 Prior to his exodus from Twitter, Jordan Peterson called out Scientific American. In his tweet, he said, Darwin was wrong, but some random columnist for, quote, scientific American is right. Probability, zero. More woke idiocy and thinly veiled Marxist criticism of, quote, unquote, essentialism, masquerading as enlightened science. Scientific American has had some questionable pieces in the past, so I decided to check this article out that Jordan Peterson was speaking of. When I opened the article in question, the first thing I noticed was that it was written by Lisa Feldman Barrett, one of the most well-known neuroscientists in the world. In addition to that, she's a best-selling author. Jordan Peterson has said some pretty ignorant things in the past, but this, you know, like his tweet really got me asking a couple questions. One, does he really not know who Lisa is? And two, if he doesn't, why didn't he just take two seconds to go Google it real quick? Regardless of your opinions of Jordan Peterson, the man is not stupid, so what's going on? I'm always trying to figure out why people don't do the bare minimum by looking into things. So what I believe we're seeing, and this is a wider-spread problem within the Manisphere, this thing is called strategic ignorance. And the reason this is an issue is because as many of you know, the Manisphere reaches a lot of young men, and strategic ignorance is this form of misinformation. This misinformation is indoctrinating a lot of people and within the Manisphere, that's specific to young men. So today, I thought we could discuss the art of strategic ignorance and how prevalent it is within the Manisphere community. And if you're a long-time subscriber of the Rewired Soul, you know we're gonna get into some solutions at the end of this thing. So first, we need to understand what strategic ignorance is. In recent years, it seems the world is just getting crazier and crazier, and I have become absolutely fascinated with irrationality and things like self-deception and denial. Why do we lie to ourselves? Why do some of us refuse to seek the truth? Why do we think we're independent thinkers when it's so obvious that we're just going along with the tribe? Strategic ignorance is an insidious form of self-deception. Strategic ignorance is avoiding information because it goes against our self-interest. For example, let's say you're like me and you know that you could shed some pounds. Well, most of us know that eating a high amount of calories isn't gonna help us accomplish this goal. Even if we're not dietitians, we're well aware of ingredients and nutrition items that we're going to need to look at if we wanna lose weight. There's a simple way to avoid eating bad foods, and that is by checking nutrition labels. It's one of the easiest things we can do, but why won't we do it? Instead, we don't look because we don't wanna know the truth. If I knew the truth about what's in this thing that I really wanna eat, now there's a responsibility to make a healthier decision. But if I don't check, I don't know, and that, my friends, is strategic ignorance. Like, I was a drug addict and alcoholic for many years, and I just celebrated 10 years sober, and I've educated myself a lot about addiction. But back then, I chose to not learn about it because by learning about addiction, it would have ruined my buzz, you know what I mean? Let's take a look back at Jordan Peterson and that ignorant tweet that got him absolutely roasted on Twitter. Again, though Peterson can be awful, he's clearly intelligent in certain aspects. To become a psychologist, he obviously had to do a lot of research, but he couldn't spare one minute of his life to Google Lisa Feldman Barrett. As you could see, it doesn't take long to Google Lisa and instantly see she's a professor of psychology at Northeastern University. Under the snippet for her website, it shows she's in the top 1% of the most cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience. But in Jordan's tweet, he refers to her as a quote, random columnist for scientific American. Lisa, being the class act that she is, simply retweeted it by saying, this tweet speaks for itself. Jordan Peterson looked absolutely silly in front of an endless amount of people on Twitter, but this was an act of strategic ignorance. This specific type of strategic ignorance has a moral component to it. And as you'll see, this happens a lot within the manosphere. And although he says stuff like this... Up yours, woke moralists. We'll see who cancels who. Jordan Peterson's entire platform comes from a place of morality. People in the manosphere believe they're upholding the ultimate moral duty of teaching these young men what it means to be a man. And the manosphere folks, they also believe that they're defending men against the perceived injustices that are directed towards men. To purposely spread misinformation about Lisa would be an immoral act by Peterson. An act of immorality can lose him a lot of support from his following. But by utilizing strategic ignorance by not looking Lisa up, it provides Jordan Peterson with this shield of plausible deniability. We'll dive into it a bit more later, but a key aspect of the manosphere's strategic ignorance is to not look deep into the science of anything. Jordan Peterson believed this was a slam dunk by saying that Lisa's peace in Scientific American was part of some awoke Marxist agenda. This wasn't a simple opinion piece written by Lisa Feldman Barrett saying that Darwin was wrong like