I’ve become more convinced to your view. One of my friends is like you in that he has the patience and focus to go through every single potential counter argument and rebut it in an engaging way. I would definitely get bored and, even if I forced myself, I would do crappier, less engaged work. I think there’s a bit of jealousy on the part of people like me towards people like you, so we cope by being overly skeptical of the battle of ideas.
The Equality Thesis isn't the whole story with Wokism.
For example, the US military has a problem with Chinese spying. One of the reasons is that the US military hires Chinese people with Chinese passports from China, believes they are 100% American if they've been in the country for 6 months, and gives them sensitive information. A Blank Slater would easily understand why a Chinese person who was raised in China might have some loyalty to China. Wokists are forbidden from understanding that.
In fact, logically consistent people who believe in the equality thesis should be MORE opposed to some forms of immigration than hereditarians are. If you really believed that culture is the only difference between Sweden and Somalia, then you would conclude that Somali culture is one of the worst, most destructive things on Earth, and ought to be eradicated. The people who really believe in the Equality Thesis are Sowellite conservatives.
There's a chance you may want to skip existing elites alltogether. All the normie shows use ''had the highest recorded IQ in class or whatever" as a synonym for this guy's really smart and gonna be a big player. Just switch IQ for SAT. And make all SAT scores public and searchable. Do the same with at least all government employee salaries. On the same website. Everyone will search their classmates, notice the less capable ones that got further ahead for *reasons* and you'll have the energy needed to get something functional going.
Have a reality tv show where normie men with a week's training beat army women at airsoft.
Then do the same for high SAT v. low SAT (Is there data on the correlation between IQ (I mean SAT) and marksmanship?)
Normies understand that successful fighters are just better, in the same sense they admire Trump despite him calling himself better because, yeah lol he's rich and bangs supermodels, of course he is.
Then declare that for high IQ graduates batchelor's should really only be two govt funded years. But they must be psychologically healthy (ie. lift weights/do sports). And why can't you do law or medical school straight out of high school on the basis of your LSAT or MCAT again? Bring back LLBs. Also, any firm with government contracts MUST NOT DISCRIMINATE! Govt spending is 26% of GDP? Well, well, well.
----
A Loyal American Elite before the Trump admin is over. And one with the revolutionary zeal needed to overthrow the current order.
Overall, Indian immigration to the US will lead to a strengthening of the left and development like in Canada.
In addition, the fact of "human biological diversity" is not only the difference in IQ, but also the innate ethnocentric nature of people, especially non-Western nations.
Therefore, it is quite rational for any political right-wing party that believes in social Darwinism, the free market, and love for white people to oppose mass Indian immigration to the United States.
Whether accepting HBD would cause someone to become more or less supportive of 'wokism' or egalitarianism depends on what their current explanation of human inequality is. Perhaps for someone who believes in a Christian, moralistic, anaturalistic, account of inequality which emphasises individual choice and free will (like prosperity gospel), the realisation that socio-economic outcomes are heritable traits may cause them to become more left-wing.
But the woke left believe inequalities between groups and individuals are largely explained by structural discrimination, nepotism, ruthlessness and idiosyncratic luck. Being convinced differences in innate talent explains inequality should move them to the right. This is why they are so resistant to even hearing the evidence.
A hereditarian left would also look very different to a woke left. It wouldn't support equality of outcome, and all of the harmful policies needed to achieve that. Instead it would likely be contented with some degree of redistribution to close, but not eliminate, individual and group differences. It would also support equal amounts of redistribution for individuals equally deficient in human capital who belong to races with different distributions of human capital. While I do not favour those policies, they would be a massive improvement on the policies that the 'woke' and 'liberal' elite both implement now.
"It wouldn't support equality of outcome, and all of the harmful policies needed to achieve that."
Why?
Look, elite Chinese in Malaysia are racist and don't think their success is their fault. Most probably believe in HBD like LKY. But the Bumiputera is still in place because people use politics to get what they can for their own regardless of fairness.
"It would also support equal amounts of redistribution for individuals equally deficient in human capital who belong to races with different distributions of human capital."
This seems even more bizarre.
The congressional black caucus doesn't care about poor whites. It exists to support the welfare of blacks as blacks. It shares as little with whites as possible while achieving that end. The less redistribution that goes to poor whites, the more there is for blacks.
