Jordan Peterson’s Book Pulled from New Zealand Shelves Following Mosque Shooting - Sensationalist Headlines

What the fuck is this thread Jordan Peterson is not an alt-right promoter, he's spoken out against them multiple times He's literally done studies on why people become mass murderers, a lot of his work is centralized around such vicious behaviour in adolescents/teenagers - What the fuck are people trying to pin the blame on him for? The book they banned is an antithesis to people who sit inside all day, festering on sites like 4chan until the point they take their anger and hatred out on society.

The difference is, slander/libel is a direct action between/regarding two people, and you resolve it it by proving factual truth and demonstrable damages in court, which is essentially a negotiation between all parties. The other is purely hypothetical, based on the potential offense/harm coming to an abstraction of a group and therefore can't be moderated by anything other than blanket rules enforced by the state, and is therefore a form of enforced morality/expression. Not compelled, mind, but certainly enforced and that can be invoked on behalf of hypothetical third parties. And that works out great.

A negotiation for the purposes of controlling speech that is deemed to be damaging. How demonstrable are the damages? Are there no calculations in regards to potential damage in libel cases? The few links I've skimmed through so far certainly indicate there is.

I think it would have been a lot more effective to link to a story of someone being arrested in Canada for misgendering someone under C-16 than to a year-old story from the UK about a woman who won on appeal.

Let's not pretend slander/libel laws can't be abused either.

The fact alone that Peterson's a psychologist who believes in IQ is embarrassing enough. Read the thread bud and you might learn something. Alt right figures "disavow" each other constantly, but that doesn't mean their rhetoric isn't the same.

Genuine question, what's wrong with believing IQ? I thought the data has been pretty concrete in terms of being correlated with academic success, career success, interest and performance over time in certain careers, etc. And I've been reading the thread. Many points I agree with. That being said, it's not appropriate to label Jordan Peterson as an alt-right figure. The guy isn't a white supremacist, he's not an anti-semite, he's not a neo-nazi. Islamophobic? Yeah, I won't argue against that. Criticism of Islam doesn't translate into advocating for the slaughter of muslim people - You can't pin the blame of someone with these viewpoints for pushing the ideology of a fucking mass murderer. A lot of his work revolves specifically around understanding and avoiding this type of violence and hatred in a society. For fuck's sake, he directly talks about mass shootings in the book that they banned. Peterson is not the person you should be fucking blaming after a mass murder.

IQ is a terrible measure that often times completely ignores other forms of intelligence. Its original design was for tests for kids learning French; that's it. It was not meant to be stretched and changed the way it has morphed into this massive behemoth that often times has its definition changed from study to study. It fails to ascertain and entertain the myriad of intelligences and its not a surprise that for the most part the term has been dropped for more specific terms.

It's pretty clear you didn't read the article or the thread because nobody is pinning the blame on him. The article pointed out that the book wasn't banned for it's material but rather this particular image that was floating about. https://twitter.com/poynterdesign/status/1108858850596122625/photo/1 Let's not make this more than what it is, it's clear that this was a very bad look at this time and nobody wants to be near it. And despite what Jordan may be he is still an idiot who believe in cultural marxism and thinks letting people say hate speech will solve hate speech.

IQ tests are imperfect and are often poor assessments. It's hard to determine what exactly it is you're supposed to assess to determine intelligence. What exactly is intelligence at all? Knowledge acquisition? How well you can read other people? Straight up book learning you acquired in school? Motor skills? What kinds of testing environment is the right one? Are we just supposed to ignore outside factors? If I'm just giving people logic problems and timing how quickly they can answer, that can be influenced by all kinds of things. People decades ago justified racism and segregation with IQ tests. Some people clearly still do. But when school districts with wildly different racial demographics receive wildly different levels of funding and quality of teaching staff, those tests can be skewed. People ignore societal issues and instead look at cosmetic "IQ" tests to justify their prejudiced views without bothering to think any further. Many scholars have moved towards the idea of "many intelligences," that your ability to acquire written knowledge, develop interpersonal relationships, quickly pick up physical sports or tasks... involve entirely different types of ability, talent, and learning. Many different types of intelligence. (Disclaimer: I am not a psychologist, but I am a trained educator.)

A measurement not being useful for everything doesn't make it useless for everything. As the other person said, IQ is extremely correlated with many forms of societal success on a population wide level.

Is there anywhere left on the internet one could actually have a discussion about a story like this without the conversation devolving into something like this thread? Yes, we all have varying opinions on Jordan Peterson. I'd like to be able to talk about the ramifications of a generally inoffensive book being banned in a developed modern nation without the emotional love or hatred of the author. Particularly without knowing why you have a tattoo of his face on your arse, or why you think he's an actual nazi. Maybe that's just me.

