is his team Dave Rubin, H3H3, um... in searching to see if this is named i came across some reddit posts about applying to it, standard skepticism applies, i have spoilered via individual threads for Mandark's convenience
Dude asked too many questions so they rejected him:
https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/aie2af/letter_i_was_accepted_as_a_peterson_fellow_for/spoiler (click to show/hide)
Dr Peterson, the following is an unedited transcript of the email exchange I have had with Acton since being accepted as a Peterson Fellow. I'm confused. Your message of responsibility speaks to me deeply and it does not seem very "responsible" to ask someone to uproot their life, move across the country, lose a year of wages, go into $65,000+ in debt, all for a program that refuses to answer basic questions about your level of involvement. The Acton MBA seems like a wonderful standard program but Fellows applied for this because of YOUR NAME, not because of Acton. If you just signed off on this as a branding deal I'm profoundly disappointed. I'm flummoxed that you haven't mentioned it once in a public interview that I can find in the past months, not even your recent Q&A.
I spent well over 20 hours working on my submissions for this Fellowship. I'm so sad this time seems to have been wasted.
Perhaps you really are selecting for those "most comfortable with ambiguity" and they will get a chance to work with your team on the revolutionary online university project, I hope that's true, and I wish I could have been a part of it. I can not and will not risk my family's future for something that appears so outwardly unprofessional and sketchy. I hope you understand that I have personally contacted more than a dozen Fellowship Recipients who were fully accepted and rejected the offer for the same reasons I have. We are very unhappy and disillusioned. We are some of your most devoted fans. We deserve answers and an apology. I await your response.
My first email below was in response to my acceptance, I'm happy to provide you screenshots, I wish not to post them publicly to avoid sharing personally identifying information:
CEO (Jeff Sandefer):Hi Topher, I’m replying for Chris, so he can focus on helping the last few applicants with extra financial aid and spend some time with his family. We appreciate the time you’ve spent in the audition process and hope you’ve gotten some value from it. And I applaud your skepticism; it’s a valuable trait. However, it doesn’t sound as if this is the right opportunity for you. The work we’ll be doing together requires a tolerance for ambiguity and will be messy. We’ve got a terrific team and a extraordinary group coming to Austin, but it’s a pioneering bunch. We don’t know many of the answers because emergent growth is unpredictable and we’ll be co-creating the future as we go. As to your questions, there’s a purpose behind every step in the audition process, because with each choice, each of us learns more. For example, we needed to ask for quick turnarounds because we were surprised when over 2300 people answered the call for only 50 spots. With such a limited number of fellowships, we had to rapidly process finalists to assemble the best cohort possible and give each person as timely a response as possible as we filled the last few precious spots. And the last thing we needed was more outreach from Dr. Peterson when we already had far too many qualified people on the waitlist. If you remain interested I’d hope you’d follow what the initial band of Peterson Fellows accomplishes, and if it seems attractive, re-audition for a later cohort where there’s more information available and less risk. Until then, we wish you all the best, Jeff
A number of people are applying and are skeptical, some background on Acton:
https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/a3tpep/peterson_fellowship_acton_mba_something_doesnt/spoiler (click to show/hide)
Does anyone else think there’s something mighty suspicious up with this Acton MBA thing Dr. Peterson is now advertising?
I got the email and jumped at the opportunity, applied immediately, got a reply from some “master teacher” saying my replies were consistent with top candidates and I would be auto forwarded to next round. “That’s cute” I thought.
Reached out to a friend, she applied, exact same thing happened, and we filled that form out in very different ways.
So I went on the site, filled out the form entirely randomly, put my name down as something like “w33dsmoker”, put options in the boxes that weren’t even possible, repeated this three times. Every single application had the same thing “wow congratulations auto forwarded to next round”, top candidate.
But it’s not even just that.
This course starts in February, and seems to be pretty much full time. For a man who’s preaching responsibility and getting your life together this seems like a rather large contradiction in terms. “Please uproot your entire life in 3 months”.
In addition there’s literally no detailed information as to what this course is, where it came from, and how involved Dr. Peterson actually is. If at all.
Does anyone feel something is up here? Perhaps some data gathering exercise, something gone massive wrong, or just a selling of the “Peterson” name to some institution?
I just completed step 2 and preparing for step 3. You need to provide professional history, educational history, link to your LinkedIn profile, video response to a dilemma they pose and a Wonderlic test (link provided). I will complete this and let you know what happens next.
I might be able to offer some perspective. I too have been accepted, but I have some "ties" to the Acton founder, Jeff Sandefer.
So it should be known that Jeff Sandefer is a somewhat conservative "activist." He founded the Acton Institute, which is a think tank that promotes individual liberty, and the Acton Academy, a homeschooling program that's based in the Hero's Journey (and challenging the modern public school system). He has been on the board of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which is a conservative/libertarian group that advocates for economic freedom and individual liberty in Texas. He's spoken at Freedom Works too.
