Quotulatiousness

May 11, 2018

“65% of managers add zero or negative net value to the company” Jordan Peterson

Filed under: Business — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

TheArchangel911
Published on 21 Sep 2017

to see the full lecture go to https://youtu.be/Q7GKmznaqsQ

In this lecture, he talks about the thorny problem of predicting performance: academic, industrial, creative and entrepreneurial); about the practical utility of such prediction, in the business and other environments; about the economic value of accurate prediction (in hiring, placement and promotion) — which is incredibly high.

Intelligence (psychometrically measured IQ) is the best predictor of performance in complex, ever changing environments. Conscientiousness is the (next) best predictor, particularly in the military, in school and in conservative businesses. Agreeable people make better caretakers; disagreeable people, better disciplinarians and negotiators (within reasonable bounds). Open people are artistic, creative and entrepreneurial. Extraverts are good socially. Introverts work well in isolation. People low in neuroticism have higher levels of tolerance for stress (but may be less sensitive to real signs of danger).

Match the career you pursue to your temperament, rather than trying to adjust the latter. Although some adjustment is possible, there are powerful biological determinants of the five personality dimensions and IQ (particularly in environments where differences are allowed to flourish).

May 7, 2018

“Playing Pied Piper for a lost generation of lefty-baiting edgelords has given an ambitious academic incentive to embrace his inner troll”

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the June issue of Reason, Matt Welch looks at the Jordan Peterson phenomenon and notes that he’s not “the second coming”:

“If you think tough men are dangerous,” University of Toronto psychologist and overnight YouTube superstar Jordan Peterson writes in his new book, “wait until you see what weak men are capable of.” It’s a warning shot for would-be social engineers trying to defang maleness and for Peterson’s startlingly large audience of young dudes teetering on the edge of nihilism. Perhaps it is also a subconscious caution to the author himself.

January 2018 was the month Jordan Peterson went from unknown to inescapable. The two reasons for that were a Channel 4 News (U.K.) exchange that went viral after an increasingly hostile and flustered female interviewer failed to hang an unflappable Peterson as a misogynist, and then the appearance one week later of his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Random House Canada), which immediately shot up bestseller lists throughout the English-speaking world. “He has skyrocketed from relative obscurity to international celebrity in a couple of weeks,” Psychology Today noted with wonder.

As befits a lecturer fixated on the “tightrope” between chaos and order, good and evil, yin and yang, “the Jordan Peterson moment” (so christened by New York Times columnist David Brooks) has produced an almost perfectly polarized response. Celeb psychologist Jonathan Haidt called Peterson “one of the few fearless professors”; Houman Barekat in the L.A. Review of Books deemed him a peddler of “toxic masculinity” and “reactionary chauvinism.” He is “the most important and influential Canadian thinker since Marshall McLuhan” (Camille Paglia), or an “an intellectual fraud who uses a lot of words to say almost nothing” (Nathan J. Robinson).

What is indisputable — and what makes the Peterson pop phenomenon more interesting than the quality of his work — is the way it has galvanized a generation of wayward young men, including many who have clustered around the “alt-right.” The numbers are staggering, and vaulting upward by the minute: As of early April, there were 49 million views of his YouTube videos, 1,008,000 subscribers to his channel (plus 584,000 Twitter and 256,000 Facebook followers), and, most impressively, an estimated $90,000 a month donated to his account on the crowdfunding site Patreon. By Peterson’s own reckoning, the solid majority of his sold-out audiences on the lecture circuit are males between the ages of 20 and 35; their gratitude for his “grow the hell up” message has moved the man to tears on several public occasions.

Peterson self-identifies as a classical liberal, frequently retweets content from the Cato Institute, and forthrightly criticizes the alt-right for playing the “collectivist game” of identity politics. Yet he’s a lightning rod among libertarians too. I first became aware of the psychologist last fall when his name came up serially at a private gathering of libertarian activists anxious about the real and perceived overlap between their world and the reactionary right. One participant counseled keeping Peterson at arm’s length, lest “we end up with another cult-leader libertarian.” Taking the opposite view at the website Being Libertarian was Adam Barsouk, who argued that “Peterson is able to do something no libertarian commentator before him could: he can argue that a freer, less coddled way of life is not just ethical, but also adaptive, better for humanity as a whole.”

