> The story goes something like this, I get recommended a clip on YouTube, there’s a man who is calm, articulate, and says something that completely violates the narrative. How fascinating. Is my understanding of the world completely wrong?! I need to read everything this man written.
I think author understanding of the world is not wrong, but his approach - definitely. He expects to find some "wise man" who would have answers on all the world problems, sort of a panacea-man, which is clearly not a smart approach.
If someone was an expert for covid-related topics, why would you even watch this peron videos analysing Ukraine war? That makes zero sense.
It's the behaviour I notice rather than the stated motives;
> But dear reader see this pattern for what it is... every 6 months I
find someone new to obsess over... Without fail, each one of comes
to disappoint.
Serial obsessive fixation seems a problem right there in
itself. There's a deep need that isn't being satisfied. What is it?
> says something that completely violates the narrative. How
fascinating.
A rebel! One validated by popular opinion no less!
The problem is, no matter how many rebellious public intellectuals we
binge on, it will not take one any closer to being that rebellious
and fascinating person. Escape from such a cycle is to jump directly
to being that which you wish to be. Do not pass "Go". Do not collect
$200.
Find what is so odious in this "narrative" of which you speak, and
loudly denounce it!
But beware, if you like to have friends. Instead of being the cool,
interesting person at the party, who knows all the latest,
internet-celebrity-validated talking points, you will be the bus loony
in the anorak who people avoid. Trust me, I've lived it for 40
years. With some guile you can go to ground disguised as university
professor for a while.
> Serial obsessive fixation seems a problem right there in itself. There's a deep need that isn't being satisfied. What is it?
I do feel that the author has some interesting personality trait - but I'm not sure if he's in the minority.
After writing my comment I have realised that maybe it's why I never understood the appeal of Twitter. I have never had any "gurus" or "authorities" that I'd universally respect. I could never understand why would I follow some individual on twitter - why would I care? When I read that the author says he follows that "person" so deeply, watching their videos for hours, I completely can not relate. Neither on logical nor emotional level.
I might dig into a topic, let's say, siege of Berlin during II WW, but I'd be focusing on the topic and the source / author will be completely irrelevant. I'll even probably select various ones, as I enjoy challenging my own perspective.
> I could never understand why would I follow some individual on twitter - why would I care?
Because if someone puts out good tweets at a reasonable frequency, then following them means you will have good tweets in your feed at a reasonable frequency.
You might also get a lot of terrible tweets in your feed, but that's fine, that's how Twitter works, you just scroll past the terrible stuff.
It's not a million miles of subscribing to a newspaper. You don't expect every piece to be good, but as long as there are a few good things every week, it may be worth it.
Old Twitter was much better for offering you a plethora of perspectives, especially of random individuals "on the ground", in whatever sense, who were not professional talking heads. That time is long gone.
While I don’t use social media, nor am I prone to personality obsession like the author, there’s definitely something to be said about following an “authority” on Twitter and the like. Whether they’re an artist whose work you enjoy, a top expert in a field you’re interested in, or simply a person whose writing on some topic you appreciate, surely there’s an individual whose insight you’d find valuable enough to “follow”?
> surely there’s an individual whose insight you’d find valuable enough to “follow”?
Not me. What I would like to follow is a topic that interests me, with discourse predominantly populated by subject matter experts. "User-based" follow systems like Twitter only make sense insamuch as the user sticks to their expertise, and as soon as they start veering away into new topics their comments are just as likely to be noise as the average schmuck, and I don't know why I would want to waste my time deliberately consuming noise.
What you describe wanting, is what academic journals are. Subject matter experts discussing that subject matter with one another. Social media is not for you, and that's fine.
What other people are describing, is more like, an author writes a book you enjoy; so you read another book of theirs. There is enjoyment in their prose style and personal voice, and so they seek out more of the same.
And maybe the first book was a scifi or mystery novel, and the next book you find by that author is a non-fiction history of egypt, or a genetics textbook. You will likely still enjoy reading that book.
Sometimes that author can even be an expert on all such topics; Issac Asimov existed, after all. But when people are reading for entertainment, they'll be less picky.
> surely there’s an individual whose insight you’d find valuable enough to “follow”?
Not really. I'd rather follow a site with news in topics that are of my interests (e.g. https://electrek.co/) than some short-form messages of an individual. If these tweets would be containing links to their blog then I'd rather check the blog occasionally.
What I have learnt is that the majority of people are not interesting enough to keep quiet just to be "allowed" to be around them. The number of people I respect and am interested in listening to their opinion goes down from year to year, with experience. Most people are jerks that deserve to stay in their bubble with their "friends".
In a neighbouring thread we're talking about "conviviality" (Ivan
Illich's "Tools for..."
It's an odd word.
What I found is that almost every random bore at the pub has a wealth
of interesting stuff to say. You just have to tease it out. You have
to work at conversations. It's a bit of a lost art imho.
The first step is always to get the topic off the mainstream (stop
exchanging platitudes) by showing an interest in some marginal
personal remark. Doesn't work for everyone of course. And some people
just don't want to.
Living in Finland I learned the art of just being quiet around others
and that "interesting company" can be hanging out without words, say
just appreciating a walk together.
So I'm with in theory. People are interesting for the most part. However the amount of work to reward you are describing is tantamount to pulling up hedgerows in zelda for coins. Your not likely to find anything amazing but maybe once in awhile interesting. Again probably depends on the establishment
A cousin of mine in her 20's has a podcast. I listened in on one and was surprised to hear that whe was giving out financial and investing advice. For context, she lives with her husband in his childhood bedroom with her inlaws, and works two or three days a week as a health professional. She has virtually no savings or investments, relies on her inlaws for food, and has an expensive Jeep on a 6 year loan. Interesting to think that folks are listening to her advice as though she is an expert.
I can believe it. There are those skilled at performative intellectualism, i.e. sounding very smart and insightful, but the performance itself is the product, it is all they sell and offer. Whenever I hear a public speaker appealing to supposed ancient wisdom of obscure tribes and traditions who had better-than-modern diets, laws, monetary policy, medicine, footwear (or lack iof), etc then that tells me that it’s just more hucksterism
Also, it just takes a lot of time to produce that kind of content
The people with the knowledge/experience are often busy doing real world stuff
For others, producing that content is the "best" thing they can do with their time, but ironically that means you probably don't want to listen to them
I’ve begun noticing this performative art play out more and more often on HN lately, especially in threads regarding medicine and healthcare. Apparently everyone became an armchair doctor and got their public policy degrees while on lockdown. It usually leads to a deep discussion with just one comment buried in the middle of the stack going “uhm, wtf?”
I should start a list of red flags in my notes. “Inflammation” comes to mind as well as any sort of explanation that invokes evolutionary biology or neuroscience.
You see someone make sense of a complex topic, be able to cut through bullshit and appearances, you can use that as a "character witness". Maybe that person has solid thought processes and may get other complex issues right too. There are a few people who I see to be often proven right.
Clearly there is a middle ground, we should not blindly follow some authority, but some skills generalize, and some people may be worth listening to on general topics, and not just the ultra-specialized experts.
It is an obviously wrong approach. There are plenty of intelligent people out there, this doesn't keep them from being occasionally wrong. If you have access to the opinion of people who devoted their whole lives to the field in question, why would you seek it from an influencer that perhaps gained fame from being an authority in a couple of non-related fields?
In the last couple years there was more than ample opportunity to see how badly this approach fails, you have droves of these "public intellectuals" as TFA calls them for every crisis (COVID, energy crisis, russian wars, gaza etc.) and almost all of them are just Average Joes dishing out their BBQ-level hot takes in public. Remember all the math and physics PhDs in 2020 suddenly being genius experts on disease modelling? The same people who suddenly became experts on warfare some time in early 2022? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Yes. This was prominent when Russia invaded Ukraine. It was as if millions of people woke and decided, "I'm tired of being an infectious disease expert. Starting today, I'm a military intelligence expert!"
Thing is, none of the people i followed for COVID takes did that. They've carried on posting about infectious diseases. So i think it is possible to distinguish between these barbecue-level fake public intellectuals, and real experts, because apparently i did that.
That people do pay attention to the Tomas Pueyos of the world is a problem - but not because it's impossible not to, just because they're doing it!
You know, there is a difference between Covid denialism and saying “maybe we should have invested in a lot more air purifiers and good ventilation”. I’m butthurt about the lack of science used for understanding an airborn contagion even by our elected officials.
Scientific people who are outside of a field that has institutional scientific blindness problems are absolutely allowed to call out that bullshit when we see it. We don’t get upset when a non chiropractor says that chiropractors are hucksters. I should not be lumped in with Covid deniers for pointing out that most disease experts massive undervalued and underutilized air ventilation techniques (an example technique would be doing regular activities, like classes, outside)
The thing about being a professional contrarian is you don't need to know anything about the underlying subject, or have special access to information, you just follow the mainstream media and say the opposite.
Meanwhile I saw a friend of mine who actually is an immunology PhD get driven off Twitter in 2020 by angry mobs.
Is considering oneself an omniscient Oracle the right approach?
> If you have access to the opinion of people who devoted their whole lives to the field in question, why would you seek it from an influencer that perhaps gained fame from being an authority in a couple of non-related fields?
For myself, the domain(s) that the "influencer" has skills within is crucially important, as certain domains encompass or intersect with almost all others.
This is an interesting comment section from certain specific perspectives, but if one lacks the necessary background you could miss out on the show entirely.
> You see someone make sense of a complex topic, be able to cut through bullshit and appearances, you can use that as a "character witness". Maybe that person has solid thought processes and may get other complex issues right too. There are a few people who I see to be often proven right.
But do they really cut through bullshit and appearances? The individuals that the author has mentioned are mostly oversimplifying the world.
> Maybe that person has solid thought processes and may get other complex issues right too.
That's the issue here - treating real world issues as a though experiment. It creates solutions that are very appealing to people who perceive themselves as thinkers. The ideas are usually simple, round, fair, based on some fairness coming from nature or math, but they completely discard the complexity of the problem. As soon as you start adding corner cases it solution fails.
You can see that as well in software engineering - if only we could simplify the problem we're trying to solve, the solution would be so clean!
> why would you even watch this [person’s] videos analysing Ukraine war?
Because that was how you began life.
Your parents (and later/lesser, primary school teachers) were the source of answers on nearly everything.
There’s probably something quite natural about transferring a belief of being competent/knowledgeable in one area into some expectation of the same in another area. It's the underpinning of the "appeal to authority" logical fallacy.
It certainly works in the opposite direction: someone whom you know to pontificate out their backside on one topic, that expectation holds for the next, randomly chosen topic as well.
If someone is a free thinker and person of knowledge and eloquence that I respect I'd probably be interested in hearing their position on pretty much any topic, not just their narrow field of professional interest. Take Noam Chomsky for instance, I seriously doubt that that many people online listened to his lectures on linguistics, right?
This is very true. I think part of the issue is that there's an element of critical thinking skills that you would hope to eventually acquire _AS_ you continue to listen to any attributed public intellectual. Otherwise you can go your whole life reading Christopher Hitchens from when he was a great rhetorician and contrarian of US foreign policy to his transformation of racist war-mongering anti-theism days.
That's difference in knowledge vs intelligence though. We see repeatedly that people with expert knowledge are frequently wrong because they shape what they see to fit their knowledge. Intelligent people can give more insight on a variety of topics without having expert level knowledge just because they are smart and can put the puzzle together differently.
It's the adage of "when you only have a hammer everything looks like a nail."
Intelligent people have a full toolbox to analyze things with but domain experts tend to only have increasingly large hammers.
> Intelligent people can give more insight on a variety of topics without having expert level knowledge just because they are smart and can put the puzzle together differently.
