That's the thing, Peterson would generally be good if he were just throwing interesting and occasionally kooky perspectives about the world and society out there. It's actually a plus to have public intellectuals who approach social life from a totally different angle than the mainstream. It's the whole "cult leader" aspect of his phenomenon, and his cultivation of that aspect by insisting that he's offering profound truths about the proper way to live life, that are concerning.
For me personally, Peterson is quite intolerable for the same reason Sam Harris is mostly intolerable; they are both so incredibly lazy intellectually. And of course at the same time incredibly smug about their own supposed learnedness and intellectual superiority. Sure they're smart, but for me at least, intelligence isn't what makes you an intellectual. It's the combination of being intellectually rigorous and putting in the work to know your stuff and the stuff you criticize.
They mostly get away with what they do mostly because to point out their infuriating intellectual laziness you have be the opposite of that: meticulous, and deeply knowledgeable about the topics they pretend to understand, which mostly requires someone who has actually studied them on an academic level. This isn't such a large group of people, and they have more interesting topics to discuss than Peterson or Harris.
It's also somewhat tedious work, pointing out how time after time they keep throwing around big ideas and big words without doing the actually intellectual part, which would be
1) doing the detail-level explanations of what they mean
2) getting to know the history of philosophy on a level where they would be able to accurately understand numerous complicated philosophical ideas and the long history of existing arguments and counter-arguments around the topics which they talk about, so they could actually address those real arguments and real counter-arguments instead of strawmen and caricatures.
But of course, that's a huge amount of work you need to put in, and they both have a target audience of people like them: people who want to understand the broad strokes of societies and philosophy, but who would really strongly prefer that they don't have to put in too much work themselves.
Which in itself is a perfectly reasonable position for an audience member. It would absolutely be nice if someone like Peterson could actually just explain to you what you need to know. I would love if this is the way this stuff works.
The problem is that the broad strokes don't really match with the complexity of the real world, and even the simple explanations for the most part aren't that simple. What Harris and especially Peterson pretend to be able to do isn't actually possible for someone who would be truly intellectually rigorous, and that leaves the field to charlatans like Peterson and Harris who just pretend to be able to do it anyway.
And this is what the "intellectual dark web" is, for the most part, a bunch of people who have realized that if you can act convincingly enough and pretend to explain complex ideas in an entertaining way (when really you're either just making stuff up or distorting the ideas to a point where they're barely recognizable), you ccan be way more popular than most proper academics in these fields can ever hope to be, and make some serious money.
Here's some explanations of how lazy Harris really is when putting together an argument:
And here's a critique of Stephen Hicks's "Explaining Postmodernism", which has become somewhat of a hit unfortunately, probably in part due to Peterson advertising it. To me this book is kind of the perfect example of the level of actual "intellectuality" of the "intellectual dark web".
Sure this is a long video, but it also covers a lot of ground around about philosophy, and is mostly not that difficult to follow, even if there's parts that are likely to go past you if you don't know this stuff already. Considering that misrepresenting and arguing against "modern liberalism" meaning in part basically the last century of philosophy, I think videos like these are helpful in vaccinating people against BS arguments from certain types of populist talk.
The two videos above also combine into a pretty decent starter package on some basics on western philosophy.
Here's another video on how Peterson doesn't know his stuff about postmodernism, but it's a bit redundant. As is this video on how Peterson doesn't know Marxism or Communism, or Nazism. There's a lot of good critique of Peterson in the YouTube if you look for it. (And probably a lot of not-so-good criticism.)
And here's another video about that just not sheds light on Petersons vagueness, but also explains some basics about feminism that I think aren't very commonly known but would be helpful for general discussion. (I already posted this in another thread.)
Last edited by Itse; 09-21-2018 at 05:53 AM.
The Following 6 Users Say Thank You to Itse For This Useful Post:
Read the article, was more of the same, still think the dogpiling was dumb and came from a place of faux intellectualism and ideological bias.
“I read the article, and my opinion remains unchanged from when I didn’t read it and was called out as not having read it because of how completely wrong in my assumption of its contents.”
So, yeah.
It’s ok to just admit you were wrong instead of using lazy insults and calling others “cute.”
Here's some explanations of how lazy Harris really is when putting together an argument:
This is a very strange way of characterizing it, and a pretty unnecessary video given that he spends a lot of time making a point that could be made in a couple of paragraphs.
Harris is, at core, a consequentialist. Like just about every other consequentialist since Bentham, he's planted a flag in his "base" value, which he says is the reduction of human suffering and the increase of "human wellbeing", which is a vague notion that seems to be mostly the opposite of reducing suffering but he also acknowledges that values that we strive for that are distinct from suffering and pleasure are important to us (leading a productive, meaningful life). This suffers from all of the problems that all consequentialist moral theories suffer from, while simultaneously attempting to use a trick of language to import incommensurable values into its "base" value (in other words, Nagel was right). Utilitarianism has plenty of nails in its coffin as a valid and consistent moral theory, and so Harris's does too.
