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  1. Agreed, however some have "grown up" more than others and there still remains evolutionary traits that date back thousands of years. Evolution is a long slow process comparatively. So I don't disagree that humans are evolving, of course they are, more civilised for one we could argue. No, you completely mis-interpret and mis-represent what I'm saying. Myself, and I believe Peterson is saying that certain traits/instincts observed in males still exist that date back thousands of years and are likely inherent of the evolution process. No one, not even Peterson is saying that some of this behaviour is acceptable or uncontrollable. He is saying that to aid in controlling these urges/instincts understanding why they exist and what may trigger them is useful. On a recent thread about punishment, folk on here were advocating that rather than punishing criminals they should be either rehabilitated or efforts made towards prevention. Yet here we are slating a Phycologist for suggesting that some unacceptable behaviour is evolutionary, and should not be ignored, so that it can be addressed in a positive manner.
    3 points
  2. Something that came up in the cryptocurrency thread reminded me of this bit of trivia: In the days of the old west, people used the US dollar and the Spanish 8 Reale coin (they were "pieces of 8") interchangeably because they were basically the same size and made of silver, and that worked because the value was based on the amount of precious metal. They used to chop up the coins when lower denominations weren't readily available. In deference to the Spanish (presumably), it was into 8 bits (1 Reale each) so 25 cents was two bits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_dollar (This makes clear that the Spanish dollar was used by a lot of folks, much like the US dollar is used outside the US today)
    2 points
  3. If I wanted to add a hook, I would find one that is either sound science or where I make it clear that this is could be a dream realized at some point. I would never sell it as a fact. I have given local media news and because it could affect lives (COVID-19) I was careful to point out exactly where the science is (but also where the edge of my expertise is). Feeding folks false information is in part responsible for where we are today. To me it does matter little if it is a facebook post or a book. As a scientist you have at least some responsibility to uphold science. If there is something useful to say about similiarity it might be. And of course not. But that is what Peterson claims in his book. It is a switch and bait tactic. We start off with something that may be true (there are some issues with his claims, but since it is popsci one might let the details slide) as the bait and talk about lobsters a bit. But then after all the lobsters he then suddenly shift gears and then claims (without evidence) that see, this is all priomordial and therefore in humans we humans also have these strict hierarchies. So he does not actually provide studies or data on human hierarchies, he just magically established them to be true. He tends to do things in interviews and elsewhere too. He starts off with a claim that may be somewhat true and then makes a huge jump and claims that that somehow establishes his big narrative. If a proper scientist would want to make that argument one would first ask, are these male dominance hierarchies real? And what would be a good example. So let's say an average company. And the test the claims beign made. Are folks in higher management happier? Do they have more serotonin? Are they the only one with female partners? What about the women, is it true that they have different hierarchies and are mostly competing for men? Can we see test that? And I am fairly certain if plot all the claims Peterson makes with regard to seronin levels, happiness, access to reproductive partners, we won't see the linear graph that he tries to paint. Most folks writing a pop-sci book write within their realm of expertise. I have read Hawking and while he some bouts of speculation outside his expertise, these are not the central themes. Peterson's theme are almost exclusively outside of his expertise. Maddeningly he does not seem to use his expertise when it comes to his own arguments. He worked in addiction. So you would think that he know the lit (and I suspect he does). But in his book he just sold us the strict male dominant hierarchies and claims in the book that at those at the lower end, the diminutive and weak ones with low serotonin (and again, low serotonin is actually associated with low impulse control), then you are also prone to do drugs because you need it to control your misery. And that flies directly in the face about what we know about addiction. If we look at our corporate model, do we really think that in the upper levels we won't see addicts? We could test that, too and try to plot our assigned hierarchy level vs drug abuse but what we know about the 80s cocaine waves as well as opioid crisis, we kind of know that drug abuse are not necessarily linked to social status. And then we could continue to talk about the issues in fitting women into this model, which according to him are obviously not part of that hierarchy. They are only competing for prime sex partners, which again is just borrowing from semi-mythical animal models and then directly transplanting it to humans rather than highlighting specific human research to justify that. To perhaps make a comparison, it would be the equivalent of me borrowing concepts from GR and then somehow use that as justification why a certain diet would surely reduce your risk of cancer. It is not just nice story-telling. It is me trying to convince you of something using woo-tactics. And that is the part that I fine objectionable. I would be less annoyed if he was just a random woo-doctor peddling bad science. There are many of those around. However, he is one of the folks who kind of uses (indirectly) his credentials to boost his woo. Even intelligent folks like you therefore give him more credence and assume that what he is talking about is really backed by science. There is a difference in my mind regarding overhyping science (which I consider bad) and peddling ideology.
