Jordan Peterson's Dishonest Debate Tactics

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]But now notice how strange it was that earlier Peterson was like and you know it still requires you know people to go back and debate what actually happened and then I bring up like the most surface level the most elementary knowledge of not like well okay yeah you're right did you not know this before I said it do I really want to watch this seems cringe just cuz it's me >> quantify how's that direct death of 100 million people so you know that's a pretty stark fact and if we're going to argue about that well then we're really not >> was I the last person to debate Jordan Peterson while he was still alive I'm just kidding aren't going to get anywhere.

[00:00:33]>> That is Jordan Peterson. And whatever you think of him, the man is good at this. Good at making a conversation move on his terms. Good at projecting the confidence of someone who's already settled the question before the question's actually been examined.

[00:00:45]>> Well, then we're really not going to get anywhere.

[00:00:47]>> The question in this case is whether 20th century political violence indictes the left more than the right.

[00:00:52]>> The leftists have the worst record in terms of sheer numbers of people killed.

[00:00:55]That's the claim that Peterson is making across this exchange with the political streamer Destiny. The communist regimes killed more people than fascist ones and the body count alone tells us something real about the nature of leftwing ideology. Destiny is pushing back not atrocities but rather the accounting. A subtle but crucial distinction.

[00:01:12]>> I mean it depends on how we're quantified. Yet on the surface Peterson looks like the rigorous one. He's got the numbers. He's got the data. He's got that tone. The one that says I am done being patient with your insulence.

[00:01:22]>> Not really. But I want to show you what's actually happening underneath that confidence because there's a certain pattern running through this exchange. One where certainty and uncertainty get deployed in very specific, very convenient ways. When it comes to communist atrocities, stockf facts, how dare you even debate it?

[00:01:38]>> But when it comes to ideological classification of Nazism, well, that's a open question. Needs more research. Just a matter of opinion, really.

[00:01:45]>> So, it's a matter of opinion.

[00:01:46]>> Now, before we dig in, a quick disclaimer because it matters. Peterson is reacting to something very real.

[00:01:52]Left-wing atrocities do get softpedled in corners of mainstream discourse.

[00:01:56]>> What about the Ukrainian fam?

[00:01:57]>> Like the 6 million people Lennon intentionally killed through forced starvation and famine.

[00:02:00]>> I mean, it's pretty ridiculous the frame that is intentional.

[00:02:02]>> 6 million leftwing atrocities do get softpedled in corners of mainstream discourse.

[00:02:06]>> What about the Ukrainian fam?

[00:02:07]>> Like the 6 million people Lennon intentionally killed through forced starvation and famine.

[00:02:10]>> I mean, it's pretty ridiculous the frame that is intentional, right? Like, let's be real, right? There was a famine and we can argue about the mismanagement of famines, but capitalists have mismanaged famines all the time. the hollowore, the great leap forward, the Cambodian genocide.

[00:02:21]>> The reality is that was their normal prison system.

[00:02:22]>> These deserve serious engagement. And they don't always get it. So when Peterson leans hard on the body count, he's not inventing a problem out of nothing. What he's doing is using a real problem as cover to commit the mirror image version of the same offense. And that is the part that we need to shine a light on. Here's where the pattern starts with what sounds on the surface like balance.

[00:02:40]>> I don't believe that the conservatives are necessarily any less by the calling of power than the leftists. That's going to vary from situation to situation.

[00:02:47]Though I would say probably overall in the 20th century the leftists have the worst record in terms of sheer numbers of people killed.

[00:02:52]>> All righty. Peterson starts with what sounds like fairness. Granting the conservatives are no less tempted by the calling of power than the left. That sounds fair. That sounds like someone willing to spread criticism around. But notice what he did with it. That concession is decorative. It exists to make the sentence that followed land harder.

[00:03:08]>> Though I would say probably overall in the 20th century, the leftists have the worst record in terms of sheer numbers of people killed. Now, that is the payload, and it's one of the most well-worn talking points in right-wing media. The left killed more people, and the therefore is always implied, never stated, be more suspicious of the left.

[00:03:23]The left is more dangerous. Don't let them near power.

[00:03:25]>> Okay. The downfall of the Soviet Union is one of the great accomplishments in world history. Again, the Soviet Union is one of the most murderous regimes in global history.

