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On April 09 2018 07:10 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On April 09 2018 06:46 IgnE wrote:On April 09 2018 05:23 zlefin wrote:On April 09 2018 05:12 IgnE wrote:On April 09 2018 05:02 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On April 09 2018 04:16 IgnE wrote:What is so damning about Peterson for me, is not that he tells stories about the pancake-dragon, it's his completely disingenuous use and abuse of figures like Nietzsche and Orwell. Reading that CurrentAffairs essay previously linked in this thread by kollin, I don't know how any intellectually honest person can read JP's use of Orwell's Wigan Pier and not be completely disillusioned with most of his pronouncements in areas outside of clinical psychology. The Wigar Pier quotation is totally damning in my view, and clearly reveals the unconscious ideological iceberg underneath all of his political opinions (JP's constant insistence that he is against all ideology should put everyone else on notice that he is, in fact, a deeply ideological man). If he can't even deal with Orwell in an intellectually honest manner, imagine how he thinks about all the "postmodern neo-marxists" he's always railing about. I didn't know if this was a philosophical/ psychological reference so I Google that term. That was a mistake. Thanks, Urban Dictionary. Besides his obsession with trying to make outdated and disproven Jungian analysis look credible, his insistence on taking mundane and unremarkable platitudes and making them sound as ridiculously wordy and confusing as possible (which equates to "brilliance" in the minds of his supporters), his victim blaming for sexual harassment in the workplace, his denial of any gender pay discrimination, and the fact that he says he identifies as a Christian yet doesn't believe in Jesus's resurrection story (which I think is a contradiction or at least an inconsistency, no?), didn't he also gain notoriety from refusing to follow university protocols on simply acknowledging gender equity (citing freedom of speech, as if his employers aren't allowed to try to enforce additional policies that are aimed towards fairness and acceptance of students)? The pancake-dragon story is in the currentaffairs essay kollin linked and that I relinked. Robinson transcribed one of Peterson's lectures where he is talking about the dragon of chaos and ropes in a story about a young child eating pancakes. I don't find Peterson to be "ridiculously wordy and confusing." I think that says more about the willingness of critics to appeal to the lowest common denominator than it does about any intended obscurantism on Peterson's part. "Look at this guy using big words, trying to be nuanced, and capitalizing words! What a pedant!" That linked article from current affairs seemed to me to make a pretty good case for peterson being needlessly wordy and confusing. what do you make of the part of the article wherein they claimed such (if you read the full article and remember your thoughts on that part)? I think it's a mostly cheap tactic by a critic who wants to criticize both Peterson's supposed wordiness and his very plain-spoken teaching style. I don't think a "good case" is made that someone is "needlessly wordy" by simply pulling out a detailed paragraph in a 600 page book that is supposed to comprehensively address some topic. Robinson effectively points to it, and says, "there's nothing there, and it's confusing to boot!" I didn't find that paragraph particularly confusing, did you? And I certainly don't understand criticism that on the one hand the man is too wordy and confusing, and on the other hand he's just a demagogic self-help guru speaking in simple sentences that are infinitely interpretable. I much prefer it when someone lays everything out somewhere, like Peterson seems to do in his writings, because it's much easier to point out where he smuggles in baseless assumptions, compared to the relatively "straight-forward" or "common-sense" approaches he takes when speaking, that offer much greater hermeneutical latitude. There's a certain fetish for "clear writing" that relies upon a strong belief in the possibility of unambiguous communication of meaning in the Anglosphere, and it annoys me when people who should know better cynically deploy it as part of a short-sighted rhetorical philistinism. Yes, many people are obsessed with being able to understand others' arguments. How dare they have the expectation that an educator should be clear and concise and straightforward and comprehensible! Peterson's writing reminds me of middle schools students who repeat mundane statements and talk in circles just to reach the page requirement for the English assignment. I wouldn't be surprised if Peterson changes the margins and font sizes too.
