Dr. Jordan B Peterson - Professor and clinical psychologist

Bee

Founding Member
#81
I wonder if thats the solution, send the lower IQ people to the third world!
Dangerous ground. You may as well say why not go the whole way and bring in Eugenics. Where does it stop? It's less than 100 years since people were segregated in concentration camps and the Nazis attempted to exterminate them because they didn't fit the ideal standard of the time. Not just Jews, but people with disabilities, Gypsies, homosexuals, etc.

The thrust of the discussion on this thread seems to have an underlying premise that a person has lesser value if they are not smart. I am not at all comfortable with that suggestion. And before I'm accused of being a bleeding heart liberal, I'd just like to point out to Jon that the left doesn't believe everyone is equal. I don't know how many more times I have to say it. Actually, it's pretty discourteous that I've had to say it so often and I'm still ignored.
 

Jon

Administrator
Staff member
#82
Eugenics is selective breeding. But that is not so far removed from gene editing to remove a babies risk of a certain disease. With Crispr cas9 technologies, children will soon be tweaked for improvements or get left behind. If your child had progeria, for example, wouldn't you want to tweak the genes responsible for this condition, to give your child a normal lifespan? Gene editing can remove any desire for Eugenics and yet achieve the goal of a human race with better DNA. I don't think the latter is a bad goal. Robust human health can only be a good thing.

I agree, the left doesn't consider that everyone is equal. Just look at the vilified old white male's treatment by the left. My (limited) historical understanding is that the left has always been against racism, gender equality and ageism. Yet prominent members of the Democrat party are out to slur "old white men." By going overboard with the virtue signalling, they are denigrating a carefully stratified group of innocent people based on their age, sex, and gender.

In fact, a potential future president of the United States has (mis-)used race as her calling card. Elizabeth Warren said she was Native-American when applying to the Bar. They found her application document, the evidence is in. Yet her DNA test shows that she has under 2% Native-American DNA which is less than the average American.

So, yes, the Democrats do not consider that everyone is equal, but they do consider some to be more equal than others. e.g. Native-American > old white men.

Bee, your contributions are always welcome. The last thing we want is an echochamber of back-patting and cheers of "Here here!"
 
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Uncle Gizmo

Founding Member
#83
Dangerous ground.
Indeed! This is one of the Major concerns of Dr Jordan B Peterson. Our natural tendency to group people into inferior groups and deal with them! This was the way that the Soviet Union operated. For example , they would decide that a particular lawyer was against communism, and then decide actually this means "All Lawyers" are against communism and round up the whole group and intern them in the gulags. My comment was poorly written, I meant to suggest a one for one exchange, in a humorous context, to overcome the objections people have to immigration.
 

Uncle Gizmo

Founding Member
#84
As to saying that some people are of lesser value?

Now, that's s difficult one! A starting point would be to define value... But no, the starting place might be who's value? Let's say Society. And then what is society? Does this encompass 1 country, all democratic country's, all countries in the world? (Better not include aliens yet!)

when I'm programming I have found it's a mistake to try and program for all eventualities. The best way is to program for the simplest possible case and then expand on that. It works very well! I wonder if that's a way to approach this problem?
 

Uncle Gizmo

Founding Member
#85
If we take the simplest and in a way the most valueless thing in society from the point of view of providing something useful to society then consider a "baby". It produces nothing of value, and consumes vast amounts of resources.

I'm not sure that's a very good example because I couldn't think of the contra to it... Except maybe "mother" which sort of defeats the baby idea!
 

Uncle Gizmo

Founding Member
#86
Actually Bee, why not swap? What is the problem with sending people from the first World with low IQ and exchanging them from people in the third world with high IQ? You see the problem with objecting to this idea, apart from the problem of choosing the group by IQ, and that's a different kettle of fish! The problem is, are we automatically devaluing people from the third world, just because they live in the third world? So the question could be, what gives us the right to live in our privileged first world? What value do we provide over and above the value that someone from the third world could offer? We are probably better educated for one thing, (depending on the IQ issue, which need sussing out) then there's the issue of wealth, every member of the first world is far wealthier than the majority of the 3rd world members, If you take into account all the things we take for granted, like infrastructure, access to medicine, education, food!