Citation needed. This sounds like a Rationalist power fantasy which doesn't fit my experience of the world at all.
Violating the narrative is irrelevant. But if someone writes something interesting, logical, that I didn’t already know, I usually look for more, whether it’s hn comments , github projects, youtube videos, arxiv papers etc. once I see something particularly dumb or illogical from them, I stop. Especially if I found some other rabbit hole to follow.
why would you even watch this peron videos analysing Ukraine war?
So I do this, a lot. Rogan is a good example I struggle with. I regularly go I wonder what Joe Rogan thinks about this, on subjects I know he doesn’t know shit about or is just plain wrong about. It isn’t relegated to just Rogan.
Musk was another awful one when you first get into him.
This has to be a form of non-sexual attraction I think. I’m not gay, but how is this not gay? Like, what the fuck, am I in love with these people?
I almost have to shake my head and snap out of it.
Edit:
I’ll add that I’ve gotten extremely good at filtering his guests but still weak to filtering him (it’s kinda like still having feelings for your first). Anytime he puts on a comedian I always go “yeah whatever, who cares what some random comedian thinks about ______”, but I wasn’t able to do that with Rogan. No sir, I listen with both ears as he describes like … nuclear fusion.
Yes, this is a textbook parasocial relationship. No judgment—me too. I've been listening to the "New Heights" podcast a lot recently, so my most recent parasocial relationship is feeling like Jason and Travis Kelce are my friends. Of course I know they're not, it's just how these things work. Parasocial relationships are ubiquitous in the modern day.
My favorite analogy is that parasocial relationships are the Doritos of socialization: appealing. delicious, addictive, can temporarily keep hunger at bay—but fundamentally not satiating, lacking in essential nutrients, and unhealthy when they displace their original natural & more nutritious alternatives.
It's kind of inescapable in modern politics, because it's effective at getting people elected and/or making money. It's not the worst way to get elected; certainly better than relying on narrow donor class money. Just .. recognize the limitations of it.
I’m inclined to agree. The problem is, unlike High School where the kids just grow the fuck out of all the stupid teenage bullshit, adults seem to not have that kinda structure going on.
So instead of being a Rogan stan for those weird years in High School, you are grown ass 30 year year old Stan who’s been stanning for 5 years now minimum.
Adults today don’t know how to snap out of the high school shit they easily snapped out of after high school. It’s like we’re in a high school that never ends.
I don't think that's "adults today". Adults in the past also had parasocial shit going on. Do you think the people banging on Sherlock Holmes's author feeling personally betrayed by the ending were all young kiddos?
I think the issue with being an adult is that you often think you've outgrown childish inclinations. In actuality, I find adults will act childishly and then assume, because they are adults, their behavior must be mature and taken seriously.
Somewhat weird comment...I thought it was obvious, I and others are occasionally interested in what e.g. Joe Rogan has to say because it's entertaining.
I didn't think this was in any way confusing or surprising, and never thought this had anything to do with love.
Plenty of couples started with "oh he's so cute and funny" / "I love listening to her jokes", and few years later found themselves retelling those stories to a wide audience, at their wedding.
A guy standing up every week declaming with moral authority? The word you are looking for is preacher.
And that's what these people are. They provide a comforting sense of moral certainty and judgement; they define enemies, usually a nebulous Them; they're satisfying to listen to; and they publish on a schedule to reinforce the little ritual of listening to them. You've heard the adhan and you are called.
> This has to be a form of non-sexual attraction I think. I’m not gay, but how is this not gay? Like, what the fuck, am I in love with these people?
People have somehow lost all the words for communicating relationships between people that aren't sexual. Although the "fan" relationship can get pretty weird at times. It's interesting to hear from someone who's liminal enough to realize that they're inside the experience but also knows what's wrong with it. Thank you for this post.
> I wonder what Joe Rogan thinks about this, on subjects I know he doesn’t know shit about or is just plain wrong about
Maybe an "appeal to authority" type situation which is guiding an anxious brain? e.g. Rogan has a massive following, therefore you wonder: "why does this person have such a massive following? It must be because they have important things to say. I had better listen too."
It does feel like something like that. Maybe not that exactly, but many people have some sort of need for external authorities to tell them what to do, what to think, who to be, etc. Some lack of confidence in their own judgement? Insecurity about making their own decisions?
That’s not what it is. People are looking around, shaking their heads, with an vague feeling that things *aren’t right* and waiting for someone to be like “alright everyone we’re heading off to start a new life frontier, let’s go!”, and Joe Rogan and Elon Musk feel like the charismatic alphas/cult leader you should be hitching your wagons to.
Because sometimes the crazy cult leader ends up being right, revival (much like the religious revivals of the 1830s in the US) and making a big change when society is in flux is just something in our blood. Problem is right now nobody wants to actually buy 60,000 acres of undeveloped land to get it all started, they just want to profit off of people via parasocial relationships.
I think as men we have a deep seated need to have a strong leader we respect. If we went into the woods and made a tribe I’d for sure want Joe Rogan or Elon Musk making the decisions. Joe Rogan gives even the village idiot a fair shake to make their point on his podcast. It’s like watching a wise king preside over court. There’s not some big gay mystery here, it’s hardwired “if we go hunting a mammoth, I want Joe Rogan leading the hunt and presiding over the feast!”.
I keep hearing this meme repeated lately (most recently by the My Pillow guy), and I guess my brain is wired differently, but oh boy, would I hate that society.
If you are trying to be a well-rounded person with well-founded opinions on different topics, it makes sense to believe that there are others like you who are further along the way.
Both of your examples have a very strong technical component, either understanding the underlying biology/epidemiology or understanding war theory and practice. It is indeed unlikely that someone is an expert in both.
But many important topics have far fewer, if any, objective truths attached to it. In the case of covid restrictions, opinions should obviously be founded on science, but science can only inform our moral choices, not make them for us. Is the damage done to developing minds worth locking down schools if it reduces the spread of covid? Can there be a state/societal mandate to force people to stay in their homes, or even to get vaccinated?
You can come to very different conclusions based on how your worldview is constructed, and I think the sign of a true intellectual is that they can coherently describe theirs, and make other intellectuals understand it, even if they are diametrically opposed to it.
> If you are trying to be a well-rounded person with well-founded opinions on different topics, it makes sense to believe that there are others like you who are further along the way.
Maybe that's the issue with me. The more I learn, over years, the more cautious I become about forming an opinion. It's very rare that things are black or white, I can see it being all very grey. So if I see someone describing, with full confidence, that this is good and that is bad, without all that load of middle-tones, it just makes me feel that they either are not too smart or do not have good intentions.
> You can come to very different conclusions based on how your worldview is constructed, and I think the sign of a true intellectual is that they can coherently describe theirs, and make other intellectuals understand it, even if they are diametrically opposed to it.
I can see the appeal here. What I do not understand is, why would you approach that person as an authority?
> It's very rare that things are black or white, I can see it being all very grey
Yes, it's much easier to paint the whole world one color than trying to paint it in two colors: you'd have to make distinctions and that's quite hard. But on the other hand, if two colors are not enough to paint the whole world, surely one color is even less enough?
That might be an interesting experiment. Poll people on a large scale about dozens of minuscule moral issues that can be determined as GOOD or EVIL, then try to assemble more complex moral issues out of these building blocks. You could end up with some sort of statistical model of morality.
> it's very rare that things are black or white, I can see it being all very grey
When I was a teen I saw the world as black and white.
When I got in college I knew they are all grey.
And now I understand there are different shades of grey. Most of time we have no enough information to tell, but sometimes it's worth to look closely to distinguish them.
<< Maybe that's the issue with me. The more I learn, over years, the more cautious I become about forming an opinion.
Yep. Naturally, there is a weird social pressure to have an opinion now even if it ends up being just wrong later. Somehow just waiting is not acceptable. You need to take a stance and declare yourself as team A or team B ( or more ), which only adds to the further tribalization of our discourse.
It's not really English to have a 'well-founded' opinion..
Opinions are not based on knowledge or certainty.. they're opinions.
I miss when opinions were a thing you said to get the 'nothing' out and a probative suggestion that started conversations.
Locking opinion down to knowledge and certainty is essentially non-sensical in English.
The old saying was 'opinions are like assholes, everyone's got one'. Perfectly encapsulates how serious opinions are.... not at all serious, by design.
I'd agree, but then the number of people that I meet who are otherwise intelligent and thoughtful, but have a casual, uncritical belief in the ability for Elon Musk to lead humanity forward on multiple fronts is shocking.
Have you ever heard of the "all in" podcast?
I'm not seeing a very sympathetic analysis of this. This phenomenon is as old as time, with Socrate's students hanging on his every word.
In my view its an entirely reasonable thing: you encounter a person who can articulate a coherent ideology, method, system (etc.) which is entirely new to you. You use that person as a means of learning this system; and when you've learnt it all, you move on.
The key thing is you arrive at a critical point where you have seen their pov and can criticise it; and that you dont end up in a cult-like following of their ideas.
This cultishness is everywhere in academia, see, eg., all the departments that are "Kantian" or "Wittigensteinian" --- people forever trapped in the work of one author. I am very suspicious of "History of"-type disciplines for this reason.
I dont see this as having to do with social media, but if at all, maybe it accelerates it. I certainly think you need much more than 6mo with any substantive person.
The social media part exacerbates the issue because the intellectual has direct access to their listeners. In the past, if you wrote an influential book, indeed your fans might go back and comb through your back catalogue. And the basic idea of you needing to write your next great book on the next hot topic to maintain your fame is there. But social media cuts out the book writing cycle, instead you can spend five minutes on a tweet, a few days on a YouTube video, etc. The loop is much tighter, and the effect is accelerated.
It's noteworthy but sadly not surprising[1], that someone like Peterson is listed as an 'intellectual'.
This man talks like ChatGPT when asked to clad a text of the most basic ideas, frequently completely missing the point, into sophisticated-sounding language.
The other names tell me nothing; but having the former in the list kept me from looking up the latter.
I agree with Chomsky's definition [1]: intellectual is a person who tries to talk intelligently in public about affairs that are relevant to the general public. Being a top scentist or a top sellng author does not neccessarily make you an intellectual.
As other comments said, this is not just an appeal to authority. He really is an authority.
However, having established real authority, he then uses it to convey ideas which are less supported. https://youtu.be/eKwSDqJAum8?si=WKNMLmu8Y8OO7kwn&t=631 calls this a "science sandwich", and it is a good description. So, for instance, he'll have a series of lectures. Some are real science. Such as how the big 5 personality characteristics correlate with political alignment. Others are pseudoscience. Such as using Jungian archetypes to push his politics. He doesn't differentiate, and audiences who have accepted his authority ALSO don't differentiate.
I don't want to come off too hard as directly defending Jordan Peterson--I maybe watched a video or two on YouTube a while back with him talking about something... I liked one and hated the other--but this overall description of someone who is just saying a lot of stuff without any boundary between what they really actually know and where they are so far off the rails they might as well be on a psychedelic trip also sounds like it could apply to the likes of Plato... whom I'd 100% label as an intellectual.
Plato studied “philosophy” which at the time aimed to provide a full explanation to everything in life. Later in history knowledge got more and more specialized. As time goes by, being able to do meaningful contributions to various fields becomes more difficult. It is considered for example, that Gauss was the last scientist to contribute to all branches of science and similarly John Von Neumann was the last mathematician who made meaningful contributions in all branches of sciences. So yeah, you could say for Plato there were no boundaries as the amount of knowledge that existed was small enough to be fully handled by a human .. and it’s likely not the case anymore.
Saying someone is right because they are a police officer is an appeal to authority.
