Jordan Peterson | Hierarchies, Inequality, BIG 5
What this covers
Dr. Jordan Peterson is arguably one of the greatest synthesists of ancient spirituality with cutting edge science, uncovering the nature of reality. In this talk we discussed competence hierarchies, wealth inequality, psychometrics, maximizing human potential, and much more. Enjoy.
SHOW NOTES 📝 0:00 Welcome; lobster notice; positive comparison to Tony Robbins 1:25 "Competency hierarchy" discussion, also, "dominance hierarchy"; pure power is an unstable basis; chimpanzee and crustacean examples 9:08 Economic success and IQ; job performance and trait conscientiousness; both saying AND doing the thing 14:10 Hierarchy maintenance includes other hard-working people not in power; "more fat people than starving people" 17:25 Responsibility goes up as you go up the hierarchy; more on competence and its benefits 19:00 Oppression discussion, "wise king and tyrant"; Brothers Karamazov "Grand Inquisitor" story 24:15 Radical left despises competence; the definitive way to make an IQ test and Big 5 model; statistical correlations 28:35 The statistical reality of distributions; listening to the tails 30:26 Career choices by sex, things and/or people 32:28 "There are no right-wing conservatives in psychology; none." 34:36 Confusing theory with fact; more gender difference in occupations 38:15 "Success is disproportionately rewarded"; nonlinear-ness; Google and diversity discussion; "The Great Leveler" by Walter Scheidel mention; Gini coefficients ever-present throughout history 44:34 More on inequality and societal instability and status; "Monopoly", stacking up at zero 48:30 Tech as a resource multiplier; U.S. Armed Forces/83 IQ discussion 51:55 You can't train creativity; MBA screening process; overestimating training 53:50 Liberals and conservatives are BOTH wrong on work; everyone is not the same; "genetic lottery" in Silicon Valley 57:20 Working with cocaine addicts in personal practice; hope for the future 1:01:00 More on inequality, moral burdens, not-simple problems; "Scrooge McDuck money bin" idea; Bill Gates' polio and malaria initiatives mention 1:04:20 Putting money to societal problems; things parents should teach children; positivity across species; Jaak Panksepp research on rats for touch and play questions 1:11:30 More Panksepp, on iterative games, esp. dogs and rats; "emergent reciprocity" points to development of ethics 1:14:18 Universal ethics trading game "brief story"; winning the game vs. winning the set of games; ethics around the game 1:18:46 "Quick dive into science and God"; informed decision-making; Biopreparat story 1:24:01 Ethical direction of scientific query discussion; facts and/or/vs. values; the bomb 1:26:25 Intellectual Dark Web and conversations in society; Carl Rogers mention; "can't force someone to be better"; being intellectually honest is the most interesting 1:30:20 More on having real conversations; "meaningful engagement is the deepest of cognitive instincts"; life is suffering 1:34:00 State of flow is the primary religious experience; more on religious experiences 1:35:03 Simulation Q1: Are we in a computer simulation? "Is A, B?" 1:37:57 Acknowledgement/thanks for Dr. Peterson 1:38:47 Credits
Welcome ✌🏽 We Uncover The Nature of Reality 1 Interview Smart People 2️ Synthesize First Principles 3️ Elevate Planetary Consciousness
⭐ Our trusted funnel of projects ► https://allensaakyan.com 💗 Build DAOs for the New Earth. Meet Basic Needs for All and Maximize Our Potential. We're doing this at HOME DAO, join us if it resonates ► https://thehomedao.com
🎨 DR. JORDAN PETERSON Website ► http://jordanbpeterson.com Twitter ► http://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson Instagram ► http://instagram.com/jordan.b.peterson 12 Rules For Life ► http://amzn.to/2AgPtZ9
20% OFF DISCOUNT CODE ► SanFran SELF AUTHORING ► http://selfauthoring.com UNDERSTAND MYSELF ► http://understandmyself.com
Source description (no synthesized summary yet).
Peterson argues that competence hierarchies, grounded in intelligence and conscientiousness, are biologically universal and necessary for functional societies, but create inevitable inequality that destabilizes societies and requires moral restraint from the successful to address without destroying meritocracy itself.
