Psychology for Lawyers

forays into the work of jordan peterson


Part I
putting Jordan Peterson to use in thinking about
your writing for the course

Why Do People Explore? [3:15 mins.]

Read as If It Matters [4:08 mins.] [what you read provides "tools" for you to use] [end presentation at 1:04 mins.]

Earning Your Knowledge [6:03 mins.]

Become Disciplined | Top 10 Rules [33:06 mins.] [presentation on how we learn, at 4:37 mins., end at 7:05 mins.]

Existentialism | Authenticity [On Writing Bad Essays] [1:06:08 mins.] [relevant commentary begins at 7:55 mins of the video, ends at 10:46 mins.]

Let Your Insufficiencies Burn Off Like Deadwood [11:21 mins.] [on a student who can't write, begin at 2:16 mins., end at 4:34 mins.]

Yin-Yang, Order and Chaos [10:33 mins.] [the Jordan Peterson story of the performance of two gymnasts who push themselves to the limit, begins at 3:51 mins.of the video, ends at 7:21 mins.]

How to Improve Your Life [5:10 mins.] [a talk to students, a passionate view of student life; "learn to think, learn to speak, learn to read"; the opportunity you have as a student]

footnote

JBP on 12 Rules for Life
[1:30:32 mins.] [on reading the great psychotherapist/clinicans, and words of praise] [begin at 3:28 mins., end at 6:56 mins.]


Part II

sorting yourself out | cleaning up your life | and other advice

Improve Your Life [9:39 mins.] [face what you fear; we don't know what the limits are when you "speak the truth forward"; look at the time you waste; "you are not everything you could be and you know it"]

The Difficulty of Growing Up in the Modern World [6:00 mins.] ["choose your limitation or let it take you unaware"; "choose your sacrifice, at least you get to choose it"; you are young enough to be full of potential; "when you become something the world opens up to you"; "Jung talked about . . . rediscovering the child you left behind"; "pick your sacrifice, you don't get not to make one"] [end presentation at 3:27 mins.]

How to Be Optimistic [4:31 mins.] [a story about endurance; "who knows how tough you are"; "pushing yourself against the world"]

How to Start Fixing Your Life [4:19 mins.] ["here's the way to clean-up your life": quit doing the things you are doing you know it is wrong to be doing; "see what happens" ("your vision will clear up a little bit"); moving away from what is untrue and that is bad; "clean up your existential space" ("the more you do this, the more you are going to be able to do things"; "if you are going to clean up the world, start with cleaning up your existential space"; stop doing things you not to be inadequate and wrong"; expand your domain of competence; fix the things you can fix; take the opportunity to "expand your domain of consciousness"; becomeing strong enough to deal with the suffering that is ever present in life]

Sort Yourself Out and Make It Manifest in the World [7:59 mins.] [suffering (a reality) and the pursuit of meaning; play the best game you can]

footnote

"The Moment I Became Serious"
[6:27 mins.]


Part III
key ideas

hierarchies (dominance hierarchies | hierarchies of competence)

Inequality and Hierarchy Give Life Its Purpose [5:40 mins.] [Big Think, 2018]

Why You Must Have a Purpose [11:07 mins.] [excepted from "Iceland: 12 Rules for Life Tour: Lecture 1," 2018, beginning at 50:58 mins., end at 57:04 mins.] [commentary on Price's Law]

How To Become Exceptional In Your Career and Life [22:29 mins.] [the idea of a career & success, knowing that we exist in hierarchies of success/achievement/competence] [end presentation at 4:06 mins.]

What You Admire is What You Value [2:27 mins.] [on having an "intrinsic value structure"]

evolutionary biology

On Evolution [2:46 mins.]

On How You are Older Than You Think [1:56 mins.]

perception, frames, and how we deal with complexity

Dragons, Divine Parents, Heroes and Adversaries: A Complete Cosmology of Being [1:14:41 mins.] begin presentation at 5:50 mins., end at 7:38 mins.] ["it is necessary for you to look at the world through a limited frame of reference"; you're brain is primarily a reducing agent (as is much else); "we deal with the complexity of the world in part by inhabiting a a series of reducing elements"] [in a simplified view of the world, we are always trying to get somewhere, that is, from one place to another, point A to point B; motivational systems are like "isolated one-eyed personalities--cyclops"] [prior to the class presentation, Peterson has commented on "dealing with ideas we don't understand well,"; there are some things we are not smart enough to understand; "talking about the grammar of belief"; commentary on his reading about belief systems (and who he was reading); "the grammar of belief is religious in nature"]

