It’s an honor he deserves. First he was extrapolating from lobsters to people with a lot of naive and misunderstood neurobiology and evolutionary biology, and now Jordan Peterson is misreading a paper about ants to misapply it to humans.
30% of the ants do 70% of the work. Not a consequence of the West, or capitalism, in case it needs to be said :) https://t.co/z45k6ENzYJ pic.twitter.com/pWuwF4d37d
— Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) August 19, 2018
Because “the West” and “capitalism” are social constructs that ants are not aware of. Unfortunately for Peterson, an ant expert stepped right up.
The point Jordan Peterson is trying to make is that people he doesn't like are lazy, and is misquoting a research result as some sort of proof.
The paper itself did not show that 70% of ants are lazy. They stepped up as soon as the working crew was removed. https://t.co/Dkr5eDIeYY
— Alex Wild (@Myrmecos) August 19, 2018
Maybe Peterson will announce that he’s a myrmecologist next?
Anyway, I read the paper. He doesn’t get it. The research shows that when fire ants are excavating narrow tunnels, where only a few at a time can be at the digging face, they optimize their behavior, avoiding a mad, industrious rush that would merely clog the tunnels and hinder hauling grains of dirt away. They did things like remove the 5 most active digging ants, and found that there was no reduction in the rate of digging, because others would readily step forward to fill in. It’s not at all about what fraction of the population are doing their fair share of the work; it’s about an optimal strategy for a specific task.
I guess he thought he was making a joke to reinforce the biases of his followers — but instead people who know something about ants and logic have turned him into the joke.
I’m surprised he hasn’t whipped out the “We only use 10 percent of our brain” trope yet, whether he believes it or not.
Obviously you didn’t really understand the paper in question. I mean, he is an Evolutionary Biologist after all. s/
timgueguen @1: In Peterson’s case it might be true.
“In Peterson’s case [only using 10% of his brain] might be true.”
That percentage seems really optimistic.
Look, since you disagree with him you’re clearly one of those who hasn’t taken the time to read all of Peterson’s work and watch at least 40 hours of his videos. This means you lack the full context required to understand that not at all erroneous two line tweet.
The proposition that “Capitalism is best because Nature” goes back to Social Darwinism starting about 150 years ago. Does Peterson know nothing of past discredited ideas and so is doomed to keep repeating them in apparently new clothes?
I’m not sure I even understand what idea he was trying to mock. Is he making a strawman of the claim that…30% of people do 70% of the work, and that’s only because of western capitalism? Is that a thing?
Whereas Peterson thinks, as we see from these ants, that in societies of any type not everybody should have to work all the time?
Or was his interpretation that even in ants most individuals are unable to find the employment they need to buy food and shelter?
Setting aside the naturalistic fallacy in support of his point, what was the point even supposed to be?
Holy cow, Peterson tried to use ants as evidence the “naturalness” of capitalism? Those selfless ants, who totally disregard individual benefits, to the extent of sacrificing individual lives, to achieve the optimum interest for the collective hive?
Funny how capitalism, the most “natural” economic system, only existed piecemeal until the 16th century and did not really take off until the Industrial Revolution. Funny how feudalism was also defended as the natural order before that.
nomdeplume@6–
JP is not only ignorant of the history of discredited ideas, he seems to determined to create as many new discredited ideas as possible.
I for one welcome our evo-psych overlords.
@ monad
I think the original argument/gleeful misinterpretation of the ants’ active workforce was that ants are ‘socialists’ (well, more like collectivists, but it’s the same thing, init?), and see, only a few 30% are working and the other ones are just lazing around and collecting the benefits of their sisters’ hard work.
I think I see it: without capitalism the ants naturally produce a just society where all members get a sufficient share of the colony’s resources to happily survive, regardless of how much work they do. So therefore as a human society we should emulate nature and do the same, dropping such elements of capitalism as work against this and introducing such elements of socialism as necessary to achieve this.
More seriously, monad has it right: this is more of Jordan Peterson’s classic “be obscure and let the readers take what they want from it.” And of course it’s on Twitter, a medium designed for bad arguments, which doesn’t help.
I just like to imagine the quality of students who are flocking to his courses based on his high profile over the last two years.
Needless to say, Peterson gets everything wrong.
He is not even trying.
This paper is about…fire ants.
.1. Fire ants are immigrants from South America.
.2. They have been wildly successful in the USA.
This shows that South American immigrants are superior to the native born USians.
At least, using Peterson’s pathetic nonreasoning from thin air.
Do you think he’ll ever find a vertebrate that he’d consider a good model of how humans should behave?
