Nathan Cofnas on Race, IQ, and the Jason Arday Scandal That Made Him Famous

33:14Coleman Hughes:So where do you draw the line between groups in these scenarios? Because obviously, if you give out a bunch of IQ tests, you can find differences between all kinds of groups, right? You can find differences between races, as you've described, white, black, Asian, Hispanic. This is how we think of the term race. Between liberals and conservatives, you can find IQ gaps. Between white northerners and white southerners you can find iq gaps just ethnicity alone right like forget race you can find huge iq gaps between french americans and russian americans and irish americans and italian italian americans and none of these you know from my point of view i think it's potentially dangerous to the social fabric to focus on any of it including iq differences between liberals and conservatives.

34:07Coleman Hughes:For instance, you mentioned in passing, no one had a problem when I was saying the conservatives have a lower IQ. Well, I might have a problem with that at a university where I was trying to create a hospitable and harmonious environment for different political tribes to get along. So, I mean, it's one thing to say, you know people like i guess it was cambridge didn't have a problem with that it's another thing to ask whether they should have had a problem with it or at least um uh you know a an inclination to not uh blast that through the uh through the speakerphone to the school right then you would have had to sign a second letter to not fire me for saying conservatives have lower IQs on average.

35:00Coleman Hughes:Right. Well, so, okay, there's two different issues here, right? Because one is I don't want anyone to get fired for, you know, in America, we would say constitutionally protected speech. That's not quite relevant in Britain.

35:17Coleman Hughes:But it's another question as to whether these sorts of discussions should be mainstreamed. So I had, you know, you'll recall Charles Murray had a book called Facing Reality like four or five years ago. You remember this? I read it, yes. Yeah, and I had, I read it as well, and I had Charles Murray on my podcast. And our disagreement focused, you know, not on, you know, what is true. I'm not a race and IQ researcher. I understand that many things could be true. It's very complicated. And there's lots of controversy surrounding actually what is true there. But it's a whole separate conversation. What kinds of discussions should be mainstream in a society that is striving for the good, racially harmonious, tribal strife-free society.

36:19Coleman Hughes:And we had a really strong difference of opinion about whether these sorts of conversations should be held in the mainstream. Like, what does that mean? Mainstreaming, because, you know, Charles Murray, he had his bell curve argument, right? That was one argument about, here's how the world is. The facing reality argument was very different. The facing reality argument was, okay, here's how the world is, and we need to have a frequent public mainstream conversation about this particular set of facts, this subset of facts about the world, in order to improve society. Now, that's a very different claim, right?

37:00Coleman Hughes:So do you agree? Are you arguing more, here's what's true, a la the bell curve? Or are you arguing more, here's how we should talk about it in mainstream media and mainstream society? And here's why it's important to talk about it. And if it's that second argument, can you explain to me why is it important to have these conversations in the mainstream. I don't think everything that's true needs to be discussed and broadcast and investigated. Maybe people should be allowed to study whatever is maybe true, but I don't think it's meritorious to talk about every uncomfortable fact, and it's not something that I would encourage or do myself.

37:46So there has to be some reason to study whatever it is. Now, there are some things that should be studied, but don't need to be broadcast to everybody. We don't need to teach race realism in elementary schools. right this is important but uh my my contention is that there are at least some people who do need to know about this and there has to be an open discussion at least among the cognitive elites who are kind of setting the the uh the cultural agenda that they need to be aware of this so that they have an accurate understanding of how the world works. My basic idea is that wokeism is what follows from the denial of group differences.

38:41If you believe that all groups of people innately have the same distribution of socially relevant traits, so a person born in the Congo is exactly the same as a person born in Japan, exactly the same as a person born in Germany, on average. On average, they're exactly the same. And any differences in outcome among these societies, therefore, must be due to the environment, because you're ruling out genes based on some moral or whatever principle. And what follows from that? Differences must be due to the environment and the most obvious environmental explanation is white racism or the legacy of white racism, particularly when it comes to lower performance by groups that were historically persecuted, for example, Africans.

39:43If you are looking for an environmental explanation for why black people or people of African descent, either in Africa or in Western countries, in most cases there are some exceptions, for example, in the United Kingdom, African immigrants do it very well because of selective immigration from Africa. But in general, that's the trend, and the most obvious explanation is white racism. And wokeism is simply the project of recognizing a moral emergency to fight the racism and bring about conditions where all groups achieve at equal rates, to have equal outcomes. Because then we will know that the environment has finally been equalized.

40:36until we confront the false empirical claim that is the root of wokeism, then it will be impossible to get rid of wokeism. And I think wokeism is a very destructive ideology, as we have seen. That's why I think it's important.

40:57Coleman Hughes:Okay, I'm going to summarize what I think you're saying, and then I'm going to tell you why I disagree. So you're saying, effectively, you know the moment we rule out genetic explanations wokeism is the logical option it's what we will be left with if we don't allow and um you know allow as you put it cognitive elites uh allow is the wrong word but maybe encourage cognitive elites to be aware of the kinds of arguments charles murray and arthur jensen made and and so forth insofar as that's what you're saying, I would argue, I would make two arguments. I mean, the first is that this is a false binary.

