Re Cofnas: Facts and Logic About Woke

Some fights just can't be won

Nathan Cofnas has a new article titled “Beating Woke with Facts and Logic” that has some points I would like to comment on.

Wokism is based on the following logic:

Empirical premise (equality thesis): All races and sexes have on average the same innate distribution of socially relevant traits.

Moral premise (moral equality): All people have an equal right to achieve their potential.

Conclusion (wokism): The persistence of massive group disparities presents us with a moral emergency to fix the environment and bring about equality of outcome.

Cofnas has no evidence for this rather facile model of wokeness. Quantitative research suggests that wokeness is an equilibrium resulting from modern dysgenic evolutionary pressures and information-spreading processes which are mostly downstream of the former. For example, wokeness is not 1 big idea, it’s lots of little ideas that evolve in a background of woke genetics, aka shrinking amygdalas, shrinking testicles, browning average skin tone, shrinking mean IQ, and so on.

Another way to look at this is that one must wonder how wokeists could become convinced of the self-evidently untrue idea that “All races and sexes have on average the same innate distribution of socially relevant traits.” The answer is that they’re biased towards accepting egalitarian claims while they’re biased towards rejecting truer, more inegalitarian claims. For example, if you show a teenaged wokeist Richard Lynn’s world IQ estimates who, theoretically, has nothing in his mind but basic reading and arithmetic skills, he’ll react defensively and will feel the need to look for rebuttals, because he’s genetically biased towards egalitarian thinking. If you show him a wrong “corrected” IQ map, he’ll be very happy and look no further. Then he’ll say to his friends “the experts say Lynn’s work is bogus!”. And that will be the conclusion that gets repeated on TV by the wokeists.

Convincing wokeists of factually incorrect, egalitarian ideas is like rolling a ball down a hill. Convincing a wokeist of true, offensive ideas is like getting a multi-ton piece of metal to fly in the air. Each piece of metal and each ball is one wokeist. If one team of influencers scores a point for every wokeist they roll down the hill, and one scores a point for every wokeist they make fly, who wins? The team that doesn’t need thousands of dollars and a team of aerospace engineers to score every point, obviously.

More specifically, it confuses the proximate cause of victory, which is tanks shelling their enemies, with the ultimate cause, which is the goals of the people operating and controlling the tanks. Wokism didn’t win because it was backed by power. It was backed by power because it became the ideology of the elites who wield power. Ideas first, tanks second.

Cofnas sees humans as too flexible. It’s reminding me of those libertarians who think they can break the law and get arrested and then change the minds of their persecutors in court. Vox Day’s father did this and ended up in federal prison.

At the trial, Beale had clearly lost it, declaring that he answered only to “the Lord Jesus Christ”, saying “I do not consent to this proceeding!” and embarking on rambling soliloquies accusing the judge and government of “extortion, deception and lack of disclosure.”

Unsurprisingly, he was sentenced to 11 years and 2 months’ jail for five counts of tax evasion by diverting income offshore, and his appeal failed.^[3] He and his weirdo gang of friends were also convicted of conspiracy to impede an officer and obstruction of justice.^[4] One of his sons took over Comtrol.^[1], which was acquired by Pepperl+Fuchs in 2019.^[5]

In general, by the time some group of people show up with tanks, they probably think they own you. This is an interpersonal conviction that is secondary to ideas. Trying to argue with such people is like trying to argue with a grizzly bear that is raiding your fridge and roaring at you in your own house. It sees you as a source of food. It has evolved for a million generations to exploit you as a source of food and to be immune to verbal bluster about how you are not a source of food. Humans are exactly the same and that’s why war is a historical constant.

To win a tank war, you need to be concerned with both the mechanics of tank fighting and the mental state of the people in the tanks. If you can get enemy tank commanders to defect to your side, that’s preferable to blowing them up.

What if they are disloyal? By fighting against you to begin with, they proved themselves to be a danger. By defecting, they showed themselves to be disloyal to their original side. They will stab you in the back eventually. That’s why successful wars in human history always consisted of just defeating the enemy.

Cultural change doesn’t happen automatically in response to an individual stating a radical idea, even if it’s a true idea backed up with lots of evidence. You can’t just publish a book or a tweet and say, “there was no revolution, I guess we have to give up.” For an idea to spread, millions of people have to argue it out over Thanksgiving dinner tables, water coolers, and dorm room hookahs. Prominent figures have to take a stand in favor of the idea, and show that they are willing to pay a price for their conviction. The good news is that millions of people—including many academics—already know the truth about race. They need recognize what is at stake and start making their case.