[00:03:32]>> The framing might be defensible on there is a literal scholar debate over whether the holiday was a genocide or not, but that guy debating Kirk was a [ __ ] So, like, first of all, [ __ ] scholars on genocide. I'm sorry. I don't trust any of them anymore. My bad. I just don't.

[00:03:44]But the issue is that fine, you can have a debate on whether or not the holiday was a genocide. If the facts, if that fact pattern, even half of it existed for today in Israel Palestine, people would lose their [ __ ] minds. Okay?

[00:03:57]Somebody in the Israeli cabinet or whatever, Ben Giver, small church says something like, you know, uh, we should starve out the enemy or whatever [ __ ] They've said [ __ ] up [ __ ] And then Netanyahu for one month wants to do a starvation plan. There there is.

[00:04:08]Nobody starves. It doesn't happen, okay?

[00:04:10]But he wants to. And people are saying boom that's people are saying that's it evidence of a genocide. Meanwhile, Ukrainians and I think Kazak Kazakhstanians, Kazakians, I don't know what you call them. Kazakhstanians are literally being force starved.

[00:04:24]The food is being requisitioned from their cities. And if they try to leave their city, there are guards outside that shoot and kill them for trying to escape the city so that they don't have to eat their family members or watch their family members being eaten. There is no world where Israel could do that to Palestinians. People like, well, is it technically a genocide?

[00:04:48]I'm accounting. But it's never presented as an argument. It's always presented as a conclusion. And as Destiny is about to show, the framing is doing an enormous amount of work that Peterson isn't acknowledging.

[00:04:58]>> Though I would say probably overall in the 20th century, the leftists have the worst record in terms of sheer numbers of people killed.

[00:05:03]>> So, I mean, it depends on how we're quantified. Not really. When Destiny says it depends on how we're quantifying that, he's making a completely reasonable point. How you count deaths, how you attribute them to specific regimes, which chain of causation you follow, these are genuine methodological questions that historians wrestle with.

[00:05:17]They're not a dodge. They are the substance of the debate. And yet, what is Peterson's immediate response? Not really. Full confidence, as if Destiny just said something profoundly embarrassing. This move is worth slowing down on by dismissing the challenge so briefly and so sharply. Peterson positions Destiny as the one being obstructionist, the one refusing to accept plain facts when actually Destiny's raising exactly the right issue. Peterson's just bulldozing past it. To put a name to the maneuver, it's called Appeal to the Stone. It's the rhetorical move of declaring an argument wrong without offering any reason for why it's wrong. You just dismiss it confidently and hope the confidence does the work that the reasoning didn't. So, remember Peterson's not really. We're going to come back to it. Now, before we carry on, I want to show you something that I've been using a lot lately, and it saved me a whole load of boring work.

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[00:08:00]>> So, I mean, it depends on how we're quantifying.

[00:08:02]>> Okay, we just quantify Mau. How's that?

[00:08:05]Direct death of 100 million people. So, you know, that's a pretty stark fact.

[00:08:09]And if we're going to argue about that, well, then we're really not going to get anywhere.

[00:08:11]>> You know what? Fine. Let's take Peterson up on the invitation to quantify Mau because this is worse than it sounds.

[00:08:17]The 100 million figure is associated mainly with the black book of communism published in 1997 which has been criticized by historians including get this some of its own contributors of inflating figures and more insidiously inconsistent methodology. But here's the crucial part. The black book's 100 million is the total across every communist regime of the 20th century.

[00:08:37]The Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, North Korea, the entire Eastern block, all of it combined. Peterson is taking that sum of all regimes number and attributing it to Mao alone. You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?

[00:08:50]>> Direct death of 100 million people.

[00:08:51]>> That's not citing a contested figure.

[00:08:53]That's taking the biggest number in the vicinity and pinning it to a single dictator. Now, the most commonly cited estimates for deaths attributable to Ma's great leap forward range from roughly 15 to 55 million depending on how broadly deaths are attributed. Even the commonly cited upperend estimate, Frank Duterta's 45 million, is itself contested. So, Peterson's stark fact is inflated by a factor of at least two and arguably more than that. And there's one more word worth pausing on. He doesn't just say deaths. He says direct deaths.

[00:09:20]>> Direct death of 100 million people.

