Jordan Peterson / Cathy Newman debate

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This really wasn't that intellectual but it was at least something of a Snickers moment. What I still can't get over is she didn't even hedge her bets and play good cop in any areas let alone show any areas of agreement. It was pretty much a non-stop barrage of impulsive questions that seemed to suggest she had her filter on 100% pass-through. It'll be interesting to hear what kind of feedback she gets and whether she thinks things over this weekend or further doubles down on her positions going forward.

run time - 29:55

wow that was painful to watch.
also: she was not listening to anything he said.


also: regarding growing up and finding meaning in one's life and all:
I've been having conversations with friends, lately. The doctors feel the hospital structures are designed for maximum throughput, and that they can't proviide the care they know the patients need - so they look for other things to do to find meaning in their lives. The teachers find the rigid structures unbearable, and feel like they can't provide students with information in a way that allows students to understand why things matter- they are forced to teach to the test.
The IT guys don't really care anyway. The particle physicist maintaining a billion dollar accelerator in a medical facility complains that the patients don't get the treatment they need, and he's basically just a mechanic there.
The designers aren't asked to design, i.e. think things through and organize information strategically, but only to make it look nice, as cheap as possible.
Not a single one thinks they are doing meaningful work, and every single one thinks they could be doing teir job better, but the financial or bureaucratic structures of their workplaces don't allow it. Every single one got depressed during our conversation.

growing up and taking on responsibility is hard when there is nothing that can't be done a little cheaper and a little worse.

Last edited by shlaifu on 18 Jan 2018, 8:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

All of the above points are why I'm really liking Bret Weinstein's interviews a lot lately - both Joe Rogan's JRE 1055 with him and Waking Up Podcast #109 with Sam Harris were excellent. While he's in board with Dr. Peterson on the important stuff he seems to be trying to look forward more where I think Dr. Peterson is trying to help people make sense of the past and the remnants of it that we see all around us.

I've started reading those dreaded postmodernists, for a bunch of reasons, in part because I like postmodernist film and felt I needed to be able to explain things I have had so far only an intuitive understanding of to my students.

What struck me is the prescience in their analysis of some things. Baudrillard, who declared reality dead in the 80ies, also thought that work was getting increasingly obscene, meaning: particular jobs are meaningless and everyone involved knows it. This transparency he compares with pornography (hence the word obscene): it's all out in the open, and it's obvious that it's fake, yet to compensate for the fakeness, it's exaggerated - he uses the prefix hyper- to mark the concept.
hyperreal. etc.
Baudrillard doesn't seem happy about this.

I've read some by Gilles Deleuze, too. Deleuze describes reality as a constantly morphing network, everything can be connected to everything else at any given moment, and everything is in flux.
Sounds a bit far out, but then - my computer here is connected to labour conditions in foreign countries which are connected to capital flows which are connected to history and colonialism and so on and so.

Both Deleuze and Baudrillard seem to be mistaking the narrative construct every culture wraps around the bare reality of atoms and void with that bare reality. But the story is not the bare reality, yet for our human terms -it might just as well be.

Conservatives argue that there is a solid core that we should stick to, but Marx already wrote that everything solid is melting into air. The postmodernists seems to be embracing that, which I don't particularly like, but I can see why - just go with the flow, sort of.

I'm going to watch Bret Weinstein now.