I don’t think this is fully thought-through. When 10 million people start arguing against woke, if 10 million others respond by arguing in its favor, the latter will win the natural wokeists with minimal resources and without truth on their side. That’s exactly what happened in the 20th century, and it’s because woke people are innnately biased in favor of woke. That hasn’t changed.

Liberal elites have a good track record of changing their minds in response to reason and evidence.

No they don’t, I can’t think of when they have exhibited this trait ever.

More important, when it comes to the war on woke, we can’t (metaphorically) just blow up our “enemies.” The scientists, writers, business leaders, scholars, artists, lawyers, and bureaucrats who keep the gears of modern society turning are overwhelmingly on the woke left.

War is destructive and is undertaken with that being already understood. The war on woke may not be worth the costs, but that doesn’t mean that changing people’s minds is a viable alternative strategy. Rather, conservatives should consider how much woke they want to tolerate in exchange for a better economy. The current answer is still a substantial amount. Republicans are mostly done with anti-white discrimination and transgenderism but are continuing to allow all other forms of identity Marxism.

The human mind is not a logic machine. However, a clear-eyed review of the evidence shows that, under certain circumstances, many people (especially smart people) can be persuaded by reason.

I don’t think Cofnas has this evidence, because my review of the evidence concluded that the political power of persuasion is weak and limited.

High hereditability does not mean genetically determined. Heritability is relative to a population and an environment: within a particular environment, the heritability of a trait in a population is the proportion of the variance associated with genetic differences. If you change the environment, the genes “for” X might lead to Y. Genes that “coded for” girls being a tomboy in the 1990s now code for cutting their breasts off and getting hormone therapy. Genes “for” hanging witches in Salem in the 1690s drove social media mobs in the 2010s.

There are magic degrees of freedom in Cofnas’s thinking. He’s thinking like other people aren’t fixed and determined. But they are fixed and determined; you have no control over them. They might change in the future, but not because of you. In fact, control over yourself is quite limited — you’re largely already determined by your own genes.

In addition, Cofnas seems to not understand human evolution. He says “Genes that ‘coded for’ girls being a tomboy in the 1990s now code for cutting their breasts off and getting hormone therapy”, but he doesn’t know these are the same genes. It’s been a whole generation, the gene pool could have shifted a bit. He might respond “but the shift is too large.” What shift? He made up the idea that tomboys are gone and replaced with transgenders out of thin air. This is the human genetic idea bias I previously discussed in action.

When it comes to the Salem example, he’s actually hitting on one thing that has changed predictably over many generations. Human moral panics in recent times are always led by hysterical mother-aged women fretting over the safety and comfort of female children and teens. Were the Witch Trials different? Weren’t they about persecuting girls? Nope, they were the same:

The trials began after a few local women in Salem Village were accused of witchcraft by four young girls, Betty Parris (9), Abigail Williams (11), Ann Putnam Jr. (12), and Elizabeth Hubbard (17).^[20] The accusations centered around the concept of “affliction”, and the women accused of having caused physical and mental harm to the girls through witchcraft

And even today they’re usually based on something that isn’t real, and feature extremely disproportionate responses relative to the actual group-value of the “afflicted” and the reality of the power of “witchcraft”. What seems to have shifted is that the Witch trials were led by men, protecting teenaged girls, who would mostly become wives later, from spinsters and cougars. Today it’s mostly spinsters and cougars “protecting” teenaged girls from marriage and men, or occasionally electronics. This shift is extremely predictable if you consider the rise of feminism, which has been monotonic and inter-generational, and which is correlated with genetic changes in the population.

In an informational environment where facts about hereditarianism are readily accessible from credible sources, genes that now lead to wokism might have a different effect.

Genetic effects work linearly on traits. Genes for wokeism will still have a leftward effect. In fact, the strength of their effect will not change. The informational environment will have become more right-wing, inducing a partial shift of the population mean to the right, but wokeists will still be on the left in predictable ways. This is well-known to people well-versed in quantitative genetics.

Humans are uniquely adapted to live in an environment where critical information is transmitted culturally. Other animals get by on instincts and a bit of individual learning.

Humans are still primarily driven by instinct. I would say it’s 70% genetics, 20% learning at most, and 10% noise. I see no need to decompose learning into individual and social, it’s not just a useful distinction at this point. What you learn is also correlated causally with your genotype; when you are born you have a genome but no learning, so genes come first. Learning that is totally orthogonal to your genotype is maybe responsible 10% of behavior variance. And it’s impossible for a writer to control that variance ; it’s mostly ontologically random.

