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I love how Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist, saw that one of his patients suffering with a drug addiction was spending all of his money on drugs when he got it and concluded that "poor people don't know how to handle money" rather than "my patient's disease is making him spend money on drugs instead of necessities." I feel bad for anyone who is a client of this man.

"I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers." -- Stephen Hawking, when asked by a reporter for his IQ

Imagine your dad coming to you, his adult daughter, to complain about a fat woman on a magazine cover for five solid minutes tho. Imagine

When I was a kid, my mom, a college teacher, brought me Eysenck's IQ Test book, with ~10 variants of test. And I solved them all during a weekend. At the first one I got around 110, and last ones I easily solved for 140. So it is either a greatest intellectual improvement in human history, or IQ just shows how someone is good at solving poorly defined logical puzzles.

Imagine if your clinical psychologist told you that he didn't believe that people could fundamentally change

The sentence “To Jordan Peterson’s credit, I have no idea what he’s talking about” is beautiful

"The relationship between poverty and intelligence is self evident once you think about it for any length of time" is just "I think there is a relationship between poverty and intelligence, no I don't have any source, my word must suffice, clean your room" To think I once adored this man.

literally so easy to diagnose this guy with "divorced because his wife got sick of being treated like she was literally an inferior being, also rolled her eyes at his bullshit a bunch before she finally left" it's unreal

“This is why I’m a radical defender of free speech. You should be exposed to ideas that make you ask questions even if they make you uncomfortable!” *looking at magazine cover* “This isn’t where this picture belongs! It makes me uncomfortable, as though it’s trying to make me question my preconceptions!”

"I don't know the solution" = "I actually think the solution is eugenics but I can't say that out loud" Every single thing about him is like psychology 100 years ago or something. He was born in the wrong century.

Remember children: IQ tests only prove how good you are at solving IQ tests.

At my grocery store we have a lovely teen with Down syndrome who bags groceries. He is helpful, smiling and cheerful every time I see him. I don’t buy the IQ argument at all. Some of the stupidest people I have met have been wealthy and less useful to society than this young man. I don’t know who he lives with, but I’ll assume he isn’t living on his own or earning a living wage, but he is helpful and useful to society. Our acceptance of him throughout his life, along with good parents and social programs have helped make him the cheerful person he is. Tossing our hands up and giving up on a low IQ child robs the world of people like this young man. I will assume that he has a job due to some social program benefiting his employer.

"some rich people *are* parasitical but some aren't" but also ALL poor people are parasitical and just want government handouts to spend on drugs. Super consistent jordy

Peterson's refusal to define the actual problem is maddening. "There's is nothing for 10% of the population to do" sure SOUNDS like a problem, but he's missing the very last step. How is this actually affecting the world right now? Is there 10% of the population that can't get jobs and are suffering because of it? So we need to find a way to fit them better into society, by making jobs for them? Or is 10% of the population failing at jobs that they aren't able to do, and employers should be free to fire them? Peterson's great trick is to stop right before he finishes his argument, so that in order to disagree with him you have to infer his conclusion, giving him the ability to dismiss you immediately because "I never said that." It's cowardly and brilliant at the same time.

School psychologist here. When I evaluate a kid’s “IQ,” I’m more concerned about their individual cognitive differences-not how “smart” they are. Knowing that a child has trouble in a specific area (like the kiddos with ADHD or Autism who struggle with processing speed and working memory or the kids with SLD who have a hard time with auditory processing) is useful because it tells me how to design the child’s Individualize Education Plan (IEP) to best help. Just saying “we’ll, they’re just dumb” isn’t constructive at all-even when you’re working with a child with low cognitive and adaptive abilities due to an intellectual disability.

My IQ is 143 and I've lived below the poverty line most of my adult life. Take that, JBP

Personally I think his position has always been "I want to do eugenics but would never straight up say that because I'd get cancelled"

the thing with Peterson is that he really impresses centrist pseudointellectuals because he does this thing where he finds problems with everyone including conservatives, he says "these people who are trying to find solutions aren't smart enough to realize the problem is complicated" and everyone claps him for it, failing to see all he has said is that the problem is complicated and offers no complicated solution himself, he is contrarian for the sake of it and never says anything meaningful if you look carefully

"If you don't buy IQ, you might as well throw out the rest of psychology" Me keeping up with developments in modern psych: lol ok, we can do that.

