I made videos where I read Jordan Peterson's new best-selling book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, and share my thoughts in detail. I went in blind and edited out the silences from reading; it's my raw thoughts as I read, which show you one of my processes for how I think things through and analyze them.

12 Rules Screencast part 1 talks most about whether animals are intelligent (I disagree with the book and explain my view). I also talk about writing techniques.

12 Rules Screencast part 2 discusses a wider variety of issues, many of which I believe are important criticisms of the book.

Scholarly Criticism: Jordan Peterson’s Sloppy Cite (+quotes, research) changes format. I made slides and focused on criticizing one cite about serotonin and the brain. It's shorter and more organized.

12 Rules Screencast part 4 finishes discussing rule 1 at a faster pace using notes and quotes instead of the book text.

https://www.aynrand.org/novels/opar

Ayn Rand called her philosophy “Objectivism” because central to it is a new conception of objectivity. Traditionally, objectivity has meant the attempt to efface the knower out of existence, so that consciousness can “mirror” or “copy” reality, “untainted” by any processing. Skeptics then bewail the possibility of man knowing reality, since any attempt to do so must make use of his senses and/or rational faculty, both of which engage in processing.

This text is confusing so I wrote an explanation of the issue:

There is an idea that if an observer or thinker has any traits or characteristics, these bias his observations or ideas. His evidence and conclusions are tied to his own nature – the way his eyes work, the way his brain works, etc. The thought is that people with different eyes or brains could not agree with each other because they will each see or think about the world in their own different way, and won't have any objective ideas/evidence for common ground.

Objectivism says the logical implication of this way of thinking is that you kinda need to not exist to avoid bias. Any eyes or brain have a particular form (or "identity" is the word Rand uses) and therefore the only way to avoid bias is not to exist, not to have anything like a brain or eyes that are one way instead of a different way!

Objectivism rejects the idea that your eyes taint your observations, and that observations have to perfectly mirror reality to be any good. Even if you have blurry eyesight or you're colorblind, you can learn about actual reality instead of merely your subjective perceptions. Having a particular kind of eye doesn't prevent you from having a connection to reality.

To think objectively requires certain methods of thinking, such as trying to understand the nature of your eyes and brain and account for any problems they may cause. E.g. you can know your eyes are flawed and get glasses. And you can also use cameras and other tools to look at the world. And the results are there's an underlying reality which can be understood, rather than a chaos of incompatible observations for each observer or measurement instrument.

Objective thinking requires other things as well, like trying to see other sides of issues instead of just arguing for your initial position. Standard reason stuff.

None of this should lead us to skepticism, to giving up on there being a real world that we can know things about.

when i was growing up, no one told me about tragedy and malevolence – not parents, school, TV, books. (fantasy books do present evil, but outside the context of the real world, as a fantasy.) so i was not prepared to face the human condition (which has positive aspects, potential and opportunity, but there's also plenty of weakness, sin, suffering, etc. the world is full of problems, some quite hard). i was told society is great, evil is rare and weak, reason and success are common.

it's been difficult finding out how fucked up the world is. it would have been easier to face from the outset instead of as a readjustment later.

One of the meanings here is: don't lie to children about the nature of the world to shelter them in certain ways (other ways of protecting children are good, and the distinction takes some serious thought to get right). but i don't think that's primarily it. i'm from the San Francisco Bay Area. neither my parents nor teachers knew what the world was like themselves!

when you read a book that talks about important problems in the world, you get to choose how much attention to pay. you can just read through it and miss a lot of the point. that's what people normally do.

to get more out of it, you have to voluntarily choose to analyze it more, and think through what the negative issues are.

learning about the serious problems of the world isn't just a matter of opening your eyes, it takes a large, active effort. you have to put work into understanding them and making them a part of your own thinking.

it's up to you how much evil, badness, chaos, misery, etc, to voluntarily bring into your life.

it's understandable, in a way, that people usually don't bring in a lot. they don't take a book like Atlas Shrugged or The Gulag Archipelago and read it carefully and think through all of the meaning.

and they have a lot of excuses. this isn't like leaving your lights off to not see that your home is dirty. it takes a major effort to understand the world's misery and disorder beyond what is well known. flipping a light switch is easy, but you can say you're too busy doing other things to carefully think through the full consequences of some long, difficult books. or you can say that you did read it and think about it a lot – and face some of the world's evil – while not doing enough to face even more of the evil/problems (stopping short and pretending you did near the maximum, when there's really a lot more which you didn't make the effort to be aware of).

