One of my favorite examples of Jordan Peterson stupidity is when he was lecturing about some ancient civilization artwork that showed two serpent creatures creating humanity. He said that because the snakes were drawn in a double helix that this ancient civilization knew about and wanted to represent DNA.
Snakes coil around one another in a double helix when they mate. The snake creatures in the art were just fucking.
Stuff like this is why I will never understand people following him. Like, I get it. It’s the bigotry. And when it comes to that, nothing else matters. I understand it on paper.
But at the same time… why? When he’s constantly wrong, or when they have to constantly lie about the things he says, why keep listening to him? Why are they like this?
Which is a kind of superpower that makes him hard to criticize. Whenever he commits to a fact or something, that’s easy to disprove, and people do it all the time. But, when he just says something about cultural marxism or whatever, it’s so hard to unpack what he’s actually saying that it’s hard to prove he’s wrong.
That lets his followers say that he’s so smart that even the leftist intellectuals can’t take him down. Obviously they don’t understand what he’s saying either, but that doesn’t matter. It lets them adore him as some kind of intellectual hero.
Peterson’s got the act of a public intellectual down pat. He’s never seen without a suit or with a smile, he has a distinguished haircut and a trimmed beard. He shows no sense of humour and uses big sciencey-sounding words.
That lets him have a symbiotic relationship with incels. He makes money selling them things like books, they get to point to a “public intellectual” who’s on their side.
But not in an obvious way like say Ben Shapiro. He does it using words that sound plausibly scientificalish.
I just want someone to say to him “So, they say when you truly understand something, you can break it down so that other people can understand it. So, break down what ‘cultural marxism’ is so that one of these poor young men you worry so much about can understand what you mean”.
I’m sure he’d try to deflect, try to gallop, try something. But, I would bet that a good interviewer, just keeping him focused on those two words, would show he has no idea what he’s talking about.
I don’t think so. Not even wrong is for something where you can understand what they’re saying, but what they’re saying is so nonsensical that it’s not even wrong. Peterson instead uses words that seem like they could belong together but that are borrowed from many different fields to end up with something that sounds like it could plausibly mean something if you could unpack the words he’s using, for example, in a debate he said this: “We lose the metaphorical substrate of our ethos.”
That’s not “not even wrong”, it’s just words that have never been used in that order by anyone else, so they could essentially mean anything. Unless you can get him to explain what he means by those words, you can’t say that he’s wrong. But, he’s using those words to deliberately obfuscate what he’s saying, and if you ask him to explain what it means, he’ll just drive the conversation somewhere else.
A lot of young boys don’t have positive role models and feel lost. I think that, in many ways, we are transitioning as a society and young boys are trying to figure out what it means to be a man.
That said, there are better role models than Peterson. He really seems to think that he has expertise in every area he touches on (and he can’t help but touch everywhere).
Don’t forget the time he wanted to quit benzos to show how masculine he was. His doctors wanted to taper him down so his brain didn’t fry (benzo addiction alters brain chemistry and withdrawal can seriously screw you up or kill you if you stop), but trying to taper off over several years wasn’t manly and powerful. So he flew to Russia and got a few potentially sketchy doctors to put him in a medical coma for a month, and that’s part of why he’s so fucked up now.
Oh, or the part where his daughter convinced him to only ever eat red meat, and literally nothing else.
Even though facing the road to recovery like a man is manlier than an easy band-aid fix where you go nap-nap for a little bit and wake up crazy, but unaddicted.
It did make me raise an eyebrow when Rogan got him to admit he was afraid of the possibility of Heaven being real, due to it also being eternal.
Bruh, if you really don’t believe in something, why fear it? Do you know how scared I am of the possibility that Jason Vorhees is real? Not at all! I’m also not scared of the idea that Outworld is real and will take over our realm if we lose another tournament…
So shouldn’t the concept of Heaven be just as powerless to his sense of fear?
I’m not making a statement or trying to imply anything, I’m not sold on an afterlife of any kind (I think it’s a lovely idea, but, I also think it literally raining chocolate is a lovely idea), I just found that confusing is all.
The risk about being wrong about heaven, although infinitesimally unlikely, is very grave because it is forever - over time, being wrong about this would outweigh every other poor decision you’ve ever made.
And yet, of course, this alone is not a reason to believe in it. Even if you were to do so, which version do you pick to have faith in when there is no hard evidence for any of them?
