Whenever anyone becomes widely reviled (rightly or wrongly), there's always a lot of exaggeration and misrepresentation that makes it difficult to sort out what's deserved or not. To that end, I appreciate that you grappled with some of the nuance around what he did or didn't say or mean.
But past that, I think it's pretty fair for people to dislike him or roll their eyes at him even just based on the things here. I am someone who is also concerned with the medicalization of young people who are often not even trans or not able to meaningfully consent to dangerous or irreversible treatments; I also think the rulings about things like "sweetie" are draconian; I also think the fat-positivity movement overstates its health claims. But every time someone argues something in a hotheaded or asshole-ish way, it hurts the substance of the argument in the public perception. And while I appreciate his less controversial ideas have helped some people, they're nothing especially groundbreaking that can't be found elsewhere.
So I wouldn't unsub from you over interviewing him or anything. I just don't think he's a very good spokesperson for the things he cares about, and I'm annoyed he taints important conversations with his poor emotional regulation so that it's even harder to persuade anyone of nuance. It doesn't matter if there is something more complex to his ideas about trans people if "this trans person is a narcissist for sharing themselves with the public" is how the idea is conveyed to the majority of people. Saying an overweight model is basically unattractive dooms any conversation about potential downsides to carrying extra weight or whether it's ethical to tell the public it's "healthy."
The dumb stuff he says is very short, inflammatory, and easy to understand, whereas when he talks about stuff in more detail it's meandering and (imo) boring and sometimes difficult to discern any meaningful point. No one who doesn't already agree with him is going to bother with sitting through his explanations.
And in the end, it's fair for people to dislike other people purely because of their personality. There are a lot of people I agree with politically who I think are shitty people because they so often behave in destructive ways. I'm center-left and progressive, and I feel like a lot of the left is horrible *and* wrong, and a whole other portion of them are just horrible. I wish both categories would shut up because when they open their mouth it's counterproductive. For the latter group I could sit there and go, well, what they *mean* is this, and maybe it would be noble in a way to point out how their critics misrepresent them, but they still suck and people are still right to dislike them even if not all the dislike is clearheaded.
Honestly I must agree it's a totally valid reason to dislike him based on personality. Indeed, the emotional charge he adds to the things he says can totally nullify the intended effect of his messages. Gabor Mate said something about Peterson being too angry for him and I thought yup that's fair.
As mentioned, while I do like Peterson, I don't like *every* aspect. The idea with this post was more to correct the misrepresentations in the Some More News video. The "dangerous fascist bigot" comments make me think 🤨, but for the people who say "he's just not my taste, I think he's a dick" I would think fair enough and move on.
Yeah, it is really odd when people call him stuff like a fascist. It's a bit alarming that so many people on the left can't make the distinction between refining versus destroying hierarchies, or else genuinely think hierarchies are inherently negative. (Especially weird because so many people who think that way are just blindly looking to the equivalent of authorities in the social media sphere to tell them what to think.)
I have a story that takes the cake though. I had a very leftwing friend tell me they were worried a friend was getting into "white supremacist" stuff, and it turned out they were referring to Jordan Peterson of all people. I was like... uh, he sort of sucks but he isn't a white supremacist, and most of his stuff is pretty banal and probably helpful to that person based on what little I know about them. I feel like I have a mental file of all the stuff one could feasibly accuse Peterson of, but that one really blew my mind. (I feel like if Peterson ever really commented on race, innocuously or not, it would be a big dust-up I would have heard about?)
What was extra weird was the friend and their friend in question are both nonbinary-who-call-themselves-trans (which is a whole other can of worms), and I almost wanted to say that their friend is clearly able to form their own judgments if they can get past his views on trans issues, but it was already such a weird conversation I didn't want to add any fuel to the fire. My friend has generally seemed to absorb ideas from Tumblr posts instead of investigating things, so I didn't want to give them another unexplored thing to form a negative opinion about.
