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My Conversation with Jordan Peterson

Here is the transcript and audio, here is the summary:

Jordan Peterson joins Tyler to discuss collecting Soviet propaganda, why he’s so drawn to Jung, what the Exodus story can teach us about current events, his marriage and fame, what the Intellectual Dark Web gets wrong, immigration in America and Canada, his tendency towards depression, Tinder’s revolutionary nature, the lessons from The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, fixing universities, the skills needed to become a good educator, and much more.

Here is one bit:

COWEN: Your peers in the Intellectual Dark Web — the best of them — what is it they’re wrong about?

PETERSON: Oh, they’re wrong about all sorts of things. But at least they’re wrong in all sorts of interesting ways. I think Sam Harris, for example — I don’t think that he understands. I don’t think that he’s given sufficient credence to the role that religious thinking plays in human cognition.

I think that’s a huge mistake for someone who’s an evolutionary biologist because human religious thinking is a human universal. It’s built into our biology. It’s there for a reason. Although Sam is an evolutionary biologist, at least in principle, with regards to his thinking, he’s an Enlightenment rationalist when it comes to discussing the biology of religion, and that’s not acceptable.

It’s the wrong time frame. You don’t criticize religious thinking over a time frame of 200 years. You think about religious thinking over a time frame of 50,000 years, but probably over a far greater time span than that.

COWEN: So if that’s what Sam Harris doesn’t get —

PETERSON: Yeah.

COWEN: If we turn to senior management of large American companies, as a class of people — and I know it’s hard to generalize — but what do you see them as just not getting?

PETERSON: I would caution them not to underestimate the danger of their human resources departments.

Much more than just the usual, including a long segment at the end on Jordan’s plans for higher education, here is one bit from that:

Universities give people a chance to contend with the great thought of the past — that would be the educational element. To find mentors, to become disciplined, to work towards a single goal. And almost none of that has to do with content provision. Because you might think, how do you duplicate a university online? Well, you take lectures and you put them online, and you deliver multiple-choice questions. It’s like, yeah, but that’s one-fiftieth of what a university is doing.

So we’ve just scrapped that idea, and what we’re trying to do instead is to figure out, how can you teach people to write in a manner that’s scalable? That’s a big problem because teaching people to write is very, very difficult, and it’s very labor intensive and expensive. So that’s one problem we’d really like to crack. How can you teach people to speak? And can you do that in a scalable manner as well?

Definitely recommended, even if you feel you’ve already heard or read a lot of Jordan Peterson.

The Jordan Peterson Moment

That is the new David Brooks column, here is one excerpt:

Much of Peterson’s advice sounds to me like vague exhortatory banality. Like Hobbes and Nietzsche before him, he seems to imagine an overly brutalistic universe, nearly without benevolence, beauty, attachment and love. His recipe for self-improvement is solitary, nonrelational, unemotional. I’d say the lives of young men can be improved more through loving attachment than through Peterson’s joyless and graceless calls to self-sacrifice.

But the emphasis on strength of will, the bootstrap, the calls to toughness and self-respect — all of this touches some need in his audience. He doesn’t comfort. He demands: “Stop doing what you know to be wrong. … Say only those things that make you strong. Do only those things that you could speak of with honor.”

There is much more at the link.

Jordan Peterson’s 12 rules for life

Peterson’s 12 rules

Rule 1 Stand up straight with your shoulders back

Rule 2 Treat yourself like you would someone you are responsible for helping

Rule 3 Make friends with people who want the best for you

Rule 4 Compare yourself with who you were yesterday, not with who someone else is today

Rule 5 Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them

Rule 6 Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world

Rule 7 Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)

Rule 8 Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie

Rule 9 Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t

Rule 10 Be precise in your speech

Rule 11 Do not bother children when they are skate-boarding

Rule 12 Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

They are from this article, via Michelle Dawson.

As it should be

The next time you send your doctor an email, don’t be surprised if they charge you a fee to answer.

More healthcare groups are charging fees to answer patients’ electronic messages, often the ones you exchange via their portal. Doctors say it’s only fair if they’re spending time on the messages and note that an email discussion can often save you the time of having to come in.

The typical cost of an email message claim was $39 in 2021, including both the portion paid by insurance and by the patient, according to a Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker analysis.

Some patients have been taken aback by the charges. They are surprised at the notifications on portals about the change, and irritated at the idea of a new fee.

Dr. Lauren Oshman, a family physician and associate professor at the University of Michigan Medical School, says she initially experienced some patient resistance and anger about the prospect of being billed for emails.

Now, she says, patients are typically pleased that they are able to get a direct response from her through a portal message.

“They’re thrilled when they get me directly,” she says.

Here is more from the WSJ, via the excellent Daniel Lippman.

Tuesday assorted links

1. “…we demonstrate that when an organism needs to adapt to a multitude of environmental variables, division of labor emerges as the only viable evolutionary strategy.

