He’s got a terrible bee in his bonnet about identity politics and “wokeism” which often makes him come across badly but he has has an extremely logical/rational way of trying to unpick complex issuees, which is almost always interesting to listen to. Plus he is willing to recognise and defer to legitimate experts on most important topics. Which is refreshing.
Peterson, Harris, etc....
- Thread starter prath92
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I find listening to him frustrating. He seems to talk a lot and not leave me with the impression that he's said very much.
Yeah, his AMA’s tend to end up as unfocused rambling. I only posted this one because it’s all about his differences of opinion with the “IDW”
I haven’t listened to him in ages but enjoyed the recent interview with Eric Topol on covid which triggered this AMA.
He loves the sound of his own voice.
I like this.
Can I ask where you are on Peterson in this regard? He often makes a long point about the extreme left and then slips in at the end "and this is also true about the extreme right". He never seems to do the same but the other way round, which makes me highly suspicious.
The reason I'm concerned with Peterson is that one of my oldest friends has been turned onto him by another of his friends, who is a church minister incidentally. I worry about Peterson being an alt right gateway as many think he is.
I haven’t listened to Peterson as much but he generally comes across as one of those “predictable on every issue” people I’m referring to there. It’s possible he was more complex a while ago but ended up radicalised by his choice of company. Either way, I think you’re right to be suspicious.
For what it’s worth, I think the biggest danger from any of them (including Sam Harris) is their effect on your YouTube algorithm. Especially for the young, vulnerable and/or impressionable.
This is an excellent podcast on what can happen with too much time on youtube listening to people like Peterson. Maybe get your friend to listen to this first?
thats lovely
Sam Harris doing the 13/52:
African Americans Commit 50% of Violent Crimes, Yet Cops Kill More Whites Every Year
African Americans Commit 50% of Violent Crimes, Yet Cops Kill More Whites Every Year
Sam's wrong on the numbers, but they don't necessarily make good reading no matter how much you try to control your biases - Blacks are 2.0x as likely to be a perpetrator than a victim of a violent crime as per DOJ stats.
I don't know about the numbers, but like most statistics this ignores important context such as poverty, education, neighbourhood etc
It's only a short clip, but does Harris ever offer a conclusion and solution to the issue? Finding statistics is easy, but unless you are dull enough to believe having more melanin in your skin makes you more inherently violent, the important question here is why and how do we solve it. Maybe he should talk more about that.
I don't really see how he is wrong by the numbers approx.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_States#Crime_statistics
As to regards as to why that is there has to be some good research made on the topic. I don't know the answer. Has to be several variables.
He doesn't give a solution, but to be fair to him, he does then go on to discuss social and wealth inequality and how disproportionately better off you are if you're white. If we're being generous to him here we can say the crux of his point isn't to say being black inherently makes you violent, but these disadvantages make it more likely, and therefore the police violence figures will be skewed based on social and economic factors, as opposed to an undercurrent of racism within policing.
The most controversial opinion he expresses there is that these social/economic issues are due to racism in the past and trying to address racism right now won’t fix the problem. I can see why that opinion would piss a lot of people off. For what it’s worth, I disagree. But only partially. Trying to push back against contemporary systemic racism won’t immediately end poverty, criminality and violence in underprivileged black communities in the US. But it will help.
Nothing else he says is remotely unreasonable. Assuming he’s not quoting completely made-up statistics anyway.
IDW in shambles, Harris compares Weinstein to a raving lunatic/Alex Jones.
Shame.....
love it when these twats turn on each other.
Okay that's interesting. That's terrible editing then as that short clip kind of misses the most important part and allows people to draw their own conclusion, which inevitably will involve racism.
Oh good, more Harris bashing without reason. How's that agenda coming along?
Firstly, he does a very long episode on this which you can listen for free here, https://samharris.org/can-pull-back-brink/ where he goes into more depth about sources of stats and so forth.