- Dominance hierarchies are 300+ million years old and biological universals, not cultural artifacts; in humans they function as competence hierarchies requiring reciprocal pro-social behavior to remain stable
- IQ and conscientiousness predict life success with remarkably high correlation (~0.7), validating meritocratic systems, but meritocracy inevitably generates inequality which correlates strongly (0.9) with male homicide and social destabilization
- No policy intervention or training can solve the problem of cognitive stratification; the only historical solution to inequality is war, revolution, or epidemic; the answer must be moral—successful people voluntarily directing resources to reduce suffering
This asset isn't compiled yet
You're seeing its claims, ranked. Compile it to build the argument threads, weight them, and check each claim against your library — the full view.
As soon as there is economic surplus in a society, inequality emerges; even in hunter-gatherer societies without surplus, inequality exists in friendship, health, and sexual access, but economic inequality only appears with surplus.
“as soon as you get a surplus, you get inequality...even in hunter gatherer societies where there's no surplus, there's still inequality because there's inequality of friendship, there's inequality of health, and there's inequality of sexual access...when you're thinking about it purely economically, you start to get inequality as soon as you get a surplus”
Science cannot determine its own ethical direction; science is methodologically value-free by design, so questions about which problems to pursue scientifically must come from outside science.
“science was designed to be as valuefree a methodology as possible. It's designed for that. And so then people say, well, why is there a gap between science and values? It's like, well, because it's built into the methodology. So, it looks to me like you need something that's outside of science to direct the the ethic.”
Dominance hierarchies are a biological universal that emerged at least 300 million years ago, predating trees, and are not a cultural artifact of capitalism or economic systems.
“the neurobiological systems that we have evolved or that have evolved to deal with dominance hierarchy placement...are at least a third of a billion years old. And that's far longer than there's that's there weren't trees a third of a billion years ago. So dominance hierarchies, hierarchical organizations among animals are older than trees.”
Questions like 'are we in a simulation' are philosophically untenable because they require decontextualizing terms like 'reality' and 'simulation' from their relational context; meaning emerges from context and relational position in language, not from isolated definitions.
“most of the time you can't pull single terms out of a conversational stream and assume that the the term has a bounded definition that's self-evident using only that term...what do the words mean? Well, it depends on where they are in the phrase...you triangulate all of that simultaneously”
In chimpanzee hierarchies, brutal males who rise to the top through intimidation and strength alone tend to have very short-lived empires and meet violent deaths, suggesting that even in non-human primates, stable hierarchy requires pro-social behavior and reciprocal relationships, not pure dominance.
“in chimpanzee hierarchies, the brutal males can rise to the top, but they tend to have very short-lived empires and to meet very very violent deaths...in order even for a chimpanzee hierarchy to be stable across time, then the top chimp had to be quite pro-social”
Trait conscientiousness is the second major predictor of success after IQ, defined as the ability to keep contracts with oneself and others—saying you'll do something and then actually doing it—and is especially predictive of success as a manager and administrator.
“the next most um relevant predictor is trait conscientiousness...the best way to sum up a conscientious person is that they're very good at keeping contracts with themselves and others...it's especially crucial if you're a manager and administrator”
The correlation between inequality across American counties and male homicide rate is 0.9—so strong that inequality alone explains male homicide without requiring additional variables.
“the correlation between inequality across counties in the United States and male homicide rate because that correlation is about 0.9...you don't need any other explanation for the male homicide rate than inequality. It's staggering work.”
Walter Scheidel's historical analysis demonstrates that inequality is ineradicable and has been increasing across 10,000-15,000 years of history; using burial site data (jewelry distribution), he can estimate historical inequality through Gini coefficients.
“The Great Leveler by Walter Shidell. It's a new book relatively new book and he details out the he details out the ineradicability of inequality...Shidell's work which is really really interesting. He's traced back inequality 10 15,000 years using you can do it for example let's say you find a Neolithic burial site and there's 200 people in it...you can even derive a jinny coefficient estimate which is an estimate of inequality from burial sites.”
The US Armed Forces has a policy that recruits must have an IQ of at least 83 because over 100 years of careful statistical analysis concluded that below that threshold, there is nothing in the military at any organizational level that a person couldn't perform counterproductively.
“you can't induct anyone into the armed forces in the US if they have an IQ of less than 83...after a hundred years essentially of of statistic, careful statistical analysis, the armed forces concluded that if you had an IQ of 83 or less, there wasn't anything you could possibly be trained to do in the military at any level of the organization that wasn't positively counterproductive.”