    2 points
  4. When you're talking about volumes and hypervolumes, your set needs to be equipped with a measure function. The technicalities are too much to go into in a single post, but see the wiki link if you're interested. The standard measure used on the Reals is the Lebesgue measure where the length (in one dimension) is just the difference of the endpoints. So, if we're looking at the length of a point p, we need to just take p-p, which is, of course, 0.
    1 point
  5. https://phys.org/news/2021-10-nobel-prize-physics-awarded-scientists.html Physics Nobel rewards work on complex systems, like climate Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Goran Hansson, center, flanked at left by member of the Nobel Committee for Physics Thors Hans Hansson, left, and member of the Nobel Committee for Physics John Wettlaufer, right, announces the winners of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in Stockholm, Sweden, Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2021. The Nobel Prize for physics has been awarded to scientists from Japan, Germany and Italy. Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann were cited for their work in "the physical modeling of Earth's climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming". The second half of the prize was awarded to Giorgio Parisi for "the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales." Credit: Pontus Lundahl/TT via AP Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for work that found order in seeming disorder, helping to explain and predict complex forces of nature, including expanding our understanding of climate change. Syukuro Manabe, originally from Japan, and Klaus Hasselmann of Germany were cited for their work in developing forecast models of Earth's climate and "reliably predicting global warming." The second half of the prize went to Giorgio Parisi of Italy for explaining disorder in physical systems, ranging from those as small as the insides of atoms to the planet-sized. Hasselmann told The Associated Press that he "would rather have no global warming and no Nobel Prize.'' Manabe said that figuring out the physics behind climate change was "1,000 times" easier than getting the world to do something about it. He said the intricacies of policy and society are far harder to fathom than the complexities of carbon dioxide interacting with the atmosphere, which then changes conditions in the ocean and on the land, which then alters the air again in a constant cycle. He called climate change "a major crisis." The prize comes less than four weeks before the start of high-level climate negotiations in Glasgow, Scotland, where world leaders will be asked to ramp up their commitments to curb global warming. more at link.................
    1 point
  6. It's not been explained to me why such a huge distinction needs to be made between male and female behaviours, transactions and attitudes. Women can be territorial, jealous, ambitious, prideful and ruthless, with men and with other women. Women can take umbrage as well as men. Women can be confrontational and even physically violent when they are injured or threatened - much more so if their children or mates are threatened - just as men (at least the advanced species with which I'm familiar) are more likely to take desperate measures if their mates or offspring are in jeopardy. I suspect Peterson needs to make this distinction in order to justify his stand on all those people who can't be, or refuse to be, classified as M or F ticked neatly in a box. At least he does seem to protest an awful lot about pronouns he might "be forced by law" to utter sometime when referring to a student. AFAIK, we don't have any laws forcing anyone to address anyone else they do not wish to, let alone send them to jail for using the wrong.... well, most words.
