I don't see how that's fundamentally different than what James did in the essay. He paints the audience as a monolith & interprets their motivations, then asserts that they're being duped rather than expressing a philosophical difference. So you should understand the annoyance.
In the same way, religious people can write about this without first having to explain why God is real. We know that people have different views on this - theist/atheist, pragmatist/empiricist. They can write all sorts of things from those perspectives.
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I agree with you. But if you write about social/psychological phenomena in a way that characterizes a broad swath of people (particularly in the latter case, where you're interpreting their internal proceses as well as external characteristics) as rubes, you should expect them
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Neither 'rubes' nor 'dupes' appears in that piece. This is clearly how you feel about someone giving a psychological explanation for the attraction to Peterson's rhetoric. It is v similar to how religious people feel when people look at the psychological reasons for their belief
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Because they think it is really true and feel wounded that people who think it isn't want to look at why they are drawn to these ideas. It's obvious to them. It's because it's true! So they keep on & on insisting people debate them on the rightness of their beliefs.
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Oh for chrissakes, he literally uses the phrase "snake oil". I don't agree with all of Peterson's ideas; attempting to nudge me into the "jilted believer" box is exactly the sort of condescension I'm talking about. People are annoyed because they've been mischaracterized. 1/
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Right. Is that not OK? Must we pretend this kind of thing has worth? Obviously people will be annoyed if they think it does. Same with anything some people think true & others don't. And of course, people feel annoyed if they think they're right & others don't.
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It seems like more than this tho. You're not just pointing out that people get annoyed when other people don't believe the same thing as them? Its like you think James shouldn't have written from an angle of not sharing those views.
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I think he should have acknowledged that he was writing from one side of the empiricist/pragmatist divide instead of feigning objectivity.
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Another different claim. First he wrong for thinking Peterson was wrong. Now he is wrong for not acknowledging he thinks Peterson is wrong. This is really silly. You are all over the place and keep changing what the problem is. You just want to have a problem for some reason.
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