Rough and tumble play, especially among juvenile male rats, catalyzes prefrontal cortex development; male rat pups not allowed to engage in rough and tumble play show prefrontal hypodevelopment and can be treated with Ritalin (ADHD medication).
“rough and tumble play, especially among juvenile males, catalyzes prefrontal development and that rat pups who are male that aren't allowed to engage in rough and tumble play show preffrontal hypo development and you can then treat them with rolin which is the ADHD drug”
The reason people reject low offers in the ultimatum game is because they're playing a lifetime of iterative games, not a one-off game; the right strategy for lifetime trading is to not settle for less than 50%, which establishes reciprocal norms that benefit you long-term.
“because you don't play one trading game. You play a lifetime of trading games. And the right answer to the question of how to play a lifetime of trading games is to not settle for less than 50%”
Success breeds success non-linearly; each success increases the probability of the next success exponentially, and each failure increases the probability of the next failure exponentially, making downward spirals particularly vicious.
“success is disproportionately rewarded. It's not linear...as you start to succeed the prob each success nonlinearly increases the probability of the next success...as you fail they close exponentially...once you start to fail, good luck to you...each failure increases the probability of the next failure in a nonlinear mash fashion”
IQ is the most documented phenomenon in the social sciences (except for the 0.9 correlation between inequality and male homicide rates), and correlates with various measures of success—academic achievement, learning speed, economic success, managerial performance, and entrepreneurial success—at approximately 0.5, which is three times more powerful than typical social science effects.
“there's absolutely no doubt that IQ is the most documented phenomena in the social sciences except for one thing. There's one only one thing I've ever seen that that is has been measured more powerfully and accurately and that was the correlation between inequality across counties in the United States and male homicide rate because that correlation is about 0.9...the correlation between that and IQ is about 0.5 which is about three times roughly speaking...two to three times as powerful as the most typical next powerful order of effects”
Rats laugh when tickled with an eraser; this discovery shows commonality of positive emotion systems across biological strata and is evidence that positive emotions are deep evolutionary features shared across species.
“Pankep was the scientist who discovered that rats laugh...it's like actually it is a really big deal because it shows that it shows commonality of the positive emotion systems across biological strata essentially”
If you're the giver in an iterated game, you might want to offer 60-40 (more generous than reciprocal) to broadcast your reputation as generous, because in iterated games, people prefer partners who give more than 50-50, allowing generosity to be rewarded through increased opportunities to partner.
“if you're the giver rather than receiver...you might want to offer $60 $60 because especially if your reputation is being broadcast...Your goal is to let everybody know that if they play with you, you give them 60 and you get 40...you want to play with the person who offers you 10 or do you want to play with the person who offers you 60”
Lobsters demonstrate sequential dominance dynamics where a loser in a battle becomes more likely to lose the next battle (and a winner more likely to win) at rates that exceed what you would expect from a linear function of previous victories/losses, showing this pattern is fundamentally biological and appears even in low-complexity nervous systems.
“if you tally up you watch a lobster engage in sequ sequential dominance disputes. So basically physical challenges um his probability if he loses the prob if he loses a battle the probability that he'll lose the next battle is higher than you would expect if you just derived a linear function that was a consequence of the tally of his previous victories and losses.”
Meritocracy inevitably drives inequality, and in an unregulated meritocratic system (like Monopoly), one player ends up with everything and everyone else stacks up at zero; this is a fundamental structural problem of any productive system.
“a meritocracy will drive inequality...when you're playing Monopoly, you know, the game. I mean, that's a perfect example of how inequality emerges. Everybody's equal to begin with...One person ends up with everything. everyone else stacks up at zero.”
When a larger rat plays with a smaller rat, if the large rat pins the smaller rat in the first bout, dominance is established; however, if paired repeatedly without the large rat letting the small rat win approximately 30% of the time, the small rat will stop asking the large rat to play.
“if one rat is 10% bigger than the other, then in like nine out of 10 cases, the big rat can pin the little rat...if you pair them repeatedly...the little rat has to ask the big rat to play...if the big rat lets the little rat win 30% of the time the little rat will no longer ask him to play”
The ethic of reciprocity emerges biologically from iterated interactions; stories and philosophical ethics are humanized versions of this biological reality, suggesting that ethics emerges from the bottom up through evolutionary processes rather than being imposed from above.