And what about people who profit from all this. If I'm a superintend of education and I'm making a fat six figures a year am I going to say "yeah, actually I can't change kids IQs and my job is kind of bullshit and you should just give parents vouchers." Of course you aren't going to do that. You're going to say "the latest blank slate education fad, of which I'm a credentialed expert in implementing, is the solution we have longed for."
I'm talking about what a hereditarian left would believe. None of the groups you talk about are hereditarians, so their current political positions are not relevant evidence.
If even as much as 50% of white Ivy-league grads become Republicans because of Cofnas's hereditarianism, then they will become the shot callers and set the norms for the Republican party instead of the retarded Christians. --Stealing a big chunk of issues away from the Democrats that the Democrats are right about: pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-environmentalism, anti-Russian. And this alone will bring over the majority of the smart set of the rest of whites.
They're not right about pro-gay. At most you could argue for indifference towards gays, but being actively "pro" is not desirable. Also I would ask why America should be anti-Russia yet pro-Israel when Israel just engaged in a mass slaughter?
The overwhelming majority of high IQ folks have no stigma for gays. AKA "pro". ...Anti gay stigma comes directly from Christianity retardation (like Islam). Smart folks know this.
I would make the case for neutrality over pro but that's just me. I'm anti-gay personally but I would ignore it politically as it's a side issue, it should just be disincentivized and not normalized. Buggery is gross, it doesn't lead to procreation, it lower birth rates, it's a social contagion to some degree, etc. Moderate toleration at best.
well i'm just giving you an insider's tip that smart educated folks secretly think you are a fool to retarded Christian ethics (intellectually insecure), or on the intellectual level of a Muslim, if they hear you say you are anti gay.
Sure but I don't base my politics on placating EHC libs. I'm just saying taking a stance of indifference is more or less fine, but why would we want right wing people being actively *pro* gay? It's just silly.
why? like Cofnas, we want to win the cognitive elite. and because they are right about a lot of things, like abortion and gays. "fuck around and find out" --lose the female-vote by being anti-abortion or lose the smart-set by stigmatising the gays, and you can lose your country. (the liberals win the elections and open the borders.)
" Which great difference in men's intellectuals, whether it rises from any defect in the organs of the body particularly adapted to thinking; or in the dullness or untractableness of those faculties for want of use; or, as some think, in the natural differences of men's souls themselves; or some, or all of these together; it matters not here to examine: only this is evident, that there is a difference of degrees in men's understandings, apprehensions, and reasonings, to so great a latitude, that one may, without doing injury to mankind, affirm that there is a greater distance between some men and others in this respect than between some men and some beasts."
Everyone agrees that there is "great difference in men's intellectuals." Locke notes that "some think" there are "natural differences of men's souls," but (at least in this section) "it matters not here to examine."
I'm not convinced that Locke was a blank slatist in the sense of denying innate intelligence. His essay about blank slatism is about the recondite philosophical question of whether we are born with "concepts" or whether we learn them by experience. That's quite different from the question of whether individuals and groups vary in potential ability. Locke was an "empiricist" in the "empiricist vs. rationalist debate" and the "empiricists" were closer to modern science.
Furthermore, at the time he was writing, Virginia Amerindians were mostly nude savages. In the intervening centuries we've discovered that many Amerindians CAN become Christians and learn mathematics. So there is not equality in innate intelligence, but at the time Locke was writing there really were very large environmentally-caused differences. Amerindians today live in houses and they don't go around trying to hunt whites with spears.
The doctrine of innate racial equality of ability seems like a late 19th and 20th century corruption of liberalism, not something that was part of liberalism from the beginning.
Does IQ or any other aspect of "hereditarianism" explain aggression and impulsivity? Because those are the main relevant issues with the racial group I'm thinking about.
Hereditarians might have more success converting former wokes to their cause if they emphasize that there are exceptions to group differences, and that acceptance of the positions doesn't necessitate changing your treatment of individuals -- this worked for me. Murray makes this argument with the example of not hiring Obama for a job because he's black.
It could be that this is only necessary for convincing midwits, and true liberal elites are sufficiently dedicated to truth that they don't need the reassurance. It could also be that true liberal elites will go the route of treating even exceptional individuals in accordance with their group characteristics. But it seems unlikely.
