Psychologists From Canada

"Our African ancestors were the first to engage in breathing. By that logic, I think by breathing today, we are engaging in cultural appropriation of the first Homo sapiens. And so the only way I will ask you to stop being racist is to suffocate - to stop breathing."

"... as soon as I got backpropagation working, I realized--because of what we'd been doing with Boltzmann machines--that you could use autoencoders to do unsupervised learning. You just get the output layer to reproduce the input layer, and then you don't need a separate teaching signal. Then the hidden units are representing some code for the input."

"I first of all explained to him why it wouldn't work, based on an argument in Rosenblatt's book, which showed that essentially it was an algorithm that couldn't break symmetry... The next argument I gave him was that it would get stuck in local minima... We programmed a backpropagation net, and we tried to get this fast relearning. It didn't give fast relearning, so I made one of these crazy inferences that people make--which was, that backpropagation is not very interesting... [One year of trying and failing to scale up Boltzmann machines later] "Well, maybe, why don't I just program up that old idea of Rumelhart's, and see how well that works on some of the problems we've been trying?"... We had all the arguments: It's assuming that neurons can send real numbers to each other; of course they can only send bits to each other ; you have to have stochastic binary neurons; these real-valued neurons are totally unrealistic. It's ridiculous." So they just refused to work on it, not even to write a program, so I had to do it myself."

"It seems very likely to a large number of people that we will get massive unemployment caused by Ai."

"If you or I learn something and want to transfer that knowledge to someone else, we can’t just send them a copy. But I can have 10,000 neural networks, each having their own experiences, and any of them can share what they learn instantly. That’s a huge difference. It’s as if there were 10,000 of us, and as soon as one person learns something, all of us know it. It’s a completely different form of intelligence. A new and better form of intelligence."

"In late 1985, I actually had a deal with Dave Rumelhart that I would write a short paper about backpropagation, which was his idea, and he would write a short paper about autoencoders, which was my idea. It was always better to have someone who didn't come up with the idea write the paper because he could say more dearly what was important. So I wrote the short paper about backpropagation, which was the Nature paper that came out in 1986, but Dave still hasn't written the short paper about autoencoders. I'm still waiting."

"Then we got very excited because now there was this very simple local-learning rule. On paper it looked just great. I mean, you could take this great big network, and you could train up all the weights to do just the right thing, just with a simple local learning rule. It felt like we'd solved the problem . That must be how the brain works. I guess if it hadn't been for computer simulations, I'd still believe that, but the problem was the noise. It was just a very very slow learning rule. It got swamped by the noise because in the learning rule you take the difference between two noisy variables--two sampled correlations, both of which have sampling noise. The noise in the difference is terrible. I still think that's the nicest piece of theory I'll ever do. It worked out like a question in an exam where you put it all together and a beautiful answer pops out."

"The reason hidden units in neural nets are called hidden units is that Peter Brown told me about hidden Markov models. I decided "hidden" was a good name for those extra units, so that's where the name "hidden" comes from."

"I got Christianity at school and Stalinism at home. I think that was a very good preparation for being a scientist because I got used to the idea that at least half the people are completely wrong."

"We got quite a few applications, and one of these applications I couldn't decide if the guy was a total flake or not... He wrote a spiel about the machine code of the brain and how it was stochastic, and so the brain had this stochastic machine code. It looked like rubbish to me, but the guy obviously had some decent publications and was in a serious place, so I didn't know what to make of him... David Marr said, "Oh yes, I've met him." I said, "So what did you think of him?" David Marr said, 'Well, he was a bit weird, but he was definitely, smart." So I thought, OK, so we'll invite him. That guy was Terry Sejnowski, of course... the book was one of the first books to come out about neural networks for a long time. It was the beginning of the end of the drought... both Dave Rumelhart and Terry said that from their point of view, just getting all these people interested and in the same room was a real legitimizing breakthrough."

"I think political systems will use it to terrorize people."

"I'm much more interested in how the brain does it. I'm only interested in applications just to prove that this is interesting stuff to keep the funding flowing. To do an application really well, you have to put your whole heart into it; you need to spend a year immersing yourself in what the application' s all about. I guess I've never really been prepared to do that."

"Attachment is the most powerful force in the universe. We are meant to learn in the context of attachment about what we are attached to, and the things that serve our attachment needs."

"The digital playground is an incredibly cruel playground."

