So I came across this Jordan Peterson clip from some podcast where he says just the stupidest things imaginable. You don't have to watch it, I will be quoting it here.

A while back a Disney executive mentioned on video, she said "well, I have two children, five and seven, one is trans and the other is pansexual"

This is a lie, the executive in question seems to have five children who are at least in their teens. How unexpected that he would lie like this.

And I just thought mathematically right away, it's like the chance you have a trans kid is 1/3000. That is not a very high chance.

This, too, seems made up, the actual number from quick googling seems to be at least 1/200. Now here comes the good part.

And let's say the chance that you have a pansexual kid is the same, whatever pansexual means. But whatever that is, it is rarer than trans because no one ever even heard about it until 5 years ago.

Absolutely stunning display of logic and valuing facts. The actual number seems to be more than 1/100, btw.

So the joint probability that you have a trans kid and a pansexual kid is 1/9000000

This does not actually matter because of what he says next, but just so we are keeping track, I'll calculate the actual probability.

math

Of five children, the chance of at least one being trans is 1-(199/200)^5 ≈ 1/40. The same for at least one pan kid is 1-(99/100)^5 ≈ 1/20. Given the rough approximations in the probabilities and ignoring likely correlations, this is an order of magnitude calculation, and we will therefore ignore subtracting the probability that exactly one child is both trans and pan, mostly because I do not want to check my calculations (for the record I think it is about 1/5000). We get the total probability of (1-(199/200)5)*(1-(99/100)5) ≈ 1/1000

The probability is around 1/1000, three orders of magnitude more than Kermit's estimate. This is ignoring multiple factors that would make the actual probability significantly higher, most likely. Anyways, I lied before, this is the actual best part:

The odds that you are a pathological narcissist sacrificing you own children [...] is 8999999:1.

This is like saying that if you roll two dice and get two sixes, the chance that the dice are weighted to always roll sixes is 35:1. This is like saying that if you flip a coin and it lands heads, there is a 50 % chance that it actually landed tails and you are just delusional. This is like saying that if you get struck by lightning, the odds are 999999:1 that no you didn't.

The density of falsehoods and nonsense in the clip is just stunning. People unironically call this person a scientist and an intellectual!!

  • emizeko [they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    when the Koch money spigot turns off you will never hear from this guy again

    • Evilphd666 [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Wilks Brothers theocratic cultist billionaires.

      Elections and campaigns

      The Wilks brothers supported Texas U.S. Senator Ted Cruz in the 2016 United States presidential election, contributing $15 million to a super political action committee backing Cruz. They gave $50,000 in 2016 to the candidacy of Jeff Judson, who unsuccessfully challenged fellow Republican Joe Straus, Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, in the District 121 Republican legislative primary in March 2016. Farris Wilks gave $75,000 to Jeff Cason in the 2020 Republican primary in the contest to replace Jonathan Stickland in Texas State House District 92. Their Defend Texas Liberty PAC gave more than $3 million to the Don Huffines 2022 Texas gubernatorial campaign.

      Political media

      The Wilks brothers, along with political commentator Ben Shapiro, helped launch and fund The Daily Wire, a conservative news and opinion website in 2015. Additionally, the Wilks Brothers provided early stage funding to Prager University, a YouTube channel and media company started by Dennis Prager to further conservative causes to a young audience. They are major donors to conservative advocacy group Empower Texans.

          • emizeko [they/them]
            ·
            2 years ago

            thanks. after reading this article I hope they kick the bucket too

            https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3p33j/fracking-farris-dan-wilks-prageru-climate-crisis-denial-shapiro

            • bbnh69420 [she/her, they/them]
              ·
              2 years ago

              Oh they absolutely suck, while the Koch’s are the most open, there are dozens of rich pricks funding the worst people on earth

  • nat_turner_overdrive [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    The popularity of that guy truly feels like being gaslit. There has never been a time that he's been in the public eye and seemed like a healthy, sane individual. He's always been very clearly a man so crippled by his own inner demons that he projects them onto the world around him and it makes him say truly bugshit crazy things. I would even say the university and professors involved in his phd should be stripped of their certifications. Imagine thinking that broken man is equipped to help anyone else.

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      There has never been a time that he’s been in the public eye and seemed like a healthy, sane individual.

      His break out appearance was simply "Owning the Canadian Libs On National TV". All his subsequent appearances were purely performative - debating Zizek on a book he didn't read, smoking DMT with Joe Rogan, playing cowboy dress-up with Ben Shapiro, doing a podcast in which he cries a lot - with the primary goal of selling his latest book.

      Dude doesn't exist save for the wide constellation of other conservative news outlets that promote him. He's purely a creature of marketing. Anyone could fill the role. Thirty years ago, it would have been Oral Roberts or Ted Haggard. Today, he's just the latest incarnation of Right Wing Traditionalist Mysticism.

      • nat_turner_overdrive [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I've seen clips of his lectures that I think predate his anti-trans tirades and even then he seemed so troubled by his own demons he doesn't realize that's what he's talking about - like when he gets into his chaos dragon, ancient knowledge of dna stuff. The people in the faculty around him have to have known he's insane for years.

    • SoyViking [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I believe he has a genuine appeal for a lot of reactionary men. AFAIK he does some basic psychology stuff but it is coded as not being woke/leftist/gay/feminine/etc. thereby making it acceptable to chuds.

  • StellarTabi [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    This, too, seems made up, the actual number from quick googling seems to be at least 1/200. Now here comes the good part.

    it's probably going to be a higher number (unless that's already an overestimate).

    I spent a lot of time in my life not eating sushi, not really knowing what sushi was. When I found out what sushi was, I started eating it like water 24/7. My mom loves sushi, so it was actually a bit strange we spent so long never going to sushi restaurants together, until we did.