Peterson’s popularity has demonstrated the happy fact that you can reach illiberal ears with a message that contains some classical liberal content. But he has gotten there not via persuasive argument about intellectual ideas but through the top-down, teacher-student, authoritarian exhortations of self-help. Playing Pied Piper for a lost generation of lefty-baiting edgelords has given an ambitious academic incentive to embrace his inner troll.

May 4, 2018

Jordan Peterson – Winston Churchill predicted the Death of our Civilization

Filed under: Education, Health, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Dose of Truth
Published on 9 Apr 2018

Without tradition or culture and the diligence to keep it alive our value systems and lessons learned by our ancestors will be soon forgotten and Western civilization will descend in to chaos as a result of the forgotten history and disregard for its tradition and value structure. Jordan Peterson sits down with former Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson and they discuss this topic and Jordan Peterson provides us with an education on concepts in psychology like memory and its function. John Anderson starts off with words of Churchill, as Jordan Peterson unpacks the statement made.

April 18, 2018

Stossel: Jordan Peterson on Finding Meaning in Responsibility

ReasonTV
Published on 17 Apr 2018

Jordan Peterson is an unlikely YouTube celebrity. The Canadian psychologist lectures about things like responsibility. Yet millions of young people watch his videos, line up to hear his speeches, and buy his book 12 Rules for Life. It was number one on the Amazon bestseller list for a month.

———

John Stossel asks: What could make a book about responsibility take off?

“People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom,” Peterson tells Stossel. “There’s just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.”

The other side of the story, according to Peterson, is that “it’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.”

Peterson instead advises: “Adopt responsibility for your own well-being, try to put your family together, try to serve your community, try to seek for eternal truth….That’s the sort of thing that can ground you in your life, enough so that you can withstand the difficulty of life.”

Many leftists hate Peterson. They attack him for saying people should be “dangerous.” Peterson explains to Stossel that he means people should have the capacity to be dangerous, but control it.

“People who teach martial arts know this full well,” Peterson says. “If you learn a martial art you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously you learn to control it.”

Advice about that, and responsibility, bring Peterson big audiences.

—–

The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.

March 26, 2018

Rick McGinnis on Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos

Filed under: Books, Education, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Peterson’s book and lecture series has been much in the news lately, so Rick McGinnis shares his thoughts, particularly about the message and intended audience for 12 Rules for Life:

It was probably inevitable that this sudden notoriety would create a demand for a book-length statement of principles from Peterson, and he obliged earlier this year with 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Deceptively packaged as a self-help tome, the book expands on a series of postings Peterson made on Quora, a crowdsourcing website that, instead of asking for money, invites its readers to contribute answers to questions posed by other readers.

The book’s structure is straightforward; after sketching in the origin of the dozen precepts, he states them at the outset of each chapter, explains them in varying degrees of complexity with examples from his practice as a clinical psychologist, anecdotes from his own life or – and this is proving to be most tantalizing – ruminations on quotes from history, philosophy, mythology or (most often of all) the Bible.

On the surface, Peterson’s edicts for a good life are self-evident: Stand straight; Obey the Golden Rule; Choose your friends wisely; Set yourself reasonable expectations; Raise your children well; Don’t be a hypocrite; Cherish meaning; Don’t lie; Listen before you speak; Choose your words carefully; Let children fail so they learn to succeed; Be kind to animals.

But lest you think that short paragraph should save anyone the price of the book, it has to be understood that we are at least a generation, perhaps several, from the point where these commonsensical statements were known, understood or accepted by any sane adult. We are, at the end of a century of phenomenal technological advances and cataclysmic history, sorely in need of a book-length exposition on phrases that you’d once expect to find on needlework samplers.

