What are your thoughts on Jordan B. Peterson?

Post Reply New Topic

I have been recomended his channel by a friend. His opinions seem to divide the audience, what is your opinion on him/his work/ his opinions/ the attention hes been getting lately. Im genuinely curious.

According to This Wikipedia Article...

The article mentions his hatred of "Political Correctness"...
My kind of professor!

Definitely look into him. He is a very good hearted and intelligent person. His opinions are based off of intellectual thought and study. He may not always be right(no one is), but he is open enough to learn from others. He is drawing so much attention because a lot of people understand his thoughts are reasonable while people constantly attack him for not being politically correct, the ole Alt-Right label attack form the radical left(SJW Type), not to be mistaken for progressive left. If you don't agree with irrational opinions, you are alt-right even if you are a progressive leftist, lol.

I'd never heard of him - before googling just now

I agree with most things he had to say. I think we need more such intellectuals in the public sphere.

I'd say he's well worth a listen. He has a few eccentricities, but at the very least he usually has an eloquent and interesting analysis to present.

His is teaching personality development according to C.G.Jung, which is basically a religious approach, and not used by scientific approaches.
It doesn't mean it's all wrong, it's just all full of "wisdom" you can find in any religious text. And as with any religious text, you have to pick yourself what you want to keep and what you want to discard.

His cultural criticism is a mixed bag of reasonable arguments (university tuition fees are creating indebted servitude), and unreasonable nonsense (cultural marxism is a very, very vague concept used by alt-rights to vaguely define an enemy), based on really bad sources (Randian philosopher Stephen Hicks, who wrote a very confused and biased randian analysis of postmodernism, and some even more confused things about modern art, which I happen to know something about and can definitively judge: this chap is about as realiable as any angry youtuber ranting about modern art).

so: overall: mixed bag, heavily religiously tainted, mainly confused about things he didn't read/doesn't understand but blames for general dissolution of society.
consume at own risk, or maybe read an actual book, which is probably better.
I recommend Yuval Noah Harari or Robert Sapolsky instead.

I think he's a vain fame-whore who will say anything to stay in the spotlight for another 5 minutes.

I'm rather embarrassed that he teaches in Canada--I'd like to export him, like Bieber. America can have him.

I started off with his 2015 Maps of Meaning on Youtube (he's been generous enough to record his classes - ie. free public auditing since well before he had any clue that he'd get global fame/notoriety) and I think it's a great place to start because the concepts progress from one another quite well.

I think he's done a good job of bringing us back to symbol, the importance of emergent group phenomena, how our subconscious minds shape our behavior not just individually but at the mass level, and he's done a lot as well to shake out a lot of what actually happens when people try to implement utopian schemas (not what they wished for) as well as sorting out human evil, how it happens, and what its precursors are.

A man who due to his profession, is conditioned to only look and attempt to solve issues regarding human behavior, at the individual scale.

Peterson over extends himself into historic, political/sociological topics, where he who only studied psychology isn't qualified to speak with authority about.

Psychologists don't specialize in groups or masses of people. They look at the individual.

Great man!

true. for him, people are resentful, never poor or discriminated against - it's all psychological, on an individual level, never "real". The only "real" things for him are symbolic and abstract ideas.
He explains millions of Germans turning Nazi with Hitler's psychology. That a whole generation grew up in this symbolic order and it was just normal for them, that they were just children of their times, never plays a role for him.

He also never mentions that 2 out of 2 people he admires had temporal lobe epilepsy -personality disorder (Jung, Dostoyevsky etc.) -

Lots of borrowed ideas. He's become popular for introducing people to ideas which have been out there for a while, and expressed better.

You seem to be suggesting that industrial/organizational psych doesn't exist.

Except he's never said that or suggested that people aren't genuinely oppressed and he's often highlighted otherwise. Where do you come up with this stuff?