Wait, is Jordan Peterson as terrible as people say?

Several commenters recommended I watch a 3 hour long anti-Jordan Peterson video, so I had a look...

I recently released an interview with Jordan Peterson, and as usual he’s a quite polarizing figure.

There were several of the typical “unsubbed” comments, but a couple people actually recommended a specific video that highlights why they have such a negative reaction to Peterson’s presence.

I thought it would be interesting to see where the opposition was coming from, so I took a look at the video:

Before we get started, let me point out that I don’t agree with everything Peterson says. He’s said a couple things here and there that made me go:

In fact we have a major disagreement. He’s religious, I’m not. I also think he gets a bit too intense at times when he talks about the “terrifying” nature of life, for example. Sometimes he says things that, if you’re unwilling to hear him out, he sounds stupid.

“So then when I look at a story like ‘Cain and Abel’ I think, well, the question ‘Did that happen?’ begs the question, ‘What do you mean by happen?’”

All this said, I think he has plenty of worthwhile things to say. He may take a while to explain certain things, but personally I feel like it’s usually worth the wait. I can definitely understand if he turns off people because they feel he’s too meandering, or they don’t like how intense he gets about some things. Fair enough.

Peterson speaking, dangerously of course.

But it still baffles me that some people accuse him of being “dangerous,” or a “fascist,” “bigot,” “Nazi” and so on. I would assume they have only seen misrepresentations of him or made snap judgements about his comments totally removed from context. Though, I’m willing to be proven wrong.

Associating Peterson with the super Nazi character “Red Skull” in the Captain America comic book was pretty ridiculous.

I had a look at the Some More News (SMN) video that many commenters recommended. I looked at the length and had high hopes for it. It’s a full 3 hours long, so I thought that there has to be some pretty damning stuff in there. I was expecting many examples of Jordan getting things flat out wrong, presenting shaky logic or having some completely unredeemable takes. However, most of the bulk of the video is just enthusiastic disdain and attempts to zing Peterson.

“[Peterson has the] ability to state something that was complete hogwash with a level of confidence that only an old white guy could get away with.”

Because of how many times the host blatantly misrepresents Peterson, it reminded me a lot of Peterson’s interview with Cathy Newman. For those unfamiliar, “So what you’re saying is…” became a bit of a meme because Newman said several times throughout the interview so what you’re saying is… followed by a mischaracterization of Peterson’s point. Peterson would often reply: ‘I didn’t say that. What I said was…’

Meme.

This post covers the first hour of the Some More News video. I may take a look at more of it later on, but I’ll take a break here as this post is already twice the length of my typical Substack post.

Table of Contents

1) Is Peterson wrong about Lobsters and hierarchies?
1a) Peterson and the Lobsters
1b) SMN claims Peterson thinks all social hierarchies are ‘rigid,’ pyramid shaped, and great as they are
1c) SMN assumes that because Peterson mentions the Pareto principle, he thinks it’s ‘great.’
2) Is Peterson a trans-phobe?
3) SMN: “Peterson demands you respect his Bigotry”
3a) Elliot Page Tweet
3b) Sports Illustrated Plus-Sized Model Tweet
4) SMN: “Jordan Peterson is not a climate expert”

1. Is Peterson wrong about lobsters and hierarchies? [35:00 - 55:40]

We’ll start here, because this section is easier to talk about objectively.

SMN claims here that:
1) Peterson is wrong about Lobsters
2) Peterson is wrong about hierarchies
3) Peterson is saying we should do nothing to ameliorate current social hierarchies
4) Peterson says current hierarchies (wealth inequality etc) are great as they are

However, as we’ll see…
1) Peterson didn’t make an error regarding Lobsters, SMN just misunderstood what Peterson said. (He misinterprets ‘involving serotonin’ as ‘raising serotonin’ )
2) SMN assumes Peterson to have said something he didn’t, based on the fact Peterson made a certain triangle shaped gesture. (I’m not exaggerating, he referenced one specific gesture of Peterson’s at least 4 times)
3) SMN somehow interpreted ‘we shouldn’t demolish existing hierarchies’ as ‘we should do absolutely nothing to improve current hierarchies.’
4) SMN makes the mistake of assuming Peterson endorses a phenomenon because Peterson simply pointed out that that phenomenon exists.

