If you’re interested in more background, here’s the update I wrote to Tyler Cowen:

Hello Tyler. Second Order San Salvador went great.

The Pupusas were fresh; the talks were excellent; the brutalist church was indeed beautiful; we may have been able to set Bukele’s underling right on some boneheaded agricultural policy through Robin and Cremieux; and El Xolo served the best meal I had this year.

With Hackathon speed, we drafted a platform for Reform, who as of yet don’t have one despite being the highest-polling party in the UK. Housing was the keystone because the party has little to lose in terms of support in London, freeing them to defy the interest groups that would otherwise kibosh such efforts. Robin had some very fresh, political economy-compatible ideas for reorienting the welfare state around fertility, marketizing healthcare and education, and deregulating prediction markets. We have connections at Reform, and we’re trying to get them to take a look at it!

We ran a panel on the sociology of sexuality: What to make of the “smart teens don’t have sex” finding; why sexual markets don’t clear and what the sociological price controls are; Hanson on sex redistribution, transgenderism in Thailand, search costs, and multiple equilibria; why dating apps appear to have gotten worse; why married couples don’t have more sex (David Brooks didn’t have a satisfactory answer but we didn’t either), and the degree to which sexuality is socially mediated.

Other sessions ranged from Jones on optimal immigration policy, Latin American underperformance and solutions; a presentation from a local academic archaeologist Carlos Flores-Manzano (he had a very interesting take on the archaeological relationship between fungus eating and human sacrifice); Robin on aliens; Aria Babu on how to find a husband; and Robin again on his experience inside the U.S. national-security and research apparatus, the kinds of policy ideas they don’t like, and why.

Of course, Duncan and I learned some things from experience. We should have invited more people so we could hold multiple sessions at once (all told, we had 23 attendees, including 8 who were British and 2 Latin Americans). We should have filmed more sessions, because the ones we did film came out great. We should have tried harder to host Salvadoran government officials, though I expect that will be easier going forward. Most of all, we learned that we should have provided food, so people wouldn’t have had to go to separate restaurants and disrupt coordination by arriving back at divergent times—of course, there is a good reason why conferences tend not to handle meals like this. There is no such thing as an instantaneous lunch.1

But the most important thing I learned is that there should be more conferences. I thought organizing Second Order would be straightforward and yield excellent results, and such was the case. The ease of putting this on—though it’s a rather risky point to dwell on if I’m trying to highlight my own contributions—is simple enough to explain. Manifest Man, methinks, is actually quite competitive with Davos Man in many respects (if nothing else, if he were in charge, the world economy would grow at 6% a year!). Many things come easily when your ideology attracts intelligent, open‑minded people who are willing to take risks.

Credit is also due to our wonderful patrons who, instead of making us fill out 20 forms for kludgeocracy reasons, gave us a meeting within a weekend and a decision within 15 minutes; wired funds directly to my bank account; and require as recompense only a freewheeling, literary thank-you note. So thank you, Tyler, for revolutionizing philanthropy—even my university seems to be catching on—and for so much more. I’ll quote a bit of my opening speech:

The second person we should applaud is Tyler Cowen—the gray-eyed man of destiny. Not only because of the 5k he gave us for this conference, which is incredibly generous, but because of the very blatant extent to which our subculture owes him in general. All of what will happen here depended on an intellectual network he’s spent years building. Let us venerate this most illustrious of intellectual ancestors!

The EV grant was wonderful and covered the cost of filming the conference, the first fruits of which will be released imminently. But I must offer especially sincere thanks for starting all of this, for birthing Manifest Man like Athena from the head of Zeus and bringing him up. Duncan and I met at WIP’s Invisible College and got to know each other through the EV conference. Your efforts, very broadly considered, are what made this easy.

But if the easiness was easy to explain, its excellence was more subtle. Palpable, but subtle. On the last day at brunch, Hanson asked, “What made this unique?” because he couldn’t put his finger on it. As a group, we discussed the question.

Second Order felt meaningfully different from rationalist events, economics conferences, certainly from right-wing events. I think there were several reasons why: It was a hybrid of all those forms, and one more oriented towards normal prestige than the rationalist conferences that were the general mold. Brit Progress, Bukele, and Cremieux also helped to differentiate things. But none of that was satisfying to Hanson, who (unsurprisingly) was probably considering something more abstract. I think [REDACTED] said “the vibe was ‘what comes next’”; not just economics or the culture war, but wonkish, creative policy thinking on all fronts, with a rare emphasis on aesthetics and culture. I think that’s about right.

Where might that have come from?

My sense is that there’s real unmet demand, in a very general sense, for the GMU School brand. Should there be discussion groups? A “Schelling Point CMU”? Should there be biographical, perhaps documentary projects—say, a Five Lives of the George Mason School published by Tamara Winters, or a film made by Dutch avant-garde filmmaking collective Keeping It Real Art Critics?

These are, in any case, the questions and projects that increasingly occupy my attention.

In August 2005, around a month after Philip Tetlock published Expert Political Judgment, John Ioannidis published “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” kicking off what we would later come to call the replication crisis. In retrospect, Tetlock’s project was always a close cousin. Just as the replication crisis revealed that enormous swaths, even whole subdisciplines of modern science aren’t demonstrably real, Tetlock revealed that most experts’ pretensions to special understanding of the world do not survive basic scorekeeping.

The narratives have the same moral: In the modern West, prestige has been a decidedly overrated proxy for epistemic competence. Like Ioannidis, Tetlock used the tools of social science to find the limits of social science.

Yet Tetlock’s critique was not nihilistic. Fortunately for epistemology in general, hidden in the rubble of expertise was the suggestion of something more robust. If Tetlock found most experts incompetent, some still reliably outperformed others. And perhaps as famous as his finding that expertise was fake was Tetlock’s discovery that these better forecasters shared some non-obvious intellectual habits.

Read the whole thing there.

Dates: 7th to 11th January 2026

Location: Palestra House, San Salvador

✨ Apply here! Applications are due December 21st, EOD AoE. ✨

What is Second Order?

A five‑day residential unconference for ~30 early‑career economists, policy wonks and kindred thinkers. At an unconference, the schedule is participant driven: we collaboratively craft the content at the beginning of each day, so you can run whatever you are most enthusiastic about! The classic case for this is that conversations in corridors between sessions are often the most valuable part of traditional conferences, hence unconferences aim to transform the entire conference in this manner. Some sessions from previous iterations:

• Replication markets

• Threshold models of preference cascades

• A step-by-step guide for how you won’t build a house in London

• Informational supply chains

• A history of cybernetics

• Uncertainties on optimal immigration policy

• Frequentism’s insanity in two diagrams (1st, 2nd)

• Evaluating mechanisms for fertility decline

• The promise of for-profit government

• Introduction to mechanism design

• Writing a manifesto for Reform

Evenings will include informal talks, shared dinners, and plenty of unstructured time for conversation and mischief—plus the usual Second Order traditions of games, lightning talks, and late-night debates.

Expect Garett Jones, Robin Hanson, and possibly Salvadoran policymakers!

Who should apply

We’re primarily looking for curious people with some economics-adjacent interests. Note that some of our most valuable participants previously had no formal economics training, and we’re seeking a diverse group with varied backgrounds—so when in doubt, apply!

A few other things we value are demonstrated excellence in other areas, super reasoning / critical thinking ability, and desire to understand the world as an entire system rather than just one particular part.

Logistics

We’ll offer two kinds of tickets: residential and non-residential. Residential tickets will be limited and include lodging at or near the Palestra House. We expect to charge around $250 for students and $400 for non-students (residential), and $100 for non-residential attendees. We’ll finalise the cost by the time of the acceptance email. If cost is a barrier, please apply anyway and note it in your form—we can likely subsidize a few places.

We won’t be providing most meals. The unconference scheduling software will include meal slots so participants can self-organize lunches and dinners—whether that’s cooking together or sampling restaurants around San Salvador. We’ll provide a stocked refrigerator, an opening dinner, and a closing brunch, but otherwise meals will be left open.

Venue: The conference will take place at Palestra House. Check-in will be Wendesday, January 7th, at 4 PM. We will disperse on Sunday, 11th January. All beds will be singles, and single gender rooms will be available should that be your preference. The venue has a pool, so you may wish to bring swimming costumes.

Travel: A taxi from the El Salvador International takes an hour to get to San Salvador.

Contact

Please email second.order.retreat@gmail.com if you have any questions or concerns.

