--- /dev/null
+Title: Interview with Kelsey Piper on Speech and the Liberal Project in the Trump II Era
+Date: 2025-07-25
+Category: other
+Tags: Kelsey Piper, censorship, discourse, politics, race
+Status: draft
+
+On 17 July 2025, I sat down with [friend of the blog](http://unremediatedgender.space/tag/kelsey-piper/) Kelsey Piper to chat about politics.
+
+[TOC]
+
+### Post-Election Candor and the Costs of Silencing
+
+**ZMD**: Hi, I'm Zack M. Davis, here today with journalist Kelsey Piper to talk about how political pressures shape our speech and therefore our world-models. What gets said, what gets left unsaid, and how that changes over time. In particular, we had an election not too long ago, which had various impacts on our information environment that I'd like to try to make sense of with you.
+
+**KP**: Yeah, I think the thing you initially reached out to me about was a Tweet that I sent a little while after the election, which was kind of lighthearted.
+
+**ZMD**: I actually have that here. Quote,
+
+> having a woman as fire chief is I guess related to DEI but given that you have a woman fire chief obviously she'd be a lesbian so I don't think the lesbianism counts for any extra DEI here
+
+End quote.
+
+**KP**: So I showed this quote to some gay people who all thought it made perfect sense. And I showed it to some straight people who were honestly extremely confused by what I was trying to say. So in case you have any straight people in your audience, gay women are much likelier to be into traditionally masculine hobbies like carpentry and math and firefighting and stuff like that. And I would expect that we are wildly disproportionately represented among firefighters. I'm just adding this clarification because I mentioned this to several people who were like, I just don't get it at all; I don't understand that.
+
+**ZMD**: Do you think they really didn't get it, or were they pretending to not get it?
+
+**KP**: No, I think they really didn't get it. I think if you don't know very many gay people and just haven't thought very much about it, you have never like organically run across differences in hobbies between gay women and straight women. I think they were sincere.
+
+**ZMD**: So the reason I was curious about that is because it didn't seem to me like something I would have expected Kelsey Piper to tweet if Kamala Harris had run the election.
+
+**KP**: Yes. So when you reached out to me and were like, Would you have tweeted this if Kamala Harris won the election? I was like, I don't think so. I was quite upset about Trump being the president. I think most of his policies will be quite bad for various stuff that I care about. Most importantly, disease control overseas, which just saves a ton of people, and I'm personally really enthusiastic about it, but also I don't really think it's going to be great for AI. Why are we letting Nvidia sell chips to China again? Because Jensen Huang talked to Trump and Trump thought it sounded like a good idea. Why are we deporting tons of people who are working and not committing crimes? Because Stephen Miller wants it. Very few of the things that are happening are things that I'm happy about.
+
+And given that, I try and take a step back and go, What could I and people in my general reference class have been doing differently over the last four years that might've caused more of the stuff that we cared about to happen in the world? And one of my diagnoses was, cowardice, being unwilling to get mild social disapproval, refusing to say true things we thought were really important. I actually think I always said true things I thought were really important, even when this involved disagreeing pretty substantively with progressives, but saying true things that aren't very important, saying true things that are just kind of small and trivial.
+
+I feel like a lot of the stuff that happened over the last decade was stuff where there were just things you expected people to be a little annoyed at you about, or to get some people saying, Wow, that was in bad taste or whatever. And so you just wouldn't say them because that was a lot easier than pissing off 10 people to no effect. But on a societal scale, if everybody gets shaped that way, then you only have various true, interesting, but not that important stuff being said by people who are in a totally separate information bubble, and that matters.
+
+And also you get a reputation for being humorless scolds, I think that's bad. And it is hard to differentiate yourself from people who have quite different beliefs than you, if you only occasionally take stands about really big things and don't say a bunch of small incidental things, which might nonetheless add up to part of your worldview.
+
+Anyway, I thought like the gay rights movement did better when people felt less like, "I'm scared that I'm going to get in trouble for saying the wrong thing about gay people" and more like, "Ah, gay people, this is a quirk of our society." And so I was intentionally like, what if I'm a little bit more willing to say things that I expect some people to have a negative reaction to, but that I think are true. And I think are fine, like gay women are more likely to become firefighters than straight women.
+
+I wish, looking back over the last four years, not that I'd taken big stands on anything different—I did take the big stands I believed in—but that I'd said more small things. And I wish that it had been easier to differentiate me from someone who had different beliefs than me. And so I've been trying to do that. And I thought it was funny that you thought of that Tweet in particular, because it did feel to me like—most Tweets, if you asked me, why did you tweet this? I'm like, I don't know. But that, I had specifically been thinking about, what would be doing better communication?
+
+### Political Teams and the Neoliberal–Progressive Split
+
+**ZMD**: Yeah, I wasn't surprised that you would have that thought. I was surprised that you would say that in public. Because neoliberals and progressives are not actually the same thing, but there's this coalitional relationship.
+
+**KP**: So in particular, I think that neoliberals have been reluctant to annoy progressives to a degree that is actively counterproductive. I think that the Democratic Party has two factions; they disagree on a ton of important stuff. I think that the neoliberals are right on nearly all of those disagreements, and the progressives are wrong on nearly all of the disagreements. In California politics, when you're trying to vote, it is useful to figure out who is the moderate Democrat on the ballot, and who is the progressive Democrat on the ballot. And in my opinion, the progressive Democrats will make terrible policy calls in office, and the moderate Democrats will make good policy calls in office. But they both run as Democrats. This is kind of insane. You could imagine a world where the Republican Party in California was just very liberal, and these people call themselves Republicans. But because of the nationalization of our politics, that doesn't happen at all. They all run as Democrats, you just have to squint.
+
+So if you're politically informed, you're aware that these factions exist. You have maybe seen some of their veiled or less-veiled sniping at each other. But most people just look at the Democrats, and everybody I talk to who's right of center, this distinction is often extremely illegible to them. And they're like, you guys all think this. And I'm like, no, no, no. A bunch of people think that. A bunch of other people strongly disagree. But the neoliberals have tended to try pretty hard not to offend the progressives. And often, this has taken the form of neoliberifying progressive ideas. You have this progressive agenda, we will find a technocratic set of reforms that we can sell as part of that thing. And I think it would be much more productive, honestly, to just say, Nope, that thing is stupid. However, here are some non-policy proposals, which are not your thing, because your thing is actually stupid.
+
+People disagree with me, but there's a lot of disagreement over how much to fight. But to me, the most decisive reason that this should be a fight instead of the neoliberals trying to play nice with the progressives is one, they don't play nice back; they're assholes. Two, I think that if you are right-of-center, and you want the Democratic Party to be an effective force in American politics, you shouldn't have to know a bunch of inside lore to figure out who your allies are. It should be pretty clear. I think people are getting a little bit better about this now, like there was a bunch of [_Abundance_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_book)) fighting. But one thing that that did do is get some people to carve out stances on this one way or the other. I have, depending on when you publish this podcast, some news about upcoming stuff in this vein. But, yeah, it's a problem.
