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techstepgenr8tion
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05 Jul 2020, 3:43 pm

Bradleigh wrote:
Thus why I won't watch the video of this topic, and only comment on what I have seen before. I think that Jordan Peterson is really good at making himself sound like a reasonable figure of authority, a mix of his tone of voice that he does not seem to raise while he keeps in control everything he say sound deliberate, right as he puts in something a little dangerous.

This is probably why I as well have to watch what I say to who on here, Facebook, or anywhere else. There are plenty of people who don't trust their own capacity for sorting out details, operate on heuristics or the wisdom of crowds, and such signals that a person is good at persuasion actually tends to shut down conversation because the person in question then sees the skillful communicator as someone who could potentially convince them of just about anything without it having any truth to it.

That filter of describing someone as 'sounding reasonable' as an autonomous element that anyone can pick up and use equally from an actual reasonable person out to a sociopath. This is where admittedly I have trouble empathizing or relating to a lot of people, ie. I find that whatever fears I could have of someone's capacities for locution can be put to rest by listening to both the content of what they say and, in the age of the internet, a pretty lengthy record of their merits and demerits. It's part of why slander and libel generally don't close doors for me, I can read the 'this person is awful' articles and quite often figure out that those articles are coming from a set of worldview memes that feel like they're under attack and, like any other memetic structure or anything else in nature, survival is survival whether right or wrong.

Eric Weinstein, when he or he and Bret were being interviewed by Dave Rubin and Eric was describing his initial reactions to Jordan Peterson, made a good observation that Peterson would say a lot of things that seemed to make a unique sort of sense but that he'd frequently hit these 'sour' notes, and I think it's the places where he'd talk about postmodernism and Marxism or say things that sounded off-the-cuff accusitory as if they were talking points (which for a guy who spent decades researching the difference between Soviet and US culture it's more a problem of what seems obvious to him by his analysis and forgetting that other people didn't follow him on his academic journey), interestingly I'm seeing more coming out of people like James Lindsay and other tangent professors that Peterson wasn't completely wrong on that but, when it comes to communicating with people, you can say a true thing in a way in a way that the 'other side' would say it and then it doesn't matter whether it's true or not - it appears that you're using it as tribal heraldry and playing the same game of soccer hooliganism that anyone else does where facts on that side are really just a birds nest of spaghetti code that doesn't have to have internal consistency - it's an identity of a particular group and it's using facts in an evolutionary rather than logical manner.

That's also where careful speech isn't always necessarily manipulative, ie. plenty of people want to get through the tangle of identity trip-wires and evolutionary uses of facts spooled into birds nests because they actually want to examine fundamental shared reality and clear up the straw. Do I think Peterson's been trying to do the later? Largely yes. Do I think he's done it as successfully as he could have? I don't know, but I do see where there are plenty of places where he did damage to his efforts. He was absolutely right that if you say 'new things' and if they need to be said then they're going to be said badly/poorly at first because it's an alpha version of the code and it's code whether or not you want it to be - particularly when most of your audience is looking for what strands of data belong in their own or their group's birds nest and which ones don't, and what you're actually doing is trying to fabricate a whole new birds nest with its own internal logic. What so much of the IDW, especially Bret and Eric Weinstein, seem to be trying to do is build a nest that matches ground-level reality as accurately as possible while being extremely mindful that there are certain load-bearing fictions and myths that we have in our culture that aren't optional, for example the equality of people (ie. you can't trust people decide whose less or more - evolutionary arms races and zero-sum utility of that makes it impossible, this is why people get freaked out these days when someone talks genetics and IQ) as well as rights to freedom, abolition of slavery, etc. and its the attempt to build the most truthful and non-destructively accurate representation of reality that you can, all the while trying to build that representation in such a way that it's far more durable and compatable with our concerns about the future such as being able to take care of the environment, keep global temperatures if not below the 2 degrees C rise than as close to it as possible, and then - probably the most ambitious part of what they want to do - try to figure out how what we know about Darwinian game theory in human communications and interactions can be harnessed in far more pro-social ways than they are right now.

The problem with what we have right now, Darwinian game theory run amok, is that it's essentially the springs flying out of society as our most extreme members lead arms races and multi-polar traps (games / offers other people can't refuse), and these are guaranteed to destroy us if we can't get them in check by some kind of moderating force that's just as self-writing and just as capable of pulling the extremes of achievement or the extremes of ruthlessness back to earth and back to something like universal or near-universal accountability.


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Pepe
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05 Jul 2020, 8:43 pm

vermontsavant wrote:
This guy's theory on "status and dominance" in human society is based on the study of lobsters,enough said.


Have you any idea of how expensive lobsters are? 8O



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05 Jul 2020, 10:01 pm

^^^
Yea, lobster is quite popular in my area


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Biscuitman
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06 Jul 2020, 1:36 am

He is someone who the phrase 'stupid persons idea of a clever person' would seem to apply