LQG, LSD* and depth psychology

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I'm just about glad I read this but the experience was like munching slices of supermarket white bread. The story of Loop Quantum Gravity is told chronologically through the biographies of Lee Smolin and Carlo Rovelli. It's the journey of those who started with General Relativity and tried to quantise spacetime. The nodes and links of LQG are not spacetime quanta, they're precursor objects out of which spacetime, along with its metric field, should emerge in the low-energy limit.

This is the fabrication of reality at the Planck scale, way down from observational data. The models are not without interest (especially the cosmological models) and the approach seems to have its compelling moments .. but .. but .. all the nasty things said about the theological or purely mathematical nature of String Theory also apply here, do they not?

If you're short of cash you could skip the book and read the Wikipedia article, though you are unlikely to understand it without a total familiarity with GR and QFT (not me!). The author had somehow to handwave his way over this cathedral of densely-connected abstractions: the "Quantum Space" reading experience is consequently pretty anaemic.

I'm guessing that Baggott wrote this book because, with the continuing decline in the prospects for String Theory, he's become convinced that there's something to Loop Quantum Gravity and wants to raise its profile for a generation of new physicists wondering what on earth they should be devoting their lives to.

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A few posts ago I said:

"I'm expecting this book to be a bunch of left-Keynesians arguing that an incoming Labour government should put more demand into the economy through deficit spending and increased transfer payments in order to stimulate investment and productivity."

I think I oversold it. This is a bunch of mediocre essays with no new ideas and many mistakes which reminded me of the kind of stuff sixth formers write. It insults the intelligence and bores the unfortunate reader. Give it a miss and read Steve Keen instead.

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Adrian pushed his copy in front of me. As I worked my way through I grew more impressed. It's an easy, folksy read but far from superficial. It puzzled me for a while - how should we think about this book? - and in the end I place it mostly in the Jungian tradition of optimal personal development.

Peterson has read deeply across the disciplines and has melded evolutionary theory, neuroscience and depth psychology into something coherent and new. That is a real achievement.

His blind spot is sociology - he doesn't see how the SJW orthodoxy he confronts is in reality the ideology of the new petty bourgeoisie, conjured into being with the neoliberal transition of the 1970s. He should read Poulantzas.

Still, this omission does not invalidate anything he says since even being conscious of the social dynamics does not suggest any different conclusions.The problem is here regardless.

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"Freud was a genius," Peterson remarks, “you can tell because people still hate him.”

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* Left Social-Democracy.

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.