One peeve of mine is these sorts of folks complaining about the popularity of people like Jordan Peterson. Sure I agree that Peterson is confused, pseudo-profound, and misogynistic, but maybe if academics churned out more philosophy that spoke to the concerns of real people Peterson would have less of an audience. People like him are popular because academia produces only impenetrable walls of irrelevant jargon.
I think that is a perfectly reasonable and prudent approach (assuming those who are interested can still navigate to it) - this allows these important conversations to take place without disrupting the community mood in the main thread.
In the longer term, I believe strongly that with some effort (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20375985), perhaps HN might one day be the one place where such things could be discussed in an objective manner, and perhaps once we iron out the kinks in how that can be accomplished, the outside world might even be able to learn these skills and we could finally start to discuss these topics in a reasonable manner before time runs out (as seems to be the case with many of them, such as global warming).
Sincere thanks for allowing the discussion to take place.
EDIT: It seems others can't navigate to it from the main thread. Dang, if you read my reply (within the disconnected thread), I hope you can start to see why I believe this phenomenon is an important problem. Society is at a point of impasse on too many important issues. Our technological capabilities have been developing at a parabolic rate, but our cultural and language/communication developments have been largely static.
This imbalance is starting to become an existential threat on several different fronts, and I think it is time that people with "great" power should be starting to consider whether a moral obligation to at least try to do something comes with that power.
"maybe if academics churned out more philosophy that spoke to the concerns of real people Peterson would have less of an audience"
Someone did. His name is Wittgenstein. Folks just don't read him.
Also, real people def experience existential dread. Camus and Sartre are great reads for trying to come to terms with the possibility of infinite (but some infinities are larger than others!) freedom
Real people experience oppression, which is why most of the "postmodern neo-marxists" care so much about stopping it.
Real people experience ethical dilemmas, and would find a lot of utility in exploring the thoughts of Kant, JSM, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Arendt. Out of those, Kant is the only one whose sort of difficult to understand without knowing the jargon. Really this article is about how terrible contemporary French Philosophy given that the useless jargon seems only to be in their works (since Hegel anyway)
Kierkegaard doesn't use academic philosophy jargon, but he came up with his own, and the English translations of his work come off as cryptic and dense.
People don’t want philosophy; if they did then there are plenty of authors from Aristotle through the modern day. Existentialism is basically “how to survive in an arbitrary world that makes no sense”. It’s a fucking guidebook for the modern world built in the years before and after WW2.
People en masse want pop-philosophy that confirms their existing beliefs. Nobody reads JP to become a better person, they do it to feel better about being a shit person.
> Nobody reads JP to become a better person, they do it to feel better about being a shit person
Without wishing to get into yet another discussion about Peterson, I think that's a pretty textbook example of an intellectually dishonest attempt to simply pigeonhole someone you probably don't know all that much about into the "enemies" basket.
I've read and listened to JP to some extent - believe it or not, yes, as part as some kind of greater effort to better myself, as is much of my reading. I agree with some of what he thinks, and disagree with others, but I don't regret the time spent. If that makes me a "shit person" then frankly I think it's your worldview that is the problematic one.
> Nobody reads JP to become a better person, they do it to feel better about being a shit person.
I've just watched an interview with him where he says that, when he's out on the street in basically any city in the world, he's approached roughly once every ten minutes by someone thanking him for the help they got from his lectures and books. In many cases they say that, thanks to JP, they were able to lift themselves from shitty life situation (ex. abusive family, addiction, depression, aimlessness, anger etc.) and turn their lives around. I cannot reconcile that with your comment.
The stance that "the world is arbitrary and makes no sense" is itself far from uncontroversial! Indeed, the very term "modern world" suggests that our world (in contrast with the "pre-modern" one) does derive much of its comparative success from institutions and frameworks that work (at least to some extent) in ways that can be made some sense of and understood fairly well.
>Nobody reads JP to become a better person, they do it to feel better about being a shit person
I contest this, JP is among the many reasons why I've practically 'turbocharged' my life and transformed from a scrawny pretty toxic guy into an assertive, empathetic, can-do and intelligent dad-type guy.
I am assuming this is a sincere question, so I'll give a sincere answer.
Peterson has consistently made two arguments (that come to mind) that cause these accusations:
- his arguments that "dominance hierarchies" naturally favour men, as they are more aggressive, more disposable, more risk-taking and less burdened by the necessities of child-rearing, and are not an invention of "the patriarchy". He supports this argument by pointing out its near-universal equivalent in nature, especially lobsters. These structural realities inevitably hinder women's achievements in the workforce, which he suggests is purely natural.
- He notes that families with two parents are, on the whole, more stable and successful than families with only one, and suggests that society should make it less easy to create so many single-parent families, for example by placing limits on divorce.
Both of these arguments make a, to some, very unwelcome point - that perhaps gains in women's rights have, and will, come at a huge cost to society that is only going to get worse, and that we're a couple of decades into a giant experiment that, for a lot of people, could turn out very badly indeed.
This kind of thing is simply unsayable in today's climate and, not surprisingly, he's public enemy #1 in some circles. That said, I don't think his ideas are merely "misogynistic" and he just hates women. Needless to say, however, some of these ideas have been seized upon by actual misogynists to justify their ludicrous beliefs, which rightly or wrongly has not exactly helped his cause in the eyes of the twitter mob.
