I hope Nathan will write a book about the origins of wokism, combining Rufo's, Hananians and his own approach - finding egalitarianism at the root - to this. A book like this is sorely needed.
By the way, I wonder where Pluckrose & Lindsay's book fits into all this (looks like it is on the same line as Rufo).
Bit later than I would've liked, but I finally finished, and was pleased to do so.
While there's much I could talk about, the main reason why I'm in your camp and away from the quietists like Hanania on this is because he's completely wrong about there being any sort of wide awareness of the race-IQ gaps. The Bell Curve is certainly not the least-popular book in the world, but its popularity is still fairly marginal. As I've outlined in my essay, it's about twice as popular as of now as David Icke's most-popular book. Meaning it's more than fair to say HBD, race realism, or whatever else you wanna call it, is barely above lizardman constancy. Hence why there are zero celebrities, bigwigs, or even politicians, who openly advocate for it. There are no current members of Congress who openly support HBD, and there are members of Congress who openly support QAnon.
We are supporters of an extremely marginal idea. Hence why our first priority should be raising awareness. The LGBT rights movement is our nearest template, and I intend to outline more of my feelings on such in later writings. But if they're our nearest template, we are in the '80s-AIDS-panic stage, not the "one state is on the cusp of legalizing same-sex marriage" stage.
I'm also very much in agreement with Amy on the importance of focusing on K-12 over universities. She's absolutely right in that wokeness is both a worse problem there, as well as being easier to tackle, and deserves strong credit for having the foresight to recognize such. If she expounds on this more in any other interviews, I'd be happy to have a listen.
Amy Wax has really thought hard about the question of moral worthiness.
Hereditarianism should be discussed, but it’s not a panacea or magic bullet. Cultural and environmental factors continue to have some impact on outcomes.
You touched very lightly on the problem of proclaiming moral equality if you also valorise competence/IQ. Who you gonna throw out of the balloon, or are we really drawing lots?
I can see why this might not be the moment for a full debate of this point, but it occurred to me to wonder whether the women and children allowed off the Titanic before the men were those men's moral inferiors, their moral superiors or their moral equals.
And then I thought how it was perhaps the same self-abnegating nobility that impels us to give everyone a chance to be air traffic controller for a day.
Unless you can figure out a way to monetize kindness or other vague value intelligence will be the measure that is highest valued. All systems by being systems are best navigated by the intelligent. They will rise to the top cult or cult.
The difficulty in moral worth arguments is as follows.
1) Groups accomplish things
2) The composition of your group is a huge part of its success
With #1, I'm not some communist or anti-individualist. I just note that high IQ societies accomplish things. It may be individuals within those societies that do those things, and individualism is important (just look at North Korea). But you don't see low IQ societies accomplishing anything, even if they have a few high IQ people within them.
And so when we say "everyone has equal moral worth", certainly we mean people in the third world have equal moral worth. And if they have equal moral worth, how can we deny them the right to be a part of our society? Just because of "an accident of birth"? What would happen if they all came here? We'd be a low IQ society.
Who's the most accomplished high IQ person today? Probably Elon MusK. He gets that we don't want the demographics of his birth country.
Murray's ideals are fundamentally charitable. They don't really work at scale. They can work on a small scale with many contributors and few recipients. A kind of curated garden of equality. He bit the bullet on this in The Bell Curve, but it's clearly a concession to empirical reality and not part of his broader moral intuition. There's still a beauty to it, but you can't take it too far.
Hanania is pretty simple. He's got a sweet gig with an income stream and some influence, but to paper over his past as an internet Nazi he needed to embrace "invade the world, invite the world." It fits in with his self serving narcissism just fine.
With regards to the claim that low IQ correlates with higher criminality, Roland Fryer's position may make this a totally blameless correlation, instead of low IQ people having some sort of biological moral failing that makes them criminals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjdKIxc0x5A&ab_channel=UniversityofAustin
Essentially Fryer uses a Chicago school economist theory of crime (he also uses it for policing decisions, where it shows that the police are mostly not racist towards black people). A criminal is making an economic decision to be a criminal, and in fact it may be the rational decision if it's better than any alternative (measured in utils).
So then you can make the argument that the only thing to blame here is an economy that prices high IQ labor highly and low IQ labor lowly. Of course high IQ people don't make the choice to be a criminal very often. If you have the IQ to pull off Ocean's 11 type heists you could use it to become a millionaire in the legitimate economy instead. For low IQ people criminality is the best economic decision.