One bookstore removed his books from there shelves due to personal believes (and to avoid controversy about the picture above). I don't really think there is a lot to discuss here, it's not a nation wide ban or anything.

It's pretty reasonable to talk about the author in a news story about a book being banned. Someone asked if he was alt-right, which I think is a reasonable question to ask, and got several responses. I don't see the problem tbh. If you have thoughts about strictly the book being banned, you can always just share them?

Yes he does. He's repeatedly used an old US ARMY study that used that same form of IQ you're defending to come to the conclusion that some people are beyond saving. He has repeatedly used that study.

Are you referring to what he says here? I'm not sure you should interpret that as them being beyond saving, just that you can't teach intelligence, which is hardly a radical idea.

Can you point to an example of his arguing that people are beyond saving based on IQ scores?

I think this conversation about JP's credibility should've fucking ended when he said "Feminists support the rights of Muslims because of their "unconscious wish for brutal male domination." ", his Denial of Climate Change, Believes shamans were able to analyze Molecules by ingesting Psychedelics, believes Quantum Physics are somehow linked to Mysticism (btw nothing about Quantum physics even remotely resembles that shit), Believes that the reason why women are raped is because they put on makeup (victim blaming), and also believes that the human subconscious somehow is information stored from the previous generations and from biblical events. Fuck Sake that's a sci fi gimmick, ITS FROM FUCKING DUNE... Btw all the life advice he has given, i can point to a thousands of other self-help guys and what not who don't spout Pseudoscience bullshit by JP. Like fuck sake, we need to have some goddamn standards. If someone is screaming that bullshit, they don't deserve any form of being taken seriously.

As usual it's hard to pin down where he asserts something categorically, but he is clearly taken to throwing shade on proponents of taking action against it. Plus he tweets shit like this: https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/1024870660022124544 https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/1007846661509566464 https://youtu.be/pBbvehbomrY

Anything that is against Climate Change is a danger not only to society, but every single patch of dirt on this fucking rock. My state got obliterated in the worst flood ever recorded in the state just a few weeks ago. And had a Cyclone form Over Land... Usually shit is in a grey/gray viewpoint and what not. But for Climate Change, its as Black and White as you can possibly get. Any chance that questions Climate Change or being skeptical about it, is just bringing forth the destruction sooner.

Jordan Peterson on Climate Change HL: OK, climate change. I saw you posting a link to a study suggesting that a lot of the way that it’s talked about has been over-hyped. What are your beliefs about climate change? JP: Well, I don’t really have beliefs about climate change, I wouldn’t say. I think the climate is probably warming, but it’s been warming since the last ice age, so, HL: But It’s dramatically accelerated in the last couple of decades. JP: Yeah, maybe, possibly, it’s not so obvious, I spent quite a bit of time going through the relevant literature, I read about 200 books on ecology and economy when I worked for the UN for a 2-year period and it’s not so obvious what’s happening, just like with any complex system. The problem I have, fundamentally, isn’t really a climate change issue. It’s that I find it very difficult to distinguish valid environmental claims from environmental claims that are made as a secondary anti-capitalist front, so it’s so politicised that it’s very difficult to parse out the data from the politicisation. So he doesn't outright deny climate change, though the "climate is probably warming" seems really weaselly of a comment for a public figure to make so I'm not even sure. What we do know about Petersons stance on climate change is that it's; A) Not manmade B) Not as catastrophic as scientists predict C) Even if it is, there is nothing we can do about it D) He see's environmentalism through the lens of political and economic systems, not as a science E) Quoting 12 Rules for Life: We remain eternally nostalgic for the innocense of childhood, the divine, unconscious Being of the animal, and the untouched cathedral-like old-growth forest. We find respite in souch things. We worship them, even if we are self-proclaimed atheistic environmentalists of the most anti-human sort. Even if he doesn't deny it's happening, he seems to hold both an incredibly ignorant view on the topic while simultaneously expressing with frighteningly radical opinions of the people involved in it, both scientists and activists. Not a good look in any case.

Perhaps more to the point might be to say that while he may not personally believe it he definitely is convincing people not to.

"But he convinced me to pick up my bedroom" I swear to fuck, it feels like people gravitate towards JP cause they had shit parents or no parents to tell them this shit. so JP looks like the fucking messiah.

Jordan Peterson talking about things he doesn't understand is Jordan Peterson's entire brand though.

https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/b49682/contrapoints_is_wrong_about_jordan_peterson/ I don't really know anything about misogyny, race, intelligence quotients, or psychoanalysis. However, I do take issue with some of the other points you made. 1) I don't think you can gauge someone's political beliefs based on where their critique is placed. If I recall correctly, he has stated that the reason for this disparity is the majority of people in academia and media leaning towards the left. I am willing to accept this explanation since I do not want to speculate about someone else's motivations. 2) This is obviously true. Could it be such that @Reg instead meant that the age-old practices of good posture and petting cats shouldn't have caused the controversy it has? 3) I'm not sure whether we are less or more virtuous individually, but I do agree that we have it better. I could think of a million reasons why life is either harder or simpler though. 4) This is clearly wrong. He mentions people talking to him about how he helped them. You could check his comments, blog posts about it, questions from people at his talks, and videos of people talking about it. Do you mean that the advice isn't original, that he helped for wrong reasons, or that this doesn't count? 5) Meanie.

