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I'm surprised that more people here aren't talking about Scott ripping off the bandaid in his latest series of posts, which very much take an IQ-realist and pro-Lynn stance, and without really mincing words about it.
Scott has tip-toed around the topic in the past, largely playing it safe. There was some minor controversy almost half a decade in the past when his "friend" (one who had ended up marrying Scott's enbie ex Ozzy) leaked private correspondence between the two of them where Scott explicitly acknowledged that he believed in population-wide IQ differences but felt he couldn't speak up about it. Going back even further, on his now defunct but archived LiveJournal, he outlines his harrowing experience doing charity work in Haiti, where the sheer lack of common sense or perverse and self-defeating antics from the populace knocked him speechless.
I note (with some pleasure) that Scott raises some of the same points I've been on record making myself: Namely that there's a profound difference between a person who is 60 IQ in a population where that's the norm, versus someone who is 60 IQ due to disease in a population with an average of 100.
What's the wider ramification of this? Well, I've been mildly miffed for a while now that the Scott of ACX wasn't quite as radical and outspoken as his SSC days, but now that he's come out and said this, I sincerely doubt that there are any Dark and Heretical ideas he holds but is forced to deny or decline to defend. It's refreshing, that's what it is. He might not particularly delve into the ramifications of what this might mean for society at large, but he's not burying the lede, and I have to applaud that. It might we too early to celebrate the death of wokeness, but I think that the more milquetoast Scott of today being willing to say this matters a great deal indeed.
Not much. People hated the race and iq talk because reactionaries did not wish for mass migration so pointing out group differences for many in a more niche camp was a way to ask for a smarter society. In Moldbugs case, pointing this out breaks the idea of equality within people and kills the secular god of progress as most explicitly believe that people are all equal by birth and any differences are forced on by society. Spandrell has written on this and he is right.
It is a sympton of better times where one does not have to tiptoe around reality like we did in 2021 but it will not lead to a lot. More popular public intellectuals like Taleb will keep denying group differences and even those who do get them will use them as explicit reasons for why future embryo selection must be equitable.
Spandrell outlines this exact thing in his essay politics of heredetarianism. The essay is on this exact topic and is worth reading in its entirety. People will just argue for the same bioleninist policies and want more migration from "smarter" nations. It is a motte and bailey fallacy on both sides.
Many on the hbd right point out hbd because they can defend that easier than they can defend the explicit ideal of sovereignty where a nation can reject any group in any number for any reason. The leftist will deny group differences, even if he does not, he will still advocate for the same policies as the bioleninist is now a subject of even more sympathy but deep down their ideal is a society where the non-bioleninists lose, the host in particular.
Twitter post 2024 is more honest about this and themotte has been talking about this for a while. HBD is a small step forward, the true ideal is always going to be sovereignty and the ability to just demand a cessation of migration in the American case since Scott's blog and this forum are largely full of Americans. People will still think the evil people in their heads are evil. The problem was never just HBD, leftists know that some of it exists.
"I dont want more migrants because they are not as high iq" is a less honest argument than "I don't want more migrants because I care about ethnic makeup". Few may even argue for the former but the latter makes more sense to me. A denial of HBD is a symptom of a society where people believe in plenty of out-and-out lies because religion demands a suspension of reasoning for faith. You need Schelling points, it will go from "all are equal biologically" to "all not being equal that way means we need to double down".
I just dont think woke is a good word because people essentially took 90 percent of liberalism victories and then shunned the last 10 percent. This is not a call for a total retvrn to feudal landlord systems, the advances in society that liberalism advocated for are based on egalitarian ideas. Most people will still be left leaning if not far left due to the nature of society today. Napoleon did rise after the French Revolution yet France was one of the first countries that made demographic research hell by banning stats for ethnicities.
There is no return to the 90s or the early 2010s in my case. It is either more bioleninism or a post liberal world order, as a betting man, I would bet on the former simply because demographics now are worse.
It indeed is, he got his life wrecked for his blog where he tried to be as honest as he could be. Scott still had massive blindspots and was not completely honest about everything but given the volume of things he wrote and his contribution to the genesis of the motte, he did a much better job than he needed to. Being on substack and this temporary thermidor has allowed him to be more open.
Not at all, Scott is a very smart, honest liberal. He is not a heretic and would at times even lose arguments in his own comment section to guys like Steve Johnson, Spandrell and Jim of blog.reaction.la but that is a minute part of the vast things he wrote. He could have chosen not to do the anti-reactionary q and a, even though I think his criticisms were incorrect, simply touching something like NRx is a display of his willingness to be honest.
I like Scott, and I agree with yarvins criticism of him which is fine because all of us have flaws, Scott is less flawed than most and I say that as an out and out reactionary.
Also on the thing about higher iq places, Asia which according to many has high iq people famously has a culture of iq denial where kids are forced to attend cram schools as anyone can ascend from brainlet to high status nation wide entrance exam prodigy with just "hard work", incels call this the just take a shower bro meme because a naturally good looking guy barely does much yet looks better than them. Not a hard bio determinist btw, plenty actually have gone from total scrubs to world beaters but the top 1 percent is 1 percent for a reason. I saw kids studying 14 hours everyday who did not get a good uni at all though all the ones who did get good uni studied as much on average.
These places will admit to group differences when in the US or whilst talking about migration as they want to justify why they left their own nation and why they are doing better than other ethnic groups.
In the U.S., I would think that HBD has much more to do with civil rights precedent, disparate impact arguments, and accusations of racism than with immigration. Blacks make up a disproportionately large percentage of the prison population, do worse in school, and have worse job prospects than whites and Asians. Is that due to overt racial discrimination or hidden structural racism? If all races have the same IQ, that doesn’t seem like a bad explanation, but if blacks have a lower average IQ, then you can take racism out of the equation. Likewise, Jews are overrepresented in elite universities and positions of power. Is that the result of an insidious Semitic plot? Possibly, or it could just be that they have a higher average IQ than Gentiles.
The former is the reason for many things, collectivism is a very real thing. Grifter extraordinaire Bari Weiss during her previous grift showcased this when she went on JRE, talked about racism and then sounded like a stormfront user but with the word isreal instead of Europe. This is a good post by Academic Agent. The HBD claim here is the correct one political correctness-wise.
I have criticised people in the past for low iq anti semitism, the kind Dan Bilzerian indulges in, pointing out collectivist sentiment is not a call for ill behavior towards them, its just something that most never wish to even consider as a real possibility. This is the de facto behavior in India, I do not expect for others to be markedly different. Does not help at all that boomercon positions in the US are far more philo semitic than what you expect.
Oh, Jews definitely have much higher levels of in-group bias than most Gentile whites (and, along similar lines, Evangelical Christians’ positive views of Jews are definitely not reciprocated), but it seems to me that Jewish success in America has less to do with nepotism than with higher IQ. White Baptists have nearly the same level of in-group bias as Jews do, yet they don’t have the same level of success despite having had a significant head start in this country. It seems to me that differences in IQ likely explain the bulk of those disparate outcomes.
Likewise, some blacks definitely experience some racial discrimination, but that doesn’t mean racism is the primary reason they have worse life outcomes on average.
You get cliques of gentiles that are nearly as successful. They’re just smaller.
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