41:38Coleman Hughes:It's not the case that we are in a forced choice between Ibram Kendi style wokeism and genetic explanations of group differences in IQ. I can envision many other status quos societally that seem to me healthier than both of those and seem to me possible. For instance, cultural explanations of difference, right? That is a third option. The idea that every group may have the same genetic inborn potential, but culture alone is sufficient to get you rather large disparities in performance, right? It's like, why are there no Japanese grandmasters in chess other than the one that was really raised in America?

42:38Coleman Hughes:Meanwhile, there are all these Kazakhstani and Uzbekistani chess whizzes that are super grandmasters. Well, clearly culture has something to do with that. Like having been part of the former Soviet Union where chess is prized as opposed to a culture that doesn't really play chess at all because they play shogi or whatever. So, I mean, that's just one boutique example, of course, but there are any number of examples, and Thomas Sowell has spent a career documenting these, where culture is a sufficient explanation such that neither discrimination nor genetics is necessary to explain the observed disparity, right?

43:19Coleman Hughes:So it's not a forced choice between Kendiism and genetic disparities. And then further than that, I would argue there's yet another stable status quo, which is that people don't focus much on disparate outcomes to begin with. in other words a lot of what i think motivates what you're saying is we've got all these intellectuals on the left people like kendi that literally say black people are 13 of the population but look how we're not 13 of people in prison and look how we're not 13 of people that get arrested by the cops and look how we're not 13 of phds and 13 of nobel prizes and stir up all of this resentment based on disparate outcomes and the assumption that racism is behind it all and white supremacy is behind it all.

44:17Coleman Hughes:And then a guy like you comes along and say, well, hold on, there's this other explanation. And it's important to discuss this precisely to disempower that other explanation. But I do think there is, you know, if as long as we're sort of trying to intervene in the current way race is talked about, one way of intervening could be to say, look, that whole left-wing style of argumentation is just divisive, right? It's just divisive, and we should stop considering it to be high status. You know, there was a, Nathan Glazer is one of the early kind of neocons in the 1960s and 70s who was arguing against affirmative action.

45:08Coleman Hughes:He had a passage from a book, Ethnic Dilemma, that I was really affected by. And he's talking about white European immigrants, talking about the Irish and the Italians and the Jews that moved to New York City and so forth. And he said this, if these groups had analyzed the statistics, they might have found much to grouse about. Since the Irish dominated politics, all other groups were by that token deprived. Since the Jews were most successful in terms of high occupational status, all the others were by that token deprived. Yet that's not the way the political debate went, and all the European ethnic groups believed they had done well in America, and they were scarcely a one that bears grievances, right?

45:49Coleman Hughes:So he's describing a status quo that works, which is that, you know, political elites just don't go there with respect to fixating on differences between people because it's divisive, because it threatens to tear apart society if you do. So all of that is to say there are more options than simply a choice between wokeism on the one hand and Charles Murray on the other. So this goes back to my hypothesis and why we need to talk about the right stupidity problem. Now, the mainstream right has been saying for a couple generations, has been advancing the culture theory. And there are very smart people who believe in the culture theory.

46:45I'm not denying it, including most notably Thomas Sowell, who presented the most sophisticated version of the cultural theory. But it's in whatever your intuitions are about the persuasiveness of the culture theory or the culture theory as a noble lie that could somehow let us avoid the more taboo and difficult question of genetic differences, we have seen as an empirical fact that the vast majority of intelligent, thoughtful people do not believe in the cultural theory, given the choice between the hereditarian theory, which they regard as racism, Nazism, or whatever, the culture theory and the white racism theory.

47:41The vast majority gravitate to white racism. Some accept the genetic theory, and the culture theory is a really niche view held by people at the Hoover Institution and National Review. It just isn't mainstream.

47:56Coleman Hughes:What's your evidence for that? Well, who teaches the culture theory? At universities, do they teach the culture theory or do they teach the racism theory? Does the New York Times talk about the culture theory? They teach neither, right? They teach the racism theory. Oh, sorry. They teach the racism theory. Okay, so I misunderstood you. I thought you were saying that the genetic theory is more popular than the culture theory. You're saying wokeism or tendyism is more popular. The genetic theory is probably more popular. I've spent my adult life at universities. I've heard about the genetic theory, even if not necessarily in class, sometimes in the classroom.

48:45But I know very few people who seriously believe in the culture theory. Again, it's something people say.

48:53Coleman Hughes:That's not a scientific poll, though. I mean, do you have polling data? I don't have polling data. Who you've talked to is not necessarily relevant, right? But, I mean, I think you would presumably agree that if you turn on the television, if you go to a typical classroom, they're not talking about black rednecks and white liberals, Thomas Sowell's book on that. It's a niche idea. They're not talking about cultural or genetic in mainstream. They're talking about, they're either not talking about it at all, which I think is a pretty good status quo, or they're assuming the Kendi, basically the Kendi thesis.

49:36So my argument is that the cultural theory simply isn't persuasive. Now, I have, I'm a big Thomas Sowell fan. He's super smart. Nobody questions that.

