Cathy Newman and Jordan Petersen on C4 News

Cathy Newman was an embarrassment during that interview, came across as aggressive, didn't make any valid counter points. I wish someone else had interviewed him. I've watch quite a few of his interviews and I think his views on trans are very interesting

“If you disguise your 'disagreeableness' you are being agreeable? These words are by nature a little bit woolly, imprecise and also very very subjective.”

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Agreeableness is just the label, which seems to fit reasonably well but isn’t a definition of the category. The Big 5 personality traits are not defined categories. What the psychometric people do is generate batches of questions about what you think and what you behave and see if the answers clump together. Do people who answer question 15 “yes” also answer question 112 “yes” and question 135 “no.” You do this a zillion times, apply some statistics and you discover that the answers to {these questions} seem to clump together and the answer to {those questions} clump together.
Silly illustration – you might find that people who like ballet, hate football, hate spaghetti, hate dogs and love cocoa. So you define that clump as “jingumpyness”.

Before you started you had no idea that people who like ballet and cocoa hate football, dogs and spaghetti. You had no prior concept of “jingumpyness” – it just fell out of your tests. And it turns out pretty robustly that there are 5 personality lumps that clump. One of them happens to be called Agreeableness. When you look at the questions that are clumped there, they seem to have to do with compassion, politeness and so on. But it absolutely doesn’t matter what you call the clumps.

The clumps are not even slightly subjective – they’re the statistical output of batteries of questions that have been tested and tested. Btw if you think it matters what questions you ask, and that you can rig the answers by rigging the questions, you can’t. You just ask as many questions as you can think of. If it turn out that some of your questions are really the same question that doesn’t matter. The sums can work that out. Watch one of JP’s videos on psychometrics if you want a fuller and more lucid explanation.

“Being agreeable I assert is a choice not a character trait.”

Yes and no. ACTING in an agreeable fashion is a choice. But having a personality that is agreeable is a character trait. The difference is that you naturally act according to your personality, but you can choose to act against your nature (to some extent.) If you do choose to act against your nature, it’s an effort. If you want to act consistently against your nature, you need to train yourself and actually lay down some new neuronal connections. Somebody who is naturally extrovert finds it easy to go to a party and introduce themselves, make new contacts, and enjoys the experience. An introvert can steel themselves to do that, practice small talk and with effort learn how to act in a reasonably extrovert way but it’s exhausting. Depending on how introverted they are naturally they’ll find it a modest effort or a huge effort. With lots of practice and training at acting in an extrovert fashion, an introvert may become reasonably comfortable acting extrovert. But it’s like learning a second language. It’s hard work.

And in some ways it’s pretty hard to learn to act against your nature. For example my wife is very orderly (a subset of conscientiousness) but I am not. I often do not even SEE the aspects of disorder that she complains about. Go clean up your mess in the lounge – I go to the lounge and see no mess. I go back – what mess ? Eventually she drags me round to the lounge and points accusingly at the folded newspaper on the coffee table and the sofa cushion that hasn’t been put back just so. It’s not that I’m being ornery. She perceives a mess. I perceive a perfectly orderly room.

If you disguise your 'disagreeableness' you are being agreeable? These words are by nature a little bit woolly, imprecise and also very very subjective. As you say people who want to climb the greasy pole can muster up civility, charm and agreeability in spades when it suits them. In much the same way that many men who knock their wives about can often somehow magically suppress his violent nature when surrounded by bigger scarier men.

Being agreeable I assert is a choice not a character trait. Now certain people have a wider range of choices afforded to them thanks to assorted privileges. Just how slaves had little agency to be much more than agreeable to their masters, would you be as asinine to argue they were just agreeable by nature? Because people argued it was In their nature to submit at the time. I call weapons grade nuclear bullshit on that one, with the greatest respect of course.

Also a lot of this dominance hierarchy stuff can get rebutted quite effectively by looking at male homosexuals who as a cohort earn more on average than the average straight man. When there isn't quite the need to compete over all the females.

You can if you are a clever academic dictate the rhetoric by narrowing your focus to a laser like precision and examining only the data that supports your view. I'm not acquaintated with Peterson all that much beyond this interview however it is quite clear he is as capable of doing that as much as his opponents are.

What this interview reveals to me is that many of those on the left have gotten incredibly intellectually flabby with all this no platforming nonsense and reflexive censoring of view points they disagree with. Feminism to an extent has been infected by this as well as cries of mansplaining etc can be trotted out whenever a viewpoint or or idea is trotted out they don't wish to engage with, but this is a malaise that is afflicting the left in particular thanks to it's cultural dominance of the last few decades. The religious right was the same way back in the 70s and 80s.

