Hey Nathan, I don't know much about you, and I don't follow Aporia that closely – though I've read some of the articles, and I enjoyed them – but my friend sent me this article and asked me what I thought, so I thought I'd try to give a response.
I'd start out by saying that this post is excellent. There is a level of care, detail, mastery taken here is wonderful. Nothing you've said strikes me as wrong or insufficiently refined. There are two points I want to bring up, and I hope I communicate them to you with sufficient respect and clarity.
1. You briefly mention how power is necessary to make change, but ultimately this relies on the people who have power wanting that change.
I can't tell you how much I appreciate the paragraph where you talk about power as a proximate cause. You seem to understand that power exists to launder consent for itself, and that it will take whatever system it can to generate that consent – whether it be the divine right of Kings, technical genius, military cohesion, or indeed, wokeness.
You explain this so beautifully, and then you kind of drop the ball at that; you don't delve deeply into why the laundering mechanism should change from wokeness to "race realism". Your argument is basically because "race realism" (your phrase, I would use a different one) is true and more adaptive/functional than equality, e.g., produces more great works.
I will point you to this tweet, by a right-wing goon who you might be familiar with.
Darwin is obviously not at fault for the rise of Nazism by introducing natural selection – especially given the "world ice theory" situation. However, by introducing the concept of evolution into public consciousness, he did create a situation in which other morons could inject a degraded version ("social Darwinism") into consciousness and slip that nonsense in to justify the absolutism of the Führer.
If you want "race realism" over wokenness to be convincing to elites, you're going have to show them why it makes their job of stewarding the people easier, once its tenets is falls down to the imbecility at the bottom of the pyramid. Or else, why the imbecility of wokeness is worse than the imbecility of race realism; which is what you've kind of started to do here a little bit.
Which leads to my second comment...
2. There nothing here in your post that encourages elites to act at elites; that is to say, to act as stewards of the power and truth they possess.
Going back to that Tweet, part of what makes en elite is knowing that once they express truth and power (i.e., develop a dominant culture), they ought to take responsibility for the ways in which the masses will distort this culture in mind-numbingly stupid ways
You make a quick detour by mentioning Christ in the Roman empire. One of the reasons that Christ was so successful in deposing existing Roman morality is that he didn't just just provide a treatise of truth and then peace-out. He took great pains to cultivate disciples who could be sent to cultivate belonging and answer ridiculous questions such as: "If you are God, and you are good, then why did you let my mother die of cancer because that's evil?" in a compassionate and satisfactory way.
What answer are you going to give some poor sap who is IQ-limited and clumsy, but his neighbor and best friend growing up goes on to the heights of success and fame? How will you make him feel like he still belongs with race/IQ-realism?
Again, what made Christ divine (I'll stick with a lowercase 'd', I'm not about to get into a religious battle here), is that he said "this is who I am" and also (crucially!) "this is how you can belong to my earthly body if you join me." There is an element of stewardship. And, despite this, millions of blockheads have managed to tarnish Christ's worldly undertaking in the most heinous of ways.
I understand that you may not be trying to be political scientist or political operative here. You are likely trying to present a stack of proper, well-integrated facts that someone else (e.g., Rufo) can take and fit into the proper context of power politics. But in the interest of giving you larger voice and more impact over the elites (or elites-in-training) that are your primary audience, I would offer that you start putting effort into expanding on the nitty-gritty specifics of this:
"There will be a multidecadal transition period between wokism and a new, reality-based system, which will require various stopgap measures."
I think you have a responsibility – and of course you can disagree – to explain how the theses in this post will allow for elites to take more stewardship over the people they are accountable to, and who belong to them. Otherwise, ultimately to me (and I'm nowhere near an elite, but I could fit the mold), you are basically presenting ideas and praying that someone more magnanimous and competent and you picks up the crown and runs with your treatise. To me, that is feeble.
I agree with basically everything you say. But I'm less pessimistic than you are about what will happen when the principles of race realism "fall[] down to the imbecility at the bottom of the pyramid." If laws were put to a plebiscite, the majority of Americans would vote down free speech, free markets, etc. and turn the country into a quasi-fascist dictatorship. But it doesn't matter what the majority wants because, for better or worse, our social system is built so that the elites call the shots.
"But it doesn't matter what the majority wants because, for better or worse, our social system is built so that the elites call the shots."
This doesn't really square. It seems rather obvious that elites are constrained by public opinion in what they can do. Think of how many "elite" opinions can't be actualized because they go too far against what the people want. It shouldn't be hard to come up with a rather long list.
Just because elites get their way on many issues doesn't mean they get their way on all issues.
This is important because the composition of "the people" is changing rapidly, in large part because of elite actions (mass third world immigration). That change in public composition is going to change the options available to elites.
No elite thinks "yes, what happened in Detroit is a good thing and just what I wanted", but it's the best people can come up with in a majority black city. Elites realize that to get elite they have to behave a certain way in line with public opinion, so they do.
>Think of how many "elite" opinions can't be actualized because they go too far against what the people want. It shouldn't be hard to come up with a rather long list.
Maybe one way to wrap hereditarianism up politically is to address it as one kind of luck. From your perspective, you had no control over the genes you were born with — they were completely outside of your control. And you also don’t have any control over the parents you were born to. Those are somewhat different things because you could have parents with enormous intellectual gifts and serious substance abuse.
A political agenda that wrapped it up as luck would take some of the sting out of it. You’re not any less of a human because of your genes. But you might end up with lower lifetime earnings than your neighbor because he lucked out in genes and you didn’t. I realize that this moves away somewhat from the race focus of the original post. And that would be absolutely intended, because the effect otherwise would be to essentially say, “oh, you were born black, how unlucky.” Nope. But this approach would also emphasize an important aspect: differences within groups are driven largely by the same factors are differences between groups. Genes drive IQ drives income and other outcomes.
There could be progressive and conservative versions of the program on luck. The progressive version would be that the government ought to do what it can to offset bad luck. That sounds like a justification for redistribution on an individualized basis and power-sharing with unlucky groups. The conservative approach would be to leave things alone because government assistance makes things worse and we can’t magic away real ability differences. Neither would look on the unlucky as having less dignity. I’d guess that the progressive version would be more effective at generating power, because it creates spoils. But I’m neither a progressive nor a conservative, so I could be way off.
Yes, good response – I can see you are starting to think in terms of power and political management. You are able to point out why and how power is able to launder itself more easily based on wokeism/egalitarianism than it is on race realism/HBD.
> The conservative approach would be to leave things alone...
...which is why they always lose the political/power game...
Now, if you want to continue making a political program out this idea of 'HBD as as form of luck' you have to answer a few questions.
Where are you going to train elites to learn and propagate this doctrine of 'HBD as luck'? Universities? Churches? Monasteries? Government internships? Media?
Which institutions are you going to make the face of this this doctrine? How can you mitigate the effect of those lower on the ladder who twist the message, or use it for self-aggrandizement? What's your process for making sure these folks fall in line when they make mistakes?
Most importantly, how will the 'unlucky' be able to borrow meaning and power from the 'lucky' – in what ways can they launder a sense of significance by belonging to the patronage of those groups & individuals who are 'lucky'?
Looking at someone who is 'less lucky' with 'equal dignity' is not automatic; it is the result of centuries of deep cultural and religious programming. Are you willing to continue deeply program the population in this way?
The issue is that if you are lucky to get good looks or athletic ability, the left has no problem with that luck.
The only luck they hate is IQ luck. I believe that is because only IQ luck threatens their ability to concentrate power to themselves.
In the end leftism is never about a consistent moral philosophy. It is about obtaining power and exerting that power onto others (all while claiming to be morally superior).
In summary, it is fine to view politics as a luck distribution problem.
But not fine to believe the left approach the solution to that problem with anything but their usual abject hypocrisy. Because leftists are oddly selective about who they hate (and it is NOT the lucky).
I won’t disagree, but I will note that income-based programs (income tax, most kinds of welfare) don’t differentiate between income generated by good looks or athleticism and income generated by IQ.
I recently read a history of the early Christian church (The Rise of Christianity - Rodney Stark) that suggested that a key element of the successful spread of Christianity was its rapid spread among the "second-tier" elite.
A variety of factors (care during plagues, elevated status for women and children, sanctifying grace and the beatific vision, a robust intellectual culture, social and intellectual integration for Hellenized Jews, etc.) made Christianity deeply appealing for those elites who were not already atop the pagan hierarchy.
"What answer are you going to give some poor sap who is IQ-limited and clumsy, but his neighbor and best friend growing up goes on to the heights of success and fame? How will you make him feel like he still belongs with race/IQ-realism?"
I think Jesus had some good answers, though modern society doesn't want to hear them:
"If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all."
"Does he not leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it?"
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."
You're more likely to convince liberals of HBD than conservatives. If there's hope that things can change through things such as embryo selection then I can see liberals being more open to the idea of differences, maybe not group differences but individual differences. Conservatives, Republicans and right-wingers are a complete lost cause due to a lack of intelligence and prestige. They would also be against any solutions like embryo selection due to their reactionary and theocratic tendencies.
Liberal multiculturalists can be persuaded to not record racial statistics, that's basically the situation in France. Racial division is seen as taboo and low status. A much more effective strategy would be to appeal to the ruling liberal elite by saying that the rising tide of right-wing populism is due to dysgenic fertility (which it partly is). You would get a much more receptive audience.
>Republicans and right-wingers are a complete lost cause due to a lack of intelligence and prestige.
Remember that the average White Republican is only 4-5 IQ points lower than the average White Democrat. Would you say Russians or Italians are too stupid to understand HBD because they are 4-5 IQ points lower than the average White American/Brit?
Soon it's likely to be possible to select embryos for polygenetic traits (such as intelligence, good looks, etc). When that happens many prospective parents will do so -- because the vast majority of people care more about their children than their political beliefs, and because most parents want their kids to be clever, good looking, etc.
Yeah, I think people of all political orientations will eventually embrace embryo selection. Some wokes and Christians might have hesitations but eventually a majority will do it. As with lab-grown meat, I think countries like Israel and Singapore will probably lead the way (especially controlling for size), and the US will be the biggest player since we are big.
> I think people of all political orientations will eventually embrace embryo selection
It'll start out as a few trend-setters but I expect that once it starts getting popular, there will be a tipping point where people say "if everyone else is giving their kids super-powers I need to too or mine won't be able to keep up".
The one thing that we are likely to agree is on that the old moral majority Christian right types are a lost cause. They're too hostile to eugenics to ever be convinced. But the idea that liberals could be convinced is laughable. Will Stencil is a representative of that class. Those are your hyperrationalist liberal technocrats, and they'd rather ban you, and everyone else even open to HBD, off the internet than give you the time of day. How will bans on racial statistics lead to eugenics? If they're logically consistent, French liberals are more likely to use such bans to push for a ban on genetic research on racial differences too.
Rightwing populism is a result of the death of theocratic, religious tendencies on the right. Nonchurchgoering Republicans put Trump in the White House. Unfortunately, as things currently stand, the secular right is at a total disadvantage compared to the far more politically savvy religious right. Trump's secular base lost out on the border wall and mass deportations, while the Evangelicals that jumped on the bandwagon after he won the primaries got RvW overturned.
It might be an uphill battle, but if you want HBD and eugenics, the embryonic secular right-populist movement is your best best. Anything else is a childish fantasy.
So a highly militaristic, expansionist, ethnonationalist democracy or an authoritarian, civic nationalist single-party city state? Neither is a society that technocratic 'liberal' globalists could create. They can barely tolerate their existence.
1. Your descriptions of Israel and Singapore are misleading. They are not as illiberal as you make them sound. They are definitely more liberal than most of the world including the beloved-by-globalists Ukraine. Their existence is not opposed by the globalists. Granted they are not like the US and Western Europe. But no one else is except for Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
2. It matters a lot exactly which "liberal globalists" you are looking at, and it also matters a lot if you are talking about support for embryo selection versus support for discussion of race differences. You conflate these two by just using the term "eugenics" (a term I would not use because it's too politically charged; see https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-i-oppose-eugenics by Richard). I can certainly imagine someone like Noah Smith endorsing embryo selection and saying that discussion of race differences is irrelevant because we will all be very smart in a few generations.
1. They are at most slight exaggerations. Your long post isn't really disputing this. Israel is a democratic society with gay vegan atheists. That hasn't stopped it from building settlements and many prominent politicians want to annex the West Bank either in whole or in part.
I have no trust in the Economist's rankings. They're obviously extremely biased. Compare only the states with right-populist governments in Eastern Europe. They rank Hungary as less democratic than Poland. Orbán has never tried to ban his political opponents in the way that Kaczyński attempted with his 'lex Tusk' before the last election, but Poland is far less defiant towards Washington.
I specified that Singapore is civic nationalist. It has relatively severe restrictions on press freedom for a 'democracy.' The elections are fixed through districting. The actual electoral process is theoretically 'free and fair' in itself, but the composition of parliament is mostly predetermined. The PAP wins sixty percent and 83 out of 93 seats. This is not comparable to Japan.
2. Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias are commentators on substack. They are not representative of the decision-making class of 'liberal' globalists. Will Stencil actually works for an NGO and is.
It's true that Israel has built settlements (though, most near the Green Line and not nearly enough to make a two-state solution impossible, see Shaul Arieli) and that many prominent politicians have at least talked about West Bank annexation, though few are really serious about it. The settlement lobby is really a special interest group. Israel won't resettle Gaza. It's an exaggeration to call Israel - which has offered a two-state solution based on the Clinton parameters several times https://thirdnarrative.org/israel-palestine-articles/palestinians-still-reject-clinton-parameters/ - an "expansionist state", though it has irredentist and expansionist elements, certainly, but they are not a majority. There's a reason why the Gaza withdrawal happened. And there's a reason even Netanyahu was willing to engage in two-state negotiations under Obama and Kerry, and objects to a Palestinian state based on security grounds and not on irredentist ones.
