Jordan Peterson

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wood
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Jordan Peterson

Post by wood »

For those of you who have an opinion on the guy, please share.

I came across his name at a party last year when some millennials told me how they have watched all his videos and are a big fan. After a bit of youtube watching I have to say that he makes a lot of sense to me. He seems to be able to express with words things that I knew I was aware of but didn't know how to express. He also seem to have good advice on how to deal with depression, relationships, personal development etc. I think he is being spot on when it comes to his views on the western world, and his views on men. Can't really tell what's ultimately on his agenda though.

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Jean
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by Jean »

I agree, I find him to be spot on most of the time. I just think he often trie to put more sense in biblical stories than there is. But if it makes christians feel and act better, that's not bad.

ThisDinosaur
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by ThisDinosaur »

My opinion on him is...fluctuating. I can't tell whether or not to take his ideas seriously.

On the Pro side, he's very articulate and his worldview is very internally consistent.

On the Con side, he has formulated his views from outdated psychological ideas that are rejected by modern science, (i.e., Freud, Jung) and probably has his own biases toward defending Christianity.

Although, given the how crappy modern psychological science is, maybe going back to hundred year old ideas is progress.

daylen
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by daylen »

The attitude on this forum that "Jung is shit" and "MBTI is outdated" seems excessive and out of tune with reality. What ever happened to appropriate technology?

The main purpose of language is to communicate actionable intelligence. MBTI is common and clearly has utility, therefore it is a useful tool in the hands of communicators for a narrow selection of problems. MBTI is easy to learn, internally consistent, and has explanatory power; simple as that.

Of course there is a way to explain the insights without it, but is that the most efficient way to do it given the current understanding of the English population?

Also, any science that deals with a system as complex as the human brain is going to be crappy but does that mean we shouldn't talk about it?
Last edited by daylen on Fri Jan 26, 2018 9:09 am, edited 1 time in total.

jacob
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by jacob »

daylen wrote:
Fri Jan 26, 2018 9:06 am
What ever happened to appropriate technology?
There's an app for that! :?

ThisDinosaur
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by ThisDinosaur »

daylen wrote:
Fri Jan 26, 2018 9:06 am
MBTI is easy to learn, internally consistent, and has explanatory power; simple as that.
Not good enough. Its got to be able to make some predictions or you have no way of knowing if you're just fooling yourself.

Observation => Tentative Explanation => Prediction (based on explanation) => Observation

Pseudoscience explains everything but predicts nothing. Now, in Peterson's defense, the idea behind his Self Authoring Program is that humans are story-telling creatures. (The Logos idea is that, when we explain concepts and name things they become Real to us.) So, you get people to write about their life and they feel better about it and perform better. So, in that sense, he seems to me to be doing real science.

MBTI, on the other hand, is like standardized cold-reading. Ask people a bunch of questions about, for example, whether they prefer to be alone or in groups. Then tell them that they are the type that prefers to be alone vs. in groups. "Wow, you really get me. You just GET me, you know?"

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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by jacob »

@ThisDinosaur - It's akin to a classification scheme. Like calling something with three corners a triangle. Does it have three corners? Then it's a triangle. Next, what can we say about triangles in general (as opposed to this three-cornered thing in particular)? We can, for example, calculate the area. The "prediction" would be the last step in the following chain:
concrete three corner thing -> abstract triangle -> abstract triangle's area -> concrete three corner thing's area.
The third step would be what Aristotle called the "mathematics" and what we would call "theoretical science".

The MBTI types are abstractions of human personality. Psychologists don't like MBTI because they don't like the way the "theoretical science" step is handled. As far as I understand, the issue is mainly with the functional stack theory which they think goes too far. However, the theoretical step can be removed while retaining the usefulness of the classification scheme. That's essentially the Logos idea. When we classify animals, "cow" is an idea to us ... we only say Bessy is a cow because Bessy shares qualities with other animals and so we deem those animals cows. In similar way we call some humans INTJs and other ENFPs and so on.

The best thing to come out of MBTI thus is that human personalities can be named in a finite ans easily countable (16) groups. We're not as unique in the snowflake sense as we think. We can learn about ourselves by first identifying the group and then learning about ourselves from others in that group.

James_0011
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by James_0011 »

Jung never intended his personality types to be used the way people on this forum do. He just saw them as descriptions, ones that change over the course of a persons life and even day to day on some cases.

He didn’t want people to take them as “I’m intp so I should do x” or “intp so I show work at y company”.

