Jordan Peterson / Cathy Newman debate

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thanks for picking them out for me, I'll have a closer look tomorrow.

so. I have watched the videos now, and as I expected from my superficial knowledge of Weinstein's position, I largely agree with him, and therefore haven't learned much new.

particularly the first talk, the one at virtual futures (btw., - have a look into the beginning of this event. It was initiated by the acceleratiinist movement of british ohilosoohy of the nineties, which is heavily associated with a guy called Nick Land, who has since turned rightwing tribalist, albeit a weird one living in hong kong or singapore (don't remember which), talking about the importance of national and cultural identity etc) was so spot on my own views that I found it somewhat boring.

I have been thinking lately about what changes need to be made to the current system for it to survive (because it does seem to be working well in harnessing innate human drives), trying to make as few changes as possible to stay realistic.
For that purpose, I had a look into marxism - not because I think equality of outcome is fundamentally a good idea, but much rather because I had been reading that his analysis of capitalism is rather deep.
and it is.
have you seen the debate between petereson and harris, moderated by weinstein?
the discussion about elton john's glass? - well, marx's ideas of "use value","exchange value" and "fetishism" would have made that whole bit obsolete. Peterson and Harris were needlessly debating around "value", unable to work out that they were not talking about one ting, but of many.

so, again, I think Marxist analysis of capitalism introduces a lot of useful concepts. However, socialism does not address ecology, properly, and getting rid of markets would mean getting rid of selection mechanisms. bad idea.
In that respect: would a basic income fix these things? - no. it might help with reducing the unhealthy level inequality, though, but I don't see how it can fix such stupidities like planned obsolescence of commodities.
there needs to be a mechanism to internalize as-of-yet-externalizable costs, namely pollution of all forms.
you could open up a market for carbon sequestration and add the price to undo your carbon footprint on to fossil fuels. Or the price of recycling your electronics.
however, - how do you internalize, even express, say, the price of the destruction of a biotope, or the extinction of a species?
In that respect, I like Bruno Latour's "parliament of things", - an institution, in which non-human entities etc. are given a representative, just like today there are representatives whose job it is to look after the interests of nations-
after all, nations are fictituous.
If we are happy to accept representatives of fictituous constructs, having representatives for other objects, like oceans, or insects, is an interesting idea and technically feasable.

I did and TBH I was a little bummed out with how shallow a lot of it was. I did like that Peterson was attempting to constructively play devils advocate to Sam's moral landscape concept, and I think there was agreement that Sam's ideas needed a lot more implementation practicality and consideration to to be broad based across populations, customs, intelligence ranges, etc.


We might just need a brutal level of accountancy and auditing on all fronts, one which people increasingly can't run from or find new as of yet undiscovered zones of externality to pour their junk off into.

One thing that did hearten me in the last few months was a group conversation 0thouartthat0 had with a few of his friends where one of them was in a field I hadn't previously known existed - ie. something like a science of complex systems (I think he was calling it complexity science). I'd really prefer if we did put more effort into fields like that to see how emergent patterns work in markets, in politics, between people, because I think this is the sort of science that could end up with the bureaucratic teeth to put hard stops in certain things or to be able to warn us of our cultural and political equivalents to global warming.

As of right now though I'm not sure on whether we can reach back into the 18th or 19th centuries for useful information - maybe on the personal levels, maybe for partially formed ideas that, if they match the data, the extent to which they do can be used as a raw unconditioned foundation of sorts but that's about it. Past that we'll really want to make sure we have solid evidence of what's causing what, what the costs of direct interference are, and from there we may be able to come up with good adaptation strategies. Until then, and without that data, the 'what' is still contentious and people have that silly football teams political orientation to how they line up with the arguments and their content.

true, it was not particularly useful in any respect.



here, I have no hope. not only because of the necessary overhead, but also because of corruption. but also because of
what I have to say to the following paragraph



the problem with the science of complexity is nouminality. The noumenon is a term by Immanuel Kant, and refers to the real reality. Kant needed to come up with this term to be able to make a distiction between the reality that our senses mediate to us, and the rest.
Before radioactivity was discovered, radioactivity did not exist. Science helped us discover it, but science isn't done discovering things, making complexity science a sport of elaborate guessing.
I don't want to sound negative on the effort of engaging in studying emergence and so forth, but I will not embrace the hope that that will get us anywhere soon.