But frankly, there's no real way around that problem. At some point, a moral theory that claims to be "true" is not going to have meaning except by reference to some bedrock that's self-justifying. If you believe in objective morality, your flag's going somewhere. The only other alternative is moral skepticism. Harris doesn't shy away from the fact that he's done so - his response is effectively, "if the word 'bad' is going to mean anything in terms of human values, then 'the greatest possible suffering for everyone' has to fall within it" - once you have agreement on that, you can work from there. And from that point, he's correct that the way to know how to decrease human suffering and increase "wellbeing" (no matter what you may think that means) must be derived from facts about the universe. What else could it be derived from?
So I don't think it's correct to call the reasoning lazy or careless. It's simply flawed. He also has to bite the bullet and feed the utility monster, as I believe he's acknowledged in the past. These are just things you have to live with if you're going to espouse a consequentialist moral theory. The better criticism from my perspective is, "well, what's new here that called for you to write a book about it? This is all pretty much a rehash of old ideas with a fresh coat of paint." This is a problem that Harris runs into elsewhere - his book "Free Will" is more or less entirely correct as far as it goes, but also totally unnecessary and trite, without dealing with any of the more interesting questions in that area.
In the case of The Moral Landscape, the titular analogy is really the useful contribution to moral consequentialism, effectively positing that despite there being an objective value, it's not necessarily useful to ask what the absolute best way to achieve that value is. There are multiple value "peaks" that are effectively indistinguishable from one another, and really the goal is to move uphill, which can get you stuck on a local "peak" without realizing that there's Everest a mile away. It's an interesting and insightful analogy... that didn't need a book. An essay would have done the trick.
__________________ "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
It was exactly what I assumed it was. Get 5 experts on nutrition in a room and you're going to get 5 very different opinions, y'all got what you needed to dog pile and couldn't help yourselves but leap all over it because that mean, nasty JP just has to be taken down a peg. The willingness to experiment is the mark of a refined mind.
I enjoy the good criticisms of JP, but this was just dumb garbage.
Peterson sees a problem in society and he's doing something about it. He makes the same rants that a group of 40somethings sitting around the table would. Kids are entitled, techy and impatient. So instead of blaming the world, do something about it. I don't find him to be a rehearsed talking head like Harris is. Peterson does get challenged on issues he's not that good in and he adapts.
The fact that this may improve the lives young white males, why is this a problem? Is there this fear that 'the white male' will rise again and dominate the world stomping on every woman or non-white person. With our systems in place now that'll never happen. So what's so scary about it?
__________________
Watching the Oilers defend is like watching fire engines frantically rushing to the wrong fire
For me personally, Peterson is quite intolerable for the same reason Sam Harris is mostly intolerable; they are both so incredibly lazy intellectually. And of course at the same time incredibly smug about their own supposed learnedness and intellectual superiority. Sure they're smart, but for me at least, intelligence isn't what makes you an intellectual. It's the combination of being intellectually rigorous and putting in the work to know your stuff and the stuff you criticize.
They mostly get away with what they do mostly because to point out their infuriating intellectual laziness you have be the opposite of that: meticulous, and deeply knowledgeable about the topics they pretend to understand, which mostly requires someone who has actually studied them on an academic level. This isn't such a large group of people, and they have more interesting topics to discuss than Peterson or Harris.
I'd argue there's a strong connection between the narrow specialization of modern academics, and the declining profile of intellectual discourse in modern culture. Specialists tend to be ####ty communicators. They're so deep in their niche that they don't know how to contextualize it or make it relevant to a general audience. They only know how to talk to other specialists.
Confining dialog around important social issues to a small number of obscure academics, to be passed on to the masses from on high, is one of the reasons academics - especially those in the social sciences and humanities - are held in such low regard today. Their contempt for the public is evident.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Itse
The problem is that the broad strokes don't really match with the complexity of the real world, and even the simple explanations for the most part aren't that simple. What Harris and especially Peterson pretend to be able to do isn't actually possible for someone who would be truly intellectually rigorous, and that leaves the field to charlatans like Peterson and Harris who just pretend to be able to do it anyway.
If these fields are so complex that even the reasonably educated people who make up the audience for Peterson, Harris, etc. can't understand them, then I question the utility of the research. This stuff is ultimately political. You simply aren't going to get public buy-in for fundamental changes to how we organize society and communicate with one another on the basis of small numbers of academics saying "this stuff is complex, so just trust us when we say we need to do X, Y, and Z because of intersectional theory." Especially when it has become evident that those academics are ideologically and politically homogeneous.