Release the Inner Beast. Be the Lobster. i Must say i agree with
Jordan Peterson, in the fact that our common Ancestor From a Third
of a Billion Years ago; the Lobster, is a major way of Life to Gain Self
Esteem, Fearlessness, and in general, yes, Better Emotional Regulation
and Sensory Integration and even the ability to Love others more Unconditionally
for it is fear that destroys all that is Good. Yes; to be or not to be a Loving Lobster.
I keep My Claws Fully Extended
with my Heart Open. And it is True
without the Lobster, not likely the Love
will be as strong as I Will be with the Will and
Strength that Naturally comes from the Lobster;
And the Grace and Love that comes from the original
Greek Definition of Meek that means one who is Forceful
and Skillful enough to adequately defend themselves with
Grace Automatically coming with the Confidence of that. And
in General, Higher Levels of Serotonin. This is also in alignment with
John B. Calhoun's Experiment with A Rat Utopia Land where Rats were provided
a limited amount of space and all the Free Food they could eat. Eventually, Social
Roles Broke down and Males no longer defended their Territory and they spent their
Days Grooming themselves incessantly for something to do; no longer gaining the scars
that come with a struggle and an actual fight for life that means defending one's territory;
thereby, literally increasing the Neuro-Chemical Serotonin in perceived position in the Social
Hierarchy reaching for the Ladder to the top; for fun pun Lobster Claws Fully extended for the
fight for life too. Anyway, in the Utopian Rat Experiment, the females started pair bonding
aggressively and no longer did the Utopian Rat Group seek to reproduce. The result
of that was eventual extinction. True; one can see similar analogies in so-called
Modern Human Cultures that continue to Move away from our basic Social Animal
Classically Evolved Human Nature where we become more the Tools we create in
our lives of Instant Utopian-like Gratification. Meanwhile; just like
the Rat who is our 75 Million Years-old or so ancestor; Intermittent
Gratification through the struggle of life is what we too are still evolved to do.
We lose our stance; we lose our position in the Hierarchy when we lose what we are
still evolved to do through a Third of a Billion Years or so of Natural Classical Evolution now.
There is no escaping Nature but there is working with Nature if one understands one is a part of
Nature and not really any more important in the scheme of life than the Lobsters we boil for Dinner now.
A Tough 'Green Pill' to swallow; but if successfully swallowed in enough Adaptation in Intermittent Reinforcements
now in life to Accommodate Challenge; even if, we are the ones to Manufacture that Challenge to escape the trap
of Constant Instant Gratification. Anyway, the consequences are still better NeuroChemical and NeuroHormonal
Balance in Ways of Emotional Regulation and Sensory Integration to achieve Nirvana and Bliss and the Kingdom
of Heaven within. True though, True Utopia is a life still of Intermittent Reinforcement; in other words; there is
No Free Trip to Heaven. Of course, I am Retired now and Financially Independent, so I have the ability to
create my own Social Roles without bowing down to anyone now. I go around the Metro Area making
Lobster poses; yes, standing upright; to the dismay of some of the Local Folks but more of a way
of Hooray's by the Opposite Gender as such. Nope; no Group Identity for me; A Force
of one Loving Lobster, I've come to be. So, Understand one's place in Nature as
Evolved to be and Co-Create the life you want with Relative Free Will
at the top of the Self-Actualizing Capstone of the Pyramid
of Flesh and Blood now. Works for me; and no, I do not
agree with everything Jordan Peterson Brings to the
Table as he has a whole lot of Science but is missing
just a tad bit of common sense, in my opinion;
For we are way way too much of a me me Society
to go the way of Group Identity now. Unless, one is going to
the Local Church as such. That too is losing its hold; and for those who
can handle the Finance as such it's the best time in the History of Humankind
to be a Pioneer of one per SmART Ape Act of get all Together, now; Works for me.
If i had to still work for bucks; much much harder it would be; in some cases depending
on where one lands to work, almost literally impossible for this Heaven thingy to come true now.
Anyway, thanks for sharing and Human Potential is a game of never enough now for me totally satisfied as
such in Emotional Regulation and Sensory Integration with Moving Meditation; Free Verse Writing Meditation;
And the Occasional Yoga Selfie Lobster Pose to enforce my position in the Community I live in; while it strikes a note
deep, deep, deep within that some folks may not quite be able to put their Lobster Claws on; hehe. True;
the Hierarchy is a real deal as there is no escaping our Nature and Neurochemicals and Neurohormones
and the such as that now. True though, too; we humans have a Secret Weapon that Rats and Lobsters
do not have. We have Imagination and Tools of Reason with the Greatest Weapons of all that
are both Creativity and Love in Fearless ways of up now too; the struggle is real and so
is the success; a Creative one with Imagination in alignment with our Human
Nature and the rest of Nature it can and will be; depending on the individual.
Those are the days
'we' live in; these now; the
best of days of Never enough
Human Potential to do next. Never Boring;
Always moving forward to the next step that is now;
up the ladder of Success within; Fallen Angel
Status no longer an issue for those who
would bring those who can climb the
ladder higher in individual
original Creativity now;
i.e. the Kingdom
of
Heaven
within Realized
forevermore now;
as an ongoing practice, as such..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQWZK5U233s

Have a nice day; a thrill a minute in a struggle; if you like too; heHe;
As Alway LiGht comes from dARk and DArk Returns to LiGHt and
the Stairway to Heaven is Shadow lit by LiGHT;
yes; a Dance
and Song
Helps too; all
original as such too..

