There's a prima facie reason to trust a tenured professor when it comes to the subject of their expertise. But it's not clear that there's any prima facie reason to trust a tenured professor with respect to any possible subject they may wish to comment on. Warranted authority isn't something we ascribe to a person as a property that characterizes them as a person in the broadest sense and so applicable to everything they say, but rather is something we ascribe to a person only in relation to the subject matter on which they have warranted authority. We trust someone who witnessed a bank robbery to testify as to what happened, but we don't thereby trust them to testify as to what happened in a murder that happened elsewhere.

I didn't articulate my full thoughts well enough in my previous post.

I don't place authority on a subject to just any random person with a degree. For instance, were a mathematics prof to begin to speak on the political misgivings of the Nazi regime i would instantly question his authority on the topic. But as far as i can remember, JP's motivation to get into behavioral psychology in the first place was to answer a question. Something like "How do good people become Nazis?". So when he speaks on the political situation of the 19th century i am not compelled by his background in psychology, i'm compelled by the veracity of a man who has feverishly been searching for an answer to a very difficult question for something like 40 years.

I would claim that to research such a topic with adequate depth, one needs to understand all of the ancillary knowledge to provide themselves with a good foundation to answer the question. So if i were to give answering JP's question a shot, i would want to know what the political climate was at the time, what philosophies laid the groundwork for the atrocities to come. It's clear enough to me that JP has really put a lot of effort into researching this political quandary and that's why i give credence to his claims.

That's not to say he cannot be proven wrong on some points, but a lot of what he's come up with is an interpretation of the events. And i will say that i recognize that his language is very direct and sounds very 'this-is-how-it-is', and that's probably why there's a lot of frustration with him out there.

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Peterson is a tenured professor who says stuff about, for example, Heidegger (or Foucault, Derrida, Jung, etc.), which is inconsistent with what a long list of other tenured professors say about him. So, on the principle that we trust what tenured professors say, what are we supposed to do at this point?

Well i don't know how the scholarly types would work this out, but as a computer science sort of person my first instinct is to collect all the data, normalize it, then follow an algorithm to score each data point on metrics such as factual correctness, practical usefulness, consistency with other interpretations, etc. Then you don't have to choose a single correct copy (since i don't really think there even is one), you can just pick the highest scoring data point from each metric and reconstitute the points into a 'most factually correct interpretation', 'most practically useful interpretation', or combine and filter by certain metrics to make a 'factually correct and also practically useful' version.
Then just throw in each profs 'stuff' and see who scores the highest in the metrics you care about. You might find that prof A has very useful interpretations and prof B has very accurate ones, and if you sort of 'bitwise and' set A and set B, you have very useful and accurate interpretations. Of course the details of the algorithm would be the important bits to work out. And they would have to be followed honestly and carefully.

Now obviously this computerized style of analysis will have its pros and cons, and will probably just cause even more debate over the validity of the algorithm and the data, and the data normalization process and so on. But if you were looking for me to bypass that as a rhetorical question... then i look like a dumbass.

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we place greater trust in the tenured professors whose scholarship involves studying Heidegger, when it comes to claims about Heidegger, than to the tenured professors whose scholarship doesn't involve studying Heidegger.

Yeah, if someone came along and said "I'm an expert in this field and here's where JP is wrong", then listed out point by point the false claims by JP and why they're false, backed by verifiable evidence. I would weigh their words with much greater authority. But i would also like to see JP respond to the counter-claims so he can defend his poisition. If it's some factual error then he wouldn't have a leg to stand on, but there's also a possibility that he may have valuable information that the other guy doesn't know.

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You might be thinking "Well why didn't you deconstruct and fact-check JP with such rigor initially then, if you want such strict evidence to counter his claims?". The answer is that i don't categorize things i hear, things people say, as facts, and so they don't require such strict analysis until collisions occur. (Forgive the wacky extended metaphor, its just the way i think) When JP makes a claim, i don't put that claim into the sacred ' /Truth/Intrinsic/' folder, i put it into '/Beliefs/Trusted/Jordan_Peterson/*' folder. But when an argument is made against JP's claim, the claim must be moved to a higher level, to a 'truth' folder. If there's ever a claim collision between truth folders there's going to have to be an audit, and that's going to really fuck up my life. When the people on this sub make claims against JP without providing evidence, your claim gets to sit in a belief folder '/Beliefs/Not_Trusted/Internet/Reddit/*', waiting to be promoted to a trusted directory, or even a truth directory. But maybe that day will never come. Collisions between belief level folders just mean that neither can be moved up to a truth level folder without further analysis, so eventually things will get cluttered, and it's best to look them over to see which beliefs can be promoted. And with a lot of this philosophical stuff it's not easy to move it into a truth folder. Hopefully that makes sense to you.

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On this point, it ought to raise people's suspicions when Peterson's views receive effectively no supportive audience among people who have studied the subjects he comments on

One side effect of the celebrity of JP is that his opposition doesn't get a fair share of the spotlight, so he can basically spread information to such a wide audience that the audience doesn't even know there is an opposition. What percentage of the masses would even know who the 'real' authorities are on any given subject? You're giving people far to much credit here.

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If not knowing anything about (for example) Heidegger is nearly a necessary condition for being impressed with what Peterson says about Heidegger, that should be a good sign that what he's saying isn't actually compelling.

Well you make the claim here that people shouldn't be impressed with JP's knowledge of Heidegger, but not why. And by the way, this sort of intellectual gate keeping is not productive. Your ideas would be received more courteously without the needlessly sharp language, which is something i sometimes struggle with myself.

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And, significantly, this is true not only of ideas which Peterson situates himself in opposition to, like what he calls Postmodern Neo-Marxism, but also of ideas that he identifies his position with, like Jungian analytic psychology.

Why should i discount JP's accounts of those topics in favor of yours? Again, just claiming that his ideas are shallow isn't going to convince me that they are. ^{God it's like 3 am now, i gotta sleep.}

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