Jordan Peterson & Bret Weinstein on Fascism and Far Right

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We're in a pretty awful state of cultural decadence, and I mean self-medicating nihilism with whatever we can legally, or artfully, get our hands on and the rent-seeking behavior at the top is quite epic. Almost anything we do, if taken by itself, will be a band-aid on something that really needs several dozen stitches.

I finished the video I posted earlier. I'll have to look elsewhere for more on the biology side of his thinking, but I feel glad to have gotten the full Evergreen story.

I find it shocking that so few people stood up to the leaders of that moral panic, either among the students or the faculty. I heard a few hints that Bret had seen trouble building already in some of his comments. I guess both sides, all sides need to beware of narcissistic leaders.

I don't find it odd that young people protest. I find it odd that old people protest less! I don't find it odd that young people go too far. I find it odd that older people didn't act like adults.

Yeah, I think the ugly stuff in this seems to be people in high places in these organizations who decide to use the youth protesters either against people they don't like, or against people who aren't in line with their own political schemes. It's a similar thing to how there were so many people getting injured in protest clashes over the past year, Charlottesville being most notable, due to seeming police stand-down orders. I'm rarely shocked when the extreme elements have a go at each other or when they badger/heckle those just across the center from them, but I'm deeply troubled when the supposed 'adults' in authority start behaving essentially like 2nd or 3rd century pagan emperors and playing games with their personal political enemies, enemies of their enemies, etc..

I hear tell that I can personally meet actual snowflakes in this community. I want to meet them in the wild.

I'll bump this thread to add another video. You've probably seen it already, tech.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04wyGK6k6HE

Jordan Peterson's first JRE interview, it seems. At 23 minutes in, or so, Joe mentions a trope. "Women earn 79 cents for ever dollar a man earns," and then shows that he misunderstands the research. He shows that he misunderstands the type of statistical analysis that produced that number, in specific ways. This is sophomore level research and statistical analysis, and JP darn well knows it. When he chimes in, he doesn't correct the misunderstanding. He perpetuates it.

Maybe he'll clarify later, and maybe at that point in JP's YouTube presence he didn't really understand the power of a clip taken out of context. I want to offer a generous interpretation, but from here it looks like a d*ck move, fr. To pick up on another thread, my friend who watched this same video had mentioned he felt like JP got needlessly antagonistic at times, and came off like a difficult, angry coworker. He probably has good cause to feel annoyed; I don't know the details of his story, yet.

Sure. I'll find it later on. I believe that number is adjusted for lots of factors.

http://www.epi.org/publication/womens-w ... their-pay/

TY.

I read through it and I think I'm largely still stuck in the quandary that I was before. We're getting into the mass accumulation of small effects and it's something we as human beings are particularly bad at.

I'll take the author at their word that there is still a degree of pay gap that can and does happen albeit I have to consider as well that they've rolled in psychological and historical causes in choosing career - ie. that the career and hours choice issue sopped up enough of the gap that they felt it was misleading to talk about the same job and experience hourly wage numbers.

Where I'm stuck:

- Capitalism is fundamentally racist, sexist, ableist, etc. in that it speculates heuristically in who to hire to make the most money, pays according to those estimates, just that unlike racism, sexism, and ablism in the usual sense it's more like an unbridled pragmatism and one where it would be rather likely that even women and minorities themselves at higher levels of companies are likely perpetuating it. Those decisions include availability to work and perhaps also leadership, likelihood of them staying, likelihood of attendance vs. absence, etc. and while I don't think it's fair that it works that way I'm also wondering - if we try to get government involved, that we may be passing the point where the return vs. damage to female career is in a place where it'd desirable. I like that they're considering culture as a culprit, we can improve that through education and that might lesson some of the variance but even there it's tough to tell.

- With women and men there's also apparently the difference in distribution - ie. that female IQ population-wise clusters tighter to the center or median and male IQ across population is lower in the middle and stretches out in both directions farther. Accordingly with IQ above 130 and below 70 there's significantly more men than women. I think that mostly plays itself out in STEM although yes, I'm sure that out of the women who do go into STEM there probably are a significant number who forgo it for other factors - either lack of faith in their math skills, what other women or men think on a social level, what they may have heard about the environments, etc..


I had the chance to listen to the Mythcon debate between Tom Smith and Sargon of Akkad and while they both had points they both got pretty boneheaded with engaging each other. Tom did try to make a lot of the above points but also I think he had a tendency to push the social constructionist argument, ie. that we'd have more women trash collectors and sewer cleaners if the weren't coddled away from it or told it was unfeminine. Seems like there a lot of job fields that are male dominated mostly because no one else wants them. Also what he was debating for - ie. the minority getting chosen when two potential hires are identical otherwise and a tie-breaker is needed, is great in theory but I have no idea how they'd qualify those scenarios; ie. an employer could either almost completely hire minorities, hire their own race, or their own gender and they'd have a lot of leeway to fudge these numbers. The downside of culture is that we know how to brainstorm laws, we have no idea OTOH how to make dishonest people honest.

This could also be where SJW's have been getting a bit unhinged in the last four or five years - ie. that progress in social justice is hitting a bit of a wall and it seems to be a wall that's made, rather than by bigotry, more on biology, economics, the way systems self-sort, and for as much as they want to fight on to solve the world's ills it seems like their battle is increasing an uphill one with nature itself rather than attitudes that can be particularly pinned down one or two correctable dynamics. Accordingly return on their invested energy seems to be plummeting.