I am not super qualified to comment on Hungary versus Poland, but I'll say some things. I will note that the Polish populist government is gone. I think the criticism against Orban mostly stems from his attacks on the media and constitution, not from bans on political opponents. Orban is so secure he does not need to. In the US both parties talk about banning their political opponents from office. Trump said Crooked Hilary should be locked up, now the Dems say Trump should be thrown in prison. One could argue that if people talk about banning their political opponents, it's a sign of a healthy democracy because it means they have some viable opponents! Orban doesn't really. Anyway, The Economist does admit that Russia is more democratic than China, and has for many years. This is not what you would expect if it had the kind of bias that you are alleging.
Singapore has a first past the post system. In the last election the second and third place parties each won a bit over 10% of the vote each. It's not 60-40 or anything like that. There is no gerrymandering like in the US. So of course the PAP wins most of the seats. Many countries have first past the post which leads to very disparate outcomes that look different than public support. Would say Britain is not a democracy because of the 2015 election results? Heck, CGP Grey made a video about it calling it the worst election results in history! Yes, Singapore is certainly less of a liberal democracy than Japan, and everyone admits that, but as with Israel it's still not as illiberal as you are portraying it to be!
Israel is highly militaristic, definitely, that's by necessity but it's definitely the case. I would not call it "expansionist". The settler lobby and in general wants what it wants, but that's only the fringe Smotrich / Ben-Gvir corner of the right. I think about 10-20% of Israelis can be described as "expansionist", just some Likud backbenchers and Smotrich and Ben-Gvir types. Even when the right is in power (like now) you don't see annexation or huge expansion of isolated settlements. Netanyahu himself participated seriously in peace talks (see https://thirdnarrative.org/israel-palestine-articles/palestinians-still-reject-clinton-parameters/ and https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2017-06-08/ty-article-magazine/.premium/exclusive-obamas-plans-for-mideast-peace-revealed/0000017f-f58f-ddde-abff-fdef4a8c0000 ). Israel is definitely an "ethnonationalist democracy", it's a democracy where Arabs vote and have rights and have joined the government but it's totally unafraid to assert its Jewish character, the symbol is a Star of David and so on. So yes, no, yes. Israel also has the gay vegan atheist leftist Yuval Harari, who is a WEF creature, supports the existence of Israel, and also wrote in Sapiens that humans will do genetic engineering.
Singapore is not really authoritarian. It's a "flawed democracy" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index for the rankings) and is more free than Ukraine. It is on par with Hungary. This is according to The Economist, who you cannot accuse of being biased against Ukraine. Singapore has real elections. While one party - the People's Action Party (PAP) - is dominant, this doesn't make it not a democracy, anymore than Japan is not a democracy because the DPJ almost always wins or South Africa is not a democracy because the ANC always wins (there are some other problems with South Africa of course). Singapore's last election (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Singaporean_general_election for the Wiki) saw the PAP only win 61.23% of the vote. Other parties do and are allowed to run. Singapore is an "illiberal democracy" like Hungary. It is not "authoritarian" or "single-party". I don't know if I would call Singapore "nationalist" (of course the nationalism here being civic and not ethnic) in the sense of the populist right in the West, with aggressive flag waving. No one describes it like that. But it is true that Singapore for instance does not allow dual citizenship, which I guess means something. So I'll go with no, yes, no.
I think you overrate how right-wing Israel and Singapore are in your descriptions. I also think that technocratic "liberal" globalists (Matt Yglesias and Noah Smith types) generally support the existence of Israel and Singapore. Many of them are critical of Netanyahu but they are generally pro-Israel and support the existence of Israel, and Israeli secular liberals are certainly huge on IVF and PGD. They usually don't have anything bad to say about Singapore at all, at least not that I have seen, though you should take this with a grain of salt because unlike Israelis, Singaporeans are seen as "non-white" and "non-Western" and thus held to a lower standard. But yes, by the standards of America and Western Europe, they are definitely right-wing socially / culturally (though liberal by global standards), and of course they are non-Christian.
I do agree that technocratic liberal globalists like Smith and Yglesias could not create these kind of societies (on the other hand, maybe they could create some kind of based capitalist libertarian YIMBY society), but they do tolerate the existence of such societies. I also think that Noah these types might have trouble endorsing "race realism" even if they privately believe it but would still support embryo selection and say something about polygenic scores being hard to compare between races. Pinker is a technocratic liberal globalist and is one of the most prominent "HBD" people, though he is discreet about it. Anyway, one has to distinguish between support for embryo selection, where I expect that many liberal globalists will be onboard, with support for "HBD" which is a harder sell. One also has to think about heterogeneity within these kind of technocratic liberals. Someone like Smith or Yglesias will be much easier to get on your side than someone like Clinton or Obama. I am not denying that you have a real point here, and that modern-day "liberal globalist" sensitivities are not very amenable to discussions about the genetics of intelligence, especially when race is involved. But I do think they will come around on embryo selection, even if it's after Israel and Singapore. I can certainly imagine someone like Noah Smith endorsing embryo selection and saying that discussion of race differences is irrelevant because we will all be very smart in a few generations.
I have little doubt that Noah Smith and Matty Y can be convinced to support something that all their friends already support, that is after all the heavy lifting has been done by others to make it acceptable enough they feel safe supporting it. However, this is essentially useless for getting anything done.
Matty Y writes huge essays about education reform and opposes school vouchers. Now you know this guy should know enough about genetics and the null hypothesis that all of his education writing it false. Yet he still does it. Because he's a liberal and team liberal believes in the power of public education. Maybe if blue states start passing school vouchers he will write about how "we have always been at war with the teachers unions", but such a revelation will come after the political victory, not before.
"endorsing embryo selection and saying that discussion of race differences is irrelevant because we will all be very smart in a few generations."
There are some problems here:
1) We don't know if embryo selection will make everyone smart in a few generations. We know that if you get enough eggs (which is still an involved process) that you can drastically reduce the chance of certain diseases. We also hope that it will increase IQ, but that is harder to measure and the effect is not huge currently.
We also won't really know the affect until we run the experiment at scale for a few generations (if people end up smart but with the personality of the Unabomber its a failed experiment). And the societal impacts are also unknown (I'm reminded of the discussion in Brave New World where they make everyone an Alpha++ and it ends in a war of all against all).
I support embryo selection, but not as a get out of jail free card for making other smart choices about running our society. I don't want to put all my eggs in one basket.
2) Which leads to the discussion that really matters, immigration. Noah and Matty are most famous for wanting to flood the first world with low IQ third world trash, on the basis of denying their low IQs. If the idea here is "embryo selection will bail us out of that terrible choice" then that's a really bad idea. If it doesn't work out, you're fucked.
3) Moreover, if embryo selection did work as well and as fast as everyone hopes, why do people even need to immigrate? In the blank slate view the third world is poor because something something institutions. In reality we know low IQs (which also cause bad institutions) is the cause. If embryo selection is going to solve their low IQs, why do they even need to immigrate. They can just stay where they are and we can being the IQ and "institutions" to them.
4) The correct "technocratic" solution is to cut off all third world immigration today. This will keep the first world the first world, and thus able to keep producing technological breakthroughs like embryo selection. As that technology improves and is used more and more and scale and we see the real life effects and iterate, its use can be expanded to the third world.
What we should not do is induce mass third world immigration potentially destroying the first world economic and R&D machine that can develop these technologies.
You'll note that is what countries like Singapore and Israel came up with. They don't let their demographics get overwhelmed by outsiders by having the more strict immigration regimes in the world.
1) I think we do know it will help, and I think current gains are already on the order of 5+ points. Polygenic scores are improving all the time. IVG isn't too far away either, we should certainly have that in one generation, after which point you can talk about 15+ points. I don't really believe the Brave New World thing. Imagine as a thought experiment going to a third-world country and people telling you that embryo selection will make our country like America, with gender ideology and so on, it will be a failed experiment. That would be ridiculous. Of course it will succeed. I have confidence. I agree that we shouldn't just give up on policy and promote embryo selection as a panacea. Which brings me to point 2.
2) I definitely don't support unlimited low-skill immigration into the US. In the US the situation is a bit different than in Europe though. As Richard Hanania is fond of pointing out, most murders in the US are not committed by immigrants. I agree of course that the situation on the border right now is really bad.
3) The blank slate view for third world immigration is not the most convincing one. Bryan Caplan and Richard Hanania types argue that because of comparative advantage and so on, immigration is generally good for global GDP, good for the GDP of the receiving nation, good for global GDP of the sending nation because of remittances, etcetera. I think there is some truth to these arguments, and I don't think that legal blue-collar Mexican immigration for instance has been horrible for the country. I agree with you of course that it's not so simple, that political circumstances like the 14th amendment and our welfare state prevent us from turning the US into a big UAE, or even into something more reasonable like Israel or Singapore which have a nontrivial number of Southeast Asian guest workers.
3+4) Umm ... this includes for instance banning Indian immigration to the US? Or Iranian immigration? That's not a good idea. Especially Indian immigration. Indians in the US out-earn Jews! I strongly support Indian immigration to the US. There are third world countries that reliably send us high-quality, selected immigrants. I certainly support cracking down hard on illegal immigration, experimenting with some guest worker programs (again, tricky because of the 14th), cutting off all immigration of Somalis and Afghans except for really selected people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali types and Afghan translators who helped us, and so on. But I think having legal blue-collar immigrants from middle-income countries like Mexico is fine even if their average are IQs are below 100. My stance here is moderate, probably similar to Musk's. I don't disagree with you at all that national IQs are important, but they are not the only consideration. And with the US, given that the demographic picture is different than Europe and the welfare state is smaller, I am more open to this sort of thing. Hispanic immigration has made a lot of large US cities safer by displacing a certain subset of the native population with a really high crime rate. You can't say the same thing about Muslim migration to Europe.
5) Singapore and Israel have lots of immigration! But of course you're right that they are very strict on illegal immigration, and they don't allow themselves to be demographically overwhelmed by low-skill immigration. I agree, they are good examples.
At independence Israel was 80% Ashkenazi or so, but it accepted lots of third-world migrants. Of course as cremieux demonstrated, non-Ashkenazi Jews in Israel average ~100 compared to ~110 for Ashkenazi. Later on they accepted Ethiopians on overcrowded planes and flew them in. They were not afraid to do very aggressive measures to integrate them, and even gave temporary birth control shots. Ethiopian-Israelis now have higher average income and education than Arabs, and they probably average in the 90-95 range. Israel accepts lots of Jews who tend to be high skill. They also accepted lots of non-Jewish Russians with a tenuous Jewish connection. During the Russia-Ukraine war, Israel accepted Ukrainian refugees with absolutely no Jewish connection. It's true though that while Israel has a lot of immigration, it is generally medium and high-skill. Of course throughout its history and to the present Israel has accepted tons and tons of medium-skill and high-skill Jewish immigrants. For obvious reasons Jewish immigrants tend to be high-skill and medium-skill. Israel is not afraid at all to build a wall on the Egyptian border to prevent the illegal "infiltrators" from coming up, deport the "infiltrators" from Africa who came before the wall, and who are in South Tel Aviv and have a big crime problem, and rightly so. Israel also has plenty of guest workers from countries like Thailand and the Philippines, but it does not give them citizenship. So Israel does have lots of immigration, but it's generally medium and high skill. I like Israel's policies.
Like Israel, Singapore has had a lot of high-skill immigration whose ethnicity is the same as that of the majority ethnicity of the country. Also like Israel, Singapore has a lot of guest workers from Southeast Asia, and in fact even more than Israel has. Singapore though has definitely not cut off immigration from the third world. There is huge migration from Malaysia, Indonesia, and China to Singapore. Granted the Malay that have moved to and move to Singapore are disproportionately higher-skill and ethnically Chinese. Still, definitely a nontrivial proportion of the Malay immigrants are low-skill ethnic Malays. It's not like Singapore banned Muslim migration or banned low-skill migration wholesale.
So I think Israel and Singapore are good models to emulate, yes. I think what Elon Musk wants is more or less correct. I agree with you that our current policy of letting in tons of low-skilled illegal migrants is absolutely awful and needs to stop, but I don't think we need to go for a hardcore restrictionist policy.
Despite a near total abortion bad, IVF clinics are running just fine in Texas.
If there is going to be a backlash against embryo selection, its going to be the left complaining about eugenics.
2) France is being overrun by low IQ Muslim hordes. See no evil here no evil doesn't solve the immigration problem.
3) If embryo selection works well in a reasonable timeline, the entire concept of race will become irrelevant. Of course, it would also eliminate the strongest arguments for things like immigration (if we can improve the genes of the third world, they can just stay in place and get rich).
4) The most important issue is immigration, as becoming majority dumb brown is the biggest existential issue threatening the west. Most any other inefficiency can be overcome without the entire engine of prosperity and progress from breaking down.
The goal should be to protect that engine long enough for it to overcome biology (if possible).
> If embryo selection works well in a reasonable timeline
Embryo selection would work a lot faster/better if it wasn't just limited to gametes from the social parents of the prospective child. And you you want it to work (which I do, for the good of the species) it'd work best if prospective parents could use gametes from the entire population, chosing those from individuals with the best of the desired traits.
I've never in my life heard a parent brag about how stupid or ugly their child was, so this has a chance of happening.
It is for some, it isn't for others. So I think prospective parents should be allowed to choose; some will choose to use others' genetic material, which will be enough to improve the quality of the species.
I can't speak for rightwingers in general, but Right-to-Lifers absolutely are. Campaign Life Coalition here in Canada is opposed to in vitro, surrogacy and embryo selection. Numerically they are weak, but they are politically savvy and well-funded. They are less powerful in this country, but in America they manage to push the GOP around in the same way that the wokesters push the Democratic Party around.
You know in theory half the country is against abortion, and yet it loses by a landslide even in deep red areas.
I think we need to differentiate between "the official line" and "what people actually believe". Birth control is still against Catholic doctrine, but as someone who has a lot of weekly attending catholic friends that ain't too strict for people.
In general your average religious pro-lifer is against abortion but doesn't want to push the issue to hard. They might vaguely be against surrogacy but that isn't a big issue. IVF is pretty much just fine for them (they want to have a baby after all, so that's pro-life), and they never heard of embryo selection.