What young men need are good fathers and role models, they have not been getting them.

Shwangalangadingdong : "I feel more uncomfortable then really with a few of his 'observations' about women but he's not easy on anyone"

That made me smile, because I just listened to his answer to a question from a woman, at one of his talks in London, the gist of which seemed to be - you've given a lot of advice to men, what's your advice to women ?

The answer included this line which indicates that he's thinking along the same lines as you :

"A reviewer of my book yesterday said something about, something like my “negative attitude towards women” which I found was quite interesting because as far as I can tell I don’t really have a negative attitude towards women….or if I do, it’s no more negative than the attitude I have towards men…"

SilkyDrawers : "However all the 'disagreeable' women I've worked with fortunately don't give a flying fuck if they're seen as disagreeable"

Which is pretty much the point of being disagreeable.

Though intelligent disagreeable people learn to disguise their disagreeableness in front of people who they need to butter up. Unintelligent disagreeable people don't learn buttering.

Incidentally as JP explains one of the big disadvantages of being too disagreeable is that it greatly increases your chances of getting into jail. Be very disagreeable, very unconscientious and male and you have a really excellent chance of going to jail. And fully deserving to be there.

Given that it's so damn difficult to discern how much is nature v nurture, it becomes next to impossible to assert or refute the radical feminism on the issue of how much sexism actually exists. Yet we should be cautious as just because something is difficult to quantify does not mean it does not exist.

Yet it becomes very difficult to argue against facts like:

• Two women a week murdered at the hands of men.
• The overwhelming number of sexual assaults/rapes that occur.

One thought I'll leave with is how when women are literate and have reproductive rights societies fare better. Furthermore this visceral male drive to compete, gather, expand and grow resources is inevitably going to end in disaster as our planet has neither infinite space nor infinite resources.

Whatever we end up doing we are going to have to change as the trajectory we are on is not a pleasant one. Perhaps not in our lifetimes but still...

YippeeKiYayMelonFarmer

I hope that discovering that you’ve been discussing JP on mumsnet isn’t going to wreck JP’s street cred with your son ☺

“He really seems to be speaking directly to young men doesn't he?”

I think so. I’ll try to explain why I think that. When he veers off from psychometrics and psychology and waxes more philosophical, he’s really distilling thirty years of his own search for meaning in life. And since it’s his life and he’s a man, it’s more likely that he’ll find an empathetic reaction in young men, who are seeking meaning in their life. Some of his thoughts are perfectly unisex, but some are not.
Young women (on average) will probably find his meaning less meaningful to them. (I am assuming, disgracefully, that young women and young men are on average a bit different.) That’s not to say that young women won’t find his thoughts interesting, it’s just less likely that they’ll feel “Yes ! That’s me !”

I’ll offer a personal example. Having done a couple of personality tests online, I find – not even slightly to my surprise – that I’m broadly in the middle of all of the personality traits, except one. I’m stupendously non neurotic, which is to say that you do need to put an actual cobra in my bed before I get seriously worried. So when Peterson talks about life as suffering, I’m thinking “Eh ? What suffering is that ? I don’t have any suffering.” Now part of that is obviously that I actually don’t have any suffering, because I have a really easy life. (Fear not, ye who suffer a lot, no doubt old age is going to have a lot of suffering to offer me.) But part of it is personality, because if I think about it, I can remember things that were little bits of suffering. And if they were trivial, I forgot about them by the following morning. And if they needed sorting out, once they were sorted out I forgot about them. So when Peterson talks about suffering I’m thinking “Hmm. How interesting. These poor people. That must be really tough.” I’m not thinking “Yes ! That’s me !”

So I suspect that Peterson finds a resonance with young men because more of them feel more “That’s me!” than is the case with young women.

His Maps of Meaning lectures, which are an idiosyncratic mix of cultural archetypes, psychology of religion, art etc are quite openly sexist in that he discusses the cultural role of the Good / Tyrannical Father, the Good /Tyrannical Mother. And the Hero. Who is always male. His (mostly female) students do ask him – hey, the Hero’s always male, what’s the Hero figure for us females ? And his answers are not particularly inspiring or convincing (including to him – ie he knows he hasn’t got a good answer.) That doesn’t mean that he’s deliberately excising heroic female archetypes from his conception, because – relying on actual cultural histories - female heroes are thin on the ground. But it does mean that he has failed to weave an inspirational story that works as well for young women as it does for young men. Young women can, and do, watch with curiosity and interest but I suspect it’s more usually it’s a sympathetic connection not an empathetic connection.

