Jordan Peterson: The Video That Will Change Your Future - Powerful Motivational Speech

[Music] if you're hungry it's not a deterministic Drive it's a subpersonality that has a goal and then it has a bunch of action patterns that are going to work in reference to that goal it has a bunch of perceptions that that suit that goal and it organizes your emotional responses around that goal and so to think about it as a personality is it much it's a much more intelligent way to look at it one other thing about Skinner's rats you know Skinner could get rats to do almost everything and he would reward them with food and so he had a simple rat model but his rats were starved down to 75% of their normal body weight so not only were they not social gregarious rats like rats are because they were isolated they're genetically altered from wild rats but they also weren't as complex as a rail route because they were starving and so but you know a starving rat is a pretty good model of a rat and a rat has a pretty good model of a person but our a lot of our models of simple behavioral learning were based on starving isolated rats so anyways how to think about motivation well think about it from the hypothalamic perspective so we could say one thing that motivation does is set goals we could say that emotions track progress towards goals and I'm gonna use that schema even though it's not exactly right so you say well motivation determines where you're gonna aim so if you're hungry you're gonna aim at something to eat and then that will organize your perceptions so that you zero out everything that isn't relevant to that task which is almost everything you concentrate on those few things that are going to facilitate your movement forward when you encounter those things that produces positive emotion as you move through the world towards your goal and you see that things are laying themselves out that facilitate your movement forward those things cause positive emotion and if you encounter anything that gets in the way then that produces negative emotion and it can be like threat because you're not supposed to encounter something that gets in the way it can be anger so that you move it away it can be frustration disappointment grief those would if you had a response that's serious to an obstacle it would probably punish the little motivated frame right out of existence you know so you walk downstairs and I don't know the contracting company and set a wrecking ball through your kitchen it's like that's going to be disappointing you're not gonna keep eating the peanut butter sandwich in the rubble that little frame is going to get punished out of existence and some new goal is going to pop up and it's dead and you know one of the things we're gonna try to sort out is how do you decide when you've encountered an obstacle that's so big that you should just quit and go do something else because that's not obvious you know and you can you can get into counter productive persistence pretty easily so we don't know how people solve that problem it's a really complicated one so anyways we're gonna work on that scenario your hypothalamus pops up micro goals that are directly relevant to biological survival that produces a frame of reference so it's not a goal it's not a drive and it's not a collection of behaviors it's of little personality and the personality has a viewpoint it has thoughts that go along with it it has perceptions it has action tendencies all of that you can see this in addiction most particularly so one of the things that you find often with people who are alcoholic is they lie all the time and that's because when they're they built a little alcohol dependent personality inside of themselves or a big one it might maybe it's 90 percent of the personality and one of that one of the things that component consists of is all the rationalizations that they've used over the years to justify their addiction to themselves and to other people and so the addiction has a personality you know and so when the person is off mod maybe they're addicted to meth or something like that where we know the addiction is more it's it's it's more short-term powerful that I would say than an alcohol addiction he'll say anything and that the the words are just tools used to get towards the goal and if they happen to be deceptive whatever it doesn't matter they're just practical tools to get towards the goal and then when you get towards the goal and you take a nice shot of meth or something like that you reinforce all those rationales that you use to get the drug and then the next time you're even a better deceiver and liar so okay so we're gonna say motivations one way of thinking about as they set goals but is not the right way of thinking about it they produce a whole framework of interpretation and so we're gonna think about that framework of interpretation and then emotions emerge inside of that so that's it so the world is framed motivation set goals you could say the world has to be framed so motivation sets that frame whose goals emotions perceptions and actions and then actions track progress so positive emotion says you're moving forward properly towards your goal and if you encounter something you don't expect you stop that's anxiety it's like oh we're not where we thought we were and so we don't know what to do so we should stop because we don't know where we are what we're doing stop frozen and then the more powerful negative emotions like pain they might make you get out of there so emotions forward stop reverse that's your emotions within that motivated frame so and that's another example of how your mind is embedded in your body you know emotions are like they're they're offshoots of action tendencies that's that's the right way to think about it because action is everything fundamentally so what are some basic motivations most of these are regulated by the hypothalamus by the way and that tells you just how important a control system it is the other thing that's useful to know about the hypothalamus is that it has projections going up from it that are like tree trunks and inhibitory projections coming down that are like grape vines so you can kind of control your hypothalamus as long as it's not on too much but if it's on in any serious way it's like it it wins so partly what you do to stop yourself from falling under the Dominion of your hypothalamus is to never ever be anywhere where it's