I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but Cambridge is one of those prestigious “elite” universities, and sometimes they do exhibit some good sense.
Jordan Peterson requested a visiting fellowship at the Faculty of Divinity, and an initial offer has been rescinded after a further review.
— Faculty of Divinity (@CamDivinity) March 20, 2019
Oh, but Peterson is mad about this. How dare they deny him an appointment! They owe him!
University of Toronto psychology professor Dr Jordan Peterson had planned to be with Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity for two months in autumn.
But on Wednesday the university took the invitation back after a review.
Dr Peterson said the faculty had “made a serious error of judgement in rescinding their offer to me”.
He has fired back.
This is what we academics call “burning your bridges,” or “guaranteeing that you’ll never get a second invitation,” or “confirming the wisdom of their decision,” or “hah, what college would want you as a visiting professor after that childish outburst,” etc. Poor man. He gets no respect from his peers, so he’ll have to settle for a consoling tongue-bath from his mob of under-educated manbabies.
The Peterson Method
1) Get internet famous by telling right wing bigots exactly what they want to hear.
2) Get offended when people who know better point out how FoS you actually are.
3) Make a fortune off the right wing rage circuit.
4) Become clinically depressed when you realize you have sacrificed your integrity and your career to make racists seem reasonable.
How dare they refuse to give him what he thinks he deserves, basing said refusal on things that he says. The bastardry.
Oh, and Divinity School? Hell I’d be pissed if I couldn’t clear that low-ass bar too.
It is impossible to complain about virtue-signaling without virtue-signaling (or dog-whistling to the alt-right). It’s no mistake he used that expression. Peterson is a virtue-signaling, dog-whistle-blowing hypocrite.
LOL.
Even the School For Studying Imaginary Beings doesn’t want him any more.
Jordan Peterson once again shows that he is cosmically stupid.
There are any number of fundie xian and Catholic theological seminaries that would take him in a second. The Southern Baptist ones would love him.
Same goes for the Right Wingnut misnamed think tanks like the Heritage foundation.
Jordan Peterson has long ago found his rightful place on the far right of the lunatic fringes.
He just hasn’t figured it out yet.
Peterson here admits to being a xian.
In the past, he has been a bit ambiguous about that.
It’s not much of a surprise though.
He is a routine right wingnut hate merchant, selling his follower’s hate back to them for money.
Peterson hates just about everything and everyone including women, nonwhites, nonxians, the educated, the progressives etc..
One of his main hates is…atheism and atheists.
@5- raven
How can the Jungian Pied Piper really hate atheists if we don’t exist? We don’t murder people therefore we are a figment of our own imagination says the greatest novel ever written.
Yet don’t witches live in swamps? Or am I not remembering that correctly? Witches exist but atheists don’t? Peterson’s brain must be a strange place to live. I shudder at the implications for South Park’s Imaginationland when the hordes of cultural Marxists storm the gates wielding pronouns.
It’s easy for him.
When he isn’t just wrong, he is incoherent.
Here is a great example of that. Old post recopied.
One more Peterson quote for the road that the lying troll claims we never read.
Peterson’s hates are most of our society, women, nonwhites, trans, Muslims, Progressives, the educated.
Notably Peterson also hates atheists.
Since this is an atheist blog, that is most of the people reading and commenting on this blog.
Since Peterson hates most people, most people don’t much like him back.
The quote above is just another fact Peterson got wrong.
Godel never said that proof is impossible without an axiom. His Incompleteness Theorem proved something very different. Peterson is just name dropping here, the Logical Fallacy of Appeal to Authority.
And this is a deepity.
It sounds profound until you look at it twice.
It’s meaningless. and completely wrong. Faith in the gods has absolutely zero to do with any and all proof.
Peterson does this a lot. When he isn’t outright lying, he makes up facts that are just easily proved to be…wrong.
So angry he’s forgotten how to spell “signalling”.
“…a consoling tongue-bath from his mob of under-educated manbabies.”
OK, that one will go into my repertoire.
Womp, womp.
“Virtue signalling”. Yet another example of right-wing projection. Haven’t right-wingers been doing that for years — whenever they invoke God and Jesus; pretend to get all outraged about the 1st Amendment, National Anthem, abortion etc. wrap the flag around themselves, etc.
Good grief! Assuming this nanointellectual is referring to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, that is, to use the famous quote, “Not even wrong.”
