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INTRODUCTION

The specialized, personalized report you will receive after completing the understandmyself.com process will help you understand your personality in great detail, and aid you substantially in your understanding of others. It will help you determine what jobs suit you and why, what sort of people you are likely to find compatible (and incompatible), where your strengths and weaknesses lie and, perhaps most importantly, just how profound the differences between individuals actually are. It isnt only that we differ in our opinions. We differ in how we perceive the world, how we filter our facts, and how we arrange our goals and actions. Appreciation for the genuine differences between people can help you orient yourself in the world, and appreciate the truly diverse viewpoints necessary to make the complex systems of society function, as well as increasing your comprehension of the singular and unique combination of basic traits and subsidiary aspects that characterize you, personally.

Over the last fifty years, specialists in the measurement of personality (a field known as psychometrics) have been applying advanced statistical techniques such as factor analysis to study the language people use to understand themselves and each other. According to the lexical hypothesis the primary guiding idea behind such work each and every human language contains a relatively complete description of the important similarities and differences between individuals. Language has encapsulated such description because human beings are exceptionally social, and need to understand each other to cooperate effectively and avoid conflict.

Most of the work done to understand personality has been conducted on the adjectives that people use to describe each other (words such as happy, sad, nice, hard-working, and creative). Psychometric specialists have given extensive lists of such adjectivessometimes as single words, sometimes as phrases, and sometimes as sentencesto many thousands of people, and used statistical techniques referred to earlier to determine how the words group together. People who are likely to describe themselves as sad, for example, are also more likely to describe themselves as fearful, anxious, uncertain and volatile, and less likely to describe themselves as cool, collected, calm and stable. The same applies in other domains: people who are nice are compassionate, empathic, caring and soft, while their polar opposites are hard, competitive, blunt and tough. Five such dimensions of variation (the Big Five) have been identified, cross-culturally. The two just described correspond to neuroticism and agreeableness, respectively. The three remaining dimensions include extraversion, which is a measure of sociability; conscientiousness, a measure of dutifulness and reliability; and openness to experience, a measure of creativity and interest in ideas. The understandmyself.com process, based on a personality scale known as the Big Five Aspects scale (developed by Dr. Colin DeYoung, Dr. Lena Quilty, and Dr. Jordan B Peterson in Dr. Peterson's lab) extends the Big Five description, breaking down each of the five traits into two higher-resolution aspects.

Excerpt from:

Understand Myself - What You Need to Know

Cats are uniquely positioned in the animal kingdom. While they can digest vegetables and other foods ours love licking the caps of olive and coconut oils, and don't get me started on cheese these killers were designed to exclusively consume meat. Obligate carnivores need plenty of it for optimal health.

Humans, relatively weak predators for most of history, are equipped with different digestive systems. For example, we need fiber. Yet we're adaptable: we can survive on a stark diversity of nutritive sustenance. From Arctic whale blubber feeders to the equatorial ital vegetarian diet, we turn most anything into food, for better or worse.

Vegans eschew any animal product whatsoever, up to and (sometimes) including honey. At the opposite end of the spectrum are carnivore dieters, or, as their preference has become known, carnivory. Forget low-carb; this clan eats no carbs.

The diet's most famous proponent is probably Jordan Peterson, the Canadian professor who already boasts of a long list of controversial topics in his resume. Inspired by his daughter, Mikhaila, who reportedly recovered from a series of autoimmune problems stemming from juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. According to The Atlantic,

"Some unknown process had triggered her body's immune system to attack her joints. The joint problems culminated in hip and ankle replacements in her teens, coupled with 'extreme fatigue, depression and anxiety, brain fog, and sleep problems.'"

At 15, Mikhaila began an elimination diet, which is arguably the most reliable means for discovering food allergies. Starting with a popular target, gluten, she kept going until all that was left was "beef and salt and water." Noticing his daughter's progress, Peterson began the diet, which he claims helped him shed 50 pounds in seven months.

Not that he's completely happy about it. While he stopped snoring, overcame autoimmune conditions, shed himself of psoriasis and gingivitis, slept better, cured leg numbness, and threw out his antidepressants, the diet is allegedly "a little hard on your social life."