49:49Coleman Hughes:Sorry. Can I just, can I just, just really quickly. if you take from the fact that few people believe it, that the cultural theory isn't persuasive, why do you not also take from the fact that few people believe the genetic theory that it's also not persuasive? So I'm responding to the two reasons. So I'm responding to the idea that, okay, so maybe it's genetics, but it would be less taboo. It would be less socially disruptive to promote the cultural explanation. so whether it's true or not perhaps as a noble lie it would be instrumentally good to teach people a cultural explanation people could say okay it's culture and then we can kind of move on from there and we don't need to need to talk about it so i'm assessing it is that a plausible strategy in in real life can you persuade people to accept the culture theory we have a whole mainstream conservative institutions like Hoover, like National Review, and similar institutions have been pushing the cultural theory.

51:02That is the standard conservative ink explanation for racial disparities. So we've already tried. The hereditarian explanation, my claim is, first, it's true. So if you present the evidence to people who are capable of understanding the evidence and the reasoning behind the hereditarian perspective, it should be possible to change their minds. And we've never really tried, because hereditarians are not allowed to participate, with the exception of Charles Murray, who's kind of grandfathered in. And he's never explicitly made a statement that he thinks these differences are based on genes.

51:44Coleman Hughes:Okay, but hereditarianism used to be a perfectly acceptable opinion among elites, maybe even a dominant one in the progressive era. In America, in Britain, in France, in Brazil, you know, until the 1930s, it was perfectly untaboo to believe that genes were the source of disparity between peoples. and so by the logic of this argument the fact that it wasn't taboo and didn't win the conversation the the um the marketplace of ideas therefore it's not uh uh it's not possible to persuade people now right it's like it's it became you're kind of starting the timeline somewhat late by saying it's never been tried because it used to be almost the default in the academy well sometimes bad ideas win in the marketplace of ideas because the marketplace doesn't only reward truth.

52:47Also, it's manipulated by taboos and ideas are imposed on people. You look at the history of religion, right? What religion people believe in depends on who wins some war, depends on who's a better general or something totally arbitrary. In the case of hereditarianism, for hundreds of years, left-wing liberal intellectuals have been attracted to the idea of blank slateism and human malleability and the denial of group differences. It was never based on evidence. Going back from John Locke to Alfred Russell Wallace to John Stuart Mill, Theodore Waits, none of them had any evidence. They just asserted as a moral metaphysical principle that all groups of people are the same.

53:46And because that was amenable to their political ideology, just because on the basis of wishful thinking, which is another important factor in the marketplace of ideas, Because this had become the orthodoxy by the end of the 19th century.

54:07And hereditarianism then became taboo after World War II, when this kind of inquiry became tainted by its association with Nazism. Even though, to be clear, the Nazis were not scientists. It was made up. It was totally ideological. but the opponents of hereditarianism were very clever about making this association between any kind of biological thinking and the crimes of Nazism. So the taboo was established and this whole debate was shut down and that's where we are now. One of my worries is that, and I want to ask you if you don't worry about this as well, is that, and this is what I said to Charles Murray, is that if you picture what it actually means to mainstream a

55:01Coleman Hughes:conversation, what that means is we're talking about it on cable news. kids are overhearing it on cable news at the or at the dinner table with their parents and all of it filters down in a way such that you would literally have 10 and 11 year olds at school black kids and white kids and hispanic kids and asian kids getting into arguments about who is dumber inherently because of their race, right? And none of it would require the elite speaking on TV to be un-nuanced because, you know, it's clear to me that someone like you or someone like Charles Murray has no problem decoupling the idea of average genetic differences between races on the one hand and treating individuals equally on the other, right?

56:03Coleman Hughes:You have no problem decoupling that. Do human beings in general have no problem decoupling that? I think the answer to that question is almost certainly a resounding no. And, you know, it, you know, when we ask, is truth subordinate to the good society, right? Like the point of speaking the truth or studying the truth or investigating the truth is ultimately to make society better, either in discrete cases or in like a rule consequentialism type of way. But Would it be making society better to mainstream a conversation that would almost inevitably lead most people who aren't great at decoupling these two things to look at their fellow citizens and judge them on the basis of race and feel they had a intellectual basis for doing that?

57:06Coleman Hughes:I mean, to me, it seems obvious that that would tear society apart. And so there should be, to some extent, a kind of a taboo on mainstreaming it, at the same time that there exists an understanding that if you do want to study this, you can. Well, I'm not sure that's radically different from my own position, which is I don't say that this needs to be discussed on cable news. But maybe another point, which I think is important, is you imagine a scenario where a child—I can't remember if you said this just now, but you said this in the Charles Murray podcast—that you imagine a scenario where a child hears about this discussion on television, and then he goes to school, and then he tells his black friend, like, I've heard this thing.

58:10and then everyone feels bad and like nothing good has happened, right? Okay, I accept that that is a thing that could happen and probably in a country of 350 million people, something like that would happen. Maybe it would happen a lot. And that's bad and if we can take measure, something that leads to that bad result is to that extent, that's a reason not to do the thing. that leads to that result. Now, also consider what happens when we tell people that there are no differences between populations, that everyone is born on exactly the same average capacities, dispositions, everything else. Well, and therefore, differences between them are due to, well, the environment, which inevitably means white racism.

