Good news, everyone! Jordan Peterson has resigned from the University of Toronto.
I recently resigned from my position as full tenured professor at the University of Toronto. I am now professor emeritus, and before I turned sixty. Emeritus is generally a designation reserved for superannuated faculty, albeit those who had served their term with some distinction. I had envisioned teaching and researching at the U of T, full time, until they had to haul my skeleton out of my office. I loved my job. And my students, undergraduates and graduates alike, were positively predisposed toward me. But that career path was not meant to be. There were many reasons, including the fact that I can now teach many more people and with less interference online.
Uh, that was the only reason. He’s got a huge and gullible audience, and he’s raking in the cash. Why stick with that honorable and difficult job of teaching, when grifting pays so much better? Most of his article is about making excuses, though, none plausible.
First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE). These have been imposed universally in academia, despite the fact that university hiring committees had already done everything reasonable for all the years of my career, and then some, to ensure that no qualified “minority” candidates were ever overlooked.
This is nonsense. Universities are still hiring a majority of heterosexual white people. Shall we look at the statistics from the NSF?
The share of academic doctoral positions held by women with SEH doctoral degrees increased from 26.4% in 1999 to 38.5% in 2019. Underrepresented minorities also hold a larger share of these positions than they did in 1999, although their share remains small (8.9%) and is considerably less than their share of the population, which is about a third of the U.S. population ages 18–64. The share of those in academic doctoral positions with one or more disabilities increased to 9.1%, slightly less than their share in the population (10.5%)
So a third of the minority population of the US belong to a minority, but less than 9% of the academic population are a minority. I don’t think you can argue that white students have a negligible chance of employment because black people or women are hired to the exclusion of white men. That’s obvious. Even an ignoramus like Peterson should be able to figure it out.
It’s really because they’re out to get him personally.
My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions. And this isn’t just some inconvenience. These facts rendered my job morally untenable. How can I accept prospective researchers and train them in good conscience knowing their employment prospects to be minimal?
That’s a bit more plausible. Still, if a Peterson student applied for a position at my university, we’d first look at the work they have done, not the work of their mentor. That’s the first and most important criterion. If what they learned from Peterson was to swagger into the interview and bluster about how the trans and gay folks are prejudiced against him, then maybe that would affect their employment possibilities.
If you thought that excuse was bad, wait until you see #2.
Second reason: This is one of many issues of appalling ideology currently demolishing the universities and, downstream, the general culture. Not least because there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough (BIPOC: black, indigenous and people of colour, for those of you not in the knowing woke). This has been common knowledge among any remotely truthful academic who has served on a hiring committee for the last three decades. This means we’re out to produce a generation of researchers utterly unqualified for the job.
Whoa. That’s kind of the same as #1 — his white male students can’t get employed — with the added poison of the assumption that the BIPOC hires are utterly unqualified for the job
. And if you disagree with him, then you aren’t even remotely truthful
! Peterson is a bigot, plain and simple.
All my craven colleagues must craft DIE statements to obtain a research grant. They all lie (excepting the minority of true believers) and they teach their students to do the same. And they do it constantly, with various rationalizations and justifications, further corrupting what is already a stunningly corrupt enterprise. Some of my colleagues even allow themselves to undergo so-called anti-bias training, conducted by supremely unqualified Human Resources personnel, lecturing inanely and blithely and in an accusatory manner about theoretically all-pervasive racist/sexist/heterosexist attitudes. Such training is now often a precondition to occupy a faculty position on a hiring committee.
It’s true: I can and have crafted such statements, where I promise that I won’t discriminate against women or minority students. It’s easy to do. I can honestly and accurately say that I will give equal opportunity to all of my students. I guess Jordan Peterson is unable to do that.
I have also taken anti-bias training, and it is required by my university before I can be on a hiring committee! However, these Human Resources personnel are supremely qualified to do that, and have an expertise that I lack. It is amazingly arrogant that Peterson would so ignorantly dismiss them.
Need I point out that implicit attitudes cannot — by the definitions generated by those who have made them a central point of our culture — be transformed by short-term explicit training? Assuming that those biases exist in the manner claimed, and that is a very weak claim, and I’m speaking scientifically here.
Yes? So? The purpose of the training is to remove roadblocks to hiring minority faculty. We’re not trying to abruptly change the prejudices of existing faculty, we want to make everyone aware of bias for the benefit of potential employees. Once again, Peterson is an uncomprehending buffoon.