I disagree he seems perfectly able to turn himself into a joke all by himself he needs no help at all.
uncle frogy
Surely Prof. Peterson has staked a claim to more than one Fallacy.
So, when are we going to let Jordan “girls have cooties — I mean, females are chaos” Peterson in on the news that that vast majority of individuals in an ant colony are sterile females?
Sam Seder and the rest of the gang at The Majority Report mocking Peterson for his nonsense
timgueguen:
How do you know he hasn’t? Have you reviewed literally all of his output, to get the full context of his conmanship?
Assuming some ant individuals are really “freeloaders”, is it not a consequence of capitalism because
1) ants are socialist, or collectivist or whatever
2) ants are not remotely humanlike, so human political systems cannot be meaningfully applied to their communities
I think Peterson is conflating these, in order to insinuate both that
1) freeloading is characteristic of socialist systems everywhere
2) freeloading is a type of inequality, interchangeable with capitalist exploitation, and more broadly inequality is an unavoidable outcome in all kinds of social systems, not just capitalism
From 1), a conservative would conclude that while socialism might work “well enough” for ants, freeloading makes it sub-optimally efficient and unfair and morally untenable for humans.
From 2), a conservative would conclude that inequality is a law of nature and unavoidable and morally meaningless.
lumipuna @21:
This is accurate. Quoting the first reply to the tweet from a Peterson supporter:
Come on, don’t be unfair to the man. He just got a few percentages wrong. He meant to say that 50% of the people do 90% of the work and get 10% of the income!
Kreator @22: If Peterson supporters were so set against “political” interference in naturalistic outcomes, why then their obsession with cuckoldry? Judging by the number of occurrences throughout the animal kingdom, brood parasitism is a perfectly valid evolutionary strategy! Can’t have it both ways, guys! 😉
hums the pink panther theme
So he misreads a paper, then misapplies what he thought he read to wave generally in the direction of an argument that’s absurd on its face…
[turns to camera, smirks, makes exaggerated shrugging motion]
That’s Our Jordan!
I always love appeals to behaviour found in the animal kingdom made on the internet.
Though I still don’t know what point he was trying to make anyway.
<blockquote=>Though I still don’t know what point he was trying to make anyway.
I don’t either. It’s a cryptic comment (as many of Peterson’s tweets are). Which is what makes it amusing that so many people seem so certain Peterson has misread the paper based not on what he actually wrote but on their own interpretations of his comment.
@3 & 4
I think that excuses him too much. It isn’t that he isn’t using his brain or considering his ideas. On the contrary, I think he carefully considers his statements most of the time. It’s just that he does it in a way designed to piggyback on the beliefs and biases of easily manipulated people. If he was just an idiot that’d be one thing, but what he really is is a deliberate provocateur using right wing ideology to make money off the rubes.
Chris 61
Wrong as usually. Peterson makes a verifiable claim, which is that 30% of ants do 70% of the work. This is not the conclusion of the study and is therefore evidence that Peterson either misread (charitable interpretation) or misrepresented (probably true interpretation) the study.
He is a conperson.
A hate merchant reflecting his follower’s hate, lies, and bigotry back to them for a fair amount of money.
Peterson is just another Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, or Alex Jones.
@31
Precisely
What about the grasshoppers? Won’t anyone consider the grasshoppers???! They have a role in this too!!!!
@30 Giliell
I draw your attention to figure 2D. Approx 30% of ants DID do approx 70% of the work (as summarized in the article about the study which was referenced by Peterson).
chris61, I draw your attention to the title of the study: “Collective clog control: Optimizing traffic flow in confined biological and robophysical excavation”.
I draw your attention to the first sentence of the article cited in the tweet: “For ants and robots operating in confined spaces like tunnels, having more workers does not necessarily mean getting more work done.”
But fine. Do you dispute that, if it is true on that basis to claim that “30% of the ants do 70% of the work.”, then it is equally true on that very same basis to claim that “30% of the robots do 70% of the work.”?
@35 John Morales
The basis on which to claim 30% of the ants do 70% of the work is figure 2D. Do you dispute that’s what the data in figure 2D show?
chris61, I have no idea of what figure 2D shows, since there’s no such figure in the citation adduced by Peterson on that tweet, from which I quoted.
So, no, I have no basis for disputation (nor have I reason to disbelieve that that figure (in the paper? I have no access to it) indicates that traffic flow in confined biological and robophysical excavation becomes less optimal when higher proportions of workers crowd the work space).
But fair enough; you don’t think that what he cited was the basis for his claim.
