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The death of a public intellectual

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Re: The death of a public intellectual

#331

Post by amanaplanacanal »

PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #325
wsve wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

Is it a political agenda if it's verifiable fact? When someone says 2+2=4 is that political?

This was supposed to be a personality test, not a political debate. Why would he even bring it up?

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#333

Post by mrguyorama »

esafak wrote: post #2

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 p…

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.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#334

Post by RationalDino »

ablob wrote: post #328
RationalDino wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actu…

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 ou…

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.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#335

Post by defgeneric »

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.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#336

Post by ebiester »

mola wrote: post #326
ebiester wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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…

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?

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#337

Post by Obscurity4340 »

dralley wrote: post #283
JSavageOne wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>he was briefly addicted to anti-depressants 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 spea…

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.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#338

Post by saurik »

RationalDino wrote: post #281
AlecSchueler wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this just an appeal to authority?

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…

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.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#339

Post by helpfulclippy »

DavidPiper wrote: post #143
simongray wrote: post #110

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…

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…

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.

Re: The death of a public intellectual

#340

Post by petsfed »

blueflow wrote: post #287
RationalDino wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actu…

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 someo…

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.

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