+
+**ZMD**: I think part of the reason right-of-center people have that perception is because if there is active collaboration to downplay these ideological differences, then it's like you're on the same team. And so people who are trying to do different things on the different team, they're right to perceive that team dynamic.
+
+**KP**: I've been watching the same thing play out on the right. And it has been revealing about why this happens and how much of it is culpably not having been responsible about carving out distinct identities, and how much is being a team player, and how much it's it just being always very hard as an outsider to parse other groups.
+
+On the right, I've been watching it play out between Christian conservatives who are kind of anti- a big chunk of the MAGA base and will call it "woke right" or whatever. And there's a lot of the people who they call woke right would absolutely hate that term and do not use that term to describe themselves. I don't totally know what term they do use to describe themselves, but this division is real.
+
+And reasonably often you see appeals that are like, the reason you guys have to stop doing what you're doing is because it is getting in the way of all of us uniting behind President Trump and his glorious agenda to do all of these things. So given that I don't like President Trump, and I think his glorious agenda is bad for our country, these are both the other team. I'm against both of them. I still like would like to have a much better understanding of—I care a lot who wins that factional battle. I think that they are very different in terms of the effects of them winning the factional battle on the Republican Party and therefore on the country. But it is true that both of them are the other team.
+
+And it is also true, some people want the worst elements of the right, especially Clinton's team in 2016 famously wanted this, right? They wanted Trump because he would be the weakest opponent. They specifically wanted the illiberal populists to ascend because they thought it would be the easiest to beat. I think this was a correct assessment in that Clinton stood more of a chance against Trump than she stood against any other Republican nominee.
+
+It was an incorrect assessment if you care about the country. I think from the values of all the people who made this bet, the thing that happened was much worse than if they had—to be clear, I don't think they were causal. But to the extent they had any effect, it was an effect that was very bad by their values and by my values. I think you shouldn't do this; you should try and get the better of your enemies to be ascendant in as much as anything you do is dedicated at intervening in conflicts among your enemies. And trying to get the worst one as a counterbalance or because they'll be weaker in the next—I don't know, when I look at foreign policy, when I look at like domestic group politics, it feels to me like that has a very poor track record and is corrosive and kind of evil. So I'm down on it, but you still want to know, even if they are the other team and it is in some context reasonable to treat them all as the other team, I think it is valuable to know which of the factions within the other team you want to be ascendant on the other team and you want to be powerful and which ones are more possible to compromise with and stuff like that. Similarly, I think it is useful to try and be clear about that to people who disagree with you so that they can have that mental handle if it's useful.
+
+### Navigating the Attention Economy of Lies
+
+**ZMD**: But what about when there's a conflict between maximizing clarity and securing victories for your team?
+
+**KP**: A thing about politics is that a lot of it is about what you successfully communicate to people and what you successfully communicate to people is always going to be an impoverished and horrible subset of what you actually believe. I'm kind of tempted to be a purist about this and be like, fuck messaging, say what you actually believe loud and proud and clear. In the information environment I observe us to be in, this feels kind of like fake posturing of honesty or something like that. The act of being loud and clear and honest does not feel closely related to the act of causing people to have an accurate model of you, or the stuff that you care about, or the effects that you're having on the world. This is not an argument for lying. I don't think that you should ever do that.
+
+But I think that the problem of causing people to have accurate beliefs in our current information ecosystem is like 20% a problem of loud and clear saying what you truly believe, and way more than that, a question of which circulating lies do you bother responding to if there are a million circulating lies, and you want to respond to the important ones, but not become someone who is defined by signal boosting things that are lies even in order to refute them.
+
+On Twitter today, I want to say the majority of the posts I saw were clear provocations where it felt to me like the intent was to farm engagement. Like, you know, the person who's going like, you won't be genetically related to your mixed-race children. I don't even think they care about that. I think they noticed that the fastest way to get 50 million views on Twitter is to say that, and then have every single person on Twitter jump in to quote tweet you and explain how genetics actually works.
+
+**ZMD**: And how there's different ways of quantifying relatedness such that if you actually understand the math, there's nothing to be confused about, but the math doesn't compress to a Tweet.
+
+**KP**: Exactly. So that is a perfect example of me being like, okay, I feel like being loud and clear about the truth is an out. You should be loud and clear about the truth. That's good. I'm in favor of that. But trying to make sense of the world in this information environment, do you write a blog post trying to explain the different understandings of relatedness? I'm going to link that blog post every time someone tweets this for engagement, which to be clear, I see it like every month or two. So there's clearly a bunch of people who like have noticed this is a great engagement strategy. Do you get a lot of your own engagement by just sharing it to be like, this is dumb and bad, and I disagree with it?
+
+I don't think you should generally just share things to say they're dumb and bad and you disagree with them without some reason to think they're also influential or important or something like that. But again, this is a bunch of calculations that are not just about, you should say the truth. And then you have to ask a bunch of questions about is this an important misunderstanding people have? Are the people who misunderstand it, do they have any overlap with my audience? Am I going to be saying this to anybody who doesn't already know this? Or am I just saying this to an audience that already completely agrees with me about everything?—which is sometimes still worth doing, in part because sometimes you're wrong about whether your audience agrees with you about everything. And in part, because sometimes a lot of people believe something because they got the impression it's believed by people they trust, and they don't actually know the actual argument for it. And it's worth doing that. But yeah, I feel like telling the truth is important, and also a ton of the decisions I end up making are not about, Is this true? It's about, Is this a representative fact? Is this like a surprising fact? Is this a fact that should be surprising, even though people won't find it surprising for whatever reason? Is this lie, a lie that a lot of people actually believe or a lie that like one bot came up with and that other bots are sharing and that probably no humans or not that many humans have been persuaded by and it's not that worth the review? I don't know. I think about this a lot. And it's kind of depressing and very different than how I thought about it like ten years ago.
+
+**ZMD**: Yeah, so that's why that's why I was so interested in having this conversation. Because I feel like there's there's alpha making explicit that—I think a lot of the smartest people on Twitter, including people who are not on your team, see the same things you do. And yet you're playing different characters, [deciding which true statements is it in my interest to talk about](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting).
+
+**KP**: Yeah, I think almost everybody is doing that. Some people are consciously thinking about which true statements are important and representative and worth talking about. But every single person is making that judgment on some level. I would just disbelieve anybody who was like, "Ah, yes, I share all true statements that come to my mind."
+
+**ZMD**: That's not possible.
+
+**KP**: You can't. It cannot be done. It would be really interesting. But it's not in fact possible. I share a lot of cute stories about my kids. My filter for which cute stories about my kids to share is something like, are the kids comfortable with me sharing it? And is it cute and funny and lighthearted? Because I don't like getting nasty comments about my kids or whatever. And does it fit well in a tweet? And then if it does, it gets Tweeted. And of course, that means many interactions with my kids get left on the cutting room floor.
+
+**ZMD**: Tantrums are not great tweets.
+
+**KP**: Tantrums are not great tweets, anything that the kids either now feel embarrassed about, or I think that they would feel embarrassed about in five years, plausibly. They don't mind potty humor type stuff now. But I could imagine teenage them being really upset if I Tweeted their younger child potty humor. It's hard because I have the impression that some amounts of being too public about your kids can be bad for the kids. And I've read older kids discussing what was bad for them about their parents being too public about their lives to try and anticipate objections that my kids might have five, ten years down the line. But things like this are kind of idiosyncratic. There are things that some people will say was unequivocally good for them, and some will say is unequivocally bad for them.
