By David Futrelle
In addition to being terrible, Canadian fussbudget paleothinker Jordan Peterson is just plain fucking weird, especially when it comes to his diet. You’ve probably heard about his all-meat diet ( The Atlantic goes into great detail about it here).
But have you heard what happens when he drinks apple cider? In the video below, he tells Joe Rogan that when he drank apple cider after going on his all-meat diet it “produced an overwhelming sense of impending doom” and kept him awake for 25 days.
As in, literally no sleep for a month. Which is literally impossible. While one young Frenchman with a rare disorder managed to survive on only a few minutes of sleep a night for several months, no one has ever gone completely without sleep for 25 days in the history of our species; that’s more than twice the world record. Which you’d think that Peterson, as a professor of psychology, would know.
Anyway, the video (below) is only a minute and a half, and it will CHANGE YOUR LIFE.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfoKwQ2Cw6A
@Valya
Yeah, the thread goes into why that’s bad, especially when trying to use it as a model for medical treatment, but even just for advancing science. If we pretend this wide range of differences that affects more than 1 out of every 50 people is all one category, we’re closing a lot of doors.
Kupo,
I love how that thread arose because Chuck Tingle said there were infinite sexes across infinite timelines and Laci Green came sweeping in with TERF dogwhistles to lecture about how that was wrong.
What a bizarre hill to die on.
TERF:s know about intersex people, they usually say the intersex don’t really prove anything since they’re a small minority. Sex is a binary with a few abnormal exeptions to it, that’s what they say. Just like “humans are a two-legged species” isn’t disproven by the fact that some people have one or no legs.
Ugh I’m in a discussion with academic TERF:s right now on Facebook. It’s so hard, because… You know how there are those seemingly polite and rational people arguing about immigration, different cultures etc, in a way that support racism. I think the vast majority of people I know in philosophy see such crap for what it is. But there’s an exact analogy among transphobes, people who use feminist premises and argue in a very polite and reasonable-sounding way that of course we shouldn’t be mean to trans women and they even deserve compassion because they often have it rough, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that they’re actually men who remake their bodies because they’re unhappy about the male gender role, not actual women, and yada yada yada, and you’re free to disagree of course but let’s have a rational discussion about this without resorting to name-calling like using the dreaded “TERF”. And I see so many otherwise smart people in my profession who completely fall for this crap.
So I feel like I have a duty to take these discussions, and also sound as calm and reasonable to an outsider looking in as the TERFs I argue aganist because otherwise I’m just gonna fucking lose the discussion and fail to convince anyone! We can lament the fact that that’s the way it works, but that’s still the way it works, and it’s important that I do manage to convince colleagues reading the discussion on this one!
But at the same time, I’m literally sick to my stomach from this discussion because it’s my friends on the line! It’s not just some academic disagreement!
Ugh.
@wwth
Yeah, I saw that. Even Chuck was getting frustrated with it and the man beams rainbows of positivity.
It is ironic – I think I will struggle to sleep tonight because I made myself feel too afraid reading about Fatal Familial Insomnia…?
@Dvärghundspossen
Gee, that sounds so fun /s. I’d probably just start swearing at everything.
Also, way off topic, but I swear the spironolactone pills they gave me smell like mint. Seriously, it’s like opening an altoids tin. Is it just me, or what?
“So Jordy, how’s the new diet?” “Oh, it’s great, it’s great. Just fantastic, yeah. It does have the side effect of sometimes causing me to feel unbearable fear for a month. Just a ceaseless internal scream that cannot be silenced, a cold, terrifying mental siren that chases away the sweet release of sleep and leaves only waking nightmares. But yeah, other than that, I gotta say I’d recommend it to anyone.”
OK so about the month without sleep, I watched that clip and some of Peterson’s other stuff a while back and I think I have a pretty good idea of how his mind works. Heavily projecting some of my own least favourite character traits here of course, but to me this seems like a case of a bullshitter knowing a bullshitter when they see one.
At its most innocent (and least stupid), what he said about the apple cider could just have been similar to an involuntary thing I sometimes do when I’m having a stressful interaction and kind of zone out and just leave a hollow shell there to perform “normal human” to its best ability. I know what I’m going to say before I say it, but I don’t have the spoons to think of anything else to say quickly enough and disrupting the seeming normality and flow of the conversation absolutely isn’t an option, so I have to go with what my brain automatically generates as it is. In this mode I very, very often say things that aren’t true and I don’t believe myself and don’t expect others to believe, but that MEAN something that is true. In this case, he just wants to (and fails to normally) describe how strongly he feels about the wrongness of the apple cider, putting it in terms he thinks will convey the feeling. A part of this is not being able to stop yourself from automatically doubling down and often outright claiming you do mean it literally when challenged. I absolutely hate when I do this, it makes me feel like an idiot, and it very justifiably makes people think I’m weird. Thankfully I’m not a revered intellectual and public speaker presenting as a scientist and speaking with authority on consequential issues.
Peterson explicitly believes that stories have meaning that is true without being literal, in a way that goes much further than literary studies, so saying dumb shit like this is just perfectly consistent with his belief system. He seems to think that if something feels true or profound, then there’s truth in it, but only if it feels that way to him. That there is an objective reality and you can gain access to it through your mind and stories and symbols. He has that access. He knows which stories are ancient and true (everything conservative that props up hierarchies) and which are new, artificial and made up (anything that gives a voice to people who don’t deserve it based on their position in the ancient hierarchy). When others’ feelings and experiences don’t match his they obviously are doing it wrong. Like so many intellectual dudes, he’s a solipsist.
A lot of people are expressing surprise that he’s a professor with a seemingly legit PhD and a practicing clinical psychologist. Sadly it isn’t surprising at all. We give authority, respect and power to really incompetent and shitty people all the time.
