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Let's hear it from a psychologist: "If you don’t buy IQ research, you might as well throw out all the rest of psychology." (Jordan Peterson) https://youtu.be/D

by mudita 6y ago

Let's hear it from a psychologist: "If you don’t buy IQ research, you might as well throw out all the rest of psychology." (Jordan Peterson) https://youtu.be/D7Kn5p7TP_Y?t=2938 https://youtu.be/D7Kn5p7TP_Y?t=2938 For anybody interested in personality research, I warmly recommend this lecture series, by the way. These are the basics, which psychology students learn at university.

0x737368 6y ago
Ah yes, a comment about Jordan Peterson that immediately gets downvoted, despite Peterson being competent in the field and the people that are downvoting this are almost most certainly not. I've noticed this every time his name gets mentioned, and I always wondered why that is. Whenever I'd ask one of his "critics" about what's the issue with him I can't get a good answer. So what is it? Can someone maybe explain to me why is there such animosity towards him? Is it just because he's considered to be a "conservative" by hard leftists(despite mostly being a classic liberal). Have we really reached the point where people will automatically go against somebody just because he's "not one of us", and not even consider the ideas. If so we have a really dark road ahead of us. It is even more disappointing to see this on HN. I expect this sort of hivemind on Reddit and Twitter, but I used to have a higher opinion of the userbase on HN.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  For the record, I didn't downvote your original comment and I don't have any opinion on Jordan Peterson's expertise as a psychologist. But as a public speaker, he is not a "classical liberal" he is a reactionary conservative with a bent for sophism. His views on culture and on the left are simply wrong, obviously so, but they are presented with academic gravitas and conviction. He implies, though is careful to not outright state, that men are superior to women in intellect and rationality, as are white people when compared to black people (though Ashkenazi Jews are even smarter, so he's not racist!). He does often outright state that "Western" culture is superior to other cultures, that Marxism and post-modernism are not the products of "Western" culture, that Hitler was actually a leftist, and many other obvious falsehoods. he conflates marxism and post-modernism, two diametrically opposed views of history and culture (not to imply that they are the only possible ones, of course). In short, he is a conman who rides his (quite real, as far as I've heard!) academic and clinical credentials in Psychology to make it seem that he is an authority worth listening to on other topics; and he tries to sell damaging, reactionary falsehoods on those other topics.
  - 0x737368 6y ago
    Thanks for the response. I think discussing whether he's liberal or conservative is a wishy-washy subject and I'm on shaky ground when discussing whether he's right about the left, but in the interest of having a dialogue I do have some retorts about some of the other things you've mentioned. Re: men superior to women in intellect and rationality - only thing I've seen him state to this effect was describe the distribution of IQs and commenting that the average is the same, however the lowest and highest IQ individuals tend to be male, however women are more packed around the average. I wouldn't describe this as sexist or male-chauvinistic, he's discussing results of studies. From the same observations you'll find that there's more 75-th percentile women than men. When I formulate my conclusion this way, am I now being sexist towards men? Re: white people being more intelligent than black - if you agree that IQ measures intelligence at least in some capacity, then the results of whites on avg. having a higher IQ than blacks, and Asians and Jews higher than whites, speak for themselves. It might be an inconvenient and unfortunate reality, but you can't fix or mitigate this problem if you just sweep it under the rug. On the other hand, whenever I watch highlights of the NBA, the CRUSHING majority(like 99%) of the athletes there are black/mixed race. So is NBA racist for presenting all of the most athletic players as black? Should we also not talk about how white basketball players are underperforming in physical aspects in the NBA as it's racist? I haven't kept that much track about the cultural stuff he said nor am I educated enough in the subject so I can't agree or disagree with you there, however I wouldn't call him a conman. His lessons of personal responsibility and guidelines on how to improve and add structure to your life seem sound. I suspect that his advice resonates more with people of a certain temperament than others, which is why I often hear that his advice is useless, despite there being thousands(maybe millions?) of people that have said that his advice has helped them out of a very tough spot.
    - tsimionescu 6y ago
      Re: men vs women - he has often claimed for example that women get payed less because they are unwilling to do the better paying jobs (most famously in the Cathy Newman interview [0]). He also claims often that women are more interested in empathy and men in systems, so that men are vastly much more likely to be in fields like engineering, while women are more vastly more likely to be interested in fields like nursing [1], with natural differences as large as 20:1. He himself may not make this value judgement, but given the general social consensus that views engineering as a more prestigious, intellectual job than medical nurses, I think it's mostly fair to characterize this claim as I did. I disagree with this conclusion any way - I believe that IQ testing quickly loses any kind of predictive power when applied to different backgrounds, and many implicit and even explicit biases quickly show up. I also find it hard to believe that a society where women:men ratios in any profession are 20:1 or 1:20 can be characterized as the free-est in the world on this issue. More