I mean... climate science has been doing a good job running simulations, and they are all horrible. And politics and the economy seem to be collectively answering: " but it's only simulations based on data from the past. you aren't certain enough of the exact outcome"
science answers back: " no, we're not. but all outcomes are horrible"

I listened to john gray. and ordered one of his books. he seems to advocate for preparing for "all but the worst" events, in regards to climate change. He is likely correct.
....oh dear, the not too distant future looks bleak.

regarding whether it makes sense to look at 18th or 19th century theories: it depends.
Since world order and economic order fall into the the realms of myths, rather than sciences, having a look at what assumptions and beliefs these myths are based on, and what mythologists have thought about them, to look for models to expand and adapt, rather than come up with models from scratch.
I'm not even going anywhere near implying that Marx got it perfectly right, even on the analysis level, let alone that it still holds for this century.

but he gave me good terms with which to think about different kinds of value - and how to differentiate it from price.
And there is one idea that I got from him, which is to view capital as its own entity. So, when Marx writes that capital tends to accumulate, I find that highly interesting - because it takes individual agency out of the picture. It's not about individual capitalists and the risks they are taking to accumulate personal wealth, but about the systemic setup that leads to money, over the long run, ending up on the side of capital, independently of who owns that capital.
It's a view that immediately makes the argument that "capitalism would work for everyone if people (bankers, capitalists) weren't so greedy" invalid. It's not about individual greed, i.e., personal wealth accumulation.

But about the problem that money is turned into capital (money that has the sole purpose of making more money, however possible, and without any human factors involved. capital doesn't care who owns it. the system, if it were in fact entirely neutral, doesn't work in favour individuals, and would still create this accumulation at the top).

I don't think a workers' revolution is a way to go, because unlike Marx, I think markets are valuable tools.
But I am convinced for now that my thinking got richer through engaging with his ideas, in the way that my thinking got richer from engaging with ancient greek philosophy, even though scientifically, it's all nonsense.

Also, I needed to understand some of the terminology, to understand newer ideas, like those of Guy Debord and Theodor Adorno. They try to marry philosophy of aesthetics with economic systems using Marx's terminology.... which was the thing I was initially interested in.
Or: to answer the question why it seems there's only superhero films in cinema, and why the cinema of the 70s was so much more open and interesting and it all collapsed.

It could be that, like a lot of things in science, this stuff won't tame itself enough to be easily tractable by human cognition or to lend itself to one, two, or even three theories. Being widely read definitely helps one see various angles of various issues and that's almost universally an enriching experience.

I think one of the earliest and maybe most successful partial attacks on the conservatism that I had in my mid 20's (2000's period) was a book by John Ralston Saul that a coworker recommended called Voltaire's Bastards. It was one of those books that was so packed with history I wasn't previously familiar with (Canadian, English, French, and Spanish political history from the late middle ages onward) that it felt like I was learning a new thing or two every page and I think the two most memorable things I took from it were a) the bureaucratic classes and how they acted more to ensconce themselves than be useful to anyone and b) that some kinds of public works, like sewage systems, highways, or railways, aren't best initiated by the private market.

What I do wonder about, occasionally, is where we'll be when we can 3D print in metal more cost effectively. They already do have some printers that companies are using either for very complex parts that are far more expensive to machine and I could see this, as prices drop, also meaning long-tail items wouldn't need to be kept in inventory. I also wonder, if this keeps going on, whether increasing numbers of people will be putting instructions together for the refrigerator that lasts fifty years or longer or the invincible rake or shovel, and it could turn out that a sort of printing maker's movement could turn our culture on it's head with respect to the waste-driven aspect of consumerism. Things generally seem to change not when people realize there's a problem but when competing strategies simply can't be kept out any longer. I also do wonder, if and when 3D printers and print materials for durable goods become more widely available, what kinds of impact that will have on old-fashion capitalism and whether that may mean as well that capital, at least as we've previously thought of it, will become a more squishy category - as we maybe saw the forerunner of with software and apps.

Something else that's interesting about John Gray, I'm listening to his Uncertain Minds (Part Two) which is the Q&A and he actually takes a shot at modern nihilism, essentially that before the last few hundred years few people believed in the perfectibility or undeviating progress of humanity and that people like Homer and others got on just fine without it necessitating deep depression and hopelessness. On a similar note but a very different interview/lecture I remember John Michael Greer mentioning that people fell in love, procreated, etc. just fine in the dark ages and it's a wonder that it's so difficult now. That makes me wonder to some extent, is it possible that our orientation to meaning and to each other has perhaps been deprecated that much, maybe by overstimulation or overleveraging in certain areas? If that were the case it's so pervasive that I'm not even sure how we'd get under it to figure out to what degree its happening or what the most poisonous items in our psychological or sensory diets would be to that effect.