I suppose that could be an extremely garbled pop-sciencey rendition of the second incompleteness theorem — broadly, and slightly simplified, “no consistent set of axioms can prove its own consistency” — but “thinking” the former expresses what Gödel proved is probably only done by bending over so far backwards one’s head is inserted into one’s arse. It’s hard to see clearly in confined smelly dark places.
8) @chris61 – “signaling” is correct for North American English. Cambridge would likely view it as a misspelling though.
He doesn’t seem to be able to read though. Or in his rage missed the part that said, “an initial offer” while calling them liars for not saying they extended him an invitation after he asked for one. I can’t tell if he’s mad that they rescinded it as much as that they revealed he had to ask to be invited in the first place, instead of them begging him to come lend his brilliance to their humble establishment on their own initiative.
Raven@7, I am forever grateful to Gary Kasparov (and before him, Orwell) for pointing out that for authoritarians, inconsistency in the Dear Leader’s thinking is not a bug, but a feature. It provides an opportunity for the faithful to demonstrate their faith by dutifully and gratefully lapping up the Dear Leader’s absurd, nauseating spew and pronouncing it delicious.
Does his allusion to Kurt Gödel indicate that not only has he never read Gödel, but probably didn’t even read the Cliff notes to the Popular Mechanics article? No problem. His fanbois will proclaim it a brilliant proof. His ego gets stroked and he can continue to be as pig ignorant as always.
You know, I once thought Ted Cruz was our most embarrassing export from Canada. Ted hasn’t gotten any better, but Peterson continues to prove me wrong every time he opens his mouth.
What has Kermit ever done to deserve such a comparison?
If Peterson were like a muppet, it would be Sam the Eagle at his worst.
“Proof itself, of any sort, is impossible, without an axiom.” This just seems trivially and boringly true. A implies B isn’t going to work unless you can prove A. I’m not sure where God comes in, unless he’s admitting you can’t prove God exists. But this is what Peterson does, make some bland observation and then follow with a complete non-sequitur designed to enrage the listener to start an argument in which the fact the original statement was garbage is forgotten.
Anyway, what on earth would Peterson do at Cambridge? I knew a few people in Cambridge Divinity and they were studying canon law and church history. I don’t think Peterson knows anything about either. Is there a book he wants to publish and it’s all ready to go except for putting “Fellow at Cambridge Divinity” on the cover? And now he has to thrash around for some other institution to steal a reputation from?
Actually, it’s false. You can start with nothing but inference rules.
And that’s just within formal logic. Proof without axioms is quite common in law, science, history… OK, you (or Peterson) might claim there are “implicit axioms”, but the very point of axioms is that they are explicit.
Isn’t it axiomatic within the inferential system that the inferences are true?
I’ve actually been thinking about implicit truths held that ground certain conclusions, so this is something I’d have to agree with.
As an example, I think an implicit axiom that atheists and non-creationist Christians hold is that the evidence of the observable universe matters, and is not a deliberate and completely undetectable deception. And the converse of that is that creationists (and other types of religious fundamentalists, like Hindu fanatics) implicitly hold the opposite of one or both of those propositions.
Or something like that.
A more famous example of an implicit axiom is that of Euclidian geometry: that space is flat. Flat space underlies the parallel postulate being true; different ways that the parallel postulate can be false are underlain by space being either positively or negatively curved.
Well, having job applications rejected can get depressing and might even sting a bit sometimes. But it never occurred to me that I could point the twittersignal at the clouds and loudly (and visibly) proclaim the unfairness of it all. If only I had. I could be raking in mountains of cash by publishing rough drafts of my inner monologue and command the loyalty of my fans by hitting send on social media.
No, actually I have no regrets on that part.
4) Become clinically depressed when you realize you have sacrificed your integrity and your career to make racists seem reasonable.Roll around in a bed full of money, confident that this is what the Sky Bully wants for you.
Peterson would have been disappointed when he found out a School of Divinity can’t turn you into a god.
I’m sure his fanboys will be more than willing to denounce Cambridge en masse.
@HappyHead Cruz doesn’t really count as a bad export, since he wasn’t raised and educated here. Mark Steyn would be a better example.
@11: It’s not just hypocrisy, it’s projection. They know full well that what they do is string together platitudes for views that they already have. They think we’re doing the same thing. Like Innuendo Studios’ video that came up today points out, right-wingers think hierarchy is natural and inevitable, so everything we’re doing is either naive or (much worse) intentional effort to redistribute the hierarchy in a way that isn’t maximally meritorious.
