Emails With Nathan Cofnas

Yes, I recognize that, since I am a race realist. But this was never a problem for me when I was a conservative. Nobody ever brought this to my attention, and I never thought about it.

Regardless, I don’t think that having or not having a reasonable answer to the origins of black culture is a reliable indicator for intelligence. There are lots of assumptions that people take for granted everyday and never bother to question (e.g. God, morality, anti-hereditarianism, cornucopianism, etc). That’s true for both wokists, conservatives, and virtually everybody.

If you asked my former conservative self where black culture came from, I would’ve said that I’m not sure and that I need to think about it more. If you waited and pressed me even harder, my intuitive default answer would’ve been “a combination of genetic and environmental factors”, because that was usually the answer to most things in my psychology and biology classes. I found the hereditarianism hypothesis somewhat intuitive even back then, but I never would’ve said “genetics” out loud in public because:

1. I knew that I’d be labeled “racist” to suggest that genetics might cause racial disparities.
2. I didn’t know enough about genetics to know if or why that’s true or false.

I know that a lot of conservatives are unintelligent, but I think that you might be underestimating how many conservatives may be receptive to race realism, if they weren’t indoctrinated to knee-jerk away from it.

There’s evidence on both sides, and some groups of immigrants probably have net positive effects (according to most measures).

You’re right. I meant to say “mass immigration”, not immigration unspecified. Regardless, it’s true that most immigration in most Western countries these days does not benefit the average Western citizen.

Most sociolinguistic studies show that it takes two generations for the average immigrant and their descendants to start learning and speaking English natively in the United States. In the early 1900s, it took three generations, so language assimilation has gotten faster in the past 100 years, and this topic certainly varies depending on the immigrants’ backgrounds. But even if we suppose that all groups are innately the same, there’s no reason why the native population should have to wait 2-3 generations for immigrants to assimilate into a country. And that only covers linguistic assimilation.

Immigrants also tend to be hostile to both Western and conservative values. It’s reasonable for conservatives to oppose letting people immigrate, when they don’t share the same values. Even if everybody has the theoretical potential to be equal, non-European immigrants still have a different culture than European immigrants, which makes them less desirable to most conservative Westerners. The cultural hypothesis gives conservatives good reasons to oppose most immigrants, especially if available evidence shows that such immigrants are unlikely to assimilate.

Conservatives would say that the amount of racism experienced by each race is clearly negligible, so that racial disparity is nearly non-existent.

For other disparities, they’d probably say something like “A rising tide lifts all boats”. If all races have equal opportunities, then it doesn’t matter that they don’t have equal outcomes. If one race lags behind another, it’s because they didn’t work as hard as the more successful race. 20% of people are always going to be in the bottom 20% of anything (wealth, social status, talents, looks, etc), so equality in outcomes is futile to pursue anyway.

I don’t believe that necessarily follows. Conservatives would correctly blame racial disparities on the lower voluntary agency and lack of initiative that’s exhibited by black people.

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No, this was clear to me back in high school, years before I ever became a race realist. It’s also crystal clear to virtually every conservative that I’ve ever seen or known: family, friends, teachers, acquaintances, Fox News, online news sites, social media, etc, as I stated before in my response essay.

I even laid out a list of reasons explaining why conservatives don’t believe in systemic racial oppression. I don’t understand why I need to repeat that conservatives clearly don’t need to believe race realism to recognize that systemic racial oppression is a complete myth. Wokism has blatant contradictions and irrationalities. These fatal flaws cannot be ignored.

Many conservatives would agree that it’s not insane to hypothesize that. But once again, racism was a long time ago (two generations) and slavery was five or six generations ago. Today’s black children grew up with equal rights, and so did their parents by and large.

Even if wokesters disagree, that doesn’t conclude that demographic quotas (discrimination against whites and Asians) is the solution. I already explained that demographic quotas have largely no proven benefits for most black people. But even if we ignore that, discrimination against blacks in the past doesn’t justify discrimination against whites in the present. As Martin Luther King Jr said, people should be judged according to the content of their character, not their race. This aspect of conservative ethics is rational and consistent.