In contrast, we cannot even feed ourselves without a wealth of cultural information about what is safe to eat and how to process it

This is totally untrue, first off humans can eat raw meat, especially when it’s freshly killed, the raw meat people showed this. Your appetite is instinctual, you instinctive find rot and waste disgusting. If you dump a bunch of people on an island they’ll quickly learn what is poisonous on their own and will eat fauna and edible plants. They may even re-invent fire and start cooking quite easily, don’t underestimate instinct.

The tools we need to survive do not grow out of bodies, but have to be constructed via cultural knowhow

You don’t need many tools to live in hunter-gatherer poverty. I’m confident I could invent spears and clubs on my own never having seen them. It’s just a matter of sufficient intuition (instinct) and fluid intelligence (which is intrinsic).

First, conform. Man is by nature a herd animal.

Many lower types are; that is not everyone; genetic variance is large. I am not a conformist.

Second, copy the successful. We evolved an impulse to copy successful people because they’re probably doing something right. Suppose Ug is the best hunter in the tribe. Unlike everyone else, he always attaches feathers to the back of his arrows. You have no idea what makes Ug successful. But if you do everything that he does, you might hit upon his secret. So you start fletching your arrows.

A lot of people, including myself, are just smarter than this. I don’t copy blindly, I understand and build my own theories, and I would do that if I were raised on North Sentinel Island. People like me invent everything which the sheeple then copy. A lot of people like me who knew Wokeism was false invented it in writing, because they were genetic race communists. They were just liars. These people include Gould, Lewontin, Richerson and Boyd, Cavalli-Sforza, Turkheimer, and Boas. If you’re as smart as me, you can read their work and figure out quickly that they know they’re lying.

Obviously, these heuristics can misfire. Whenever a celebrity commits suicide, there is a spike in people killing themselves at the expense of their fitness. People even copy the method of suicide. If a celebrity slits his wrists, fans reach for a razor. If he hangs himself, a rope.

And this is why people aren’t that conformist. Some people copy more than others, but the biggest copiers just die. Most people don’t copy very much. What looks like copying is actually just genetic similarity. Median people are basically the same as every other person. They don’t have to copy, they’re just all the same, on average. Same height, IQ, personality, etc. They’re all within like 5 IQ points of each other on all of those bell curves. It’s just math.

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. The beliefs and values that we are imprinted with in childhood and adolescence leave an indelible mark, which in most cases can never be erased.

This is called the impressionable years hypothesis, and it has some weak support in the literature. However, I’d be careful to not overstate it. For one, you must think about how a mean changes when you append values to a list of increasing size. The list represents all the political ideas known to the person.

This kid started off as a leftist before swinging right for a while, before inevitably converging.

This one was a massive rightist, then swung a bit around the center, before converging. This is probably where the Wilson effect, the finding that traits tend to increase in heritability as people age, comes from.

To think you have control over the value that this thing converges to is foolish. Unstable beliefs != moldability and they don’t mean innate neuroplasticity. If you go by intelligence, neuroplasticity probably doesn’t decline until your 50s or 60s. Rather, people have just learned all of the basics by the age of 25; at 15, not so much, some stale old talking point might swing your view for a small time, because it’s new to you.

Age and Cognitive Ability

The ethologist Konrad Lorenz speculates that teenage rebellion is a biological adaptation. During the pubertal period, people “loosen their allegiance to all traditional rites and social norms of their culture” and become open to new ideals.

They make actual rebellion illegal, and law breaking peaks about 8 years after puberty in men, and not during the “teens”.

source

If you spend any time in a middle or high school you’ll find out there is no rebellion. There are kids learning to think from themselves, and therefore beginning the process of converging on some value other than their parental mean for important moral traits (due to mendelian segregation creating massive genetic variance among siblings), but on average there is no rebellion. Otherwise, schools would not even exist. Inevitably, all those kids grow up having questioned nothing, and will vote for the same shit as their parents, since they have the same genes, plus or minus a little evolutionary pressure.

“Hmmm I think today I will rebel by throwing a fit over chores and using tiktok too much. After school of course.”

When surveyed in 1996, Germans born in the 1930s were twice as likely as Germans born in the 1910s to hold “extreme anti-Semitic beliefs.” People in the former group spent the first 6–15 years of their life in the Nazi education system, while those in the latter experienced Nazi propaganda only as adults. Among Germans born in the 1920s, only women had significantly elevated rates of anti-Semitism, but the researchers provide evidence that this is because the most fanatically anti-Semitic men in that cohort were more likely to die in the trenches. In other words, people who spent a significant part of their childhood or adolescence (but not early adulthood) under Nazism resisted de-Nazification in a way that others did not.

