FB keeps showing me ads for Jordan Peterson's Peterson Academy. I know why it does that -- I seek out a lot of reading that someone who'd plunk down hundreds of dollars to hear Peterson ramble might also read -- but I do think it's nuts that there are apparently folks who'd plunk down hundreds of dollars to hear Peterson ramble. Judging from the Peterson Academy trailers -- complete with dramatic music and sweeping pronouncements like, "All your ideas are the ideas of dead philosophers. Every single one of them... The probability that you've had an original idea is like zero."

And it's such horseshit, because it's not *entirely* untrue -- many of your ideas when it comes to ethics and values, for instance, probably are shared by dead philosophers (and politicians and monarchs etc etc) who exerted cultural influence over the societies from which our own is descended. But ALL of them?? Surely he didn't mean ALL of them -- except he said "every single one of them." How is that not the point where most people tune out? Why take one's claim into obviously flawed territory? Is that supposed to be mindblowing, such that people plow forward to know more? Is that why the music is so dramatic??? (more...)