Saying someone is relevant because they have worked and made contributions to a field over the course of many years, and have had those findings integrated with the findings of others is a matter of practical management of complexity.
No. If the parent comment said "because Jorden Peterson has 20 years of experience, his opinion on topic X must be correct" then it's an appeal to authority. They didn't say that.
By the way, abusing terms is another sign for fake intellectuals...
You have to use some metric to define 'intellectual' and those all seem like reasonable ones to me. I don't see why you'd consider most of those as appeals to authority. Teaching at Harvard and tenured Professor perhaps but the rest are appeals to experience.
I’d argue that he has published 100+ academic papers on multiple sub-fields of psychology. Specifically on the “psychology of belief” so basically how believing “something” implies certain actions.
The problem is p=>q doesn’t imply ~p => ~q
95% of times when i hear about Peterson, its someone trying to discredit him. Then i go to Youtube, search for what Peterson said about $topic, and can't find shit that i would even bother about. This stuff is getting creepy. Where is all the dislike coming from?
Why do people ever dislike public figures? Why do people dislike Dr. Oz or Dr. Phil or Jake Paul?
Peterson is / was a drug addict that gives mediocre-at-best self-help advice, who also goes around whining about wokeness and saying hateful things, while somehow keeping a large audience and grifting them for millions of dollars. As far as public figures go, it's fairly typical for such a person to invite antipathy.
Nothing you just said disputes any of what Peterson has said. The fact that you mention him being a "drug addict" (he was briefly addicted to anti-depressants after his wife got cancer) and then use words like "whining" to try to discredit him without actually addressing or disputing anything he's said shows you just have an axe to grind with no substance.
That is a very severe understatement. He was so badly addicted to benzos (for years) that he ended up going to Russia to have himself put into a weeks-long medically-induced coma to go cold-turkey, which resulted in brain damage. (He insisted on that course of action, which Western doctors refused to go along with, for obvious reasons).
That left him unable to walk or speak properly for months and he still hasn't and probably will never fully recover. Just watch videos of him from a few years ago and compare them to videos from recently.
I get that benzos is being studied as a potential treatment for depression, but he was doing massive quantities, and not as part of a pharmaceutical trial.
Ketamine? Source needed. He said it was a benzodiazepine. A prescribed anti-anxiety drug, which in rare cases is documented to create the exact withdrawal problem he had.
It wouldnt be rare if all the cases were consistent with the duration of Peterson's access to + use of them—which is in turn a far more useful term ("access") to describe his relationship with drugs, in my seldom non-controversial opinion. Everyone bitches about their minor tranquilizer AFTER they're cutoff, smh [sighs]
Edit: also, "slow well-publicized descent unto madness and suicide on a wave of intellectual dishonesty by public psychological expert and academic" or something using a combinatorial variation inclusive of all those words would be just peachy
Why is fame relevant at all to this discussion? What is this fixation with "his fame" as a sort of dialectical deus ex machina you keep using it to escape simple unfavorable discussion with respect to Mr. Peterson? (I used the word respect in the same sentence, see? We good?) Can he grab anyone's pussy also?
Edit: also, does he say it was antidepressants? Anyone got the transcripts of podcast episodes where Jordan Peterson lies about being addicted to benzodiazepines/benzos and instead suggests they were antidepressants? I wish Klonopin was an anti-depressant yo, although im also glad thats absurd and truly not the case for my own sake
Edit: help your man Peterson out? Did you purposefully lie or understate the publicly known and available information regarding the nature of his addiction? Was he maybe cleaning his room so thoroughly to find lost drugs Junkie Jesus style? I wanna believe you but my brain can't just lay down its arms and allow this kinda explicit foolishness or deception.
Klonopin (benzo) !== ketamine (dissociative). My conjecture is many would benefit more from that kind of treatment than the former. Benzos lead to physical and mental oblivion just like alcoholism does.
You originally said the commenter hadn't discredited anything that Peterson said. Now Peterson may have a substantial body that is sound and doesn't fall into the categories critiqued. I certainly don't suggest that he has never said anything of merit.
This is incredibly wrong and convenient. He was addicted to benzos—not anti-depressants. Benzos are anti-anxiety drugs but it is more helpful to think about them as"alcohol in a pill". Peterson is, in a sense, not distinct from an alcoholic.
I'm not one to shit on drug addicts, hell, pot-kettle. But Peterson rubs me the wrong way because of his audacity in acting as if he is above the "usual" drug addict and that he can cheaply sell you the keys in the form of clichéd advice and can sell you better shit if you privately pay him to consult with him when he has to go all the way to fucking Russia to recieve "adequate treatment".
I just can't even with this guy. Like, Im not gonna say he has zero helpful ideas but they are tainted with the nonsense that helps nobody but himself.
Edit: i would like to find out the length of the supposef addiction as well. I just hate when people lie about this shit or polish it up when such stories should be unvarnished and relatively congruent with that which is known objectively or publiy particularly in such a public facing individual.
Edit: he also has the perfect justification so its interesting if his accounts depart from a more objective one in a way that is palpable
When Peterson needed the kind of therapy or care you fancy yourself receiving in him, he had to go to Russia. Please, take your time and take that in. Why didn't he just call his own hotline? Lol
Or you could just be a decent person. It's not that hard.
"The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence."
Counterexamples: Trump, Elon Musk's tenure at Twitter, Boris Johnson. Clearly the current system is not purely a meritocracy. This is also a completely vague statement, so plenty of room for weasling. What exactly does "predicated on competence" mean? I once read that someone fairly famous wrote "Be precise In Your Speech". Oh yeah, that was Peterson.
Women deeply want men who are competent and powerful. And I don’t mean power in that they can exert tyrannical control over others. That’s not power. That’s just corruption.
Anybody can pick a few random quotes out of context and dispute them. Keep in mind I'm not actually defending Peterson's views (I agree with some, disagree with others), I'm defending his status as a public intellectual.
My experience and history shows that women definitely tend to be more attracted to men who are competent and powerful. There is nothing misogynist about that statement. That statement does not imply that all women are the same, it's a description of a pattern that has a semblance of truth.
"Nothing you just said disputes any of what Peterson has said. ... try[ing] to discredit him without actually addressing or disputing anything he's said shows you just have an axe to grind with no substance."
Nothing there about his status as a public intellectual.
2. "Anybody can pick a few random quotes out of context and dispute them." These are tweets he sent on Twitter, not replies to other people. There is no more context. There is a high density of this crap on his twitter feed. At the time I looked, the quoted tweets were in position 4, 8, and 17 on his feed. I could have disputed more of them but those were the easiest to address.
3. There is a difference in between "women definitely tend to be more attracted" and "Women deeply want". If Peterson meant the former he should take his own advice and be more precise in his choice of words. Similarly if I've misinterpreted his other tweets, that's on him for not providing more context. He's not new to this game. (And this is, apparently, one of his rhetorical tactics. There is link in another comment to "bait and switch".)
Is his status as a public intellectual immutable or irrevokable, ever? Or does his Ph.D + tenure position ahelter him from deserved pushback on his nonsense and grifting in perpetuity?
When he starts talking stupid, am I to defer to his "public intellectual" status and not only turn off my brain and logic and common sense and/or suspend judgment forever or would that still be ok and would you respond well to an invitation to join me in doing so?
Edit: how many stupid things or over how long a period of uninterrupted time does it take for you to at least reexamine your views? Like this advocacy is as illogical as it is manipulatively and fiercely incorrect on a factual and qualitative basis jointly :/
Peterson was taking doctor prescribed medication during a time when his wife was dying of cancer and like many in the US (opioid crisis) he got hooked on them.
He is now off of them. If anything this should be celebrated, not denigrated.
Like or dislike Peterson, it's important that we get our facts straight and avoid editorializing for the sake of manipulating readers.
There seems to be a lot of disagreement in the replies to this comment around the exact nature of Jordan's health troubles/medical problems in 2019/2020. This is the most direct recounting of what happened, for anyone who cares to take a look:
What you are experiencing is called "the controversy bait-and-switch". Peterson is a master of it.
What he does is say something designed to look like a dog whistle to get people upset. Then when challenged on it, he say something reasonable to pull in fans. Then he says something else which is designed to be misunderstood, and repeats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKwSDqJAum8&t=244s explains it, and shows an actual example of how Peterson does it. This example had Peterson using the phrase "enforced monogamy" without context, causing people to assume that he wanted laws to enforce monogamy. Then, when challenged, he said, "Oh, no, what I meant was SOCIALLY enforced monogamy. All that I'm saying is that monogamy is a good thing!" Score 1 for Peterson. And people left sore about it are now primed to react doubly at whatever piece of bait he presents next.
Ngl, its a big PITA if you say thing A, and some people understand A, B, C and D and then get mad at you for supporting D. This happened to me some times before and i absolutely hate it. Seeing your argument that its a baddy thing makes me feel very uneasy.
And the "dog whistle" thing you mentioned is conceptually that, accusing someone of saying something they didn't exactly say. I hate this concept. How would someone even proove that something they said wasn't a "dog whistle"?
Let's say you support A, but know that many supporters of A also support B, C, and think that A implies D. Detractors also know that an argument that A implies D.
If you are arguing for A, and you are versed in basic argumentation (as anyone in Peterson's situation is), it is reasonable to expect that you understand the landscape of the argument. As such, if you know that this will be used to discredit your argument, it is incumbent on you to say, "I am arguing for A. I define A as such. With that definition, I am not arguing for D or that A implies D."
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As for dog whistles, you avoid having that problem by explicitly condemning the groups that use the dog whistle (if you indeed believe that group is wrong -- e.g. explicitly denouncing white nationalists), and by adjusting your argument to avoid any semblance of dog whistles as you learn about them.
Yes, it's more work, but this is the landscape of public discourse. Consider that minorities like Muslims have had to do this to the point of absurdity. (E.g. someone does not support the indiscriminate bombing of Palestinian hospitals and the withholding of substantial relief aid to Gaza, but that does not mean they support Hamas or its taking of hostages.)
There's no indescriminate bombing of hospitals. Nice how you pushed this lie so casually.
There are very strong proofs that a hospital was hit by a failed rocket launch of a gazan militia against Israel. Plus Hamas and other militias keep their weapons under schools hospitals and mosques. When ever Israel bomb these sites it first gives notice to evacuate. It's in no way indescriminate.
As opposed to a surprise raid against civilians in they're homes butchering their families, mothers before children, babies beheaded before their mothers and children tied up and burnt alive.
Perhaps that is why ppl decrying the bombing of gaza while not mentioning what Hamas did get such strong condemnations
And, as you will notice, I did not say "I" on this. I said "someone."
The point of the argument is to say that someone who espouses A does not immediately support B, and used a contemporary example.
I could have as easily said, "someone who does not support the bombing and murder of 8,000 Gaza residents by Israel or the withholding of aid does not immediately support the hostage taking of 230 hostages by Hamas." Would that be a less controversial opinion for you?
Nope, you wrote murder, that's not a fact, that's editorializing.
This is a war, the first strike was the senseless butchery I described. The ideology that drew that strike calls for annihilation of all Jews. And yet, Israel doesn't indescriminatly murders civilians. Israel called all civilians to leave the bombarded area, Hamas called them to stay. you have no idea how many of those dead are combatants, So how is saying "murder of 8000" not controversial?
Israel has no obligation under any international law, or any moral obligation to give aid as long as the hostages are not released. Remember these hostages are as young as 9 MONTHS. Hamas have not let the red cross see them.
A person who says what you wrote indirectly supports Hamas by spreading their morally corrupt narrative.
But by the time you've built yourself a major brand based on doing this over and over again, your repeated protestations about "just being misunderstood" wear thin.
It's not difficult to show that a given statement was meant innocently, but it does require some effort.