    1 point
  7. It could be. I think my main criticism of the movie is that the documentarist has highlighted too much the weird fringe of men's right activism rather which diluted the overall message. But in all fairness, I do not remember much of the details, I generally just did not find it very enlightening. However, I think where there is some intersection is basically the definition of masculinity which we struggle and where folks such as Peterson find their selling points. In many (including Western) societies masculinity is or was often defined in the context of strength, dominance, independence, self-sufficiency and so on. The man is the provider and that is how it should be. They are considered the builders of civilization, the mover and shakers and they should be listened to because of that. Peterson's view and some of those I consider fringe among men's advocates is a desire to uphold that worldview. Unfortunately, it has at least two consequences. One is a certain desire to keep women out of male spaces as they just not fit the established mould. And two, it puts an enormous burden on men, which not everyone can fulfil (not everyone will be rich) and certain folks use that and try to explain those who are unsuccessful how to deal with it while still keeping the traditional view on masculinity as a banner of how things should be. They can score a lot of points by blaming feminists for their misery, for example. At the same time they lack introspection to figure out whether it is not the adhering to the perceived ideals of masculinity. Looking back at my youth and personal experiences that is something that at some point rang a bell for me. I still have trouble doing certain things that are not considered manly as instilled to me in my youth. Asking for help, for example. There are in my mind absolutely toxic elements in the ideals we grew up with and learning how to change that to make our lives better and happier is IMO a much better way they struggling in some weird dominance game that some insist on playing. I think Peterkin had the right idea, either leave (or perhaps call security if such exists) but something to not escalate it further. I wished my younger self had thought that way. Yes but again, that already implies a natural order of things were posturing and underlying violence are a necessary part of the discourse. Again, he fills a couple of pages of it in his book where goes back and tries to make a kind of evolutionary argument about this behaviour. But doesn't it strike you as odd that he explains human behaviours from an exclusively male perspective? I.e. couldn't it be that how women resolve conflicts is the normal and civilized way and we are just want to break faces and are therefore forces of chaos? I.e. if a woman behaves like what Peterson thinks a man should do is chaos, does a man behaving like a woman (which I don't think he ever defined properly other than that they seek providers) create order or double-chaos? Simply put that concept does not make any sense whatsoever and if I try to make sense out of it by looking at his other thoughts, I arrive at the point that I posted earlier.
    1 point
  8. Wow. You make the wife sound helpless and like some sort of possession ("you... take your wife and leave"). Have you met many American women? Why would my confronting the guy be "standing up for myself"? In your scenario he is hitting on her, not me. And my wife would definitely stand up for herself, an alternative you completely ignore for some reason. (As well as that my wife would refuse to leave a party unless the building was under rocket attack) And there's yet a fourth alternative where I do get involved and neither flee the party nor tell the guy rudely to leave or get punched - instead I simply tell him he is making my wife uncomfortable and he should stop. And I'm aware of no evidence that any such pest would have "a set of skills" that allows him to predict my or my wife's response. And, from my experience, most spouses opt for the relatively peaceable "knock it off" response because they know the interloper will back away in embarrassment. I think you may have watched too many violent American movies where everything must be resolved through some vigilante asskicking. Social shaming is far more powerful.
    1 point
  9. If we take this line of thinking apart it basically means male interactions are fundamentally a posturing where we assess the level of violence we should level at each other. This, to me sounds like an overly simplistic model, after all we have many, many everyday interactions and violence or even thoughts of violence are the extreme outlier (in my experience). So it would sound odd that this extreme outlier should somehow be a defining factor of our behaviour. It seems to me that he is taking an extreme outlier and then creates a model of human behaviour out of it. In fact I would think most folks nowadays would react to a sudden violent outburst with shock rather than with a skillful well-adjusted reaction, simply because we actually do not think in those terms. Moreover, society has a measures to outsource violence (e.g. police). Yet Peterson puts the threat of physical violence as a core concept in male behaviour: So thinking that we as men only respect each other because we know that we would beat each other up. And then if we tie it into his dominant hierarchy thinking it clearly depicts a worldview where men basically cannot interact without thinking in terms of physicality and all interactions are based on the assessment of these physical interactions (and again without providing evidence, but we can treat this more as his personal opinion rather than expert opinion for now). So the issue then is then strangely that he claims that the issue with women is that our normal male skill set suddenly fails and because it is not acceptable to hit women. So to me that is an utter turnaround. First he is saying that we are slaves to our primordial behaviour (and that in itself has issue in terms of the biology behind, but let's ignore that for now) and that we actually cannot act differently. But then he says that somehow society has stopped us applying our skills to women, which should not be possible it was such an universal mandate. As such I do not find his views on this matter internally consistent. If on the other hand our ability to learn and change ourselves which the environment and society (which animals also are doing) then the whole argument of underlying unchangeable and fundamental principles of male behaviour do not make sense. Realistically of course there are both things at play here, but by only using aspects that supports his ideology and ignoring nuance that counters it, he is basically using badscience as a justification for his opinion.