If anything, the reason why conservatives oppose demographic quotas is precisely because they care about the equality thesis. It doesn’t make any sense to allow less qualified or unqualified people to take prestigious positions when they could’ve worked harder to get those positions in the first place. Once again, conservatives are more concerned with equality of opportunities. If some races choose to not work as hard as others, then they are not being denied equal opportunities compared to other races.

Conservatives also believe that past discrimination didn’t have much effect on the modern state of affairs. They’re actually mostly right about that, but it’s not for the reason that they think.

I disagree. Not achieving meritocracy is a bigger problem. A society can’t function properly if it doesn’t select the best people to run every position. It also doesn’t make any sense to put less qualified (or even unqualified) people into prestigious positions, when more apt people are available instead.

Perhaps, but it’s not clear how abandoning a pure meritocracy would correct these group disparities to any significant degree. There’s absolutely no evidence that “affirmative action” reduces racial disparities regarding intelligence, crime rates, or single parent households. From the woke perspective, “affirmative action” would supposedly reduce wealth disparities, and thus theoretically reduce other disparities as a consequence, but even this is dubious.

At most, demographic quotas can only raise the income and wealth of the highest performing members of underperforming demographics who were still lower performing than higher achieving people from more successful demographics. Demographic quotas clearly don’t help the average black person, nor do they help the blacks who are the worst off. This should be evident from how the averages for racial disparities keep failing to disappear.

We must also recall that the stricter the quotas are, the more worse off everybody will be, since they stricter quotas lead to less and less selection based on merit. This inevitably leads to mediocre doctors, mediocre scientists, mediocre “innovators”, mediocre judges, etc for society.

Of course it’s clear that demographic quotas are incompatible with meritocracy. According to wiktionary.org, the definition of meritocracy is: “A type of society where wealth, income, and social status are assigned through competition”. It is not meritocratic at all to assign prestigious positions to people based on their race rather than their qualifications and merits. Any society that does otherwise would be disqualified from being a meritrocracy, by definition.

Wokists can insist otherwise, but they’re just lying. They can lie a trillion times or more, but no amount of lying will ever change the truth. Demographic quotas are simply not compatible with meritocracy. They inevitably lead to a society where positions are based on race, not merit. I’m sure that you and all truly rational people agree with me on this.

Because they’re not qualified enough. Conservatives believe in equal opportunities, not equal outcomes. If lower-performing groups aren’t qualified enough to be assigned a prestigious position, then they didn’t try hard enough, even if they did the best they could.

In this regard, Conservatives are more reasonable than wokists. Equal outcomes are not possible for any society because nature is inherently inequitable. By comparison, equal opportunities are more realistic for human societies.

It’s also not clear why we should focus on disparities between blacks and whites in particular. As I wrote in my response essay: “As of 2010, approximately half of the people living below the poverty line in the US are non-Hispanic white (19.6 million)”. More white people live in poverty than black people. So why should we care about poor black people specifically, when we could instead view everybody as individuals and care about lifting all poor people up in general? This is a rational position.

If it’s reasonable to replace qualified European-descended white collar workers with less qualified African-descended workers for the sake of equality, then it should be equally reasonable to replace them with less qualified European-descended workers. By raw numbers, there are more impoverished whites than there are impoverished blacks in the US. Taking equality seriously should imply an obligation to help impoverished whites just as much as we help impoverished blacks. But that’s not what we see from wokists. They’re only focused on performance by race, rather than performance by individual. If wokism were rational, then why does it have such glaring blind spots?

That might be what they believe, but is it true? No, it isn’t. More intelligent people are able to realize that. The leftists are delusional. The real reason why blacks don’t accomplish as much as Japanese do is because they literally don’t work hard enough. They just don’t put in enough effort. Sometimes they don’t even want to put in the effort. The conservatives are making the correct rational judgment on this.

I also stand by my original point on “affirmative action”. From a rational point of view:

“It’s equally insensitive for leftists to support ’affirmative action’, since it implies that black people cannot succeed in a merit-based system”. – Zero Contradictions, “A Rational Analysis of Wokism”

About half of the population agrees that the implications of demographic quotas sound insensitive. It also still stands that the insensitivity critique against the conservative point of view doesn’t have any explanatory power for why intellectuals may lean towards wokism.