I watched the full Peterson/Newman debate on YouTube for the first time yesterday. I learned about Peterson only recently; it looks like this debate occurred at a time when my mother was starting to get very ill health, so I missed his "rise" to status, so to speak, because obviously I was needing to tend to family at the time.

After seeing this, some other videos, and reading some articles about him, I've noted that he is extremely precise in his speech and logic. Most I've seen. He doesn't resort to snark, use too many words, go off on tangents, or react with ad hominem hyperbole, as most journalist talking heads (like Newman) do -- or even most people in general, for that matter (witness the schoolyard insults on any generic social media debate, or any 'comments' section on any Internet article).

He shares a number of concerns and views on issues that are very similar to mine. We look at the world and life in many of the same ways.

It is nice to see someone like him bring sense to today's chaotic and confused milieu. We need more rational and moderate Petersons, and fewer extremes like President Trump and the SJWs who -- while hating each other's guts -- happen to share a tendency toward over-the-top inflammatory speech and aggressive insult-trading at the expense of careful, objective reasoning.

I find myself liking a lot of Bret and Eric Weinstein's ideas for similar reasons. They'd both label themselves as progressive but as far as I've listened to them they mean 'progressively spot and work to remedy problems' rather than progress toward full socialism. In that their lectures I think they do well at spotting a lot of problems that are causing capitalism to sour more than it needs to or confusions of concept between what markets actually do well vs what kinds of things you really don't want in the hands of markets but we sort of pass them on anyway in a sort of faith-based manner (for example the degree to which they turn around and dictate our lives seems to risk accelerating competition and any mooring to human culture right off the map).

He chooses his words to make relatively precise statements, and his logic is sound, true.
Except that he, more often than not, attacks postmodernists and neo-marxists, - throwing them into one bag without distinction, or understanding their thoughts or the historical facts. He makes a precise statement about a vague group that he made up - I believe it's called a strawman argument.
Peterson's logic is sound, except that he ignores a lot of variables, and arbitrarily sets fixed values for others - in other words, his logic is sound, but it's based on a lot of assumptions, rendereing the outcome of his logic setup useless in reality.

He uses Nietzsche as a source for his arguments in a way that makes me wonder if he has even read Nietzsche - mainly because he goes on to attack postmodern neomarxists for things Nietzsche said, not Marx.

And his ad hominems are not explicit insults - however, they are implicit insults. He calls postmodern neomarxists "resentful". That sounds like a psychological statement, but diagnosing a large, made-up and ill defined strawman is pretty careless for a clinical psychologist.

Yes, he expresses himself in a civilized manner, but that only makes the debate appear more civilized, and doesn't automatically raise it to a higher level. It's just slow-burning, and not the full-blown garbage fire of Trump and the SJWs.
Inflammatory nonetheless.


Do we need more Petersons? I don't think so. I'd prefer it if public intellectuals were less biased, and weren't trying to push their own agenda and would engage with the real world, rather than with their own ideological constructs which they try to label as "real world".

Shut Out: Peterson, Rubin Propose Free Speech Funding Site

Online media platforms are slowly taking away the ability for conservative-leaning creatives to have an income. Now, some social media stars are talking about a solution.

After the deplatforming of a famous free speech YouTube personality on Patreon, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Rubin Report host Dave Rubin have been assembling a team to create their own crowdfunding platform. Peterson has made public statements both on Patreon and YouTube with Rubin, lamenting the platform’s censorship while proposing a solution.

This happened in the wake of Patreon booting free speech YouTube personality Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, for using a slur (out of context) to mock racists online.

This interchange did not even happen on the Patreon platform or even in Benjamin's own channel. Benjamin was essentially stripped of a major source of income for an out of context exchange on another website.

https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/techw ... nding-site

Jordan Peterson has disconnected from the fundraising site Patreon because of its hostility to non-leftist causes.

The fatal flaw in American leftism, from Peterson.

Is Jordan Peterson aware of the fact that Marx didn't advocate for equality of outcome?

Peterson now taking on Big Diet (like Big Pharma):