It’s a bit like Roko’s Basilisk, come to think of it. We can all be quite sure it isn’t real. But (the way it works out in this case), why needlessly take the gamble even if there is no evidence? Infinitely unlikely risk, but with infinitely large consequence.
Even if we assume he somehow made it through the hippy era as a PhD holder without trying it, there’s no way no one has hooked him up in the past ten years.
As an agnostic atheist that favors materialism, I found it to be very fun and exciting to do pretty massive doses of psychedelics, especially ones that frequently spur thoughts of “higher powers.” 2C-E, in particular is known for bringing about thoughts about the divine, and that was a lot of fun (I just played around on Universe Sandbox while I came up, put on some good music, then laid on the floor in a blanket and thought about the universe for a few hours).
God I gotta trip shrooms this weekend, that one time where I saw myself as a squid outside of my body playing with it and being judged by a stream of squids for refusing to “Stop playing with that thing and move on to embrace your truest self, a being beyond physicality, a being that can take any form or shape it wants, something far great than a human being.”
Was awesome…
God I hate being human. I’d demand to be freed from this flesh prison, but I’m not sure there’s anything to actually let out… That I may actually BE the flesh prison.
I feel like I’m in this weird camp of “I Don’t Want To Be An Atheist!”
Not because I fear Hell or anything, I just find the concept of a cold purely material universe where no greater force than Entropy exists scarier than any interpretation of Tartarus!
I feel like I’m in this weird camp of “I Don’t Want To Be An Atheist!”
I don’t think it’s that unusual. Most people are just pretty good at pretending that they believe in a higher power and repressing that fear that maybe this is all we get.
At least personally there was a period of about a year where I went through every apologetics argument I could find in order to try and hang onto the religion I grew up with, followed by another year where I called myself a deist before I confronted the possibility that there was really no evidence for anything more than materialism. I wound up reaching the conclusion that unless we find more evidence, most religions and supernatural beliefs are just wishful thinking. And given my personality, I couldn’t really ignore that conclusion once I got there.
I just find the concept of a cold purely material universe where no greater force than Entropy exists scarier than any interpretation of Tartarus!
It is a bit overwhelming. I tend to fall back on acknowledging that I am part of the universe rather than in opposition to it as a way of confronting that existential dread. Plus, entropy is actually not as scary as it seems at first since space and time are really, really big compared to the scales we perceive and think in. That leaves lots of places where order can appear without violating the second law of thermodynamics, and our species is very unlikely to ever really reach that point where the heat death of the universe affects us personally.
So I just file “the cold indifference of the universe” away in the same area as knowing the sun will one day expand and consume Earth: it’s interesting to know how it all works, a little scary, but very unlikely to ever significantly affect this little pocket of the universe I perceive as my self.
Yeah I just worry he might do what I did and find Gaia. Us earth worshippers are annoying enough without Dawkins among us. Though I’ll acknowledge I already had a foot in the door to pantheism at the time
Eh, I think he’s too stubborn and too good at defining his terms to go that route. I love the idea of Spinoza’s pantheistic view of the universe, but I would never tell the average person that because I don’t want to end up in the same box as Einstein, where just because I use the word “God,” people assume I’m religious.
Personally, I think Dawkins would wind up going the same route as Sagan, defining mystical experiences related to the universe as “numinous” rather than “religious” for precisely that reason: because it’s really obnoxious when people take your words out of context, so stick to using very specific words that don’t carry the baggage of religion.
I don’t know why it is necessary to accuse Dawkins of taking a drug he has stated he hadent taken and them make conjectured comments about his sexual life
If you’re a fan of extreme cringe, Jordan Peterson’s podcast episode with Richard Dawkins is the source for all that. But the double helix thing was probably the most entertaining one.
20 minutes of rambling builds up to Jordan Peterson saying he thinks people can comprehend DNA by moving their consciousness down to the micro level. Dawkins just repeats that back baffled. Then before he can even give a proper response, Peterson says: “I have have taken extremely high doses of psilocybin.”
Because Dawkins shouldn’t get a prize for being merely “Not as insane as the other bigot!”
What’s your understanding? Because he literally had humanitarian awards for basically being the biggest piece of shit ever when it came to women and transpeople, especially if they were both!
Lobster Peterson: “The way these snakes are drawn in resemblance to the structure of DNA, it is evident that ancient civilizations were familiar with the concept of DNA.”
I revere Ancient Egyptians and think that the disbelief (not denial, mind you) of their accomplishments relates to the sophistication of their math and architecture skills. Same as my disbelief at Ancient Rome’s ability to build a massive colosseum. How anyone could build anything massively impressive that still stands today before the Enlightenment astonishes me.