"When is the last time you saw a 70-year-old change his mind about something important? Or even a 25-year-old? Some people remain open to revising their core beliefs in adulthood, but they are exceptions."
Considering the state of the Republican party, it happens more often than it seems. It just isn't immediately obvious until the person has moved several intermediary stages to the new position. Even when you consider in-out migration from the party, deep red states officials have adopted positions/beliefs fairly unheard of 20 years ago (counterpoint: the greatest generation has passed, the silent generation is now exiting the scene, plus there is the Great Sort so there has been a demographic change in addition to value changes). So that's in favor of people adopting new beliefs.
To the point if truth and how people behave when their basic premises change (e.g. from Christian belief to social justice): I once talked to someone who went to a real life meet up for an HBD publication. She said it was exactly what you'd think, with people talking about race differences in the crudest terms. Unlike the publication that had plenty of "to be sures" and "this is a distribution and it doesn't reflect individuals...", once out in the open and in normal conversation, it became "Filipinos are stupid" and people musing about a high-IQ whites only commune. Maybe she just had a bad experience, but taboos often exist not just for the thing itself but for the cloud of things that happen once something becomes permissible.
With new information, often the next step is "Well what are we going to *do* about that." This is something you think will be positive, but I'm not certain. It might be we become a colorblind society where people accept different groups of people will be more successful in different fields at different rates OR it might inspire explicit racialized policies. We'll then be back to absurd 19th century legal questions over what to do with quadroons in Return to the Land colonies.
The truth is self-affirming. It should be pursued as an end unto itself, and therefore we don't need to adjudicate competing predictions about the political consequences of verboten knowledge.
The framing in your piece above is parochial. The best answer to "Why are you so concerned about group differences in IQ?" is to note that it's simply a means to a far more important end: understanding how our minds work.
Intelligence is both a highly polygenic and obviously highly consequential trait. We need to understand it at as granular a level as is possible. It's axiomatic that with that understanding, we will also necessarily understand whatever the truth happens to be about group differences.
The people who are rabidly committed to the equality hypothesis are also terrified of the consequences of actually figuring out whether and to what extent those differences even exist. It's like claiming that astrology is bollocks but also incredibly dangerous.
Because there are significant group difference in measured intelligence, it is both very useful and necessary to have diverse samples to triangulate around how intelligence actually works. Note for example that the same people who were claiming sibling-admixture studies showed genetic equality based on educational outcomes are now compelled to claim that Biobank IQ tests are inferior measures of intelligence. Well yes, but then stop blocking the very research necessary to best understand how our genes produce intelligence.
This is of course practical as well. Consider IVF. Should we choose embryos at random, or based on their allegedly symmetrical shape under a microscope, or because choosing the right embryo could avoid consigning someone to a lifetime of being too stupid under US law (IQ less than 70) to choose whether to commit murder?
And in addition to raising the floor, we might one day need to raise the ceiling for our own survival as a species. For example, we may need to get smarter on average, whether by selection or gene editing (unlikely because of how polygenic intelligence is), or perhaps smart drugs, in order to terraform the solar system. And as you note, intelligence isn’t the only socially desirable trait we’re concerned with.
Ultimately the development and acceptance of fundamental knowledge--how our minds literally work--is not a political strategy or conclusion but an existential necessity.
Addressing the end of your essay: again I claim that discussion of disability is also "woke", since discussion around rights of disabled people has all the same characteristics and comes from largely the same people. No sane person claims that disabilities are caused by the able-bodied, but institutions still have an obligation to accommodate them. Likewise, even if elites admit to themselves that certain groups are dumber and more violent on average, institutions would still be obligated to prevent the awful outcomes endemic to those groups. Don't you agree? If not, part of your new narrative has to address the brutal crime, imprisonment, and poverty that those people face.
Kind of a funny analogy: inflation may start with an imbalance between the money supply and economic activity, but once it gets started, it becomes embedded in people's minds and doesn't just go away once the balance is restored. The zeitgeist of equity will not just go away, and a practical solution to the blatant discrimination and cruelty coming from the woke must still conform with it.