Early on and quite often, Peterson comes across with butt-clenching dread as the smartest-man-in-the-room, laying out the stories behind the facts, culled from his years of reading and research, with the force and volume of a firehose. He relies heavily on evolutionary biology to explain our hardwired need to create and find our place in hierarchies, with examples that distill our endlessly troubling social responses to bluff, authority, and even violence down to chemical and neurological mechanisms set in place way back in time with far less complex creatures (a scenario that’s easily satirized as “we are all lobsters”).

It’s been observed – and confirmed by Peterson – that the ideal audience for his book is young people in general and young men in particular. As a former young man, I can attest that being told by a wise older man, clearly on your side but unwilling to sugar coat the facts, that the bully and the big-man-on-campus are better armed than you are to jockey for status and fulfillment – the alpha lobsters, waving their claws around to appreciable effect – is very much less than comforting. Peterson’s ideal audience will have to endure the climb up a very steep hill of biological determinism to reach the far more hospitable plateau beyond.

I’m not saying Peterson is wrong. From the perspective of an older man, I’ve seen this lobster battle played out too many times to deny its plausibility. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t suggest that the ideologies that he decries, imagining that there is no biological determinism – not even the binary division of gender – or even a landscape governed by measurable standards or objective truth, is far more appealing to young people raised to believe in an ever-expanding entitlement of “rights” and a pursuit of “justice” that needs to triumph above history or biology.

It’s when Peterson tries to explain the philosophical and even theological roots of our cultural systems that things might be rewarding, for both young and older readers. He has a core group of texts that he relies upon, with particular emphasis on Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn on the modern side, and while he will evoke ancient mythology – the gods of Egypt make several appearances, though even he can’t overcome the essential strangeness of their myths – he reaps more rewardingly from the Bible, especially in one passage where he analyzes the difference between the Old and New Testament God.

March 14, 2018

“[Jordan Peterson has] been described as ‘rightwing’ or ‘far right’ by journalists who have apparently forgotten how to think”

Filed under: Australia, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Guardian, Gareth Hutchens discusses the rise of Jordan Peterson:

Professor Jordan B Peterson is not yet a household name in Australia.

But he’s in the middle of a speaking tour that has found an enthusiastic audience. All four speaking events have sold out, including his Sydney and Brisbane shows this week. Organisers know they could have booked more venues.

Why are Australians paying to hear him talk?

Peterson loathes identity politics, rails against postmodernism and “neo-Marxism”, and despises gender studies and political correctness. He asserts the biological differences between men and women, and delivers pep talks on how to live a meaningful life and how to find the right partner.

He gives lectures on the truths embedded in myths and legends that are thousands of years old.

To appreciate where he’s coming from, it helps to be familiar with Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and their premonition that the death of mass belief in God would lead to nihilism and/or the rise of totalitarian value systems as alternatives.

I’ve watched Peterson’s online lectures for a while now, after he became an internet celebrity in late 2016.

It’s been fascinating witnessing media outlets trying to come to terms with him. He’s been described as “rightwing” or “far right” by journalists who have apparently forgotten how to think.

Does he belong to the far right because he loathes political correctness, identity politics and postmodernism? Noam Chomsky has made similar criticisms for decades. As did Christopher Hitchens.

Is it rightwing to lament the damage done to the left by the increasing tendency of leftist students on North American campuses to harass people who challenge their ideological orthodoxy? Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist and physician from Yale University, who is a self-confessed progressive, says he can’t understand their behaviour. Bret Weinstein, a former biology professor of Evergreen State College, says he can’t understand it either. He considers himself “deeply progressive” but he says the left is “eating itself.”

Peterson deserves to be taken seriously.