To whit, Norse pagan iconography is a very common in white supremacist imagery. So while I find the Norse pagan imagery interesting and compelling, I can't just hang it on my wall without preparing to defend myself against accusations of being a neo-Nazi. Is it my fault? Is it the accusers fault? No, obviously, it's the Nazis fault; they're the ones that tied a neutral-by-way-of-antiquity symbol to ethnic cleansing.
Does Peterson see what he says as a dog whistle? Impossible to say, but also irrelevant: there are extremists who believe that what he says is in fact a dog whistle, and just like the Norse Pagan imagery, the awfulness of their beliefs taints Petersons beliefs by association. And it turns out that Peterson doesn't have much control over that usage, even if he had a problem with it: the dog whistle is in the promulgation of his ideas by others, not his expression of those ideas.
Just to be clear, I do think Peterson's observations (re: gender roles, amongst others) are just wrong on their face. But that's out of scope for this post.
The only time I hear about dog whistles is when liberals say that alt right or similar with opposing viewpoints use them. I start to wonder if it is in their head only, or a rhetorical tool so that they can say "did you hear that? it was a dog whistle! tread carefully!"
I hope for better times when we can take what people say at face value and stop second-guessing what they supposedly mean.
This term pre-dates the alt-right by decades. The term "dog whistle" was popularized by William Safire in 1988, who campaigned for Richard Nixon among other things. It's historically understood to be a tool used primarily by social conservatives.
"In 1981, former Republican Party strategist Lee Atwater, when giving an anonymous interview discussing former president Richard Nixon's Southern strategy, speculated that terms like "states' rights" were used for dog-whistling"
One that I think about a lot is the "ok" symbol, when its not being held up as a separate symbol (that is, not held up like the peace sign or a middle finger). If you'd normally put the palms of your hands on your knees while sitting, but instead put the o of the symbol on there, then you're doing the thing that's a dog whistle.
And what's insidious about it is that to some extent, people do it just because they know it winds up liberals. Hell, there's a picture of 16-year old me making the sign that way, specifically because the photographer told us not to. That was 25 years ago, so I'm not sure if the symbol had been overloaded at that time. I certainly had no idea about that extra connotation.
Its never clear in isolation if a person using the symbol semi-covertly is doing so because they want to confuse liberals, or to advertise to neo-nazis. Its the same as wearing a red shoelaces in certain parts of Los Angeles. Are you doing it because you're a Blood? Or because you think it goes well with your outfit? What if its both? And if you're not in the context where that extra connotation matters, then no one assumes that there might be that extra connotation. You see the exact same sort of bonkers nitpicking from e.g. QAnon about how every little thing is just code for "this politician is involved in the child sex trade, and want others in the child sex trade to know". Sometimes the accusation of dog-whistling is just bonkers. But I have also seen neo-nazi militias advertising in neutral spaces, and the only reason I was tipped off is because they called themselves the 1488th Civil Defense Militia or some such. As the saying goes, if you know, YOU KNOW.
There are also more explicit dog-whistles, where the word people want to use is deemed politically incorrect. Think "urban" when somebody really means "black" in the late 80s into the 90s.
This is also called the "motte-and-bailey fallacy", and it's utterly insufferable.
It's the off-internet equivalent of 'I'm just trolling, bro, why do you haff to be mad ;)'
What confuses the matter further is that some of his advice is actually common-sense good-advice. He's not famous or controversial for giving that common-sense good-advice, though.
There comes a point where a taxonomy of fallacies is just splitting hairs. But these two are ones that I would choose to distinguish, even though they have a lot of sympathy.
The point of a controversy bait-and-switch is to draw attention and followers based on how reasonable you are. I already explained how it works above.
A motte-and-bailey fallacy, for those who don't know, is that you have two statements that you equivocate between. The motte is very easy to defend. The bailey is an attack. When you are attacking you switch to the bailey. When you are defending you switch to the motte. And then you switch back by pretending that your defense of the motte actually advanced your bailey.
I see this as different because you actually DO intend to convince people of the bailey if you can. And while in the controversy bait and switch you make it clear when you flip between positions, in the mott-and-bailey you equivocate and attempt to leave people confused.
Unfortunatelly, the video is incomplete.
The presenter explains what Peterson said and shows a video of his reaction to the accusations.
What is missing is the actual video snippet of Peterson performing the fallacy - i.e. show me what Peterson said, don't tell me what he said.
Preferably at least a few the seconds leading up and shortly after the timerange in question should be included to minimize the risk of an out-of-context citation.
As it is now I have to go searching for the interview in question if I want to check for myself if he actually did a bait-and-switch, as only evidence for the switch part is actually presented.
If the video featured proper citations, one for the bait and one for the switch, I might've been able to form an opinion, but alas, for now it is not meant to be.
That presenter eventually learned not to make that mistake. His recent videos all include links to the original videos exactly so that people who want additional context can get it. But he didn't do that back then.
However, in my experience, Drew goes out of his way to fairly represent people's positions. Based on that I would trust that he's fairly representing his understanding of what other people actually did. Drew's mistakes are far more likely to be from honest error than malice.
I never thought "enforced monogamy" to be a reference to laws, because that is absurd. I always thought it meant socially enforced, and then not even by any particular sex.
I think the ragey criticisms are baited by him dancing around far right positions while otherwise talking pretty normal stuff. Anger based criticisms end up lying to make their point and then make Peterson more popular as a result.
A while back, when I was just beginning therapy, my therapist recommended I take an online personality test, which unbeknownst to me, was authored by Jordan Peterson. After I took the test, it gave 5-7 paragraphs explaining what each individual personality trait meant. Pretty boilerplate, but for some traits, when you got further down the explanations, it started feeling less and less like a personality test.
For example, for the "agreeableness" trait, it would talk about how it was testing how "compliant, nurturing, kind, naively trusting and conciliatory" the person is, and that it generally found women scored higher. Sure, I can believe you've found that during your surveys.
But then you scroll down a little more, and it starts saying things like "This difference in agreeableness between men and women is largest in countries such as Norway and Sweden, where the most has been done to ensure equality of outcome between the sexes. This provides strong evidence that biological factors rather than the environment and learning account for the dissimilarity."
Uh... Why are we talking about Norway and Sweden suddenly? Scroll down a little more, and it makes more sense: "Agreeable people, [...], are more likely to enter professions associated with people, such as teaching and nursing, which are dominated by women. This is true even in the Scandinavian countries, where attempts to produce gender-equal societies has reached a maximum."
Ah. So what we have here is, regardless of whether you agree it's true or not, a political agenda masquerading as a personality test. It's purpose is to argue Peterson's vocal political belief that the gender pay gap is not an issue, because women are biologically better at being nurses instead of engineers. His proof? Just look at those Scandinavians, they have completely solved sexism (citation needed) and still see this gap!
Peterson may have genuinely good self help books and lectures, but the issue is it's not for the purpose of actually helping people. It's to push people closer to his world view, to agreeing with his political agenda. If you truly gained something from reading his books or watching his lectures, don't let me take that away from you. But be mindful of when his self help veers towards political beliefs.
> Ah. So what we have here is, regardless of whether you agree it's true or not, a political agenda masquerading as a personality test. It's purpose is to argue Peterson's vocal political belief that the gender pay gap is not an issue, because women are biologically better at being nurses instead of engineers. His proof? Just look at those Scandinavians, they have completely solved sexism (citation needed) and still see this gap
I'm not sure it's a political belief per se so much as a refutation of the implicit assumption that the gender pay gap is entirely the result of sexism and more likely the result of other factors, not least of which are the traits and proclivities of either sex.
I'm not prepared to debate whether or not his argument on the topic is legitimate, but it is something that he has elaborated on and supported with some data.
'...in the Scandinavian countries, where attempts to produce gender-equal societies has reached a maximum'
Is not a verifiable fact. It's just a political opinion, used in conjunction with a verifiable fact, to smuggle a political argument into a 'scientific' personality test.
When I run a speed test for my internet it will often give me comparisons to give me an idea where I fit in with others and can also give suggestions, such as explaining what docsys means, etc.
Don Quixote and tilting at windmills comes to mind.
If 5% of the time the discrediting is legitimate, then that should be enough to generate dislike for the man. If the 5% was rhetorical and it's really 0%, then you're not actually paying attention for reasons you should investigate. JBP is not a well man. Not physically, not morally, not ethically, and not spiritually.
If you were publicly outspoken on all of your views across all facets of life (eg. controversial topics, personal topics like relationships) with thousands of hours of content online, there would be plenty of people who strongly disagree with you and to use your words "dislike" you. The other way that's not possible is if you're not actually taking a stance on anything.
The article isn't that long, they kind of address your criticism in there.
They're lamenting the fact that no matter the person, every person whose ideas they find fascinating becomes less fascinating the longer they consume their content.
They blame it on the fact that every subsequent idea is less researched and thought out than the one before because there is simply not enough time for them to have thought it out properly.
And it reminds me of something I heard once: 'Your first book/song/album/painting is the result of your entire life up to that point, your next is done in significantly less time.' Basically, until you actually provide a result, you have all the time you want to craft it exactly how you want it. But once you have a following, they will demand more from you and now you have an implied deadline.
I'm sure I'll get downvoted here, but I think Peterson is brilliant. His books have absolutely given me insightful ideas that have improved my life and relationships.
12 Rules for Life was mostly good, it definitely helped me with some things. I liked his earlier podcasts on JRE and other shows.
However, I couldn't get through Beyond Order at all; I had to drop it fairly early. I think I still like the Peterson from 5-ish years ago. How he currently is, and how he has _mostly_ been for the past 2 years or so does not align with me anymore.
I'm 100% with you on that. I've never heard meaningful or valid criticism of him. It's all lazy hand wavy utterances that indicate all of his critics never listen to him for more than 20 mins.
Even if you disagree with him Jordan Peterson is absolutely a public intellectual. Anyone who has been so publicly outspoken with such an enormous following and made a dent in the universe is absolutely a public intellectual. Just because you disagree with his views (none of which you've disputed in your vague criticism) doesn't dispute that.
Peterson has helped me. That being said, Peterson is someone with a few good ideas that encompass a singular limited view of the world. It doesn't help with military maneuvers (or the world political theater at large), or dietary choices, or a host of other topics. It's not necessary for someone to have deep thinking applied to every topic, but that's an assumed, pre-requisite of an intellectual. Someone who is smart and has something valuable to say, primarily because it has been a focus in their lives, have repeatedly been asked to voice opinions. These opinions are inappropriately over-valued in the modern zeitgeist.
Asking Peterson about AI is silly. eg I wouldn't ask John Ousterhout, who is looking to formalize a process for creating "great programmers", about how to maximize my tax deductions.
It might help to expand your horizons a bit. I see a lot of dudes on there I easily spotted for having limited range from the start. The trouble is people like this float too far off the ground and never come down to catch up. They usually lose their touch long before they gain the limelight, but are able to cruise a bit.
The big tell: is "being a public intellectual" all they have? Do they have no experiences with the real world to temper flighty, assumption-based beliefs? Bad news. Even Zeno of Citium saw the world as a merchant while Stoicism was cooking in his head. You can't create or benefit from philosophy isolated from people who challenge your assumptions.
Here's some people to get you started:
On Malik (some interesting photography too): https://om.co/
Wil Wheaton (yeah I know, but he hit a new gear once he got past alcohol and started really dealing with his childhood trauma): https://wilwheaton.net/
I've read several of these works excited to hear intelligent challenges to my worldview but they always have the opposite effect. The arguments are _so_ bad, so fallacious and ridiculous that I can't help becoming more convinced that they must be wrong.
Kendi's grand plan involves an unelected review board with full veto power over any law or policy (no more separation of powers) made at any level of government (no more federalism!).
