Why Biology and Math are Key: Commenting on Keith Woods vs Academic Agent, 2024
Internet history repeats. Where are we 16 months later?
16 months ago, in October 2022, Keith Woods and Academic Agent (also referred to as Neema Parvini) debated on what the prime mover of history is. It started when Academic Agent produced a video titled Against Ideology, wherein he argues that ideology is not very important when it comes to explaining historical events like the rise of leftism. Rather, Machiavellian power struggle (almost Darwinistic!) motivated by Paretian sentiments (instincts!) is key. Keith Woods responded with his own video, Against Academic Agent, where he counter-asserts that leftism is caused by elites being imbibed with leftism morality in university, and that parties and political violence are fundamentally motivated by ideas. Woods also claims that Academic Agent’s Machiavellian model lacks the ability to explain the friend-enemy distinction and ideological differences between power centers.
In my first video ever, I commented on this debate and offered my own ideas, emphasizing the need to integrate biology into the discussion as well as math and statistics. I offered up a statistical model based on the Fisher/behavior genetics decomposition of behavioral variance, which dissects the strength of genetic and environmental influences on behavior. If we let the behaviors be political, and add in an “ideas” component, an estimation of the parameters of the model will be highly informative for this debate. I also said we could understand the great shift left by dissecting how the various components changed over time, and how each contributed to the observed change in leftism.
I ended the video with just one piece of evidence. It shows that the biggest contributor to variance in liberalism-conservatism is additive genetic variance. Therefore, this solves Keith’s question as to from where comes the friend-enemy distinction and ideological differences between power centers. Primarily, the source of these is genetic differences. Friends are genetically similar, politically, and enemies are different.
Based on this data, ideas, at best, can only a minor cause of political differences, secondary to genetics. At worst, they could be nothing, the environmental variance instead coming from random noise, economic incentives, or something else.
Now, the debate is being recapitulated. On February 5th, Academic Agent published The James Lindsay Debate Club Theory of History. His post essentially restates what I, years ago, called the Lindsay Fallacy:
James Lindsay inspired me to name a fallacy after him. It is a special instance of the correlation does not equal causation fallacy where someone observes some philosophy books correlating with social change, and assumes the books to be the cause. I decided to bestow this honor upon Mr. Lindsay after watching the first hour of a video titled ``Hegel, Wokeness, and the Dialectical Faith of Leftism'', produced by Lindsay. The thesis of said video is that ``the Hegelian dialectic is the operating system of the Left'' and specifically that ``you need to understand the Hegelian dialectic, their religion, to understand and predict wokeism.''
An hour into the video, Lindsay has presented the following evidence: (a) a CRT textbook used the term ``dialectic'' (b) Marx was influenced by Hegel and used the term ``dialectic'' (c) The Young Hegelians were leftist and thought that the dialectic of the State was not yet complete.
I believe the following evidence falsifies Lindsay's hypothesis. (a) Lindsay himself mentioned this one: the Young Hegelians were opposed by conservative Hegelians who believed that the Prussian State was the Absolute Idea of the State, the completion of the dialectic. Hegel himself seems to have leaned this way -- Russel states in his summary in A History of Western Philosophy that Hegel was a monarchist and supported the Prussian State. Russel also stated that Hegel said that he believed the dialectic could continue in the Americas via conflict between the Northern continent and the Southern continent, but Hegel was apparently quiet as to what he thought the new synthesis would look like.