Peterson suggests. Feldman Barrett's primary research is into emotions and she's explaining why body language is an extremely flawed way to detect emotions. First, she explains how research shows that facial expressions vary greatly. Quote, in real life, people express a given emotion with tremendous variability. In anger, for example, people in urban culture scowl or make some of the facial movements for a scowl. Only about 30% of the time according to meta-analyses of studies measuring facial movement during emotion. Scowls are also not specific to anger because people scowl for different reasons such as when they are concentrating or when they have gas. The same tremendous variation occurs for every emotion studied and for every other measure that purportedly tells us about someone's emotional state, whether it's their physiology, voice, or brain activity. Scientists have been moving towards AI that detects emotions, but Lisa goes on to explain why this is flawed research as well. Quote, emotion AI systems therefore do not detect emotions. They detect physical signals such as facial muscle movements not the psychological meaning of those signals. The conflation of movement and meaning is deeply embedded in Western culture and in science. An example is a recent high-profile study that applied machine learning to more than 6 million internet videos and faces. The human raiders who trained the AI system were asked to label facial movements in the videos, but the only labels they were given to us were emotion words such as angry rather than the physical descriptions such as scowling. Moreover, there was no objective way to confirm what, if anything, the anonymous people in the videos were feeling in those moments. So one has to wonder, did Jordan Peterson actually even read this article or did he just read the headline? But let's be charitable. Let's say that he actually read this article. Charles Darwin's book, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals was written in 1872. This means that it was written 150 years ago. To think that science can't be updated in 150 years because you have a hard on for Charles Darwin is absolutely ridiculous. Even Darwin was smart enough to know that his groundbreaking research was just a starting point for future scientists to build off from. With Peterson, he should absolutely know better, but what about Andrew Tate? Andrew Tate is another well-known figure in the manosphere who has been infecting the minds of young men around the world with his misogynistic and sexist takes. But for some reason, people seem to see him as some good source of advice. Guys, I'm waiting for my blue slushie to be ready. I guess it takes a minute for the machine to get ready. And no, I can't have the red one. And I'm watching these three guys have conversations about one of the guys likes a girl that's in Starbucks. And he thinks she's giving him signals to go in and ask her out or ask for a number or whatever. And the guys are trying to pump him up. And one of the guys goes, well, Andrew Tate says, if you don't know who Andrew Tate is, look him up, try not to give him any views. But for the love of God, I don't know if I should get out of the car and help these guys out or if they're already quoting Andrew Tate, are they too far gone? And I should let them go back into Starbucks, make a fool of themselves in front of this girl so they don't get any girls ever. I don't know. I feel like it's a Star Wars moment. Can he be saved from the dark side? Nah, I don't think he can. One of the reasons young men take what he says so seriously is because he has a lot of money. This is a clear example of the halo effect, which is a cognitive bias that makes us believe that one aspect of a person influences everything else about that person. It's a cognitive shortcut. For example, the thought process goes, Andrew Tate has money, therefore he must be smart and he's someone that I should take advice from. One would think with how much money Andrew Tate has, he has a ton of time that he would use to do something productive like educate himself on what he talks about and maybe read some books. Unfortunately, that's not the case. Reading books is a very cheap way to, I guess entertain, I wouldn't call it entertainment because my brain is far too advanced. I'm gonna sit there and go, smart people read. No, I need action. I need constant chaos in my life to feel content. I need to be driving a super car and fighting. And a bunch of hoes and champagne and going crazy. I can't just sit there. Oh, and the pirate on the boat. It's for people with slow brain. Listen, whether or not someone reads books is absolutely none of my business, but it allows for strategic ignorance on the part of men like Andrew Tate within the Manisphere. A common trope of the Manisphere is to turn evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology to explain what men and women should and shouldn't do. By engaging in strategic ignorance, they can act with the confidence of someone who has read a ton of books and they know everything, but they avoid any information that may contradict their prior beliefs. In her recent video, Munecat does an excellent job explaining how people in the Manisphere simply don't look further into the research that they're citing. When discussing the guys from Fresh and Fit, she points out that oftentimes the same study that these guys use to argue their terrible beliefs is the same study that explains exactly why they're wrong. They just didn't go further into the