If Mort Divine ruled the world

[Dak]

So two issues: How is Peterson listening when he's talking, and he is "appealing to inadequecies".

First listening vs talking: This reminds me of criticism I've gotten here on at least a couple of occasions: Based on my comments on this board I must be a shitty therapist. Therapy doesn't look like posting on a message board, and no one here is my client. Therapy also doesn't look like public speaking. I can tell you right now that the overwhelming majority of paid therapy time is the client talking. A good therapist is good at listening and eliciting more talking in the right direction with minimal comments. What you get in Peterson's public speaking/book is the distillation of thousands of hours of listening with cognitive and behavioral therapy responses. Tolstoy might have been right about unhappy families, but unhappy people are often unhappy in similar ways. That's part of the reason general therapy techniques work and how Peterson can have the connection with a mass audience as if he's been listening to them for hours. However, the catch to it is plenty of therapists can be decent in a normal clinical setting and not have the mass effect Peterson has. I think SA might be right as to why that is.

- Side note about jargon- notice he swerves into jargon were he isn't an expert.

Second issue: Appealing to indequecies in young men. I see this critique a lot and it's patently untrue. Appealing to the inadequecy would be telling people "it's not your fault", "your inadequecy is actually a strength", etc. That's the exact opposite of Peterson's message: Make your bed, clean your room; you're not as good as you could be and you know it.

 

[Einherjar86]

A good therapist is good at listening and eliciting more talking in the right direction with minimal comments. What you get in Peterson's public speaking/book is the distillation of thousands of hours of listening with cognitive and behavioral therapy responses.

This is fair and probably true, as Freud did the same thing (just not on YouTube).

Second issue: Appealing to indequecies in young men. I see this critique a lot and it's patently untrue. Appealing to the inadequecy would be telling people "it's not your fault", "your inadequecy is actually a strength", etc. That's the exact opposite of Peterson's message: Make your bed, clean your room; you're not as good as you could be and you know it.

This is also fair given that my comment was brusque and unexplained. For what it's worth, I don't think he appeals to the perceived inadequacies of young men. I think some of his comments and some of his writings do, and I'm even willing to believe he doesn't intend it that way. The problem is that they still do, mainly because he exhibits very little consideration for what he actually says, even if takes great care in figuring out what he means.

 

[Dak]

This is also fair given that my comment was brusque and unexplained. For what it's worth, I don't think he appeals to the perceived inadequacies of young men. I think some of his comments and some of his writings do, and I'm even willing to believe he doesn't intend it that way. The problem is that they still do, mainly because he exhibits very little consideration for what he actually says, even if takes great care in figuring out what he means.

If there's a place where Peterson is "appealing to inadequecies", it's related to the disdain for "neomarxist postmodernists", and it's the dismissal of "white privilege". How this ties into his main audience is that you have young men (probably mostly white) not doing well in any number of ways for any number of reasons (some self-inflicted, some not), and stacked on top of that is their "privilege" being thrown in their faces in equal measure with derision ("YOU'RE A WHITE MALE!"). So you have this "prophet" or "fatherly" figure telling them A. that they aren't doing well for x reasons, some of which includes being a point of liberal derision, the disqualifying of male traits, etc (this counts as the "listening") B. That they have permission to succeed....but that it's up to them to do it. It's the "A" portion that is that "appealing to them" portion. Now, I would not be surprised if a substantial number stop at that, or at least don't go much farther. But you can't really get to B if A is still a problem, so Peterson can't just ignore it.

 

[Dak]

http://www.isegoria.net/2018/03/any-study-of-gun-violence-should-include-how-guns-save-lives/

The numbers of defensive gun uses (DGUs) each year is controversial. But one studyordered by the CDC and conducted by The National Academies’ Institute of Medicine and National Research Council reported that, “Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence”:

Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.
.........................
one recent Washington Post story reported that, “For every criminal killed in self-defense, 34 innocent people die”:

In 2012, there were 8,855 criminal gun homicides in the FBI’s homicide database, but only 258 gun killings by private citizens that were deemed justifiable, which the FBI defines as “the killing of a felon, during the commission of a felony, by a private citizen.” That works out to one justifiable gun death for every 34 unjustifiable gun deaths.