Meanwhile; I'm getting late for a date
with about 300 or so College Age folks to dance.
Struggle it is; but the rewards are endless fun in Challenge;
196th Week of Doing that tonight it also is; Just another one of my Special Interests; long;
more as such and never enough. 1.18.18; 10:28 PM Central Standard Time; so far now..

Sounds like a modern rehash of Heraclitus.


This is where I'd say I'm not quite sure of that - ie. there might be both a distinction and a meaningful difference, with the question of consciousness, rather than just a philosophical musing. If what we were experiencing as consciousness were the atoms, that would have one set of consequences. If we were the motion between them (for an easy example think the firing of neurotransmitters), then that has another set of consequences. Stranger still if we're something like the chaining of probability fields or something like probability fields creating joint optioning engines - that has yet another set of consequences. Even if it looks like bare atoms it seems like there's a lot of possibility in they ways which things can twine together and more fluid or energetic language may not even be mistaken if it's above the atomic level in that emergence seems to have its own ingredients of flow baked in.


One thing you'll definitely want to pay close attention to in Bret's interview on Waking Up 109 is he talks about the elevation of the genetic and evolutionary dialog - that in a way what was a physical battle is increasingly sublimating upward into the kinds of global communications we have. I'd agree with the postmodernists that it's a dizzying picture but I do think Jordan Peterson exposes one of the areas of containment that they miss - ie. natural consequence which on its own terms isn't open to a whole lot of philosophy, particularly when one's actively engaged in the throws of it.

One of the biggest challenges I think of the 21st century is coming to terms with just what it is we are as well as what our components are, how our base-level components might control us, and even to what extent our base level components move and even dominate society with or without our knowing or even permission. I think of that especially considering that there are goals from lower strata of a person's consciousness which they're not aware of but those goals actually do move in a certain kind of harmony with similar kinds of behavior from other people and those impulses or motives often well up to the surface as the kinds of behavior that the people themselves partaking in them don't understand but - quite often - are so good at backward rationalizing that they rather cleverly hide from themselves that it's even happening.

Part of my own experience with that last bit was how my own childhood, with PDD-NOS, worked. People here often joke about the hive mind with 'NT's' and there might, by my estimate, be a mapping of that to what's classified in the Big 5 as agreeableness. Whatever's going on with that there seems to be a very strong nonverbal chain of communication that gets tuned over people's lifetimes and among that group of people it even seems to act like a collective immune system where they can agree to like or dislike a person almost in unison, for reasons they don't fully understand (or again are shielded from seeing the ugly details of), and our society itself seems to be a mesh of disparate organs and networks laced together and it almost reminds me in some ways of the interactions of tree root systems. Whatever it is though it seems to be one of many things that's governed by parts of our brains we have little access to (save those of us who meditate or trip) and it's one very deep - and truthfully quite dark/scary - layer when one thinks of all the ways people really attempt to kill one another or mark another person permanently with the body-language of an outcast and it gets passed off as jest, personality conflict, or whatever else.

Really what I think the postmodernists were attempting to do - in a sort of half-baked way perhaps - is wean themselves onto thinking in this level of complexity and leaving the more classical ways of thinking such as religious doctrine, Newtonian worldviews, or classical versions of political theory, but as they voyaged out there it's like they got dazzled and mistook the tenuousness of it for there being no 'there' there. I don't think that's quite the case for a lot of the reasons I mentioned above (and reasons that I think Bret Weinstein articulates well) - ie. that for as 'dark-web' like as these social subsystems may be there's clearly something quite tangible and predictable in how the resulting game theory plays itself out. It also does suggest that while a lot of people wouldn't buy into the idea of a collective unconscious in the 'we are all one' sense there seems to at least be a fair amount of evidence that if so much of human behavior isn't even understood by us it's not surprising that some pretty explosive patterns could form below the subfloor of our awareness.