“there you have is emergent ethic of reciprocity...human beings that ethic emerged at the biological level and then human beings watched it develop and told stories about it that's where the stories came from and then out of the stories we coded an explicit ethic...ethics came from but it emerged from the bottom up something NZ predicted like 150 years ago”
As countries increase gender neutrality in their socioeconomic policies (most extreme in Scandinavian countries), personality and interest differences between men and women increase rather than decrease, with a positive correlation between gender neutrality and gender differences in traits.
“there's a correlation between how genderneutral the country is and how big the differences are between the men and women and the difference is positive not negative...there are no right-wing conservatives in psychology there are none I'm dead serious, man...the people who generated the findings hated them. They hated the findings...everyone who's a social scientist was hoping that as you flattened out the gender differences in the sociological landscape, you would decrease the personality differences...and that's not what happened. You maximize them instead.”
Despite unfairness, if you must distribute wealth unequally, a meritocracy is probably the best way to do it, because you're giving resources to people most likely to use them generatively; however, this still leaves the terrible problem of what to do with people who stack up at zero.
“if you have to have unequal distribution, then a meritocracy is probably the best way to do it...it still leaves you with this terrible problem which is what do you do with all the people who stack up at zero?”
The eight richest people in the world have as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion people, and this inequality applies not just to wealth but to all creatively produced goods (recording sales, book sales, hockey goals, city populations, star masses, tree sizes in jungles)—making inequality a problem more troublesome than capitalism alone.
“the eight eight richest have equal to the bottom 3.5 billion”
There is 10% lifetime probability in the United States of being in the top 1% for at least one year, indicating some genuine upward mobility despite wealth concentration.
“you have a 10% chance in your lifetime in the United States of being in the top 1% for at least a year...it's not dismal, you know”
Scheidel's historical analysis shows no statistical evidence that left-wing or right-wing governments ameliorate inequality; inequality is not within the purview of political organization.
“there's no evidence for that at all. It doesn't look like inequality is with it. It doesn't look like the amilaration of inequality is within the purview of political organization.”
The UN set a goal in 2000 to halve global poverty within 15 years, and this goal was achieved in 2012—three years ahead of schedule—representing the fastest decrease in human poverty in the history of the planet by a massive margin.
“the UN set as one of its millennial goals in the year 2000 to have the rates of poverty in the world by 50% within 15 years, right? And we hit that in 2012, 3 years ahead of schedule. It was the fastest decrease in human poverty that has ever occurred in the history of the planet by a massive margin.”
Obesity is now a bigger problem than starvation in the world, with more obese people than starving people, representing a significant reversal of the historical poverty problem and a reason for optimism.
“obesity is a bigger problem now than starvation. It's like we should have party in the street for that, right? There's more fat people than there are starving people.”
Societies destabilize as inequality increases; this destabilization has clear markers and consequences that require serious attention to the inequality problem, making it deeply concerning even if political solutions are ineffective.
“As inequality levels increase, societies destabilize. And the best indicator of that, I already mentioned that that was work that was done by um uh Martin Daly and Marggo Wilson...the social science on inequality is also clear.”
Bill Gates is admirably putting resources toward eliminating the world's five worst transmissible diseases, particularly polio (nearly eradicated) and malaria, which would be among the most beneficial things possible to do for Africa.
“I'm kind of an admirer of Bill Gates...he's doing a really good job of of putting the boots to the five world the world's five worst transmissible diseases...polio is just about defunct...there's almost nothing that could possibly be done for Africa that would be more useful than to get rid of malaria”
Premature infants who are massaged three times a day for 10 minutes gain weight at nearly the rate they would in utero and leave the hospital on average 5 days earlier, with beneficial cognitive and physiological effects detectable 6 months later, demonstrating that touch is a primary human need.
“if you massage them three times a day for 10 minutes, then they'll gain weight about as fast as they do in uterro and they leave the hospital on average 5 days earlier and the beneficial cognitive and physiological effects are still detectable 6 months down the road”
In the ultimatum game, the classical economist's prediction is that the receiver should accept any amount because getting something is better than nothing; however, across cultures, people typically offer approximately 50% and reject low offers (poor people are more likely to reject than wealthy people).
“the classic econ economist would say you should offer her a dollar...What happens when you do that. What happens is that is never what people do. They usually offer approximately 50%. What's and and if they don't then the other person refuses...if you matched a rich person and a poor person...the poor person is more likely to refuse the lower offer than a rich person is”
Carl Rogers identified that for therapeutic conversation to work, the client must come with willingness to make things better; you cannot force someone to improve—they must already think things could be better than they are.
