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The death of a public intellectual

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Re: The death of a public intellectual

#251

Post by snorkel »

jimmydddd wrote: post #232
michpoch wrote: post #77

> 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 ha…

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. Interestin…

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

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#252

Post by LudwigNagasena »

Dudelander wrote: post #50
m463 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Jordan Peterson a canadian university professor? I've only briefly heard him, but why is he so polarizing? He just seemed to say sort of "be a decent person and work hard".

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 ha…

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?

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#253

Post by wsve »

blueflow wrote: post #228
virtualritz wrote: post #211

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. [1] https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellec…

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?

Let me give a personal story about this guy,

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.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#254

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

blueflow wrote: post #228
virtualritz wrote: post #211

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. [1] https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellec…

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?

> Where is all the dislike coming from?

He is providing, if not a counter-narrative, then at least a narrative orthogonal to those other people favor.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#255

Post by TurkishPoptart »

BryanLegend wrote: post #215
virtualritz wrote: post #211

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. [1] https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellec…

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.

Yes, not to mention his (completely free) lecture series on the Bible, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn.... an incredibly scholar he is.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#257

Post by jmcqk6 »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #245
jlos wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you would not consider someone who has the following CV an intellectual? - Has published or co-authored over 100+ academic papers in multiple fields - Has h-index of 41, i10-index of 77, with 21,000 citations [0] - Taught at Harvard - Tenured Professor at the largest University in Canada - 20+ year clinical practice - Best selling author with over 5 million copies sold You don't have to like his ideas, but if this…

Isn't this just an appeal to authority?

No, it's a listing of demonstrated contributions.

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.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#258

Post by memonkey »

ivanhoe wrote: post #209
michpoch wrote: post #77

> 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 ha…

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.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#259

Post by slothtrop »

unixhero wrote: post #39
eBombzor wrote: post #4

Reminds me of Huberman.

Yeah how so?

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.

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