There is a very disturbing corollary to the last segment. I am a regular reader of fellow Substacker HolyMathNerd and she recently reviewed Rob Henderson's book. What truly blew my mind is her assertion that the practices of wokeism/performative denial of reality are not actually errors, but indeed a skill being deliberatively put to use to attain social advancement in an increasingly competitive milieu:
"signaling that one believes certain things while acting as if one believes other things—may eventually be recognized as a marker of intelligence and proper preparation for class climbing"
Place yourself inside the nomenklatura during Lysenkoism and the above capacities would be useful indeed. Also recall very similar themes in 1984 about willfully pursuing cognitive dissonance and using ambiguous language which carries whichever meaning that is desirable at-the-time. Modern terms like "inclusion" and "diversity" closely align to duckspeak.
"What truly blew my mind is her assertion that the practices of wokeism/performative denial of reality are not actually errors, but indeed a skill being deliberatively put to use to attain social advancement in an increasingly competitive milieu:"
Not wishing to criticize Christianity, but this is similar to believing in the resurrection of Jesus. Most religions have similar difficult to believe beliefs that mark one as belonging. Indeed in some ways the difficulty in believing is the test for entry.
I have some experience of Nigeria and the interaction, shall we say, between farmers and pastoralists. Part of the basis for the terrible trouble between them in the last fifteen years or so is the sharp reduction in the ability of cattle to produce milk. This is for a series of factors relating to the sparsity of vegetation meaning that the cattle aren't healthy enough to produce much. The pastoral people of Nigeria are the Fulani (along with a few much smaller group), who have even abandoned the use of butter for traditional rituals at things like weddings and initiation ceremonies.
Anyway, one of the Fulani responses to the strangulation pastoralism has suffered in the north has been the shift of pastoralism towards the centre and south, necessitated by the better vegetation and pasture but enabled by a mix of veterinary advances and mass deforestation meaning the tsetse fly is no longer to be feared. But a downside of this movement* is that there is very little market at all for dairy in the south. Upon investigating this I discovered that lactose intolerance amongst the Igbo and Yoruba people, two major groups of the south, are at astonishing rates of something like 80-90%. I suspect this means that southern Nigerian kids get something like zero dairy once they are off the breast. The northern Hausa, Kanuri and of course Fulani have much greater tolerance, as you describe.
*An expert on pastoralism told me that the rupture of the last couple of decades experienced by the Fulani of Nigeria is the biggest change ever experienced by any pastoralist group anywhere in the world, ever.
Fascinating, thank you. David Frye’s book ‘Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick’ is a highly readable account of farmer-pastoralist interactions.
"Hence contemporary outbreaks of Lysenkoism—trumping science with ideology—including the denial of the biological reality of sex being driven by deeming Trans folks to be victims of an oppressive society, while—as is normal to Lysenkoism—seeking to shame, shun, and otherwise punish, those who dissent. This leads to the nonsense of claiming sex is “assigned” at birth, rather than being observed—a capacity developed over a billion years of sexual reproduction."
An important caveat is that modern intersectional (i.e. woke) science denialism - unlike Lysenkoism - is not imposed top-down, but rather - true to its Anarchist roots - bottom-up, like a mob. It only becomes state- and corporate-imposed once it has reached a critical mass in academic settings. Obviously, we are way past that point now, though Lysenkoism was state-sponsored from the very beginning, whereas intersectionalism always had a Libertarian Socialist (or Chomskyite) tinge to it. Once those becoming true believers of woke dogma complete their education, becoming employed by corporations and the state, they subsequently end up impairing the functioning of the institutions who employ them.
Yes. My next post on my substack will be about that very point of operating via networks. And a regular theme of mine is that activism degrades all it touches.
the stupid thing is, ignoring evolutionary differences was supposed to encourage people to use the talents they had; instead, "I'm oppressed" has replaced genetics as an excuse to not try to improve.