Pro-life religious friends of mine that needed to skirt Catholic doctrine to have kids did so.
Murdering a kid in your own womb is never going to get a complete pass, because quite frankly it shouldn't. But that's a world away from "help more babies be born and make them health and happy."
> but in America they manage to push the GOP around in the same way that the wokesters push the Democratic Party around
This is because of FPTP which (because of Duverger's rule) results in there being 2 big parties. Because there are only 2 parties, with no-one else getting a look in, it's easy for a special interest group to take control of one of the big parties and then use that to control what happens in the country.
If USA had a fully proportional system (like e.g. Netherlands) there would be lots of viable parties, and if a special interest group took control of one of the big ones, and changed its policies to something the voters don't like, it would avail them nothing, as voters would simply switch to another party.
It's both disgusting and undemocratic that special interest groups (such as wokies or religious extremists) get to rule when most people dislike them, which is why in countries that use FPTP, getting rid of it ought to be the most important political objective.
" A much more effective strategy would be to appeal to the ruling liberal elite by saying that the rising tide of right-wing populism is due to dysgenic fertility (which it partly is)."
Yeah that would be great if it wasn't a lie. In what world is right wing populism due to dysgenic fertility when liberals on average possess much greater mutational loads? Not to mention that the rise of the right wing populists is barely a decade old, so it can in no way be attributed to mutational load.
You're also just asserting that liberals could be convinced of HBD more than conservatives without any evidence whatsoever. All current trends point to the opposite, and not surprisingly; are liberals known to accept hierarchichal ideas, or is that a tendency which right wingers have? Obviously the latter.
(1) Strongly agreed on the intellectual bankruptcy of the cultural theory of race differences arguments. In addition to your three points, I would also add that culture is not intrinsically less insulting than the hereditarian explanation, and perhaps more so. You can't do much about your genetic heritage (at least for now). But culture is the accretion of a people's folkways, so what does an attack on it represent?
(2) I appreciate your more specific prescriptions for what needs to be done, although as I can see it boils down to "keep soldiering on" and "keep Nazis at arms' length." As you know, I am relatively more skeptical about the scope for success within any reasonable timeframe. We are already for the most part in a situation where "those who know, know" and those who don't, have no interest or stake in it. My prescription trends more towards: (a) Exit out of existing sclerotic and captured institutions - tactical libertarianism, if you will - through advocacy and implementation of Open Borders, network states, and DeSci; (b) transhumanist acceleration, which may well make many of these issues moot sooner than people see truisms that were ultimately self-evident even from the works of psychometrists a generation ago.
(3) Minor quibble but I don't think it's accurate to reference Sub-Saharan African IQ of 85 in relation to "hunting and gathering on the savanna". Agriculture came there in 5,000 BC afaik, and they were actually impressively early to iron manufacturing. The core reason IMO was just the lack of cold winters. It's the combination of cold winters x agriculture is what seems to have generated apex North Eurasian intelligence. Most Africans did have agriculture and those Africans were smarter than Africans who continued to do hunting and gathering.
I don't think rice farming was responsible for East Asian intelligence, but I do think it shaped the Asian personality. All things being equal, rice farmers tend to be better than everyone else (including wheat farmers) at doing homework.
Rice farming was possible for collectivism. Wheat places are more innovative. Doing homework is conscientiousness, people need to pass exams and innovate.
It may measure something useful, but just about every study on the effectiveness of homework in improving academic outcomes has found that it is virtually useless.
Open Borders is the worst idea imaginable and probably the biggest reason to push for more HBD.
Giving blacks a few token jobs to make them feel better is something we could afford.
Making the first world majority low IQ brown is a potential existential crisis with no upside.
We have these occasional racial panics were we do a bunch of dumb stuff, but then the silent majority gets tired of it and pushes back. No more silent majority and you get a dysfunction spiral with no end.
1) you can’t change your genes, but you can play the cards you’re dealt in better ways and stupid ways. Socially enforced monogamy alone would do wonders for a lot of low IQ communities toward bettering their material circumstances
I wouldn’t say it’s “bankrupt”, unless it’s attempting to sit under the “blank slate” umbrella. OF COURSE heredity affects your base stats, and different groups have differing average stats. But culture (how you play the game with the character sheet you have) DOES make a big difference
We should also remember that in one sense we CAN change our genes - or rather the genes of our heirs - through mate selection.
What future generations will be like depends on what traits we encourage and select for, and that in turn is largely a matter of culture.
If, for example, we create a culture in which women value intelligence and engineering talent, future generations will likely have more intelligence and engineering talent. If we create a culture in which women value athleticism and flashy displays of wealth, future generations will likely be more athletic and have flashy displays of wealth - but might be very dumb.
So, I think I'll be doing an in depth reply to your work later; and I appreciate your responses to the earlier comments - But I think the core of our disagreement is as follows. Quoted from your piece:
"For if we want to include any cultural features, then a continental or sub-continental scale origin notion of race will not do, as such regions are collections of cultures and folk can, and do, shift between cultures."
"If you want to explain different distributions of outcomes among human groups, race is not very useful, precisely because we are so much the cultural species."
But it is useful, it's the most useful thing!
The most successful European ethnicities are responsible for many multiples more groundbreaking mechanical inventions than the least successful ones. And yet all African societies however different they may (theoretically) be from each-other can claim NONE. ZERO. The difference between any and none, is huge.
If you are gonna deny the validity of a category that corresponds perfectly with A) Fully detectable visual and genetic identification and B) Which is easily the most important aspect of any remotely recognizable version of modern human life; what category could possibly be valid?
Now true, so far I've only done European vs. Black African; and things get fuzzier with other distinctions like Arab and North African vs European... so you'd have an easier time arguing that there were only 2 races.
I have discussed why Sub-Saharan Africa lagged. There are a whole lot of relevant geographical, environmental and institutional factors which are relevant. If you wanted to create a situation of “yep, these folk are going to be behind” it is almost perfect. Few useful harbours; no navigable rulers; lots of co-evolved pathogens, parasites, predators and megaherbivores; endemic slavery due to low population density making labour more valuable than land … Genes matter, but we are above all the cultural species: lots of other things matter as well.
The short history of human invention is: if it was invented before about 500BC it was invented first in the Fertile Crescent; from 500BC to 1500 it was invented in China; after 1500 in Europe/West. Unless it was about horses, in which case the steppes (or boundary thereof). There are some exceptions, but not many. Hard to fit that into a genetic explanation.
Kaplan’ et al’s “embodied capital” analysis is the closest I have come to it, though I am aware of the r-selected K-selected distinction. I am aware anthropologists note the difference in Sub-Saharan family structures, which are fairly clearly responses to a dangerous physical and social environment and clearly entail lower parental investment, by human standards.
Right on. Definitely encourage a read of some of Rushton and Rushton-adjacent works (cold winters theory stuff). This acknowledging (as does Nathan) that Phil had some shoddy empirical work.
Anyone advocating for embracing false explanations will be proven wrong soon enough. The evidence continues to accumulate and the genomic databases are ever-growing. Environmental explanations will continue to be falsied and the elite public understanding of the replication crisis in the social sciences is only going to continue to grow. Those who want to embrace keeping quiet are going to need a plan to suppress evidence to the detriment of the social sciences and our understanding of the world altogether. Aporia and realist researchers like Emil are not going to stop. The truth will find its way. The genomic databases with the relevant information to bury blank slatism are growing larger every year as the cost keep falling dramatically. With true causal explantions, we can devise realistic solutions.
I've embraced the power of genetic enhancement in hopes that we can benefit humanity. I hope progressives will be receptive someday. Delaying this technology and ideas will cause more harm than good.
This is a brilliant essay and I am on the Cofnas side of Rufo/Hanania/Sowell debate. I am excited for the future of Aporia.
Hopefully, this will help lead the Hereditarian Revolution. The page is designed to disseminate information in a thorough, distilled, and quick/easy-to-read manner.
Brilliant essay that has the added benefit of suggesting a simple and perfectly feasible way out of our present bind.
I associate the woke with being conformist and ill-informed, just the way modern, scientifically literate people a hundred years ago must have viewed Christians and look at that melancholy, long withdrawing roar. With enough brainy people (Steve Sailer, Emil, Bo and Noah) and cool people (Ricky Gervais, Konstantin Kisin, Leo Kearse) on our side there's no reason why others shouldn't start making the same negative associations with wokism.
No, not as far as I know but he seems the type who would. After all, the only thing stopping anyone endorsing it is honesty, and I think Gervais is probably honest.
I find diamond’s argument hilarious, about race purportedly not being a thing. Like, imagine if you ordered a Chesapeake retriever and diamond shipped you a chocolate lab. You complain. And then diamond argues, well you see, they’re actually the same breed because they’re both are dark brown, are similar in size and retrieve. It wouldn’t fly! Of course, people find the analogy to dog breeds offensive. But in Spanish the same word “raza” that is, race, refers to race in people and breeds in dogs? “Mejorar la sangre” for the win!
Also, I was wondering whether race realism would be easier to explain as something we all already do, just more honest. For example, online dating is racist, but we can’t be real about it. OkCupid stopped sharing the data because it was embarrassingly racist. On Grindr, Asians wear sunglasses, and blacks take grayscale pictures. (I’m not trying to pick on whites; they are often the least racist among groups.) Participants don’t need statistics to infer the higher social status of whites.
But socially acceptable people say two things. First, attraction is too subjective and incommensurable and mysterious to analyze. This point pretends that dating isn’t a market, that we don’t offer prospective partners something they want in return for something we want. Second, attraction is too personal or bodily to racially criticize. Along these lines, such criticism is tantamount to sexual assault. By racially criticizing someone’s attractions, people threaten a severe moral sanction to procure unwilling sex.
These positions reflect a desperate attempt to reconcile perceived goods of (1) sexual autonomy and (2) not being seen as racist. They are enforced only by fiat of what is socially acceptable. Personally, I think sexual autonomy is good. I would also extend that view to associational freedom more generally. But the social consensus is that racism is fine in some contexts (but don’t be too explicit) and VERY BAD in others. I think this consensus has come about, strained and dishonest as it might be, because people understand on some level that, to borrow the cliche, everyone is a little bit racist.
Likewise, Coleman Hughes’s colorblindness strikes me as fake. (I believe that this view is woke orthodoxy?) And not only because of the above example about dating. Like, if you want to be colorblind, you have to have a blinded assessment. For example, a standardized test or a race or even a subjective evaluation where you don’t know who is being evaluated. You can’t just squeeze your ass hole and will yourself into colorblindness. But a formally blinded assessment doesn’t make sense for many choices; it depends on how important the choice is and what the assessment is likely to reveal. If we’re not going to invest in colorblind screens, we need to accept some bias.
But I think Hughes’s point gets at another issue normal people have with hereditarian thinking. Even if racial differences can be attributed to something heritable, many people think that attributing racial group averages to individuals is morally wrong (or so they say!). For every observable characteristic but race, we start from the general and update on specifics as you learn them. But race is taboo. I’m not sure that, even if people accepted hereditarian thought, they would stop piously claiming that they only judge individuals as individuals. The information itself is illicit.
Yeah, the “judge people as individuals” is obviously the ideal, but in many scenarios, information is limited, and you have no choice but to make probabilistic judgments based on known relevant data about group averages etc. I get mildly annoyed when people like Murray don’t point this out. I think Nathan is write that there’s too much tiptoeing around obvious truths like this.
I agree. It’s the ideal, but sometimes we have to stereotype. Still one should not overdo it and be compassionate about it. For example I would try to be extremely careful about assuming black people or women at professional events are staff; they are more likely than the base rate but a false positive is awkward and offensive. Of course in life or death situations are different.
As a man I have no problem with women being more scared of men at night based on statistical truths about men and crime, but the idea that upper-class women are in constant danger from upper-clsss men because every man is a potential rapist is absurd and offensive.
I feel that many hereditarians are GLEEFUL at the lower IQ of blacks. I understand the joy of discovering something suppressed, I understand the anger at Kendi types and so on. I understand that politically it's good for fighting the wokes. But no, it's not really a good thing, I wish it weren't so, of course I would wave a wand to increase the average Black IQ to 100. Who wouldn't?
Yeah I’m pretty much a basic bitch normiecon from the 90s, so I actually think colorblindness and the MLK quote are pretty noble goals, and eugenics is a great evil.
That said, I’m perfectly happy to discuss the heritability of IQ and the group averages, but I also detect a certain GLEE at the topic from many. And also an assumption that “low IQ = low morals and high crime”, which is insulting to all the non criminal stupid people.
The next issue to address may be the social stigma and real career impract. Imagine you are a smart and capable young person who knows the truth. You want to be public but you will lose institutional support among conservatives, you will be removed from your PhD program, you likely won't become a professor and you may lose your ordinary job. I would say that Sowellism is not even THAT popular among many conservatives because even talking about explanations is so highly taboo...most just ignore it.
A person with a family or who wants to have a family would be right to be hesitant about this. Substack is not a realistic alternative - especially because someone smart enough to understand Jensen's The g Factor probably has very nice alternatives career wise or in academia.
It is very difficult to see a realistic career path where you openly discuss these topics. Both Bo Winegard and Noah Carl lost their academic positions for their views. Same with Bryan Pesta who was already a professor. You are an interesting exception, but you might find it difficult to actually get an academic position after your current one.
I would enjoy seeing you provide some advice on this because it's a major obstacle. :)
1) Wait until tenure before open discussion of this, and 2) go for slightly less radioactive issues like Ashkenazi IQ, male variability, and so on. Given how black people were treated in this country before 1965 it’s understandable people are so sensitive about BW. I wouldn’t lead with it.
I would also add just talking about the heritability of intelligence, within group. People aren't aware of twin studies. The Blank Slate by Pinker should be more widely read. And I think you might have an easy time getting liberals to accept white liberals vs white conservatives. Kathryn Page Harden is talking about the income-IQ correlation. You can talk about income-IQ and height-IQ without denying that poor people and short people gave discrimination in some contexts. I'm a huge capitalist and a hereditarian who believes that rich people have a significantly higher average IQ than poor people. But I wouldn't deny that US universities unfairly discriminate in favor of rich people. Cremieux just had a post about it.