So there's definitely a need to correct some of the weird stuff. I wish anyone in my life who needed to hear it would be more willing to hear it, though. It's sort of self-terrorism to get wound up believing exaggerations about public figures.
I don't like Jordan Peterson because he is posing himself as an intellectual, slightly conservative man but actually takes propagates harmful nazi-rethoric. The hate he spews is 1:1 the hate which got spewed by the nazis in the 1930's, just not with the same vernacular. Some words are slightly altered to keep his bad illusion that he isn't as much right-wing as he supposedly is.
Jordan Peterson is one of the reasons trans people are being killed today.
Not to mention that his work was influential on the christchurch-shooter as well, leading to his 12-rules for life being pulled off the shelfs after the shooting.
In December 2020, Troy Parfitt published “The Devil And His Due: How Jordan Peterson Plagiarizes Adolf Hitler”. The author of the book has collected over 3.000 examples of Peterson paraphrasing and intellectually plagiarizing Hitler. Parfitt also has a YouTube channel with hours of analysis of Peterson’s speech.
As a (former) Peterson fan who recently watched this video, too, I understand where you’re coming from with these criticisms. I had similar reactions on my first viewing. But I can’t shake this feeling that they’re in bad faith. SMN isn’t saying what you claim them to be saying (ironically). They mean something more like, “You’re explaining the existence of hierarchy, and not doing enough to attack the unjustness of them, in the midst of a Nazi epidemic. And those same Nazis just happen to watch your videos. Curious”
I think Some More News’ video, in addition to being way too long for a starting point (who in the hell is going to watch 3 hrs of criticism of someone they like?), is probably too subtle and mainstream to reach a Peterson fan. As a former fan, I’d recommend starting with Philosophy Tube’s two (35-40 minute long, which should be no problem because you just watched a full 3 hours, right? Right? RIGHT?) videos on Peterson. If you’ve only got time for one, go with Jordan Peterson’s Ideology. If you’ve got time for both, I’d say to start with Jordan Peterson & The Meaning of Life, as it came first chronologically and Is about his first book. These were the first Peterson-Critical videos that I saw that, as a fan, I walked away from saying “Wow, that was an eminently fair critique.” And they set up a basis for me to view all subsequent critique of his work from within.
Imo the problem with Peterson isn't that he's stupid or is speaking complete nonsense, its that he communicates on nuanced positions advocating against one extreme while never mentioning the other extreme. Just like the sanitized Peterson tweet you described, the danger there is in the effect.
"Could a distinguished professor with 3 million twitter followers saying extreme one-sided statements like 'doctors doing transitions are criminals', and 'climate change types bother me' while avoiding giving the actual nuanced justification have an ultimately negative effect on his impressionable audience?"
In this post you're describing how what he's saying is never completely out of pocket, there's a steel-manned position underneath it that is reasonable, which I totally agree with. The thing is, when people say "what you're saying is ___" and he says "I didn't say that" because he understands the steel-man, what about the times he doesn't get pushback and its the viewers that think to themselves "ah so what you're saying is <insert more extreme extrapolation of the one-sided critique he just gave>"?
I absolutely think he's a smart guy that has a lot of valuable things to say, and it's great you had your conversation with him. Even as an Atheist he completely changed the way I viewed religion. I just think he's sometimes irresponsible with his rhetoric, and as a public figure he has some amount of responsibility for his impact. Like with the climate thing, what possible good could come out of that statement? People against climate change will think they're on his side completely and climate change is false, while people that would be able to understand the nuance of "no model is truly perfect" get distracted by the feeling of 'oh boy people that deny climate change are gonna love this' rather than having that valuable nuance communicated directly.
Everything has extremes on either end where some things are optimized to the extent that they're overly detrimental to other things, so we're always trying to seek balance somewhere within that spectrum (not necessarily the middle) to get the tradeoffs we want. Unfortunately people don't realize this, so if you _only_ advocate against one extreme without communicating the dangers of the other, people will inevitably fall to the other extreme and you'll cause other problems instead.
