motorcycleman9

People prefer to not need to do that.

The way that CPI inflation is calculated accounts for spending pattern changes already, including mortgage/rent. If you don't have a nuanced critique of the CPI calculation method, I'd argue that this point is moot.

It's also worth pointing out that the average square footage of a home has grown considerably in this time, and that even if you are comparing a similar sized home, it is unfair to compare a home 3 miles from city center in a city of 1 million people to the same in a city of 2 million people, after it has grown through the years.

The sociological data regarding being raised by a single parent is out there. It is extremely clear that it correlates with a number of negative outcomes. You being offended by this doesn't change the statistical reality of the situation.

https://fathers.com/statistics-and-research/the-consequences...

You continue to state that market forces are bad, while not paying any attention to the counterargument that they are pretty good compared to the alternatives. Making an honest comparison would be a much tedious discussion.

Buying drugs online.

Sending money to venezuela.

Keeping millions of dollars untouched by intermediaries by memorizing a secret phrase and deleting all other records.

To me, it seems like man's constant fight against the brutality of mother nature will never end. As long as we need food, need medicine, and entropy destroys what we create, we will need a lot of people working to solve problems.

Any conception of basic income where we can freely give out $2000 a month to everyone has a net present value roughly equal to giving each person a lump sum payment of $500,000. There's not enough wealth in the world to sustain it.

You were not incorrect to say they are a minority. Nobody factually disputed you on this detail. However, other folks added relevant details to show the prevalence of fun ownership and to give context to the political influence of gun owners.

You are explicitly mischaracterizing his arguments. Peterson has spent more time than you or I arguing about the pros and cons of patriarchal hierarchies. The fact that he is willing to admit to their merits and demerits is evidence that he is more open-minded, and arguing at a higher level of abstraction, than most people in the political debate.

Peterson opposed C-16 on genuine and extremely reasonable free-speech grounds. He was speaking as an individual that endorses the value of free speech. Hate speech laws obviously limit free speech, have a chilling effect on genuine debates, and can even hurt our ability to think straight.

To clarify my point on the slavery example-

Slavery was present for hundreds or thousands of years. It was also obviously morally wrong for the entirety of it's existence. It's decline in the western world was relatively quick compared to the duration of it's existence. This decline came about as the western world became rich enough that eliminating the suffering of slaves was worth the inconvenience of replacing their labor. This change of material conditions gave enough cultural leeway for passive conformists to embrace legislative change.

It is not obvious that the Stanford prison experiment is a complete fraud. Even with it's flaws it suggests that people are much much more likely to engage in immoral behavior when an authority figure endorses it. Historical atrocities confirm this.

I don't think there's a productive way to argue about the cancel culture point. Data supporting which side is "winning" the cancel culture war is too cherry-pickable. The only ground I can stand on is that people such as Stephen Pinker getting cancelled is obviously ridiculous.

I do not think that the personality traits discussed are superficial. Other posters have provided more evidence, especially regarding openness and conscientiousness, that I speculated on earlier. I do not think that the purpose of PG's essay is to flatter himself.

I think there are obvious cases where passive moral conformists (which you would argue are at the bottom of PG's rankings) are a net good in the world. PG doesn't spend any time highlighting this because it is not the focus of the essay.

Classifying people by their expressed personality is the best way to do it. If you refuse to judge a person by the content of their character you are blinding yourself.

Many people intentionally mischaracterize Peterson as intolerant. His position is generally extremely open-minded and comes from the position of a psychologist that has seen the failure modes of many different clients' lifestyles. When he tells moral tales that tilt toward a conservative lifestyle, they are told in the sense that straying from a conservative path is morally fine, but subjects you to personal risk of worse outcomes.

I think the exercise of considering which historical atrocities you would passively comply with is a good exercise for understanding the banality of evil. PG did little to argue his moral superiority from this perspective, rather highlighted how different people conform to the norm, regardless of the virtue (or lack thereof) of the norm itself. The many anti-slavery individuals of the past still largely did nothing for hundreds of years until popular opinion and material conditions changed tides.

You point out that he did have an axe to grind regarding cancel culture, and highlight that it's not particularly heroic. But in doing so it makes it even more apparent that the anti-cancel-culture crowd is passive and ineffective, making his point clearer.

He could have made the same point regarding conformity by citing the Stanford prison experiment if he wanted to. I'd be willing to bet a dollar that there are personality psychology studies that even correlate 5-factor personality traits to moral conformity. Unfortunately popular culture is bit too much of the opinion that there are no underlying personality traits that predict future behavior nowadays.

Using a slur does does not "require malintent by definition". Slurs can be used as terms of endearment, within jokes, etc.