Maybe Peterson’s parents can help out with a timely international transfer of funds.
David Frum has to be up there for dubious Canadian exports. Didn’t he come up with the whole “Axis of Evil” thing?
No. An inference is neither true nor false. It can be truth-preserving or valid, i.e., such that if the premise(s) is/are true, so is the conclusion – but as Goedel showed in his second incompleteness theorem, sufficiently powerful formal systems that assert (i.e., can prove) their own consistency are, in fact, inconsistent. An inference rule just says that within a (usually, formal) system, you are allowed to make an inference corresponding to the rule. You could have a formal logic which includes the inference rule A -> ~A. It wouldn’t be particularly useful, admittedly, but there’s nothing that says a formal logic has to be useful.
blf @12: A paper recently posted at the arXiv, The Provability of Consistency, may interest you. (I’m not a logician, though I am a mathematician and a fan of logic.) Here’s the abstract.
LOL Jordan Peterson, the literal poster child of virtue signalling, whose entire living is now made… VIRTUE SIGNALLING… has the balls to say the university is doing it?
wow.
If anyone was going to virtue signal, perhaps a school of divinity would be the best candidate
And rescinding an invitation is divinity school euphemism for “fuck off’
And logic is an approximate description of how reality works, and gödel proved that approximation had self contained issues. Undecidability is not a proof that mathematics doesn’t work, it’s a proof that mathematics has enough expressive power to describe different models of reality that are mutually exclusive, but consistent in themselves.
C.f. Infinitesimals vs. Limits. Both self consistent models of some aspect of reality, but not admitting of mutual consistency.
Mildly amusing, it is, that in a discussion about this JP specimen this digression about logic occurs.
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pilgham @17:
Axioms are (by definition) asserted, not proven. Premised, not inferred (any axiom).
Outside a formal inferential system, they are not necessary for proof.
(You can prove to yourself that powerfully kicking a large rock with a bare foot will hurt like heck, and it takes no axioms whatsoever. Or: the proof of the pudding is in the eating)
Nonsense. It’s merely a proposition, and A can still imply B even if A is false (which is even worse than unprovable!).
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KG @27 is correct, though he leaves out that such a system would not be consistent, which is why it would not be useful.
(cf. principle of explosion)
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diskgrinder @32, 33:
It can be, but it need not be. It’s a thing in itself, an abstraction.
Peterson is simply a bullshit artist. My best friend of 37 years is also one, so I have quite a bit of experience. Bullshit artists have no attachment to the truth per se, they just want to have an affect on other people. They have an assertion they want to make, and they choose a set of premisses that tend to make their assertion more plausible. They are unconcerned with whether their premisses are true and even whether their argument is valid. In my friend’s case, his conception of reality seems to be based on a narrative that he generates that he finds satisfying, but I don’t know that this is a definitional feature of bullshit artists.
My friend is highly intelligent, funny, generous, and a very decent fellow, but it took me a long time to come to terms with his bullshit artistry. Now I find it entertaining and fun, but I never take anything he says concerning questions of fact as reliable. Peterson has none of my friend’s good qualities, and is a conceited asshole in the bargain, and moreover is harmful in what he asserts. I hope he stops being a thing soon, but I fear that even if he disappears he will be replaced by something equally horrible.
leerudolph@28, Thanks for the heads-up! I’ll add that one to the pile…
John Morales:
Here’s the epigraph and first few pages of a book chapter I wrote several years ago. I had had an NSF grant from now defunct Interdisciplinary Grant in the Mathematical Sciences program, to spend a year among psychologists; one goal of such grants was to expand communication between mathematicians and other scientists. The book was one product of my effort to show psychologists that there already are some, and should be more, mathematical models of various psychological processes in addition to the standard cook-book statistical manipulations that are the most widely used (and widely misused) models throughout the social sciences. This chapter introduced a section with chapters (by other authors) on “Quantum Probability for Social and Behavioral Scientists”, “The Sorites Paradox: A Behavioral Approach”, and “On an Intensity Attribute—Loudness”. The sentence in bold type (here and in the original) is more or less what I quoted you saying, above.
Depending on various obscure variables hidden deep within Google’s algorithms (alternatively, the phases of the moon etc.), at various times and places this link may or may not work to let you read more of the chapter if you’re interested.
Define “heap” as particles with an angle of repose. Consult Humpty Dumpty.
jack16