Could someone more sympathetic to these views help me out with what I'm missing?
Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations" was eye-opening on a topic I thought I was already well-informed on, and it barely scratched the surface. So much stuff boiled to the surface in the almost 10 years since.
Once I heard Kendi's definition of racism (1) I could no longer take that guy seriously. He is a social justice warrior public intellectual of the post modernist variety leading me to think he is either innocently and unknowningly deluded or an intentional and nefarious grifter profitting from giving apparent credence to the hard left hardliners. A similar role that Jordan Peterson leverages to make a living arguing or giving theoritical support for the religious right.
Not knowing anything about him, do you think I should weigh a 2 minute off the cuff answer in a Q&A segment over what I might find in the 320 page book ubermonkey suggested? The framing of the video is plainly and severely biased, so I have to be suspicious about editing and what context or expansion/correction I might find in a longer clip, plus how the framing itself affects my own interpretation.
edit: Having read all...this, I think I'll still go with the free book, courtesy of my library.
Granted a book can contain much more context that might help the author save face but claiming that the "framing of the video is plainly and severely biased" is tenuous. Why? Because the clip was self contained, It contained 1 question "Please give your definition of racism" and 1 answer that was a definition of racism that was self referential.
You could claim he mis-spoke but c'mon, here's a guy who wrote a book about racism, his full time gig is lecturing primarly around the topic of racism in a University and appears all over the place speaking about it. If he cannot give a straight-up coherent definition of racism off the cuff then there is something seriously wrong. My guess is that this compeletely inadequate definition he gave truly reflects how he thinks and frames the topic of racism and articulating it so briefly it highlights how ridiculous it is.
You may disagree with this interpretation and that's fine but claiming the clip is biased is weak because the clip itself is complete, no editing/cutting and contains 1 very simple question and a complete albeit incoherent answer. Indeed the video contains added text but ignore that, just focus on what he (Kendi) says. That should suffice to support my previous comment.
"Humans aren't robots. They aren't flawless. Every prolific public speaker messes up and says something that's complete nonsense while trying to collect the right word."
Competely agree, what's jarring is that he is replying to a simple question asking to define something that is literally the focal point of his intellectual career. It is possible that he just messed up and said something that as you say was 'complete nonsense'. But for me a simple accident is not the most likely reason given the context.
"Surely this isn't the first time he's been asked this question on camera if it's such an important part of his persona. Why this clip? If he consistently defines it poorly, that's one thing. I can't take what could be his worst attempt to define it as normal."
Fair enough, can you source any other examples of him defining racism?
>> "Fair enough, can you source any other examples of him defining racism?"
The suggested book is in my TBR list now. I haven't made a claim one way or the other, so I have nothing to cite or source. I really have no clue about the guy other than this one clip and the book recommendation, so I'm going to go with the medium where he has room to run and an editor challenging him on what really is a complex topic.
"What is racism?" could fill a book. And hey, what do you know, someone wrote one.
Agree, it is a complex topic but anyone that suggests that Martin Luthar King Jr. was racist because he claimed that "he would like to be judged not by the colour of my skin but the contents of my character" like Robin DiAngelo has (and Kendi falls into this category because he describes [and defines!!!] racism in the same way that DiAngelo does) is not worth the time in my humble opinion. There is a potentially unlimited number of books to read and we all have limited amount of time so some sort of filter is required. And anyone that thinks in a way that leads them to believe that Martin Luther King Jr. was racist is way off and not worth it.
The reason I'm saying this and why I referenced "post modernist" in my original quote is that these people (Kendi, DiAngelo) are defining racism in a way where the intent of the perpetrator of perceived racism is omitted and ignored. This is why I believe the Kendi definition in the video is no accident, he's trying to define it in way such that the intent of individual or group does not come into the equation. Whether you intend to be racist or not does not matter, you are racist by definition if you have the right (or wrong) colour skin.
Post modernism provides the theoretical underpinning of this claim as this school of though claims that objectivity does not exist, it is a phantom and a harmful one at that. There is merely a collection of different subjective experiences and beliefs and my subjective interpretation is as good as anyone elses. So if I interpret your action as racist then according to post modernist doctrine by definition it is racist, regardless of whether you intend to be or not.
Can't you see the problem here? Can't you see the potential problems that wide spread adoptation of such ideas on racism outlined above that are esposed by Kendi, DiAngelo and others would have on society and how it provides an awful basis for the successful collaboration of large and diverse number of people? Defining people by their race, what's more, trying to solve the problem of racism by focusing more on ones race making it the center of your being is in my opinion a political, social, moral and philosophical deadend. Go ahead and read the book but in my opinion it is a waste of time and possibly even worse than that.
Humans aren't robots. Every prolific public speaker messes up and says something that's complete nonsense while trying to collect the right words. Surely this isn't the first time he's been asked this question on camera if it's such an important part of his persona. Why this clip? If he consistently defines it poorly, that's one thing. I can't take what could be his worst attempt to define it as normal on this clip alone.
He would get the benefit of the doubt if he otherwise had insightful things to say. The problem is that his entire body of work is gaffes and nonsensical statements like this. His interview with Ezra Klein is filled with him whiffing on softball questions.
He's also currently embroiled in controversy. His own peers allege gross mismanagement of his $40 million in funds, producing almost no research and loaning university funds to family members to purchase luxury real estate.
You can read the whole book if you want to waste your time. It's easy: racism is white people not wanting to be around gangs; black culture glorifying beating up old Asian people is not racism.
Not going to like, the definition of racism there makes sense to me. Racism being a set of racist policies resulting in inequality based on racist beliefs. I mean, how else do you describe what race-based slavery is? Slavery is a policy resulting in literal enslavement based on the idea of black people's inferiority.
Like, compare this to ableism-- disabled people often are not allowed to get married because, in order to receive support in society as a disabled person, disabled people are not allowed to have anywhere near the personal worth of an able-bodied person. There's no way this came about completely without some fucked up ideas about disabled people. I also see no way to discuss how this policy came about without bringing up a society-wide acceptance on the lack of worth disabled people "should" be allowed to have.
In the context of an entire presumed talk, conference, interview, panel, or whatever presumably about race and racism... nah not really lol. Dude only really has about a minute to respond, and he probably spent already at least 30-45 minutes about it. At some point if I ask a biologist after a discussion about biology what a biologist is, "a biologist studies biology" makes sense. If you go to an entire talk/convo/conference/whatever about a subject and still need someone to define the subject to you, idk man?
With all the respect that is possible on an anonymous forum like Hacker News but I think you are wrong to not be concerned about a person receiving millions in donation funding (1) to counter racism who defines racism using the same word. It's a serious red flag and with the benefit of hindsight if you read the NY times article linked below there was and is very good reason to be concerned.
The person who asked the question states that he listened to the talk and did not hear any definition of racism. This is why he asked the question. If you're really curious you can listen to the whole talk (2). Not that I would recommend listening to the whole thing.
The author has completely the wrong approach to absorbing wisdom from public intellectuals. Yes, of course every thinker is limited. They produce some beautiful work, some good work, and some mediocre work, some bad work. The trick is to consume the former and avoid the latter. Furthermore, we ought to evaluate writers based on their best work (use max(..) instead of average(..) as the aggregation operator). Of course Nassim Taleb, after getting famous, became cranky and overeager to engage in tawdry public insult-slinging. That does not detract from the beauty and depth of his best work. Of course George RR Martin's later books are not very good, and he will probably not finish the series. That does not reduce the magic of Tyrion Lannister's defense of King's Landing. I could produce an endless stream of examples like this.
"This guy had something interesting to say" is not a good heuristic for finding people who you can trust on multiple subjects.
A little bit better heuristic is if the person can publicly admit they have been wrong about something and change their mind.
I have been more and more disappointed by analytical analysis, in other words "wiseacring" of all kinds of intellectuals, so I have started to believe the problem is more in the analytical approach itself, and less in the person doing the analysis.
I am gravitating towards people who talk from experience, not from analysis. I expect them also to not appear to be reactive, talking from fear. An example of a person talking from fear would be a kind of junior developer who can never admit they are wrong, and who tries to cover up their mistakes.
It seems that everyone has their own whipping boy "public intellectual" in mind that once loudly said a thing that they disagreed with, and this is the opportunity to really stick it to them for that audacity.
Here's my hot take: consume what you want, just don't let it consume you. All of these people have probably said something worth mulling over, whether you ultimately end up agreeing with them or not. Learn what you can and then move on.
The only difference between a public intellectual and an entertainer or other content creator, is that the public intellectual had at least one novel idea about something important. I mean idea very broadly here, it can take the form of a reframing, an intuition pump, a system for reasoning, etc. That makes them known as "the guy who came up with x" vs. "the guy who makes videos about y". Rogan has a podcast, Taleb is the fat tails guy.
But even the best public intellectuals only have a few novel, high quality ideas a year. Most have only a few during their whole career. If someone only writes a book when they have something to say (a rarity for professional authors, more common amongst people who don't like writing). That book probably contains a few, maybe only one, novel idea. That's the case for books, what about tweets or videos?
Entertainers and public intellectuals compete for the same bandwidth. They show up in the same feeds. In order to compete, the intellectuals have to lower their standards, and the result is that many public intellectuals are only in the intellectual business 1/100 of the time, and in the hot takes business the other 99/100.
1. Hedgehogs. Have one overarching theory that they are certain of.
2. Foxes. Can pick and choose from a variety of sources.
Both groups are smart, informed, and interesting. But when you follow them for a long time, a clear pattern emerges.
- Foxes do much better at making future predictions that come true.
- Hedgehogs become far more popular pundits, and generally wind up getting paid far better. Most pundits with popular shows are hedgehogs.
Why? My theory is that we listen to pundits because it is comfortable to outsource our thinking to them. We find that comfortable if they are smart, well-informed, and certain. It is easy for us to think, "Well if this smart and well-informed guy is so certain, I'd surely agree if I did the work. So now I don't have to bother."
There is a problem here. We become certain when it is easy for us to think a thing true, and hard for us to think it might be false. We feel that the evidence is truly overwhelming. It may be overwhelming. But it is more likely that we're simply being intellectually dishonest. So we actively choose intellectually dishonest pundits who agree with our presumptions, and then become sure that they are right. We enjoy listening to them. But, being intellectually dishonest, they are probably wrong. And now we're emotionally committed to their brand of insanity!
Try this rule of thumb out. Assume that a person who is certain, is probably wrong. And when you find yourself feeling certain, nurse that little doubt about how you REALLY know. It takes time, but consistently making this choice can change your life. For a start, you'll start actually thinking about things that you currently only think you're thinking about.
Just listened to half of an interview (the interview is long, and it's now bedtime) of John Gray.
I think you'd class him as a fox, but perhaps he's more of a badger. Digs deep and wide into history to interpret the present and plot the future. Asks "what's similar and what's different, what's permanent and what's ephemeral?" Not afraid of being unpopular at the time. Some certainty is required when everyone is saying you're wrong, and is justified when ten years later they're saying that what you said ten years ago is obvious.
That said, while he's solid on geopolitics snd the larger systems we are subject to, I wouldn't listen to him about what's happening with dating or something like that.
But I agree that it is not a perfect distinction. For example, Malcolm Gladwell writes on such a variety of things and viewpoints that he can't be a hedgehog. But he pursues a good story over what what is true, and therefore isn't very reliable. By contrast Nate Silver really likes to go to his statistics toolset. But I would call him a fox.
However I think there is something to Tetlock's division. And I think my theory connecting certainty to lacking intellectual integrity has a lot to do with it.
I got it from Tetlock, and didn't realize that his applying it to intellectuals wasn't original to him. I also previously knew about it from Archilochus.
