CharonY

Actually you are right. The social morality outrage in the past has actually resulted in discriminatory (morality) laws, which includes sodomy laws (targeting homosexual men). So I was wrong, the past was far more restrictive than things are today. So the question here is do you purposefully misunderstand the law (as Peterson does it) or do you really just lack good info on it? There are good articles that one could read but fundamentally the one aspect that limits free speech in Canada in the Criminal Code is hate speech defined as advocating genocide and the public incitement of hatred. Misgendering does not advocate genocide of e.g. transgender persons nor does it incite hatred as such. Now if we go away from the criminal code and look at discrimination, which has a very narrow domain, it would depend on the situation. If you refused to call the hypothetical "Anna" by her or address her by her gender it could be considered workplace harassment. The question is then is are you against legislation against workplace discrimination or harassment? Or do you think that transgender person should be subject of harassments? Or do you think there should be no anti-discrimination and harassment laws to begin with as they would interfere with free speech?

Except of course there are no bans, even if you imagine there are. You are still able to yell at folks for talking in their own language, folks are able to talk back (though less so in the past) and some folks yell at the yellers. None of which would result in legal challenges in whatever shape or form. You keep forgetting that these are social, not legal pressures (and note I was referring to your bit about how everything got more PC, which again, squarely falls outside the legal domain). Anti-discrimination laws are only applied in a very narrow field (I think almost exclusively labour laws). The whole thing Peterson espouses (and which you seem to insinuate) is pure fantasy , as legal scholars and actual lawyers have repeatedly explained. I almost feel it is part of the victimhood complex that the dominant part of the population (i.e. the groups that traditionally determined social norms) feels now that certain social constraints are also applied to them and not exclusively to marginalized and/or otherwise powerless folks.

Fundamentally that has not really changed. Just go back a few decades and see how many folks are offended when, say you hold hands or publicly kiss a partner from a different race (or *gasp* same gender). In the 80s in Germany talking to my parents in our native language was offensive for many natives causing with frequent backlash. Realistically, two things have change. One is what is considered offensive. Especially as you get older it seems to get more and more, but really it is more of a change of what. The second part, which I suspect really creates the sense of impacting society is where the domain where the causing offense is facing social pressure. In the past, social pressure was either only locally (i.e. folks around you that feel offended and let you know, which can easily be minimized by surrounding you with folks you know) as well as in areas of public domain such as press and media. We all know that there are groups limiting (or censoring, if you will) what is considered acceptable on TV (e.g. violence nudity and so on) and other media. The big change nowadays I think is the rise of social media. Now everything that would normally only be regulated in mass media has been filtered into our daily lives (if it includes a social media presence). Folks still do their being offended bit just as decades ago, but now they can reach far and wide. I.e. I think society has not changed that much, but our tools. And I think we are utterly unprepared to what it really means. You are getting it backwards. Discrimination laws require that the victim demonstrates systematic discrimination against their person, which is often very difficult to prove. The employer can simply claim underperformance. You do not defend against it, if you do not deliver materials (such as a well-documented set of discriminatory behaviour). So basically you are saying that you want to be an employer but be able to say things like e.g. black people are lazy without any repercussion. Under that law, that may actually not be enough, provided you still pay them the same and give them the same job opportunities. However if you repeatedly state the former and pay them worse, there might be a case stating that you are in fact discriminating against black workers. Do you think that such a law is just or not? Second scenario: a person with the legal name of Anna who was born male but presents female works under your direction. What do you call her? Do you try to figure out her original (male) name so that she would not force her identity on you? How would calling her her legal name forcing anything on you, for example.

Though if one would take it to the level of Peterson it would mean that civil discourse with women would be impossible or at least much harder than with men, and that is clearly not empirically supported. It also strikes me as extremely funny, considering that academics (including Peterson) typically are only able to be a threat to donuts much less projecting violence. I am going to amuse myself with imagining the head of Fine Arts and the Dean of Engineering taking down the provost due to some disagreements. I tend to dislike the term political correctness as it typically is used in an antagonizing manner. Fundamentally it refers to certain levels of self-censoring based on (perceived) social norms. i.e. using lingua that is considered polite or civil (many words, phrases and topics have changed over time to become either more or less acceptable to be used in public). The problem of course is that regardless motivation, it is not always easy to hit the right tone. Often this gets amplified in organizations as they try to establish a public image and often aim for the least possible offensive stance , but depending on the folks deciding on it, it may be way off the mark. But the issue is that some folks use PC to disparage almost any restrictions required for civil discourse.

