I’ve sniped at Jordan Peterson a few times. I’ve tended to focus on just a few of his overtly and demonstrably wrong claims, because I don’t want to study the long-winded stream of garbage that he spews out on the internet — the very last thing I want to do with my life is become a Jordan Peterson authority. He is simply not worth it, a property that works in his favor, because no one with any sense wants to dwell for long in his mansion of madness, so only his True Believers immerse themselves in his toxic verbosity. Nathan Robinson did a great job with an overview, but all I’ve done is laughed at a few fragments of obvious absurdity.
But now to the list of people who’ve really looked at the big picture of Jordan Peterson’s career, we can add the fabulous Laurie Penny. She goes right to the heart of the Peterson oeuvre.
Over the past 12 months, and especially since the publication of his internationally-bestselling self-help book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Peterson’s work has been dissected, discussed, and debated on talk shows and in reputable publications across the same Western civilizations whose decline he diagnoses in a manner more lucrative than lucid. Few have led with the obvious fact that neither the man nor the message make coherent sense. 12 Rules disproves, by its very success, one of its central tenets: the idea that we live in anything resembling a meritocracy. The book is messy as hell. It is full of insipid platitudes, trite homilies, and self-regarding detours delivered with the assurance of a man who fully expects to see his childhood finger paintings in a museum someday. At best, he sounds like someone who wandered off into the Desert of the Real without a sunhat. There is, in short, absolutely no way this would be taken remotely seriously if anyone who wasn’t a white guy had written it.
I have to disagree mildly with that last bit, and mention Deepak Chopra and Camille Paglia as counter-examples…but perhaps counter-examples that prove the rule. You can write popular, successful word salad as a non-white-man as long as it doesn’t threaten the dominance of white men. But otherwise, yes — it’s badly written hash of the sort that, once upon a time, skeptics would have scornfully ripped to shreds and spat upon the tatters (now, unfortunately, skeptics line up to pay money to hear the Great Man speak).
Peterson’s anxious army of acolytes would claim that if you don’t understand his work it’s not necessarily because you’re an idiot, but because you haven’t read every single word in every comment thread and watched every single grainy video of Peterson pontificating about lobsters. Because what you really need to consider — and here’s the chorus that repeats — is the context.
Oh god yes. As I said, I’ve only touched on a few things, like his claim that modern lobster behavior is somehow relevant and evolutionarily related to human behavior, or his claim that ancient Chinese scholars somehow knew something about the biochemical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid and portrayed it in metaphors of divinity, but all I hear from Peterson bros is two words: “strawman” and “context”. It doesn’t matter that I quote him literally or include a video, I’m misinterpreting him, and if I would only listen to 50 hours of his YouTube videos, I would see that he’s right.
No. I do check out the immediate context of the controversial statement, and they don’t help him at all. But Penny points out that there is an even bigger context that explains, but does not justify his popularity.
Yes, absolutely. Context is vital. But what is the context that actually matters here?
* * *
The context is despair. The context is cultural civil war. The context is two thousand years of violent religious patriarchy, five centuries of brutal capitalist biopolitics, and a decade of punishing austerity that has left a great many young men quaking in the ruins of their own promised glory, drowning in unmet expectations. The context is a profoundly impoverished intellectual and political climate where the feeling of truth is more meaningful than truth itself. That’s the context in which Peterson’s ascendency was as predictable as it is humiliating for anyone clinging on to the idea that there might be a few drops left at the bottom of the barrel of moderate conservative thought. Outside that context, it would make no sense.
So the context is that Peterson has forged an identity that appeals deeply to losers, people who are resentful about lost opportunities and loss of status. They’ve tumbled down the hierarchy that Peterson loves so much. The really bad news is that he’s tapping into a huge and growing group, and yeah, society should do something to restore dignity to everyone. The even worse news is that Peterson’s philosophy is all about trashing cooperative group behavior and feeding the self-destructive resentment even more. But he and his followers don’t see that. They are all true believers.
Peterson is playing a role, but he’s not a grifter. On the contrary, his hallucinogenic body of work suggests that he has been liberally sampling his own product. He believes what he’s saying, and in this intellectual climate that sort of authenticity carries weight, even if what you’re actually saying is a paranoid mess of evolutionary psychology, horrified homophobic superstition, and religious mysticism.
Many of Peterson’s fans reassure themselves that there’s a seam of genius here buried beyond their reach, that there’s so much damn context that even a true believer can only ever see it all through a glass, darkly. Those demands for context are a cop-out: rummage around on Reddit for ten minutes and you can find enough evidence to garnish any crank’s crockpot.
But this has always been the problem: the truly damaging prophets aren’t the ones running an open con, but the ones who are absolutely confident that they bear the truth. This has been the case throughout history, that there are people so certain of their beliefs that they’ll send men off to their deaths in war, or even march straight to their own martyrdom. It doesn’t justify it or make it less contemptible to say that the prophet truly believes deep in his heart everything that he says. Intent isn’t magic, as all the kids say.
It explains his success…
Peterson has worked out the secret to monetizing his own persecution complex: If your audience is angry and lonely and you tell them that’s justifiable, you can take that muddle of meaning, blend it, and serve it through a candy-colored straw to those who are prepared to swallow anything and call it a juice cleanse. You can go quite far in the gig economy of modern entrepreneurial proto-fascism by talking to young men as if their feelings matter.
…but his motives don’t excuse the end result.
Writing in the LA Times, Cathy Young says that “for all his flaws, Peterson is tapping into a very real frustration,” and that even if they don’t like what he has to say, feminists should pay attention to Peterson’s fans and engage with their feelings.
The problem is that we already are. Constantly. Angry white male entitlement is the elevator music of our age. Speaking personally, as a feminist-identified person on the internet, my Twitter mentions are full of practically nothing else. I’ve spent far too much of my one life trying to listen and understand and offer suggestions in good faith, before concluding that it’s not actually my job to manage the hurt feelings of men who are prepared to mortgage the entire future of the species to buy back their misplaced pride. It never was. That’s not what feminism is about.
There are plenty of reasons why society treats the pain of young white men as a public concern. A great many of us learned from an early age that bad things happen when white men have hurt feelings. Children of color learn, often painfully, the importance of making the white people around them feel comfortable. Little girls are taught not to “provoke” their male peers into attacking or harassing them. This can get confusing for white boys, bless their hearts: when everyone else treats your hurt feelings as immovable facts that have to be managed by those around you, some confusion is understandable. That’s how we got to a position where male pain is intolerable, but everyone else’s pain is par for the course. I’m throwing truth-bombs, but you’re crying victim. Fuck your feelings, but make gentle, empathetic love to mine.