Once again, both leftists and rightists say things and support positions that could be interpreted as offensive to the other side, all the time. If we’re trying to figure out which position on demographic quotas is more reasonable, then we cannot ignore that demographic quotas imply demeaning attitudes towards underperforming demographics. This is clearly incompatible with the belief in equality. A truly rational person is obligated to consider this.

Not at all. Black culture is a superior explanation to woke insanity, even if neither of them are the correct explanation. The question “Who’s responsible for underperforming cultures?” is a less obvious question, whereas “How could racism cause single parent households?” and “What causes single parent households?” are much more obvious questions that most people would think to ask and answer.

Since the latter questions are more obvious to most people, it’s more important and more reasonable to answer them first. By Occam’s Razor, it’s more intuitive and more reasonable to blame the high rate of black single parent households on black people, rather than white people.

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How would a culture of fatherlessness arise out of “conditions due to racism”? What conditions are we talking about? And how is that any meaningfully different from saying that the culture of fatherlessness arose due to racism? The woke explanation for single parent households still doesn’t make any sense. The simpler explanation is culture. An even simpler explanation is genetics. If we reject genetics (for the sake of argument), then culture is the simplest explanation.

Again, there is no clear, rational connection between racism and single parent households. Any proposed explanation for how the two are even remotely related to each other ultimately resorts to mental gymnastics. Wokism is not a rational ideology. Woke beliefs are not a sign of intelligence. Most intelligent people probably support a combinational hypothesis, rather than pure wokism.

Okay, but racism hasn’t been popular for decades, nor is it restricted to white-on-black racism. One political scientist examined 346 hate crime allegations and found that fewer than 1 in 3 of them were genuine. (Book Link) Hate crimes are uncommon, and most hate crime allegations are hoaxes.

Perhaps because they have the same culture? I also don’t understand how this is a problem for the cultural hypothesis?

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Racism was a long a time ago. There’s not a single person alive today who lived through the slavery era in the US. At some point, all people would have to admit that actions that happened in the past have little impact on the modern world. It doesn’t make sense to keep emphasizing what the past was like when we can instead focus on how things work in the present.

I mentioned on my response page how German, Japanese, and Chinese immigrants also faced racism in the past, and their descendants managed to achieve decent success in spite of that. The Irish, Italians, and many other whites also experienced anti-Catholic discrimination in the US during the 1800s and 1900s. Virtually all the immigrants who ever arrived to the New World had to fight for their rights once they arrived, because anti-immigrant sentiments were strong in the past. Literally everybody has ancestors who have experience racism and discrimination.

Racism is clearly not unique to black people. If Asian and white immigrants can lift themselves up, then why can’t black people? The legacy of slavery and the Jim Crow Laws are an obvious answer, but they mainly affected dead people, not living people. For two generations, blacks have lived in the most prosperous society in world history with far greater racial tolerance than the kind experienced by Asians and other immigrants. If they still can’t lift themselves up, then it’s reasonable to posit that they only have themselves to blame.

It’s unreasonable to insist that racism and slavery have a smaller effect on today’s black people than single-parent households. Unlike racism and slavery, single-parent households are an ongoing issue that actually affect people in today’s world. Wokists focus on social issues that mainly affected dead people, whereas conservatives mainly emphasize social issues that affect living people. A majority of the Black people live today were born after the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movements.

Even if single parent households were caused by “issues that were caused by racism”, it would be more reasonable to address the problem directly. It makes more sense to propose solutions that would reduce single parent households, instead of focusing on these supposed causes that were only prevalent 60 to a few hundred years ago. We can’t change the past, but we can change the present. If the wokesters were more rational, then why aren’t they focused more on directly reducing single parent households in the present?

Even though single parent households affect a significant number of living black people, I’ve never seen any major wokists who emphasize that it’s a huge problem, much less propose solutions for fixing it. The conservative approach to racial disparities is clearly more reasonable to people who aren’t blinded by contradictory ideology.

I don’t think so. While most conservatives believe that all groups have equal potential, their explanation would be that blacks simply didn’t work as hard as whites. They had the potential to do so, but they chose not to actualize it. Thus, it’s their fault that they are where they are, and no one else’s. That’s what I personally would’ve said when I used to be a non-hereditarian conservative who didn’t know anything about genetics.