(b) Fauerbach, and Marx, stripped Hegelianism of its core metaphysical substance, leaving the dialectic as an empty shell. This means that Hegel's original dialectic did not cause Marxism. Marxism and subsequent Leftisms merely aped Hegelianism and were not truly influenced by it. Hegel himself actually stole the dialectic from a demonstration in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, where it was a tool that was used to demonstrate some hypothesis about space-time. The core to Hegelianism was, apparently, that the world is one Absolute Idea which is evolving. Everything is connected and our thoughts and political organization are determined by the knowledge of this Absolute Idea. Existence is but a thought and man exists so that the Absolute can observe its own thought. The logic of Hegel's dialectic is that the Absolute cannot both be one thing and be not one thing. It cannot be Just and injust, for instance. Just and injust are illusions and the truth is some combination found (imprecisely) by imagining their ``synthesis.'' Political contradictions are also mere illusions which will resolve; time is an illusion as well. Fauerbach, and with him Marx, sucked all of the mystical-occult substance out of this ``philosophy'' and declared that everything is material, there is no absolute Idea, none of that stuff is true. Marx was an instrumentalist who declared that such abstract philosophy was silly, and that the point was to change things. Hegel, then, was just a skin for Marx, a camouflage if you will, a way to appear en vogue, and he moved away from it in his later years as Hegel's general influence waned. Yet the now-hollow phrase ``dialectic'' remained, the substance of which for Marx was that of class conflict and the apparent inevitability of Communism. These ideas were nothing like what Hegel thought and did not deeply rely on the ``dialectic'' aesthetic.
(c) The Marxist dialectic is no longer the ``driving force'' of the Left. The textbook Lindsay cites for evidence mentions a racial dialectic. Marx never spoke of race conflict, so again the substance has been removed from ``dialectic.'' What is ``dialectic'' with no substance? Merely ``change'' or ``conflict.'' The Left is now at least twice removed from the actual meaning of ``dialectic'' yet Lindsay thinks it's their secret operating system, when in reality it's just a skin passed down via Marx to people who have an in-born temperament that predisposes them to the bleeding-heart ethic that is omnipresent in his work.
What there is here with Lindsay, then, is a clear case of someone seeing an ``idea'' and blaming it on correlated social change. However, there are at least 3 different actual understandings of ``dialectic,'' and wokeism is on the 3rd one only, and that understanding is not broached by Lindsay, because it is the understanding that ``dialectic'' is a shell filled with woke temperament on modern identity issues. The question as to where that temperament comes from is unsolved by Lindsay, because the answer is definitely not ``from reading Hegel'', or Marx, or anything for that matter.
In essence, the idealist asserts correlation = causation, and the Paretian1 points out that this correlation cannot be causation, due to some detail here or there.
Then, 2 days ago, on February 21, Keith Woods responded again with Academic Agent Is Still Wrong About Ideology.2 In it, he essentially restates his opposition to AA’s Machiavellianism, saying that great men throughout history are obviously motivated by something higher than personal benefit:
What drives people when they get into power? What drives them to seek power in the first place? Presumably, Parvini’s answer is self-interest, power for the sake of personal benefit. But history is littered with the graves of failed would-be kings who were willing to die to advance their ideas. If the masses are driven by fraudulent ideologies handed down from on high, has there never been one of them who ascends to power himself and implements them as a true believer? If we were consistent with this, we would have to affirm that all the kings and queens of the Middle Ages were paying lip service to Christianity as a means of sociological control, making them all extreme outliers of rationally self-interested atheists in a world of religion.
… The historical record shows us that ideologues and fanatics often drive history. Humans are not entirely rational, but neither can their behaviour be entirely reduced by some rational calculation to discrete computations of self-interest or power maximisation. We are a species driven by narratives and big ideas, and in a time where obvious truths are aggressively suppressed by a system increasingly incapable of justifying itself, it would be a ludicrous act of self-sabotage to abandon our greatest weapon: the truth.
Woods basically conflates idealism (information being the fundamental driver of political variation and change through time) and ideological behavior. But, as I’ve shown, Liberalism-Conservatism variation is mostly explained by genetic variation. Thus, while Leftist vs. Rightist conflicts are not merely about personal power, they are about genetics, and not ideas. And this has been revealed by math and statistics; the Woods-Parvini exchange is quite vague in terms of conceptualization, because of the duo’s reliance on words over math. They should come to embrace more math!