However, this comparison can be misleading. An armed civilian does not have to kill the criminal in order to save an innocent life. As the National Research Council notes, “[E]ffective defensive gun use need not ever lead the perpetrator to be wounded or killed. Rather, to assess the benefits of self-defense, one needs to measure crime and injury averted. The particular outcome of an offender is of little relevance.”

 

[Dak]

Not to beat the Peterson topic into the ground, but just found a new blogger/writer and he had this take, as well as a link to a condensed, journal publication of Peterson's perspective:

http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com

Robinson's attack on Peterson is much more damaging, precisely because it attacks Peterson's ideas directly instead of diverting itself with Peterson's character or the excesses of his devotees. His critique takes advantage of another one of Peterson's weaknesses: a tendency to write in convoluted and baroque academic prose. This weakness is hardly unique to Peterson, but it makes it easy for Robinson to pick out page-long paragraphs full of the sort of fluff that other writers would dispatch in half a sentence or so. To claim that this sort of academic fluff is all there is to Peterson's work is not fair. There is substance behind Peterson's writing; Peterson simply has no experience laying it out concisely. When concision is compelled out of Peterson, the strength of his underlying ideas is far more apparent. The best presentation I have seen of these ideas is a 13 page precis Peterson wrote for The Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, and Conflict. The encyclopedia's editor deserves great praise: he was able to squeeze unusual lucidity from Peterson in a very small number of pages. I do not think an honest observer can read them and then conclude he is pedaling mere fluff.

 

[rms]

i'm glad you've come full circle to peterson lacking brevity within just a few posts

maybe ill read that 13 page thing when sometime soon

 

[Dak]

i'm glad you've come full circle to peterson lacking brevity within just a few posts

maybe ill read that 13 page thing when sometime soon

I've never said he had brevity as a skill. I said he doesn't use a ton of jargon. If you wanted jargon you could read his pulished personality research.

 

[Dak]

The gaslighting of gunowners:

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/gaslighting-no-one-is-saying-that-gun-control/

 

[Dak]

Rep NC!

He's only half-right about the AR-15 though.

 

[rms]

why the hell did he say AR 15's shoot 22's?

 

[Dak]

why the hell did he say AR 15's shoot 22's?

Well, they do...... almost.

 

[rms]

dude said it wasn't a good weapon for protection because it shot 22's what is going on with that dude?

and why you wasting time backing people's arguments centered around "but i'm a good citizen, why should my rights be infringed?"

 

[Dak]

Because regardless of "rights", attacks on gun ownership inherently strip the law abiding, and no one ever blames the perpetrator. Like...ever. It's "white supremacy" or "gun culture" or "racism" or anything but the shooter, and no laws are suggested which actually consider contingent chains beyond "can't have guns shooting without guns". Fuckin cro-magnon rationale at work. Politicians and activists are philistines.

 

[rms]

http://wakingup.libsyn.com/123-identity-and-reality

Jeez @ Ezra

 

[Dak]

http://wakingup.libsyn.com/123-identity-and-reality

Jeez @ Ezra

Is there a particular time point to cut to?

 

[rms]

I think the beginning is quite clear but the whole thing is embarrassing him for, from my perspective. It's really just a shitshow more than anything of value, so if you're anti-Ezra before there's no need to listen

 

[Dak]

I think the beginning is quite clear but the whole thing is embarrassing him for, from my perspective. It's really just a shitshow more than anything of value, so if you're anti-Ezra before there's no need to listen

The posted the transcript so reading it now. Harris highlighted the same quote I did for Ein in pointing out Klein's piece:

I think we have to go in to this issue of, you just claimed you didn’t call us racist, right? You didn’t use the word racist, I’ll grant you that. You used the racialist, which you know most people will read as racist. But even if that is an adequate way to split the difference, everything else you said imputed, if not an utter racial bias and a commitment to some kind of white superiority, you say again and again that, here’s a quote from your article. This is actually the subtitle of the article. I called the podcast with Murray “Forbidden Knowledge.” You said, “it isn’t forbidden knowledge, it’s American’s most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality.” This is what, we’re shilling for bigotry and racial inequality.