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As an analogy, we can imagine two persons X and Y. Person X has ADHD but is undiagnosed, whereas Y does not have ADHD. X and Y are otherwise equal in all other aspects. Everybody assumes that X and Y have equal potential to accomplish the same things. When everybody notices that Y performs better than X, they would say that X simply didn’t work as hard as Y, since they already assumed that X and Y have equal potential to accomplish the same things. Everybody’s conclusion would be that X plainly chose not to actualize his fullest potential. That’s the conclusion that most people would reach since they are oblivious to knowing that X actually has a genetic disadvantage.

That analogy is based on real world experience by the way. People constantly told my seven-year-old self (who had undiagnosed ADHD and uncontrollable behavior) that I was simply not paying attention or working as hard as other students, despite having the same opportunities as other students. Adults say this all the time to other children and people who also have undiagnosed disabilities. So I don’t see any reason to label the conservative position as “unreasonable” when conservatives say similar things about black people and their culture.

(Eventually I was diagnosed with ADHD, and I was given treatment that was so effective that I eventually became a top-tier straight-A student. But that’s not the subject of what we’re debating.)

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The conservative critique that blacks are not working hard enough also holds under the most rational perspective (race realism). Since they’re assessing the truth accurately in this case, this further proves that conservatives have a more rational outlook on racial disparities, compared to wokists.

If their explanation is “blacks have equal opportunities to whites, and they simply choose to not work as hard”, then I don’t think so. Even when blacks are given the same opportunities, they just don’t choose to utilize them. Lots of people are like that, regardless of their race. If wokists still insist otherwise, then that re-affirms that they are driven more by emotions, not rationality or intelligence.

Probably, but it’s perfectly reasonable to believe that there are limits to what white people can do for black people. From the conservative’s perspective, it doesn’t make sense to solve past racism against blacks with modern racism against whites. Conservatives believe that all racism is unacceptable. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

Let’s consider a different group of people: Hard-Core Criminals. It’s perfectly reasonable to believe that criminals choose to commit crimes. Obviously, we want criminals to commit fewer crimes, and there are some social reforms that a society could do to disincentivize crime. But is there an infinite number of things that a society can do to stop criminals from committing crimes (besides imprisoning them)? No.

If a criminal doesn’t want to change his actions, can society stop him from being a criminal? Not usually, because we’d need to persuade him to act otherwise, when he’s not willing to cooperate with people. The point here is there is clearly at least some minimum amount of agency that is required from anyone to be a good citizen or to strive for success. And underperforming demographics are not excluded from that by any means. It is perfectly reasonable for conservatives to believe that.

If anything, the wokists are the unreasonable ones here, because they’re assuming that all black people have the same desire, motivation, and voluntary agency to be just as successful as all white people. We can debate why blacks lack the agency to be successful, but if conservatives believe that single-parent households are a primary cause of that (and it is), then it is the responsibility of black parents to choose to take care of their children.

There are millions of black fathers out there who are choosing to set their children up for failure by not taking care of them. It’s rational to blame black parents for the lack of success in their descendants. It’s rational to blame blacks for the lack of successful black people. Just as there are hard limits to how much society can help criminals become better people, there are hard limits to how much white people can help black people become better people.

Technically speaking, it’s up to humans to decide what rationality is. Nevertheless, I don’t think we should deem the cultural hypothesis as less reasonable just because fewer intelligent people agree with it.

On my response page, I listed at least five core reasons why Humanism is more appealing to intelligent people than Conservatism. You haven’t disagreed or commented on any of the points that I made there (except for the second one), so I will infer that you agree with all of them.

I believe that I presented a better and more reasonable explanation for why intellectuals are more attracted to Humanism, and hence Wokism. I also believe that the rejection of the cultural hypothesis is a consequence of being associated with an opposing set of ideas (Conservativism). If my explanations for why intellectuals lean humanist and/or woke are more plausible, then there are no good reasons to infer that wokism is more rational than the cultural hypothesis.

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My conjecture is that people who are even smarter than white wokists tend to lean towards a combination of the Cultural Hypothesis and the Woke Hypothesis. The two hypotheses aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, and it can be quite reasonable to suppose that they’re both responsible, if hereditarianism is rejected.

