Jordan Peterson's stuff is not very good.

[mc776]

For the past couple years I've liked Jordan Peterson, or at least tried to like him for my godmother's sake.

For instance, this is one of the things I consider to be him at his best:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-wWBGo6a2w
He still does frame much of this around his specific political agenda, but there is far more meat to it that he (or anyone) can only show when not under fire.

The portion of that meat that is not illusory might not be enough.

As a bit of an aside at first, I should clarify that I am under no illusion that Prof. Peterson's message is fundamentally particularly Christian, whatever people might read into it:

Lewis had divine Revelation and with it, hope of divine grace. Peterson has evolution, and no grace to be found. 12 Rules for Life is a grim book. It's no stretch to apply a theological gloss: It is full of Peterson's exegesis of the Bible, a book of wisdom and archetypal myth to him only distinguished by its status as providing the "fundamental substructure of Western civilization." Adam is an example of human weakness; Christ merely an exemplar of human strength. No one has come to save you; you will have to save yourself. The ideal of a noble freedom of the soul to choose vice or virtue drove Pelagius to reject a divine first movement of grace in humanity's salvation in the 5th century. For Peterson today that freedom is equally essential and drives him to the same conclusion. His world is suspended between order and chaos and our choices and responsibility allow us to navigate that tension, to walk the narrow way between them in our fullest participation in Being.

(I am not linking this as an endorsement of the "if not him then who" conclusion. You, dear reader, know full well what I believe about the harm his reputation is bringing. I trust the "heretic" line at the end was merely tongue in cheek, as I do not believe Prof. Peterson has ever self-identified as a Christian beyond that "cultural Christian" sense Richard Dawkins is famous for articulating.)

I've seen a few things of his on YouTube while in the office. One side effect is that I now cringe when I log into Youtube on my work account, when at least half my recommended videos are grating, screeching right-wing screeds full of SUDDEN ALL CAPS titles oozing with wilfully ignorant smug self-righteousness.

So far I have considered that to be entirely excusable. The most innocent things can end up attracting the most toxic fanbases these days - My Little Pony, Rick & Morty, all of anime as a whole. However, more things I have found have suggested that I am the one who is being wilfully ignorant here, with respect to the dog whistles and things-left-unsaid that both his fans and his haters have been so shrilly reacting to.

Recently someone brought this Twitter thread to my attention:
https://twitter.com/DIsaac8/status/979874998289547264

Read that thread, and keep in mind that I decide to respect someone's opinion on something based on the following criteria:


Intellectual integrity
You will alter your beliefs based on truth only and not convenience; as a corollary, if the truth requires it you will alter your beliefs. Your criteria for truth necessitate engagement of intellect and evidence (without necessarily categorically ruling out hearsay), and dealing with the available evidence in a good faith to discern true conclusions is an implicit part of your moral fibre. An intuitive, reflexive skepticism of moral outrage is a plus. The continence required to seek empirical confirmation and particulars before voicing a conclusion is implicit.

Compassion for those affected
"Com" "passion": this must go beyond simply having feelings. You are willing to engage with the Sitz im Leben of the thing as much as you can, wilfully suppressing the urge to project your own opinions about what's right onto the other. (You may still keep them in mind, and disagree - indeed one important aspect of this may be understanding that the other person is wrong, how they managed to get so wrong and, however reasonable or sympathetic they are, they really are wrong anyway.)

Anything that smacks of "this person is an X, Xs do Y, therefore this person must do Y" is an immediate disqualifier. It is a total deal-breaker if "Xs do Y" is based on book knowledge or mass media stereotypes, but potentially excusable if based on one's personal experiences of Xs. Either way, such a formulation is different than "this person is an X, we typically expect Xs to do Y, therefore we can presume that this person would eventually do Y and take precautions if we are not able to obtain further evidence to the contrary" which is merely reasoning by inference.

Your concern is for the specific, particular persons affected in the case and not simply for the type, identity group, ideal, whatever bullshit you think they represent. ("We must stand on the side of the oppressed" is an example of the this-person-is-X reasoning above; even if true, it does not excuse one from the need for compassion for the oppressor.)