And really, the dogma inspiring social activists today is the farthest thing from reflecting the complexity of the real world. It divides all people into oppressor or oppressed, based on group identities of race and gender, and calls for institutions to favour the oppressed groups and suppress the oppressor groups. Talk about a philosophy that neglects nuance.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Itse
And this is what the "intellectual dark web" is, for the most part, a bunch of people who have realized that if you can act convincingly enough and pretend to explain complex ideas in an entertaining way (when really you're either just making stuff up or distorting the ideas to a point where they're barely recognizable), you ccan be way more popular than most proper academics in these fields can ever hope to be, and make some serious money.
The people in the IDW are popular because they're presenting some controversial scientific and social issues in a way that's accessible and engaging. They're using modern media platforms to resurrect the idea of the public intellectual. And a public intellectual, virtually by definition, has to be a generalist, to digress and roam and seek to inform on a range of topics. They also need to have strong communication skills.
Harris' show features he and a guest talking about a subject the guest specializes in. The guest provides the narrow expertise, while the host is a proxy for the listener, steering the conversation with an engaging style. That's how these things have always worked. It's hard to imagine how this public intellectual thing would work if all we listened to were those with narrow specializations, releasing two podcasts a year on a subject of arcane interest, presented in jargon-riddled academic-speak.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Itse
And here's another video about that just not sheds light on Petersons vagueness, but also explains some basics about feminism that I think aren't very commonly known but would be helpful for general discussion. (I already posted this in another thread.)
See, this is the kind of thing the left needs to do more of to get their points across - accessible to generalists and somewhat entertaining. It even raises the excellent point that Marxism and post-modernism are themselves products of the Western intellectual tradition.
Now if only the identarian activists would recognize that the culture they're so dedicated to tearing down is the very culture that birthed their own movement. It never ceases to baffle me that people who purport to be championing liberalism, diversity, and tolerance devote all of their energies to demonizing the values and institutions of the most liberal, diverse, and tolerant social system the world has ever seen.
It's telling that Steven Pinker's documentation of the remarkable improvements in human welfare over the last 400 years attracts such fierce hostility from the left. They're unwilling to recognize progress if it's the product of an oppressive Western colonial racist patriarchal cis-normative system.
__________________
Quote:
Originally Posted by fotze
If this day gets you riled up, you obviously aren't numb to the disappointment yet to be a real fan.
Last edited by CliffFletcher; 09-21-2018 at 09:10 AM.
The Following User Says Thank You to CliffFletcher For This Useful Post:
For me personally, Peterson is quite intolerable for the same reason Sam Harris is mostly intolerable; they are both so incredibly lazy intellectually.
Just a great post Itse. Bang on. Just a few points to add.
This is true of quite a few pop-intellectuals. They work hard to establish some gravitas and a following, then they get lazy. A guy that is closing in on this Haidt.
Quote:
And of course at the same time incredibly smug about their own supposed learnedness and intellectual superiority. Sure they're smart, but for me at least, intelligence isn't what makes you an intellectual. It's the combination of being intellectually rigorous and putting in the work to know your stuff and the stuff you criticize.
Exactly. Being an intellectual is about knowing what you don't know and then putting in the work to gain understanding - not just in the subject area but in a larger sphere - of the subject itself and the compound nature of information. Harris and Peterson are highly annoying because they don't know stuff, but drone on just because they love the sound of their own voices.
Quote:
They mostly get away with what they do mostly because to point out their infuriating intellectual laziness you have be the opposite of that: meticulous, and deeply knowledgeable about the topics they pretend to understand, which mostly requires someone who has actually studied them on an academic level. This isn't such a large group of people, and they have more interesting topics to discuss than Peterson or Harris.
It's also somewhat tedious work, pointing out how time after time they keep throwing around big ideas and big words without doing the actually intellectual part, which would be
1) doing the detail-level explanations of what they mean
2) getting to know the history of philosophy on a level where they would be able to accurately understand numerous complicated philosophical ideas and the long history of existing arguments and counter-arguments around the topics which they talk about, so they could actually address those real arguments and real counter-arguments instead of strawmen and caricatures.
Which is why I go back to the question of what their peers, department, and school really think of them? Academics work their asses off to become subject matter experts, and that work never stops. The ones that rest on their laurels, or become lazy, are the ones who fade into oblivion. The ones who don't continue to push the envelope and expand their research become second rate academics. Even those with great fame and influence can quickly fall into this trap.