I think that judgment says more about you than it does about Peterson. And I know that you wouldn't say that a middle school student should be able to open a mathematics book on set theory and understand it. Many STEM people seem to suffer quite a bit from Dunning-Kruger when it comes to writing and literature. Nobody reads Maps of Meaning because it is Peterson's scholarly attempt to comprehensively tackle a subject. He's not an educator translating his findings to students in that text. He is an expert speaking to people who have already or are willing to put in the work to understand what he's saying. This conflation of his teaching and his scholarly writing is so lazy. I don't even think Peterson is a great writer! There are certainly valid criticisms of his writing style that could be made. But I reject the lazy, anti-intellectual philistinism on display here.
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On April 09 2018 07:00 Slaughter wrote:
Guess you guys aren't a fan of a lot of the top French intellectuals in the past. Their stuff can be a headache to read.
I mean, most "intellectuals" of note are only memorable because of a handful of their contributions. If you were to delve into any of their work in full, most of it would come out as a jumbled stream of consciousness.
(And I'd argue that any philosopher who has a fully coherent message through their entire life is a shitty philosopher)
Which is why a lot of this political science celebrity nonsense is so bizarre to me.
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I'm not sure you understand darkplasmaball's argument lgne. He is comparing Peterson's argument to a middle school student, while you claim that Peterson is an expert speaking to fellow scholars. Surely, then as peterson is an expert speaking to people who have already or are willing to put in the work to understand what he's saying, he should indeed not be at a level that reminds anybody, Darkplasmaball or yours, to be remniscient of middle school students.
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On April 09 2018 07:30 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
I'm not sure you understand darkplasmaball's argument lgne. He is comparing Peterson's argument to a middle school student, while you claim that Peterson is an expert speaking to fellow scholars. Surely, then as peterson is an expert speaking to people who have already or are willing to put in the work to understand what he's saying, he should indeed not be at a level that reminds anybody, Darkplasmaball or yours, to be remniscient of middle school students.
Oh really? How do you reconcile:
Yes, many people are obsessed with being able to understand others' arguments. How dare they have the expectation that an educator should be clear and concise and straightforward and comprehensible!
with:
Peterson's writing reminds me of middle schools students who repeat mundane statements and talk in circles just to reach the page requirement for the English assignment. I wouldn't be surprised if Peterson changes the margins and font sizes too.
Since when is repetition incomprehensible?
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My theory is that DPB is conflating the criticism that Peterson repeats himself (e.g. the string of quotes, each offering a different definition of "meaning") with the criticism that Peterson is just being abstruse in order to appear smarter. I admit, it is hard to conceive of a difficult paragraph full of multisyllabic words reminding anyone of a middle-school paper stretched to meet a page requirement.
Maybe I am misinterpreting DPB, and he doesn't think Peterson is a confusing writer at all. But in that case, I agree with him.
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I am confused. Do you associate; repeating mundane statements and talking in circles to be; clear and concise and straightforward and comprehensible?
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Repeating mundane statements is clear, straightforward, and comprehensible. Use of the word "concise" is obviously due either to confusion on DPB's end about what he is arguing, or a careless imprecision.
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In that case, we can only agree to disagree, as I am currently uninterested in personal semantics. What is your opinion on talking in circles on such?
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I don't think there's anything particularly "middle-school" about talking in circles, but nor do I think that the paragraph quoted at length in the currentaffairs essay features any such thing. Maybe you could point out to me where Peterson does that, as I haven't read Maps of Meaning. My critique is limited to what I consider petty, inaccurate, and ultimately anti-intellectual arguments that appear in some of the online criticism of Peterson.