What do you think? It feels a little too neat and nice, giving an escape hatch to avoid the uglier position. But it might be true. What does the data say?
It's way too neat and nice. It totally ignores one of the, and possibly THE, biggest draws of being a criminal: The thrill of violence, danger, and even lawbreaking for their own sakes. Beyond just being greedy or having low impulse control, it's fun to risk one's life and be rewarded for it, whether with money, sex, or even the mere thrill of victory. And we're not all equally drawn towards good behavior, so it's not equally easy for all people to live the straight and narrow.
Letting criminals know they'll be punished if they break the law is certainly the most helpful thing that can be done to reduce crime, but we need outlets for the more violent and dangerloving among us all the same. Exactly what and where these outlets should be is the trickier question, but we certainly shouldn't want such things to be either open or inclusive. Most should still be discouraged from participating.
I'd echo Beck below. Criminality doesn't pay (it pays less then McDonalds) but its a desirable lifestyle for a certain kind of person.
The primary problem is that the low IQ have low impulse control and have a very hard time understanding how their actions will affect them in the future. They require immediate and simple to understand feedback.
This was the crux of Murray's thoughts on the low IQ in general, they could be made to behave better but only if society essentially forced them to by providing immediate simple feedback. The kind Bukele is providing.
The real issue is that high IQ people don't want to do that. They don't want to be babysitters, and the kind of simple rules that the low IQ need would cramp the high IQ style.
Moreover, the low IQ can vote, and they usually vote for their own self destruction.
How come the government doesn't have well paid scientifically and statistically literate advisors who know dam well there's a 1 sd gap. And know it's cause is mostly genetic.
Maybe they do. If so, what to do they ponder?
How about fostering an economic system that rewards those proclivities that blacks excel in? Perhaps that involves too much interference in the free market (although “defund the police?”😂). But there are some well paid, high status jobs that you don't need to be smart to do. Some TV presenters for example, actors perhaps. Most of the folk on our TV adverts? .
Because bringing up such in public is considered unforgivably offensive in this century. Hence why even Republican administrations support dumb shit like No Child Left Behind, which would only make sense as a good idea if you genuinely believed all students have an equal capability to succeed.
How much people genuinely believe it versus their being afraid to say the truth, we can't know. But from everything I've experienced in my life, most people alive today are true believers. Whether left, right, or center.
* In the U.S. there’s actually been massive growth recently in school-choice (vouchers), home-schooling, classical schooling, etc. etc. So even though the public K-12 system is pretty evil, it’s slowly losing its monopoly (though not fast enough).
* I wonder if educated white libs really believe that there is no IQ difference between themselves and the average white West Virginia Trump voter. Do they really think that with “good schools” etc. that the MAGA GOP base could all become software engineers?
* It’s a tiny bit unfair to write off all of the ‘mainstream conservative’ crowd as hopeless. Heather Mac Donald is as courageous as anyone could be. Robert VerBruggen seems to have a great deal of intellectual integrity - he profiled Charles Murray, defended the discussion of race and IQ, and even defended Amy Wax (up to a point):
I don't know what surveys, if any, have been conducted on such, but my instinct is to your second point is "yes". In fact, it's quite a bit worse. Most educated libs, not just white libs, believe that intelligence is primarily a product of education. They generally accept exceptions. You won't see most of them them go as far as to say that shit like Down's syndrome or low-functioning autism doesn't severly negatively impact brain function. But they generally believe intelligence is about education all the same.
Nor is this merely a lib phenomenon. Most Americans, regardless of political beliefs, believe intelligence is mostly about education. That's why when we have kids, we spend so much of our time and money on it, even though we mostly hated it ourselves when we were subjected to it.
HBD is an extremely marginal position. Hence why we have more federal legislators who are followers of QAnon than advocates of HBD.
Anyone with an HR job will immediately get fired if they talk about HBD, which is like 9X% of people. Richard has an independent revenue source going directly to him and still feels the need to distance himself.
If 90%+ of society can't incorporate your ideas, they are outside the Overton Window.
Just because you can't talk about something at your job doesn't mean you can't talk about it at all. And again, two of our current congresswomen are QAnoners, and zero of them are HBDers. This also reflects what I've seen in my personal life, as it's much easier to meet people who are full Q, or at least Q-adjacent, whether on or off work, than HBDers.