There is a recent paper dealing with thinning in Australia: https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12766

I would think that somehow folks decided to elect a twitter bot.

That is very interesting. I was under the assumption that thinning and thus removal of fuel was generally seen as beneficial. But apparently there is a huge range of answers. Depending on forest type and conditions thinning may seem to have positive or negative effects. More reading is probably needed but at first glance there does not seem to a clear answer. One of the caveats I read was that thinning is often not done well, resulting not only in insufficient removal of fuel, but in fact puts more fine fuels onto the ground. Also in certain areas, having less of a canopy seems to reduce overall moisture which can have retarding effects on fires. So my guess is that what type of measures works well is likely dependent on the geography as well as the properties of the forest. So depending on these factors either of them could be right. The trick now is to isolate those factors and apply thinning only in areas where it helps. An issue of course is that changing weather patterns will also influence the outcome, so some of the older data might need to be revisited.

Well, if you are wondering about that, perhaps you need to figure out what neurodivergence means in a given context. Is there for example a classification system? A second thing to look into is whether any of the trait scores correlate with that measure.

Yes, no, work, don't care. I am not so interested in the crazy part, as in my point of view that would be an extreme part of interactions. And to perhaps to make it clear, IMO that extreme part is not what defines all other interactions. Peterson on the other hand takes that extreme part and basically says that that part is the foundation of all interactions (i.e. we are prepared to deal with crazy with violence, ergo we need the threat of violence also in civil discourse- or rather that it creates the civil discourse).

I am not even sure whether the government releases official numbers but there are researchers looking into that but of course there is probably a bit uncertainty attached for sure.

That is a good point, the values are actually total emission. Household values are a bit trickier to get. I think that in the US residential consumption was about 20% of total emission, but I do not know off the top of my head how the sectors in the different countries look like. China would certainly be an interesting country to look into in that regard.

OK, I found my old notebook. So the assay for amphetamine testing is (I think) an ELISA test which turns positive for unknown reasons. Based on that I would assume that doing it again would create similar results, but the report did not show quantitative analyses how reproducible it was (i.e. out of 10 tests how often would it show positive vs negative?). If we do a chemical screen (using mass-spec) we can actually search for masses corresponding to amphetamines and that is what was done in the case study and that screen came up clean. Perhaps a more general answer which OP might be looking into: I do not know the precise mechanism for FP in benzoylecgonine or other compounds. The main issue is that most of the time a immunochemical assay is used, which relies on antibody-antigen binding (or more typically, competition of binding). Now false positives are typically down to something that competes with your reagent standard but which is something you do not want to test for.

I think you are close to the core issue here. The most disingenuous part (I think) is that he drives home the nature part quite a bit, and on the one hand almost paints an inevitable picture of how our society is the way it is because of nature and then suddenly crosses the line in a sneaky way which makes it hard to spot whether it is still nature or nurture and then builds from there. A bit issue is that he kind of rejects that civilization is a construct with rules that moderates our "natural" responses. And by obscuring the line of what is our base nature and how we learn to behave (by liberally drawing from random examples in nature and implement them in humans) he almost argues that nurture is not relevant. Again it is taking a grain of truth (we are animals at base) but then wipe of all nuance and knowledge about human (or animal) behaviour in order to sell his book and ideology. And then he extrapolates it to extremes. For example: It is fine if you are pickup artist promoting a book, but again for presumably a researcher it is a bad look. That being said, I was not aware that he left University, which makes me somewhat less annoyed. That is an interesting take, however how does his claim that the threat of violence is actually what allows civil discourse? He does not say that this only kicks in at the extreme range of actions (at which point I would argue that the chance of discourse is long gone) but that it is at the heart of it? He also mentioned that folks not willing to fight would not be respected which again shows that in his view it seems that men are more civil than women since they are perhaps kept in line due to an implicit threat of violence. It is also interesting that I cannot really find something that would explain how women would function in such a society.