1. Peterson and the Lobsters

Here’s what Peterson says in a clip SMN showed:

“So these creatures engage in dominance disputes… so it really is the toughest lobster that wins. What’s so cool about the lobster is that when a lobster wins, he flexes and gets bigger, so he looks bigger. …The neurochemical system that makes him flex is serotonergic …it’s the same chemical that’s affected by antidepressants in human beings, and so like, if you’re depressed, you’re a defeated lobster … you give someone an antidepressant and …they’re ready to take on the world again. Well if you give lobsters who just got defeated in a fight serotonin, then they stretch out and they’ll fight again. We separated from those creatures on the evolutionary time school somewhere between 350-600 million years ago and the damned neurochemistry is the same. And that another indication of just how hierarchies of authorities are. They’ve been conserved since the time of lobsters.”

SMN goes on to say that Peterson is wrong because high serotonin in a lobster makes them aggressive, but it has the opposite effect on humans. He quotes this study titled Serotonin and aggressive motivation in crustaceans: Altering the decision to retreat that Jordan referenced in his book. Here is the quote:

“In vertebrates, lowered levels of 5HT (endogenous or experimentally induced) or changes in the amine neuron function that lower the effectiveness of serotonergic neurons generally correlate with increased levels of aggression, whereas in invertebrates, the converse is believed to be true.”

This is a misunderstanding on SMN’s part. SMN is assuming Peterson to have said “An increase in serotonin will make lobsters and humans more aggressive.”
However, Peterson said that it is a serotonergic system that makes lobsters aggressive and that system is affected by antidepressants.
・Is the system that affects lobsters’ aggression serotonergic? Yes.
・Is the serotonin system affected by antidepressants? Yes.
The paper Peterson provided in his book indeed supports this notion. It is a serotonergic system that is at play here and the serotonin system is affected by antidepressants. It just happens to work in reverse directions for vertebrates vs invertebrates.

In fact, Peterson isn’t the only person to draw parallels between humans’ serotonergic systems and sea creatures’. See: Serotonin Coordinates Responses to Social Stress—What We Can Learn from Fish. By the way, Jordan’s timeline for our “separating” from the lobsters appears accurate per Florida International University.

You could call Peterson out for saying “the damned neurochemistry is the same,” and say he should have said “they use the same damn neurochemical,” but I mean… I think Peterson respects the audience’s intelligence enough to not worry about being misinterpreted as saying ‘our brains work exactly like lobster brains.’

In any case, right after this, SMN concedes himself that Peterson is “not exactly saying we are like lobsters, but we’ll get to that later.” SMN later says “When you stand back from it, really, this lobster theory is all for him to point out that hierarchies simply exist, which is a thing that is absolutely true …and if the point of lobsters is to show how hierarchies are super old or whatever, then just look at studies that point that out?” So SMN’s point apparently is he doesn’t like the lobster example.

2. SMN claims Peterson thinks all social hierarchies are ‘rigid,’ pyramid shaped, and great as they are

SMN shows a clip of Peterson where he basically says that per Darwin, whatever has been around the longest is most likely very effective and that:

“So the idea that the hierarchy is something that has exerted selection pressure on human beings - I don’t think that’s a disputable issue.”

What does SMN take issue with in this clip? That Peterson gestures in a pyramid shape while talking about hierarchies. SMN says that him gesturing like this shows Peterson believes in a “very rigid form of hierarchy - few at the top, pyramid shape, is the natural, older than trees, unchangeable hierarchy he wants to push with his lobster theory.” SMN refers to this gesture more than once as evidence to say Peterson believes all hierarchies are “rigid.” (I’m not exaggerating that he’s really trying to take Peterson’s gesture and make an argument about it. He brings the gesture up again later at 53:27 to say that gesture of Peterson’s indicates “…his weird conclusion that every hierarchy is the same shape.”)