And much as I admire Peterson, since his own inspiration is obviously rather personal, I doubt that he’s going to be the person best placed to help young women find meaning (beyond his unisex advice.) But what do I know ? I’d be very interested in the takes of any women who watch his stuff and do find it inspirational. What has he got to say (if anything) that a female listener found inspirational (over and above interesting) ?

Yes I think that's it. I feel more uncomfortable then really with a few of his 'observations' about women but he's not easy on anyone, which is why I am so engrossed. You don't hear people talk like he does too often. His talk web chat with a transwoman was really interesting. One of the very few interviews I've seen with him where I felt the other person was his intellectual match. I really hoped Cathy Newman would be but it really was a huge disappointment and missed opportunity.

Why are you embarrassed?

I read Breitbart occasionally. I don't agree with it but I'd rather be willing to understand where they're coming from. Especially given the White House resident. If he were willing to engage seriously with things he expected to disagree with, the world would feel just a less volatile right now....

Slightly embarrassed to put my hand up and say I have also listened to a few podcasts of his. I really enjoyed the Joseph lecture and love how he dispenses advice to his students and the tangents he goes off into.
My (17 yr old) son has also watched a few of his lectures. That really surprised me I have to say.
I am going to listen to the rest of the biblical lectures and come back to his rather odd misogyny (not sure how else to describe it) at a later date, because he really is worth listening to.

And yes re young men. Mine are too young yet. But I worry about DD for many reasons. And I worry about DS. For some similar reasons but also different ones. Again, I don't think it's zero sum, that looking out for one has to come at the expense of the other.

YippeeKiYayMelonFarmer I think they other dimension is the equality of opportunity / equality of outcome distinction. I'm not sure which you mean with participation on the same level?

SilkyDrawers : "It takes huge, huge self-confidence to confront the great and the good in interviews, and you simply won't get to the top without a very tough hide."

This is an excellent point. We might be overdosing on the "agreeableness" point, as it's not that big a factor at the median level. But at the top pay levels it may loom larger, not merely because top jobs involve tough pay negotiations but because it may be easier to do your job better if you're not extremely agreeable. As well as negotiating for your own pay, you may have to negotiate with people in your company about whether your sales strategy should be pursued rather than theirs. Or whether their plans for a new factory are misconceived. Or you may need to negotiate with a supplier for a discount. Or fire a colleague who's a friend of yours. So some of the agreeableness angle may not just be about asking for pay rises. it may be that some particularly agreeable people don't like jobs where they have to do things that make them uncomfortable.

Someone said on this thread that they were going to go and battle for a pay rise in a few weeks, and the thought of it was bringing her out in hives. But she'll probably be able to manage it despite the stress. Especially if she practices in advance. But you don't want a job where the mere thought of going in to the office brings you out in hives, because you know you're going to hate your day.

me "[Peterson's] point is that dominance hierarchies in humans are not a contingent cultural edifice constructed by the patriarchy; because all social animals have them"

I realise on rereading that I didn't word that very well. What I should have said is that humans having some kind of dominance hierarchies is not a contingent cultural edifice etc. But the particular form that dominance hierarchies take in human society is obviously influenced by culture. Basketball is not innate. But you can still earn a high place in the male dominance hierarchy by becoming a basketball star (and no not just because of the money.)

CritEqual : "I take issue with this 9% figure also as these neatly delineated "reasons" may in fact be comorbid and the sexism that Peterson in no way denies exists and in fact recognises as a factor."

Perfectly fair point. To some extent, the sums are going to tell you something about that. So for example if you find that agreeable men get paid 1% less than non agreeable men, but agreeable women get paid 2% less than non agreeable women, then that's a clue that some other factor is joining in to make agreeableness an extra big handicap for women. Or if the figures go the other way, you might find that there's some other factor damping the effect of agreeableness.

To the extent that Cathy Newman is getting abuse, I presume it's coming from resentful bitter men. If any of them have gone further than abuse into actual criminal threats, the correct sentence in the courts is pretty clear to me. They should be made to watch a course of Peterson's lectures. In which they will discover that his main bit of advice for improving your life is "Forget about lecturing other people on their motes, sort out your own beam first."

YippeeKiYayMelonFarmer

Proving that this or that is innate, or caused by socialization is a very difficult thing, especially as if any things about human behavior are innate then they’re bound to entwine themselves into the culture and create a mixture whose origins are going to be difficult to discern. I recall someone saying a long time ago that asking “how much of human behaviour is caused by genes and how much is caused by the environment” is a bit like asking how much of a rectangle is caused by its length and how much is caused by its breadth” – well, it’s a bit difficult to say.

