I walked away feeling notably enlightened after listening to one of my favorite podcast hosts, Steven
Levitt (Co-Author of Freakonomics) interviewing Moncef Slaoui, the head of Operation Warp Speed (the U.S. COVID-19 vaccine program). Highly recommended. The show is called "People I Mostly Admire." This episode was released on Dec 11, 2020.
"The sage as astronomer.— As long as you still experience the stars as something “above you” you lack the eye of knowledge."
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, # 71.
At New Discourses, Calum Anderson notes that Douglas Murray is offering important ideas for our moment in time using incidents from several recent colleges to illustrate. The article is titled, "Why University Students Need to Listen to Douglas Murray." An excerpt:
As is the case with all truly interesting people, the least interesting thing about Douglas Murray is his sexuality. He has been a steadfast voice of reason during an age of unreason, and a formidable opponent of the woke activists who presume to speak of his behalf as an openly gay man . . . Murray specifically chastises employees at Penguin Random House for their attempt to prevent their employer from publishing Jordan Peterson’s upcoming book Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. He calls the inability to listen to contrary points of view a “generational phenomenon” which has been adopted by children who believe that “speech is harm, and harm is not harm, that silence is violence and that violence is fine.” Murray was addressing my generation, and despite what may be regarded as a sweeping generalization I am not the least bit offended. Not every twenty-something thinks this way, but the most vocal among us do and that is a serious problem: “the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity” (Yeats).
I had seen this interview before, but I happened on it again tonight. If you've never seen it, you might agree that it's quite a spectacle--more than 25 millions viewers are evidence of that. Cathy Newman (of Channel 4 of a British TV show) is interviewing Jordan Peterson in 2018. This is intense and it goes on and on. I'm tempted to say that Newman violated every one of Heterodox Academy's suggestions for how to have a civil conversation. This is not a conversation, but it makes for some extraordinary theater. Newman entered the studio to school Peterson. She put on a clinic in strawman argument. And after several of the most painful minutes, she still didn't seem to have the faintest clue about the meaning of "multivariate analysis" and its relevance to many of her questions.
Newman's main technique was to misstate Peterson's position, requiring Peterson to dig out, over and over, which he does with saintly patience. Toward the end, the attacks turn purely ad hominem and then it's finally over. This interview was a precursor to what has increasingly become a commonplace "interview" in 2020. Interviews are now too often gotcha matches based upon false accusations. When this happens, the advantage usually goes to the unfair interviewer because if the successfully defends the attack, the interviewer just moves on to another attack based on new falsities. There is an unfair disparity throughout these conversations, because it normally takes a lot longer to repair a false accusation than to make one. That said, Peterson patiently and swiftly swats these false accusations away, leading to ever new accusations.
I'm not entirely certain that I have yet distilled all of the take-home lessons here, but I watched the whole thing tonight, finding it impossible to click away to some other website. After it was all over, I found myself nodding in agreement with many of the comments, such as these:
Jordan: Hitler was evil
Cathy: So your saying you supported the Nazis? --
“Let me get this straight, you're saying we should organise our hierarchy like lobsters”
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Jordan Peterson: "I like ice cream" Cathy Newman: "So you're saying we should stop making yoghurt?"
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Kathy Newman's greatest life accomplishment is probably introducing millions to Jordan Peterson.
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I have recently read that Jordan Peterson is again entering public life after a long bout with illness. In the following short video, he explains what he has been going through.
I've often posted collections of quotes (see here). Tonight I was preparing for a lecture and I wanted to mention some of the all-time favorite short quotes. There are many website that offer such collections, including this one, where I obtained these short quotes that work well for me.
“Either you run the day, or the day runs you.” – Jim Rohn
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” – Anais Nin
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” – Mahatma Gandhi
“Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail.” – Charles Kettering
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” – Alan Kay
“Change your thoughts and you change your world.” – Norman Vincent
“If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else. – Booker T. Washington
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” – Wayne Gretzky
“The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is doing it.” – Chinese Proverb
“The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.” – Helen Keller
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” – Aristotle
“The only true wisdom is knowing that you know nothing.” – Socrates
“If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today.” – E. Joseph Cossman
“Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else.” – Judy Garland