vapid - offering nothing that is stimulating or challenging.
vapid - offering nothing that is stimulating or challenging.
my problem with JBP is that he presents his ideas as facts but they are nothing more than pseudo science and cherry picking to fit his narrative (e.g. he hasn't really understood the Jungian archetypes and keeps waffling on about it with great confidence). He seems to fit very well into Alan Sokal's definition of the "intellectual imposter". (the irony here is that Sokal himself hasn't understood postmodernism lol)
All Jungian psychology is pseudoscience; hell most psychology is pseudoscience outside of measurable behaviorist or cognitive approaches.
The thing people miss is there are a lot of people out there who haven't been exposed to such ideas.
I do think he got too big too fast and wasn't really ready to be a cultural icon like he became.
I think him and NN Taleb are on similar footing when it comes to the quality of their thought though. Both are interesting, but the well isn't very deep and you'll have to move on to something new before long.
Every single idea he has is conservative orthodoxy of one kind or another. Nobody living in the Western world has been spared exposure to the ideas he is so in love with. He is just good at failing to explaining them while being as un-concise as possible.
If that were the case, he wouldn't have the massive following he does.
His followers follow him because he reinforces existing points of view. Nothing wrong with that, just saying that having such following doesn't imply original ideas.
I recommend the "what is true?" making sense podcast episode (https://samharris.org/podcasts/what-is-true/). It helped me better understand Peterson outside of the spotlight generated by him touching the controversial topics if our society. My opinion on him after that interview is even less flattering: he seemed interested in bending terminology and logic itself for the benefit of crafting a worldview he deems innate to humans, instead of researching our nature though inquiry. The feeling I got was that of an erudite anti-scientist.
In particular, the anecdote about how Peterson wanted to be a preacher.
Where might a person acquire such knowledge? It implies that someone would have had to compile all of JP's ideas, and then compare it against the knowledge of all Westen people. That sounds like quite an undertaking.