February 18, 2018

Nitay Arbel on Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life

Filed under: Books, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

A guest post at According to Hoyt:

Those looking for an ‘alt-right’ manifesto will be sorely disappointed. Peterson actually says explicitly that on some economic issues (e.g., income disparity) he leans somewhat left, and elsewhere in the book laments that the cultural demonization of anything masculine is (as he describes it) causing a backlash, in terms of a resurgence in popularity of European parties he calls ‘far right’ or even ‘fascist’. (For Trump, to be clear, he uses the term ‘populist’, which undeniably fits.)

Nor will you find a camouflaged Christian revivalist tract here, as some claim. To be sure, Peterson heavily draws on the Bible and particularly on the Christian New Testament for quotes, but there are plenty of references to Eastern religious philosophies as well, particularly Taoism (‘yang vs. yin’, which here becomes ‘order vs. chaos’) and classical Buddhism (the concept that life is suffering). Among Christian theologians, Kierkegaard’s “act of faith” comes up repeatedly. During an interview, he was asked point-blank “Are you a Christian, and do you believe in G-d?” His intriguing answer: “I think the proper response to that is No, but I’m afraid He might exist.”

Nor is it some sort of “EST”-type (quasi-)cult manual, with Peterson setting himself up as a guru.

Moreover, it does not purport to be a reasoned scholarly tome of conservative philosophy. This is where Peter Hitchens (brother of the late Christopher) gets a little dyspeptic in his review in The Spectator, as he found it wanting there. http://archive.is/4eQIE (h/t: masgramondou)

David Solway, in his much more sympathetic article on PJMedia, hits the nail on the head, I believe. https://pjmedia.com/trending/jordan-peterson-phenomenon/ Like Solway, I find it hard to identify a single new idea in the book — pretty much everything Peterson says would be familiar to those of us who have been reared on Scripture and the Great Books.

But we have reached the level of intellectual corruption where, as George Orwell put it, the first duty of any thinking person is the restatement of the obvious. And that, Peterson does very well indeed. The book is a coherent whole, an engaging read, yea even a compelling ‘recap’ to the well-read. Peterson makes his discourse more engaging through extensive illustrations from psychological research, his own clinical practice, neuroscience, and his own life experience. Most importantly, it will bring wisdom of the ages (and of rational-empirical thinking) to a millennial generation drowning in derp and denial of objective reality. To those who, if you will pardon me the phrase, “know not the gods of the copybook headings”.

I just finished reading the book myself, and I largely agree with this summary.

January 29, 2018

“… those I know in the alt-right crowd dislike [Jordan Peterson] more than the honest progressives I know”

Zachary Slayback tries to discover why so many intellectuals dislike Canadian psychologist Jordan B. Peterson:

I’ve spent the last few years thinking about how to upend higher education and have worked with some leading entrepreneurs and thinkers in this space. Continually, we come back to the question of liberal arts education and its value (remember, I studied philosophy!). Some people are too quick to dismiss liberal arts education as useless and not worth the time. Instead, they insist on purely vocational education. Yet many of the most successful and happiest individuals I know are widely read (rarely because of their college courses), can discuss ideas from Aristotle to Jung to Jacobs with you, and love the idea of entertaining big ideas.

I visited Peterson’s lectures and found them to be nuanced, intricate, and to jump well between clinical experience, psychological research (most of which was well-validated, hard to do in psychology), and Jungian myth interpretation. When he released his Bible lecture series, I found myself, for the first time since I was a child, intimately listening about the ideas that go into religion and how these ideas surface elsewhere in the culture. More than a decade of skepticism towards religious texts due to their shallow readings and uses for the Joel Osteens of the world melted away.

His lectures rarely touch on politics in any capacity. When it gets brought up, he’s quick to note that he does not oppose calling trans individuals by their pronouns but that he opposes having his language dictated by a central political committee. This seems commonsensical to me. Part of what made the American and Canadian traditions so egalitarian is their rejection of forced speech and titles.

And for those who listen to Peterson, he bridges any kind of ideological gap (in fact, those I know in the alt-right crowd dislike him more than the honest progressives I know). Peterson’s worldview is a classical liberal rejection of collectivism (an ideology that killed more than 50 million people in the 20th century alone) while simultaneously not falling into an atomized view of the individual relative to his culture.