For me, he's just going through logical steps:
1. These horrible videos have rightly caused huge backlash and ignited an entire movement, and becamse the biggest story in the US during a pandemic. It's a big deal.
2. The videos and movement suggest that this is a racially-motivated problem.
3. Do we have the greater statistics to investigate if this is true?
4. We do, okay let's look at them, what do they actually say?
5. If the statistics do not clearly show what the movement wants, what do we do then?
6. In this case, in his reading they do not show what the movement wants, so he says we should at least be allowed to mention that.
7. But he knows if he mentions that, certain people (ahem) are going to accuse him of being racist.
8. This is no way to better a society. If you're driven by media rather than stats and emotion rather than reason you get the wrong outcomes. It's fine to be angry, it's right ot be angry, but that's not when you should make policy.
Finally, he also goes into detail on the banning of the choke hold in NY and from his conversations with police it's only going to be a bad thing as an example.
I was pretty interested after listening to so I dug into the available stats via the NY Times database and other academic papers. What I took away (I think I cited some of these stats in the American cop thread) is that less than 50 unarmed people are killed by cops in the states each year. Yes, of cousre that's 50 too many, but it's hardly a meaningful number in a country of 350m. More people probably died of Covid in Florida while I've been typing this. The issue is the the 950 odd killed by cops who are armed.
There is no easy way to arrest someone who resists in a world where you have to assume they're armed. The arms are the problem. And training is inadequate and keeps having its budget reduced. These are the statistically driving issues behind police killings. It's not as easy a media narrative, but if people want to fix the problem, that's the areas to tackle. Not defund them, as catchy as that is.
By the way, Jordan Peterson videos get a lot of views. Much more than the likes of Harris, Shapiro etc. I've seen Peterson videos with more than 30 million views. He attracts a lot of traffic.
He quotes the 800 % figure from Portland., which as far as I know (but I could be wrong) is a claim that originates from the Fraternal Order of Police. I'm looking at the official crime statistics:
- January 2020 - August 2020: 33 homicide offenses.
- January 2021 - August 2021: 60 homicide offenses.
- June 2020: 5
- July 2020: 15
- August 2020: 7
- September 2020: 7
- October 2020: 8
- November 2020: 3
- December 2020: 6
- January 2021: 8
- February 2021: 9
- March 2021: 8
- April 2021: 3
- May 2021: 10
- June 2021: 9
- July 2021: 5
- August 2021: 8
The numbers on a national scale are more or less correct, but the reason mentioning that statistic is such a meme is that it's used as a conclusion, a way to argue that there's no problem with policing. That's basically what he's doing here, and it's systematic for how he treats the subject. E.g. he'll pick one single study, the Fryer one, and he won't mention studies that concludes otherwise. He won't stop there: while that study finds no difference in use of force in shootings, it does find a large difference in how the police treats black people and white people in all other interactions. What Fryer argues is that the police aren't just racist, but that they're calculating rational racists (he's an economist, after all); he argues that with shootings officers face a lot of scrutiny, so they can't risk treating people differently. In other interactions, though, they can get away with it so they use more force against black people.
Does Harris agree with Fryer? No, not exactly. He does acknowledge his numbers, but says that while it's certainly possible that it's because of racism (though apparantly that would be weird because non-white cops exhibit similar behaviour), it could also just be because of the way black people act in police encounters. So Harris takes one part of one study and concludes that there's no systematic racism problem with policing.
Edit: I misremembered at the end there, I think he also has mentioned a study that was later retracted.
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Utter nonsense. There are tons of activists, organizations who are better placed to answer these questions than Sam fecking Harris. If you are actually interested you would pay attention to their work. Not some douchebag podcast host who has nothing to contribute to the conversation. Also, anyone with common sense would tell you that cops lie about statistics all the time and the media outlets like NYT regurgitate them like facts without ever questioning the veracity of this information.
I have already listened to it, not very impressed. Criminologist Peter Hanink also listened:
Sam Harris has also argued in the past that chokeholds aren’t really deadly and cops should be allowed to use them because it is practiced in jujitsu classes every day all across the world. This is the level of master intellect we are dealing with here.
