Jordan Peterson learns that freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences
Jordan Peterson learns that freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences
I’m sharing this article because it changed my perception of Jordan Peterson, and exposed him as intellectually dishonest at best and more likely a fraud artist. Starting with essentially his dissertation. It is a long read but it is incredibly well researched and written:
This video from Some More News really highlights all of Jordans bullshit. It’s long as fuck but I enjoyed every minute of it
It’s a good article. I’ll admit that Jordan Peterson is a good psychologist and knows many words and stories, he can make many people feel smart or dumb through his incantations of nonsense. But that’s it, all the rest of it is bunk.
His essays read like an anthology of writings someone made to finish a book report due tomorrow, after not sleeping for 3 days yet somehow feeling wide awake from the crazed panic.
Also see this screenshot on Firefox Mobile (Est. reading time 63 - 81min). Readers will be well-advised to skim over the copious amount of Jordan Peterson excerpts. Lol.
You haven’t read the linked article, because the author does adress this. They point out that Peterson specifically does hide obvious and banal ideas in his sentences, so that when people finally find some blatant truths in his word salad, it makes it seem like the ideas are much more profound than the platitudes they actually are.
Here is a quote from the article:
The inflating of the obvious into the awe-inspiring is part of why Peterson can operate so successfully in the “self-help” genre. He can give people the most elementary fatherly life-advice (clean your room, stand up straight) while making it sound like Wisdom.
And remember the author actually shows this with numerous in-depth examples from Peterson’s writings. A better editor would do nothing, because Peterson writes like that with intent, the intent being to disguise what a cultish hack he is.
I do my best, when I see an intellectual huckster, to point at it and call it what it is.
Those who are taken in by hucksters have a tendency to dig in about it, and that’s not my business.
The article was a fun read, but for readers who don’t have time, I believe Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” describes the same problem with marginally fewer words. My favorite excerpt, though, really nails exactly the BS your article mentioned:
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one.
The philosopher of language Paul Grice introduced the concept in his pragmatic theory, argued such:
Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.[1]: 45
Oh the irony lol
Pro tip, if you place > on the empty lines you’ll make one continuous quote.
Like
this.
Website. Also Jerboa does the same. I imagine Sync behaves that way because that’s what reddit did.
I actually prefer this version, it allows you to separate quotes without having to put anything in between.
This article is just many many words which boil down to- Jordan sucks because I don’t like his writing style.
Not very compelling.
I completely disagree. Based off of your comment it seems that you did not absorb the article whatsoever.
There are many good examples in the article of Peterson presenting opinion as indisputable fact and obscuring ideas with complex language. Particularly when he is challenged based on those ideas.
Not to mention the examples of how he treats children and others. It is an absolutely wild read. Lengthy but eye-opening.
I think my comment was misunderstood: it was kind of a half-joke about Peterson’s writing.
Everyone learned to make their concept as long as possible in school because they were better-received, and that’s what Peterson is doing: talking in the most convoluted way possible to make his otherwise bland ideas feel smart.
I didn’t mean it to be a jab at the users, but I might’ve written it too ambiguously.
Obviously in most cases it’s better when something you read on the internet is short and concise: my gripe was with a lot of news sites (and, in this case Peterson) who do the exact opposite of that to seem smarter. The “joke” was that it’s a behavior learned in school, where the more you write the better, even if you could’ve expressed the same concept in a much shorter way.
Here is a good short video