I think the thing that irritates me most about Klein (besides many other things), is that he strikes me as the sort of person who will refer to himself as "a white guy" (like in this podcast)...and then pull the antisemitism card as soon as it suits him. I haven't looked to see if he has done it before but it wouldn't surprise me if it has or does happen.

Probably the only thing Klein had right from the whole piece was that Harris is quick to take offense and not quick to recognize when he is giving it. Which, incidentally, has nothing to do with Klein's actual position. Klein repeatedly used Murray's opposition to the welfare state as evidence of racism. This is piss-poor logic. He also threw out random "inequality" factoids with no qualifiers or further exposition.

What it continuously boils down to for Klein is the welfare state and this fantasy that whites as a group have it amazing (but that at the same time we can't judge groups on group characterics!):

What is interesting about the move Murray makes, and this is the thing that I call out in my piece and have talked about a bit, is that what Murray is intent on showing is that genetic or environmental, it can’t be changed, it’s immutable.

He says, “There is this notion” — this was in your podcast — “there is this notion that if traits were genetically determined that’s bad and if they’re environmentally determined that’s good, because we can do something about them if they’re environmental. If there’s one lesson that we’ve learned from the last 70 years of social policy, it is that changing environments in ways that produce measurable results is really, really hard. We actually don’t know how to do it, no matter how much money we spend.”

If you go read both the original and the second Vox pieces, they are primarily about this claim. They are primarily about the claim that we cannot change these outcomes. They are primarily about the claim that if you move people into adoption into high-income families, they have a 12 to 18 point IQ change. There is tons and tons of evidence — now we’re getting into my world again — in the realm of social policy, of not just effects from social policy on one generation, but multi-generational effects from things like Medicaid and so on.

One place where I think this is important is that, a lot of the debate here and the reason people care about it, is that if you’re saying things are immutable, often people say they’re immutable because they’re genetic. Murray actually says they’re immutable really no matter what.

If you say they’re immutable, that’s actually a way — and this is what Murray does, again explicitly and repeatedly both on your show and in other places — is say that because they’re immutable, that really means that this is not on us. This is not on us, white America, or America broadly, and we don’t have to kind feel so bad. We can embrace the politics of difference. We can begin removing some of these social supports. Don’t need to have as much affirmative action. Don’t need this employment nondiscrimination stuff. We can cut the size of the social welfare state.

I'd love to know what evidence he has. It seems like all we have is evidence that the inequalities persist (which is ironically the evidence Klein et al will use to demand more spending and villify those advocating different policies!). The broad poverty rate hasn't appreciably fallen since "The Great Society" policies were instituted (ironically my link somehow claims that 1-3% in ~50 years is progress! But won't show the graph showing massive, shorter improvements prior), black homeownership, unemployment, and incarceration hasn't budged, and the number of black single mother homes exploded.

https://www.cbpp.org/blog/poverty-h...s-but-official-poverty-measure-masks-progress
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-no-progress-african-americans-20180226-story.html
https://www.city-journal.org/html/black-family-40-years-lies-12872.html

The biggest lie Klein told the whole time was the following:

I think a conversation that included more African-American voices and more people who have specialization in the history of race in America, in the history of these ideas in America, in the history of how these ideas and social policy in America interact, would lead to a better, more fruitful, more, as you put it, adult, and also a more constructive, debate.

He most certainly doesn't mean a Sowell or Walter Williams. He means [insert generic critical theory/marxist sociologist].

Harris brings up, not a new point, but uses his Semitism to good effect here, and Klein completely shits the bed in response:

You have the fact that — this is actually in Reich’s recent book, of which that op-ed was a crib — the finalist in the 100-meter dash in the Olympics, the male finalist, every single finalist since 1980 has been of West African descent, right? That does not appear to be an accident, and it doesn’t matter what country they came from. It does not appear to be best explained by environment. There’s a very similar story that it can be told about East Africans with respect to the marathon. There’s this shocking disparity in this particular type of athletic ability that is segregated in this way based on population ancestry. It happens to be a great ability, and it’s all good for those sprinters.