action is necessary right you don't want to go into a biker bar because you might find yourself in a situation where panicked defensive aggression is immediately necessary you probably don't want that you don't want the panic you don't want the terror you don't want the frenzied fight you don't want any of that you don't want to have to run away in absolute panic so you just don't go there and then a huge a huge part of how we regulate our emotions is just by never going anywhere where we have to experience them and so that has very little to do with internal inhibitory control and everything to do with staying where you belong so okay so basic motivations hunger thirst pain pain is not regulated by the hypothalamus that's a different circuit anger slash aggression thermal regulation panic and escape affiliation and care sexual desire exploration play and you can kind of break those in you can kind of break those into the classic Darwinian categories too and say well there's a set of motivations that go along with self maintenance gotta be your survival ingested and defensive see I've sort of coded them there so the the self maintenance there's an adjustable base ik motivations that go with self maintenance you say that's hunger thirst there's a set of defensive motivations paying anger thermal regulation panic and escape and then there's there's motivations that are associated with reproduction affiliation care and sexual desire and then I put exploration and plays sort of outside of that I would say because those two things serve both of these approximately equally when I went to Harvard I came from the Gil and I had spent a lot of time with my adviser there and a research team that he had trying to understand the genesis of antisocial behavior and I'm among adolescents mostly so well as kids as well antisocial behavior is very persistent so if you have a child whose conduct disordered at the age of four the probability that they will be criminal at the age of fifteen or twenty is extremely high it's unbelievably stable it's a very dismal literature because you see these early onset aggressive kids and and it's persistent and then you look at the intervention literature and you throw up your hands because no interventions work and believe me psychologists have tried everything you could possibly imagine and a bunch of things that you can't in order to ameliorate that so we're really interested in trying to understand for example if you're antisocial by the age of four then there isn't an intervention that seems to be effective so and the standard penological theory is really quite horrifying in this regard because what you see is that male aggression Peaks around the age of 15 and then it declines fairly precipitously and and and sort of normalizes again by the age of 27 and standard penological Theory essentially is this cold-hearted it's like if you have a multi if you have someone who's a multiple offender you just throw them in prison till they're 27 then they age out of it and that's all there is to it that's that's what we've got now there's some downside to that because there's a corollary literature that suggests that the worst thing that you can do with antisocial people is to group them together which is what we do in prisons so so that's a whole mess anyways one of the things we were doing was trying to see if there might be cognitive predictors of antisocial behavior and so we used this battery of neuropsychological tests that was put together at the Montreal Neurological Institute took about 11 hours to administer and hypothetically assess prefrontal cortical function and we computerized that reduced it to about 90 minutes and then assessed antisocial adolescents in in Montreal and found out that they did show deficits in the problem-solving ability that we associated with with prefrontal ability when I got to Harvard I thought well that's interesting we could use the neuro psych battery to predict negative behavior perhaps we could use it to predict positive behavior so I thought well what if we turned the neuro psych battery and over and thought well can we predict grades for example because you know that's a decent thing to predict so we ran a study we ran a study that looked at Harvard kids University of Toronto kids line workers at a Milwaukee factory and managers and executives at the same Factory and what we found was that the average score across these neuropsychological tests they were kind of like games they were game-like you know so in one in one test you had there were five lights in the middle of the screen and a box was associated with each light and you had to learn by trial and error which boy was associated with with each light that was one of the tests so we took people's average score across the tests because they seemed to clump together into a single structure you can do you can find that out statistically if you take a bunch of tests you can find out how they clump together statistically by looking at their patterns of correlations and you might get multiple clumps which is what happens with personality research where you get five or you might get a singular clump which is what happens in cognitive research and we got a single clump essentially and then we were trying to figure out if at the same time I was reading the literature on performance prediction and there's an extensive literature on performance prediction a lot of it generated by the Armed Forces by the way indicating that IQ is a very good predictor of long-term life success and so here's that here's the general rule if your job is simple which means you do the same thing every day then IQ predicts how fast you'll learn the job but not how well you you do it but if your job is complex which means that the demands change on an ongoing basis then the best predictor of success is general cognitive ability and and I learned that the general cognitive ability test clumped together into a single factor that's fluid intelligence or IQ and then we didn't know if the factor that we had found was the same factor as IQ and it and we still haven't really figured out whether or not that was the case because it kind of depends on how you do the analysis but anyways I I got deeply into the performance prediction literature and I found out well if you wanted to predict people's performance in life there's there's a couple of things you need to know you need to know their general cognitive