✨ Apply here! Applications are due December 21st, EOD AoE.✨

The analytic depth of this engagement, though, is generally shallow. Did you like “Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America”? I thought it was pretty good. I hope you liked the paragraph about me. I had wanted more; maybe next time.

Anyway, Ava Kofman understands Curtis Yarvin’s personality pretty well. Her article was sort of like Aristophanes‑on‑Socrates: spot‑on, even delightful as caricature, but fraught as explication. If you’ll let me get all Knoll’s Law, Kofman doesn't really understand Yarvin’s political theory and actually writes things that—as we’ll see—are factually incorrect about it.1

Both Kofman and Danielle Allen’s works would have been significantly more fun if they had engaged with Yarvin in a way that passed the Ideological Turing Test. But it’s not totally fair to fault them for it.

Unqualified Reservations may have a snazzy website these days, but Yarvin’s epigrammatic and conceptually dense prose—very atypical in our era—doesn’t help our clerisy, who will have limited attention to expend understanding a far-right blogger. What’s more, no secondary sources yet guide curious outsiders through the over 1 million words of Yarvin’s corpus (significantly more content than many of history’s big names). The canon remains mostly up for grabs.

I hope some eminent Yarvin expert gets around to writing the definitive exegesis soon.

A Concise Reading: What Yarvin Believes About the Problem of Politics

Mainstream academics who try to interpret Yarvin tend to be political theorists because the problems that Yarvin deals with are traditionally those of political theory. But unlike figures he’s often grouped with like Patrick Deneen, Yarvin is not actually grounded in the “political theory” tradition. He instead emerges from an alien discipline, that of economics, as part of the general trend of economics imperialism.

One could see Yarvin as a methodological cousin of mechanism design theorists like William Vickery, Paul Milgrom, and—dare I say—Glen Weyl. When Paul Milgrom designed the auction format that won him the Nobel Prize, he didn’t stop to wonder, “Is it just for the government to get so much money from auctioning off bits of the radio spectrum? Is money good?” Milgrom’s task is, of course, more modest and more tractable.

Curtis’s political thought is similar. He’s not concerned with who deserves to rule or what values they should uphold, per se. His goal is to design the structure that most reliably produces prosperity; his frame is, in some broad sense, utilitarian. Not the utilitarianism of Peter Singer or Holden Karnofsky, but the methodological utilitarianism that prevails when trying to do economics.

He picks an objective (prosperity or GDP), and, having inherited Rational Choice Theory from econ, attempts to design a system of incentives that implements the objective. Thus, Yarvin reduces the problem of politics to an alignment problem.

For-Profit Government, in Context

We’ve learned some things about running large organizations in the 250 years since Washington and Madison’s valiant right-wing coup against the disaster of the Articles of Confederation. In the late 18th century, the corporation was in its infancy. Now, corporate institutional architecture does almost everything of importance in our world. The number of effective organizations run like the American government, by contrast, is approximately zero, and Yarvinists think there is a reason for this—such experiments prove less effective and lose out to for-profit firms.

Does Apple have a constitution? No. So, how does it know what to do? It has a different model, a goal: to provide value for its shareholders, the fulfillment of which the CEO and board have personal stakes in.

What would a political system that internalizes 250 years of innovation in running large organizations look like?

Like many of the most successful organizations in the world, the neocameralist (the term Yarvin uses in his original blog2) state would sell shares on an American stock exchange, which would entitle shareholders to a portion of future dividends. The state would float its first shares on a public exchange to anyone who wants to buy them from the previous owners.3

Its shareholders would elect a board of directors, which would vote on a CEO who serves at the board's behest. Choosing political leaders is typically considered a hard problem, but in the private sector, it’s mostly a solved one—just get an executive search team. Call me crazy, but I think it’s actually possible this approach could manage to rival the renowned talent-spotting of American elections.

The mandate of this CEO is simple: maximize value for the shareholders; i.e., maximize market capitalization/GDP, which, though not perfectly correlated with human flourishing, is pretty close, and not that difficult to measure.

How does a government maximize GDP? Ask a mainstream economist, and they would say something like: maintain the rule of law and property rights, keep taxes at the Laffer curve optimum, and provide public goods effectively and efficiently. This government would not be incentivized to oppress or genocide any of its citizens, who are all its assets.

I think it’s easy to underestimate the beauty and promise of this idea.

You may have noticed that unlike approximately all modern political theory, Yarvin’s system has no grounding in the concept of rights. Don’t read too much into that: Yarvinists believe that our system would maintain human liberty far more assiduously than the current government does.

After all, though the vision of keeping government restrained with written constitutions was a noble experiment, we can now see that it is a failed one: the Alien & Sedition Acts, internment of Japanese, the Patriot Act4—courts didn’t hesitate to rubber-stamp them all. And fundamentally, any assembly that adopts the Bill of Rights can just as easily repeal or ignore it.

For a Yarvinist, limited government is a contradiction in terms. Instead, we must design a government with incentives to behave well.

Hayek taught us that the price system is an inhumanly effective aggregator of information. Coffee prices integrate immense amounts of information—weather, pests, shipping costs, and our cafe-side demand—into a single number. Under an NYSE-listed regime, the discount rate on its stock would do the same: serving as an unerringly reliable, ceaseless referendum on all policy.

Would the for-profit US ban, for example, gay marriage? I don’t think it would. Oppression shrinks the tax base and projects social instability; traders consider this risk when assigning value to the shares. The country’s directors would be prudent to reverse course before billions of dollars evaporate.

Would it assassinate its opponents? Random violence is a costly thing, and a CEO who engages in it invites a coup from the board. Arbitrarily seizing property sends the same message: your assets aren’t safe!

Rights, then, live inside the NPV: violate them and the stock reacts. They are protected not by fragile norms, but because defying them is tangibly, ruinously expensive.

A cold mechanism, perhaps, but far more credible than parchment promises that history demonstrates are abandoned when expedient.

I’ll be honest: As some sort of Chesterton's Fence conservative, I’m not absolutely sure I’d push the button to implement this in the US tomorrow. But I unambiguously support more experimentation—a for-profit government for Micronesia, say—and I think you all should too.

Neocameralism’s Place in Intellectual History

The concept of intellectual lineage takes up a lot of space in Yarvin’s thought. From How Dawkins Got Pwned—probably Yarvin’s finest essay:

In my opinion, the only sensible way to classify traditions—as with species—is by ancestral structure. While the existence of introgression and the absence of reproductive isolation makes it technically impossible to construct a precise cladogram of human traditional history, we can certainly produce sensible approximations.

So what is Yarvin’s place on the intellectual cladogram?

As a political thinker, he is descended chiefly from the Austrian School. Hans-Hermann Hoppe (though more of a crank than I’m comfortable with these days) argues in Democracy: The God That Failed that monarchy is better than democracy, since “no one ever washed a rented country.”5 But he also argued that “private law society” is preferable to either.

Yarvin dispensed with the chimeric “private law society” part of the argument, which itself can be seen as consonant with Austrian tradition: Since at least Murray Rothbard, Hoppe’s intellectual progenitor, there’s been a tendency to try to rehabilitate monopoly in radical libertarian economics. This culminated in 2014 with Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, which makes the case that natural monopoly is good. Yarvin made a more limited version of this case seven years earlier with Neocameralism: The state is a natural monopoly, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

I’d be remiss not also to mention the influence of the Rationalist writers on Yarvin, whom I’d argue—though it’s somewhat radical—did basically come out of the Chicago Econ. GMU economics professor Robin Hanson studied epistemology at Chicago and econ at Price Theory outpost Caltech. It was he who “discovered” Eliezer Yudkowsky, with whom he co-founded the first Rationalist blog, Overcoming Bias.

The Rationalist movement has changed in various ways since, but its mores are still deeply influenced by this lineage: most notably their emphasis on empiricism (something Effective Altruism inherited), Rational Choice, and much of their terminology. As social theorists, the Rationalists unambiguously dwell within this paradigm.

As a political thinker, Robin Hanson is the most similar figure in modern intellectual life to Yarvin: Both devised and advocated remarkably original, econ-influenced systems of governance. Yarvin’s first public appearance as the author of Unqualified Reservations was in a debate with Hanson on the relative strength of their two systems: Yarvin’s neocameralism against Hanson’s rule-by-betting-markets.

At the time, there was no consensus as to who won. But I think we can now provisionally conclude that Yarvin did: after all, Hanson himself came around to the neocameralist position.