Furthermore, the accrediting boards for graduate clinical psychology training programs in Canada are now planning to refuse to accredit university clinical programs unless they have a “social justice” orientation.
Oh, gosh. Other than Peterson’s knee-jerk reaction to the phrase “social justice”, what’s wrong with expecting an accredited psychology program to pay attention to social justice? So as a non-psychologist, I had to look up what that means.
According to Goodman et al. (2004), a social justice approach can be defined as “scholarship and professional action designed to change societal values, structures, politics and practices such that disadvantaged groups gain increased access to these tools of self-determination.”
Jordan wouldn’t want to give disadvantaged groups self-determination. He’s a bigot, after all!
Then we get his real bete noir. We can’t have those non-heterosexual people running around!
That, combined with some recent legislative changes in Canada, claiming to outlaw so-called “conversion therapy” (but really making it exceedingly risky for clinicians to do anything ever but agree always and about everything with their clients) have likely doomed the practice of clinical psychology, which always depended entirely on trust and privacy.
Conversion therapy doesn’t work. Not allowing clinicians to commit conversion therapy on patients is no more a violation of trust and privacy
than is banning lobotomies.
Then he goes charging off to indict Hollywood.
And for those of you who think that I am overstating the case, or that this is something limited in some trivial sense to the universities, consider some other examples: This report from Hollywood, cliched hotbed of “liberal” sentiment, for example, indicates just how far this has gone. In 2020, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the Oscar people) embarked on a five-year plan (does that ring any historical bells?) “to diversify our organization and expand our definition of the best,” They did so in an attempt which included developing “new representation and inclusion standards for Oscars,” to, hypothetically, “better reflect the diversity of the movie-going audience.” What fruit has this initiative, offspring of the DIE ideology, borne? According to a recent article, penned by Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik, but posted on former [emphasis on former] NY Times’ journalist Bari Weiss’s [fuck Bari Weiss] Common Sense website (and Weiss left the Times, because of the intrusion of radical left ideology into that newspaper, just as Tara Henley did recently, vis a vis the CBC): “We spoke to more than 25 writers, directors, and producers — all of whom identify as liberal, and all of whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma. … How to survive the revolution? By becoming its most ardent supporter. … Suddenly, every conversation with every agent or head of content started with: Is anyone BIPOC attached to this?”
Right. That’s why there are no movies with white actors in them.
This guy is so patently ludicrous that it’s astounding he gets published. He closes his screed by telling us that Vladimir Putin agrees with him.
Congratulations, University of Toronto! You got rid of that asshole.
What a dick.
I gotta say choosing to be one of his grad students is a indication of poor judgement to begin with.
So I tried to look at some of his “research.” There is a noticeable gap in papers in recent years.
I tried to read the following and as far as I can tell it’s mostly trolling. A weak correlation of “neuroticism” to being less conservative is pronounced to be significant to higher reported happiness in conservatives claimed by other authors. He claims to extract this relationship out from under the much stronger correlations of wealth to conservatism and wealth to happiness.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275652281_Why_Do_Conservatives_Report_Being_Happier_Than_Liberals_The_Contribution_of_Neuroticism
When a therapy one advocates for is featured in American Horror Story (as is Peterson’s conversion therapy) maaaaybe it’s time to start wondering if one is really backing the right horse?
As a Torontonian I am ashamed he ever called this city home. After he said the incel van attacks, which killed 10 people near my home, could’ve been prevented if only we had enforced monogamy, I’ve wanted to punch him in the face. So glad there’s less reason now for him to be around.
As a Torontonian I am ashamed he ever called this city home. After he said the incel van attacks, which killed 10 people near my home, could’ve been prevented if only we had enforced monogamy, I’ve wanted to punch him in the face. So glad there’s less reason now for him to be around.
“And my students, undergraduates and graduates alike, were positively predisposed toward me.”
except the ones he insisted on misgendering
I hear all of the quotes from him in the voice of Hugh Grant’s Death to 2020/Death to 2021 character Tennyson Foss.
I’m sure he could find someone to haul his “supremely trained” white ass out of the office right now if it would make him feel happier about it. It’d be worth a TikTok, right? (I can only guess at these things.)
Gimme a break. It’s never been easy to land an academic position, or if it ever was, it hasn’t been since I’ve been paying attention. I can bring some experience to bear on this, though my lack of serious academic ambition and marketability of my skills in industry also played a role.