59:10The majority of intelligent people think, if you deny hereditarianism, the majority of intelligent people think that the most plausible explanation for group disparities is some form of injustice. And even if you accept the Thomas Sowell theory, which I think we shouldn't accept, it's incorrect, and in fact it doesn't appeal to large numbers of people. Even if you did accept that, you would still have to ask who is responsible for this culture. Because his theory is that Africans were kidnapped from their homeland, taken as slaves, and then put in this environment with low-class white people. And then they got this culture from white rednecks, and they're still suffering from the consequences of that.

1:00:01this would still flow from the crime of slavery and other injustices, and there would still be responsibility for fixing that. So there's still, whatever it is, as long as it's an environmental explanation for group differences, it's going to trace back directly or indirectly to white racism. So what if you teach kids that, and you teach kids that their group is in some respect doing less well than another group, and it's due to that other group, the better performing group having committed some crime. We know that that also causes problems. That's wokeism. That's racial tension. That's the cause of the current racial tension that we're living in.

1:00:43So yes, I'm acknowledging that the bad scenario that you described is real. It's something that we should consider, but I argue that you have to balance it against the alternative. You had suggested that, well, just to quickly finish, you suggested the alternative of, well, why don't we just not talk about it? That's great. If we don't talk about it, then I won't talk about it either. I just write some technical stuff in the journal, and I'm not going to, you know, go on podcasts to talk about it. But, you know, that doesn't work. Telling people not to notice this massive racial disparities doesn't seem to work.

1:01:29Coleman Hughes:Well, I would push back on that because, look, if I think about the way I grew up, I grew up in a town that was, to simplify it, basically 70 % white, 30 % black. Okay. What did we learn about race in school at the time, this is pre-wokeness, we basically learned treat everyone nice, treat everyone equally, don't be racist towards any individual, don't judge people on the basis of the color of their skin. And that's it. That's effectively what we learned. And we listened to 30 seconds of a Martin Luther King speech, the most famous one on Martin Luther King Day, which encapsulates that message plus a lot more charisma than i just delivered it with and effectively it worked in the sense that there are disparities to notice if you notice them but they're not necessarily salient they're not necessarily uh in in in other words it's a matter of emphasis if you're emphasizing the political equality is important and treat every individual well and and don't treat them differently based on their race if that's the salient sort of civic religion then i don't think it necessarily follows that people will start blaming groups and getting into oppression olympic type activities i don't think that inevitably follows and i don't think it's a forced choice between that.

1:03:06Coleman Hughes:That's why I gave the Nathan Glazer example, because he was speaking to a reality he grew up in, in which the potential for visible disparities was everywhere. And yet there was a norm, like a true cosmopolitan norm of people just getting along. And what's more, you know i think you know as long as we're trying to intervene in this race race conversation which i think we both are and i think we both have the same ultimate goal of like the society we would like to see um what we should be focused on is ensuring that processes are fair because when people when people know that processes are fair they don't really care that the result is racially disparate, right?

1:03:57Coleman Hughes:Nobody really thinks too much about sports, for instance, because we all understand every sport is like close to a pure meritocracy. Nobody cares that there are more of one race than another. Because we understand that music is close to a pure meritocracy, nobody cares that, very few people care that there are lots of musicians that, you know, or excel at one thing. You know, nobody, the world of comedy is like a pretty pure meritocracy in terms of like, you can make audiences laugh, you become famous, right? So people, people don't tend to analyze and obsess over the disparities in domains that they, they feel are processes that, that are, that are transparent and meritocratic and, and, and fair.

1:04:48Coleman Hughes:And so shouldn't the emphasis be on on making sure processes are fair and then actually people don't obsess over over over the results like i don't i don't think it's i don't think it is true that we necessarily obsess over disparities in the absence of a specific ideology of wokeness that makes people do that so as you say the civic religion used to be treating everyone as individuals.

1:05:22And then there was a brief period in the 1990s and 2000s where that was basically what people were told, treat everyone as individuals. You're at the very tail end of the millennial generation, I was born in 87, but you're right before Zoomers start. So that is the ideology that we grew up with. The question is whether that's actually a stable equilibrium. Because it worked for a 20-year period, sort of worked, does that mean that we can just turn back the clock to 2005 and just live like that forever? Now, if we could, then that would be fine. But the reason that became the civic religion was that people thought once we become post-racial, you remember that term post-racial, which was used for a brief period of time, like around the Obama election?

1:06:28people really thought that okay we've raised a generation of people that doesn't really see race in the same way as previous generations which is my experience too like i just i thought that everybody i knew just thought that it was irrelevant and we were moved and that racism was just this thing that happened in the past and a new era. People thought that that was going to usher in an era of actual equality, meaning equality of outcome, that racism was what was responsible for the disparities and no more racism. So, you know, there'll be no problem going forward. When it became clear that that wasn't going to happen, it was inevitable that there was going to be a backlash.

