It's an opinion piece. It's not supposed to be objective journalism. Do people seriously not understand the difference?
Sure, but not all opinions are equal. Good opinions are based on an accurate representation of the thing or person the opinion is about. This article doesn't even attempt to do this. It starts with the false dichotomy in the title (probably not the authors fault) and continues with the authors complete failure to cite anything substantial Peterson has written or said (as opposed to non-substantial things like tweets), and even then only one quote is a complete sentence. Even the conclusion that Peterson is a snake oil salesman fails to take into account the fact that a mere 5 minutes on google would have revealed; What Peterson is selling actually works for a substantial group of people.
So no, it doesn't need to be objective journalism; that's merely determining the facts. However, any good opinion depends on something that approximates objective journalism and is formulated as a genuine attempt to provide a valid and sound argument. This piece doesn't even come close.
It's an opinion piece. It's not supposed to be objective journalism. Do people seriously not understand the difference?
What I fail to understand is the value in writing, publishing and sharing what are often poorly-substantiated opinions versus attempting to treat a subject fairly.
To rubecube’s point, it feels like some of you have never read an opinion piece before. Sure, there are good and bad ones, but there are bad ones in every single paper I’ve ever read.
I don’t know what the issue is with this piece existing, other than some of you disagree with the opinion or the way it’s presented, but it doesn’t fall outside the norm of opinion pieces at all.
It’s no fun taking the world so seriously that you start to reject the very existence of the opinion section. It’s like the OG Internet forum.
What I fail to understand is the value in writing, publishing and sharing what are often poorly-substantiated opinions versus attempting to treat a subject fairly.
The value is it sends a message to fellow-travelers that you're on their side. It also riles up people who disagree with you.
So pretty much Rick Bell level stuff. Which is nothing new in opinion pieces. But it is telling that those sorts of pieces are all we get from Canada's Toronto-based media on the subject of Jordan Peterson. I get the impression of a social clique that genuinely hates the guy, and bitterly resents his success. It's unfortunate that we live in a country where the media is dominated by a social clique of a couple thousand people living in the same city.
The UK media, as much as it's sometimes criticized for being too London-centric, demonstrates much more diversity. This interview, by a London-based journalist, is both in-depth and fair-minded. We've yet to see anything similar in the Canadian media.
Even the conclusion that Peterson is a snake oil salesman fails to take into account the fact that a mere 5 minutes on google would have revealed; What Peterson is selling actually works for a substantial group of people.
I can spend 5 minutes on Google and "reveal" that homeopathy "works" for a substantial group of people. That doesn't mean its peddlers aren't hucksters.
I can spend 5 minutes on Google and "reveal" that homeopathy "works" for a substantial group of people. That doesn't mean its peddlers aren't hucksters.
Peterson is a practising clinical psychologist with enough credibility in his field to land a job at Harvard. And his book was in the works before anyone ever heard of him.
The snake oil salesman slur is all about the money he makes on Patreon, which has inspired a tremendous amount of jealousy and resentment in Canadian academia.
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If snake oil salesman have McGill, Harvard, and and UofT on their resumes, I can't wait to hear the backgrounds of the real experts in these conversations.
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There are opinion pieces that treat their subjects fairly and reasonably disagree with them. There are also opinion pieces that deliberately set out to smear their subject by finding as much ammunition to fire at them as possible, while trying to present that ammunition in the worst light possible for the subject. The latter is called a "hit piece". It's a cheap tactic to try to foist an opinion onto an audience, rather than expressing the opinion fairly and allowing the audience to decide if it agrees or disagrees.
You seem to be saying "this is nothing new, there are a lot of articles like this, why are you surprised". If that's your point, I agree completely, there are many such articles, which is why there's a category called a "hit piece". It's not novel, but it's still a dishonest and deleterious addition to any public conversation.
Just taking the "huckster" thing as an example, it's an unfair charge to level at someone... that is, unless you explain what you mean, and make substantive criticisms as to how they present their message. Referring again to Lindsay's piece, he says something quite similar:
Quote:
Originally Posted by James Lindsay
Enter Peterson, billing himself as an accessible hero archetype who was “raised and toughened in the frigid wastelands of Northern Alberta,” and who “has flown a hammer-head roll in a carbon-fiber stunt plane.” Rather than telling men who refuse to suffer the nearly insufferable that they are weak, Peterson reaches to them by lecturing in two-hour blocks with a message of “clean your own room” before setting out to change the world, to think deeply, be reflective, become competent, and stand up for yourself and what you believe is right. These are all very good messages, and he delivers them with all of the humor and humanity, and the substance and depth, for which Murray rightly congratulates him.