+
+So I try not to be neurotic. I think a lot of bad parenting is being excessively neurotic about this. But I try and exercise some judgment. But of course, because there's judgment, there's cultivation, and you get a partial window. And I think everybody knows that you're getting a partial window into somebody's life. But, you know, that doesn't mean that it doesn't have some of the effects on them that are just a consequence of it being filtered or whatever.
+
+### Wokeness in Retreat and the Vibe Shift
+
+**ZMD**: Stepping back a minute, about this like team dynamic. Back in May, Scott Alexander told Curtis Yarvin that he's become more optimistic about liberal institutions because, quote,
+
+> The "vibe shift" against wokeness is as far as I can tell a genuine autochthonous liberal victory that predates anything Trump II was doing
+
+End quote. And I thought that was a really interesting contrast with your self-report that you changed your Tweeting strategy after the election.
+
+**KP**: So I think a lot of this depends on what we mean by wokeness. I think peak fixation with identity politics and stuff like that was 2021 or so. I think I had already pre-election seen a bunch of people turn against a lot of stuff that I think of as peak wokeness in terms of identitarian framings of everything they do and stuff like that. I had already seen a lot of people going like, Okay, so a lot of people in 2020 were preference falsifying, right? And going along with stuff that they didn't think was right. I think that had stopped before the election, but people mean different stuff by wokeness. And it's certainly not true that all of the rollbacks of access to transition—today, [Puerto Rico limited access to transition for legal adults](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/puerto-rico-law-ban-hormone-therapy-gender-affirming-surgery-transgender-youth/). That would not have happened without Trump. And if you're thinking of that as part of wokeness, then that certainly is a consequence of Trump and downstream of Trump.
+
+If you're talking about vibes on Twitter, vibes on Twitter are dramatically different because Trump won. I think Scott has said, and I think I agree, that the vibes on Twitter are in fact liable to provoke a backlash in the other direction just because the right is speed running a lot of stuff that I thought was kind of specific to the illiberal left until I saw it on the right. But certainly the vibes on Twitter are extremely different than in the hypothetical world where Harris won. I think the stuff at universities is very different. I think that the universities were already stepping back from a bunch of their most unpopular like DEI-type policies, but I think that it would have been a pretty limited retreat instead of, you know, fire tons of people and like negotiate settlements with the DOJ type retreat. So my stance, which I think has been consistent for about the last eight years or whatever on affirmative action has been that if I happen to know of two kids with identical test scores and one of them had a life that was very neatly directed at optimizing for the things that my admission office wants to see, and the other one had a life in which there was nobody with the wherewithal or attention to optimize their life for what the admissions office wanted to see, then the second kid is a lot more impressive and admitting the second kid is a lot more valuable.
+
+Because, two kids of identical talent, the one who everybody knew exactly which notes to hit is going to have an application that looks a lot more optimized for the results, and the second kid is not like that, means that given approximately equivalent impressiveness of application, the second kid is in fact more impressive. For a while, this was my understanding of all we were trying to do with affirmative action, find the people who did not have as many opportunities, such that you were in fact improving the quality of your class by admitting people who had fewer opportunities.
+
+Bard did not have a very impressive college application. Bard is really, really smart and I think substantially influential and stuff like that and would have been a good admit to a top school, but she was in foster care at the point where she was applying to school. Maybe don't include this on the podcast, we'll have to check with her—
+
+**ZMD**: We'll cut this out.
+
+**KP**: I know people who were very smart and didn't have as impressive scores. There is a completely separate thing that you could also do and call affirmative action, which is, we would like the following balance of our student body, and so we will pick the most impressive people from this background, and the most impressive people from this background, and the most impressive people from this background, to create the student body that has the resemblance we like the best. I think the Supreme Court has said you can't do that. I think the Supreme Court was right to say you can't do that. I think that is not a good thing to do. I think the thing that is actually valuable is actually also almost impossible to do because, think about how I literally defined it. I said the people who know which set of targets to hit to impress an admissions office. If the admissions office changes which set of targets to hit to impress it, those are the people who will know how to hit the new ones too. And this is how we get, you know, Zohran Mamdani is technically African-American or whatever. But also, oh, is it helpful to have studied in a foreign country? Guess who studied in a foreign country? Is it helpful to have done a missionary trip? Guess who does that missionary trip? You cannot actually rig the system in favor of the people who didn't have dedicated adults putting in tons of optimization effort on their behalf, because rigging the system is the thing that the dedicated adults will do. So I've kind of gone, okay, it's not that I don't think of that as a fundamentally worthy endeavor. And as alpha lying on the ground, frankly, if an admissions office could figure out how to do it, it would make their university stronger and better and good, and they should. But they can't figure out how to do it. Nobody is, it may be fundamentally the kind of thing that cannot be figured out how to do. And we shouldn't instead just aim for a kind of demographic—I think the Supreme Court got that one right.
+
+And I think that based on the Supreme Court ruling, there was already some movement at universities to do this, but I think that that is going to be a lot more all-encompassing and involve a lot more like open retreat and a lot more exposés of practices that were going on, and stuff like that is a consequence of Trump. So I think I more than half disagree with Scott, but I think there is a bunch of wokeness that was already on the retreat regardless. And then there is a bunch of stuff that other people mean by wokeness that either would have stayed or would have been retreated from much more incompletely and in a way that didn't require anybody to acknowledge as much that they've been doing it.
+
+**ZMD**: So part of my motivation for asking is, I'm wondering from the perspective of trying to triumph in the neoliberal _versus_ progressive conflict, it might be an advantage in the conflict, once the other guys win, you say, Ah, well, we were already fighting wokeness this whole time; it was already in retreat. Even if that isn't actually true.
+
+**KP**: So I agree that that is totally a move to make. I also feel like it is important to say that both neoliberals and progressives have spent the last year trying to pin woke on the other, and they are both wrong. I'm not the first person to say this. I have like seen other people point this out. Woke was its own weird phenomenon, that was neither in line with traditional progressive objectives. A lot of the progressives are socialists, or at least capitalist-skeptical. But they weren't particularly identitarian before woke became a big thing. And I think that identitarian stuff came out of Tumblr and academia and stuff like that and was embraced by nonprofits, both the more neoliberal nonprofits and tech, which is pretty neoliberal, and the progressive nonprofits. And at this point, because the identitarian stuff did not make the world a better place in any way for anybody, as far as I can tell, except individual people who got jobs out of it, since the identitarian stuff was bad, then all of the factional conflict, everybody's like, well, you guys did this dumb identitarian stuff, which was bad. And in some ways, I have tried not to say the progressives did the identitarian stuff because I don't think that's true. Like I said, I think you should say true stuff. I do think the fact that everybody starting a year ago was trying to blame the identitarian stuff on their political enemies was in fact a form of wokeness already profoundly being in retreat. The fact that people were saying, you guys ruined the party with this shit. That is an important kind of wokeness being in retreat that was already true.