"The woman offers the man fruit. Maybe that's how our female ancestors enticed males to join them in caring for offspring: "I'll offer you food, and in response we're going to make a team. That's the deal." And that's the human deal. That's why we're more or less monogamous and why we more or less pair-bond, and why something approximating marriage is a human universal. You can find exceptions, but who cares? Look at the vast pattern. The price we pay for having very large brains is that we're very dependent, and it takes a long time for us to get programmed, and because of that we need relatively stable family bonding, and that's basically what we've evolved. You don't get that without making males self-conscious. Why not impregnate and run? It's not "Why do men abandon their children?" that's the mystery. It's "Why do any men ever stick with them?" Just look at the animal kingdom. The simple and easiest thing is always the most likely thing to occur. It's the exception—the long-term commitment—that needs explanation."

"You can't have the conversation about rights without the conversation about responsibility, because your rights are my responsibility. That's what they are, technically, so you just can't have only half of that discussion. And we're only having half of that discussion. Then the question is, "Well, what are you leaving out if you're only having that half of the discussion?" And the answer is, "Well, you're leaving out responsibility." And then the question is, "Well, what are you leaving out if you're leaving out responsibility?" And the answer might be: "Well, maybe you're leaving out the meaning of life." Here you are, suffering away. What makes it worthwhile? Rights? It's almost impossible to describe how bad an idea that is. Responsibility: that's what gives life meaning. Lift a load. Then you can tolerate yourself. Look at yourself: you're useless, easily hurt, easily killed. Why should you have any self-respect? Pick something up and carry it. Make it heavy enough so that you can think, yah, well, useless as I am, at least I can move that from there to there. For men, there's nothing but responsibility. Women have their sets of responsibilities: they're not the same. Women have to take primary responsibility for having infants, at least, and also for caring for them. They're structured differently than men for biological necessity. Women know what they have to do; men have to figure out what they have to do. And if they have nothing worth living for, then they stay Peter Pan—and why the hell not? The alternative to valued responsibility is impulsive, low-class pleasure. Why lift a load if there's nothing in it for you? And that's what we're doing to men and boys that's a very bad idea. "You're pathological and oppressive." "Fine, then! Why the hell am I going to play? If I get no credit for bearing responsibility, then you can be sure I won't bear any." But then your life is useless and meaningless, and you're full of self-contempt and nihilism, and that's not good. And so that's what I think is going on at a deeper level with regard to men needing this direction. A man has to decide that he's going to do something: he has to decide that."

"Women are attracted to men's ability to generate, to be productive, and to share. These qualities transcend wealth, which can disappear."

"It's so interesting to watch the young men when you talk to them about responsibility. They're so goddamned thrilled about it. It just blows me away. It's like, "Really?!" That's the counterculture: Grow the hell up and do something useful! "Really? I can do that? Oh, I'm so excited by that idea! No one ever mentioned that before!" It's like, "Rights, rights, rights, rights…" Jesus! It's appalling. People have had enough of that. And they better have, because it's a non-productive mode of being. Responsibility, man: that's where the meaning in life is."

"Do you want to be what you are or do you want to be what continually changes what you are?"

"Snake predation was no joke. It shaped our evolutionary past. We're attuned to snakes. We are really good at detecting the camouflage pattern of snakes in the lower half of our visual field. There's evidence that the reason human beings have such acute vision—which means that our eyes were opened—is that we co-evolved with snakes and we learned how to see them. And then the price we paid for seeing was that our brain grew, because you need a lot of brainpower to see. And the consequence of our brain growing was that one day we woke up and discovered the future. And the future is where all the snakes might live instead of where they live right now. I already made the case that there's a tight link between what you eat and information—conceptual link as well as a practical link. But it's also the case that we can see colors. The question is: Why? The answer is: We evolved to see ripe fruit. In the story of Adam and Eve human beings are given vision by the snake and the fruit. That turns out to be correct."

"What do people do that animals don't? Work. What does work mean? It means you sacrifice the present for the future. Why do you do that? Because you know that you're vulnerable, and because you're awake. From here on in, from this point forward, there's no return to unconscious paradise. I don't care how many problems you've solved so that today's okay. You have a lot of problems coming up. No matter how much you work, you're never going to work enough to solve all the problems. All you're going to do from here on in is to be terrified of the future. That's the price of waking up. It's the end of paradise, and that's the beginning of history."

"The idea that paradise, the proper habitat of a human being, is a walled garden is a good one. It's an echo back to the chaos/order idea. Walls: culture. Garden: nature. The proper human habitat is a properly tended garden."