I think if this is really your belief, you need to stop talking about the meta argument (whether anti-wokists should push hereditarianism) and start creating as many high quality arguments that hereditarianism is true as you can. You seem to assume that any intelligent person would agree that hereditarianism is true if they looked at the data, but nothing I’ve seen has been that bullet proof. And there are plenty of good left wing arguments that at least add a considerable amount of doubt to the hereditarianism thesis. (Sasha Gusev provides some arguments for example.) I know plenty of smart people who are familiar with at least some of the data that don’t even think IQ is a very good measure.
Right now, the easily available evidence and argument online simply isn’t of a high enough quality (in my mind) to convince a committed leftist that hereditarianism is true. Moreover, it is not strong enough for someone who is on the fence or exploring these ideas to open themselves up to social banishment by even raising this type of argument with friends or family as a possibility, let alone raise it as true. Maybe if you considered both sides and had to choose in a safe environment, the evidence would fall in hereditarianism’s favor, but given the immense taboo around the subject that simply isn’t enough. If you want people to become hereditarians in the current social / political environment, you first need to work as hard as you can to craft a near bulletproof argument that hereditarianism is true. I just haven’t seen anything like that yet. Until someone can go into an argument where they know they will be branded an extreme racist safe in the knowledge that the facts are *definitely* on their side, your approach simply isn’t going to work.
Race IQ isn't the ONLY thing Cofnas must push the woke smart-set to go hereditarian about. 1.) He also must rub their noses in the Putnam's Bowling Alone issue that white homogeneous economies have more "social capital" than with diversity. 2.) And that game theoretic identitarianism beats multiracial atomised individualism, for nation states. 1 and 2 are also hereditarian realism.
Good article, it gives an in depth coverage of the 1950/51 UNESCO report on race, a clear definition of wokeness, a link between liberalism and wokeness through John Locke onward, and commentary on what a possible hereditarian left would look like.
I’ve become more convinced to your view. One of my friends is like you in that he has the patience and focus to go through every single potential counter argument and rebut it in an engaging way. I would definitely get bored and, even if I forced myself, I would do crappier, less engaged work. I think there’s a bit of jealousy on the part of people like me towards people like you, so we cope by being overly skeptical of the battle of ideas.
The Equality Thesis isn't the whole story with Wokism.
For example, the US military has a problem with Chinese spying. One of the reasons is that the US military hires Chinese people with Chinese passports from China, believes they are 100% American if they've been in the country for 6 months, and gives them sensitive information. A Blank Slater would easily understand why a Chinese person who was raised in China might have some loyalty to China. Wokists are forbidden from understanding that.
In fact, logically consistent people who believe in the equality thesis should be MORE opposed to some forms of immigration than hereditarians are. If you really believed that culture is the only difference between Sweden and Somalia, then you would conclude that Somali culture is one of the worst, most destructive things on Earth, and ought to be eradicated. The people who really believe in the Equality Thesis are Sowellite conservatives.
Jinchao Wei was a permanent resident in America (not a citizen). He joined the Navy and was later recruited by the Chinese government to be a spy.
https://maritime-executive.com/article/sailor-accused-of-spying-on-u-s-navy-was-not-an-american-citizen
Yeah, check my note above. We actually need a clean-slate replacement of a massive chunk of the current elite class. And it needs to happen soon.
There's a chance you may want to skip existing elites alltogether. All the normie shows use ''had the highest recorded IQ in class or whatever" as a synonym for this guy's really smart and gonna be a big player. Just switch IQ for SAT. And make all SAT scores public and searchable. Do the same with at least all government employee salaries. On the same website. Everyone will search their classmates, notice the less capable ones that got further ahead for *reasons* and you'll have the energy needed to get something functional going.
Have a reality tv show where normie men with a week's training beat army women at airsoft.
Then do the same for high SAT v. low SAT (Is there data on the correlation between IQ (I mean SAT) and marksmanship?)
Normies understand that successful fighters are just better, in the same sense they admire Trump despite him calling himself better because, yeah lol he's rich and bangs supermodels, of course he is.
Then declare that for high IQ graduates batchelor's should really only be two govt funded years. But they must be psychologically healthy (ie. lift weights/do sports). And why can't you do law or medical school straight out of high school on the basis of your LSAT or MCAT again? Bring back LLBs. Also, any firm with government contracts MUST NOT DISCRIMINATE! Govt spending is 26% of GDP? Well, well, well.
