Jordan Peterson is not an Oracle
Canadian professor of psychology Jordan B. Peterson offers his views on every possible topic, but should we listen?
This article began as I was writing about highly intelligent and successful figures in academia who abuse their well-earned recognition in one area to peddle pseudo-science and nonsense in other areas. I began by writing about William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor, who after his successful scientific career spent his life peddling eugenics and pseudo-scientific racist theories without having any training in human evolution, biology, neuroscience or similar. However, few people today know Shockley, so I began writing about a very famous contemporary: Canadian professor of psychology Jordan B. Peterson who gained a massive following in part due to his very successful book 12 Rules for Life combined with his criticism of political correctness and identity politics, which turned him into an icon on the political right.
The fame of Jordan B. Peterson has put him in a position to make highly public statements and remarks about almost everything in society. Peterson excels as saying absolute rubbish about a long list of topics, but he does so in such an elegant speech filled with intellectual sounding words and phrases that it sounds like he said something profound and insightful anyway. Somehow because Peterson is a professor of psychology people falsely assume he is credible on as wide range of topics as biology, artificial intelligence and energy policy.
Peterson's Misconceptions About Artificial Intelligence
Lately, Jordan Peterson was interviewed by Lord Conrad Black at the Canadian Democracy fund, where he talked at some length about ChatGPT, a chatbot created by OpenAI. Here Jordan Peterson grossly mischaracterized ChatGPT as more intelligent than the average person, or certainly within the next one or two years. That is completely hyperbole. ChatCPT is not general intelligence and was never designed to be that. The creators of ChatGPT are very clear on that: It is a specialized AI made specifically for generating text based on textual input.
In simplistic terms, it has been shown numerous questions with corresponding answers. Text generation is based on probabilities of a word following another. It basically has calculated probabilities between a huge number of words and sentences. Based on probability, it can basically extrapolate what the text should be. It isn't actual thinking, but thanks to being trained on an enormous amount of text, it can conjure an illusion of doing that.
Peterson goes on to make countless inaccurate statements, such as saying it derives its analysis from human speech. No, ChatGPT is working with text, not speech. It is not speech recognition software nor speech synthesis software.
Further, he makes the claim that ChatGPT has not yet been trained on real-world data and everything would be even more mind-blowing once that happens. Completely untrue. You can even ask ChatGPT if it has been trained on real-world data and it will answer the following:
Yes, I have been trained on a diverse dataset of real-world text, including web pages, books, and other forms of text that were available on the internet. The training data was carefully curated to ensure that it represents a diverse range of perspectives, cultures, and styles. The goal of this training was to help me develop the ability to generate human-like text that can answer a wide variety of questions. However, it is important to note that this training data has a knowledge cut-off at 2021, and may not reflect more recent developments or changes in the world
I covered this particular topic at some length, as Artificial Intelligence is one of the areas I studied as a computer scientist and would know better than Jordan Peterson. Other experts have commented on his inaccuracies in other fields. Biologists, for instance, have criticized one of Petersons favorite analogies of power hierarchies between lobsters and humans.
Peterson's Misconceptions About Biology and Evolution
Peterson talks about how similar lobsters and humans are because you can use anti-depressants on humans and lobsters to regulate neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin, which affect the mood in humans. The only problem is that these neurotransmitters have entirely different functions in lobsters compared to humans.
When nature needs a particular function in a species, it just picks neurotransmitters and hormones from a shelf. As far as nature is concerned, they are just generic messenger doodads which can use for whatever it wants. Of course, when two species are strongly related there is a good chance neurotransmitters and hormones serve similar function. But humans and lobsters have very little in common. To quote Leonor Gonçalves, Research Associate in Neuroscience at UCL:
Our last common ancestor with the lobster was an animal that existed 350m years ago and it was the first animal that developed an intestine. This is the main organ we have in common – not serotonin and definitely not the nervous system.