ability if they're going to do a complex job you need to know their trait conscientiousness some of you might have heard that rebranded as grit in a very corrupt act by the way because it's a good predictor of long-term life success freedom from negative emotion low neuroticism is another predictor but it's sort of third on the hierarchy and then openness to experience which is a personality trait is associated with with expertise in creative domains the evidence that now I should tell you so there's such a complicated question I should tell you how to make an IQ test is actually really easy and you need to know this to actually understand what IQ is so imagine that you generated a set of 10,000 questions okay about anything it could be math problems they could be general knowledge they could be vocabulary they could be multiple choice it really doesn't matter what they're about as long as they require abstraction to solve so they be formulated linguistically but mathematically would also apply and then you have those 10,000 questions now you take a random set of a hundred of those questions and you give them to a thousand people and all you do is sum up the answers right from so some people are gonna get most of them right and some some of them are gonna get most of them wrong you just rank order the people in terms of their score correct that for age and you have IQ that's all there is to it and what you'll find is that no matter which random set of a hundred questions you take the people at the top of one random set will be at the top of all the others and it with very very very high consistency so one thing you need to know is that if any social science claims whatsoever are correct then the IQ claims are correct because the IQ claims are more psychometrically rigorous than any other phenomena phenomenon that's been discovered by social scientists now the IQ literature is a dismal literature no one likes it here's why here's an example so here's a little here's a fun little fact for you for liberals and conservatives alike because conservatives think there's a job for everyone if people just get off their asses and get to work and liberals think while you can train anyone to do anything it's like no there isn't a job for everyone and no you can't train everyone to do everything that's wrong and here's one of the consequences of that so as I mentioned the Armed Forces has done a lot of work on IQ and they started back in 1919 and the reason they did that was because well for obvious reasons say let's say there's a war and you want to get qualified people into the officer positions as rapidly as possible or you'll lose so that's a reason and now the Armed Forces has experimented with IQ test since 1919 and in the last 20 years a law was passed as a consequence of that and which was that it was illegal to induct anyone into the Armed Forces who had an IQ of less than 83 now the question is why and the answer was all of that effort put in by the Armed Forces indicated that if you had an IQ of 83 or less there wasn't anything that you could be trained to do in the military that wasn't positively counterproductive now you got to think about that a because the military is chronically desperate for people right there it's not like they're it's not like people are lining up to be inducted right they have to go out and recruit and it's not easy and so they're desperate to get their hands on every body they can possibly manage and then especially in wartime but also in peacetime but then there was another reason to which was the Armed Forces was also set up from a policy perspective to take people in the underclass let's say and train them and move them up at least into the working class or maybe the middle class so there's a policy element to it too and so even from that perspective you could see that the military is desperate to bring people in but well with an IQ of 83 or less it's not happening okay so how many people have an IQ of 83 or less 10% now if that doesn't if that doesn't hurt you to here then you didn't hear it properly because what it implies is that in a complex society like ours and one that's becoming increasingly complex there isn't anything for 10% of the population to do all right well what are we gonna do we're gonna ignore that we're gonna run away from that and I won't believe me we have every reason to or we're gonna contend with the fact that we need to figure out how it is how it is how it might be possible to find a place for people on the lower end of the general cognitive distribution to take their productive and and worthwhile place in society and that isn't just gonna be a matter of dumping money down the hierarchy because giving people who have nothing to do money isn't helpful it doesn't work it's not that simple well so that's kind of an answer to the question of whether or not we should deal with the with IQ forthrightly it's like if you can find a flaw in that logic like just go right ahead it's not like I was thrilled to death to discover all of this by nose by no stretch of the imagination was that the case so so what so IQ is reliable invalid that's the first thing it's more reliable and valid than any other psychometric test ever designed by social scientists by a factor of about three that's fact number one fact number two is it predicts long term life outcome at about 0.3 0.4 which leaves about 85 percent 70 to 85 percent of the story unexplained but it's still the best thing that we have well it's also the case that in places like Great Britain when IQ tests were first introduced they were actually used by the Socialists and they were used to identify poor people who had potential cognitive potential and to move them into higher into Institutes of higher education so there's an upside you know a social upside as well this is something you can't say anything about without without immediately being killed so I'm hesitant to broach the topic but I'll tell you one thing that I did in the last week that's relevant to this so there and this just shows you how complex the problem is first of all we should point out that race is a very difficult thing to define because racial boundaries aren't tight right so and so when you talk about racial differences in IQ you you're faced with the thorny problem of defining race and that's a big problem from a scientific perspective but we'll leave that aside and I wrote an article this week somebody stood