Excellent, so we don't have stats we can use and I'm listening to the wrong people, activists for example are clearly a more rational place to start for objective discussion. Will do.
He actually argued (with a police trainer, and having spoken to cops) that choke holds at least give cops an option, and that there is no longer a non-weapon alternative now available to them where they're barred. How would you, master intellect posessor, suggest that police apprehend, say, a 250 lbs man who is resisting arrest in a public setting? Keep asking nicely?
Cool, I shall give that a listen. Thanks.
First of all, cop trainers are disgusting. I think it was @Rado_N who posted a video of them at one of their seminars saying, I had the best sex after choking some to death. Second, no amount of training can stop a cop from killing someone. A simple google on any of the cases over the last year will tell you that these cops have had a history of complaints against them. These are people who undergo the same training but fail to learn anything in the process which often results in innocent people dying.
Activists, non profit organizations, are the only reason we have any useful data, body cam footage, etc that help victims' families win cases against cops. If cops had it their way, they are responsible for zero killings, and every time a city pays a victim's family millions it is a farce.
I trained in Aikido (a modern derivative of Ju Jitsu) alongside police for many many years and the level of pressure in both chokeholds and immobilsation locks is generally proportional to the resistance met. Of course, you could go way further if you're a psycho.
Full of solutions eh?
The most annoying thing for me when it comes to Sam Harris and his ilk of morons is that most of their arguments can be disproven by any student at the undergrad level. Someone who took an intro class to criminology, sociology, media studies, or prisons/policing in America etc.
Do you have a link to what you consider reliable data? Btw the NYT is about as woke as you can get together with the Washington post apart from Vox maybe.
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So any barista then.
Top post.
The DOJ releases an annual report each year detailing some statistics related to violent crime.
Blacks are 1.80x as likely to be the perpetrator of a violent crime than the victim of such crime. Maybe there's systemic issues causing this number, perhaps overly aggressive policing in poor neighborhoods, socio-economic issues, poverty, oppression.
Below are cross race incidents of violent crime:
For the last row titled "Asian" - it says 24% of violent crimes against Asians are committed by whites, 27.5% of violent crimes against Asians are committed by Blacks, 7% by Hispanics and 24% by Asians. For the Black row, <0.1% of violent crimes against Blacks are caused by Asians. Dividing 27.5% by 0.1% and the mathematical conclusion is that Blacks are ~275x more likely to commit violent crimes against Asians than Asians are to commit crimes against Blacks.
That's insane and inexplicable.
Perhaps the answer would be according to the statistics that Asians are the least criminal minority while black people in the US are the most criminal minority. Which is why you get a heavily skewed ratio.The DOJ releases an annual report each year detailing some statistics related to violent crime.
Blacks are 1.80x as likely to be the perpetrator of a violent crime than the victim of such crime. Maybe there's systemic issues causing this number, perhaps overly aggressive policing in poor neighborhoods, socio-economic issues, poverty, oppression.
Below are cross race incidents of violent crime:
For the last row titled "Asian" - it says 24% of violent crimes against Asians are committed by whites, 27.5% of violent crimes against Asians are committed by Blacks, 7% by Hispanics and 24% by Asians. For the Black row, <0.1% of violent crimes against Blacks are caused by Asians. Dividing 27.5% by 0.1% and the mathematical conclusion is that Blacks are ~275x more likely to commit violent crimes against Asians than Asians are to commit crimes against Blacks.
That's insane and inexplicable.
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Peterson’s always crying… he seems very emotionally unstable.
Kind of like if you mixed Kermit the Frog with an emo teenager and put the result into the body of a middle aged man with a cult YouTube channel.
Bless him.
He got himself so addicted to meds that he went to some Russian clinic and put himself in a coma and seems to participate in an all meat diet for....... reasons
The dudes entire claim to fame is debating a bunch of university kids and telling incels to clean their room.