I'm late to the Jordan Peterson party

He's good, isn't he? Jordan Peterson.

Time pressure meant I only watched the first half of this but I was impressed. Interrogated by Channel 4's Cathy Newman, in full SJW-mode, Peterson stays calm and reframes her points with knowledge, precision and intelligence. It's a model of how to educate the public - and one so seldom seen.

Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic transcribes the most egregious dialogue sections.

Ross Reinhold, in his latest post, analyses the interview around the pivot of Cathy Newman's psychological type, which he takes to be ESTJ. It's an insightful discussion, particularly where Reinhold observes that Newman at no point takes Peterson's arguments on board.

"Journalist Newman entered the Interview with Peterson with a set of strongly held beliefs about various general social inequities and some specific beliefs about Peterson’s character and motivations. Throughout the interview these beliefs were challenged due to how Peterson handled the various charges and inferences she was making.

He was calm, rationale and informative as well as intellectually informed. Newman prior to interview and during the interview found herself seriously twisting and distorting what Peterson had said or done in the past and what he was saying to her in the moment of the interview. ...

As an ESTJ she extraverts her Thinking and Intuition; this is her natural language. These two qualities (command of logic – from Thinking and ability to form generalizations – from Intuition) make her an effective debate warrior for her causes. Yet we saw logical discourse with Peterson repeatedly created dissonance with her beliefs requiring her to regularly re-program what she heard from Peterson, i.e. “So you are [really] saying . . . .” to make his statements more consistent with her belief structure. One of the interesting things about the Feeling mental process is when Feeling is involved in cementing conclusions about things and people, Logic doesn’t have much of a chance of changing the conclusion. And for a dominant Thinking person like Cathy Newman, what contrary logic does to conclusions cemented by Feeling is create Cognitive Dissonance.

But I believe Feeling based conclusions only change over time, with experience or new experience. So Cathy Newman in the eyes of most people decisively lost the battle with Jordan Peterson. But it is unlikely that one battle will cost the War. I doubt that Ms. Newman has altered her belief structure. If she got to know and converse with people like Jordan Peterson on a more regular basis, her Feeling conclusions may re-shape. But if she surrounds herself with true-believers whose foundations support her own, change is unlikely. Her logical nature will be used to reverse engineer the facts to support her public conclusions."

The ideologues of the social-liberal world order are ENFJs. This type focuses on compassionate idealism, in a manner which often trumps a clear-sighted evaluation of reality. One could say they are rather prone to moralistic wishful thinking - and rather hostile to those more skeptical, or perhaps realistic.

As an interrogator-administrator rather than ideologue, Newman is ST rather than NF. But interestingly enough, it appears that Jordan Peterson is himself an ENFJ. A social justice warrior for calling it correctly.