I concur. When I first met my wife, she tried, gently, as people courting do, to explain why vegans, which I was at that time, are difficult to eat with. Like Peterson, switching to a ketogenic diet cleared up a number of long-standing health conditions. The dietary move also allowed my wife to be less gentle and more honest, the best course of action when discussing emotional issues. Some vegans are difficult to eat with.

Yet so are carnivorists, apparently.

Humans evolved by ingesting and digesting whatever nourishment was at hand. Trial and error watch enough clansmen die from eating that type of mushroom, don't eat it. An archaic scientific brain emerges: learning through self-reflection. The other perished; I must not follow.

Yet with so many decisions now available we've become paralyzed. With everything right here in this aisle, I'll choose nothing, or just one thing so I don't have think too much about it. Yet thinking always comes, it's what our brains do, with a caveat: it requires justification. This food becomes the focus, so let's make of it a religion.

Carnivory certainly has its acolytes. Health benefits certainly follow a severe change of diet, if you're eliminating the source of your ailments. Modern humans are carbohydrate junkies. The macronutrient exploits our brain's reward system, especially in the form of sugar. What was once a rare source of pleasure has become the major staple of our diets. Cut that out and you'll be healthier.

What replaces carbs matters. The ketogenic diet holds up in the short-term, but evidence that it's healthy over time is sketchy and sparse. Removing the constant assault by sugar on your microbiome is essential. Relying on beef and salt as the only forms of sustenance, however, looks equally foolish. University of Chicago's Microbiome Center faculty director, Jack Gilbert, breaks it down.

"Your body would start to have severe dysregulation, within six months, of the majority of the processes that deal with metabolism; you would have no short-chain fatty acids in your cells; most of the by-products of gastrointestinal polysaccharide fermentation would shut down, so you wouldn't be able to regulate your hormone levels; you'd enter into cardiac issues due to alterations in cell receptors; your microbiota would just be devastated."

Let me clarify the part about vegans being difficult. Food is a shared experience. The ritual of eating is an important bonding mechanism. There's a reason samosas are Indian and pizzas are Brooklyn: cuisine lives at the intersection of environment and culture. Cultures spring up, in part, from the food they produce and share. It is arguably our most sacred ceremony, as it is what gives us life.

Chefs devote their lives to exploring an infinite palette of flavor profiles. The very few that make their way onto your plate consist of what they believe to be the height of their passion. Then the person you're dining with sends it back because it has soy, or butter, or whatever fad toxin is being eliminated that day.

We should applaud the creative genius and strong will many chefs displays when branching out into plant-based restaurants. Diversity is the mark of a powerful imagination, one of our brain's unique qualities among the animals. Simultaneously we must recognize the neuroses too much choice has created. An animal that starves itself due to the psychological chains of orthorexia is a creature suffering from the ravages of affluence. Let's not pretend otherwise.

Which can be as unhealthy as a gluten allergy, if not more so. While Mikhaila's body went into remission for eating a few dashes of pepper on a steak for three weeks (or her father's month-long remission from a bit of apple cider vinegar), she can freely drink bourbon and vodka. As James Hamblin writes,

"The idea that alcohol, one of the most well-documented toxic substances, is among the few things that Peterson's body will tolerate may be illuminating. It implies that when it comes to dieting, the inherent properties of the substances ingested can be less important than the eater's conceptualizations of them as either tolerable or intolerable, good or bad. What's actually therapeutic may be the act of elimination itself."

What is likely toxic to the body is the idea that a particular food is toxic to the body. A 2018 study showed that just thinking you didn't have a protective gene against obesity changed the physiological response of volunteers, causing them to be inclined to eat more. Just as sexual arousal begins in our brains, not our loins, our connection to food is in our heads more than our bellies.

In 12 Rules For Life, Peterson writes that "Order, by contrast, is explored territory." The contrast was chaos, unexplored territory, "the domain of ignorance itself." As Hamblin notes regarding this extreme dieting, restriction brings with it order. Yet what it lost the pleasure of sharing meals and exploring the world's unique contributions to cuisine does not seem worth the sacrifice.

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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook.