@37 John Morales
The article cited in the tweet states that the study in question showed 30% of the ants do 70% of the work. That number comes from figure 2D of a Science paper (behind a paywall as you note). This is a ‘verifiable claim’ as Giliell wrote and as Figure 2D does indeed show that under the conditions of the experiment 30% of the ants did do 70% of the work, Giliell’s claim that this is not what the paper showed is clearly based on something other than reading the paper. How does someone conclude someone else misunderstood or misrepresented a paper that they themselves clearly didn’t read? (You needn’t answer. This is a rhetorical question.)
chris61,
It may have been intended as rhetorical, but there is at least one good answer: by comparing the claim to the paper’s abstract (which, unlike the paper itself, is not behind a subscription wall) and noting the degree of discrepancy.
Salient sentence: “Our biological and robophysical excavation experiments, supported by computational and theoretical models, reveal that digging performance can be robustly optimized within the constraints of narrow tunnels by individual idleness and retreating.”
Do you consider that your own paraphrase (“under the conditions of the experiment 30% of the ants did do 70% of the work”) is the same as Peterson’s claim (“30% of the ants do 70% of the work”)?
I don’t; one is rather specific, the other is rather general.
For example, were I to take out the qualification when, say, claiming that in a closed single-sex society of humans 100% of sexual activity is either autoerotic or homosexual, it would convey an entirely (and false) different meaning. Same thing here.
John Morales,
I sincerely hope you aren’t a scientist.
chris61 @40
Even if we don’t know what Peterson’s specific argument is, we know a few things;
– He believes that this study shows some sort of behavior in ants that he thinks is present in humans, so therefore it must be natural. That’s already a fallacious appeal to nature, and it’s typical for Peterson. Humans do not have the same behavioral properties as ants.
– I read the paper, and it explains that the reason the ants divided up the labor like this is because a small number of ants doing most of the work prevented the tunnels from being clogged. I doubt that Peterson was suggesting something as innocuous as “humans are hardwired to use limited numbers of people for jobs involving cramped spaces”.
What’s your angle anyway? Are you trying to offer constructive criticism to people on your own side, or do you honestly believe that Peterson has something worthwhile to say?
@41
Inference. I don’t know what he believes about that study because he doesn’t say. As far as humans not having the same behavioral properties as ants, that’s true on many levels. On the other hand there seem to be a lot of people studying behavior in ants and other insects with the express expectation of better understanding human behavior. Do you think they’re all deluded?
You believe that Peterson meant to imply something nefarious by his tweet. Maybe he did. But there is nothing in the tweet itself to indicate that he either misunderstood or misrepresented the ant study.
I think it’s a bad habit to call someone out for misrepresenting/misunderstanding a paper based on your inferences rather than their statements. I think it’s a doubly bad habit to tell someone that Peterson’s claim is not supported by the paper when clearly, had the claimant (looking at Giliell) read and understood the paper, she’d know that wasn’t the case. I think it’s a triply bad habit to suggest that you can judge the merits of a claim about a paper simply by reading its abstract.
I actually have a magical incantation that grants access to papers in Science.
Hocus-pocus ka-diddley-ocus! Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas! Alla-kazam!
Now, maybe I’m just dumb and don’t know how to read a Lorenz curve, but I don’t see how “30% of the ants do 70% of the work” can be derived from Fig. 2D.
The actual text of the paper says:
Or in other words: If 22%-31% of the ants (depending on the soil moisture) did no excavation work, then by simple math, 100% of the work of excavation is done by 69%-78% of the ants. I have no idea how to work back from that to 70% of the work.
Peterson misrepresents the paper by leaving out the crucial information that it is very specifically and narrowly about excavation work or digging tunnels; reading the abstract restores that context and makes it clear that he is at best being sloppy.
You could argue that he got the sloppy wording from the press release, but even there, the emphasis on digging and excavation is there in the text. And even mentioning “the West” or “capitalism” is a complete non-sequitur. He might as well have written:
30% of the ants do 70% of the work of tunnel excavation. Nothing to do with the price of tea in China, in case it needs to be said.
Why would anyone think that something so irrelevant needs to be said?
@44 Owlmirror
How is he being sloppy when he links an article describing the details of the experiment and providing the context for the statement?
@chris61:
I really don’t think you understand what the are you saying. If sentence X is a correct statement under condition Y and within context Z, then it does not mean that sentence X is a correct/valid statement by itself alone. If you pull the sentence X out of its context, then you are quoting something out of its context. It’s a common fallacy and the basic tool that any anti-science asshole is using.