Depth of thought
Implicit if you take the first two seriously enough. A habit of considering the logical implications of a statement at least two steps in, or as many steps as one can honestly do without simply imagining and fantasizing about the possibilities. Even where "this person is an X, Xs do Y, this person will therefore do Y" is ultimately found to be justifiable based on the evidence related to that particular person, there must be some meaningful engagement of the questions of what it means to be X or do Y at all.


Now to apply that to the court cases linked in that Twitter thread...

https://www.canlii.org/en/on/onsc/doc/2009/2009canlii80104/2009canlii80104.html
Sordi v. Sordi, 2009 CanLII 80104 (ON SC) at paras. 11-12, 19-22, 25

[11] Dr. Peterson wrote some eight reports purportedly directed to issues which, as argued by the respondent’s counsel, are relevant to this case. All of those reports were served in accordance with subrule 23(23) of the Family Law Rules.[6] At least two of them were used previously in the proceeding, in that they were attached to an affidavit filed in support of a motion brought by the respondent in which he sought an order for, inter alia, certain medical records. Counsel for the respondent does not now seek to have Dr. Peterson testify on those particular reports. She does however, still want to have the doctor testify re the other six reports.

[12] Of course, Dr. Peterson did not ever see the applicant, with or without the children and had no access to any third party observations of or about her. Aside from what was set out in the Kawartha Family Court Assessment Service Report, all of his information about her came from the respondent. As is detailed on many occasions in Dr. Peterson’s various reports, that information was almost universally negative. Dr. Peterson himself admitted, when testifying during the voir dire, that his assessment of the respondent was one-sided and biased. He also said that he had nothing to say about the applicant’s competency as a parent, and that he could not possibly compare the two parties as parents. Those statements are rather puzzling to say the least since his various reports are replete with negative comments about her parenting.

[paragraphs 19-21 omitted for brevity, please click and read]

[22] I go next to the report entitled “Report 1: General Comments on the role of the Father in Child Development Specific Comments on the role of Cameron Sordi as Father to his Children”. That title is somewhat misleading in that it contains less than two pages of references to articles that Dr. Peterson found by doing an on-line search of on-line material on that topic. Dr. Peterson has no expertise in that area. If he had, then he might have known that the proposition that fathers play a key role in proper development of children in both intact and non-intact families, and that mothers have no legal “leg-up” when it comes to deciding custody cases, have long since been accepted by our courts here in Canada. I do not need to consider any of the articles referred to by Dr. Peterson to accept that.

...

[25] I go next to the report dated May 6, 2009, entitled “Comments on of [sic] Kawartha Family Court Assessment Service Report Dated April 16, 2009”. In large measure, this report is an attack upon the methodology of the assessment process. This is surprising to say the least, as Dr. Peterson has admitted his total lack of experience or training in this field. I do not myself claim any such training or experience. However, as I said in my ruling of November 2, 2009, dealing with Mr. Barry Brown, I see dozens of custody/access reports every year. Over the course of my career on the bench, I have seen hundreds of them. I see them at the conference stage and at trials. I am more than familiar with the methodology employed by individuals and institutions to produce a report of this nature. The approach taken in the Kawartha Family Court Assessment Service Report Dated April 16, 2009 does not depart from the norm.

In short, he's trying to pass himself off as an expert in an area he has no knowledge about, beyond some shallow inferences made from Internet searches that had apparently not been vetted for context, currency and reliability.


Intellectual Integrity: For the guy who gave me the (still good) gift of ~If you abide by the truth, whatever happens next will have been the best thing that could possibly have happened~, this was a disappointing surprise. This seemed to be operating at a level worse than mere common sense, let alone an actively researching academic. He shows no hesitation in speaking volumes about things in which he has neither any direct knowledge nor skin in the game.

Consider the following from pargraph 27 of Sordi: ...Professor Paciocco lists and defines many possible types of bias, including: lack of independence bias; adversarial bias; selection bias; team bias; professional interest bias; association bias; and noble cause distortion bias. I venture the opinion that Dr. Peterson suffers from at least two, if not three, of those.