[00:09:22]>> That is a specific claim because the bulk of the 20th century communist death toll and the overwhelming majority of the great leap forward deaths come from famine whose attribution is precisely the methodological question that Destiny raised just a second ago.

[00:09:34]>> It depends on how we're quantifying. Is famine direct death? Is it policy failure? Policy indifference? Deliberate policy? Historians take those questions seriously and they don't all agree on the answers. Consider the plague of Justinian, right? Somewhere between 25 and 50 million people dead of bubonic plague under the Christian Bazantine Empire in the 6th century. By the accounting that Peterson is using, you'd have to say Christianity directly killed 50 million people, wouldn't you?

[00:09:59]>> Direct death.

[00:10:00]>> But nobody does that, do they? Because the plague was a bacterium, not an ideology. Attribution requires causation. He needs to give an argument.

[00:10:08]Direct is a causal word, not a timeline.

[00:10:11]Now, Ma's case is genuinely more complicated than a pandemic. His policies almost certainly did contribute to the famine. But that's exactly why the distinction between policy failure, policy indifference, and deliberate policy matters. Peterson's direct death flattens the entire question the historians exist to answer. Peterson smuggles direct in in the same breath he's refusing to discuss methodology.

[00:10:30]>> And if we're going to argue about that, well, then we're really not going to get anywhere.

[00:10:33]>> The word is doing enormous work and none of it is visible to anyone who isn't paying close attention. Now, I want to be clear about something. Mao's regime was utterly catastrophic. Even the lower estimates represent one of the worst man-made disasters in recorded history.

[00:10:46]This isn't a defense of Mao. It's a very simple observation. Peterson is citing a number that's wrong, declaring the methodological question dead before it began and using stark fact to shut down the specific issue a historian would tell you matters most. Destiny isn't saying that Mao didn't kill people. He's asking how we're counting. Peterson answered by reaching for the big >> if I had 20 people making [ __ ] videos like this of my [ __ ] then you [ __ ] retards wouldn't be in the seat all and be like well I think that Destiny just should have been more careful so he wouldn't have been misunderstood here and I just think that available number and declaring the debate over >> and if we're going to argue about that well then we're really not going to get anywhere so >> I'm not disagreeing that the holiday happened as well the Soviet Union and the and China were notice what Destiny is doing here because it's easy to miss the rhythm of the back and forth he's not defending the Soviet Union, nor is he minimizing the Holy War. He says explicitly, "Those were horrible." Restating it as Peterson keeps interjecting with more figures, more numbers, as if Destiny were questioning the atrocities themselves rather than the framing around them.

[00:11:46]>> While Destiny is actively conceding the atrocities, saying explicitly and repeatedly that they were horrible, Peterson keeps stacking fresh death to holes on top. 20 million here, 50 million there, until any response short of total capitulation starts to sound like minimization. Destiny threads the needle carefully. He concedes the facts.

[00:12:02]He doesn't concede the frame.

[00:12:06]>> It's a war of >> I'm just saying for World War II, it depends on how much you attribute the war does to Nazi Germany, et but sure.

[00:12:11]Like largely speaking, I don't think that the left beat the right uh because the right wasn't trying. I don't think it's because Hitler's lack of trying led him to kill less people than what who ended up dying during the great leap forward or during the industrialization.

[00:12:20]And here's where destiny lands the first real blow. Peterson's framing has a very convenient asymmetry baked into it.

[00:12:26]Communist regimes, the Soviet Union, Mauish, China, Cambodia, are counted as representing the left. The death tolls are charged to the left's account. But Nazi Germany somehow doesn't make it onto the right-wing ledger. It just doesn't show up in the accounting. It's a devastatingly simple point. Hitler wasn't failing to commit atrocities, was he? He wasn't trying and coming up shore. He industrialized mass murder. 6 million Jewish people in the Holocaust, plus millions of others. Roma, disabled people, political dissident, Soviet prisoners of war. The war itself, tens of millions dead across Europe. This is not a regime that was attempting to kill fewer people and underperformed. So the question has to be asked, why does Mao count against the left, but Hitler's body count doesn't get charged to the right? That gap needs an explanation.

[00:13:07]And the explanation that Peterson is about to reach for is very revealing.

[00:13:10]>> Well, I also think it's an open question still to what degree Hitler's policies were rightwing versus leftwing, and no one's done the analysis properly yet to determine that.