Related Articles Around the Web

Excerpt from:

Jordan Peterson: Is the carnivore diet safe? - Big Think

The other week, I had the distinct pleasure of recording a radio dialogue with Justin Brierley and best-selling British author/journalist Douglas Murray for the Unbelievable? program. We were very fortunate to catch Douglas and pin him down, coming off one of his routinely long legs of travel (we last found him in Mexico, I think) and still juggling a nightmarish schedule that kept us on our toes up to the early morning of recording. Thankfully, all was well in the end, and with Douglas adequately tanked up on coffee, followed by more coffee and then another cup of coffee, we enjoyed a very fast-paced 75-90 minutes together. Our goodbyes were warm but of necessity brief, to all our regret. While my readers wait for the program to air on January 3rd, here are some after-thoughts as a preview of coming attractions.

I first discovered Douglas in the summer of 2018 when preparing to write what would become a viral hit piece about Jordan Petersons dialogues with Sam Harris,Sam Harris Asks Questions Jordan Peterson Cant Answer.It was only the second or third thing I wrote after joining Patheos, but it would take on a life of its own and launch me into the circle of commentary on Jordan Peterson and the wider phenomenon known as the Intellectual Dark Web. Primarily famous in the UK and European pond, Douglas Murrays name rang no bells when I first saw that he would be moderating/joining the UK leg of the dialogues. By the time I came to write the piece, I had already familiarized myself enough with Douglas to know that he was far more than a third wheel in the debate and devote some space to his contributions.

Douglass body of work and thought quickly proved a much richer mine of material than I expected, on an impressively wide array of topics political and non-political. In fact, while he is best known for the former, it was some of the latter that interested me most. And among his areas of political focus, it was not necessarily his signature issues of immigration and Islam that drew and kept my strongest interest. Rather, what struck me most in getting to know Douglas through his various books, articles, speeches, etc., was the sense that I had stumbled onto one of the worlds last old humanists. (Well, that plus the sense that this guy and I would have been thick as thieves in high schoolbook thieves, natch. Any man who self-confessedly upgrades his favorite books from soft to hard-back, only to be stuck with two copies because he made notes in the soft copy so he cant get rid of that now, is a man after my own heart.)

Anyhow, humanism is a word now fraught with baggage in Christian circles, with some good reason. Many self-identified humanists proudly associate it with an aggressive rejection of the Christian faith. Nevertheless, it is a word I have argued Christians should be stealing back for themselves. I steal it back unblushingly on my own profile with the description Christian humanist. Ive developed my own philosophy of Christian humanism at some length in my contribution to the forthcoming anthology Myth & Meaning in Jordan Peterson (Lexham, March 2020the essay is entitled The Image of Christ: Peterson as Humanist). But if someone were to ask me for the short version, my new favorite short version is a riff on something Roger Scruton once said: I see the world, and the individual people in it, as lovable.

In context, Scruton was originally criticizing post-modern culture, specifically the way it desecrates the human person through art deliberately made orthogonal to beauty. This kind of art typifies a loveless culture, a culture that does not see the world as lovable. It is fundamentally anti-human. Thus, the task of the true humanist, to be a lover of mankind, is essentially counter-cultural. I would assert that it is also essentially Christian.

Why, then, do I find such a kindred spirit in Douglas Murray, who, despite my best efforts, didnt leave our conversation rushing to reaffirm the lost Anglican faith of his youth? (He was, in fact, rushing to meet his publisher for a last-minute late lunch, with humblest apologies for causing such a nuisance.) Its because I believe we each in our own way have taken up the humanists task. In a recent interview with Scotlands The Herald, he says that he doesnt love nations in the abstractEngland in the abstract, Scotland in the abstract. Rather, I love people. I love things about the people.

We both of us also recognize the Christian essence of the humanists task, even though Douglas still does so as a self-described Christian atheist. He takes this moniker both as a recognition of his abiding love for Christian language/liturgy/culture and a recognition of the Judeo-Christian bedrock that makes him wonder out loud whether human life would still be sacred in an atheist world. Douglas recognizes that he cant escape this bedrock underlying his basic instinct that while human beings are manifestly not equal in a host of outward characteristics, they are still equal in value.

