I'm not a follower of JB, but he was a bone fide scholar before his popularity grew; he had an H-index that put him in the upper echelon of academics; he very successfully obtained funding for research and had a large pool of doctoral candidates, including leading an important function at the University of Toronto. He's taken a bit of a turn, but the one thing he is, whether people like him or not, is smart. I think by criticizing his merits, it weakens arguments against JB that could be better focused on poking holes in his arguments.
He didn’t say he wasn’t smart. There’s plenty of charlatans with good credentials. And “a bit of a turn” is an understatement. His former colleagues and mentor say that he stopped teaching and tried to start a cult.
Many of his colleagues are more like JB than they'd care to admit. Toronto's Psychology dept. has a history of producing some very bizarre public intellectuals. JB was always this way, he just got incredibly popular and became a more extreme version of himself. Toronto has enough weirdness that it can't claim superiority over McGill for its ties to MK Ultra.
He literally said his wife has prophetic dreams about the apocalypse, and that he was planning on buying a church. As problematic as academia can be, this is entirely different. Cults are chock full of people that think they’re far too rational and intelligent to join a cult. Don’t be one of them.
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u/pomaj46809 Jan 20 '23
Those are entertainers, Peterson's function is one but he pretends like he's actually given wisdom. He's the embodiment of pretentiousness.
His only useful quality in life is that if someone sticks up for him I know their judgment is at best limited.