1:07:22Because if you still are committed to the empirical premise of wokeism, which is that all groups are innately the same on average, then you reach a point, you have a whole nother generation of striving for colorblindness and being post-racial, But people can't help noticing that there are conspicuous differences between people who come from different identifiable groups. So how can you, if as long as I think.

1:07:57Coleman Hughes:But I think I think you're telling that story. You're leaving out the true cause of that change from the post liberal to the woke era, which was not. I mean, the way you just described it now is, you know, when people realize that colorblindness didn't create equality, things started getting woke and crazy. Well, that's not actually what happened. What happened is when Facebook and the Internet came along and disrupted society in a hundred different ways that we're still living the ramifications of, you know, almost like second or third printing press, like technological revolution. That's when wokeness started becoming crazy.

1:08:40Coleman Hughes:It wasn't that people were exhausted by colorblindness and were just slowly beginning to notice that still a lot of black people, a lot more black people are in prison than 12%. There was a much more discreet and identifiable cause around 2013, which is, you know, that's the year that everyone and their mother was on Facebook and getting fed algorithmically promoted videos taken by smartphones of black people getting killed by cops. And so to me, that's a more that theory of the case that an adjustment to a fundamentally transformational technology led to a lot of the things that we're that we're complaining about, rightly, is not the same as saying colorblindness failed.

1:09:34Coleman Hughes:Right. Social media was almost certainly an important catalyst, but it was still, these moral concerns didn't arise after smartphones, right? People have been concerned with race and racial disparity, and they've been protesting. There were vicious conflicts about it. Many of them, certainly the woke side was the correct side during civil rights when there were actual discriminatory laws and discriminatory practices against African Americans. But people have been concerned with the existence of disparities for generations, many generations. and we fought it was more violent than than it was during the great awokening people were just as passionate about it as during the great awokening okay social media helped organize people help help get people riled up but this is not a new ideology that just arises in 2012 when there's a spike in social justice talk in American newspapers.

1:10:47We tried, so we had the African Americans got legal equality in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. People expected equality to follow from that. It didn't work. We tried affirmative action. affirmative action originally meant just taking action to find qualified applicants from the historically persecuted group. That had limited effect. So then affirmative action changed to giving people a real significant leg up, extra points, de facto quotas. We've been trying this kind of thing for a long, long time. And because the desired outcome was not attained, it was inevitable that we would at some point reach a tipping point where people would demand action.

1:11:49So why did people, social media created opportunities for activists to mobilize around any issue? Why did they choose this one?

1:11:59Coleman Hughes:It's because... Because the technology preferentially boosted the most divisive narratives. It gave a competitive advantage to certain ideas over others, at least in the short run. But that is driven by the fact that a lot of people care about this issue. A lot of people were, it's a divisive issue. But Nathan, it's always going to be the case that a lot of people care about this issue. That is survivable as a status quo. right? A lot of people are going to care about a lot of things. What is not survivable is a perpetual, you know, riots of 2020 or riots of the late 60s, right? Those are, there's a huge difference between lots of people care about this, but there's no riots about it.

1:12:49Coleman Hughes:It's not really affecting most people's lives most of the time. And we're defunding the police in 10 different cities because we can't get we can't think clearly about the relationship between crime and policing and racial disparity right so there's really like between the rodney king riots and 2024 it really was as good i would say it was as good a status quo as has ever existed on race in any society ever. And to be born, if you were behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, and you didn't know what race you were going to be, and I told you, you could be born in America in 1998, that would, it would hard, it would be extremely difficult, probably impossible, to choose a better society that has ever existed anywhere, right?

1:13:45Coleman Hughes:And so if that status quo isn't something to aspire to, to aspire to bring back, then I don't know what is. And I would further make the point that, you know, as you concede, like, or as you argue, like, colorblindness isn't new, it's been tried. Hereditarianism isn't new. It's been tried probably for longer, you know, maybe not for longer, maybe for the same amount of time. but was that a stable status quo i mean is it an accident i asked um i asked chachi bt to to uh list every society from the past you know 300 years where genetic differences i guess you know genes would the concept of genes would have been around not not not for 300 years but where the idea of inborn or innate differences between races and intelligence was mainstream and perfectly acceptable to talk about.

1:14:48Coleman Hughes:Almost every society in which that was true didn't have political equality, right? Like you could sort of make an argument for maybe Britain in the early 20th century as being maybe the one exception. And the other exception it gave was Germany pre-1933, which obviously would be no one's example case because of what followed. but all of that you know is it is it possible that the kind of society in which which truly becomes comfortable with race realism because human beings are so bad at decoupling the claims about average differences from treatment of individuals um those kinds of societies eventually they're going to going to be they're going to become comfortable with denying political equality to to certain groups of people and that has proven to be an extremely unstable status quo uh not only in america but in south africa um and and all over the world.

1:15:57Coleman Hughes:So what would you make of that argument? But why, I mean, why would you assume that we would be less likely to accept political equality among people if we accepted average differences between groups? First, almost everybody acknowledges that individuals vary, and the idea that we should take away the vote from people with below average intelligence is not a mainstream view at all. So even though the majority of people acknowledge that half of people are below average intelligence, that's not a serious political movement. And even if we accepted that there are patterns of group differences, So the means of certain traits are different in different racial groups.