The Myers Briggs suff is a gross misrepresentation of his work. The creators of Myers Briggs didn’t have fotmal training in psychology and took Jung out of context due to their lack of training I presume.

daylen
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by daylen »

@ThisDinosaur The user can make predictions for how they should interact with others with respect to the classification, then talk about it with others to come to a consensus. MBTI is not just a classification scheme but an efficient communication tool. The utility depends on the user.

ThisDinosaur
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by ThisDinosaur »

Ok, MBTI is a classification scheme. But is it the most useful one available?

One of Peterson's insights is the idea of Theories-As-Tools. Humans have to oversimplify the world in our minds in order to live in it. Because our sense organs and even our brains are not equipped to form accurate depictions of reality. Only functional ones.

I've said before that I appreciate the Myers Briggs idea that different people think and prioritize differently. But I was reading some of the INTJ links in one of the other threads here recently with some skepticism. Some of the descriptions sounded like me and others didn't. So I retook an online MBTI test and confirmed my INTJ diagnosis. I asked my wife to take one as well. (I figured it would be more useful for me to read about her type than mine.) She read the result and said, "this doesn't sound like me at all." I would have guessed that she would be more prone to believe in horoscope-like personality test results than myself. But she was unimpressed.

Anyway, my personal experience has not supported the usefulness of that particular framework.

daylen
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by daylen »

@ThisDinosaur We have discussed this stuff on the forum ad nauseam, though reiteration is part of the learning process.

The model should be used in accordance to the situation. MBTI just happens to be popular and strikes a balance of complexity that is useful in several situations.

You should always be skeptical of this stuff; this isn't abstract algebra where we can hand out internally consistent arguments that follow directly from axioms. No description will sound 100% correct because we are dealing with complex systems. Reality is messy, thought is messy, communication is messy.. everything is messy. Just because a tool isn't useful to you does not mean that it isn't useful to others or that it cannot become useful to you in the future.

Tyler9000
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by Tyler9000 »

I'm not qualified to argue many of his individual points on the merits, but personally I think Peterson is a modern icon of reasoned debate and free speech. The fact that he is controversial at all speaks far more negatively to his detractors than to him. IMHO, if we all approached debate and disagreements the way Peterson does the world would be a much better place.

ThisDinosaur
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by ThisDinosaur »

daylen wrote:
Fri Jan 26, 2018 11:39 am
Just because a tool isn't useful to you does not mean that it isn't useful to others or that it cannot become useful to you in the future.
Fair point. I've changed my mind about stuff before. I'll probably change my mind about this, too.

Case in point, I'm still formulating an opinion about Jordan Peterson. He may very well convince me to take Christianity seriously again. Maybe I'll be the same protestant evangelical I was when I was fourteen. That's progress!
ffj wrote:
Fri Jan 26, 2018 10:41 am
I watched that debate between him and Julie Newman.
Painful. Watching someone who claims to be a journalist refuse to actually *listen* to the person they are interviewing feeds my cynicism. Its not just that she clearly had a political agenda. Its that she took an opportunity to actually understand and find common ground with political opposition and just set it on fire.

George the original one
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by George the original one »

He's boring as f**k.

ducknalddon
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by ducknalddon »

ThisDinosaur wrote:
Fri Jan 26, 2018 12:08 pm
Painful. Watching someone who claims to be a journalist refuse to actually *listen* to the person they are interviewing feeds my cynicism. Its not just that she clearly had a political agenda. Its that she took an opportunity to actually understand and find common ground with political opposition and just set it on fire.
I wouldn't take too much notice of that, all political journalism in the UK is like that, it's very adversarial.

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RFS
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by RFS »

I have completed the self authoring program & the understandmyself.com assessment, watched all 2018 "Personality and Its Transformations" lectures, and listened to all of his biblical lectures. This man's work has transformed my life. Here comes an immense simplification of his work:

When I was in college, I had a friend circle that studied english, women's studies, religion, etc. They introduced me to postmodern philosophy, and it damaged my mental health. Humanities students learn that every situation allows for an infinite number of interpretations, and all elements of western culture are oppressive tools used for exclusion and male dominance. Our values system has no intrinsic value. It's a powerful argument because it's true. Whenever you create a value system, you exclude things from the value system. And there are an infinite number of interpretations that can be applied to situations. This "freedom" demoralized me completely, and it helped rationalize the dispensing of moral responsibility. Everything is a social construct, nothing really matters. It was like dropping into an abyss of nihilism.