The old guard is falling. We can understand why they’re unhappy about it, but it shouldn’t imply that we ought to prop them up. You better believe that I think white men have an earned place in the culture — we just have to learn that it is not automatically the top spot, and that all the Proud Boys and neo-Nazis actively damage the status we should earn. We also don’t accomplish anything by scurrying backwards to embrace bad ideas that we think help our cause. Bad ideas like evolutionary psychology.
How do you launder a bad idea to send it back to market? You bundle it up with some slightly better-sounding ones and repackage the whole deal as dazzling insight. Right now, the rhetoric of evolutionary psychology is a popular detergent, as it has been for the last two centuries. The enduring notion that civilization is merely an extension of men’s biological urge to battle it out for sexual access to the highest-quality women, that reproductive, racial, and economic injustice are both natural and morally just, is nothing new.
Anything goes for Peterson fans. They’re desperate. They’ll grab at anything they think will restore their supremacy, and Peterson’s secret is that he can serve any old garbage that will reinforce that nonsense, and they’ll gobble it up.
The people buying what Peterson has to sell are not doing so out of stupidity, or even ignorance. Plenty of information exists about, say, the limits of comparison between the complex lives of human beings and the simple ones of giant sea insects. Gently explaining that they’ve been sold a lot of horseshit does no good. “Tell the truth,” their guru exhorts them, “or at least don’t lie.” But what good does that do when you’ve been given license to experience your most embittered suspicions as cosmic wisdom, and liberty to define your own truth from a drop-down menu of superstition and conspiracy?
So what can we do?
We cannot continue to take Jordan Peterson seriously as a scholar and still respect the Western philosophical tradition in the morning. Jordan Peterson is a very silly man. He is also a very serious warning about how our intellectual culture has been downgraded. Engaging in any serious political conversation with him can only debase both our conversation and our politics. There is much to be gained, though, by seeing him clearly for what he is: the yammering sidewalk mystic of our age, the canary twittering madly to alert us to the imminent collapse of political coherence, with all that is solid melting into airtime.
Are you planning to debate Peterson, as his fans so often tell me to do? Don’t. I make the same recommendation to anyone planning to debate creationists — we’ve been doing it for decades, and all it does is reinforce their sense of entitlement and their belief that they should be taken seriously. You should know this by now, because creationists, like Peterson, love debate and beg to be invited into them. Stand apart. Tear into their arguments. Point out where they’re wrong. But don’t dignify these frauds with one-on-one engagements.
That’s the third most common taunt I get from Petersonions. 1: “Strawman!” 2: “Context!” 3: “Debate him!”. All are bogus.
??? Jordan Peterson who?
He’s already well into fading into obscurity.
As soon as people started paying attention to his extensive writings and videos, one thing became clear.
He’s usually wrong and often lies.
Jordan Peterson and every other demagogue from Sarah Palin to Donald Trump have been tapping into our main problem.
As economic inequality grows, more and more people are getting left behind by our society. It’s not just young working class males either. It’s the 99%, not the 1%.
We are leaving an increasingly broken world to our children.
Some but not many have thought to address this problem in the obvious way.
When you find yourself in a hole, first…stop digging.
We could just, you know, set things up so our society is more functional for the 99% who do almost all of the work.
That gets my vote as TWWNS (Truer Words Were Never Spoken) Sentence of the Month.
Fucking Jordan Peterson–the L Ron Hubbard of the 21st century. Beloved by many men as a writer of Teh Deepities. Will surely be the father of a new religion at some point.
The most important thing I’ve learned from reviewing grant proposals is that if you can’t convey your ideas clearly, you have not thought them through enough yourself , and they are not ideas.
So, to the Lobsterian fanboys’ demand for “context”: sorry, the burden is on the writer/speaker to be immediately understandable. If s/he is not, they don’t have anything to say yet.
So, send Jordan a copy of Strunk & White, have him study some good prose (Jane Austen is recommended), and when he can formulate and thus communicate ideas, give me a call. Until then, he’s not saying anything, and so need not be read or listened to or noticed at all.
Precisely. Even when you flat-out ask a Peterson supporter who’s whining about theis supposed context you’re not getting to explain the context you’re apparently totally missing, at best, you get a link to a video that lasts anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours. At worst, you basically get told you need to read several books and watch several of these videos to get it.
@Tony! I wonder if Peterson isn’t more a 21st Century Norman Vincent Peale combined with Ayn Rand. No, he doesn’t have Rand ideas about economics, but he seems to cater to the same “The world is suppressing your true genius!” line of thinking Rand does.
@garnetstar: No objection to your general point, but Strunk & White were a lot like Peterson. Self-absorbed privileged hacks who wrapped their prescriptivist biases in useless platitudes (“avoid needless words”) and deepities, often contradictory ones. And since they did have some instinct for good writing (as opposed to a conscious understanding of it) they constantly flount their own stupid rules, which is liable to confuse any reader that makes the mistake of taking them seriously. Their awful book is the man reason Anglo people no longer know what “passive voice” means, for a start.
Sorry for the tangent, but as a linguist the undeserved reverence given to those idiots really gets to me.
…flout their own stupid rules, I mean. It’s “to flout”. Flaunt is a word, but the wrong one, and “flount” isn’t anything.
Well, I was thinking of Strunk & White because they are synonomous, in the US anyway, with the basic and remedial. The last time I encountered the book was in 6th grade, about eleven years old, and that’s the level of writing that Peterson needs to try to do at least as well as. (The “omit unnecessary words” prescriptive is actually one that Peterson could really stand to hear, as he seems to retain the childish idea that throwing lots of words at something conveys meaning.)
So, really that was an insult to Peterson, suggesting that his style is so bad that even a prescriptive and error-ridden guide to writing, usually of any good only to children, is what he could use.
Perhaps you just haven’t listed to enough of his lectures, like this autonomous autodidact…
https://twitter.com/BeatstickMagic/status/1015433343792369665
HUNDREDS of hours.
@garnetstar: Thing is, children especially shouldn’t be subjected to Strunk & White. Doing this has created entire generations of insecure English-writers who are afraid to trust their linguistic intuitions and instead rely on half-remembered, poorly understood, ahistorical prescriptive rules. Split infinitives and “stranded” prepositions, for example, go back to the West Germanic period — they’ve been part of English for as long as there has been an English. And yet some people twist their sentences into unparseable, needlessly ambiguous knots trying to avoid them, because they’ve mistaken some dead old white guys’ peeves for prescriptive rules.
“Avoid needless words” is Strunk & White’s “clean up your room” — basic advice you could get literally anywhere else but which, since it is at least true, serves to legitimise the nonsense surrounding it. Except it’s even worse than “clean up your room”, because the entire trick is knowing which words are “needless”. And if inexperienced writers knew that, they wouldn’t need the platitude.
@timgueguen:
he doesn’t?
I’m not asserting he does, just would not be at all surprised if he does, so I’d wanna see more evidence before making a conclusion one way or another. Just because he doesn’t prioritize Randisms in his youtube lectures is no proof he doesn’t embrace her crap. I don’t think I’ve ever ranted about euchre on the internet, but I do enjoy a good game.
