My Heroes and Influences
There is great utility in emulating people who have achieved success or embody qualities you would like to see in yourself. Many people in our personal lives and culture represent something of value we would like to see manifest in ourselves. This includes both thinking about one's career and also traits in our personal lives. Mentors, heroes, and influences come in all forms.
Personal influences
My mother comes first as many mothers should. Beyond her imperative as a mother is her attitude. Strong in the face of stress and her kids (but I repeat myself), she carried the weight of the world without complaint. My mom has always been driven to help others, even at risk to herself. After experiencing a severe stroke several years ago she still helps others in the ways she can in the form of crafting projects for the benefit of her kids, grandkids, friends, and stroke support group members. As far as I know this has always been automatic for her. Do kids need something? Want something? They always come first. Even when my sister and I pushed her buttons to no end in various ways, it never changed her attitude. In my personal life no one embodies self-sacrifice as much as my mother. Watch out for her presents though, they may be rigged! Or covered in duct tape. From her I learned to be careful with the taking up of labels for myself, who I am and what I stand for. This came from a youthful rebellion I have written about before. Labels can be dangerous and lead many toward false assumptions and this is why I recoil as harshly as I do when I or those I am familiar with are branded casually as things they are not. You could say Mom instilled in me a healthy sense of caution toward adopting any identity-based beliefs or even something like being an asthmatic.
My sister is as bratty as a sister can be, though I still remember her arguing with bullies who would block the school doors in Oklahoma against her kid brother's entry (or exit -- details are foggy). Just like our mom, she would break back and limb and go without sleep to care for her girls. If she has seen an 8-hour night's rest in the last 16 years, I would be surprised. When she’s not caring for her kids and the opportunity strikes to do something just for herself that would recalibrate her, she does it. Whether she recognizes that this self-care puts her in a better position to care for others, I don’t know. She has also shown me what someone with a steel spine and an independence-driven mindset can achieve. When confronted with a choice to settle for less than she deserves or fight for what’s right, she chooses to fight. Do not pick a verbal altercation with her: you will lose.
My boyfriend has (re)taught me things I knew to be worthwhile in a new way that better helps to guide my actions. He taught me the merit of pursuing different avenues of advancement if one isn't panning out, rather than going in circles and behaving surprised when things end up the same as before. He is also incredibly stubborn when it comes to pushing me outside my comfort zone to try new things. 4 years ago I could not swim and you would not have caught me willingly going into a pool. Now, I can swim serviceably. At the very least I am comfortable enough in the water that if disaster strikes (and in a certain tubing experience, has struck!) I know I am capable of handling it. No one else has ever managed to get me to take those kinds of risks.
Cultural influences
Jordan Peterson has been one of the most maligned and mischaracterized individuals in the public sphere in the last few years. He has nearly a decade of lectures on his YouTube channel regarding the dangers of totalitarianism and ideological excess (no matter which direction they come from). Yet, he has been painted as a villain in the eyes of many ideologues.
The first thing that brought Peterson to public prominence and my attention was his opposition to Bill C-16 regarding the addition of gender identity and expression to the Canadian human rights code. His issue was frequently misunderstood by many claiming that he wouldn’t use the preferred pronoun of a trans person in the classroom, which was not the case and had never happened. Peterson took issue with the compelling of speech which is ultimately what the result would be if you risk fines and jail for refusing to use specific language. He had a rigorous debate on the matter at Queen’s University and further testified to the senate about his opposition to the bill.
Less than a year later there was another bump in popularity for Jordan Peterson after the release of his first book for mainstream audiences and after he was interviewed by BBC’s Kathy Newman. I think that interview is one of those time-capsule moments at least in my life which exemplifies perfectly the frustration in engaging with an ideologue. At every turn what you say or what you try to say is turned inside out and interpreted in the worst possible way because the person cannot seem to conceive that you could have arrived at certain viewpoints or opinions in a rational manner.
After a nearly two-year hiatus in which Peterson battled medical complications from benzodiazepine withdrawal and the potential loss of his wife — who luckily has survived what was supposed to be a terminal cancer diagnosis — Peter was again targeted when he returned to the spotlight and starting his own podcast. The most recent event involved him being caricatured by the writer Tah Nahesi Coates in the new Captain America comics. Therein the primary antagonist "the red skull" is shown promoting a book called "10 rules for life."
Photograph: Marvel, Captain America Comic
Photograph: https://jordanbpeterson.creator-spring.com/
Playing off the new attack from those who can't resist mischaracterization, Jordan and his daughter produced shirts and posters (above) that turned the joke around. "Hail the lobster" instead of "hail hydra" and "tell the truth, and clean your room" -- well-known simplifications of two of Jordan's rules from his first book (“12 Rules for Life: An Antidote To Chaos”). That book, its sequel, and his lectures have directly and indirectly helped more people than can be easily quantified by improving lives and motivating many to kick-start their careers.