2. How is AI helping ornithology?

3. Vesuvius Challenge Prize awarded, we can read the first scroll.  And a background Bloomberg piece.

4. Seafood as a resilient food solution after a nuclear war.

5. Nabeel Qureshi on whether there is a Moore’s Law for intelligence: “The shocking implication of what we have seen in this piece so far is that there may be no great, transformative breakthroughs needed to get to the critical inflection point. We already have the ingredients. As Ilya Sutskever likes to say, “the machine just wants to learn” – data, compute, and the right algorithms result in intelligence of a particular kind, and more of those inputs results in more intelligence as an output!”

6. What is Jordan Peterson doing in his new shows?

7. Enceladus questions.

From my email (on single-parent families)

I won’t do double indentation, but this is all from Rick from Baltimore:

“In your post today, you cite to an interview you gave in which you describe the negative effects of children growing up with one parent and state that “I don’t have a magic wand to wave to make all those men worthy of having a nice family, but we could do much more than what we’re doing now”.  So my question is what is it that we can or should be doing?  It seems like one of the more important questions of our day.

So what does a Tyler Cowen pro-parent plan look like?  I can think of a number of candidates for interventions, but most of them don’t strike me as things you would advocate for either because of their limited effectiveness or their unintended consequences.  Some possibilities that I can think of:

  1. Parenting interventions in poor communities (i.e. an army of social workers descending on poor communities to teach parenting and advocate for children).
  2. Shorter/fewer prison sentences in order to allow more poor men to be present for their children and improve the sex ratio in poorer communities (thereby encouraging more committed relationships).
  3. Similarly – more drug decriminalization?  Less?
  4. Tax reforms of the kind advocated for by people like Brad Wilcox to encourage rather than penalize marriage.  (Seems like a good idea to me, but I don’t know how many people there really are out there who choose not to wed for tax reasons).
  5. Better/more jobs for working class men and all-out brutes?  (Seems like an obvious idea, but how?  More unions? Fewer?  More tariffs and less free trade?  Get rid of the Jones Act?  More immigration? Less?  A larger standing army?  A return to more vocational education as advocated for by people like Mike Rowe?)
  6. The re-churching of America?  If so, what are your suggestions for how to accomplish this (evangelical minds would like to know)?
  7. Cultural shifts?  Melissa Kearney points out that up and down the educational ladder, Asian kids almost always have a dad.  Should we be more Asian?  More Mormon?
  8. Less cultural feminization?  Less blame cast on structural oppression and more of a return to a culture of personal responsibility as preached by Jordan Peterson et al.?
  9. More recognition of the downsides of the sexual revolution as described by Louise Perry?  Less premarital sex and pornography? The return of the shotgun marriage?
  10. More cultural depictions in Hollywood etc. of successful mixed-collar marriages in order to encourage more college-educated women to marry plumbers and electricians?

What else am I missing?  What do you think would work?”

TC again: I would add this.  We don’t know what would work.  But it can’t hurt to have the intelligentsia unified and vocal in a belief that a) this problem really matters, and b) like most problems it is not a hopeless one and improvement is possible.  I propose that as step number one — are you on board?

LLMs and censorship

LLMs will have many second-order effects on censorship.  For instance, Chinese may be more likely to use VPNs to access Western LLMs, if they need to.  The practical reason for going the VPN route just shot way up.  Of course, if Chinese citizens are allowed unfettered access (as I believe is currently the case?), they will get more and more of their information — and worldview — from Western LLMs.

In short, the West has just won a huge soft power and propaganda battle with China, and hardly anyone is talking about that.

You have to wonder how good the Baidu model — due out in March will be.  Or how good will it be in a year?  To be competitive, I suspect it will have to be trained on Western texts and audio.  Maybe there is a way they can pull out the “T. Square” references, but then there is jailbreaking, or again asking the Western models about T. Square.  And even if “T. Square” is purged from the discourse, general Western ways of thought will make new inroads upon Chinese minds.

Various people on the Right are upset that ChatGPT won’t belch out some of the right-wing points they are looking to read.  Well, I think the Baidu model may be more than willing!  Or how about all the new services and products tied to Chat, but drawing upon additional material?  In well under a year these will be all over the place.  Heck, you already can consult Tyler Cowen bots of various sorts, choose your preferred oracle.  For a small sum you could hire someone to build a Jordan Peterson bot, or whatever you are looking for.

If you are concerned with “right-wing voices in the debate,” you should be praying for OpenAI to maximize its chances for product survival.  If that means an unwillingness of “the thing” to write a poem praising Trump, or whatever, go for it!  ChatGPT survival is going to do wonders for free speech, whether or not the approach you favor occurs through OpenAI/ChatGPT or not.

We’re at the stage where you are rooting for (the equivalent of) radio to work, and to stay relatively unregulated, whether or not you agree with the talk show hosts on the very first marketed channel.  We are going to have a whole new set of channels.

