Many of you are probably familiar with Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s book, The Coddling of the American Mind. One of the points that they make, which shouldn’t have been up to them to make, was that if you set out to design a conceptual system to make weak and timid people who can’t operate in the world, you couldn’t do a better job than to create what constitutes the safe-space culture that currently permeates university campuses.
But I think he is on a much better track than Haidt and Lukianoff. For he says,
generally speaking, if you want to improve something, rather than criticize and change what already exists, it’s easier, especially now, it’s easier just to build a parallel system and see if you can put something in that’s a competitor.
And there is this:
I would say if you want to become a good educator, which perhaps might mean that you were following in my footsteps, for better or worse, is like, well, you have to learn to read, and you have to learn to think critically, and you have to learn to write, and then you have to learn to speak. You have to get good at all those things. And they’re all worth getting good at. They’re unbelievably powerful skills.
At best, I only accomplished three out of four. When speaking, I can be OK in Q&A format, but otherwise I am insufficiently animated. It is hard for me to stay awake during someone’s monologue, especially my own.
I strongly recommend the entire interview. I came away from the transcript convinced that Peterson has accumulated a great deal of wisdom. You can criticize him on any given point, just as you can criticize a championship baseball manager for taking out a pitcher and having the next guy give up a home run. Even the best managers make mistakes sometimes, but that does not make you better qualified to be the manager.
Which interview? Please provide a link.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/02/my-conversation-with-jordan-peterson.html
Peterson, like Jung, is a field of study onto himself. Like Jung too, he seems to be filter. Reading them is like reading about a fire in a newspaper. It gives the sense that there are realities out there that you cannot really fathom until you have direct experience. Talking about how we are wired for religion is one thing. Experiencing religion quite another. Jung was very big on individual rights. Jung’s thinking on government is essential in my view. Peterson gives the impression that he is supportive of individual rights too, yet he also seems to advocate expanding government. There is a duality there redolent of the political from which he claims to be apart. Definitely an interesting thinker with which to engage.
Love him or hate him, JP is one of the most effective antidotes against the left we have seen in a long time.
Build the parallel system, like open software. Competing is easy, that is why prices keep dropping on innovations.
Like if you want to type at your computer with vowels, and you don’t like typeface explosions on your screen, then build a better command interface for linux. Bingo, an open source group is formed, linux gets a powerful console technology, much better than the bash crud, much better than Microsoft Power Typeface Everywhere Shell. You get a console that speaks plain text to you and you speak it back and vowels allowed! S tht y dnt lk ths.
Peterson’s advice seems to focus on building structure and drive in his listeners (patients). This is probably great advice for someone suffering in a slum, and probably terrible advice for someone suffering at Harvard. As a former Ivy League tryhard, he’s just not for me.
“It is hard for me to stay awake during someone’s monologue, especially my own.”=AK
My mother used to say of certain people, “They are in love with the sound of their own voice.”
I disagree with Arnold Kling often, but you write an interesting and smart blog. Your monologues are probably pretty good. Just stay under 10 minutes.
I think good speaking is pretty much a matter of self-confidence and being really interested in your subject.
Self-confidence cuts down on the “ums” and being interested in your subject naturally makes you more animated.