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On April 09 2018 04:38 farvacola wrote:Fair enough, I suppose I should clarify that by "practically entirely debunked," I'm mostly referring to the notion that some aspect of the lens being criticized performs a sort of destabilizing effect that must be addressed by those who implement said lens in pursuit of making a qualitatively "good" statement about something. Good criticism of folks like Peterson or Dennett or Pinker inevitably relies on exposing the extent to which these thinkers overlook the implications of the limits inherent to the substance of their chosen platform. Peterson, for example, repeatedly makes naked appeals to categorical labels that totally ignore the problems of using the label without some kind of mediating acknowledgement. While this forum has already seen its share of "Marxist" definition disputes, that figures as only one among a host of terms that Peterson uses in service of constructing his perspective, but fails to appropriately situate against a backdrop of meaningful granularity. Instead, and as the words of those most inclined to a defense of Peterson indicate, the terms-without-background tend to figure more as tendentious buzzwords than grounded bases for critical explication. There's also the problem of how susceptible to the thing of criticism Peterson's criticism oftentimes ends up being, particularly when it comes to postmodern concepts. Any sort of implementation of Jungian archetypes that claims to say something generalizable lives and dies on the reliability of the outline of the archetype, which, as it so happens, is precisely the sort of stability that pomo lenses like Lacanian mirrorism or Ricoeur's phenomenological hermeneutics disrupt. Even Jungian individuation falls victim to its inability to account for the extent to which the human psyche metabolizes the shadow of the "self that thinks it sees itself" just as much as the "self" itself. Nevertheless, those inclined to give the archetype the faith it needs to stand on its own two legs needn't acknowledge that inclination without some kind of pomo push, which, of course, is exactly the sort of thing Peterson likes to decry so often  (good Kierkegaard quote, btw)
Did you just heap Peterson together with Dennett and Pinker for no reason other than to namesdrop? What on earth do these people have in common?
E: just to clarify, I mean Dennett and Pinker on the one hand (who may not see eye to eye on many themes of philosophy, but are intellectually honest in their debates),and Peterson on the other, who mumbles some pseudo post-Jungian mumbo-jumbo and just because he has a degree in psychology people think he knows what he's talking about.
Oh, and just in case I googled those three names together and I got 0 hits (well, I got lots of hits on Pinker and Dennett, but 0 on those two + Petersen).
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On April 09 2018 08:01 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On April 09 2018 04:38 farvacola wrote:Fair enough, I suppose I should clarify that by "practically entirely debunked," I'm mostly referring to the notion that some aspect of the lens being criticized performs a sort of destabilizing effect that must be addressed by those who implement said lens in pursuit of making a qualitatively "good" statement about something. Good criticism of folks like Peterson or Dennett or Pinker inevitably relies on exposing the extent to which these thinkers overlook the implications of the limits inherent to the substance of their chosen platform. Peterson, for example, repeatedly makes naked appeals to categorical labels that totally ignore the problems of using the label without some kind of mediating acknowledgement. While this forum has already seen its share of "Marxist" definition disputes, that figures as only one among a host of terms that Peterson uses in service of constructing his perspective, but fails to appropriately situate against a backdrop of meaningful granularity. Instead, and as the words of those most inclined to a defense of Peterson indicate, the terms-without-background tend to figure more as tendentious buzzwords than grounded bases for critical explication. There's also the problem of how susceptible to the thing of criticism Peterson's criticism oftentimes ends up being, particularly when it comes to postmodern concepts. Any sort of implementation of Jungian archetypes that claims to say something generalizable lives and dies on the reliability of the outline of the archetype, which, as it so happens, is precisely the sort of stability that pomo lenses like Lacanian mirrorism or Ricoeur's phenomenological hermeneutics disrupt. Even Jungian individuation falls victim to its inability to account for the extent to which the human psyche metabolizes the shadow of the "self that thinks it sees itself" just as much as the "self" itself. Nevertheless, those inclined to give the archetype the faith it needs to stand on its own two legs needn't acknowledge that inclination without some kind of pomo push, which, of course, is exactly the sort of thing Peterson likes to decry so often (good Kierkegaard quote, btw) Did you just heap Peterson together with Dennett and Pincker for no reason other than to namesdrop? What on earth do these people have in common?
Can't speak as with regards to Dennett but Pinker is another psychologist whose work outside his field has been very iffy at times.