Academic Agent responded on the same day with Reply to Keith Woods on Power, Ideology and History. Here, he claims Woods strawmanned him. His theory is not about whether there are true believers or not. It’s fundamentally about what actually happens in the process of power; describing the actual patterns of history, and noticing that it isn’t primarily a debate club. Rather, it’s a battlefield, those who win must be fit — “ power does have its own logic, and its own disciplining mechanisms for those who hold it. For example, Power cannot stand rival castles and seeks to eliminate them.” And, more importantly, Parvini circles around genetic explanations, citing both a study from Emil Kirkegaard on Jewish gene flow influencing the coming of Civil Rights in the US, and Jonathan Haidt, who, in The Righteous Mind, comes close to grasping the idea of leftism as genetic, ascribing it to inborn moral impulses (“moral foundations”) which have been found to be highly heritable.
In his response, Surfing Against the Tide of History (this is getting exhausting), Woods doubles down on his same angle, avoiding the question as to how much genetics and economic/physical/Darwinistic/military/Machiavellian realities shape stated and realized political goals compared to pure verbal philosophy, and again emphasizes the importance of ideas.
The same goes for the Islamic Revolution: there were a lot of groups opposing the Shah, but if Khomeini’s followers were not true believers in his brand of Islam and the necessity of it ruling Iran, he would not have had an organised minority to wield against the failing regime. On the level of organising a regime change in a modern mass-society, wanting to reward your friends and punish your enemies isn’t a strong enough organising principle to win out, except when that friend/enemy distinction is broadened beyond the personal, uniting men in their commitment to ideals.
The fundamental essence of this article is again that Woods thinks Parvini’s view is that power is fundamentally economic, and Woods thinks this means that we shouldn’t see any real ideological variation; that variation is implied to come from the debate club. We know it comes from genetics, and Parvini weakly alludes to this as well.
Parameterizing their views
We can split up ideological variance into variance due to genetics, economics, and ideas. With this, we can summarize the AA view, the Woods view, and the Woods view of AA’s view, which I think is significantly off from AA’s actual view, but not extremely far off.
Academic Agent’s view
Genetics: 30%
Economics/Machiavellian factors: 65%
Ideas: 5%
Keith Woods’s view
Genetics: 1%3
Economics/Machiavellian factors: 10%
Ideas: 89%
Woods’s view of AA’s view
Genetics: 1%
Economics/Machiavellian factors: 98%
Ideas: 1%
Now, here is my view, which I think is best supported by scientific-quantitative evidence:
Genetics: 70%
Economics: 15%
Ideas: 15%
If this is correct, that makes Parvini more correct than Woods, which is my own evaluation of their exchange. However, Parvini is still understating the importance of biology in favor of economic/Machiavellian analysis. I agree with Parvini that ideas are a small but measurable factor.
Importantly, these numbers are for at-a-time, and my numbers are specifically for the analysis of leftism. I permit that things are different in different behavioral domains. For example, when it comes to policies and politics around tobacco, I hypothesize that information is a lot more important. When it comes to the rise of leftism through time, I believe it was 100% genetics as of now. Woods and Parvini do not make either of these distinctions in the writings I have read, so I will assume their “numbers” just stay the same for this.
What the evidence says
For the through-time, at-a-time distinction, I have new data showing that the accumulation of deleterious mutations can explain all of the measured rise of leftism since at least 1960. I’ve been talking about this for a few months; this is a key advance since October of 2022. There is also a lot of circumstantial evidence around this: evolutionary pressures are faster than most believe, leftism probably happens at the end of all empires and civilizations as a part of their deaths (suggesting a common biological cause, not a specific 21st century chemical or informational cause), a thorough review of contrary work revealed nothing (no one has actual evidence of environmental or ideological causation), meanwhile there are a lot of signs of genetic degeneration. People are sicker, leftists have higher levels of mental illness, left-handedness is increasining, etc. Similar things happen for rats who succumb to weak selection pressures. Rat-leftism emerges.