I spoke to someone who is personal friends with Sandefer (I promised not to disclose their name, so I'll just refer to them as "Earl"). Earl is like Sandefer - a very wealthy entrepreneur. From what Earl said, it sounds like the program is trying to get students to be able to have at least one one-on-one session with JBP. But it doesn't sound like JBP will be very involved besides that. Sandefer is a big believer in a lot of what Peterson announces. Note that Sandefer started Acton b/c he was fed up with the tenured business academics standing in the way of innovation.
It may be that JBP just accepted the deal knowing Sandefer is a big believer in individual liberties (he's spoken at FreedomWorks), and that Sandefer's school is different enough and not to bureaucratic to be able to accept JBP's name.
So, take what you will from this, but I figured I'd add this.
You got a voicemail and everything? All I got was the following email:
"Dear ________
Congratulations again on making it to the finals of the Peterson Fellowships. Because of the high volume of top quality auditions, we’re having to make some difficult decisions as we get to the final selections and hope you will take a special test recommended by Dr. Peterson’s team to help us with these final selections.
Are you up to the challenge? If so, here are your next steps:
Watch this video
Take this assessment within the next 72 hours (please allow at least 45 minutes to complete the assessment).
Sincerely,
Acton MBA Admissions Team"
What do you think of this? It doesn't seem to resemble your experience at all. I'd like to find out whats on the other end of the assessment but I wont be able to complete it until tomorrow. Maybe they had their initial draft picks, and then their second ones? I guess I'd fall into that camp ?
Peterson himself explains the way to transform how the world learns:
https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/8h9fis/last_night_in_dc_jbp_expanded_on_the_direction/spoiler (click to show/hide)
I met today with my now three-person team to further develop the online university. We're employing a variety of statistical and computational strategies aimed at mapping out the most relevant domains of knowledge, as well as developing technology that will help people assess their knowledge in those domains, so they will be able to determine what they know and what they have yet to learn.
Initially – we’ll try to get beta users to do this to begin with – we want you to submit questions and we want you to submit the source of the answer to the questions. And then we’ll put the questions up and have people vote on their utility but also answer them, and then we can rank-order the questions in terms of difficulty.
You can do a process called item response theory. So, imagine you take a multiple choice test, and then you give a score on it, and then you analyze each of the questions: the good questions will be answered correctly by the people who did well on the test. And so you can analyze every single question for its utility as a marker for the knowledge domain. So you can organize questions – if they’re contributed by a large number of people – with regards to the utility of the questions. and so, we envision – to begin with – to set up a system that would enable people to map their domains of knowledge and then to chart a pathway to learning more. So that’s one set of modules, let’s say. We also want to figure out how we can help people learn to write and to speak and to think and to read, so there will be a knowledge domain and skill domain.
Now, how can you help? At the moment you can’t. it’s not easy to have people help on things. It’s hard to organize. But we do want to use as many people as we possibly can. Because one of the things we want to build into the system is a distributed administration, so that it’s not dependent on any one to administer…. So that it’s self-organizing and self-improving, so that the system will just get better and better as people use it. And so we’re going to try to build that into the architecture.
Now, I don’t know if we can pull this off. And like I said, it’s premature to even talk about it. But that’s the sort of thing we’ve started to discuss. As soon as we can possibly manage it, we’ll start inviting people to contribute, because we can build huge databases of questions very, very rapidly if we have lots of users. And if we get the statistical processes right, we can really start to map out these domains of knowledge.
So we’re thinking that would be a good way of making testing non-punitive. ‘Cause if you’re at high school or university and you take a test and you fail, it’s like someone’s beating you with a stick. Your ignorance is revealed, but in a catastrophic way. This would do it differently. It’d say, “Look: you know about as much about biology to put you above 20% of the people who’ve done this exam. So, that’s not too bad, it’s not nothing. You’re better than 1 in 5. But if you want to know more about it, here’s a pathway forward. You spend 15 hours on this and you’ll put yourself up in the 30th percentile.” And you can do that with all sorts of different domains. And so hopefully we can make those pathways to knowledge available to everyone…
So the goals are:
To educate the largest number of people possible
With the minimal possible overhead and cost
In the most efficient possible way
That’s the mission statement. And I think we’ve got the technology - especially if people collaborate on this - to do that... to make a deadly, deadly learning system.
I'm surprised at how negative these threads about it on the r/JordanPeterson subreddit are, especially looking at what I guess is the normal content for the subreddit, at least these people are being skeptical about their wank dad though they seem to think it's less his fault and he, as the Tsar in the desiccated castle, may be unaware