As he discusses in this dialogue with Jordan Peterson (transcript here), it is this instinct that leads him to back away slowly when the odd fan asks him why he never talks about the IQ question. He urges anyone who shows an unhealthy curiosity in this area to join him. Agreeing together, both he and Peterson broadly condemn the pernicious conflation of difference in economic worth with difference in intrinsic worth. Here Douglas borrows a line from novelist Iain McEwan that hes used more than once, which is that we most of us eventually come to realize the nicest person we know may never have read a book. (Theres something about the fondness with which Douglas always lingers on this line that makes me wonder whether perhaps, for him, it might be more than hypothetical.) He wonders uneasily whether, best-selling books by Steven Pinker notwithstanding, we havent really progressed so very far beyond the 20th centurys blood-stained pages.

Douglas also has an instinct which he described to me as not just an instinct, but a drive to affirm the essential meaningfulness of life. Like Whitman, he replies to the question Oh me, oh life of the questions of these recurring, what good amid these oh me, oh life? with the answer That you are here. That life exists. Or, to quote one of his favorite lines from Rainer Maria Rilke in translation, Being here means so much. In a testy, must-read Easter debate about euthanasia with a far more calloused colleague at The Spectator, Douglas unapologetically embraces and repeats that simplest, least ironic of catch-phrases: Choose life.

I highlighted a case study from his latest book,The Madness of Crowds, about a young Belgian woman who first mutilated and then killed herself as she tried to become a man and only found that she had unlocked new depths of misery. The Belgian state was by her side the whole way, holding her hand even to the grave. Its impossible to read Murrays account of this case and not sense from him a deep sadness, an instinctive protective motion of the heart towards a soul who needed help to live and found only help to die. Its an instinct that quietly suffuses much of his commentary, inspiring me to give him the honorary title equal opportunity humanist in my review of the book. When we talked, he shared his particular burden for the listless and depressed, whom he constantly wants to encourage like Edgar encourages his blind father Gloucester in King Learas the old man falls to what he thinks is his death. Despite the fact that he has only a few more minutes of life, it is in those last few minutes that, as Douglas puts it, he discovers everything. If Douglas could leave people with one message, it would be the message that thats worth hanging around for, if you would only just hold onfor a few minutes more, hold on.

What, then, does it mean, this instinct, this drive? Douglas sees and accepts it by the natural light, like Auden in Precious Five accepts that he must bless what there is for being. What else are we made for, agreeing or disagreeing? But the question remains, to what might this point? To what, to be Augustinian about things, might this tend?

I had far too little time to discuss with Douglas where I think it tends. (For this dialogue at least, though he has graciously left his door open for more in the future.) The final third of our conversation turned to questions around Christianity, as he briefly reviewed his archetypally Victorian crisis of faith while I briefly encapsulated how I was raised to view faith and reasonas dancing partners, not enemies. When our host asked Douglas what it would take for him to make his way back, he told us only half-jokingly that he would need to hear a voice.

This challenge was a left turn, to say the least. But Douglas took pains to explain that he doesnt intend to trap Christians with it. He is quite serious: If youhave heard a voice, he would very much like to know about it. To the milquetoast politically correct Anglican who responds to the challenge with a Come come, my dear fellow, dont tell me youre actually asking about an actual voice from heaven, Douglas would say Why not? He would like to know. He would like to listen. Even if you honestly cant fake it and say youve heard a voice, at least putsomethingdown on the table. At least put some damn skin in the game, like the persecuted Christians in Africa and the Middle East, or the Christians in the American black church who dare to forgive their killers, whom Douglas regards with reverent awe. Otherwise, whats the point of it all?

There was limited time to convey that I understand what he means. I understand, I think, what hes looking for. I hope I began to nudge him towards it. I had the foresight to bring along a few of my dead friends in glorious 19th-century binding and briefly wave them at Douglas as we said our goodbyes, and to remind him of C. S. Lewiss warning that a young atheist cant be too careful of his reading material. (It amused me to realize that Ive been a Christian for over 20 years, longer than Douglas has been an atheist.) He seemed quite touched.

