7 ms·

I see Jordan Pererson gets downvoted here, but recommend all critic to read “12 rules for life” themselves. This book helped me a lot.

squirrelicus 7y ago
It's worth all the down votes and more. I'm sure you can divide the down voters into a handful of camps. Those who are somehow convinced he has ties to the despicable alt right, those who are annoyed they keep hearing about him, and those who have actually heard him speak but, ianno, think taking responsibility and straightening yourself out is bad or something. Maybe they're just afraid of confronting their shadow.
- badpun 7y ago
  There are at least three more reasons why people dislike or even actively attack him: - he says that there can be value in religion, and it for some reason triggers some people - he's a critic of the "neo-Marxist post-modern left" - he promotes emphasis on oneself before emphasis on collective, which in left's eyes is "reactionary". I.e. in his opinion, lots of people have vast room for personal improvement, which will in turn make their life better and easier - while in the left's eyes this is just a diversion, because the best way to life improvement is unionisation, political movements etc.
- charliesome 7y ago
  > Those who are somehow convinced he has ties to the despicable alt right, When he's hosting two prominent alt right figures as guests on his podcast [0], I think it's pretty fair to say that he has ties to the alt right. [0]: https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/1116431837956583424 https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/11164318379565834...
  - wesammikhail 7y ago
    1. Ben Shapiro is alt-right. Yea and I shit cotton candy. https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-task-force-issues-report-detailing-widespread-anti-semitic-harassment-of?referrer=https%3A//www.google.com/ https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-task-force-issue... 2. By that logic, Chris Wallace has ties to Russia too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHY8yG4mVzs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHY8yG4mVzs 3. If Peterson is alt-right then so are you. Because I am pretty sure that in one way or another you associate yourself with someone who likes Peterson whether you know it or not. So you associate yourself with someone who associates themselves with Peterson who in turn associates himself with what you yourself would classify as alt-right. You disgust me you alt-right [insert insult here]. See how these things go? Maybe it´s best if we all just stopped with the stupid mental gymnastics.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - squirrelicus 7y ago
    The first thing that must be said is that there is no true definition of alt-right. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma... The second thing that must be said is that in order to communicate, we must use a consistent definition of the category for it to be useful. The third thing that must be said is that when we argue "semantics", we're trying to figure out a shared definition of a category. Without it, there is no agreement. With it, arguments usually evaporate pretty quickly. The left side of the aisle commits a dishonest fallacy constantly with respect to "alt-right". There is a category of despicable people. There is a category that includes non-despicable people. It's not right to waffle between the two to bolster rhetoric. There is a category of despicable people that believe Western civilization is good because of its whiteness. These are the original "alt-right" people that everyone agrees are "alt-right". They are racist and pretty much everyone rejects them across the entire political spectrum. Maybe they number 100k globally with a very generous estimate. There is a subset of those people who believe that enforcing ethnostate boundaries is good. They number maybe 10k globally, generously speaking. They are definitely "alt-right" by everyone's definitions. There is a larger category that uses the word "alt" to imply simply an "alternative" right, which includes all conservatives that don't agree with traditional turn off the century neoconservative figures. So if you don't like Hannity and O'Reilly but do like Shapiro, then you're "alt-right" because you attach yourself to this new wave of conservative thought that doesn't agree with the old guard. The definition here matters. People on the left want to stretch and shrink the definition to fit their rhetoric. But this is key here: the final category of alt-right doesn't really even overlap with the racist ethnostatists that everyone hates. All that being said, Peterson isn't really even conservative. He just happens to be criticising more left leaning figures than right leaning figures because today, the left is far closer to totalitarianism than the right, in his estimation.
ai_ia 7y ago
I agree. I used to watch Peterson's lecture on Youtube even before his rise. It brought me out of despair and my constant feeling of meaninglessness of life. To all people, who are downvoting Peterson, take some time to watch his classroom lectures on Youtube.
- tareqak 7y ago
  Do you not believe that some people might have already watched some of his classroom lectures, speaking tour lectures, and broadcast debates and then decided to downvote afterwards? Edit: tense
  - ai_ia 7y ago
    Well, it's not big assumption since there has been a continuous negative coverage about Dr.Peterson in the media. Also, recently a NZ bookstore banned his books. But if people have watched his lectures and didn't like it, then I don't have any issues getting downvoted.
upatricck 7y ago
I am currently listening to the 12 rules for life audiobook, He does have helpful advice. but in the book he argues that chaos if feminine and order is masculine, and he fails to give any logical reasons for that claim. I understand those who are heavily offended by that viewpoint. Except from that the book is generally good. 3.5 stars.
- wesammikhail 7y ago
