Cathy Newman and Jordan Petersen on C4 News

[AssignedPuuurfectAtBirth]

Just on. He was saying that people are different due to ' agreeableness, women being more likely to be so; men less so, hence the gender gap

It's the first time I have ever seen Cathy Newman angry. And he was spluttering a bit, first time for him too, for me, I think.

Watch it on + 1

I agree with some of Petersen's views but he didn't come off at all well here

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.

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....

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.

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) ?

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.

So I don't find it at all unreasonable to assume that given how much horrific misogyny that exists at the measurable and lethal end of the spectrum that there is a whole iceberg of casual and upwards in severity levels of it underneath.

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...

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.

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…"

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.

“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.

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

I like him actually, he has guts to say what others don't

I said earlier - i quite like CN and i do feel a bit sorry for her. This whole hoohaar must be very humiliating for her. Problem is she did bring it on herself by the way she conducted the interview - she tried to trip him up and humiliate HIM. It was interesting and entertaining though and i felt they had a mutual respect by the end. I wonder if she’s learned anything from all this and on watching it all back what her views are on his points.

I'm quite disturbed by the tentative emergence of what can be called an Alt-Right feminism which offers surreptitious sympathy to essentialist - and sometimes even racist and eugenicist - ideas. (Anne Marie Walters is a prime example of this phenomenon). Whatever valid issues you might have with the transgenderist movement, Petersen is a nasty piece of shit. The fact that he gives race and gender essentialism a respectable, intellectual face makes him if anything more insidious than the likes of Richard Spencer, who are at least more up-front about what they believe.

Please be aware of feminism's shift to the right. It is a tendency that is there and has been so since the likes of Margaret Sanger.

YippeeKiYayMelonFarmer

As to intellectual bonding between mother and son, I recall seeing Pride and Prejudice on my mum’s desk when I was about fourteen. I instantly concluded that it couldn’t possibly be worth reading – how could it be if my mum was interested in it ? Eventually I got round to reading it when I was about thirty and I loved it. I read it again every five years or so and it still makes me laugh.

Personality test – I think I found a link to this on the Graun. Seems OK.

personalitylab.org/tests/bfi2_self_pol.htm

I think JP has a pretty extensive professional experience of women from his clinical and consulting practices– both high end career gals and people with serious problems. And there’s no reason to doubt that he follows his own advice – “listen, you might learn something.” He’s extremely well read, so he’ll have jumped into as many fictional ladies’ heads as are offered. And he’s married and has a daughter. So I imagine that as an external observer, he’s in a pretty high percentile for understanding women. But he’s still only an external observer. What I’m doubting is whether any man, however intelligent and open, can really get to the bottom of what it feels like to be a woman. I know this marks me as a pretty evil sexist in some folk’s eyes, but as I say I’m not neurotic so who cares.

So I think I’m just saying – I doubt that Peterson can do as good a job for women as for men. Which – if I’m right – would a shame.

In any event I’m not sure it’s reasonable to expect him to have cracked women as well as men – it’s taken him 30 years of thought to get where he is now, and he’s hardly slacker. For all his relativity stuff, Einstein couldn’t get his head round quantum mechanics. Can’t expect the same bloke – or blokette – to crack everything.

As to solutions to female disadvantage I have nothing helpful to say myself. Peterson claims no magic wand either. Here’s a clip I offered a few posts back :

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p4RvLiS-3I

But – and I know it doesn’t answer your question at all – I’m sure he would say that if you want to design social reforms that help women overcome the disadvantages that biology has presented them with, in areas of life that have traditionally been dominated by men, it couldn’t hurt to try to find out as much as possible about what those disadvantages are.

Just catching up with this and have just seen the whole interview.

I have never been so embarrassed of an interviewer. Not ever. Peterson came across as brilliantly intelligent. Newman came across as utterly thick.

He had research and evidence. She had a desire to be offended or try to catch him out, and she failed with every single response.

I'm a woman and a feminist and I cringed each time Newman responded to very specific things he said with random "so you think x" then when he had clearly said "I think y".

Newman should quit interviewing intelligent people like him until she learns to actually listen to what is being said to her, and then respond to that and not her crazy deluded interpretations.

On 'agreeableness' : The problem with this is that not only is it a survival mechanism for women, it also begs the question, what would the results be if women stopped behaving in an 'agreeable' manner.

There is amongst JP's talks and lectures a fair bit mixed in about how men deal with disagreement and how ultimately if there isn't agreement it can be dealt with through violence. He also says that this means that men and women do not know the 'rules of engagement' when disagreeing with each other. I think his point was that men ultimately deal with disagreement through violence if necessary and woman do not.

This resonates with me as I work in a male dominated industry, and now I manage mostly men. I also have 2 sons. It has taken me many years to figure out how to deal with disciplinary issues I have with men successfully, and I have changed my behaviour accordingly.

When dealing with an angry het up man it does occur to me that a man dealing with the situation would possibly have faced violence in my position (I've seen it happen). It strikes me that I have changed my behaviour towards dealing with these situations, and one way I do that is by not considering the possibility that my 'disagreeableness' will end in violence, as if I was to consider that I would not be able to carry out my job properly. I would probably back down / avoid the situation.

This goes against my natural instinct which is to fear an angry man, as I have been subject to male violence in the past. Added to that the daily relentless reporting violence towards women by men. It's a reality to me that my interactions with men are far more likely to end in violence than my interactions with women

I do not find it anywhere near as stressful to deal with females possibly for this reason. I know that this is an issue for other women in my industry and the ones that do make it tend to be accused of 'acting like a man', which quite oddly is used as an insult towards women by men. I'd like to hear more about that from JP.

Also in one of JP's lectures he said that in any group of men and women there will be more in common amongst men + women than men + men or women + women. I find that very interesting but it wasn't explored too deeply.

I find his stance against the Canadian government and his fight against 'compelled speech' regarding the trans / pronouns issue to be both compelling and brave. It seems to be a hill he's prepared to die on and I find it interesting that he has chosen to fight so publicly to the point he is prepared to lose his license as a clinical psychologist of over 30 years.

It's interesting that he has not once in his many interviews / talks on the compelled speech issue he does not mention any feminist arguments that support his case. On the one hand he seems to be critical of female agreeableness and on the other calls some disagreeable women raging harpies. It seems like he is contradicting himself somewhat there

The problem with wanting endless scientifically-cited refutations of Peterson is that his legion of alt-right and "who me? I'm never alt-right! how very dare you" fanboys have the patience to spam gish-gallop YouTube videos at you eternally. Not wanting to engage with the gish-gallop does not mean you don't have a scientific basis for disagreeing with him.

To be honest, after watching him and his army of young male idiots spam reddit endlessly for years (even Reddit's sick of him now, which tells you something!) I'm past earnest refutations of his work. I'm more about mocking him tbh: www.macleans.ca/opinion/is-jordan-peterson-the-stupid-mans-smart-person/ (spoiler alert: he is)

To be clear, Jordan Peterson is not a neo-Nazi, but there’s a reason he’s as popular as he is on the alt-right. You’ll never hear him use the phrase “We must secure a future for our white children”; what you will hear him say is that, while there does appear to be a causal relationship between empowering women and economic growth, we have to consider whether this is good for society, “‘’cause the birth rate is plummeting.” He doesn’t call for a “white ethnostate,” but he does retweet Daily Caller articles with opening lines like: “Yet again an American city is being torn apart by black rioters.”

His attacks on Newman on Twitter are sickening, to be honest. Completely denying she's in any danger, which is of course just putting her in more danger.

The fact he spoke about trans issues does not make him my ally, any more than Donald Trump is women's/feminism's ally because he banned trans people from the military.

I'd be incredibly worried if my teenage son was a fan of his. I'm not concern trolling there. They are so vulnerable to online radicalisation and Peterson's tedious YT videos are a classic gateway.

I have learned so much from the women on this board who have really challenged my thinking, but I have begun to find I am coming here less often as the same theories which I broadly agree with, are no longer challenging me, and often not challenged in any meaningful way (not counting the MRA ploppers who cant sustain an argument beyond, you're all haterz) so I'm actually really excited by the challenge JP brings to this, and I want to grapple with the challenge to my feminist thinking. I don't know where I'll end up with my view on his position, I may get to a point of frustration with his lack of analysis of women, and put this down to misogyny, I don't know, but I'm welcoming the challenge.

I completely agree with this. I think for me the challenge is how to turn (feminist) theory into practise and how to successfully challenge and win the current battle we face with the issue of transgender rights. If that means reading up about Nazism, listening to a lecture about the Old Testament or reading Gulag Archipelago then that's what I'll do because I'm hungry for a bit more now. History has a lot to teach us

Holdmecloser I haven't seen him attack CN on twitter he asked for any abuse to stop. Can you post anything to support your claim?

As for indoctrinating young men (well he seems to have indoctrinated a few women in that case) I think that teaching critical thinking and fighting for free speech is quite the opposite myself

twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/953385332367486976

I'm baffled that this sexist moron has received such a warm welcome on the feminist board, of all places.

Read his most recent tweets, he has completely backed away from asking his followers to stop harassing her and returned to denying such harassment exists.

He has spent all morning attacking her.