagine what Rand would do with modern social media.
I kind of agree and disagree. Part of the reason there is such a rise of fascist grifters is because they present a comforting message with a clear call to (in)action with satisfying psuedo rhetoric. If the left can't offer something better then they will lose ground. Either work out how to fight the rhetoric, or provide a better message.
There is a clear alt-right pipeline, but I don't think there is an equivalent for the left. That's a problem!
Anyways, the athiest version of Joel Osteen is going to be some libertarian asshole who convinces kids that some imaginary freedom is all that matters so it's okay to hate minorities as long as you have pseudoscientific reasoning behind it. The left version is the Komen foundation.
I tend to agree, and really I think that's the ultimate fallacy in Robinson's conclusion. But.....if there's no one speaking any truth in that space as an opposite to the kind of psuedo-intellectual, i am very smart, bullshit that people like Peterson and Shapiro peddle, what's to combat it? There is an entire generation of kids growing up on this shit, and the only fairly known work from the other side is..Contrapoints maybe?
There is way more competition for the left-leaning academic/quasi-academic market (far more supply of left-leaning experts), with the predictable impact on quality.
This phenomenon isn’t confined to the book market. There are similar dynamics in the markets for law clerks, judges, professors, etc.
It is crazy how often Youtube tries to sneak Peterson videos into my feed and it bugs the shit out of me, it's getting to the point that I suspect a conspiracy. And you're right, they're never labeled, and always have an attention getting, but innocuous enough title that you can't identify them as right wing bullshit easily.
That's not YouTube, that's the alt right. Having videos like that is a big part of how they promote their ideology.
Start with innocuous content to prepare people for more obviously right wing content, and someone can be brought, in step at a time, to the point where Nazism seems like a good idea.
Peterson is a big part of the first step: he "address" real problems that are not really addressed in general, so vulnerable people listen, and get indoctrinated.
Edit: I mean, Libertarianism has been selling a reinforcement of male white privilege successfully for decades now. That's why it appeals to so many college aged males, because much like the philosophy contends, they've never really been told no in their life, and are still naïve enough to think that they got where they are solely through their own hard work. But Libertarianism dies off for the vast majority of believers, excepting truly phenomonal, self absorbed morons like Rand Paul, whereas Peterson's spin on it has had staying power.
I mean it is YouTube. Or at least their engagement algorithm. Why the fuck does Peterson get recommended to everyone.
Oh, plenty of people realize it's a big problem.
There's just not a lot that can be done about it because those kinds of videos generate Youtube a lot of ad money, so they're not going to do anything about them. Maybe every now and then if there's big enough uproar about a specific video or creator, but there'll always be more.
I can't remember any of them. The only thing I took away from it is that lobsters form hierarchies based on how they fought one another which changes serotonin levels in their brains which, over time, changes neural pathways. Which had me wondering if that happens in humans, too, but my therapist said no, it doesn't.
What irks me about the man is that, the two times I've seen him argue against people (Matt Dillahunty, Zizek) is his opponent will make a good point (and one that is understandable), to which Peterson replies with something about the metaphysical substrate of virtue or something like that, followed by "you can't have an opinion if you haven't read Tchaikovsky Dostoevsky or Tolstoy".
A professor of mine once said "if you cannot express your idea in simple terms it probably isn't a good idea" aaand that's stuck with me for a long time. Yes some topics are insanely complicated, but if you understand it and have solid ground to stand on (rationally) you can always dumb it down. Even if it ends up being something like "gravity makes things go down". The fact that Peterson has not once, on a plethora of subjects, been able to express his ideas in a simple, straightforward manner is a red flag, to me.
Oh, if we're talking about wolves in sheep's clothing I'd like to throw Dave Rubin into the hat.
edit:
Oh, and Peterson's "life is suffering, humans are made to suffer" can just go burn in a fire.
Because the people making the videos are deliberately creating titles and descriptions to get them viewed by people who don't care, and to deceive border line people, so the videos seem like they are popular content that drive engagement, and therefore get recommended to other people who engage with them, and so on.
Same thing happens to dog videos. The algorithm is too dumb to make the difference between the two.
But the alt right is good at creating the funnel and updating their strategy when people get wise.
The “alt” in Alt-Right means it’s alternative to conventional western liberal education.
Jordan Peterson isn’t a new phenomenon, y’all, and we don’t need to compete with his space. Corporations need to be stringent about giving platforms to bigots and grifters, obviously, but there’s always going to be this kind of vacuous snake-oil salesmen pitching grievance-based misogyny and homophobia. That’s a tale as old as time, and before it was Peterson and Rogan it was Limbaugh and Hannity, or Stossel and O’Reilly, or Buckley and Wallace.
There’s always going to be these kinds of people. The solution is removing their influence, not trying to get down in the muck next to them and hope we make as pretty a pig.
Left-wing grifters and right-wing grifters will both collect people who are honestly duped. Right-wing grifters have far more ability to collect people who see past their bullshit but will follow (or fund) them anyway.
It's been long observed that nationalists, fascists, and bigots use words and arguments not to actually prove a point, but to obfuscate their own goals, whether we are talking about Sartre on antisemitism or Eco on fascism.
So somebody like Peterson or the rest of the "intellectual dark web" (Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, Alex Jones, et al) can be an obvious grifter spewing obvious bullshit, and part of their audience will know that it's bullshit and won't care. Not all of their audience, mind you, just a large enough contingent to keep their respective careers buoyed.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Partly because he's incredibly prolific, there's a shitload of content, and there's a shitload of content criticizing him. Peterson in particular very rarely writes anything, other than his full-length books, so the vast majority of his content are in talks and podcasts. That means that people who listen to him (whether to agree with him or skewer him) are overwhelmingly using YouTube to access his content.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Peterson also claims that he once drank a glass of apple cider and it fucked him up so badly he was unable to sleep for like six weeks.
It's been pointed out to him that if a human goes without sleep for that long they would probably die. But that didn't seem to register with him.
I can't believe Jordan 'The Dragon of Chaos is Symbolically Feminine' Peterson is taken seriously by anyone.