Personally, I focus on persuading people on the margin, those who are open to hearing heterodox theories. I won't discuss these things with someone who's firmly committed to the standard narrative unless I'm already very close to them.
Fortunately, I'm in a hard science, and the people in this field tend to have little interest in politics, much less political correctness, so there are many people who could be persuaded.
"Whites are the ones who brought blacks out of Africa and created the conditions where they failed to develop a culture of homework, respect for the law, and strong nuclear families."
Although you mean this rhetorically, as the probable response blacks and liberals would have to the urgings of soft realists, considering this response seriously begs a question: why do black people lack agency? They are always acted upon, rather than agents of their own actions. (Except for crime, of course.)
No matter whether people accept the hereditarian model or not, can't we ask black people to be agents of their own destiny as opposed to being the planet's perennial victims?
Any secular political project without utopian aspirations is bound to fail. Look at the successful projects of the last century. Zionism was romantic to the point of insanity. Communism promised heaven on earth. Fascism would restore the Roman Empire. Naziism sought to perfect man. In this century woke tells us that we can choose our own sex and be whatever we want. All of them promised, in their own way, a perfect world. As Christians stared down lions in the area for the City of Heaven, Zionists endured pogroms and fought an insurgency against the most powerful empire in the world in Palestine for Israel, Red Army soldiers trudged through a brutal civil war for the communist utopia and millions of Germans laid down their lives for the masterrace.
Apart from a few honourable exceptions like yourself, most race realists lack the bravery to even speak their minds. All that you offer is a purely negative victory over wokeness. It is noble to stand for the truth, but without a utopian vision your truth is an ugly one. Few well-adjusted men will risk their careers on behalf of an ugly truth. Ugliness attracts the ugly of spirit. Take a look at the blackpill community for a glimpse at the sort of men that love ugly 'truths.'
As a political project race realism is doomed unless it is combined with a utopian vision of its own. At best it might be wielded in defence of some sort of traditionalism. Nationalism, not of the traditionalist kind, but of the modernist, eugenic variety, can provide that vision of utopia. I doubt that anything else can. Limp-wristed rhetoric about how different communities might be allowed to self-segregate but that we may have to accept diversity hires in government for some time will inspire very few to take a strong public stand that could destroy their careers.
I actually think it's a desirable truth that these differences are rooted in genetics rather than social factors. We've learned after decades of trying that social programs don't work. But biotech is advancing at an astonishing rate, and it's plausible that we will understand how to genetically engineer higher intelligence in the future. I don't think it's necessary to be utopian; we just need to explain to people that genetics are not actually "immutable". It's a solvable problem. In this area, it's traditionalists who will take more convincing.
I think I misinterpreted what you meant by “utopian” then - I thought you meant it in the more literal, narrow sense of a state of perfection, but if you just mean an ambitious vision that nonetheless accepts that we will never run out of problems to solve, then I agree.
1) I'm not sure what the reasoning is behind this statement: "...the first generation has an average IQ of 100, their children will have an average IQ of 90, assuming heritability of 50%."
If the first generation is selected for 90% percentile intelligence (of Nigerians), and the second generation is the offspring of two 90% percentile-intelligence parents, why should we expect regression to the (Nigerian) mean? Is the author saying: (a) Nigerian immigrants intermarry with (non-selected) black individuals, so their offspring have lower intelligence; (b) Nigerian immigrants got a high draw of non-genetic contribution to intelligence, which they cannot pass to their offspring; (c) The genetic contribution to intelligence regresses to the mean of the ancestral population?
(2) If you are serious about a hereditarian revolution, you might consider publishing a guide, or list, of magazines/Twitter accounts/Substacks that engage with the hereditarian hypothesis seriously. Naturally, as you are engaged in an ongoing converstaion on this topic, you are acutely aware of the areas of the internet on which the conversation takes place. As passively interested readers, we only pick up bits and pieces. Decentraliztion is great, but it makes things harder to keep track of.
For traits like height or IQ, individuals in a population vary. Heritability is a measure of how much of that variation is due to genes rather than environment. The higher the heritability of a trait, the more your phenotype is "determined" by genes.
Suppose your parents both have IQs of 130, which is 30 points above their population mean of 100. If IQ is 100% heritable, that means both your parents have genes for 130 IQ. You inherit those genes, so your expected IQ is 130. Suppose IQ is 0% heritable. Now it doesn't matter who your parents are--your expected IQ is the population mean (100). Suppose IQ is 50% heritable. Then your expected IQ is in between your parents and the population mean (115).
Nigerian mean IQ is probably around 80. The 90th percentile is around 100. If two Nigerians with IQs of 100 have children, assuming 50% heritability, their children will (on average) have an IQ of 90. (The heritability of IQ is actually higher than 50%, but that's how the numbers work in the example.)
(2) There are many crackpots in the hereditarian camp, and it's hard to know who to listen to. I mention Aporia. Also people like Razib Khan, Gregory Cochran, Crémieux, i/o, Steve Sailer, Charles Murray, Neven Sesardić...
Cofnas and the Folks at Aporia are doing strong and valuable work here, and had they been active during the perestroika of the 90s, our civilization might be in a much better place.
That being said, what I think is being missed here is that the findings of HBD can and should trigger hatred. That hatred should of course not be indiscriminate, and should be tempered by compassion for the soon to be vanquished. But things like the clearing out of Whites from 25% of our major cities by an orgy of black violence in the 60s that continues today; constitute atrocities. And it matters very much that these atrocities, already unjustifiable even if there was the possibility of soon bringing the new inhabitants of these cities into civilization had no justification whatsoever.
It matters very much that even most intelligent Blacks, and even roughly half of Republican blacks feel a deeper kinship with their more dysfunctional racial family, than to the whites who've been so willing to invite them in. See polling on reparations, who is to blame for the state of black America, or OJ Simpson if you doubt this. Or see Republican Senator Tim Scott fanning the flames of 2021 with his comments on the Jacob Blake shooting.
If you are going to say that an atrocity has been committed, and you do not seem angry then you come across as if you were begging. You come across as weak. And weakness only secures compassion if you already have the sympathy of the strong. We do not.
Whites willing to invite them in? By “invite them in” you mean do the slave trade right?
I agree that a lot of black elites make comments like that, but given the way Sowell types are treated I can forgive them.
I prefer to be mad at ideas. It’s not black peoples’ fault that they were brought to the US in the first place, that they have an average iq of 85, and that elites have told them that it’s all about racism.
I’m mad at criminals and murderers of course but I believe most people of whatever race are not terrible people and we should be nice to them, within reason. No, that doesn’t mean I want 10 million random Somalis in America.
Why would I want that exactly? No it's the leadership that I hate, and the ruling liberals who made this possible. As well as some, but not particularly most of their criminal class.
You can't conclude from answers to the GSS that self-identified race realists are less intelligent than the general population. Respondents answering that black-white socio-economic differences are attributable to differences in "in-born ability to learn" (response B to Q59 on pages 63 and 64 https://gss.norc.org/documents/quex/2000%20GSS%20v1.pdf) are not representative of race realists.
The survey is administered in person through a face-to-face interview, so most people responding as such will be those who can't parse that answer B constitutes racism, either because they have low verbal ability, or because they haven't received a software update in 50 years. By contrast, self-identified race realists will almost unifromly understand the social and political implications of the question, and give a more socially palatable answer to the interviewer sitting across the table. We would even expect race realists to be smarter than average (even if JQers) for the reasons you gave in your first article - they have a more satisfactory explanation for 99% of racial differences than either liberals or conservatives.
Likewise, using the low number of open race realists at the very top of the professions or the arts to draw inferences about their population distribution ignores the social and legal penalties race realists would face if their beliefs were revealed. Of course there isn't a cellist in the Berlin Philharmonic who openly supports race realism or German nationalism. If they did, they would immediately lose their job!
You're letting your political disagreements with (the majority of) race realists cloud your judgement about their likely intellectual distribution.
Emphasis on *self-identified*. In "Why We Need to Talk about the Right's Stupidity Problem" I said this applies to whites who "*admit* to being race realists." I could have made this more explicit, but I'm talking about people who are openly race realist. If most smart realists keep their views secret, they can't influence how race realism is perceived, and they can't publicly make well-grounded arguments for right-wing positions.
In that case you mean *publicly* identified, not self-identified, race realists, whom I agree are not intelligent people.
But the issues of the intellectual poverty of publicly identified realists/hereditarians (i.e. cosplay Nazis) and WNs who hold contradictory positions on group outcomes pertain to two separate networks of people. Most of the people whom you criticise as being "race realist for whites, woke for Jews”, engage with politics through anonymous social media accounts, and are part of a larger collection of anonymous hereditarians, who are the most immediate reservoir of intelligent hereditarians. You appear to be conflating the two networks when comparing data about the intelligence of one to the ideological problems of the other.
I think this is right and whilst I think Nathan makes good points overall, he reads a little too much into some data points that are unreliable for the reasons set out here.
IMHO there are a couple of additional things to mention:
1) Race-realists (soi-disant or otherwise) often get goaded into making bolder claims than the data allows for, because libs are so utterly dominant in cultural and intellectual life that libs set the terms of any debate. Realism about HBD (or whatever you want to call it) needs to be presented *extremely* conscientiously to prevent conflation of (a) what the evidence actually says with (b) what normies think that that implies. The question referred to above is a good example. There are 3 separate elements to this: first, is there such a thing as an ability to learn? Second, if so, to what extent if any is that ability in born versus environmental? And third, what is the effect of the answer to question 2 on economic outcomes later in life? I strongly suspect that these three are being muddled together into a mono factorial issue by the people answering the question, and that's why the responses seem incoherent. This of course, is on top of the obvious problems with social desirability bias.
2) The midwit bell curve meme is funny because it's true - Race Realism (or whatever you want to call it) is a de facto alliance of a few cognitive elites and a larger number of "common sense, innit?" normies who intuitively and correctly grasp something that their ostensible intellectual superiors do not. With that being the case, it's important not to get *too* hung up on the social connotations of RR, nor to get *too* focussed on distancing oneself from those at the left hand end of the distribution curve. It's counterproductive to spend that much time running up hill fighting reality. BUT it follows from this that Nathan has raised a very important and legitimate point. There is a huge amount of human capital locked in modern liberalism (inc. Wokeness), in the form of intelligent, diligent, low time preference, high impulse control, pro-social people who have signed up fully to what MM calls the Blue Tribe. Cofnas, Rufo, and Hanana can argue till the cows come home about the marginalia (I'm on Team Cofnas btw) but at some point there needs to be some real effort to bring these people back.
So overall, I give this article 2 and a half cheers.
There are of course individual blacks of great talent like Fryer, or Sowell, or Justice Thomas, but it's factually - indeed *scientifically* - wrong to suggest that any black can become a Fryer just by bootstrapping hard enough. Normie cons should stop peddling false hopes.
I think for hereditarianism to become mainstream and palatable to those who are currently on the political left, we need to talk LESS about the right-wing political implications of hereditarians which are totally obvious, and more about left-hereditarianism and the genetic lottery and such. From a moral perspective it's good to be aware of both the "right-wing" and "left-wing" political implication of hereditarianism. I don't think it justifies mistreatment and hatred of black people anymore than it does of 85 IQ whites, or that hereditarianism about Jews and Asians justifies anti-white hatred. What kind of sick moral system would have where so much is dependent on the empirical question of whether hereditarianism is true?
AFAIK the only person on the socialist left to do this is Freddie de Boer, who frequently argues that the *moral* case for financial redistribution is built on the *empirical* fact of inherent inequality between people.
But he's a pariah even amongst his fellow socialists, so I conclude that there's very little appetite amongst the left for hereditarian thinking.
The reason for that, IMHO, is something you get at in your last sentence. The modern West has, for some reason, completely abandoned the "is/ought" distinction, and so we are constitutionally incapable of separating empirical observations about Homo sapiens from normative questions of policy and interpersonal behaviour. L
I do not like the socialist hard-left at all and do not want to appease them or make their life easier in any way, but I was more thinking about normie center-left people like who could embrace Pinkerite ideas. KP Harden isn't as left as FdB and Pinker certainly is not.
Anyway, it's true that HBD is politically more convenient for the right than for the left, but so what? Climate change is more politically convenient for the left and many right-wingers accept it and push pro-market solutions like nuclear and solar PV, though unfortunately some do deny that it's a problem at all.
Hey Nathan, I don't know much about you, and I don't follow Aporia that closely – though I've read some of the articles, and I enjoyed them – but my friend sent me this article and asked me what I thought, so I thought I'd try to give a response.
I'd start out by saying that this post is excellent. There is a level of care, detail, mastery taken here is wonderful. Nothing you've said strikes me as wrong or insufficiently refined. There are two points I want to bring up, and I hope I communicate them to you with sufficient respect and clarity.
1. You briefly mention how power is necessary to make change, but ultimately this relies on the people who have power wanting that change.
I can't tell you how much I appreciate the paragraph where you talk about power as a proximate cause. You seem to understand that power exists to launder consent for itself, and that it will take whatever system it can to generate that consent – whether it be the divine right of Kings, technical genius, military cohesion, or indeed, wokeness.
You explain this so beautifully, and then you kind of drop the ball at that; you don't delve deeply into why the laundering mechanism should change from wokeness to "race realism". Your argument is basically because "race realism" (your phrase, I would use a different one) is true and more adaptive/functional than equality, e.g., produces more great works.
I will point you to this tweet, by a right-wing goon who you might be familiar with.
https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1539004402094297090
Darwin is obviously not at fault for the rise of Nazism by introducing natural selection – especially given the "world ice theory" situation. However, by introducing the concept of evolution into public consciousness, he did create a situation in which other morons could inject a degraded version ("social Darwinism") into consciousness and slip that nonsense in to justify the absolutism of the Führer.