bringing disorder into your life is serious business. most people are already overwhelmed with their problems, so maybe they shouldn't. as Jordan Peterson would say, you need to get your own life in order before you should take on a bunch of other challenges! (don't overreach!)

this idea helps clarify for me why people don't get a lot out of books like Atlas Shrugged and The Beginning of Infinity. it's not just lack of intellectual skill. these books are serious business and present major world issues, and facing those is a difficult challenge which most people do not wish to voluntarily face. and even people interested in such things limit their exposure, limit what sort of evil and chaos they voluntarily bring into their mind to grapple with.

the more you think through the meaning of important books and ideas, the more you're bringing hard problems into your life and exposing yourself to ongoing tragedies. that's a hell of a thing to do, especially for someone who's life is already chaotic. (my life is very well in order today. but i took on such things in the past when my life was not yet organized. i was pretty damn fearless and this worked out very well for me, but it doesn't work out well for most people who try it – who take seriously a lot of major world problems, and see a lot of the world's folly, without having their own problems and life under control.)

it's difficult because the best way to get your life in order really effectively is to get really good at reason, but learning about reason will reveal to you all kinds of ways the world is irrational and disordered.

what i've done, over time, is keep integrating more and more thinkers into my thinking. in a serious way where the ideas actually make a cohesive whole.

i think this is very rare.

i did David Deutsch first, then Karl Popper, then William Godwin, then Edmund Burke, then Ayn Rand, then Ludwig von Mises, then Richard Feynman, then Thomas Szasz, then Ann Coulter, then David Horowitz, then Leonard Peikoff, then Jordan Peterson.

That's roughly the order, though I worked on some people at the same time. Putting them in linear order is a loose approximation. I read some initial Rand before Burke. Rand is a particularly long project that's still ongoing.

That's a reasonably complete list of thinkers I've engaged with in a BIG way who lived after ancient Rome, and who are public figures. i've done lots of smaller projects like reading a couple good things from someone, but i'm listing people where i went through tons of material. i've spent hundreds of hours on most of these thinkers. I'd guess Burke or Feynman is the least time on the list, and I've done around 20 book readings for each.

i don't just learn these thinkers as points of view, frameworks, perspectives. i actually learned the ideas for my own use and integrated them into my own thinking, and I integrated all of them into the same single worldview. i made them all compatible (while dropping some errors, but retaining major pieces – if there isn't a major piece i can get major value from then i don't spend this much time on a thinker).

Jordan Peterson has done some of this. He often refers to Jung, Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and others. However, he missed some very important thinkers. He learned some Popper without going into enough depth, and he learned a little Rand and didn't appreciate it very much. Jordan Peterson is aware of Thomas Szasz too, but sadly didn't go into depth – that's a big deal which is directly related to his profession and to public advice he gives about anti-depressants.

Most people only use one thinker at a time. On this issue they are a Kantian, on that issue a Marxist, and on a third issue they've got some environmentalist ideas they picked up at college. They don't learn from a bunch of different thinkers about the same issue and figure out how to put the ideas together into a better whole. It takes a major act of creation to do that. It takes figuring out a new idea which incorporates value from multiple prior thinkers and also stands on its own, and which is overall superior to any of the prior ideas. That's hard but very important.

i was linked to one clip of Jordan Peterson, on some specific political point, about 4 minutes long.

i watched it. i didn't love it. it's not his best work. i agreed with it, but i already knew it.

nevertheless i saw enough promise in it to find another clip, and another, and i soon found some which impressed me more and i watched dozens. and then i watched whole lecture series (not clips) and more. and i've started reading his old book and his new book.

if i'd missed that first opportunity to discover JP, i would have found him later. he's been in news articles of the type i sometimes see, been tweeted about by people i follow, been involved in things of interest to me (e.g. he interviewed James Damore), etc.

But I didn't miss that first opportunity. I took it and ran with it, energetically. I try to spot opportunities like that.

Similarly, one day from a google search I found one old blog post by Robert Spillane. The comments were moderated and my comment was never approved, and the blog doesn't get new posts anymore, and never had very many.

Nevertheless, from this one lead I immediately found his books, read some, contacted him, had some discussions, etc.

After I read FoR, I then, on my own initiative, found the author's website and went through all the links (a dozen) and read things, and some of those links had their own links with more to find (e.g. the old TCS site with maybe 50 articles was one link on DD's site), and I kept going from there by e.g. joining the TCS email group and IRC chatroom, which led to talking with DD and others, etc.