"Pursue what is meaningful, not what expedient" is Jordan’s 7th rule, and (while imperfectly followed) it’s always in the back of my mind. In lectures and his book, he expands this: we know what is meaningful by paying attention to ourselves and recognizing when something is tugging for our mind's attention. It can be something as simple as learning a new skill or a craft you have always found yourself drawn to but were never daring enough to attempt. This rule plays well off of the 7th rule in its sequel, “Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life,” in which he tells the reader to “work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens.”
For me, it's writing. Sure I could pursue any number of things. My bachelor’s degree is in geology, my career now is in IT, but at the end of the day I am always playing with ideas and words. My brain runs at a frenetic pace with thoughts I can’t adequately express out loud until they have been written first. I have more ideas than I can pursue with the time available to me. And still I falter and don't follow the rules because I let life get in the way and the ease of distractions pull me away from the effort. Writing is hard, and to do it well requires failing first (like many things). Stressors that make it difficult for me include: when does research end and writing begin? When should a thought conclude, and how do you know when it should continue? What if there is one piece of information that I am missing that ruins the whole idea?
There is so much I would like to convey in any one piece of writing that I resist approaching that dragon in the first place and end up with 20 or more things begun and very few finished, with more to arrive in my thoughts at 4 am demanding expression. Still, I persist ever-slowly toward listening to and following certain rules, even if I am inconsistent. This essay is a new beginning toward some persistence. Peterson's fatherlike advice and ability to stand up to immense scrutiny makes him a valuable mentor anyone could learn a few things from. His rules crystalize valuable life lessons that people in my personal life have also tried to teach me, which didn’t stick until I heard them reframed by Jordan Peterson.
Bret Weinstein is a man who has fought battles of the intellectual sort on many fronts in his life and lost most of them yet he seems to come out wiser and still willing to fight regardless of the threat to his reputation and livelihood. The first, to my knowledge, involved his discovery with Deborah Ciszek at the University of Michigan regarding lab mice. Implications from the discovery suggest that mice being used for testing were compromised in a way that could produce an overestimate of how cancerous something is or an underestimate of the toxicity of a chemical when used in humans. According to Bret, at some point he had a phone call with the Nobel laureate Carol Greider who originally discovered that lab mice had long telomeres and he asked her, “where are you going to publish so that I can cite it?” and he was told that the discovery would be kept “in house.”
His concerns, however, fell on deaf ears, because of what he suspects are other incentives. For instance, getting things right in science is a matter of being able to hypothesize (predict) accurately and often. Enter perverse incentives: The more you succeed at that, the better you are prepared against your peers. Now, say that you have a discovery that only you are aware of. You could take that information into consideration and let no one else know about it and therefore win yourself accolades for predictions based on information you kept to yourself.
Bret's second battle, and the one that I discovered him through, was his defiant stance against the Evergreen state college in Olympia Washington, specifically the administration and a subset of their activist-trained students. Ahead of the University's annual Day of Absence in 2017, the school decided to flip the script. Instead of students and faculty of color choosing to leave campus for off-site events to show, "this is the campus without us in it," they instead requested the white faculty and students to leave campus. Taking issue with the request was treated as a racist act. Bret took issue with the change in a letter in which he wrote: "There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away." Bret and his students who came to his defense were threatened on campus. In one particular incident, a group of students went around with baseball bats looking for him. The events led to Bret getting forced out of the University he taught at for 14 years along with his wife.
There is far more behind the scenes of what happened at Evergreen than the circumstances around the Day of Absence that I will not be able to cover with brevity in an essay that is not about that subject. I recommend that people check out Mike Nayna's documentary. Even more can be found in Benjamin Boyce's 20+ episode "found footage" expose.
In early 2020 Bret and his wife Heather Heying began The Dark Horse Podcast and waded into new battles, whether they intended to or not. In their own words:
On The DarkHorse Podcast, we will explore questions that matter with tools that work. Weekly episodes of "The Evolutionary Lens" are co-hosted with Heather Heying, in which we use an evolutionary toolkit to reveal patterns in nature--including human nature. Other episodes will feature Bret hosting long form discussions. Some guests will be well known, others obscure, but all of them are chosen because they have demonstrated unusual insight. The state and future of civilization will be a recurring theme, so buckle up!
Almost any topic they cover comes with this lens in mind to understand not just how people behave, but any complex system that involves organisms. Early in the pandemic Bret and Heather were extremely concerned about COVID-19, and they still are. They have regularly covered research on the virus from across the globe including not just those published in American journals and covered in American news but also those in Mexico, India, Israel, and more. With their understanding of science generally and evolutionary biology specifically -- together with the research of other highly credentialed individuals -- they have fought for over a year to get the mainstream to cover lab leak origins of SARS-CoV-2 as a hypothesis.
While there is no "smoking gun" on the virus origin there is a body of circumstantial evidence — covered extensively by former Science, Nature, and New York Times writer Nicholas Wade —that leans in a particular direction. Back in January Bret and Heather were guests on Real Time With Bill Maher where they argued that lab leak is and always has been an obvious and reasonable hypothesis, especially considering the virus' place of origin: Wuhan China, which hosts the Wuhan Institute of Virology that was specifically researching bat-corona viruses. It shouldn't require Jon Stewart slamming Stephen Colbert on the subject for it to be an acceptable proposition to discuss in mainstream circles.