So Crip Dyke, I see you take euchreist.
Only in 2s & 3s.
Rob Grigjanis@3–
This is the exact reason I stopped arguing with creationists. After a while I realised that it made no difference. No matter how stupid an argument they presented was, you’d shoot it down and so they’d just move to the next stupid argument, and by the time you’ve done that cycle nine or ten times and they’re still insisting on the evidentiary and logical superiority of their position, you just know that they never had any intention of evaluating evidence. (I do make exceptions for people who were raised creationist and are starting to test their beliefs.)
The kicker for me was when I got so sick of making the same arguments over and over that I would simply refer people to the appropriate page on the Talk Origins Archive — a superb resource where almost every creationist argument ever proposed has been examined and debunked with links to evidence (although it might be getting a bit old now; I haven’t visited in years). And without exception, the creationists would refuse to visit the site but would keep yammering their same old misrepresentations. Which meant they were never interested in examining ideas, they just wanted to have an online argument to prop up their delusional self-image as culture warriors for Jesus.
And, yes, I do think there is a lot of overlap in the mental gymnastics of creationists and Peterson fans. Which is why I am so frustrated that Peterson got such a foothold in the skeptic community. Really, if you can reject Bigfoot but evangelise Peterson, it’s a pretty damning indictment of your skeptical rigour.
Sure you can, but at best you’ll be one of the Token Good’uns, not the subject of an orgiastic cult of personality, like Peterson and his self-styled “buckos.” Chopra and Paglia earn some patronage and headpats and get trotted out whenever a person of color or woman needs to disprove racism or sexism. It’s a great living, but let’s not pretend it earns you top dollar or helps you achieve some kind of parity.
Sounds like paradise, really. Whatever austerity and oligarchy has done to young white men is a comparative luxury to what it’s done to people who actually face systemic injustice and institutionalized lack of opportunity. More “economic anxiety” of the exclusively white, male, and able-bodied sort. No, thanks. The last thing we need is to validate these persecution myths by paying special attention only to the trials and tribulations of members of the top of hierarchy. Working-class people, in the US, anyway, are not, by and large, right-wingers who fall for this sort of self-pitying piffle that Peterson and other MRAs and white supremacists traffic in, elegies to “hillbilly'” cos-players be damned.
Chrislawson at 16:
I think, in large part, many of the skeptics who have jumped into the Peterson camp were of the type who seemed skeptical because they could partially paraphrase the previous debunkings of Bigfoot and crop circles, but never really put much information into learning the methods that went into the debunking or how to apply them to other claims and ideas.
In other words, they called themselves skeptics because they overlooked the fact skepticism is a tool, not an identity. Of course, a good many of them came along in the midst of a growing lobby; the motive of which often came across more as cultivating that identity instead of sharing a tool and encouraging the use thereof.
Laurie Penny is a national treasure. Her review of Ivanka Trump’s book is one of the most savagely erudite pieces of writing I’ve ever seen.
https://thebaffler.com/war-of-nerves/ivanka-stepfordian-night-ghast-of-neo-capitalist-auto-taylorism
Sorry, can’t help myself. Penny opens with:
When it comes to debating or arguing on line I always evaluate the audience. Are they putting stuff in front of an audience that needs to see rebuttals? I sometimes think its not worth it but then occasionally get successes swaying an audience member and renew my hope.
Most such proselytizers block negative responses on their sites of course so then I rail against them from afar.
Wot? No lobsters?
I edit video when I can and this job has had me work on people’s abstract expressionistic art films from time to time. Early on I noticed something while doing this; after the amount of hours and the minutiae of the process a certain, dare I say, transcendent effect starts to take hold. It’s more pronounced with abstract works because they don’t make obvious narrative meanings a lot of the time. It’s all symbolism and suggestion. Even the writer/directors often have trouble communicating the desired effect in words. As such I’m spending long hours in this process with someone else’s ideas, going back and forth over and over, making the most of every detail and movement that you can, (or making what you have work with the desired meaning). And after a while I find I “get” it, on some deep level. It’s like I’m inside it, running with it.
The first time I had this experience it really made me question any other occasion I thought I “got ” something. Because in this instance it’s actually professionally hazardous. You need to be more objective. You need to concentrate on what the audience is going to get that first time and if you’re too close you’re going to screw that up.
My suspicion now though is that this can happen with almost anything; a topic, art, the writings of a particular person. You look at anything long enough and you too might “get” it on some quasi-spiritual level, if there’s enough material or motivation. Religion especially seems to insist on and even depend on this kind of study, if you can call it that. If you’re not feeling it, go back and keep reading, turn it every which way in your head, repeat it over and over and over until you do “get” it. And whenever you see some devotion like this you see this kind of call to “study” every word, of Peterson, or the five hour videos about aliens or any other conspiracy theories, I tend to think the same sort of thing is at work. (this might be a known psychological effect, I don’t know)
Badland @20: I see your link and raise you Fifty Shades of Socialist Feminism:
Cat Mara
Oh my ♥
I have come to the conclusion that on average, women have changed a lot during the last 50 years and men have only changed a little. That leads to a complete clash in what they want from life and from the first time in history women are able to choose between more options than wife, taking care of the husband and children, spinster sister, taking care of relatives, and nun, taking care of probably everybody. Women look at what men (do I have to say “not all men”?) have to offer and decide that they’re not that good at sex anyway.
I was listening to Peterson on a podcast the other day and he said something that made me think, for no apparent reason, that PZ and the people here must just hate him.
I didn’t have to go very far back to find this example. Glad to see y’all haven’t changed much in the years since I’ve been gone.
I used to come here frequently early in my intellectual/skeptical development, until I realized that this isn’t a place for people looking for intellectual development.
I knew PZ would hate Peterson but I wasn’t sure what the reason would be. Peterson’s political views are certainly more than enough, as are his views on gender differences (which, from my understanding, are in line with consensus science) but I didn’t think PZ would go the Deepak Chopra route.
Quick question PZ: how many citations do your papers have? At the Aspen Ideas Festival recently, Peterson said his have over 10,000. Just wondering if you’re in the ballpark. I mean, I know the hiring standards at Harvard aren’t what they used to be, but I though they were at least a little bit higher than the U of M Morris.
Perhaps both institutions have made hires they regret.
One point about your criticism – I rarely hear Peterson talk about race. He doesn’t address “white men” in his lectures and speaks about as broadly as a person can speak. Yet his detractors seem to want to paint his audience white. It’s interesting, and seems to reflect more on their world-view than his. More interesting is this question: if he were only talking to/about white men, so what? He’s trying to help them make their lives better and be less hateful/racist/sexist/etc. Why on earth would you want him to stop from doing that?