I love that channel. It’s one of the best channels I’ve discovered all year. A perfect balance of entertainment with deep dives into current hot topics. It’s like John Oliver but triple the length and even more sarcasm.
Cody’s showdy is absolutely one of the best things. Even just on how he decided to do a bit where his outfit got more deranged as the world got more chaotic and I don’t think he’s straightened his tie since the 2010s
Really? He’s on the “Ancient Super Humans were Super Geniuses!” pack? I expected him to have a higher level of research than fucking Spirit Science, but naw.
Hell even if they had ladder double helixes the most reasonable explanation would be a laborer did some psychedelics and either blew a priest’s mind with it or decided to incorporate the thing that blew their mind into some detailed work. It’s not difficult structure to imagine while tripping and ancient people sure did trip from time to time.
In general, assume ancient people were on drugs before you assume ancient people had knowledge of the complex structures they didn’t have the tools to observe.
One of my favorite examples of Jordan Peterson stupidity is when he was lecturing about some ancient civilization artwork that showed two serpent creatures creating humanity. He said that because the snakes were drawn in a double helix that this ancient civilization knew about and wanted to represent DNA.
Snakes coil around one another in a double helix when they mate. The snake creatures in the art were just fucking.
Source is at 1:15:39 in this vid: https://youtu.be/hSNWkRw53Jo?si=MPWip62wkrMX_bP7
Stuff like this is why I will never understand people following him. Like, I get it. It’s the bigotry. And when it comes to that, nothing else matters. I understand it on paper.
But at the same time… why? When he’s constantly wrong, or when they have to constantly lie about the things he says, why keep listening to him? Why are they like this?
Because he ‘sounds’ smart, so they latch on to that as their plausible legitimacy as to why what he says must be true.
When he talks/writes, he says a lot of words that communicate nothing. You have no idea what his point is.
Which is a kind of superpower that makes him hard to criticize. Whenever he commits to a fact or something, that’s easy to disprove, and people do it all the time. But, when he just says something about cultural marxism or whatever, it’s so hard to unpack what he’s actually saying that it’s hard to prove he’s wrong.
That lets his followers say that he’s so smart that even the leftist intellectuals can’t take him down. Obviously they don’t understand what he’s saying either, but that doesn’t matter. It lets them adore him as some kind of intellectual hero.
Peterson’s got the act of a public intellectual down pat. He’s never seen without a suit or with a smile, he has a distinguished haircut and a trimmed beard. He shows no sense of humour and uses big sciencey-sounding words.
That lets him have a symbiotic relationship with incels. He makes money selling them things like books, they get to point to a “public intellectual” who’s on their side.
He gish gallops word salads.
But not in an obvious way like say Ben Shapiro. He does it using words that sound plausibly scientificalish.
I just want someone to say to him “So, they say when you truly understand something, you can break it down so that other people can understand it. So, break down what ‘cultural marxism’ is so that one of these poor young men you worry so much about can understand what you mean”.
I’m sure he’d try to deflect, try to gallop, try something. But, I would bet that a good interviewer, just keeping him focused on those two words, would show he has no idea what he’s talking about.
Oh I know this one, it’s called being “Not Even Wrong”
I don’t think so. Not even wrong is for something where you can understand what they’re saying, but what they’re saying is so nonsensical that it’s not even wrong. Peterson instead uses words that seem like they could belong together but that are borrowed from many different fields to end up with something that sounds like it could plausibly mean something if you could unpack the words he’s using, for example, in a debate he said this: “We lose the metaphorical substrate of our ethos.”
That’s not “not even wrong”, it’s just words that have never been used in that order by anyone else, so they could essentially mean anything. Unless you can get him to explain what he means by those words, you can’t say that he’s wrong. But, he’s using those words to deliberately obfuscate what he’s saying, and if you ask him to explain what it means, he’ll just drive the conversation somewhere else.
I can easily deduce from his inability to elaborate, that he has no idea what he means and likes those words together.
I think this is the case with most public “intellectuals”
A lot of young boys don’t have positive role models and feel lost. I think that, in many ways, we are transitioning as a society and young boys are trying to figure out what it means to be a man.
That said, there are better role models than Peterson. He really seems to think that he has expertise in every area he touches on (and he can’t help but touch everywhere).