[00:13:17]>> What?

[00:13:18]>> What the [ __ ] >> There it is. having established with >> question still >> the explanation that Peterson is about to reach for is very revealing >> well I also think it's an open question still to what degree Hitler's policies were rightwing versus leftwing and no one's done the analysis properly yet to >> oh determine THAT >> WHAT WHAT THE [ __ ] there it is having established with complete confidence that the left's death toll is a stark fact not worth debating Peterson >> saying it hasn't happened no no no no no that's not ex that's not at all what he's saying what he's saying here is the analysis hasn't been done properly not on the amount of people killed, but on whether or not the um Nazi regime's policies were considered leftwing or rightwing. That's the analysis that he's talking about. That's what he means there.

[00:14:02]>> Now, tells us that whether Hitler was right-wing is an open question, still unresolved, awaiting proper analysis. We simply don't know yet. Yeah. What?

[00:14:12]Just sit with that for a moment.

[00:14:14]>> Communist atrocities, we're assured, are obvious, settled, barely worth questioning. And if we're going to argue about that, well, then we're really not going to get anywhere.

[00:14:21]>> Nazi ideology, however, is uncertain, complex, requiring further research.

[00:14:27]>> It's an open question still to what degree Hitler's policies were rightwing versus leftwing.

[00:14:30]>> How convenient. Certainty flows in one direction towards conclusions that indict the left. Skepticism gets deployed in the other towards conclusions that would implicate the right. This foul has a name, and you've almost certainly experienced it yourself. It's called a double standard, applying one evidentary standard to claims that you like and a stricter one to claims that you don't. It's a close cousin of special bleeding where an exception gets made for your preferred case without adequate justification. But the structure is the same either way.

[00:14:54]Peterson isn't being cautious. He's being cautious selectively in exactly the way that protects his preferred conclusion.

[00:15:01]>> It's an open question still to what degree Hitler's policies were rightwing versus leftwing. And no one's done the analysis properly.

[00:15:06]>> In To's deposition, I'm pretty sure Andrew asked that at one point because because I think I think I posted this in chat earlier. She used that whole uh I can't authenticate or verify these text messages to blah blah blah blah blah. I think she does that 79 times. I control Fed for authenticate and that word showed up 79 times in the deposition. Um I think at some point Andrew asks her he's like is it do you have memory problems? And he's like, "Why is it that your memory problems only seem to pop up?" Because sometimes she could remember specific words from messages.

[00:15:35]And he's like, "Why is it that sometimes the memory problems only seem to pop up when they hurt you, but u never pop up when it's a message that helps you?

[00:15:43]>> You have to determine that because it was a national socialist movement for a reason. And the socialist part of it wasn't accidental.

[00:15:48]>> Oh boy, we've arrived at the actual argument. The National Socialist argument. This is one of the most frequently repeated talking points in right-wing online spaces. Hitler's party was called the National Socialist Party >> and it doesn't hold up on two separate grounds. First, what did the Nazis actually do when they came to power?

[00:16:05]Within weeks, they banned independent trade unions. They arrested the leaders of the Socialist Democratic Party and the Communist Party, Germany's actual left-wing movements. They burned books associated with socialist and Marxist thought, the genuine political left.

[00:16:16]>> Now, technically, he's making a bad argument here because this is what every leftist does when they come into power is they kill all the other leftists. you know, >> because it was a national socialist movement for a reason and the socialist part of it wasn't accidental.

[00:16:27]>> Well, but the so I mean there was no, you know, cooperatively formed businesses that were owned by all of the people for the people and distributed to the people and I don't think redistribution was high on Hitler's list of things.

[00:16:36]>> That's true.

[00:16:36]>> And destiny cuts to the economic reality. He's correct. Socialism in any form serious political theorists use the term involves collective or state ownership of the means of production, redistribution of wealth downward, and protection of workers rights. In fact, Nazi Germany did none of this. Private ownership of industry was preserved and expanded. Jewish owned businesses were seized and handed to other German industrialists, not to workers, nor to the state in any meaningful socialist sense. Strikes were banned. Independent unions were destroyed on day one. The economic reality of the Third Reich simply does not fit a leftwing model.

[00:17:08]That is the consensus of economic historians who have studied the period.

