23
Jan
2018
Potpourri
==> The priority deadline is soon approaching if you want to apply for a PhD fellowship to work with us at the Free Market Institute (at Texas Tech). Details here.
==> I offer a useful suggestion to Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson.
==> I may have already blogged this but: Not all GDP is created equal.
==> Dan Sanchez joins the backlash against the backlash (sic) against Jordan Peterson.
==> Speaking of which, here’s the interview that’s gotten some 3 millions views by this point. I actually don’t think this interviewer was as bad as Peterson’s fans had led me to believe.
Bob,
So you’re saying you think Peterson was advocating we organize our societies along the lines of lobsters?
haha!
Bob,
So you’re saying you think the interviewer has the skills, integrity, and looks of a lobster, and thus should be boiled alive and eaten? Wow. Just… wow.
You said, ” I actually don’t think this interviewer was as bad as Peterson’s fans had led me to believe.”
I had the same reaction as you.
At first I thought Cathy was playing devils advocate for journalistic sake, roughly speaking, and performing moderately well. And then she became fairly combative and ideological so I gave her the benefit of the doubt and thought, “well hell, she has to be doing a bit here because the strawmen she keeps pitching are becoming more absurd as time goes on.” And then at the end when he “puts her on her ass”, so to speak, you immediately realize she’s just insanely ideologically compromised. So I came out of this interview thinking she actually came off worse than I had expected from the headline I saw describing it, not only because Peterson was devastating intellectually, but just the way he handled it compared to how she handled herself.
Jordan Peterson himself had some thoughts on the interview and its aftermath.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK2-xYyNpYk
The subject of the interview of itself is covered in the first 32 mins or so;
Peterson has a truly breathtaking ability to articulate and defend his worldview and expose postmodernism as the fashionable nonsense that it is. But, when Sanchez says those alt-right people are driven by resentment and Peterson isn’t like that at all, I’m rather inclined to say no, Peterson projects a fair amount of resentment. His resentment may be well justified but it’s there, It comes through in his latest podcast on the Lindsey Shepherd affair: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YWVmDSMl30s. I won’t pretend for a second to know how to improve Peterson’s presentation but I bring this resentment issue up because I feel I can’t point my progressive friends to much of Peterson’s podcasts or YouTube clips because my friends will just write him off as just another angry white dude. Sure, that’s really only my friends fault for emphasizing form over substance but the angry white guy demeanor isn’t projected by others I’m inclined to use as support material. Bob Murphy to name one,
I actually don’t think this interviewer was as bad as Peterson’s fans had led me to believe.
You also didn’t think Judge Napolitano was badly treated on Jon Stewart’s show.
Peterson: There’s this idea that hierarchical structures are a sociological construct of the Western patriarchy. And that is so untrue that it’s almost unbelievable. I use the lobster as an example: We diverged from lobsters evolutionarily history about 350 million years ago. And lobsters exist in hierarchies. They have a nervous system attuned to the hierarchy. And that nervous system runs on serotonin just like ours. The nervous system of the lobster and the human being is so similar that anti-depressants work on lobsters. And it’s part of my attempt to demonstrate that the idea of hierarchy has absolutely nothing to do with sociocultural construction, which it doesn’t.
Newman: Let me get this straight. You’re saying that we should organize our societies along the lines of the lobsters?
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/putting-monsterpaint-onjordan-peterson/550859/
“And it’s part of my attempt to demonstrate that the idea of hierarchy has absolutely nothing to do with sociocultural construction, which it doesn’t.”
If we accept that the idea of hierarchy has nothing to do with sociocultural construction that does not disprove that the hierarchy we actually have very much does have something to do with sociocultural construction.
A charitable view if the question would be that it was using irony to point out that Peterson was talking about what the interviewer considered to be the wrong thing and was missing the point. On this reading the question does make sense.
I may have a listen to this, although I wasted quite a bot of time on his lectures.
I have just heard an interesting program explaining why our nervous system that is shared by lobsters leads us to exhibit bias based on our sociocultural constructs. Have a listen.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09pl66d
Peterson: Tide pods are absolutely not safe for consumption.
Newman: So you’re saying they’re delicious with milk?
https://tinyurl.com/y9d47mfh