No fan of Jordan Peterson but his response to twitter "banning" him is excellent.

Thank you for mentioning Marmot's book. It's an excellent rounded discussion of the statistical research.

Yes, Marmot does indeed say that people in occupations lower in the hierarchy have worse health. His Whitehall studies show a clear social gradient in health in the very stable clearly graded occupational hierarchy of civil servants.

There are obviously factors outside of social hierarchy that have a significant effect. For example, if a sedentary person with a bad diet chose to start eating five portions of vegetables a day and do couch to 5K then they will probably improve their health outcomes, while their position on the social status/job/income hierarchies remains the same.

Similarly better educated people have better health outcomes.

Religious people might fare better too. (I'm not advocating religion).

One of Marmot's studies looked at people at the same level in the occupational hierarchy with differing amounts of control in their jobs, and found markedly different rates of disease: low control consistently led to more disease. Managers rated jobs for their degree of control, and so did the civil servants themselves. The really curious thing is that these ratings were lowly correlated, (the managers thought levels of control were different from the civil servants actually doing the job) yet both measures predicted levels of heart disease. So when it comes to control, it seems how people view their jobs, and how others view their jobs, both seem to play a role.

The Bowman Gray studies of monkeys on a high fat diet, showed a clear social gradient in atherosclerosis in a stable hierarchy. They also showed that the introduction of high status monkeys from another group increases artheroslerosis in the higher status monkeys who are fighting for position. Being lower in the hierarchy was detrimental to health, but so was fighting for position.

Marmot also considers greater inequality to be detriment to health, even when people at the bottom have enough to meet the basic needs for subsistence on a healthy diet. There is considerable economic and political opposition to social engineering greater equality.

Marmot also discusses social isolation, and having the economic means to participate in social activities.

I'm more inclined towards improving diets, and exercise, and education for the whole population and earning more money myself, rather than standing up straight to boost serotonin to improve my social status through posture (though I do have a friend who swears by Alexander Technique).

He isn't a broken clock. He is certainly way above average intelligence, and has learned to communicate that incredibly well. He just also happens to have and follow strictly certain beliefs.

FWIW I enjoy his content to a degree, but also find him, as a whole, annoying. His views on humanity, and thus women (driven by said beliefs), are simply wrong, and his book is trash. I could not bring myself to read much beyond his stupid f*** lobsters.

Higher spots in the dominance hierarchy, and the higher serotonin levels typical of those who inhabit them, are characterized by less illness, misery and death, even when factors such as absolute income—or number of decaying food scraps—are held constant. The importance of this can hardly be overstated

I think there is quite good evidence that having a 'low status' in human societies is extremely harmful to health, and higher status beneficial. Professor Marmott discusses this in his book too.

It was a video a pp posted with Peterson being interviewed by Helen Lewis. She obviously went in hard and was quite rude to him. He does get a bit impatient with her. But he also skewers her arguments very effectively. I shouldn't have said he makes her look like an idiot - she makes herself look like an idiot.

You should watch his interview with Cathy Newman. It's entertaining. I think he mentions the lobsters. In fact, that interview is a very good demonstration of how Peterson is talked about by his detractors. "So what you're saying is..." 😂

I completely agree.

When I read his book I also realised that the accusations thrown at him for that book just don't match up to what he actually said in the book.

I quite liked his ten rules or whatever he called them. I found the book itself more like an extended opinion piece, but I find him an essentially good man who cares deeply about other people, particularly people who are suffering , and is genuinely trying to make his contribution to help people.

😀I was just thinking of that too !

I haven't read Waugh in decades apart from Decline and Fall (it wasn't as funny as I remembered)

Is that the "Patriarchy is a myth" video?

I just noticed the axes of Peterson's example are the other way round to the curve on the wikipedia page, so it does look like an lower case l-shaped curve (if the lower case l's in your type face are like hockey sticks). I was taking him literally because he uses the capital L shape.

@TheLassWiADelicateAir Damn this infernal interweb. If only one go back to sending messages with the traditional cleft stick.

I'm not seeing in this where he's given any kind of numbers that we should expect in these scenarios? He's given factual examples with their numbers but that's really not the same thing. Why would he give evidence to make a claim he isn't making? Do you think he is saying that the distribution of the heavenly bodies is the same as lobster territories,

I think he's actually talking about two separate things here that you are conflating, one being hierarchy and the other being how things are distributed, which can be applied to a lot of other kinds of things as well. I've seen it applied to how much people wear the different clothes they have relative to each other, for example, which isn't about social hierarchy at all.

It is Peterson who conflates outcomes in the world of the (male) lobster with the distribution of human wealth when he starts crossing over the line with this sentence:
It’s winner-take-all in the lobster world, just as it is in human societies, where the top 1 percent have as much loot as the bottom 50 percent [11] — and where the richest eighty-five people have as much as the bottom three and a half billion.

