Jordan Peterson

April said:

I personally relate to the fact that he cannot (or refuses) to answer something he isn't completely sure about or is way complicated because sometimes you cannot give just a straightforward answer. Maybe he doesn't like the labels and doesn't want to admit he's agnostic because he wants to believe in the resurrection, or he doesn't believe in the same way as everyone else and doesn't want to spend time explaining or confusing people lol.

Click to expand...

Then he shouldn't be on a debate stage discussing these ideas. The entire point of an exercise like this is to articulate your ideas and spend time explaining them for the benefit of an audience.

To be clear, I like Jordan a lot and agree he has an awesome perspective. His values align closely to my own. But dodging direct questions about religious belief during a debate about religious belief is just silly. And by dodging, I'm also including spewing nebulous verbal diarrhea that creates more confusion instead of clarity and passing it off as an answer. "Philosophers" are very adept at this game -- using what's called 'purple prose', hoping the audience will mistake their own confusion for an inability to understand brilliance. It's freshman 101 nonsense and it lowers my esteem of Jordan Peterson that he used this tactic.

Korg said:

Then he shouldn't be on a debate stage discussing these ideas. The entire point of an exercise like this is to articulate your ideas and spend time explaining them for the benefit of an audience.

To be clear, I like Jordan a lot and agree he has an awesome perspective. His values align closely to my own. But dodging direct questions about religious belief during a debate about religious belief is just silly. And by dodging, I'm also including spewing nebulous verbal diarrhea that creates more confusion instead of clarity and passing it off as an answer. "Philosophers" are very adept at this game -- using what's called 'purple prose', hoping the audience will mistake their own confusion for an inability to understand brilliance. It's freshman 101 nonsense and it lowers my esteem of Jordan Peterson that he used this tactic.

Click to expand...

I dunno. Maybe it's the Fe in me, lol, but I believe just because he isn't clear or doesn't know how to simply explain his answer doesn't mean he shouldn't be in the spotlight. I think he still deserves to be there even though some of his answer are imbiguous. But, I can see where you're coming from, are you a Ti user?

I used to listen to his lectures often before he started doing interviews when he was just starting to get harassed by SJWs and liked him a lot.

People seem to scoff at the lobsters point but I never understood why. The idea that hierarchy is a natural pattern that emerges rings true. For example, on this forum, traits that might put you lower down the hierarchy in the world at large puts you in a higher position here. The idea that the our most recently evolved traits are the most to flimsy rings true to me.

Anyway, he just got a bit repetitive for me. The lecture series was varied but his interviews are too topical and one-note. I saw him talk in London, just after 12 rules came out, and it was okay, but nothing special. Jung-lite.

I gather that his religious position is an agnostic gnostic and I don't think he wants to open the can of worms that would come with talking about his personal revelations but I don't really know because I couldn't get through the Sam Harris debate.

Cornerstone said:

People seem to scoff at the lobsters point but I never understood why. The idea that hierarchy is a natural pattern that emerges rings true.

Click to expand...

They scoff because deep inside they know it's true and they don't want it to be due to the implications it has for their own lives. Especially if they've spent all their time making bad decisions and wasting their opportunities and talents.

It's not a coincidence that the people who are most vehemently against the idea of hierarchies are the ones least likely to thrive within them. Being 30 years old with nothing of value to offer the world is a bitter pill to swallow; it's way easier to externalize blame onto 'the man' and various -isms rather than accept nobody gives a shit about someone with zero skills, a bad attitude and an outward appearance that looks like an obese cartoon character who was the victim of schizoid vandalism.

Adults, of course, develop morals and ethics to navigate this hierarchy in a way that is mutually beneficial and uplifting to everyone. But hierarchies are a fact of life, no doubt about it.

Perhaps you guys have seen this: https://www.personality-database.co...psychology-neuroscience-mbti-personality-type

It seems to be a lot of people believe he is an INFJ... but some get very passionated about those peoples being idiots because he is obvious an INTP or an ENTP.

Korg said:

They scoff because deep inside they know it's true and they don't want it to be due to the implications it has for their own lives. Especially if they've spent all their time making bad decisions and wasting their opportunities and talents.

It's not a coincidence that the people who are most vehemently against the idea of hierarchies are the ones least likely to thrive within them. Being 30 years old with nothing of value to offer the world is a bitter pill to swallow; it's way easier to externalize blame onto 'the man' and various -isms rather than accept nobody gives a shit about someone with zero skills, a bad attitude and an outward appearance that looks like an obese cartoon character who was the victim of schizoid vandalism.

Adults, of course, develop morals and ethics to navigate this hierarchy in a way that is mutually beneficial and uplifting to everyone. But hierarchies are a fact of life, no doubt about it.

Click to expand...

I agree with you, but:

- 30s is not too late to put your life in order. That kind of attitude is not helping and will cause even more resentment, imo.
- What do you mean by adding value to the world? Who and what offers value to the world, in your opinion? Can you add value without excelling in the hierarchical game?

I think one reason is also that a lot of people are high on agreeableness and simply don't like looking at life as a competition/hierarchical game.

April said:

Well at least it sort of tests on the same things. Hmm.

@Ren look lol

Click to expand...

