Jordan Peterson
About
Psychologist and public figure who has promoted Carl Jung
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Claims by Jordan Peterson (20 of 163)
Sexual selection can produce fatal runaway traits
Sexual selection can produce runaway transformations that undermine survival, as in the Irish elk whose females fixated on antler width until the animal had a twelve-foot rack incommensurate with survival, suggesting that what was selected for was 'wrong'—an analogy for how our current scientific way of paying attention may be a flawed, ultimately fatal fixation.
Bill C-16 makes speech content mandatory
Bill C-16 and the underlying Ontario human rights code mark the first time the Canadian government has compelled the actual content of speech (outside the commercial realm) by requiring the use of preferred pronouns on request, which Peterson refuses to do.
Subjective identity is a poverty-stricken notion
The legislation goes beyond social constructionism into solipsism by holding that identity is determined solely by how a person subjectively feels at a given moment, which is a poverty-stricken notion of identity because identity must at minimum be functional and negotiated with other people.
Postmodernists reject rational dialogue
Postmodern radicals oppose free speech because they genuinely do not believe in dialogue, rationality, or the possibility that groups with different power orientations can resolve differences through civilized discussion, which is why they engage in no-platforming and shutting down opposing speakers.
Animals survive without empirical conception of truth
People got along for millions of years and animals still manage without an empirical conception of the world, operating on some level of representation of reality that does not require articulated empirical investigation; it is possible to survive without a clear notion of truth, but probably not possible to be reliably understood in a conversation about scientific reality.
Truth claims aggregate from micro to macro
Peterson distinguishes micro claims (locally valid context-independent facts) from the macro claim (the totality of the materialist-realist worldview as an ethic and framework of reference); he concedes the micro claims while insisting that the macro metaphysics underlying them could be fundamentally flawed in a way that proves fatal, so that the micro parts were fatal too even though one couldn't see it.
The inside thing cannot ground the outside thing
If the scientific endeavor is nested inside a moral endeavor, then morality cannot be grounded in science, because logically the inside thing cannot ground the outside thing; therefore once Harris concedes that science should be nested inside a moral framework, he cannot also claim a scientific basis for morality.
Science is a tool, not a description of reality
Science strips the world of its subjectivity, which may be a fatal error; Peterson therefore thinks of science as a tool rather than as a description of reality, in contrast to Harris's realist view that science describes reality as it is.
Manufactured pronouns are part of a neo-Marxist agenda
The manufactured non-binary pronouns (zhe, zher, etc.) are part of the lexicon of the radical postmodern/neo-Marxist left, intended to occupy linguistic territory, which is why Peterson refuses to cede that territory by using an ideologically saturated vocabulary.
The fire-in-the-room analogy of incomplete truth
Saying there is no fire in this room while the rest of the house is on fire is factually true but a stupid theory—a consequentially incomplete description nested within a larger truth or falsehood—because the relevant question is whether there is a fire around that will kill you, illustrating how a locally true claim can sit inside a fatally inadequate framework.
Darwinian truth is a form of pragmatism
Darwinism, as the American pragmatists recognized, is a form of pragmatism: every goal-directed action has an embedded ethic that what works is true enough, because a finite organism cannot keep up with a multi-dimensionally transforming environment and can only generate random variants, killing the wrong ones and letting correct-enough ones propagate; therefore no truth claim can surpass this process.
University lawyers' warning proves the law's reach
The fact that the University of Toronto's lawyers reviewed the legislation and warned Peterson that even talking about not using preferred pronouns might be illegal is the strongest evidence that the law has the draconian reach Peterson claims.
Negative vs positive injunctions impose unequal cost
There is a fundamental asymmetry between negative injunctions (asking someone to stop doing something, which can be infinite in number yet costs no time or cognitive overhead) and positive injunctions (asking someone to actively do something, like learning and vigilantly applying new pronouns); compelled pronoun use is a positive injunction that imposes a real ongoing cost.
Canada legally encodes social constructionism
Canadian law has effectively written a discredited radical social constructionist view of human identity into legislation, making it illegal in principle to claim that biology has any causal connection to gender identity, gender expression, or social orientation, which will lead activists to next target biologists.
A fatal scientific theory is in some sense wrong
If the proposition that the universe is best conceptualized as subatomic particles was true enough to generate a hydrogen bomb but not true enough to prevent everyone from dying, then from a Darwinian perspective it was a pragmatically insufficient proposition and therefore in some fundamental sense wrong, perhaps because it reduced the complexity of being to a material substrate and ignored the surrounding context.
Acute agony is the most undeniable reality
The most undeniable form of consciousness is acute agony, because no one doubts that they are in agony and no one can act as if they aren't, which is why so many religious systems start with the metaphysics that life is suffering and treat it as bedrock.
Operationalization succeeds while generalization fails
Establishing an objective fact requires narrowing and parameterizing the search, excluding many things; this can generate a pragmatic truth that works within the experiment's confines but proves catastrophic when generalized back to the broader world—a pattern especially common when social science theories are applied to reality because they leave so much out.
If it does not serve life, it is not true
Following Nietzsche, Peterson adopts as a fundamental axiom a definition of truth in which if a proposition does not serve life it is not true; thus scientific truth must be nested inside a higher moral endeavor, and the highest truths are moral truths.
Darwinian process is the only adjudicator of truth
The only final way of sorting out whether a scientific claim is sufficiently true is through Darwinian means, because the Darwinian process is the only way of adjudicating truth; one can never fully get outside it, in part because one is too ignorant to transcend it.
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