While sending neurotransmitters around in a lobster does things, it is hard to talk about a lobster as a species with feelings and emotional state like a human:
Arthropods don’t have an amygdala (lobsters don’t even have a brain, just an aglomerate of nerve endings called ganglia)
Peterson's Misconceptions About Renewable Energy and Climate Change
Jordan Peterson never seems to tire about making sweeping claims and conclusions about things he only has a superficial understanding of. At Cambridge Union event in 2018 he elevated himself to an expert on climate change and energy policy.
In the video, Dr. Peterson states that even if the “more radical claims” about climate change are true, “we have no idea what to do about it”.
“What’s the solution? What are we going to do? Switch to wind and solar? Well, good luck with that. Try it. See what happens. We can’t store the power. Germany tried it, they produced more carbon dioxide than they did when they started because they had to turn on their coal-fired plants again. That wasn’t a very good plan,” he says.
Except Peterson's claim is patently false. We can look at CO2 emissions for Germany from Our world in Data. It shows a 40 percent reduction in the timespan from 1980 to 2020.
One has to keep in mind that this is also a period of both population growth and GDP growth. Hence, there are more Germans each consuming more in 2020 than in 1980. Yet, their total CO2 emissions are lower. Jordan B. Peterson also fails to mention that the primary reason Germany has been criticized in energy policy is because they shut down nuclear power plants in the very same time period. That made the CO2 reductions much less than they could have been. Renewable energy not only had to be brought online to replace fossil fuels, but also to replace huge amounts of nuclear power with zero CO2 emissions.
In this context, it is actually quite remarkable that Germany managed to cut CO2 emissions. They did it while imposing a major handicap on themselves. And several countries have managed to cut emissions at similar level or more by adopting renewable energy and switching from coal to gas.
We can look at Denmark, which didn't shut down nuclear power plants because they didn't have any. In this way, they show better what is possible. You can see a dramatic fall in fossil fuel usage and massive growth in usage of wind power.
In other words, Peterson's claim that nobody has figured out how to reduce CO2 emissions is just absurd.
Further, he claims that climate models over a 50 year timespan have such large error bars that you cannot measure the consequences of your actions. We can actually test that claim by Jordan Peterson by inputting all emission data for the last 50 years into the climate models that got made 50 years ago. Allow me to quote the journal Science:
Most of the models accurately predicted recent global surface temperatures, which have risen approximately 0.9°C since 1970. For 10 forecasts, there was no statistically significant difference between their output and historic observations, the team reports today in Geophysical Research Letters.
In other words, the relatively primitive climate models we had in the 1970s gave accurate predictions about climate today. Climate deniers will claim that the models gave the wrong predictions, but that claim rests on a deeply flawed understanding of what a climate model is.
A climate model predicts what temperatures and climate we will get given specific inputs such as the orbit of the Earth, the amount of forest and CO2 emissions. Climate scientists, however, don't have crystal balls: They cannot predict exactly how many humans will cut CO2 emissions or burn down forests. All they can do is make some educated guesses. To counter for that, they present various scenarios and show what happens in each of these scenarios. That allows you as the reader to build some intuition about how serious the developments are and what needs to be done.
Just like the 1970s, we have climate models today which show major temperature increases. Those models show results for different scenarios; meaning different choices made by humans. No climate scientist can tell like a fortune-teller exactly what humans will do. Thus, the only way to verify whether a model gave accurate predictions or not is to actually go back and adjust the inputs to what was actually observed in terms of humans emissions. But even if we get that right, predictions can get thrown off. There could be sudden massive volcanic eruptions, which would cause a cooling of the earth. However, it would be utterly reckless to base climate policy on a hope that volcanoes will have massive eruptions.
What Economists Get Wrong About Climate Change
Jordan B. Peterson then goes onto to heap praise on the climate work of Bjørn Lomborg, who has no credentials within climate science or economics. Yet, he writes about both and publishes without any peer-review. He holds a PhD in political science. So, here we have somebody much like Peterson who come with bombastic claims within fields they don't actually have expertise within. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy organization, have heavily criticized his work.
People like Lomborg tries to compare the cost of mitigating climate change against the cost imposed on society by climate change. But to quote Undark magazine:
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