Results for “peterson” 77 found
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.
What should I ask Jordan Peterson?
I’ll be doing a Conversation with him, though with no associated public event. So what should I ask?
Woody Allen debates Billy Graham where is Jordan Peterson?
For the pointer I thank D.
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.
Friday assorted links
1. Steve Davis is leaving DOGE (NYT).
2. 18 minute podcast with 3takeaways.
3. TV show about SBF and Caroline?
4. Where the tariff case stands.
5. Finding talent in Ghana in the age of AI.
7. Jordan Peterson vs. 20 Atheists, long video, not saying you should watch it.
Trumpian policy as cultural policy
The Trump administration has issued a blizzard of Executive Orders, and set many other potential changes in the works. They might rename Dulles Airport (can you guess to what?). A bill has been introduced to add you-know-who to Mount Rushmore. There is DOGE, and the ongoing attempt to reshape federal employment.
At the same time, many people have been asking me why Trump chose Canada and Mexico to threaten with tariffs — are they not our neighbors, major trading partners, and closest allies?
I have a theory that tries to explain all these and other facts, though many other factors matter too. I think of Trumpian policy, first and foremost, as elevating cultural policy above all else.
Imagine you hold a vision where the (partial) decline of America largely is about culture. After all, we have more people and more natural resources than ever before. Our top achievements remain impressive. But is the overall culture of the people in such great shape? The culture of government and public service? Interest in our religious organizations? The quality of local government in many states? You don’t have to be a diehard Trumper to have some serious reservations on such questions.
We also see countries, such as China, that have screwed-up policies but have grown a lot, in large part because of a pro-business, pro-learning, pro-work culture. Latin America, in contrast, did lots of policy reforms but still is somewhat stagnant.
OK, so how might you fix the culture of America? You want to tell everyone that America comes first. That America should be more masculine and less soft. That we need to build. That we should “own the libs.” I could go on with more examples and details, but this part of it you already get.
So imagine you started a political revolution and asked the simple question “does this policy change reinforce or overturn our basic cultural messages?” Every time the policy or policy debate pushes culture in what you think is the right direction, just do it. Do it in the view that the cultural factors will, over some time horizon, surpass everything else in import.
Simply pass or announce or promise such policies. Do not worry about any other constraints.
You don’t even have to do them!
They don’t even all have to be legal! (Illegal might provoke more discussion.)
They don’t all have to persist!
You create a debate over the issues knowing that, because of polarization, at least one-third of the American public is going to take your side, sometimes much more than that. These are your investments in changing the culture. And do it with as many issues as possible, as quickly as possible (reread Ezra on this). Think of it as akin to the early Jordan Peterson cranking out all those videos. Flood the zone. That is how you have an impact in an internet-intensive, attention-at-a-premium world.
You will not win all of these cultural debates, but you will control the ideological agenda (I hesitate to call it an “intellectual” agenda, but it is). Your opponents will be dispirited and disorganized, and yes that does describe the Democrats today. Then just keep on going. In the long run, you may end up “owning” far more of the culture than you suspected was possible.
Yes policy will be a mess, but as they say “man kann nicht alles haben.” The culture is worth a lot, both for its own sake and as a predictor of the future course of policy.
Now let’s turn to some details.
In the first week, Trump makes a huge point of striking down DEI and affirmative action (in some of its forms) as the very beginnings of his administration. The WSJ described it as the centerpiece of his program. Take origins seriously!
Early on, we also see so many efforts to make statements about the culture wars. Trans issues, for instance trans out of the military. No more “Black History Month” for the Department of Defense. There are more of these than I can keep track of, use Perplexity if you must.
It is no accident that these are priorities. And keep in mind the main point is not to eliminate Black History Month, though I do not doubt that is a favored policy. The main point is to get people talking about how you are eliminating Black History Month. Just as I am covering the topic right now.
How is that war against US AID going? Will it be abolished? Cut off from the Treasury payments system? Simply rolled up into the State Department? Presidential “impoundment” invoked? I do not know. Perhaps nobody knows, not yet. The point however is to delegitimatize what US AID stands for, which the Trumpers perceive as “other countries first” and a certain kind of altruism, and a certain kind of NGO left-leaning mindset and lifestyle.
The core message is simply “we do not consider this legitimate.” Have that be the topic of discussion for months, and do not worry about converting each and every debate into an immediate tangible victory.
What about those ridiculous nominations, starting with RFK, Jr.? As a result of the nomination, people start questioning whether the medical and public health establishments are legitimate after all. And once such a question starts being debated, the answer simply cannot come out fully positive, whatever the details of your worldview may be. People end up in a more negative mental position, and of course then some negative contagion reinforces this further.
JFK and UAP dislcosure? The point is to get people questioning the previous regime, why they kept secrets from us, what really was going on with many other issues, and so on. It will work. The good news, if you can call it that, is that we can expect some of the juicier secrets to be made public.
I think by now you can see how the various attempts to restructure federal employment fit into this picture. And Trump’s “war against universities” has barely begun, but stay tuned. Don’t even get me going on “Gaza real estate,” the very latest.