RE: no debate. How many non-debatable things are we up to now, PZ? I lost count years ago. The number of topics you won’t debate must be up in the hundreds by now. Any longer and someone might think you’re arbitrarily declaring these things off limits for debate because you don’t want your ideas challenged in a forum you don’t control. But that can’t be true.
Also, glad to see the comments haven’t really changed much either. There’s an economic inequality detour and a superfluous Ayn Rand reference. All we’re missing is Nerd jumping in with something nonsensical.
I miss those days. Except, really, I don’t.
@firsttimelongtime:
Read for content: PZ doesn’t like the format of debates. He’s opposed to debates because of how debates are conducted, the topic of the debate is only peripherally important, if at all. He’s said many times that there’s no truth seeking at debates: people show up for entertainment, not to consider evidence and make new decisions about which beliefs might be justified by that evidence.
This isn’t about not wanting ideas challenged and it isn’t about controlling the forum. PZ publishes research all the time that can be questioned and challenged and PZ doesn’t control the biology journals. For PZ it’s about confronting actual challenges to ideas: that’s exciting for PZ and for others here. But 1) things like creationism aren’t challenges in any format, and 2) even things that theoretically could be challenges can’t be formatted so as to test an idea in the context of a debate before an audience.
You’re getting everything exactly backwards on this.
And neither is a 1 to 2 hour audience-attended debate, at least not in most circumstances.
Finally, Peterson is so positively clueless about his own knowledge and limits that regardless of topic and regardless how well or poorly you format a particular debate, debating Peterson before an audience is absolutely useless. This is a man who claimed that humans are descended from lobsters. In a two hour debate with this rambling ninny hammer you’d need to spend so much time putting out these stupid fires he doesn’t even realize he’s lit with his careless speech that you wouldn’t have anything like the time required to put forth and defend your own thesis.
Peterson is among the worst debate partners I could imagine.
Actually let me acknowledge a potential error: some sources use “descended” in quotes and attribute that to Peterson. Others quote him saying the lineages diverged 350mya, which is also ludicrously wrong.
These aren’t actually automatically contradictory claims, even though both are horribly, horribly wrong. For instance, we are descended from a lobe-finned fish AND our lineage diverged from the lobe-finned fishes a bit over 350mya. If lobsters as a clade existed 350mya, then some non-lobster group might be descended from “lobsters” (just not the ones alive today) and have diverged in ancestry from today’s lobsters 350mya. That’s internally consistent. It’s just wrong as fuck.
So I thought I’d acknowledge that I don’t know which sources are right since I don’t have access to the original, but also argue that it doesn’t matter: Peterson is still speaking carelessly and out of his realm of expertise such that he makes mistakes so clearly, patently awful that even a non-biologist like me can spot them.
The following statement is true.
Peterson is descended from lobsters.
The previous statement is false.
firsttimelongtime
As someone who has no idea about you apart from what you write, your post smacks of confirmation bias. So much I could say about your post, but I’ll stick to – people who cite someone elses work may not agree with them, may indeed be citing them to refute them, but that Peterson feels the need to announce in a talk how many cites he has had suggests a need to assert his own importance.
Crip – glad to see you’re still around, playing the role of loyal foot soldier.
“PZ doesn’t like the format of debates. He’s opposed to debates because of how debates are conducted, the topic of the debate is only peripherally important.”
Interesting explanation – except it’s not what PZ said. He said, “all [a debate] does is reinforce their sense of entitlement and their belief that they should be taken seriously.”
PZ is opposed to debates because it gives the other side air time, and that’s the last thing on Earth he wants to give his political/intellectual opponents. Besides, it’s much easier to sit back and pour your thoughts out to a blog where the vast majority of people agree with every word you say, and if anyone presents a serious challenge to your ideas you can just ban them. It’s hard to be intellectually humble, and think that perhaps there are people in the world, people you may disagree with politically, from whom you can learn a thing or two. Besides, for PZ to engage in a debate with Peterson he’d have to become familiar with his actual arguments. And it’s much easier to snipe at Laurie Penny’s characterization of his arguments instead.
“Finally, Peterson is so positively clueless about his own knowledge and limits.”
This may be part of the reason why you or PZ feel like you can’t talk to Peterson fans. The person you are describing here bears no resemblance to the Jordan Peterson I’ve been listening to. I’ve barely scratched the surface of his podcasts, and I’ve heard him say “I don’t know” or “I don’t know how to think about X” more than a few times. One of his rules in his latest book is: listen like you have something to learn from the person you’re talking to. That’s about as humble as it gets, and something I can’t imagine PZ saying in a million years. If there’s one person who is certain of just about everything he writes, and is loathe to admit or even address errors, it’s the proprietor of this blog.
@jazzlet,
He was asked a question, if I’m not mistaken, but he could have brought the number up on his own. Either way, 10,000 citations is, I think, quite a lot for an academic. I’m simply wondering if PZ was in the same ballpark.
@firsttimelongtime:
You need to read others analysis of Peterson. Try this to start.
Peterson has a habit of doing this. He’s been called as an expert in multiple trials. While I don’t know what percentage of cases his expert opinion was questioned by the court for failing to live up to basic standards of scientific rigor, I do know that he was rejected as an expert witness at more than one trial.
Having no sense of where one’s limits actually are doesn’t mean you must think your abilities are unlimited. It just means that your actual limits don’t resemble what you think are your limits. Peterson is a perfect exemplar of that.
Again, this is the idiot who claimed that the evolutionary relationship between lobsters and humans – which, again, dates to the protostome/deuterostome split and far predates the Cambrian – not only was as recent as 350mya, but also (at least partly) explained the emergence of hierarchies in human societies.
It doesn’t matter how many times you say you don’t know if you’re still confidently spouting bullshit like “lobsters explain human hierarchies” or “job application quizzes can determine which confessions are legitimate without ever collecting data on quiz takers who confess to crimes during police interrogations”.
The man is arrogantly ignorant. That he sometimes says “I don’t know” doesn’t change the fact that his glaring errors prove this beyond any reasonable doubt.
Here’s another good bit about Peterson’s courtroom idiocy.
Darn it. Link failed:
Try this.
In my experience, the “I don’t know” is rather quickly followed by something resembling “I just know that…”, and then the listener completes the circuit of unassociated dots in their own head for a lightbulb moment, but everything is utterly deniable. It’s less “I don’t know” than “I will not publicly express an opinion” (though for the most part, I’ve noticed that he actually doesn’t know… but has a very confident opinion presented in short, declarative sentences that sound like facts and real knowledge.
Dammit. Not “I will not publicly express an opinion”, but “I will now publicly express an [authoritative] opinion”. He really likes that one, the argument from authority. Can’t argue with 10 000 citations, right?
PZ had a great link to a biologist’s refutations of Peterson a while ago, can’t find it now, oh well.
Hey, we have a lobster! What took you so long, firsttimelongtime?