If Peterson makes a comparison and says outcomes observed in one system are 'just as it is' in another system then he needs to back that up with data. Otherwise a skeptical person might not believe what he says is true.

For everything except lobsters Peterson gives us a mathematical law which tells us how those other things are distributed:
This principle [of Unequal Distribution] is sometimes known as Price’s law, after Derek J. de Solla Price, [13] the researcher who discovered its application in science in 1963. It can be modelled using an approximately L-shaped graph, with number of people on the vertical axis, and productivity or resources on the horizontal.

To be precise Price created a mathematical model of networks of citation, in an attempt to explain how some papers are cited so much more than others. It assumes the mean out-degree (i.e. the number of citations) of nodes (each paper is a node) is fixed over time. Price's model predicted a power law distribution. Price compared his model to real citation network data and found a reasonable fit to a power law distribution.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%27s_model

In the examples Peterson cites researchers have done the work to fit the data sets to power law curves with various coefficients.

Power law distributions are highly skewed distributions with long tails which I suppose if you squint hard enough might be very, very roughly the L-shaped graph that Peterson describes. Statisticians would not model a power law as an L-shaped graph because they'd want sufficiently many data points to fit a power law curve. You can see the shape here en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law

Peterson is trying to embed reasonable research about male lobster behaviour in a wider narrative of reasonable statistical research (and in the whole book fit them into a even wider narrative). The relationship between the two bodies of research is tenuous.

Peterson's narrative is not one in which he says 'hey look at the male lobster hierarchy', now 'look at the human wealth hierarchy', but this is merely an observation that these hierarchies exist, and these hierarchies are unrelated in any way whatsoever, except by the fact that they are hierarchies. Peterson says humans have primordial calculator at the very foundation of our brains that evaluates rank, part of a serotonin feedback loop where the production of more serotonin improves how others rank you, which feeds back into your primordial calulator, ranks you higher, produces more serotonin... Or it can opperate in the opposite negative direction. Peterson claims this mechanism is subject to Price's law:
Circumstances change, and so can you. Positive feedback loops, adding effect to effect, can spiral counterproductively in a negative direction, but can also work to get you ahead. That’s the other, far more optimistic lesson of Price’s law and the Pareto distribution: those who start to have will probably get more.

There is not enough evidence fro a scientific person to believe him.

That doesn't mean you have to personally feel like a victim.

Which was my whole point.

Also, which 'feminism' are you talking about because a lot of so-called feminists believe in all kinds of rubbish like TWAW which is distinctly not feminist.

Couldn't agree more. I don't feel like a victim but society tells me I am all the time, just because I'm female.
I don't get this. Feminism recognizes that women as a sex class are overwhelmingly the victims of sexual assault and men are overwhelmingly responsible for it. That doesn't mean you have to personally feel like a victim. Good for you if you don't but it's not just about you.

I actually think that feminism has "gone too far" in lots of ways. Notably the idea that there are no differences between men and women, which has been an idea in feminism (not just liberal/third wave) for many decades now. The denigration of motherhood. The idea that casual sex is good for women. The idea that men hate us and that we will always be victims. Feminist ideas certainly led me, personally, along some destructive paths when I was younger. I was a good feminist, and it messed me up.

Couldn't agree more. I don't feel like a victim but society tells me I am all the time, just because I'm female.

I've seen that before. I think he makes Helen Lewis look like an idiot.

Feather footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole

It's from Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop . Lord Copper was a press baron (based on Rothermere?) He brooked no disagreement from minions- the most that could be expressed was "up to a point Lord Copper.

I actually think that feminism has "gone too far" in lots of ways. Notably the idea that there are no differences between men and women, which has been an idea in feminism (not just liberal/third wave) for many decades now. The denigration of motherhood. The idea that casual sex is good for women. The idea that men hate us and that we will always be victims. Feminist ideas certainly led me, personally, along some destructive paths when I was younger. I was a good feminist, and it messed me up.

That's not at all what he says or writes. I'm not sure how you can claim he thinks something other than what he actually expresses.

This is the man who thinks women are "chaos" and men are "order". No thanks.

I doubt the word "lobster" has ever been used so many times in a MN thread before

😆

It's funny, especially in a section of Mumsnet which is about feminism.

I'm not seeing in this where he's given any kind of numbers that we should expect in these scenarios? He's given factual examples with their numbers but that's really not the same thing. Why would he give evidence to make a claim he isn't making? Do you think he is saying that the distribution of the heavenly bodies is the same as lobster territories,

I think he's actually talking about two separate things here that you are conflating, one being hierarchy and the other being how things are distributed, which can be applied to a lot of other kinds of things as well. I've seen it applied to how much people wear the different clothes they have relative to each other, for example, which isn't about social hierarchy at all.