The OP has persuasively petitioned to have this thread reopened on the grounds that it has been educational and productive for two months now. As such, we are retracting the previous mod post.
In order to avoid having the same discussions ongoing in separate threads, and to avoid giving Jordan Peterson more attention than he deserves, we ask that his frequent outrageous statements be contained here. This is an exception to our rule on megathreads. A separate thread on JP should only be created for exceptional and unusual news.
We apologize for the prior confusion.
Update [Sep. 8, 2018]: At the bottom of this OP I added links to an on going exhaustive series of essays by Dan Dolderman, a colleague of Jordan Peterson in the Department of Psychology at University of Toronto.
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The following is a great article against Jordan B. Peterson, Professor of Psychology at University of Toronto.
// The Intellectual That We Deserve
By Nathan J. Robinson, a Phd student in Sociology and Social Policy at Harvard University.
Please read the entire article and the articles below (maybe even the entire thread as well to avoid going around in circles) before posting and wondering why Jordan Peterson has been receiving criticism.
A few select quotes below since the article is long.
If you want to appear very profound and convince people to take you seriously, but have nothing of value to say, there is a tried and tested method. First, take some extremely obvious platitude or truism. Make sure it actually does contain some insight, though it can be rather vague. Something like "if you're too conciliatory, you will sometimes get taken advantage of" or "many moral values are similar across human societies." Then, try to restate your platitude using as many words as possible, as unintelligibly as possible, while never repeating yourself exactly. Use highly technical language drawn from many different academic disciplines, so that no one person will ever have adequate training to fully evaluate your work. Construct elaborate theories with many parts. Draw diagrams. Use italics liberally to indicate that you are using words in a highly specific and idiosyncratic sense. Never say anything too specific, and if you do, qualify it heavily so that you can always insist you meant the opposite. Then evangelize: speak as confidently as possible, as if you are sharing God's own truth. Accept no criticisms: insist that any skeptic has either misinterpreted you or has actually already admitted that you are correct. Talk as much as possible and listen as little as possible. Follow these steps, and your success will be assured. (It does help if you are male and Caucasian.)
Jordan Peterson appears very profound and has convinced many people to take him seriously. Yet he has almost nothing of value to say. This should be obvious to anyone who has spent even a few moments critically examining his writings and speeches, which are comically befuddled, pompous, and ignorant. They are half nonsense, half banality. In a reasonable world, Peterson would be seen as the kind of tedious crackpot that one hopes not to get seated next to on a train.
But we do not live in a reasonable world...
Peterson's answer is that people figure out how to act by turning to a common set of stories, which contain "archetypes" that have developed over the course of our species' evolution. He believes that by studying myths, we can see values and frameworks shared across cultures, and can therefore understand the structures that guide us.
But here I am already giving Peterson's work a more coherent summary than it actually deserves. And after all, if "many human stories have common moral lessons" was his point, he would have been saying something so obvious that nobody would think to credit it as a novel insight. Peterson manages to spin it out over hundreds of pages, and expand it into an elaborate, unprovable, unfalsifiable, unintelligible theory that encompasses everything from the direction of history, to the meaning of life, to the nature of knowledge, to the structure of human decision-making, to the foundations of ethics. (A good principle to remember is that if a book appears to be about everything, it's probably not really about anything.)
_ _ _ _ _What's important about this kind of writing is that it can easily appear to contain useful insight, because it says many things that either are true or "feel kind of true," and does so in a way that makes the reader feel stupid for not really understanding. (Many of the book's reviews on Amazon contain sentiments like: I am not sure I understood it, but it's absolutely brilliant.) It's not that it's empty of content; in fact, it's precisely because some of it does ring true that it is able to convince readers of its importance. It's certainly right that some procedures work in one situation but not another. It's right that good moral systems have to be able to think about the future in figuring out what to do in the present. But much of the rest is language so abstract that it cannot be proved or disproved. (The old expression "what's new in it isn't true, and what's true isn't new" applies here.)
The next article is by a Psychology Professor who vouched for Peterson to work at University of Toronto.
By Bernard Schiff, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at University of Toronto.
Select quotes.
Remarkably, the 50 students always showed up at 9 a.m. and were held in rapt attention for an hour. Jordan was a captivating lecturer — electric and eclectic — cherry-picking from neuroscience, mythology, psychology, philosophy, the Bible and popular culture. The class loved him. But, as reported by that one astute student, Jordan presented conjecture as statement of fact. I expressed my concern to him about this a number of times, and each time Jordan agreed. He acknowledged the danger of such practices, but then continued to do it again and again, as if he could not control himself.