People don't pursue FI with this kind of vigor and jumping on the opportunity. This has been visible to me for many years, and I've pointed it out but that doesn't change it.

They also rarely pursue anything in life, which is intellectual, much like this. Sometimes they try a new TV show and then immediately jump on it and watch all 3 seasons. Sometimes they hear a song and listen to every song by that band. Those things aren't common. If it's actually intellectual, and requires judging something to be intellectually good (instead of fun or similar), then it gets a LOT rarer.

People get into computer/video games, and from 15 minutes of trying it out they then want to play for 25 hours in the next week. But usually that's only in a casual, for-fun way. It happens much more rarely with a serious, competitive approach to the game (usually only for people who are already very skilled and serious at some other game).

You need some energy – some caring about life and taking opportunities and running with them (and caring about reason not just "fun") – or you should not expect to get very far with philosophy or much of anything worthwhile.

Life is about doing things. Most people live in a state of half-alive, half anti-Objectivist. (Most people means you, not "other people".)

12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson:

On Quora, anyone can ask a question, of any sort—and anyone can answer. Readers upvote those answers they like, and downvote those they don’t. In this manner, the most useful answers rise to the top, while the others sink into oblivion.

Some useful answers rise – and so do some bad ones. Some great answers sink into oblivion. This is well known, yet also contradicts the claim that the most useful answers rise. JP is overstating the wisdom of the mob.

Quora tells you how many people have viewed your answer and how many upvotes you received. Thus, you can determine your reach, and see what people think of your ideas.

Their viewing and voting patterns do not tell you what they think. It omits why they like things – their reasoning, their thoughts. It also leaves you with no way to tell if they're being honest (you can't spot dishonesty through votes and view).

As of July 2017, as I write this—and five years after I addressed “What makes life more meaningful?”—my answer to that question has received a relatively small audience (14,000 views, and 133 upvotes), while my response to the question about aging has been viewed by 7,200 people and received 36 upvotes. Not exactly home runs.

JP's goal is popularity. He judges a home run not by what he thinks of what he wrote, but by what other people think. His stated goal – his criteria of success (a home run) – is to get views and upvotes, not to please himself.

My goal, when I write, is truth. I don't judge ideas by popularity. I go by arguments. If someone has a criticism – even one single criticism from one person – I'll consider the reasoning and address it or change my mind. But if a thousand people downvote me without giving any arguments, I don't regard that as making any difference intellectually.

The Quora readers appeared pleased with this list. They commented on and shared it. They said such things as “I’m definitely printing this list out and keeping it as a reference. Simply phenomenal,” and “You win Quora. We can just close the site now.” Students at the University of Toronto, where I teach, came up to me and told me how much they liked it.

JP is a second-hander (see The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand to understand the term more). He's judging his work by the opinions of other people instead of by rational evaluation of the content of the work. He's concerned with who thinks what (social metaphysics, as Ayn Rand called it) instead of what the rational arguments about the material are.

If I were sharing a success story like this, I wouldn't quote reason-less praise. I'd be concerned with the rational benefit of the popularity. Did it get me any questions or criticisms I learned from? Did the audience have enough intellectual merit to help me improve the ideas? It's nice if people like you're work and they're helped, but that must not be a creator's primary motivation or reward. Yet JP focuses on it.

I had written a 99.9 percentile answer.

JP writes this like it's 99.9th percentile quality, when he's only demonstrated 99.9th percentile popularity. These are completely different things which JP blurs together.

Quora provides market research at its finest. The respondents are anonymous. They’re disinterested, in the best sense. Their opinions are spontaneous and unbiased. So, I paid attention to the results, and thought about the reasons for that answer’s disproportionate success. Perhaps I struck the right balance between the familiar and the unfamiliar while formulating the rules. Perhaps people were drawn to the structure that such rules imply. Perhaps people just like lists.

Market research is the wrong approach to truth-seeking. Who cares if people like lists? JP should be considering if lists are the best way to present his work – according to his own judgement about the issues themselves.

JP seeks to figure out what people want to hear, in what format, instead of creating original work and structuring it as he thinks best fits the content.

JP is better than this. He is, in various ways, an original and independent thinker. He does good work. That's why this error stands out. It's an internal contradiction he has, which conflicts with some of his very substantial virtues and makes things harder for him.

I started reading the new book 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson.

In the forward by Norman Doidge, he states one of JP's themes:

if one wants to live a full life, one first sets one’s own house in order; and only then can one sensibly aim to take on bigger responsibilities.

This is an anti-overreaching view.