Also that "fat" woman isnt fat at all, and incredibly hot, just saying.

Point of order: The idiom of _picking yourself up by your bootstraps_ was an example created by Samuel Smalls in his 1848 book _Self Help_ to illustrate an impossible action. Nobody can do this.

I actually died laughing when you cut to him in a completely quiet room followed by him saying "free speech" as if he hadn't slept for a whole week.

“IQ is predictive of success” My school tested my IQ to screen for intellectual disability’s because of my dysgraphia and my family’s history of ADHD. I scored 135 and I have gotten Ds in nearly all of my classes since my sophomore year. If you look at my comment history (please don’t look at comments I made when I was 16 oh god) and talk to me you wouldn’t guess I scored 135 on an IQ test. IQ tests are the phrenology of the 21st century.

Automatically I’m really against JP’s claims that IQ is equal to how much money you have, bc I went to a private school for ten years and there were consistently ppl in my classes who were legitimately dumber than a bag of rocks. And to this day they’re still doing just fine bc their parents have money.

The sad thing is, Peterson is touching on a genuine problem here, that there are disabled people who can't get jobs because their superiors are unwilling to provide them the tools they need to function. But, of course, instead of phrasing his argument in terms of "People have different needs and those needs don't take away from their worth and right to live a comfortable life", he phrases his argument in terms of "Some people are inherently better than others"

Jordan Peterson: "I had a client who spent his disability paycheck on drugs every single time. This 100% definitely happened, and also it's the disability program's fault, while poor little old psychologist me did nothing."

I took an actual IQ test (not one of those cheap online courses) and my IQ is something like 75-80 within that general range but I'm doing great in life. I'm not the smartest man alive but I can do everything that people with 100 IQ can.

Sometimes I'm convinced JP got his liscence from a cereal box, because I can't imagine how he actually managed to convince someone he could be a psychiatrist. Also, I love how Joel points out that Jordan says that the snake symbols were inspired by DNA strands, when in fact, it just looks like snakes fucking. Brilliant. Tells you how much the man "thinks" about stuff.

The fact that people find Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro intelligent tells you a lot about our society. It's theatrical intellect.

I was one of those classically 'gifted but arrogant' undiagnosed ASD kids at the age going into high school, and I remember getting an IQ score of 124 and being so mad that I didn't get a 'genius' score (140), so I took another test, and another, and another, I googled tips & tricks, I practised over and over and over because I needed so badly to be my dumb kid idea of 'clever'. Eventually I managed to get a score of 161, a jump from the 7th percentile to the 0.007th, in no more than a couple months. Considering that I am also a total idiot, then if that story doesn't prove how little merit IQ tests have, then idk what does, love the vid!

everytime i see this, his tweet about dr feldman barrett is EXTREMELY funny. I work and am doing my postgrad at a damn law school and we cite barrett! you can't discuss neurology, culture or emotion in the 2020s without discussing barrett, not if you want to pass peer review lol. the fact he doesn't know who she is really goes to show how disconnected he actually is from the academic disciplines he pretends to have expertise in.

Most people who say they believe in personal responsibility think that just means "everyone needs to hold themselves accountable for their own lot in life without unfairly blaming others", but responsibility also necessarily means "everyone needs to hold themselves (and each other) accountable for how their actions negatively affect others- intentionally or not, individually and collectively". People tend to forget the latter part.

Seeing these clips of him lecturing help me understand how he developed his idea of students as entitled or complaining etc. and why he joined the "PC has gone mad" lot: he somehow became a college prof through some broken system, despite being deranged. Then a bright, young and motivated new-gen of students get into the college and show up for their first lecture "wow, we made it, academia" .. and it's Peterson saying 'IQ testing is actually 100% real and people who score less than 87 cannot even dig a ditch, and we need to 'do' something about them' ... and the students are like 'what the actual f-ck' and legitimately think they have wasted their life working to get into a college program, then they question him or complain to staff. lol.

So, this is what I'm hearing: if it's genuinely the case that there are very few jobs for people with IQs below 85, then that's the best possible case I've ever heard for Universal Basic Income.