Just last week, I met with an acquaintance in San Francisco, the Mecca of American political correctness, who described herself as a “liberal democrat type,” who had listened to and met Peterson at a company event. She admitted that she couldn’t read into his politics and found his talk compelling about the nature of the world, men in it today, and why people like Peterson must appeal to so many people outside the San Francisco and Washington DC bubbles. She was explicit in saying that she was neither a libertarian nor a conservative and still Peterson motivated her to introspect, read into Jungian archetypes, and better understand the culture that shapes the world.

She’s not alone. I regularly speak to friends and acquaintances from across the political spectrum who find value in Peterson’s talks. These are people years out of college (or who never went) who now pick up classics like Dostoyevsky, Jung, Neumann, and even the Bible with a critical intellectual lens. Peterson regularly talks about and shares letters from fans who admit that his moralistic talks inspired them to pull themselves together and “sort themselves out” by figuring out what they want from life and pursuing that. r/JordanPeterson (yes, he has his own subreddit) is filled to the brim with stories of people saying how Peterson helped them get control of their lives and navigate the world.

I’ve bought but not yet read Peterson’s recent book, 12 Rules for Life. It’s not the sort of thing I usually read, so I’m not quite sure what to expect (Indigo says it’ll be delivered tomorrow).

January 20, 2018

Lindsay Shepherd discovered “that not only are critiques of social justice not taught, they aren’t even to be acknowledged”

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Uri Harris writes about the trainwreck Jordan B. Peterson interview on UK Channel 4 with Cathy Newman, where Newman appeared to be unable to engage with his arguments, as though she was previously unaware of their existence. Harris also briefly touches on the background to the WLU kerfuffle with Lindsay Shepherd which I think explains a lot about how that incident was triggered:

When Lindsay Shepherd was reprimanded last year by three Wilfrid Laurier faculty members for showing her class a video clip from a televised debate on gender pronouns, Shepherd’s professor Nathan Rambukkana wrote an apology drawing attention to his teaching style. He wrote: “[T]here is the question of teaching from a social justice perspective, which my course does attempt to do.”

When I contacted Lindsay Shepherd earlier this month, she told me that she didn’t know Rambukkana taught from an explicitly “social justice” perspective. However, after going through the syllabus, she realised he had talked about it in his Week 2 lecture, and that the reading material that week also mentioned it. Yet even then, she said, she was unaware how loaded the term “social justice” is and how it often aligns with censorship and one-sidedness. Her response when I asked her whether she recognised various social justice terms was:

    My undergraduate degree is in Communication from Simon Fraser University, and the gist of my program was learning about power; mostly power as it manifests in media and media industries. I was very accustomed to talking about feminism, racism, and oppression. Less so the other terms you mention, which I only became more acquainted with in my graduate degree program, and many of them as a result of the Laurier incident — i.e. I was unaware of any substantial critique of intersectionality, gender theory, and critical theory, as we were only taught them from the “social justice perspective.”

Shepherd had lots of exposure to a social justice perspective, but only from within the perspective itself. She was taught social justice beliefs but had never been taught to critique those beliefs. When she came across a professor who did just that—Jordan Peterson—she found it interesting and new, even while disagreeing with him. (She later came to realise he may have been right about the legislation he was criticising.) So she shared a clip of the debate with her students, and only afterwards did she discover that not only are critiques of social justice not taught, they aren’t even to be acknowledged.

The methodology underpinning much of the social justice perspective is known as critical theory. What’s notable about critical theory is that it specifically distinguishes itself from ‘traditional’ theories through its emphasis on criticism. This makes the apparent unwillingness of its adherents to engage with criticism themselves especially noteworthy. When you explicitly emphasise your criticality and base your theory on a commitment to look beneath appearances and see things as they really are, you don’t get to be selectively critical.

« Newer Posts

Powered by WordPress