Jordan Peterson thinks it makes sense to compare humans with lobsters

chava

Well-known member
have to admit i started off fairly sympathetic to him a few years ago, but lately, with all the stuff version's been mentioning, not so much. i'm sure he has some interesting points or good advice but i'm not convinced, given all the other bs, that it's worth ardently defending him over.

it seems like the standard path for a "public intellectual" is to start off doing fairly respectable work in their own field, then increasingly reach beyond their area of expertise to make overgeneralized, lazy arguments about complex social issues as they become more famous. being famous makes you dumber.

What lazy arguments? I also did like him better before fame, but mostly people attack because they don't want to hear 'intellectuals' (he never call himself that) simplify things. Yeah, well if there's something's intellectuals need to do more nowadaya it is exactly that. I think they don't mainly because they're all specialist while he s more like a classic polymath type, who can synthesize things.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
What lazy arguments? I also did like him better before fame, but mostly people attack because they don't want to hear 'intellectuals' (he never call himself that) simplify things. Yeah, well if there's something's intellectuals need to do more nowadaya it is exactly that. I think they don't mainly because they're all specialist while he s more like a classic polymath type, who can synthesize things.

the vids version posted for one.

i'm not interested in defending post modernism but those videos make his criticisms look pretty unconvincing.
 

version

Well-known member
The problem with the polymath tag is one of the major criticisms I've seen time and time again is that he doesn't know what he's talking about outside of psychology.
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
He didn't do himself any favours in the Zizek debate. Did anyone catch that? Zizek definitely 'won' but it was a fairly affable affair all told.
 

chava

Well-known member
He didn't do himself any favours in the Zizek debate. Did anyone catch that? Zizek definitely 'won' but it was a fairly affable affair all told.

It was pretty crappy sure. Though for all the banality I still think his initial attacks on communism had merit.
 

chava

Well-known member
The problem with the polymath tag is one of the major criticisms I've seen time and time again is that he doesn't know what he's talking about outside of psychology.

With the specialization that's common now, being able to fuse different psychological schools in enough for me
 

chava

Well-known member
the vids version posted for one.

i'm not interested in defending post modernism but those videos make his criticisms look pretty unconvincing.

His argument goes that postmodernism is basically just relativism (not necessarily applauding it though, he is wrong here), and he claims we are not wired, even hardwired, for that. Quite the contrary.
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
It was pretty crappy sure. Though for all the banality I still think his initial attacks on communism had merit.

Yeah and Zizek is simply better at doing that live stuff. Off the cuff. Playful. Win over the crowd. Get the jabs in. But in the end I think he warmed to Peterson somewhat. Might give it a rewatch. There were some nice moments.
 

chava

Well-known member
Yeah and Zizek is simply better at doing that live stuff. Off the cuff. Playful. Win over the crowd. Get the jabs in. But in the end I think he warmed to Peterson somewhat. Might give it a rewatch. There were some nice moments.

Peterson is best solo. He is quite bad at interviewing in fact. I wonder how he is as a therapist.

Edit: his interview with Milo is quite..something..
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
His entire shtick is that people need to forget about silly things like activism and get their own houses in order. Turns out he's a drug addled lunatic with insane ideas about diet and health. He's in no position to be preaching to anyone.

to be fair activism is not the class struggle and the more people realised this the less of a abject state we would be in. it's a diluted 'noble proles' framework which puts way too much emphasis on subjective factors and hence we return back to idealism without conducting a ruthless critique of everything existing.

Chava is right in that Peterson's opposite is Sam Harris, but why should we care? let the middle classes fight it out amongst themselves.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Aren't you? Mr Vigilant Citizen?

not at all. the biggest error is to assume that an organic metaphysical bond existed between the ruled and the rulers in pre-capitalist times. social engineering has existed for millennia. it does not scare me at all.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Who's doing cross disciplinary work for the layman to understand but him?
He is genuinely right about what to do with the alt-right types. It's a masculinity crisis, but not how people usually think
His defence for free speech is much much deeper and interesting than anything else
He is an icocnoclast on almost every topic : his views on DMT, fascism, music, ADHD, technology, dependency etc
Doesn't any away from any topic and willing to stick his head out

etc

how can you defend something as ineffable as free speech? It's like trying to defend the existence of God. Free speech is just religion for people who have lost their christian/judeo/islamic cosmology.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
everyone criticises Erdogan in turkey, even AKP loyalists. they just know where to gob off and where to shut their trap. So to then argue that the same dynamics don't take place in the west is foolish.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
alt right isn't a masculinity crisis either. JP is far closer to the woke leftists than he'd like to admit. he's closer to the transactivists (who called him out) and postmodernists than he'd like to admit.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
it's just a scene. a pathetic scene. fascists used to kill 20 people a day in istanbul in the late 70s. these cunts can't even leave their mums basements to get a cup of coffee. it's not a masculinity crisis at all it's just liberals realising that they need to go back to good old American nationalism.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
to defend him or to condemn him is to partake in that very spectacle. not that I'm saying I'm immune from the spectacle, I live in a spectacle society after all. but there's no good in investing too much into a person who (hold your horses) is the necessary stepping stone the woke literati manufactured to pursue their dominance. A bit like the way that remainers manufactured brexit and they are the ultimate victors.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I guess for him that's one and the same thing.

yep. and we go back to cosmological argument and give Sam Harris a victory. so he needs to smarten up and read Mulla Sadra:

1. There is existence
2. Existence is a perfection above which no perfection may be conceived
3. God is perfection and perfection in existence
4. Existence is a singular and simple reality; there is no metaphysical pluralism
5. That singular reality is graded in intensity in a scale of perfection (that is, a denial of a pure monism).
6. That scale must have a limit point, a point of greatest intensity and of greatest existence.
7. Hence God exists (= existence).
Thus the proof begins with the concept and reality of existence and of God and ends with it. It displays an apparent similarity with the argument for the existence of God by intensity or the limit case argument found in Aquinas and discussed in Miller 1996, and even more recently in some forms of the modal ontological argument (Nagasawa 2017, Speaks 2018).
Nevertheless, the Sadrian proof remains susceptible to the common criticisms of ontological proofs. It actually seems to be tautological. Because he argues that the reality of being eludes human ability to confine it to discourse, it is not perhaps surprising that the manhaj al-siddiqin is not in strictu sensu an apodeictic proof. In a perceptive gloss, Tabataba’i (d. 1981), the eminent philosopher and commentator, argues that Mulla Sadra does not provide a demonstration but rather an assertoric argument because in effect all proofs for the existence of God begin with his effects and deduce his existence as the cause of those effects. This is because existence is an a priori intuition that all sound intellects possess and within that intuition, the existence of a Necessary Being is logically necessary. Proofs for the existence of God, therefore, are not attempts at producing demonstrations that convince or even fulfil the scientific parameters within proof theory, but are mere reminders to what we already know in our souls and hence corroborate and support faith in the One. This perhaps why Mulla Sadra never refers to his argument as a ‘demonstration’ but as a way (manhaj) of understanding and as a thought experiment (tadhkira). Thus the ‘argument’ may be a useful means for the exposition of a theistic viewpoint but does not fall into the category of persuasion.

I.E: the same problems that Anselm's argument faced, which atheists are unable to deal with because that would take their enquiries from the realms of speculation into the realms of dirty politics.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mulla-sadra/
 
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