  > he fails to give any logical reasons for that claim. It would take a mere 10 seconds of googling to find the answer to that question as he is literally asked about it every few hours on twitter or in interviews. And every single time he explains it but it seems to fall on deaf ears. > I understand those who are heavily offended by that viewpoint I personally don´t understand those people because they are not really listening to the argument. They are selectively hearing what they want to hear. In your "question" there is an embedded assumption that order (masculine) is "good" and chaos (feminine) is "bad". And that´s why people get offended; if they didn´t equate chaos with bad, there would be no reason to get offended. This happens because they are not _actually_ reading Peterson. They are reading what they _think_ someone like Peterson would say but in doing so they miss the point completely. Peterson argues that chaos in literature is most often presented as feminine (mother nature for instance) and order is presented as masculine most often (God, the heavenly father for instance). At any point in time, order OR chaos can both take hold to varying extreme degrees, which is not good for society. Example: Totalitarian states (extreme order/masculine) are bad, but so is anarchy/chaos and the complete lack of order. Both extreme order and extreme chaos are bad he argues constantly. Would it be any better if Peterson argued that chaos was masculine and order was feminine? not really, people would still get offended because that´s what people want to be. They don´t actually stop and listen to what is being said, which is unfortunate :/
  - silveroriole 7y ago
    Perhaps he shouldn’t bother linking order/chaos with gender at all. There are plenty of arguments you could make that order IS feminine - who, in the American viewpoint, traditionally keeps house, tidies up, makes peace, establishes family routine, is someone you come home to every night? And who is a risk-taker, a go-getter, the one who leaves the comfortable routine and embarks on unknown adventures? I know various literary and psychological arguments about feminine chaos (ooh, the undefinable feminine lack and void! Jungian archetypes!), but what Peterson is trying to get at by this feminine chaos/masculine order thing - apart from a truly boring “the middle way is the best” argument that you point out and which clearly doesn’t require a gender linking to make - is completely unclear. e: incidentally, if any of Peterson’s theory ramblings do appeal, just go and read Freud, Jung, Lacan, Marx, the Bible etc in the original. They are all vastly more interesting, subtle and worthwhile than Peterson’s jumbled, evo-psyched retelling of them.
silveroriole 7y ago
I did read it. I decided not to take life advice from someone who writes, about a two-year-old child: “I picked him bodily off the playground structure, and threw him thirty feet down the field. No, I didn’t. But it would have been better for him if I had.” It’s a ‘joke’, but it’s a weird joke. I believe he thinks this over-aggression makes him seem dominant and powerful; in reality, a grown man getting so furious at an infant that he fantasises about throwing it is just odd. I can see why young men on the internet find it appealing to be told that being aggressive is actually cool and powerful and good, but that doesn’t actually make it good advice. I also don’t agree with his sexual-marketplace ideas about how women choose mates, and why it’s a good thing for women to choose men who behave badly towards them because they’ll change: “[female lobsters] identify the top guy quickly, and become irresistibly attracted to him. This is brilliant strategy, in my estimation. It’s also one used by females of many different species, including humans. ... His aggression has made him successful, so he’s likely to react [to the female] in a dominant, irritable manner. Furthermore, he’s large, healthy and powerful. It’s no easy task to switch his attention from fighting to mating. (If properly charmed, however, he will change his behaviour towards the female. This is the lobster equivalent of Fifty Shades of Grey, the fastest-selling paperback of all time, and the eternal Beauty-and-the-Beast plot of archetypal romance. This is the pattern of behaviour continually represented in the sexually explicit literary fantasies that are as popular among women as provocative images of naked women are among men.)” Is this good advice or information for men or women? Personally, I don’t think so, but since it bears absolutely no relation to how I chose my partner, I suppose Peterson would say I am some kind of outlier or unusual female. Readers may make their own minds up about the quote.
- gexla 7y ago
  > in reality, a grown man getting so furious at an infant that he fantasises about throwing it is just odd You are getting that backwards. In reality, people think that way. They get angry with kids. They may even think violent thoughts. Tragically, they may actually be violent. Any time you make a statement about what's weird about interactions between adults (especially parents) and kids, you should clarify that you do or do not have kids. So, I'll ask, do you have kids? I ask because we can be rational in an HN discussion. Dealing with kids tests that rationality. > Is this good advice or information for men or women? Men who are "alpha male" types get more selection. This may or may not be true. The "should" (rational decisions) is a different argument. JP is trying to explain how things ARE (and he could be wrong on that.) That's different from advice and the information is neither good or bad.
0_gravitas 7y ago
I feel like I tend to agree with Peterson 80-90% of the time, what with all the clean-your-room stuff, but the last 10-20 I really disagree with
- wesammikhail 7y ago
  Which is fine really. It would be more worrisome if you agreed 100% or disagreed 100%. That means that you´re not really listening.
sridca 7y ago
> This book helped me a lot In what way did the book help you a lot? What do you now do differently in life?