Regardless, it is a useful insight. We usually shouldn't trust talking heads who seem certain. And the exemplar that I hold in my mind was Karl Rove's 2012 meltdown as he refused to question his certainty that Romney would win: https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2012/11/07/16458...
Comes with the territory when you are on the lookout for Rockstars and fueling the influencer economy. This post should reach 1 on HN to close the circle for max universal irony.
It’s unfortunate that there is not an “intellectual media network” that does all the hard public relations stuff for intellectuals and allows them to easily share their work with a public audience. Since this doesn’t exist, you end up with people that are willing to play — and are good at — the media game, which usually means making outrageous attention-grabbing claims that are far outside the person’s expertise.
It seems like this used to be what the MSM would bring in experts to comment on complex issues in economics, foreign politics, history, health, science, technology, etc. before each station developed a significant bias due to top-down pressure from ownership or bottom up pressure to push narratives that paralleled the politics of their predominant viewership. Then it was public programming like NPR and PBS. But now almost every outlet finds partisan experts. It would be great if there were a truly neutral non-political source of expert commentary. But how can such an outlet sustain neutrality being subject to those same evolutionary pressures?
HN is honestly doing a great job of this, but is a very different format than planned programming.
Perhaps the key is to watch both sides and formulate your own opinion. Maybe it's better to know the biases outright than to rely on someone else to find neutral viewpoints. Of course the problem with that is, a huge amount of the population has no interest in hearing multiple perspectives, and only wants the 'home teams' talking points.
Initially, it was good. Then, it went downhill due to a relaxation of rigour; for every expert giving a scholarly overview, there was a junior academic pushing their particular line. On particularly polarising issue, outright gibberish slipped through (during Jeremy Corbyn's time as leader of the Labour party, for example). These days, there seems to be a scree of shallow articles about current hot topics.
The problem with this is that serious questions require difficult work, while what the mass audience fundamentally want is a verbal version of professional wrestling. With all the keyfabe and face/heel narratives.
Are you suggesting something like scientific journals like Nature? Where there is an extreme barrier to publish in and often takes years to get anything out?
Maybe you’ve pointed out a positive for these scientific journals.
What is most off here is the analysis. The idea is that either someone is totally right about everything they assert because of extreme caution and care, or they are terribly wrong and flawed in a way that makes all of their ideas poison. But most intellectuals are in between there in a way this piece almost describes.
Take this specific example of Peter Zeihan. He dares to get out of his areas of expertise and gets somethings wrong and some things very wrong. But much of his core analysis is extremely relevant and useful. He tends to start from population demographics and the raw material sources of industrial supply chains. There is a lot of interesting stuff there and much of what Peter Zeihan points out is quite right and well ahead of the curve. For example, he was talking about Chinese demographic shrinkage well before it started to make major economic and political impacts.
So the idea here is that because Peter Zeihan tries to go as far as he can with what he has and ends up in the weeds much of the time that all of his work can be dismissed as foolish wandering about in the weeds. But that is false. The core issues of demographics and industrial supply chain roots remain and have very large impacts that are not particularly well hidden from careful examination. This implies that the real challenge is not deciding if a public intellectual is truly great or disgracefully fallen, but rather defining which points they make are solid and where it is that their reasoning falls off.
Same here. But I was distracted by the fact that I could not understand how they are being rendered. The js (https://thmsmlr.com/assets/app-76652943792d609207b149d2720cc...) seems to say that they are being drawn on canvas but the only canvas present in DOM can be deleted with the shapes still animated. Any clues as to how these are being rendered?
Cult of Personality.
The strong man for one, the celebrity for the next, the intellectual for the other.It presumably makes one's own lack of power,fame and significance bearable.
Egoprothesis in a deficient mental model of the world.
> The story goes something like this, I get recommended a clip on YouTube, there’s a man who is calm, articulate, and says something that completely violates the narrative. How fascinating. Is my understanding of the world completely wrong?! I need to read everything this man written.
Read books. Watch Harvard/Yale lectures on humanities. Write notes on them. Think for yourself and write essays on the those topics. Once you get comprehensive education, random YouTube celebrities will stop being deep and fascinating to you. Or at least you will have 30-40 other perspectives from renowned thinkers to complement your worldview.
(Edited/extended per nonrandomstring's comment below)
Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but it seems to me that the Author expects to find a human that is to be right on their subject matter, all the time, and never goes beyond that narrow scope.
It's quite possible to be right in a carefully enclosed area, but you have to expand that area as much as possible to make it applicable to the modern world. Thus, mistakes (and the experienced gained from them) are part of the territory.
I see the authors quest as one bound to be fruitless in the long run.
I curate my information sources, and I readily accept their flaws. I know that Peter Zeihan sometimes gets out over his skis intellectually, but that's a part of his schtick. I know the general biases, strengths and weaknesses of those I pay attention to. I give them authority with my attention, they didn't get it from anywhere else. I believe everyone should take similar care.
> First it was Jordan Peterson, then it i was Eric Weinstein, then Chamath, the list goes on. Most recently, it’s been Peter Zeihan.
These are not intellectuals, let alone public ones. They are all American and follow a 'clickbait' model to public discourse. Seems like you repeatedly fall for it and enjoy doing so. Nothing here reflects any form of intellect.
Yes, the list is basically demagogic pseudo-intellectuals. As pointed out in the article they are "pseudo" as although they might be studied in one field, they quickly start talking about other topics that they have not studied academically and simply try to enforce their model upon. A lot of "clever" people start sounding less clever the more they talk about something you know about.
because rather than doing serious intellectual work they're really good at selling what people want to hear, deliberately targeting an American online audience and their anxieties (as that is very profitable). All the mentioned guys are essentially permanent guests on the US podcast circuit.
Peterson and Zeihan are examples of this. Peterson has essentially monetized telling Americans what a dystopia Canada is, acting like some sort of reverse Handmaids Tale refugee, and Zeihan is the modern version of his mentor (and Straftor boss) George Friedman, whose primarily claim to fame is predicting an inevitable war between Japan and the US[1], on a crude theory of geographic determinism, "in the next two decades" in 1991. Zeihan has picked that baton up and replaced Japan with China.
> Peterson has essentially monetized telling Americans what a dystopia Canada is, acting like some sort of reverse Handmaids Tale refugee
I think this hyper reductive. You can watch all his lectures, at Harvard and others, online[0]. It's hard to look objectively at his life and not call it "serious intellectual work".
He might have done "serious intellectual work" in a distant past, like his main book were he writes in details about his grandma pubes he saw in a dream, or when in his lecture at UoT were he compares an ancient depiction of two snakes to the twin helix of DNA, but for the past few years he's been rambling about the culture war and strangely defending the fossil fuel industry.
>"You can watch the incredibly popular lecture series "Personality and Its Transformations", "Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief", as well as his "The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories" lectures for free."
I won't pretend I ever watched more than a few minutes of any of this stuff, but isn't it a bunch of inane rambling about finding deep psychological meaning or universal truths in fairy tails? Nonsense along the lines of "Slimey the worm from sesame street represents the dragon, the great primordial evil which the warrior, the eternal hero, must slay to conqueror his fears..."
It's the kind of analysis that right/conservative people with 'pragmatic/common sense' self-perceived alignments would usually mock college professors for, except in Peterson's case it gets lapped up because he mixes it in with things like "communism is bad because it murdered millions of people" and "If you're feeling depressed you should try not living like a slob"
That is the point of this article though, read a bit further down:
"Without fail, each one of comes to dissapoint. They’re either a one trick pony, and every development in the world is analyzed through the same tired lens whether its applicable or not."
Yeah but, one would think after spending even a couple of minutes with Jordan Peterson's corpus of output that maybe we shouldn't venerate people who happen to say one or two things that we find interesting.
Jordan Petersen talks a lot about life being a struggle and how to get through it and make the most of it. A lot of that resonates strongly in many people, it isn't something you would find faults in after watching a few minutes. And that is within his field of expertise so it makes sense that those points are pretty good.
The problem is when Jordan Petersen starts to talk about other things than that, like politics, gender roles etc. There he repeats similar talking points I've seen on online forums for 20 years now, nothing new or interesting.
Edit: Sometimes downvotes amazes me. Did someone downvote this because I said Jordan Peterson said something good, or because I said he did something bad? Will never know. But I've noticed that balanced takes tend to get more downvoted since both sides downvotes them.
For me at least, there's a question as to, "which Jordan Peterson?"
There is the guy you just described, who existed before his year(s?) long struggle with addiction, and then there is the apparently (to me at least) bitter, resentful and angry man who returned after.
Since his return, his expressions, language, positions (and even clothing) have taken on a darker, angrier tone and there's a lot less hope in what I've seen.
For me, this makes this individual different from some others who may fade away over some of issues cited in the article, but remain essentially the same person.
His personality and message changed after a deep and difficult struggle.
I'm not trying to criticize or defend the man, just raising the issue that he may be different from some others in the list.
What do you think an intellectual is? An intellectual is someone whose hobby or vocation is using his mind to consider the big questions and issues of human life.
There is no certification or competency test for intellectuals. If you say you are one, then— like saying you are a “football fan”— you probably are one.
I say I am an intellectual because I want people to think I am always ready to talk about any philosophical topic. Also I wrote a book about living an intellectual life, so there is evidence I do want to use my mind to consider big questions. Not that evidence matters much.
I am American, too. Turns out some Americans enjoy living a life of mind.
I tend to be a bit repulsed by any online discussion of 'intellectuals'. Pretty much always devolves into BS a la GP. "You like Josh Joshson? He's stupid, you must be too", or "who needs intellectuals? Use your own brain"
My definition of a public intellectual is someone who is very bright and can "think in public" about a variety of issues. Weinstein definitely meets that bar for me, probably Jordan as well. Can't speak for the other two as I'm not familiar with their output.
Over the years, Jordan Peterson has gotten more and more aggressive and polarizing. I suspect that social media attention has been a huge influence, because the new Jordan Peterson (NJP) sounds like the old Jordan Peterson's (OJP's) loud aggressive clickbaity twin. Where OJP might have written an academic paper for other scientists, or delivered an hour-long carefully-thought-out lecture, NJP sends an angry tweet full of insults.
For example, after losing a court battle against the College of Psychologists of Ontario, he talked about it as such: "Don't bloody well lecture me ... some dimwit judge with a liberal bias did ... lecturing me about taking responsibility for what I say." I highly recommend watching the video. The tone is also part of the message: https://youtu.be/M5PESEbY_H0?t=74
Or when in December 2021, the Prime Minister of Canada tweeted this to encourage people to get a booster dose of the COVID-19 vaccine (keeping in mind that there were at no point any mandates for boosters, this was purely an attempt at advertising the fact that booster doses were available and recommended by the healthcare professionals):
> Justin Trudeau: "If you’re taking care of some last-minute Christmas shopping this week, here’s something else you can add to your list: a booster. If you’re eligible for one but haven’t gotten it yet, please, do so now. And if you don’t have your first or second dose, now’s the time to get it."
NJP replied to the tweet as such:
> NJP: "Up yours @JustinTrudeau. Seriously. You'd have to kill me first."
I cannot imagine OJP saying any of these things with this tone and this level of imprudence. OJP was generally cerebral, intellectual, academic, deep, calm, polite. He was a well-respected academic through and through.
NJP, on the other hand, is irritable, imprudent, aggressive, abrasive, impulsive, rude. He is a sensationalist yelling pundit through and through.
Yes, that's precisely why I don't like him, thank you for articulating it so clearly! I want to compel the people around me to speak a certain way, and I have built an identity around that, and Peterson's cutting social commentary shakes me to my core.
