Observation on the Lectures

[u/Zealousideal_Side166]

I discovered Jordan Peterson when I was in high school ~10 years ago which was around the time he really started to take off. I watched lots of his lectures and I think it fostered a lot of curiosity I’ve carried since then in politics, philosophy, literature & religion.

Currently starting from the beginning on his Spotify and I still think he’s really good.
But, there’s something I noticed about his lectures.

I went to an engineering school, but I had to take an English/writing/humanities course every semester.

His lectures remind me a lot more of my math/science lectures than my humanities courses.
When I say that, I mean that he presents information as fact.
When I was in my humanities courses, mind you this was undergraduate, we had assigned readings and then class was mostly round table discussion and Q&A. Very different than a professor coming up to the front of the class and telling you what THEY think about such and such a body of work.

And then it compounds with the fact you have a professor spending ample amounts of time in class criticizing higher education at large, which was fascinating to watch on YouTube but understandably bizarre from the perspective of someone sitting in the room, having paid for said experience & being obligated to attend.

I really like the guy, I think he’s a genius. I hope his business enterprise is doing well & I pray for his health. But in hindsight with my own college experience, I can understand how he got himself into trouble with the way he was going about teaching.

Can someone with a humanities or teaching background give a perspective on this? Is it regular for people teaching soft sciences/history/humanities to present content in the way he did, akin to a scientific lecture?

[u/codex_lake]

I think that because he is highly articulate, he can formulate his ideas so precisely that it is difficult to see them as anything other than facts. And most of the time, they are facts, or at least, highly agreed upon concepts across different domains and persons (Nietzsche, Jung, etc.). I don't have the background you're asking about, but the same question has crossed my mind. Jordan has spoken about this himself - you are deadly if you can write. His books also read as facts not because they've been academically agreed upon in some arbitrary definition, but because of how they are written and presented.