In other letures he's cited a book that he got the whole "snakes fucking = DNA" idea from. The source the author of the book gave for that info basically amounted to "I did a lot of drugs in South America"

My parents told me my IQ is in the low 140s, which is perfect because I can almost understand the plot of most Rick and Morty episodes. Thanks genetics!

Fun fact: "Jordan Peterson" is the correct way to pronounce the word "eugenics" in a Toronto accent

Jordan Peterson’s assertion that “IQ is the metric that determines if someone is good and/or capable of anything” is essentially just eugenics. I am shocked that a University ever let him teach.

Peterson reminds me of those kids in class who would take a 5 minute IQ test online and base their whole being on it.

Essentially he’s saying “poor people aren’t good with money, they’re too stupid. That’s why they don’t need it.”

Ultimately it's kind of obvious: the Sports Illustrated cover is an affront to Peterson because it's an institution (Sports Illustrated) very publicly placing a particular person _somewhere Peterson doesn't think she belongs._ At their core there is perhaps nothing more conservative than believing that 1) _people have their place_ and 2) people should _know_ their place and not get uppity. It doesn't matter that this is an utterly silly and meaningless hierarchy of 'people who get to be on Sports Illustrated covers' - it _is_ a hierarchy, and as such just like any other hierarchy it _must not_ be challenged.

The more I watch analysis of JBP, the more I just want to say, "Jordan, who hurt you and how?" I mean, for a psychologist, Jordan's lack of reflection on his own rage is kind of shocking. Here's a man who literally said that he would rather die than be "forced" to use someone's chosen pronouns.

“Adam Ruins Everything” does a great job debunking IQ tests, including going back to their history! It’s a great watch and I recommend it for sure.

At this stage, I'm waiting for JP to present a series of Anchient Aliens

I took an IQ test and scored very well. And yet, I am unemployable because I've committed the crime of being over 50 years of age. The system is broken.

I think it was in the second year of my psych degree when someone asked a lecturer if childhood IQ scores was a good determinant of adult success. Her reply was that IQ alone didn't map to the highest scores being the most successful. There's far too many other variables at play for it to be a simple positive correlation. Then she said something that I've always remembered and this was 30 years ago. "There's people who could easily complete a doctorate sleeping on a park bench and people who can barely read or write that are multimillionaires".

took some random online iq test the other week and got ~130, guess i'm off to law school, jordan peterson really has changed my life

Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is *literally* *impossible.* Why do people keep repeating this phrase?! The level of unintentional irony in using that phrase as an synonym for "effort," is so high, it gives me nosebleeds.

"Other people aren't the problem" - bullies are not the problem - systemic failures are not the problem - rapists are not the problem - abusers are not the problem - the biases and failings of MDs and other elements in the system are not the problem "You are the problem!" - Jordan Peterson

Ah yes, Jordan "It's impossible to train people to be creative, adaptive thinkers" Peterson. A psychological inspiration for the ages - the only psychologist who's willing to tell you he can't make you a better person, even while he sells books telling you he can make you a better person. It's that creative, adaptive thinking of his that does it. You just can't teach that! And neither can he.

It's just eugenics wearing a mustache and a funny hat.

There’s an important difference between “thinking things through” and “thinking things through after actually confirming or at least reasonably evidencing the facts, information, and ideas behind said things.”

He words his arguments very cleverly to absolve himself of the burden of proof. 8:39 "The relationship between poverty and intelligence is self-evident if you're willing to think it through for any length of time." In other words, if this relationship he claims exists is NOT self-evident to you, you simply haven't thought about it enough.

A popular phrase I've heard in my Psych BA and my research position which studies cognitive development is "intelligence is what intelligence tests measure". When testing for a construct, you want to know what the construct is first so that you can then make a valid test. The problem with intelligence is, no one really knows what it is. If you don't know how to define intelligence, how are you supposed to make a test with construct validity? IQ tests reveal how well you've done on the test, not necessarily how intelligent you are.

I really like the "put your house in order before saying anything". Like the people that decide the policies that affect our lives have their houses in order.