Jo is right, your results roughly correlate with INFJ-T.

My results are similar to yours except on the 'agreeableness' scale where I score quite a bit lower.

Korg said:

As for myself, I like Jordan Peterson's practical advice and have seen him speak live, but his inability to state his arguments without relying on mythology and archetypes drives me insane. It's too esoteric, too vulnerable to conjecture -- anything can be read into it. People seem to forget that mythology existed as a way to communicate ideas in pre-literate societies. It was merely functional. Mythology doesn't have some inestimable wisdom in it that is so great, so supernatural that it defies expression via regular, written / spoken language. You know why there are flood myths? Because floods happened. That's it. My point is that it's not necessary.

Click to expand...

My take is that the consistent references to mythology and archetypes serve a variety of purposes from JP's point of view. One of them, which I don't think has been mentioned here, is that it endows JP with a peculiar, unique identity as a speaker. He's the guy who's known to ground his perspective in mythology and religious narratives. When you think about it it's also a nice marketing move—it makes JP instantly recognisable among the mass of public intellectuals of his kind. I'd say that consciously or unconsciously he sees it as a strength.

I agree with you that there are shortcomings involved with this, though, including the conjectural/unfalsifiable statements it allows. But in this sense it's not surprising that JP has such a strong kinship with Jung and psychoanalysis in general. Psychoanalysis has the same strengths and weaknesses. Whenever he debates with a more rigorously empirical speaker those weaknesses come to the fore, as I suppose is the case with Sam Harris (though I haven't watched those debates myself).

Wyote said:

Empirical imperialists are the Hitler's of logicians

Click to expand...

Jaysis that's a strong statement Wy lolol

Empirialists?

I'm currently into the work of a philosopher called Wilfrid Sellars who has a fascinating critique of this 'empirical imperialism' by the way. I think you'd find it interesting, I plan to discuss it at some point in the Anteroom.

philostam said:

- 30s is not too late to put your life in order. That kind of attitude is not helping and will cause even more resentment, imo.

Click to expand...

I completely agree. If anything, I'd say one should be continually putting their lives in order at any age.

My point isn't that 30s are too late. It's that we all reach a stage where the pluripotentiality of youth tapers into an actual life path, the overall quality of which is heavily determined by choices made thus far, which themselves are heavily determined by one's mental model of the world, understanding of taxonomies and so forth. For those who made egregiously bad choices because they were heavily influenced by a disempowering conception of the world that masqueraded as a sophisticated moral system, accepting the consequences of that can almost be impossible. It is easier to double down and externalize blame.


It's not just leftist wokeism that can lead to this, of course. There are many other examples -- Christian fundamentalism, white supremacy and blind nationalism come to mind as well. Those lead to an entirely different set of problems around hierarchies.

philostam said:

- What do you mean by adding value to the world? Who and what offers value to the world, in your opinion?

Click to expand...

I don't have a formal definition of it, but just shooting from the hip while I'm tired, I'd say it's deliberately cultivating and using your unique gifts to help meet the needs of communities around you.

philostam said:

Can you add value without excelling in the hierarchical game?

Click to expand...

Of course. But that doesn't mean hierarchies don't exist or that they're bad. A parent-child relationship is a hierarchy and it should be clear how that is an opportunity to add value to another human life without beating them in a competition. I think this is what good fathers do, really.

JP's back

Poor Jordan, he seems to have been through hell.

Ren said:

Poor Jordan, he seems to have been through hell.

Click to expand...

His wife had cancer at the same time as he was going through withdrawal for anti-anxiety meds. I don't know if you've had a close loved get cancer but needless to say it's a family experience and not limited to the individual. Maybe that's an obvious observation but to your point yes, he has been through hell.

Baffling to me that you guys think this guy is agnostic. My friend is really into him and sent me material from him and he has this whole lecture series about philosophy from Bible stories.

I suspect many of you were raised with religion. As someone who was never raised with religion whatsoever, much of his language and metaphors are very obviously religious and hard to understand if you've never been exposed to religion.

slant said:

Baffling to me that you guys think this guy is agnostic. My friend is really into him and sent me material from him and he has this whole lecture series about philosophy from Bible stories.

I suspect many of you were raised with religion. As someone who was never raised with religion whatsoever, much of his language and metaphors are very obviously religious and hard to understand if you've never been exposed to religion.

Click to expand...

?

We mean that he clearly ought to be agnostic, but he prefers to live with his cognitive dissonances.

He simply doesn't have 'faith' in the literal truth of the resurrection.

Deleted member 16771 said:

?

We mean that he clearly ought to be agnostic, but he prefers to live with his cognitive dissonances.

He simply doesn't have 'faith' in the literal truth of the resurrection.

Click to expand...

I don't know he seems really religious to me. If you weren't religious you wouldn't even think in those terms. I never quote the Bible or talk about what Jesus said, you know why? Because I don't have any of that knowledge because I'm not religious! I literally have no idea what he's talking about at times. He seems very religious. Maybe he doesn't fit the definition of other people's religious but as a person who has always been agonistic, he is definitely not agnostic.

I don't think he's agnostic either, just that he has a different sort of view on religion which is less literal.