Fewer people would like to cause less emission, but each person using emitting less, would obviously do the same. A French person emits ca. 5.13 tons per year, a Chinese person 7.38 and an American 15.52. So if Americans were somehow able to replicate the French model they would be cutting down their effective population by a third. Affluence is an issue. Despite increase of efficiencies that you cite, only recently did US per capita consumption went back to 1950s levels. I.e. while we have more efficient technology, we seem to make up for it by using more of it. Likewise, despite reduction in growth rates, industrialized nations are also the highest consumers of products and have added the most to the overall CO2 budget. This is a trend that only has slowed down in recent years due to the rise of rise of green energy movements.

That sounds right. I am not doing urine analyses anymore but I do recall that this was something that was an issue back when we were developing assays. Not sure how common the effect is, though as I think it was more or less based on a single report.

The circumstance are those outline by TheVat and Koti, essentially situations that culminate in possible physical altercations. While I agree that those would or should be outliers in behaviour, in the context of Peterson's theories that would actually be at the basis of civilized behaviour. I.e. if the threat of violence is gone, we won't have a functional ordered system of interaction (so to speak). And I agree that regular social interactions actually do not appear to be that way, which is one of the criticisms to Peterson's assumptions. So in whole I think we mostly agree, and for the most part are just highlighting what Peterson has been writing (and talking about) does not seem to mesh with how society actually works.

I think that is the part which certainly dips into the toxic part. Due to social expectations backing down would appear weak and showing weakness is not something that is allowed to show in men (but is expected in women).

A report has been finally fully reviewed and has been published indicating high protection after 6 months for hospitalization for the Pfizer vaccine. However, protection against infection drops about by half. I.e. breakthrough infections become more common. Which in turn is especially bad news for still unvaccinated folks as well for efforts to actually curb the viral spread. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)02183-8

And that is probably because your view of masculine ideals differed from mine and you might not have accepted certain toxic elements freely as I did. Remember, it is not masculinity in itself that is toxic, but rather certain elements *if* they are to your detriment. In my case I can clearly identify aspects that influenced me and where detrimental to me, though the same might not be detrimental to you. It depends a lot also on the environment, including how isolated you are in society and so on. Many of the more harmful elements are simply limited if you have sufficient exchange with peers who can help modulate your behaviour in a positive way (if you have good friends). I freely admit that I was really dumb in my youth. I would not have asked for help (though calling security would be asking for help...?) and I might have thrown the first punch or otherwise escalated the situation as I would find myself unable to back down. I am also utterly unclear how threatening violence actually manages to de-escalate situations. Perhaps it is a cultural/societal thing, but I cannot remember a time where threatening violence actually successfully de-escalated a situation. But that is the thing, isn't it? It means that if we are in a conflict situation we should start puffing up and bring deterrents to the table. Americans claim that open carry is therefore a great idea to deter violence. Looking at the actual numbers I simply don't think that is true.

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.

Sorry, I was putting into a broader context. I started the discussion with MigL in which I referred mostly to his first chapter, and what he was discussing in the interview was something that he also stated in his book. I.e. I am trying to find a consistent argument in his philosophy. Of course, it is possible that all his ideas are unrelated and perhaps even allow for contradiction. But then I think a discussion on his views would be pretty moot as they might be anything at any given point. So if we talk about the fundamental aspects he is explicitly saying in his book that the posturing and jostling for dominance is hard-baked into our brains and that depending on where you are in the hierarchy, it will affect all aspects of life. I.e. in your example the male with low serotonin would probably abandon his wife and the dominant male would take over your wife. If you have enough serotonin you would push back and then inevitably a struggle for dominance would ensue. In the book he states that these need not be violent but as he expounded further they require the underlying threat of violence. In fact, I do not think that he actually made a claim that it is part of our personality as such, rather that this is the basis, and personality outcomes are based on that. I.e. if you lose the struggle for dominance, you will be diminuitive, stressed and unhealthy (again, from his book). So either he claims it is a fundamental aspect and that justifies his hierarchical dominance model (which in turns is used to justify a link to happiness, drug abuse, self-worth and other issues), or it is not fundamental at which point I am not sure what then his reasoning in the book are then really is meant to convey. I think in a way that Peterson worked his way backward here. He sees that men are seemingly more frequently involved in physical violence (there are some big caveats here, which we again are forced to ignore) and from there builds up a male-centric viewpoint of interactions, specifically to separate them from female-female or female-male interactions. I.e. he starts with the conclusion and tries to use the biggest (in his view) separator to justify it. Men are more violent and that colours their interaction. Men are forces of order (sounds weird, but it is a theme he repeats quite a bit with the imagery of feminity as the forces of chaos, which goes back to I suspect Jungian archetypes). Therefore any civil engagement needs the threat of violence to be orderly (and orderly escalation, if you will) Now anything that breaks this perceived mold is not seen as a viable alternative, but rather that somehow breaks order. I.e. you can beat up a woman and therefore civil discourse breaks down. I.e. confronting a man perhaps in the context in a joust for dominance, that is orderly that has rules that you as a men somehow are clear about and can adhere to. But if a woman enters the same context, she is a "crazy woman" and cannot be controlled. Fundamentally of course, it is more of a worldview and kind of fringe philosophy. But then he uses his clout to somehow sell us that idea as kind of a real explanation of human behaviour. At which point anthropologists and real philosophers probably writhe in anguish.