Good advice, however, is cheap. Similar messages to many of Peterson’s are available in any number of self-help books, especially for the young entrepreneur or businessperson. That kind of thing has never before been enough to inspire a generation of lost boys, who mostly want to find their way to winning in a way that truly resonates with them — to some kind of masculine success. So Peterson urges them in intentionally inflected tones to be, for example, powerful and instructs them so by riding on a claim that it’s what women really (secretly) want from men more than anything else. Wink, wink. After all, it was true when men were men and women were women, and we can all know it because this mythological story about snakes from the Bible bears it out. And so by tossing in some pop-psychology and pop-evolutionary theory, partially rooted within his own expertise, Peterson gives this melange of advice the full appearance of “depth and substance.”
That's a reasonable concern, well expressed. He fleshes it out further later when he evaluates Peterson's epistemology. As you say, Lindsay's was obviously the better article (if you can even call the G&M one an article), and this is why. If all you do is call the guy a huckster and absurd and not worth taking seriously over and over again, paragraph after paragraph, you might as well not write an article at all, because it can all be boiled down to "this guy is bad and I hate him".
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Peterson is a practising clinical psychologist with enough credibility in his field to land a job at Harvard. And his book was in the works before anyone ever heard of him.
The snake oil salesman slur is all about the money he makes on Patreon, which has inspired a tremendous amount of jealousy and resentment in Canadian academia.
And if he stuck to his field, I'd be more inclined to take him at face value. Instead he continuously acts as a credible authority and wades out of his depth into areas that are quite clearly beyond his expertise, as has been noted by both CHL and myself and the in the article CHL posted.
EDIT: Also I'm sure some practicing MDs are jealous of the money that homeopaths and other woo practitioners is make, but that doesn't make their huckster charges any less valid.
Instead he continuously acts as a credible authority and wades out of his depth into areas that are quite clearly beyond his expertise
This is true, in so far as his criticism of Bill C-16 is concerned. But even if he never talked about anything but psychology and "the life well lived" - which are areas that are pretty clearly within his realm of expertise - his schtick would still be highly problematic, because he's creating a highly motivated, highly ideological moral community out of young people who are disaffected and desperate for meaning. Those are arguably the most dangerous kind of people to have as the core of such a movement.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
There are opinion pieces that treat their subjects fairly and reasonably disagree with them. There are also opinion pieces that deliberately set out to smear their subject by finding as much ammunition to fire at them as possible, while trying to present that ammunition in the worst light possible for the subject. The latter is called a "hit piece". It's a cheap tactic to try to foist an opinion onto an audience, rather than expressing the opinion fairly and allowing the audience to decide if it agrees or disagrees.
You seem to be saying "this is nothing new, there are a lot of articles like this, why are you surprised". If that's your point, I agree completely, there are many such articles, which is why there's a category called a "hit piece". It's not novel, but it's still a dishonest and deleterious addition to any public conversation.
Just taking the "huckster" thing as an example, it's an unfair charge to level at someone... that is, unless you explain what you mean, and make substantive criticisms as to how they present their message. Referring again to Lindsay's piece, he says something quite similar:
That's a reasonable concern, well expressed. He fleshes it out further later when he evaluates Peterson's epistemology. As you say, Lindsay's was obviously the better article (if you can even call the G&M one an article), and this is why. If all you do is call the guy a huckster and absurd and not worth taking seriously over and over again, paragraph after paragraph, you might as well not write an article at all, because it can all be boiled down to "this guy is bad and I hate him".
Well I'd tend to argue that the G&M piece was likely working within the confines of a word count and trying to generate clicks. Even the title of the piece is obviously clickbait. So I guess I'd concede that the article itself contains quite a bit of inflammatory and irrelevant words regarding Peterson as a person but it's overall take on the content of his work isn't inaccurate.
Well of course you don't think it's inaccurate, you already agree with it and don't require any justification. That was its purpose, and why Cliff posted that Mill quote on the last page. It's like you're acting out the point.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
This is true, in so far as his criticism of Bill C-16 is concerned. But even if he never talked about anything but psychology and "the life well lived" - which are areas that are pretty clearly within his realm of expertise - his schtick would still be highly problematic, because he's creating a highly motivated, highly ideological moral community out of young people who are disaffected and desperate for meaning. Those are arguably the most dangerous kind of people to have as the core of such a movement.