On domain specificity, I did a small online survey of people asking if they would change their view from any imaginable information in specific domains. As I thought, they would not change their views on feminism no matter what you prove about women: immaturity, infertility, and so on, supporting the idea that feminism (and with it the rest of leftism) is caused by genetic degeneration. Meanwhile, on coffee (similar to tobacco), people were open to changing their view on banning it if it was shown that it causes cancer or something similarly harmful. High school politics were in between, suggesting limited but measurable potential to achieving high school funding reductions with propaganda.
On at-a-time causation, the evidence on heritability is very clear. That means we need to estimate what the remaining variance is due to. For leftism, my priors shifted from economics towards ideas over the last year.
An upper estimate for the effect of HBD on leftism suggests it might shift people right by at most 0.5 SDs. This suggests ideas may explain 10-20% of variance in political behavior. This explains why people spend time on propaganda; on some domains, there is some response, but in leftism-conservatism the response is weak, though it may be there. However, basically the most powerful ideas cannot make a 70th percentile leftist shift right of the center; it can only make them centrists. HBD facts might be able to turn Democrat hardliners into never-Trumpers slightly to the left of Richard Hanania, but it will not make up for what is fundamentally a moral and mental illness going on beneath (the lack of right-wing mental constitution stemming from genes).
Soon, I want to run a comprehensive study on the maximum effect known ideas have on leftism-conservatism.
As for elite theory and economics, it’s unclear exactly how much influence it has, but I think Parvini overstates the case generally. In a debate with Woods I had, I did a review of some basic evidence and found that democracies are responsive and people vote with only a little randomness. Gregory Clark shows that social mobility (“class recirculation” for Parvini) rates are stable between societies and mostly meritocratic, seemingly relying on IQ and conscientiousness.
So, something like half of the elites are actually born to the lower classes every generation. Thus, everyone is related, and ruling class ideological genetics will move with lower class ideological genetics. Combining this with democracy being real and not an illusion, the deviance due to to elite uniqueness is likely pretty low, though not exactly 0 per se.
There is some evidence that elites are a bit more leftist, though not much, and their descent obviously seems to go at the same pace as the masses. I suspect their genetic degradation process started earlier.
I have a model for estimating the amount of deviance due to elite power and genetic differences. First, imagine we can estimate a regression of class or personal genetic/phenotypic values onto a society’s general policy leftism:4
This is basically how much the policy changes when one of the class positions (E = elite, U = underclass) changes. Power can be measured as
The null hypothesis is that, in a democracy, the elite class is influential according to their vote count, and so policy is just F’ = P(E)E + P(U)U, which is the population mean. So, as the regression beta gets bigger, the elites have more power.
The deviance due to elites not agreeing with the masses can be written as
This is just how it would be in a democracy where elites have say proportional to their size minus how it would be if elites agreed completely with the underclasses.
Now, deviance due to elite power is
Thus total deviance equals F - U.
So assuming the error term is very small, we can estimate the total deviance by estimating the betas and the class positions. To actually do this, one would have to survey elites, the masses, as well as figure out how to estimate the value of society level policies. The first two steps are definitely doable in theory. The last step is a little harder but imaginable. It would be like if the government itself took a leftism test. Perhaps leftism of groups could be measured by their agreement with a set of existing and debated policies in one dimension. Society’s score is the policies that are currently in place. In the racism domain, you could ask about:
Slavery
Segregation
Miscegenation
Affirmative action
Reparations
Mass immigration
Extra nonwhite senators
Anti-racist education in public schools
Etc. The State would be anti-racist on 4 or 5. Maybe give it a 4.5. The elites could conceivably get as high as an 8. The masses might get a 4. This would imply democracy. Repeat with only domains for better estimates of general power.
For now though, I’ll use two tricks to estimate the deviance on leftism. First, let’s assume that money is power. This makes sense, because generally speaking, if you can control people with some ability, then it’s worth money. If you have more money, you have more influence than if you have less money. So if elites have 50% of the wealth, for every point their leftism goes up, societal leftism would be expected to go up 2 times more than if elites only had 25% of the wealth; they can spend double on it. So, we will set beta to be the proportion of wealth the two classes owns. We’ll define the elite as the top 1%.