SMN “quoting” Peterson’s gesture.

While mimicking the Peterson gesture, SMN says:

"Once you believe [Peterson’s] lie that number 1, rigid hierarchies are in our nature and number 2, concepts capitalism are synonymous with natural hierarchies, you can then be on a much more insidious journey."

SMN plays a clip of Peterson saying that the left serves to remind those sympathetic to societal hierarchies that the clumping of people at the bottom of the hierarchies is not good. Quoting Peterson:

“The right can say ‘well yea we need the damn hierarchies and they need to be buttressed’ and the left can say ‘yes, but they have to be maintained properly so they don't deteriorate and degenerate.’ I think that's ancient wisdom and the ancient Egyptians figured that out in their symbolic representations.”

SMN alleges that Peterson says every hierarchy reflects competency. Peterson didn’t say this, or at least SMN didn’t provide a clip of him saying this. At 53:36, SMN then shows this clip of Peterson saying:

“So the left can’t just demolish the hierarchies in the name of some equality of outcome let’s say because you blow out the future, you leave people aimless and you destroy the very institutions that allow people to make competent progress in the world. That’s not an acceptable outcome. So, we have to agree to live with the tension. Necessity for hierarchies, the proclivity for them the pathologize and the necessary voice of the left in speaking for the dispossessed.”

SMN says at 54:00 that “So his conclusion to all of this hierarchy talk is that we should do nothing.” He says Jordan Peterson is “right-wing” and again at 55:39 says: “…and then his conclusion is that the right wing doesn’t have to change at all…”

This doesn’t at all seem to be what Peterson said. Peterson said that the left can’t demolish the hierarchies with an equality of outcome. There’s a difference between ‘doing nothing’ and ‘not absolutely destroying something.’ Peterson also acknowledged that the left is necessary. They need to be present to speak for the dispossessed. Rationally, we would take that to mean that the left needs to inject change in the hierarchy when necessary so that it doesn’t get out of control. However, they shouldn’t be allowed to completely destroy the hierarchy.

So I’m a little confused by what exactly SMN is attempting to refute, unless he assumes that the only thing that can be done to ameliorate the hierarchies in our capitalistic society is to demolish them?

If his beef with Peterson is that Peterson isn’t in favor of the demolishment of capitalism, then I’m not sure what to say other than to read this post by Michael Shellenberger:

Why Elites Like Greta Thunberg Hate Capitalism

3. SMN assumes that because Peterson mentions the Pareto principle, he thinks it’s ‘great.’

Skipping forward a bit, I came across SMN talking about Peterson and the Pareto distribution. The Pareto principle essentially says that productivity, money, resources et cetera will not be distributed evenly.

I’ll leave you to look into that one if you’re not famililar, but SMN says 1:11:06 that: “It's a distribution that pops up sometimes and Peterson seems to think it's everywhere and great every time.”

“It's a distribution that pops up sometimes and Peterson seems to think it's everywhere and great every time.”

Yet literally right after saying that, he goes on to play a clip of Peterson saying “It’s a very very vicious statistic…” He also presented another instance of Peterson talking about this Pareto principle where Peterson first says “So here’s a nasty little law…”

“It’s a very very vicious statistic.”

How you get “great every time” from “nasty” or “vicious,” I’m not sure. I think it’s clear that this prefacing with ‘vicious,’ or ‘nasty,’ was to say that it’s ‘an unfortunate reality.’

So I mean if his beef with Peterson is that he thinks capitalism has merits, why not just start there? This long series of mischaracterizations to make Peterson look like a manipulative extremist is ironically, quite manipulative.