Compassion for Affected Parties: I can certainly infer sympathy for the man. That is not enough.

Depth of Thought: I'm sure he's thought a lot about this stuff, but it doesn't seem to have gone meta enough for him to question his sources.


Now this might not be entirely fair, since this dates back to 2008-9. You can probably find far more egregious bullshit on this very blog from that time. (My first quasi-random sampling of that was of me deadnaming someone and alluding to sexual violence on them. I am sorry.) Even more charitably, he might sincerely have not understood a whit of what he was getting himself into. Either way, he may well have repented of the things that caused the finding of his incompetence in Sordi.

That said, even before knowing anything about Peterson's adventures in expert testimony I've watched multiple videos of him and, based on what he talks about, I would have no idea from their contents what he has a degree in or what he's a professor of. He never gives any spontaneous, not-entirely-voluntary indication of actually having a deep factual knowledge of any particular field - long tangents into current research he's in, getting disproportionately annoyed at very specific popular misconceptions about his work, suddenly tying in the current thread of conversation with a seemingly remote thread related to his area of expertise. Even Richard Dawkins (at least at his best) has that going for him.

After a while Prof. Peterson's material feels like a social science/philosophy version of a "one instant death move you will need to defend yourself" martial arts instructor. At best, a secular Seraphim Rose. Somewhere in between, Richard Dawkins with a better internalized classical liberal education in lieu of biological insight.

So, moving on to the other case...

https://www.canlii.org/en/mb/mbca/doc/2014/2014mbca70/2014mbca70.html
R. v. Pearce (M.L.), 2014 MBCA 70 (CanLII) at ~para. 32 onwards

[32] Dr. Peterson was allowed to testify on the area of whether there is a phenomenon of repressed memory (to address the appellant’s repeated claims of not remembering what happened during the argument with the deceased and the officers’ invitation to him to try and unblock his memory). Dr. Peterson was not allowed to explain why the appellant’s confession was unreliable based on his consideration of the three areas of: how interviewing techniques affect the reliability of responses; how personality traits can make a person more prone to suggestion; and how a person’s physical condition, such as intoxication or hunger, can affect responses. The appellant concedes that the judge did not err in refusing to admit expert evidence on the last area relating to a person’s physical condition. It is readily understandable to a jury that a confession from a person who is intoxicated, tired or hungry may be less reliable.

[33] On the proposed area of how interviewing techniques affect the reliability of responses, Dr. Peterson’s opinion was that suggestive or leading questions, such as the style of questioning of O’Donovan and Depencier, can cause the interviewee to infer the desired or correct response through deduction as opposed to stating what they actually remember. The judge ruled that Dr. Peterson’s opinion had two shortcomings. He was not properly qualified as he had no experience in the area of the psychology of police interrogations. Also, his opinion had no scientific qualities and was unnecessary. The judge held that the jury was quite capable of viewing the confession and coming to their own conclusions about its reliability in light of the other testimony in the trial and the submissions of counsel.

[34] On the proposed area of how personality traits can make a person more prone to suggestion, Dr. Peterson’s opinion was based on an online personality assessment that the appellant had completed called “the Unfakeable Big Five.” The Unfakeable Big Five purports to scientifically measure the five recognized areas of a person’s personality (agreeableness, stress tolerance, conscientiousness, openness and extraversion). The Unfakeable Big Five was devised by Dr. Peterson for his private consulting business and is used as a tool for hiring employees. According to this online personality assessment, the appellant was a highly agreeable adult (97th percentile) as well as being above average in tolerating stress (71st percentile).

[35] Dr. Peterson’s opinion was that people with an agreeable personality trait like the appellant are susceptible to being manipulated during questioning.

Quotes from the trial decision (2012 MBQB 22) follow. I will quote my own selection:

[15] Dr. Peterson obtained his Ph.D. in psychology in 1991. He is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto and also conducts a clinical practice. His curriculum vitae lists several pages of publications with a special emphasis on personality traits and memory. There is no indication in his curriculum vitae that he has ever testified as an expert witness on any matter or that he has ever provided an opinion on the reliability of a confession. He does executive counselling for lawyers and has a consulting business in employee assessment which assists employers to hire employees without relying on interviews, which he considers, in general, to be neither a reliable nor a valid means to obtain information.