So does the question of a person's value come from something intrinsic to the person, or does it come from their geographic location?
 

Jon

Administrator
Staff member
#87
One thing to factor in when talking about the relative value of an individual, is that the scale doesn't necessarily have to be just positive. It could have a negative axis too. For example, Hitler provided negative value to the Jews. Then again, he provided positive value to the Brownshirts. Perhaps the concept of a person's value is essentially an infinite collection of different graphs, depending on both the domain being measured and the perspective of the individual affected.

So, that said, I think it is fair that we are all equal and unequal at the same time. It just depends on what area you are talking about.
 

Uncle Gizmo

Founding Member
#88
Well I found someone else that's critical of Dr Jordan B Peterson, not quite sure if they have anything concrete to say.

Nothing Is a Greater Waste of Time Than the Planned Debate Between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek

Extract:-
Jordan Peterson, a man whose crass theories are often dilutions of evolutionary psychology

I quite like the evolutionary theory, and I was aware of it before Jordan, Eckhart Tolle says something similar. However I have no idea whether it is a thing or whether it's a delusion of Jordan's. I have no training in the subject! However my common sense tells me two things, Jordan believes what he's saying, and what he's saying makes a lot of sense! I have no reason to think that Jordan is lying, so he is either telling the truth or deluded!

He doesn't come over as deluded to me, he comes over as a down-to-earth guy, trying to explain a subject he has studied and worked out over the last 40 odd years. I am aware that people like to attach labels like "Deluded" to their enemies to devalue them, and to attack them. And that seems more likely to me in this case.

I would also add, that if you have differences with people, then a debate is a good way to go! So criticising them for getting together and having a debate seems very odd. I suppose it just makes a good headline!
 

Bee

Founding Member
#89
What is the problem with sending people from the first World with low IQ and exchanging them from people in the third world with high IQ?
Firstly, contributions to society shouldn't be measured purely in terms of IQ. There are many ways to contribute. Let's take an extreme example:

A friend of mine has two sons, one of whom has Downs Syndrome. He is never going to be able to work or support himself, and his IQ is limited. Yet, he's one of the happiest people I know. He loves dancing and music and art (and he's a brilliant artist by the way) and to see him enjoy himself makes other people genuinely happy. Under a regime where people with lower IQs are all sent to live together in some IQ-exchange programme, we would all be deprived of the joy he reminds us about that lies in the simpler things in life. But by annexing him to live with other people of a lower IQ, aren't we saying that we only value high IQ?

You may or may not personally value the example I've given. But I do. And moreover, in a world where we are continually urged to be mindful, to be aware, to be present and in the moment so we can truly experience life, people like him are valuable.

Secondly, let's assume the idea has legs and we do enter into an IQ-exchange programme. What you then do is create a society (the low IQ's) who cannot ever progress and improve their condition. Moreover, they may not even be able to function - who would be the doctors, scientists, managers, accountants, solicitors, teachers etc? We know that within the normal distribution, criminality and IQ/education are linked. When a society doesn't have the infrastructure to function, anarchy ensues.

Finally, Dr Meredith Belbin (a psychologist famous for devising a test to see how teams function) actually tested a version of this idea. Except he put the high-IQs in a team, expecting them to be able to deliver outstanding results.

What was at first deemed to be likely was that high-intellect teams would succeed where lower intellect teams would not. However, the outcome of this research was that certain teams, predicted to be excellent based on intellect, failed to fulfil their potential. In fact, it became apparent by looking at the various combinations that it was not intellect, but balance, which enabled a team to succeed. Successful “companies” were characterised by the compatibility of the roles that their members played while unsuccessful companies were subject to role conflict. Using information from psychometric tests, predictions could be made on the roles that individuals played and ultimately on whether the company would be more likely to figure among the winners or losers.

One interesting point to observe from the experiment was that individuals reacted very differently within the same broad situation. It is a common experience that individual differences can cause a group to fall apart. People just don’t fit in. On the other hand, variation in personal characteristics can become a source of strength if they are recognised and taken account of. So understanding the nature of these differences can become an essential first step in the management of people, providing one can recognise what is useful for a given situation and what is not. The most successful companies tended to be those with a mix of different people, i.e. those with a range of different behaviours.
 