Lately I've been a little skeptical concerning IQ, mainly regarding what it is measured and how they know their measurements are right. When calibrating a speedometer, you can verify the measurement is correct by measuring how long a vehicle takes to travel a known distance and using the correct formula. With IQ, there doesn't appear to be a straightforward test like that, and I haven't even heard what exactly IQ is measuring from people who strongly advocate for it. That isn't to say I don't think people have different characteristics. I just think they can't be accurately summed up in one number, and it would be far more beneficial to use a number of tests to learn more about a person's strengths and weaknesses.

When asked in a 2004 interview with The New York Times what his IQ is, Stephen Hawking gave a curt reply: "I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers."

I've seen cats less obsessed with boxes and fitting in them no matter the cost than Peterson.

Joel, I just wanted to compliment you on your oratory and delivery of this video. You make a lot of points I don't agree with, but you deliver your arguments in an extremely convincing manner. Keep it up!

During my College years, I was for the first time kinda made to really depend on myself and my own adulting skills: working, planning out costs and money, all that. I, who was a kid who, by some IQ tests (yes, plural) had a pretty high IQ. And I was an idiot in handling my money, I can safely say! Now though, I have grown to be smarter with it, because of experience, because I started looking at ways to spend it more carefully, and use sales in the grocery store and all that, or by dressing up much warmer during winter to save on gas, or by spending more time with other people, either at my place or at theirs, to sort of save on that. Part of that came from other students, either on campus or in the same classroom, sharing their tricks to save money. A few of us even shared which grocery chains sold the most important products at a discount at any given time, so we could save money every week. It didn't take high IQ to manage this. It took experience and helping each other out. Jordan Peterson is a quack

It turns out that "it's really complicated to explain why" he thinks they're DNA means it came to him in a hallucination. He thinks he saw DNA when he was on shrooms. And he believes in a collective unconscious. Those combined gets there. He explained it in a discussion with Richard Dawkins.

Ever since I watched Shaun's video on The Bell Curve, any time I hear someone bring up IQ my brain instinctively waits for them to bring up racial differences. And given enough time, they'll do it almost without fail.

My IQ was 90 when I took it (10 years ago, age 23). I did well in high school, but I never went to college. And yet, I taught my self 2D and 3D animation and have worked on music videos and tour visuals for bands like Red Hot Chili Peppers, Incubus, Bad Bunny, and many more. I run an online animation studio and am completely financially self-sustained from it. But I have a poor IQ score. I'd like to hear Peterson's thoughts on this. From what I've read, IQ tests can be helpful at diagnosing some learning disabilities, but is it possible we put too much stock into these tests? What do they really measure? I suck at tests in general because I think long and hard about things. Tests prioritize quick problem solving skills and memorization. I'm slow to make decisions, but does this mean I'm dumb? People are different, and we shouldn't punish people for thinking differently. There's a theory of multiple intelligence, and many forms of intelligence can't be easily measured through standardized testing. Creativity operates on a different wave length. My personal life experience is a contradiction to Peterson's hypothesis that IQ predicts success. How many people have you heard of who brag about having a high IQ score and yet don't produce or do anything notable with that IQ. Saying you have a high IQ is just a fancy way to say you have high insecurity.

iq is kinda crazy when you think about what factors into how someone preforms on tests. i have taken iq test and scored high(130-135), and other times i’ve scored lower (90-110). the world is more complicated than tests and its sad we hammer this into kids

It is extraordinary how long I was able to be a fan of Jordan Peterson's early lectures, assuming he was talking in good faith and that the problems he raised were meant in the spirit of improving people's wellbeing, like an actual lecturer in psychology concerned with the question of meaning whose solution to nihilism was "orient away from Nazi death camps." Hearing him say "10% of the population have trouble with the complexity of modern occupations and we haven't done anything to address this" back in 2015: damn straight, we need to revolutionise work and make it less needlessly bullshit. Hearing him say it now, in an interview with Stefan Molyneux, and go "I don't have a solution": god damn, it's going to be death camps, isn't it.

I love how Big Joel has just grown more and more to look like an ancient Greek philosopher over the past years

My IQ is 140, but I’m an human disaster, Jordan.