You would think bringing up QAnon at work should be at least as cancelable as HBD to any company with an HR department, so why is QAnon so much more popular, prominent, and acceptable? Even after every one of Q's predictions that wasn't so vague as to mean absolutely anything has ended in failure? Whereas HBD started off on solid footing, and has only grown more solid with time. Why are there still no open celebrity HBDers -- well, not living ones -- even though we have open Emmy-award-winning celebrity QAnoners?
Sure, there's a decent chance HBD might actually be more controversial than QAnon, but I really do think it's awareness. Almost all Americans spend our entire lives being taught "we're all the same" to some degree. Some of us just take it more seriously than others, but it's at least a background assumption to all of us by this point. That affects you, even when you don't really believe it.
HBD is a fundamental threat to things that matter. If you took HBD seriously it would change the entire way our society works.
QAnon isn’t a threat to anything.
People have always been able to talk about stuff behind closed doors where nobody can hear. Even in totalitarian states this happens all the time. What matters is that it can’t be done publicly there is no way to build the necessary political mass to change anything.
Also, I know that spergy atheist right-wingers like to mock Great Books programs but come on, where do you think new conservatives come from? There's no way to truly absorb Homer, Shakespeare and Dostoevsky and come away as a true-believer wokeist. In fact there's no better inoculation against Wokeism than reading Dostoevsky (prophecy) or Solzhenitsyn (reportage) on the inevitable results of Russian wokeists taking the reins of the Russian state, to the applause and enthusiasm of clueless Western liberals. You can't get that from the quantitative sciences!
Wow, I just read Walt's pro-reparations argument. I think it would work. It's convinced me enough so that next time the topic comes up, I'm gonna tell folks I'm in favour of reparations...and here's why. 🤔
I hope Nathan will write a book about the origins of wokism, combining Rufo's, Hananians and his own approach - finding egalitarianism at the root - to this. A book like this is sorely needed.
By the way, I wonder where Pluckrose & Lindsay's book fits into all this (looks like it is on the same line as Rufo).
I'm already working on such a book: https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/wokism
Good to see you back, Nathan!
I'll give the whole thing a listen later today.
Bit later than I would've liked, but I finally finished, and was pleased to do so.
While there's much I could talk about, the main reason why I'm in your camp and away from the quietists like Hanania on this is because he's completely wrong about there being any sort of wide awareness of the race-IQ gaps. The Bell Curve is certainly not the least-popular book in the world, but its popularity is still fairly marginal. As I've outlined in my essay, it's about twice as popular as of now as David Icke's most-popular book. Meaning it's more than fair to say HBD, race realism, or whatever else you wanna call it, is barely above lizardman constancy. Hence why there are zero celebrities, bigwigs, or even politicians, who openly advocate for it. There are no current members of Congress who openly support HBD, and there are members of Congress who openly support QAnon.
We are supporters of an extremely marginal idea. Hence why our first priority should be raising awareness. The LGBT rights movement is our nearest template, and I intend to outline more of my feelings on such in later writings. But if they're our nearest template, we are in the '80s-AIDS-panic stage, not the "one state is on the cusp of legalizing same-sex marriage" stage.
I'm also very much in agreement with Amy on the importance of focusing on K-12 over universities. She's absolutely right in that wokeness is both a worse problem there, as well as being easier to tackle, and deserves strong credit for having the foresight to recognize such. If she expounds on this more in any other interviews, I'd be happy to have a listen.
Amy Wax has really thought hard about the question of moral worthiness.
Hereditarianism should be discussed, but it’s not a panacea or magic bullet. Cultural and environmental factors continue to have some impact on outcomes.
It might be that everyone agemrees with you but that the Democrats feel like they need the woke activists.
What is the book mentioned at the binning?
You touched very lightly on the problem of proclaiming moral equality if you also valorise competence/IQ. Who you gonna throw out of the balloon, or are we really drawing lots?
I can see why this might not be the moment for a full debate of this point, but it occurred to me to wonder whether the women and children allowed off the Titanic before the men were those men's moral inferiors, their moral superiors or their moral equals.
And then I thought how it was perhaps the same self-abnegating nobility that impels us to give everyone a chance to be air traffic controller for a day.
