6 ms·

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

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
- 0x737368 6y ago
  But surely the social consensus that engineers are more prestigious than nurses is on the society and not on Peterson. It might be difficult to predict the success of somebody via IQ if you compare two individuals from radically different socio-economic backgrounds, but you can compare two individuals with different IQs from similar socio-economic backgrounds and statistically IQ is a very good predictor of success. With regards to men-to-women ratios, Peterson pointed out that countries that have the free-est social expectations(e.g. Scandinavian countries) have the most diverse differences between men and women. From my personal experience going to a university in the UK and studying CS, I could count maybe 3-5 women out of a cohort of 350+ students. I don't think you can accuse the UK of actively discouraging women from joining these fields, quite the opposite. So why don't they choose these high paying fields in such progressive countries such as UK? I do agree with you that "race" has no strict scientific basis. I'm not sure how those studies qualified races, so that's something I'll need to look up. I still disagree with him using conman-style tactics per se, but I will admit that I was a bit disappointed in SOME stuff that he was saying outside of his areas of expertise. Not because I thought he was wrong, but because for me his explanations of psychology set such a high standard that anything less would be overshadowed. I find that he has a very "conversational" approach at discovering new ideas - he'll sort of discuss different aspects as he goes and almost arrive at conclusions right in front of the audience. The drawback to this approach is that sometimes he might be wrong about some things - I think that's okay. Case in point - in his debate with Zizek, iirc he quickly got shotdown by Zizek because he was pretty much out of his depth, and Peterson admitted that he was wrong. A lot of his detractors point this out as a coup de grace for Peterson, but I find it refreshing to see somebody who makes mistakes in the search of answers, but admits they were wrong and perhaps corrects themselves(not sure about the last part, I haven't kept up with his most recent stuff).
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    > countries that have the free-est social expectations(e.g. Scandinavian countries) have the most diverse differences between men and women. From my personal experience going to a university in the UK and studying CS, I could count maybe 3-5 women out of a cohort of 350+ students. I don't think you can accuse the UK of actively discouraging women from joining these fields, quite the opposite. So why don't they choose these high paying fields in such progressive countries such as UK? Well, there are two options: either this is right and there is a vast gulf between the workings of the male and female mind, or these countries are not as free of social expectations as they like to think they are. Not sure how the UK and Northern Europe compare, but a (female) friend who left Romania for Germany was shocked at how large the social pressure on women to give up working after having a child are. She has had multiple colleagues directly and indirectly pushing her into feeling like a bad mother for holding a full-time job while having a child at home. In my own university days in the CS department, there was a marked difference between the number of men and women, but nowhere near what you're saying: it was more like 10 women for every 20 men, maybe a little less. I've had several female professors, including the head of the Polytechnic institute and the head of the CS department. In my job today, I am on a team of 4 men and 3 women (all programmers), working on a project with a female project lead, and probably overall 30 men and 6 women in Dev, and 50 men and 14 women if you include QA (who also do Python-based automated testing). This is on a project deep in the world of computer networking, not some soft field. And the team is about half in Romania, half in India - not exactly countries known for their courageous tearing down of social norms. So again, I'm very skeptical of claims that a society where a major professions are overwhelmingly dominated by either men or women is "(one of) the most free societies in the world in terms of choice". It's possible, but I think it's far more likely that the studies claiming this were simply wrong, given the outcomes. Especially since I doubt nurses are significantly better viewed in Northern Europe in terms of job prestige and intellectual rigor than in other places. > But surely the social consensus that engineers are more prestigious than nurses is on the society and not on Peterson. Well, if he's saying that women are more fit to be nurses and men are more fit to be engineers, than I feel justified in saying that he's implying women are less suited than men for intellectual labor (not necessarily dumber, but at least less likely to enjoy it). That may not be his intention (though I believe it may well be), but he also doesn't go out of his way to disclaim it. > So why don't they choose these high paying fields in such progressive countries such as UK? My strong belief is that it's a problem of education and social pressures. Even in Romania (to be clear, I keep bringing it up because it's the country where I have the most experience), where women do choose these fields in much bigger numbers for whatever reasons, there are deep biases against women's ability in this field. Female colleagues were more likely to be a professor's target for ridicule, or simply receive lower grades on exams for the same mistakes. They would be less likely to be given as positive examples, and less likely to be encouraged towards this field. > I find it refreshing to see somebody who makes mistakes in the search of answers, but admits they were wrong and perhaps corrects themselves Yes, that is a quality I also appreciate in people and in Jordan Peterson in particular. I have also seen him change his opinion on the right to deny service to gay people during an interview (he was for this right initially on grounds of freedom of religion essentially, but then when presented with the fact that the same arguments were often used to deny black people service 50 years ago, he took a moment, thought about it, and admitted that his previous position was wrong and that people shouldn't be denied service based on their sexuality). I truly appreciate this, and it is quite a rare thing to see. > but you can compare two individuals with different IQs from similar socio-economic backgrounds and statistically IQ is a very good predictor of success. Yes, agreed - that's why I'm not necessarily against the idea that IQ is meaningful at least to some extent. I do think however that the moment you start comparing IQ results across populations, biases quickly creep in and it gets much harder to tell if the difference is caused by a difference in the underlying IQ or in the test itself. Even if comparing between two similar-income American (non-recent immigrants) families in the same city in America, one with black skin and the other with white skin, there is some SMALL chance that there are inherent biases, either internal or in the test, that may affect the validity of results. And from what I've read, many such comparisons are far, far from this close. Some famous books on the topic, such as "The Bell Curve", include horribly, obviously biased studies, such as comparing the IQs of white and black kids as measured by apartheid South Africa!