If you want "race realism" over wokenness to be convincing to elites, you're going have to show them why it makes their job of stewarding the people easier, once its tenets is falls down to the imbecility at the bottom of the pyramid. Or else, why the imbecility of wokeness is worse than the imbecility of race realism; which is what you've kind of started to do here a little bit.
Which leads to my second comment...
2. There nothing here in your post that encourages elites to act at elites; that is to say, to act as stewards of the power and truth they possess.
Going back to that Tweet, part of what makes en elite is knowing that once they express truth and power (i.e., develop a dominant culture), they ought to take responsibility for the ways in which the masses will distort this culture in mind-numbingly stupid ways
You make a quick detour by mentioning Christ in the Roman empire. One of the reasons that Christ was so successful in deposing existing Roman morality is that he didn't just just provide a treatise of truth and then peace-out. He took great pains to cultivate disciples who could be sent to cultivate belonging and answer ridiculous questions such as: "If you are God, and you are good, then why did you let my mother die of cancer because that's evil?" in a compassionate and satisfactory way.
What answer are you going to give some poor sap who is IQ-limited and clumsy, but his neighbor and best friend growing up goes on to the heights of success and fame? How will you make him feel like he still belongs with race/IQ-realism?
Again, what made Christ divine (I'll stick with a lowercase 'd', I'm not about to get into a religious battle here), is that he said "this is who I am" and also (crucially!) "this is how you can belong to my earthly body if you join me." There is an element of stewardship. And, despite this, millions of blockheads have managed to tarnish Christ's worldly undertaking in the most heinous of ways.
I understand that you may not be trying to be political scientist or political operative here. You are likely trying to present a stack of proper, well-integrated facts that someone else (e.g., Rufo) can take and fit into the proper context of power politics. But in the interest of giving you larger voice and more impact over the elites (or elites-in-training) that are your primary audience, I would offer that you start putting effort into expanding on the nitty-gritty specifics of this:
"There will be a multidecadal transition period between wokism and a new, reality-based system, which will require various stopgap measures."
I think you have a responsibility – and of course you can disagree – to explain how the theses in this post will allow for elites to take more stewardship over the people they are accountable to, and who belong to them. Otherwise, ultimately to me (and I'm nowhere near an elite, but I could fit the mold), you are basically presenting ideas and praying that someone more magnanimous and competent and you picks up the crown and runs with your treatise. To me, that is feeble.
I agree with basically everything you say. But I'm less pessimistic than you are about what will happen when the principles of race realism "fall[] down to the imbecility at the bottom of the pyramid." If laws were put to a plebiscite, the majority of Americans would vote down free speech, free markets, etc. and turn the country into a quasi-fascist dictatorship. But it doesn't matter what the majority wants because, for better or worse, our social system is built so that the elites call the shots.
"But it doesn't matter what the majority wants because, for better or worse, our social system is built so that the elites call the shots."
This doesn't really square. It seems rather obvious that elites are constrained by public opinion in what they can do. Think of how many "elite" opinions can't be actualized because they go too far against what the people want. It shouldn't be hard to come up with a rather long list.
Just because elites get their way on many issues doesn't mean they get their way on all issues.
This is important because the composition of "the people" is changing rapidly, in large part because of elite actions (mass third world immigration). That change in public composition is going to change the options available to elites.
No elite thinks "yes, what happened in Detroit is a good thing and just what I wanted", but it's the best people can come up with in a majority black city. Elites realize that to get elite they have to behave a certain way in line with public opinion, so they do.
>Think of how many "elite" opinions can't be actualized because they go too far against what the people want. It shouldn't be hard to come up with a rather long list.
please elaborate a bit
Maybe one way to wrap hereditarianism up politically is to address it as one kind of luck. From your perspective, you had no control over the genes you were born with — they were completely outside of your control. And you also don’t have any control over the parents you were born to. Those are somewhat different things because you could have parents with enormous intellectual gifts and serious substance abuse.
A political agenda that wrapped it up as luck would take some of the sting out of it. You’re not any less of a human because of your genes. But you might end up with lower lifetime earnings than your neighbor because he lucked out in genes and you didn’t. I realize that this moves away somewhat from the race focus of the original post. And that would be absolutely intended, because the effect otherwise would be to essentially say, “oh, you were born black, how unlucky.” Nope. But this approach would also emphasize an important aspect: differences within groups are driven largely by the same factors are differences between groups. Genes drive IQ drives income and other outcomes.
There could be progressive and conservative versions of the program on luck. The progressive version would be that the government ought to do what it can to offset bad luck. That sounds like a justification for redistribution on an individualized basis and power-sharing with unlucky groups. The conservative approach would be to leave things alone because government assistance makes things worse and we can’t magic away real ability differences. Neither would look on the unlucky as having less dignity. I’d guess that the progressive version would be more effective at generating power, because it creates spoils. But I’m neither a progressive nor a conservative, so I could be way off.
Yes, good response – I can see you are starting to think in terms of power and political management. You are able to point out why and how power is able to launder itself more easily based on wokeism/egalitarianism than it is on race realism/HBD.
> The conservative approach would be to leave things alone...
...which is why they always lose the political/power game...
Now, if you want to continue making a political program out this idea of 'HBD as as form of luck' you have to answer a few questions.
Where are you going to train elites to learn and propagate this doctrine of 'HBD as luck'? Universities? Churches? Monasteries? Government internships? Media?
Which institutions are you going to make the face of this this doctrine? How can you mitigate the effect of those lower on the ladder who twist the message, or use it for self-aggrandizement? What's your process for making sure these folks fall in line when they make mistakes?
Most importantly, how will the 'unlucky' be able to borrow meaning and power from the 'lucky' – in what ways can they launder a sense of significance by belonging to the patronage of those groups & individuals who are 'lucky'?
Looking at someone who is 'less lucky' with 'equal dignity' is not automatic; it is the result of centuries of deep cultural and religious programming. Are you willing to continue deeply program the population in this way?
The issue is that if you are lucky to get good looks or athletic ability, the left has no problem with that luck.
The only luck they hate is IQ luck. I believe that is because only IQ luck threatens their ability to concentrate power to themselves.
In the end leftism is never about a consistent moral philosophy. It is about obtaining power and exerting that power onto others (all while claiming to be morally superior).
In summary, it is fine to view politics as a luck distribution problem.
But not fine to believe the left approach the solution to that problem with anything but their usual abject hypocrisy. Because leftists are oddly selective about who they hate (and it is NOT the lucky).
I won’t disagree, but I will note that income-based programs (income tax, most kinds of welfare) don’t differentiate between income generated by good looks or athleticism and income generated by IQ.
I recently read a history of the early Christian church (The Rise of Christianity - Rodney Stark) that suggested that a key element of the successful spread of Christianity was its rapid spread among the "second-tier" elite.
A variety of factors (care during plagues, elevated status for women and children, sanctifying grace and the beatific vision, a robust intellectual culture, social and intellectual integration for Hellenized Jews, etc.) made Christianity deeply appealing for those elites who were not already atop the pagan hierarchy.
"What answer are you going to give some poor sap who is IQ-limited and clumsy, but his neighbor and best friend growing up goes on to the heights of success and fame? How will you make him feel like he still belongs with race/IQ-realism?"
I think Jesus had some good answers, though modern society doesn't want to hear them:
"If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all."
"Does he not leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it?"
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."
Wokism is itself the manifestation of morons degrading concepts like CRT https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2021/12/10/heresy/
You're more likely to convince liberals of HBD than conservatives. If there's hope that things can change through things such as embryo selection then I can see liberals being more open to the idea of differences, maybe not group differences but individual differences. Conservatives, Republicans and right-wingers are a complete lost cause due to a lack of intelligence and prestige. They would also be against any solutions like embryo selection due to their reactionary and theocratic tendencies.
Liberal multiculturalists can be persuaded to not record racial statistics, that's basically the situation in France. Racial division is seen as taboo and low status. A much more effective strategy would be to appeal to the ruling liberal elite by saying that the rising tide of right-wing populism is due to dysgenic fertility (which it partly is). You would get a much more receptive audience.
The rising tide of right-wing populism is good though, and virtually the only force fighting back against left-wing insanity.
>Republicans and right-wingers are a complete lost cause due to a lack of intelligence and prestige.
Remember that the average White Republican is only 4-5 IQ points lower than the average White Democrat. Would you say Russians or Italians are too stupid to understand HBD because they are 4-5 IQ points lower than the average White American/Brit?
I think younger right-wingers are more secular and more techno-optimist, and more positively inclined toward embryo selection.
Soon it's likely to be possible to select embryos for polygenetic traits (such as intelligence, good looks, etc). When that happens many prospective parents will do so -- because the vast majority of people care more about their children than their political beliefs, and because most parents want their kids to be clever, good looking, etc.
Yeah, I think people of all political orientations will eventually embrace embryo selection. Some wokes and Christians might have hesitations but eventually a majority will do it. As with lab-grown meat, I think countries like Israel and Singapore will probably lead the way (especially controlling for size), and the US will be the biggest player since we are big.
> I think people of all political orientations will eventually embrace embryo selection
It'll start out as a few trend-setters but I expect that once it starts getting popular, there will be a tipping point where people say "if everyone else is giving their kids super-powers I need to too or mine won't be able to keep up".
The one thing that we are likely to agree is on that the old moral majority Christian right types are a lost cause. They're too hostile to eugenics to ever be convinced. But the idea that liberals could be convinced is laughable. Will Stencil is a representative of that class. Those are your hyperrationalist liberal technocrats, and they'd rather ban you, and everyone else even open to HBD, off the internet than give you the time of day. How will bans on racial statistics lead to eugenics? If they're logically consistent, French liberals are more likely to use such bans to push for a ban on genetic research on racial differences too.
Rightwing populism is a result of the death of theocratic, religious tendencies on the right. Nonchurchgoering Republicans put Trump in the White House. Unfortunately, as things currently stand, the secular right is at a total disadvantage compared to the far more politically savvy religious right. Trump's secular base lost out on the border wall and mass deportations, while the Evangelicals that jumped on the bandwagon after he won the primaries got RvW overturned.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/30/republican-party-nonreligious-populists/
It might be an uphill battle, but if you want HBD and eugenics, the embryonic secular right-populist movement is your best best. Anything else is a childish fantasy.
Tbh Israel and Singapore are probably your best bets, like with lab grown meat.
So a highly militaristic, expansionist, ethnonationalist democracy or an authoritarian, civic nationalist single-party city state? Neither is a society that technocratic 'liberal' globalists could create. They can barely tolerate their existence.
The tl;dr of the long post I just made is:
1. Your descriptions of Israel and Singapore are misleading. They are not as illiberal as you make them sound. They are definitely more liberal than most of the world including the beloved-by-globalists Ukraine. Their existence is not opposed by the globalists. Granted they are not like the US and Western Europe. But no one else is except for Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
2. It matters a lot exactly which "liberal globalists" you are looking at, and it also matters a lot if you are talking about support for embryo selection versus support for discussion of race differences. You conflate these two by just using the term "eugenics" (a term I would not use because it's too politically charged; see https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-i-oppose-eugenics by Richard). I can certainly imagine someone like Noah Smith endorsing embryo selection and saying that discussion of race differences is irrelevant because we will all be very smart in a few generations.
1. They are at most slight exaggerations. Your long post isn't really disputing this. Israel is a democratic society with gay vegan atheists. That hasn't stopped it from building settlements and many prominent politicians want to annex the West Bank either in whole or in part.
I have no trust in the Economist's rankings. They're obviously extremely biased. Compare only the states with right-populist governments in Eastern Europe. They rank Hungary as less democratic than Poland. Orbán has never tried to ban his political opponents in the way that Kaczyński attempted with his 'lex Tusk' before the last election, but Poland is far less defiant towards Washington.
I specified that Singapore is civic nationalist. It has relatively severe restrictions on press freedom for a 'democracy.' The elections are fixed through districting. The actual electoral process is theoretically 'free and fair' in itself, but the composition of parliament is mostly predetermined. The PAP wins sixty percent and 83 out of 93 seats. This is not comparable to Japan.
2. Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias are commentators on substack. They are not representative of the decision-making class of 'liberal' globalists. Will Stencil actually works for an NGO and is.
It's true that Israel has built settlements (though, most near the Green Line and not nearly enough to make a two-state solution impossible, see Shaul Arieli) and that many prominent politicians have at least talked about West Bank annexation, though few are really serious about it. The settlement lobby is really a special interest group. Israel won't resettle Gaza. It's an exaggeration to call Israel - which has offered a two-state solution based on the Clinton parameters several times https://thirdnarrative.org/israel-palestine-articles/palestinians-still-reject-clinton-parameters/ - an "expansionist state", though it has irredentist and expansionist elements, certainly, but they are not a majority. There's a reason why the Gaza withdrawal happened. And there's a reason even Netanyahu was willing to engage in two-state negotiations under Obama and Kerry, and objects to a Palestinian state based on security grounds and not on irredentist ones.
I am not super qualified to comment on Hungary versus Poland, but I'll say some things. I will note that the Polish populist government is gone. I think the criticism against Orban mostly stems from his attacks on the media and constitution, not from bans on political opponents. Orban is so secure he does not need to. In the US both parties talk about banning their political opponents from office. Trump said Crooked Hilary should be locked up, now the Dems say Trump should be thrown in prison. One could argue that if people talk about banning their political opponents, it's a sign of a healthy democracy because it means they have some viable opponents! Orban doesn't really. Anyway, The Economist does admit that Russia is more democratic than China, and has for many years. This is not what you would expect if it had the kind of bias that you are alleging.
Singapore has a first past the post system. In the last election the second and third place parties each won a bit over 10% of the vote each. It's not 60-40 or anything like that. There is no gerrymandering like in the US. So of course the PAP wins most of the seats. Many countries have first past the post which leads to very disparate outcomes that look different than public support. Would say Britain is not a democracy because of the 2015 election results? Heck, CGP Grey made a video about it calling it the worst election results in history! Yes, Singapore is certainly less of a liberal democracy than Japan, and everyone admits that, but as with Israel it's still not as illiberal as you are portraying it to be!