Oh boy my eugenics alarm was going off this whole video and when you brought up his attitudes on race i cringed. Also he's completely ignoring the fact that most psychologists have completely thrown IQ out the window as a useful metric of study.

I like it when big joel is challenged by insane tweets

I took two IQ tests in my life, one when I was a kid in a relatively poor family, in a country that just went through a revolution. My IQ was quite low at the time, according to the objective list presented by professor here, I was destined to be somewhere between mechanic and "factory production assembler". Later in life, my saint mother moved mountains to give me the ability to educate myself, (useless endeavor, according to esteemed professor, it's not like I can move stratas), our country got more stable and our financial situation got way better, and I took that test second time at the end of my uni. I got very high numbers this time, high enough to even maybe be a "Trainee" (really, professor, trainee? Just, like, in general?). Clearly all of this means that I am unique creature that could somehow defy my preexistent faith and jump from one group to another. I still don't know how it is possible, but as the only person on the planet who is able to do that, I think I need to be studied by the best iqologists out there. Maybe have my skull dimples measured or whatever real science they do

Why does Jordan Peterson sound more like a preacher than a lecturer

People not being able to handle money due to mental illness, addiction and disability is certainly real and present in society, and in most countries they solve that by having something like a conservatorship that is handled by government employees, relatives or volunteers. Transparency is important, and you're usually not allowed to enrich yourself through it since that would be incredibly immoral. I mean, who would possibly want to systematically prey on the most vulnerable people in society through weird for profit shenanigans anyways?

SI has been in the process of rebranding their swimsuit issue to be a women-centered lifestyle magazine more than catering to men for a few years now, and I had the joy of being put in charge of SI’s customer service line right when that change started - and since I had nobody to tell me what I could or couldn’t say since the company was in the middle of a big restructuring and they replaced the whole customer service team with me I had the freedom to pretty much tell a bunch of angry men to shove it and we already have their money so there’s nothing they can do about it bc we don’t give refunds to entitled pricks. It was great.

Jordan Peterson is the regular conservative person's idea of a smart person.

He has a great handle on 100-year old cognitive science. He is not up to date. I have a high IQ, at least I did when I was 14, according to a psychiatrist specializing in learning disability and gifted children. Why did I take that test? Because I went from being moved from a normal public school in 5th grade to a gifted class (the only one for my grade in the public school district), despite behavioral problems. I did fine but demanded I go back to honors or A level curriculum at the end of the year. I did fine there for a year but I emotionally fell apart the next couple of year as a consequence of psychological disturbance, which was all related to childhood trauma experiences between age 3 and 13 and abuse suffered from ages 6-12, and to my abuser being largely but not completely removed from my life. I went on to basically miss the 9th grade due to psychological and related health problems (which did not make me repeat a grade but set me back to the remedial classes), to repeat the 11th grade, to have a child at 18, and to drop out of school. But within a year I got my GED, went to college. I did not great in college but was a B and C student mostly except for 1 A and 1D. I joined the army got our finished college with. A better GPA, and finished graduate school (all while working part time and as a single parent with no support from other parent by that point), got a job, and now earn in the 85 percentile for full time people my age. So what you can see is there are some things that held me back to the point of not moving at all, despite IQ, or that didn’t, because of IQ, depending on when you took a snapshot of my “performance.” I also had more than average family and community support (despite not protecting me earlier on/in other ways). How important is IQ to my story? There is plenty of evidence that IQ can work against you if it is too high and you aren’t in jobs requiring it, like physicist or engineer, and lots of evidence that “emotional intelligence” is more important in most fields/for life success in general/for most people. Moreover effort and determination, often underscored by socialization emphasizing academic and professional performance is highly predictive of performance in those areas. Also, as you might expect psychological health can be much more important. It’s absurd to put so much on IQ. Would Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory make s good trial lawyer, (ordinary) corporate manager, salesperson, marketing executive, entertainment executive, actor, athlete, entrepreneur, or counselor? If we are going to regress IQ against income from work or education, why don’t we do the same with adverse childhood experiences (ACE), which are so varied but are commonly lumped under a single acronym? Why don’t we say having parents that demand performance and schools, friend/pert groups, and communities that do the same is most important. A median IQ kid born to the kind of parents that send their kids to push exclusive impossible to get into Manhattan pre-schools are going to do better, on average than virtually everyone else, as are median IQ kids that are not abused don’t have felons for parents, and live in higher than average two adult (especially two parent) households. This obsession with IQ is an insanely blinders securely on fallacy, even if we concede that IQ is not just predictive, not just causal, but actually also significant and meaningful.