[00:17:11]>> And I don't think redistribution was high on Hitler's list of true. It was a strange mix of polites it redistribution wasn't high on Hitler's list. the economic substance wasn't socialist. But now notice how strange it was that earlier Peterson was like and you know it still requires you know people to go back and debate what actually happened and then I bring up like the most surface level the most elementary knowledge of not like well okay yeah you're right did you not know this before I said it this is so this is so slop acknowledges this and immediately pivots >> it was a strange mix oftian yeah rather than revising the claim he reframes it conceding the specifics while preserving the conclusion. This is what philosophers call an ad hoc rescue.

[00:17:55]>> No, the real philosophers call this the floating table, guys. Even when you kick out all the legs, the table is still floating there. That's what he's doing.

[00:18:02]>> When your original claim is collapsing, rather than update to the correct answer, you introduce a modification designed to save it. In this case, the category was socialist.

[00:18:09]>> It was a national socialist movement for a reason.

[00:18:11]>> That failed. So, the new category has become a strange mix. It was >> vague enough that it can't really be pinned down and doing exactly the same rhetorical work as the original, keeping Nazism off the right-wing ledger.

[00:18:22]Peterson is appealing to complexity. But here's the thing. All political movements have complexity. Every real world system draws on multiple traditions. But complicated and uncatategorizable are not synonyms.

[00:18:33]Historians of fascism, Robert Paxton, Roger Griffin, and Alio Gentile, have spent decades working through exactly this complexity and arriving at clear conclusions. Nazism sits on the far right, not because it's a perfect theatrical fit, but because its core ideology, racial nationalism, anti-Marxism, hierarchial organicism. Is that really a switch destiny? He said that it needed to be studied because it wasn't clear. Doesn't that imply a mix?

[00:18:55]No, you [ __ ] [ __ ] He wanted to claim that there was some open-ended question about whether or not it would be considered a left or far-left government such that you could attribute all of the Nazi Germany deaths to the left. And he says that, by the way, while having engaged with exactly zero part of the historical record or historians that talk about Nazi Germany.

[00:19:15]Zero, none of it.

[00:19:17]>> Anti- liberalism is right-wing in its origins and its logic. So, a strange mix is not an engagement with that scholarship. It's a way of keeping the question permanently suspended.

[00:19:26]>> That's true. That's true. It was a strange mixtarian.

[00:19:29]I don't think it was a strange mix. I think it was a bit to appeal to mid-le and center left, the KPD and the German socialist party by holding themselves national socialist. I think it was very much like an authoritarian ultraist regime that pretty okay, that was a much better answer. I thought I'd give it a time. Okay, good job.

[00:19:41]>> Early fist with people get mad at me because something far right or far left because they have a >> you know and here Destiny is doing the historical work that Peterson refuses national very light historical work.

[00:19:52]Very light historical work.

[00:19:53]>> Socialist wasn't incidental. It was strategic. The Nazis were operating in a political environment where the German working class was being competed for by multiple parties. The social democrats, the communists, the Catholic center. To win that constituency, you needed to sound like you were on their side. So you called yourself a socialist. You talked about the people's community. You used the language of national solidarity and collective belonging. But you stripped out the actual class politics, the internationalism, the workers ownership and replaced them with nationalism, racial hierarchy and the cult of the leader. This is documented by Hitler no less. Indeed, in my campf, he described the need to rest the German worker away from Marxism. Not by adopting Marxist policies, but by offering something more emotionally compelling, national belonging, racial identity, and a clear enemy to blame.

[00:20:39]The name was the hook. The substance was something else entirely. And rather than engaging with any of this, Peterson is about to float a proposal so methodologically confused that it's absurd. People get mad if you call something far right or far left because they have an >> Well, you know, one of the things I would have done if I would have been able to hang on to my professorship at the University of Toronto would have been to extract out a random sample of Nazi policies and strip them of of markers of their origin and present them to a set of people with conservative or leftist beliefs and see who agreed with them more. And that is what is the point? This is like this is stupid on like seven different levels. First of all, historically whether something was considered right or left is um it's like it would be difficult to say that if this particular thing appeared at the time and then now you react to the policy now, does that mean retroactively or retrospectively that it was considered left or right at the time?

[00:21:30]Does that make sense? Like um I'm trying to think if I can think of an example.