squirrelicus 7y ago

It's worth all the down votes and more. I'm sure you can divide the down voters into a handful of camps. Those who are somehow convinced he has ties to the despicable alt right, those who are annoyed they keep hearing about him, and those who have actually heard him speak but, ianno, think taking responsibility and straightening yourself out is bad or something. Maybe they're just afraid of confronting their shadow.

badpun 7y ago
There are at least three more reasons why people dislike or even actively attack him: - he says that there can be value in religion, and it for some reason triggers some people - he's a critic of the "neo-Marxist post-modern left" - he promotes emphasis on oneself before emphasis on collective, which in left's eyes is "reactionary". I.e. in his opinion, lots of people have vast room for personal improvement, which will in turn make their life better and easier - while in the left's eyes this is just a diversion, because the best way to life improvement is unionisation, political movements etc.
charliesome 7y ago
> Those who are somehow convinced he has ties to the despicable alt right, When he's hosting two prominent alt right figures as guests on his podcast [0], I think it's pretty fair to say that he has ties to the alt right. [0]: https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/1116431837956583424 https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/11164318379565834...
- wesammikhail 7y ago
  1. Ben Shapiro is alt-right. Yea and I shit cotton candy. https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-task-force-issues-report-detailing-widespread-anti-semitic-harassment-of?referrer=https%3A//www.google.com/ https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-task-force-issue... 2. By that logic, Chris Wallace has ties to Russia too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHY8yG4mVzs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHY8yG4mVzs 3. If Peterson is alt-right then so are you. Because I am pretty sure that in one way or another you associate yourself with someone who likes Peterson whether you know it or not. So you associate yourself with someone who associates themselves with Peterson who in turn associates himself with what you yourself would classify as alt-right. You disgust me you alt-right [insert insult here]. See how these things go? Maybe it´s best if we all just stopped with the stupid mental gymnastics.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- squirrelicus 7y ago
  The first thing that must be said is that there is no true definition of alt-right. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma... The second thing that must be said is that in order to communicate, we must use a consistent definition of the category for it to be useful. The third thing that must be said is that when we argue "semantics", we're trying to figure out a shared definition of a category. Without it, there is no agreement. With it, arguments usually evaporate pretty quickly. The left side of the aisle commits a dishonest fallacy constantly with respect to "alt-right". There is a category of despicable people. There is a category that includes non-despicable people. It's not right to waffle between the two to bolster rhetoric. There is a category of despicable people that believe Western civilization is good because of its whiteness. These are the original "alt-right" people that everyone agrees are "alt-right". They are racist and pretty much everyone rejects them across the entire political spectrum. Maybe they number 100k globally with a very generous estimate. There is a subset of those people who believe that enforcing ethnostate boundaries is good. They number maybe 10k globally, generously speaking. They are definitely "alt-right" by everyone's definitions. There is a larger category that uses the word "alt" to imply simply an "alternative" right, which includes all conservatives that don't agree with traditional turn off the century neoconservative figures. So if you don't like Hannity and O'Reilly but do like Shapiro, then you're "alt-right" because you attach yourself to this new wave of conservative thought that doesn't agree with the old guard. The definition here matters. People on the left want to stretch and shrink the definition to fit their rhetoric. But this is key here: the final category of alt-right doesn't really even overlap with the racist ethnostatists that everyone hates. All that being said, Peterson isn't really even conservative. He just happens to be criticising more left leaning figures than right leaning figures because today, the left is far closer to totalitarianism than the right, in his estimation.

ai_ia 7y ago

I agree. I used to watch Peterson's lecture on Youtube even before his rise. It brought me out of despair and my constant feeling of meaninglessness of life. To all people, who are downvoting Peterson, take some time to watch his classroom lectures on Youtube.

tareqak 7y ago
Do you not believe that some people might have already watched some of his classroom lectures, speaking tour lectures, and broadcast debates and then decided to downvote afterwards? Edit: tense
- ai_ia 7y ago
  Well, it's not big assumption since there has been a continuous negative coverage about Dr.Peterson in the media. Also, recently a NZ bookstore banned his books. But if people have watched his lectures and didn't like it, then I don't have any issues getting downvoted.

upatricck 7y ago

I am currently listening to the 12 rules for life audiobook, He does have helpful advice. but in the book he argues that chaos if feminine and order is masculine, and he fails to give any logical reasons for that claim. I understand those who are heavily offended by that viewpoint. Except from that the book is generally good. 3.5 stars.