----
A Loyal American Elite before the Trump admin is over. And one with the revolutionary zeal needed to overthrow the current order.
You've created a very good article, but I want to point out some important facts:
Indians actually support the left, advocate for socialism, anti-white discrimination, etc:
https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-case-against-indian-immigration?triedRedirect=true
https://knightsofthegreenshield.substack.com/p/riding-the-tiger-why-the-anglosphere
Migrants retain their views even through generations:
https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-assimilation-myth
Overall, Indian immigration to the US will lead to a strengthening of the left and development like in Canada.
In addition, the fact of "human biological diversity" is not only the difference in IQ, but also the innate ethnocentric nature of people, especially non-Western nations.
Therefore, it is quite rational for any political right-wing party that believes in social Darwinism, the free market, and love for white people to oppose mass Indian immigration to the United States.
Whether accepting HBD would cause someone to become more or less supportive of 'wokism' or egalitarianism depends on what their current explanation of human inequality is. Perhaps for someone who believes in a Christian, moralistic, anaturalistic, account of inequality which emphasises individual choice and free will (like prosperity gospel), the realisation that socio-economic outcomes are heritable traits may cause them to become more left-wing.
But the woke left believe inequalities between groups and individuals are largely explained by structural discrimination, nepotism, ruthlessness and idiosyncratic luck. Being convinced differences in innate talent explains inequality should move them to the right. This is why they are so resistant to even hearing the evidence.
A hereditarian left would also look very different to a woke left. It wouldn't support equality of outcome, and all of the harmful policies needed to achieve that. Instead it would likely be contented with some degree of redistribution to close, but not eliminate, individual and group differences. It would also support equal amounts of redistribution for individuals equally deficient in human capital who belong to races with different distributions of human capital. While I do not favour those policies, they would be a massive improvement on the policies that the 'woke' and 'liberal' elite both implement now.
"It wouldn't support equality of outcome, and all of the harmful policies needed to achieve that."
Why?
Look, elite Chinese in Malaysia are racist and don't think their success is their fault. Most probably believe in HBD like LKY. But the Bumiputera is still in place because people use politics to get what they can for their own regardless of fairness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumiputera_(Malaysia)
"It would also support equal amounts of redistribution for individuals equally deficient in human capital who belong to races with different distributions of human capital."
This seems even more bizarre.
The congressional black caucus doesn't care about poor whites. It exists to support the welfare of blacks as blacks. It shares as little with whites as possible while achieving that end. The less redistribution that goes to poor whites, the more there is for blacks.
And what about people who profit from all this. If I'm a superintend of education and I'm making a fat six figures a year am I going to say "yeah, actually I can't change kids IQs and my job is kind of bullshit and you should just give parents vouchers." Of course you aren't going to do that. You're going to say "the latest blank slate education fad, of which I'm a credentialed expert in implementing, is the solution we have longed for."
I'm talking about what a hereditarian left would believe. None of the groups you talk about are hereditarians, so their current political positions are not relevant evidence.
If even as much as 50% of white Ivy-league grads become Republicans because of Cofnas's hereditarianism, then they will become the shot callers and set the norms for the Republican party instead of the retarded Christians. --Stealing a big chunk of issues away from the Democrats that the Democrats are right about: pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-environmentalism, anti-Russian. And this alone will bring over the majority of the smart set of the rest of whites.
They're not right about pro-gay. At most you could argue for indifference towards gays, but being actively "pro" is not desirable. Also I would ask why America should be anti-Russia yet pro-Israel when Israel just engaged in a mass slaughter?
The overwhelming majority of high IQ folks have no stigma for gays. AKA "pro". ...Anti gay stigma comes directly from Christianity retardation (like Islam). Smart folks know this.
I would make the case for neutrality over pro but that's just me. I'm anti-gay personally but I would ignore it politically as it's a side issue, it should just be disincentivized and not normalized. Buggery is gross, it doesn't lead to procreation, it lower birth rates, it's a social contagion to some degree, etc. Moderate toleration at best.
well i'm just giving you an insider's tip that smart educated folks secretly think you are a fool to retarded Christian ethics (intellectually insecure), or on the intellectual level of a Muslim, if they hear you say you are anti gay.