I think the main point that should be taken away from people like Peterson and Pinker is that the notion that everything is a function of society, and not at all influenced by biology (and by implication reformable in the political realm*) is essentially a dogma. Reality is more complicated and so we should at least be open to other possibilities. But proving how much is this and how much is that is way more difficult.

As to Scandinavia, you don’t have to accept that the data prove the innateness of interests driving job choices. You could argue that it’s still all about society, but that the Scandinavians have just failed correctly to identify the political levers that they need to pull to get rid of society’s sexist influences. They tried but by accident they pulled the wrong levers.

You could say the same about Peterson and his lobsters. His point is that dominance hierarchies in humans are not a contingent cultural edifice constructed by the patriarchy; because all social animals have them, and regulate them with the same sort of brain systems. But it’s still open to objectors to say – phoeey ! Humans are different, our brains are so big that we can and do override old brain systems that we share with animals. (Peterson’s psychology lectures are an interesting rejoinder to that sort of argument, btw. Essentally, he argues, the new human brain systems get to be in control when, and only when, the old brain systems are completely satisfied and have their feet up having a nap. But whenever the old brain systems are unhappy, the new brain systems don’t get a say at all.)

For another interesting take on the nature v nurture thing, and in particular on the tenacity with which some folk will hang on to dogma, this is a highly entertaining show from Norway.

• note that this is an oversimplification. There may be innate things that are reformable and non innate things that aren't reformable.

@CritEqual IMHO age works very well for them, at 25 they couldn't really throw their weight around as they're usually not established names yet. It isn't till they're in their 40s and 50s that the 'big names' in the media really hit their stride and start leveraging their power/acting like a complete PITA to the 'underlings' like me because they have power and are highly valued for their experience and name. Some are nicer about it than others. No different to the blokes really.

I may be biased against your Cathy Newmans because of this. What jarred with me was her 'I represent poor victimised underpaid women' POV when in reality she is far more closely aligned with the ferociously ambitious male CEOs of this world. I don't envy her poor pro Just my opinion though.

@CritEqual IMHO it works very well for them, at 25 they couldn't really throw their weight around as they're usually not established names yet. It isn't till they're in their 40s and 50s that the 'big names' in the media really hit their stride and start leveraging their power/acting like a complete PITA to the 'underlings' like me because they have power and are highly valued for their experience and name. Some are nicer about it than others. No different to the blokes really.

I may be biased against your Cathy Newmans because of this. What jarred with me was her 'I represent poor victimised underpaid women' POV when in reality she is far more closely aligned with the ferociously ambitious male CEOs of this world. Just my opinion though.

Also very important to mention that the replacement fertility in most east-euro countries is abysmal and these nations will literally die out within several generations.

I've lived half of my adult life in Western Europe and the other half in Eastern Europe (roughly). From the countless women I've encountered, anything from shop cashiers to doctors, there is no doubt that eastern women are far more disagreeable on average. In fact, the women are more disagreeable than the men in the east. And this is supposed to be the patriarchal, traditional, religious stronghold of Europe. We're talking about countries where there is virtually no welfare safety net and divorce laws are terrible for the lower income partner. Maybe this is why Bulgaria has 5 times more female directors and execs than Sweden. The best way to create equal outcomes between ''identity groups'' is to sweep the rug under everyone and let them fight to the death. But I'm not sure this is the kind of world we should be fighting for.

@SilkyDrawers in your experience how well does being disagreeable work once the female presenters are past a certain age?

That 'agreeableness' thing rang quite true to me, actually, working in the aforementioned meeja for 20 years has shown me that the women who rise to the top in on-air roles are FAR more likely to be 'disagreeable', for want of a better word. It takes huge, huge self-confidence to confront the great and the good in interviews, and you simply won't get to the top without a very tough hide. Toughness and ballsiness are traits that we've been historically discouraged from exhibiting so these women do stand out, while the rest of us watch on from the sidelines with a clipboard being agreeable and being sidelined.

Cathy Newman is just the sort of stroppy, quite aggro journo who does well and rises to the top. It's still very sexist how women are negatively perceived for being like this whereas the men are just 'strong' and 'assertive, but that's not always true - viz Paxo cops just as much stick for being stroppy and difficult. However all the 'disagreeable' women I've worked with fortunately don't give a flying fuck if they're seen as disagreeable