2. Is Peterson a transphobe?

To get an idea of why some people think Peterson is a transphobic bigot, we need to take a brief look at how he rose to popularity. It was mainly because of his adamant opposition to Canada’s gender identity rights Bill C-16. The bill is concerned with what constitutes a hate crime and how such crimes should be dealt with. At first glance, it seems nice to have a bill to make trans people more accepted in society. However, per cbc.ca “Critics voiced concerns that the law will penalize citizens who do not use specific pronouns when referring to gender diverse people.”

Peterson’s issue wasn’t with trans people, but with coerced speech. That is, he adamantly took the position that the government should not be able to force you to say something. In Peterson’s own words:

“It was a discussion about language and who controls language. I believed my government had overreached its purview in the legislation that it said was motivated by compassion. I said that, it’s like you can’t tell me what I have to say.” Peterson’s point was was that this precedent could lead to some undesirable places.

Let’s look at what Bill C-16 actually says!

It’s just a pronoun, why can’t you say just it? , you might think.
I skipped around in the Some More News video to see if C-16 would be brought up and indeed it was. SMN excitedly says “Let’s look at what Bill C-16 actually says!” He explains that Bill C-16 is merely an innocuous amendment to the Canadian human rights act. “It didn’t force anyone to use a preferred gender pronoun lest they be jailed,” he says. “In other words, everything Peterson was this bold stance against … was a fantasy. It was never in this bill, something anyone who simply read the thing would know.”

Yet, in October 2021 them.us wrote an article titled Misgendering Is a Human Rights Violation, Canadian Court Rules. The article explains how a “nonbinary and genderfluid” person sued their former employer for referred to them using “gendered nicknames” such as “sweetheart,” “sweetie,” and “honey.” The verdict? The restaurant and specific offenders were to pay Nelson $30,000 in damages. The article specifically references Bill C-16 at the end.

Nelson’s attorney, Adrienne Smith, celebrated the decision after the ruling was handed down last week. They said the decision showed that “the correct pronouns for transgender people are not optional.”

“The correct pronouns for transgender people are not optional.” So, pretty much exactly the type of thing SMN was saying wouldn’t happen … happened. Apparently using terms of endearment (like the kind of things my grandma or aunts would call me) is now considered a hate crime in Canada. Not just SMN, many people said Peterson was overreacting to the bill but it seems he correctly predicted the potential severity of it.

This is a different country so it has nothing to do with C-16, but things are even more severe in Australia. Canberra radio newsreader Beth Rep was told to pay transgender activist Bridget Clinch $10,000 compensation for misgendering her. What did she do specifically? She merely liked a Facebook post.

…the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal yesterday found Ms Rep breached discrimination laws when she 'liked' offensive comments on the post, and ordered she pay Ms Clinch $10,000 in compensation.

So with that in mind, let’s take a look at Peterson’s Twitter. SMN titles this section…

3. “Peterson demands you respect his bigotry” [19:25 - 26:38]

1. Elliot Page Tweet

Some More News brings up this tweet where Peterson is criticizing Elliot Page. I remember seeing this tweet when it was posted.

“Remember when pride was a sin? And Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician.”

I thought it was over-the-top of Peterson to call Elliot Page a sinful narcissist in front of 3 million people while at the same time calling the physician who respected the wishes of a fully-grown, 35 year old adult “criminal.” Peterson received a suspension from Twitter and was notified that he must delete the tweet.

SMN criticized Peterson for not just taking the loss and deleting the tweet, saying:

“Instead of y’know, being an adult and deleting the tweet, he instead put out a 15 minute video of this harrowing attack on his freedom to be a bigot on a social media platform… Hey man, just delete the tweet! It’s super not hard, just a few buttons at most.”

While on the surface Peterson’s tweet sounds bad, if you want to determine whether someone is a ‘bigot’ you have to look at why they actually say certain things.