They did not resist de-Nazification, they just held a lower opinion of Jews on paper. That’s probably because they were exposed to more anti-semitic ideas on average than people who didn’t attend Third Reich schools. It led to nothing. No resistance, nothing. In fact the people who did the actual fighting and the Holocaust were the 1910 cohort. The 1930s cohort never did anything anti-semitic in real life. So the moral of the story is if you get anti-Woke Hitler, you can produce 10 years worth of people that think less of DEI on paper, but who do nothing to stop it in real life after Hitler loses. That’s how it is, because the effect of ideas on behavior is limited and partial.

Fluctuations within birth cohorts largely track inflation rates. (Economic hardship makes people more materialist.) But change at a population level is driven mainly by generational replacement, not individuals becoming more postmaterialist.

It’s evolution.

When communism failed, most left-wing cognitive elites gave it up. Not even Bernie Sanders (neither an intellectual nor an establishment figure) wants a planned economy. The Democratic Party platform advocates regulated markets and some redistribution of wealth. Belief in free markets is now correlated with intelligence. Communism survives among the low-IQ wing of the left, including Antifa thugs and professors of grievance studies.

I have this thing I’ve been saying to friends where I point out stupid people need gore and destruction to grok what smart people already knew. For example, I already knew Hasan Abi was a piece of shit, now stupid people know it because he abused his dog on camera. The dog is a victim of stupid people. A society of people like me wouldn’t have let that dog get hurt by the psychopath to begin with. Iryna Zarutska made a bunch of stupid people realize black crime kills. I already knew that and supported dealing with it from the beginning. Stupidity demanded a blood sacrifice to figure out what Smartness knew ahead of time. So it is with Communism. Smart economists already knew command economies were terrible. Leftists needed to kill hundreds of millions of people to figure it out. The elite are still mostly so dumb that they need sacrifices to change their views. We’ll have to just let them try woke and ruin millions of lives, then maybe they’ll change their minds.

More than that, those leftists are still leftist. If they move on from race Marxism, their track record suggests they’ll just move on to some new destructive “idea” that satisfies their egalitarian urges. Then what, another cycle of appeasing them? Convincing them? They ought to pay us. Forgive me for thinking this is an unfair arrangement. What am I, a janitor who exists to clean up leftist messes? I would prefer if possible to forbid them from making messes in the first place.

Prominent liberal race deniers included John Stuart Mill (Father of Classical Liberalism), Alfred Russel Wallace (socialist and co-discoverer of the principle of natural selection), Alexander von Humboldt (German explorer and polymath), and Theodor Waitz (German anthropologist and author of an 1859 book on human equality). In 1852, conservative British politician and (later) Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli complained about “that pernicious doctrine of modern times, the natural equality of man,” which he said was being pushed in the spirit of “cosmopolitan fraternity.” Writing in 1916, the reactionary American anthropologist Madison Grant attributed the “widespread and fatuous belief in the power of the environment, as well as of education and opportunity to alter heredity, which arises from the dogma of the brotherhood of man, derived in turn from the loose thinkers of the French Revolution and their American mimics.”

Madison Grant is correct, I already knew Locke was a dumbass and not worth reading, and so on with those other dry boring “thinkers”. This is just the ball going down a hill vs. making a wokeist fly. You can be a poor thinker when the stuff you think is favored instrinsically by your audience.

In 1951, UNESCO published a report acknowledging that its 1950 statement had been “much criticized, especially by physical anthropologists and geneticists.” They released a new version, which took essentially the same position on race as the first one: “within different populations consisting of many human types, one will find approximately the same range of temperament and intelligence....Available scientific knowledge provides no basis for believing that the groups of mankind differ in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development.”

They changed their position in name only in 1951. Lol. What about now, after 3 more generations of dysgenics?

But, as I explained, history shows that liberal elites have a fairly good record of changing their political views in response to information.

I strongly disagree that Cofnas showed this. He showed them slowly changing their view on some economics, while retaining their poisonous egalitarianism, and failed to show them changing their view substantially on any other topic.

Post hereditarianism, the right-wing position will become much more attractive: some inequality is built into nature, and it is better to just make peace with that fact.

I agree here, I think Cofnas and I generally want the same thing. I just disagree scientifically that wokeists will change substantially. You could say my position is a deep iteration on his, that I find it better to make peace with the fact of hereditary political differences. Fighting woke requires economic sacrifice. Maybe it’s not worth it. Life is defined by extreme limitations, humans are mortal and fragile and of limited intelligence, but there is a tendency to think of politics as the infinite. Anything is possible! Not so. We’re stuck with a linear combination of wokeness and LHC rightism until selection pressures change and new people are born. Ultimately, a new equilibrium is only possible through a mixture of radical genetic and technological change. Politics is already determined.