The Peterson Effect

I’ve mentioned before that Jordan B Peterson (JBP) first came to my attention when an academic described him as some far-right nutjob (I paraphrase, but only slightly). The academic in question was grilling a graduate teaching assistant because she used, in class, a clip from a public news channel in which Peterson was arguing with another academic about sex and gender issues. The academic was not interested in the content or context of the clip, but merely that JBP was a bad, bad, bad, bad, person who should not form part of any classroom discussion unless it’s to attack him.

Quite apart from the issue of any lecturer pushing such a partisan view on students, what, I wondered, had JBP said that had made him so hated?

I’m still wondering that.

What horror, what monstrosity has he advocated, that elicits such a visceral reaction to even the mere mention of his name?

I’ve watched, read and listened to a good deal of JBP’s output and I haven’t yet been able to find anything I would, personally, describe as “hateful”. Some odd things, sure. His snake/DNA musings are definitely in that ‘odd’ category for me. But what is most fascinating is not the content of JBP’s words (as interesting and insightful as they can be), but the reaction to them.

I’ve just listened to JBP’s conversation with Richard Dawkins which was posted a couple of months ago

It’s a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion, although we don’t hear quite so much of Dawkins’ viewpoint, in which they explore some really interesting questions and ideas. It’s obvious to me, perhaps because of my academic background, what’s happening here. JBP is grappling with some difficult questions and is exploring possible threads of insight. His ideas are not fully formed and he’s exploring them by discussion and exposition in a loosely structured almost associative way. Dawkins occasionally interjects with disagreement (quite strong at times - he describes one of JBP’s thoughts as “bullshit”) and with nudges to get JBP back on track. I’ve had hundreds of discussions of a similar style with colleagues - although perhaps not so eloquently expressed, or with quite so much intelligence (at least on my part). So, for me, it was a real pleasure to listen to this kind of discussion.

What is really interesting, though, are the kinds of comments posted in response to this and to the “fact checking” video tweeted by Dawkins. Here’s just a few of them calling JBP’s competence into question

Disappointing you would give Peterson any credibility . . . He has never had an original idea just uses other peoples ideas & his coherence is limited

Jordan Peterson is a charlatan hiding behind smokescreens

JP is bungling idiot

JP is a charlatan that used pseudo science and pseudo intellectual ideas to bolster his preconceived conclusions and biases

Now, being brutally honest, these are very similar to the kind of statements I might make about Judith Butler at this moment in time. So I’m certainly guilty of adopting a somewhat less than academic detachment at times.

If you have a look at JBP’s page on Google Scholar you will see that he has an H-index of 56 and 18,519 citations. What do these numbers mean? Google Scholar does slightly inflate both the H-index and the citation count, so also bear that in mind.

The H-index is an attempt to assess the ‘quality’ of a researcher. It works like this : if you have authored (or co-authored) 40 papers, and 20 of those papers have each been cited at least 20 times by other people, then your H-index will be 20. To get that up to 21 you will need to have 21 of those papers each cited by at least 21 other people. And so on. So JBP has written 56 papers that have each been cited at least 56 times by other scientists.

It’s a flawed metric (obviously), and it does depend on the specific field you’re in, but in general, you don’t get a high H-index unless you’re really very good at what you do. It might come as a shock, but the majority of working physicists, for example, do not have an H-index anywhere close to 56. Academic papers are cited much less frequently by other scientists than one might naively suppose.

My own H-index is a respectable, but not stellar, 26 with a total of 4,702 citations according to google scholar (and remember that these tend to be inflated). Citations are a funny business - one of the papers I’ve written that I really think says something reasonably important has only 6 citations. One paper that was knocked up in just 2 days and, I thought, was more of a kind of cute ‘curiosity’ piece of little import, has 258 citations. Go figure.

The citations refer to citations in other research papers by different researchers.

So by a very commonly-used academic measure, JBP is very well-respected by other scientists in his field. So clearly not a charlatan or a bumbling idiot. And the H-index is very commonly used (almost universally I would say). Before I left my university position I was on hiring panels and we were instructed to discard candidates with an H-index lower than 7.