For what it's worth, I both agree and disagree. I do think single-parent families are a real problem, and I agree that the necessities of childrearing structurally hold women back from their full career potentials. I don't, however, agree that the solution is to roll back divorce laws, or send women back to the kitchen (not that he said this, but he hasn't said NOT THIS!). Perhaps society can offer (much) more child-raising support. Maybe we need to retreat from the idea of the nuclear family altogether, and raise children in extended families or even communities (there are examples of this in different cultures). We need to do something - but I can't stomach the idea that we can just go back to the "good old days (for some)".
He's right about many things, but he's also curiously stuck in the past, and very boxed-in by his own personal experiences - which has been a double edged sword. We can't simply roll back people's rights in order to solve a problem, whether that problem is real or not! His real blindness is not being able to offer palatable solutions, or to understand why people might not like the ones he has made.
Anyway, that's the (perhaps unfair but anyway highly unsurprising) reason people think he's misogynistic.
> Maybe we need to retreat from the idea of the nuclear family altogether, and raise children in extended families or even communities
I don't think this will work very well. Extended families are one thing, and people can and do make such arrangements - but by and large, it turns out people care more about their kids than their "career potential", and there's nothing wrong with this in principle! The position that women's achievements in the workforce must be exactly equal to men's, and that anything less than that is oppressive, is quite ideological and does not really stand up to scrutiny once you account for these factors.
Aggressiveness is a different matter, though. It's not something that we promote on purpose to keep the women down, it's a consequence of how complex firms and enterprises are structured in the first place. The whole point of firms is that they're like tiny little private governments or fiefdoms, that internally run on the exact same kind of politics as actual governments do! This comes with obvious drawbacks (the primacy of aggressiveness un the workplace is but one of many, many such distortions!), but also has very real benefits - larger firms and enterprises really are better at achieving their goals in many ways. When we say that some things are "natural", this need not mean "actively good" in some absolute sense - it might just be the case that we don't trust that people will manage to do any better!
> I am assuming this is a sincere question, so I'll give a sincere answer.
It is indeed, so thank you. I will do my best to reply as well as you have. Although, it doesn't seem we disagree so I will doing more of a job of clarification of what I think are a few key and important points. (And, please note my disagreement isn't with you, but the initial misogyny claim which was made by someone else.)
> Peterson has consistently made two arguments (that come to mind) that cause these accusations...
He does do those two things. However, what is rarely ever touched on (in misogyny discussions) is whether his theories are actually ~correct observations of reality, as it is.
For example: "These structural realities inevitably hinder women's achievements in the workforce, which he suggests is purely natural."
The precise makeup of the current workforce (at any given time and place), is a result of some form of social evolution. Since men have essentially run the show on planet earth for all of recorded history, and there are observable differences between men and women, it shouldn't be surprising that the workplace might have evolved to favor men. If this is the case, merely observing the fact isn't misogynistic.
I'd argue the very same thing could be said about your second example.
> Both of these arguments make a, to some, very unwelcome point - that perhaps gains in women's rights have, and will, come at a huge cost to society that is only going to get worse, and that we're a couple of decades into a giant experiment that, for a lot of people, could turn out very badly indeed.
This seems perfectly plausible to me, in the current state of society. Could we redesign & improve society to overcome these negative consequences (you point out what seem like fine ideas below)? Maybe. But maybe not. I lean strongly towards the maybe side, but the fact of the matter is, no one knows for sure! Lots of people think they know, but almost no one realizes their beliefs are actually speculation, based on heuristics, memes, and a poor understanding of history and other subjects. (More on this below).
At the very least, we should be trying out lots of things to see what works and what doesn't. It's easy to have the implicit/subconscious/axiomatic belief that "they way things are" is due to some intentional and wise design process, and while I agree great caution should be taken when reordering societal norms, the idea that what we have now is anything near optimal or fair (across multiple dimensions, not just gender) seems highly unlikely.
> I don't, however, agree that the solution is to roll back divorce laws, or send women back to the kitchen (not that he said this, but he hasn't said NOT THIS!).
If we were able to make an anonymous but binding financial wager of sufficient size to justify me going through his hundreds of hours of speech in search of evidence, I think I could offer plenty of evidence to the contrary. Not to win an argument, as is usually the case in such situations, but to demonstrate something fundamentally important. As it is, technically, it is unknown (by you and I) whether he has explicitly stated disagreement with those ideas. This is a hard to see but very important distinction, and is an example of why I keep pounding the drum that epistemology should somehow be part of the HN guidelines. If any diverse community on earth is capable of objective discussion on such matters, HN seems like a prime candidate. I'd like to see us work towards it, because there are a growing number of very serious problems right now that seem to be in a state of impasse. If everyone says "not my problem", how do we expect these issues to ever get resolved?
> Anyway, that's the (perhaps unfair but anyway highly unsurprising) reason people think he's misogynistic.
I believe HN is capable of better. And I don't think it would require nearly as much work as one might think. Once a person understands what is going on, and can see (and admit to) this unintentional behavior in themselves, improving it is a matter of self-discipline and cooperative teamwork. Being in favor of undertaking such an initiative is a matter of opinion, but thinking this is impossible lacks epistemic humility, and is another example of the problem.
