"Jordan Peterson's popularity is the sign of a deeply impoverished political and intellectual landscape"
[1] https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-d...
You can figure out for yourself, watch this debate and tell me if Peterson is the type of person described in the article.
I promise I'll read your full article beyond the first paragraph :)
Quite fascinating discussion, like watching a match of intellectual boxing :)
Things are busy at work today, but I'll check it out when I have some time. If you could point me to a shorter clip within the almost 2 hours video, I will be more likely to look at it.
> Jordan Peterson appears very profound and has convinced many people to take him seriously. Yet he has almost nothing of value to say.
The irony of this is that the author himself has nothing of real value to say. (See, I said it so it must be true)
But then I realized much of what he is saying is true - and it personally hits my ego in such a way that the reaction is pretty much revulsion/dismissal.
Can it be written more concisely? Probably. But he is an academic afterall...
FWIW: If you enjoy his lecture style / cadence - try his Audiobook version. I would likely have a tough time with reading his book - but the audiobook format delivers like his youtube lectures, which IMO are very well done.
https://www.amazon.com/Meditations-Thrift-Editions-Marcus-Au...
https://www.amazon.com/Senecas-Letters-Stoic-Thrift-Editions...
No, it's not. Stoicism has much more depth and the Stoics would not agree with Peterson on many things. Stoicism also doesn't need to be updated.
Adam Sandler has earned people more money from movies than almost anyone. That doesn't mean Anthony Hopkins needed an update.
I originally thought his critique of postmodernism/continental philosophy and stuff was interesting, reminiscent of chomsky
His thesis on alcoholism is interesting, clearly he's atleast a decent psychologist. Reminds me of my aunt, psychologist at U. of Missouri, really interested in carl jung and religion.
IQ testing and personality tests always seemed broken to me. What is IQ measuring? Personality tests seem like arbitary categories. All of this is based on frequentist statistics (factor analysis), wonder if there's a bayesian perspective but I have no idea what i'm talking about honestly, especially compared to Peterson.
I can't stand his economic views, they're similar to Joe Rogan's "classical liberal"/market fundamentalist views. I like Kevin Carson's word: vulgar libertarianism:
"Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term 'free market' in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles. So we get [a] standard boilerplate article… arguing that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the poor, because 'that’s not how the free market works'— implicitly assuming that this is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations on the basis of 'free market principles.'"
1. Do you regularly apply some of these rules in your life?
2. What arguments were not logical in your view?
Peterson's thesis is something like the following: that the early biblical stories constitute a kind of dominant eigenvector of human cognition and experience, what you get when you iteratively retell a story over a hundred generations.
To dismiss this as anecdotes or fiction is very much to miss the point of what Peterson is trying to do.
I am certainly pro-Bible, but in the terms you're putting it here it doesn't seem especially compelling.
- It sorely needed an editor. Echoing other's sentiments, it could have been < 1/3 of its length. The writing style was rambling, overly emphatic, and arguments were often not coherent.
- It used a gratuitous amount of Bible quotes, which
I got suckered into to buying the book because the author is a compelling public speaker. I enjoy his lectures.In retrospect, though, part of what makes him a compelling public speaker are his highly emotional arguments, which don't seem to be founded on great reasoning, and therefore make for a bad book, since we have more time to be critical about arguments when reading.