“Carl Rogers...was really interested in the preconditions for therapeutic conversation...the client had to bring to the session before he or she arrived the willingness to make things better...you can't force someone to be better”
Jaak Panksepp discovered dedicated play circuitry in the mammalian brain, which is equivalent to discovering a continent in terms of understanding biological functions.
“he he panks up discovered the play circuitry in mammals and that's also a big deal right that's like discovering a continent”
Most wealthy people are not Scrooge McDuck figures hoarding money; their wealth is deployed in the economy making them more money, and if they're poor money managers, wealth disappears rapidly.
“most people who have money, their money is out there doing things. It's not like it's in their bedroom...Money is usually working for them making them more money. Yeah. But it's also doing a bunch of other things...if you're a bad money manager, even if you're wealthy, your money tends to disappear very rapidly.”
Career selection between men and women is driven primarily by temperamental differences (Big Five personality traits) and interest differences, where men average higher interest in things and women in people—a one standard deviation difference—rather than by differences in mathematical ability or discrimination.
“career choices between men and women...are driven in large part by temperamental differences...the biggest difference between men and women that's been measured psychometrically...is difference in interest. And it's actually pretty big...men on average are more interested in things and women on average are more interested in people. And it's a one standard deviation difference, which is a big difference”
Religious and spiritual experiences are real phenomena that deserve explanation; they can be induced chemically and have neurobiological markers, so they cannot be dismissed as mere illusion, even if you don't believe in the supernatural.
“religion is a human universal, right? And religious experience, people have religious experiences...you can induce them, which is also, you know, you can't you can't just write that off...it's not just conceptual like you know, you can say, well, there's a spiritual realm. It's deeply experiential.”
There are no right-wing conservatives in psychology; the field is overwhelmingly liberal/progressive, which makes psychometric research on gender differences more credible because the researchers who found those differences were biased against finding them.
“there are no right-wing conservatives in psychology there are none I'm dead serious, man...the people who generated the findings hated them. They hated the findings. They were completely biased in the other direction...everyone was hoping...that you would decrease the personality differences...and that's not what happened”
The value of an Ivy League education is not in the instruction but in the screening; students get into Harvard because they're already exceptionally capable (99th percentile IQ plus other abilities), and they would learn as much at any university; private school students do better not because of superior education but because smarter students attend them.
“all of the value of the Ivy League education is in the screening before the before the uh before the education starts...people go to Harvard and they get educated, but they'd get just as educated if they went somewhere else...the reason that people who go to private schools do better than people who go to public schools is because generally speaking, the people who go into private schools are smarter.”
Science is not necessarily a beneficial process for humanity; while the scientific revolution has created comfort and technology, it has also enabled weapons like hydrogen bombs, which could easily set civilization back 50,000 years if deployed—the benefit of science depends on what humans choose to do with it.
“it is also not self-evident that science has served a beneficial function for human beings...one good hydrogen bomb blown up over North America would set us back about 50,000 years...it isn't even necessarily the case that scientific endeavor is a pro human life process depends on what we do with it”
Women are on average more sensitive to negative emotion than men, with an effect size such that if you randomly selected a woman and a man and bet that the woman was more anxious and emotionally pained, you'd be correct 60% of the time; at the extreme tail of the distribution (top 1%), almost all would be women.
“Women are more sensitive on average to negative emotion than men. And the effect size of that is something like if you took a random woman and a random man out of the population and you had to lay a bet on who had higher levels of anxiety and emotional pain and you bet that it was the woman, you'd be right 60% of the time...if you took the top 100 people, top one in a 100 people who are the most sensitive to negative emotion, they'd almost all be women.”
Flow states, where you lose sense of time and self-consciousness, represent meaningful engagement and mark that you're where you should be doing what you should be at the right time.
“In that state of flow, you lose a sense of time. Yeah. Well, you lose your self-consciousness too as well...I think it's the deepest of cognitive instincts. And so that's really cool, man. If that was true, I think it's actually true.”
Among junior high students with off-the-charts mathematical ability, there is little to no gender difference, yet disproportionately more men pursue STEM fields, indicating that girls are capable but uninterested, not incapable.
