Peterson comes across as pompous, self-absorbed, and not very self-aware

Tuesday, August 14th, 2018

Like many folks recently, Robin Hanson decided to learn more about Jordan Peterson, so he read Maps of Meaning:

He doesn’t offer readers any degree of certainty in his claims, nor distinguish in which claims he’s more confident. He doesn’t say how widely others agree with him, he doesn’t mention any competing accounts to his own, and he doesn’t consider examples that might go against his account. He seems to presume that the common underlying structures of past cultures embody great wisdom for human behavior today, yet he doesn’t argue for that explicitly, he doesn’t consider any other forces that might shape such structures, and he doesn’t consider how fast their relevance declines as the world changes. The book isn’t easy to read, with overly long and obscure words, and way too much repetition. He shouldn’t have used his own voice for his audiobook.

In sum, Peterson comes across as pompous, self-absorbed, and not very self-aware. But on the one key criteria by which such a book should most be judged, I have to give it to him: the book offers insight. The first third of the book felt solid, almost self-evident: yes such structures make sense and do underlie many cultural patterns. From then on the book slowly became more speculative, until at the end I was less nodding and more rolling my eyes. Not that most things he said even then were obviously wrong, just that it felt too hard to tell if they were right. (And alas, I have no idea how original is this book’s insight.)

Hanson shares one of his own insights that he had while reading the book:

It occurs to me that this [evolvability] is also an advantage of traditional ways of encoding cultural values. An explicit formal encoding of values, such as found in modern legal codes, is far less redundant. Most random changes to such an abstract formal encoding create big bad changes to behavior. But when values are encoded in many stories, histories, rituals, etc., a change to any one of them needn’t much change overall behavior. So the genotype can drift until it is near a one-step change to a better phenotype. This allows culture to evolve more incrementally, and avoid local maxima.

Implicit culture seems more evolvable, at least to the extent slow evolution is acceptable. We today are changing culture quite rapidly, and often based on pretty abstract and explicit arguments. We should worry more about getting stuck in local maxima.

Comments

  1. Bob Sykes says:

    Both Piggott and Vox Day have repeatedly stomped all over Peterson. They claim he is a disingenuous leftist.

  2. Graham says:

    Hanson sets a curiously high, and technically specific, bar for this sort of thing. One that I’m not sure great sages of the past could pass, far better thinkers and writers though they might be than Peterson.

    I start to wonder if the humanist mindset and the “rationalist” one have diverged completely as the latter has become more, to be perhaps unnecessarily rude, autistic in its expectations. The first para you cited definitely gave that impression.

  3. Harry Jones says:

    You can judge a man by his enemies. Because of the sort of enemies he attracts, I’m inclined to give Peterson the benefit of the doubt.

    Nobody’s perfect, but some people are clearly better than others.

  4. Aretae says:

    I found Peterson’s 12 Rules worth reading. Some useful insights.

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