Wait wait wait, that's not true.

You would struggle to find anyone more interested in abstract ideas than I am. Most of the time I don't even have an internal monologue going because it's superfluous noise on top of the flow of thoughts, most of which are abstract.

I read that passage and see, "Specific irrelevant statement about location, more irrelevant specifics couched in imprecise but evocative language, historical musings that I cannot evaluate the relevance of with this much context, pivot to humility that is rationally bizarre given the speaker's purpose here but perhaps understandable given that making such displays sometimes aids social facility."

I don't Everett's opening at all--not for abstraction's sake, anyway. Indeed, what frustrates me most about such flowery prose is that it takes forever to actually get to the concepts, the abstractions underlying the specific choice of words. "I wanted to understand things (abstractly), and you dumped eighty extra words on me to massage the feelings of people whose feelings are massaged by pretty words."

Now, this isn't to say that people who like abstraction can't embrace the poetry of, well, poetry. It just has very little to do with actual abstraction. It's dispensable. If it helps some people open up their minds and notice larger patterns, good for them! For me, just get to the point, please.

Furthermore, as a master explainer of abstract concepts like evolution, one would be hard-pressed to claim that Dawkins did not like abstraction. "Climbing Mount Improbable" is a testament to an abstract idea with immense and at times almost shocking explanatory power.

I think the difference between Dawkins and Peterson is more likely to be that Dawkins is in love with what is. Not with pretty ideas--though he is quite partial to those, as one can tell from him coming up with the concept of "meme". But a pretty idea is not enough. He wants to know: is it right? Is this how things are? (With more sophistication: does this conceptualization map closely onto reality?)

For Peterson, my sense is that this is less dear to his heart. Of course he doesn't want to be flat-out wrong, but he seems far more willing to tolerate being sorta-right-in-essence-and-I-don't-know-how-right-it-is-but-it-feels-right-so-it-is-probably-right-and-don't-make-me-quantify-how-probably.

Put negatively, Dawkins has no patience at all for rubbish. He wants to identify it and toss it in the bin. He will clean his intellectual room.

Peterson's intellectual room is a comparative mess.

Maybe the mess is vital for human progress. But with Peterson and almost never with Dawkins I worry that the mess is hiding important clues about how to actually progress, and if we were all a bit more like Dawkins in this regard we might collectively be better off.