1:16:55Well, there would still be a distribution within each race. So, I mean, why would you take, would you say then black people shouldn't vote? Because, but what about a smart black person? I don't see how that logic would stand up to even the kind of lowbrow scrutiny that would exist in public debate.

1:17:25Coleman Hughes:Right, but just because it's not logical doesn't mean that people wouldn't psychologically make that association. I mean, I do not believe that human beings are perfectly rational. We see evidence of that every single day. There's a huge literature testifying to the cognitive biases that we are liable to. And all of those get worse in the context of tribalism. People, I mean, Charles Murray said that the hardest thing it has, the hardest task of his career has been separating, has been persuading people of the point you just made, that overlapping bell curves are not a reason to treat individuals differently.

1:18:14Coleman Hughes:And there are, even in the case of average differences, there's going to be tons of people that go counter stereotype or counter average, right? So you can never judge. It makes no sense to... He said this has been one of the hardest logical syllogisms for him to impart to people. And yet, what lesson does that yield? Well, if I accept that human beings are not perfectly rational, which is to me, just an element of the tragic vision, what Sowell will call the tragic vision of human nature, and i observe a pattern where almost every society in history to mainstream talk of racial differences also that went hand in hand with the denial of of political equality to the disfavored races then maybe you know is it possible that human beings in general right not guys logical enough to to to go to cambridge or teach you know um to go to oxford but the masses in general just don't decouple in that way for the most part is that possible i think and if it is possible what are the what are the what are the political implications of that well first I think that you're drawing too strong a conclusion from the fact that political inequality and talk about race differences often go together.

1:19:53I'm not even sure that that's true. I think that would require some careful examination because there have been multiracial empires and multiracial societies throughout history. and in the Roman Empire, that at a certain point they began accepting lots of different people as Roman citizens. I can't cite the details off the top of my head, but I'm not sure that the empirical claim you made is correct. I think there have been Babylonian Empire where at least some people they're people of different races who are acknowledged to be different um participated in society as equals so that would require some investigation i'm not making a definitive statement about that but i mean those are just put a pin that those those

1:20:47Coleman Hughes:are societies that viewed everyone outside the empire as by default a barbarian and therefore or they can be slaughtered, enslaved, conquered. So those were absolutely no ideals of equal freedom. I don't know. I think that's an exaggeration. But the point is they recognized that people of different races could be incorporated into the society, the same way as people of different races become American and then have an American identity with equal rights that come with that status. so anyway that that would require its own investigation before before i would be able to to say something definitive about that now i i agree in principle with what you're saying that a responsible person should consider how the whole how if you're going to promulgate ideas to the general population, you should consider how is it going to be taken.

1:21:55If it's a subtle idea, if it's a sophisticated idea, if it involves understanding statistics, then you should think about how it's going to be, how it might be simplified by the general population and how they will interpret it and then act on it. So yes, in principle, yes, certainly.

1:22:24So is this particular idea impossible for people to absorb without becoming haters, racists, and running around discriminating against people? I don't see why we would think that they would. Again, we already understand that individuals differ.

1:22:56Coleman Hughes:Why would someone like Charles Murray say this is the point that he tries to hammer and just nobody seems to get? Well, I think that it's partly because he's running up against the taboo. People don't want to get anywhere near this idea of, I think that many of the critics who claim not to understand this are acting in bad faith. Maybe some people really can't understand it, which is, I mean, there are certainly limits to what education can do, but canceling one year of middle school just to teach every child in America to understand the concept of overlapping bell curves would probably be a good use of resources.

1:23:53I think that you just have to try to make people understand, and you have to explain it. Also, people form beliefs, or they're heavily influenced by by what they think epistemic authorities are saying about that topic. So Murray is written off as a racist, a crackpot, and the respected authorities are saying that we're all 99.9 % the same. Anybody who says that there is a difference between groups is the same as Hitler. so they're hearing that and maybe the many people don't really know how to interpret the the statement for themselves so they just say well all these authorities are on one side saying murray is no better than hitler and then this there's murray guy i don't know about that so i'm just going to go with you know the first group yeah i mean well yeah obviously i don't

1:24:54Coleman Hughes:think murray is a racist or a crackpot um i think nor do i think you are um and i think those those kind of attacks are really unfair unhelpful um but but i i i do think that you should take more seriously the possibility that people actually can't get this through their skulls uh on mass and price that into your theory of how we should talk about race. I mean, I remember having a years ago, it just came back to me. I was years ago having a conversation with one of my close friends who is definitely above average intelligence. And we were talking about differences between men and women. and I had just read maybe a book by Simon Baron Cohen on gender differences, average gender differences.

1:25:49Coleman Hughes:I had no problem understanding the difference between an average and everyone, right? So obviously when you say the average men are taller than women, you don't mean all men are taller than all women. In fact, I could walk out in New York City right now and in 30 seconds, I would find a woman that was taller than a man on the same street. That's how common it is to go counter stereotype even on a difference of five inches of average height, right? So I had no problem understanding that. Like an hour into this conversation, he's like pushing back and pushing back and pushing back. And then he says, hold on, is what you're saying that it's, and then he explains the difference between an average tendency and a hard rule.