Next, let’s assume U is 0 and set E to be the SDs the elite mean is from the the U mean in terms of U SDs. A good upper estimate for this number is .8, because about 90% of college professors are Democrats, compared to 50% of the voting population each presidential election. The SD of a binary variable with mean 0.5 is 0.5, so .4/.5 = 0.80. This is likely too high, because actual elites tend to be less liberal than college professors.
Now, Western elites tend to own maybe 30% of the wealth, so we can set their beta at .3. This yields a deviance of 0.24 SDs.
If this was interpreted for the list above, and the item mean was 4, and the responses were on a binomial distribution, then this would be equivalent to .24 / 1.4 = 0.17 items.
So this, with generous assumptions, would not be enough to actually shift general policy on leftism-conservatism significantly. Elites would both have to be a lot more powerful than wealth indicates, and a lot more leftist than the general population.
It’s hard to equate this to variance explained, but it vaguely suggests that masses and elites tend to travel together, and elites are not as powerful as some “elite theorists” would think. I would currently argue that something like mass-elite holism is a good descriptor for how politics works; any viable political attitude will tend to have mass and elite supporters, and the attitude is embodied at each level of society by its relevant supporters at that level. There have never really been any society-accepted policies, religions, attitudes, etc that did not find significant support at all levels of society.
This informs What We Should Do, which is the real and useful part of this discourse. AA’s tightly organized minority will actually not overpower a genetically leftist mass,5 nor will it persuade a genetically leftist elite. Keith Woods will never persuade AOC to be based with his discourse. Instead, we need to be thinking about genetic interventions, probably genetic segregation and the initiation of a based breeding society as I discuss here.
Both AA and I are influenced by Pareto, who currently stars in my profile picture. AA says, “This most controversial thesis of mine ultimately comes from the work of Vilfredo Pareto, but I had not fully committed to it at the time of writing The Populist Delusion and somewhat left it hanging in that book.”
In another exchange, I responded to a video Keith Woods made claiming, essentially, that the masses are too irrational for democracy to be real. He responded once, loosening his idealist position a little bit. I responded again, arguing that democracies are responsive to the masses; for the most part, democracies are democracies, with some caveats in some policy domains that don’t effect the masses. I believe leftism is a total-population genetic phenomenon, although the elite might be slightly ahead due to having lighter selection pressures sooner.
Note on 2-24-24: changed from 0% to 1% so everyone can avoid talking about absolutes.
In theory, this could be directly estimated by getting the policy positions of all of society in different domains, and the positions of elites and masses in those same domains, and then just running the regression. When the i subscript is dropped, I mean the leftism scores specifically, and not just any score.
Unless, of course, it has a mean leftism-conservatism that is extremely outlier, and comes to own basically all of the wealth in a country. This is likely how historical military dictatorships worked; typically after extremely bloody civil war, a sometimes radical elite could come to own everything for a time. Class recirculation and the failure to perform eugenics leads to their downfall. The beginning of the AA elite takeover route is gathering a 3 SD political elite that is genetically based; this is the same as the start of the breeder route. The elite takeover route is more likely to fail overall as compared to the breeder route, however, unless some sort of extreme external chaos occurs that allows them to own everything in an existing place. Otherwise, per the breeder route, they should focus on increasing their numbers through selective breeding, perhaps in an isolated, independent place that is founded. In keeping with AA being more right in this debate, the Keith Woods route is more immediately wrong; it focuses on persuading the unpersuadable, instead of gathering the worthy.
AA and Woods both feature here. https://www.thehebrewconservative.com/2024/05/30/going-native-the-talmudic-network-of-noticers/
Seems like a lot of explanation is missing still of how genetics connects to women-voting becoming an inalienable truth, even among the men of that study. Genuinely belief in early-feminism? It seeming too impossible by how democracy now requires half of women's vote, so people just accept it and try to avoid thinking about it? A type of stubbornness for school/society-taught "truths"? The last one though wouldn't explain how things got this way in the first place.