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Comment by _asrm | Hacker News Reader

So how come not everyone can be a prophet? The Bible tells us why people who wouldn’t listen to the Pharisees listened to Jesus: “He spoke as one who had confidence”. You become a prophet by saying things that you would have to either be a prophet or the most pompous windbag in the Universe to say, then looking a little too wild-eyed for anyone to be comfortable calling you the most pompous windbag in the universe. You say the old cliches with such power and gravity that it wouldn’t even make sense for someone who wasn’t a prophet to say them that way.

“He, uh, told us that we should do good, and not do evil, and now he’s looking at us like we should fall to our knees.”

“Weird. Must be a prophet. Better kneel.”

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I can't get onboard with this interpretation. There are a ton of people who are very charismatic and prone to making sweeping statements about the universe, and yet they don't gain a substantial following. Reza Aslan, for example. He's popular, but not nearly on Peterson's level. There are people who are drawn to Peterson simply due to his charisma, but I think at the end of the day there's something else going on. I think he's hit some kind of nerve though it's difficult to pinpoint it.

Edit: Ha, maybe I should read the goddamn piece before commenting.

He has absolutely hit a nerve, or hit a few nerves and done so with great accuracy.

You see the thing about Peterson is for whatever reason (could even be just for the purposes of marketing himself), he is very much the controversialist.

Time and again he'll say something controversial that he knows will troll a huge audience and then he's always got research and facts to back it up. That his take is often facile isn't really of consequence as any typical interviewer doesn't have the tools to take him up on it.

The guy is a professor of psychology. You may not like him or his views, but he is "smart", and fundamentally the meat of his message is actually quite benign so you can't even really accuse him of being "bad".

It's like he's built his own persona into this gigantic strawman that looks like an ogre to everybody.

Is it really that controversial though? I'm nearly 40 and I feel like had Jordan Peterson said a lot of what he says now when I was at University it would have been of almost no note whatsoever.

It feels more like his statements are elevated to controversy by how polarised, anti-contextual and narrow the margins of contemporary discourse have become rather than him being particularly controversial.

"Enforcing equality of outcomes though imbalanced policy is less desirable than giving equality of choice and letting other natural variables dictate the outcome" seems such an uncontroversial statement as to be almost self-evident, and yet...

Like I say, the meat of his ideas are not controversial and actually quite banal. He doesn't really say a lot of things that self-help authors haven't been saying for years.

As you point out the acceptable margins of contemporary discourse are stifling and he purposely sets out to challenge (even "bait") them, and this is what's controversial. I think this is what people like him for, as much as for his actual therapeutic writings.

"he purposely sets out to challenge (even "bait") them, and this is what's controversial"

You've summed up exactly what I was trying to get to but failed in 10x as many words. Thank you.

I don't think controversy needs to be modern. To take a more extreme example, it was common just over 100 years ago in the UK to hear that women should not have the vote due to the distinct natures of men and women [0]. Now (for comparison's sake) we hear Peterson talking about how women are naturally more "agreeable" and "self-sacrificing", and that this is vital for the purposes of childcare [1]. I'm not qualified to debate biological determinism, but I do wonder whether statements like this reinforce existing prejudices about the capabilities of both men and women in the workforce. Just recently for example there was an article about how men tend not to work in nurseries, "as parents assume they pose risk to children" [2].

[0] http://www.johndclare.net/Women1_ArgumentsAgainst.htm

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9hcKUUFn5k

[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2018/03/14/majority-co...

Though I agree that they may have the same effect on the general population, there are still large differences between claiming that "on average, on a very large sample size, population X has more Y than Z," saying "population X must always be Y" and saying "population X is banned from doing anything but Y".

Whether there is a slipper-slope danger here is, I think, the real question, and how much other values should we sacrifice, if any, to actively and energetically avoid this slippery slope.

> Is it really that controversial though?

Yes.

> I'm nearly 40 and I feel like had Jordan Peterson said a lot of what he says now when I was at University it would have been of almost no note whatsoever.

Whether it would have been controversial in another context is irrelevant to whether it is controversial, which is never an inherent feature of an utterance and always a statement about its relation to a particular context.

But, yes, I'm nearly 45 and a lot of it would have been controversial when I was in college (in fact, a lot of it is almost identical to controversial things right-wing speakers were saying when I was in college; the only exception of note seems to be the factual controversy over his description of the content of specific current laws.)

> "Enforcing equality of outcomes though imbalanced policy is less desirable than giving equality of choice and letting other natural variables dictate the outcome" seems such an uncontroversial statement as to be almost self-evident, and yet...

...it's been a controversial statement from the right for four or five decades or so, and only not earlier because before then the right was almost uniformly overtly opposed to equality of choice, and didn't need to engage in elaborate concern trolling of this form.

It's not controversial because anyone disagrees that equality of choice and opportunity is the ideal, it's controversial as a criticism of specific policies because it assumed that equality of opportunities/choice is not their goal, and, where those laws directly address material circumstance as part of their mechanism, assumes that the circumstances addressed are immaterial to equality of choice/opportunity.

> because anyone disagrees that equality of choice and opportunity is the idea

Yes, this is something I've noticed. How when he talks about equality he assumes the premise that everybody is talking about "equality of outcome" rather than "equality of opportunity" which may be the case to a certain extent, but nobody that's actually studied inequality to any serious degree believes this.

Having watched a lot of Peterson's lectures, there's a fact about him which I think might lead a lot of critics to say false things about his level of confidence or arrogance. He speaks in a very confident, impassioned tone, but his actual words are permeated by deep humility.

Yes, there is a dissonance there that led me to be suspicious at first. It's probably just that he's an introvert who learned "how to speak confidently" from a book or a course or something.

That said, I don't think he comes across as completely intellectually honest in a lot of his interviews. I think that this might be more a product of a lot of the bad faith he's been subjected to than anything intrinsic to his ideas. Though I do think he plays it up a bit now to broaden his reach.

I think he learnt how to speak from a few decades of teaching, and in his teaching technique (as opposed to speech giving, debating). I've noticed most teachers and lecturers I've met as being good confident speakers. Not all academics, but the proper educators, almost all yes.

I've noticed that he does fall into set patterns of anecdote and stories in interviews, like he will reply to a question and then pause for a little bit and then reply with something almost pre-scripted, a previous thought but slightly changed.

I've noticed this in teams, too. Sometimes there is something which is clear to everybody, but which needs the right person to say it, in order for it to have the necessary gravitas to be followed.

I think a lot of people need authority figures to function.

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