    1 point
  10. So you were being "figurative" when you said... Yeah, I'm calling BS on that.
    1 point
  11. Wow, your sampling abilities suck! I think it's much better to sip gallons of sour milk as opposed to having to drink TheVat of it (wink wink). It's important to be able to spit out the crap. I watched it start to finish. When this guy steps out of his area of expertise and tries to extrapolate in others, he makes errors as most people would. I don't assume that as a given, it's part of most criticisms on his teachings (especially his YT videos). It's not my interpretation of his stances that prompt me to take up a cause against them. It's too easy for anyone to justify their own actions by pointing to a scholar like Peterson and claiming science supports aggression and physical behavior from men as part of their genetic (evolutionary) makeup. Many men hide like cowards behind a double standard that gives them an excuse to choose violence when they're too intellectually challenged, and then they want to be forgiven for being "real men". They see the use of reason, diplomacy, compromise, and fairness as weak, and while your Jordan Peterson might deny identifying with men like this, he's giving them LOTS of encouragement to continue behaving in ways they see as masculine.
    1 point
  12. Quantum Mechanics is clearly defined and mathematically consistant. It somewhat difficult to understand, but, once you do, it is not strange or ambiguous at all. Free will ( and consciousness ), on the other hand, is not clearly defined, nor consistant. So which of the two is strange ?
    1 point
  13. Sampling can be useful. One sip from a gallon of milk will inform you that it's turned sour. Not necessary to chug the whole bottle.
    1 point
  14. My opinion is that your biases are showing. He says that when dealing with 'crazy' men or women, once civil discourse has come to an end, the next step is physical. And that can be done with 'crazy' men, but obviously not with 'crazy' women. Don't hear or see what isn't in the video. Well that explains things. I've never read his self-help book. ( being the Clint Eastwood type, I've never needed help ) And I hope I wasn't too rude when I asked about your area of expertse. It was rhetorical; I know full well what your expertise is. But I have to ask, if you wrote a book on genetic sequencing, meant for the general public, would you include some sensationalist elements to make it more 'interesting' for the lay-person ? Might you include a chapter on how similar human genetic structure is to a lobster ? And does that one specific similarity make us and lobsters the same ? Do you think a pop-sci book is equivalent to J P's actual research and expertise ? Do you also dismiss all of Michio Kaku, Brian Green, Stephen Hawking, and other's work, because they have written pop-sci books ? Again, don't get your information from pop sci books, or, snippets of interviews on YouTube, taken out of context.
    1 point
  15. Citation needed Don't anthropomorphize nature. She hates that.
    1 point
  16. So the basic premise of those kind of arguments is that are certain behaviours and structure in nature and then argue that because of that, the same thing should be in humans. Especially (but not exclusively) in conservative cycles this is an often-used argument to explain why certain things are the way they are and why the should be like this. It is after all "normal" or "natural". Now there are several issues with that. One is that of ethics. Just because things exist in nature (e.g. rape and killing) does not make those actions moral. But what I think is also important is that this argument completely ignores the variability and versatility in nature. For example, the almost archetypical explanation of hierarchies has been developed in wolves. I am sure you have heard about the strict hierarchy from alphas all the way to the submissive omegas. So the argument goes that this is universal and that is why we have same hierarchies in humans. However, the funny bit is that this appeal to nature argument is actually wrong as those kind of hierarchies are not "normal" in wolves. You see, those behaviour were created under artificial conditions (e.g. zoos) whereas the structures of free-roaming wolves are familial packs, which I have mentioned earlier. See a nicely written article here. So in other words, the presumed natural order only exist under artificial conditions. Thus if even animals have different social structure depending on their environment, how does it make sense to assume that we have a fundamentally "natural" structure if we, as a species, are masters in reconstructing our environment? Again, it is an example of poorly understood concepts and blend it into a woo-narrative. Also, if he remains calm he obviously counters his own argument. Rather obviously he went into the submissive role as he did not really threaten violence. Probably he forgot that serotonin works differently in humans.
    1 point
  17. I thought it was enough for a 'point' to be defined as dimensionless. If Conscious Energy wants to define something else, with physical extent, he should call it something else.