+
+**ZMD**: What month/year did you see this?
+
+**KP**: I am not going to be very reliable at dating internet arguments that I saw on Twitter. I can try and dig up some Tweets for you. I do think that people were saying peak woke has already passed by 2022, and we're depending on what you define as peak woke. They were referring to a real thing. This is not just something that was made up later to rationalize it. There was a real thing that did peak in 2020 or at latest 2022. And that people were talking about by then as on the retreat. And there's other stuff that didn't.
+
+### Hereditarianism and the New Mexico–Massachusetts IQ Gap
+
+**ZMD**: So I had another question here. In April, you wrote, quote,
+
+> my impression of 'hereditarian' stuff is that it's a major part of the right-wing radicalization pipeline, and I want to figure out how to fix that. I had a long post about this in my drafts which basically argues in extremely melodramatic terms that the Libs Won't TelL You—
+> that the people of Massachusetts are intrinsically better and worthier and smarter than the people of New Mexico [...]
+
+End quote. Can you tell us more about that post idea?
+
+**KP**: Okay. I am probably not going to wade into that just because wading into it is an incredibly unpleasant experience. The same reason I don't post about trans stuff. People are uniquely unpleasant on those issues. Whenever I post something even tangentially related, someone will post pictures of monkeys and literally assert, these are the true pictures of Africans or whatever. And I'm just like—
+
+**ZMD**: Wait, how many followers do you have?
+
+**KP**: 50,000.
+
+**ZMD**: Okay. I'm only at like 1300 followers. I don't actually see these people.
+
+**KP**: Okay. I think this is genuinely an important difference between being a smaller account and a larger account on Twitter, is how unpleasant your mentions can get. So I have this impression that every once in a while you see someone who's like, I read this blog post about statistics or whatever, I found this blog post persuasive. The liberals will hate me now and hate my children and have no desire to have me in their coalition. A lot of the blog posts explicitly frame it that way. They don't just go like, here are the national IQ numbers. They go, here are the national IQ numbers, and once you have read the secret knowledge you are cast out of the garden of Eden, the libs will never talk to you again. You're one of us now. And I think that framing is part of how that framing is compelling to a kind of person compared to if they just had the numbers.
+
+Now I want to be clear that when I have looked at the national IQ numbers, they were very, very bad. This is not a topic that I have like spent a ton of time looking into, but a friend of mine showed me a couple of examples for specific countries when people were debating the quality of [Cremieux](https://www.cremieux.xyz/)'s research, a couple of countries where they had arrived at a national IQ estimate by looking at studies of orphans in orphanages. And now I hope it is like extremely obvious orphans in orphanages are an unrepresentative population, both in that people who died and otherwise left their kids in an orphanage are an unrepresentative population, and because orphanages are extremely, incredibly bad environments for child development. And so if you have a result from an orphanage, I think it is like basically no information.
+
+And if anybody is using for any other numbers, results that are a survey of IQ of children in an orphanage, that makes me go, okay, I don't believe you. I feel like it should have been so obvious to you that children in an orphanage are not representative of a country that it seems suspicious. It's like if I was looking into, I don't know, a study on survival rates for premature babies or whatever, and I realized that they like completely missed the thing where we changed how maternal mortality was scored a few years ago. It's like, come on, everybody knows that. If you didn't know that, then you are not serious in this field. And if you knew it and didn't care to clarify it for your audience in favor of making your point, you're lying. And I don't trust you. I don't like you.
+
+But anyway, say somebody has their orphanages blog post. One line of objection you can make is that blog post is mistaken because children in orphanages are going to have artificially low IQs because orphanages are extremely bad for child development. Another line of objection you can make is all of the people pushing this are racist. And some of them genuinely sincerely want to conduct mass ethnic cleansing in the United States and basically cause a race war, because I think that is what would happen if you tried to do large scale ethnic cleansing in the United States. They are bad people.
+
+But I think there's a kind of person who finds that second argument like anti-persuasive. And the first argument they might find persuasive. If you say to them, those are bad people, I think a certain kind of person goes, okay, I was also told that Xs and Ys were bad people. Xs and Ys didn't turn out to be bad people. I just don't trust you when you tell me people are bad. But if you say to them, have you looked at orphanages and child development, then they, they are like, oh, okay. If those numbers are in fact from an orphanage and I can show you the numbers are from an orphanage, that's pretty persuasive. And I think it's kind of unfortunate that as far as I can tell, you run into much more of the, "these people are super-racist" than the "orphanages are super-unrepresentative" style of response.
+
+I think that is bad for—my preferred thing is if some people would like look at IQ data, and it would be like, Wow, people in Massachusetts are a lot smarter than people in New Mexico. And this is true if you look exclusively at white people; I'm not trying to make a point about the relative composition of those states. I think it's because Boston is where a bunch of universities are. This is the case. And okay, it's the case. I think if the studies are bad, the studies can be criticized as bad. I think if the studies are less bad, then, broadly, what policy implications do you think it should have that people in Massachusetts are on average smarter than people in New Mexico?
+
+**ZMD**: I mean, you probably won't know this offhand, but do you know what the [effect size](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size) is on that?
+
+**KP**: I don't know it offhand.
+
+**ZMD**: Right. Because like part of what makes the ethnic politics so tense is that, and why we have these affirmative action fights is because, you know, if you do ... sorry, I'm hesitating, because I'm not sure ... If you do apply equal admission standards, you're going to end up with many, many fewer black people at Harvard, for example, because you know, the black–white IQ gap has usually been measured at about one standard deviation. I think there's some more recent studies that said it was like 0.9 of a standard deviation.
+
+**KP**: You know, honestly, Zack, I feel like if we're going to talk about those, I would want to have actually looked at the studies and see whether I find them ridiculous, like the—
+
+**ZMD**: Like the orphanage thing, that's fair.
+
+**KP**: Like the orphanage thing. And since I haven't done that, I feel uncomfortable both with sitting here and nodding, but—
+
+**ZMD**: Yeah, that's entirely fair.
+
+**KP**: I would want to look, and I have not done so.
+
+**ZMD**: That's entirely fair.
+
+**KP**: And similarly, I haven't looked at the exact numbers, but I think there would be a lot fewer New Mexicans admitted to Harvard, and I kind of just—
+
+**ZMD**: And the sad and tragic part is, that's not a politically salient identity. So even if there was a similar gap, people wouldn't notice and people wouldn't fight about it.
+
+**KP**: No, but that's the aspirational thing, right? I think that this is a country in which we are all individuals and which we are not fundamentally members of various identity groups. And it is good if we are like judged on our merits as individuals. And if only the thousand smartest kids or whatever get into Harvard, then I hope that I'm one of them. And if I'm not one of them, it doesn't matter to me the skin color of the people who did get in because I am not a member of a skin color. I'm a member of a national identity that I think is ideally not ethnically rooted or whatever. I think that the thing to do is liberalism, where we are individuals and not category members and where like all of that stuff is trivia on the level of like Massachusetts versus New Mexico.
