How to Read Leon Voß's Writings from 2023 through 2025
A map of my writings
Articles are more engaging and efficient than books, but books have the benefit of being self-contained and better indexed. While it might look like my articles are each self contained, I really write in thematic sequences, sometimes engaging in multiple at one time. The articles that are a part of each cycle probably add up to contain at least as much substance as the average New York Times best-seller nonfiction book, like Robert Sapolsky’s Behave, which I recently wrote about.
I thought I would give a summarized table of contents for my articles from the last 3 years. Then maybe I’ll make this a yearly post hereafter. Then at any point in time, the table of content of my writings will just be the sequence of these posts.
Where does leftism come from?
The first thematic sequence, dating back to 2023, addresses the origins of leftism. It includes debates and critiques of non-scientific theories of leftism, as well as my own model building. I ultimately decide that we must use the scientific method of mathematical sciences to satisfactorily answer the question. I create a mathematical model of evolutionary pressure on quantitative traits and treat leftism as a normally distributed psychometric. I provide quantitative evidence fitting the model that leftism’s modern increase was the result of collapsing selection pressures and the resulting accumulation of de novo mutations in the gene pool. This hypothesis was subsequently discussed and critiqued by the broader HBD sphere. I addressed their points and found most of them unsatisfactory; it ended with me concluding that I have about 95% confidence in the theory being true, and 4% confidence in it being closely related to the Flynn effect and increases in height and brain mass (basically, physical, potentially epigenetic and brain-related changes to improved nutrition and other features of modernity, inducing behavioral changes), and amending the theory to include evidence for “Social Epistasis Amplification,” meaning the social change is amplified by memetic effects (which are downstream of evolutionary and non-memetic pressures) by a factor of 25% to 75%.
Here are the articles:
Positive, model building
Cross-sectional data indicates inconclusively that de-novo mutations are accumulating, and leftism appears more where more indicators of DNMs are.
Deriving some equations for the mathematical evolutionary pressure of quantitative traits model. I now try to avoid explicit equations on Substack. It seemed easy enough to me, but if you are making explicit equations, it should be published in a journal somewhere or folded into a technical white-paper or manuscript. That’s just how the bell curve is.
Why can’t it be genes? (2023)
Why can’t leftism be genes? (2023)
Leftism has happened before (2023)
Accessible discussion of anti-hereditarian bias, fallacies which preclude evolutionary hypotheses to social change, and why you feel like the mutational load hypothesis is wrong, but it’s probably not and you’re just biased against hereditarianism and are engaging in one of the heuristic fallacies I debunk here.
Asterisk indicates scientific article, not a blog article. This article uses a binary leftism metric and finds what I predicted.
Popular application of mutational load theory, addressing population decline since the 19th century and what that means for smart and based people (dark elves) who exist today in lesser numbers.
Analyzing direct molecular genetic evidence for mutational load theory.
Replicating the previous article with a better, normally distributed continuous measure of leftism.
What is leftism? (2025)
Discussing why you should treat leftism like a highly heritable, normally distributed, psychometric trait, contra ideas that you need to break it down into “deeper personality factors” and so on (this is just circular political blank slatism).
Chinese Rice Farms and “Culture” (2025), Evolution explains regional differences in China best (2025)
Fast evolution and Chinese rice farms.
Discussing how IQ eugenics created modern science and the industrial revolution.
Criticism of other writers
Hanania’s theory is what I call the historical legalism theory of Woke. He seems to think laws have a significant random component, and this component shapes society for a long time. In other words, the US Civil Rights act just passed randomly, and laws are powerful, so this caused us to be woke in other contexts. The problem with this is that laws don’t pass randomly, they aren’t enforced randomly, and they don’t evade repeal randomly. All of these things depend on the underlying sentiments of the population. The law is made for man and not man for the law.
Moldbug thinks leftism memetically evolved from Christianity. Basically, the genome and the underlying sentiments of people stayed the same, but modern governments set up an environment where woke people did better than non-woke people due to separation of church and state. Moldbug seems to think “separation of church and state” was an exogenous shock, similar to Hanania on the Civil Rights Act. I just cleaned up his incoherent argument a lot for him, but even this fails all the empirical tests, so it is wrong. You can see this in the person of Moldbug; the man clearly has instincts which weren’t common in the 18th century, like no aversion to homosexuality (quoted in the article). Aversion to homosexuality is instinctual and related to general disgust sensitivity, it’s not learned. Clearly, people changed on a fundamental level and this changed their social norms.
Addressing two YouTubers. One thinks Woke is some kind of conspiracy theory for the elite to profit off of the masses, the other thinks it’s all ideas.
Critiquing Cremeiux’s birth order environmentalism. While he showed some good evidence for an environmental component in birth order effects, he downplayed the genetic component too much.