I have called Douglas the gay humanist in the title of this piece for purposes of clickbait (you did click, didnt you?) but Im afraid now that Ive got you all to click and read to the end I have no great reward in store. This is because it turns out I actually dont particularly care, and neither does Douglas. This was a source of some slight hilarity at one point in our dialogue, in which I waved about the woman card I never use while Douglas reflected on The Guardians mysterious reluctance to say Hey, lets give Douglas a good write-up, hes gay!

In fact, I do like to think of Douglas as a gay humanist in another and older sensethat is, the sense of men who go gayly in the dark. With such men, I will gladly walk arms linked, for only by such men is darkness pushed back one day more.

The week I recorded our dialogue, I went with a few friends to sing carols at an out-of-the-way country nursing home where an old neighbor friend of ours is spending her last days. I still had Douglass voice in my head as we walked around with our tidings of comfort and joy while the residents listened, some more responsive than others. A friends daughter walked around distributing candy canes. At one point, she came to one woman lost in Limbo. The girl wasnt sure what to do, so my father helped her. The woman eventually did take the candy.

Douglas, of course, was not there in person. Still, I shouldnt have thought it strange to turn and find him smiling over my shoulder, leaning forward to whisper, Thats worth hanging around for.

C. S. Lewis said that friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another What? You too? I thought I was the only one! Like Rick Blaine at the end of Casablanca, I believe this is only the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

More here:

My Friend the Gay Humanist | Esther O'Reilly - Patheos

Tillamook is home to a marriage longer than most people in Oregon have been alive.

Dr. Roy and Claire Peterson, arguably one of the most inspiring pairs of people in the county, will celebrate their 75th wedding anniversary Dec. 31 surrounded by friends and family.

Roy, 96, and Claire, 96, met as freshmen at Washington State College in Pullman, Wash. on a blind date, over a Coke, in the Cougar Cottage in September 1941 and were married Dec. 31, 1944 in Colfax, Wash.

Soon after graduation from Washington State, in the 1940s, the two permanently relocated to Tillamook where Roy or Doc if you prefer was a veterinarian and Claire worked as a secretary before the couple started their family.

They have three children: Anne (Richard), Jean (David), and Eric (Loretta); 11 grandchildren: Erika (Julio), Robert (Tammy), Lindley, Leslie (Nathan), Sarah (Scott), Sean, Meredith, Katie (Jordan), Jessica (Greg), Patrick, and Troy (Kelly); and three great-granddaughters: Georgia, Hannah, and Zoey.

Seventy-five years together has given the couple innumerable memories and stories they are always happy to share with those around them. In their three-quarters of a century in Tillamook, both have served on numerous organizational boards and have been very socially active.

Roy and Claire still live in their Tillamook home, go on daily walks, enjoy well-made tuna fish sandwiches topped with bread and butter pickles, and laugh several times every day.

Happy anniversary you two love birds! You are so very much loved. Now go turn on Glenn Millers String of Pearls.

Go here to see the original:

Peterson 75th Wedding Anniversary | Community - Tillamook Headlight-Herald

The Jordan B Peterson Podcast (archive below) features audio versions of some of the most popular and compelling of Dr. Petersons YouTube videos, interviews with some of the worlds most compelling thinkers (Camille Paglia, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, General Stanley McChrystal, Iain McGilchrist, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, among many others), lectures from the 12 Rules for Life tour unavailable anywhere else, as well as an assortment of audience Q and As (a particularly popular feature). We hope to include a wider assortment of great scientists, in particular, in the upcoming year.

Philosophical and psychological topics include

Dr. Peterson concentrates primarily on the role of the individual, and the responsibilities that accompany mature individuality, assuming that productive, engaging, peaceful and otherwise highly functional social systems depend on the idea of the sovereign person, and the burden and opportunity of adventure, vision and destiny that accompany that idea.

On March 24th 2019, The Jordan B Podcast partnered with Westwood One, the largest audio network in the US, in the hopes of bring the podcast and its ideas to a larger audience, as well as to effectively and carefully monetize the endeavour so that it could continue to grow, and so that Dr. Petersons many other projects could find security and support. This new version debuted March 24, and features his daughter, Mikhaila Peterson, as co-host. We hope that this partnership improves the podcast during its second year, providing an optimized balance of news, conversation and (who knows) a bit of humor to the main lecture, interview and Q and A content.

Read the original here:

Jordan Peterson | Podcast