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The Jordan Peterson point is a good one. His point has been for quite a while that if you're a young man, and you're unhappy with your life, the way to fix tha

The Jordan Peterson point is a good one. His point has been for quite a while that if you're a young man, and you're unhappy with your life, the way to fix that is to work on fixing your life, not joining some far-right movement. Google really worked at cross-purposes with its own agenda there.

paulddraper 9y ago
Holy s---! I never knew what could happen by bring a stickler for traditional English. (Adds a whole new depth to 'grammar Nazi') Thanks for the massive wakeup call... I'm going to have to move to less capricious ways to use the internet.
throwawayknecht 9y ago
> His point has been for quite a while that if you're a young man, and you're unhappy with your life, the way to fix that is to work on fixing your life, not joining some far-right movement. Weird, then, how as soon as something went wrong with his life, he joined a far-right movement. (And seems to be very well-compensated financially for doing so.)
- eradicatethots 9y ago
  It doesn’t seem like this is true from his Wikipedia page. Don’t see any movements listed here. Don’t think havi views that a far right movement supports is the same as joining and supporting that movement, and I don’t think it’s fair to label him that way.
  - cabaalis 9y ago
    I fear your belief is in the minority. Increasingly, choosing a side and holding it is becoming required.
    - musage 9y ago
      For people who disqualify themselves as honest thinkers. Numbers don't change that.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    Whether a person has actually joined a movement appears to matter less than if some vocal group claims a person has.
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    I do try to be tolerant of different views, but I can see the viewpoint that there's slim difference between belonging to an organization that wants to revoke my human rights, and merely wanting to revoke my rights independently.
    - 13years 9y ago
      It is not being stated that he supports the same views. Only on some points they align. For example, some of the far right such as DS are anti-capitalist. We wouldn't say that anti-capitalist are far right, although some far right groups align on that topic.
notahacker 9y ago
It depends what one considers Google's agenda to be. If Google's agenda is to promote a progressive worldview, then a highly-credentialed man cultivating attention for rants about how using non-traditional gender pronouns is a road to gulags makes an unlikely champion, even if some of his more nuanced and informed opinions are interesting in their own right. If Google's agenda is primarily to make ad revenue - which is better supported by the evidence - then having a flagging system and demonetising videos by people that annoy certain sections of society enough to get flagged a lot even if you reinstate them is probably a net positive for the overall value of advertising on Google's network. (I don't think Peterson's income has exactly suffered either; quite the reverse since his Patreon account will have enjoyed the additional publicity)
- ac2u 9y ago
  I wouldn't say your point about how he cultivated attention is accurate. At every possible opportunity, in every interview and discussion, he's stated that his problem is not the use of these words, it's the prospect of forcing their use through policy and categorizing this as a form of forcing speech. I agree with you that overall it's ended up as a net positive for him, at least income and publicity wise.
  - notahacker 9y ago
    If his criticisms of policies were restricted to traditional freedom of speech arguments like those made by many others he'd have attracted little attention (and would still have a monetised YouTube channel instead of a big alt-right following on Patreon). Instead, he's taken the approach of arguing that the gender pronouns themselves promote murderous communism and his colleagues should be ashamed of using them. Lest one think he is more crusader for academic freedom with a minor in hyperbole than latter day wannabe McCarthyist with a minor in hypocrisy, he combines that with interviews demanding that "counter-civilization" women's studies programmes be defunded along with half the rest of the humanities department because they're "dangerous" and "revolutionary" . At every possible opportunity, in every interview and discussion, he's made it abundantly clear that he's the exact mirror image of the most paranoid, censorious and utterly impervious to reason "social justice warriors" on campus - just somebody that wants to class everything they disagree with as Marxism rather than hate speech

paulddraper 9y ago

Holy s---! I never knew what could happen by bring a stickler for traditional English. (Adds a whole new depth to 'grammar Nazi') Thanks for the massive wakeup call... I'm going to have to move to less capricious ways to use the internet.

throwawayknecht 9y ago

> His point has been for quite a while that if you're a young man, and you're unhappy with your life, the way to fix that is to work on fixing your life, not joining some far-right movement. Weird, then, how as soon as something went wrong with his life, he joined a far-right movement. (And seems to be very well-compensated financially for doing so.)

eradicatethots 9y ago
It doesn’t seem like this is true from his Wikipedia page. Don’t see any movements listed here. Don’t think havi views that a far right movement supports is the same as joining and supporting that movement, and I don’t think it’s fair to label him that way.
- cabaalis 9y ago
  I fear your belief is in the minority. Increasingly, choosing a side and holding it is becoming required.
  - musage 9y ago
    For people who disqualify themselves as honest thinkers. Numbers don't change that.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  Whether a person has actually joined a movement appears to matter less than if some vocal group claims a person has.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  I do try to be tolerant of different views, but I can see the viewpoint that there's slim difference between belonging to an organization that wants to revoke my human rights, and merely wanting to revoke my rights independently.
  - 13years 9y ago
    It is not being stated that he supports the same views. Only on some points they align. For example, some of the far right such as DS are anti-capitalist. We wouldn't say that anti-capitalist are far right, although some far right groups align on that topic.

notahacker 9y ago

It depends what one considers Google's agenda to be. If Google's agenda is to promote a progressive worldview, then a highly-credentialed man cultivating attention for rants about how using non-traditional gender pronouns is a road to gulags makes an unlikely champion, even if some of his more nuanced and informed opinions are interesting in their own right. If Google's agenda is primarily to make ad revenue - which is better supported by the evidence - then having a flagging system and demonetising videos by people that annoy certain sections of society enough to get flagged a lot even if you reinstate them is probably a net positive for the overall value of advertising on Google's network. (I don't think Peterson's income has exactly suffered either; quite the reverse since his Patreon account will have enjoyed the additional publicity)

ac2u 9y ago
I wouldn't say your point about how he cultivated attention is accurate. At every possible opportunity, in every interview and discussion, he's stated that his problem is not the use of these words, it's the prospect of forcing their use through policy and categorizing this as a form of forcing speech. I agree with you that overall it's ended up as a net positive for him, at least income and publicity wise.
- notahacker 9y ago
  If his criticisms of policies were restricted to traditional freedom of speech arguments like those made by many others he'd have attracted little attention (and would still have a monetised YouTube channel instead of a big alt-right following on Patreon). Instead, he's taken the approach of arguing that the gender pronouns themselves promote murderous communism and his colleagues should be ashamed of using them. Lest one think he is more crusader for academic freedom with a minor in hyperbole than latter day wannabe McCarthyist with a minor in hypocrisy, he combines that with interviews demanding that "counter-civilization" women's studies programmes be defunded along with half the rest of the humanities department because they're "dangerous" and "revolutionary" . At every possible opportunity, in every interview and discussion, he's made it abundantly clear that he's the exact mirror image of the most paranoid, censorious and utterly impervious to reason "social justice warriors" on campus - just somebody that wants to class everything they disagree with as Marxism rather than hate speech