likely, there are great social and historical pressures trending in this direction, and the state is simply doing nothing to try to reverse this injustice. Looking at former communist countries, that are generally not even close to having any kind of women in STEM programs that could be considered to bias results, the women:men ratio in STEM fields is something like 30:70. Re: IQ and "race" - I don't think so. You may accept that IQ has some correlation with what we understand by intelligence in regular usage, but that doesn't mean in any way that you can meaningfully compare people for IQ across arbitrary divides such as "race", especially when "race" is highly correlated with things such as poverty, teacher attitudes, social attitudes etc. And I keep saying "race" and not race because there is no scientific basis for our notions of race - they are arbitrary social constructs based on skin color and culture (for some examples: are Italians and Irish people white? 50 years ago, they were considered a different race; or, what is the race of the child of a mixed black-skin & white-skin couple? Is Kamala Harris black or white? What about her children? Are they white? black? semitic? south-asian? How many studies of IQ vs race on similar populations actually look at any kind of genetic evidence, vs just skin color?) I will admit that "conman" was a bit rough and an exaggeration. Still, he is definitely using some conman-style tactics to sell his opinions outside his area of expertise. I am not talking about the area of psychology, which includes his self-help work, but about his political discourse. [0] The Cathy Newman Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcjxSThD54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcjxSThD54 [1] Jordan B Peterson: Why so many Male Engineers and Female Nurses? (3 minute video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7uZOAzVRgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7uZOAzVRgU
feanaro 6y ago
I do not understand this statement as claiming that IQ is the entire content of the field of psychology. Do you?
- mudita 6y ago
  No, of couse not, that would be a very, very strange claim. I agree with rcxdude's reading of the statement: 'if you reject IQ, you have raised your standards of evidence so high you must logically reject everything else in psychology/psychometry as well'
Bodell 6y ago
Jordan Peterson is a great example of the failing of Psychology in the academic world. I'll list some quotes by him below and you can decided weather or not he should be listened to, or if he is simply selling right wing propaganda on Youtube. "If men are pushed too hard to feminize they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology." "the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence." [referring to men being placed higher than women in society] ""Peterson says that "disciplines like women's studies should be defunded", advising freshman students to avoid subjects like sociology, anthropology, English literature, ethnic studies, and racial studies, as well as other fields of study that he believes are corrupted by "post-modern neo-Marxists"."" He also has a bible series on YouTube that asserts that god created the appropriate hierarchy of man, and that it should not be tampered with. We should mold society on the archetype of the book of Genesis. Which in my humble opinion is simply Calvinism in the extreme. Most of this can be found on YouTube or his Wikipedia page. This is not to say everything he says is wrong, that would be silly. But I believe it should be approached with a heavy dose of skepticism.
- danaris 6y ago
  Your conclusion ("the failing of Psychology in the academic world") is not supported by your evidence. You have demonstrated that there is one prominent psychologist who holds some fairly-obviously terrible and inaccurate beliefs, and is willing to trumpet them to anyone who will listen. This is no more an indictment of the field of psychology than the occasional right-wing "climate scientist" Fox News brings out to "prove" that climate change is not real is an indictment of the field of climate science. Many scientific fields likely have a handful of far-right kooks who would be happy to rack up YouTube views promulgating alt-right talking points dressed up in the trappings of science. That says very little about the state of their fields, and a great deal about the state of our nation. And YouTube.
  - Bodell 6y ago
    I'm sorry. I was very murky with my wording. I was not trying to say that the field of Psychology had failed or was a failure. What I meant to say was that, our current state of academia has in this instance demonstrated "a" failure. That failure to me is highlighted by the comment I responded to when it was implied that Peterson's view was more "bonafide" because it was from a "real" psychologist. By all academic standards the commenter would be correct. Peterson is not only a Psychologists but also a professor, A widely published and cited one at that. One who has been afforded debates at collages with Sam Harris and Zizek. This to me is a failure of the academic world to distinguish between leaders of the field of psychology and crackpot YouTube personalities. By credentials alone he is both and this is unnerving to me. That said, of course, I do not believe that it speaks to psychology as a whole. But again I poorly worded that sentence and take responsibility for the misunderstanding. I would only add that I think, and I may very well be wrong, that if a physicist were to parrot "free-energy/perpetual-motion" to anyone that would listen, that person would be promptly removed from teaching at any legitimate university. That is not to say physics is better than psychology, if anything it implies that it is easier than the still very important soft sciences.
efficax 6y ago
Peterson is a jungian hack
- bumby 6y ago
  Can you elaborate? I’m aware of his controversies in pop culture but I’d be interested in any disagreements within his academic field. I’ve heard him disagree with Angela Duckworth regarding her “grit” attribute but that’s the extent to which I’ve heard