Sure but I don't base my politics on placating EHC libs. I'm just saying taking a stance of indifference is more or less fine, but why would we want right wing people being actively *pro* gay? It's just silly.
why? like Cofnas, we want to win the cognitive elite. and because they are right about a lot of things, like abortion and gays. "fuck around and find out" --lose the female-vote by being anti-abortion or lose the smart-set by stigmatising the gays, and you can lose your country. (the liberals win the elections and open the borders.)
" Which great difference in men's intellectuals, whether it rises from any defect in the organs of the body particularly adapted to thinking; or in the dullness or untractableness of those faculties for want of use; or, as some think, in the natural differences of men's souls themselves; or some, or all of these together; it matters not here to examine: only this is evident, that there is a difference of degrees in men's understandings, apprehensions, and reasonings, to so great a latitude, that one may, without doing injury to mankind, affirm that there is a greater distance between some men and others in this respect than between some men and some beasts."
-John Locke
https://www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/courses/439/locke0420.htm
Everyone agrees that there is "great difference in men's intellectuals." Locke notes that "some think" there are "natural differences of men's souls," but (at least in this section) "it matters not here to examine."
I'm not convinced that Locke was a blank slatist in the sense of denying innate intelligence. His essay about blank slatism is about the recondite philosophical question of whether we are born with "concepts" or whether we learn them by experience. That's quite different from the question of whether individuals and groups vary in potential ability. Locke was an "empiricist" in the "empiricist vs. rationalist debate" and the "empiricists" were closer to modern science.
Furthermore, at the time he was writing, Virginia Amerindians were mostly nude savages. In the intervening centuries we've discovered that many Amerindians CAN become Christians and learn mathematics. So there is not equality in innate intelligence, but at the time Locke was writing there really were very large environmentally-caused differences. Amerindians today live in houses and they don't go around trying to hunt whites with spears.
The doctrine of innate racial equality of ability seems like a late 19th and 20th century corruption of liberalism, not something that was part of liberalism from the beginning.
Does IQ or any other aspect of "hereditarianism" explain aggression and impulsivity? Because those are the main relevant issues with the racial group I'm thinking about.
Those traits are also heritable and related to IQ.
Hereditarians might have more success converting former wokes to their cause if they emphasize that there are exceptions to group differences, and that acceptance of the positions doesn't necessitate changing your treatment of individuals -- this worked for me. Murray makes this argument with the example of not hiring Obama for a job because he's black.
It could be that this is only necessary for convincing midwits, and true liberal elites are sufficiently dedicated to truth that they don't need the reassurance. It could also be that true liberal elites will go the route of treating even exceptional individuals in accordance with their group characteristics. But it seems unlikely.
"When is the last time you saw a 70-year-old change his mind about something important? Or even a 25-year-old? Some people remain open to revising their core beliefs in adulthood, but they are exceptions."
Considering the state of the Republican party, it happens more often than it seems. It just isn't immediately obvious until the person has moved several intermediary stages to the new position. Even when you consider in-out migration from the party, deep red states officials have adopted positions/beliefs fairly unheard of 20 years ago (counterpoint: the greatest generation has passed, the silent generation is now exiting the scene, plus there is the Great Sort so there has been a demographic change in addition to value changes). So that's in favor of people adopting new beliefs.
To the point if truth and how people behave when their basic premises change (e.g. from Christian belief to social justice): I once talked to someone who went to a real life meet up for an HBD publication. She said it was exactly what you'd think, with people talking about race differences in the crudest terms. Unlike the publication that had plenty of "to be sures" and "this is a distribution and it doesn't reflect individuals...", once out in the open and in normal conversation, it became "Filipinos are stupid" and people musing about a high-IQ whites only commune. Maybe she just had a bad experience, but taboos often exist not just for the thing itself but for the cloud of things that happen once something becomes permissible.
With new information, often the next step is "Well what are we going to *do* about that." This is something you think will be positive, but I'm not certain. It might be we become a colorblind society where people accept different groups of people will be more successful in different fields at different rates OR it might inspire explicit racialized policies. We'll then be back to absurd 19th century legal questions over what to do with quadroons in Return to the Land colonies.
They don’t understand facts and logic…
The truth is self-affirming. It should be pursued as an end unto itself, and therefore we don't need to adjudicate competing predictions about the political consequences of verboten knowledge.