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On April 09 2018 08:03 kollin wrote:Show nested quote +On April 09 2018 08:01 Acrofales wrote:On April 09 2018 04:38 farvacola wrote:Fair enough, I suppose I should clarify that by "practically entirely debunked," I'm mostly referring to the notion that some aspect of the lens being criticized performs a sort of destabilizing effect that must be addressed by those who implement said lens in pursuit of making a qualitatively "good" statement about something. Good criticism of folks like Peterson or Dennett or Pinker inevitably relies on exposing the extent to which these thinkers overlook the implications of the limits inherent to the substance of their chosen platform. Peterson, for example, repeatedly makes naked appeals to categorical labels that totally ignore the problems of using the label without some kind of mediating acknowledgement. While this forum has already seen its share of "Marxist" definition disputes, that figures as only one among a host of terms that Peterson uses in service of constructing his perspective, but fails to appropriately situate against a backdrop of meaningful granularity. Instead, and as the words of those most inclined to a defense of Peterson indicate, the terms-without-background tend to figure more as tendentious buzzwords than grounded bases for critical explication. There's also the problem of how susceptible to the thing of criticism Peterson's criticism oftentimes ends up being, particularly when it comes to postmodern concepts. Any sort of implementation of Jungian archetypes that claims to say something generalizable lives and dies on the reliability of the outline of the archetype, which, as it so happens, is precisely the sort of stability that pomo lenses like Lacanian mirrorism or Ricoeur's phenomenological hermeneutics disrupt. Even Jungian individuation falls victim to its inability to account for the extent to which the human psyche metabolizes the shadow of the "self that thinks it sees itself" just as much as the "self" itself. Nevertheless, those inclined to give the archetype the faith it needs to stand on its own two legs needn't acknowledge that inclination without some kind of pomo push, which, of course, is exactly the sort of thing Peterson likes to decry so often (good Kierkegaard quote, btw) Did you just heap Peterson together with Dennett and Pincker for no reason other than to namesdrop? What on earth do these people have in common? Can't speak as with regards to Dennett but Pinker is another psychologist whose work outside his field has been very iffy at times.
I don't actually know anything about Pinker's work outside of psychology and philosophy of mind. Mind pointing me in the right direction?
E: actually, I saw him on a panel discussion on "the future of AI" with other self-inflated egos like Musk and Kurzweil. It wasn't very interesting.
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Is this still related to US politics at this point?
Feels more like an intellectual pissing contest.
I get people don't always want to talk about what I think is important, but we've had several pages of tourism advice and debating the writing style of a Canadian intellectual now and I'm just not sure what any of this has to do with the thread.
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Rhetoric and style are political. Also it's fun.
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On April 09 2018 08:17 GreenHorizons wrote:
Is this still related to US politics at this point?
Feels more like an intellectual pissing contest.
I get people don't always want to talk about what I think is important, but we've had several pages of tourism advice and debating the writing style of a Canadian intellectual now and I'm just not sure what any of this has to do with the thread.
That Peterson is so widely lauded by the right as their foremost public intellectual while being so intellectually bankrupt is emblematic of a lot of the problems with conservatism that should be blatantly obvious to people by now. It's related to US politics so much as discussion surrounding any of the mediaspheres darlings is.
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On April 09 2018 08:17 GreenHorizons wrote:
Is this still related to US politics at this point?
Feels more like an intellectual pissing contest.
I get people don't always want to talk about what I think is important, but we've had several pages of tourism advice and debating the writing style of a Canadian intellectual now and I'm just not sure what any of this has to do with the thread.
