RE: Jordan B Peterson: A Real Intellectual
This is a continuation of the above post.
Peterson now covers the second of his two videos that caused all the controversy:
The second vid covers the practices of the HR department at the University of Toronto on two fronts.
The first is the current equity strategy, equity, not equality of opportunity, but equality of outcome. The second is the use of faulty tests for the HR department to find unconscious bias and then reeducate them.
Essentially, what he does, as I cover in this post, is follow these two policies to their logical conclusion, which is absurdity.
The basic idea, Peterson says, is that a certain group, in this case HR,
gets to define demographics as it suits them. In this case it is women and men. Now, if any department from the top to the bottom of University does not have absolutely fifty/ fifty distribution between men and women, it is deemed corrupt and discriminatory, and measures are taken.
10:00 Here he makes on of his very best points, and it might end up being the best takeaway from this video.
He says that in Sweden, a place where they have taken legal and social measures to make sure everything is equal between men and women, instead of finding men and women becoming more alike they actually become more different.
In Sweden, there is 20 to 1 ratio of women to men in nursing, and a 20 to 1 ratio of men to women in engineering.
Therefore:
12:30
Social constructionism is wrong!
(I am hoping to find the reference to this study, since it was a population wide study, not a small group.)
Not only is it wrong, but Peterson points out that for it to be right:
13:59
you have to assume men and women have identical interests and temperaments and that if they don't the state should bloody well intervene to insure that they do.
So, you have the fact that women and men are naturally different, and these ideologues want the state to force them to be the same.
Already insane.
He goes on to say that what about Asians, Indians, Jews, gays, etc. that are over-represented in certain professions, do we want to even that out too?
He is exposing the basic absurdity of identity politics here, the fact that it sounds good in the moment, but breaks down into absurdity in the long run.
15:22
The problem with fractionation by group identity is that it's endless.
He believes that eventually you will fractionate it all the way down to the individual, except that there is already a culture that does that, and it is Western Civilization, where the ultimate group is the individual.
Now, the second part of his beef in this video is with the HR department has to do with their policies on unconscious biases, and while at the moment these rules only apply to the HR department itself, he wisely says that it is already other places and is probably coming for you.
He is very disturbed by the idea that you will soon be forced to let the state muck around as he says with your perceptions, to retrain them.
He takes issue with the Harvard Implicit Association Test, which I believe is the instrument that is being used widely now to determine whether or not someone has unconscious biases. He says that even the author has admitted that the test is not reliable as a diagnostic.
(I was curious about this test. I took it here:
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/. I took the Weapons IAT, that purports to determine whether or not you associate danger with blacks or not. These were my results:
Here is your result:
Your data suggest a moderate automatic association for Harmless Objects with Black Americans and Weapons with White Americans.
It is a very odd test in which they are continually changing which keys to press for which results and measuring the rapidity of response. I think the idea is that if you are quick to click on a dangerous weapon after you clicked on a black face, and slower with a white face, you associate black people with weapons more, or something.
As you can see from my results, I consider blacks more harmless --but can't that be an insult itself?- and whites as more dangerous or associated with guns. It seemed to me that because they changed which buttons to use to indicate black and white people, and harmless and dangerous, it might also be that your rates would speed up as you got used to the new buttons. It might be that I have seen more movies with rednecks in them or more white people talking about the 2nd amendment. Seems to prove nothing.
Never mind, you might want to take one of these tests to see for yourself.
18:02 Peterson thinks the most important thing to know is that diagnostic tests have
rules of reliability that few tests pass, tests like the I.Q. test and the Big Five Inventory pass these tests, and these implicit bias tests pass no rules of reliability. In other words, people who take these tests have different results on different tests.
Also, there is no evidence that testing a certain way on the test will predict behavior, so if it isn't reliable and doesn't predict behavior, what good is it?
18:55 Peterson:
It's good if you want people to send you to retraining exercises so that you can have your perceptions adjusted in the direction that your organization and the state thinks is proper.
He makes the point that there are organizations even now, and places like hospitals, that are using these tests to terrorize their employees. My take is that these tests are just like Lie Detectors, a mind fuck of the highest degree, but not what they claim to be.
20:10 Here Peterson says that these are being used for political not scientific reasons and that the reason they are getting away with it is that the field of social psychology is totally corrupt, and this is an example.
20:30 His final damning analysis is that even if, for the sake of argument, you admitted that these tests were valid, you would still have a problem:
There's no evidence whatsoever that those damn unconscious bias training programs have the effect they're supposed to have, and there's some evidence that they actually have the reverse effect.
That pretty much concludes his commentary on the first two videos that got all the attention.
Main take aways:
#1: Forcing equity instead of equality of opportunity on people is wrong and Sweden proves it.
#2: The problem with identity politics is that it ultimately reduces down to the individual, a system that we already have.
#3: Forcing bad science on organizations for political reasons is an assault on the individual and should not be tolerated.