The above video is a clip from one of Peterson’s videos commenting on this incident:

“People tell me well you were so mean to Ellen Page and I think... Well y'know, Ellen Page is a star and she advertised her transformation and made the claim that it revolutionized her life and she displayed her body in a public forum and got 1.7 million instagram likes for it and probably enticed well let's say one young girl who's confused into becoming sterile which is one too many for me but it could be as many as what 100, 500, 1000 and I have my tendency to feel a hell of a lot more sorry for a set of confused isolated and lonely pubescent girls who have no one to love them enough to help appreciate who they are then I do for one overprivileged and unfortunately confused narcissistic Hollywood star.”

So his point was about the effect the post would have on adolescents viewing it.

The Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine presents on their website a massive uptick in the number of kids being referred for Gender Dysphoria in just the last decade.

The massive rise in cases of gender dysphoria seems to have started in 2014. The Rolling Stones published an article that December titled 11 Ways 2014 Was the Biggest Year in Transgender History, noting that it was a landmark year for transgender people on television, it was a “golden age” for transgender models, and that Facebook announced that the site would now allow users to select from over 50 gender identities and three gender pronouns (he, she or they). Could this increase in cases of gender dysphoria be the result of kids looking watching a TV show or social media post and thinking “Hey, I didn’t know that was a thing. Maybe my angst is because I’m in the wrong body? These transitioned people on TV and social media look so happy…” ?

A 2018 study about Rapid-onset gender dysphoria documented an increasing trend among adolescents to self-diagnose as transgender after bingeing on websites like Tumblr, Reddit, and Youtube. Yet, a 2016 paper claims that 61-98% of gender dysphoric children reidentify with their biological sex during puberty.

A gender clinic in the UK which has treated 19,000 people with gender dysphoria since 1989, is now being sued by 1,000 of the patients. Quoting the article on the case from independent.co.uk :

Staff, patients and parents have raised concerns that young people using the service were put on the pathway to transitioning too early and before they had been properly assessed.
“We support the findings of the Cass Review, Interim Report and believe there has been a real level of harm that has been perpetrated towards patients who were rushed into taking life-altering puberty blockers without adequate consideration or proper diagnosis.”

So at least 1/19 of the people who went to that clinic in the UK regret it. There are many reports online of people regretting their transition.

Of course this is a very controversial topic. (A bit more context here if you’re interested) Peterson’s tweet execution was poor… but would the reaction have been any different if Peterson said this?

Could a celebrity posting to her 6 million followers on instagram this photo with the caption “Trans bb’s first swim trunks #transjoy #transisbeautiful” have an ultimately negative effect on impressionable kids who are confused about who they are?

So I mean regardless if you disagree with the execution, Peterson was addressing a very important phenomenon. What appears to be a harmless Instagram post could have a big impact on several thousand kids.

Why wouldn’t Peterson “just” delete the tweet instead of accepting the suspension? Well, obviously Peterson believes in freedom of speech - it’s the whole reason he rose to popularity, as discussed earlier. In fact, despite it earning him $33,000 a month, Peterson deleted his Patreon account because it was banning creators with views Patreon didn’t agree with.

2. Sports Illustrated Plus-Sized Model

Peterson is not so good at Twitter. Even his own daughter agrees he needs to get off.

Mikhaila Peterson @MikhailaFuller

@elonmusk can you bring my dad @jordanbpeterson back on here but also somehow make sure he doesn’t spend all his time on Twitter? 🙃

This next tweet is about Yumi Nu being on the cover of the Sports Illustrated 2022 Swimsuit edition.

Interestingly, this tweet is still up where the Elliot Page tweet got him a suspension. 🤔

Dr Jordan B Peterson @jordanbpeterson

Sorry. Not beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.