1:26:41Coleman Hughes:And it was like an aha moment for him. Cause then he, suddenly he understood what I was saying. And more importantly, what I was not saying. And he said, oh, okay, well that's, well, that's reasonable. Um, but what, what struck me was that this guy who I knew to be smart, smarter than average, quicker than average, um, took so long to get to something that, that for me was obvious and the entry point to the conversation. And what, what it suggested to me is the possibility that like, really we are at some level deeply wired for tribal conflict and tribal narratives. And we only need a small push to go from an average difference to a categorical one.

1:27:37Coleman Hughes:And that's, ironically, that is one of the problems with wokeness, right? One of the problems with talking incessantly about white privilege is that the moment you give people social permission to do that, they will literally apply it to every white person, no matter of their individual circumstances, no matter if they came from wealth or whether they came from poverty. And we saw this. We saw how this went down. Sorry to interrupt. This really feels like an exaggeration. Like even the unsophisticated people understand that there are different kinds of white people and that some people are smart and some people are stupid.

1:28:23Is it possible you're exaggerating a little bit about how much we stereotype and just can't help it?

1:28:32Coleman Hughes:I mean, is it possible I'm exaggerating? Well, look, I'm telling a real story for my life. uh it's it's one data point but i think it's a data point that is illustrative i think it's it's it's possible i'm exaggerating it's also possible that you and i live in bubbles of smart people that are just much better at decoupling this precise sort of thing than um then than people than human beings in general are uh and would you acknowledge that's possible Well, certainly. I have always made it clear that I'm addressing the elites. I don't write for the average people, let alone below average people.

1:29:21I don't think they understand what I say. they, it's, I, that's not my, my role in this discussion. My idea is that the elites need to understand this. It's the elites that are driving these trends that set the tone for the culture, that control institutions. They are the ones who need to be informed about it. I don't want to see, talk about this on cable news. I don't, it just needs to be something that quietly becomes accepted among the decision makers and takes the winds out of the sails of wokeism so we can move on from that. That's the hereditarian revolution that I'm calling for.

1:30:06Coleman Hughes:So if we were to change the subject back to conservatives versus liberals, and you talked about an instance where you had, what is it you had published an article arguing that conservatives why we need to talk about the right stupidity problem right why we need to talk about the right stupidity problem so from from my perspective this is precisely the kind of group difference that let's posit that it's true for the sake of argument i i assume i'll assume you you did your research and you know what you're talking about. It's precisely the kind of thing that probably elites should not say in public.

1:30:46Coleman Hughes:You know, given that one of the, if not the most dangerous fault line on which we are always, always, you know, on the brink of having an earthquake, a political earthquake, is conservatives versus liberals. And that part of what we know drives conservative resentment is in America is this sense that liberals look down on them. It would be, in my view, very, mostly unwise to talk in too mainstream a way where too many conservatives can hear about the average differences in conservative versus liberal IQ, because I am certain, I'm certain that the average person in particular, probably the average liberal and the average conservative, but definitely the average conservative, because he or she is in the group being denigrated, would not be able to absorb that information in an emotionally neutral way.

1:31:52Coleman Hughes:Tell me about it. I know very well. Yes. And so given that that's true, and that I really would like to live in a country with less political polarization, not more, it seems to me that's precisely the kind of fact that a wise person should say, well, we're gonna soft pedal this one. well i don't think that a politician should say necessarily say that i don't think hillary clinton should say that uh maybe she did say it but uh i don't think it's it needs to be said but you know that the title of that essay was called why we need to talk about it and my reason wasn't that we need to say everything that's true and people need to suck it up because I have a right to say what's true.

1:32:40That wasn't my answer to that question. The answer was, we need to understand something is wrong with the political ideology. Again, I am on the right. I also found that in the general social survey, people who reveal themselves to be race realists have even lower IQs. They have the lowest IQs of all, even though I'm a race realist, and I think that's correct, the correct position to take. But if you attribute racial disparities to genetic differences between groups, then you get the lowest score on some abbreviated IQ test. So why do we need to talk about this? It's because conservatives need to understand there's something wrong with their political philosophy, ideology in its current form that fails to attract smart people.

1:33:40That's why we need to confront the facts. Now, we don't need to tell the average voter in Iowa that conservatives have lower intelligence on average, but there needs to be a community of intellectuals or thought leaders who is aware of the facts so that they can respond to the world as it is.

1:34:06Coleman Hughes:How do you keep it from spilling out into public view in that scenario? I mean, it's, I don't think it's, again, you know, there can be a kind of mild taboo. It can be considered impolite to talk about it. There are a lot of things like that. We don't go around picking apart people's religious ideas. It's considered kind of rude to do that. Even if you have evidence that someone is wrong, you don't make a big deal. Some people do, but there is a weak taboo that kind of encourages people to be nice to each other. And there could be something similar when it comes to talking about group differences.

1:34:57Okay.