[00:21:38]Um I like this is a bad example, but like if we were to say that like somebody's pushing for like a $2 an hour minimum wage. I don't know what the first US minimum wage was. It's like is this a leftwing policy or a a right-wing policy? Well, that would seem to me today to be a very right-wing policy, but if the if there was no minimum wage, I mean, I guess it would be a leftwing policy, right? Or maybe you could argue that um in this country there are people that push for no minimum wage and there are other people that push for a minimum wage. Well, which one is more leftwing or right-wing? Well, if the people pushing for no minimum wage are doing so because they believe in uh strong unions that can engage in sectorwide bargaining or something like that, then I mean technically that can be more leftwing than rightwing. I really depends. The idea of extracting a policy and then extracting a policy from an entire system of governance like x amount of years ago and then removing all context and then ask people leftwing or rightwing. It's just so stupid. I don't know.

[00:22:33]analysis has never been done as far as I know. So, we actually don't know. And we could know if the social scientists would do their bloody job, which they don't generally speaking. That's something we could know. We could probably use the AI systems we have now, the large language models to determine to what degree left and right beliefs intermingled in the rise of national socialism. So, that's all technically possible. So, and it hasn't been done.

[00:22:52]So, it's a matter of opinion.

[00:22:53]>> Okay. So, there's a lot to unpack here.

[00:22:55]Let's take it in order. First, the proposed study. Peterson imagines taking Nazi policies, stripping them of their origin, and presenting them to conservatives and liberals to see who agree with more of them. If conservatives agree more, Nazism was right-wing. If liberals agree more, it was leftwing. This is, to borrow one of his phrases, low resolution thinking.

[00:23:13]>> Low resolution thinking.

[00:23:14]>> The methodology isn't useless. It's just strategically incomplete. There are two things that you could actually test for.

[00:23:19]What the Nazis did and what the Nazis said, and those will give you opposite answers. Test the policies. private industry preserved, trade unions crushed, Jewish owned businesses transferred to other German capitalists, ultra nationalism, racial hierarchy, militarism, traditional gender roles, and the systemic destruction of Germany's actual socialist and communist movements. Strip the origin markers of all of that, hand it to modern conservatives and modern liberals, and the conservatives would recognize more of it. The policies map right. Now, test the rhetoric, the language of solidarity, national socialism. It draws heavily on themes associated with the left. It maps left. But we've already seen why the two diverge. The rhetoric was strategic, borrowed language designed to pull the German working class away from actual socialist parties, while the policies crushed those parties and left capital entirely untouched. Same playbook as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

[00:24:12]The label isn't the thing. So when Peterson vaguely gestures at Nazi policies without distinguishing substance from slogan, he isn't proposing a study. He's exploiting the fact that his audience won't ask which Nazi features. Because the moment you separate what the Nazis did from what they said, the argument collapses. And that is what makes this move so, shall we say, effective. It requires a level of nuance that Peterson is counting on his audience either not to have or to refuse to apply, which in a dark way is genuinely brilliant.

[00:24:40]>> And that analysis has never been done as far as I know. So, we actually don't know.

[00:24:43]>> Now, this part is hilarious. The classification of Nazism has been done exhaustively by generations of serious scholars. Robert Paxton's the anatomy of fascism. Hannah aren the origins of totalitarianism. Richard Evans's three volume history of the Third Reich. This is one of the most thoroughly studied political phenomena in history. The gap that Peterson is describing doesn't exist. And when he says >> and we could know if the social scientists would do their bloody job, which they don't, >> appreciate that this is a signature Peterson move. When the established consensus doesn't align with his preferred conclusion, the academics are failing. When no research supports his view, the research simply hasn't been done yet. The goalposts keep moving further out. It's the rhetorical hallmark of an unfalsifiable position.

[00:25:23]No finding he dislikes will ever count because the standard is infinite. And notice the grievance attached to it.

[00:25:29]>> You know, one of the things I would have done if I would have been able to hang on to my professorship at the University of Toronto.

[00:25:34]>> He's simultaneously leveraging academic authority. I'm the professor. I could have done this. and dismantling the entire field for not agreeing with him.

[00:25:41]The academy is authorative when he speaks for it, derelct when it contradicts him. This is tennis without the net. Then there's the large language models line.