My problem with evolutionary thinking in social sciences is that, depending on the biases on preconceptions of the listeners, evolutionary thinking could be a benign but futile exercise in truth-seeking, or a dangerous justification for intolerance and violence against the outgroup. In its current form evolutionary thinking can only consist of unfalsifiable stories. The only criteria for acceptance, as far as I can tell, are 1) the narrative must weave together some pieces of data (could be anthropological, genetic, linguistic, historical, or archeological) to make it sound scientific, and 2) the narrative must make sense to some group of people today - in other words the narrative does not contradict the biases, preconceptions, and agendas of some group of contemporary listeners. If those two conditions are met, the narrative will be accepted for the purposes of understanding the world and developing policy. We have seen both futile truth-seeking and evolutionary justifications of violence in modern history, and even today from different evolutionary storytellers with different agendas. Without some way to reign in or standardize the field, I can’t help but find it inherently dangerous. Even as path to truth I call it futile. The narrative format of evolutionary thinking like this makes it difficult to separate hypothesis from accepted truth, which makes it a poor avenue to discovering truth. Maybe I would get on board if practitioners were to develop and standardize some guardrails and best practices to avoid the dangerous potential and to separate out fact from hypothesis.
Yes, there has been some very bad evolutionary thinking. There has also been some vile evolutionary thinking. It does have a tendency to generate “just so” stories. Grounding the social science in biology is not easy and I regard it more as a block to bad ideas rather than a “how to” manual.
Thus, we do not expect biologists to start with chemistry, or to reason from chemistry, except where it clearly does matter (e.g., in trying to understand the internal structures of organisms). We do expect them not to entertain hypotheses that make no chemical sense.
Similarly with the social sciences. Does your hypothesis make sense given we are evolved beings? A lot of silly nutritional claims fall over when that question is asked. All the blank slate theories fall over too.
Consilience does not abolish emergence. On the contrary, it just says “it arises out of”, it does not say, “has no emergent causal processes with their own logic”.
So, perhaps I should not say “grounded in”, I should say “does not violate”.
Perhaps on reflection we shouldn’t link the social sciences to policy, in particular if we’re going to link social sciences (🤮) to biology. I say this as a right winger, careful. The solution to certain vexing questions that will defy solution is all too tempting in its finality. For example, most Fascist regimes were simply a response to Communism, and solved Communism with Finality.
However in the land of science supreme the social sciences-🤮genug, that’s politics in science’s white robes - in the land of Scientific advancement, Kultur and supreme engineers, biology was added to the mix with unnecessary and insanely excessive outcome. It was totally unnecessary. And no your science isn’t better than theirs, nope. Just newer.
And to be candid; your problem in Australia and here is exactly too much executive conditioning, and not enough direct physical action.
Kindly execute a good punch to each other’s nonces and then start swinging until you get a less educated but better outcome.
Or perchance embrace the engineering solution to Lysenko and company, because that’s exactly what it was….
If you aren't reading Emil Kirkegaard's substack (https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/ ) , you probably should. Lots of discussion on "taboo" topics about racial/cultural differences based on actual research and science
“The churn of slavery massively undermined cultural transmission, the selection was for physical robustness and, if anything, against executive functions.” So slave traders were doing IQ tests?
Promoting the idea of a subspecies conveniently allows the subspecies of humans who find murder and war a solution to their resource distribution problems free rein. Now that’s stupid.
The author writes "The regions where the local physical environment has been successfully managed longest"
What does this mean. The region in which dense human populations have existed the longest (which I would think implies successful management of the environment) has been in West Asia and Eqypt (fertile crescent).
I meant a mixture of technological capacity and social complexity and development. A problem with the Fertile Crescent has been long-term degradation of the soils: either from irrigation raising salt levels, deforestation leading to soil loss or just poor soil management. After the Muslim conquest, they also shifted to high level of cousin marriage (not a good idea in the long term) and some institutional structures whose development path also turned out to be not good for long term success.
Egypt suffers from being far too easily centralised (so a tendency to institutional and technological stagnation) and the easily conquered “underfed peasants in water-logged fields full of pathogens and parasites” problem. From the Assyrians to the British, Egypt was conquered or foreign dominated far too easily. Between Pharaoh Nectanebo II fleeing the Achaemenid Persians (340BC) to the Officers Revolt of 1952 Egypt was ruled by foreign empires or dynasties. There was a state in Egypt. There was no Egyptian state.