    1 point
  18. A point in 3-space can be considered as the limit of the volume of a sphere with r-> 0. You can formally set up the volume as an integral function, and then take the limit.
    1 point
  19. The fact that he is prominent for a wide range of issues all unrelated to his specific area of clinical psychology makes it close to impossible to address all the issues. Moreover, he argues things complicated enough that it is is very hard to figure out the actual point, which is to me a weasel tactic. But let me give one example that I had to discuss in class because of him. He argues that human brains work like lobsters. In lobsters serotonin correlates with aggression and Peterson asserts that this creates natural hierarchies. And since lobsters have it in a primordial way, obviously the same is in humans. More aggressive folks are more dominant and higher on the social totem pole land since men are more aggressive it is obvious that social structures. Conversely, low-ranked humans have less serotonin and decreased confidence. Conversely folks with high serotonin levels are high in the totem pole and are true alphas. Basically he is saying that a single hormone determines social hierarchies, happiness as well as illness, lifespan and so on. The basic idea here is that hierarchies are universal biological entities and therefore that human hierarchies are also created that way. Now this is silly on rather many levels. First the use of lobsters makes absolutely no sense. They are obviously rather far away from humans and while marine biology specialist can probably add more detail about the veracity of his claims about lobsters, but as a whole they are not social and do not have complex social structures nor do they even have a proper brain. Between lobsters and humans there are a lot of different other social animals who show a huge range of different behaviour aside from the more agressive -> more dominant -> healthier and more successful axis. Dominance in many mammals are based on familial ties for example, where we find parents to be dominant in a particular group (also that we do have both matriarchies and patriarchies as organizational elements). It does not mean that agressive behaviour does not play a role, but simply that the situation is very complex in many animals and we cannot take a random species (especially one that is so far away form humans) and then use that to explain human behaviour (at least not in a meaningful way). Finally if we want to look at sertonin specifically, in vertebrates low (not high) serotonin levels are associated with aggression and poor impulse control. Also animals with these deficits rarely have high social status. This is especially true for humans as violent behaviour is not typically rewarded. There is a lot more that could be discussed on that, but I already did it once and it was a tremendous waste of time. I am not certain that I want to do that again. But fundamentally what he did here (and he does it on many other occasions in areas such as law, anthropology, philosophy and so on) he takes a data point (behaviour in lobsters) and then builds a huge overarching grand theory that is supposed to explain the totality of human hierarchies and social behaviour. Yet in truth neither elements are really connected in a meaningful way (he could have chosen and other animals and gotten exactly the opposite outcome). And this strategy is exactly what Oz and others have been doing to peddle simple rules that somehow are going to change your life. In Oz's case it is being healthy and fit and in Peterson's case it is, I dunno some kind of manly man? I am not sure, I have not asked my dragon yet. The big issue is that by being that far outside his realm of expertise he is doing what a lot of folks on this site (typically banned) are doing. Take something half understood and extrapolate it to the max. View everything from this specific point of view and ignore existing bodies of knowledge. And there are many other examples, where folks with relevant expertise in, say philosophy, might chime in. That being said, I don't think that it is really worth the time. And with regard to my own expertise, I think I have made it frequently clear that my main expertise is mostly in the area of molecular biology, especially with relation to cell physiology, though I have also got a smattering of bioanalytics (in certain areas) and biomarker-related research. Incidentally, these are the only areas where I have authored publications or got money for consulting. I also believe that I have not at any point make grandiose claims of expertise in areas that I have only read things out of interest but where I am not actually doing active research. I have no idea how one connects with the other, however. Are you perhaps suggesting that I should actually start peddling my miracle cure for diabetes and stupidity?