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

0x737368 6y ago
But surely the social consensus that engineers are more prestigious than nurses is on the society and not on Peterson. It might be difficult to predict the success of somebody via IQ if you compare two individuals from radically different socio-economic backgrounds, but you can compare two individuals with different IQs from similar socio-economic backgrounds and statistically IQ is a very good predictor of success. With regards to men-to-women ratios, Peterson pointed out that countries that have the free-est social expectations(e.g. Scandinavian countries) have the most diverse differences between men and women. From my personal experience going to a university in the UK and studying CS, I could count maybe 3-5 women out of a cohort of 350+ students. I don't think you can accuse the UK of actively discouraging women from joining these fields, quite the opposite. So why don't they choose these high paying fields in such progressive countries such as UK? I do agree with you that "race" has no strict scientific basis. I'm not sure how those studies qualified races, so that's something I'll need to look up. I still disagree with him using conman-style tactics per se, but I will admit that I was a bit disappointed in SOME stuff that he was saying outside of his areas of expertise. Not because I thought he was wrong, but because for me his explanations of psychology set such a high standard that anything less would be overshadowed. I find that he has a very "conversational" approach at discovering new ideas - he'll sort of discuss different aspects as he goes and almost arrive at conclusions right in front of the audience. The drawback to this approach is that sometimes he might be wrong about some things - I think that's okay. Case in point - in his debate with Zizek, iirc he quickly got shotdown by Zizek because he was pretty much out of his depth, and Peterson admitted that he was wrong. A lot of his detractors point this out as a coup de grace for Peterson, but I find it refreshing to see somebody who makes mistakes in the search of answers, but admits they were wrong and perhaps corrects themselves(not sure about the last part, I haven't kept up with his most recent stuff).
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  > countries that have the free-est social expectations(e.g. Scandinavian countries) have the most diverse differences between men and women. From my personal experience going to a university in the UK and studying CS, I could count maybe 3-5 women out of a cohort of 350+ students. I don't think you can accuse the UK of actively discouraging women from joining these fields, quite the opposite. So why don't they choose these high paying fields in such progressive countries such as UK? Well, there are two options: either this is right and there is a vast gulf between the workings of the male and female mind, or these countries are not as free of social expectations as they like to think they are. Not sure how the UK and Northern Europe compare, but a (female) friend who left Romania for Germany was shocked at how large the social pressure on women to give up working after having a child are. She has had multiple colleagues directly and indirectly pushing her into feeling like a bad mother for holding a full-time job while having a child at home. In my own university days in the CS department, there was a marked difference between the number of men and women, but nowhere near what you're saying: it was more like 10 women for every 20 men, maybe a little less. I've had several female professors, including the head of the Polytechnic institute and the head of the CS department. In my job today, I am on a team of 4 men and 3 women (all programmers), working on a project with a female project lead, and probably overall 30 men and 6 women in Dev, and 50 men and 14 women if you include QA (who also do Python-based automated testing). This is on a project deep in the world of computer networking, not some soft field. And the team is about half in Romania, half in India - not exactly countries known for their courageous tearing down of social norms. So again, I'm very skeptical of claims that a society where a major professions are overwhelmingly dominated by either men or women is "(one of) the most free societies in the world in terms of choice". It's possible, but I think it's far more likely that the studies claiming this were simply wrong, given the outcomes. Especially since I doubt nurses are significantly better viewed in Northern Europe in terms of job prestige and intellectual rigor than in other places. > But surely the social consensus that engineers are more prestigious than nurses is on the society and not on Peterson. Well, if he's saying that women are more fit to be nurses and men are more fit to be engineers, than I feel justified in saying that he's implying women are less suited than men for intellectual labor (not necessarily dumber, but at least less likely to enjoy it). That may not be his intention (though I believe it may well be), but he also doesn't go out of his way to disclaim it. > So why don't they choose these high paying fields in such progressive countries such as UK? My strong belief is that it's a problem of education and social pressures. Even in Romania (to be clear, I keep bringing it up because it's the country where I have the most experience), where women do choose these fields in much bigger numbers for whatever reasons, there are deep biases against women's ability in this field. Female colleagues were more likely to be a professor's target for ridicule, or simply receive lower grades on exams for the same mistakes. They would be less likely to be given as positive examples, and less likely to be encouraged towards this field. > I find it refreshing to see somebody who makes mistakes in the search of answers, but admits they were wrong and perhaps corrects themselves Yes, that is a quality I also appreciate in people and in Jordan Peterson in particular. I have also seen him change his opinion on the right to deny service to gay people during an interview (he was for this right initially on grounds of freedom of religion essentially, but then when presented with the fact that the same arguments were often used to deny black people service 50 years ago, he took a moment, thought about it, and admitted that his previous position was wrong and that people shouldn't be denied service based on their sexuality). I truly appreciate this, and it is quite a rare thing to see. > but you can compare two individuals with different IQs from similar socio-economic backgrounds and statistically IQ is a very good predictor of success. Yes, agreed - that's why I'm not necessarily against the idea that IQ is meaningful at least to some extent. I do think however that the moment you start comparing IQ results across populations, biases quickly creep in and it gets much harder to tell if the difference is caused by a difference in the underlying IQ or in the test itself. Even if comparing between two similar-income American (non-recent immigrants) families in the same city in America, one with black skin and the other with white skin, there is some SMALL chance that there are inherent biases, either internal or in the test, that may affect the validity of results. And from what I've read, many such comparisons are far, far from this close. Some famous books on the topic, such as "The Bell Curve", include horribly, obviously biased studies, such as comparing the IQs of white and black kids as measured by apartheid South Africa!