This trend of people modifying someone's words and then projecting those modified words onto them has been more and more widespread. I see it as intellectually dishonest, and as depriving someone of their own agency in the context of discourse. Everyone has a right to speak for themselves, and this mindset erodes that right.
It's almost like she helped him get his point across, it was clearly an "Us vs Them" debate for her, she pushed it hard, and Peterson defused her with his argumentation and composture.
It's kinda sad how things have gotten to this football team filosophy where you defend your side no matter what. I'm glad Peterson is having all this reach, even though I don't agree 100% with all he says.
Not with what he said in the interview, I wasn't clear about that, it's more about some of the concepts that he goes about in his biblical series and in some interviews, can't find a link right now.
For example, the concept that truth can be anectodal instead of empirical (as derived from grand narratives and the reason why religious stories hold so much weight in western civilization) is still something that twists my brain. I believe there is a greater truth behind these stories, and what we tell each other are abstractions and pieces of those underlying truths. To understand and explain these narratives is to mine for what actually valuable for us, and telling them is a way of "triggering" our minds into going through the process in which those truths manifest themselves... but maybe that's the only way we can achieve a protocol of sharing primitive truths with our communication.
I think that's a part of it. Funny enough I found Jordan Peterson through HN a while back when someone linked his Maps of Meaning lectures in a thread about what books or articles changed their lives. Now we're here talking about his philosophies.
While I like Petersen's message and analytical competence quite a bit, in this interview he makes the mistake that a lot of highly intelligent people make: he states the truth at his level of intelligence and training and expects the other person to understand perfectly. "If you've correctly listened to my exact construction of words, you should understand." He could do better at connecting with her, on a relational level and not only an intellectual one. (Which, yes, is much more of an abstract concept and is typically a lot harder for intellectual people, and is definitely a lot harder when someone seems hostile.)
He still does a good job of articulating the nuances of his position, but needs perhaps a little more connective tissue to let her know "I'm not against women! Hear me out." And I don't mean to let her off the hook, because she inappropriately framed his arguments a number of times.
It's incredibly difficult to think on your feet in front of an audience/camera, let alone actually learn and genuinely absorb an entirely new level of complexity for something you already think you know. I appreciate what Petersen's saying about how the gender gap as described is a myth, and he articulates his reason for saying so: it's actually an 18-factor gap. But after he explains this and she continues to use the phrase gender gap multiple times to challenge his view, that's where he needed to identify that she has not correctly processed his real view, and stop her: "But ok it shouldn't be called a gender gap: based on the data, it's an 18-factor gap. Do you see what I'm saying?"
Where in the interview does he even use hard concepts. I have no degree in ANY related fields that Peterson is fluent in and there is not a single sentence where I can say that it would be hard to understand.
Multivariate vs univariate analysis of variance is not at all a simple set of ideas. There's a ton of deep abstraction there, both on the side of statistical analysis as well as the theoretical underpinnings of large-dimensional spaces (and for that matter, interrelationships between variables). But moreover, he was dropping the concept casually, and medium provocatively by saying "the gender gap doesn't exist"--she was having to process "is this fool serious??" at the same time as a technical scientific argument.
Put yourself in her shoes. He was appearing to deny a widely reported phenomenon that is but one aspect of the repression women face in our culture. That would be frustrating.
I won't say that you don't have a valid point in general.
But in this situation, IMO Petersen did a fantastic job of being personable, clear, and helpful. Especially considering he was granted one sentence at a time.
If it was any less "intellectual", it'd be a interview with a fifth-grader.
He goes full on clinical psychologist on what he thinks happened, and also where he thinks he could have lead the interview for better. According to him, he was not dealing with Cathy Newman the person, but rather a personification of an ideology. It's very interesting to hear, also for the remainder of the interview.
Less intellectual wasn't exactly what I meant. I also thought his explanations were clear. He did flirt with provocation: "It doesn't exist" is perhaps less clear and helpful than "It doesn't exist as described", especially when gender is one of those 18 factors that contributes to variance.
There's a strong tendency to divide the world into with us and against is, allies and enemies, for us and against us. Government, social justice, social media. It's as if we are trying to recreate a two party platform in every area.
And it's disappointing.
The same happened with James Damore. His points have been frequently misinterpreted, despite the careful language used. Only in a very crude sense was it an "Anti-diversity" memo; the thesis was Google should shift attention from equality of outcome gender diversity to other forms.
Peterson is an even more distinctive example because it went back and forth many times (and was a better venue).
I hope we see more people like Peterson. Not necessarily people who think the same as him, but people who have rational unallied perspectives.
That seems to be the advantage of the interview format: Jordan Peterson had the (repeated/continuous) opportunity to correct the misrepresentation/distortion of his words. James Damore was not given that chance.
Peterson's relationships with feminism and youth activism are very touchy subjects, both because of factors addressed in the article, and because Peterson engages them with a vitrol that's absent from most of his other work. I'm a huge proponent of most of his lectures, but readily concede that he gets combative there in ways that are unproductive if not shortsighted. The Guardian had a review of his new book that, while blind to some nuance, landed some reasonable blows against him.
My advice to anyone looking to form an opinion on Peterson: Begin with his Maps of Meaning series on youtube. They're ~2hr lectures on the intersection of biology, religion, and morality, and they are the most illuminating rationale of world religion, its motivation, and its persistence, that I've ever read. He's frequently referred to as "Christian" because that's an easy set of values for readers to recognize, but dig into the lectures and you'll find that he's only "Christian" because the christian framework of morality is a subset of a larger and more universal moral framework common across time and cultures.
The text of the posted link covers a subset of an interview. I'm speaking about things outside the posted link's text. I haven't watched the video it refers to in full.
It's tough, when discussing activism and political engagement, especially by youth and typically w/r/t left-wing politics and especially feminism, to get Peterson to detach universities' far-left activism from activism in general. This is especially unusual given his gift for engaging with topics in enormously broad scopes.