Israel is highly militaristic, definitely, that's by necessity but it's definitely the case. I would not call it "expansionist". The settler lobby and in general wants what it wants, but that's only the fringe Smotrich / Ben-Gvir corner of the right. I think about 10-20% of Israelis can be described as "expansionist", just some Likud backbenchers and Smotrich and Ben-Gvir types. Even when the right is in power (like now) you don't see annexation or huge expansion of isolated settlements. Netanyahu himself participated seriously in peace talks (see https://thirdnarrative.org/israel-palestine-articles/palestinians-still-reject-clinton-parameters/ and https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2017-06-08/ty-article-magazine/.premium/exclusive-obamas-plans-for-mideast-peace-revealed/0000017f-f58f-ddde-abff-fdef4a8c0000 ). Israel is definitely an "ethnonationalist democracy", it's a democracy where Arabs vote and have rights and have joined the government but it's totally unafraid to assert its Jewish character, the symbol is a Star of David and so on. So yes, no, yes. Israel also has the gay vegan atheist leftist Yuval Harari, who is a WEF creature, supports the existence of Israel, and also wrote in Sapiens that humans will do genetic engineering.
Singapore is not really authoritarian. It's a "flawed democracy" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index for the rankings) and is more free than Ukraine. It is on par with Hungary. This is according to The Economist, who you cannot accuse of being biased against Ukraine. Singapore has real elections. While one party - the People's Action Party (PAP) - is dominant, this doesn't make it not a democracy, anymore than Japan is not a democracy because the DPJ almost always wins or South Africa is not a democracy because the ANC always wins (there are some other problems with South Africa of course). Singapore's last election (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Singaporean_general_election for the Wiki) saw the PAP only win 61.23% of the vote. Other parties do and are allowed to run. Singapore is an "illiberal democracy" like Hungary. It is not "authoritarian" or "single-party". I don't know if I would call Singapore "nationalist" (of course the nationalism here being civic and not ethnic) in the sense of the populist right in the West, with aggressive flag waving. No one describes it like that. But it is true that Singapore for instance does not allow dual citizenship, which I guess means something. So I'll go with no, yes, no.
I think you overrate how right-wing Israel and Singapore are in your descriptions. I also think that technocratic "liberal" globalists (Matt Yglesias and Noah Smith types) generally support the existence of Israel and Singapore. Many of them are critical of Netanyahu but they are generally pro-Israel and support the existence of Israel, and Israeli secular liberals are certainly huge on IVF and PGD. They usually don't have anything bad to say about Singapore at all, at least not that I have seen, though you should take this with a grain of salt because unlike Israelis, Singaporeans are seen as "non-white" and "non-Western" and thus held to a lower standard. But yes, by the standards of America and Western Europe, they are definitely right-wing socially / culturally (though liberal by global standards), and of course they are non-Christian.
I do agree that technocratic liberal globalists like Smith and Yglesias could not create these kind of societies (on the other hand, maybe they could create some kind of based capitalist libertarian YIMBY society), but they do tolerate the existence of such societies. I also think that Noah these types might have trouble endorsing "race realism" even if they privately believe it but would still support embryo selection and say something about polygenic scores being hard to compare between races. Pinker is a technocratic liberal globalist and is one of the most prominent "HBD" people, though he is discreet about it. Anyway, one has to distinguish between support for embryo selection, where I expect that many liberal globalists will be onboard, with support for "HBD" which is a harder sell. One also has to think about heterogeneity within these kind of technocratic liberals. Someone like Smith or Yglesias will be much easier to get on your side than someone like Clinton or Obama. I am not denying that you have a real point here, and that modern-day "liberal globalist" sensitivities are not very amenable to discussions about the genetics of intelligence, especially when race is involved. But I do think they will come around on embryo selection, even if it's after Israel and Singapore. I can certainly imagine someone like Noah Smith endorsing embryo selection and saying that discussion of race differences is irrelevant because we will all be very smart in a few generations.
I have little doubt that Noah Smith and Matty Y can be convinced to support something that all their friends already support, that is after all the heavy lifting has been done by others to make it acceptable enough they feel safe supporting it. However, this is essentially useless for getting anything done.
Matty Y writes huge essays about education reform and opposes school vouchers. Now you know this guy should know enough about genetics and the null hypothesis that all of his education writing it false. Yet he still does it. Because he's a liberal and team liberal believes in the power of public education. Maybe if blue states start passing school vouchers he will write about how "we have always been at war with the teachers unions", but such a revelation will come after the political victory, not before.
"endorsing embryo selection and saying that discussion of race differences is irrelevant because we will all be very smart in a few generations."
There are some problems here:
1) We don't know if embryo selection will make everyone smart in a few generations. We know that if you get enough eggs (which is still an involved process) that you can drastically reduce the chance of certain diseases. We also hope that it will increase IQ, but that is harder to measure and the effect is not huge currently.
We also won't really know the affect until we run the experiment at scale for a few generations (if people end up smart but with the personality of the Unabomber its a failed experiment). And the societal impacts are also unknown (I'm reminded of the discussion in Brave New World where they make everyone an Alpha++ and it ends in a war of all against all).
I support embryo selection, but not as a get out of jail free card for making other smart choices about running our society. I don't want to put all my eggs in one basket.
2) Which leads to the discussion that really matters, immigration. Noah and Matty are most famous for wanting to flood the first world with low IQ third world trash, on the basis of denying their low IQs. If the idea here is "embryo selection will bail us out of that terrible choice" then that's a really bad idea. If it doesn't work out, you're fucked.
3) Moreover, if embryo selection did work as well and as fast as everyone hopes, why do people even need to immigrate? In the blank slate view the third world is poor because something something institutions. In reality we know low IQs (which also cause bad institutions) is the cause. If embryo selection is going to solve their low IQs, why do they even need to immigrate. They can just stay where they are and we can being the IQ and "institutions" to them.
4) The correct "technocratic" solution is to cut off all third world immigration today. This will keep the first world the first world, and thus able to keep producing technological breakthroughs like embryo selection. As that technology improves and is used more and more and scale and we see the real life effects and iterate, its use can be expanded to the third world.
What we should not do is induce mass third world immigration potentially destroying the first world economic and R&D machine that can develop these technologies.
You'll note that is what countries like Singapore and Israel came up with. They don't let their demographics get overwhelmed by outsiders by having the more strict immigration regimes in the world.
1) I think we do know it will help, and I think current gains are already on the order of 5+ points. Polygenic scores are improving all the time. IVG isn't too far away either, we should certainly have that in one generation, after which point you can talk about 15+ points. I don't really believe the Brave New World thing. Imagine as a thought experiment going to a third-world country and people telling you that embryo selection will make our country like America, with gender ideology and so on, it will be a failed experiment. That would be ridiculous. Of course it will succeed. I have confidence. I agree that we shouldn't just give up on policy and promote embryo selection as a panacea. Which brings me to point 2.
2) I definitely don't support unlimited low-skill immigration into the US. In the US the situation is a bit different than in Europe though. As Richard Hanania is fond of pointing out, most murders in the US are not committed by immigrants. I agree of course that the situation on the border right now is really bad.
3) The blank slate view for third world immigration is not the most convincing one. Bryan Caplan and Richard Hanania types argue that because of comparative advantage and so on, immigration is generally good for global GDP, good for the GDP of the receiving nation, good for global GDP of the sending nation because of remittances, etcetera. I think there is some truth to these arguments, and I don't think that legal blue-collar Mexican immigration for instance has been horrible for the country. I agree with you of course that it's not so simple, that political circumstances like the 14th amendment and our welfare state prevent us from turning the US into a big UAE, or even into something more reasonable like Israel or Singapore which have a nontrivial number of Southeast Asian guest workers.
3+4) Umm ... this includes for instance banning Indian immigration to the US? Or Iranian immigration? That's not a good idea. Especially Indian immigration. Indians in the US out-earn Jews! I strongly support Indian immigration to the US. There are third world countries that reliably send us high-quality, selected immigrants. I certainly support cracking down hard on illegal immigration, experimenting with some guest worker programs (again, tricky because of the 14th), cutting off all immigration of Somalis and Afghans except for really selected people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali types and Afghan translators who helped us, and so on. But I think having legal blue-collar immigrants from middle-income countries like Mexico is fine even if their average are IQs are below 100. My stance here is moderate, probably similar to Musk's. I don't disagree with you at all that national IQs are important, but they are not the only consideration. And with the US, given that the demographic picture is different than Europe and the welfare state is smaller, I am more open to this sort of thing. Hispanic immigration has made a lot of large US cities safer by displacing a certain subset of the native population with a really high crime rate. You can't say the same thing about Muslim migration to Europe.
5) Singapore and Israel have lots of immigration! But of course you're right that they are very strict on illegal immigration, and they don't allow themselves to be demographically overwhelmed by low-skill immigration. I agree, they are good examples.
At independence Israel was 80% Ashkenazi or so, but it accepted lots of third-world migrants. Of course as cremieux demonstrated, non-Ashkenazi Jews in Israel average ~100 compared to ~110 for Ashkenazi. Later on they accepted Ethiopians on overcrowded planes and flew them in. They were not afraid to do very aggressive measures to integrate them, and even gave temporary birth control shots. Ethiopian-Israelis now have higher average income and education than Arabs, and they probably average in the 90-95 range. Israel accepts lots of Jews who tend to be high skill. They also accepted lots of non-Jewish Russians with a tenuous Jewish connection. During the Russia-Ukraine war, Israel accepted Ukrainian refugees with absolutely no Jewish connection. It's true though that while Israel has a lot of immigration, it is generally medium and high-skill. Of course throughout its history and to the present Israel has accepted tons and tons of medium-skill and high-skill Jewish immigrants. For obvious reasons Jewish immigrants tend to be high-skill and medium-skill. Israel is not afraid at all to build a wall on the Egyptian border to prevent the illegal "infiltrators" from coming up, deport the "infiltrators" from Africa who came before the wall, and who are in South Tel Aviv and have a big crime problem, and rightly so. Israel also has plenty of guest workers from countries like Thailand and the Philippines, but it does not give them citizenship. So Israel does have lots of immigration, but it's generally medium and high skill. I like Israel's policies.
Like Israel, Singapore has had a lot of high-skill immigration whose ethnicity is the same as that of the majority ethnicity of the country. Also like Israel, Singapore has a lot of guest workers from Southeast Asia, and in fact even more than Israel has. Singapore though has definitely not cut off immigration from the third world. There is huge migration from Malaysia, Indonesia, and China to Singapore. Granted the Malay that have moved to and move to Singapore are disproportionately higher-skill and ethnically Chinese. Still, definitely a nontrivial proportion of the Malay immigrants are low-skill ethnic Malays. It's not like Singapore banned Muslim migration or banned low-skill migration wholesale.
So I think Israel and Singapore are good models to emulate, yes. I think what Elon Musk wants is more or less correct. I agree with you that our current policy of letting in tons of low-skilled illegal migrants is absolutely awful and needs to stop, but I don't think we need to go for a hardcore restrictionist policy.
> Conservatives, Republicans and right-wingers are a complete lost cause due to a lack of intelligence and prestige.
I always considered it hilarious that the intelligence research community's single greatest nemesis turned out to be a *former Neo-Nazi*.
Who?
Maybe this guy https://www.unz.com/isteve/oliver-d-smith-of-crackpotwiki/
1) I've seen zero evidence of right wingers being against embryo selection.
https://dallasivf.com
Despite a near total abortion bad, IVF clinics are running just fine in Texas.
If there is going to be a backlash against embryo selection, its going to be the left complaining about eugenics.
2) France is being overrun by low IQ Muslim hordes. See no evil here no evil doesn't solve the immigration problem.
3) If embryo selection works well in a reasonable timeline, the entire concept of race will become irrelevant. Of course, it would also eliminate the strongest arguments for things like immigration (if we can improve the genes of the third world, they can just stay in place and get rich).
4) The most important issue is immigration, as becoming majority dumb brown is the biggest existential issue threatening the west. Most any other inefficiency can be overcome without the entire engine of prosperity and progress from breaking down.
The goal should be to protect that engine long enough for it to overcome biology (if possible).
> If embryo selection works well in a reasonable timeline
Embryo selection would work a lot faster/better if it wasn't just limited to gametes from the social parents of the prospective child. And you you want it to work (which I do, for the good of the species) it'd work best if prospective parents could use gametes from the entire population, chosing those from individuals with the best of the desired traits.
I've never in my life heard a parent brag about how stupid or ugly their child was, so this has a chance of happening.
People can raise other peoples (genetic) children today and few do. They want to give birth to their own children.
Picking the best of your own eggs and sperm is still choosing your own eggs and sperm. It's a huge jump to "use other peoples genetic material."
It is for some, it isn't for others. So I think prospective parents should be allowed to choose; some will choose to use others' genetic material, which will be enough to improve the quality of the species.
I can't speak for rightwingers in general, but Right-to-Lifers absolutely are. Campaign Life Coalition here in Canada is opposed to in vitro, surrogacy and embryo selection. Numerically they are weak, but they are politically savvy and well-funded. They are less powerful in this country, but in America they manage to push the GOP around in the same way that the wokesters push the Democratic Party around.
You know in theory half the country is against abortion, and yet it loses by a landslide even in deep red areas.
I think we need to differentiate between "the official line" and "what people actually believe". Birth control is still against Catholic doctrine, but as someone who has a lot of weekly attending catholic friends that ain't too strict for people.
In general your average religious pro-lifer is against abortion but doesn't want to push the issue to hard. They might vaguely be against surrogacy but that isn't a big issue. IVF is pretty much just fine for them (they want to have a baby after all, so that's pro-life), and they never heard of embryo selection.
Pro-life religious friends of mine that needed to skirt Catholic doctrine to have kids did so.
Murdering a kid in your own womb is never going to get a complete pass, because quite frankly it shouldn't. But that's a world away from "help more babies be born and make them health and happy."
> Pro-life religious friends of mine that needed to skirt Catholic doctrine to have kids did so.