Would you care to comment on Peterson’s mindbendingly fuckwitted belief that an ancient Chinese depiction of two snake-like beings twining round each other is “a representation of DNA”? Or the rationality of anyone who takes Peterson seriously once they know about that?
Incidentally, there is no scientific consensus on gender differences, although sqwallers like Peterson like to pretend there is. I suggest you read Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender, if you are genuinely interested in an alternative view.
The long wait for a lobster to turn up suggests to me that we’re past peak Jordan Peterson. I don’t know if he’s still raking in such huge amounts from gullible crustaceans, but they certainly seem less fired up to come and defend their guru when he’s slighted. Serotonin supplies depleted, perhaps?
firsttimelongtime
Could you make an actual argument we could discuss?
Because so far it’s nothing but vague assertions that Peterson is ok and PZ is wrong, but that#s all just so vague and meta that it’s pretty hard to know what you actually want apart from sneering at the locals, apparently.
So, tell us: which sensible argument that goes beyond granny’s advice to clean your room, sit straight and eat you veggies has Peterson made, what supports it and why do you personally think that it’s true?
KG
The traps must be malfunctioning again, I think they need to be taken in for maintenance.
Also, CD, from your link:
Sounds about right. :D
Giliell
Don’t be silly, you just have to read all his books and then you’ll know exactly what firsttimelongtime is trying to say.
rq
The videos don’t forget the videos, but DO forget that Peterson clearly never said that ancient Chinese people knew about DNA, even if there#s a video where you can clearly hear him say that.
Wait . . . are you people trying to claim that a bunch of judges know more about analyzing witnesses than the stupendously amazing and also exceedingly humble Jordan Peterson????
This, of course, explains his calm and measured response of expressing a desire to slap someone who wrote a critical review.
@Giliell:
Some beautiful quotes in your video where he’s asked about the DNA/ancient symbolism crap.
When asked if he really believes that the Chinese knew the structure of DNA and represented it in art:
“I wouldn’t say I believe that. I have my suspicions.”
Rambling about how knowledge of DNA’s structure is widespread cross-culturally and has been for thousands of years:
“I think people have had intimations of DNA as the cosmic serpent for [pause] ever.”
And, finally, my personal fave on this video: Explaining how he knows what he knows about ancient persons’ “intimations” that DNA’s structure is helical:
“I’m guessing in a dream-like way”
So, to sum up: take him seriously, but don’t hold him accountable for being wrong as fuck or for using an epistemological process that’s guaranteed to produce massive, unnecessary streams of false positives that wouldn’t be produced when using better epistemology.
And, of course, what really makes all this so funny and beautiful and contemptible at the same time is the fact that he really did assert this shit with certainty originally. “I’m guessing in a dream like way” is what he says when someone who actually knows something asks him a challenging question. But his original statements are much less qualified, much more certain. For instance, in one lecture he projects a picture of Chinese art depicting entwined serpents and says the following:
So, yeah. He’s in a pickle, because people who go to primary sources will assume that either he “really believes that” and lied when he said that he didn’t believe it and only had “suspicions”, or he lied when he says that he “really believes that”. The two stories are in direct conflict. You can’t have it both ways.
There is another alternative, however. Since he’s not saying both at the same time he could really, honestly have changed his mind from “really believing that” to, well, not. But that actually supports my primary thesis (which is not incompatible with Peterson sometimes lying to his audiences) that he’s a careless thinking and a careless speaker and so he says stupid shit all the fucking time. He’s so careless that non-psychologist lawyers have no trouble pointing out that he’s bullshitting the courts and, as rq reminded me, had to order him not to talk about certain things that were irrelevant to the case and even to add a suggestion that his testimony be partially scripted to prevent him launching into unrelated bullshit when he was trying to answer specific questions that were directly related to the case (because, apparently, he couldn’t be relied on to identify what was relevant and what wasn’t).
Literally we’ve had a court consider the question of whether or not Peterson knows the limits of his knowledge and can manage to speak with precision and the answer the courts have given us, after considering the question with far more care than we’ve given it here, is that Jordan Peterson is simply so untrustworthy that even when he’s speaking about a topic where he’s generally expert, someone has to babysit him so he doesn’t say stupid shit.
You really want that person as a debating partner? Good grief.
Or worse, being stuck in a car with him and him giving you directions.
Ejector seat. Preferably for him, but it would also work if you ejected.
@Giliell:
Oh, FSM. It’s far too easy to picture:
I wondered when this would happen – the patented Pharyngula pile-on.
This lobster fascination you all have is interesting. I just looked up the relevant pages in Peterson’s book and he never claims humans descended from lobsters, and the idea that lobster brains have anything to tell us about human brains is apparently something debated in the psychological literature according to the footnotes he uses. I’ll take what you say about Peterson’s assertion at face value. But my question then becomes, so what? He’s wrong about a claim he made about lobsters. It doesn’t invalidate his argument about hierarchies, which is really the argument you want to have, I suspect.
“Can’t argue with 10 000 citations, right?”
I’m not arguing with it. I’m simply wondering if 10,000 is a lot and how PZ, being a real, serious scientist, stacks up. He’s called Peterson a charlatan and compared him with creationists and unserious thinkers like Chopra. He can’t be both, right? He can’t be a serious academic who used to teach at Harvard and an unserious charlatan with views as silly as creationists.
“Could you make an actual argument we could discuss? Because so far it’s nothing but vague assertions that Peterson is ok and PZ is wrong, but that’s all just so vague and meta that it’s pretty hard to know what you actually want apart from sneering at the locals, apparently.”
PZ’s argument is that none of us should take Peterson seriously. Like a creationist, Peterson should be de-platformed and cast out into the ether. Except there’s a problem with that. Peterson is by most accounts a serious academic with some interesting points to make that were not obvious to me the first time I heard them. He’s making what I characterize as the ultimate atheist argument. You all should be thrilled with Peterson’s analysis of the Bible stories because he’s making the argument that god, as an all-knowing, all-seeing creator, doesn’t exist but is a creation of humans trying to work out the meaning of life.
My argument – and my reason for leaving this site – is that politics consume PZ and most of the people to the point where it affects their ability to see reason and evidence. PZ’s world in this regard is black and white. Peterson says things that the right wing can glom on to. His politics are not pure progressive/socialist. Therefore, he must be an enemy. PZ’s blinders won’t even let him see the powerful atheist argument, or any argument really, that Peterson makes.
My last point about Peterson. Early on in almost every podcast of his I’ve heard, he says that he uses the biblical lectures to try to work out his own thinking about things. He deliberately goes off into areas where his knowledge is uncertain and he might be wrong. So when he says something like “I wouldn’t say I believe that. I have my suspicions.” I take him at his word. This to me is another illustration of his intellectual humility, not as Crip so eloquently put it: “a careless thinking and a careless speaker and so he says stupid shit all the fucking time.”