"You can kill people with compassion. That's the Freudian Oedipal situation. Think about working in a nursing home. There's a rule of thumb that we can use as a guide when interacting with people in general. It is this: Do not do anything for anyone that they can do themselves. You just steal it from them. Imagine that you're working with elderly people. It might be easier to do something for them than to let them struggle through it. But you just speed their demise by taking away their last vestiges of independence. People do the same thing with kids. The answer is: struggle through it."

"A thing isn't quite real until you name it."

"The kids are starting to burn this place and to trash it. They're dragging a grand piano down the stairs. It's the destruction of high culture, about which they're nothing but cynical, because they don't believe that hard work and sacrifice can produce something of any value. They want to bring it down and destroy it. You can see it in the story of Cain and Abel. Abel is hard working and everyone likes him, and he makes the proper sacrifices, so his life goes really well. And that's part of the reason that Cain hates him. He's jealous and resentful, but worse than that—if you're not doing very well and you're around someone who is doing very well it's painful, because the mere fact of their Being judges you. And so it's very easy to want to destroy that ideal so that you don't have to live with the terrible consequences of seeing it embodied in front of you. And so part of the reason that people want to tear things down is so that they don't have anything to contrast themselves against and to feel bad. And that's exactly what's happening here. Kids are destroying all of this culture, because the fact that it exists judges them."

"I regard free speech as a prerequisite to a civilized society, because freedom of speech means that you can have combat with words. That's what it means. It doesn't mean that people can happily and gently exchange opinions. It means that we can engage in combat with words, in the battleground of ideas. And the reason that that's acceptable, and why it's acceptable that people's feelings get hurt during that combat, is that the combat of ideas is far preferable to actual combat."

"The thing that's so interesting about being alive is that you're all in. No matter what you do you're all in; this is gonna kill you. So I think you might as well play the most magnificent game you can while you're waiting—because, do you have anything better to do, really?"

"Without that forward-going, courageous consciousness, a woman herself will drift into unconsciousness and terror. It's the sleep of the naïve and damned. She needs to wake herself up and bring her own masculine consciousness into the forefront so she can survive in the world. Unless woman is taken out of man, then she isn't a human being—she's just a creature."

"The selection pressure that women placed on men developed the entire species. There's two things that happened. The men competed for competence, since the male hierarchy is a mechanism that pushes the best men to the top. The effect of that is multiplied by the fact that women who are hypergamous peel from the top. And so the males who are the most competent are much more likely to leave offspring—which seems to have driven cortical expansion."

"To come up with the idea that you can bargain with the future is the major idea of humankind. We suffer. What do we do about it? We figure out how to bargain with the future. And we minimize suffering in that manner."

"[About what Canadians may think about him being ordered, in 2023, to undergo social media communication coaching:] Either someone like me is wrong, or all of the institutions in Canada have become dangerously corrupt. Well, who the hell is going to believe the second one?"

"Your values have to be hierarchically organized with something absolute at the top, because otherwise they do nothing but war. This is true if you're an individual and it's true if you're a state. If you don't know what the next thing you should do is, then there are 50 things you should do. Then, how are you doing to do any of them? You can't. You have to prioritize. Something has to be above something else. It has to be arranged in a hierarchy for it not to be chaotic, so there is some principle at the top of the hierarchy."

"A huge problem on the social media side is that we put undue access to status in the hands of people who will misuse accusations to garner attention."

"Part of the reason that politicians have come to believe that the public is stupid and has no attention span is that television had a 30-second attention span. So you had to assume your audience remembered nothing, knew nothing, and could flip out to a different channel at any moment. Plus the bandwidth was insanely expensive. Now all that is gone. I think that will be a revolution in political discourse."

"There's an insistence that the Being that's spoken into being through truth is good. This is the most profound idea ever. It is also the most believable idea ever. What cures in therapy is truth. Of course, you must encounter the things that you're afraid of, but this is enacted truth, because if you know that there's something you need to do by your own set of rules and you're avoiding it, then you're enacting a lie. You're not speaking the lie, but you're enacting it, and that's the same thing: untruth. If I can get you to face what it is that you know you shouldn't be avoiding, then what's happening is that we're both partaking in the process of you attempting to act out your deepest truth. That improves people's lives radically. The clinical evidence for that is overwhelming. We know that if you expose people to the things that they're afraid of and are avoiding, they get better. You have to do it carefully, cautiously, and with their approval and participation. Of all the things that clinicians have established that's credible, that's #1. It's redemptive insofar as both people are telling the truth. The difference between deception and repression is very small. People can handle earthquakes and cancer and even death, but they can't handle deception. They can't handle the rug being pulled out from underneath them by people who they love and trust. This does them in. It makes them ill, it hurts them psycho-physiologically, and worse than that it makes them cynical, bitter, vicious, and resentful. And then they also start to act all that out in the world, and that makes it worse."

