Pretty much this.

And people also should remember how absurdly broad most fields are. Your dermatologist almost certainly is not an expert in cardiology, even though your dermatologist and your cardiologist are both medical doctors.

JP can have expertise in some narrow area and still be a complete crank when it comes to all the **** he apparently talks about on youtube.

W T F . For twenty bucks, he can call me and I will give him some more useful life advice -- read real journalism and quit watching ****ing youtube videos.

No. Like I already said I only looked him up because you made the claim and you are often fos. I said I would have corrected anybody that made such a ludicrous claim if I understood it was ludicrous.

And your quoted posts are filled with nonsense. A full professor at a good but not elite school is usually a world leading guy in some (perhaps narrow) discipline. Comparing people like that to a dentist or joe blow working cardiologist isn’t reasonable

No one's gonna make inconsequential exaggerations as long as Max is on the case.

OK, like I said, Jordan Peterson #1 Fan on 2p2. That's you, buddy!

I may not have been precise enough in my language when I disagreed with Peterson's crackpot IQ theories, theories I don't think you endorsed but lol probably will eventually to own the libs, but now you're gonna go down with the ship as calling Peterson a world leading guy in SOME discipline. (Crying on webcam is not a discipline, Max.)

The problem isn't the cool rat stories, it's what he says immediately before or after it and how he nonsensically attaches it to complex ideas completely unrelated to rats. Like he is right about everything he says about lobsters and their serotonin levels (afaik) but is full of **** once he connects it to natural hierarchies within humans.

And for something to be a factoid, it has to be false, so maybe I misunderstood you and you we're firing more shats than I am giving you credit for.

Sounds like something a loser lobster would say

The above is, to come full circle, essentially the same as Harris's criticism of him.

It's kind of amazing to see otherwise pretty rational people (like the guy I work with) tolerate these fairy tales essentially because they like the conclusions he comes to, I assume.

Maybe a bit random but this guy is very good at the twitters:



https://twitter.com/classiclib3ral/s...14423162458117

If you don't think all of this is funny then you just don't have the necessary IQ to really understand it, sorry.

typisk norsk å være god

I think its certainly possible that serotonin and human social status doesnt connect in any way, but is it really a wild speculative theory he proposes here? For example there has been a number of studies in monkeys where the connection is very clear. And below is NY Times and Newsweek writing about some research from UCLA that aside from looking at monkeys also (very weakly) suggests that it plays a role in humans as well in a study of college students. Its not hard evidence, just an indication, and if you add in that many animals have the serotonin-status connection i have a hard time seeing why this gets so much heat.

Also i take issue with people talking about human status hierarchies as if thats not a natural thing. Is that the view of more people around here? I have seen 2 people suggest this until now. I have always viewed it as something biological that is just going to be there to regulate you and theres nothing you can do about it. I have a very hard time seeing that as anything but biological/natural. But hey, im not a biologist person.


https://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/27/s...the-brain.html

http://www.newsweek.com/little-help-serotonin-170282

lol

Yeah I think lol covers it

My point exactly, if that wasn't clear. We're always asked for "nuance" with these figures and it almost always gets followed up with a variant of "he makes some good points", but really we're into Trolly's "**** one goat" territory, except there's a whole flock of goats. I am sure JP knows a whole lot of established psychology, and has the occasional good political opinion about universal healthcare or whatever. None of those trivialities compensate for all the goat-****ery.

I'm always waiting to here when I become sufficiently nuanced in my stance on these people, but that day somehow never comes. There is no point at which I'll have accepted enough of his "some good points" that my criticism will be accepted. It's a rhetorical smokescreen.

Really, he's just another figure we're waiting on to go Full Milo and lose their status overnight.

People also use factoid to mean a trivial piece of info. Which is why I used it here, because his knowledge about rat behaviour is cool but irrelevant to what I'm judging him on.

Right but at it's most charitable it's lazy thinking to overlook differing contexts.

JP circa 1942, "Jewish-Canadians and German-Canadians get along OK but over in Germany everybody is so polarized!"

Heh, I have literally never heard the word "factoid" used to mean something that is not true. Maybe that usage is not current in Australia? I have always understood it to mean something that is true, but is so divorced from context and understanding as to be either useless or downright misleading. An example is something like "people who are married are happier than people who are not". This is known to be true, but it's a useless fact by itself. Is that because happier people are likelier to get married? What about divorced people, if they're unhappy, shouldn't that count as a negative towards marriage? Etc etc.

"Serotonin is linked to status" is a factoid, because it's not clear what conclusion we should draw from that. Serotonin levels are linked to all kinds of things, some negative, some positive. Which way does the causation run, or indeed is there any causation? Is there some third variable? The human brain is far too complicated to reduce to neurotransmitters.

To elaborate a bit further, lobster brains are in fundamental ways extremely similar to human brains. They're composed of cells, with axons and synapses. Neurotransmitters mediate electrical connections between neurons. What conclusions should we draw from this? Should it be that lobster and human cognition is fundamentally the same - that lobster and human brains work the same way? No, to assume this would be to miss basically everything that matters about human cognition. But this is exactly what Peterson is doing with this serotonin thing, taking low-level similarities between lobsters and humans and extrapolating that to say there will be high-level similarities.

It's a bit similar to how you can argue with animal comparisons either that humans are naturally monogamous or naturally promiscuous. Humans share behaviours and traits with species who exhibit either type of behaviour. It's lazy oversimplification. In the case of Peterson - and this is what the Harris quote is getting at I think - it's extremely clear that he has just picked examples from the animal kingdom, or from myths, or whatever, that supported whatever he already believed to be true.

Not only that but, even if we take it as true, it's a big old naturalistic fallacy. Maybe there's natural tendency for humans to be domineering or to have hierarchy. That says nothing about how humans ought to arrange society.

I think I brought up nuance itt and I was referring just to Fly. Your posts or Well Named are fine. It’s the posters that take days to concede a trivial point and somehow can’t do it without random and baffling insults I was talking about. Maybe nuance isn’t the right concept, but more emotion based reasoning and projection.

Actually, you guys have been arguing about this for just over 47 hours. That is hardly "days" lol. Credibility much?

Well im the one that brought up this thing about status hierarchies. Tell us who exactly you think has gone into this naturalistic fallacy you cry about here.

You should really just concede this one since the point is very trivial. There needs to be wiggle room when you talk to people or else you just cant have a discussion, even if you lack 1 hour on 2 days. If you talked like this in daily life nobody would bother engaging with you. Just shows how much group identity makes people contest every single thing they can get their hands on. Its not intelligent.

That said its not 47 hours at all, this "expert" discussion started 11 days ago and have been going up and down since then.

It's Peterson who commits the naturalistic fallacy, in the way he premises his advice on the analogy to lobsters. I agree with bladesman that it's the largest problem with his use of that particular material.

I dont think Peterson in that clip suggested that we "ought" to organize society like this and that. Hes not making a normative statement. He makes a descriptive statement, he says that it is inevitable that there will be status hieararchies in human societies. And thats sort of true, but its not a claim of how we "ought" to have things.

I'm talking about the advice he gives in his book.