There is already ChatGPT, with products coming from Anthropic, Google, and Baidu.  Soon.  And surely that is far from the end of the story.

Wake up people!  Don’t be done in by your own mood affiliation.

Academia, and economics in particular, is becoming too elite

In 1970, just 1 in 5 U.S.-born PhD graduates in economics had a parent with a graduate degree. Now? Two-thirds of them do, according to a new analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The trends are similar for other fields (and for foreign-born students), but economics is off the charts.

This partly reflects population trends: Over that same period, the share of parents with graduate degrees and college-age children rose 10 percentage points, to 14 percent, our analysis of Census Bureau data shows. But compared with the typical American, a typical new economist is about five times more likely to have a parent with a graduate degree.

The new analysis comes from Anna Stansbury of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Michigan graduate student Robert Schultz, who got their hands on detailed data on U.S. PhD recipients going back more than 50 years. The data includes extensive information about almost half a million recipients in the 2010-to-2018 period alone.

It shows that the elite dominate even more among the top schools that produce about half of all future economics professors. Among the top 15 programs, 78 percent of new PhDs since 2010 had a parent with a graduate degree while just 6 percent are first-generation college students.

Here is the full story, via Daniel Lippman.

Monday assorted links

1. What makes for a good YouTube video?

2. The ten-year anniversary of The Start-Up of You, by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha.

3. Data and market power.

4. Citation practices and the Chicago School of Economics.  Interesting results, but too much bad terminology in the abstract!  Do the researchers actually not realize this?

5. Jordan Peterson to be Chancellor of Ralston College.  Here is the Facebook page for Ralston.

6. Starlink vs. tyranny?

Friday assorted links

1. UT Austin workshop in March on Progress Studies.

2. The dating culture that is D.C., with a partial cameo by Jordan Peterson.

3. My Bloomberg column on whether we should be worried by falling crypto prices (no).  And will recent SEC proposals stifle crypto?

4. Self-heating plasma and nuclear fusion.

5. Seth Curry, late bloomers?

6. In my view, David Leonhardt understands trade-offs, intertemporal substitution, the importance of economic and social life and education, and other basic concepts of thought.  He is a voice of sanity.  Here are a number of public health experts embarrassing themselves.

The Kids Are Also Polarized

Adolescents used to identify with a party but polarization was muted by a general warmth towards authority figures. Today, however, the warmth is gone and adolescents are as polarized as adults which has implications for future polarization and generalized distrust. New paper by Iyengar and Tyler (note the data is pre-pandemic):

We have shown that the onset of partisan polarization occurs early in the life cycle with very little change thereafter. Today, high levels of in-group favoritism and out-group distrust are in place well before early adulthood. In fact, our 2019 results suggest that the learning curve for polarization plateaus by the age of 11. This is very unlike the developmental pattern that held in the 1970s and 1980s, when early childhood was characterized by blanket positivity toward authority figures and partisanship gradually intruded into the political attitudes of adolescents before peaking in adulthood.

When we considered the antecedents of children’s trust in the parties, our findings confirm the earlier literature documenting the primacy of the family as an agent of socialization (Jennings and Niemi 1968; Jennings, Stoker, and Bowers 2009; Tedin 1974). Polarized parents seem to transmit not only their partisanship, but also their animus toward opponents. It is striking that the least polarized youth respondents in 2019 are those who have not adopted their parental partisan loyalty.

In closing, our findings have important implications for the study of political socialization. Fifty years ago, political socialization was thought to play a stabilizing role important to the perpetuation of democratic norms and institutions. In particular, children’s adoption of uncritical attitudes toward authority figures helped to legitimize the entire democratic regime. Indeed, researchers cited this functional” role of socialization in justifying the study of political attitudes in childhood (Kinder and Sears 1985; van Deth, Abendschön, and Vollmar 2011).

In the current era, it seems questionable whether the early acquisition of out-party animus fosters democratic norms and civic attitudes. Extreme polarization is now associated with rampant misinformation (Peterson and Iyengar 2021), and, as indicated by the events that occurred in the aftermath of the 2020 election, with willingness to reject the outcome of free and fair electoral procedures. The question for future research is how to transmit party attachments, as occurred in the pre-polarization era, without the accompanying distrust and disdain for political opponents.

Hat tip: John Hobein

Monday assorted links

1. Short video, Beijing residents on Biden and Trump.  They are better thinkers than the lot of you.

2. Worthwhile Canadian moose car-licking warnings.  And new Jordan Peterson book coming in March.

3. Other coronavirus variants found in frozen bats outside of China.

4. Tanner on Substack.

5. Rolf is wrong again.  And yet another dispute.  And French students who talk about their teachers (NYT).  They send the police, that is what they do.

6. Open access improves the quality of citations.

7. Derek Lowe on the Oxford vaccine.