+
+And I think it would be that part of why I haven't written the post. There's a lot of reasons why I haven't written the post, but part of why I haven't written the post is because I think it would be bad if people started going like, "Oh, New Mexicans, they're kind of dumb. I always swipe right on kids from New Mexico"—some people would do that. People are horrible about this. As soon as you introduce a category that people can be awful to each other around, they will do so. They will do so. Even if the quality of the evidence base is absolute shit, they will do so. Even if there's absolutely nothing there, like this is human nature. And I would not want to meme into existence, interstate IQ resentments, even if I think it is a great analogy for like the insanity of the discourse along another dimension, because I think it's bad for our country, and because I think it's like fundamentally illiberal. It takes two sentences of conversation with a human being to get a pretty good sense of them as a human being. And I think that it is basically in any context where you might be working with them or getting to know them, worth those two sentences instead of like going off of, Oh, they're from New Mexico, or Oh, they're from Massachusetts or whatever. You can just think of people as individuals, treat people as individuals, treat every person as an individual, and not as a member of a category and do not obsess over the category of memberships that fundamentally do, I think, give you way, way less information than just talking to them for three sentences.
+
+### Individualism and Affirmative Action
+
+**ZMD**: I'm in this position where I absolutely agree with the moral sentiment you're articulating, but I have this really grandiose rationalist dream of, actually you should be doing Bayesian reasoning that takes base rates into account. I think we may have an empirical disagreement of how often this could actually be useful if you're not doing monkey politics and just strictly optimizing for empirical accuracy.
+
+**KP**: We probably have an empirical disagreement about how useful that is, but also I think that liberalism is a really, really good social technology. I think the idea that we are judged as individuals and not as members of groups is much better than any competing account of how to treat people. And it is not natural. You have to reinforce it. And one thing that we do as a society, ideally, is make a promise to people. We will not judge you based on who your parents were or the color of your skin or which ZIP code you were born in or anything like that. You will have a fair chance and you get upward mobility if you can make use of upward mobility. Obviously promises like this are not even quite promises. Ethoses about what society is supposed to offer you, about what it means for society to be filling its side of the deal, are imperfect. Society does not perfectly fill its side of the deal. But I think that that is like a much, much better aspiration than, well, we will keep track of what ZIP code you were born in and we will care a lot about who your parents were, but that's just a prior that you can overcome like with enough effort, which people are not obligated to give you and often won't give you because your parentage made you not worth their time to assess in the first place. I think as a ethos, having the ethos of your society be, everybody gets a shot. It is very obvious why everybody buys into this social contract. It is very obvious what everybody gets out of this social contract. And it is much less obvious to me what I get out of a social contract that is basically, we don't owe you the same shot that other people get. And we don't owe you a hearing as an individual instead of as like a member of whatever categories we treat you as a member of. As a social contract, I think that one doesn't work. This is part of why I think it is right for the Supreme Court to have said you can't do affirmative action and stuff like that. I think that the liberal social contract where we don't judge by skin color, but by the content of our character, where we give everybody a shot based on who they are and not who their parents were, I think it's really, really important. And whenever I read about countries that have less of that ethos, they're awful places. It is so, so bad for a country and a culture.
+
+I think you can say, Ah, but if we are just rationally truth seeking, we don't care about the social contract. We are just trying to get to the right answer. But I also think like tribalism makes people shit at getting to the right answer. It doesn't seem to me like there is any society out there that's like, Ah, yes, we are being a reasonable amount of discriminatory. It like seems to me like the intense default is to have a intensely aristocratic culture with approximately no meaningful social mobility. And the thing that is a much closer approximation of the correct way to treat everybody is just treat them as a person who they are. And maybe this is a disagreement because I fundamentally do not believe that there are large differences between people that are predictable in advance from any external trait of theirs. And if you do believe that, maybe you're like, well, Kelsey's just underestimating how likely this is because you believe something different than me. But it seems suspicious to me that there are literally no societies that have done something that doesn't seem grotesquely worse than liberalism in every way, along every measure. Liberalism seems to work way, way better than any of those.
+
+**ZMD**: Sorry, I'm in this weird position where I have a lot of like super ultra nitpicky technical objections, but I also recognize the thing you're saying, that it's not like I can like talk about [dath ilan](https://www.lesswrong.com/w/dath-ilan) as a contrast that actually can do the statistics. I agree that if the only choice is between liberalism and tribalism, I'm with you on liberalism.
+
+But I think that in the process of reinforcing this liberal equilibrium, people do end up confusing themselves about these subtle nitpicky technical things. Like this idea of like treating people as individuals, what does that actually mean in a Bayesian sense?
+
+**KP**: So for a concrete example, we have a school, right? A kid comes into the school. We give the kid tests to figure out what level they're at. I believe that it is practically correct, and morally upholding our end of the social contract to give all kids the same test. And on the basis of their scores on that test, place them into a class where they will learn the material they don't know yet and not learn—
+
+**ZMD**: Yeah. So, again, sorry, this is a super, super nitpicky technical objection. You're going to laugh at this, but technically, you're still grouping people by test score.
+
+**KP**: So actually we're not. It's placing a child in—
+
+**ZMD**: It doesn't have to be a discrete grouping. So I agree, if you make predictions, when you make predictions based on someone's race or sex, we agree that obviously there's huge variation, you're going to get a lot of stuff wrong. That's terrible. As a super, super ultra-nitpicky technical objection, tests also have error.
+
+**KP**: And you should try and minimize that error, but okay. Specifically, if you imagine hypothetical sexist version of our school, which is like on average, it is rarer for a girl to be a real prodigy in math than a boy. This happened to me as a child. I want to be clear. I am talking about an experience that I had. Therefore, if we get a girl who has high scores, then that is likelier to be explained by like error or variation in the test. And we shouldn't put her in the advanced class. Again, this literally happened to me.
+
+**ZMD**: They probably weren't using—
+
+**KP**: Well, I was the highest score in the class on the advanced placement test. And the teacher told my mom that she didn't think a girl should be in the advanced math class and therefore was recommending that the advanced math class consist of boys who had all gotten a lower score than me. I think this is the practical implementation. I think this also happens to black kids who are really good at math. I think this also happens to Latino kids who are really good at math. I think this is in practice what all of this, some people like are better than other people, I think it is a third grader who is the best score in their class being told they aren't allowed to take the advanced class because somebody read a study or something.
+
+**ZMD**: And the people who are doing that were probably not doing the correct Bayesian reasoning, because the test score _is_ very informative.
+
+**KP**: The thing that I would like them to do is to just use the test. I would like them to not ask themselves, is it surprising that a girl is good at math? Is it surprising that a student from this background is good at math? I just want them to let me take the test. And if I pass the test, let me take the advanced math class. That's the whole ask. And I do believe that there are brilliant kids of every background who would score their way in to the advanced math class and who are, because of racism, because of sexism, being assessed as not as smart. And then they don't get into the advanced math. But my mom yelled at the teacher and was like, fuck you, put her in—she was very polite; my mom would never say that—but put her in the advanced math class. I got in the advanced math class. I raced through a series of accelerated math classes from there. But it's like so easy for me to imagine the world where my mom didn't know to push back or where the teacher wasn't willing to overtly say the reason we didn't put Kelsey in the advanced math class is because she was a girl. If my mom had just heard Kelsey's not a good fit, she wouldn't have pushed back. It took the teacher being the kind of person.
