Scott Alexander Thinks Jordan Peterson's _Twelve Rules For Life_ Is Pretty Good
I'm inclined to think Peterson is pretty good, so this doesn't surprise me too much.
posted by Winston Smith at
12:11 PM
Thursday, April 12, 2018
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11 Comments:
As an experiment give the book to your critical thinking class, and see if they can find how many sloppy arguments Peterson makes. Ugh.
Is it bad? Because I just assumed it wouldn't be great...but *am* kind of a fan of the guy. And some sane people say it's good. I can't see myself reading a self-help book...but I'm curious now.
There’s a video by Peterson on youtube that’s supposedly about cultural marxism and post-modernism. Being a sort of anarcho-marxist, I was naturally interested, and checked it out. Imagine my surprised when I discovered that what Peterson is doing is using “post-modernism” and “cultural marxism” as vaguely-defined labels to demonize ideas that he doesn’t like. He doesn’t actually explain what is bad about ‘cultural marxism’ or even what it is. Surely, a professor of psychology could not be so sloppy! But then I remembered, it’s psychology; speaking as a holder of a psychology degree (a lowly BA) I feel he’s taking a bit too much advantage of psychology’s self-awarded privilege of slinging pseudo-scientific bullshit.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/02/13/engaging-jordan-peterson-is-enlightening-and-frustrating/
If you prefer watered-down Jungianism to the real thing, hés the guy for you.
Jesus, DA, tell us what you really think.
But I feel ya, actually. (Especially on the psychology point.)
I haven't followed that link yet, but I think that part of the problem is that there's no good term for the collection of nonstandard quasi-philosophical views that's taken over the left. "Cultural Marxism" isn't very good, though there's something to it. I sometimes call it "the postpostmodern mishmash"...but one of my students recently told me that 'postpostmodernism' is an actual thing...so...
Anyway, it's strange, loose bundle of second-hand pomo, poststructuralism, critical theory et al... Which is not to fully excuse excessive sloppiness...but we need a term.
What "DA" said, there's some common sense mixed with...I dunno, a lot of sloppy thinking.
My impression is that people who are fans think it's good. People who are neutral (like me) think it's bad. People who hate him think it's bad.
PZ Meyers is dead on: you can't fight one kind of bad thought with another (in this case, pseudoscientific gibberish. And the point PZ is attacking is *really* gibberish.)
Apparently Peterson is talking about hierarchy in lobsters(!) as evidence that hierarchical behavior emerged really early.
Meyers points out all the scientific fallacies in Peterson's arguments.
Its' also a logical fallacy: in the case of lobsters, any hierarchy is purely an emergent behavior (and isn't really hierarchical): there's no actual organization or social structure, just isolated individual interactions, and no cooperative behavior at all.
lol yeah, I've sorta heard something about the lobster line. But I only heard him say something like "this dominance stuff goes all the way down to lobsters." Which I guess isn't true after all, then.
Dominance does not imply hierarchy, and dominance in lobsters doesn't have anything obvious to do with *how* today's society is organized. Yeah, you can get some surprising behavior from pure nearest neighbor interactions like this. Here are some examples:
* Formation of crystalline solids. Perfectly arranged, but not hierarchical.
* Formation of glasses. Localized order, but disorganized at large scales.
* Schools of fish and flocks of birds, both V and swarm style.
* Dendritic growth. This actually forms trees, and is based on competition between dendrites for nearby resources.
* On the other hand: there's the gas phase. That's nearest neighbor, but the only "organization" is that no two atoms can overlap in space.
Now, you may be able to make some claims aobut self-organizing systems from these phenomena. But drawing any useful with human society as it exists is meaningful only in the most abstract sense. You can't draw conclusions about the actual organization.
Welp, Winston, my father taught me Avenger’s First Law, which is that people tell you what you want to hear. That is the source of his popularity.
His message is to Jungianism as Velveeta is to real cheese.
"His message is to Jungianism as Velveeta is to real cheese."
Jesus Christ...that mad had a family, man.
You guys are freaking brutal.
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