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Old 02-01-2018, 07:42 PM   #27
Clodfobble
UNDER CONDITIONAL MITIGATION
 
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: Austin, TX
Posts: 20,012
The interview on Channel 4 was good. I agreed with everything he said.

BUT.

There were some things the interviewer (because she sucked) didn't follow up on, which were brought to greater prominence in the Joe Rogan interview (who tried to follow up a little better, but wasn't as much of a Devil's Advocate as he could have been.) In Peterson's mind, a single step toward group mentality or group protection is an inevitable death march to literal genocide a la Maoism. At the same time, he acknowledges that unchecked capitalism leads to increasing extremes of inequality that lead to an unstable-and-doomed-to-collapse system. He notes that "we have to figure out ways" to correct for that, and more specifically that we haven't come up with any such ways so far.

Similarly, he notes that men and women overlap on average more than they differ, and it is only in the extremes where strongly-correlated stereotypes arise. I agree. However, he also notes that most people don't understand these statistics, with the only conclusion being that this is why people don't understand the factual nature of his statements about extremes. The other side of that coin, however, is that people also don't understand the level to which men and women overlap, and why that statistically-unlikely aggressive woman who is interested in tech does often suffer from the reality of discrimination at a social level, and often an institutional one, from her male peers. He acknowledged that gender does play a role--albeit a smaller one than is often claimed--but the interviewer was a sensationalist idiot unwilling to drill down into the nature of that percentage, regardless of its size.

Enforcing equality of outcome is not the solution, I totally agree--but neither is pretending there are no individual, non-general realities for people (of both genders) who are in the 40% but assumed to be in the 60%. Again, he glosses over this with "we have to solve those problems" and freely admits he has no solutions. That's a cowardly punting down the field, IMHO. It's not enough, from a personal ethical standpoint, to say that "A is not the problem, and I'm done." You have to continue to acknowledge that there is still a problem, and try to come up with other ways it might be solved.
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