Jesus christ that woman is completely ret*d.. She hardly listens to jordans answers and looks for every possible to opportunity to misrepresent or misinterpret what he is saying. The leaps and assumptions she is making aren't even coherent with the context??

I think if she gets grilled by her supervisors it'll be because of just how badly and flagrantly she did it. When you're trying to spin or game someone you've gotta blend your categories, bate-and-switch, or shift goalposts subtly enough that the bulk of the audience can't tell your doing it and thinks your making sense. From the first minute of the interview it seemed like it wasn't even a failure to keep and more like her either completely forgetting that or even not knowing the ropes to begin with.

Newman provided a perfect example of the entitlement of the modern feminist who demands all of the rewards of success sans the overcoming of adversity which is required to earn it.

Her position can best be expressed using the following question:

"Why should a woman have to jump over the same hurdles as men do in order to get to the top?".

Peterson, meanwhile, is aware that people are individuals rather than statistics - which should come as no surprise considering his chosen field of expertise. He also demonstrated a degree of empathy which was notably lacking in Newman, framing his responses in a manner which spoke to Newman as an individual and to her personal desires and needs, as well as to her ego.

She doesn't seem to know how the world works and she doesn't seem to want to know. The later is particularly dangerous.

I'm not sure that's true. She comes across as reasonably intelligent. I suspect the role she plays in front of the cameras is something of a facade.

Best case scenario is she was playing devils advocate but if she did that she went so far in lampooning the worldview that it would almost take an Ann Coulter or Lauren Southern to push it to that extreme. If that were the case I think, for as many Youtube videos as I see commenting on this, that there'd be an equal number of videos talking about this as a pro-conservative publicity stunt in the way that many people cracked down on the spoof feminist research paper a year ago that got sent into a pay-to-play journal.

She's working for a channel which has made of itself the Progressive mouthpiece in British media. It's quite possible that she's uncritically accepted the ideology that she represents, but it's equally plausible that she's simply blowing with the wind.

It's interesting to see the different responses to that interview in different cultural and ideological spheres of the internet. I've found a similar argument cropping repeatedly up across various feminist or pro-feminist, UK-centric discussion boards. They suggest that JP doesn't understand feminism but that he makes a lot of valid points, especially regarding free speech. There's a strong intimation that Newman was out of her depth, or that she isn't an especially good advocate. Aside from the obvious fallacy regarding Peterson's depth of knowledge of their position being little more than an ideological defence mechanism, it's actually quite pleasing to see feminists (UK based ones, at least) championing free speech and the right (inevitability even) to offend.

Outside those very specific realms, the interview has been near-universally described as "catastrophic".

So in other words her bosses likely might be dumb enough to appreciate how she handled it. Good to know.


Hopefully, for those taking that seriously as a lesson learned, that will sink in, bake into their identity, and as it does they'll equally be forced to contend with beliefs they've had which push against that in more subtle ways.

Ideally, if enough people paid attention to it, that might also be something of a watershed in this kind of journalism - ie. where they start confronting the reality that the internet just has too many facts available, that people who want to think critically can't be kept down, and that there's a growing rank in their audience who can spot and deconstruct this stuff from a mile away.

What she did is extremely old-hat and I think her cohort might begin to realize that.

This looks like the first rehash interview with Jordan regarding how the interview went and the subsequent News Channel 4 fallout. I'm maybe a little over a half hour in and he's stated, several times, that he's been in contact with News Channel 4 and also his publisher because he'd like to set up a second interview to if possible resolve the fallout - mainly that he's deeply concerned with the way the media is handling it, considers it really unhealthy, and wants the thing to end on a more conciliatory note. It's a really good idea, just that if they knew what they were doing to begin with they wouldn't allow it because it would be a victory of human decency at the direct loss of political ideology.

"So what you're saying is..."

"No."