"Jung said that science is nested in a dream. The dream is that if we investigated the structures of material reality with sufficient attention and truth, we could then learn enough about material reality to then alleviate suffering—to produce the philosopher's stone, to make everybody wealthy, to make everybody healthy, to make everyone live as long as they wanted to live or perhaps forever. That's the goal—to alleviate the catastrophe of existence. The idea that the solutions to the mysteries of life enable us to develop such a substance, or multitude of substances, provided the motive force for the development of science. Jung traced that development of the motive force to over the period of 1,000 years. Jung went back into alchemical texts and interpreted them as if they were the dream upon which science was founded. Newton was an alchemist, by the way. Science did emerge out of alchemy. The question is, What were the alchemists up to? They were trying to produce the philosopher's stone, which was the universal medicament for mankind's pathology."

"If you are not capable of cruelty, then you are absolutely a victim of anyone who is. For those who are exceedingly agreeable, there is a part of them crying out for the incorporation of the monster within them, which is what gives them strength of character and self-respect, because it is impossible to respect yourself until you grow teeth. And if you grow teeth, you realize that you're somewhat dangerous, or seriously dangerous. Then you might be more willing to demand that you treat yourself with respect and that other people do the same thing. That doesn't mean that being cruel is better than not being cruel. What it means is that being able to be cruel, and then not being cruel, is better than not being able to be cruel, because in the first case you're nothing but weak and naïve, and in the second case you're dangerous but you have it under control. If you're competent at fighting, it actually decreases the probability that you're going to have to fight, because when someone pushes you you'll be able to respond with confidence, and with any luck a reasonable show of confidence, which is a show of dominance, will be enough to make the bully back off."

"To know that the biblical stories have a phenomenological truth is really worth knowing, because the poor fundamentalists are trying to cling to their moral structure and I understand why, because it does organize their societies and it organizes their psyches so they've got something to cling to. But they don't have a very sophisticated idea of the complexity of the idea of what constitutes truth, and they try to gerrymander the biblical stories into the domain of scientific theory, promoting Creationism, for example, as an alternative scientific theory. That just isn't going to go anywhere, because the people who wrote these damn stories weren't scientists to begin with. There weren't any scientists back then. There's hardly any scientists now! Really, it's hard to think scientifically. Even scientists don't think scientifically outside the lab, and hardly even when they're in the lab. You've got to get peer-reviewed and criticized. It's hard to think scientifically. So, however, the people who wrote these stories thought more like dramatists think, like Shakespeare thought. But that doesn't mean that there isn't truth in it; it just means you have to be a little more sophisticated about your ideas about truth. And that's okay. There are truths to live by. Okay, fine—then we need to figure out what those are, because we need to live and maybe not to suffer so much. And so if you know that the Bible stories in general are trying to represent the lived experience of conscious individuals, then that opens up the possibility of a whole different realm of understanding and eliminates the contradiction that's been painful for people between the objective world and the claims of religious stories."

"And let us not forget: wicked women may produce dependent sons, may support and even marry dependent men, but awake and conscious women want an awake and conscious partner. It is for this reason that Nelson Muntz of The Simpsons is so necessary to the small social group that surrounds Homer’s antihero son, Bart. Without Nelson, King of the Bullies, the school would soon be overrun by resentful, touchy Milhouses, narcissistic, intellectual Martin Princes, soft, chocolate-gorging German children, and infantile Ralph Wiggums. Muntz is a corrective, a tough, self-sufficient kid who uses his own capacity for contempt to decide what line of immature and pathetic behaviour simply cannot be crossed. Part of the genius of The Simpsons is its writers’ refusal to simply write Nelson off as an irredeemable bully. Abandoned by his worthless father, neglected, thankfully, by his thoughtless slut of a mother, Nelson does pretty well, everything considered. He’s even of romantic interest to the thoroughly progressive Lisa, much to her dismay and confusion (for much the same reasons that Fifty Shades of Grey became a worldwide phenomenon)."

"The intellect is the most incredible human capacity. It is the highest of all human capacities, actually. However, it is also the thing that can go most terribly wrong, because the intellect can become arrogant about its own existence and its accomplishments, and it can fall in love with its own products. That's what happens with ideologies. You become obsessed with a human-constructed dogma of which you believe is 100% right, and it eradicates the necessity of anything transcendent."