He was a preacher more than a teacher.
Jordan has a complex relationship to freedom of speech. He wants to effectively silence those left-wing professors by keeping students away from their courses because the students may one day become "anarchical social revolutionaries" who may bring upon us disruption and violence. At the same time he was advocating cutting funds to universities that did not protect free speech on their campuses. He defended the rights of "alt right" voices to speak at universities even though their presence has given rise to disruption and violence. For Jordan, it appears, not all speech is equal, and not all disruption and violence are equal, either.
If Jordan is not a true free speech warrior, then what is he? The email sent through his wife's account described Bill 28, the parenting bill, as part of the "transgender agenda" and claimed it was "misleadingly" called "All Families are Equal." Misleading? What same-sex families and transgender people have in common is their upset of the social order. In Maps of Meaning, Jordan's first book, he is exercised by the breakdown of the social order and the chaos that he believes would result. Jordan is fighting to maintain the status quo to keep chaos at bay, or so he believes. He is not a free speech warrior. He is a social order warrior.
_ _ _ _ _He has done disservice to the professoriate. He cheapens the intellectual life with self-serving misrepresentations of important ideas and scientific findings. He has also done disservice to the institutions which have supported him. He plays to "victimhood" but also plays the victim.
[New! On going] The most extensive critique to date by an academic and peer.
//Prologue - A personal note
Foreplay - Agreeing on freedom of speech
Part 1 Problems with fundamental assumptions
-Subsection 1: Foolishness as a Lack of Balance and Contextual Sensitivity
-Subsection 2: Philosophical Foolishness
-Subsection 3: Theoretical Foolishness
-Subsection 4: Moral Foolishness
Part 2 More Problems with Fundamental Assumptions
-Subsection 1: The Naturalistic Fallacy
-Subsection 2: Bear Food Reasoning in Darwinian/ Functionalist Clothing
-Subsection 3: Issues of Scale
Part 3: The Bucko Mistake
-Subsection 1: Literally Terrible Advice
-Subsection 2: Metaphorically Terrible Advice
Part 4: The Problem of Collective Assholeification
By Dan Dolderman, Professor of Psychology at University of Toronto
Select quotes.
So, I think I have a good sense of what Jordan has said, and what he means. And I will try to convey as clearly as I can, the important points of divergence. I think I have sufficiently expressed, here and in other places, my appreciation with much of his teachings, but it's time to look at the other side. I think some of it is, unintentionally I'm sure, downright dangerous and could cause harm. Which is why I feel it's necessary to talk about this.
Table of Contents.
Prologue: (i.e., the part after the Table of Contents…)
Foreplay) Agreeing on freedom of speech: yayyy!!!
Part 1) Problems with Fundamental Assumptions: "In this corner, Dominance hierarchies!!! (crowd goes WIIIIILLLLLLLD!!); and in this corner, Compassion!!! (Woooo…..????…*pin drop*)"
Part 2) More Problems with Fundamental Assumptions:
A) the naturalistic fallacy;
B) issues of scale
Part 3) The Bucko Mistake: why telling Bucko to straighten his shoulders, clean his room, and sort himself out can cause bigger problems
Part 4) The Problem of Collective Assholeification: the much bigger, much subtler, but even more important mistake in telling Bucko to sort himself out
Part 5) The Perfect House Problem: why being told not to try to change the world until you have your house in perfect order is, potentially, at least as murderous as Post-modern NeoMarxism and all that…
Part 6) The Myth of "The myth of white/male privilege": Hi, my name is Dan, and I'm a white male. "Hiiii Dannn". Smiles and nods all around while I take my seat in the circle.
Part 7) Psychology at the Ending of the World: Section A:"truth" (JBP-style) and collective action: The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help us God.
Part 8) Psychology at the Ending of the World:Section B: Postmodernism: Why Rules are Agents of Chaos; and 'Postmodernism' is the antidote
My point is, while Jordan can go ahead and argue that the Gulag is a death-sentence for socialism, another real smart and book learnin' person, like Chomsky, can also legitimately argue, with lots of facts and theoretical subtlety and vast knowledge of history, that Jordan is wrong.
I feel like I am in BizarroWorld where nothing makes sense, because I know that Jordan knows everything I am about to say. He even says most of it himself in his own academic work. But then, it is as though he sweeps half of it under the carpet, even derogating and ridiculing it, to emphasize the other half, and this is where I believe a deep Foolishness has crept into his overall public narrative.