And if someone challenges you on your bullshit tactics, you definitely don’t get to say that “well, look, the sentence X is correct within the right context and condition!”
@ Owlmirror
You look at figure 2D which is a graphical representation of figure 2C. It plots the cumulative fraction of workers (from 0 to 1) against the cumulative fraction of work (from 0 to 1). If you go to ~ 0.7 on the X axis (horizontal axis) and look at where the point on the line falls on the Y axis (vertical axis) you’ll see that ~0.7 (i.e 70%) of the ants accomplish about 30% (fraction = 0,3) of the work. Hence the remaining 30% of the ants accomplish the remaining 70% of the work. Even among the 69-78% of ants who do any work at all, some ants do more than others and having some ants do more than others can be shown by mathematical modeling to result in more total work than having all ants do equal work.
@46 lotharoloo
That is utter nonsense! Anyone who ever quotes anything, pulls sentences out of their context. It’s only a fallacy if you fail to provide the context (as Peterson did with his link) or state a conclusion that doesn’t take the context into consideration (which Peterson didn’t).
@chris61
Bwhahahahaha. Candidate for the dumbest things I’ve heard today. “Everyone quotes things out of context”. I don’t think I want to dignify this stupidity with a longer response.
@48 lotharloo
LOL! Candidate for the best quote pulled out of context I’ve read today. Thank you for demonstrating my point, lotharloo.
Well we can at least see that his fanbois think he intended such a conclusion:
and
Now obviously, this conclusion does fail to take into account the context: that when the hardest-working ants were removed, others immediately took their places and the overall work-rate remained the same so the differences in individual work-rate had nothing to do with differences between those individuals. And either Peterson did intend the conclusion these fans think he did, or he demonstrated his inability (or unwillingness) to say what he means so others – including his most devoted followers – can understand it.
But research shows that the flying spaghetti lobster only touches 30% of them with 70% of its noodly appendages. This is just science.
@50 KG
And do you think that is applicable to human beings – that all human beings in any given job are equally or at least similarly capable of performing that job? Or do differences in individual work rate often reflect differences in the talents and abilities of those individuals?
Would clogging up a tunnel with a bunch of them help to answer your questions?
chris61 @42
Peterson is always impenetrable and vague. It lets his followers infer whatever they want from what he says, while still giving him an out if someone criticizes him. Given his obsession with dominance and hierarchies, and that thing about lobsters, it’s reasonable to conclude that he was using this study to claim that inequality is natural and good. That’s certainly what his fanboys got out of it.
The scientists who study ant behavior don’t just assume that parallels between human and ant behavior are evidence that the behavior is genetically hardwired in humans. In a lot of cases, the studies are about suggestions for how humans could learn from ant behavior in limited contexts. That does nothing to prove that inequality is natural.
This study was about preventing congestion in cramped spaces by having a limited number of individuals in the tunnels, and that when spaces became available, the less productive ants upped their productivity and replaced. This does nothing to support Peterson’s fanboys’ claim that the study proves that inequality is natural and due to unequal productivity. Crucially, there’s no evidence that the ants who dug more we’re rewarded more by the colony. That makes their claims about societal inequality even more dubious.
Also I’d like to note something:
When I pointed out that humans and ants aren’t behaviorally equivalent, you defended ant models of human behavior.
When we pointed out that the observed ant behavior did nothing to prove the fanboys’ claims about social inequality, you defended them by questioning the applicability of the results to humans.
That’s not just inconsistent, it concedes that the fanboys (and most likely Peterson) got the results of the study wrong.
This whole discussion reminds me of Natalie Wynn’s video about Peterson, particularly the bit where she talks about him saying ostensibly true things with very provocative implications (such as saying “there are physical differences between typical men and women” which is true in a vacuum, but saying it in the context of a discussion about the underrepresentation of women in executive positions).
Well this study does seem to show that certain tasks are most efficiently performed, even by animals with brains only a minuscule fraction the size of human beings, by some animals working harder than others. If efficiency is your goal then yes inequality in effort expended would seem to be good.
Of course I defended ant models of human behavior because actual researchers use ants to model SOME aspects of human behavior. That is not the same thing as saying ants and humans are behaviorally equivalent.
Nowhere did I defend fanboys. I think the fanboys are wrong. But KG’s argument for why the fanboys are wrong is also wrong because not all aspects of ant behavior are applicable to humans.