Finally, let’s return to those tariffs (non-tariffs?) on Canada and Mexico. We already know Trump believes in tariffs, and yes that is a big factor, but why choose those countries in particular? Well, first it is a symbol of strength and Trump’s apparent ability to ignore and contradict mainstream opinion. But also those are two countries most Americans have heard of. If Trump announced high tariffs on say Burundi, most people would have no idea what it means. They would not know how to debate it, and they would not know if America was debasing itself or thumbing its nose at somebody, or whatever.
Canada and Mexico gets the cultural point across. Canada, all the more so, and thus the Canadian tariffs might be harder to truly reverse. At least to many Yankee outsiders, Canada comes across as exactly the kind of “wuss” country we need to distance ourselves from.
To be clear, this hypothesis does not not not require any kind of cohesive elite planning the whole strategy (though there are elites planning significant parts of what Trump is doing). It suffices to have a) conflicting interest groups, b) competition for Trump’s attention, and c) Trump believing cultural issues are super-important, as he seems to. There then results a spontaneous order, in which the visible strategy looks just like someone intended exactly this as a concrete plan.
In a future post I may consider the pluses and minuses of this kind of political/cultural strategy.
Sunday assorted links
1. Construction Physics year-end post.
2. Independence for New Caledonia?
3. Religion in the lives of some leading intellectuals, please note prophets of the Marginal Revolution.
4. Scott Sumner on immigration.
5. Schubert and his piano sonatas (NYT).
7. Galileo Jupiter moon discovery anniversary.
8. China’s best music of 2024?
9. End of Genesys okie-dokie, and more. Full set on YouTube.
Saturday assorted links
Thursday assorted links
1. “At the end of this podcast, @tylercowen jumps in to tell me and @patrickc why we’re both wrong.” Sounds like me, noting that most of the podcast is not me.
2. The new Jordan Peterson educational venture.
4. Korea is running a trade deficit in kimchi.
5. Luca responds to me on urbanism and mobility.
7. New open access book on Spanish economic history. And the older one on Spanish economic growth.
The Ludwig von Mises comeback
That is the subject of my latest Bloomberg column. Here is one excerpt:
The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises is having a moment, especially in Latin America. Argentine President Javier Milei admires Mises, and he has adopted some Misesian ideas, such as the notion that “the middle of the road leads to socialism.” Milei used to be an academic economist and knows the ideas of Mises well.
More colorfully, on Saturday the Brazilian UFC fighter Renato Moicano delivered an on-camera polemic (warning: audio in link NSFW) in praise of Mises and defending free speech and private property. His impromptu lecture pointed listeners to Mises and what he called the six lessons of the Austrian School of Economics, as well as his forthcoming podcast. Those lessons — as well as a G-rated version of Moicano’s economics lecture, and a Mises-inspired speech on business-cycle theory by President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador — are available on the website of the (US-based) Mises Institute.
And this:
Meanwhile, among free-market types, the vibes have shifted in a way that has boosted the influence of Mises. For a comparison, the ideas of Friedrich A. Hayek were ascendant in classical liberal circles during the 1990s, in part because Hayek had won a Nobel Prize. Hayek’s writing style was also more gentle, while Mises was uncompromising. As Hayek said about Mises’s book on socialism, published in 1922: “At first we all felt he was frightfully exaggerating and even offensive in tone.”
Milton Friedman was another great economic thinker of the 20th century, and he was renowned for always smiling and never losing his temper at his intellectual opponents. Friedman wrote a book called Capitalism and Freedom. Hayek’s was called The Constitution of Liberty. Mises, meanwhile, was producing books with titles such as Omnipotent Government and The Anti-Capitalist Mentality. He was the one of that troika who allied himself with Ayn Rand.
Today, however, many of Mises’s proclamations no longer sound as outdated as they might have a few decades ago. In his treatise Human Action, he was fond of stressing “Man Acts” as a fundamental principle of economic and social analysis. Whatever that might have meant at the time, these days I would not be surprised to find a comparable phrase in a Jordan Peterson book. Indeed, Peterson recently expressed his admiration for Moicano’s endorsement of Mises.
Finally:
As for Latin America, Mises may be just the kind of market-oriented thinker the region needs. Polemics do sometimes cut through the obfuscations of political discourse. Friedman and Hayek’s generosity toward their opponents is perhaps not the best strategy for the notoriously brutal politics of Latin America. And some of Mises’s more impolite notions — such as the idea that economic policy can simply become worse and worse over time — seem to be proving out in countries such as Brazil, which has been mostly stagnant for a long time now.
Worth a ponder.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Paul Christiano appointed to USG Head of AI Safety.
2. Further worries about the anti-cavity thing. I don’t pretend to know the answers here, but this has not been thought through well enough. And SSC update.
3. Fritz Peterson, RIP, MIE. Very 1970s.
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
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!”
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:
- Parenting interventions in poor communities (i.e. an army of social workers descending on poor communities to teach parenting and advocate for children).
- 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).
- Similarly – more drug decriminalization? Less?
- 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).
- 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?)
- The re-churching of America? If so, what are your suggestions for how to accomplish this (evangelical minds would like to know)?
- 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?
- 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.?
- 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?
- 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?