For the things he says. I'd encourage you to look for criticism of him online. He his the obligatory subject of plenty of video essayist on Youtube, it's kind of a meme at this point.
He has been widely criticized by legal scholars for misrepresenting the Canadian Bill C-16, which extends the human rights act to cover transgendered people. Peterson, a clinical psychologist, claimed that it would compel speech.
This is probably what the article is referring to. Before the incident Peterson was a respected academic psychologist, but was widely criticized for his amateur legal analysis of C-16. He has since continued to ruin his reputation by making transphobic tweets about Elliot Page, body shaming the plus sized model Yumi Nu, climate change denial, and generally expressing right wing views on a range of issues.
In your opinion, would it be a misrepresentation to say that C-16 makes it easier to fine employers that refuse to use employee pronouns for harassment?
>He just seemed to say sort of "be a decent person and work hard".
We live in a world where even that statement is controversial.
There is a zeitgeist of re-engineering society. Peterson and his tired schtick of "just keep doing the things that were successful for previous generations" interferes. It is unwanted.
Jordan Peterson unfortunately is very much a public intellectual. He just also happens to be a complete and total charlatan who is demonstrably ignorant of most the works he both cites and criticizes.
Im no longer catholic, but i use Jesus as a comparison to thrse figures. It's what i call the jesus principle: "Would jesus have this many things to say?"
Jesus was 'the son of god' and yet he didn't have that much to say when it comes down to it. Really. When you compile all the things he said, without duplication, it would probably fit in a one hour podcast.
Now, take joe rogan's guest. Let's say Alex Honnold. He lives a really interesting life and one hour into the podcast he would be struggling for things to say.
Should you listen to these public intellectuals you mentioned? sure. But after one hour or so, thats really enough to get an abstraction.
Because when it comes down to it : There's really not much to say.
im explaining it poorly. What i mean is that the principle is "if jesus didn't have that much to say,who is this guy that he talks for thousands of hours?"
Yours is a bad example. Jesus said that the old law was still valid, which means that in fact you have to study the entire OT to get the full message. He just left it to the reader as an exercise
Well imho you have to study the OT in the light of his new message. If you're a Christian then your priority is the message of Christ which seems quite broad and sweeping in a good way. And therefore contradicts all the intolerant teachings from the OT.
(Disclaimer: not a Christian. Constantly amazed at people who have faith)
You are again making a mistake. Jesus didn’t have to add much because it was implicit that everything written in the OT was the truth.
Unfortunately if you don’t believe in Christianity there is no book or philosopher that has told the whole “truth” about the universe, so any new kid on the block might indeed have many things to say
My statement was about information content. It was really never about Jesus at all. My point is that it's really rare to have so many interesting or new things to say, and anyone who says interesting and novel things all the time for a long time(not jesus) would either have to be redundant, bs-ing, or trying to say things beyond their ken.
Get into ideas, not the people who introduce you to them. It's probably still an interesting idea well after the person loses their novelty to you. Don't lose yourself so readily to our bizzare celebrity worship/parasocial culture.
Peterson seems strongly influenced by Jonathan and Matthieu Pageau who are doing quite a job at restoring meaning to the western world, linking rational and irrational thinking into a kind of universal theory with mathematical notations across verticals. It's really mind-blowing and imho, Matthieu Pageau is one of the greatest intellectuals of our time and he remains quite isolated and hidden. His content is infrequent, freshly brilliant, and challenging for those curious to learn it.
The debate about the "public intellectual" is a very old one by now. Most date the emergence of the public intellectual to the Dreyfus affair. I read the author's list here with sadness, thinking that the younger generation is being cut off from the history of an important modern phenomenon by youtube's algorithm. Youtube videos just aren't a good medium for this. Sustained, in-depth conversation across journals and magazines and periodicals was much better.
I'm not an expert, but I have an opinion, maybe some of you want to follow: ALWAYS SUPPORT THE UNDERDOGS. They are the ones experimenting with new ideas and hopefully sharing both what worked and what didn't.
Unfollow all the players with a huge following. They stop producing quality.
Start by supporting underdogs, people who have a following, but small and growing.
Eventually they'll become bigger in terms of following. Then unfollow them.
Many underdogs just copies the viewpoints of bigger channels, watching those is even worse than watching the original since at least the original had some thought behind it.
I think a valid strategy is to watch what big personalities were saying or doing when they were still small. Look at what made them big instead of what they do when they are big.
I think I don't have to "follow" or support anyone, or is that become a must in this new digital world? Like, if you don't follow anyone the system will ignore you or something, I don't know.
Zeihan's synthesis view of geopolitics is pretty interesting, but he does display glaring faults when he ventures beyond that niche, e.g. when he tries to summarise the economic systems of the world in his most recent book he says all of Europe is socialist, which is what I would consider a very basic American layman's take on economics, not really fitting for any kind of public intellectual in the social sciences. I try to look past it, though, since his demographics and culture-focused geopolitics analysis is still interesting to me.
This was my take on Zeihan too. He's one of the few I've approached in the way the OP is talking about (minus the worship part). I bought and read one of his books.
I completely agree with your take: his demographics work was a new model of thought for me, and interesting to think about and apply. A lot of his extrapolation felt really off, though.
For Zeihan in particular I went a bit deeper in trying to figure out why a lot of his analysis didn't sit well with me. Part of it was the America-centricity - the superficial non-interest for Europe and other continents. The second part, though, was that I don't think he really considers that the people making these systems work also suffer if the systems collapse. At a societal level, we are motivated to keep our global systems maintained because they sustain our ways of life - not because somebody signed an agreement. The signing was just a means of getting it started.
Anyway, end rant, but I guess his ideas feel too far down the isolationist line. My analysis of which probably proves the OP's worshipping point. It's designed to pull you in.
I think of Peter Zeihan commentary as having two parts.
The first part is where he takes a current event and contextualizes it with a bunch about the geography, demography and supply chain stuff, or maybe some history. I'd say he has an overall pretty high level of quality here, helped along by the fact that everyone's geography and demography is usually pretty stable from week to week.
In the second part, he takes everything from the first part and fits it into his career-long public storytelling project, where he's writing a thriller novel out loud 5 minutes at a time, set in the near future where Eurasia is now Mad Max except without all the gas, and pirates rule the seas. I happen to love Mad Max AND pirates, so I have fun, but I don't take it as seriously as the first part.
I have a similar effect with TV series, getting excited at a new premise at first, but then often losing interest midways once the pattern-matching kicks in and I get a grasp on what their shtick is. The magic is usually only in the beginnings.
I really like the text. Short, concise and to the point. I also felt like you were describing a little bit of me lol. The one thing I fail to capture is, what is the solution to this problem? How can these intellectuals not "die"?
Popularity is not a good filter for importance, especially about future importance. In old times, editors would decide what gets popular, now algorithms do and they are quite dumb and don't take risks.
This post treats the constant stream of "new public intellectuals" as some kind of organic, natural phenomenon. It's not, these people reach the top of your YouTube feed because someone wants them there. There's nothing organic about Eric Weinstein or Lex Fridman.
People on this site are quick to call something "enshittification" when there are some obvious cash-grabs by megacorps, but are reluctant to admit that the algorithm feeding you content is manipulating you in a similar way.
> And take note when one doesn’t fall, study them the hardest.
I did, and they subsequently got banned from every social network, and even their website isn't linkable from Facebook or X or YouTube.
There's nothing organic about Eric Weinstein or Lex Fridman.
Do we know how this was done before? Let’s say you are a hit broadcast network, and you have these new hit shows called Friends and Family Matters. What’s your plan as a broadcast company now?
Should the TV company organically wait to see what kind of TV shows audiences want to see? Or should they create 10 shows that copy Friends and Family Matters, each targeting a different demo (you know, like black people, or women).
So, if you want to build a loose network of content creators, with your fulcrum being like a Rogan for the general demographic, with a contrived character like a Friedman being the “nerd”. So the loop here is you cast a wide net with Rogan, then niche them down to your Jocko’s, Friedman’s, etc.
Rogan doesn’t disclose when he does Ad drops anymore either. So he’s a really bad actor at this point.
Like yeah Joe, you just talked about McDonalds for 10 minutes for free again on an episode with 10 million listeners huh? Oh, talking about the latest movie in theaters again? As if that’s not a 5 minute ‘hey McDonald’s, we can leave this 7 minutes in about how your Coca Cola tastes better than regular Coca Cola, or we can just edit it out. I’m sorry? Did we say edit out? What we meant was, how about like 30 million for 6 month campaign? No? Okay, see ya. No, we never recorded anything about McDonald’s soda tasting better.
What makes you think Eric and Lex are not organic? Certainly both are well connected, but do you really think someone at youtube tapped them to be famous?
Idk where the line between organic and inorganic is, but I highly doubt youtube sat down in a meeti g with Lex and said "youve been chosen, were gonna blow your channel up"
We know that Youtube can put their fingers on the scales of their algorithm, and that they do. It's probably a single variable like `multiplier` in their hotness formula that is a default of 1.00. Lex Fridman gets insane reach beyond the quality or popularity of his content.
But it's not about a single person. It's that these midwit pseudointellectuals (Peterson, Weinstein) can constantly get churned through the top of the algorithm. People like the guy who wrote this initial post, in turn, think that there are no political discussions going on deeper than dumbed down, often misused regurgitated political philosophy from much smarter thinkers of the past.
It really seems like Lex Fridman was boosted as a "safe Joe Rogan", a stoner/intellectual/macho podcaster guy, but one who won't lead his audiences into conspiracy theory territory. Or maybe it just seems that way to me because Lex obviously idolizes Joe Rogan and either smokes too much weed before his interviews or acts as if he does.
I really can't wrap my mind around how he managed to get so many high profile guests so fast, except to guess that his father's connections had a lot to do with it. Every part of his meteoric rise seems inorganic to me.
Lex started out as an AI guy if I'm not mistaken.
Also - as an aside - he is legitimately one of the worst interviewers of all time. He is so insanely bad at asking good questions. but he has really interesting people on his show so it doesn't matter.
Why not? Sans the actual sitting down with the person, that seems entirely unnecessary.
We know the reverse is definitely true, people actually do get deplatformed, so why is it unreasonable to think at least some winners have been picked?
> First it was Jordan Peterson, then it i was Eric Weinstein, then Chamath, the list goes on. Most recently, it’s been Peter Zeihan.
Man repeatedly falls for the worst "public intellectuals" (really, pretentious charlatans), discovers that they're not trustworthy, and runs to the internet screaming "THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL IS DEAD." nah brah, you just have bad tase.
Jordan Peterson -> an incoherent rambler. He's incapable of putting together straightforward premise1-premise2-premise3-->conclusion arguments. If you ask him "how's the weather?", you'll get an hour long brain spew about Ancient Rome, Napoleon, woke feminism, and the worst Holocaust takes you can imagine.
Eric Weinstein -> a narcissist mathematician who came up with a theory of everything, but refused to publish it because real physicists might criticize it and hurt his feelings. He wanted to be recognized as the new Einstein based solely on a video of a talk to a non-physicist audience. His podcasts are mostly rants against the Physics Deep State and Big Science, which he calls the "Distributed Idea Suppression Complex", because they're all in a big conspiracy to suppress his genius ideas.
Chamath -> don't know him.
Peter Zeihan -> just another hyper-caffeinated prognosticator who claims to know the future.
> which he calls the "Distributed Idea Suppression Complex", because they're all in a big conspiracy to suppress his genius ideas.
I don't say this sarcastically or ironically... but isn't that one of the big things proper science actually does? Think about it for a moment, science is the business of suppressing all the stupid ideas humans have come up with over the centuries. And until it got started doing that, those ideas were everywhere, keeping everyone ignorant.