I used to watch Jordan Peterson. He has 5head ideas,but when he talks about them he uses multiple big words that I end up lost.(I don’t watch him he hurt my head)(English is my second language)
I've also often heard people deride Peterson without clear reasoning. Very hand-wavy at best. "I don't like this person so here are reasons I came up with why I don't like them".
What people should try to understand is that he's deeply worried about massive second-order effects when he takes these very direct, principled stances about things (e.g. freedom of speech). One example is that he has studied totalitarianism and often talks about the millions who have died under such regimes. For him, preventing that from happening again is worth angering some people.
Same with the surge in transgenderism: why would he hold back criticism if he knows that thousands of vulnerable kids will make irreversible decisions based on influencers? It's a moral imperative for him to say what he sees as the truth.
It's similar to Nassim Taleb, who often seems very harsh on social media at first glance. For him it's all about being honourable, having skin in the game, and calling a fraud a fraud and how that tends to avoid systemic risk.
[Interestingly, NNT is very critical about JP and that many of his psychological "facts" are actually psychobabble reliant on non-replicating social science. I'd guess that is a much more solid angle of attack on JP than "right wing Nazi fascist", but the nuance would be lost on most members of the public.]
Thanks for giving JP a fair shake on your interview. Based on SMN and a few other similar jokesters I had held off offering opinions to young people in my life about him, but your patience and exemplary research really helped me understand who he was and where he was coming from.
I'd be curious to hear more specifically about his politics -- I think the "illiberal left", as he might characterize the ideas that react strongly with his, has a lot to gain by incorporating his ideas.
People are lazy and they don't want anyone to challenge their beliefs, so it is easier to label someone and move on than to actually try to understand. Peterson works hard to make this garbage world better and keyboard warriors are sitting at home, farting into chairs and crying on forums. snowflake generation
I’m a big fan of Jordan Peterson. Do I agree with everything he say’s? Of course not. I can disagree with anyone without being disagreeable 😉
Whenever anyone becomes widely reviled (rightly or wrongly), there's always a lot of exaggeration and misrepresentation that makes it difficult to sort out what's deserved or not. To that end, I appreciate that you grappled with some of the nuance around what he did or didn't say or mean.
But past that, I think it's pretty fair for people to dislike him or roll their eyes at him even just based on the things here. I am someone who is also concerned with the medicalization of young people who are often not even trans or not able to meaningfully consent to dangerous or irreversible treatments; I also think the rulings about things like "sweetie" are draconian; I also think the fat-positivity movement overstates its health claims. But every time someone argues something in a hotheaded or asshole-ish way, it hurts the substance of the argument in the public perception. And while I appreciate his less controversial ideas have helped some people, they're nothing especially groundbreaking that can't be found elsewhere.
So I wouldn't unsub from you over interviewing him or anything. I just don't think he's a very good spokesperson for the things he cares about, and I'm annoyed he taints important conversations with his poor emotional regulation so that it's even harder to persuade anyone of nuance. It doesn't matter if there is something more complex to his ideas about trans people if "this trans person is a narcissist for sharing themselves with the public" is how the idea is conveyed to the majority of people. Saying an overweight model is basically unattractive dooms any conversation about potential downsides to carrying extra weight or whether it's ethical to tell the public it's "healthy."
The dumb stuff he says is very short, inflammatory, and easy to understand, whereas when he talks about stuff in more detail it's meandering and (imo) boring and sometimes difficult to discern any meaningful point. No one who doesn't already agree with him is going to bother with sitting through his explanations.
And in the end, it's fair for people to dislike other people purely because of their personality. There are a lot of people I agree with politically who I think are shitty people because they so often behave in destructive ways. I'm center-left and progressive, and I feel like a lot of the left is horrible *and* wrong, and a whole other portion of them are just horrible. I wish both categories would shut up because when they open their mouth it's counterproductive. For the latter group I could sit there and go, well, what they *mean* is this, and maybe it would be noble in a way to point out how their critics misrepresent them, but they still suck and people are still right to dislike them even if not all the dislike is clearheaded.