As you can imagine, this bullshit doesn't help anyone live properly at all. You don't act as if being is good, you don't act as if truth is the pathway to enlightenment, and you don't act as if you should pursue the deepest meaning possible in your life. Next thing you know, you're hitting people on the head with bike locks at Antifa rallies because you're bitter and resentful at the world for being a shitty place (to you, the person that takes 0 individual responsibility for their life!)

Dr. Peterson taught me that while there are infinite interpretations for the world, there's interpretations that allow you to live properly. He taught me that you live in a relationship with your own conscience, and that pursuing the most honorable, noble, exciting, worthwhile version of your self is the highest goal in life that you should strive for. When you have an aim, and you work towards it, your psyche indicates that what you're doing is meaningful. You accept the suffering of life! Your mindset changes, and you start transforming the chaos in your life into order. You start with the small things (that's where the whole "clean/organize your room!" thing comes from), you make incremental progress each day, and you're a completely different person in a few months.

I think his mission is to provide a humanities education to people that enables ass-kicking and striving towards what people can be, rather than destructive nihilism. I'll leave it with this quote:

"To the degree that you do not manifest what's within you, your life falls apart around you. Everything that could make you bitter multiplies, until you're in a situation where you want the destruction, you want to bring it on. It's not surprising. Life can be so terrible that the question "should it exist at all" can be a real question. The answer is, "It depends on how you live it." If your life is so terrible that you can't bear it, then it raises the question of whether you're living it properly. And that's not to say people don't suffer under bearings that are too big to bear, they certainly do. But it doesn't matter. If you let that embitter you, if you let that destroy your allegiance to the proper path, all it does is make that worse and everything else. It's no out."

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ffj wrote:
Fri Jan 26, 2018 10:41 am
I haven't listened to his advice on relationships or depression etc. I'm afraid it is going to be cringeworthy to be honest, plus I don't need it personally. Also, this whole pronoun thing and other stupid topics I have no interest in. A lot of people seem to love him though.
His advice on that is fantastic, imo. He's also a practicing clinical psychologist. He's been helping people sort their lives out for several years.
Last edited by RFS on Sat Jan 27, 2018 11:39 am, edited 1 time in total.

Papers of Indenture
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by Papers of Indenture »

I've listened to all of his Maps of Meaning lectures and three podcasts he did with Rogan. Interesting but i'm not sure I learned much new. I've travelled a lot of ground with Jung and myth in the past.

I have no issue with him but the cult like following is a little off putting to me. I often find him to be out of his depth and prone to making the same errors he points out in others when he leaves the realm of psychology, Jung, and self help.

I have read that he has never undergone Jungian analysis himself. Odd for someone who uses Jungian theory with such huge brush strokes.
Last edited by Papers of Indenture on Fri Jan 26, 2018 6:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

ThisDinosaur
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by ThisDinosaur »

Papers of Indenture wrote:
Fri Jan 26, 2018 6:38 pm
I often find him to be out of his depth and prone to making the same errors he points out in others when he leaves the realm of psychology, Jung, and self help.
What do you mean by this?

@RFS
Do you think there's any benefit of buying the self authoring program over just spending some time reflecting/writing about your life and goals? I've read about the underlying research, and I'm interested, but not enough to spend $15 and a hundred hours on a self help program. Also, im skeptical of how much it would help someone who's already purusing FIRE with a savings rate >70%. Maybe I'll reconsider after I'm FI and wandering aimlessly for meaning.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Nothing new under the sun.
https://www.amazon.com/Man-Steel-Velvet ... 0911094237


It's more like engineering than science. It works without having to be reflective of some eternal truth. If you convey "order" you will attract "chaos", if you convey "assertive" you will attract "receptive" and vice-versa ad nauseum. Humans are very impressionable. It's like if you tell yourself "I am delicious like a peach.", you will instantly vibe more sexy (unless you are trying to attract somebody who is also saying something like "I am delicious like a peach." to himself.) Then since you are a social animal, the feedback loop from others, and even your self-perception of some of your behaviors as reflected in environments other than the social, will reinforce the behavior and aspects of identity.

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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by Solvent »

It's odd, two weeks ago I'd never heard of this guy and then in the last ten days every website I frequent has exploded with articles about him. I gather he's not new on the intellectual scene but he was certainly under my radar until recently.

I won't comment on him directly but more on some of the things I read about him/interviews. It reminds me of what happens to Peter Singer, a philosopher who I like, consider quite original, and who is very precise with his words. The interviews you find with Singer, going back at least a decade, often see instances of statements from journalists like: "So you're saying we should kill disabled people". Must be aggravating for interviewees to have to keep repeating "I didn't say that, you're not engaging with my actual views..."

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