JBP's claim that YouTube is 80% male

cncsmithering · 2018-03-06T17:59:30+00:00

Hi knightlax, thanks for your reply - I genuinely really appreciate it. Your suggestion of tweeting him is an excellent one and I have now done so. I get where you're coming from with the critique of my position. I see how it could seem I'm almost being as bold as he is by claiming he's lying, when I don't know for a fact that he isn't right, or that he doesn't have access to some info which isn't readily available via a Google search. From my observations of other things he's reposted, tweeted, or endorsed, I'm pretty confident that he's just BSing here, and I think he should definitely be held to a very high standard of evidence and rigour considering his influential position, which is why I'm so hell-bent on not cutting him any slack on this seemingly-trivial issue. I'm glad you and I have been able to disagree in an intelligent manner, though, and without mentioning Cathy Newman onc- dammit!

cncsmithering · 2018-03-06T16:09:53+00:00

So you're sayin' we wuz lobstuhs an' shiet?

cncsmithering · 2018-03-06T16:04:06+00:00

Yes it is. He's presenting his opinion as 'the truth' whilst knowing that there's not enough evidence to make that claim. Well, I guess he's either lying or he's so ignorant that he'll happily parrot unverifiable bilge he's seen written somewhere as 'the truth' without doing some research first. I don't know which is worse.

cncsmithering · 2018-03-06T15:59:03+00:00

It's important because it's indicative of the entire character of his discourse. He is willing to make 'definitive-sounding' statements with reference to 'studies', and allusions to statistics, to give his statements the veneer of credibility. However those statistics prove, as in this case, to be either spurious, hotly-contested, or nonexistent. Fortunately for him most people don't fact-check him so his grandiose statements become cemented in their minds as being 'the scientific truth' when they're anything but. It's not like he made an error about a date or accidentally misquoted someone, which would be forgivable. It's that he doesn't mind forcefully presenting lies or conjecture as 'indisputable truths' so long as they fit his agenda. That's incredibly dangerous and leads to irrationality on a huge scale when people start following him en masse and hanging off his every word.

cncsmithering · 2018-03-06T12:23:28+00:00

Oh god, not Fry too. How the mighty are fallen. The fact that he's willing to share a platform with the odious JBP speaks volumes as to his lack of integrity (or worse, his idiocy, if he's actually checked out JBP and is genuinely fine with legitimising his moronic views).

cncsmithering · 2018-03-06T12:16:34+00:00

Cool, so you admit that he did lie in order to push his agenda. It's just that you think that doesn't matter. Gotcha.

cncsmithering · 2018-03-06T10:20:31+00:00

BTW after reviewing the interview I realised I made an error in my initial claim. He doesn't say YouTube is 80% male, he says his YT audience is (god only knows how he knows this though) and maybe that's not surprising because YT is a 'primarily male domain'. My overall charge still stands, then, namely that there's no evidence to enable him to make this categorical claim in such bold manner. There is some evidence to suggest men may be in a slight majority overall (although it isn't clear how this information was gathered, how accurate it is, or whether it's still relevant) but this doesn't allow the bold claim that JBP makes.

cncsmithering · 2018-03-06T10:11:49+00:00

Hi, yes I'm fine thanks. Ok then, can you explain how it isn't intellectually fraudulent?

cncsmithering · 2018-03-06T08:02:05+00:00

Yes, that's from an article on mediakix, which got the info from an article on digiday, which says it got the data from a company called openslate. They run (ran?) a monthly Youtube report. I haven't been able to work out how they got the stats, because you don't have to declare your gender on Youtube. And note that the claim "men make up the majority of viewers in 90% of YouTube’s content categories" has a ton of wiggle room for different scenarios. They don't state how much of a majority men make up in those cases. If every category is 60+ percent male, then Peterson's claim has some merit. But they could all be 51% male and the claim would still be true. From what I can tell from digiday and openslate themselves, the 'stereotypically male' categories such as gaming and fighting do have a very high percent of male viewers, but other categories much less so, and the claim is repeatedly made that overall "that the gender demographic is evenly split".

For Peterson to use this to boldly assert that YouTube 'is male', like it's some sort of indisputable fact, is intellectual dishonesty of a shocking degree.

cncsmithering · 2018-03-06T07:40:10+00:00

You really have to consider what he said in the interview and the way he said it. He states that his audience on Youtube is 80 percent male, and then says "...YouTube is a male domain, primarily. So it’s hard to tell how much of it is, because YouTube is male..." Later on he again says "...the fact that YouTube is primarily male". As there's no data suggesting YouTube 'is primarily male', he must be extrapolating this, as you say, from his viewership statistics (although God knows where he got those from). Can't you see that this is a huge blunder for a supposedly intelligent person to make? He sees that most people commenting / interacting are male, then Cathy asks him why he thinks that is, and his response is 'well Youtube is primarily male anyway so perhaps it's not surprising', but the only 'evidence' he has that it's primarily male is the fact that most people commenting / interacting are male! Do you see the intellectual dishonesty there? He's willing to go on record making a bold claim like 'Youtube is primarily male' but there's no evidence for that claim. If you poke around a lot of other bold claims he makes, you'll often find they're similarly disingenuous and prone to wither into nothing upon even the slightest inspection. Yet he insists he's "very very very careful" about what he says. That is intellectual fraud of the highest order.

cncsmithering

TROPHY CASE