Oh? I was under the impression Catholic doctrine was pro-natalist. Am i wrong?
Catholic doctrine is against IVF and some other stuff, but people I've known that needed to do so to have kids just ignored the churches doctrine.
> but in America they manage to push the GOP around in the same way that the wokesters push the Democratic Party around
This is because of FPTP which (because of Duverger's rule) results in there being 2 big parties. Because there are only 2 parties, with no-one else getting a look in, it's easy for a special interest group to take control of one of the big parties and then use that to control what happens in the country.
If USA had a fully proportional system (like e.g. Netherlands) there would be lots of viable parties, and if a special interest group took control of one of the big ones, and changed its policies to something the voters don't like, it would avail them nothing, as voters would simply switch to another party.
It's both disgusting and undemocratic that special interest groups (such as wokies or religious extremists) get to rule when most people dislike them, which is why in countries that use FPTP, getting rid of it ought to be the most important political objective.
" A much more effective strategy would be to appeal to the ruling liberal elite by saying that the rising tide of right-wing populism is due to dysgenic fertility (which it partly is)."
Yeah that would be great if it wasn't a lie. In what world is right wing populism due to dysgenic fertility when liberals on average possess much greater mutational loads? Not to mention that the rise of the right wing populists is barely a decade old, so it can in no way be attributed to mutational load.
You're also just asserting that liberals could be convinced of HBD more than conservatives without any evidence whatsoever. All current trends point to the opposite, and not surprisingly; are liberals known to accept hierarchichal ideas, or is that a tendency which right wingers have? Obviously the latter.
Excellent article. Some thoughts:
(1) Strongly agreed on the intellectual bankruptcy of the cultural theory of race differences arguments. In addition to your three points, I would also add that culture is not intrinsically less insulting than the hereditarian explanation, and perhaps more so. You can't do much about your genetic heritage (at least for now). But culture is the accretion of a people's folkways, so what does an attack on it represent?
(2) I appreciate your more specific prescriptions for what needs to be done, although as I can see it boils down to "keep soldiering on" and "keep Nazis at arms' length." As you know, I am relatively more skeptical about the scope for success within any reasonable timeframe. We are already for the most part in a situation where "those who know, know" and those who don't, have no interest or stake in it. My prescription trends more towards: (a) Exit out of existing sclerotic and captured institutions - tactical libertarianism, if you will - through advocacy and implementation of Open Borders, network states, and DeSci; (b) transhumanist acceleration, which may well make many of these issues moot sooner than people see truisms that were ultimately self-evident even from the works of psychometrists a generation ago.
(3) Minor quibble but I don't think it's accurate to reference Sub-Saharan African IQ of 85 in relation to "hunting and gathering on the savanna". Agriculture came there in 5,000 BC afaik, and they were actually impressively early to iron manufacturing. The core reason IMO was just the lack of cold winters. It's the combination of cold winters x agriculture is what seems to have generated apex North Eurasian intelligence. Most Africans did have agriculture and those Africans were smarter than Africans who continued to do hunting and gathering.
I don't think rice farming was responsible for East Asian intelligence, but I do think it shaped the Asian personality. All things being equal, rice farmers tend to be better than everyone else (including wheat farmers) at doing homework.
Rice farming was possible for collectivism. Wheat places are more innovative. Doing homework is conscientiousness, people need to pass exams and innovate.
Funny that you keep mentioning homework.
It may measure something useful, but just about every study on the effectiveness of homework in improving academic outcomes has found that it is virtually useless.
Open Borders is the worst idea imaginable and probably the biggest reason to push for more HBD.
Giving blacks a few token jobs to make them feel better is something we could afford.
Making the first world majority low IQ brown is a potential existential crisis with no upside.
We have these occasional racial panics were we do a bunch of dumb stuff, but then the silent majority gets tired of it and pushes back. No more silent majority and you get a dysfunction spiral with no end.
1) you can’t change your genes, but you can play the cards you’re dealt in better ways and stupid ways. Socially enforced monogamy alone would do wonders for a lot of low IQ communities toward bettering their material circumstances
I wouldn’t say it’s “bankrupt”, unless it’s attempting to sit under the “blank slate” umbrella. OF COURSE heredity affects your base stats, and different groups have differing average stats. But culture (how you play the game with the character sheet you have) DOES make a big difference
We should also remember that in one sense we CAN change our genes - or rather the genes of our heirs - through mate selection.
What future generations will be like depends on what traits we encourage and select for, and that in turn is largely a matter of culture.
If, for example, we create a culture in which women value intelligence and engineering talent, future generations will likely have more intelligence and engineering talent. If we create a culture in which women value athleticism and flashy displays of wealth, future generations will likely be more athletic and have flashy displays of wealth - but might be very dumb.
I have shifted my views somewhat.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/thoughts-on-race
So, I think I'll be doing an in depth reply to your work later; and I appreciate your responses to the earlier comments - But I think the core of our disagreement is as follows. Quoted from your piece:
"For if we want to include any cultural features, then a continental or sub-continental scale origin notion of race will not do, as such regions are collections of cultures and folk can, and do, shift between cultures."
"If you want to explain different distributions of outcomes among human groups, race is not very useful, precisely because we are so much the cultural species."
But it is useful, it's the most useful thing!
The most successful European ethnicities are responsible for many multiples more groundbreaking mechanical inventions than the least successful ones. And yet all African societies however different they may (theoretically) be from each-other can claim NONE. ZERO. The difference between any and none, is huge.
If you are gonna deny the validity of a category that corresponds perfectly with A) Fully detectable visual and genetic identification and B) Which is easily the most important aspect of any remotely recognizable version of modern human life; what category could possibly be valid?
Now true, so far I've only done European vs. Black African; and things get fuzzier with other distinctions like Arab and North African vs European... so you'd have an easier time arguing that there were only 2 races.
I have discussed why Sub-Saharan Africa lagged. There are a whole lot of relevant geographical, environmental and institutional factors which are relevant. If you wanted to create a situation of “yep, these folk are going to be behind” it is almost perfect. Few useful harbours; no navigable rulers; lots of co-evolved pathogens, parasites, predators and megaherbivores; endemic slavery due to low population density making labour more valuable than land … Genes matter, but we are above all the cultural species: lots of other things matter as well.
The short history of human invention is: if it was invented before about 500BC it was invented first in the Fertile Crescent; from 500BC to 1500 it was invented in China; after 1500 in Europe/West. Unless it was about horses, in which case the steppes (or boundary thereof). There are some exceptions, but not many. Hard to fit that into a genetic explanation.
Have you read any life history theory at all?
Kaplan’ et al’s “embodied capital” analysis is the closest I have come to it, though I am aware of the r-selected K-selected distinction. I am aware anthropologists note the difference in Sub-Saharan family structures, which are fairly clearly responses to a dangerous physical and social environment and clearly entail lower parental investment, by human standards.
Right on. Definitely encourage a read of some of Rushton and Rushton-adjacent works (cold winters theory stuff). This acknowledging (as does Nathan) that Phil had some shoddy empirical work.
Anyone advocating for embracing false explanations will be proven wrong soon enough. The evidence continues to accumulate and the genomic databases are ever-growing. Environmental explanations will continue to be falsied and the elite public understanding of the replication crisis in the social sciences is only going to continue to grow. Those who want to embrace keeping quiet are going to need a plan to suppress evidence to the detriment of the social sciences and our understanding of the world altogether. Aporia and realist researchers like Emil are not going to stop. The truth will find its way. The genomic databases with the relevant information to bury blank slatism are growing larger every year as the cost keep falling dramatically. With true causal explantions, we can devise realistic solutions.
I've embraced the power of genetic enhancement in hopes that we can benefit humanity. I hope progressives will be receptive someday. Delaying this technology and ideas will cause more harm than good.
This is a brilliant essay and I am on the Cofnas side of Rufo/Hanania/Sowell debate. I am excited for the future of Aporia.
There was plenty of evidence earlier. People just ignore it.
Very well said! I agree 100%.
Probably going to be your best article so far
I've written the Philosophy of Race FAQs to help people understand hereditarianism better: https://zerocontradictions.net/FAQs/race-FAQs.
Hopefully, this will help lead the Hereditarian Revolution. The page is designed to disseminate information in a thorough, distilled, and quick/easy-to-read manner.
Brilliant essay that has the added benefit of suggesting a simple and perfectly feasible way out of our present bind.
I associate the woke with being conformist and ill-informed, just the way modern, scientifically literate people a hundred years ago must have viewed Christians and look at that melancholy, long withdrawing roar. With enough brainy people (Steve Sailer, Emil, Bo and Noah) and cool people (Ricky Gervais, Konstantin Kisin, Leo Kearse) on our side there's no reason why others shouldn't start making the same negative associations with wokism.
Wait, has Gervais publicly endorsed race realism?
No, not as far as I know but he seems the type who would. After all, the only thing stopping anyone endorsing it is honesty, and I think Gervais is probably honest.
I find diamond’s argument hilarious, about race purportedly not being a thing. Like, imagine if you ordered a Chesapeake retriever and diamond shipped you a chocolate lab. You complain. And then diamond argues, well you see, they’re actually the same breed because they’re both are dark brown, are similar in size and retrieve. It wouldn’t fly! Of course, people find the analogy to dog breeds offensive. But in Spanish the same word “raza” that is, race, refers to race in people and breeds in dogs? “Mejorar la sangre” for the win!
Also, I was wondering whether race realism would be easier to explain as something we all already do, just more honest. For example, online dating is racist, but we can’t be real about it. OkCupid stopped sharing the data because it was embarrassingly racist. On Grindr, Asians wear sunglasses, and blacks take grayscale pictures. (I’m not trying to pick on whites; they are often the least racist among groups.) Participants don’t need statistics to infer the higher social status of whites.
But socially acceptable people say two things. First, attraction is too subjective and incommensurable and mysterious to analyze. This point pretends that dating isn’t a market, that we don’t offer prospective partners something they want in return for something we want. Second, attraction is too personal or bodily to racially criticize. Along these lines, such criticism is tantamount to sexual assault. By racially criticizing someone’s attractions, people threaten a severe moral sanction to procure unwilling sex.
These positions reflect a desperate attempt to reconcile perceived goods of (1) sexual autonomy and (2) not being seen as racist. They are enforced only by fiat of what is socially acceptable. Personally, I think sexual autonomy is good. I would also extend that view to associational freedom more generally. But the social consensus is that racism is fine in some contexts (but don’t be too explicit) and VERY BAD in others. I think this consensus has come about, strained and dishonest as it might be, because people understand on some level that, to borrow the cliche, everyone is a little bit racist.
Likewise, Coleman Hughes’s colorblindness strikes me as fake. (I believe that this view is woke orthodoxy?) And not only because of the above example about dating. Like, if you want to be colorblind, you have to have a blinded assessment. For example, a standardized test or a race or even a subjective evaluation where you don’t know who is being evaluated. You can’t just squeeze your ass hole and will yourself into colorblindness. But a formally blinded assessment doesn’t make sense for many choices; it depends on how important the choice is and what the assessment is likely to reveal. If we’re not going to invest in colorblind screens, we need to accept some bias.
But I think Hughes’s point gets at another issue normal people have with hereditarian thinking. Even if racial differences can be attributed to something heritable, many people think that attributing racial group averages to individuals is morally wrong (or so they say!). For every observable characteristic but race, we start from the general and update on specifics as you learn them. But race is taboo. I’m not sure that, even if people accepted hereditarian thought, they would stop piously claiming that they only judge individuals as individuals. The information itself is illicit.
Yeah, the “judge people as individuals” is obviously the ideal, but in many scenarios, information is limited, and you have no choice but to make probabilistic judgments based on known relevant data about group averages etc. I get mildly annoyed when people like Murray don’t point this out. I think Nathan is write that there’s too much tiptoeing around obvious truths like this.
I agree. It’s the ideal, but sometimes we have to stereotype. Still one should not overdo it and be compassionate about it. For example I would try to be extremely careful about assuming black people or women at professional events are staff; they are more likely than the base rate but a false positive is awkward and offensive. Of course in life or death situations are different.
As a man I have no problem with women being more scared of men at night based on statistical truths about men and crime, but the idea that upper-class women are in constant danger from upper-clsss men because every man is a potential rapist is absurd and offensive.
I feel that many hereditarians are GLEEFUL at the lower IQ of blacks. I understand the joy of discovering something suppressed, I understand the anger at Kendi types and so on. I understand that politically it's good for fighting the wokes. But no, it's not really a good thing, I wish it weren't so, of course I would wave a wand to increase the average Black IQ to 100. Who wouldn't?
Yeah I’m pretty much a basic bitch normiecon from the 90s, so I actually think colorblindness and the MLK quote are pretty noble goals, and eugenics is a great evil.
That said, I’m perfectly happy to discuss the heritability of IQ and the group averages, but I also detect a certain GLEE at the topic from many. And also an assumption that “low IQ = low morals and high crime”, which is insulting to all the non criminal stupid people.
Do you support polygenic embryo selection and "liberal eugenics"?
The next issue to address may be the social stigma and real career impract. Imagine you are a smart and capable young person who knows the truth. You want to be public but you will lose institutional support among conservatives, you will be removed from your PhD program, you likely won't become a professor and you may lose your ordinary job. I would say that Sowellism is not even THAT popular among many conservatives because even talking about explanations is so highly taboo...most just ignore it.
A person with a family or who wants to have a family would be right to be hesitant about this. Substack is not a realistic alternative - especially because someone smart enough to understand Jensen's The g Factor probably has very nice alternatives career wise or in academia.
It is very difficult to see a realistic career path where you openly discuss these topics. Both Bo Winegard and Noah Carl lost their academic positions for their views. Same with Bryan Pesta who was already a professor. You are an interesting exception, but you might find it difficult to actually get an academic position after your current one.
I would enjoy seeing you provide some advice on this because it's a major obstacle. :)
No political movement can succeed without personal sacrifice. This cannot be avoided.
1) Wait until tenure before open discussion of this, and 2) go for slightly less radioactive issues like Ashkenazi IQ, male variability, and so on. Given how black people were treated in this country before 1965 it’s understandable people are so sensitive about BW. I wouldn’t lead with it.