    1 point
  20. Jordan Peterson's qualifications ... 'After graduating from Fairview High School in 1979, Peterson entered the Grande Prairie Regional College to study political science and English literature,[17] studying to be a corporate lawyer. During this time he read The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell, which significantly affected his educational focus and worldview.[17][3] He later transferred to the University of Alberta, where he completed his B.A. in political science in 1982.[15] Afterwards, he took a year off to visit Europe, where he began studying the psychological origins of the Cold War; 20th-century European totalitarianism;[17][18] and the works of Carl Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,[10] and Fyodor Dostoevsky.[18] He then returned to the University of Alberta and received a B.A. in psychology in 1984.[19] In 1985, he moved to Montreal to attend McGill University. He earned his Ph.D. in clinical psychology under the supervision of Robert O. Pihl in 1991, and remained as a post-doctoral fellow at McGill's Douglas Hospital until June 1993, working with Pihl and Maurice Dongier." and career ... "From July 1993 to June 1998,[1] Peterson lived in Arlington, Massachusetts, while teaching and conducting research at Harvard University, where he was hired as an assistant professor in the psychology department, later becoming an associate professor. While still at Harvard, he switched his primary area of research from familial alcoholism to personality. After the change of focus, he has published extensively.[24][25][26][27][28][29] Author Gregg Hurwitz, a former student of Peterson's at Harvard, has cited Peterson as an inspiration of his, and psychologist Shelley Carson, former PhD student and now-professor at Harvard, recalled that Peterson's lectures had "something akin to a cult following", stating, "I remember students crying on the last day of class because they wouldn't get to hear him anymore."[30] Following his associate position at Harvard, Peterson returned to Canada in July 1998 and eventually became a full professor at the University of Toronto. Peterson's areas of study and research within the fields of psychology are psychopharmacology,[32][33] abnormal,[34] neuro,[35] clinical, personality,[36][37] social,[37] industrial and organizational,[1] religious, ideological,[17] political, and creativity.[38] Peterson has authored or co-authored more than a hundred academic papers[39] and was cited almost 8,000 times as of mid-2017; at end of 2020 almost 15,000 times. All from Jordan Peterson - Wikipedia While I don't doubt that his popularity provides a large revenue stream that has allowed him to quit his teaching and clinical duties, I really don't think you can accuse him of over-reaching his area of expertise. My opinion is that your comment about him giving professors a bad name, as well as Phi's penchant for labelling people, is out of line.
    1 point
  21. I dislike many of them, especially when he blames the rise of toxic masculinity on feminists trying to "feminize" men. It's a LOT like the argument that men can't help themselves when it comes to "being men" and having to control themselves around women. Men like Peterson seem to argue that people are just animals while also profiting from his intellectual pursuits. He has the cake, he eats the cake, and women everywhere suffer for his POV. He doesn't even believe women merit equal pay for equal work. And in general, I see calls from the right for a more balanced approach as hypocritical. We need a LOT more than just a gentle course correction towards the center, we need a fairly massive push if we're going to address the problems we currently have as a planet. To me, the right and its extremists have declared they're tired of losing the intellectual battle and just want to win no matter what. They don't care that their hatred and bigotry has been marginalized, that so many people see their dwindling numbers, and they've decided they deserve to be the majority so they just ARE. It doesn't matter that they're losing elections, they just deny it and threaten to take over local legislatures where they lost, with force (like animals) if necessary. We're supposed to be growing as a species, but men like Jordan Peterson claim we'll lose our inherent humanity if we change. In fact, he believes we can't change our basic nature, so he enables toxic male attitudes and defines masculinity and femininity as "order" and "chaos". Me personally, I wouldn't listen to a thing this asshat says.
    1 point
  22. Too much of anything is always bad. The difficult part is agreeing on the right mix. As for J Peterson, his ideas are certainly well thought out, and the fact that he has a large following, from all parts of the political spectrum, allows certain people to bring up his large RW following as proof that he is evil/incompetent/opinionated/etc. He is not just another opinionated guy with a YouTube channel, he is actually a tenured profesor at the University of Toronto in the field of Psychology. He is not right wing at all, as a matter of fact, his notoriety began when he opposed a law that would have forced Canadians to use people's preferred pronouns, which is totally absurd. In your own fantasy, and sometimes demented mind, you can use any pronoun you wish, but forcing others to do so , and live in your reality is something not even G Orwell considered. If I should want to be referred to as, "His exalted royal highness", should people be jailed if they don't do so ?? He has no problem complying with requests to use preferred pronouns, and has often done so in interviews and debates; he has a problem with being forced by law to do so. I suggest getting less information from YouTube.
    0 points
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