I can’t speak for Peterson’s ostensible field, but what counts most is having important peer-reviewed publications. In fact, unlike other processes, peer review isn’t subject to any consideration but the value of the results. It’s true, you could guess something from an author’s name, but not a whole lot, and definitely not sexual orientation. Anyone with genuinely significant findings in my (former) field and recommendations from top researchers is going to be taken seriously. You still need to do an interview and in my experience, a presentation. You can screw that up and it’ll hurt, though there used be room for brilliant researchers who are lousy speakers.
Diversity could very well be a tie breaker among the vast over-supply of newly minted PhDs who are “supremely trained” but have not produced work of any lasting value. And why the hell shouldn’t it be? It’s a market like any other filled with a lot of “soft” criteria. Anyone willing to work is entitled to make a living, but nobody is entitled to fill one of a limited number of highly competitive positions.
Indeed. “I’ll found my own university with blackjack and hookers.” (That might even work.)
I would cheer if that happened.
On the day Peterson is reduced to a skeleton, the world will be a better place.
I haven’t seen any evidence that Peterson has even been at U. of Toronto at all in the last few years. Mostly he has been very sick and almost died at least once. He was in Russia trying to kick his benzodiazapine addiction, got pneumonia, spent time on a ventilator, then went to Serbia, where he caught the Covid-19 virus. When he isn’t sick, he is on the right wingnut grifter circuit selling hate back to the loons for money.
I’m sure his department at the U. of Toronto is celebrating right now. AFAICT, few people in the department wanted Peterson around.
I give them zero points for not tossing him. Sure he had tenure but he said enough lies, spread enough hate, and violated enough civilized norms to lose that tenure. Given his pages and pages of misogyny, anti-LGBT hate, and racism towards nowhites, no woman, LGBT, or nonwhite could be safe around him or assured that he wouldn’t blatantly discriminate against him.
raven@10 I’d chip in for the dermestid beetles.
To celebrate, I’m posting a few of Peterson’s greatest hits.
He made his reputation by hating women, an open misogynist.
My comments are in bold.
professor emeritus ?
The university and his department were desperate enough that they were willing to bribe him to leave? Just to be on the safe side I checked and he is on U of T Psych Dept list.
Peterson’s petulant little screed is hilarious.
Indeed it is, dude. Indeed it is.
I knew of Peterson long before he became world famous. For some reason, Ontario public TV saw fit to occasionally air one of his lectures, or have him on a chat show. His secret, even back then, was that he had mastered the art of sounding like he knew what he was talking about. I don’t doubt that he spent long hours practicing the thoughtful expression, the significant pause, and the utterly confident delivery which said “I know more about this than you, because I’ve thought about it deeply“.
But listening to his actual words made it clear that there was no substance. A weird mixture of the obvious and the ridiculous, couched in vague pseudo-intellectual gibberish. I’m sure many people were taken in.
And of course, when faced with people who do know what they’re talking about, the petulant twelve-year old Peterson roars to life. For example (it’s nearly an hour, but there are people worth listening to involved).
LOL, is he serious? To the limited extent it’s occurred, increasing diversity in films and other cultural spheres has been amazing, and can only get better.
Putin, quoted by Peterson:
He was in the KGB! For 16 years! Comedy.
Hey, if Putin agrees with him, maybe he could work for the FSB! (If he isn’t doing so already, that is…)
…and he won’t have any Kazakh, Uzbek, Lithuanian or other minorities to worry about, ‘cuz most of them have their own countries now. Bonus!
And conservatives always accuse liberals of whinging.
@13 the directory doesn’t list any change in status so Peterson’s resignation may not have taken effect yet.
Toronto’s rules for emeritus:
Appointment
The following process should be followed:
Qualified retiring faculty should indicate on the appropriate notice to retire form their desire to have the title Emeritus/Emerita conferred upon retirement.
The Provost’s Office will confirm eligibility.
The award of Emeritus/Emerita will be reported for information to Academic Board at the next session after the faculty member’s retirement date.
After review by Academic Board, newly appointed Emeritus/Emerita faculty receive a letter from the President advising them of their status.
The business officer should update the individual’s status in HRIS.
———— If the Academic Board decides, they can veto emeritus. They might be happy to be clear of him.