We both know that genetics are the true main cause of racial disparities. Since we agree that culture comes from genetics, the conservatives’ cultural explanation makes more sense, since it is closer to the correct conclusion (i.e. genetics is the main factor that causes racial disparities). The conservatives are only one step away from figuring out the correct answer. All they need to do is to just figure out that culture comes from genetics.

You and I may have different intuitions regarding which hypothesis is more reasonable than the other. But don’t you agree that the conservative hypothesis on racial disparities is closer to the correct answer?

I don’t have any data, but it’s clear that most Libertarians are not (strong) race realists. Most of the Libertarians on r/Libertarian and r/ShitStatistsSay tend to say that race realism is racist, whenever people mention innate differences in intelligence. As an example, Libertarians reacted quite poorly to my biorealist critiques of Libertarianism.

That may be true for a minority of right-libertarians, but definitely not most of them. Stefan Molyneux and Hans-Hermann Hoppe are the only major libertarian / anarcho-capitalist race realists that I’ve ever heard of. And left-libertarians are unquestionably woke.

Libertarians hate race realism because Libertarianism is a subset of Humanism. Race realism challenges the sacred assumption that all humans are created equal. We must also recall that most right-libertarians (at least two-thirds from surveys) believe in objective morality, and at least a third of them are Christians. An audience like that just isn’t susceptible to biological realism.

Most right-libertarians favor a distinct combination of the cultural, leftist, and government explanations. Right-Libertarians are unique since they frequently blame government policies for racial disparities: welfare, zoning, government-backed slavery, government-enforced segregation, the drug war, victimless crimes, police brutality, unfair tax audits, unfair government regulations, mediocre public schools, etc. Libertarians never miss an opportunity to blame the government for the world’s problems.

Although libertarians have higher average IQs, they also have higher average AQs (for autism), so they’re not necessarily representative of smart people in general.

You bring up an interesting point about Libertarians having higher AQs. This makes a lot of sense. Since this actually supports my thesis, I added a new section about it on my Wokism page.

I think Carl is wrong about that. Everyone says they e.g. “support free speech” in surveys, but many of the same people are woke in practice.

That’s a good point regarding that survey question. However, I recall that Eric Kaufman’s book Third Awokening supports the conclusion that most cognitive elites are actually liberals/humanists who just go along with wokism, despite being less gung-ho themselves.

The average intelligence of these groups is less important than the ideology of the elites.

Absolutely. We agree on this, but I thought it was worth mentioning nonetheless.

“Equality of opportunity” is not a clearly defined concept. What conditions must be met for A and B to have “equal opportunities”?

This is a great question. Everybody agrees that A and B must have equal legal rights. Equal educational opportunities are important too. There is a lot of debate about how equal these educational opportunities are in the Modern West, but it is fairly common to believe that they are mostly equal for all races.

Beyond those two (legal rights & education), parenting is the third most important. If over half of blacks grow up in single parent households, then that suggests that they don’t have equal opportunities as children of other races. From the conservative perspective, that’s something that black fathers voluntarily deny to their black children. Beyond forcing the fathers to take care of their children (which no one supports, unfortunately), there is no strong public activism to do anything about this.

Once again, the wokists don’t have any plans or proposals for directly addressing the fatherless homes problem. By contrast, the Conservatives actually talk about this enormously important issue more than the wokists do, so Conservatives arguably care more about black-and-white equality than wokists do.

Most people probably lack the cognitive capacity to understand ideas about metaethics.

You’re probably right about that. I revised that bullet.

Perhaps, but I think it’s important to avoid reinforcing the idea that the only valid moral argument is one that highlights benefits for blacks.

You’re absolutely right, so I’ll re-order the bullets to help avoid reinforcing that idea, as you suggested. Nevertheless, I wrote about that question because some people have asked me about it. Wokists claim that they want to help underperforming demographics perform better. If we can show them that accepting biological realism and its implications would actually be more effective for helping underperforming demographics perform better, then that would undermine wokism.

Of course, this won’t work as long as wokesters are controlling the medical schools and the judicial establishment. (Medical and law schools should be fined with liability penalties every time an unqualified DEI-chosen graduate loses a malpractice claim.)

It will be necessary to control the judicial establishment, but we don’t need to control the medical schools to enforce that proposal. My point was that legal penalties could strongly incentivize post-graduate schools to drop their demographic quotas.