But imagine if you and I as Jews decided to worry that maybe there was some underlying anti-Semitism that kept Jews out of the finals of the 100-meter dash in the Olympics. Do you think there is a Jew on earth who thinks that? I would doubt it, but it’s certainly possible to think.
.............................
If you go looking for bigotry as your explanation for every difference you see — you can read about this in Reich’s book — if you have populations that have their means slightly different genetically, 80 percent of a standard deviation difference, you’re going to see massive difference in the tail ends of the distribution, where you could have 100-fold difference in the numbers of individuals who excel at the 99.99 percent level. This is just something you will see by virtue of statistics.

What does Klein respond with?

I do think this is a good place to close, because I do think this is our bedrock disagreement. I think you look at me, you look at the folks who you see as engaging in identity politics, which is something other people do, but not you, and you see tribalism.

You see on my part a social justice warrior tribalism of some sort or another, someone who is looking for evidence of racism and bigotry. I look at our society, and I see society that, even now, on every study we run, shows huge, huge, huge racial bias. I mean I look at a study done just a couple of years ago, showing that if you send employers a resume and everything is equal except for the name, one name is African American-coded and another name is European-coded, you get 50 percent fewer call backs the African-Americans.

I look at evidence of it, when African-Americans go into the hospital, they do not get treatment for pain at the same rates as white Americans, because doctors do not believe them. They think they’re trying to scam the drugs or something.

I see us a society that is not 100 years or 1,000 years or 10,000 years away from a long, long, long legacy of not just racism, but violence and oppression of the worst kind, a society where we did things that even now to just go through them, it chills you. But that was 50 years ago. Some of it still goes on today.

Violence and oppression of the worst kind 50 years ago. Is Klein a Holocaust denier? But look at what he does here. Does he respond? Nope, no argument to counter, so he dips out with an red herring and a couple more factoids. This is why he's a journalist. Just a better than average wordsmith with no other talents.

 

[rms]

I'd love to know what evidence he has.

this claim was backed by one study, I think he claimed was Flynn's, that showed adopted minority families saw an increase of 12-18 IQ points

What does Klein respond with?

that's the whole podcast and what I sensed in the emails. Klein never really answers anythings and just tries to call Harris an amateur psychologist. It's so strange that Harris never just went all out on him (gave up around an hour and a half)

 

[Einherjar86]

Klein is doing Harris and Murray a courtesy by saying "racialist" instead of "racist." He knows that "racist" carries connotations of intentionality and bigotry (e.g. "I don't like black people"). "Racialist," by contrast, signals the unintentional and entirely historical dimensions of Harris's and Murray's comments.

Also, I'm sure Klein would love to have a conversation that featured Sowell. He would also probably prefer that it featured Henry Louis Gates, John McWhorter, and Cornell West. In fact, a conversation comprised mostly of black intellectuals is probably the ideal.

Harris's comment about anti-semitism is confusing. Sheer physical performance necessitates a very different kind of endurance test than intellectual performance. A test of mental performance, or intelligence, cannot limit itself to the parameters of a particular task; intelligence can be assessed by the questioning of cognitive tasks, since questioning is itself a cognitive task.

The same can't be said for physical tasks; questioning the parameters of the hundred-meter dash doesn't qualify as a test of physical endurance.

I actually think Harris's anti-semitism comment is pretty damn condescending, when you really consider what he's saying.

 

[rms]

Harris's comment about anti-semitism is confusing. Sheer physical performance necessitates a very different kind of endurance test than intellectual performance.

I think you're being too specific with the general claim here. Some people are born better sprinters than long distance running. Some people are born better doing mathematics than writing poetry.

Haven't wasted my time with an IQ test since i was middle school or something but last I remember it was more general 'questions' or 'tasks' which would seem to remove (or aims to remove) contextual learning.

did you listen to Harris' podcast that is mentioned in this one with the Harvard economics prof?