I’ve downloaded a few of his talks because I keep thinking that some day I’ll snort a few rails of meth and try to unpack one in a blog posting. For example, his talk on cultural marxism and post modernism appears to be entirely free-associating about political movements and thought-streams that have nothing to do with either. It’s not a competent performance, especially if he’s professing Psychology and is dabbling in philosophy, economics, and political philosophy – and pulling huge swaths of material out of his ass as fast as he can bloviate. Another bit of his that I have started on a few times, but then turn off so I can scream and curse psychology as a field, and Peterson in particular, is a piece where he is asserting, basically, that the cause of all mental illness is people have trouble handling complexity. And, then proceeds to mis-characterize terror management theory as fear of death. If there’s such a thing as professional malpractice for teaching psychology-related topics, that’s it. He does this kind of shit everywhere he just makes stuff up and says it in a tone of certainty and when you actually realize what he just said it’s “no, wait, he did not say that!!?” and then you’re hammering your keyboard with your fist. Assuming you know anything, or think you know anything, about what he’s talking about.
The reason I think that’s relevant is because he appears to be teaching students, who appear to be absorbing those teachings, therefore he is creating a little blossom of bullshit in the shitstream that is popular psychology. I can’t imagine what it’d be like to get one of Peterson’s students and have to deal with someone who thinks that marxism is a breakfast food, and post-modernism is a position for sexual intercourse, or whatever shit popped into Peterson’s mind at the time he was “teaching” that topic.
There is a chance that some of you read my comment above and were wondering if maybe I wasn’t being a bit unfair. This is the video in question:
If you have any understanding regarding current models of mental health, you may experience nausea, disorientation, and growth of additional heads, so be forewarned. It feels to me like listening to a creationist or a flat-earther talking: there’s such a thick, fat, stream of wrong that truth hasn’t got a chance to close its gaping, horrified mouth and say, “wait, but…!” before he’s on to something else.
I don’t know if that’s a public speaking engagement, or a class, or what, but seriously I’m gonna say that it’s teaching malpractice. Someone who learns about mental health from that talk is going to have to unlearn a bunch of wrong stuff and then learn a bunch of actual stuff, and they’ll have a huge cognitive dissonance hangover to sleep off.
This guy arguably spent time and effort to learn something once. I say arguably because nothing I’ve seen suggests he has an understanding of anything other than his own opinion. And I wouldn’t even count him an expert on that because like a lot of other scumbags, his opinion is straight up adoption of the worst trash other people have thrown out. It’s not exactly well thought out and it’s no more coherent than any other extended edition of “Get off my lawn!”
Unfortunately whatever he learned didn’t really gel very well because he gives every indication of having since decided he has nothing left to learn. He simply knows everything. He treats every other field of knowledge as though it were trivial and anything important about it can fit on an index card. It doesn’t take much curiosity about learning to figure out his point of view is trite nonsense. Just glancing at the course descriptions in the university catalog is enough to dispel this fragile fiction. How can he be surrounded by so much knowledge and still fail to recognize it? He must put a lot of effort into being an ignoramus.
Apparently Peterson is a Jungian, which, from what some people have said, is like being a 21st Century geologist who doesn’t believe in plate tectonics.
Apparently Peterson is a Jungian, which, from what some people have said, is like being a 21st Century geologist who doesn’t believe in plate tectonics.
Jung claimed that there were personality templates called “archetypes” – which all people subconsciously mapped their behaviors and beliefs to. In other words, he claimed that myers-briggs personality types (loosely having something to do with Jungian theory) were real, i.e: there really are ENTPs and they exhibit certain behaviors. Note: it’s a person’s archetype that makes them what they are – the archetype is not merely a sorting/classification formula, it’s actually supposed to predict a person’s behaviors. It may as well be a claim that horoscopes also determine your fate. He also came up with a dream analysis method that was also a bunch of stuff he pulled out of his imagination. (Typical Leo, huh?) Jung’s archetypes, of course, were European culture-centric and the assumption that some Mongol would also adhere to a particular archetype was rather obviously problematic especially to the Mongol. Although Jordan Peterson seems to share the same archetype as Jung, namely “bloviating psychologist” so maybe there’s something to it or maybe there’s something about psychologists that makes them bloviate.
@15, @21
What’s the phrase? “Lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man!”
@20
Significant portions of the websites where I work are significantly out of date. I would not be terribly surprised if it takes a while for this to be updated, depending on who is meant to initiate the changes, how busy they are, and how long it takes to go through the system.