Don’t forget the time he wanted to quit benzos to show how masculine he was. His doctors wanted to taper him down so his brain didn’t fry (benzo addiction alters brain chemistry and withdrawal can seriously screw you up or kill you if you stop), but trying to taper off over several years wasn’t manly and powerful. So he flew to Russia and got a few potentially sketchy doctors to put him in a medical coma for a month, and that’s part of why he’s so fucked up now.
Oh, or the part where his daughter convinced him to only ever eat red meat, and literally nothing else.
Even though facing the road to recovery like a man is manlier than an easy band-aid fix where you go nap-nap for a little bit and wake up crazy, but unaddicted.
Thanks for connecting the dots for my dumb ass - it was on the tip of my frontal lobe but I just couldn’t quite make it…
I can only assume he played a bit too much Assassin’s Creed before coming up with that one.
Richard Dawkins has a pretty fun comment about that https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NvzMJqkZV74
I just want to note that Dawkins has almost certainly taken LSD.
That might be, but I think he at least claimed on that podcast that he hadn’t.
It did make me raise an eyebrow when Rogan got him to admit he was afraid of the possibility of Heaven being real, due to it also being eternal.
Bruh, if you really don’t believe in something, why fear it? Do you know how scared I am of the possibility that Jason Vorhees is real? Not at all! I’m also not scared of the idea that Outworld is real and will take over our realm if we lose another tournament…
So shouldn’t the concept of Heaven be just as powerless to his sense of fear?
I’m not making a statement or trying to imply anything, I’m not sold on an afterlife of any kind (I think it’s a lovely idea, but, I also think it literally raining chocolate is a lovely idea), I just found that confusing is all.
The risk about being wrong about heaven, although infinitesimally unlikely, is very grave because it is forever - over time, being wrong about this would outweigh every other poor decision you’ve ever made.
And yet, of course, this alone is not a reason to believe in it. Even if you were to do so, which version do you pick to have faith in when there is no hard evidence for any of them?
It’s a bit like Roko’s Basilisk, come to think of it. We can all be quite sure it isn’t real. But (the way it works out in this case), why needlessly take the gamble even if there is no evidence? Infinitely unlikely risk, but with infinitely large consequence.
Praise the Basilisk, please don’t kill me Basilisk
Because claiming you have all the knowledge is even dumber than believing in religion.
Even if we assume he somehow made it through the hippy era as a PhD holder without trying it, there’s no way no one has hooked him up in the past ten years.
Idk would you want to be near him when he trips? He doesn’t seem like a fun person to do a substance that can cause experiences of religion with.
I would absolutely want to be there for Dawkins on acid.
As an agnostic atheist that favors materialism, I found it to be very fun and exciting to do pretty massive doses of psychedelics, especially ones that frequently spur thoughts of “higher powers.” 2C-E, in particular is known for bringing about thoughts about the divine, and that was a lot of fun (I just played around on Universe Sandbox while I came up, put on some good music, then laid on the floor in a blanket and thought about the universe for a few hours).
Dawkins on acid would be a hell of a time
God I gotta trip shrooms this weekend, that one time where I saw myself as a squid outside of my body playing with it and being judged by a stream of squids for refusing to “Stop playing with that thing and move on to embrace your truest self, a being beyond physicality, a being that can take any form or shape it wants, something far great than a human being.”
Was awesome…
God I hate being human. I’d demand to be freed from this flesh prison, but I’m not sure there’s anything to actually let out… That I may actually BE the flesh prison.
I feel like I’m in this weird camp of “I Don’t Want To Be An Atheist!”
Not because I fear Hell or anything, I just find the concept of a cold purely material universe where no greater force than Entropy exists scarier than any interpretation of Tartarus!
Ego death is a hell of a thing…
I don’t think it’s that unusual. Most people are just pretty good at pretending that they believe in a higher power and repressing that fear that maybe this is all we get.
At least personally there was a period of about a year where I went through every apologetics argument I could find in order to try and hang onto the religion I grew up with, followed by another year where I called myself a deist before I confronted the possibility that there was really no evidence for anything more than materialism. I wound up reaching the conclusion that unless we find more evidence, most religions and supernatural beliefs are just wishful thinking. And given my personality, I couldn’t really ignore that conclusion once I got there.
It is a bit overwhelming. I tend to fall back on acknowledging that I am part of the universe rather than in opposition to it as a way of confronting that existential dread. Plus, entropy is actually not as scary as it seems at first since space and time are really, really big compared to the scales we perceive and think in. That leaves lots of places where order can appear without violating the second law of thermodynamics, and our species is very unlikely to ever really reach that point where the heat death of the universe affects us personally.