If you look at some of the other comments on Dawkins’ twitter posting of the ‘factcheck’ you’ll see a good number praising Dawkins for cutting through JBP’s alleged nonsense and waffle. He absolutely took JBP to task in no uncertain terms a couple of times, but what wasn’t mentioned was how many times Dawkins agreed with JBP - which far, far outnumber the instances of disagreement. You can listen to it yourself and hear the genuine agreement - and it’s obvious Dawkins wasn’t just being ‘polite’ because he was able to be very blunt when he felt it necessary.

And so we see the potential start of another internet ‘mythology’ taking hold - that Dawkins cut through the (alleged) bullshit of JBP. The internet, and social media in particular, seems to be a mythos machine - where each side ‘buys into’ the mythos that suits them.

Mythos : a pattern of beliefs expressing often symbolically the characteristic or prevalent attitudes in a group or culture

We can’t, of course, ever be truly objective, but we can do our damndest to get as close to it as we can. In this spirit I would suggest that, objectively, JBP is an extremely intelligent, eloquent, scientist/thinker who has some valuable insights and opinions, and is objectively not hateful. I came to this conclusion by listening to what he said and thinking about it - and I came in with the pre-conceived notion that I was going to be listening to some unhinged fascistic loon.

What appears to be happening is that many people seem to get their opinions neatly pre-packaged by other people. I can’t say I’m entirely innocent of this, either. Time is finite and sometimes it’s just not feasible to investigate every claim and every idea and every person to the nth degree. So it’s very tempting to ‘borrow’ an opinion from someone you respect and with whom you mostly agree.

That’s OK, as long as you file it in the “caution: this is a borrowed opinion” section of your memory and are prepared to listen to, and honestly consider, conflicting opinions as and when necessary.

JBP might be the most misrepresented person on the internet. The overwhelming majority of the critical comments and commentary I’ve seen simply miss the points he’s trying to make and disastrously misunderstand them. Or it could be wilful misrepresentation in some cases - but it’s hard to read people’s minds.

As an example, consider the unholy furore caused by Peterson when, during an interview, he posed the rather pertinent question in the aftermath of #MeToo of whether women should wear lipstick and high heels in the workplace. Everywhere, little internet heads exploded with righteous froth. They entirely missed the point of what he was saying and why he was saying it. The nuance and profundity of the observation he was making by posing it as a rhetorical question in this fashion seemed to escape most commentators.

It was a dig, obviously too subtle for most, at all sorts of targets, not least the “everything is socially constructed” peanut heads. It was woefully misinterpreted as putting the blame on women for sexual harassment in the workplace. When you really think about what’s behind the question it opens up a whole can of worms about sexual signals, evolution, and sexual selection as it applies in a social setting - and how attempts to over-impose artificial restrictions on the complex interactions between men and women might just backfire and make everyone more miserable overall. JBP does articulate some of these issues during the interview.

This is Peterson’s style. His language is carefully chosen, eloquent, and dense with insight for the most part. And he frequently asks challenging questions. He can ramble with the best of us, though, on rare occasions. But give the guy a freakin’ break - he’s only human (part human, part lobster, actually). I found 12 Rules for Life, Peterson’s bestseller, to be one of the most fascinating books I’ve read. It took me ages to read it. Not because it was boring, or lacking clarity - quite the opposite - I simply found that I was stopping to think about almost every paragraph.

The Peterson Effect can be found everywhere. You choose your mythos and stick to it. In my experience, those who have been labelled as ‘right wing’ are attached to a mythos based more on pragmatism whereas those labelled ‘left wing’ are attached to a mythos based more on emotive thinking. This is, obviously, something of a generalization.

There are hopeful signs. Twitter is a medium designed to amplify division and outrage. Nothing gets more clicks than a good froth. The popularity of podcasts like The Joe Rogan Show, however, show that millions of people really want to listen to topics explored in depth.

The issue these days is that institutions seem to have been captured and over-influenced by spoiled shouty children - the kind of people who think Twitter is the height of intellectual debate. In these conditions, where Twitter has far more influence than it deserves, we have fertile breeding grounds for The Peterson Effect.

But there’s a large number of people who are more Rogan than Slogan, and that’s a cause for optimism.

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