Moldbug’s intern wrote something fashionable among the bay area crowd going on about “positive feedback loops.” It sounds smart, but he wouldn’t engage with my science. Apparently, I’m not widely read enough among his target audience, and meritocratic discourse is just some BS from 19th century Anglo science. Discourse today must be democratic, which means you must pander to the crowd to get a spot. I believe it was written at the time that my resistance to this is considered “autistic” by the cool people. That offended me at the time, but it’s kind of cool to watch the masses be consistently wrong about something. You just need to monetize your open secret and you’re golden! I am really only constitutionally interested in meritocratic spaces.
Responding to a gish-gallop of criticisms that didn’t really hit the theory.
Responding to Cofnas’s knowledge-model of wokeism. He thinks it’s just people who seriously believe HBD isn’t true.
Why Scott Alexander’s conflict-mistake dichotomy falls apart under actual logical examination, and how to replace it with my scientific theory.
Who has power?
The next sequence develops my rejection of meaningful “elite theory.” I now believe we live in a peasant democracy and this causes the government to suffer from the moral and intellectual shortcomings of the median person, which are vast. I believe that “elite theory” is possible, and that there is some meaningfully defined conglomerate of a Fighter class and an Elite class which can rule over people, but that Western instances of these classes are genetically democratic, so they give out power to the peasants, thereby failing to rule properly.
A Theory of Democracy (2024)
Political science usually treats democracy as stemming from a combination of ideas and supposedly exogenous institutions. Basically, books and constitutions. Both are kind of magic and without a book telling people why they should write a democratic constitution, they’ll just be monarchists, and without a well-designed constitution which magically induces everyone to follow it, democracies can fail for trivial, shallow reasons. This is obviously stupid and it would seem that the best theory of democracy is just genes: both high IQ and a certain temperament found among white people are the best predictors of democracy. Books and constitutions don’t matter. The UK has a monarch and no constitution and nobody reads old enlightenment books, but it has the right kind of white people, so it has a stable democracy, for example. Meanwhile, the best constitution hand-crafted by Americans plus the best Arabic translation of Locke airdropped over Iraq will never make it a good democracy.
Shows America’s elite is not very nepotistic and is closely related to the demos.
Debunking Moldbug’s theory of academic sovereignty.
Quantifying elite theory and testing my mathematical model.
Scientific explication of my theory.
What is culture?
Discussing the abuse of the word culture in popular and scientific writing, the problems with mainstream models of cultural evolution, and building my own model.
The problems with cultural evolution as a concept and its roots in academic Marxist activism.
My new model of memetics which posits that ideas which influence behavior are many, and changes in the average behavioral effect of ideas are downstream of non-memetic forces. They therefore have an amplifying effect on non-memetic forces, which precede memetic forces.
Replying to a new article by one of the very old originators, Feldman, of the cultural evolution idea, exposing how his sources are garbage and offer no empirical support for his premises. Nevertheless, you hear about cultural evolution a lot more than biological evolution of social traits. That’s memetic, but it’s downstream of people like the author existing in greater number than people like me, something which wasn’t always the case.
Why twin studies aren’t biased by “culture” and how they debunk culture theories.
Eugenics
Why we should have a classical eugenics program. I believe eugenics is the only solution to present social problems, since they were caused by dysgenics.
Discussing why classical eugenics did not take off (only eugenic people like it an dysgenics overwhelmed us first).
Discussing ethical objections to classical eugenics (intelligence is good, being unintelligent sucks, so it’s a moral imperative to do a humane classical eugenics program).
Discussing the cost of a eugenics program.
Fertility and Marriage
Original application of an ML method to derive the Roman age at first marriage distribution. Mean around 16 for girls, and 21 for males. The vast majority of girls married in their teen decade between 10 and 19 years of age. The majority of age gaps must have been between 2 and 8 years since most males married between 15 and 25. People frequently deny that antiquity was like this and habitually try to up the actually age at which people married to be closer to modern norms, because for some median people today consider teenage marriage to be extremely offensive, kind of like racism in academia.
Discussing how the ancient pattern faded. It lasted to 1600 AD in Western Europe, contrary to claims that North-western Europeans always married late. Over the next 350 years, the rest of the world caught up, and then the West began a second transition to an even later marriage pattern — instead of marriage in the mid-twenties, it now occurs in the thirties. I allege that the first transition must have been caused by something very similar to the cause of leftism today. Perhaps mutational load, or perhaps some kind of epigenetic change.
Using Germany as a model white country with very little late 20th century migration, I examine their fertility statistics and show that the transition to 30s marriage is caused by a preceding change in desired number of offspring. In other words, something perturbed the minds of Germans first, and they marriage habits followed to conform to their new desires. This sounds like some kind of psychometric evolution, coinciding with modern leftism. Note also that the MWEMP from the 1600s coincided with early modern leftism: the rejection of medieval monarchy and religion.