But then again, the first rule of debate should be to put your opponent’s arguments in the best possible light before refuting them, something that absolutely never happens here. So you can be forgiven for assuming the worst of Peterson since PZ doesn’t give a shit about addressing any of his ideological opponents’ actual arguments, much less putting them in the best possible light.
The issue here is that n number of lectures before saying that, he has already said, out lout and in public, “that’s what I believe” about the very same topic – in this instance, the Chinese art snakes and DNA.
It’s not just lobsters he’s wrong about.
Anyway. If you like Peterson, you might like von Daniken, too. He also made some really deep associations I’d never heard before and were interesting to contemplate.
Why not? A lot of serious academics have shown a very deep and serious interest in rather… non-academic topics well into their serious, academic careers. People aren’t so one-dimensional that they are serious and right all the time.
And since I seem to be working through that comment backwards:
Ah. Well, hit the road, JAQ, ’cause we’re taking this international circus on the road and Peterson is our spiritual guide. Kind of like Virgil, but less concise, less helpful, and quite a bit creepier. We’re going to use his citations as prayer tokens on the highway to enlightenment and good music, so the more the merrier. Perhaps he sings better than he lectures.
From across the room, I see Peterson’s eyes light up with the tell-tale post-dream light of another unbelievable idea floating out of the confusion of his collective subconscious. As he inhales and opens his mouth to speak, I’m already half-way across the room, eyes straining for the brass glint… ah, there it is! I make a bee-line for the instrument, but I realize I will not make it in time. “Quick! Someone give him a saxophone, he’s about to lecture!!!”
Thankfully, a tenor sax flies out of the semi-darkness of the room to land perfectly into Peterson’s outstretched hands, the mouth-piece aligns just as he starts to speak, and the entire room is silenced by the saddest, most melodramatic tones ever to be coaxed from a woodwind instrument.
I put down the sad trombone that is Peterson’s usual saviour, close my eyes, and take a quiet moment of gratitude to savour the melancholy of the lone white prophet. Once again, intellectual chaos averted.
No, I want to argue that he’s rhetorically reckless, and as such an untrustworthy source of information. I do that in part because everyone should know he’s a terrible source of information – in the same manner and for the same reason I might attack Deepak Chopra’s or Gwynyth Paltrow’s credibility – and in part because I’m rebutting your claim that the only reason one wouldn’t want to debate Peterson is because one is close-minded and doesn’t want to hear certain views expressed.
If someone wants to argue about hierarchies in human societies and the extent to which they’re inevitable due to biological constraints on how our brains process information, I’ll happily have that debate with anyone who has a hope of actually informing me. But Peterson is so unreliable I wouldn’t be able to take his word for anything. He might be right about any number of things, but his track record is poor enough that I couldn’t trust him. Since I would have to go to a different source to gain confirmation, why wouldn’t I just start with that other source and skip the wasted time with Peterson altogether?
you missed entirely that he ORIGINALLY claimed to know this with certainty, then back off to the position “I wouldn’t say I believe that. I have my suspicions.”
So then why are you twisting what I said? Why don’t you acknowledge that a definitive statement in one video followed by a contradictory statement in another video when challenged doesn’t show intellectual honesty? I didn’t say that one statement showed reckless thinking and reckless speaking. I said that the fact he was able to BOTH assert as fact and assert that he was “guessing in a dreamlike way” on the same topic shows that he’s reckless in thinking and speaking.
How can he possibly have been certain earlier but merely be guessing later? How is that possible, firsttimelongtime?
How it’s possible is intellectual confidence, a lack of skepticism, a lack of critical thinking, a lack of self awareness, and a recklessness in thought and public speech.
But of course you would NEVER put my argument in the best possible light before you address it, because, well, I don’t know. Is being a hypocrite better than being intellectually incompetent? Is it possible you’re a malicious liar? Are you just having a bad day with reading comprehension? Can’t find your glasses & decided to comment without even being able to read my entire comment? I guess I can’t possibly know. Why don’t you pick, since I want to paint you in the best possible light.
The best possible light for painting, in my opinion, is slanting sunlight on the green lawn of my country estate. You can borrow it if you like, CD.
Why not indeed. This is a classic case of the argument from authority. It also shows firsttimelongtime’s ignorance that he cites Harvard – years in Peterson’s past – when he could have cited the equally prestigious U of T where Peterson currently holds a tenured faculty position.
But of course the response to either assertion – that having once worked at Harvard or currently teaching at U of T means all one’s later ideas are worthy of serious scrutiny – is the same. Both the tenure decision and the Harvard employment decision are years in the past and in another role. Just as judges who appear to reliably support certain jurisprudence when seated on lower courts can vote very differently when appointed to a supreme court, the necessary deference to a higher authority that ends with a higher appointment (either to a supreme court or to a tenured faculty position) can be a strong influence on many people. This is as it should be with lower courts, and it should likely also be true, though to a lesser extent, when one is an academic expected to perform original thought but also still a student or underling whose work reflects well or poorly on the teacher.
With academics not prone to skepticism (a group to which Peterson appears to belong), being forced to test your ideas against the requirements laid down by an instructor attempting to instill rigorous critical thinking can be very good. But if the academic doesn’t learn how to apply that skepticism when it is not imposed by others, the liberation of tenure will result in a terrible decline in the quality of work. Usually this is foreseeable with enough examination, but not all institutions do allow for such detailed examination in their hiring process. And though UofT does allow for such examination, that doesn’t mean it’s perfect in performing that examination.
And, wouldn’t you know it, the faculty member who was almost solely responsible for Peterson gaining tenure now says he regrets his advocacy of Peterson.
Read it and weep.
@rq:
Sounds beautiful.
“People aren’t so one-dimensional that they are serious and right all the time.”
Ah, but they are so one-dimensional here. On this blog, Peterson is unserious and wrong, all the time. He’s like a creationist, don’t cha know, even though he’s making the ultimate atheist we can’t let facts get in the way of a good narrative.
Crip – I conceded your argument in my last comment. I’ll stipulate that he’s wrong about whatever he said about lobsters I can’t find. So what? You claim this error, along with a DNA claim and something else involving a criminal case, means that everything else (!) he says is completely unreliable. Does that include the atheist argument he’s making? Does that mean he’s wrong about the nature of archetypal stories? Or does he actually have a couple serious arguments we should be wrestling with? I mean, you’re like a child playing I’m rubber and you’re glue. PZ has said some seriously stupid and wrong shit over the years, but you still take him seriously. Why do you forgive PZ and loathe Peterson? (I have my suspicions).
Crip – when you say shit like this, “With academics not prone to skepticism (a group to which Peterson appears to belong)” you lose everyone (including me) who has actually listened to a Peterson lecture or podcast with an open mind. You’re simply not describing the person I’ve been listening to, and you’re not reading or accepting my characterization of him as a humble thinker. Case in point, at the Aspen Ideas Festival he was asked about things he’s been wrong about in the past, and he named a few things right off the bat that he’s changed his mind about based on new evidence.