+
+**ZMD**: Being overtly sexist.
+
+**KP**: Literally say it is because Kelsey is a girl. And I'm sure I am just completely convinced. And it is kind of foundational to my views here that all across the country, there are girls who should be in advanced math class. There are black and Latino kids who should be in advanced math class. And the teacher just didn't happen to say to the parents, yeah, their scores qualified them for the advanced math class, but we didn't put them in there because—have you seen _Stand and Deliver_?
+
+**ZMD**: A long time ago, yes.
+
+**KP**: So I was talking with Bard about this, because of course in _Stand and Deliver_, the inner city school teacher who is a brilliant guy and a very good math teacher reforms the curriculum so that a bunch of these kids can take Calc BC. And it's not the case that all of the kids in the school can take Calc BC, but there are a bunch of kids in that school who can take Calc BC. You just need a teacher and principal that are dedicated to building the pipeline so that those kids get to take Calc BC. And if that's woke, I am so, so in favor of woke. I feel very passionately that every inner city school in the country has kids who could ace Calc BC. Now, is there problems with the colleges trying to accept those kids when they haven't in fact, aced Calc BC and they don't have the preparation to succeed yet? I'm not excited about that. You can't, because like it took this one man who was an incredibly gifted math instructor. But the kids have the potential. I really sincerely completely believe that the kids have the potential.
+
+And if you're like, yeah, I believe that this is true of kids in New Mexico, even if the average IQ score of New Mexico is not the same as the average IQ score, I think that the way to go is to have them take the test and then put them in the advanced math class if they did well on the test. And you want to be like, in theory, in dath ilan, they could use a combination of the test score and a genetic assessment of the child's intrinsic math ability, and the genetic score would add like 2% meaningful knowledge to the test or whatever, at some point it's a thought experiment. I don't have a dispute with the thought experiment. I just have a conviction about America, which is that the way this actually happens in practice is that kids who could succeed in advanced math are ruled out on the basis of qualities, which—yeah, there are fewer girls who can make the IMO team than boys by a very large margin, and this had nothing to do with whether my third grade math teacher should have let me take the advanced class.
+
+**ZMD**: Right. By the way, what year was that example?
+
+**KP**: I was in third grade in 2002.
+
+**ZMD**: Yeah. So sexism was not defeated in 2002. I guess we already knew that.
+
+**KP**: Yeah. I don't know how many girls that's happening to today or how many students of other backgrounds where people will assume they aren't good at math. I think some people are going to say, ah, yeah, but with woke, we went way too far. And now they would be like more likely to put the girl in the advanced math class. And I think this really misunderstands how policies like that happen on a distributional level. Like a random third grade teacher decided which kids went into the advanced class. Does that random third grade teacher believe that it is actively good to put girls in and discriminate against boys? Maybe like there probably exist random third grade teachers who believe that. There's also tons of random third grade teachers who believe the exact opposite, because a lot of them from 2002 are still teaching. People have long careers. A lot of them are the literal same people. And a lot of the others don't happen to believe the latest _zeitgeist_, whatever it is. I doubt that my third grade teacher in 2002 had been taught not to let girls take the advanced classes. I don't know what she was taught, but probably not that, at least not that explicitly, not in 2002, but she was still doing it. And my guess is that whenever at a high level, you're like, we're going to have an emphasis on more students from disadvantaged backgrounds in advanced classes or whatever, you have some people who are really gung ho and are very excited that the highest scoring math student in the third grade class was a girl. You have some people who don't care and put the top four scores in the advanced class because they always did. You have some schools that have like abolished the advanced class because it might have the wrong people in it or whatever. You have plenty of that. You have some teachers who don't care what the district is doing these days. They're going to do things the way they've always done it, goddangit. And maybe continue exclusively putting the boys in the advanced class or whatever like criteria they've always been using. You have some who put in the kids whose parents kick up a fuss. This is actually a major thing. I don't have the study in front of me, but I think [Ozy](https://thingofthings.substack.com/) at one point pointed out to me that if you just test and put kids in, a lot more black and Latino kids get in than if you give teachers any discretion. Partly this is because teachers discriminate, and partly this is because the parents of upper-middle-class white and immigrant kids will advocate. They will be like, there's an advanced math class. Put my kid in the advanced math class. My kid's advanced. What did my kid get wrong? We'll work with them on that on the weekends with the tutor, put them in the advanced math class. Families that like are less likely to have that wherewithal in that relationship with the school, their kids don't get in the advanced class, even if their test scores totally justify putting them in advanced class. This is again the thing I was saying earlier, even if the thing you were trying to do was support for the people who were not relentlessly pointed to the target, you can't support those people, because you've just changed the target. And then the people who are good at pointing at the target will keep on pointing at the target.
+
+Anyway, my understanding is that if you just try to use objective—yes, tests have error, yes, tests are imperfect, but I think you get less racism and better results for everybody. I think that there is no student group who loses out if you just test and then put the stronger test scores in an advanced class.
+
+**ZMD**: But with respect to—I think a lot of people have this idealistic liberal individualist dream of just treat everyone as individuals, who would still—if you did use only test scores and then, you know, the elite institutions are full of Asians and Jews and whites and very few blacks and Hispanics, I think they would be sad about that.
+
+**KP**: So Caltech has been like that for a while, I think, because California banned affirmative action a while before the feds did, and Caltech ended up being like 60, 70% Asian is my understanding. And I don't in fact think this was either a sign that Caltech was doing anything wrong or inherently a big national outrage. I think it's okay, because I would like us to evaluate everybody as individuals, then I do not feel invested in there being a lot of white people at Caltech in particular, because I am not thinking of myself as a member of the white category that has to make sure the white category is getting its fair share of things.
+
+The students at Caltech going to be good engineers who will generate tons of revenue and make toys cheaper and make energy cheaper and stuff like that. When I'm getting the thing I want to get out of Caltech as a non-Caltech student, I think you just have to commit to, we are individuals and everybody deserves evaluation as an individual and is not defined by their membership in various other categories. I think that there are brilliant people of absolutely every background, and you will get brilliant people of absolutely every background.
+
+Part of what I mean when I say that I think a lot of the woke stuff over the last half decade failed is that it failed directly at the objective of helping disadvantaged black and Latino Americans get the opportunities that they get in life. I don't think it produced better outcomes in schools. I think it produced worse outcomes in schools. I don't think it produced more overlooked kids whose math teachers assumed that they wouldn't be good at math getting into advanced math classes. I feel very strongly that this happens, that this is really bad and that we can do stuff about it. And if all of the DEI stuff we were doing in schools had produced results there, then I would be like, it's great. I don't care if the copy editors keep doing obnoxious things with changing which words we're allowed to use this week. I'm really, really glad that we are putting in the advanced math classes, all of the kids who belong there without discriminating against on the basis of the color of their skin. But I don't think that happened. We didn't see a bunch of efforts to replicate _Stand and Deliver_. And again, I think with the right people running it, you could have a pipeline to Calc BC in every single inner city school in America. I think it would work. There would be kids there who could handle the course material and do really well.