Internet Writing is Eating the World

As Kofman writes in her New Yorker profile of Yarvin—and it is an amusing passage:

The eternal political problems of legitimacy, accountability, and succession would be solved by a secret board with the power to select and recall the otherwise all-powerful C.E.O. of each sovereign corporation, or SovCorp. (How the board itself would be selected is unclear, but Yarvin has suggested that airline pilots—“a fraternity of intelligent, practical, and careful people who are already trusted on a regular basis with the lives of others. What’s not to like?”—could manage the transition between regimes.)

But Yarvin just totally spells this out in a way totally unrelated to aviation, as in Against Political Freedom:

To a neocameralist, a state is a business which owns a country. A state should be managed, like any other large business, by dividing logical ownership into negotiable shares, each of which yields a precise fraction of the state’s profit. (A well-run state is very profitable.) Each share has one vote, and the shareholders elect a board, which hires and fires managers.

This happens a lot. At my Great Books-flavored right-wing summer program, we recently hosted a guest speaker from a nearby university. With a nifty slideshow, she expounded on the ideas of three contemporary thinkers: Patrick Deneen, Danielle Allen, and Curtis Yarvin.

Yarvin’s slide? Two quotes on monarchy from his recent interview with NYT, and two quotes from Unqualified Reservations, on the subject of race.6

And that was just the first time! At Hertog, there are speakers around three times a week, and they bring up Yarvin like a quarter of the time—negatively, of course. Jonah Goldberg, for instance, got up and noted, after saying something grouping Yarvin and Deneen, “Monarchy, that’s not a new idea, it’s actually a very old idea.” Neocameralism—as I hope I’ve made clear—is something quite novel.

The intellectual level of this engagement is super low compared with the criticism of Yarvin you could find on, say, 4Chan. I think that’s a problem.

There’s a structural reason all of these generally intelligent people just can’t get it. Yarvin’s paradigm—interspersed between ≈600 essays that are 1/4 block quote and 1/12 ironic—is just different. From econ he inherits Rational Choice, methodological individualism, and, at least implicitly, preference-satisfaction utilitarianism (if only later to internalize various critiques of it). I don’t know that much about Danielle Allen, but I think it’s quite possible she never took an economics class.

I am reminded of a line from Cowen on Dwarkesh:

Regarding the internet writing mode of thinking, I would like to see more economists and research scientists raised on it, but the number may be higher than we think… It’s a very powerful new mode of thought, [and] it’s not sufficiently recognized as something like a new field or discipline, but that’s what it is.

Cowen described this enterprise further with Aashish Reddy:

[In internet writing,] you use an informal voice. You try to get to the point quickly. You might link to things, but you’re not so obsessed with origins of ideas. You bring together reasons from different perspectives and try to synthesise them. And there’s a deliberate disregarding of what we used to call “high culture” and “low culture” arguments. And there’s a tendency to be prolific, and maybe do many short things compared to the world of books. Off the top of my head, that’s how I would characterise Internet writing—other than of course, it’s on the internet. You give it away for free, usually—not always, but it’s sort of for free.

Of course, Yarvinists have bigger gripes with the Cathedral than its difficulty with understanding internet writing. But should there be Internet Intellectual History? Ought it do for blogs, listservs, and forums what Cambridge contextualism did for 17th‑century pamphlets? What would its canon be—which of Yarvin’s essays?

Should academics be allowed to cite altmetrics alongside citation indexes in tenure dossiers? Should there be “journals” of blogs? Should every department be like GMU Econ? Should Yale hire me?

I’m not sure, but I think these are some of the questions people should be asking. Because Yarvin will probably not be the last to popularize a new ideology over the internet. On the contrary, he’ll in all likelihood be seen as only the first.

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Thanks to the creative application of new technologies, the 2020s are quietly shaping up to be a golden age of archaeology.

In 2023, then 21-year-old Luke Farritor (now of the DOGE) combined machine‑learning pattern recognition with high‑resolution CT scans to decipher the first word from the Herculaneum scrolls: a Roman library charred by Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Fully decrypting the library could ultimately double the surviving corpus of Ancient Greek and Roman literature—an unprecedented bonanza for classical scholarship.

Analysis of ancient DNA has resolved long-debated questions about human migrations. After sequencing hundreds of Bronze Age human genomes, David Reich’s research team at Harvard positively identified southwest Russia as the geographical origin of the Indo-European languages, while other genomic work has dated Homo sapiens-Neanderthal interbreeding to 47,000 years ago, several millennia prior to earlier best guesses.

Fossilized human footprints in White Sands, New Mexico, have been conclusively dated to about 23,000 years ago—proof that people were in North America during the last Ice Age and forcing scholars to rethink when and how humans first crossed into the New World.

Lidar has recently revealed massive ancient cities under jungle canopies, from the Mayan platform of Aguada Fénix in Mexico—larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza—to mysterious urban centers in the ancient Amazon.

These developments—whether driven by artificial intelligence, the decryption of ancient genomics, or airborne lasers—promise to momentously expand society’s understanding of humanity’s past. Notably absent from this bounty, however, are the fruits of traditional, physical, Indiana Jones-style archaeology. The world of bits, as has often been the case these days, is leaving the world of atoms in the dust.

Read the whole thing there.

When Peter Thiel was at Stanford, everyone knows that he started the Stanford Review. But people forget that he got money for this from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute—an org started by one William Frank Buckley. This still exists, and they still give those right-wing student newspapers grants.

To strive in this greater right-wing internet nexus (and a lot of the rest of the world) is to learn to live in spiraling networks of mentors and mentees, minnows organizing themselves around whales like Thiel, the Red Scare girls, and Cowen. I’ve spent some time here, and I have lived well enough. Of course, I’ve missed a lot of opportunities, but—in the spirit of Patrick Collison and Nabeel Qureshi—here are some of the things I’ve found helpful:

1. Send more cold emails—this is probably the best advice I can give you. Most people should be sending 10x more. Aspire not to have a single living hero you haven’t met.

2. Have a general idea of what is going on where (SF—Yarvin + most Twitter people, NYC—Sovereign House, DC—GMU), and try to spend as much time as you can in all those places. Agglomeration effects are no joke.

3. Go to more conferences and parties. At least at good colleges, there’s usually a lot of money available for undergrads to go to conferences. Use this enthusiastically. If any of you reading this are ever in New York and want to get into Sovereign House, DM me on Twitter.

4. Going to right wing parties is very synergistic with reading blogs and being into Twitter discourse. If you regularly read a lot of blogs, you’ll have a lot to talk about with the people who write those blogs. In fact, you’ll find that the only people you’ll have anything to say to at these parties are the “microcelebrities”—the successful bloggers and big Twitter accounts—so you’ll naturally talk to them.

5. Don’t worry about bothering microcelebrities. They aren’t actually famous. And even people at Sovereign House have read them much less than you think.

6. Avoid “networking.” Make friends with people you actually like. It’s especially rewarding to have same-age friends you grow alongside: Theo Jaffee, who I’ve known since the first grade, is a strong example of that for me.

7. Still, it’s not a sin to be strategic about mentorships: To pat myself on the back, Curtis has gotten ≈3x as famous as he was when I first went to work for him.

8. And if you do “network,” it’s classier to do it on behalf of others. Typically, you know someone who could benefit from a meeting or job more than you can. Repay such favors.

9. Again, Hanania called rationalism, “The belief that fewer topics and ideas in the areas of politics, morality, ethics, and science should be considered taboo or sacred and not subject to cost-benefit analysis.” I’d encourage a lot of you guys to apply this lens to the “normal”/cathedral institutions. Ofc they suck in a lot of ways, but that doesn’t mean they would suck for *you*. Don’t not try to go to Harvard just because you understand how evil they are. It’s far worse for Harvard if you’re there! Be the only kid at Harvard willing to talk on Fox News or testify in front of Congress about how much they suck—it’s a good niche.

10. On basically the same note: Have a realistic understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the mainstream media. Reflect carefully on Scott Alexander’s “The Media Very Rarely Lies” and Hanania’s “The Media is Honest and Good.”

11. Take every opportunity to make public appearances.

12. Make a Manifold account and use it to practice your epistemic habits.

13. Apply for an Emergent Ventures Grant. Tyler Cowen personally interviews everyone, and if you’re younger than 21 and understand his perspective, you can generally get an “Early Career Support” grant of ≈5k. If you’re under 21 or not, though, look through the list of winners to get a feel for the kinds of things they fund, and consider what you could try that’s like that.

14. In preparation for applying, sign up for emails from Tyler Cowen’s blog (perhaps the most influential in the world) so you know what’s on his mind.