So I just file “the cold indifference of the universe” away in the same area as knowing the sun will one day expand and consume Earth: it’s interesting to know how it all works, a little scary, but very unlikely to ever significantly affect this little pocket of the universe I perceive as my self.
Yeah I just worry he might do what I did and find Gaia. Us earth worshippers are annoying enough without Dawkins among us. Though I’ll acknowledge I already had a foot in the door to pantheism at the time
I think Dawkins would simply acknowledge it as a hallucination brought on by cultural concepts.
Eh, I think he’s too stubborn and too good at defining his terms to go that route. I love the idea of Spinoza’s pantheistic view of the universe, but I would never tell the average person that because I don’t want to end up in the same box as Einstein, where just because I use the word “God,” people assume I’m religious.
Personally, I think Dawkins would wind up going the same route as Sagan, defining mystical experiences related to the universe as “numinous” rather than “religious” for precisely that reason: because it’s really obnoxious when people take your words out of context, so stick to using very specific words that don’t carry the baggage of religion.
I don’t know why it is necessary to accuse Dawkins of taking a drug he has stated he hadent taken and them make conjectured comments about his sexual life
That’s hilarious! I had no idea there was more to this. Thanks for sharing.
Now I gotta track down Rogan and Peterson talking about Dawkins.
If you’re a fan of extreme cringe, Jordan Peterson’s podcast episode with Richard Dawkins is the source for all that. But the double helix thing was probably the most entertaining one.
Here it is: https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast/id1184022695?i=1000574664589
Holy crap, I just listened to it, it’s a monologue by Peterson. He’s just talking at Dawkins, it’s incredible. Completely oblivious.
20 minutes of rambling builds up to Jordan Peterson saying he thinks people can comprehend DNA by moving their consciousness down to the micro level. Dawkins just repeats that back baffled. Then before he can even give a proper response, Peterson says: “I have have taken extremely high doses of psilocybin.”
The best cringe.
How the fuck do you “move consciousness” and what is the “micro level”,
I understand all of these words, but they are meaningless in this order!
Of course Dawkins and Peterson are rubbing elbows, I mean Peterson is basically the top person on Harris’ speed dial.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/shorts/NvzMJqkZV74
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Isn’t Richard Dawkins a bigger transphobe than Peterson, having literally compared being trans to wearing blackface?
deleted by creator
Because Dawkins shouldn’t get a prize for being merely “Not as insane as the other bigot!”
What’s your understanding? Because he literally had humanitarian awards for basically being the biggest piece of shit ever when it came to women and transpeople, especially if they were both!
Lobster Peterson: “The way these snakes are drawn in resemblance to the structure of DNA, it is evident that ancient civilizations were familiar with the concept of DNA.”
Bro, they fucking
Joke’s on you. The crazy hair guy explained that ancient aliens taught Egyptians how to pyramid dna. Pwned!
It takes a super-advanced alien race to master the forbidden technology of triangles.
I love the hidden racism in those theories. Ancient Egyptians couldn’t possibly have been smart enough to build the pyramids! It must’ve been aliens!
I suppose that’s true for some people.
I revere Ancient Egyptians and think that the disbelief (not denial, mind you) of their accomplishments relates to the sophistication of their math and architecture skills. Same as my disbelief at Ancient Rome’s ability to build a massive colosseum. How anyone could build anything massively impressive that still stands today before the Enlightenment astonishes me.
I love that channel. It’s one of the best channels I’ve discovered all year. A perfect balance of entertainment with deep dives into current hot topics. It’s like John Oliver but triple the length and even more sarcasm.
Cody’s showdy is absolutely one of the best things. Even just on how he decided to do a bit where his outfit got more deranged as the world got more chaotic and I don’t think he’s straightened his tie since the 2010s
Really? He’s on the “Ancient Super Humans were Super Geniuses!” pack? I expected him to have a higher level of research than fucking Spirit Science, but naw.
Hell even if they had ladder double helixes the most reasonable explanation would be a laborer did some psychedelics and either blew a priest’s mind with it or decided to incorporate the thing that blew their mind into some detailed work. It’s not difficult structure to imagine while tripping and ancient people sure did trip from time to time.
In general, assume ancient people were on drugs before you assume ancient people had knowledge of the complex structures they didn’t have the tools to observe.
And that’s an understatement, lol.
Big Joe Rogan energy.
To be fair, the DNA Helix as we understand it is literally based on an acid trip had by some scientists