Here's some dispassionate inquiry: he leans on IQ far too heavily to explain how the brain works. While there is correlation between jobs and IQ and some research that shows a mild inverse relationship between IQ and crime, it's not the end-all-be-all of psychology, as he claims, "If you don’t buy IQ research, then you might as well throw away all of psychology."
What of all of the other areas of psychology? If IQ was found to be completely spurious, we'd still have other psychological research. IQ is not foundational like he claims.
It's like Peterson has never read the criticisms[1] of the Bell Curve and believes it in its entirely. His lectures and interviews on the subject are really just a rehashing of the same, mostly discredited arguments. Even Charles Murray has stepped back from a single number determinant of a single kind of intelligence[2].
I'll try to summarize his position on IQ without doing him a disservice.
* IQ is highly correlated to intelligence (what is called technically g). Highly enough that you can use it as a measure of general intelligence.
* IQ is the only test we have that accurately measures intelligence and that is not a self-report test.
* IQ has been shown to be the highest predictor for success in life. Highest does not mean only. In fact, its correlation is .35. Conscientiousness is the second best predictor, but amounts to half of IQ.
* There is no way to raise IQ, which is genetically determined. But there are many ways to lower it.
It also very important to consider that a) he made a lot of highly cited research on the topic, b) he is very knowledgeable on the literature and c) he says many times that the results of these studies are disheartening and nobody likes them (him included).
He never implied, for example, that there is an inverse relationship between IQ and crime, quite the opposite. IQ is related to the Opennes personality trait.
Crime is caused by low Agreableness, which is another personality trait. He also cites often the work of Martin Daly, which studied how crime is correlated to a too steep inequality, where the social ladder is too hard to climb, which makes people turn to crime as the only alternative.
What of all of the other areas of psychology? If IQ was found to be completely spurious, we'd still have other psychological research. IQ is not foundational like he claims.
It's like Peterson has never read the criticisms[1] of the Bell Curve and believes it in its entirely. His lectures and interviews on the subject are really just a rehashing of the same, mostly discredited arguments. Even Charles Murray has stepped back from a single number determinant of a single kind of intelligence[2].
[1]: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/course/topics/curveball.htm...
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20050205010706/http://www.skepti...