The next goal, if I were to think proactively on this, would be to figure out how to undermine the pain inflicting effects and relevance of these differences - particularly those that just seem to stubborn and self-sorted for human will to make much of a dent in. UBI seems like it would be a good start, maybe also pushing innovation and price-reduction in our basic staples for survival.

Not sure what else to say other than that.

I'm fine with women and men having different job preferences, all else being equal.
Many professions dominated by women are low paid, and professions that have become female-dominated have become lower paid.
This suggests inequality elsewhere.

Right. I think the main point I was trying to make is it may be coming so many compoundings of small things that there'd be no way to chase it out either though activism or legislation. I'm not against people brainstorming ways around these hurdles, just that I'm starting to think people will increasingly be catching on, as the well of pursuable causes dries up, that these are problems inherent to complex systems themselves and that the task of solving this type of thing is much more challenging than we would have ever thought.

This is the kind of thing where I'm thinking, when we really feel confident in neural networks and the state of AI's ability to out-process us and come up with desirable solutions, that we might turn it on our social problems to see if it can come up with better solutions than we can brainstorm at present.

I meant to write a longer reply. It definitely matters how laws affect things. We have too many examples of unintended consequences to rashly make laws.

I focus on promoting access, and try to change what laws cannot.

UBI still seems like the last bad remedy for a lot of social ills. I hope people use their free time well.

I think what scares me a lot about our running into the margins on a lot of social issues, I think our culture is on the verge of understanding its place in nature in all the most depressing ways. The understanding I'm getting forced toward is that we're resting on top of a rancid and antihuman process and structure. I caught part of Eric Weinstein on Joe Rogan 1022 and he mentioned a quote from his brother about the natural selection game - ie. that it's a spelling b that ends in genocide and that he himself, Brett, even commented when asked about only having two kids - if you really get to know just how fowl and value-devoid the survival race is would you even want to play it?

This is actually making more bullish on AI - ie. we might be creating the only thing that has any freedom to deeply choose or modify its nature as well as it's pitfalls. We also may be designing something qualified of supervising us in ways that we're, on average, too limbic or lacking too much in executive functioning and cognitive instinct-interrupts across our population to manage at all. On our own, and it hardly gets blinder than with social constructionist doctrine, it's like we're trying to paper over a massive stinking dead body and hope we can hide the smell of it or pretend that the slightest shift in what's in the rotting giant below won't rip the paper veneer. The idea that we can lift our whole society up by its bootstraps just by sheer will and social pressure seems at this point almost as logically infeasible as a person's hunt to gain supernatural abilities. In fact I'd almost say the later in some cases might have a better chance because who knows whether a person might be able to rub the right neurons together and come up with some sort of biological radio receiver - the same can't be said of willing hundreds of millions of people, of drastically different mental capacities, out of the instincts that boil away under the surface all day long.

One of the worst attributes of nature, which we'd have to either genetically engineer ourselves out of or breed out of ourselves the hard way, is taking in part of nature's grading on a curve. That curve pits us in constant competition - for both procreation and really, ultimately, right to be alive and it seems like the later is just an extrapolation of the former. In the future the average could be 300 IQ and if genetics still didn't have all the fluidity of temporary circumstance a person with a 200 IQ would probably be treated almost as badly as someone with a 70 or 85 IQ today. What we get to see with capitalism's ability to survive is because it's as amoral as nature and it's about flying by the seat of our pants and letting the devil take the hindmost. If we want better we clearly have to replace the rotten timbers within ourselves, otherwise we're back to papering refuse.

For as grim as all of that is it seems like we've had spectacular success in decreasing inequality compared to what we could have ever hoped for by as conventional means as we've employed. That's not to say we shouldn't fight on, just that I think we'll have to considerably change our approach and take this to higher playing fields than just the political level.

Something I might recommend - there was a recent interview between Jordan and Camille Paglia. That interview actually turned me on to something, ie. it sounded like they're both hitting a sort of cul de sac where the things they're even trying to wake people up to and the ideas they'd want to offer in lieu of the confusion they point out are becoming their own sorts of pessimism, like Jordan wondering whether any degree of sheltering makes people neurotic enough not to be functional or even having older and more adult parents rather than young and half-inept ones makes legions of adults who can't hack the hidden Darwinian landscape that underpins our culture (the solution to that would be what - encourage childhood bullying or aboriginal parenting as a public health service?). It almost seemed like Jordan got a talking to about his hopes that Christian values would lead us out of this. What's probably closer to the truth, even though we've been leaving Christianity behind as a value set it seems like the desire to make the world as equal as possible in outcome isn't a lack of Christian belief - rather it's an extension and herniation of it's core principles and concepts out beyond its doctrines and is heretically hyper-Christian in its goals and concepts. It also almost seems to fall back on the question, rather indirectly, of whether our social abrogation of survival of the fittest, hasn't lead us down a trail of nearly irreparable decay. To that - thank God for crispr cas9, that might really be our only salvation from a massive stagger backward.

So it's not just the SJW's, it's even the best and brightest centrists who are heading into some really painful times ideologically and with respect to hope in any sort of sociological or political manipulations solving our problems.

I have a local contact who allegedly knows a lot of these ranting and raving type snowflakes whom I've heard a lot about, but have never actually met. I don't think I'll know how they tick until I actually meet them in person. It sounds like they have a significant intersection with other mental health issues. I mean, isn't someone who flies off the handle all the time over slights clearly troubled?