by mudita 6y ago

0x737368 6y ago

Ah yes, a comment about Jordan Peterson that immediately gets downvoted, despite Peterson being competent in the field and the people that are downvoting this are almost most certainly not. I've noticed this every time his name gets mentioned, and I always wondered why that is. Whenever I'd ask one of his "critics" about what's the issue with him I can't get a good answer. So what is it? Can someone maybe explain to me why is there such animosity towards him? Is it just because he's considered to be a "conservative" by hard leftists(despite mostly being a classic liberal). Have we really reached the point where people will automatically go against somebody just because he's "not one of us", and not even consider the ideas. If so we have a really dark road ahead of us. It is even more disappointing to see this on HN. I expect this sort of hivemind on Reddit and Twitter, but I used to have a higher opinion of the userbase on HN.

tsimionescu 6y ago
For the record, I didn't downvote your original comment and I don't have any opinion on Jordan Peterson's expertise as a psychologist. But as a public speaker, he is not a "classical liberal" he is a reactionary conservative with a bent for sophism. His views on culture and on the left are simply wrong, obviously so, but they are presented with academic gravitas and conviction. He implies, though is careful to not outright state, that men are superior to women in intellect and rationality, as are white people when compared to black people (though Ashkenazi Jews are even smarter, so he's not racist!). He does often outright state that "Western" culture is superior to other cultures, that Marxism and post-modernism are not the products of "Western" culture, that Hitler was actually a leftist, and many other obvious falsehoods. he conflates marxism and post-modernism, two diametrically opposed views of history and culture (not to imply that they are the only possible ones, of course). In short, he is a conman who rides his (quite real, as far as I've heard!) academic and clinical credentials in Psychology to make it seem that he is an authority worth listening to on other topics; and he tries to sell damaging, reactionary falsehoods on those other topics.
- 0x737368 6y ago
  Thanks for the response. I think discussing whether he's liberal or conservative is a wishy-washy subject and I'm on shaky ground when discussing whether he's right about the left, but in the interest of having a dialogue I do have some retorts about some of the other things you've mentioned. Re: men superior to women in intellect and rationality - only thing I've seen him state to this effect was describe the distribution of IQs and commenting that the average is the same, however the lowest and highest IQ individuals tend to be male, however women are more packed around the average. I wouldn't describe this as sexist or male-chauvinistic, he's discussing results of studies. From the same observations you'll find that there's more 75-th percentile women than men. When I formulate my conclusion this way, am I now being sexist towards men? Re: white people being more intelligent than black - if you agree that IQ measures intelligence at least in some capacity, then the results of whites on avg. having a higher IQ than blacks, and Asians and Jews higher than whites, speak for themselves. It might be an inconvenient and unfortunate reality, but you can't fix or mitigate this problem if you just sweep it under the rug. On the other hand, whenever I watch highlights of the NBA, the CRUSHING majority(like 99%) of the athletes there are black/mixed race. So is NBA racist for presenting all of the most athletic players as black? Should we also not talk about how white basketball players are underperforming in physical aspects in the NBA as it's racist? I haven't kept that much track about the cultural stuff he said nor am I educated enough in the subject so I can't agree or disagree with you there, however I wouldn't call him a conman. His lessons of personal responsibility and guidelines on how to improve and add structure to your life seem sound. I suspect that his advice resonates more with people of a certain temperament than others, which is why I often hear that his advice is useless, despite there being thousands(maybe millions?) of people that have said that his advice has helped them out of a very tough spot.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    Re: men vs women - he has often claimed for example that women get payed less because they are unwilling to do the better paying jobs (most famously in the Cathy Newman interview [0]). He also claims often that women are more interested in empathy and men in systems, so that men are vastly much more likely to be in fields like engineering, while women are more vastly more likely to be interested in fields like nursing [1], with natural differences as large as 20:1. He himself may not make this value judgement, but given the general social consensus that views engineering as a more prestigious, intellectual job than medical nurses, I think it's mostly fair to characterize this claim as I did. I disagree with this conclusion any way - I believe that IQ testing quickly loses any kind of predictive power when applied to different backgrounds, and many implicit and even explicit biases quickly show up. I also find it hard to believe that a society where women:men ratios in any profession are 20:1 or 1:20 can be characterized as the free-est in the world on this issue. More likely, there are great social and historical pressures trending in this direction, and the state is simply doing nothing to try to reverse this injustice. Looking at former communist countries, that are generally not even close to having any kind of women in STEM programs that could be considered to bias results, the women:men ratio in STEM fields is something like 30:70. Re: IQ and "race" - I don't think so. You may accept that IQ has some correlation with what we understand by intelligence in regular usage, but that doesn't mean in any way that you can meaningfully compare people for IQ across arbitrary divides such as "race", especially when "race" is highly correlated with things such as poverty, teacher attitudes, social attitudes etc. And I keep saying "race" and not race because there is no scientific basis for our notions of race - they are arbitrary social constructs based on skin color and culture (for some examples: are Italians and Irish people white? 50 years ago, they were considered a different race; or, what is the race of the child of a mixed black-skin & white-skin couple? Is Kamala Harris black or white? What about her children? Are they white? black? semitic? south-asian? How many studies of IQ vs race on similar populations actually look at any kind of genetic evidence, vs just skin color?) I will admit that "conman" was a bit rough and an exaggeration. Still, he is definitely using some conman-style tactics to sell his opinions outside his area of expertise. I am not talking about the area of psychology, which includes his self-help work, but about his political discourse. [0] The Cathy Newman Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcjxSThD54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcjxSThD54 [1] Jordan B Peterson: Why so many Male Engineers and Female Nurses? (3 minute video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7uZOAzVRgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7uZOAzVRgU