Hey Nattie,
Honestly I must agree it's a totally valid reason to dislike him based on personality. Indeed, the emotional charge he adds to the things he says can totally nullify the intended effect of his messages. Gabor Mate said something about Peterson being too angry for him and I thought yup that's fair.
As mentioned, while I do like Peterson, I don't like *every* aspect. The idea with this post was more to correct the misrepresentations in the Some More News video. The "dangerous fascist bigot" comments make me think 🤨, but for the people who say "he's just not my taste, I think he's a dick" I would think fair enough and move on.
Yeah, it is really odd when people call him stuff like a fascist. It's a bit alarming that so many people on the left can't make the distinction between refining versus destroying hierarchies, or else genuinely think hierarchies are inherently negative. (Especially weird because so many people who think that way are just blindly looking to the equivalent of authorities in the social media sphere to tell them what to think.)
I have a story that takes the cake though. I had a very leftwing friend tell me they were worried a friend was getting into "white supremacist" stuff, and it turned out they were referring to Jordan Peterson of all people. I was like... uh, he sort of sucks but he isn't a white supremacist, and most of his stuff is pretty banal and probably helpful to that person based on what little I know about them. I feel like I have a mental file of all the stuff one could feasibly accuse Peterson of, but that one really blew my mind. (I feel like if Peterson ever really commented on race, innocuously or not, it would be a big dust-up I would have heard about?)
What was extra weird was the friend and their friend in question are both nonbinary-who-call-themselves-trans (which is a whole other can of worms), and I almost wanted to say that their friend is clearly able to form their own judgments if they can get past his views on trans issues, but it was already such a weird conversation I didn't want to add any fuel to the fire. My friend has generally seemed to absorb ideas from Tumblr posts instead of investigating things, so I didn't want to give them another unexplored thing to form a negative opinion about.
So there's definitely a need to correct some of the weird stuff. I wish anyone in my life who needed to hear it would be more willing to hear it, though. It's sort of self-terrorism to get wound up believing exaggerations about public figures.
Peterson, like Musk, is demonized by fools and worshiped by morons.
I don't like Jordan Peterson because he is posing himself as an intellectual, slightly conservative man but actually takes propagates harmful nazi-rethoric. The hate he spews is 1:1 the hate which got spewed by the nazis in the 1930's, just not with the same vernacular. Some words are slightly altered to keep his bad illusion that he isn't as much right-wing as he supposedly is.
Jordan Peterson is one of the reasons trans people are being killed today.
Not to mention that his work was influential on the christchurch-shooter as well, leading to his 12-rules for life being pulled off the shelfs after the shooting.
In December 2020, Troy Parfitt published “The Devil And His Due: How Jordan Peterson Plagiarizes Adolf Hitler”. The author of the book has collected over 3.000 examples of Peterson paraphrasing and intellectually plagiarizing Hitler. Parfitt also has a YouTube channel with hours of analysis of Peterson’s speech.
As a (former) Peterson fan who recently watched this video, too, I understand where you’re coming from with these criticisms. I had similar reactions on my first viewing. But I can’t shake this feeling that they’re in bad faith. SMN isn’t saying what you claim them to be saying (ironically). They mean something more like, “You’re explaining the existence of hierarchy, and not doing enough to attack the unjustness of them, in the midst of a Nazi epidemic. And those same Nazis just happen to watch your videos. Curious”
I think Some More News’ video, in addition to being way too long for a starting point (who in the hell is going to watch 3 hrs of criticism of someone they like?), is probably too subtle and mainstream to reach a Peterson fan. As a former fan, I’d recommend starting with Philosophy Tube’s two (35-40 minute long, which should be no problem because you just watched a full 3 hours, right? Right? RIGHT?) videos on Peterson. If you’ve only got time for one, go with Jordan Peterson’s Ideology. If you’ve got time for both, I’d say to start with Jordan Peterson & The Meaning of Life, as it came first chronologically and Is about his first book. These were the first Peterson-Critical videos that I saw that, as a fan, I walked away from saying “Wow, that was an eminently fair critique.” And they set up a basis for me to view all subsequent critique of his work from within.