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Bee

Founding Member
#90
Actually, coming back to this, there's another point I hadn't thought of. That of meritocracy. If we send people with low IQs to the 3rd world, in exchange for their smarter counterparts, aren't we simply saying that if you aren't smart, you don't deserve to have a first world standard of life?

The very thought is chilling.
 

Jon

Administrator
Staff member
#91
Interesting reasoning Bee. You could then say because you aren't smart, you don't deserve to have the same income as someone who is smart. Next step, communism!

Or if you like, you could say because you are not smart enough to get a medical degree, we are being exclusionary to those individuals. Aren't we simply saying, you are not smart and so you don't deserve to have a life as a doctor?
 

Bee

Founding Member
#92
Jon, that's not the point I am making.

Being a doctor means you have to have a certain level of intelligence - combined with an ability to apply it. I know plumbers who earn as much as doctors. Different skillset. You could argue that plumbers 'need' less intelligence. But where would the high IQ society be without working sanitation?

I am smart enough to be a doctor. I would think all of us in this forum probably are. But are we doctors? Why not? If I choose not to be a doctor and 'waste' my smarts, do I forfeit my first world life? Of course not - I contribute to society and the economy in a different way. Just as people with lesser intelligence do.
 

Jon

Administrator
Staff member
#93
Let me try angle #2. :p

If you don't do the swap, aren't we simply saying that if you are smart (in the third world country), you don't deserve to have a first world standard of life?

[Clue: this is a zero sum game.]
 

Bee

Founding Member
#94
Everyone deserves a decent standard of living. Whether that's first or third world. Intelligent or not.
 

Jon

Administrator
Staff member
#95
In that case, why discriminate against the smart when you say, "don't deserve 1st world standards of living if you are not smart?" It affects both the smart and the not-so-smart, but you are favouring the not-so-smart over the third-world smart individual. Why isn't your argument, "Remove the not-so-smart and replace with the smart (from the third-world)", if you believe they deserve a decent standard of living?

Because it is a zero sum game, when you argue that you shouldn't send Group A to the third world because they deserve 1st world standards, you are implicitly saying you favour Group A over Group B, because Group B doesn't have 1st world standards either. But you have elected to favour Group A. Unless you mean to not send Group A, but to also invite Group B, all 1.2M of them from India, crammed into East Sussex in the UK. I hope social services can cope!
 
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Bee

Founding Member
#96
Jon - stop being mischievous. Everyone deserves a decent standard of living. The side issue is that we can categorise countries by calling them first and third world.

But, I am not going to be diverted from the original point. Creating one society with smart people and one society with not smart people is a bad idea on many levels.
 

Uncle Gizmo

Founding Member
#98
I must say whatever you think of Dr Jordan Peterson, he has been very good for my education! In one of his lectures he mentioned Sisyphus pushing The Rock, and he asked, was Sisyphus happy? Interesting question! So I searched the internet and found this thread on medium:-

Camus, Suicide, and Imagining Sisyphus Happy

It was very interesting, Albert Camus, (French philosopher) thinking, in some ways, similar to What Dr Jordan Peterson says about being depressed and suicidal...

This Sisyphus thread led me to the above contrary Jordan thread.
 
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Jon

Administrator
Staff member
#99
Jordan is like a breath of fresh air. Being stifled by much of the politically correct debate, certain groups have put a gun to the head of those who wish to oppose the status quo. Having a super-smart advocate like Mr Peterson has unleashed the pent up frustrations of people worldwide. No wonder his following has grown exponentially.
 

Uncle Gizmo

Founding Member
I hadn't considered medium as a good place to read stuff! I sort of dismissed it because it only allows you 3 goes a month until you sign up. Also most of the stuff I've read on there in the past has been about programming, and I've never found anything of much interest. Now though, it looks like the different aspects of Peterson being thrashed out by people might well pique my interest! Here's another example about Peterson on medium which is sort of, "for him" I reckon..

The Jordan Peterson Phenomenon
 
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