There is a very disturbing corollary to the last segment. I am a regular reader of fellow Substacker HolyMathNerd and she recently reviewed Rob Henderson's book. What truly blew my mind is her assertion that the practices of wokeism/performative denial of reality are not actually errors, but indeed a skill being deliberatively put to use to attain social advancement in an increasingly competitive milieu:
"signaling that one believes certain things while acting as if one believes other things—may eventually be recognized as a marker of intelligence and proper preparation for class climbing"
From: https://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/agency-is-a-life-defining-skill
Place yourself inside the nomenklatura during Lysenkoism and the above capacities would be useful indeed. Also recall very similar themes in 1984 about willfully pursuing cognitive dissonance and using ambiguous language which carries whichever meaning that is desirable at-the-time. Modern terms like "inclusion" and "diversity" closely align to duckspeak.
"What truly blew my mind is her assertion that the practices of wokeism/performative denial of reality are not actually errors, but indeed a skill being deliberatively put to use to attain social advancement in an increasingly competitive milieu:"
Not wishing to criticize Christianity, but this is similar to believing in the resurrection of Jesus. Most religions have similar difficult to believe beliefs that mark one as belonging. Indeed in some ways the difficulty in believing is the test for entry.
I have some experience of Nigeria and the interaction, shall we say, between farmers and pastoralists. Part of the basis for the terrible trouble between them in the last fifteen years or so is the sharp reduction in the ability of cattle to produce milk. This is for a series of factors relating to the sparsity of vegetation meaning that the cattle aren't healthy enough to produce much. The pastoral people of Nigeria are the Fulani (along with a few much smaller group), who have even abandoned the use of butter for traditional rituals at things like weddings and initiation ceremonies.
Anyway, one of the Fulani responses to the strangulation pastoralism has suffered in the north has been the shift of pastoralism towards the centre and south, necessitated by the better vegetation and pasture but enabled by a mix of veterinary advances and mass deforestation meaning the tsetse fly is no longer to be feared. But a downside of this movement* is that there is very little market at all for dairy in the south. Upon investigating this I discovered that lactose intolerance amongst the Igbo and Yoruba people, two major groups of the south, are at astonishing rates of something like 80-90%. I suspect this means that southern Nigerian kids get something like zero dairy once they are off the breast. The northern Hausa, Kanuri and of course Fulani have much greater tolerance, as you describe.
*An expert on pastoralism told me that the rupture of the last couple of decades experienced by the Fulani of Nigeria is the biggest change ever experienced by any pastoralist group anywhere in the world, ever.
Fascinating, thank you. David Frye’s book ‘Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick’ is a highly readable account of farmer-pastoralist interactions.
You go to college because you’re conditioned to go to college.
"Hence contemporary outbreaks of Lysenkoism—trumping science with ideology—including the denial of the biological reality of sex being driven by deeming Trans folks to be victims of an oppressive society, while—as is normal to Lysenkoism—seeking to shame, shun, and otherwise punish, those who dissent. This leads to the nonsense of claiming sex is “assigned” at birth, rather than being observed—a capacity developed over a billion years of sexual reproduction."
An important caveat is that modern intersectional (i.e. woke) science denialism - unlike Lysenkoism - is not imposed top-down, but rather - true to its Anarchist roots - bottom-up, like a mob. It only becomes state- and corporate-imposed once it has reached a critical mass in academic settings. Obviously, we are way past that point now, though Lysenkoism was state-sponsored from the very beginning, whereas intersectionalism always had a Libertarian Socialist (or Chomskyite) tinge to it. Once those becoming true believers of woke dogma complete their education, becoming employed by corporations and the state, they subsequently end up impairing the functioning of the institutions who employ them.
As promised, my latest post, about activism via networks.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/modelling-coordination-in-an-activist
Yes. My next post on my substack will be about that very point of operating via networks. And a regular theme of mine is that activism degrades all it touches.
the stupid thing is, ignoring evolutionary differences was supposed to encourage people to use the talents they had; instead, "I'm oppressed" has replaced genetics as an excuse to not try to improve.
