Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

[dada]

Remember that Einstein quote about the two limitless things in the universe?

Recently I've come around to the opinion that stupidity serves an evolutionary function. It forces the intelligent to work even harder, which is good for things like creativity and human survival.

[Jerky]

Remember that Einstein quote about the two limitless things in the universe?

Recently I've come around to the opinion that stupidity serves an evolutionary function. It forces the intelligent to work even harder, which is good for things like creativity and human survival.

Ha! I've got a similar theory about rock bands. A band full of virtuoso players will almost always produce boring or unappealing music (or else they suffer that fate of becoming cult or "musicians' musician" type bands). There has to be at least one mediocre or even bad musician in the band to ground the high-flying instrumentalists.

J.

[minime]

Remember that Einstein quote about the two limitless things in the universe?

Recently I've come around to the opinion that stupidity serves an evolutionary function. It forces the intelligent to work even harder, which is good for things like creativity and human survival.

A use for the useless eaters. I've found my calling. What's for lunch?

[MacCruiskeen]

It was Project Willow who first acquainted me with Jordan Peterson, with a video in the Gender thread last year, where a gaggle of students were accusing him of "transphobia" for refusing to use "their pronouns". (What's the next demand? Their own adjectives? Their own verbs?) I found his stance, and his patience, impressive, as did Willow.

Just wanted to clarify why I started this thread. After Willow posted that video, I barely thought of JP and knew nothing at all of his professional work, nor had I any great interest in finding out more. Life is short. Then suddenly, a month ago or so (after his book came out), Peterson's name was all over the msm; he was, or so these wise journos were warning us, a huckster, a phoney, a shameless recycler of banal & boring self-help nostrums, an opportunistic Trumpite nonentity interested only in making a quick buck, a publicity hound, and -- worryingly -- a dangerous, because increasingly influential, "alt-right" guru. (These were the "dozen crappy reviews" I referred to in the post under the OP, the McLeans screed being among them.).

So I was surprised to find those two interviews with Brand and McGilchrist, two very different Brits whose work I admire and like and respect. McGilchrist and Brand weren't fascists, or Trumpites, or idiots, or reactionaries, or nobodies! (Or journalists.) So why were they giving Peterson the time of day? Then I watched those two videos and realised why. This man is certainly no fool, nor is he obviously a bastard, nor is he an evasive or dishonest slimeball. Whatever you think about Jordan Peterson, at least he doesn't hide behind the Ignore Function. And he is a man of very considerable professional accomplishments.

That I started this thread is not -- and it gets really boring to have to emphasise this every time I post anything here -- a blanket endorsement of Peterson's opinions, of which I still know very little, and nearly all of that second-hand.

[norton ash]

Mixed feelings here. I know he's an arrogant self-promoter and likes to poke the beehive and could be described accurately as reactionary. But I DO like to see some of the enormities of farcical, combative gender-mandering and abuse of language quite rightly called out.

[Sounder]

dada wrote...
Recently I've come around to the opinion that stupidity serves an evolutionary function. It forces the intelligent to work even harder, which is good for things like creativity and human survival.

How does it make them work harder? More likely they can coast and still do fine. Anyway the same person can be stupid in one sense while being quite intelligent in other ways.

Also most people are not as stupid as they are made out to be.

Hell, for all I know, the people that are willfully ignorant may be the smart ones.



Yes Mac, if MSM paints a bulleye on a person it is reasonable to wonder why.

[minime]

From a locked thread (mostly): I ordered The Master and His Emissary (609p ugh) from my local library--it's been on my reading short list ever since I quit reading (books)--however I didn't post in the Peterson thread for fear that a discussion of the ideas within might be unacceptable, as there has been no discussion of ideas presented in the thread heretofore. Cult of personality, and all that. I think that must have been the idea in the first place, though I can't say for sure

I wonder if this book would have been written without The Origin of Consciousness... or what it might have looked like. Anyway can't wait. The similarities in the function of the eyes across species is a revelation. How we might use that knowledge to retrain ourselves and our perceptual abilities is interesting to me.

Is that transhumanism? Horrors!

[Jerky]

So this isn't endorsement?

"Damn, this guy is brilliant, and bracing. No wonder he's becoming so famous. No wonder his own students (and other audiences) are flocking so enthusiastically to his lectures.

He is a clinical and developmental psychologist. Surely he is giving good and vitally important advice here? Surely what he says is true and insightful?"