But the way to deal with these areas of "weakness" is NOT with an overly stiff "sort yourself out, straighten your shoulders and face your damn existential responsibility!" type of approach. (That's part of it, yes, and helpful to a point, and I already talked about this at length (see Prologue). But taken too far and applied unskilfully (i.e., without wisdom), this becomes terrible advice. Of course, the way to deal with areas of weakness is ALSO NOT a simplistic, compassion-all-the-way kind of approach that lets people just sit around feeling sorry for themselves, virtue signalling while they wait for the next handout.
The right way, is to balance these approaches skillfully. I see very little of this reasoning in Jordan's work, and far more of it that holds up 'sorting yourself out' as the overwhelming solution, to the point that he derides proponents of, or arguments for, compassion. This is simply not based on 'facts', but is ideologically driven, and this is why I think it is Theoretically Foolish.
Jordan warns frequently against such people, and feeds into a narrative that sees "the Left" as just hypocritical, resentful pricks, throwing temper tantrums and trying to bring down the successful and get stuff for themselves that they didn't actually work for. Jordan seems to believe that exposing this apparent hypocrisy of "the Left" is a really important thing to do. This is worth looking at carefully, because it is often weaponized, you might say, and used inaccurately in many cases, to disparage activists and people genuinely concerned and trying to enact positive change around environmental and social justice issues.
As a result, we have hardwired systems not only for Dominance and aggression and such, but also for pro-social qualities of kindness and empathy and compassion and altruism and generally-not-being-a-dick. We see this biological embeddedness of human "goodness" in mountains and mountains of evidence that links social outcomes to individual outcomes, through far more systems that merely the lobster-based dominance-serotonin systems.
In short, compassion (and 'self-compassion', which is really just part of 'compassion' anyway), should be the nucleus, the seed of the person's "highest ideals", in the first place. It's better to care about, feel deeply about, be moved by suffering and act to reduce it, than to emotionally distance yourself from it, keep your nose to the grindstone, and allow 'evil' to go unchallenged. It's better to act through a lens of predominantly caring about others, than to pursue your own self-based goals without regard to the consequences. Greed is not good, despite the passionately-defended faith of much of modern economics that assumes otherwise. The argument that individuals striving for success produces a better world for all, a kind of moral invisible hand that propels humans ever-upwards, is just not true (see Part 6: The myth of "the myth of white/male privilege").
There are many different ways in which Naturalistic Fallacies creep into and guide Jordan's arguments, and when you expose their interwoven tendrils, I think the lobster-story just flat out falls apart. It is a highly misleading guide to "human nature", and leads to reasoning errors that result in often-bad advice. The Valiant Individual Hero as a paragon of human goodness, is just a myth; rather than being The Truth (or even Jordan's version of truth as he explained to Sam Harris). You have not been being told about the archetype of the Hero; you have instead been misled by the archetype of the Trickster. We will discuss this in more depth in the next essay: Part 3: The Bucko Mistake.
Jordan's book, 12 Rules for Life, is mostly nonsense. It gives generally questionable (read, "bad") advice, which in some key ways, is likely to be harmful. This is what I think most needs to be carefully considered because as a general Rule of Life, I'd say "First, do no harm" is a good place to start, and Jordan's advice fails on that account in ways I think are irresponsible. It does have some good pieces of advice and interesting insights, but so does literally any adult with whom you sit down in a bar and talk to for half an hour. (Probably kids too….although why are you sitting down with kids in a bar?)
"12 Rules for Life" is a puzzling mixture of science, pseudoscience, common sense folk wisdom, classic Dad-advice, surprisingly-misinterpreted philosophy and Biblical references, and a paradoxical lack of critical reflection. This is precisely the opposite of what "The Antidote to Chaos" should be. I have met no small number of psychologists, educators and others who express mystified frustration that 'questionable' psychology is misinforming people in such large numbers that they find themselves having to repeatedly, effortfully, indeed exhaustingly, challenge and disabuse people of beliefs that they've adopted from Jordan. I've heard from therapists who struggle with their clients who've adopted dysfunctional and self-defeating beliefs, parents express concern about his parenting advice, educators talking about others bringing what they see as harmful practices into their classrooms while citing Jordan-logic, and a wide array of people expressing their concern at how "people they know" are exhibiting distressing, demeaning and disappointing behaviours, seemingly as a result of becoming a "Peterson fanboy".
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