[16] Dr. Peterson testified that there are five basic personality traits, which he says are well-recognized by psychologists – agreeableness, stress tolerance, conscientiousness, openness and extraversion. He has developed a test to identify these traits, which he uses in his consulting business. Pearce completed that test on-line and scored very high on agreeability. According to Dr. Peterson, agreeable people are malleable to suggestion.

[17] Dr. Peterson has no prior experience with police interrogations and has never viewed a video of a police interview of a suspect. However, he testified that in assessing interview techniques and the reliability of answers provided by interviewees, an interview of a murder suspect by police would be no different than a job interview. In either case, he said that interviews are highly suspect as a means of gathering information because interviewers are often incautious in their techniques and taint the responses by effectively suggesting answers to the interviewee.

[18] Dr. Peterson opined that there are a number of factors which affect the reliability of Pearce’s confession and which he summarized in the conclusion to his written report:

In conclusion: Pearce was subject to an extremely leading interrogation, conducted after he convincingly cleared a polygraph test, in the aftermath of a drug-related suicide attempt, by detectives who completely and explicitly accepted the validity of a (sic) unsubstantiated theory of repressed memory. His susceptibility to a confession under these conditions is not surprising, 1) given the nature of his personality and his recent emotional experiences and 2) given the contents of the psychological literature on the distortion of autobiographical memories as a consequence of interrogation.

[19] In arriving at this conclusion, Dr. Peterson reviewed the transcript of the police interview and the transcript of the polygraph examination. It is notable that he did not view the video of either, so he had no opportunity to observe Pearce. By comparison, Dr. Moore testified that, in assessing the reliability of a confession, it is important to view the video to see the demeanour of the suspect and the tone of voice of the interrogator.

I don't remember if I actually laughed out loud at some of this.

The problem he indicates with respect to leading questions is valid. However, between the cops, the lawyers and the judge there is no need for expert testimony on that.


Intellectual Integrity: Ah, so that's what he's a professor of.

This time he does have skin in the game: his testimony is in his capacity as someone who has a consulting business that bases itself on the unreliability of interviews. Which is good, except that that skin does not extend to any real negative consequences if he actually were wrong but the court were to fail to catch it.

Compassion for Affected Parties: Full disclosure: when I wrote the description with this with respect to applying shallow propositional logic to particular individual persons, I had this specifically in mind. I am familiar with that sort of projection and extrapolation from book-knowledge that has no grounding in experience. The past eight years of legal practice are still slowly beating that habit out of me. At this point I suspect I am spending so much energy on this at all because I am experience vicarious shame for it on Dr. Peterson's behalf.

Depth of Thought: So apparently he's a professor of psychology, not philosophy. That may explain the epistemological gap, I guess.

The appellate court quotes the voir dire judge at paragraph 45: There was no explanation as to the legitimacy of isolating one personality trait from the others in determining a person’s response to interrogation.

There's no way to explain this besides either bad faith or bias to the point of incompetence.


The appellate court disposes of the case thus:

[147] In summary, the judge properly understood and fulfilled her role as a gatekeeper of expert evidence. Regrettably, what was an otherwise well-crafted charge to the jury was not adequate in the circumstances because it failed to caution the jury about the phenomenon of false confessions which was necessary for the appellant to have a fair trial.

[148] I would allow the appeal, quash the conviction and order a new trial.

The outcome of this case is a testament to the very opposite of that wonderful advice I still thank Prof. Peterson for: he abided by bullshit and the appellate court did the worst thing they could have done.

In conclusion, at this point it seems best to simply treat Prof. Peterson's public works as invisible - neither believe nor disbelieve anything on his authority or lack thereof. If I ever do cite him in the future, I should do so only provided that I articulate in full, explicitly, independently, the reasoning that leads to the conclusion being argued. I'm not sure why I would do that, except in a "even this guy you're such a huge fan of is saying this" context or maybe to debunk some of the shriller haters lest they make fools of themselves attacking straw men.