I certainly concede the fanboys quoted above got the results of the study wrong. But that says nothing about whether Peterson did or not. I think PZ’s fans frequently misunderstand studies, I don’t think that it follows that PZ necessarily does.
chris61 @56
The sort of unequal effort shown in the paper isn’t the same sort that Peterson defends. I’ve already given a few reasons why the results don’t prove that classism is natural. If Peterson’s point was something other than that of his fanboys, I can’t imagine how he thinks these results could reinforce any of the views I’ve seen him promote.
I agree with you when you say that ants are good models for some aspects of human behavior but not others. My original point was that just because you can find behavioral parallels between humans and ants doesn’t imply that the behavior is hard-wired in humans. It’s entirely possible for a behavior to be instinctual in one species and learned in another. I was under the (possibly mistaken) impression that you disagreed.
I didn’t keep up that much with the discussion between you and KG. The fanboys are wrong whether the behavior of the ants applies to humans or not. They can’t use the ant behavior to argue for inherent differences in ability between humans because the less productive ants were able to pick up the slack when the more productive ants were removed. If this applies to humans, then that disproves the fanboys’ claims. If it doesn’t, then the fanboys shouldn’t use the ants a talking point.
I mentioned this at the beginning, but Peterson is pretty much always vague with regards to his ideas. At this point, I’m suspicious that he’s doing it deliberately so that he can act as a Rorschach test for his fans while dodging around his critics.
Of course they do. I never said or implied otherwise. Of course this does not imply that socio-economic inequalities and hierarchies are natural and beneficial.
Are you really this stupid, or just dishonest? My point was solely that the fanbois clearly understood Peterson as drawing the lesson from the ant study that current social inequalities are natural and beneficial, and that therefore, either Peterson intended this implication, or he is unable or unwilling to be clear about what he means. I said nothing whatever about the fanboys being wrong. They are not, of course, wrong about there being differences in talent and industry between people (see above). They are wrong in thinking this justifies current social arrangements. You may possibly have come across the slogan “from each according to ability, to each according to need” or some variant thereof. You will presumably be surprised to learn that it was not part of the wisdom of Jordan Peterson, but was advanced by, among others, Karl Marx and Peter Kropotkin.
The first quote @58 is also from chris61, but from #52.
@58 KG
My apologies for misunderstanding you.
@57 emergence
No argument here.
Otherwise I’m not really trying to defend what Peterson believes or doesn’t believe because I don’t follow him enough to feel confident that I know what that is. It just seemed to me as I stated in my original comment that a lot of people were jumping to a conclusions based on what they thought Peterson was implying rather than what he actually wrote.
@chris61, #47 [Lorenz curves]:
My eye was naively drawn to the first 30% on the horizontal axis, where it looks like barely any of the work has been done (maybe .025%?). After thinking about what you wrote, I’m still trying to understand why it’s the other 30% that’s being discussed. Would it be correct to say that it’s significant because there’s a line that can be drawn from the bottom right to the top left, which would intersect at 50%/50% if everything were equal, but that line intersects the actual curve at (approximately) the 70%/30% point, which is why ant/work is phrased that way in the first place?
I don’t think that providing a link is the same as providing context. All too often, I have seen people make arguments and provide links in support of those arguments, where the linked pages do not support the argument. The most extreme examples I can think of have been ones where creationists linked to mainstream science to support their anti-science arguments, but there have also been examples where PZ, for example, has linked to something, made an argument based on something in the link, and simply gotten something wrong.
In most cases outside of creationist ones, it can be a simple case of occasional human fallibility, but Peterson, specifically, has a history of providing citations — the scholarly form of links — that don’t support the arguments that he makes while referencing those citations. I think it’s reasonable to infer that Peterson messed up here because he has a historical pattern of messing up.
“30% of the ants do 70% of the work”, taken out of context, looks like a general statement about ants and all work done by those ants, rather than about the narrow case of tunnel excavation.
While “Not a consequence of the West, or capitalism” doesn’t look like much of a conclusion, I am pretty sure that the sort of person that can think that can read in a conclusion, or more than one conclusion.
@61 Owlmirror
re figure 2D. The line showing equal distribution of the work would be the straight line drawn from the bottom left to the upper right. The point of the graph was to express that the work is distributed unequally; that some ants work harder than others. So 30% of the hardest working ants do 70% of the work. But as far as I can see there’s nothing magical about that way of expressing the data. You could just as easily say that 30% of the least hard-working ants do less than 1% of the work – but I think the point was to use a number combo that showed it was a minority of the ants who did the majority of the work.
Providing a link isn’t as good as explicitly explaining context but there’s only so much you can do in a single tweet. In any case I don’t consider it misleading.