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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.
Well, the problem is that if you simply go back to the top of the hill, all you can do is slide back down. If liberalism in general doesn’t work, you’re just going to end up exactly where we are now, except that it will be “the future” when it happens, and as you point out the demographics would be much worse than they are now. I am unusual here because after thinking about it, I think the “bad idea” might well have been the enlightenment itself, and certainly by th3 time you have birthright plebiscite you’re just going to speed run chewing through civilization to the bottom where the people who vote have no idea how anything works, no desire to learn, and no stake in making it all work.
I've heard this "liberalism doesn't work" idea before, but never really been convinced by it. Equality of opportunity doesn't need to be taken so literally that you toss it all away when one person is born with 1 IQ point less than another. Treat people equally before the law, and generally socially and culturally. Treat people according to the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Most of the "counterarguments" I've heard are that if people are born with different talent or even just different inherited wealth from their parents then this doesn't work because they don't really have equality of opportunity, but... so what? If people are born with different circumstances then equality of opportunity doesn't inevitably lead to equality of outcome and that's okay. Set up a society in which everyone has an opportunity to thrive and carve out a happy healthy life for themselves, and let them sort themselves out. Maybe the 70 IQ person have a small apartment and a job at a fast food place while the 130 IQ person lives in a fancy manor and works at Google. Let them. I don't see how liberalism or the enlightenment prevent this. Instead, it is the regression from this ideal that wokeism represents that is the problem. We went from "people of the same skin color should share the blame and credit for each other's actions" to "people should be treated according to their own actions" back to "people of the same skin color should share the blame and credit for each other's actions". Wokeism is explicitly illiberal, not a failing of liberalism.
Are we pursuing equality, where in the case where there's an easily-predictable bimodal distribution of anti-social behaviors, imposing a law grants massive advantages to the group whose anti-social behaviors are less legible?
Or is the goal equity, where we acknowledge that legal equality is, in aggregate, going to create a power imbalance (and thus seek to install guardrails to limit that)?
I strongly disagree.
The entire goal of liberalism is to destroy the fact there's a distribution in the first place. That's why we impose equality before the law when this when the distribution splits across, say, sexes- we subsidize the high-performers in the [in aggregate] less productive sex at the cost of the [in aggregate] more productive one by permitting more mayhem by the low-performers in the [aggregate] less productive sex. Same with race, same with religion, same with everything else that's generally accepted as a consequence of the role of the cosmic dice.
Wokeism is the natural expression of the now-uncontrolled moral hazard created by this regime under the same banner of subsidizing the high-performers in the disadvantaged group (Exhibit A: "women in STEM", used as an excuse to have more women than men going to college for worthless degrees).
That's why the people who have a mind for equity find themselves drifting closer to the traditionalists, who for all their failings at least had a solution to the moral hazard- traditionalism finds itself more compatible with a surviving society by induction, but by its nature cannot inform how a thriving one should behave.
The woke can only be considered explicitly illiberal if they're aware the moral hazard exists and are trying to expand it. (Simply taking advantage of the fact it exists is only illiberal in the fact that the resultant untaxed [social] pollution causes [social] climate change to a point where the average member of society feels that the underlying cause of that pollution must be addressed before it destroys that society's ability to exist.)
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