[pault]

I really enjoy his lectures but people should be aware that he's been in the middle of some controversy over LGBT legislation in Canada and has attracted a following of vocal red pill types. The comments on his YouTube videos are kind of disturbing. His psychology lectures are great and I mostly share his views on post modernism, but I wouldn't want to be associated with his fan club.

[kelukelugames]

Don't forget Peterson's claim that only men have high enough motivation to be successful in competitive industries. His view is problematic because some VCs grill female founders not on their products but on their motivation level and how they will take care of their kids. Most power couples I know hire nannies. It's common enough where people shouldn't ask.

Anyway, I concede people can be good in one way or another while also being a total shitstain. See Spacey, etc. But Peterson has always been too angry for me. He's like Colbert with no satire.

[pjscott]

I was curious to see if he'd actually said that or if you were misrepresenting a more reasonable claim. I'm not familiar with Jordan Peterson but managed to find this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV2yvI4Id9Q

... in which he says that high-powered careers are very unpleasant due to hyper-competition among people who are exceptionally willing to tilt their work-life balance way toward work, and that most (but not all) of such people are men. Which doesn't sound like that unusual a claim, really: it's a fairly mainstream belief that women average more family-focused than men, and you only need a small difference in means between populations to get a big difference in representation at the far tails of a trait's probability distribution. (I would have preferred that he make the point with less bluster and more graphs, but that's just a matter of taste.)

Is that what you were alluding to, or does he somewhere else contradict this to make the crazy and very different claim that "only men have high enough motivation to be successful in competitive industries"?

[mcguire]

Thanks for the link! This thing is hilarious!

About 7:00: "And you think when you're 19, 'cause you're so clueless when you're 19, you don't know a bloody thing, you think, "well, I'm not really sure I want children anyway". Like, oh, yeah, you can tell how well you have been educated. Jesus. Dismal. Dismal. Without fail.

"I've watched women go through their professional careers, many, many of them. It's a very rare woman who at the age of 30 who doesn't consider having a child her primary desire. And the ones that don't consider that, generally, in my observation, there's something that isn't quite right in the way that they're constituted or looking at the world.

"Sometimes you get women who are truly non-maternal, you know, by temperment. They have a masculine temper [-ment?], disagreeable, they're not particularly compassionate, they're not maternal, they're not that interested in kids. Fair enough, man. But there aren't that many of them and there's plenty who will not admit to themselves that that's what they most desperately want."

[kelukelugames]

Right? He's like a caricature from the Mad Men era. No wonder so many of the MRA or whatever they are called love him.

[watwut]

The funny implied that interest in kids and being agreeable are kind same thing is not even funny. Where is that particular bs coming from?

[kelukelugames]

No, that would be at least be a somewhat defensible claim. Peterson literally says some men have crazy high motivation and women don't. It's not from this video.

I saw it when one of my co workers started sending my Peterson vids. God, I wish I never heard of this guy.

Okay, I made the mistake of watching the linked video. At one point he claims the old boys' club doesn't exist at law firms. I mean...where did the term come from?

[mcguire]

"At one point he claims the old boys' club doesn't exist at law firms."

Well, sure, you see, those hyper-competitive men who happen to like that sort of environment would never, ever, do anything dishonorable or unethical to reduce their competition. It's purely "market determined right to the core"[1].

[1] Yes, I went back to get the quote.

[emars]

Lame that you'd say this without posting the source.

[mpweiher]

> Peterson's claim that only men have high enough motivation to be successful in competitive industries.

Hmm...pretty much everything you claim here is wrong.

First, his is not a claim from first principles or ideology, but an observation from many years working with at least one highly competitive industry: lawyers. So independent of what you want the world to be, this is what he says he observes in reality.

Second, his claim is not about "success". It is about reaching the top of whatever dominance hierarchy you find yourself in. Per definition, only very few people can be in that particular place, and his central argument is that equating these two (your personal success = reaching the top of some dominance hierarchy) is a losing proposition for almost everyone, simply because there isn't enough to go around.

Third, and maybe most importantly, he says that even if you are one of the few people who have the ability/luck/desire to achieve this very dubious form of success, it is almost certainly a losing proposition because it sucks on just about every other metric of having a good life, unless you are psychologically structured in such a way that this alone will make you happy.

Fourth, he notes that women are generally smart enough to figure this out. As are most men. There are a few men who don't, who will subordinate everything else in life to reaching the top of that dominance hierarchy. His claim is that most if not all of these people will not have good life.

And finally, as usual, this says nothing about individuals, but only something about populations. In his case, he says that law firms are doing everything to keep their highly qualified, super smart and highly effective female lawyers, but they can't, because most of them just drop out of that race to the top.

Are you claiming this is not true?