Unless you can figure out a way to monetize kindness or other vague value intelligence will be the measure that is highest valued. All systems by being systems are best navigated by the intelligent. They will rise to the top cult or cult.
The difficulty in moral worth arguments is as follows.
1) Groups accomplish things
2) The composition of your group is a huge part of its success
With #1, I'm not some communist or anti-individualist. I just note that high IQ societies accomplish things. It may be individuals within those societies that do those things, and individualism is important (just look at North Korea). But you don't see low IQ societies accomplishing anything, even if they have a few high IQ people within them.
And so when we say "everyone has equal moral worth", certainly we mean people in the third world have equal moral worth. And if they have equal moral worth, how can we deny them the right to be a part of our society? Just because of "an accident of birth"? What would happen if they all came here? We'd be a low IQ society.
Who's the most accomplished high IQ person today? Probably Elon MusK. He gets that we don't want the demographics of his birth country.
Murray's ideals are fundamentally charitable. They don't really work at scale. They can work on a small scale with many contributors and few recipients. A kind of curated garden of equality. He bit the bullet on this in The Bell Curve, but it's clearly a concession to empirical reality and not part of his broader moral intuition. There's still a beauty to it, but you can't take it too far.
Hanania is pretty simple. He's got a sweet gig with an income stream and some influence, but to paper over his past as an internet Nazi he needed to embrace "invade the world, invite the world." It fits in with his self serving narcissism just fine.
With regards to the claim that low IQ correlates with higher criminality, Roland Fryer's position may make this a totally blameless correlation, instead of low IQ people having some sort of biological moral failing that makes them criminals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjdKIxc0x5A&ab_channel=UniversityofAustin
Essentially Fryer uses a Chicago school economist theory of crime (he also uses it for policing decisions, where it shows that the police are mostly not racist towards black people). A criminal is making an economic decision to be a criminal, and in fact it may be the rational decision if it's better than any alternative (measured in utils).
So then you can make the argument that the only thing to blame here is an economy that prices high IQ labor highly and low IQ labor lowly. Of course high IQ people don't make the choice to be a criminal very often. If you have the IQ to pull off Ocean's 11 type heists you could use it to become a millionaire in the legitimate economy instead. For low IQ people criminality is the best economic decision.
What do you think? It feels a little too neat and nice, giving an escape hatch to avoid the uglier position. But it might be true. What does the data say?
It's way too neat and nice. It totally ignores one of the, and possibly THE, biggest draws of being a criminal: The thrill of violence, danger, and even lawbreaking for their own sakes. Beyond just being greedy or having low impulse control, it's fun to risk one's life and be rewarded for it, whether with money, sex, or even the mere thrill of victory. And we're not all equally drawn towards good behavior, so it's not equally easy for all people to live the straight and narrow.
Letting criminals know they'll be punished if they break the law is certainly the most helpful thing that can be done to reduce crime, but we need outlets for the more violent and dangerloving among us all the same. Exactly what and where these outlets should be is the trickier question, but we certainly shouldn't want such things to be either open or inclusive. Most should still be discouraged from participating.
Perhaps criminalizing dueling was a mistake.
I'd echo Beck below. Criminality doesn't pay (it pays less then McDonalds) but its a desirable lifestyle for a certain kind of person.
The primary problem is that the low IQ have low impulse control and have a very hard time understanding how their actions will affect them in the future. They require immediate and simple to understand feedback.
This was the crux of Murray's thoughts on the low IQ in general, they could be made to behave better but only if society essentially forced them to by providing immediate simple feedback. The kind Bukele is providing.
The real issue is that high IQ people don't want to do that. They don't want to be babysitters, and the kind of simple rules that the low IQ need would cramp the high IQ style.
Moreover, the low IQ can vote, and they usually vote for their own self destruction.
How come the government doesn't have well paid scientifically and statistically literate advisors who know dam well there's a 1 sd gap. And know it's cause is mostly genetic.
Maybe they do. If so, what to do they ponder?
How about fostering an economic system that rewards those proclivities that blacks excel in? Perhaps that involves too much interference in the free market (although “defund the police?”😂). But there are some well paid, high status jobs that you don't need to be smart to do. Some TV presenters for example, actors perhaps. Most of the folk on our TV adverts? .
🤔
Because bringing up such in public is considered unforgivably offensive in this century. Hence why even Republican administrations support dumb shit like No Child Left Behind, which would only make sense as a good idea if you genuinely believed all students have an equal capability to succeed.