research. One of my favorite books on self-deception is actually one that I just found, just read it, loved it so much. It is called Why Everyone Else is a Hypocrite by Robert Kurtzman. He discusses how acquiring new information gives you additional responsibilities. Kurtzman writes, having information can cause social problems with subtle and wide-ranging effects. I'm going to discuss issues related to one's reputation in the context of perceived duties. Many philosophers have written extensively on this, most notably Kant, so I'll just make a few general remarks. People's reputations suffer to the extent that they are perceived not to discharge a duty. If you can save a drowning child at little risk to yourself, people perceive you as having an obligation to do so. So, getting access to new information can give you a new duty that you didn't have before. Basically, if the Fresh and Fit crew or Andrew Tate actually exposed themselves to additional knowledge, it could hurt their reputation, much like Jordan Peterson being strategically ignorant helps them protect their brand as men who are supposedly doing something morally good. Now, this is a great time to pause and ask ourselves, do we have a moral duty to educate ourselves? And feel free to leave a comment down below because this is something that I'm constantly wondering about. Like, is it immoral of us to just be oblivious to things even though the information is readily available? So, it's difficult to answer this question because most of us, we're extremely busy and don't have time to educate ourselves on every topic under the sun. But in the case of the manosphere, the situation is different from the average person. See, they're reaching a lot of people and they've positioned themselves to be people of influence. So, do you think people with a large influence have a moral duty to educate themselves completely on a topic before holding strong beliefs and relaying them to others? Think about how many men are out there parroting the bad information from people within the manosphere that's rooted in strategic ignorance. The information is then spread and can influence others within individual communities. That's when we return to the question of, do we have a moral duty to educate ourselves? Personally, I would argue that this depends on the topic. For example, if I'm telling someone that I heard some study says drinking coffee at 7 a.m. is better than drinking coffee at 8 a.m., that's a low risk situation. So, in that example, what's the worst thing that can happen if I don't take a deep dive into that study or that information? To be clear, just out of my personal values, I fact check that information because I think it's important to do so, but if I didn't, really not a big deal. Worst case is the person realizes the study is bogus and stops trusting my opinions when I bring up studies, but it'll do minimum harm. But what about higher risk situations? Like, what if it was about something I heard about medications? Do I have a moral duty to educate myself before spreading information to others? Like, I would definitely say yes, because if we influence someone about what to do or not to do when it comes to medication, that can be harmful. People in the Manisphere community are being conditioned to not look into information. There's a certain amount of trust that goes, there's a certain amount of trust that goes into believing what these men have to say, and it could be beyond harmful. So recently, after realizing how big of a problem the Manisphere was becoming, I wanted to get to the root of the issue, and I kept asking, why are young men so miserable? And more importantly, why are young men so angry? Right? Like, I know my personal experience, like I used to be a really angry young dude, but I wanted to see what was going on. So over on Twitter, by the way, follow me on Twitter, at The Rewind Soul, I was asking for book recommendations, and someone recommended this book called The Boy Crisis by Warren Farrell. I had never heard of Warren Farrell, so I decided to do some quick research into him to see if he's someone who knows what he's talking about. First, I saw that his book had 923 reviews, which isn't bad. This amount of reviews typically means that the book has sold a lot of copies. Like, to put it in perspective for you, a lot of really good books are lucky if they have 100 reviews. So typically, bad books not only don't sell a lot of copies, but they have a way lower rating as well, but as you can see, Warren Farrell's book had four and a half out of five stars. I also saw that he has a PhD and has written a lot of books over the last 40 years. These were all indicators that he's probably someone who kinda knows what he's talking about. Like, he has a decent reputation, a lot of people are reading his books, so I grabbed a copy, and once I started reading, I realized how wrong I was. From the start of his book, it was filled with terrible information and bad data. The fact that it went through editors was mind-blowing to me. See, I came to this book looking for answers as to why young men were so angry and miserable, but throughout the book, his primary argument is that women have it much better than men. Since followers of the Manisphere are being conditioned in strategic ignorance, this can be dangerous. This is no different than blaming marginalized groups for all of your problems instead of what the source actually is. And by the way, if you didn't get the memo, that's capitalism. To give you an idea of