I just kinda thought of it like Sunday chit chat. Politics kinda pauses over the weekend most of the time, but I'm assuming people will be more focused Monday lol
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On April 09 2018 08:01 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On April 09 2018 04:38 farvacola wrote:Fair enough, I suppose I should clarify that by "practically entirely debunked," I'm mostly referring to the notion that some aspect of the lens being criticized performs a sort of destabilizing effect that must be addressed by those who implement said lens in pursuit of making a qualitatively "good" statement about something. Good criticism of folks like Peterson or Dennett or Pinker inevitably relies on exposing the extent to which these thinkers overlook the implications of the limits inherent to the substance of their chosen platform. Peterson, for example, repeatedly makes naked appeals to categorical labels that totally ignore the problems of using the label without some kind of mediating acknowledgement. While this forum has already seen its share of "Marxist" definition disputes, that figures as only one among a host of terms that Peterson uses in service of constructing his perspective, but fails to appropriately situate against a backdrop of meaningful granularity. Instead, and as the words of those most inclined to a defense of Peterson indicate, the terms-without-background tend to figure more as tendentious buzzwords than grounded bases for critical explication. There's also the problem of how susceptible to the thing of criticism Peterson's criticism oftentimes ends up being, particularly when it comes to postmodern concepts. Any sort of implementation of Jungian archetypes that claims to say something generalizable lives and dies on the reliability of the outline of the archetype, which, as it so happens, is precisely the sort of stability that pomo lenses like Lacanian mirrorism or Ricoeur's phenomenological hermeneutics disrupt. Even Jungian individuation falls victim to its inability to account for the extent to which the human psyche metabolizes the shadow of the "self that thinks it sees itself" just as much as the "self" itself. Nevertheless, those inclined to give the archetype the faith it needs to stand on its own two legs needn't acknowledge that inclination without some kind of pomo push, which, of course, is exactly the sort of thing Peterson likes to decry so often (good Kierkegaard quote, btw) Did you just heap Peterson together with Dennett and Pinker for no reason other than to namesdrop? What on earth do these people have in common? E: just to clarify, I mean Dennett and Pinker on the one hand (who may not see eye to eye on many themes of philosophy, but are intellectually honest in their debates),and Peterson on the other, who mumbles some pseudo post-Jungian mumbo-jumbo and just because he has a degree in psychology people think he knows what he's talking about. Oh, and just in case I googled those three names together and I got 0 hits (well, I got lots of hits on Pinker and Dennett, but 0 on those two + Petersen).
Because folks would rather talk about something else, I'll just say that I think my criticism of Peterson can be levied against both Dennett and Pinker when it comes to their play at doing history, the former with an emphasis on religion/morality and the latter philosophy itself. Both have more easily defended backgrounds in their respective specialties than Peterson though, so I can see why you'd take issue.
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On April 09 2018 08:24 IgnE wrote:
Rhetoric and style are political. Also it's fun.
I definitely think both the tourism advice and Peterson/rhetoric and style can be relevant to a US politics thread, but I wasn't reading that. I was reading a rather pedantic discussion where your opponents largely don't even understand your argument (not that I understand the specific texts any better than anyone involved).
You're probably more aware than most that I'm interested in dissecting the way people engage with political ideas they reflexively disagree with in the thread and in society at large, but it doesn't feel like that's where this is heading.
To the more generic aspect of simply being political, then it could just as easily be had in any of the other politics threads that struggle for such post volume.
fwiw I just wanted to nudge the conversation back towards the parts that make it relevant to the US politics thread specifically or at least understand how what seemed like personal beefing on some obscure stuff was relevant. To that end I can see your point.