1:34:58Coleman Hughes:So, um, final topic I want to hit with you is you've been a critic of the university of Austin where I teach. And, um, my understanding is that your criticism is, is something like hypocrisy, right? It's a free speech university that doesn't actually, uh, obey free speech. And you've talked about how race is taught at UATX and intimated that we should be teaching race and IQ type curriculum. So I, so far as I know, I'm the only person that teaches a course fully on race at UATX. So I don't think I was your intended target there, but I do want to hear what your criticism is and talk about that for a minute before I let you go.

1:35:48So my criticism wasn't directed at any particular individual who's teaching there, but about the selection of the faculty and the range of views. So you have your perspective and you'll teach from your perspective. So I respect that. But it's quite conspicuous that in a university that is explicitly founded to be heterodox, seems to be deliberately avoiding what I see as the most central heterodox idea, which is the existence of genetically based differences between groups. And there are other issues with the University of Austin. I admire a number of people who are associated with it. So that's not the blanket condemnation of everyone, you know, within 10 miles of the University of Austin.

1:36:44But I don't think that it's... I think they made some serious mistakes in setting it up. I think they should have... Apparently, they're teaching very low-level mathematics. They're very weak on science. A lot of the courses are...

1:37:12Coleman Hughes:Is that still true? Have you checked in on that in the past? semester or two? Because I know there was a big reform on that front about a year ago. So maybe everything has been totally reformed since then and my comments are out of date. I wouldn't be able to say if that's the case. Yeah. You know, I think for what it's worth, I think this feels like a case of looking a gift horse in the mouth because, you know, what that means is we've got this concern that you and I both share of colleges are taken over by woke indoctrination and nonsense. and it's almost impossible to start a new college. It's like, it's a thankless task that you basically need to be a billionaire in order to do it.

1:38:16Coleman Hughes:And you pretty much can't do it in certain states because of the regulation, right? So there's no innovation in the sector. And then you get one university that is trying, essentially. and um you know obviously not not nothing's going to be perfect when you're when you're doing an experiment but i think isn't isn't it wiser to be like supportive of the the experiments that are going in the direction you want rather than critical because it's it's um not your perfect ideal? So it depends how much you depart from the perfect ideal. I think there are a number of things that the University of Austin could have done that were really obvious and aren't just my eccentric ideas about, but really obvious ideas.

1:39:09And a lot of people were saying this. It should have been under the control of academics who do research much more than it was. They should have hired prominent scientists to set up laboratories and centers. And this was all very possible, given the resources that were available to them. And they really, in the opinion of me and other people, like Steven Pinker said exactly that. So Steven Pinker, who doesn't agree with me that hereditarianism is the most important thing to talk about. was still saying many of the same critiques as I am about the University of Austin. Of course, he resigned from the advisory board.

1:40:02Many people resigned.

1:40:04Coleman Hughes:Yeah, I mean, he resigned on the basis of an of an article that I consider to be a slanted hit job. And I don't, I don't, you know, he didn't have any more information than was presented in that article. So, you know, to me, that's not a great reason or it's at least too trusting of mainstream journalism on controversial institutions. And, and, you know, if you talk to people at UATX, you would get a different side of the story not presented in that, in that article that made Pinker resign. Maybe, but he did say, he did fault Heterodox Academy for not do, I mean, the University of Austin for not doing the things that I just mentioned, hiring very prominent people to, to take charge of creating new programs and like scholars, you know, senior scholars with the track record of working within the university and understanding how the system works.

1:40:57He was saying exactly that, which I think is true, even if he was misinformed by this article. As far as that goes, he was right, and other people were saying that. I'm saying it too. So there is a worry that even though the University of Austin has some very good people there and serious scholars and intellectuals, that the education becomes kind of doesn't attain the depth and breadth that we should aspire to.

1:41:37Coleman Hughes:Have you visited the University of Austin? Nope. You should do that because I think, well, I don't know what you'll come away thinking, but you'll come away with a richer picture of it, I think, than you can by reading about it or the like. And you would be welcome to sit in on any of my classes. Oh, that's very kind of you. I've never been to Texas in my life, but if I am and you're teaching, I'd be very happy to do that. All right. And I mean that. I mean that. Okay. Is there anything that you want to say that we haven't covered?

1:42:20Coleman Hughes:or any last words you want to leave with my audience before, before I let you go? Well, uh, just, uh, uh, very, very happy to talk to you. I, I think, uh, I'm not sure that we disagree, uh, as much as it seems. Um, I think we share concerns about misuse of information and how dangerous ideas could be simplified. by the masses. And I think we have similar ideas about a desirable society. But I enjoyed our conversation debate and thank you for having me on. All right. Thank you, Nathan.

1:43:13Coleman Hughes:On Tuesday, September 8th, I will be at the 92nd Street Y in conversation with Dara Horn. Dara's last book was called People Love Dead Jews, and it was an award-winning examination of the ways in which contemporary culture sentimentalizes Jewish suffering while ignoring Jewish life. In her new book, which is provocatively titled The Final Solution to the Jewish Question, Dara takes the next step, not only tracing the myths that have spread antisemitism in the past, but asking what can actually be done about them. So get your tickets now. I assume they will sell fast. Once again, that's Tuesday, September 8th at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.

1:43:52Coleman Hughes:See you there.