Think about that! When was the last time PZ changed his mind about, well, anything (politically at least) based on new evidence. I might have missed something in the years I was gone but I can’t imagine the PZ I remember ever changing his mind.
firsttimelongtime
So, let us have that argument. Make your case. What is Peterson’s argument about hierarchies, what is the evidence in his favour?
CD
I was more thinking about it along these lines:
P: Turn left.
Me: Are you sure?
P: I absolutely am! I am the navigator here!
Me: hmmm, but we want to go to Toronto. This sign says “Miami”.
P: Yes of course it says “Miami”, do you not understand?
Me: OK, if you’re sure.
Some hours later…
Me: We’re in Miami now, I think we’re wrong.
P: Of course we’re wrong! You didn’t listen to my 7 hours lecture!
Me: Well, you told me to turn left, I even asked you!
P: I never said “turn left”! I said it might be interesting to see what would happen if we turned left!
Me: But…, nevermind. How are we going to get to Toronto now?
P: This is why men and women cannot work together. You always blame us for all our problems and then you ask us to fix them for you and we cannot even slap you!
In full disclosure, I was once on a trip with somebody who repeatedly assured me we were right, he’d travelled the same journey the week before with someone else and he remembered the different places.
When I could finally stop and take the map I saw that we were wrong. When I told him so he said “Well, last week we were wrong as well…”
Yes, he survived and I didn’t abandon him on the Autobahn like a puppy after Christmas.
Have you read the piece written by the UofT professor who advocated Peterson be hired and receive tenure?
Did you read any of the evidence and analysis in the court decisions on his expert testimony where judges had to impose limits on him because he couldn’t be trusted to impose limits on himself at the boundaries of where he had actual data to support his conclusions – or even at the limits of what was actually relevant to the trial and responsive to the questions asked?
They literally had court hearings about whether or not Peterson is reliable, and on more than one occasion the court found him unreliable.
Of course you listen to someone with an open mind the first time you listen to them. But when the evidence comes back from experts in his specific field (e.g. Bernard Schiff), when the evidence comes back from formal hearings on his reliability, don’t you have to actually consider that evidence and adjust how open you are to believing him at his word?
My fields of academic expertise are Canadian law and feminist ethics. Peterson provided embarrassingly bad and inaccurate testimony to Parliament in Ottawa. He was testifying to our version of the US congress and he couldn’t bother to get his testimony correct. I was able to identify quite a number of clear and specific errors in that testimony through my own expertise. You don’t have that expertise, but you don’t have to rely on me. You can read this rebuttal or watch this other rebuttal delivered by one member of a panel that also contains Peterson.*1
There is a mountain of evidence that Peterson is unreliable.
Does that mean his every statement is wrong? No, of course not. However it does mean that if I’m seeking out informed opinion to read, I’ll skip Peterson and move on to other people who address the same topics (if I’m interested in that topic) simply because it’s not productive to spend my limited time studying the words of a person who has provided a great deal of evidence of unreliability when there are other people opining on the topic who haven’t provided such evidence of unreliability.
*1: Peterson begins discussing his opinion of the law’s effect around 5 minutes in. The lawyer who rebuts Peterson’s erroneous statements begins speaking at about 21 minutes in. It’s also interesting to note that Peterson, in that first segment, is asked about Bill C-16 (a federal bill that was eventually passed into federal law), but if you have a legal education you can instantly recognize that a great deal of what he’s talking about relates only to the OHRC, an Ontario specific provincial law that had not been amended in several years and was in no way related to the separate federal legislation. Even the interviewer seems to muddle the issue by framing the debate at the beginning of the video as related to C-16 but then spending time asking questions about the OHRC. Complaining that the Parliament can’t pass a federal law because you don’t like a completely separate provincial law that has completely separate provisions and effects is to be arrogantly, ignorantly uninformed.
Peterson yammers on just after 24:50 that the new law may make pronoun misuse equivalent to Holocaust denial (which itself is not illegal, though it can be part of a larger context that allows a court to conclude that S318 and/ or S319 have been violated). But this is demonstrably wrong as well. You really need to listen to the lawyer. An activist says around 29:30 that pronoun misuse is tantamount to abuse, tantamount to violence, tantamount to hate speech and Peterson is obviously satisfied and feels his position is well justified. But the activist isn’t saying that the law will consider pronoun misuse that way. The activist has different definitions than are contained in statute and jurisprudence and those definitions are produced for entirely different purposes to aid in entirely different efforts.
Peterson seems completely oblivious to the fact that activist rhetoric is not the same as controlling statutory language.
He is, in short, a nut job.
Separately:
I’ve had issues with PZ and I’ve called him out clearly at times. Why do I loathe Peterson? Well, I don’t loathe Peterson, I don’t care enough about him or know him as a person well enough to loathe Peterson.
But my training and expertise allowed me to assess that Peterson was saying about Bill C-16 at the time he originally said it. It was quite clear that what he was saying was bullshit. He was called out on it by people far more expert in Canadian law than I, and he refused to back down. He went before Parliament and testified erroneously, to the point that a Senator actively corrected him on some pieces at the time.
Some of the people who have visited Pharyngula to defend Peterson have earned my short-lived contempt for arguing so poorly as to raise questions of honesty. Others have defended peterson without earning my contempt, though I still thought they made some errors. At least one person defending Peterson provided me with information that proved me wrong. I had adopted the literal interpretation of something Peterson said as accurate, but it turns out that my interpretation was over broad because Peterson was using (as he clarified later in a separate message) technical terminology that had a different meaning from the same words used outside of the specific scientific subfield which he was referencing. I admitted error.
But nowhere in all this has anyone provided any justification for why a smart person would represent themselves as knowledgeable about a particular bill to the point that they were testifying before Parliament, and yet had no expertise in the field and held opinions in direct contradiction to what all the relevant experts in the field actually said. He was wildly overconfident about the state of his knowledge and wildly overconfident about the value of his observations. If he has since issued a thorough mea culpa for that debacle, I’ve not heard it.
In contrast, PZ was hounded relentlessly for hundreds of comments in this thread.
He doubled down with this post.
And yet he changed his mind.
Provide actual evidence that he’s issued a major mea culpa on his bill C-16 activism and I’ll consider revising my position on him. Perhaps he’s learned something that I don’t know about. Absent that, there’s a ton of reasons why I should consider him to have a deeply flawed epistemology and a reckless overconfidence when venturing into fields beyond psychology (and, if you believe his old friend and fellow psych professor who helped him gain tenure, increasingly in certain areas of psychology as well). I’m not changing my mind based on your personal sense of Peterson’s personality or humility. You’ll have to do a lot better because you’re competing against real and voluminous evidence from both primary sources and quite reliable secondary sources.