The framing in your piece above is parochial. The best answer to "Why are you so concerned about group differences in IQ?" is to note that it's simply a means to a far more important end: understanding how our minds work.
Intelligence is both a highly polygenic and obviously highly consequential trait. We need to understand it at as granular a level as is possible. It's axiomatic that with that understanding, we will also necessarily understand whatever the truth happens to be about group differences.
The people who are rabidly committed to the equality hypothesis are also terrified of the consequences of actually figuring out whether and to what extent those differences even exist. It's like claiming that astrology is bollocks but also incredibly dangerous.
Because there are significant group difference in measured intelligence, it is both very useful and necessary to have diverse samples to triangulate around how intelligence actually works. Note for example that the same people who were claiming sibling-admixture studies showed genetic equality based on educational outcomes are now compelled to claim that Biobank IQ tests are inferior measures of intelligence. Well yes, but then stop blocking the very research necessary to best understand how our genes produce intelligence.
This is of course practical as well. Consider IVF. Should we choose embryos at random, or based on their allegedly symmetrical shape under a microscope, or because choosing the right embryo could avoid consigning someone to a lifetime of being too stupid under US law (IQ less than 70) to choose whether to commit murder?
And in addition to raising the floor, we might one day need to raise the ceiling for our own survival as a species. For example, we may need to get smarter on average, whether by selection or gene editing (unlikely because of how polygenic intelligence is), or perhaps smart drugs, in order to terraform the solar system. And as you note, intelligence isn’t the only socially desirable trait we’re concerned with.
Ultimately the development and acceptance of fundamental knowledge--how our minds literally work--is not a political strategy or conclusion but an existential necessity.
Addressing the end of your essay: again I claim that discussion of disability is also "woke", since discussion around rights of disabled people has all the same characteristics and comes from largely the same people. No sane person claims that disabilities are caused by the able-bodied, but institutions still have an obligation to accommodate them. Likewise, even if elites admit to themselves that certain groups are dumber and more violent on average, institutions would still be obligated to prevent the awful outcomes endemic to those groups. Don't you agree? If not, part of your new narrative has to address the brutal crime, imprisonment, and poverty that those people face.
Kind of a funny analogy: inflation may start with an imbalance between the money supply and economic activity, but once it gets started, it becomes embedded in people's minds and doesn't just go away once the balance is restored. The zeitgeist of equity will not just go away, and a practical solution to the blatant discrimination and cruelty coming from the woke must still conform with it.
I think if this is really your belief, you need to stop talking about the meta argument (whether anti-wokists should push hereditarianism) and start creating as many high quality arguments that hereditarianism is true as you can. You seem to assume that any intelligent person would agree that hereditarianism is true if they looked at the data, but nothing I’ve seen has been that bullet proof. And there are plenty of good left wing arguments that at least add a considerable amount of doubt to the hereditarianism thesis. (Sasha Gusev provides some arguments for example.) I know plenty of smart people who are familiar with at least some of the data that don’t even think IQ is a very good measure.
Right now, the easily available evidence and argument online simply isn’t of a high enough quality (in my mind) to convince a committed leftist that hereditarianism is true. Moreover, it is not strong enough for someone who is on the fence or exploring these ideas to open themselves up to social banishment by even raising this type of argument with friends or family as a possibility, let alone raise it as true. Maybe if you considered both sides and had to choose in a safe environment, the evidence would fall in hereditarianism’s favor, but given the immense taboo around the subject that simply isn’t enough. If you want people to become hereditarians in the current social / political environment, you first need to work as hard as you can to craft a near bulletproof argument that hereditarianism is true. I just haven’t seen anything like that yet. Until someone can go into an argument where they know they will be branded an extreme racist safe in the knowledge that the facts are *definitely* on their side, your approach simply isn’t going to work.
Race IQ isn't the ONLY thing Cofnas must push the woke smart-set to go hereditarian about. 1.) He also must rub their noses in the Putnam's Bowling Alone issue that white homogeneous economies have more "social capital" than with diversity. 2.) And that game theoretic identitarianism beats multiracial atomised individualism, for nation states. 1 and 2 are also hereditarian realism.
Good article, it gives an in depth coverage of the 1950/51 UNESCO report on race, a clear definition of wokeness, a link between liberalism and wokeness through John Locke onward, and commentary on what a possible hereditarian left would look like.