You want to use an actual source instead of some random reddit post from Jordan Petereson's subreddit?

I can't respond to critiques on YouTube with critiques on Reddit? Is Reddit not a good scientific journal?

If you ever wanted to know what the average Jordan Peterson fan was like, just scroll down through that thread. Pretty eye opening comments there.

Yeah, damn, especially the guy that refuses to call Natalie "she". I don't think it's fair to generalize though.

There are several reasons why Peterson is attractive to the alt-right, if not necessarily alt-right himself. First off, hold on to your "guilt by association" horses as (or rather, if) you read this, I'll get into it in a minute. Peterson's casual chats with Molyneux (a white supremacist who has long shed any pretense of being subtle) about race and IQ are worrying in their own right, not because Peterson happens to be sitting in frame with Molyneux so much as the fact they agree, and the data they agree on (Peterson later references The Bell Curve) The central fallacy in using the substantial heritability of within-group IQ (among whites, for example) as an explanation of average differences between groups (whites versus blacks, for example) is now well known and acknowledged by all, including Herrnstein and Murray, but deserves a restatement by example. Take a trait that is far more heritable than anyone has ever claimed IQ to be but is politically uncontroversial: body height. Suppose that I measure the heights of adult males in a poor Indian village beset with nutritional deprivation, and suppose the average height of adult males is five feet six inches. Heritability within the village is high, which is to say that tall fathers (they may average five feet eight inches) tend to have tall sons, while short fathers (five feet four inches on average) tend to have short sons. But this high heritability within the village does not mean that better nutrition might not raise average height to five feet ten inches in a few generations. Similarly, the well-documented fifteen-point average difference in IQ between blacks and whites in America, with substantial heritability of IQ in family lines within each group, permits no automatic conclusion that truly equal opportunity might not raise the black average enough to equal or surpass the white mean. Disturbing as I find the anachronism of The Bell Curve, I am even more distressed by its pervasive disingenuousness. The authors omit facts, misuse statistical methods, and seem unwilling to admit the consequences of their own words. Human Intelligence This was actually the last link I read in search of Peterson's views on IQ, and I was surprised to see just how much these criticisms of Herrnstein and Murray apply to JBP. He is far too certain of IQ's power as a predictor, and utilizes unreliable sources. Neither Charles Spearman's format, nor The Bell Curve, are found to exclude environmental factors. The source for low IQ army recruits given by Wikipedia is Pioneer Fund-backed Linda Gottfredson, who outright believes it's not wrong to discriminate against blacks in hiring because she thinks they are inferior (conveniently she and Molyneux have also chatted). I'm not really sure why she's linked as a source for that information. This is where we get into the cries of "guilt by association". Now, let's be real fuckin lenient on Jordan Peterson, more than we rightfully should, for the purposes of this argument. Let's say he's only delving into a taboo subject to learn more about it. He's open-minded, or there's better sources I didn't happen to find (these are not the only ones I went through, there is literally not enough space on this post to cover this fucking rabbit hole). The premise is that the left will overlook Peterson's criticisms of extremists, and call him alt-right based on who he associates with, and not his own words (debatable!!). You think, given his work on radicalization, that this is illogical, that this doesn't weigh his arguments against each other. But white supremacists do? They're perfectly rational and considerate of the facts? Not only that, but they're definitely honest and not looking to co-opt Peterson's "open-minded" discourse on IQ? There are several reasons why alt-righters would be attracted to him for his own views, for views they think he has, or for his ability to introduce a less extreme take than their own, that they can still align with for the purposes of mainstreaming. Generally, Peterson's discourse hovers around biological differences between sexes, free speech, anti-social justice causes. He has not, as far as I can tell, mentioned "the great replacement", and is not nearly as vocal on topics of race, but has shown that his overreliance on IQ extends there, as well. He is consistently supportive of the notion that there is a "postmodern neomarxist" effort to destroy traditional society. He believes in assertive men and submissive women. And he also has a gigantic monetary incentive to build as many of the emotionally vulnerable people he has reached through his self-help work into an audience of dedicated (and paying!) fans, as well as the knowledge to do it from his background in psychology. Not as radical as Molyneux (that guy's fucking nuts), noticeable in their reactions to the attack, where Peterson went on to tweet "the pathology of identity politics on the extreme right...", which Stefan criticized. But still an alt-right enabler (and a misogynistic egomaniac), that's what I'd say, yeah.