15. Getting a grant is just the first step. Once you have the grant, you’re part of the network. EV will fly you to their yearly conferences, and you’ll be added to the group chat. Make a good impression on Tyler Cowen. He can write you letters of recommendation.

16. Strongly consider transferring colleges—you very probably aren’t considering it strongly enough. Our generation was excluded from the finest institutions of higher education by overt, illegal bias. There is now some indication things have changed for the better. Cornell and Columbia tend to have relatively high transfer acceptance rates. And Columbia, in particular, is a really promising place for a right wing kid because of its law school1, proximity to Sovereign House, and program General Studies.

17. Take gap years. Many forget you can do this strategically to get extra cycles for transfer applications!

18. Try to take classes with professors you actually like, and take them to lunch. Being right wing in the American educational system has downsides, of course, but there are also some upsides. You’ve probably noticed that it’s extremely rare for young Americans to be authentically interested in and engaged with ideas. Every year in college application essays, millions ape this to lesser and greater degrees. We don’t have to ape. Right wing teenagers actually have read books by professors from Chicago and Harvard, and truly have ambitions to study things at Yale you can’t study elsewhere. You can use this to your advantage.

19. Generally, you won’t get graded down by professors for being right wing at American universities. They’ll usually be happy that someone actually cares.

20. Do summer programs like Hudson Institute’s and Hertog’s. Just look at Nick Whitaker’s LinkedIn and try to emulate that.

21. If you’re more into labor markets, consider dropping out of college or even high school. Apply for a Thiel Fellowship—this is an IRL place where online clout is useful. You always have to be looking for situations like that.

22. Build online clout—and at this point Twitter is the only social networking that really matters for the Western right. In most situations, it’s best—as much as possible—to leave open the possibility of writing under your real name.

23. Remember that there are kinds of status (broadly construed) that are illegible in most contexts but are nonetheless extremely valuable. Like remember the Time 100 most influential people in AI list? Obviously, Dwarkesh Patel should be on there, as should Leopold Aschenbrenner and regrettably even Beff Jezos. But they’d never be on the list, even though they’re—in the truest possible sense of the word—extremely influential. Still, generally endeavor to find ways to translate less legible status into more legible status.

24. Write an article for Stripe’s Works In Progress magazine or Palantir’s The Republic. This is excellent because of the synergy: not only is it a very honest signal you have expertise on some important issue, but it can also temper your scattered knowledge and ambition into real expertise!

25. Or if you’re not into that sort of thing, at least win a Passage Prize.

26. Try playing quizbowl. Steve Sailer was one of the best players of all time, and I, Curtis Yarvin, Cremieux, Pericles Abassi, Nemets, Greg Cochrane and surely others I’m not aware of all played the game; the overrepresentation is immense. At least 5/30 of the most influential voices on Right Wing Twitter played the game!

27. Strongly consider going to law school. This is the only cranny of American education where it is net helpful to be right wing2, and admission generally comes down to a highly g-loaded test. Last year, I spent like a week hanging out at Yale Law Fed Soc—I think this place is our Neorxnawang.

28. If you’re thinking of doing this, try publishing a law review article while you’re in undergrad.

29. If you’re female, read J. Sanilac and follow his advice dogmatically. It wouldn’t be unjustified to make an Anki.

30. If you’re male, don’t obsess over PUA shit. Just increase your standards for hygiene and wardrobe, and try to increase your status. This generally will solve your women problem. But even if it doesn’t, at least you got higher status!

31. Memorize some poems.

32. If you can have an impact on someone, give as much advice as you have to. Drag them out of the hole. It’s worth it.

33. Be right wing. There is something special about what we are doing. It’s the most interesting, the most fun, the most underrated, and perhaps the most rewarding place in a generally gray contemporary world. And almost all of the promise remains in the future.

Given recent events (and my content drought), now seems a suitable time to dust it off from my back catalog.

Hi Curtis. I’ve watched most of your interviews, and I’m pretty sure Triggernometry is in the bottom 30%. The podcast’s name alone justifies a penalty of at least 10%.

The hosts are dead-weight. They basically have no perspective of any kind. Like, there might not be a single important subject either of them knows more about than you. It was almost sad seeing you try to connect with Kisin over knowing a lot about Russia and him barely responding.

Their questions are imprecise, sweeping, and predictable. In a certain way, it's almost like the questions don’t matter at all. Here is a list of what you brought up in the Triggernometry interview:

1. I am foreign service brat

2. Pitching Hoppe

3. How our ancestors would see us

4. The Red Pill

5. Pitching Oxfordianism

6. Pitching old German aristocratic right

7. Parable of the Utah gentile

8. Parable of the 15-year-old Nazi

9. Pitching Stalin’s War

10. “Leaving the frame”

11. Almost all WWII conspiracies are true except for Holocaust Denial

12. Pitching Human Smoke (and some other cool WWII sources)

13. Etymology of the word Progressive

14. American Communism as CTY plot for world domination

…I’ll stop at the 25-minute mark. This is what happens if a host just “lets a guest talk.” All Kisin got from you are some anecdotes you can find ten other places online. Who would choose to listen to this instead of any of the other appearances you’ve made?

Tyler Cowen has said, “What makes for a good podcast is the dramatic tension between the guest and host.” Triggernometry has no narrative tension. You aren’t challenged, pushed out of your comfort zone, or compelled to act in unexpected ways—even people who haven’t heard about gentiles in Utah a million times can tell you aren’t phased by the questions they’re throwing at you. I’d still listen while playing video games or cooking or something, but I could never see myself choosing to look at the video. This is the main issue.

There are other minor ones, too. For comedians, the hosts are very surprisingly uncharismatic. The guy in blue looks bored and apprehensive. The intro is long and the music excessive.

Weird lighting conditions make Kisin’s lips look almost purple.

You could handle things better as well. As usual, you don’t let your interlocutors speak very much. In this case, it isn’t a big problem because they have nothing to say anyway. You should at least let them finish asking their questions. What’s the rush?

During your retelling of the origin of the “red pill” metaphor, calling your writing “abstruse criticisms of Carlyle” is kind of low status, as is saying, “like many very intellectual people, I happen to be an Oxfordian.”

You seem to be moving your arms in weird ways. Maybe you’re stretching? You shouldn’t.

Some good old-fashioned looksmaxxing is also a good idea. I think the very cringe Justin Murphy undeservedly lucked into your aesthetic peak (and also my favorite moment of your podcasting career).

Since you’re here, I may as well also type up some “positive vision”-type things too. A hypothetical “Curtis Yarvin Experience” should, of course, be an interview show. That is all this accursed medium is even halfway good for.

BAP is yet to learn this, tbh. If you want to make an actual point about Ancient Greek sexual practices or whatever, say it in writing god damn it. Speaking blog posts into a mic in a Zizek impression is retarded.

Anyway, there are several good interview podcasts,1 but Tyler Cowen’s is the best and anyone who doesn’t agree is a philistine. Watching CWT is an intellectually potent joy; it really is like listening to Bach or reading Slate Star Codex. I think these are Cowen’s best episodes (who has the time for any of this?).

It's hard to quantify just how successful it is,2 but over the time I’ve been listening, it feels like the whole space has shifted toward what Cowen is doing. Conversations With Tyler has spawned several imitators, most directly Dwarkesh Patel (CWT with charismatic, social-climbing Indian immigrant characteristics—it works) and also Brian Chau. But I think many other interviewers, such as—forgive me—Lex Friedman, have become noticeably more “Cowen-like.”

CWT conspicuously flaunts the normal rules of interviewing. Questions are off-puttingly specific, selective, and challenging, eliciting unique and analytical answers. Cowen wrote about his craft here, though he leaves out some of the most important bits. He's said elsewhere that in the leadup to his interviews, he reads the entire body of work of interview subjects. He also neglects to mention his effective and enthusiastically employed approach of outsourcing much of the work of making “skeleton key” questions to his blog.

Cowen tosses up these incredible questions in no straightforward order—often asking a monstrously arcane and demanding question first. This makes part of the narrative tension of the show the thrill of Tyler transgressing against the norm of choreographed interviews with “natural” progressions and seeing how the guest will handle it.3 Tyler alludes to this by often describing a CWT interview as something like "a wilder and more precarious ride than you might have thought." What makes it special is the subversion of expectations around interview shows, not (just) that it is wild in and of itself.

