I spent six months of private study in my late 30s learning this. My husband assures me that most people have an intuitive understanding of what it means.

Thanks to all those responding to this question.

I understand if some prospective adoptive parents prefer not to adopt children who are in foster care (who are eligible for adoption).

But if they make that choice, I would prefer that they not bemoan the time and expense concomitant with that choice.

My husband and I adopted our two sons from foster care when each of them was five years old. It's been challenging, but we didn't choose to become parents because we thought it was the soft option.

I can't imagine an engineering degree I could have done.

Background: I went to high school in the late 1970s. We had geometry (Euclid style, not Descartes) and an algebra class for the students who were going to university.

Took an accelerated trigonometry class during summer bridge, and then failed Calculus I three times my freshman year.

That's when I shifted my academic goals from the natural sciences to history. I still retain my youthful enthusiasm for the sciences, which is why I learned about complex numbers in the first place.

Most of my friends view my ongoing efforts to understand mathematics as a charming eccentricity. As my eldest brother put it, paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, 'all logarithms are quite useless.'

Excellent recommendation.

I didn't learn about imaginary numbers until several decades after leaving college.

The predictable result? Lobsters flock to defend the truth of Daddy Lobster.

I don't accuse him of promoting inceldom as such. But he definitely promotes the view that 'sex' is something women have that men are supposed to get from them. As for alt-right, no. He's promoting the paleoconservative views that were current around the time he and I were born. Gender roles that were the product of an industrial/post-industrial economy and society are represented as the natural and inevitable result of immutable human nature.

Jungianism is no more scientific than Freudianism, and depicting women as 'chaos dragons' is not philosophy or psychology.

By his own account, he's experienced chronic anxiety and depression most of his adult life. It makes sense that he would endorse the belief that 'life is suffering'.

Given that one of the Rules is 'be precise in your speech', it's noteworthy that getting JBP to give a definite answer to a question is like nailing jelly to a cloud.

'Dr. Peterson, are you a Christian?'

Most people would answer either yes or no.

Since nobody I know in offline life knows who he is, the only evidence I have for the impact his message has on people are his supporters online.

Who are the people whose lives he's improved? What did they learn from him that they hadn't known before, and what did it enable them to do that they weren't able to do before?

Throwing rocks at Lunchbucket was harsh.

Judging a clinical patient and then writing vituperatively about her in a book was unforgiving.

Personal note: I'm about the same age as JBP, and everything useful and helpful in 12 Rules is something I'd learned before I graduated from high school. Except I learned it without the half-baked Jungianism and retrogressive gender ideology.

Like the saying goes, his work is both good and original. The good parts aren't original, and the original parts aren't good. It's like a pint of pure spring water to which a tablespoon of raw sewage has been carefully added. When you object to the sewage, his fans demand to know what you have against water.

It means that being a single woman who supports yourself and refrains from marrying should be socially discouraged.

The society Peterson advocates is the one we used to have in the United States, in which divorce was rare and shameful. A woman was almost required to be married and have children to be respected and admired.

That's what 'socially enforced monogamy' means in practical terms.

Remember what he said about Friedan and "The Feminine Mystique"? If that's enough to fuel his loathing he's at least misogyny-adjacent.

Assuring young straight white men that they are, in fact, a marginalized and oppressed group in the United States, and that feminists, neo-Marxists and trans people are the cause of their alienation and rage is worthy of criticism.