Jordan Peterson debate on the gender pay gap, campus protests and postmodernism

I think "watch X destroy Y" is just youtube's version of clickbait. I suspect you'll find videos like that tailored to most groups on youtube. I sometimes use them as trailers for longer talks that I might enjoy - although I always feel a little guilty for encouraging this sort of thing. In this case I found their interview to be excellent viewing. She was harsh and honest with him, and hurled most of the standard criticism at Peterson that people talk about. And while doing that she gave him the time and opportunity to respond. And he stayed calm, considered, articulate and entertaining throughout. I don't agree with everything either of them said, but I enjoyed watching that interview immensely - its exactly the sort of thing I want to see more of on youtube and in the public sphere. [this video]

Well they occasionally debate with each others but aren't supporting the same ideas. They do have in common that they disagree with identity politics, and as you can tell from the name calling on this HN page, this is a topic on which for many there is zero tolerance for any disagreement. Peterson mostly discusses religion (from a philosophical point of view), self-improvement, identity politics. He tends to be more on the conservative side but outside of identity politics doesn't discuss politics that much. His videos are all on his youtube channel [1]. A good way to make your own opinion is to watch the channel 4 interview, which I think is the way many people discovered him [2] Harris is a Democrat, furiously anti-religious and anti-Trump, talks about quite a variety of topics. You can browse through his podcasts [3]. He also doesn't like identity politics and islamist extremism. To get a good idea of his position on a touchy topic, you can try his interview of Charles Murray [4], which is very interesting and I think is a good example of how a relatively balanced point of view can get unfairly attacked. I am less familiar with Rubin [5]. My understanding is that he is more of a libertarian. Also less familiar with Eric Weinstein (and his brother Bret Weinstein). But you can listen to his discussion on the Intellectual Dark Web with Sam Harris [6]. Harris also has some interesting discussions with Bret Weinstein. [1] [link] [2] [this video] [3] [link] [4] [link] [5] [link] [6]

BTW, that Spectator article basically just embeds the original interview on Channel 4 uploaded to YouTube: [this video] And, wow, I just watched this and it is horrendously cringeworthy. Seems like the presenter was expecting someone soft in the head (like an MP/politician), and approached the interview in that modern British fashion, which didn't work out well at all. It's really awkward to see somebody be that badly intellectually outclassed, but then it was Channel 4... On the other hand, coming back to OP, there's something encouraging about a critical thinker having "star appeal". I think that's the best way to describe Dr Peterson, as you don't have to agree with him, but it is easy to follow his lucid trains-of-thought, and he is at least consistent.

Sigh. As the sibling comment points out, what you are saying is not true . It is contradicted by the text of the memo itself. Moreover he wasn't "very vocal about it", he wrote a memo that was then deliberately leaked by his ideological opponents in order to destroy his career: successfully so. Five years ago I felt my political views were pretty mainstream for the tech industry, for the Valley (although I did not live there). I'd have described myself as a centrist or maybe centre-left. These days my views have shifted, I can feel myself getting more conservative with time. It's not an age thing. It's more that I've started to notice the sort of tactic you used above - faced with someone making conservative arguments you disagree with you didn't bother debating the points he made. Instead you just lied about what he said and then attacked a straw man. This is consistently how Damore is treated. There are liberal arguments that can be made about what he wrote - people could point out methodological errors in his studies, or logic errors in his arguments. But they never seem to do that. Whether it's in the media (who love calling what he wrote an "anti diversity memo" even though it praises diversity and has ideas for how to increase the number of women in tech), or on Hacker News, the tactic is always the same - pretend he claimed women are worse than men and then viciously attack him on a personal level. And it's just totally false. The same tactic crops up in other similar

Re: men vs women - he has often claimed for example that women get payed less because they are unwilling to do the better paying jobs (most famously in the Cathy Newman interview [0]). He also claims often that women are more interested in empathy and men in systems, so that men are vastly much more likely to be in fields like engineering, while women are more vastly more likely to be interested in fields like nursing [1], with natural differences as large as 20:1. He himself may not make this value judgement, but given the general social consensus that views engineering as a more prestigious, intellectual job than medical nurses, I think it's mostly fair to characterize this claim as I did. I disagree with this conclusion any way - I believe that IQ testing quickly loses any kind of predictive power when applied to different backgrounds, and many implicit and even explicit biases quickly show up. I also find it hard to believe that a society where women:men ratios in any profession are 20:1 or 1:20 can be characterized as the free-est in the world on this issue. More likely, there are great social and historical pressures trending in this direction, and the state is simply doing nothing to try to reverse this injustice. Looking at former communist countries, that are generally not even close to having any kind of women in STEM programs that could be considered to bias results, the women:men ratio in STEM fields is something like 30:70. Re: IQ and "race" - I don't think so. Y

“I have noticed certain trends. When stories that focus on structural barriers faced by women in the workplace, or on diversity in tech, or on race or masculinity—stories, admittedly, that are more intriguing to me, a person interested in the humanities, than stories on technical topics—hit the front page, users often flag them, presumably for being off topic, so fast that hardly any comments accrue.” a. That's because there is no barriers to to women in the tech workplace. It just that they have a social life outside computers. b. This is a tech forum, we only want to read tech stuff. c. Your imaginary travails are of no interest to us. “Jordan Peterson debate on the gender pay gap” [this video]