There is basically no exposition, ever. Cowen never gives guests more than a two-sentence introduction and very often just says something like, “Today I am talking with X, who needs no introduction.” This is what fans think of as Cowen’s Straussian thing: he writes his interview questions esoterically. Thus, just as the narrative tension is higher for stories that begin in media res and show you the fictional world without explaining it, so too is the narrative tension higher during CWT guest’s seemingly random bursts of erudition and eloquence about unexpected topics (that Cowen realizes they have a cool perspective on from his serious research) at unexpected parts of the “conversation.”

The information density of audio content tends to be really low. By asking great questions and holding the exposition, Cowen reaches the upper limit of the medium. This makes listening to CWT cognitively demanding to an extent unrivaled by other audio content.

The selection of what Cowen would call “underratedly interesting” guests is also an important part of the CWT formula. Cowen almost always asks about books, movies, and music, and the guests always have something compelling to say. You are ofc not the same as Cowen and don’t have to copy this. But I think “must probably be able to say something interesting about music and literature” is a good acid test for who should get an interview. Cowen’s guests are ostentatiously eclectic and dependably sharp and cool (and when they aren’t, that in itself says something interesting). He has genuinely high standards for who he picks to interview.

It’s of course easier for Cowen to score cool and mainstream guests than, say, Alex Kaschuta, but this is an aspect of the Curtis Yarvin Experience that would be really awful to compromise on. Cowen’s interviews never let me down, and because of this, I happily watch every episode whether I’ve heard of the guest or not. You must have high standards too; call it as you see it, but don’t miss. “GegenUni” professor and Unz Review contributor Ed Dutton—no. Cambridge professor Nathan Cofnas—possibly.

Alex Kaschuta does a bad job of this. She often interviews Twitter accounts and writers I’ve never heard of, and they don’t reliably demonstrate why I should care. Pls never do this it’s so bad.

A related problem is the lack of diversity in guests in Kaschuta’s show. Kaschuta goes over similar topics in every interview, with people who basically all agree with each other. This just fucking kills the narrative tension; even in the good episodes, there is no suspense. Hours of podcasts on reactionary feminism and the evils of modern tech render together into predictable mental fondue. Preventing this sorry situation is an underrated upshot of Cowen’s interviews of Croatian classical guitar prodigies, homeless Washington DC visual art savants, and John Brennan—they keep his talks with Bryan Caplan and John Cochrane fresh.

It’s probably not possible, but I think it would be ideal if 50% of Curtis Yarvin Experience guests have not heard of Bronze Age Pervert. If not to prevent the show from becoming too homogenous, at least do it because it's better for outreach. Joe Rogan4 didn’t promote MMA as much as he did by interviewing people inside MMA subculture.

Still, just as Cowen’s inaugural interview was with Peter Thiel (and not someone out of left field), I think a dope proof of concept would be for you to Tyler Cowen-interview Steve Sailer; ie, spend a day or two reading his Obama book, Lomez’s upcoming book of his essays, and whatever else and see what intriguing patterns you notice. It doesn't matter that he’s lousy on camera if you do it Cowen-style. This is great because

1. Cowen and Patel would never touch him

2. Neither of them could do a better job of it than you, even if they prepped for a month

There are other openings like this.5

I’m aware that doing orthodox Cowenist interviews would be a clean break from your previous forays into podcasting. But I think holding the most high-brow interview show is a pretty desirable thing from a battlefield of ideas perspective. I also think you would be really good at it—almost no one can pull off doing remarkably erudite interviews with a diverse set of guests. You can.

And really, the average IQ of Cowen’s audience is no higher than that of yours. If you show your audience maximal respect they may well become worthy of it.

At least give it a try – and let this be the template.6 If you're going to make an interview show, this is how to do it right!7

[epistemic status: mid]

TLDR/On one foot: Like the theory of evolution randomly appearing in an appendix of a pre-Darwinian book on naval architecture, Robin Hanson figured out what woke is in a chapter of The Elephant in the Brain about the sociology of religion: an (accurate!) form of virtue signaling powered by Robert Trivers-style self-deception. If this “signaling model of woke” is valid, you aren’t going to kill woke with reason, or by making the government support it less.

For a young, right-wing world of ideas arriviste, writing about the origin of woke is like what the Upright Citizens Brigade was for comedians in the 2010s. This topic made future phenoms Richard Hanania and Chris Rufo famous, and it was on this topic that Bronze Age Pervert recently published his first-ever Substack article. The subject so saturated the online right it spilled over onto the mainstream, with Scott Alexander weighing in. Aaron Sibarium is probably right that there is much more alpha in right-wing journalism than right-wing theorizing, but if you're going to theorize, the origin of woke is an advisable area to work on.

I suspect Nathan Cofnas, a sharp Cambridge1 postdoc convincingly making a name for himself in online right-wing politics, agrees with my assessment of this issue. I’d encourage you to read his hit articles on the subject—the lovely twin debutantes of his media res Substack—because they are genuinely great. But I will let Scott Alexander summarize the Cofnas Theory of Woke as follows. Since libs and conservatives agree disparities are environmental in origin and thus basically contingent:

“[P]rogressives can win every argument by using the line of reasoning above - “Just look how much inequality there still is, this shows there’s still lots of racism or at least the lingering effects of past racism, obviously our job isn’t done yet and we need lots more civil rights law to combat it.””

Conservatives, ever biased toward explanations that don’t blame whites and indifferent to the coherence of their beliefs, hold to the "Black Culture Bad" model—or ignore the issue altogether. The intelligent find both responses less coherent than the progressive position of rectifying imbalances. Woke is left with an insurmountable marketplace-of-ideas advantage.

Thus, to fight wokeness, Cofnas advocates shattering the “taboo” against discussing group differences which sits at the beginning of his chain of causal reasoning. Thunderously publicizing the behavioral genetics work that proves group differences exist, Cofnas argues, will “[destroy] the intellectual basis of wokism”; and spur an empirically backed “revaluation of values” that consigns Western egalitarianism to the fate of Wotan and Jove.

A nerdy, Jewish new kid on the block straight out of the play 13, Cofnas unsurprisingly frames his model against those of the more established Rufo and Hanania:

Rufo traces [the emergence of woke] back to the philosophy of “critical theory” or “critical race theory,” while Hanania points the finger at civil rights law, which in his view made it illegal not to be woke. On my account, both the embrace of critical race theory and the establishment of civil rights laws were more effects than causes of wokism. The driving cause of wokism was widespread acceptance of the equality thesis, and that is what must be explained.

To be honest, the online right could do worse than having Nathan Cofnas Thought as its “standard model” of woke. We’ve all read some absolutely terrible shit on this topic. At least the Cofnas model holds up even if you’ve heard the phrase “coordination problem” before and explains why smart people—who have measurably more consistent beliefs2 and must square the equality thesis and the existence of racial gaps—are crazier on the issue rather gracefully. I’m encouraged Cofnas’s work has generated as much discussion as it has.

Still, I think we can do better. As Hanania himself hinted at in this pilfered bit of his paywalled podcast with Cofnas (edited for clarity Hanania’s endearing but Turing test-failing cadence preserved out of respect for his noble affliction):

Yeah. So yeah, so I mean, that's, yeah, that's, that's true. It is, it is, you know, I could, I could buy it. I mean, the, you know, I guess the, you know, the other thing is, you know, the assumption there is that smart people buy things because they're, you know, because they're smart, right? And, you know, it doesn't necessarily, I mean, it could be that they just, you know, buy things because they're adaptive.

Right? They, you know, like, it's like maybe the spectrum is systemic racism is the most adaptive thing to believe in. So is the second place in the marketplace. And the most adaptive thing for them to believe at a personal level and maybe societal level is that there are genetic racial differences in IQ. Right? Because so well, I mean, so well as I mean, not all smart people, you know, not all smart people reject it. I mean, you have some kind of, you know, constituency for it.

But maybe it's just like, yeah, it's not just they're not following the logic. You know, it's not, I just don't get the intuition that they're following the logic.3

The word “adaptive” is doing a lot of work here, but he’s on the right track. Hanania recognizes that it’s implausible that the logic of the systemic racism thesis proves ideologically decisive even for committed egalitarians—not (just) because the thesis itself is implausible, but also because that isn’t really how or why people form their political opinions. With this essay, I will explore further in this fruitful direction and spell out Hanania's instinctive intellectual discomfort into a full-fledged model of how woke works.