New York Post @nypost

Yumi Nu 'shaking' over SI Swimsuit cover reveal https://t.co/g1yXu8NKhX https://t.co/CQC3ELLW2F

“Sorry. Not beautiful.” Is a dick thing to say. Surely he could have made his point a better way. But did Peterson tweet that because he’s unreasonably prejudiced against all fat people? Well… let’s again see what he intended by this tweet. Peterson explained on his daughter’s podcast that his issue was with the magazine’s “insistence that all of a sudden, this non-athletic body is as beautiful as the standard swimsuit model.” He said it was a “cheap trick” by the magazine.

mikhailapeterson

A post shared by Mikhaila Fuller (@mikhailapeterson)

So, it’s a commentary on the “body positivity” movement. It’s arguable that Sports Illustrated was trying to make a point with this particular cover. The issue came out after Cosmopolitan’s “body positive” cover. Some may call the “body positivity” movement “glamourizing obesity.”

I don’t think Yumi Nu qualifies as obese, maybe overweight. Mark Bell responds to Peterson saying Yumi Nu is “not healthy” with: “not healthy compared to what?” Why doesn’t Peterson criticize the magazine for glamourizing underweight models? Bell’s co-host Nsima Inyang says “I love Jordan B. Peterson … but some takes are just kinda weird.” Yup.

David Sinclair is a well respected biologist specializing in longevity who was on the Joe Rogan show more than once. In Episode 1670 he makes a joke insinuating Joe Rogan masturbates a lot which seemed to make Rogan genuinely upset, saying: “Hey, watch it!” I thought that was pretty weird… but moved on and listened to the rest of the episode and I still enjoy his other content. I’m positive Sinclair himself immediately thought: OK that joke sounded a lot funnier and less inappropriate in my head.

The way Peterson addressed SI’s “body positive” cover was odd and excessively harsh on the model, especially considering how many views he could expect to get with such a big Twitter following. But if you’re looking for something to prove he’s a dangerous fascist bigot, this isn’t it.

4. “Jordan Peterson is not a climate expert” [9:00 - 19:00]

The host’s points are:
・Peterson says in a JRE episode that there are errors in the climate models.
・Peterson meanderingly explains how it’s ‘hard to predict how your life will go,’ that ‘things get harder to predict the farther in time you go,’ and offers some story about the ant all summer stores away for the winter where the grasshopper fiddles all summer and dies.

The intro of the SMN video starts off by making fun of Peterson’s saying

"Well, that's because there's no such thing as climate, right? 'Climate' and 'everything' are the same word, and that's what bothers me about the climate change types…"

Indeed that sounds dumb. As I mentioned at the start of this post, Peterson sometimes says things that sound stupid at first glance, like the Cain and Abel example - what do you mean by ‘happen?’ Though, if you take a moment to think, clearly Peterson is using hyperbole to make his point that the issue with climate models is that they can’t include everything in the climate system. Professor James Renwick, a climate scientist at Victoria University of Wellington commented:

"Jordan Peterson is saying that climate models are wrong because they don't include everything in the climate system. But that's true of all models in all fields, they are always simplifications of the real world, to help us understand what is going on. …"

"How do we decide what to include in climate models? Physics, mathematics and chemistry help us decide what's most important to include and what can be left out of a model. We have 70 years' experience of building weather and climate models and researchers understand this very well.

As statisticians understand, all models are wrong, but some are useful. Peterson might have sounded dumb, but he didn’t make any sort of bonkers conclusion from the simple fact that models can never be perfect.

After that, Peterson missed Rogan’s follow up question - What Rogan was wanting to know from Peterson was “Which specific climate models are wrong and in what ways?,” but Peterson was instead explaining “Here is how predictive models can be wrong.”

Did Peterson say climate change was a hoax? No.
Did Peterson use this to justify some other crazy theory? No.
Did I gain anything from this particular exchange of his with Joe Rogan? No.
Was it annoying? Yes.

*I think this clip of Peterson talking to Lex Fridman is where Peterson actually successfully expressed what he was trying to get at with Rogan.

So fair enough, this one particular exchange with Peterson and Rogan was a waste of time, but this is the chaff that you have to separate from the wheat. At the start of the Some More News video, the host said that he would be separating the wheat from the chaff while taking a look at Peterson. Though, the first hour just feels like all chaff.