Against academic philosophy
Why “Philosophy” is Invalid (2023)
The Sleeping Beauty Problem (2025)
What I do could be called philosophy. Any clean division of it from math and science is wrong and done because academic philosophers don’t want to actually put effort into studying anything. Math and science give us much more powerful ways of knowing things than the academic philosopher’s method, which produces nonsense. I see the root cause of their method being bad but still used as lack of aptitude to master math and science. Imagining an infinitely intelligent philosopher, he would be a master of math and science and it would heavily inform his thoughts on all subjects. You can see in the Sleeping Beauty Problem that most academic philosophers struggle with relatively basic probability theory, and this leads to dumb discourses where probability theory is a central topic.
Teenage phone use
Some 15 year olds are adults (2025)
Banning me from the internet at 15 would have seriously messed up my life, but there’s a demagogue peddling crap statistics to push privacy violating age verification laws to ban under-16s from most of the internet worldwide. This is extremely obnoxious behavior which panders to the lowest people at the expense of the smartest. Intelligence is a lot more important than age so, while proles intuit that they got better at making decisions between 15 and 30, bright 15 year olds still beat dumb 30 year olds on basically every metric, which should seriously make any decent person question a law that unpersons every 15 year old, instead of, say, unpersoning everyone under 95 IQ in the same way instead.
Economic genocide of elite whites by Asians
Tech is so non-white that if you removed all of them from America, the media legacy American tech worker would make $91,000 more per year given a constant elasticity derivative (as you remove foreign workers, the elasticity stays the same).
Discussing how entitled Asian immigrants act in the USA. Created several talking points on the topic: China is a shit hole and no whites want to move there, Asians claim math contests make them superior to whites despite this fact, their IQs and SATs are inflated by a huge amount by studying, which breaks tests. See How much do intelligence and g correlate?
Entitled immigrants think that grinding their way into DEI shit hole schools that have trademarks to the names of now defunct 20th century prestige colleges makes them superior to smart whites. I discuss how to build a university that keeps them out by merit and which smart, based whites want to attend.
Age of consent
Epstein hysteria has the age of consent in the discourse, probably the most it will ever be, because if you don’t take a historically abnormal position on the topic you get a mob threatening to kill you for being a “pedophile” for 17.9 year olds.
My answer is that high ones are okay, as long as you have sufficient close in age and marriage exemptions, which are non-existent and disappearing.
The Epstein case got me thinking that it always seems to be a 17 year old. When you examine the statistics, you get a ghastly picture: the majority of age of consent prosecutions are of young men, often under 21, almost always under 25, who were with high school aged girls. Even Epstein is a canard; it’s almost never an old guy, almost always a college student. The key argument for having an age of consent like France or Germany is the interests of bachelors; I guess the key argument against it are the interests of the education system, or of teenage girls with extremely low intelligence and terrible families? Since what kind of idiot do you need to be to be incapable of consenting at 17? A big one, but I can kind of see how 40% of the population qualifies for that. Just ask a 40th percentiler to read a paragraph of text or what they would do if they didn’t have breakfast today. Anyway, I’m pro-romance and marriage and so on, so I want to let young people date naturally. I support key-hole solutions like banning age gaps or pre-marital sex for dealing with Epstein types.
Future directions
I would like to make the Asian sequence more rigorous since they do seem to clog up all of the job pipelines at the expense of elite young white men. One idea of how to do this is to examine their IQ scores more closely; I would like to show that their fluid intelligence with white levels of training is lower than white levels. I believe their countries suck because they are dumber than whites on average, and they evolved to selfishly grind indicators really hard to exploit ability measures, in their own countries. Now we are dealing with the ruination of our own educated class in white countries by unbridled Asian migration. The other topics seem played out. I would like to start writing about finance and money soon; I’m working through quantitative finance books for a foundation. Stuff like the evolution of money and finance, how HBD fits in, how humans are evolved to do it, group vs individual evolution in the emergence of modern asset markets, theories of memetics and how they operate on pricing.
Very nice and handy for coming back to. Keenly waiting for the examination of asian vs white fluid intelligence (NE-asian I assume).
Not sure if you are super into evolutionary theory, but got a book recommendation: 'Evolution and the Levels of Selection' by Samir Okasha. A book that suggests that (as well as genes) cells, organisms and groups of organisms count as replicators - all nested within each other like Russian Dolls. For example:
Inside a single Russian doll, the inner units usually cooperate because they rely on each other (intra-cooperation), but conflict arises if a single unit starts reproducing selfishly at the expense of the whole (intra-conflict). Between two separate Russian dolls, they might work together for mutual benefit (inter-cooperation), or fight over limited resources (inter-conflict).
This theory of 'multi-level selection' seems to clear up for me why we have cancer, culture, kin selection, etc, but of course I could be wrong. Check my ramblings about it if you are interested: https://paleoposition.substack.com/p/critiquing-veritasiums-video-on-evolution, but the book is a lot better.
Do you have a reading list for quantitative finance?