The Robin Hanson Pill

As a proud person of TESCREAL, I couldn’t help but notice Cofnas’s model conflicts with one of the stylized facts of our traditional ways of sociology: that people generally form their beliefs not from an analytical weighing of relevant issues but based on what will help them as social creatures. I won't defend this with serious social science here because, one, I am a high theorist and it wouldn't help me as a social creature, and two, Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler do that in their magisterial 2017 classic, The Elephant in the Brain.

Following the traditional formula of the George Mason School, The Elephant in the Brain takes a well-established mainstream concept—in this case Robert Trivers-style self-deception—and takes it to its radical but patently correct conclusions. In many ways the most ambitious of the Masonian canon, The Elephant in the Brain has such radical implications for so many areas of human life that, in less scattered times, one could imagine it spawning an era-defining psychology metanarrative like The Interpretation of Dreams or at least Thinking, Fast and Slow. The last few chapters probe self-deception’s implications for sociology, and I’d aspirationally frame this essay as a coda to those, which extends the framework to the phenomenon of wokeness.

Cofnas suggests that wokeists sort through explanations for disparities between groups, weigh them on their merits, and then unwisely discard the most obvious one because of an exogenous “taboo.” Alas, Nathan, in the cognitive world of the median ideologue, things aren't so simple.

Many beliefs are adaptive because they help us model the world accurately, but, as Hanson and Simler note in Elephant in the Brain, “The value of holding certain beliefs comes not from acting on them, but from convincing others that you believe them.” This is especially true when it comes to ideology. Simler lays out the case authoritatively in his short essay “Crony Beliefs”:

When we say politics is the mind-killer, it's because these social rewards completely dominate the pragmatic rewards [ie more accurate world modeling], and thus we have almost no incentive to get at the truth.

You can also find this in Bryan Caplan. In a market setting, if someone holds implausible beliefs (like belief in alchemy or Beff Jezos) and acts economically based on those beliefs, they tend to lose their money.

Multidisciplinary conversations involving economics nigh-inevitably devolve into a debate about the “rationality assumption,” which modern left-wingers—notably in the asylum where I was raised—allege is arbitrary. It really isn’t. The tangible threat of losing money directly as a result of “irrational” behavior provides a meaningful check against wacky economic activity.

Things are different in politics. For a political actor, the cost of acting on beliefs that incorrectly model the world is very low; after all, the probability that one voter or activist will decide an election or decisively shape policy is vanishingly small. But your choice of what political team to support still has an impact: an impact on you! As Steven Pinker notes, “People are embraced or condemned according to their beliefs, so one function of the mind may be to hold beliefs that bring the belief-holder the greatest number of allies, protectors, or disciples, rather than beliefs that are most likely to be true.” Lacking a feedback loop to punish us if our model of reality turns out wrong, on rarefied ideological and moral issues we unrestrainedly psyop ourselves into believing socially advantageous things. Quoth Hanson and Simler:

Consider the belief in an all-powerful moralizing deity—an authoritarian god, perhaps cast as a stern father, who promises to reward us for good behavior and punish us for bad behavior. An analysis of this kind of belief should proceed in three steps. (1) People who believe they risk punishment for disobeying God are more likely to behave well, relative to nonbelievers. (2) It’s therefore in everyone’s interests to convince others that they believe in God and in the dangers of disobedience. (3) Finally, as we saw in Chapter 5, one of the best ways to convince others of one’s belief is to actually believe it. This is how it ends up being in our best interests to believe in a god that we may not have good evidence for. [emphasis mine]

Thus stands the Hanson-Simler Model of Religion. Look upon its logic, its elegance, its psychological realism, and despair!

It’s a beautiful synthesis of what trad Marxists would call materialism and idealism. In Hanson’s graceful narrative, ideas do influence the course of history, but you can directly understand how they propagate in “materialist,” econ-informed—dare I even say rigorous—ways. Ideas are not mere appendages of material conditions. They can have their own agenda, a “direction” they push society in independent of whatever influence material conditions may exert.

It’s also a kind of synthesis of what rationalists would call “mistake theories” and “conflict theories.” You can trace ideological differences back to large groups of people having earnestly different and often unfounded interpretations of issues as in mistake theories. But they are mistaken systematically; their incorrect ideas serve their interests—perhaps not their straightforward, material interests as conflict theorists often allege, but generally their interests as social creatures.

The Microfoundations of Woke

I agree with Hanania that people who compare religion and wokeness usually do a bad job. But understanding the status econ commonalities between religion and wokeness is essential for understanding wokeness as a phenomenon—indeed, it is much more important than understanding civil rights law.

Firstly, the elephant in the Brai—sorry, room: wokeness signals that you are high status (more on that later). But even if wokeness weren’t high status, it wouldn’t be crazy to signal that you believe in the (Cofnas’ term) equality thesis. The equality thesis might not be as generalizably prosocial as belief in a God who damns wrongdoers who commit sins out of view of others, but it’s prosocial nonetheless.

Why? People who take egalitarianism seriously are more likely to behave well toward everyone, relative to nonbelievers. It’s therefore in everyone’s interests to convince others that they believe in the equality thesis. One of the best ways to convince others of one’s belief is to actually believe it.

And wokeness isn't just about signaling generalized niceness. As the online right loves to note, ethnic tension is a veritable human universal that often manifests in costly ways. There are flashy, obvious cases like civil war and genocide, but plain old discrimination is bad for you and your firm, too. This would be the case even if civil rights law didn't make it illegal—just ask Gary Becker (it's not for nothing he made Tyler Cowen's GOAT shortlist). In an unprecedentedly multiracial, multiethnic, and gender-egalitarian society like ours, the ability to treat people well despite idpol-relevant differences is prosocial enough. It makes you a "better"—certainly less invidious—employee, customer, neighbor, and citizen.

How much of wokeness's prosociality comes from signaling your "niceness g-factor" and how much comes from signaling you can avoid offending idpol-relevant demographics (more crystalized) is hard to disentangle and probably contextually dependent. In any case, you don't signal you think everyone has equal potential by being nice to your ingroup—everyone does that all the time. To signal that you think everyone has equal potential, you should be nice to your outgroup out of commitment to your ideals. This sets you apart.

By making a land acknowledgment or posting a black square, I show I'm so moral that I'm willing to take the side of the outgroup over that of the ingroup. I take ostentatious, stylized care to promote the interests of the people who are most different from me. Because I just care that much.

The worse the outgroup behaves, the stronger the signal that my morality is that much more closely held, and I’m that much more discerning, intelligent, and committed to notice their hidden worth. This is what Larry Auster meant when he noted that “the worse a group behaves, the more the left likes it.”

In the transition from “micro” to “macro,” the prosocial memetic kernel of wokeness gives rise to more complex processes (which I’m getting to), as well as rituals and behaviors, many of which are not prosocial at all. But this isn’t a unique problem. Belief in the Abrahamic God motivated lots of people to refrain from murder and theft—but it also inspired hundreds of thousands of Russian Skoptsy to mass castration.

Similarly, taking egalitarianism seriously motivates much of the American professional class to assiduously avoid alienating the idpol-relevant groups; groups that—let’s be honest—often have a hard enough time in modernity as it is. But it also motivated the most prestigious political science journal to select an editorial staff that’s entirely female, for JHU to proudly admit a 2022 Freshman class that’s 17% white, and for state officials to plan to distribute COVID vaccines by race until Matt Yglesias told them off.

Macrosocial Behavior: What Makes Wokeness Such a Good Signal

We TESCREALists believe in Yarvin’s memetic evolution, and that wokeness has picked up nifty mind-virus (if that isn’t too negatively connotated) adaptations that make it especially communicable. The most significant of these is that wokeness is high status.

Signaling high status is a good niche for a memeplex—the universal human desire to acquire and project the greatest measure of status might as well be the foundational “law” of status econ. But status is a fickle mistress. For a meme to signal high status, it can’t be too successful. There must always be a significant and low status group that fails to espouse the meme for the savvy to distance themselves from. What's more, these divides between the high status and the low status don’t just appear. Since everyone is always trying so hard to signal status, any segregation must be enforced by significant barriers; status signals, in Hanson’s quotable terms, must be differentially expensive—“more difficult to fake than to produce by honest means.”

In the case of clothing, for example, trendy styles change often, which gives the high status (who tend to have high-status friends) a leg up, as the literal information about what the high status are wearing filters through their networks faster. Though there are isolated elements of this in wokeness, too, the main barrier to practicing wokeism is less subtle: how much it fucks with American plebs.