My problem with evolutionary thinking in social sciences is that, depending on the biases on preconceptions of the listeners, evolutionary thinking could be a benign but futile exercise in truth-seeking, or a dangerous justification for intolerance and violence against the outgroup. In its current form evolutionary thinking can only consist of unfalsifiable stories. The only criteria for acceptance, as far as I can tell, are 1) the narrative must weave together some pieces of data (could be anthropological, genetic, linguistic, historical, or archeological) to make it sound scientific, and 2) the narrative must make sense to some group of people today - in other words the narrative does not contradict the biases, preconceptions, and agendas of some group of contemporary listeners. If those two conditions are met, the narrative will be accepted for the purposes of understanding the world and developing policy. We have seen both futile truth-seeking and evolutionary justifications of violence in modern history, and even today from different evolutionary storytellers with different agendas. Without some way to reign in or standardize the field, I can’t help but find it inherently dangerous. Even as path to truth I call it futile. The narrative format of evolutionary thinking like this makes it difficult to separate hypothesis from accepted truth, which makes it a poor avenue to discovering truth. Maybe I would get on board if practitioners were to develop and standardize some guardrails and best practices to avoid the dangerous potential and to separate out fact from hypothesis.
Yes, there has been some very bad evolutionary thinking. There has also been some vile evolutionary thinking. It does have a tendency to generate “just so” stories. Grounding the social science in biology is not easy and I regard it more as a block to bad ideas rather than a “how to” manual.
Thus, we do not expect biologists to start with chemistry, or to reason from chemistry, except where it clearly does matter (e.g., in trying to understand the internal structures of organisms). We do expect them not to entertain hypotheses that make no chemical sense.
Similarly with the social sciences. Does your hypothesis make sense given we are evolved beings? A lot of silly nutritional claims fall over when that question is asked. All the blank slate theories fall over too.
Consilience does not abolish emergence. On the contrary, it just says “it arises out of”, it does not say, “has no emergent causal processes with their own logic”.
So, perhaps I should not say “grounded in”, I should say “does not violate”.
Perhaps on reflection we shouldn’t link the social sciences to policy, in particular if we’re going to link social sciences (🤮) to biology. I say this as a right winger, careful. The solution to certain vexing questions that will defy solution is all too tempting in its finality. For example, most Fascist regimes were simply a response to Communism, and solved Communism with Finality.
However in the land of science supreme the social sciences-🤮genug, that’s politics in science’s white robes - in the land of Scientific advancement, Kultur and supreme engineers, biology was added to the mix with unnecessary and insanely excessive outcome. It was totally unnecessary. And no your science isn’t better than theirs, nope. Just newer.
And to be candid; your problem in Australia and here is exactly too much executive conditioning, and not enough direct physical action.
Kindly execute a good punch to each other’s nonces and then start swinging until you get a less educated but better outcome.
Or perchance embrace the engineering solution to Lysenko and company, because that’s exactly what it was….
Learned a lot. Thanks
If you aren't reading Emil Kirkegaard's substack (https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/ ) , you probably should. Lots of discussion on "taboo" topics about racial/cultural differences based on actual research and science
Am aware of Emil’s counter-conformity work, ta.
“The churn of slavery massively undermined cultural transmission, the selection was for physical robustness and, if anything, against executive functions.” So slave traders were doing IQ tests?
Promoting the idea of a subspecies conveniently allows the subspecies of humans who find murder and war a solution to their resource distribution problems free rein. Now that’s stupid.
The author writes "The regions where the local physical environment has been successfully managed longest"
What does this mean. The region in which dense human populations have existed the longest (which I would think implies successful management of the environment) has been in West Asia and Eqypt (fertile crescent).
I meant a mixture of technological capacity and social complexity and development. A problem with the Fertile Crescent has been long-term degradation of the soils: either from irrigation raising salt levels, deforestation leading to soil loss or just poor soil management. After the Muslim conquest, they also shifted to high level of cousin marriage (not a good idea in the long term) and some institutional structures whose development path also turned out to be not good for long term success.
Egypt suffers from being far too easily centralised (so a tendency to institutional and technological stagnation) and the easily conquered “underfed peasants in water-logged fields full of pathogens and parasites” problem. From the Assyrians to the British, Egypt was conquered or foreign dominated far too easily. Between Pharaoh Nectanebo II fleeing the Achaemenid Persians (340BC) to the Officers Revolt of 1952 Egypt was ruled by foreign empires or dynasties. There was a state in Egypt. There was no Egyptian state.