Me and fly started the debate, its as simple as that. I called JP an expert and then Fly responded with the quote i showed you. We got further into in and from there other people got involved during the timespan of 30.06 to about 02.07, aoFrantic, entricure, clovis plus others more in the periphery of the discussion. Its all there for everyone to see. I dont necessarily care what you do since you seem to be too stubborn to reason with, but whoever cares can see it, and i think they also remember it.

I am not an expert in Peterson's work but afaict he is the only particle physicist with an 800 post thread dedicated to him itf. That is a check in the genius column IME.

The “J. J. Thomson Appreciation Thread” over obv SMP has like over a thousand posts, IIRC.

"Factoid" literally means "fact like" but CNN popularized using it to mean "little fact" in the 80s.

Really? That is an interesting bit of trivia.

Yes. Good or legit.

The way i see it you cant avoid all hierarchies because its everywhere and nowhere, we are surrounded by them. We can dampen some of them by decreasing economic inequality, and that will help alot in creating a society where people are more culturally similar. That is important. That said, theres still many ways we can be better or worse than other people. A person with attractive looks is going to derive huge benefits from that through his/her whole life compared to someone that is unattractive. A person that is intelligent will be respected and looked up to while a dumb person will be looked down upon. Someone good in sports will be cool while someone with bad health will be stigmatized. Someone social can build a huge network while someone not social will have zero friends. These things are going to give people wildly different social status and life outcomes. However today its not as bad to have a low rank as it might have been in the good old days when the higher ranking people had more direct power they could excert over you.

It's the claim to legitimacy that is at issue here, I think. Often the naturalistic fallacy is committed rather implicitly. I've seen it a number of times in conversations about gender roles on 2+2, and I think where Peterson falls into it the premise is often also left implicit. The chain of reasoning is something like

1) Some social outcomes in general, or social stratification in particular, are driven at least partially by biological/evolutionary factors
2) Biological differences are natural
C) Therefore, those outcomes are legitimate
C2) Therefore, many or most attempts to reduce social stratification are illegitimate and foolish

(C2) often also involves some kind of false dilemma. That is, I agree with you that it's reasonable to take into account that a certain amount of stratification in society is probably inevitable when crafting social policy. The false dilemma is usually in the (again often somewhat implicit) reasoning that no social policy aimed at reducing inequality is legitimate, or in parallel the idea that all and any amount of inequality is legitimate as a consequence of (1) and (2).

So there's a few related problems in the argument, but the naturalistic fallacy is in reasoning from (2) to (C). So, for example, I think that the human tendency towards violence -- especially among young men -- has some large biological/evolutionary component. Violence is something like a human universal. Societies are in large part structured so as to try to restrain or otherwise control violence for the good of the society as a whole. Yet no one thinks that the naturalness of violence makes it automatically legitimate, or that laws against violence are misguided attempts at social engineering.

There are still, of course, many debates to be had about what kinds of laws or norms controlling violence are useful, necessary, beneficial, or justified. If it doesn't follow that violence is legitimate from the fact that it's natural, it also obviously doesn't follow that any particular approach to reducing violence is good. But the point is that violence being natural does not inherently settle any issue.

In the same way, recognizing (for example) that natural differences in intelligence between individuals contribute to socioeconomic differences may lead us to rule out some very extreme ideal of equality of outcome -- an ideal which is almost always a strawman anyway -- but otherwise is irrelevant to the question of whether any particular policy aimed at reducing inequality is worthwhile. This is especially true given that the impact of such natural differences on outcomes is usually measured to be smaller than non-biological causes, at least in all of the research I've seen. There is clearly room to reduce inequality by social policy if we value equality. When people argue against inequality as a social problem they tend either to err in treating the current extreme levels of inequality as inevitable -- which is not supportable -- or to err by treating them as legitimate on the basis of the naturalistic fallacy.

The two words do much the same work. Unless someone thinks all natural tendencies should be fully accepted as the norm (I don't think anyone thinks that) then when someone argues in favour of the outcome then they are making a judgment about whether it's good or legit - and making the fallacy if they claim their judgement is validated by it being a natural tendency. If they're just arguing it's important or significant or interesting or ... because it's a natural tendency then that can be a fair point.

It gets a bit more interesting if someone claims a particular trait is inevitable, in part, because it's a natural tendency. That's not a moral judgement or a fallacy. It may well be wrong.

I don't disagree much. I don't think it's a case of a low rank not being as bad as it used to be. Rather we don't rank people as much as we used to e.g. the class system is much weaker, and stigma towards those with weaknesses is much much lower than it was a few generations ago.

Man this thread needs to be aborted.

A choice few posting here should have been as well.

Jordan Peterson is a right-wing grifter whose no different from the rest of the "intellectual" dark web. He's a low-rent, right-wing version of Noam Chomsky. Difference is that Noam's contribution to linguistics is infinitely larger than what Peterson has contributed to psychology. That and Chomsky is smarter outside of his speciality. You can tell that Peterson tries way too hard to sound smart by saying things in 50 words that the average person can say in 5.

Don't get me wrong. He's smart within his field. But a guy with hot takes on Frozen is clearly stirring **** up for attention and shouldn't be taken seriously.

This thread is supposed to be about Harris not Peterson.

I thought we'd promoted it to be the catch-all intellectual dark web member thread? :P

Chomsky’s not a bad comparison... I went to a talk of his on mathematical linguistics and he seemed pretty ignorant about fairly basic math he prob should have just looked up before talking in public about. And his politics definitely cross into lol territory.

Max,

Which war are you endorsing? All of them?

You wanna do some head to head quote comparing of JP and Chomsky who you judge as a good comparison?

Guy who writes and speaks against environmental destruction, war, and genocide - pretty much the same as guy who does youtubes about Oberlin freshman being uppity.

There should be Chomsky discussion. Recent interview

https://truthout.org/articles/noam-c...the-trump-era/

Eh, I'm not that interested in arguing with liberals about Chomsky. Reactionaries like ecriture is another matter.

I find it all a bit strange. It's seems related* to another thing that is really bugging me at the moment, which is the idea that protesting trump isn't justified unless we protested Erdogan or various despotic leaders that get to come to visit the UK and have tea with queenie

In my view protesting trump is far far more important even if we accepted that some of the others are far far worse.

*Maybe they're not related and it's just bugging me and this is a chance to vent.

Somebody needs to let ecriture know that Chomsky has a new appointment at a top 500 university.

Good article though. Plain opposite of JP's meandering nonsensical writing about dragons and ****.

Protest what you want. The reactionaries cry hypocrisy when someone taking medicine tested on animals protests a slaughterhouse because they believe it's actually impossible for anyone to care about anything other than themselves even a little bit unless maybe they prove it by self-immolation.

Lobsters, my man. Dragons is Kanye

I haven't read JPs stuff. Cant help picking up snippets but nothing makes me think I should put myself through it. I don't read enough Chomsky who is top class.

Lobsters and dragons too

http://observer.com/2018/05/jordan-p...tches-beliefs/

There's more too. He has diagrams with dragons about something.

That's a different point.

What bugs me is the very idea that protesting against the objectionable leader of our friends and allies isn't objectively far more important than protesting someone who is bad (even far far worse) but clearly not a political ally.

I sit corrected. I like that he's really excited about it. "Dudes, you haven't thought about this, but like the idea of dragons exists, and it's totes way more real than an actual dragon. His followers are going to be pretty excited when they discover Plato.