Imo the problem with Peterson isn't that he's stupid or is speaking complete nonsense, its that he communicates on nuanced positions advocating against one extreme while never mentioning the other extreme. Just like the sanitized Peterson tweet you described, the danger there is in the effect.
"Could a distinguished professor with 3 million twitter followers saying extreme one-sided statements like 'doctors doing transitions are criminals', and 'climate change types bother me' while avoiding giving the actual nuanced justification have an ultimately negative effect on his impressionable audience?"
In this post you're describing how what he's saying is never completely out of pocket, there's a steel-manned position underneath it that is reasonable, which I totally agree with. The thing is, when people say "what you're saying is ___" and he says "I didn't say that" because he understands the steel-man, what about the times he doesn't get pushback and its the viewers that think to themselves "ah so what you're saying is <insert more extreme extrapolation of the one-sided critique he just gave>"?
I absolutely think he's a smart guy that has a lot of valuable things to say, and it's great you had your conversation with him. Even as an Atheist he completely changed the way I viewed religion. I just think he's sometimes irresponsible with his rhetoric, and as a public figure he has some amount of responsibility for his impact. Like with the climate thing, what possible good could come out of that statement? People against climate change will think they're on his side completely and climate change is false, while people that would be able to understand the nuance of "no model is truly perfect" get distracted by the feeling of 'oh boy people that deny climate change are gonna love this' rather than having that valuable nuance communicated directly.
Everything has extremes on either end where some things are optimized to the extent that they're overly detrimental to other things, so we're always trying to seek balance somewhere within that spectrum (not necessarily the middle) to get the tradeoffs we want. Unfortunately people don't realize this, so if you _only_ advocate against one extreme without communicating the dangers of the other, people will inevitably fall to the other extreme and you'll cause other problems instead.
I used to watch Jordan Peterson. He has 5head ideas,but when he talks about them he uses multiple big words that I end up lost.(I don’t watch him he hurt my head)(English is my second language)
I've also often heard people deride Peterson without clear reasoning. Very hand-wavy at best. "I don't like this person so here are reasons I came up with why I don't like them".
What people should try to understand is that he's deeply worried about massive second-order effects when he takes these very direct, principled stances about things (e.g. freedom of speech). One example is that he has studied totalitarianism and often talks about the millions who have died under such regimes. For him, preventing that from happening again is worth angering some people.
Same with the surge in transgenderism: why would he hold back criticism if he knows that thousands of vulnerable kids will make irreversible decisions based on influencers? It's a moral imperative for him to say what he sees as the truth.
It's similar to Nassim Taleb, who often seems very harsh on social media at first glance. For him it's all about being honourable, having skin in the game, and calling a fraud a fraud and how that tends to avoid systemic risk.
[Interestingly, NNT is very critical about JP and that many of his psychological "facts" are actually psychobabble reliant on non-replicating social science. I'd guess that is a much more solid angle of attack on JP than "right wing Nazi fascist", but the nuance would be lost on most members of the public.]
Thanks for giving JP a fair shake on your interview. Based on SMN and a few other similar jokesters I had held off offering opinions to young people in my life about him, but your patience and exemplary research really helped me understand who he was and where he was coming from.
I'd be curious to hear more specifically about his politics -- I think the "illiberal left", as he might characterize the ideas that react strongly with his, has a lot to gain by incorporating his ideas.
People are lazy and they don't want anyone to challenge their beliefs, so it is easier to label someone and move on than to actually try to understand. Peterson works hard to make this garbage world better and keyboard warriors are sitting at home, farting into chairs and crying on forums. snowflake generation
Wry good piece. It is clear that the most critics of JP speech didn’t read almost anything he wrote.
His tweet about Gaza and the justifications that followed it has been despicable.
And this is coming from someone that deeply respected him.