The side effects of drinking apple cider were even worse than talking to Sam Harris?! *shudder*
@wwth
…so a speculative thought is “wrong”?
What a peculiar woman Laci Green is. Surely the whole point of imagination is that you can imagine ANYTHING. But I guess to TERFs even using your brain to imagine a possibility is verboten.
Anyway, aren’t physicists saying there are infinite realities containing every possible variation of everyone’s life now? I think that’s a thing. And if there are infinite possible realities then Chuck Tingle is, actually, definitively right and there will be infinite genders, a bit like Rick and Morty’s alternate pizza/people/phone/chairs realities:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=_pPzUo30Hq4
which, in an infinite universe, possibly actually also exist.
Also, I’m quite amused that Jordan Peterson made this biological blunder. Telling this obvious a lie destroys his credibility quite effectively. Well done, Jordie. A few more like that and we can hopefully start to consign you to history where you belong.
@kupo
Reminds me of this old Facebook post:
I too feel an “overwhelming sense of impending doom”, because I read the news.
@A. Noyd, @Viscaria: Guess who was a famous victim of night terrors? None other than everyone’s favourite (sic) racist horror writer, H.P. Lovecraft! Who knew that the Necronomicon was in fact a diet book subtitled Scream Yourself Thin? ?
@kupo:
Laci Green tried to “well, actually” Chuck Tingle?? Truly, TERFs and MRAs are made for one another– indeed, if it didn’t constitute animal cruelty I’d have one of each trussed in a sack and left on the mesa for the coyotes and gila monsters.
@kupo
Kinda wish I’d had something this simple and succint a few years ago when I was working with a company involved in clinical trial work. Clinical trial specs are replete with requirements and restrictions involving ‘males’ and ‘females’, and I tried to politely point out that trying to ask a simple question to applicants about what sex they were could easily run in to all sorts of problems as soon as they met someone who didn’t fit neatly into the standard categories. It was mostly met with confusion and a small amount of embarassment, and eventually brushed off as it was considered too hard to handle properly and wasn’t a common enough occurrence to worry about.
You mean Jordan Peterson made a ridiculous claim? Well, I’m surprised!
No doubt somebody will be by shortly to once again explain that it’s wrong to take his claims literally, that this literalism is a symptom of our inability to navigate the depths of Peterson’s profound insights into the human condition, and so forth.
Isn’t Laci Green dating a literal Nazi? You know what they say, birds of a feather…
@Cat Mara,
She literally called him “my dude” and told him to “chill out.” 😀
@kupo, wwth, I’d seen the original ScienceVet thread (which is excellent) but I didn’t know the Chuck Tingle/Laci Green origin. I just spent half an hour reading back over that, so thank you!
@Valentin
That article about FFI is indeed very sad, but hopeful, too – possibilities of a treatment in the future! Also, I wouldn’t worry too much about it, unless you know of family members who’ve had the condition.
I’m assuming that Lobsterman actually was manic, or on drugs, or something to that effect. Since they are the most likely things to cause someone to go a month with little sleep and come out fine. (Yes he could be lying, but I won’t assume someone is lying until there is overwhelming proof of it.)
I get all kinda of weird neurological symptoms to foods with high sulfites (including migraines and panic attacks). I’m not aware of sulfites ever having kicked off a manic/mixed episode, but I wouldn’t be too surprised to find out that they could.
I’m assuming that Lobsterman actually was manic, or on drugs, or something to that effect. Since they are the most likely things to cause someone to go a month with little sleep and come out fine. (Yes he could be lying, but I won’t assume someone is lying until there is overwhelming proof of it.)
I get all kinda of weird neurological symptoms to foods with high sulfites (including migraines and panic attacks). I’m not aware of sulfites ever having kicked off a manic/mixed episode, but I wouldn’t be too surprised to find out that they could.
Not to give Lobsterdude any sort of cover at all, but I had an 8-month period of my life when I felt a constant – and constantly growing – sense of impending doom. It fucked my life up completely, and I did some really stupid and self-destructive things because of it. It’s a really bad feeling.
I never did figure out the source of it (although it sure as hell wasn’t cider), and it went away eventually, which left me in the very weird position of looking back on my actions and simultaneously wondering what the hell I was thinking and knowing exactly what I was thinking but no longer feeling the emotions that drove that thinking and made my stupid choices seem like the least worst ones available.
That said – what with the whole “25 days without sleep” thing – I’m pretty sure JP is full of shit, both figuratively and literally.
Cat Mara says:
At least he had the sense not to believe in his own fictions.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Gaebolga says:
It’s actually pretty common to go through things like that, especially if you have depression or anxiety, so I don’t doubt that part of it at all. In fact, because it’s so common, it irks me that Peterson seems to think his experience was extra special.
Some Trump fans here wanted to make a point about Sadiq Khan giving a permit for that Trump baby balloon to be flown in London. So they crowd funded a Khan balloon and applied for permission to fly it, with “Lets see what he says about free speech now”.
But he granted the permit.
@Mish of the Catlady Ascendancy
OMG
Yeah, Peterson is coy about it now, since The Rationals make up so much of his audience, but he is absolutely religious. (Hilariously, the first thing I found looking for what he’s said on the subject was a lobsterian explaining that the fact that Peterson has called himself a Christian and “deeply religious” doesn’t mean that he’s a deeply religious Christian).
He’s got some unusual mystical beliefs on top of that too, mostly based on his extremely literal belief in the Jungian Collective Unconscious. He’s claimed that his wife has prophetic dreams, and that various spiral patterns in ancient cultures are literal representations of DNA, somehow pulled out of the collective unconscious by people who could not possibly know what a molecular structure even is.