Oh I have quite a bit of criticism of the guy that goes beyond that and doesn't even touch the identity politics stuff, but that's the big one for me. I find people who engage in that type of behaviour and don't acknowledge the fact that they're basically out of their element to be pretty dangerous when they command the type of audience he does.
Well of course you don't think it's inaccurate, you already agree with it and don't require any justification. That was its purpose, and why Cliff posted that Mill quote on the last page. It's like you're acting out the point.
Okay, which quotes of Peterson's did you find to be inaccurate or taken out of context?
The value is it sends a message to fellow-travelers that you're on their side. It also riles up people who disagree with you.
So pretty much Rick Bell level stuff. Which is nothing new in opinion pieces. But it is telling that those sorts of pieces are all we get from Canada's Toronto-based media on the subject of Jordan Peterson. I get the impression of a social clique that genuinely hates the guy, and bitterly resents his success. It's unfortunate that we live in a country where the media is dominated by a social clique of a couple thousand people living in the same city.
The UK media, as much as it's sometimes criticized for being too London-centric, demonstrates much more diversity. This interview, by a London-based journalist, is both in-depth and fair-minded. We've yet to see anything similar in the Canadian media.
This was never made more clear to me then when that toronto theatre dude got accused of #metoo stuff. Toronto acted like it was a massive bombshell rocking the country to its very core. Pretty much everyone I talked to, left and right wing alike were like....who?
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Alright, well we're basically analyzing a piece of garbage journalism at this point, but fine, I'll bite.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rubecube
Okay, which quotes of Peterson's did you find to be inaccurate or taken out of context?
So, first, any time you see someone write their own sentence and stick small chunks of someone else's words into it with quotation marks around them, you should basically ignore the quotation marks. Here is an example:
Quote:
A dumb joke, maybe. But an edifying one. (Jokes, as Freud knew, are frequently revealing; "an envelope for thoughts of the greatest substance.") Jordan Peterson is the intellectual as guru-mystic, and the guru-mystic as shameless huckster. He maintains that he abhors "right-wing identitarians" while simultaneously baiting them, materially profiting off their interest, and bequeathing their misguided movement the illusion of intellectual heft. He has also spoken giddily about his ability to "monetize social justice warriors," by converting outrage against him into more online donations. He is an intellectual snake oil salesman, exploiting a genuine need (pointed among the young men who shore the ranks of Peterson disciples) for meaning and order. His aim is little more than the pursuit of his own vanity and the P.T. Barnum-ish padding of his own pockets. He is a prophet, for profit.
There are no actual quotes from Jordan Peterson in that paragraph. There may be a couple of words he has said at some point or another, but that is a very different thing. Frankly, you could construct a paragraph out of words or phrases used at some point by anyone and come up with a full justification for the holocaust.
EDIT: Incidentally, I find it hilariously ironic that the author tries to justify a charge of hucksterism by quoting Freud.
So leaving those bits aside, of which there are many, there are only two quotes in the article that I can see. Here they are.
Quote:
Fitting, then, that in 12 Rules for Life he finds a hero in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose epic history of Soviet forced labour, The Gulag Archipelago is praised by Peterson as, "a forceful, terrible book, written with the overwhelming moral force of unvarnished truth."
That is a book review. I've never read the Gulag Archipelago, so I can't say what Peterson's praise of it says about him, but I'm not sure that there's any book besides Mein Kampf that would justify suspicion of a person for liking it. Well... maybe Atlas Shrugged.
Quote:
Then, Bill C-16, an amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act to enshrine legal protections on the basis of gender identity, turned Peterson into a glowering cause célèbre. "I will never use words I hate," Peterson wrote, "like the trendy and artificially constructed words 'zhe' and 'zher.' These words are at the vanguard of a post-modern, radical leftist ideology that I detest, and which is, in my professional opinion, frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century."
That's basically the source of all of Peterson's controversy from a year or so ago. Lots of people disagree with his views on this, including, apparently, the author. Fair enough.
Now look at the rest of the article and the charges levelled at Peterson, basically non-stop. Are those two quotes the basis for them? They sure don't appear adequate to render the incessant smears and vilification defensible... unless you already agree with the author, or are inclined to not think too hard and simply take the word of columnists about who's an evil misogynist alt-righter.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
Last edited by CorsiHockeyLeague; 02-01-2018 at 09:52 AM.
Alright, well we're basically analyzing a piece of garbage journalism at this point, but fine, I'll bite.