the misinformation in this book, it started out by saying how there's discrimination against men and how women are treated better. He mentions a study that more men are suffering from obesity than women due to their depression. Aside from this being correlational, it's barely true at best. According to the CDC, obesity in men is only slightly higher than women. Now, you could argue that it's happening at a faster rate over time, but as you can see, more of the female population has been dealing with this a lot longer than men have. Next, he says that women are out earning men in urban cities. This should instantly trigger a red flag for anyone who reads it. So I looked it up. I wasn't able to find any research that looked into earnings for specific cities, but we can get a general idea with the data from the most populated states. And here's what the data looks like for those states. In California, on average, men make an average of $7,162 more than women. In Texas, they're making on average $10,516 more. In Florida, men make $7,705 more. New York, $8,821. And in Pennsylvania, $11,396 more than women. Now, I want you to think about that for a second. This well-respected person, Warren Farrell, is telling men, parents and the rest of the world that women are out earning men and it's completely false. All right, this book sold thousands of copies. Without looking up this type of information, what do you think young men are thinking when they hear this? Lastly, Warren Farrell also said that the bias towards women can also be found in Google Trends data. He said, there are more people searching for, and I'm not kidding when I say this, quote, foods to eat to conceive a girl. And that's four times higher than, quote, foods to eat to conceive a boy. All right, I wanted to pause right there because let's take a moment just to acknowledge how dumb it would be to search that. If people could simply eat foods to conceive either a boy or a girl, it'd be like this scientific breakthrough of the millennium. All right, so I figured that maybe, just maybe, maybe he cherry-picked these search terms to argue his point. But even that wasn't the case because it's not even true. Listen, it only took me a couple seconds to go to trends.google.com and look into this. With the book being released in 2018, I went back to trend data from 2017. And as you can see, the search is not four times higher for women. At best, you see random spikes for both boys and girls, but boys still gets more searches. So is Warren Farrell being strategically ignorant or just negligent? Personally, I don't think it matters because it's harmful either way. But before we conclude, we need to discuss racism. Something you'll notice in the manosphere is the narrative that anyone of any race can just pick themselves up by their bootstraps. FD Signifier has discussed people like Kevin Samuels and his influence on young black men. Meanwhile, there are a variety of black people like Candace Owens who are being used to say, hey, look, see, this black person doesn't think racism is a problem. Therefore, it's clearly not. Now, I'm only half black, so I can't speak to the personal experience that many black people have in this country. In fact, my only experience with racism that was directed towards me was this one girl who I was talking to way back in the day and she literally ghosted me after I told her I was half black. But that was probably for the best, you know, before she met the family and all that stuff. The reality is that although we've come a long way, racism is still a major problem that people refuse to address. In the Mansfield, people like Jordan Peterson will point to Ibram X. Kendi or Robin D'Angelo to try and make the topic of racism seem overblown and silly. Robin D'Angelo studied sociology and Ibram Kendi majored in African-American studies. Although I think they may have some valuable points that add to the discussion, I do sometimes personally think that they go a little too far. But if you only listen to Jordan Peterson and these others in the Mansfield, you would think that Kendi and D'Angelo are literally the only academics discussing racism. When I look at a list like this that Jordan Peterson tweets, there's one name that's missing every single time and that is Dr. Jennifer Iberhart. For those of you who don't know who Dr. Jennifer Iberhart is, she is awesome. Iberhart graduated from Harvard University and went on to teach at Yale. Now she's currently a social psychologist at Stanford University and researches racial biases. Her book, Bias, Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice that Shapes What We See, Think, and Do really highlights the research that she's been doing as well as the training that she does for police departments all around the country. And when I heard about the research that she's been doing and the trainings, it absolutely blew my mind. It's really easy for someone like Peterson to attack Kendi and D'Angelo. These two are a part of the extreme. What makes attacking them easy is that these two just present ideas. What's harder to attack is evidence that's rooted in solid research and that is exactly what Dr. Jennifer Iberhart does. So we have to ask ourselves, do people like Jordan Peterson just not know about Iberhart and her work? By now, you should know that the answer is that they're probably using strategic ignorance. Why ask if we have any peer reviewed research about racial biases, when you can just attack the people who are in the extremes like Kendi and