As for why I still take PZ seriously: pick one statement of PZ’s that you believe is wrong on a topic where PZ has never changed his mind. Make an argument that it’s wrong, including actual evidence for that argument. Make sure you pick a good one, not something trivial like typing 17 when the date he should have referenced was the 19th of some month. If you convince me on that, I’ll be more sympathetic to listening to you on the next example. Provide several good, solid examples that are well evidenced and I’ll stop taking PZ seriously on some subset of issues. However, I still might choose to take him seriously on, say, developmental biology if all your examples of his errors are on political topics or history or some other clearly identifiable field.
That’s how it works. I’m perfectly willing to take Peterson seriously on the uses of personality testing in the job application process. Courts have certified him as an expert witness on that topic and I believe the courts assessment on that just as I do that he was not a competent expert witness on the reliability of suspect’s confessions to police.
But the shit that makes him popular and the shit that’s on his youtube videos and the shit that everyone seems to want to discuss isn’t the uses of personality testing in the job application process. And once you get outside of that specifically Peterson gets decidedly less reliable. Once you get outside psychology, I see no reason to treat him as anything other than entirely unreliable.
With PZ, I’ve found him to be reliable on many issues over a fairly broad swath of time. Really, it’s quite easy to make the distinction the two professors. But if you find a court case where PZ was prohibited from giving expert testimony because he was asserting expertise in areas he hasn’t studied and on phenomena for which he has no data, you should definitely let me know.
Whenever I think of Jordan Peterson, I’m reminded of what Sam Harris said about Mormonism and how it’s more ridiculous than your standard Christianity since it’s basically Christianity plus a bunch of even more ridiculous stuff.
Jordan Peterson is to Sam Harris as Mormonism is to Christianity.
“As for why I still take PZ seriously: pick one statement of PZ’s that you believe is wrong on a topic where PZ has never changed his mind. Make an argument that it’s wrong, including actual evidence for that argument. ”
So here’s the funny thing. Anticipating you asking me for this evidence, the first thing I thought of was PZ’s post here: (https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/09/29/the-theme-for-the-day-seems-to-be/) in which he lies about Peterson’s position on Bill C-16. It’s interesting because I’ve heard Peterson talk about this particular bill several times now and and PZ didn’t use or address the two words Peterson consistently uses (to include within the last couple weeks in Colorado) “compelled speech.” And PZ lied about Peterson’s position, saying, “Demanding that individuals conform to one of only two gender roles is the totalitarian/authoritarian position.”
This is where I find PZ to be entirely unreliable – where he is characterizing the arguments of people he considers to be ideological enemies. He is pathological in that he cannot help but frame their arguments in a way that makes them sound like idiots or horrible people, but once you scratch beneath the surface just a little bit you’ll find they almost always have legitimate arguments PZ isn’t addressing, and the arguments to which PZ ascribes them are false. I know all of this because I’ve been through it, many times. PZ would write something about a politician or thinker that, once I looked at independent sources, turned out to be 180 degrees different from reality.
Now, if you were to ask me about US Constitutional law, I would be on more stable footing. As it stands, I’m unfamiliar with the Canadian legal system so I am at a disadvantage. Having said that, you don’t sound like an unbiased observer in the whole Bill C-16 fracas, and neither does Brenda Cossman, who wrote the article to which you linked. That doesn’t mean both of you are wrong, but it does mean that I need additional evidence before making a determination about who is right and who is wrong. Also, I find it interesting that neither Brenda nor you cite the actual words Peterson uses to this day to criticize the bill. The words “compelled speech” are nowhere to be found.
One of the cases Peterson cites in relation to his claims about C16 is the Lindsay Shepherd affair, which he considers to be the largest scandal ever to hit Canadian universities. I assume you’re familiar with the case but for those who aren’t, Lindsay Shepherd was a Teaching Assistant who played a 5-minute clip of an interview/debate with Jordan Peterson in one of her classes, and for that reason alone she was called to a disciplinary meeting with administrators from the university. She taped that meeting and some of the comments made on it are stunning for people not familiar with the authoritarian left (of course, everyone here is quite familiar with it). The intimation is that simply playing five minutes of Jordan Peterson speaking is some sort of violation which could not be tolerated and must be corrected.
Peterson’s point, as I understand it, is that legislation like C16 lead to scenes like this, where speech is, if not overtly criminalized, is hounded into submission. I’d be interested to hear your take on this affair.
firsttimelongtime:
“Also, I find it interesting that neither Brenda nor you cite the actual words Peterson uses to this day to criticize the bill. The words “compelled speech” are nowhere to be found.”
vs
“Peterson’s point, as I understand it, is that legislation like C16 lead to scenes like this [“the Lindsay Shepherd affair”], where speech is, if not overtly criminalized, is hounded into submission.”
Heh.
So, being hounded into submission for having said something is an example of compelled speech, as you understand it.
(So clever, Peterson apologists are!)
—
You might not be aware of this, but Bill C-16 came into force in June 19, 2017.
He doesn’t say much about it these days, for some reason… could it be that his fear-mongering fretting is vitiated by extant reality.
Ah, WH.
Um, that’s not self-evidently a lie about Peterson’s position.
Care to essay making a case for what specifically constitutes the purported falsehood about Peterson’s position in that quotation, rather than just asserting that it does?
The claim that PZ never changes his mind is bizarre. When I first started following his blog (around 10 years ago), he apparently saw pretty much anyone who argued strongly for atheism or against religion as on his side. He was a big supporter of “movement atheism” and the so-called “Four Horsemen” (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett). He was particularly chummy with Dawkins. notice any differences between PZ then, and PZ now?
He also, around that time (might have been a bit later) would link to videos by a British atheist polemicist by the name of Pat Condell. Condell was, in fact, a racist – but disguised his racism as opposition to Islam. British racism isn’t usually as blatantly expressed as the American variant, or a mixture of legal and cultural reasons; as a Brit, I could see quite clearly where Condell was coming from, and said so, but at that time, PZ couldn’t. At some point, however, he wised up (I think Condell was becoming more blatant – he ended up joining UKIP), and links to Condell ceased to appear.
There are still, BTW, a number of subjects on which PZ is stubbornly wrong* – but nothing one-hundredth as fuckwitted as thinking the ancient Chinese picture of twining snake-people was “a representation of DNA”. BTW, I’m amused by our visiting lobster’s blatant dishonesty in ignoring the fact that Peterson, in the video I linked to, clearly and unequivocally said that he believed this. If you need to lie in your defence of your guru, firsttimelongtime, maybe it’s time to find a new guru.
Are you fucking serious? Why should we be “thrilled” that a reactionary crank agrees with something that’s blindingly obvious to us? Especially when you see that (equally reactionary) Christians regard him at least as a fellow-traveller, see for example here, and here.
*IM
HO, of course!