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.

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.

Yes, but the rubberband has to make sense as an analogy. If I use the rubberband and claim that is what GR is about, I am doing pseudeoscience. Also I have to say that I don't think I claimed that he said that aggressive behaviour should be excused (or at least it was not my primary intention if you are thinking about physical violence, though he does bring up the link when it comes to his lengthy musing about lobsters and he also mentioned in a different context I believe in terms of civil behaviour amongs men where violence is always implicit- but I do not recall details, it was part of a weird discussion I had with students and I am not sure how accurate they were). Rather he is saying that this behaviour is expected as fights for dominance is something that exist in all of our evolution and that this behaviour therefore determines your well-being. So the argument he makes in the book is the following: dominance hierarchies are the key element defining all life. It is ancient and controls all conscious and unconscious elements in life. We see it in lobsters which indicates it is an old evolutionary process. Specifically, we see how aggression is tied to dominant hierarchies. He has also mentioned at various points (and interviews) that the primary social hierarchy structures are fundamentally masculine. While he does not explicitly say that e.g. being violent is what takes you to the top (he drops in coalition-building, which counters the lobster example nicely). However, he does build (even in the imagery he is using, a strutting Clint Eastwood lobster) the idea that male swagger, being a manly man, is what makes you successful. Also, women in their own hierarchy, do not fight for the same thing as men do. No they really just want to identify the Clint Eastwood's and throw themselves at them (ok, now I see why that might seem attractive to you ). The more aggressive (whichever form) you are, the more serotonin you have and the higher you climb in hierarchy. If you are higher in the hierarchy, you are healthier happier and so on. If you are low status the opposite is true, you are poor, unhappy and even if you have money, you will use it for drugs. And this is, according to him, all serotonin driven: If you are judged unworthy by your peers, your serotonin levels drop. He makes direct connections between serotonin, aggression and dominance. These are not analogies, but specific claims that are not backed by science. So basically he claims that these dominance hierarchies provide a direct link to virtually all aspects of well-being. I.e. that in any context humans have this specific hierarchies which, as I noted do not necessarily exist in nature. So instead of using a rubberband to explain certain aspects, he is saying the rubberband (social dominance systems) are actually what determines all factors in live. Alphas are real and if you are not at least in that area you will suffer (and also your hormones will tell you that). For a psychologist this is hugely simplistic take on how disorders including drug abuse develop (which is ironic in more than one way). Now you could say that we should not talk about any of the specific claims they are just examples for his bigger points. But then if none of the examples are reflected by reality (or science) what actually is left? And that is the big issue, to me. Many followers of Peterson brush off the specifics of his claim and say, oh those are not relevant or just examples. But if you build your whole grand narrative based on examples that do not hold water, you are really just making a vacuous argument with some non-functional adornments on then. And if you do that as a (former) scientist you are kind of dismissing the actual work of folks who look into those details and figure out whether they are real or not (you know, science). Edit: again, I mostly refer to his self-help book as source.

I cited the lobster argument straight from his book (on google books around p.15 harping on serotonin (which is just bad biology). Not sure what specifically you want. Or how about that (and I know it is going to be a whack-a-mole but at least with you it is likely to be less frustrating than with others). How about you provide a specific argument he made that you think is worthwhile to discuss and we do that.