So, first, any time you see someone write their own sentence and stick small chunks of someone else's words into it with quotation marks around them, you should basically ignore the quotation marks. Here is an example:
There are no actual quotes from Jordan Peterson in that paragraph. There may be a couple of words he has said at some point or another, but that is a very different thing. Frankly, you could construct a paragraph out of words or phrases used at some point by anyone and come up with a full justification for the holocaust.
EDIT: Incidentally, I find it hilariously ironic that the author tries to justify a charge of hucksterism by quoting Freud.
So leaving those bits aside, of which there are many, there are only two quotes in the article that I can see. Here they are.
That is a book review. I've never read the Gulag Archipelago, so I can't say what Peterson's praise of it says about him, but I'm not sure that there's any book besides Mein Kampf that would justify suspicion of a person for liking it. Well... maybe Atlas Shrugged.
That's basically the source of all of Peterson's controversy from a year or so ago. Lots of people disagree with his views on this, including, apparently, the author. Fair enough.
Now look at the rest of the article and the charges levelled at Peterson, basically non-stop. Are those two quotes the basis for them? They sure don't appear adequate to render the incessant smears and vilification defensible... unless you already agree with the author, or are inclined to not think too hard and simply take the word of columnists about who's an evil misogynist alt-righter.
I think I might have glossed over most of that because these were the two main things that stuck out to me in the article:
Quote:
Peterson arrived at the conclusion that the difference between Google's and Bing's respective results of bikini photos revealed the former's apparent desire "to shape our perceptions themselves in the politically correct manner."
Peterson's lectures, YouTube videos, and new book contain wisdom that ranges from the incendiary (that sexual assault is a consequence of the decline of traditional marriage), to the obvious (skateboarding is cool), to the vacuously pithy ("Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong"), and utterly ponderous ("cats are a manifestation of nature, of Being, in an almost pure form").
Then, Bill C-16, an amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act to enshrine legal protections on the basis of gender identity, turned Peterson into a glowering cause célèbre. "I will never use words I hate," Peterson wrote, "like the trendy and artificially constructed words 'zhe' and 'zher.' These words are at the vanguard of a post-modern, radical leftist ideology that I detest, and which is, in my professional opinion, frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century."
These are all things Peterson has said or written and I think they're perfectly valid things to criticize him on. It's not the anti-tans angle I take issue with regarding the last quote as it is the utterly laughable hysteria.
And if he stuck to his field, I'd be more inclined to take him at face value. Instead he continuously acts as a credible authority and wades out of his depth into areas that are quite clearly beyond his expertise, as has been noted by both CHL and myself and the in the article CHL posted.
I disagree. I think we need more public intellectuals, and we need to knock down the boundaries erected between fields and subjects. The notion that you can't talk about gender in society unless you have a PhD in Gender Studies, or about Russian Literature unless you have a PhD in Russian Literature, is one of the biggest factors in the alienation of the Canadian public - including the educated Canadian public - from academia and intellectual culture. Intelligent people should be publicly discoursing about every topic under the sun.
And I haven't noticed this charge being levelled against beloved figures on the left. David Suzuki has been carrying on for decades about subjects far outside his background in zoology and genetics. Naomi Klein is a university dropout, and the Canadian media gives her a platform to pontificate about everything from global trade to climate change.
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I think I might have glossed over most of that because these were the two main things that stuck out to me in the article:
So, the first quote there is a good example of a tactic used in a hit piece. It's deliberately cast in a light meant to make Peterson sound like a crazy person, through the narrative the author put together about him up in the middle of the night googling bikini photos. It then doesn't bother to explain what he meant by the seven-or-so quoted words, or why he thinks it's a problem. To be clear, I think his explanation would probably be crazy, but it's omitted because it doesn't matter to the author, whose purpose is to smear the guy.
Second paragraph, you have several claims there. First, sexual assault is a consequence of the decline of traditional marriage. That's not actually a quote from the guy - does it represent his views? If that is a fair assessment of his position (I'm confident it isn't), what are his reasons, and are those reasons crazy or defensible? Again, it doesn't matter to the author, because in the world of a hit piece, the subject is automatically indefensible to begin with.
The last two quotes in that paragraph are pretty obviously taken out of context and designed to make him sound like a kook. Maybe they'd still sound kooky in context, but again, they're selected not to make any substantive point, but basically just as a cheap shot.
The last bit I dealt with. If all the article did was take that quote and talk sensibly about why he was wrong to say that, there'd be nothing wrong with that. Again, it doesn't, because the point of the article isn't to rebut his statements or positions. It's to smear him.
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