"The question is: In these societies, cross-culturally, who is elevated to the status of elder? And you might say 'Well, it's the roughest, toughest, most dominant chimp, oppressive, patriarchal male.' and that actually happens to not be the case at all. And so what you do see is that productive males who are older, they have to be productive, who are simultaneously generous and reciprocal, and are recognized as such in their communities, hold the status of authority and help govern properly. And so we could say that there's no evidence whatsoever on the scientific or anthropological front that the doctrine that the prime human motivation for the construction of social relations is power. And I would add to that further that if you think that power is the fundamental motivation of humankind, that is a confession not an observation. And so look out for people who make that claim because they're making that claim to justify to themselves their own use of psychopathic and narcissistic social mediation strategies. And so I don't see that the leftists who make the claim that power is the fundamental motivation have a shred of evidence on their side sociologically, scientifically, anthropologically, politically, economically, theologically or ethically."

"I know that the evidence for genuine religious experience is incontrovertible, but it's not explicable. So I don't want to explain it away. I want to pull back from that and leave it as a fact and a mystery, and then we're going to look at this from a rational perspective, and say that the initial formulation of the idea of God was an attempt to abstract out the ideal and to consider it as an abstraction outside its instantiation. And that's good enough. It's an amazing thing if it's true. But I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater."

"Group identity can be fractionated right down to the level of the individual."

"I had to force myself to concentrate, and to breathe, and to keep from saying and meaning “to hell with it” during the endless months that I was possessed by dread and terror. And I was barely able to do it. More than half the time I believed that I was going to die in one of the many hospitals in which I resided. And I believe that if I had fallen prey to resentment, for example, I would have perished once and for all—and that I am fortunate to have avoided such a fate."

"Much that is great starts small, ignorant, and useless. […] But today’s beginner is tomorrow’s master."

"Why would a dragon hoard gold? Because a dragon represents everything that you're afraid of. What's embedded in everything that you're afraid of? Absolutely everything that you need to find. Run from what you're afraid of? Run from exactly what you need to find."

"I've tried to maintain a relatively balanced view of the excesses on both sides of the political spectrum, but one thing I have clearly experienced repeatedly is that the Left will shun and exclude to a degree that's almost unknown on the Right. I've never had anyone on the Right, that I've talked to, refuse to talk to a hypothetical guest, for example. And I've had people on the Left, they just do that all the time. And I don't get that exactly. I think maybe it has to do with the association in personality between agreeableness and Leftist's proclivity. So the socialist types, the Lefties, are technically more agreeable. And I think maybe among agreeable people, if you don't go along with the agreeable game you are much more likely to be categorized as a predator."

"The lion lying down with the lamb is the idea that is either projected back in time, saying that there was a time, or maybe that there will be a time, when the horrors of life are no longer necessary for life itself to exist. And the horrors of life are, of course, that everything eats everything else, and that everything dies, and that everything is born, and that the whole place is a charnel house. It's a catastrophe from beginning to end. This is the vision of it being other than that. There's a strong idea that human beings can interact with reality in such a way that the tragic and evil elements of it can be mitigated, so that we can move closer to a state of being where we have the benefits of existence without the catastrophe that seems to go along with it."

"Lex Fridman: How often do you gaze upon death, your own? How often do you remember, remind yourself that this ride ends? Jordan Peterson: Personally? Lex Fridman: Personally. Jordan Peterson: All the time. Lex Fridman: 'Cause you as a deep thinker and philosopher, it's easy to start philosophizing and forgetting that you might die today. Jordan Peterson: The angel of death sits on every word. How's that? Lex Fridman: How often do you actually consciously— Jordan Peterson: All the time. Lex Fridman: —notice the angel? Jordan Peterson: All the time."

"Ambition is often—and often purposefully—misidentified with the desire for power, and damned with faint praise, and denigrated, and punished. And ambition is sometimes exactly that wish for undue influence on others. But there is a crucial difference between sometimes and always. Authority is not mere power, and it is extremely unhelpful, even dangerous, to confuse the two. When people exert power over others, they compel them, forcefully. They apply the threat of privation or punishment so their subordinates have little choice but to act in a manner contrary to their personal needs, desires, and values. When people wield authority, by contrast, they do so because of their competence—a competence that is spontaneously recognized and appreciated by others, and generally followed willingly, with a certain relief, and with the sense that justice is being served."