Chris Langan Sees Through Jordan Peterson

The Smartest Man in the World has no trouble seeing right through the intellectual fraudulence of Jordan Peterson:

Jordan Peterson is an interesting case. He’s uncommonly bright and well-spoken, has a pretty reliable BS detector, and is pointed in the right direction on many issues. However, even though he vocally opposes some aspects of the Frankfurtian / progressive PC indoctrination agenda of Academia, Inc., he’s an academic to the core when all is said and done.

For our purposes, this means two things:

(1) He lacks a proper philosophical foundation, resting his worldview on “common sense”, conservative platitudes, and gut instinct (including an obvious sense of moral entitlement). This is someone who would not find it easy to oppose anything that he thinks came out of the hard sciences, even when their academic gatekeepers deceptively substitute self-promotion, political prejudice, and model-dependent philosophical extrapolations for actual science.

(2) He embraces certain false assumptions like the alleged irresolvability of certain religious questions, the alleged existence of a true meritocracy, and the alleged ability of women to choose the best mates on the basis of where males reside in the power structure and how well they navigate the power hierarchy. He seems to associate the ability to get ahead under the status quo with “intelligence” when in fact, the correlation of success with intelligence persists only up to a rather unimpressive level of cognitive ability, and possibly with physical and moral excellence as well (ditto at best). In reality, economic and political success is unavoidably affected by numerous confounding factors.

In reality, the ability to navigate and rise in a corrupt power structure is less a function of real merit than of its exact opposite.

Obviously I see this as a rather rosy-hued perspective on Peterson’s esoteric gatekeeping, but it’s interesting to witness how a genuinely intelligent individual has no problem seeing through Peterson’s bafflegarble.

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