D'Angelo. Strategic ignorance provides the perfect cover so you never have to deal with the actual scientific research. All right, we've reached the fun part. So what's the solution? I've said it before and I've said it again. So when I got sober, I was taught by my sponsor that it's a lot easier to fix me than it is to fix the rest of the world. And I think we all need to do our best to avoid strategic ignorance. And the way we do this is by challenging our own confirmation bias. If we find some research or information that agrees with us, like I usually see it as a red flag. If I read something and I'm like, oh, this is definitely right. It's exactly what I thought. I'm like, this means I need to check something else out. All right, so I try to find different information that's gonna challenge it. If our beliefs are correct, they should stand up to scrutiny, right? I regularly read books by people I disagree with. And most of the time I walk away and I realize how weak their arguments actually are. But sometimes I see even in certain topics that maybe I was wrong. What makes a critical thinker is someone who challenges their beliefs and updates those beliefs based on new data and information. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to argue for the neoliberal idea that we're all individuals and should focus on ourselves, all right? We should actively challenge people when they're using strategic ignorance. We should provide them with information that explains why they're wrong and hopefully without being a jerk about it. We should educate others and try to get them to challenge the people that they're following, the people that they're listening to because by asking questions, we're getting them into that thought process, right? So even though we can't control what they do or what they think, by being in front of them and asking questions about the topic or the ideas that someone like Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate has, the people reading that are like, yeah, maybe I should be asking that question too. And when in conversations with people, right, that are bringing in these bad ideas, something that I was taught and I try to practice is doing some Socratic questioning, all right? So don't ask them why they believe something. Ask them how they came to believe that thing. And again, this won't change their mind, but it'll at least get them thinking, okay? All right, everybody, that is it for this video. Thanks so much. We made it all the way until the end. I appreciate it. This is my first like real video back in, God, I don't know, like a year over a year has it been that long? I missed ya. And I'm scripting this. I have a little teleprompter app on the laptop right here. So by the way, if you notice anything if my eyes are shooting around in weird directions, like I tried to angle it so that didn't happen. But if you notice anything, leave a comment. I've been doing podcasting for a while and let me tell you something I hate about podcasting is there's no comments, there's no feedback. Like I remember when I started on YouTube, people would be like, oh, your lighting's messed up, your sound's messed up, whatever. Can't do that with podcasting. So let me know how this came out. I'm gonna get back into the groove of this thing, get back more into, you know, my camera presence and all that, whatever. But again, I'm gonna be back doing a ton of videos. This took me forever to make, mainly because I was like setting up the office. Hope you enjoy my sick Lego connection collection. But anyways, it took me a while, but I hope to have at least one video a week. But I'm also thinking about doing like smaller regular commentary videos in between the bigger ones like this. So anyways, if you're not yet, make sure you subscribe to the channel so you don't miss any updates. Make sure you're following me over on social media. It's at the Rewired Soul on Instagram and Twitter. I love chatting with all of you. I love getting book recommendations, video recommendations. I've been loving a lot of different video SAS. It's really why I wanted to come back to YouTube. And lastly, lastly, the other thing is too, that you don't have time to get into in this video is therapy, all right? So if you're interested, especially if you're a young man, all right, down in the description below, there's an affiliate link for BetterHelp Online Therapy. Since I got sober, mental health is a huge, huge, huge part of my life. And it's not just how I stay sober. It's how I stay sane in this crazy world. And I've personally used BetterHelp Online Therapy. It's affordable, it's online. You work with a licensed therapist from your state. It's a pretty sweet deal. You can pick people based on your specific needs, whether it's like depression, anxiety, trauma, addiction, whatever it is. So if you're interested in that, check out that affiliate link for BetterHelp Online Therapy down below. It's a lot better to run into these guys in the ministry here who are often just saying really wrong and harmful and dangerous things, all right? But anyways, again, thank you so, so much for watching. I'm so glad and grateful, especially for all of you who have just like stuck around, you the real ones. And if you're new, don't worry, just hang out, you could be a real one too. All right, but anyways, that's all I got for this video. Make sure you like the video, make sure you subscribe, share it, get the world out. World out, I mean the word out. Get the word out, and I'll see you next time.