I would also add just talking about the heritability of intelligence, within group. People aren't aware of twin studies. The Blank Slate by Pinker should be more widely read. And I think you might have an easy time getting liberals to accept white liberals vs white conservatives. Kathryn Page Harden is talking about the income-IQ correlation. You can talk about income-IQ and height-IQ without denying that poor people and short people gave discrimination in some contexts. I'm a huge capitalist and a hereditarian who believes that rich people have a significantly higher average IQ than poor people. But I wouldn't deny that US universities unfairly discriminate in favor of rich people. Cremieux just had a post about it.
Basically, follow Pinker’s example, and email him for advice about it.
Have you emailed with him about it?
Yes, he is very friendly.
We need more left-of-center people to be Pinkerites.
Personally, I focus on persuading people on the margin, those who are open to hearing heterodox theories. I won't discuss these things with someone who's firmly committed to the standard narrative unless I'm already very close to them.
Fortunately, I'm in a hard science, and the people in this field tend to have little interest in politics, much less political correctness, so there are many people who could be persuaded.
Great post. Thanks.
"Whites are the ones who brought blacks out of Africa and created the conditions where they failed to develop a culture of homework, respect for the law, and strong nuclear families."
Although you mean this rhetorically, as the probable response blacks and liberals would have to the urgings of soft realists, considering this response seriously begs a question: why do black people lack agency? They are always acted upon, rather than agents of their own actions. (Except for crime, of course.)
No matter whether people accept the hereditarian model or not, can't we ask black people to be agents of their own destiny as opposed to being the planet's perennial victims?
Any secular political project without utopian aspirations is bound to fail. Look at the successful projects of the last century. Zionism was romantic to the point of insanity. Communism promised heaven on earth. Fascism would restore the Roman Empire. Naziism sought to perfect man. In this century woke tells us that we can choose our own sex and be whatever we want. All of them promised, in their own way, a perfect world. As Christians stared down lions in the area for the City of Heaven, Zionists endured pogroms and fought an insurgency against the most powerful empire in the world in Palestine for Israel, Red Army soldiers trudged through a brutal civil war for the communist utopia and millions of Germans laid down their lives for the masterrace.
Apart from a few honourable exceptions like yourself, most race realists lack the bravery to even speak their minds. All that you offer is a purely negative victory over wokeness. It is noble to stand for the truth, but without a utopian vision your truth is an ugly one. Few well-adjusted men will risk their careers on behalf of an ugly truth. Ugliness attracts the ugly of spirit. Take a look at the blackpill community for a glimpse at the sort of men that love ugly 'truths.'
As a political project race realism is doomed unless it is combined with a utopian vision of its own. At best it might be wielded in defence of some sort of traditionalism. Nationalism, not of the traditionalist kind, but of the modernist, eugenic variety, can provide that vision of utopia. I doubt that anything else can. Limp-wristed rhetoric about how different communities might be allowed to self-segregate but that we may have to accept diversity hires in government for some time will inspire very few to take a strong public stand that could destroy their careers.
I actually think it's a desirable truth that these differences are rooted in genetics rather than social factors. We've learned after decades of trying that social programs don't work. But biotech is advancing at an astonishing rate, and it's plausible that we will understand how to genetically engineer higher intelligence in the future. I don't think it's necessary to be utopian; we just need to explain to people that genetics are not actually "immutable". It's a solvable problem. In this area, it's traditionalists who will take more convincing.
I agree, but that is my entire point. Hereditarianism needs to be attached to a utopian vision so that men will want it to be true.
I think I misinterpreted what you meant by “utopian” then - I thought you meant it in the more literal, narrow sense of a state of perfection, but if you just mean an ambitious vision that nonetheless accepts that we will never run out of problems to solve, then I agree.
Stupidity is a genetic disease for which we can develop a cure. Not peoples fault for being born with it. But we should cure it.
This is a very nice article. I have two notes:
1) I'm not sure what the reasoning is behind this statement: "...the first generation has an average IQ of 100, their children will have an average IQ of 90, assuming heritability of 50%."
If the first generation is selected for 90% percentile intelligence (of Nigerians), and the second generation is the offspring of two 90% percentile-intelligence parents, why should we expect regression to the (Nigerian) mean? Is the author saying: (a) Nigerian immigrants intermarry with (non-selected) black individuals, so their offspring have lower intelligence; (b) Nigerian immigrants got a high draw of non-genetic contribution to intelligence, which they cannot pass to their offspring; (c) The genetic contribution to intelligence regresses to the mean of the ancestral population?
(2) If you are serious about a hereditarian revolution, you might consider publishing a guide, or list, of magazines/Twitter accounts/Substacks that engage with the hereditarian hypothesis seriously. Naturally, as you are engaged in an ongoing converstaion on this topic, you are acutely aware of the areas of the internet on which the conversation takes place. As passively interested readers, we only pick up bits and pieces. Decentraliztion is great, but it makes things harder to keep track of.
(1) The answer is (b).
For traits like height or IQ, individuals in a population vary. Heritability is a measure of how much of that variation is due to genes rather than environment. The higher the heritability of a trait, the more your phenotype is "determined" by genes.
Suppose your parents both have IQs of 130, which is 30 points above their population mean of 100. If IQ is 100% heritable, that means both your parents have genes for 130 IQ. You inherit those genes, so your expected IQ is 130. Suppose IQ is 0% heritable. Now it doesn't matter who your parents are--your expected IQ is the population mean (100). Suppose IQ is 50% heritable. Then your expected IQ is in between your parents and the population mean (115).
Nigerian mean IQ is probably around 80. The 90th percentile is around 100. If two Nigerians with IQs of 100 have children, assuming 50% heritability, their children will (on average) have an IQ of 90. (The heritability of IQ is actually higher than 50%, but that's how the numbers work in the example.)
For more explanation see: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27199
(2) There are many crackpots in the hereditarian camp, and it's hard to know who to listen to. I mention Aporia. Also people like Razib Khan, Gregory Cochran, Crémieux, i/o, Steve Sailer, Charles Murray, Neven Sesardić...
The rage is still missing
"He who says A must say B". - Lenin
Cofnas and the Folks at Aporia are doing strong and valuable work here, and had they been active during the perestroika of the 90s, our civilization might be in a much better place.
That being said, what I think is being missed here is that the findings of HBD can and should trigger hatred. That hatred should of course not be indiscriminate, and should be tempered by compassion for the soon to be vanquished. But things like the clearing out of Whites from 25% of our major cities by an orgy of black violence in the 60s that continues today; constitute atrocities. And it matters very much that these atrocities, already unjustifiable even if there was the possibility of soon bringing the new inhabitants of these cities into civilization had no justification whatsoever.
It matters very much that even most intelligent Blacks, and even roughly half of Republican blacks feel a deeper kinship with their more dysfunctional racial family, than to the whites who've been so willing to invite them in. See polling on reparations, who is to blame for the state of black America, or OJ Simpson if you doubt this. Or see Republican Senator Tim Scott fanning the flames of 2021 with his comments on the Jacob Blake shooting.
If you are going to say that an atrocity has been committed, and you do not seem angry then you come across as if you were begging. You come across as weak. And weakness only secures compassion if you already have the sympathy of the strong. We do not.
Whites willing to invite them in? By “invite them in” you mean do the slave trade right?
I agree that a lot of black elites make comments like that, but given the way Sowell types are treated I can forgive them.
I prefer to be mad at ideas. It’s not black peoples’ fault that they were brought to the US in the first place, that they have an average iq of 85, and that elites have told them that it’s all about racism.
I’m mad at criminals and murderers of course but I believe most people of whatever race are not terrible people and we should be nice to them, within reason. No, that doesn’t mean I want 10 million random Somalis in America.
Fuck that shit. Fuck the BLM riot apologists, and fuck the Hamas apologists.
"Invite them in": Universities, Corporations, White institutions in general.
"given the way Sowell types are treated I can forgive them": Well I can't, at least not until they are far away from me.
But anyway my hatred is for the elites in general, not specifically black elites.
Why would I want that exactly? No it's the leadership that I hate, and the ruling liberals who made this possible. As well as some, but not particularly most of their criminal class.
I just don't want them around here.
You can't conclude from answers to the GSS that self-identified race realists are less intelligent than the general population. Respondents answering that black-white socio-economic differences are attributable to differences in "in-born ability to learn" (response B to Q59 on pages 63 and 64 https://gss.norc.org/documents/quex/2000%20GSS%20v1.pdf) are not representative of race realists.
The survey is administered in person through a face-to-face interview, so most people responding as such will be those who can't parse that answer B constitutes racism, either because they have low verbal ability, or because they haven't received a software update in 50 years. By contrast, self-identified race realists will almost unifromly understand the social and political implications of the question, and give a more socially palatable answer to the interviewer sitting across the table. We would even expect race realists to be smarter than average (even if JQers) for the reasons you gave in your first article - they have a more satisfactory explanation for 99% of racial differences than either liberals or conservatives.
Likewise, using the low number of open race realists at the very top of the professions or the arts to draw inferences about their population distribution ignores the social and legal penalties race realists would face if their beliefs were revealed. Of course there isn't a cellist in the Berlin Philharmonic who openly supports race realism or German nationalism. If they did, they would immediately lose their job!
You're letting your political disagreements with (the majority of) race realists cloud your judgement about their likely intellectual distribution.
Emphasis on *self-identified*. In "Why We Need to Talk about the Right's Stupidity Problem" I said this applies to whites who "*admit* to being race realists." I could have made this more explicit, but I'm talking about people who are openly race realist. If most smart realists keep their views secret, they can't influence how race realism is perceived, and they can't publicly make well-grounded arguments for right-wing positions.
In that case you mean *publicly* identified, not self-identified, race realists, whom I agree are not intelligent people.
But the issues of the intellectual poverty of publicly identified realists/hereditarians (i.e. cosplay Nazis) and WNs who hold contradictory positions on group outcomes pertain to two separate networks of people. Most of the people whom you criticise as being "race realist for whites, woke for Jews”, engage with politics through anonymous social media accounts, and are part of a larger collection of anonymous hereditarians, who are the most immediate reservoir of intelligent hereditarians. You appear to be conflating the two networks when comparing data about the intelligence of one to the ideological problems of the other.
I think this is right and whilst I think Nathan makes good points overall, he reads a little too much into some data points that are unreliable for the reasons set out here.
IMHO there are a couple of additional things to mention:
1) Race-realists (soi-disant or otherwise) often get goaded into making bolder claims than the data allows for, because libs are so utterly dominant in cultural and intellectual life that libs set the terms of any debate. Realism about HBD (or whatever you want to call it) needs to be presented *extremely* conscientiously to prevent conflation of (a) what the evidence actually says with (b) what normies think that that implies. The question referred to above is a good example. There are 3 separate elements to this: first, is there such a thing as an ability to learn? Second, if so, to what extent if any is that ability in born versus environmental? And third, what is the effect of the answer to question 2 on economic outcomes later in life? I strongly suspect that these three are being muddled together into a mono factorial issue by the people answering the question, and that's why the responses seem incoherent. This of course, is on top of the obvious problems with social desirability bias.
2) The midwit bell curve meme is funny because it's true - Race Realism (or whatever you want to call it) is a de facto alliance of a few cognitive elites and a larger number of "common sense, innit?" normies who intuitively and correctly grasp something that their ostensible intellectual superiors do not. With that being the case, it's important not to get *too* hung up on the social connotations of RR, nor to get *too* focussed on distancing oneself from those at the left hand end of the distribution curve. It's counterproductive to spend that much time running up hill fighting reality. BUT it follows from this that Nathan has raised a very important and legitimate point. There is a huge amount of human capital locked in modern liberalism (inc. Wokeness), in the form of intelligent, diligent, low time preference, high impulse control, pro-social people who have signed up fully to what MM calls the Blue Tribe. Cofnas, Rufo, and Hanana can argue till the cows come home about the marginalia (I'm on Team Cofnas btw) but at some point there needs to be some real effort to bring these people back.
So overall, I give this article 2 and a half cheers.
Yeah I also like the idea of saying that these gaps are not black peoples fault! They can’t just work harder and close the gaps.
We can make 10000 clones of Roland Fryer though.
I agree with this, too.
There are of course individual blacks of great talent like Fryer, or Sowell, or Justice Thomas, but it's factually - indeed *scientifically* - wrong to suggest that any black can become a Fryer just by bootstrapping hard enough. Normie cons should stop peddling false hopes.
I think for hereditarianism to become mainstream and palatable to those who are currently on the political left, we need to talk LESS about the right-wing political implications of hereditarians which are totally obvious, and more about left-hereditarianism and the genetic lottery and such. From a moral perspective it's good to be aware of both the "right-wing" and "left-wing" political implication of hereditarianism. I don't think it justifies mistreatment and hatred of black people anymore than it does of 85 IQ whites, or that hereditarianism about Jews and Asians justifies anti-white hatred. What kind of sick moral system would have where so much is dependent on the empirical question of whether hereditarianism is true?
AFAIK the only person on the socialist left to do this is Freddie de Boer, who frequently argues that the *moral* case for financial redistribution is built on the *empirical* fact of inherent inequality between people.
But he's a pariah even amongst his fellow socialists, so I conclude that there's very little appetite amongst the left for hereditarian thinking.
The reason for that, IMHO, is something you get at in your last sentence. The modern West has, for some reason, completely abandoned the "is/ought" distinction, and so we are constitutionally incapable of separating empirical observations about Homo sapiens from normative questions of policy and interpersonal behaviour. L
I do not like the socialist hard-left at all and do not want to appease them or make their life easier in any way, but I was more thinking about normie center-left people like who could embrace Pinkerite ideas. KP Harden isn't as left as FdB and Pinker certainly is not.
Anyway, it's true that HBD is politically more convenient for the right than for the left, but so what? Climate change is more politically convenient for the left and many right-wingers accept it and push pro-market solutions like nuclear and solar PV, though unfortunately some do deny that it's a problem at all.