up at one point one of my talks and veiss bless their hearts took this particular question and used it as an indication of the quality of the people who are my so-called followers and by the way the quality of my so-called followers is pretty damn high and you can find that out quite rapidly just by going looking at the YouTube comments which are head and shoulders above what the standards said of YouTube comments I can tell you that so someone asked me they're both the Jewish Question right and the implication it was actually someone Jewish and the implication was that Jews are over-represented in positions of authority and power and and I was had just spoken for like an hour and a half and you know this guy had an axe to grind and I thought there's no goddamn way I'm getting into this at the moment and so I I I said I can't answer that question but that's not a very good answer so I wrote a blog post this week and I said look here's the here's the situation all right Jews are over-represented in positions of power and authority but then let's open her eyes a little bit and think for like two or three seconds and think hey guess what they're also over-represented in positions of competence and it's not like we have more geniuses than we know what to do with and if the Jews happen to be producing more of them which they are by the way then that's a pretty good thing for the rest of us so let's not confuse competence with power and authority even though that's a favorite trick of the radical leftist who always failed to make that distinction well why does this over representation occur because it does it also there's also over representation in political movements including radical political movements okay why well answer one Jewish conspiracy okay that's not a very good answer we've had we've used that answer before all right but but do we have an alternative well here's an alternative the average Ashkenazi IQ is somewhere between 110 and 150 which is about one standard deviation above the population average and so what that means is that the average Ashkenazi / European Jew has an IQ that's higher than 85% of the population that's bought higher now that doesn't make that much difference in the middle of the distribution okay but geniuses don't exist at the middle of the distribution they exist at the tails of the distribution and you don't need much of a move at the mean to produce walloping differences at the tails and the tails are important because a lot of where we draw we draw exceptional people from the exceptions right so here's an example another example of the same thing most engineers are male why because men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people and you might say well that's socio-cultural it's like no it's not and we know that because if you stack up countries by their by their egalitarian social policies which you can do quite effectively and then you look at the over representation of men in STEM fields the over representation increases as the countries become more egalitarian so it's not socio-cultural okay now men aren't that much more interested in things than women it's one standard deviation which is about the same difference by the way between the population norm and the Ashkenazi Jews but if you're looking at the person the one person in 20 or the one person in 50 who's most who's hyper interested in things and that's likely to become an engineer then most of them are men here's another example of the same thing men are more aggressive than women now you might ask how much an answer that is best place to look at that is in Sweden where the Galit Aryan policies have been laid out for a long period of time and you can you can get a more direct inference about biology if you took a random man and a random woman out of the population and you had to bet on who was more aggressive and you bet on the man you'd be right 60 percent of the time so that's not that much right it's it's deviates from 50/50 but it's not like ninety ten it's 60/40 okay so so what does that mean well we got a tail problem here again let's say that now you decide to go out on to the extremes of aggression and you identify the most aggressive one in a hundred persons they're all men guess who's in prison those people that's why most of the people in prison are men and so this is elementary part of the problem in our society is that we don't understand statistics we don't understand that you can have relatively small differences at the population level that produce walloping consequences at the tails of the distribution okay so back to IQ one final thing to say about IQ the ethnic differences are difficult to dispense with it's not easy to make them go away you can say well the tests aren't culture fair well here's a test of that so imagine you you test group a with an IQ test and you test Group B with an IQ test and then you look at their actual performance in whatever you're predicting if the test was biased against ethnic group a then it would under predict their performance and that doesn't happen now you could say well there's systemic bias in the performance measures and the potential measures and that's a possibility all right now one other thing about that there's a real danger in the ethnicity IQ debate and they the danger is that we confuse intelligence with value or that we include we we confused intelligence with yet with human value that's a better way of thinking about it and one of the things that we're going to have to understand here is that that's a mistake is that being more intelligent doesn't make you a better person that's not the case it makes me you more useful for complex cognitive operations but you can be pretty damn horrific as a genius son of a [ __ ] right it's morally neutral and we also know that from the psychometric data by the way there doesn't seem to be any relationship whatsoever between intelligence and virtue and so if it does turn out that nature and the fates do not align with our egalitarian presuppositions which is highly probable we shouldn't therefore make the mistake of assuming that if group a or person a is lower on one of these attributes than group B or person B that that is somehow reflective of their intrinsic value as human beings that's a big mistake

Channel: Motivation Madness

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Id: xcXgtki3MlA

Length: 26min 41sec (1601 seconds)

Published: Thu May 17 2018