+
+**ZMD**: We just need to clone Jamie Escalante and scale it up.
+
+**KP**: You need the right teacher, but I don't think that those kids are too dumb. I really don't. I think that those kids just need the right teacher, but we didn't have that. In fact, a lot of districts, because it was too much of a challenge to do right by those kids, just tried to get rid of programs for advanced kids altogether, because then they don't have to like grapple with whether those are being handed out fairly.
+
+The kids who are from an advanced background will be fine if the school doesn't have a gifted program. You know what they do in the Bay Area? They either send their kids to the Mandarin immersion school because they know that the Mandarin immersion school will have advanced academics because the only people sending their kids to the Mandarin immersion school are native speakers of Mandarin and the kind of obsessive parent who learns to send their kids to the Mandarin immersion school, or they take their kid to private school, or they supplement with afterschool Beast Academy and afterschool Russian math and afterschool Singapore math, all of which are big in the Bay Area.
+
+Those kids will get their advanced math instruction one way or another because their parents will do whatever they think it takes to get them their advanced math instruction. The kids you are screwing over are the kids who, you know, yeah. So a lot of why I am not enthusiastic about a lot of the DEI project is because I do care a lot about making sure that every kid gets evaluated as an individual and gets the chance to fulfill their potential, and I don't think it succeeded at that. I think if instead of giving everyone the chance to succeed as an individual and not ruling them out based on who they are, if instead the thing you do is encourage tribalism and encourage people to think of success, not as is my kid getting the best education possible, but as, do kids who look like my kid get into the best schools or whatever, I don't think that that is like good vision of what a successful, healthy, multi-ethnic, multicultural democracy looks like. I really, really care about a successful, healthy, multicultural, multi-ethnic democracy. But I think it has to be an individualist one. It has to be about everybody getting a fair chance and the best chance that you get.
+
+### Immigration and the Liberal Meta-Project
+
+**ZMD**: But if you are doing individualism—so the thing about multi-ethnic, multicultural, is that like those different cultures are clusters.
+
+**KP**: A lot of what I mean when I say that we are a multicultural society is that Europe spent a long time slaughtering each other over differences that now seem small to us, but seemed enormously big to them. And one of the technologies that emerged from this was, we may disagree on lots of things, but we are going to not only not murder each other about it, but try and enforce some things that are true regardless of who temporarily has the upper hand. And try and backfill this with a level of interpersonal decency that is something like, before I haul you out of a burning building, I don't check if you're a Catholic or a Protestant or anything like that.
+
+I think of that as the foundational liberal and pluralist view of the world. We have many important disagreements. Obviously, if someone thinks that apostates to Islam are, you know, all like evil and that that should be illegal, I have insane levels of disagreement with them. But the only level of disagreement that I have with them which is about liberalism and pluralism is that should be illegal. If they just think that they will be eternally tortured by their God, who's somehow still a good person, then we can live next door to each other and we can get along and stuff like that. If they think that the law should enforce the tenets of their religion, then we have something that's actually a threat to liberalism and pluralism.
+
+And similarly, I obviously have tons of disagreements with Christian conservatives, but if the thing that Christian conservatives want is to live peacefully alongside me and I will live peacefully alongside them, and if their packages get accidentally delivered to my house, I'll walk them over to their door and vice versa. That works. That's a success. We're all happy. We only have fights and we do have bitter fights sometimes when we disagree about what the basic foundation of rules, regardless of who is in power should say about things which ways of raising your children are within limits or stuff like that.
+
+You can have a bunch of cultures that have a bunch of disagreements on lots of things, but I think you can't have very much disagreement on the fundamental idea that we adhere to the Constitution and to basic protections regardless of who's in power. I don't think you can have very much disagreement without like serious harm to the fabric of your liberal society. I don't think you can have very much disagreement on, individuals get to choose which subgroups they affiliate with and which subgroups they want to be a part of. You can have, you can't be in our group unless you follow our rules. That's fine. But you need like exit rights from subcultures. That's very important. You can't have people trying to distribute spoils according to tribal stuff instead of according to individual stuff. If you have that stuff at very large scale, then I think you are setting yourself up for a high conflict democracy where things are worse for everybody.
+
+**ZMD**: But it seems like if you want to do this individualism thing, you need people to buy into at least a meta-culture that respects those rules.
+
+**KP**: I agree with that. I think that a lot of the power of America is as a meta-culture that respects those rules. There's this documentary about desegregation, where they talk to all of these very racist Southerners who are nonetheless like supportive of desegregation because they're like, well, the Supreme Court said that we have to do it, and I'm not a communist. I believe in obeying the Supreme Court. You might be like, "Uh, what?", but there are people who have their object-level value, which is bad, but then their meta-level value, which is, well, I don't have to agree with what the Supreme Court says to obey the highest law of the land. I think you need a reasonably high level of that attitude of, whatever my zany object-level belief, I am committed to the project of the Constitution and people having the right to do things that I would choose not to do and stuff like that. I don't want to be totally doomer here. I think we have pretty high buy-in on that project. I think a lot of people are very pessimistic right now. I think Twitter is very pessimizing. A lot of the accounts on Twitter that most strongly give me the impression of like, wow, you feel totally incompatible with liberal pluralism, when I look into it, they're almost never Americans, and I don't think that's a coincidence.
+
+**ZMD**: That's really interesting.
+
+**KP*: I have a number of times had an interaction with an interlocutor where I'm like, wow, it's not just that we have very different values. We fundamentally disagree on pluralism, on liberalism, on the idea that I do the meta values. And I click through and I read a little bit; they're European. This has happened to me four or five different times, and it has never happened to me where they turned out to definitely be an American who's a real person. There were a couple of cases where I wasn't sure they were a real person. But it is never, never—and small sample size, I am sure there are Americans who reject liberalism and pluralism, but I keep noticing this contrast, right? Where it feels to me like I keep talking to Europeans who, there are Europeans who get pluralism and liberalism and stuff like that. But the people who I feel like, wow, you are not in the meta-contract also, yeah, not Americans often in my experience.
+
+**ZMD**: I also think the distribution of immigrants that Europe is getting is not successfully integrating into their meta-culture as much.
+
+**KP**: I agree with that. Although the specific people I talked to were native Europeans whose families have been here for a long time. They were not examples of people from the middle East not adopting European values or something. But if the thing you were saying was less that and more that pluralism has been more strained in Europe because of bad policy—
+
+**ZMD**: I was thinking of like UK rape gang scandal stuff.