It has a somewhat careful methodology to this suppression. It designs experiments to falsify everything it can, conducts those experiments rigorously and exhaustively, until everyone is convinced that those ideas are wrong and the ideas are as dead as doornails.
But, if somehow it comes across one that is falsifiable but that can't be falsified by experiment, it moves on... plenty of other ideas to suppress.
Hell, science should adopt that moniker and run with it. Be proud of it. It's one of the things it gets right.
If that's his worst jab at science, he's just lazy and not very clever.
Yah. This guy sends my bullshit detector into overdrive after just a few seconds.
Can't stand the smug certainty he throws off while describing some ridiculous molecular interaction that he clearly knows nothing about, because no one does.
I've looked into a few of Huberman's citations and found some very small samples sizes. He makes a big deal of what are a best very small optimizations instead of focusing on the really impactful but boring health advice (eat well, exercise, get enough sleep). This is very common in the health / fitness space, because for most people the basics are all you need and the basics are really basic, but to make bank you have to keep coming up with new things.
I've only listened to a few of his podcasts, because they're too long and meandering for me, so perhaps there is more meat in other episodes.
I also don't think he's a grifter in the same way that Peterson is. (I'm not familiar with the other people mentioned in the article.)
I disagree with the others insofar as I think the weighty-est things Huberman suggests are very well researched, and he's generally careful to say when research is newer/sparser for certain discoveries but doesn't make a broken-record of himself. For instance: his videos focusing on sleep. When it comes to other optimizations YMMV but aggregate marginal gains would suggest that exploring these may add up.
Also these days his video series tends to focus more on interviews with experts in their respective fields, rather than his own prescriptions and perspective. I think that's commendable and great.
Develop interests of your own and go beyond public intellectuals. Don't let all your information get recommended to you, only some of it. Reach out for the rest yourself. Books are very efficient at conveying information, so read some to get a lay of the land before going deep.
Also, consider that there is more to know than you have time to learn, so be selective. Are you going to act on it? Is it going to give you pleasure?
We are vulnerable to this attack strategy in books as well. The author can lull you in with a compelling concept, but you can soon realize they weren’t able to extrapolate their thesis beyond one chapter (if that).
It’s probably the most mature moment I had as a reader, to be able to look at any book and be comfortable judging the pacing/vibe of it with regard to me. If a book isn’t vibing with you (you feel like the author is forcing a hot take), then don’t read the book. It’s no different than a date, if the person creeps you out, bounce.
This is apt, you tend to read books and the first read is great, subsequent release ends up being the same context as previous book but without substance. The best is probably being able to self reflect and think for yourself, being mindful of your thoughts, thought process and things that affects it.
IMO the problem with books is that it is extremely easy to write basically whatever narrative you want nowadays, backed by a long list of "citations" that are dubious at best.
Nobody can contradict what you say in book form.
Two books on the shelf: One says the left stole the election here are the receipts to prove it, the other says the right lied about the election here are the receipts to prove it. Both presumably have an internally consistent narrative that attempts to convince you the story they are selling is THE story.
My idea of a public intellectual is someone like Scott Alexander or maybe Eliezer Yudkowsky, but I suppose being on camera makes you more public than anything else.
I'm surprised he didn't mention lex Friedman or Joe rogan. The people I admire on YouTube still continue to resonate with me. If anyone is looking for 'leftist Jordan Peterson' I suggestion Gabor mate, he's a much more holistic and less authoritarian, and continues to inspire me.
oh ye people, you always need a golden bull to worship. turn your attention inside and listen to the truth that is always there. that's where the revolution starts. otherwise, you're just a consumer of the latest YouTube fad.
"You’re basis for truth often relies on authority of your source."
No. This is such a common logical error that it has an old name: Argumentum ad Verecundiam (often shortened to Verecundiam, or Appeal to Authority in English.) Saying "I know this because authority X said so" - you don't know it at all. It has the epistemological status of outright faith.
What counts is the connection of statements to reality and their logical integrated cohesion as a whole. And that's regardless of the source.
Experts/Authorities are neither automatically right or wrong. No honest expert or authority ever demands that their statements be taken on faith. If they actually know what they're talking about, their statements can be logically defended and tied to reality. This is the standard that everyone should be held to.
When you can personally verify all the facts about biology, physics, and distant places that you rely on to make decisions every day, then you can throw stones about arguments from authority. The rest of us use a little bit of faith.
Too much reductionism can be a dangerous thing. This is pretty much the Sophist argument and it is not enough to build a scientific foundation on.
No, you don't need to personally verify all facts. But you need to be able to observe several indepedent validations. Yes, somewhere you have to take someone's word for fact, but multiple independent observations is a close approximation to the perfect scientific method. Related to that is the fact that science is not a democracy, and these observations have to be weighed against how they fit in our generally accepted worldview. Theory is more than just facts.
Every little detail of science has to be questioned, just not by everyone personally. Where that limit for healthy skepticism is drawn is not something can answer logically, but we can recognize if it is completely wrong.
It's perfectly okay to stay agnostic on things you don't know about. It's always okay to say "I don't know." If you were forced to take a position on something you don't know about yourself, then looking to relevant authorities may be a decent enough plan, but who's forcing you to take positions on things?
You can trim that down quite a lot by assuming things aren't magic and use some minimal trust. If people say that cars are designed using newtonian physics, and you see your car is working, then you can say you have tested newtonian physics even if you don't understand the calculations.
Basically you test what you have and trust the description of the implementation. If it works you can trust the whole chain. This is of course not 100%, but it is about as reliable as it can get for an individual.
What you shouldn't do is assume that stuff that aren't 100% for sure are equally bad.
It's quite easy to test this very assumption against chaos theory in a controlled environment and demonstrate why a system involving a complex chain of dependencies is increasingly unpredictable down the chain.
As an uninformed consumer at or the bottom of the chain, you cannot trust that an interface that works today, will work tomorrow, for you do not have access to all of the chaotic variables which constrain the interface.
This is exactly why the appeal to authority is such a useful heuristic: when it comes to physics, I trust the man who teaches the engineers that car companies employ to make cars - because I can see cars work every day, so at the end of the chain there must exist a person who has fundamental insights about how the world works.
So while I can't prove something is right by appeal to authority, it's a very practical way for me to swift though the unbounded mass of claims and information that I couldn't possibly verify or prove in my lifetime, not even to a 19th century level of scientific knowledge.
For example, I saw an onion cell once at a school microscope, but I have never seen a bacteria. So as far as I can independently prove, I live in times before the germ theory of disease - but that doesn't mean I shouldn't trust my doctor when he recommends vaccines and antibiotics. The entire antivaxx movement is just an attempt to challenge the medical authority by people who are not intellectually equipped to verify the scientific claims.
Everything boils down to faith eventually, though. Even trusting the evidence of your senses is a kind of faith.
So the logical error isn't an epistemological error in all cases - you can see it as someone trying to minimize some distance metric they are operating on between Reality As It Is and Reality As I Know It by making a single hop to someone who, it is believed, has already done a lot of work investigating the ground claims.
This was the conclusion of René Descartes and the meaning behind "I think, therefore I am". It was the only safe conclusion he could come to after a deep series of introspection.
Once he got there, he systematically built up a new framework of thought and reasoning, and we got modern science and philosophy from it.
This was one of my complaints in college. You're taught a ton of things from a position of authority, but you never get a full explanation of how those things were discovered of how you could prove them yourself.
I think it would be cool if we taught kids how things work along with how they can prove it for themselves. Currently the only field which encourages you to prove things for yourself is maths, and proofs aren't even given that much importance.
Even with softer topics like history, I think it should be essential to include context explaining how we know these things to be true. On what evidence are these beliefs based on? What is the level of epistemic uncertainty of the information we're being given?
maths, and proofs aren't even given that much importance
That doesn't match my experience with college at all. I was admittedly a math major and possibly other departments do it differently, but most math courses I took put a lot of emphasis on proving stuff and proofs, and proving stuff was around 50% of the final exam in most courses.
No, you definitely do eventually. I remember plenty of that stuff from back in my advanced math days (even if I can't remember any of the math itself at this point), like the aha moments showing linear algebra work underpinning the memorization from calculus. It's just way up there in the coursework because the 100- and 200-level classes don't have the time to explain that stuff to 50-plus people and make sure any of them understand any of it.
My calc 2 professor would start every new concept by first describing (briefly) how the greeks would have done it with pure geometry, then how classic mathematics came to the solution from a different angle.
Probably the only higher math course I took that I was excited to go to lecture every day.
Colleges have 4 years, and most important discoveries took a brilliant person a lifetime of work.
How do you propose we give more detailed explanations and information for proving everything for yourself? Should college last a few hundred years instead of 4?
Did college not teach you how to access and parse through research papers and books?
If you want a more full explanation and to prove things for yourself, why didn't you do so? When you were told, from authority, about the american antarctic base, why didn't you prove its existence by taking a boat there (repeated ad-nauseam for each location in the world)
Come on, it's a spectrum. I don't expect everything to build up a careful chain of trust and verification. But I think we can still do better than what the current education ecosystem provides. You're taking the most extreme perspective to a pretty reasonable claim.
Figuring out how to prove everything myself is impractical because I'm not an expert in every subfield. I think experts in various fields can write shortcuts and simple experiments which prove a lot of knowledge. It doesn't have to be perfect.
Like, colleges right now provide "shortcuts and simple experiments" to approximate knowledge that was gained with a much more rigorous path. Yet, you decry current college as not showing the full path, as taking shortcuts.
Now, you're saying that yes, we need such shortcuts, it doesn't have to be perfect, and it's a spectrum... all of which I agree with, and seems to be the opposite of what you said above.
What's the fundamental difference between what you describe and what colleges do? Or is it just a matter of execution quality?
> This was one of my complaints in college. You're taught a ton of things from a position of authority, but you never get a full explanation of how those things were discovered of how you could prove them yourself.
Could you give some example of what would you like to prove, from your college curriculum?
Honestly, after reflecting on it I do think that I had more courses cover how to prove things ourselves than I was initially remembering. In particular, my physics and electronics labs were the most thorough.
When I wrote that I was specifically thinking about chemistry. It's really been too long since I last studied the topic, so I can't remember any exact details. I just remember a vague sense of thinking "how did we figure this out in the first place?".
Part of the responsibility definitely falls on me, I should've been more inquisitive when I was younger. Maybe the professors would've been willing to explain if I'd been more self-confident and courageous to visit their office hours to inquire further.
In a lot of cases you cannot check the connection to reality. And things being plausible (or following some "logic") means little to nothing when it comes to being correct.
It would be foolish to think the Gallic Wars happened precisely as Caesar wrote because his book was overt self-aggrandizing propaganda intended to boost his standing with the Roman public.
But as to the Gallic Wars happening at all? There is corroborating evidence. Other Romans wrote about it, often to damn it, and they treated the existence of the war as a fact. He brought tons of Gallic slaves back to Rome which would corroborate the most basic facts of the claim (e.g. that there had been wars with Gallic people) to other Romans who weren't there to personally witness it. Furthermore there is modern archeological evidence of battles and massacres which roughly line up with some of what Caesar claimed to have done.
Historians know that they can't take written sources at face value. For them, Caesar's account of the Gallic Wars is just another piece of evidence, not a Definite Proof of Everything That Was.
Caesar is not considered an infallible authority, but that has no bearing on the general consensus that Gallic Wars actually took place.
I think author understanding of the world is not wrong, but his approach - definitely. He expects to find some "wise man" who would have answers on all the world problems, sort of a panacea-man, which is clearly not a smart approach.
If someone was an expert for covid-related topics, why would you even watch this peron videos analysing Ukraine war? That makes zero sense.