“if you take junior high kids, men and women, girls and boys, and you take only those who are off the charts in terms of their mathematical interest, the gender difference isn't that great...they're good at it, but they're not interested in it”
Scheidel's historical research identifies only three mechanisms that have successfully reduced inequality: war (including revolution) and epidemics; these 'level everyone' and temporarily reduce inequality.
“the only way out of that is various forms of war, including revolution and epidemics. That's it. That's the only thing he's been able to track...what happens is well, you level everyone and then inequality decreases.”
A functioning competence hierarchy should maintain and expand itself to include more people, creating a system where smart, hardworking people become wealthy by doing things that make other people wealthy too, which is a sign of systemic integrity.
“imagine that one of the things you want from the operators within a hierarchy is that they maintain the hierarchy and they expand it so that it can include other people, right? And so competence, a good measure of competence would be the ability to work within the hierarchy while you're also expanding, maintaining it and expanding it...you would want to set up an economic system where smart hardworking people were doing things that made other people who weren't them rich too”
The moral burden on successful people must be increased; they should consider whether buying a third yacht or having a $500 meal is the best use of resources compared to hiring 50 people to solve important problems.
“the moral burden on those who are successful has to be increased...what's the significance of purchasing a third yacht rather than maybe hiring 50 people to solve a problem”
Hierarchical organization with tyrannical aspects is an inevitable consequence of scale: the fundamental archetypal representation of the hierarchy is the wise king and the tyrant, and every hierarchy can be reasonably represented with both, with the wise king being the sustaining and expanding part and the tyrant being the part where people play zero-sum games, are willfully blind, malevolent, manipulative, and unproductive—with the result that big institutions fall apart due to tyrannical elements.
“the fundamental archetypal representation of the hierarchy is the wise king and the tyrant. And every hierarchy can be reasonably represented with narratives involving the wise king and the tyrant. So the wise king is the part of the hierarchy that sustains itself and expands and includes more people. Right? So that's a functioning polity. And the tyrant is the fact that people operating within that hierarchy can play zero sum games, can be willfully blind, can be malevolent, can play politics, can cease to be productive, can manipulate the system for their own devices and all of that.”
There is no multiple intelligence—intelligence is a single factor, not multiple. This can be demonstrated by taking 100 random questions requiring abstraction from a universal library, giving them to 500 people, ranking the results, then repeating with different questions; the correlation between rankings is 0.9, demonstrating the stability of a single general intelligence factor.
“Intelligence the factor analysis have been done and we've known this since like 1920. It's it's not disputable...you took a 100 questions at random from that universal library and you gave them to the same 500 people, then you'd have two rank orders, right, from from the top to the bottom. The correlation between the two rank orders would be about 0.9. Unbelievably high.”
Working 13% more hours results in 40% more income, demonstrating that the effect of overtime is non-linear and that additional effort is rewarded disproportionately.
“if you work 13% more hours, you make 40% more money on that. That's the stat. So So that the effect of overtime is nonlinear. 13% more hours, 40% more income.”
People with high IQ who are left-leaning in Silicon Valley should recognize that their success is partly due to winning the genetic lottery (having an IQ of 150), not just hard work and entrepreneurship, and they should take this seriously rather than attributing all success to effort.
“they're the beneficiary of a genetic lottery...you have an IQ of 150. And like, that's not your doing...you can't be saying, 'Well, it's it's all me.' It's like, 'No, it's not. It's all you and the genius that you were granted as a as an infant.”
Hyper-competent people tend to actively seek out young people who need opportunities and voluntarily open doors for them; this is a widespread but unmeasured virtue of capitalism and not rare among successful entrepreneurs, professors, and managers.
“one of the things I've really been struck by with the people that I've known who are hyper competent is that one of the things they really like to do is to find young people who need opportunities and open doors for them...I've seen that among the professors that I've known that I really admired like they really like to mentor graduate schools and graduate students and develop their careers and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley that I know the same thing and good managers and administrators they're not playing a zero-sum game”
Human organizations are sufficiently complex that dominance alone is an insufficient basis for establishing hierarchical priority; competence is the more accurate descriptor for how human hierarchies actually organize themselves.
“human organizations are sufficiently complex so that dominance is an insufficient means of establishing hierarchical priority...I shouldn't be using the term dominance hierarchy”
If a conversation isn't interesting, the person facilitating it is doing it wrong; interest is a signal that engagement is happening and learning is occurring.