Treated as cranks, conspiracy theorists, and Trump supporters (even though they are progressives), Bret and Heather have stood their ground and refused to bow to the demands of thoughtless mobs or bureaucratic institutions about what is worth considering regarding scientific questions. At great risk to their careers Bret and Heather discuss things outside the Overton window (and against YouTube’s terms of service) because they believe the risk is greater if the discussion is not had. They have done and continue to do what Gad Saad would call, "release their inner honey-badger."
Gad Saad is a stubborn man who gets under some people's skin with the way he employs humor to critique his academic colleagues and others. Gad Saad has the unique perspective of being born Jewish in Lebanon and experienced its civil war as a child. He writes briefly about his memories of it in his book “The Parasitic Mind”:
I can still remember sitting around the table on Yom Kippur (the holiest day in Judaism) in 1973 watching the worried look on my parents’ faces as word broke that a combined Arab army had attacked Israel on that holy day. Existential genocidal hatred is not something that one magically and suddenly contracts as an adult; rather, it is instilled insidiously and repeatedly in the minds of otherwise pure and innocent children. I was the only one of my four siblings not to attend a Jewish elementary school. I must have been nine or ten years old, in class at the Lycée des Jeunes Filles, when the teacher asked pupils to state what they wanted to be when they grew up. Typical responses were uttered uneventfully (policeman or soccer player) until one student said, “When I grow up, I want to be a Jew killer,” after which the class erupted in raucous laughter and gleeful claps. I still have the class photos from that era, and that boy’s face is forever etched in my memory.
Gad is one who, to the best of my understanding, has always bristled at orthodoxy – a trait we share. Whenever all agree I raise an eyebrow and think about why and consider what other motivation could there be for all to be in agreement about this particular thing. We are always missing something in our understanding of any topic or situation. Gad Saad brings to bear in his writing an understanding of economics, psychology, evolutionary biology, and business. This is another reason I find him immensely fascinating because he represents an example of what one can make of themselves by carving out their own unique niche in the world across many domains.
Early in his aforementioned book, Saad describes the foundational ideals that have shaped his life: freedom and truth. His principle of freedom influences his disdain for the intelligentsia's attitude toward those like him who refuse to 'stay in their own lane" regarding any subject. One doesn't have to be a well-researched expert in a narrow field to bring something new, even if that new thing is just a different perspective. After all, it was Darwin's study of geology that took his studies in biology in the direction that led to the writing of “The Origin of Species”. Gad Saad does not constrain his thoughts to a narrow stifling orthodoxy; he’s always on the lookout to learn whatever nature can teach us, including human nature. Of his truth ideal he writes:
When I am exposed to intellectual dishonesty and ideological dogma, I respond in a manner that is akin to someone being punched in the face. I experience an adverse emotional and psychological reaction that compels me to fight back. While I am a jovial and warm person, I can become a combative brawler when I witness departures from reason that stem either from willful ignorance or from diabolical, ideologically driven duplicity. The quest for truth should always supersede one’s ego-defensive desire to be proven right. This is not an easy task because for most people it is difficult to admit to being wrong. This is precisely why science is so liberating. It offers a framework for auto-correction because scientific knowledge is always provisional. An accepted scientific fact today might be refuted tomorrow. As such, the scientific method engenders epistemic humility.
I also hold these ideals to be important and feel a similar visceral reaction to certain behaviors. His tenacity is admirable and I am often considering ways to constructively, “release my (your) inner honey-badgers,” as he puts it. In other words, his big ask is to build a steel spine and learn to defend oneself. A lesson I am 32 years into the process of learning. It's difficult to make steel out of clay, but it's something I try to work on. Alchemy works, right?
More could be said of both my personal influences and the cultural influences, though I think anyone reading gets the gist now. Of course I don’t agree with my heroes and influences on all things, yet they all -- in their open authenticity -- have presented me something to be learned, remembered, and improved upon. These are people who have had major impacts on my life and who influence how I look at the world.
In closing I would like to call attention to another rule that rounds out my motivation for writing this, from “12 Rules for Life”, Rule 9: “Assume that the person that you are listening to might know something you don’t.” This is a difficult one to follow for anyone because we all like to hear ourselves talk, to interject with what we think about a matter right away, before understanding the complexities of where someone else might be coming from. Connected to this is the presumption of good faith, that the people in our lives who we may butt heads with on occasion, or often, are not necessarily arguing in bad faith. And while it is difficult to bring any conversation to that level it is a worthy goal.
Unmentioned, but not forgotten: Glen Loury, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff, Viva Frei, Robert Barnes, Douglas Murray, James Lindsay, Peter Boghosian, Carl Benjamin, Melissa Chen, Benjamin Boyce, Ayan Hirsi Ali, Coleman Hughes, Honey Badger Brigade (particularly Karen Straughn and Alison Tieman), Helen Pluckrose, Andrew Doyle, Stephen Fry, and more.