Non-elites are always in the market for ideas that rationalize their hostility (read: jealousy) to elites, and the (in a certain, social evolutionary sense purposefully) flashy, bizarre set of norms and practices promoted by wokeness attract their ire like a Chinese fisherman netting squirming mackerel under a strobe light. This is the answer to the question, “If wokeness signals high status, why don’t the proles just adopt it so they look high status too?” The proles don’t become woke because wokeness continuously evolves to alienate them—that is what makes the status signal accurate in the first place.

Some of the ways woke alienates non-elite whites go against universal human nature. Denigrating your racial and sexual ingroup and praising the outgroups (especially not obviously praiseworthy ones) is a strong signal you’re an egalitarian, but that’s only because it swims so plainly against the current of human impulse. Elites are better placed to swallow this aversion because they are smart and sophisticated enough to intuit wokeness is high status to people who matter. Gary Becker would also probably note that non-elites aren’t as ambitious, and consequently care less about seeming high status in the first place; and that non-elite whites’ cultural, economic, and social spaces simply aren’t as racially and sexually mixed as the hangouts of their elite cousins (media, academia, law, medicine), so they have less incentive to show they don’t alienate the idpol-relevant.

Still, as Hanania understands, much of the emphasis of modern wokeness is just totally culturally contingent; i.e. as the plebs shift their sensibilities, wokeists land upon new ways to provoke them. There isn’t much hard social science in Hanania’s article, but as members of a woke society, we can recognize this dynamic:

The upper class supported the public acceptance of homosexuality in part because it grosses people out. When it won that battle, it moved on to trans ideology, because the point is less some abstract moral conviction than it is about feeling superior. It is like this with every other social issue. Today, the “conservative” position on gender and race is always the liberal position from a generation or two ago, but the modern liberal position always has a need to go one step further in order to establish distance between itself and the rest of society.

Anti-wokes often bemoan how wokeness divides people into “oppressors,” “oppressed,” and “allies,” but they don’t notice just how important that is for wokeness’ memetic contagiousness. Wokeness not only divides people into friends and enemies—it also motivates actions that épater les bourgeois enough that they’re willing to make conflict—which then reinforces itself as conflict pushes the ideological enemies apart and ideological friends closer together. Divisive ideological Schelling Points like this are how social coalitions are formed. 

In a society increasingly dominated by wokeness, we see an escalating “arms race” of signifiers designed to distance oneself from those of lower status. It’s a race without a finish line; as status is relative and not absolute, each victory leads only to the next flashpoint. If you're looking for a sociological recipe for everyone to be obsessed with wokeness all the time, lo. Says Hanania:

The upper class supported the public acceptance of homosexuality in part because it grosses people out. When it won that battle, it moved on to trans ideology, because the point is less some abstract moral conviction than it is about feeling superior. It is like this with every other social issue.

What Anti-Wokeness Actually Signals

What does anti-wokeness actually signal? For all anti-wokes’ pretensions about the logical unassailability of hereditarianism, most people who subscribe to it are just stupid and racist. As Cofnas noted:

I confirmed [the stupidity of most American racists] with GSS data, which show that, on average, whites who attribute lower black socioeconomic status to genes (i.e., admit to being race realists) have WORDSUM IQs that are 8.5 points lower than whites who espouse environmentalism.

And while there are smart, high SES racists like Cofnas, Hanania, and you, dear reader, their attachment to this belief is a perfectly accurate signal of antisocial things: They are either terrible at self-deception (the self-deception most every smart person you know does) or they don’t care enough about signaling identification with the high status ingroup (the Blue Tribe).4

Over the last couple years, I’ve been to lots of right-wing parties and conferences, and I’ve noticed with amusement that a psychologist would generally have a pretty easy time explaining the personality and/or neurodevelopmental disorders that cause someone to end up there. The men often have Asperger’s or narcissism, frequently accompanied by inflated, caustic resentment against groups like blacks and Jews. The handful of women are even more consistently unusual.

Nick Bostrom infamously touched on this topic a couple of decades ago, though he didn’t seem to understand it well enough to avoid the issue.

Q. Why do these sentences seem synonymous? And why did the world chimp out at this mild-mannered Swedish philosopher—winner of the Professorial Distinction Award from the University of Oxford, member of Prospect's Top World Thinker list, and popularizer of the famous and trendy simulation hypothesis—for saying he agrees with a claim of unchallenged factual basis?—remember, all Bostrom is noting is the very existence of the black-white IQ gap, not commenting on its causal mechanism.

A. Because in the world we live in, ‘“noticing”’ a group of people is dumb is a powerful signal that you dislike them and will mistreat them, just as assuming they have equal intellectual potential is a powerful signal that you like them and will treat them well. No wonder it's, in Cofnas' terms, "taboo" to bring up The Fundamental Constant of Sociology: The people who do so tend to be maladjusted, hateful, and crazy!

Early Great Awokening and the Hansonian Model

Thus far I’ve tried to present a newish theory of what woke is. Interestingly enough, this is not the chief question of Wokeness Studies as it currently exists. Capturing more interest is the historical, chronological question: Why did wokeness so quickly become dominant among Western elites when it did, namely in the 1960s? The two most influential works in this little field trace, and implicate, two fairly distinct 60s-originating trends: Hanania’s Civil Rights legislation, and Rufo’s the Frankfurt School-influenced American New Left. The title of Hanania’s Origins of Woke itself implies this historical, even chronological problem; not what woke is, but why woke then.

These narratives, you see, are constructed atop the assumption that woke—whatever it is—isn’t older than sixty-four. Yarvin, along with such boffins as Eric Weinstein, have increasingly challenged and litigated this assumption.5

Aspirationally, I’ll caucus with Yarvin and this ad hoc “Early Great Awokening” bloc: There is striking ideological continuity between the woke New Left and the Marxist Old Left. What’s more, for someone who’s read The Red Decade, it’s far from clear that the early 2020s are the global maximum in the influence of the radical left in American politics. And though Weinstein discarded this piece of Early Great Awokening thought like some poisonous gizzard of a puffer fish, there have been elites with proto-woke ideas for at least “two hundred years… and probably more like five.” The case is made clearest in this paragraph of 2013 Yarvin:

[I]f you look for Americans in 1913 who have the same basic worldview of an ordinary American college student in 2013, you can find them. But you can’t find a lot of them. The cultural mainstream of 2013 is not descended from the cultural mainstream of 1913, most of whose traditions are entirely extinct. Rather, it is descended from a very small cultural aristocracy in 1913, whose bizarre, shocking and decadent tropes and behaviors are confined almost entirely to exclusive upper-crust circles found only in places such as Harvard and Greenwich Village.

So this phenomenon plainly predates the 1960s, and a 60s-focused account of its progress is necessarily incomplete, what is left to explain the real history?

Anchored in universal status econ incentives instead of shoehorned historical trends, the Hansonian Model of Woke opens the door to an Early Great Awokening, just as an Early Great Awokening opens the door to the 60s-unbounded Hansonian Model of Woke. Why? The continuity that Yarvin spotlights between the Marxist Old Left and woke New Left extends to their psychological microfoundations.6 The Hansonian model, with minor tweaks, works for the characters of Romance of American Communism: Caring and knowing a lot about Marx shows you’re an egalitarian (a prudent person to cooperate with for reasons described previously).

Why was the Old Left about workers, while the New Left is about BIPOCs? Elementary. Minority issues weren’t as big of a deal when the US was 80% white. As the places American elites hang out became the most racially, ethnically, and sexually mixed social groups in human history, the returns to signaling you’re good at avoiding intergroup tension increased. Since demand curves are downward sloping (i.e., people respond to incentives)—all things equal—one would expect the contemporary 18% white JHU to have more “look how not racist I am” signaling than 1950’s 100% white JHU.

This shift opened the door to profound memetic change. The medium of literature is so significant in world history largely because it’s so apt as the coordinating basis of ideological movements. What separates Marxists from non-Marxists is that Marxists have read Marx and agree with him, whereas non-Marxists have not. You could say similar things about Protestants or Rationalists. This gives these massive, variegated groups of people a coordinating coherence. Says Scott Alexander:

An academic once asked me if I was writing a book. I said no, I was able to communicate just fine by blogging. He looked at me like I was a moron, and explained that writing a book isn’t about communicating ideas. Writing a book is an excuse to have a public relations campaign.