feanaro 6y ago

I do not understand this statement as claiming that IQ is the entire content of the field of psychology. Do you?

mudita 6y ago
No, of couse not, that would be a very, very strange claim. I agree with rcxdude's reading of the statement: 'if you reject IQ, you have raised your standards of evidence so high you must logically reject everything else in psychology/psychometry as well'

Bodell 6y ago

Jordan Peterson is a great example of the failing of Psychology in the academic world. I'll list some quotes by him below and you can decided weather or not he should be listened to, or if he is simply selling right wing propaganda on Youtube. "If men are pushed too hard to feminize they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology." "the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence." [referring to men being placed higher than women in society] ""Peterson says that "disciplines like women's studies should be defunded", advising freshman students to avoid subjects like sociology, anthropology, English literature, ethnic studies, and racial studies, as well as other fields of study that he believes are corrupted by "post-modern neo-Marxists"."" He also has a bible series on YouTube that asserts that god created the appropriate hierarchy of man, and that it should not be tampered with. We should mold society on the archetype of the book of Genesis. Which in my humble opinion is simply Calvinism in the extreme. Most of this can be found on YouTube or his Wikipedia page. This is not to say everything he says is wrong, that would be silly. But I believe it should be approached with a heavy dose of skepticism.

danaris 6y ago
Your conclusion ("the failing of Psychology in the academic world") is not supported by your evidence. You have demonstrated that there is one prominent psychologist who holds some fairly-obviously terrible and inaccurate beliefs, and is willing to trumpet them to anyone who will listen. This is no more an indictment of the field of psychology than the occasional right-wing "climate scientist" Fox News brings out to "prove" that climate change is not real is an indictment of the field of climate science. Many scientific fields likely have a handful of far-right kooks who would be happy to rack up YouTube views promulgating alt-right talking points dressed up in the trappings of science. That says very little about the state of their fields, and a great deal about the state of our nation. And YouTube.
- Bodell 6y ago
  I'm sorry. I was very murky with my wording. I was not trying to say that the field of Psychology had failed or was a failure. What I meant to say was that, our current state of academia has in this instance demonstrated "a" failure. That failure to me is highlighted by the comment I responded to when it was implied that Peterson's view was more "bonafide" because it was from a "real" psychologist. By all academic standards the commenter would be correct. Peterson is not only a Psychologists but also a professor, A widely published and cited one at that. One who has been afforded debates at collages with Sam Harris and Zizek. This to me is a failure of the academic world to distinguish between leaders of the field of psychology and crackpot YouTube personalities. By credentials alone he is both and this is unnerving to me. That said, of course, I do not believe that it speaks to psychology as a whole. But again I poorly worded that sentence and take responsibility for the misunderstanding. I would only add that I think, and I may very well be wrong, that if a physicist were to parrot "free-energy/perpetual-motion" to anyone that would listen, that person would be promptly removed from teaching at any legitimate university. That is not to say physics is better than psychology, if anything it implies that it is easier than the still very important soft sciences.

efficax 6y ago

Peterson is a jungian hack

bumby 6y ago
Can you elaborate? I’m aware of his controversies in pop culture but I’d be interested in any disagreements within his academic field. I’ve heard him disagree with Angela Duckworth regarding her “grit” attribute but that’s the extent to which I’ve heard