4:52 why something tells me that he has a solution to that but he just wants to move the overton's window enough to consider it viable

one of the points that I think is often neglected with the silly "poverty and iq" question is the way that increased stress and trauma really fuck with a lot of your higher order functions. You can see this in how previously high-performing people end up doing worse as they go through trauma or as increased life stressors that occur as one ages takes their toll. I haven't read all too much on this effect developmentally but I can't imagine that kids living through the family stress and everything that comes with being in a tight place economically is gonna be especially Conducive to developing study and test-taking skills.

it's interesting Peterson making the point that a fat woman is unhealthy when he literally decided to go into a medically induced coma in order to speedrun a detox, and then spends an amount of time explaining that he was only physically addicted, not mentally, so he's not one of the "bad people"

JP's behavior is a projection of his underlying emotional or psychological issues, such as low self-esteem, insecurity, or a need for attention or validation. However, he is also aggressive, hostile, and possibly even sadistic. I think "IT" may derives pleasure from causing others emotional pain and feel a sense of power or control over them.

you just KNOW that jordan peterson would become a phrenologist so quickly if he didn't know it would ruin his reputation

As someone with a bachelor in Psychology and who was trained in psychometry... every one of my teachers warned us against using IQ as anything more than an academic success predictor. My psychology statistics teacher especially made sure to debunk The Bell Curve (without naming the book) during one of our first classes. This teacher trained us on administering an outdated version of the IQ test and one of our tasks was to point out where the test was lacking and how to account for it in our evaluation. IQ can be a useful metric to determine if someone is having a hard time learning and can sometimes give a bit of an indication as to why it's the case, but it's an incredibly faillible test that must be administered with a lot of care and its results read with even more care.

in the last 5 years i have had 2 semesters of classes on psychology, at some of which they explained to us the problem with IQ tests ...but i'm sure JP would just take it as a sign that the modern education is inferior to the one he had.

What I love is how conservatives use the phrase "pick yourself up by your bootstraps" despite the fact the phrase was originally created as an impossibility, because you physically cannot pick yourself up by your bootstraps

Jordan Peterson is winking at eugenics with both eyes

My therapist has another client that apparently loves Peterson very much (I don't know the client or anything else about him, so I can't judge him as a person) so the both of us talk about him at times. I actually brought up Peterson first because he basically stated that BPD is the female version of ASPD which I found quite strange because the two disorders have some glaring differences between them. That promted my therapist to look into Peterson because two clients of his mentioned him. His conclusion was that Peterson was a very typical old university professor, insane, conservative with a dangerous love for facist rethoric.

I was I a family iq test as a toddler, where me and my mum were tested. Based on what my mum said, the two of us did far far better than was predicted compared to our social class and family education history. The reason? My mum travelled as a young adult, she saved for years to backpack across europe and the USA. She fully admits that the only reason she could answer half of these questions was cause she learned while travelling. And, as an overly curious child, she taught me stuff. Basically, the test was far easier to pass if you were upper class and had taken a European centric education. I.E. it was really crappy science. If it had instead had a far heavier knowledge focuse on things more common in the working class, like local info, trade skills, etc. then it would have produced entirely different results.

The more I hear Jordan Peterson talk, the more he sounds like a 19 year old r/atheism Libertarian who listens to Rage Against the Machine wrong and watched two Sargon of Akkad videos.

We all agree that Jordan Peterson is obviously extremely attracted to fat women and is deeply afraid of admitting it even to himself, right?

The "women must be beautiful and skinny" seems to me to exist to suppress women. A man who insists that a woman must fit that body type doesn't see women as equals.

The worst thing about Peterson is that he pulls in a certain demographic that is genuinely seeking reason and meaning, and he fills that need with his weird, vacuous, dog-eat-dog nonsense.

I love the idea of Stalin trying to force Jordan Peterson to be attracted to fat women in some weird body positivity fun house gulag.