+
+**KP**: Yeah. So my impression is that America is very good, possibly uniquely good at integrating immigrants in a way where they assimilate to the meta culture, regardless of whether they assimilate to the object-level culture and certainly whether their children do. A part of this is that America is less racist than other places. If you ask a bunch of immigrants to describe what stands out about America, America is extremely non-racist and Americans are extremely willing to give you a chance regardless of where you're from, are extremely common accounts. I think this is super valuable. I think this is foundational to what America is. I think without that, I think immigrants will assimilate in some ways, but which ways immigrants assimilate has a lot to do with, what are the things that stand out to them most as the culture of the country that they're joining? And are those things that make them feel a swelling of pride? It makes perfect sense that if someone comes to the United States, especially I heard from people who are biracial and in Europe and Asia, everybody treated them as Other, and they came to America and they're like, people don't treat me as other here. People seem fine with who I am. It is not notable. They give me a fair shot. This makes you enormously patriotic. You get so much buy into the meta-project from, I came to America and they treated me as an individual and it was great. Being treated as an individual was the best thing ever. Just instant buy-in to the meta-project. I think there's also, to the extent you have a culture and ethos of, part of our national strength is that the best people from everywhere come to America and become Americans and contribute their strengths to us, that's a narrative that's very easy for people to grab ahold of. And then also our welfare state is less generous than Europe's. I think Europe specifically ended up in the difficult position of, lots of refugees of war and conflict, which certainly be done successfully, America has done it successfully in the past, but I think it is a harder case than the bulk of immigration to the U.S. has been from Latin America to work here because there's more jobs and more opportunity. Also, we got a lot of people fleeing socialism. People fleeing socialism integrate extremely fast and well, because they're like, capitalism, this is great. There's food in your grocery stores. Extremely rapid process there.
+
+There's some luck of the draw there, some ways in which I think the American culture and ethos is uniquely good. It does seem to me like Europe both did a less good job of having a meta value that everybody got on board with. And the situation you described in the UK, it was just an insane policing failure. The first time somebody commits a gang rape, they should go to jail for an incredibly long time. Plausibly be deported if they're there on a temporary status of some kind. If that happens the first time, then you don't get any of the subsequent times.
+
+You need the rule of law to have any other good things in a society, but you specifically need the rule of law if you're asking people to do individualism and not tribalism, because one of the circumstances that encourages tribalism is if people feel like the objective rules will not be applied fairly and evenhandedly, and so they have to group with people who will retaliate on their behalf. This is why racist gangs show up in prison, because prisons don't have good rule of law. I think this is really, really bad and we should do way more about it, but outside prison, we have pretty good rule of law and we mostly don't get racist gangs. And if you have bad rule of law, then you are going to encourage tribalism. You need to consistently immediately enforce your laws. If you don't do that, yes, you will have a lot of problems. The rule of law is in fact really, really important.
+
+I also think the way that asylum law was written was just not very well designed for like the actual situation we're in, in the 21st century. Basically we turned away boats of Jews and then they died as an extremely direct result. And so it's very tempting to write a rule that's like, Hey, if you get a boat of Jews and they're going to be murdered unless you let them into the country, just let them in, come on.
+
+And I wish we had not had the Holocaust happen. It killed an enormous number of people. I think everybody would be better off if we had, in fact, just let everybody in.
+
+A thing about modern conflicts is that if you're literally having the Holocaust happen, then the displacement death thing is very direct. Either of these people will straight up be murdered or somebody will let them in. In most conflicts, it's more like either you let them in or somebody lets them in or they run a much elevated and horrifyingly high, but not 100% risk of death. And if the value of being in your country is way, way higher than the value of being in their country, then the amount of elevated risk of death that is necessary to get 10 million people to move there is lower than it would otherwise be. And so you have the case that I think everybody agrees on: these people will straight up be murdered by their government, which has been taken over by evil people, unless you let them in. And you have the case that people don't agree anywhere near as much on, which is the whole area is having a civil war and tons of atrocities are happening all the time, and now the entire population of the country would really like to be somewhere else, in part because wars are always, always horrible, and in part, because even if there was no war, they would rather be somewhere else because your country is just a lot better.
+
+And then you have the case where I'm kind of in favor of immigration, just, I think almost all immigration can be good. But the case that most Americans are not excited about, which is, they would like to come here because it is a better place to be. They learned that for some reason, the rule is they can only come here if someone is trying to kill them. Someone is trying to kill them because base rates of violence among young men in their home country are just very high. So they can truthfully be like, yeah, someone is trying to kill me. We're not even talking about anybody who's doing fraud, but this is not at all the thing that we had in mind when we originally wrote the, "Please don't turn away the boat of Jews who will immediately be murdered" rules. So I think in a democracy, you need to do immigration in a way that feels fair to people and doesn't feel like it is about navigating loopholes and getting in on a technicality.
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+And you need people to feel like the assimilation to the meta-culture is happening and is being prioritized. And if you don't have that, then people are not going to be comfortable with immigration. So especially if you think immigration is good and you want to have immigration, you need to be like pretty laser-focused on, we will do immigration in principled ways that are fair and transparent and don't feel to people like rules-lawyering and that promote assimilation into the meta-culture, and we're measuring whether the assimilation into the meta-culture is working and we would change course if it wasn't working. We are not just doing this blindly and we're not doing it so fast that by the time we change course, it would be too late to change course or anything like that. If you do not persuade people of those things, then people are not going to be in favor of your immigration project.
+You have to deliver on those. I think it would have been possible to let in the number of people that we let in under Biden in a way that was good for America and broadly popular and worked well. I think the Biden administration was not good at governing in a bunch of ways, but probably the most catastrophic was that they didn't have buy-in. They did things that felt to everybody like that's just rules-lawyering. That's not the thing we meant at all. They were not responsive to problems that were cropping up or things like that in a way that left people feeling like they would actually notice if this was going badly and they would change course if this was going badly on any level other than the electoral. All of that is like a recipe for what you got, which is thermostatic backlash, lots of voters going, kick everybody out. And now we're rounding up Iranian grandmas who've been here since the 1979 revolution, and just screwing up people's lives that had nothing to do with it. And now we're getting a thermostatic backlash again. Support for immigration has hit all-time highs. To some degree, politics is politics. I think it is very much possible to do better here. I think Europe seems to me to have like strained their trust along all of those dimensions a lot more, so like they have a much harder problem in terms of arriving at an immigration policy that the population feels is fair and lawful and good for the country and monitored closely enough that if it is not good for the country, it will be quickly and responsibly changed. And I think this does make Europeans less liberal and less pluralistic because people get more tribal when they feel under threat in those ways. And since I think tribalism is bad, I think it is important to avoid creating the conditions under which people become super-tribal. But again, I don't want to be doomer here. I think America's pretty good. Twitter has a lot of people that are bad. It has a lot of people who are not from America. It has a lot of bots. It has a lot of Russians who we know are just paid to try and make us all hate each other. I called them Russian bots at one point, and someone was like, technically, just so you know, they are Russian agents who are somewhat LLM-aided, but almost all of the high-level decisions are still being made by a specific Russian. I was like, thank you for the correction. I will use the appropriate terminology about the bot-aided Russian agents trying to make us hate each other going forward.
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+But if instead of being on Twitter all the time, you go outside, I think we have a culture of law-abiding people who respect each other and like each other and don't see each other primarily in terms of skin color and give each other the benefit of doubt and transact with each other successfully, sometimes across culture differences. Everybody's kids play together at the park. I think we're going to make it, but I think liberalism can fall apart in a generation.
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+**ZMD**: Thanks very much. This has been very enlightening.
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+**KP**: Yeah, super happy to.
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