wesammikhail 7y ago
> he fails to give any logical reasons for that claim. It would take a mere 10 seconds of googling to find the answer to that question as he is literally asked about it every few hours on twitter or in interviews. And every single time he explains it but it seems to fall on deaf ears. > I understand those who are heavily offended by that viewpoint I personally don´t understand those people because they are not really listening to the argument. They are selectively hearing what they want to hear. In your "question" there is an embedded assumption that order (masculine) is "good" and chaos (feminine) is "bad". And that´s why people get offended; if they didn´t equate chaos with bad, there would be no reason to get offended. This happens because they are not _actually_ reading Peterson. They are reading what they _think_ someone like Peterson would say but in doing so they miss the point completely. Peterson argues that chaos in literature is most often presented as feminine (mother nature for instance) and order is presented as masculine most often (God, the heavenly father for instance). At any point in time, order OR chaos can both take hold to varying extreme degrees, which is not good for society. Example: Totalitarian states (extreme order/masculine) are bad, but so is anarchy/chaos and the complete lack of order. Both extreme order and extreme chaos are bad he argues constantly. Would it be any better if Peterson argued that chaos was masculine and order was feminine? not really, people would still get offended because that´s what people want to be. They don´t actually stop and listen to what is being said, which is unfortunate :/
- silveroriole 7y ago
  Perhaps he shouldn’t bother linking order/chaos with gender at all. There are plenty of arguments you could make that order IS feminine - who, in the American viewpoint, traditionally keeps house, tidies up, makes peace, establishes family routine, is someone you come home to every night? And who is a risk-taker, a go-getter, the one who leaves the comfortable routine and embarks on unknown adventures? I know various literary and psychological arguments about feminine chaos (ooh, the undefinable feminine lack and void! Jungian archetypes!), but what Peterson is trying to get at by this feminine chaos/masculine order thing - apart from a truly boring “the middle way is the best” argument that you point out and which clearly doesn’t require a gender linking to make - is completely unclear. e: incidentally, if any of Peterson’s theory ramblings do appeal, just go and read Freud, Jung, Lacan, Marx, the Bible etc in the original. They are all vastly more interesting, subtle and worthwhile than Peterson’s jumbled, evo-psyched retelling of them.

silveroriole 7y ago

I did read it. I decided not to take life advice from someone who writes, about a two-year-old child: “I picked him bodily off the playground structure, and threw him thirty feet down the field. No, I didn’t. But it would have been better for him if I had.” It’s a ‘joke’, but it’s a weird joke. I believe he thinks this over-aggression makes him seem dominant and powerful; in reality, a grown man getting so furious at an infant that he fantasises about throwing it is just odd. I can see why young men on the internet find it appealing to be told that being aggressive is actually cool and powerful and good, but that doesn’t actually make it good advice. I also don’t agree with his sexual-marketplace ideas about how women choose mates, and why it’s a good thing for women to choose men who behave badly towards them because they’ll change: “[female lobsters] identify the top guy quickly, and become irresistibly attracted to him. This is brilliant strategy, in my estimation. It’s also one used by females of many different species, including humans. ... His aggression has made him successful, so he’s likely to react [to the female] in a dominant, irritable manner. Furthermore, he’s large, healthy and powerful. It’s no easy task to switch his attention from fighting to mating. (If properly charmed, however, he will change his behaviour towards the female. This is the lobster equivalent of Fifty Shades of Grey, the fastest-selling paperback of all time, and the eternal Beauty-and-the-Beast plot of archetypal romance. This is the pattern of behaviour continually represented in the sexually explicit literary fantasies that are as popular among women as provocative images of naked women are among men.)” Is this good advice or information for men or women? Personally, I don’t think so, but since it bears absolutely no relation to how I chose my partner, I suppose Peterson would say I am some kind of outlier or unusual female. Readers may make their own minds up about the quote.

gexla 7y ago
> in reality, a grown man getting so furious at an infant that he fantasises about throwing it is just odd You are getting that backwards. In reality, people think that way. They get angry with kids. They may even think violent thoughts. Tragically, they may actually be violent. Any time you make a statement about what's weird about interactions between adults (especially parents) and kids, you should clarify that you do or do not have kids. So, I'll ask, do you have kids? I ask because we can be rational in an HN discussion. Dealing with kids tests that rationality. > Is this good advice or information for men or women? Men who are "alpha male" types get more selection. This may or may not be true. The "should" (rational decisions) is a different argument. JP is trying to explain how things ARE (and he could be wrong on that.) That's different from advice and the information is neither good or bad.

0_gravitas 7y ago

I feel like I tend to agree with Peterson 80-90% of the time, what with all the clean-your-room stuff, but the last 10-20 I really disagree with

wesammikhail 7y ago
Which is fine really. It would be more worrisome if you agreed 100% or disagreed 100%. That means that you´re not really listening.

sridca 7y ago

> This book helped me a lot In what way did the book help you a lot? What do you now do differently in life?