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On April 09 2018 06:46 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On April 09 2018 05:23 zlefin wrote:On April 09 2018 05:12 IgnE wrote:On April 09 2018 05:02 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On April 09 2018 04:16 IgnE wrote:What is so damning about Peterson for me, is not that he tells stories about the pancake-dragon, it's his completely disingenuous use and abuse of figures like Nietzsche and Orwell. Reading that CurrentAffairs essay previously linked in this thread by kollin, I don't know how any intellectually honest person can read JP's use of Orwell's Wigan Pier and not be completely disillusioned with most of his pronouncements in areas outside of clinical psychology. The Wigar Pier quotation is totally damning in my view, and clearly reveals the unconscious ideological iceberg underneath all of his political opinions (JP's constant insistence that he is against all ideology should put everyone else on notice that he is, in fact, a deeply ideological man). If he can't even deal with Orwell in an intellectually honest manner, imagine how he thinks about all the "postmodern neo-marxists" he's always railing about. I didn't know if this was a philosophical/ psychological reference so I Google that term. That was a mistake. Thanks, Urban Dictionary. Besides his obsession with trying to make outdated and disproven Jungian analysis look credible, his insistence on taking mundane and unremarkable platitudes and making them sound as ridiculously wordy and confusing as possible (which equates to "brilliance" in the minds of his supporters), his victim blaming for sexual harassment in the workplace, his denial of any gender pay discrimination, and the fact that he says he identifies as a Christian yet doesn't believe in Jesus's resurrection story (which I think is a contradiction or at least an inconsistency, no?), didn't he also gain notoriety from refusing to follow university protocols on simply acknowledging gender equity (citing freedom of speech, as if his employers aren't allowed to try to enforce additional policies that are aimed towards fairness and acceptance of students)? The pancake-dragon story is in the currentaffairs essay kollin linked and that I relinked. Robinson transcribed one of Peterson's lectures where he is talking about the dragon of chaos and ropes in a story about a young child eating pancakes. I don't find Peterson to be "ridiculously wordy and confusing." I think that says more about the willingness of critics to appeal to the lowest common denominator than it does about any intended obscurantism on Peterson's part. "Look at this guy using big words, trying to be nuanced, and capitalizing words! What a pedant!" That linked article from current affairs seemed to me to make a pretty good case for peterson being needlessly wordy and confusing. what do you make of the part of the article wherein they claimed such (if you read the full article and remember your thoughts on that part)? I think it's a mostly cheap tactic by a critic who wants to criticize both Peterson's supposed wordiness and his very plain-spoken teaching style. I don't think a "good case" is made that someone is "needlessly wordy" by simply pulling out a detailed paragraph in a 600 page book that is supposed to comprehensively address some topic. Robinson effectively points to it, and says, "there's nothing there, and it's confusing to boot!" I didn't find that paragraph particularly confusing, did you? And I certainly don't understand criticism that on the one hand the man is too wordy and confusing, and on the other hand he's just a demagogic self-help guru speaking in simple sentences that are infinitely interpretable. I much prefer it when someone lays everything out somewhere, like Peterson seems to do in his writings, because it's much easier to point out where he smuggles in baseless assumptions, compared to the relatively "straight-forward" or "common-sense" approaches he takes when speaking, that offer much greater hermeneutical latitude. There's a certain fetish for "clear writing" that relies upon a strong belief in the possibility of unambiguous communication of meaning in the Anglosphere, and it annoys me when people who should know better cynically deploy it as part of a short-sighted rhetorical philistinism.
I think your'e talking about a different section of that very long article than the one I was referring to, and hence we're talking past each other as we're not referrin gto the same things. given the length of that article, and the unimportance of this tangent, it's not worth it to hunt through it to find the exact spot I was talking about.
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On April 09 2018 08:35 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On April 09 2018 08:24 IgnE wrote:
Rhetoric and style are political. Also it's fun. I definitely think both the tourism advice and Peterson/rhetoric and style can be relevant to a US politics thread, but I wasn't reading that. I was reading a rather pedantic discussion where your opponents largely don't even understand your argument (not that I understand the specific texts any better than anyone involved). You're probably more aware than most that I'm interested in dissecting the way people engage with political ideas they reflexively disagree with in the thread and in society at large, but it doesn't feel like that's where this is heading. To the more generic aspect of simply being political, then it could just as easily be had in any of the other politics threads that struggle for such post volume. fwiw I just wanted to nudge the conversation back towards the parts that make it relevant to the US politics thread specifically or at least understand how what seemed like personal beefing on some obscure stuff was relevant. To that end I can see your point.
Anti-intellectualism is one of the biggest problems in this country. Along with technocratic fetishism and misplaced trust in experts.
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EPT
