Jordan Peterson, winning isn't everything.

I am assuming that readers of this have seen the Jordan Peterson - Cathy Newman interview which has catapulted Mr. Peterson to fame (perfect book launch!). It is compelling viewing, and has been viewed a bit under six million times in the last week. The Australian news paper has also had a series of articles about Peterson and responses to the interview. If you have not seen the interview please take a look:

There is no debate that Ms. Newman got owned, there has been a lot of analysis of the interview, but the main point is that Ms. Newman was unprepared for what she was getting into, a debate with a empirical clinical psychologist.

As a result of this I started to watch some of Mr. Peterson's videos on YouTube, and discovered that all of his lectures are available, and he is a fantastic thinker, and very interesting chap. I particularly enjoyed his viewpoint on atheism)

However the point I wanted to try to capture in this article is that I did think Mr. Peterson made two errors (and possibly only two) and that they are worth noting as they speak to errors that can be made by those people who believe they are winning any argument.

Firstly, beginning at 21:44 Ms. Newman is forced to carefully reconsider her beliefs about free speech, it is the most amazing moment of the interview, Mr. Peterson has made his argument so compellingly, that she is forced to reconsider her beliefs and re-examine her intellectual rigour live!

Mr. Peterson makes his first and simplest mistake then; he says "Ha! gotcha!" acknowledging that Ms. Newman has been playing gotcha politics all interview and yet he has created the moment.

Ms. Newman is doing a very brave thing here, she is genuinely thinking, and about to come up with a reasonable point, and doing it all on live TV (something Peterson has done all interview), and at that point the best thing to do is to wait for your opponent to develop their argument, not to embarrass them. Mr. Peterson has held the upper hand in the interview the entire time, and that was the only point where I felt he lost it.

Finally, when Ms. Newman does develop her augment further, Mr. Peterson says something very interesting, namely that he would address his students by transgender pronouns if asked personally to do so. This is seemingly at odds to his previous position established on air that he would refuse to do so (at 0:48):

Mr. Peterson denies changing his position, and yet it seems to me that he has made a change here, and possibly just to ensure that Ms. Newman has nowhere to run in the interview.

So while I have developed a great interest in Mr. Peterson's work, my lessons from the interview come mainly from what I see as his mistakes...