Obviously I’m not a fan of Dawkins. I haven’t read any of his work, but from the various clips and quotes of his I’ve seen over the years he strikes me as an incurious bigot with a blinkered worldview. But I have no reason to doubt that he is a smart man.
So it’s very funny to see him realize that he’s debating a genuinely delusional person, as Peterson makes some bizarre epistemological argument that dragons are literally real because we use the concept of predator as a shorthand for animals that kill other animals. Except Peterson seems to expand the definition of predator to “anything that can kill a person” when he argues that fire is a predator.
an incurious bigot with a blinkered worldview
Yeah, that about sums it up. He has to go for the low-hanging fruit to shine intelectually. This is why he built his entire career on dunking on young earth creationists, it’s something where he can wield his entire academic expertise against people who’ve built their view of evolution by walking backwards from the assumption that the biblical measurements for Noah’s Ark must be taken literally.
So let’s see what’s going on here
“Is a lion a type of dragon?”
“YES!”
what the actual fuck
Actual image from
’s 1999 book “Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief”:
Check out the dergy :3
How did anyone take this man seriously lmao
Idk, I haven’t read the book, maybe it makes sense somehow and we’re gonna need to create a new category of super-genius in our ontologies and put Jordan B. Peterson in there, but it seems quite unlikely
That’s fairly run-of-the-mill esoteric quackery and i’m unfortunately not surprised that this shows up in a self help book. What’s worrying is that at this time, he was still lecturing at a Canadian university and practiced as a licensed psychotherapist, and that both of that only stopped after he got cancelled, oh wait, he wasn’t, he decided on his own to make a career as a professional transphobe instead because he liked getting fanmail from groypers so much.
There’s a very, very fine line between discussing, like, how ancient mesopotamian creatures we gloss as dragons often combine features of many creatures, including lions. Or how lions and other predators are used to allegorically represent many different things in medieval art, ranging from supernatural evil, to actual lions, to the authority of kings, to the gentle mercy of Christ. On one side of that line is an analyssi of a common symbol or motif based on textual and artistic sources. On the other side is whatever the fuck Peterson is.
When people occasionally argue that peasants didn’t understand literal vs metaphorical, I’ve always found that hard to believe, but maybe Peterson is actually like that.
“Matriarchal World of Darkness” is the title of my new ambient melodic death metal concept album
It’s really silly, too, if you’ve seen him actually teaching biology and whatnot at Oxford. He obviously knows a lot about evolutionary biology, but rather than continue to teach, he wastes time arguing with YECs because of the fan mail.
It’s nice to see him quit pretending and go full mask-off with his Islamophobia and transphobia. He’s all in on the grift of internet debate bro personalities.
Dawkins books The selfish gene and the extended phenotype are both significant contributions to evolutionary biology. There have certainly been meaningful critiques of both since, but for books that are 40-50 years old in a rapidly changing field, they are good.
Vulgar Materialism versus Confused Idealism, love to see it.
I can’t stop watching this, it’s incredible
A lion is an instantiation of an object in the category of dragon, the category of dragon is no less valid than the category of lion, IT ALL DEPENDS ON YOUR LEVEL OF ANALYSIS!!!
This is real philosophy, shut the fuck up Cultural Marxist
sWHO UP RN CATEGORIZING THEIR REALITY, CUZ I AM
I need to find a way to contact
, I need to to teach him about Prolog or Datalog, I wanna see what kind of new ontologies he can cook upAny suggestions for alternative systems? I fear his benzo and raw meat addled yet genius brain may not be able to handle this monumental task purely with text. We need categories here people, lots and lots of categories!!! Pictures would be nice too!!!
There are dragons everywhere for those who can imagine
:imagine-dragons:
SAIL
MAYBE I SHOULD POOP MYSELF
[
ROCK INTENSIFIES]
Peterson is doing the exact sort of postmodernism he rallies against, isn’t he? He always does this, he circled around something that almost had a point, that has a tinge of reality to it, but he swirls around in desultoey psuedo-philosphy jargon so that he never has to be pinned down as saying one thing or another.
Actual philosophers will define and redefine their terms, especially if they know they’re using the terms in ways that aren’t standard. Like Delueze/Guattari make it explicitly clear that rhizomatic and arborescent are not botanical terms and aren’t referring to literal trees, even though they’re borrowing biological terms. Foucault uses the term archaeology in a non-standard way too, but he knows he’s doing that.
I haven’t watched this whole thing and I probably won’t, but it sounds like Peterson just wants to say that the immaterial is a real thing, that meta-analysis refers to genuine Platonic forms in the ether. Otherwise what is he even saying. He’s saying dragon is a shorthand for “threat” and that biology is something like “human capacity.” So he’s almost got a point in that the conception of a dragon is biological in the sense that human biology has cooked up the concept of a dragon out of various threatening features to us as humans. It’s a big monster made of the things that would kill us, and our conception of what kills us is informed by our biology and surroundings. Different cultures have had different ideas of monsters that had to do with animals they found threatening. But he’s shouting over how the other two aren’t accepting his exact terminology, even though he’s failing to define his terms?
You could probably do a cool analysis on how early myths/legends had a lot of fierce beasts who attack humans, but now more of our monster ideas are more human-shaped. Like back then you had monsters like trolls or minotaurs, but now monsters are like zombies and vampires. You could make a cool point about how our more primal fears have become more like fears relating to our class and social position, like zombies representing mass unrest or vampires being upper class bloodsuckers.
Hey look I explained how one could talk about dragons in biological terms without shouting at Richard Dawkins or looking like my brain got scrambled on benzos
Are we watching their afterlife? They both clearly hate being stuck with the other one, and an eternity of this seems like just the thing for the gods of Olympus to decide on.
Where are the dragons? I can’t see them ;w;I need to find a Petersonian metaphysician who can help me find these dragons
It uhh involves… predators… and categories or something
Dawkins was a big one of the first round of public atheists that realized white privilege is more powerful than God. He then had a long career answering thr simplest questions for the least informed people. That did not prepare him for a battle of the minds
I fucking hated that misogyny with extra Jungian steps the moment I heard about it.
“ACKSHULLY DR PROFESSOR LOBSTER PHD MD ESQUIRE SAID THE FEEEEEMALE IS ‘SACRED’ WHICH IS WHY THE SACRED MUST BE CAGED AND CONTAINED AND KEPT ON A SHORT LEASH”
Dawkins is a pigheaded fascist and racial supremacist, he made his bed with these freaks, he can lie in it.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that categories and abstractions are real in some sense. It’s a weird view, but I think it has merit. The right question to ask, though, is “what makes your proposed abstract object worth treating as if it were real?” The utility of things like this comes from the predictive power you get from treating them as real: “the economy” is an abstract composite object in much the same way
seems to think “dragon” is, but we get a lot of predictive and explanatory mileage out of tracking it as an individual thing. What predictive utility does talking about dragons get us beyond what we get from talking about, say, a predator? I can make up all sorts of objects–let’s track the object that consists of the union of all pennies minted after 1982 and the left half of 
. That’s a “legal” object in about the same sense that the economy is, but there’s nothing interesting about it: picking it out doesn’t enhance our ability to predict or understand the world. “Dragon” in the sense that he’s trying to use it is like that.
