201–210 of 882 posts
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The ideas of social justice and equality spring from the independent quadrant. These ideas have become the rules that conventional quadrant follow and expose. This doesn't seem to contradict itself.
Well what about if the rules of the conventional quadrant become "Anyone who says or implies 'Crush !' is bad and should never be listened to"?
I have come to intensely dislike most of PG's essays, for many reasons, but the two main ones are that 1/ he plays fast and loose with the facts, reduces the whole history of (the various peoples of) humanity to a single arrow, and confuses demonstration with affirmation and, more importantly 2/ he has an unhealthy obsession with "classifying" people, by which he actually means ranking them, from top to bottom. The p…
I don't expect essays to be scientific papers. The term comes from the French verb essayer 'to attempt, to try'. It's a genre widely known for being exactly that: a (mostly) brief rundown of ideas, without an exhaustive empirical demonstration being necessary nor expected.
On top of that, it's a ~1500-word blog post on his own website. Get real.
It’s so farcical to suggest that independent mindedness always manifests as “intellectual freedom” and conformism manifests as “political correctness.” (He doesn’t use that phrase but that’s clearly what he’s trying to get at.)
We live in a world where people with power over others (even people with pretty small amounts of power like professors) have historically been allowed shielded from the consequences of espousing hate. It is not “conformist” to advocate that people should be held accountable for what they say.
What PG has done is come up with a “good” category and a “bad” category. He then says that the people who agree with him are the good people and the people who don’t are the bad ones. He does so without considering that his support of Silicon Valley tycoons and professors who are upset that their students criticized them could actually put him in the conformist category.
Loved this essay. The phrase “aggressively conventional minded” is genius, and may contribute a lot towards the solution. As someone coming from an ex-soviet state, I’ve felt personal alarm bells ring more and more, as I experience the kind of intolerance and double speak America is heading into. Both the left and the right my opinion are missing the key points on freedom (the left suppressing and labeling, the right…
Also from an ex soviet state. Also feel alarm bells going off. I'm legitimately scared. I've seen this before, I know where it goes. It's really hard to convey my feeling of alarm to people here though. Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it, I guess. Doesn't help that the conformists have been allowed to frame the narrative as 'either you agree with us, or you're literally Hitler/Stalin' depending on…
No one ends up being safe from this kind of thing as it grows. Even Mao almost lost control of the tiger, even though he thought he could steer it. My grandfather fought the Japanese as a preteen and later fought with Mao, and even he was disappeared for three days by the mob during the cultural revolution because someone denounced him as not ideologically pure enough.
As a passive independently minded, I can say that we also see natural fluctuation from epochs of independently minded reason to social conformity and back. These are good and necessarily healthy cycles because the independently minded, left unchecked, inevitably will achieve the freedom for certain individuals within that sector to explore avenues of thought and action that doom civilization and degrade reason and sa…
I could add so much more to this about the state of affairs which claims the problems in the present era were seeded almost 300 years ago and that the supposed freedoms of today enshrined in that hour were not, as it were, a byproduct of the age of enlightenment, but rather, an insideous plot concocted by masonic and conventionally minded globalists planning a society that would protect the issues they cared about an…
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The ideas of social justice and equality spring from the independent quadrant. These ideas have become the rules that conventional quadrant follow and expose. This doesn't seem to contradict itself.
Social justice and true equality aren't conformist ideas though. We live at a time when wealth inequality is around the highest since our country has kept track and you think equality is a mainstream conformist idea?
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Many people intentionally mischaracterize Peterson as intolerant. His position is generally extremely open-minded and comes from the position of a psychologist that has seen the failure modes of many different clients' lifestyles. When he tells moral tales that tilt toward a conservative lifestyle, they are told in the sense that straying from a conservative path is morally fine, but subjects you to personal risk of…
One of the main reasons for his rise to fame was the opposition to bill C-16. A bill he claimed to oppose because of its free-speech implications, when all the bill actually did was extend existing legal protections of identifiable groups to also include gender identity and gender expression. Those exact same protections already existed on the basis of race, religion, national or ethnic origin, age, sex, sexual orien…
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> But innovation isn't good per se. Innovation isn't anything in moral terms. All technological change is a trade-off. For every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population. This means that every new technology benefits some and harms others.
> All technological change is a trade-off. For every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. This, to me, reads as one of those statements that sounds wise and correct but doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. Going from digging with your hands to using a shovel doesn't have a negative trade off. Going from carrying things on your back to using a wheeled cart doesn't have a cor…
When I think of technology it's not a singular device/product/creation. It's wider in scope, kinda like a whole field. This is probably because like you pointed out you can find one thing that is just good, like a shovel. But a shovel is a mechanical tool and in the broader scheme of things.
An example I can think of is ABS, anti-lock break system. It prevents car wheels from locking under breaking and skidding, giving the driver more control while breaking. How could this be bad? ABS is a fix to a problem that was created by another technology, the car. The car dictated a lot of society as we know it today. Roads had to be built, rules of travel put in place, you could now live far from work. These might sound good to us now, but in reality they are trade-offs.
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I find it bizarre that comments like these seem to think the main battle ground for free speech is young people like myself "cancelling" people on twitter, when at the same time protestors are being arrested by secret police in the US. Like there is an authoritarian government right there for you to criticise, but you choose only to talk endlessly about tweets like "can white people make rice, or is it cultural appro…
I agree. I would like for someone to enumerate all the people who have been “cancelled” and then compare it to those that have been violently attacked.
> Also from an ex soviet state. Also feel alarm bells going off. I'm legitimately scared. I've seen this before, I know where it goes.
And not be talking about a massive police crackdown on protest and the army being brought in to police civilians. Like your alarm bells are dead silent for all of that, but some celebrity has to apologise for not saying "latinx" or whatever and suddenly you're all "ah yes, just like in the Soviet Union"?!
Let's pretend that such a projection exists and we can assign people to points on the cartesian plane. This begs the question, how do the points change over time? Mathematically speaking, we can add to our model by assuming there is some notion of a flow or a vector field on the quadrant that pulls individual people/points in directions. There are also people moving in their own directions either due to inherit perso…