“if the conversation wasn't interesting, then I was doing it wrong”
The radical left's fundamental narrative is a war on the idea of competence itself—they hate the idea of competence more deeply than merely hating the rich (as George Orwell diagnosed about socialists), which is unbelievably pathological and dangerous.
“the positioning of someone in a hierarchy of competence is in part due to their what would you say to the historical context within which that hierarchy has emerged. But to say it's all a consequence of that is part of what I regard as the radical leftist war on the idea of competence itself because I actually think that's the fundamental narrative driving the real radical leftists is that they hate the idea of competence itself.”
Approximately 300,000 people per day are being connected to the electrical grid, and the fastest-growing economies are in sub-Saharan Africa, demonstrating ongoing global development and improving living standards.
“about 300,000 people a day right now are being plugged into the electrical grid. And the fastest growing economies are in subsaharan Africa.”
Meaningful conversation between people of goodwill who are trying to tell the truth and aiming at making things better is extraordinarily valuable, and the reason YouTube is killing television is partly because there's a massive untapped market for genuine conversation.
“there seems to be a massive and relatively untapped market for actual conversation. And it's because conversation is between people of goodwill who are trying to tell the truth, who are trying to aim at making things better is unbelievably valuable...YouTube is killing television...there's a whole bunch of things that YouTube can do that TV can't”
Low-IQ clients taught Peterson about how difficult normal tasks become when cognitively impaired, providing insight into how remarkable normal cognition is and how hard it is when impaired.
“My my low IQ clients, God, they taught me so much...to see someone struggle with a task that the typical person can do without even thinking sheds light on exactly how amazing it is that that normal people can do that”
Cocaine addicts with low IQ who are also alcoholic face a triple whammy of disadvantage such that when they receive unemployment checks, the probability they end up face-down in a ditch within 3 days is really high, showing that simply moving money to the bottom of the competence hierarchy does not have a solutary effect.
“if you're a cocaine addict, you're probably also an alcoholic. And so, if you're a cocaine addict and you're an alcoholic and you're sort of on the low end of the cognitive distribution, it's like you have a pretty damn rough life...As soon as you get money, you are so done, you cannot believe it. So like when your unemployment check comes in and you're a cocaine addict alcoholic who isn't employed, the probability that 3 days later you're going to end up face down in a ditch is really really high.”
A functioning polity requires both left and right wings: the right wing maintains the hierarchy and the left wing addresses inequality, but left-wing approaches that deny the reality of competence differences are fundamentally wrong.
“a functioning polity requires a left and a right wing. Absolutely. And the reason it requires a left wing is because inequality is real and it it has to be addressed.”
After 20,000 hours of clinical work with clients spanning the spectrum from cognitively impaired to highly functioning, conversations are almost always interesting beyond belief if approached properly; everyone has unique experience worth learning from.
“I've probably done 20,000 hours of clinical work...they're almost always interesting beyond belief...everyone has their own characteristic experience that's actually unique”
Assume that the person you're listening to knows something you don't; if your life isn't the way you want it, you're ignorant about some aspect of how to improve it, and the person you're talking to might have knowledge that could help you.
“Assume that the person that you're listening to knows something you don't...if you're suffering more than you think is desirable...that means that you're way more ignorant than you need to be”
Meaningful engagement is a deep cognitive instinct and the right antidote to the suffering inherent in limited existence; when engaged, you're in your domain of competence, expanding it at the same time—exploring known territory while peering over the fence at new territory.
“the sense of engagement of meaningful engagement is the deepest of cognitive instincts...if you're engaged in something...you're safe and secure...You're in your domain of competence...explored territory...you're also peering over the fence at the same time...that sense of meaningful engagement is the right antidote to the suffering”
Reducing consciousness to its material substrate might be possible, but in the process, our understanding of the material substrate will transform so dramatically that it will no longer look like our current understanding of matter.
“it's like asking whether you can reduce consciousness to material to to its material substrate and the answer to that is yes. But by the time we reduce consciousness to its material substrate, our understanding of what that material substrate is will have transformed so dramatically that it won't look very much like the material substrate that we presume now.”
Ted Turner estimated that no matter how hard you tried in your entire life, there is no way to spend more than $400 million, suggesting that wealth above this level should be deployed intelligently for social benefit.
“Ted Turner. He estimated that if you tried as hard as you could in your entire life, there was no way that you could spend more than $400 million.”