Maps of Meaning 13: The Force Within (TVO) [28 mins.] [Peterson's comments at 6:28 mins. to 10:16 mins, on how the nature of our experience lies in emotions, motivational states, fantasies, and ideas (and that these are not so easy to articulate); when you look at the world you do so from an "emotionally-ridden perspective"; you can't think without being motivated ("you see the world through a lens, a narrowing lens")] [at the beginning of the lecture Peterson notes: "I've been telling you a story that is 40 hours long"; what Peterson presents is "a model of the way the brain processes the environment" that happens to be "the current state of neuroscience." Peterson notes that what he is presenting can't be done by describing a single view, but requires a "circling around."]

Optional: On Seeing Life in a Proper Way [5:33 mins.] [frames make virtually everything around you irrelevant; complexity, from this perspective means that things that have been irrelevant come floating in; we strive to keep most things irrelevant]

motivation, goals, emotions

2014 Personality Lecture 16: Extraversion & Neuroticism (Biology & Traits) [1:44:48 mins.] ["motivation sets goals . . . tune your perceptions"; "emotions track goals"; a tour of brain circuitry (psycho-biology of behavior) (emotion and biology)] [begin presentation at 1:45 mins., end at 12:32 mins.]

optional: No Goal, No Positive Emotion
[4:10 mins.] [on having goals; playing games ("there is a set of playable games")]

stories

Dragons, Divine Parents, Heroes and Adversaries: A Complete Cosmology of Being
[1:14:41 mins.] [presentation begins at 21:16 mins., ends at 22:20 mins,]

tools & obstacles

Dragons, Divine Parents, Heroes and Adversaries: A Complete Cosmology of Being
[1:14:41 mins.] [presentation begins at 21:53 mins., ends at 31:55 mins,] [Peterson's discussion of tools and obstacles leads to a discussion of the unknown, and order and chaos]

big 5 personality traits

Big 5 Personality Traits [6:46 mins.] [begin presentation at 2:55 mins.] [Peterson, drawing on social psychology research on differences between men and women moves into political controversy territory]

Difference Between Wisdom and IQ? [7:13 mins.] [end presentation at 1:41 mins.]



Part IV
complexity and its tributaries

"We can only occupy one place at a time. Further, the place that we occupy is shaped by the specific peculiarities, constraints and biases of our particular cultures. We are products of the social processes that shaped us, products of our time. Finally, we are characterized by profound intrinsic limitations on our perceptual and cognitive processing power. We can only make sense of a fraction of the information that constantly presents itself to us. The stability of the sense that we make is therefore fragile. Our models of experience are limited, incomplete, and chronically prone to file. Our essential existential problem can thus be more accurately conceptualized as vulnerability to complexity . . . .

* * * *

We need to determine exactly what it means to be exposed, without defence, to the underlying complexity of the world.

* * * *

[H]ow can we achieve our intrinsically determined ends in an endlessly complex environment?"

--Jordan B. Peterson & Joseph L. Flanders, Complexity Management Theory: Motivation for Ideological Rigidity and Social Conflict, 38 Cortext Forum 429, 431, 432, 436 (2002)

complexity


The Pinnacle of Complexity [8:20 mins.] [this video is an excerpt from Peterson's introductory lecture in his Personality and Its Transformation course] [a fundamental notion: we are complex; our ability to understand ourselves is low; science may not be all that good in concepualing the ideal; "it would be worthwhile if you approached this course like you were an engineer of the spirit"; a course in "applied wisdom"] [end video at 5:17 mins.]

Ways of Dealing with the Complexity of the World [6:49 mins.] [you have a built-in interpretative system] [reference to Jack Panksepp] [ you live inside a story; "we have evolved story-like structures to understand the world" -- 1:41 mins.] ["we have hemispheric specialization to deal with the known and unknown, order and chaos] ["we live in stories"; you need to understand some things about stories; one kind of story you need to know something about is mythology]

keeping most of the world irrelevant

Tools for Seeing Life Properly [5:34 mins.] [frames make virtually everything around you irrelevant; complexity, from this perspective means that things that have been irrelevant come floating in; we strive to keep most things irrelevant]

| jordan peterson and a "new" psychology for students of law |
a compilation of jordan peterson resources


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