Project De-Bullshitification: A Field Guide to Hunting Profundity

It starts, as it so often does, with a conversation. My brother, like many others, has fallen under the spell of Jordan Peterson. He speaks of the man’s ideas as “profound,” and points to the dense, academic language as proof. The logic is a curious one: if you have to consult a dictionary to understand a sentence, the sentence must contain a deep truth. It’s a compelling idea, but one that demands interrogation. Is it genuine depth, or is it a rhetorical smokescreen?

This question is the starting point for a project: a systematic effort to go through Peterson's work and distinguish the genuinely insightful from the intellectually fraudulent. The goal is not to dismiss everything out of hand—that would be intellectually lazy. The goal is to hunt for the bullshit, to isolate it, and to understand the function it serves.

Step One: Isolating a Specimen

Every hunt needs a target. I turned to my digital toolkit, using NotebookLM to scan Peterson’s writings for the kind of "garrulous and bombastic" language my brother found so profound. The tool provided a list of suspect phrases, a rogues' gallery of academic-sounding terms. From that list, I pulled a perfect specimen:

"Science allows for increasingly precise determination of the consensually validatable properties of things, and for efficient utilization of precisely determined things as tools (once the direction such use is to take has been determined, through application of more fundamental narrative processes)"

This sentence is a masterpiece of its kind. It sounds intelligent, respectful of science, and philosophically rigorous. It’s the kind of statement that makes you nod along, feeling smart for simply having read it. It was the perfect place to begin the dissection.

Step Two: The Dissection

The first step in any analysis is to translate the jargon. Stripped of its academic costume, the sentence says something quite simple: Science is great for figuring out how things work and building tools, but our myths and stories must tell us what to do with them.

On the surface, this seems reasonable. But the bullshit is often in the setup, not the punchline. A critical look reveals the rhetorical tricks at play:

1. The False Choice: It presents only two options—directionless science or science guided by "narrative"—conveniently ignoring the entire history of secular ethics.

2. The Power Grab: By calling narratives "more fundamental," it performs a subtle but significant demotion of science, placing it in the role of a mere tool awaiting instruction from its mythological masters.

3. The Hidden Premise: It smuggles in the unproven assumption that the only valid source of human values is ancient story, a premise that just so happens to be the foundation of Peterson's entire worldview.

What appeared to be a profound statement on the limits of science was, under scrutiny, a Trojan horse designed to subordinate reason to myth.

The Path Forward

This single sentence is a microcosm of the larger challenge. The book is filled with similar linguistic traps: The Logos, The Dominance Hierarchy, Chaos and Order. Each term carries a similar veneer of academic weight, and each demands the same rigorous, critical dissection.

The project is now clear. I will proceed, chapter by chapter, not as a cynic dismissing everything, but as a surgeon with a scalpel. The goal is to weed out the bullshit, to separate the parts that are genuinely insightful from the parts that are merely dressed up to look that way.

The hunt is on.

On the Irony of the Algorithm

To be clear, it’s not lost on me that there is a deep irony in using an AI to help dissect the work of a man who champions the human "Logos." One could easily label this project as intellectually lazy—outsourcing the hard work of critical thinking to a machine, and the accusation deserves to be met head-on.