Not that I care. You can hero worship whoever you wish. But shouldn't you maybe have gone back and edited your second post here before claiming disinterest?

J.

It was Project Willow who first acquainted me with Jordan Peterson, with a video in the Gender thread last year, where a gaggle of students were accusing him of "transphobia" for refusing to use "their pronouns". (What's the next demand? Their own adjectives? Their own verbs?) I found his stance, and his patience, impressive, as did Willow.

Just wanted to clarify why I started this thread. After Willow posted that video, I barely thought of JP and knew nothing at all of his professional work, nor had I any great interest in finding out more. Life is short. Then suddenly, a month ago or so (after his book came out), Peterson's name was all over the msm; he was, or so these wise journos were warning us, a huckster, a phoney, a shameless recycler of banal & boring self-help nostrums, an opportunistic Trumpite nonentity interested only in making a quick buck, a publicity hound, and -- worryingly -- a dangerous, because increasingly influential, "alt-right" guru. (These were the "dozen crappy reviews" I referred to in the post under the OP, the McLeans screed being among them.).

So I was surprised to find those two interviews with Brand and McGilchrist, two very different Brits whose work I admire and like and respect. McGilchrist and Brand weren't fascists, or Trumpites, or idiots, or reactionaries, or nobodies! (Or journalists.) So why were they giving Peterson the time of day? Then I watched those two videos and realised why. This man is certainly no fool, nor is he obviously a bastard, nor is he an evasive or dishonest slimeball. Whatever you think about Jordan Peterson, at least he doesn't hide behind the Ignore Function. And he is a man of very considerable professional accomplishments.

That I started this thread is not -- and it gets really boring to have to emphasise this every time I post anything here -- a blanket endorsement of Peterson's opinions, of which I still know very little, and nearly all of that second-hand.

[MacCruiskeen]

oh ffs

[JackRiddler]

Remember that Einstein quote about the two limitless things in the universe?

Recently I've come around to the opinion that stupidity serves an evolutionary function. It forces the intelligent to work even harder, which is good for things like creativity and human survival.

It's not how evolution works, though. I mean, stupidity probably does function (annoyingly and at great cost) just as you say some of the time, and is a big waste the rest of the time, but there's no particular meaning in it either way. It's not like there's a mama evolution who placed stupidity as a factor to prompt creativity. It's not like we should thank our stars for it because some dialectic process will see it through to a better outcome. And today's nuclear-armed stupidity (metaphorically and literally, I hardly need add) can't possibly work out well unless it prompts its own radical abolition within a very short timespan historically speaking. In time to avoid the cosmic fuck-up that is inevitable on any scale where we can imagine human life going on for further centuries, millennia? Things don't usually work out that way, however, that people see something is cosmically dumb and respond vigorously. And there will be no useful lesson left to learn afterward.

/channelingjeffwellsifigure

[minime]

oh ffs

oh ffs

The way out of this is to begin/continue discussing his ideas. I'm curious how he takes McGilchrist's research and applies it to his own life, politics, etc. That must be what his adepts are responding to. No?

[MacCruiskeen]

15m18s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8itHnfREIg

[minime]

15m18s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8itHnfREIg

Okay, I watched it. Not too helpful for me. As if I had walked into the middle of a conversation that doesn't get finished.

But I'll read more if you write more. I have to admit Iain McGilchrist drew me here. I can see that brain hemisphere asymmetry has informed Peterson's thinking, along many other sources: Greeks, especially Heraclitus, Piaget, etc.

[Spiro C. Thiery]

It's amusing how he distinguishes between indoctrination and particular indoctrination based upon whether or not the particulars are combined, apparently, to equal greater than their sum. Like, just imagine the horror of inclusivity AND gender. Why, that's almost absolutely unforgivable.

[JackRiddler]

The lobster thing should be the end of discussions taking this guy seriously as a grand thinker, whatever wise-ish things he may say here or there as he assumes the guise of a courageous social gadfly and in the process adopts a definitive systemic stance on everything that walks and squawks. Back when Konrad Lorenz was aggrandizing the market for simplistic social conservatism in ostensibly scientific terms, his schtick about the all-encompassing aggression and natural hierarchy universally innate to human societies at least deployed analogies to a species of vertebrates with brains and webbed toes, just like us. Since then the level of this discourse has apparently regressed to an arthropod state.