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• MataVatnik@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Crap, wish you hadnt asked me that. I have a lot to say but I don’t feel like typing it out, and I essentially wrote essays about it in the past. But I’ll try to quickly lay some stuff out.

  In his lectures he meanders a lot, he jumps from one topic to another without making it clear and without finishing his thoughts. So he never actually has well structured arguments or a central thesis.

  He’s an expert at building narratives. I see him as a sort of modern day spiritual leader of sorts. He’s not really giving lectures, but rather it’s more like preaching. He inspires people with his words. People who like JBP say its because he’s smart, I disagree with them, I think they like him because he’s a good preacher. But most people don’t realize that, as I mentioned his intellectual arguments are incompleteor flawed. Him building narratives for people to follow or adopt into their worldview is not necessarilya bad thing. But he is most definitely being a hypocrite because he is doing the exact same thing that he accuses the critical theory postmodernist academics of doing. I never had much issue with this because his message generally tended to be positive and gave men a way to have a positive outlook on themselves. Something that we are sorely lacking now a days.

  He is very guilty of motivated reasoning. Back when I was doing a deep dive on JBP I could give specific instances where his intellectualism is dishonest and essentially he builds an argument backwards from a conclusion, but he’s good at it so to a person who is not paying attention will not see what he’s doing and JBP will appear to make a convincing case. There is one video we’re he talks about the archetype of the father and how he says that God and the archetype of the father might actually be an evolutionary artifact. He makes a convincing argument at a surface level, but then there are issues with it that I won’t break down here. Point is, that he essentially is making an evolutionary case in favor of the idea of the father and of westerns religious worldview of a patriarchichal monotheistic God. So essentially he’s starting with a belief, and building arguments around it, not the other way around, which is why I call him a pseudointellectual. A true academic seeking knowledge would start with a premise and agnostically try to reach a conclusion, not the other way around.

  Last, he’s a grifter. To me this was clear with his famous abortion video where he is lauded for his “amazing intellectual arguments”. He was asked the question on whether or not he is in favor abortion. And in classic Peterson fashion he meanders for ten minutes, obsfuscating the the question, saying it’s a complicated answer and that we should look at the reasons that women get abortions and so on. Like no fucking shit people shouldn’t be needing to get abortions, but he never actually answered the question if he is OK with abortion. And my belief is that he is grifting for a conservative crowd and he gives them pseudo intellectual arguments to support their worldview. So if he said that women should be allowed to have an abortion it would have damaged his brand. The answer should’ve been “women should be allowed access to abortion” period.

  He is so good at hiding his grifting behind his pseudo intellectualism that it’s hard to call him out on it. You really have to dissect his arguments. And most big youtubers that were trying to take down JBP were doing a terrible job in my opinion, because they didn’t understand exactly what Peterson was doing that was bad, because he’s so good at hiding it.

  But now with this climate change bullshit…mask is off, he’s out of his depth.

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• desconectado@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Not OP, I don’t have respect for JP, but he still was a professor back then. This is like Degree Tyson starts talking BS on behavioural psychology, that doesn’t make him wrong about all his previois statements on astrophysics.

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