Quote:
But of course, that's a huge amount of work you need to put in, and they both have a target audience of people like them: people who want to understand the broad strokes of societies and philosophy, but who would really strongly prefer that they don't have to put in too much work themselves.
Which in itself is a perfectly reasonable position for an audience member. It would absolutely be nice if someone like Peterson could actually just explain to you what you need to know. I would love if this is the way this stuff works.
The problem is that the broad strokes don't really match with the complexity of the real world, and even the simple explanations for the most part aren't that simple. What Harris and especially Peterson pretend to be able to do isn't actually possible for someone who would be truly intellectually rigorous, and that leaves the field to charlatans like Peterson and Harris who just pretend to be able to do it anyway.
The problem with Harris and Peterson is they try to simplify very complex problems with reliance on one "ism" or theory. When studying and discussing very complex matters you can many times not rely on a single perspective ("ism") or a single theory to find understanding or explain the nature of things. Sometimes you need many schools of thought and many ideas to explain the complexity of chaos.
Quote:
And this is what the "intellectual dark web" is, for the most part, a bunch of people who have realized that if you can act convincingly enough and pretend to explain complex ideas in an entertaining way (when really you're either just making stuff up or distorting the ideas to a point where they're barely recognizable), you ccan be way more popular than most proper academics in these fields can ever hope to be, and make some serious money.
Well stated. It always amazes me how certain theories gain traction when they present such controversial and incomplete work. It just proves that if you can develop a following, you can say the most ridiculous things and get away with it. Because of this rhetorical engagement is all but dead because certain "thinkers" cannot be questioned, even though their thinking is incomplete or flawed.
For a guy who we supposedly shouldn't associated with the alt+right, he sure spends a lot of time posing with notable alt+right figures and symbols, digesting their questionable media sources, and promoting their conspiracy theories.
The Following 5 Users Say Thank You to rubecube For This Useful Post:
An examination of the status-seeking and religious mindset underlying the modern social justice movement, and how at its heart it's a way for educated and affluent whites to distinguish themselves from the hoi polloi:
More broadly, Woke dogmas lead to a sacred narrative about the nobility of perceived victims’ groups (e.g., blacks, women, Muslims, gays, transexuals, et cetera). Members of these groups are to be considered the innocent victims of an oppressive and iniquitous patriarchy. Whites, on the other hand, are born burdened with the original sin of privilege, and are therefore presumptively complicit in the system unless they declare fidelity to Wokeness. This creates a Manichean moral doctrine that purports to reverse the current power hierarchy. Victims’ groups are revered, and the powerful are despised. However, as we will argue, this hierarchy is not so simple because it actually elevates a healthy proportion of the powerful, namely the white educated elites who profess unquestioning devotion to Wokeness. So, in the end, it is not really a status reversal so much as a way to distinguish one group of whites from the rest...
...Those who are Woke don’t really want to inhabit an entirely Woke world without the bigoted masses; instead, they want to occupy a world of good and evil, of the just and the wicked, of the high status and the low status, of the elite and hoi polloi. The Woke faithful almost certainly do believe that the world is unjust, even wicked, and they almost certainly do sincerely want to ameliorate the suffering of its victims. However, they also want to signal their membership to an elite and morally righteous club, and therefore they need an out-group, a foil, a morally wicked other for contrast. And, they can’t let just any kind-hearted person into their club, because then it would lose its exclusivity. So they must develop a strenuous vetting system, one that is vigilant and suspicious and quick to detect sin.
__________________
Quote:
Originally Posted by fotze
If this day gets you riled up, you obviously aren't numb to the disappointment yet to be a real fan.
An examination of the status-seeking and religious mindset underlying the modern social justice movement, and how at its heart it's a way for educated and affluent whites to distinguish themselves from the hoi polloi:
An examination of the status-seeking and religious mindset underlying the modern social justice movement, and how at its heart it's a way for educated and affluent whites to distinguish themselves from the hoi polloi:
That's all well and good, but as a pretty liberal person that has traveled in political circles for a couple decades, went to a liberal arts school, worked at 3 institutions of higher learning, I have yet to encounter any of these people in real life. I assume they exist as people on the internet constantly warn against them. They are essentially like a strawman for you guys to continually knock down.
The Following User Says Thank You to dobbles For This Useful Post:
An examination of the status-seeking and religious mindset underlying the modern social justice movement, and how at its heart it's a way for educated and affluent whites to distinguish themselves from the hoi polloi:
I guess the part that amused me the most was the author trying to make the analogy that "wokeness" (used mockingly of course) is a form of religious fervour.
Comparing support for social justice with the anti-woman, anti-gay agenda driven by REAL religious zealots on the right is idiotic.
Sent from my Pixel XL using Tapatalk
The Following User Says Thank You to longsuffering For This Useful Post:
