Why has this guy suddenly amassed such a cult following...

>I'm baffled at what's happening with this guy

Really? Then you're stupid.

He's defending the canon and heroic virtues. The identity crisis young men are facing makes Peterson's messages attractive.

yeah wtf pretty simple

father figure + some science + basic traditionalism

it was just the right moment for a guy like him, he has had youtube videos for years but now that things don't "just work" anymore people are realizing that tearing down structures is not the solution to all problems.

sam.. easy on the positivism

Listen to his Joe Rogan podcasts instead. A favorable interviewer makes all the difference in how he comes comes off.

>Harris: For the philosophers in the audience I'll make one more pass, just entertain this example: so you have two labs...

>Peterson: Okay

>Harris: …that are studying the smallpox virus. And they both have the same conception of the smallpox virus in hand. They both are working with the same tools that. they got same physical tools, the same intellectual tools. One lab weaponizes it and kills five hundred people based on some motive that we would obviously want to criticize. And the other lab creates a vaccine and immediately saves the same number of lives. Now they both have the same description of smallpox rattling around in their brains.

>Peterson: No they don't because otherwise one wouldn't weaponized it. You're expecting me to assume the initial propositions which is these labs are identical except for the outcome. It’s like no they're not identical, because the outcome would be identical then. So you know it's kinda like Joshua Green’s moral story…

>Harris: I can fix this, I can fix this. Let's just not go to Green yet. Then the difference between the two labs is not a difference in their motives right, we're not just good people in one lab and the opposite in another, there's just some trivial difference in their equipment or just good and bad luck which causes one to accidentally let this virus leak out and kill people, and causes the other to successfully produced a

>vaccine. Whenever you ask members to of these labs what smallpox is and what they're trying to do they say the exact same sentences, but we have a different outcome.

>Peterson: Okay, well that's a whole different issue though, because they're not weaponize it, and they just made a mistake.

>Harris: Yeah, they made a mistake, but if they were playing around with smallpox and it was highly unpragmatic given the fact that people immediately died. And if the other lab hadn't produced its vaccine, everyone could have died. So here we got two linked to conditions that share the same epistemology, they got the same truth claims about smallpox, one is inadvertently killing people, highly non Darwinian non pragmatic on your account, the other is saving people, and in fact is the only bulwark against the consequences of the ineptitude in the first lab, right?

>Peterson: Okay well fine. First of all I don't think it's a very good example because it only causes the death of a few people, but let me let me counter with a real world example.

>Harris: No no no don't change the example - scale it up.

>Peterson: Okay

>Harris: Let's say they're killing half of humanity and the other labs saving as quickly as they can, the remaining half of humanity.

>Peterson: Okay well what would happen…

>Harris: Give me your conception of truth to describe what's happening here.

>Peterson: See you’re binding it again and because you say well one is exactly the same as the other except there's a there's a snake in one.

>Harris: There’s a hole in somebody's glove right, whatever, you can make trivial as you want.

>Peterson: Sure how about if we make it that the engineers didn't check the damn O-rings carefully enough so the space Challenger blew up. Okay so what would happen in a situation like that? Well what would happen would be that there would be a tremendous investigation into the cause of the error. And there would be moral, ah, part of that investigation would be a moral investigation. Were people being blind? Were they being careless? Were they following proper procedure etcetera. So, the first thing that would happen is that people would assume that there were genuine reasons in motivation that might have caused it. Now they wouldn't have been among the scientists necessarily they might have been among the equipment suppliers, and so we might say well maybe that piece of equipment happened to be made by slaves in China, and they weren’t too concerned with its quality. So then we might say well you know maybe that's throws the whole moral validity of the Chinese system into doubt. So that little mistake in the lab that you're describing that has this horrible consequence ends up tied up into all sorts of other things.
>Harris: But it need not be. Grant me the possibility of a little mistake that allows for smallpox to get carried home on somebody's briefcase and spreads an epidemic. It's obvious that this is possible. This is the kind of thing well intentioned people guard against working in those labs all the time.

>Peterson: Well then I would say that that was evidence that the moral notion about mucking about with smallpox was a bad idea.

>Harris: Except in this case you can't say that, and you certainly can't link a bad idea to the epistemological truth value of our understanding of smallpox.

>Peterson: Well I think you can.

>Harris: We have the other lab on the other side of the earth by the only possible method available to us producing the vaccine that will cancel the negligence of the first lab and save humanity.

>Peterson: Okay, a reasonable person would look at that situation and say well how about we don't muck about smallpox anymore, despite the fact that we got really lucky and the errors and the benefits cancelled one another out, it seems to anyone sensible that that was pure damn fluke, roughly speaking, and the idea that we should be delving into that particular bit of knowledge is ill advised. That's what would happen, and that's what I think about that example.

>Harris: Okay but it was it was a fluke in both directions right?

>Peterson: Sure but that just shows that messing about with the substance to begin with was ill conceived. Any, like, any logical investigator would immediately conclude that, it's like you're saying from a utilitarian perspective the net consequence was basically zero.

>Harris: Not that, but to say that it was ill conceived is a perfectly intelligible and defensible thing to say, but that doesn't at all suggest that anyone in either lab was wrong about the physical character of smallpox.

>Peterson: Right.

>Harris: And we need a conception of truth…

>Peterson: They were wrong in a more profound way. They were right about rearranging the chairs on the Titanic but they were pretty damn wrong about the fact that it might sink.

>Harris: Okay but that has nothing to do with the truth value of any statement about smallpox. It has nothing to do with if someone says “is this a a retrovirus?” We're gonna wait…

>Peterson: It does the way the way that I define truth.

>Harris: We’re going to wait to see if everyone dies or not before we answer that question. We can't think about scientific truth in that sense again for many reasons but certainly because we can't wait around to see if everyone dies to find out if we're making sense in the present.
>Peterson: The thing is, Sam, we do think about it that way already. We think about it that way all the time. We think, well, messing around with smallpox, is probably a bad idea because it might be fatal, anytime we have any inkling that the outcome of a scientific experiment might be catastrophe on the broadest possible scale, we immediately decide that that's a bad idea.

>Harris: Well, of course, but then again that's not, that has nothing to do with epistemology, that has to do with danger and survival and risk and things that worry us.

>Peterson: Right, which I would say are higher truths. So it does have something to do with epistemology.

>Harris: You can call them higher values but they're not they're not truth in the sense that, when it comes time to have an honest conversation about the factual accuracy of any statement about whether or not something is likely to be true, when you’re talking about probabilistic truth, there you're not talking merely about the risk of species annihilation.

>Peterson: I know that's because you leave that question out of the, you leave that question out of the realm of consideration.

>Harris: And for good reason.

>Peterson: Well, for good proximal reason, but maybe for bad distal reason.

good shit. i have to listen to this.

>Harris: But for most things we want to talk about there is no implication of danger on that scale at all. And yet we still have to make strong truth claims. We can make this is prosaic or as weird as you want, if someone says that your wife is cheating on you, presumably that's within the realm of possibility, provided that you have a wife. And you're going to want evidence, and what would constitute evidence? Well here's here's evidence: “I saw it in a dream” well that's bad evidence. Well here's evidence “I hired a private investigator and here are seventeen pictures of her at various locations with a man you've never seen before and he looks like Brad Pitt.” Now all of a sudden presumably you're interested right? Now the claim about whether or not she's cheating on you is an intelligible claim, we can drill down on what it might mean, does she have to be having sex with this person to be cheating on you? Let's say yes, she does, okay so that is a claim about what she's actually doing with this person in a locked room somewhere when you're not around. That's a claim that has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you wind up killing yourself based on your reaction to this unhappy truth.If you then wind up killing yourself, we could say at the end of the day well it would be better if he hadn't known that. It would certainly be better if she hadn't done that. It would've been better if he had married a different woman, surely we want to say that.

>Peterson: It might have been better if he had paid attention to his damn marriage. And to attribute the cause of his demise to the existence of the photographs, this is why I brought up Josh Green is that investigations into this kind of morality always frame it such a way….

>Harris: Jordan you have to grant one thing here, there is one piece that doesn't get moved here. We cannot move the piece that because you killed yourself it's not true that she was having an affair. That move is not open to you, and yet you're acting like it is.

just tell me what to think, i'm not going to read all that shit

One of the few people in the Academia who have come out against the politically correct, extreme liberal bias of the Academia with success.

Also he has helped people to sort themselves out.

>Cult.
Just because people who like him defend him from detractors does not cult make.

and this was Jordan's response

>Peterson: (pause) Well. You know, I think we've been going down this road for so long that I’m not exactly capable of them at the moment of making the micro example - macro example leap because you're making a case there that’s sort of quasi-associated with science, that’s the photographic evidence, and the Realism that's associated with that, and then you're making the claim that, you know, it's not true that she wasn't having an affair, I’d have to take that apart more. He killed himself, like you're throwing a lot of things in that example that I believe are contextually important to my unpacking the ethics behind it. You know, because you're equating the fact that she had an affair to him committing suicide which, you know there's a whole backstory there. And it also depends to a large degree precisely on what you mean by an affair, which was something that you brushed over. So you know you're acting, that's the problem with these damn micro examples, is that and this is why I don't trust Josh Green’s work, because you set up a narrative that's completely fictional and you act as if each of the subcomponents of the narrative are isolated truths that have no external context. You say well the external context has no bearing on the issue at hand, and that’s just generally not true. It has a lot of bearing on the issue at hand.

the man is the personification of a pseudo-intellectual

>pseudo-intellectual
>has an actual scientific career and plenty of citations
ok, lets just believe le ebin rational man instead

>you set up a narrative that's completely fictional and you act as if each of the subcomponents of the narrative are isolated truths that have no external context. You say well the external context has no bearing on the issue at hand, and that’s just generally not true. It has a lot of bearing on the issue at hand.

He's absolutely correct here, though. Not even a Peterson-fag. Harris is trying to paper over the nuance and complexity of real moral quandaries because they muddy his vision of a pristine, pseudo-empirico-rationalist ethics.

>has an actual scientific career

scholar.google.com/citations?user=wL1F22UAAAAJ&hl=en

Opposing PC liberal academia has been an industry for nearly 30 years. It never hurt the careers of Roger Kimball, Dinesh D'Souza or David Horowitz.

but it's mainstream now

You think you should just go back because you're on a board specifically about reading

>reading transcripts from shitty internet atheists
no thanks

>Harris is trying to paper over the nuance and complexity of real moral quandaries because they muddy his vision of a pristine, pseudo-empirico-rationalist ethics.

>truth doesn't depend on whether you die or live
>no it's more complex than that, you're missing the nuances. You see you need to comprehend the moral rationalist traditionalist paradigm shift nested within the psychological realm of consciousness to know what I'm saying. You just don't get it

it's not that hard to understand though

How exactly? The example posited was not a matter of measurements or facts but of a interpersonal dynamic between two people in a relationship, the betrayal of trust, and the ethics therein. You're the fucking psuedo-intellectual if you think brandishing statistics can answer every fucking philosophical question. Fucks sake.

IDK what his material you've listened to but most of it is definitely not ambiguous, he's gained fame exactly because he takes such definite, strong stands on a variety of issues.

nigga what? he smoked Harris cleanly and utterly

Just saying something isn't relevant doesn't actually mean it isn't relevant. You don't just get to dismiss the facts that disagree with your picture of reality. If you get hit by a truck, asking the driver to grant you the possibility that his truck didn't actually hit you isn't going to get your guts back in your body. Harris is the anti-realist here, not Peterson.

This. I'm not with Peterson on about half the shit he says, but finally reading this debate (I was here when it happened but didn't care enough to watch it) it's pretty obvious Peterson has a much firmer grasp on the nature of life and reality. Harris is intelligent in the way professional chess players are intelligent, quick, precise, strategic, analytical. Peterson is intelligent in the way you would expect a psychologist to be, he stays within the realm of the human psyche and stays away from "on paper" arguments.
I can see why people idolize Harris but he's purposefully ignoring the human factor in his arguments because they won't make sense when humanity is considered.

Peterson is really about as honest as they come
He believes every word he says
Not necessarily gonna say he's smart or right about anything but he is honest and has good intentions
I think anyone with a decent sense for people can tell this much

Hardly in the same sense as it is now. Now there's open critique and resistance.

>Just saying something isn't relevant doesn't actually mean it isn't relevant.

and saying something is relevant when it isn't doesn't make it relevant. No matter how much slithering Peterson does his death won't stop 7 from being a prime number

once you learn Harris is basically a rich kid it explains a lot

he's a good father surrogate. most men these days are either reddit or chad.

Petersson's popularity makes his ideas popular. His ideas are popular because the new generation is coming apart at the seems.

we are not talking about numbers here, we are talking about thought experiments concocted in sam harris mind

>facts are facts
>therefore we can say it would have been better if I hadn't been hit by that truck
>we see now how the problems of ethics are resolved
>I feel good about this

right, they are thought experiments, that means Sam decides the facts of the experiment.

>No matter how much slithering Peterson does his death won't stop 7 from being a prime number

Calm down, Harris. Nobody can take mathematics away from you, booboo.

One guy is saying that true means true. The other guy is saying true means true + beneficial to survival. It's obvious who's right. Peterson's definition will contradict itself if it doesn't lead to survival.

I don't understand how people are defending this

you know, you can understand how peterson defends his thesis *and* disagree with it at the same time. you can have your cake and eat it too.

How does Harris have a career?

what did he say that was wrong?

read nietzsche. he's holding up one of the lesser gods that arises in the wake of the christian death of god. it's not like people leave christianity or fedora atheism and then go on to be non magical thinkers, or that jung doesn't attract magical thinkers.

Jesus Christ, I can see why Scott Adams's kill shot of "analogies aren't good arguments" mercilessly tore Sam Harris apart. For such a scientific mind, he can't seem to rely on concrete propositions as evidence and instead always has to come up with either awkward analogies or bizarre hypotheticals, which are basically analogies for reality.

If you have a problem with thought experiments you have a problem with western philosophy. And thought experiments aren't analogies.

he doesn't say thought experiments. not all thought experiments are awkward analogies or bizarre hypotheticals, and the foundation of western philosophy since plato has been btfo awkward analogies and bizarre hypotheticals, which is why zen seems so exotic to western girls in search of colouring books, you goddamn plucked chicken.

I stumbled upon a "Sam Harris forum" (kek) yesterday and he attracts the sort of fans you'd expect.
A lot of hero worship about Sam's "razor sharp" thinking and how he "destroys" everyone who dares to cross him on his podcast.
A pleb man for a pleb world.
His only use was triggering shitlibs about Muslims, but he isn't even good for that anymore ever since went full Hitler about Trump.

It doesn't matter what he calls it, Harris was engaging in a thought experiment.

And in response to that thought experiment, he got pointed out how sloppily constructed it was, just like Socrates would have done to it. Peterson isn't that great, but you have to be pretty blind to not see which side of the dialectic method he represents in that exchange.

There is no better response to the relativism inherent in physics and psychology.

Again, Peterson argued that "true" doesn't mean "true." He's just wrong.

>i'll ignore we were talking about Harris arguing by analogy
>yeah but look at this other guy's flawed analogy
mmkay fan boy, i totally see why tolkien was not a fantasy writer unlike that awful grrm. kek

What the fuck are you talking about? Nothing you said has anything to do with the argument.

>>Harris: But for most things we want to talk about there is no implication of danger on that scale at all. And yet we still have to make strong truth claims. We can make this is prosaic or as weird as you want, if someone says that your wife is cheating on you, presumably that's within the realm of possibility, provided that you have a wife. And you're going to want evidence, and what would constitute evidence? Well here's here's evidence: “I saw it in a dream” well that's bad evidence. Well here's evidence “I hired a private investigator and here are seventeen pictures of her at various locations with a man you've never seen before and he looks like Brad Pitt.” Now all of a sudden presumably you're interested right? Now the claim about whether or not she's cheating on you is an intelligible claim, we can drill down on what it might mean, does she have to be having sex with this person to be cheating on you? Let's say yes, she does, okay so that is a claim about what she's actually doing with this person in a locked room somewhere when you're not around. That's a claim that has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you wind up killing yourself based on your reaction to this unhappy truth.If you then wind up killing yourself, we could say at the end of the day well it would be better if he hadn't known that. It would certainly be better if she hadn't done that. It would've been better if he had married a different woman, surely we want to say that.

What in the fuck is this lol.
Is all this displaced aggression over Peterson BTFO him in the conversation?
There's no way you can convince me that dreaming impromptu a thought experiment where Sam in detail tells Peterson that his wife is cheating on him and having sex behind his back and that he then kills himself isn't displaced aggression.

>wants to say argument by analogy is a valid argument
>presented with an argument by analogy
>"i don't understand, that's not an argument"
you're priceless, babby

>most men these days are either reddit or chad

or pol9k which is arguably the worst category to find yourself in

Because young people don't want secular liberalism anymore

Thought experiments are not analogies. And Tolkien has nothing to do with what we're talking about, analogy or not.

Socrates didn't die for this.

WLC is an actual philosopher and theologian. Harris is a rich white kid who bought his way into a degree and relevance, and Peterson is a backwater psychologist who became flavour-of-the-week for being a level-headed anti-SJW polemic.

He inspires hope to the hopeless and tells them what they want to hear.

>Thought experiments are not analogies
You just tried to tell me they totally were. Note how my argument starts
>he doesn't say thought experiments. not all thought experiments are awkward analogies or bizarre hypotheticals
to which the response was
>It doesn't matter what he calls it, Harris was engaging in a thought experiment.
You have no idea how priceless idiocy like yours is. Well, I guess you could look up either of their bank accounts and see a good estimate XD

Notice that this post was never answered.
Slide shill threads.

I think Peterson is known for using the cheating wife analogy to explain his idea of the underworld. harris probably adopted it because of that

Just reminds you how fucking stupid and how susceptible to trends the majority of people are.

Most people are pretty close to philosophical zombies. No other explanation for the rise of SJWs and alt right.

>tfw you realize that Socrates was the cultural marxist of his day, that his activities were undermining the fabric of traditional Athenian life, and that executing him was totally justified.

whoa

It was answered with the transcripts but if you want to be specific. Sam points out that Peterson is redefining truth to be mutually exclusive to the survival of humans, which is absurd.

Really because I read the same transcript you did and think Peterson is totally correct and Harris sounds absurd. Maybe that's why you should directly answer calls to elucidate your opinion instead of just literally copy pasting transcripts and expecting everyone to agree with you.

>Sam points out that Peterson is redefining truth to be mutually exclusive to the survival of humans, which is
peterson is well aware of the fact that he believes in the pragmatist conception of truth. pointing that out to him isn't an argument that he is being absurd, it's just a description of his beliefs.

It really was interesting to me that Sam, the supposed moral realist, had a problem with Peterson saying truth also has to serve life, in his podcast.

That said, Sam might've agreed with Peterson, had Peterson been better at debating.

can I get a quick run down on sam's moral beliefs?

>be public intellectual
>order a photoshoot
>make the face

He's just a typical moral consequentialist.

He thinks he has revolutionized consequentialism though, but he hasn't.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism

seems fair to make that peterson comparison then. I wonder how sam would respond to that if someone pointed it out to him

truth =/= truth + human survival
by redefining truth then attempting to scurry and deflect when confronted, it shows how intellectually dishonest he is. Finally when forced in to a corner he comes out with it. He's a snake oil salesman

Sam Harris is a weird guy, he is kind of a utilitarian, but when he had the e-mail exchange with Chomsky he was arguing that it didn't really matter how many deaths a decision of the US president caused, because he had "good intentions".

he likes to play the rational man but most of his positions seem to come from a standard rich kid household "common sense" point of view

you're just attacking the idea of the pragmatist conception of truth without having a proper understanding of why people under that philosophy define it that way in the first place. what makes you think you know how truth should be defined? at least look into pragmatism before bashing it

don't be a retard, he is just saying that our conception of truth is influenced by our psychology and evolution

even if there are objective facts, there's no such thing as objectivity when it comes to which facts we care about and select and study. this is not rocket science

>Sam Harris is a weird guy, he is kind of a utilitarian, but when he had the e-mail exchange with Chomsky he was arguing that it didn't really matter how many deaths a decision of the US president caused, because he had "good intentions".

Which sounds exactly like hypocrisy, doesn't it?

That's not what I'm replying to, I'm explaining why he's intellectually dishonest, the definition most people work with isn't his and by dodging, deflecting, and refusing to first explain it is why I consider him a fraud. Only after constantly keeping his feet to the fire did we actually figure out his truth. Whether you agree with his definition is another topic, I doubt most of his followers would genuinely agree with him there

can I get a quick run down on sam's moral beliefs?

He once advertised himself as being one of the "four horsemen of the apocalypse"
What else do you need to know

why is kermit fighting zoolander?

>even if there are objective facts, there's no such thing as objectivity when it comes to which facts we care about and select and study. this is not rocket science

I honestly think the fedora brigade are too memed by "rationality" to understand this.
It's just easier to go through life with the idea of truth as a matching paradigm. Put the square block in the square hole. That's Sam's idea of truth. His philosophy is a child's game that has been constructed for him to play with.

You're holding him to a standard you wouldn't hold anyone else to. Let me explain. You agree that people disagree on what counts as moral or immoral, right? Yet most people, Sam included (listen to his recent podcast with the dilbert guy) throw around those words all the time without explaining what they mean by them exactly. That would qualify him as a fraud according to the standard you're using now. Part of having a long conversation like that in the first place is to get each other to explain those terms we disagree with each on their meaning. Truth happened to be the one jordan and sam disagreed on and the way each of them defined truth was stated in the convo. The way you're talking makes me think this was the first time anyone ever cracked the code on what peterson means by true, but it's not, he has defined it that way himself other times. I agree it would be better for the two of them to just explain all their words upfront but that is just too high of a standard to hold an informal debate to. If anything it's good that their definitions came out during the convo unlike how sam never explained his definition of morality with his talk with the dilbert guy.

>The way you're talking makes me think this was the first time
makes me think you think this was the first time*

>Setting a bankrupt situation out of nowhere
>Thought experiment
Nope. The premises can be invalid.

>the definition most people work with isn't his and by dodging, deflecting, and refusing to first explain it is why I consider him a fraud

Well he did explain his definitions of truth several times in the podcast with Sam, but Sam wouldn't accept the existence of any other philosophical concept of truth besides a correspondence theory of truth.

>You're holding him to a standard you wouldn't hold anyone else to.
To use your terms properly and explain them if you're operating under a different definition is not a high standard. This is what I meant by him being ambiguous.

I have to come forward here and take back my point about his lack of defining being the main issue. His definition of truth being tied to human survival is where I stopped taking him serious.

He explained it as Darwinian truth nested in moral truth, the people listening will only have a faint idea of what he means. He couldn't just say I believe truth is what helps you survive because that just doesn't sound the same