I’m sure UoT is just devastated.
@13–
UoT basically awards all professor emeritus status at retirement if they ask for it. The request has to be approved by the Academic Board, but I would have been surprised if they didn’t grant it. Peterson has not, to my knowledge, been involved in anything that would definitely blow up his chances — research fraud (I mean his research is utter bilge, but it’s not faked or plagiarised afaik) or inappropriate relationships with studentz or somesuch. Also, the Board was on a losing wicket. If they had refused Peterson emeritus status, it would be widely touted as woke/cancel culture horrification in need of punishment. And unfortunately, universities have to be careful about this because the modern Western conservative movement is constantly looking for justifications to defund academic institutions.
This is really good news for me. U of T is one of the places I am likely to apply to for my masters in psychology and I would really not want to be associated with him.
Seems to me that the shorter version of this BS is, “I cancelled myself, so that I can spend more time making money hand over fist whining about how I have been cancelled for telling the ‘Jordan Peterson Truth ™’ {disclaimer: truths in this trademark may not conform to reality, and only vaguely resemble real world problems}”.
One of the most telling signs of the whole thing being such a transparent grift is that he is going to hold an Emeritus position. In my experience these have to actually be applied for, the process for such isn’t even remotely automatic when someone is retiring. He wants to try and retain whatever cred he can and involvement with the academic community at UofT
Raging Bee: “Hey, if Putin agrees with him, maybe he could work for the FSB! (If he isn’t doing so already, that is…)”
Maybe we should suggest he join Vladimir for tea…
#22: Oh. So Peterson’s method for dealing with the “complexity problem” is to take dangerous quantities of drugs, adopt a stupid and damaging diet, and get put into a medically-induced coma until the problems go away? I’m appalled that he was teaching students in a psychology program.
13 Raging Bee
and he won’t have any Kazakh, Uzbek, Lithuanian or other minorities to worry about,
Do you know anything about the Russian Federation?
Ethnic Groups in Russia .
@ 28 chrislawson
UoT basically awards all professor emeritus status at retirement if they ask for it.
Ah, that explains it. I thought that list af emmerati vas long even given the size of the deparment. Still Peterson now has joined that distinguished group of thse whackjebs and nuttters known for “going emeritus”.
@ 24 timgueguen
Apparently Peterson is a Jungian, which, from what some people have said, is like being a 21st Century geologist who doesn’t believe in plate tectonics.
Uh, more like one who has fervently embraced the Flat Earth hypothesis and astrology.
My background is psychology and I, literally, thought Jungians were extinct, at least in Canada and the USA. I guess there is the rare sighting.
Unfortunately for Toronto, it means he can still go about claiming he’s a professor at U of T.
@33: Yes, I know there are still ethnic minorities in Russia…but JP won’t have to know that, since no one’s gonna enforce any “political correctness” to make him notice them.
raven @10: All of that just proves that Jordan Peterson can’t even decently manage his own life, so no one else has any reason to listen to life advice from him. Even in a diverse field of fake-ass self-accredited life-coach-wannabees, Peterson stands out for his phoniness and incompetence. (And remember, he went to Russia for addiction treatment because US/Canadian treatment wasn’t good enough for his standards — as if no one in North America ever managed to kick a drug habit? That kinda sounds like an addict’s rationalization to me.)
Yeah, if Peterson is becoming emeritus faculty instead of active faculty, then technically what he’s doing is RETIRING, not RESIGNING. He’s describing himself as having “resigned” as part of his “victimhood” schtick, to give the impression that he’s bravely severing ties with an institution that he no longer wishes to be associated with, for reasons of principle.
Which is bullshit. He’s taking early retirement, and retaining the prestige title of “emeritus professor” at UofT, as well as continuing to receive faculty benefits such as a pension. Calling it a “resignation” is just another piece of Petersonian self-aggrandizing PR.
Oh fuck him, every asshole he cited, including himself, is a multimillionaire with a huge social media platform. He broke all of those supposed taboos and (like Bari who tried really hard) did not get fired.
None of these useless windbags needs to fight for survival. You can make piles of cash by adhering to his supposedly taboo believes, you don’t even have to be smart or particularly talented (see Dave Rubin, Charly Kirk, Candace Owens, Steven Crowder, Bari Weiss […]). In fact the dumber you are, the more you will be rewarded, because right wing movements tend to be anti-intellectual.
Also, speaking as a no-longer-young college faculty member myself, I think it’s profoundly selfish for faculty to encourage and perpetuate the fantasy of “dying in harness”, i.e., refusing to resign from active faculty status even in advanced old age. Except in exceptional circumstances, elderly faculty should resign long before anyone has to “drag their skeleton out of their office”.
Every elderly post-retirement-age full professor is using resources and exercising power that could be used to support a young academic (in reality, probably one or two young academics) in starting their career. If you want to have an active research career in old age as emeritus professor, and maybe even continue combining teaching with it in some way, then more power to you. But don’t sacrifice the interests of your institution and your younger colleagues to your own ego by continuing to take up space in an active-faculty tenure line for decades after the usual retirement age.
In Realityland, this is just wrong, a lie.
I’d like to see Peterson’s data on this but I know there isn’t any.
Because we know the cause of a lot of serious mental illness and it is genetics, heredity. And here is the data.
Around 81% of the cause of schizophrenia is a complex genetic basis. Schizophrenia is common with a prevalence in the population of around 1%.
The same thing can be said for autism spectrum disorders, a strong genetic basis.
“Genetic factors account for about 60 to 80 percent of the cause of bipolar disorder.”
There are known causes for mental illnesses and they are worth knowing. The contribution from “trouble handling complexity” is unknown but likely somewhere between very minor and nonexistent.
For a Ph.D. in psychology to come up with such a obviously wrong statement about a key part of the field is about as high a level of incompetence and malpractice as it can get.
Peterson just strings words together without worrying about whether they have any basis in reality.
I don’t have time for an exchange of views about this (the time I’ve spent arguing about this online during the past decade+ has probably not been good for my own mental health), but suffice it to say I disagree with raven’s #43 above.
A few links:
My blog (2013) – “‘Decades of negative results’: the failure of psychiatric genetics.”
My blog (2013) – “Nonreplication and despair in psychiatric genetics.”
Mad in America (2017) – “Dr. Jay Joseph: Why Schizophrenia Genetic Research is Running on Empty.”
raven@#42:
Peterson just strings words together without worrying about whether they have any basis in reality.
Thanks for the check. I was gobsmacked that anyone claiming to be a psychologist could be so obviously and uncaringly wrong. And he does this in all fields: the marxism he talks about would be unrecognizable to Mao let alone Marx. The postmodernism he talks about would make Derrida laugh uncontrollably. He does not seem to realize autism and OCD exist on a spectrum. He talks about IQ as if it’s a thing, etc etc. He’s omni-wrong. He is advancing the state of the art of wrongness in veritable leaps and bounds. He is like some kind of DaVinci of wrong.
A few more, and I’ll go :):
My blog (2013) – “‘…so we decided to go ahead and publish it’.”
Mad in America (2020) – “The Latest ‘Breakthrough Therapy’: Expensive New Drugs for Tardive Dyskinesia.”
Mad in America (2021) – “Dr. Pies and The Chemical Imbalance Deception.”
TL;DR version: The biopsychiatric model is dubious. The genetic/twin studies of alleged brain disorders have failed to validate it. Psychiatric drugs have caused serious and often permanent harms that psychiatrists had tried to attribute to these alleged diseases. Drug companies and psychiatrists are now acknowledging these harms because it helps them market new, expensive me-too drugs. For the past several years, while people have been screaming at me online about chemical imbalances, leading psychiatrists have not only been openly admitting the idea is bullshit; not only claiming that they never told people psychological problems were caused by chemical imbalances; not only suggesting that the notion that they ever told anyone this is a smear invented by their critics; but, and this is the kicker, insinuating that people who say they were told by psychiatrists that they had a chemical imbalance are lying or not to be trusted. It’s not medicine and it’s not science.
I really liked your takedown of JP. It is clear that he quit because it is much more lucrative for him to not be a professor. I am a fellow professor at U of T, thankfully in a completely different department (Rotman school of management). I was brave enough to post this on the National Post website – no surprises, most replied to and most disliked comments by the sheeple on that board. You have expressed what I had said, but much more eloquently.
Professor Peterson is not in any way constrained from doing anything that he has done by being a professor at U of T. The university has given him many things, including credibility and a pulpit from which to preach his viewpoints. That is what tenure allows. He is probably leaving because he does not want to face any constraints, and probably will make a lot more money as a freelance speaker. I mean, why make $200K and have to teach 3 or 4 classes, when you can make that much with 4 speaking engagements.