    Now if people were getting murdered for eating sushi, and 90% of parents were explicitly forbidding the eating of sushi, and if conservative Christians were trying to build a society where nobody is allowed to know sushi exists before the age of 18, you'd probably guess 1/9000000 people actually like sushi while making up dumb shit like "1/20 children are being indoctrinated by the Japanese, only 1/9000000 are non-crony sushi fans".

    It's not a grand conspiracy that sometimes people want things once they find out it exists.

    • ZoomeristLeninist [comrade/them, she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      even knowing trans people existed and sympathizing with their struggle, i had a mental block preventing myself from even considering that i might be trans. and as soon as i started to allow myself to accept that as a possibility, it surprised me how i hadnt realized i was trans before. we have no control over the things we internalize, and very rarely are we able to consciously confront them. even 1/200 seems low considering how strong the stigma against trans people is

  • HoChiMaxh [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Even though all of this is made up, the idea that someone experiences something that there's a 1/9000000 chance of experiencing is totally normal. That should happen to like a thousand people and should be expected. What would actually be weird is if something had a 1/9000000 chance of occurring and it happened to nobody.

  • keepcarrot [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    The joint probability also assumes that being trans and being pansexual are totally unrelated, which probably isn't true. I would assume that an NB person is more likely to identify as pansexual rather than bisexual compared to genpop, for instance.

    • Abstraction [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 years ago

      And also people in a situation where they feel they can come out are more likely to have siblings that also come out. The family being rich also probably makes it way more likely.

  • AcidSmiley [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    This, too, seems made up, the actual number from quick googling seems to be at least 1/200

    That's for the general population. If you grow up with even slightly higher awareness of the possibility you could be trans, like today's zoomers, that quickly goes up to 3-5%. That means that in older generations, one out of 20-30 people never had the chance to live as their true self, as shown in recent surveys from Canada and the US.

    • FunkyStuff [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Also assumes that the probabilities are independent for two siblings. I'm 100% sure that if one sibling is openly queer and they're both in an environment where that is accepted, there would be a higher than average chance for the other sibling to also be queer.

  • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Children are going to explore their sexuality. All this gender and sexual attraction shit doesn't cement itself until you're much older, and even then only in-so-far as you tend to become monogamous and your libido slows down such that you aren't trying to fuck everything that moves.

    So the odds of you having a Pansexual Adolescent is roughly approaching 1/1, with the only real deviation tending to be Asexuality (which conservatives also seem to think means you're gay, so...)

    I'd say one of the stronger arguments against children undergoing gender conversion is that kids really don't have a well-defined gender until the social constructs are impressed upon them. Even then, its a weak one simply because people are diverse and a one-size-fits-all morality code enforced by a bunch of bigots never comes to a good end.

    But however you slice it, Conservatives being shit at Math is a time honored tradition, whether they're discussing gender theory or climate science or the basics of evolutionary biology.

  • a_fanonist_hexagon [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Oh yeah well I wonder how many people eat only meat and benzos. I therefore conclude that Jordan Peterson doesn't exist

  • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    This is a good example of how Peterson operates and draws people in. He starts off with something most people agree with (celebrities treat their kids really weirdly), and pivots towards, and uses it a way to weave in, transphobia and bigotry.

    • HoChiMaxh [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Basic stats and probability are but the type of math OP is doing definitely isn't lol

      • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]M
        ·
        2 years ago

        Americans didn't learn how to multiply fractions together in elementary school? The math here was like, grade 3 or 4 for me here.

        • Owl [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          Nah it's counting and addition in kindergarten, addition and subtraction in 1st grade, multiplication in 2nd, a black hole made of fractions from 3rd to 7th grade, pre-algebra in 8th, then in high school you have algebra, geometry, algebra 2, trigonometry, and calculus (the last of which you never get to unless you're on an accelerated program).

          The system isn't standardized at all, and yet I've seen this exact pattern in a whole bunch of schools across the country.

          • math_tutor_throwaway [any]
            ·
            2 years ago

            This is correct except on the east coast at least geometry is freshman year of high school (accelerated is geometry in 8th grade and finishes 12th grade with calculus)

        • HoChiMaxh [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          This type of conditional probability isn't just multiplying fractions don't play dumb.

          • math_tutor_throwaway [any]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Nah in that middle part OP is just saying that the chance of having two based kids is the same as 1 minus the odds of not having those based kids, it looks more complicated than it is

            • HoChiMaxh [he/him]
              ·
              2 years ago

              I didn't say it's complicated or that I'm confused, I said this kind of application of complements is not typically done in middle school

  • Awoo [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    This, too, seems made up, the actual number from quick googling seems to be at least 1/200. Now here comes the good part.

    The scottish gov did a study a while back and determined that the hidden number of trans people (not out or not yet identifying) is probably around 1%.

  • FortifiedAttack [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I mean, it's kind of pointless to compare your calculation with his if you assume completely different initial values than he does.

    He seems to assume a total set of 2 children with the chance of being trans being 1/3000, chance of being pansexual also being 1/3000, and anything else being 2998/3000, with trans and pansexual being assumed mutually exclusive.

    I think the calculation then, with the children being an unordered set, would be 2*(1/3000 * 1/3000) = 1/4500000.

    So yeah his calculation would still be wrong.

  • gaycomputeruser [she/her]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    His math is god awful but yours still isn't exactly right either. You can't really do a combination of these as the parent and child knowing the child is queer are not indepenent. A kid that has parents who are openly supportive is more likely to tell their parents they are queer. Same for multiple children.

    Other people have mentioned other problems as well.