Sam Harris vs. Jordan Peterson

Pacal said:
I took several courses in psychology at University and I never heard of the notion that in psychology beliefs have the status of truth. In fact a great deal of time was spent about how do you determine whether or not a particular psychological hypothesis or theory was or was not true. Of course some attention was paid to finding out why people might believe that X or y was true. What sort of cognitive bias or thought process might make people believe x or y was true. In fact in the courses I took some effort was made to combat various beliefs about the psychology of humans that although widely held were deemed false.

So sorry in psychology "belief" does not have the status of truth although a psychologist would likely be interested in why a particular belief was held to be true.

I also would not say Peterson's analysis is at a higher level. Instead it is at a much lower level. It reduces "truth" to mere utilitarian usefulness. To me the "meta" level is such questions has how do we know if something is "true", exactly what is in fact "truth", can something be completely true and so forth. Petersen has nothing to say about those issues it seems.
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I'll try to clarify and you can check my work.

1) Belief as truth.
a) I believe I am handsome. This gives me confidence and a positive affect. My confidence and positive affect cause people to react well to my overtures. This response reinforces my subjective evaluation of how handsome I am.
b) A parent treats their child as if she were very smart, introducing her (and praising her) in STEM style successes. The child follows this path through high school and college.
c) Johnny believes God answers prayers. Johnny prays for a job in film-making but cannot get one. He gets a job as a car salesman instead and does quite well at it. Johnny tells me God knew what was best for him.​

2) Analysis at a higher level
a) This doesn't mean "meta" as in meta-physics, but in a heirarchical sense - a higher-category sense.
b) Brains are black boxes in psychology (at least generally). This means I am not usually interested in the biological particulars of what I report on. In this sense, it doesn't matter what's running around in someone's skull - might as well be gerbils, my interest is in behaviors and how a person expresses such high level concepts as wants, needs, drives.
c) This high-level conceptualization is shown in the language used. Peterson's field is in personality assessment. Traits are ill-defined in the "here is a micrograph of it" sense. The gap between neurobiology and psychology means he finds terms like "extroversion" worthwhile.​
 
marplots said:
I'll try to clarify and you can check my work.

1) Belief as truth.
a) I believe I am handsome. This gives me confidence and a positive affect. My confidence and positive affect cause people to react well to my overtures. This response reinforces my subjective evaluation of how handsome I am.
b) A parent treats their child as if she were very smart, introducing her (and praising her) in STEM style successes. The child follows this path through high school and college.
c) Johnny believes God answers prayers. Johnny prays for a job in film-making but cannot get one. He gets a job as a car salesman instead and does quite well at it. Johnny tells me God knew what was best for him.​

2) Analysis at a higher level
a) This doesn't mean "meta" as in meta-physics, but in a heirarchical sense - a higher-category sense.
b) Brains are black boxes in psychology (at least generally). This means I am not usually interested in the biological particulars of what I report on. In this sense, it doesn't matter what's running around in someone's skull - might as well be gerbils, my interest is in behaviors and how a person expresses such high level concepts as wants, needs, drives.
c) This high-level conceptualization is shown in the language used. Peterson's field is in personality assessment. Traits are ill-defined in the "here is a micrograph of it" sense. The gap between neurobiology and psychology means he finds terms like "extroversion" worthwhile.​
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Regarding 1) Well I did say that a Psychologist would be interested in what people believe to be true and why people believe X and y to be true. It would of course tell us absolutely zero about whether or not the beliefs were in fact true at all. All this shows is the effect certain beliefs may have it shows absolutely nothing about the truth of these beliefs in the slightest because all it discusses is what people think is true.

Regarding 2) I would entirely reject the notion that discussing "truth" has true in utilitarian is in fact a "higher" level category discussion of truth. It is in fact at a lower less abstract level of discussion. Wants, needs and drives are at a low level of abstraction and bluntly have little to do with whether or not some idea etc., is true.

further the black box idea of the human brain is old hat.

Thank you for the information that Petersen's field of expertise is personality assessment. That explains a great deal. There is an enormous amount of Pseudo in that field.
 
angrysoba said:
Yes, which is why Sam Harris came up with the thought experiment of two teams in different possible worlds coming up with a small pox vaccine, in which Team A is successful and Team B accidentally leaks it and kills everyone. Is the relevant knowledge of smallpox that each found "true" in World A, and false in World B even though the knowledge is identical?
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The answer seems obvious. The experimental set is too small.

I could see an argument for just dividing the teams into live or die, to keep it simple, but one needs tests with dozens of teams. If you start with 100 teams, and 80 discover smallpox vaccine and live, while 20 teams do the same and die, discovering smallpox vaccine might be helpful to survival, even though 20 teams wound up dead. They might argue and say it sure wasn't helpful to them (if they can still argue after they're dead), but the point is that overall, it was helpful to the 100 teams.
 
Pup said:
The answer seems obvious. The experimental set is too small.

I could see an argument for just dividing the teams into live or die, to keep it simple, but one needs tests with dozens of teams. If you start with 100 teams, and 80 discover smallpox vaccine and live, while 20 teams do the same and die, discovering smallpox vaccine might be helpful to survival, even though 20 teams wound up dead. They might argue and say it sure wasn't helpful to them (if they can still argue after they're dead), but the point is that overall, it was helpful to the 100 teams.
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No. That doesn't work. In both cases the relevant knowledge had real world effects. In one case the knowledge created a vaccine and in another it created a pandemic. Yet Peterson seems bound to claim one case is true and the other is not. It is silly and Peterson found himself unable to show how his worldview could answer these points.
 
marplots said:
To be fair, Peterson isn't schooled in philosophy. I get the impression he's winging it a bit. His position seems to be the kind of "meta" you find in psychology, where beliefs have the status of truth. This is set against Harris, who does have training in philosophy and who is a physicist to boot - the "hardest" of the hard sciences.
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Sam Harris is not a physicist. He's a neuroscientist, which I would not regard as hard science.
 
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