If you write a book, you can hire a publicist. They can pitch you to talk shows as So-And-So, Author Of An Upcoming Book. Or to journalists looking for news: “How about reporting on how this guy just published a book?” They can make your book’s title trend on Twitter. Fancy people will start talking about you at parties. Ted will ask you to give one of his talks. Senators will invite you to testify before Congress. The book itself can be lorem ipsum text for all anybody cares. It is a ritual object used to power a media blitz that burns a paragraph or so of text into the collective consciousness.

As demographics changed, racial issues increasingly replaced class issues as the main arenas for signaling competition—and the documents that had tied this movement together, screeds and battle plans, as they were, for class warfare, were increasingly irrelevant. Wokes lost the narrative consensus that served Marxism so well. Rufo missed this in America’s Cultural Revolution: the “Cultural Marxism” project was essentially a failure. Marxists can be expected to be familiar with the arguments of Kapital. Wokes can not be expected to have heard of Marcuse, Adorno, or even Angela Davis.

This relative ideological incoherence hinders the possibility of a scary, final boss Woke vision manifest in policy. A woke rendition of the USSR, created to reflect the vision of… Derrick Bell(?) is not really imaginable. Compared to Marxism, woke is a lower variance menace.

But perhaps more importantly, the shift away from Marx fundamentally altered the status economics of leftism: Whereas wokeism mantains social closure and thus stays high status by being some combination of obnoxious, gross and scary, communism mantains social closure with tomes of wordcel bullshit.

Being really into Marx isn’t just (in a certain sense—bear with me) morally impressive. It’s intellectually impressive. A Marxist knows enough about the dense social theory of a 19th-century German econ crank to identify with it. And identify they do! They’re obsessed with this lore—does any other ideology compare? In this respect, Marxism is more akin to Sikhism than fascism. If liberals read and conservatives watch TV, what do communists do? Paath? Literate culture-wise, Marxism is to modern liberalism as modern liberalism is to modern conservatism.

Ditching Marxism’s lore—and thus the intelligence signal—may have led to woke’s relative confusion, but it allowed woke to become a truly mass ideology. It’s easy to forget that Marxists have never won a majority in a democratic Western election. In the US, communist electoral performance is even more unimpressive. Said Yarvin, according to my handy internal transcript of his debate with Hanania (video to be released soon!):

one of the ways that you can see the strength of American communism in the 30s through the 50s is… [that] you can look at the number of votes that Henry Wallace got in 1948, which was about 1.2 million, and basically be like, that's how many communists you have in America at this time.

Numerically, wokeness is unequivocally more successful than Marxism ever was in the US. It’s harder to find anything that neat to estimate the number of wokes, but I’d reckon it’s somewhere between the 1.6 million who bought White Fragility and the 28% of US adults who support reparations for slavery. Jettisoning the lore made woke’s incarnation of the egalitarianism signaling memeplex less coherent (and smart) than its ancestral, Marxist strain, but it accommodated an unprecedented accessibility.

Why It Matters

In summary, wokeness is a very contagious, sticky memeplex. Espousing egalitarianism is a reliable signal that you are righteous and unlikely to provoke costly inter-group conflict. The offputting weirdness of the practices associated with wokeness means it filters out the racist and unsophisticated who are not only more likely to hate outgroups but also aren’t as savvy about what’s high status. Finally, as mainstream social science tells us, people are great at convincing themselves to maintain socially advantageous beliefs. Rufo, Hanania, and Cofnas are missing the true strength of woke religious practice: that it’s an accurate signal of, dare I say, virtue.

This model may as well be “standing Cofnas on his head.” Cofnas thinks that “wokeness is what you get from taking the equality thesis seriously.” I disagree: People “take the equality thesis seriously” so that they have a justification to perform the behaviors associated with wokeness. Cofnas thinks smart people are more woke because they “are more likely to correctly determine that, given equality, wokism follows.” I disagree: Smart people are more woke because they are better at noticing the behaviors that signal virtue.

Though Cofnas’ articles are but a few months old as of writing, his drive and that of others prove the reality of racial differences animates the projects of Aporia and their sort, who have made it their chimeric empirical quest to demonstrate the genetic provenance of The Fundamental Constant of Sociology to an jury that would sooner reject science itself. I wish them luck, but I doubt that, on the margin, writing another killer paper that moves the—regrettably—hypothetical race and IQ controversy Rootclaim a fraction of a percent closer to one hundred will have an impact on the broader culture on any reasonable time scale. Showing the Kendian “founding equations” of wokeness to be unsound won’t directly make wokeness stop being high status or an accurate signal of virtue.

My disagreements with Hanania are more limited but still important. It is obviously true that policy has stacked the deck against non-woke views, but that’s not what makes wokeness so sticky and ubiquitous. What makes wokeness so sticky and ubiquitous is that it is a generally accurate signal that you are going to treat people well, and thus are worth cooperating with. 

I read Hanania’s The Origins Of Woke as the apotheosis of the libertarian online publication tradition, and—if Kendian Wokism has “founding equations” that all disparities are caused by discrimination—libertarian column-ism might as well have an axiom, too: that “all problems are either, one, caused by the government or, two, not actually problems at all.” (I’ll still read that garbage. They’re usually right.)

Hanania’s loyalty to the libertarian internet article medium meant overstating his case—he shows Civil Rights Law is odious and socially corrosive, but he can’t prove it’s originating the problem. Says Scott Alexander:

“[Apart from the bits about racial categorization] Hanania doesn’t have much to support his claimed thesis - that civil rights laws are upstream of the cultural package of wokeness…

Even the book’s own history of the civil rights movement seems to undermine its thesis. This history, remember, is that Congress tried to pass reasonable and limited laws, and then woke activist judges and bureaucrats kept expanding them into unreasonable power grabs. And that (he says) was the origin of wokeness. But if a movement has captured the judicial branch and the civil service, it seems like it must have already originated. Grant that this was an older form of wokeness more clearly grounded in the anti-segregation struggles of the 1960s. But that just brings us back to the question of where the new 2010s version of wokeness came from, which the book also doesn’t answer.”

This has important implications, as if woke was created by government fiat, it follows it could be unmade the same way. Quoth Hanania:

The key thing to realize about wokeness is that it has never faced a real stress test… Of course, just because something hasn’t proved itself to be Lindy yet does not mean that it won’t in the future. If I was going to make the steelman case for wokeness eventually doing so, it would be based on the idea that it taps into something deep in human nature by appealing to the tears of women, so something like it was inevitable after they came to play a larger role in public life.

I think we’d be justified in concluding Hanania’s steelman case for woke standing the test of time is valid. The world provides too limited a dataset to rely on for questions like “Is wokeness a paper tiger that can’t survive without tons of state support?” But we can just see that wokeness “taps into something deep in human nature” (our compulsion to prove ourselves high status and worth cooperating with) and long predates civil rights law. Dismantling civil rights law wouldn’t be a silver bullet. It would make anti-wokeness less costly, but wokeness would remain high status and demonstrative of virtue.

That’s enough for me to sit squarely in the long-term “rising” couple of quadrants of a Bryan Caplan poll. The arc of history is long, but it bends toward everyone acting more like Western elites; their virtue and status-signaling norms are no exception. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a gay businessman in Manila acknowledging the indignity of the Negritos—forever.

I think the right’s understanding of this issue has generally gotten worse over time. Peter Thiel can tell a lot about a company from its name, and subjecting our terminology to the same sort of analysis is telling. The term “virtue signaling” was deadly serious sociologically—have you seen the term “signaling” used outside of LessWrong in any other context? (If you’re sure you have, you're more sure than me.) “Political Correctness” was certainly less descriptive, but as Curtis Yarvin would love to tell you, it wasn’t that long ago that influential Americans unironically and supportively used it to refer to the phenomenon.

The terms in use now are way higher on the Flesch–Kincaid. “Woke” is straight AAVE. And—believe it or not—the phrase “Cancel Culture” (or at least the term “canceled”) is gay AAVE: originating in “queer communities of color” on social media, generally in the context of the scandals of black celebrities.

As has generally been the trend in American right discourse (and everywhere else for that matter), simpler, flashier, and more monocausal memes have won out: Cofnas-Rufo style idealism and Hanania’s popularization of the orthodox libertarian take have replaced the implicit model suggested by the term “virtue signaling.” In a contemporary world of ideas increasingly dominated by Steve Sailer’s “Good Guys” and “Bad Guys,” this etiology of wokeness suffers from an excess of moving parts and nuance—an antimeme, not a meme, unflattering to wokes, who believe nonsense, and even less flattering to anti-wokes, who are too dumb and/or antisocial to believe nonsense.

On the margin, say “wokeness” less and “virtue signaling” more.

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