How much people genuinely believe it versus their being afraid to say the truth, we can't know. But from everything I've experienced in my life, most people alive today are true believers. Whether left, right, or center.
Great as always. Comments:
* In the U.S. there’s actually been massive growth recently in school-choice (vouchers), home-schooling, classical schooling, etc. etc. So even though the public K-12 system is pretty evil, it’s slowly losing its monopoly (though not fast enough).
* I wonder if educated white libs really believe that there is no IQ difference between themselves and the average white West Virginia Trump voter. Do they really think that with “good schools” etc. that the MAGA GOP base could all become software engineers?
* It’s a tiny bit unfair to write off all of the ‘mainstream conservative’ crowd as hopeless. Heather Mac Donald is as courageous as anyone could be. Robert VerBruggen seems to have a great deal of intellectual integrity - he profiled Charles Murray, defended the discussion of race and IQ, and even defended Amy Wax (up to a point):
https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-influencer
https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/07/race-iq-dont-suppress-public-discussion-issue/
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/if-amy-wax-is-wrong-lets-see-the-data/
* Slightly related: Walt Bismarck has some highly realistic reflections on where this is all conceivably going:
https://thevitalist.substack.com/p/the-metapolitics-of-black-white-conflict
https://thevitalist.substack.com/p/the-pro-white-case-for-reparations
I don't know what surveys, if any, have been conducted on such, but my instinct is to your second point is "yes". In fact, it's quite a bit worse. Most educated libs, not just white libs, believe that intelligence is primarily a product of education. They generally accept exceptions. You won't see most of them them go as far as to say that shit like Down's syndrome or low-functioning autism doesn't severly negatively impact brain function. But they generally believe intelligence is about education all the same.
Nor is this merely a lib phenomenon. Most Americans, regardless of political beliefs, believe intelligence is mostly about education. That's why when we have kids, we spend so much of our time and money on it, even though we mostly hated it ourselves when we were subjected to it.
HBD is an extremely marginal position. Hence why we have more federal legislators who are followers of QAnon than advocates of HBD.
Anyone with an HR job will immediately get fired if they talk about HBD, which is like 9X% of people. Richard has an independent revenue source going directly to him and still feels the need to distance himself.
If 90%+ of society can't incorporate your ideas, they are outside the Overton Window.
Just because you can't talk about something at your job doesn't mean you can't talk about it at all. And again, two of our current congresswomen are QAnoners, and zero of them are HBDers. This also reflects what I've seen in my personal life, as it's much easier to meet people who are full Q, or at least Q-adjacent, whether on or off work, than HBDers.
You would think bringing up QAnon at work should be at least as cancelable as HBD to any company with an HR department, so why is QAnon so much more popular, prominent, and acceptable? Even after every one of Q's predictions that wasn't so vague as to mean absolutely anything has ended in failure? Whereas HBD started off on solid footing, and has only grown more solid with time. Why are there still no open celebrity HBDers -- well, not living ones -- even though we have open Emmy-award-winning celebrity QAnoners?
Sure, there's a decent chance HBD might actually be more controversial than QAnon, but I really do think it's awareness. Almost all Americans spend our entire lives being taught "we're all the same" to some degree. Some of us just take it more seriously than others, but it's at least a background assumption to all of us by this point. That affects you, even when you don't really believe it.
HBD is a fundamental threat to things that matter. If you took HBD seriously it would change the entire way our society works.
QAnon isn’t a threat to anything.
People have always been able to talk about stuff behind closed doors where nobody can hear. Even in totalitarian states this happens all the time. What matters is that it can’t be done publicly there is no way to build the necessary political mass to change anything.
Also, I know that spergy atheist right-wingers like to mock Great Books programs but come on, where do you think new conservatives come from? There's no way to truly absorb Homer, Shakespeare and Dostoevsky and come away as a true-believer wokeist. In fact there's no better inoculation against Wokeism than reading Dostoevsky (prophecy) or Solzhenitsyn (reportage) on the inevitable results of Russian wokeists taking the reins of the Russian state, to the applause and enthusiasm of clueless Western liberals. You can't get that from the quantitative sciences!
Wow, I just read Walt's pro-reparations argument. I think it would work. It's convinced me enough so that next time the topic comes up, I'm gonna tell folks I'm in favour of reparations...and here's why. 🤔