I do not disagree completely with some of the points that he makes. Diversity, Inclusion and Equity are important, but cannot come at the expense of quality. As a tenured professor at the same university, I can say with confidence that even when we try to hire a “diverse” candidate, we do not make any compromise on quality, credentials, training and research potential. As a result, “diversity” hiring is very difficult. There is also a lot of research that shows that adding diversity to management, leadership, boards etc actually leads to better decisions, increased long run profitabilty and increases shareholder value .
Similarly, he is correct when he says that there is a lot of hype in the ESG space, but to write the whole thing off as BS is too extreme. A focus, or at least an eye on ESG, allows companies to consider the overall and long term impact of their corporate actions.
Not that I expect any of the National Post’s readers or Mr. Peterson’s followers to agree with a word of what I have written.
You are not disagreeing with me.
You are disagreeing with 1/2 century of medical research.
Many people find the currently available psychiatric drugs to be somewhere between a necessary evil and the difference between a normal life or being completely dysfunctional and incapacitated.
I can tell from your (that is SCs) two comments that they have strong views on the subject and disagree with most scientists and psychiatrists in the USA.
I don’t care to spend any time on this either, not being a psychiatrist or a neurobiologist and having a busy life to attend to.
No, I’m really not. (I should be clear that I’m in complete agreement regarding Peterson. I just part ways when it comes to that particular alternative. Cheers!)
“A five-year plan (does that ring any historical bells?)”
The Enterprise had a five-year mission to seek out new life and new civilizations. Is that what he’s referring to?
“First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students…”
I really thought that this was a parody, but then I confirmed that he was indeed the author. I also expected it to end with “I am not a crank.”
dstatton @ #50:
Bret Weinstein called it “[a] beautiful and heartbreaking explanation of why @jordanbpeterson has now formally joined the ranks of the academic exiles.”
Weinstein is unbothered by the suffering and death caused in part by the anti-vax propaganda and Ivermectin hawking he uses to line his pockets and ease his status anxiety. But this, this pompous, self-pitying ode to supremacy, breaks his heart.
dstatton@50 Uh, it seems reasonable to me. Clearly they are supremely trained in being heterosexual as well as in being white and male. You got a problem with that?
If Bret Weinstein says it is good, you know it is supremely bad.
Weinstein jumped the shark into poly-kookery long ago.
His latest grift is antivaxxer and advocate for quack medical treatments like Ivermectin for Covid-19 virus infection.
SC@51
That also sounds like a parody. Also, he’s Professor Emeritus, which is far from “exile.” From context, I guess he doesn’t get to keep an office, but it’s still a title and an affiliation.
There is something heartbreaking about Peterson, or at least the fact that people continue to take him seriously.
PaulBC:
Is he really? Source?
John Morales@55 Fair enough, but claiming to be a professor emeritus is a strangely heartbreaking way to declare yourself an academic exile.
PaulBC @ #54:
They all do (random exhibit A; random exhibit B)! That combination of self-important + dangerous (not in the way they think) + ridiculous is very hard to deal with. Incidentally, Bret’s wife Heather Heying is also truly awful.
Best response to exhibit A in #57:
Cross-posted with the Infinite Thread:
Anna Merlan at Vice – “Joe Rogan’s Friends Assemble in D.C. to Do Something They Say Isn’t an Anti-Vax Rally”:
SC @59, what’s the relevance to Jordan (the thread topic?)
John Morales @ #60, the “IDW”-dangerous pseudoscience nexus.
The connection is even more evident in light of PZ’s previous post about Peterson (which I know you’re familiar with, John, as you commented there).
Also, your question mark should be outside the parenthesis.
SC @63, yes :)
Regarding the IDW goes, I think it’s a bit of a nothing. No real presence.
Unfortunately, you’re wrong. Joe Rogan’s reach guarantees that their COVID disinformation will continue to endanger the public, and their hateful rhetoric makes the lives of trans people in particular more difficult. You’re lucky if the presence of these ridiculous reactionaries is insignificant in Australia, but here, sadly, that’s not the case.
I hope Sunday’s event is a flop, but the hints about possible violence related to it (directly or indirectly) are legitimately worrying. Antivaxxers’ language seems to get more threatening by the day, and people like Rogan, Peterson, Malone, and Weinstein feed their sense of persecution.