[00:25:49]>> We could probably use the AI systems we have now, the large language models to determine to what degree left and right beliefs intermingled in the rise of national socialism.

[00:25:56]>> Only how uh how did he miss this? Large language models are going to be trained on the same sociological stuff or >> trained on the historical consensus. If you actually asked one, it will tell you uniformally without hedging the Nazism is far right. Well, unless you use Grock, I guess.

[00:26:13]>> Elon Musk's AI chatbot, Grock, is now pushing anti-semitic tropes.

[00:26:16]>> Grock sent a hostile message to a user with a common Jewish last name. The bot went on to praise Hitler and referred to itself as Mecca Hitler because that is what the corpus of serious fascism scholarship says.

[00:26:27]Peterson is invoking the authority of a system whose output would directly contradict him. So, either he doesn't understand how large language models work or he's hoping that we don't. And then the line that pulls the entire exchange into focus.

[00:26:38]>> So it's a matter of opinion.

[00:26:40]>> No, Bucko, it isn't.

[00:26:41]>> Don't bring your damn problems to me, Bucko.

[00:26:43]>> Earlier, Destiny raised the methodological question of how we quantify political deaths. Do you remember Peterson's response? Not really. Full stop. Stark fact. Move on.

[00:26:52]>> Well, that's a pretty stark fact. And if we're going to argue about that, well, then we're really not going to get anywhere.

[00:26:56]>> Now, when the question turns to whether Nazism was right-wing, and the honest answer would put enormous atrocities on the right-wing ledger, suddenly we're in uncertain territory. Suddenly the research hasn't been done. Suddenly it's just a matter of opinion.

[00:27:07]>> And it hasn't been done. So it's a matter of opinion.

[00:27:09]>> As I said at the start, certainty flows in one direction only towards conclusions that indict the left.

[00:27:14]Skepticism is reserved for conclusions that would implicate the right. That's not a minor rhetorical stumble. It's the architecture off the argument. A decorative concession up front.

[00:27:23]>> I don't believe that the conservatives are necessarily any less tempted by the by the calling of power than the leftists.

[00:27:28]>> A stark fact dismissal when methodology threatens the point. a numerical slight of hand to inflate the toll, >> direct death of 100 million people, >> an ad hoc rescue when the category fails.

[00:27:37]>> It was a strange mix of policies and a retreat to unfalsifiability when all else runs out.

[00:27:43]>> Well, I also think it's an open question still to what degree Hitler's policies were right-wing versus leftwing and no one's done the analysis properly yet to determine that >> it's motivated reasoning and it works because it sounds careful. The voice is measured. The references are academic.

[00:27:55]The grievances are sincere. Millions of people hear that register and assume the content must match it. Destiny kept pulling him back to the actual question.

[00:28:02]Peterson kept slipping it. But the reason this exchange matters isn't Peterson. It's the test that it leaves behind for the next confident voice and the one after that. Motivated reasoning doesn't announce itself. It doesn't come holding a red flag. It comes wearing certainty citations and the tone of someone who's already done the hard thinking for you.

[00:28:19]>> Just quantify Mao >> Taylor.

[00:28:22]>> How's that direct death of 100 million people >> under Mao? Millions of people died. I mean, there's no comparison between Mao and a trans activist, is there?

[00:28:31]>> Why not?

[00:28:31]>> So, here's the move. When a speaker is certain about one conclusion and suddenly uncertain about its mirror image, when the bar of evidence shifts the moment the answer might inconvenience them, that is the tell, not the topic, not the politics, the direction of the skepticism. Apply it to Peterson on Nazism. Apply it to anyone on anything. And apply it, and this is the harder one, to yourself the next time you find a study easy to accept and a contradicting one hard. Because the test doesn't care which side you're on.

[00:28:56]It just tells you where the work isn't being done.

[00:28:58]>> And it hasn't been done, so it's a matter of opinion.

[00:29:00]>> Anyhow, as always, thank you kindly for the view. And an extra special thank you to everyone who supports the channel, including today's sponsor, Plaude.

[00:29:06]>> What kind of a sponsor plug was that? We need more. He's not going to make any money. Where are my haters at? Are they even trying?

[00:29:12]>> They've given up. They know you're too great, sir.

[00:29:16]>> Oh, true. They're in your chat.

[00:29:18]>> Right here, [ __ ] True.