It seems like Jordan Peterson is after simple answers. When things seem to push against his worldview, implying it’s more complicated than he thinks, he lashes against it.

One thing Jordan completely ignores is the idea that IQ could be multivariate, that people can be extremely stupid in some ways but less so in others. I'm a terrible businessman but I'm a top-level problem solver, and my IQ is over 140. Some stuff i can do better than anyone around me, and some stuff i seem brain-dead trying to solve. My supervisors at work have struggled with what to do with me, thinking of how they could smash me into being a business-minded worker, but ultimately realizing that succeeding in this could also smash my creativity, which was the real benefit i provided that others around me couldn't. They finally decided to just put up with me, and enjoy the unique solutions i threw off. Anybody can do time cards. Or can they? I designed a time card system, but i wouldn't really do them myself. So i contributed to getting thousands of time cards in, just not mine. The evidence that most people are like this is all around us, that people are almost never "just stupid" to the point of being incapable of anything. To make it more obvious, we have actual people in govt who are very clearly intellectually low-level, people making laws that obviously just don't understand what they are doing. Total abortion bans passed by people who don't know what "ectopic" means. What happens to Jordan's theory when the President's IQ turns out to be 90, and a homeless street person hits 135? As is commonly true of Jordan, his rationalizations tend to be lazy. He hits on a track, and fits everything to it. Everything bad is radical-leftist post-modern cultural Marxism, and Marxism is the ultimate evil because 100 million died in the Soviet Union. Yeah, that follows. Everything is on the most rudimentary level of abstraction. But he is articulate, and a lot of dumber people mistake that for erudition, or, to them, "smarts". Jordan is a conservative pseudo-intellectual for the post-Trump reality. We would be much better off of he hadn't come out of his Russian-induced rehab-shortcut coma. Seriously, a clinical psychologist hopelessly addicted to benzos. Talk about stupid.

never forget with any metric of measuring intelligence, the ones who introduce it into the status-quo are the ones who rank the highest on their own quiz. it is not a varied group of people with different scores who propose it. the people who claim that they can determine if an individual is a big-brained genius or not just so happen to fall under their own definition of a big-brained genius. you are more likely to vouch for something if it boosts your own ego and the fact nobody factors in that bias shows how flawed the idea of iq is.

my chief beef with the idea that poverty is a function of low intelligence is the implicit moral condemnation of being poor or stupid. our capitalism is working perfectly and a large chunk of the population really is too incurably stupid to lift themselves out of poverty, why make them continue to suffer for it? shouldn't you be, like, advocating for welfare, specifically so people aren't locked out of a comfortable life for reasons outside of their control? if the competition for housing and food is already rigged, why have the competition in the first place? i know jordan beterson is a big natural hierarchies guy but he doesn't make a very good argument beyond "that's what nature intended", or a good defense beyond "postmodernism is bad". idk. protestant work ethic moment.

Your analyses are so good! Compelling. What a gift

His harsh opposition to being “tricked” into finding someone attractive is a play for control. He wants to keep us thinking that there’s an objective way to be “correctly”, and that *he* knows what that is. This gives him power to say, “fat people are ugly and unhealthy”, “poor people are stupid”, “trans people are their assigned gender”, “women are intellectually inferior” - all from a place of objective truth. If we as a society agree that there’s nuance and things are more complicated than “only skinny white woman attractive”, he loses all of his power to say what is and isn’t objectively right and wrong, which is literally the only argument he has against everything he opposes. It means that we can be “tricked” into believing that it’s okay to be fat, that poor people deserve assistance, that trans people are their actual gender, and that men and women are equal, and that’s terrifying to him.

It’s so incredibly to me that JP can say “IQ is the biggest predictor of success” while completely ignoring the hundreds of studies that show that high IQ is associated with higher nutrition and better education in early age, stemming from wealth. Therefore the biggest predictor of success isn’t the high IQ but the fact that people with high IQs overwhelmingly tend to come from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, which is by far the bigger predictor of success. It’s such a simple and easy to see confounding factor, and I know he’s deliberately obfuscating this fact to support his own deranged obsession with IQ

You're so incredibly right. Also your voice is soothingly poetic.