Laurie Wastell has written an excellent piece in the Spectator about the ongoing investigations into Nathan Cofnas, a post-doc at Cambridge who wrote a controversial blog post last February that has already seen him lose an unpaid research associate position at Emmanuel College. I should declare an interest here – the Free Speech Union is defending Nathan. Here’s the nub of Laurie’s argument:
You don’t have to agree with what Cofnas wrote to see that the fact he might be fired for expressing his views violates fundamental principles of academic freedom. If people believe he is wrong, then they are perfectly within their rights to say why and how and to explain the flaws in his arguments. Instead, the principal claim levelled against Cofnas has been that some find his ideas ‘offensive’ and ‘distressing’. That may well be so, but if universities are to successfully fulfil their truth-seeking mission, academics’ right to explore offensive or controversial topics must come before considerations of hurt feelings. This vital principle must always be defended – especially when it comes to hard cases. Nathan Cofnas must be free to speak.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: This Substack post by Christopher Brunet about the Cofnas affair is also very good.
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His blog post is not controversial
At least two people seem to think it is controversial – perhaps they would like to explain why.
If the 2 people won’t explain why I would like to have a go at it. ——-They think it is controversial because they prefer the world to be a kind of Utopia of equality, diversity and where if it isn’t then leftist politicians should come along to socially engineer their fantasy world by sweeping reality aside and pretending that everything in the garden is lovely.
Yes lots of people I know think like that, but I didn’t think many people here do.
They don’t. ——-Just the ones that gave you the red thumbs down
Shame they can’t be arsed to share their arguments/thoughts – we all might learn something!
As someone said in the Spectator comments, he isn’t necessarily expressing ‘a view’. He is reporting on his data. That can be challenged in many ways. It should be up to those who disagree with him to find their own facts to counter this, or else admit his data does lead to this conclusion.
Either way, just stating DEI is more important than data isn’t a good way forward for a University. If you take that route then you are announcing feelings are (and will be) more important than facts. Anarchy will follow shortly after.
Yes, exactly what I thought. I didn’t read all of his substack as it’s very lengthy, but if Nathan isn’t merely sharing his opinion but is presenting this well-reasoned argument against wokeism backed up by the data then I’m afraid the snowflakes and leftards are going to just have to suck it up and deal with this inconvenient ( to them ) reality. They can untwist their knickers and attempt to counter his argument, as you say, but the way I see it this is just another nail in the ridiculous DEI coffin. The trouble is you can’t reason with the delusional or argue with the irrational and, as has been demonstrated time and again with all things Covid and ‘death jab’ related, when hardened lefties have an agenda to push, facts, contradictory evidence and counter-arguments just fall by the wayside, like pissing in the wind.
Indeed. I unfortunately haven’t changed a single person’s mind on Covid, although a couple have quietly admitted they probably won’t take any more ‘vaccines’ after family illnesses cropped up ‘out of the blue’. Neither have I changed anyone’s mind on the Climate Change scam, despite overwhelming evidence showing man cannot affect the climate with CO2.
In short there precious few out there who are prepared to alter their position. Too few people want proper debate because that’s too hard for them.
According to Carl Jung: “thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge”. Bingo.
I’ve read it but IMHO, it’s just an incoherent and incredibly verbose rant in favour of a “cultural revolution” supposed to “solve all fundamental problems of the modern [American] world.” Even a Nietzsche-quote supposed to illustrate that Germans are – by birth, obviously – all evil Nazis (“advocate nationalism and race hatred”) found its way into this piece for some reason I cannot fathom.
The only data in there is the repeated assertion that the mean IQ of different ‘populations’ would be different and that this must surely mean something. And referring to so-called IQs as data is more than a bit tenuous, as that’s not something which can be measured.
That said, I don’t think people should be censored or persecuted just for publishing something like this.
As I’ve said before, these kinds of arguments are only made in response to the received opinion which is that the reason outcomes are unequal is because of racism. You can argue until you are blue in the face that making arbitrary distinctions on racial lines is invalid/irrelevant or whatever other argument you choose to use, and I would agree, but I’m not the one you need to convince.
After more than 50 years of so-called affirmative action, nobody can have any idea about what “outcomes” (however defined) would be without it.
Some people believe that accusation of racism are a convenient tool in their political toolbox. Hence, they make up some bullshit to hang them on and not the other way round. That’s exactly the same as it was with COVID: The so-called conclusions a foregone as they’re really axioms (or articles of faith) and the work of the Scientist™ is to find something in the real world these foregone conclusion could have been derived from.
As to the specific claim: There are roughly 42 million black people in the USA. How many of these ever had a so-called IQ test? How many are illiterate and thus, cannot have an IQ test despite they certainly have an intelligence? What’s the correct frequency for re-IQ-testing these 42 million people to account for changes due to births and deaths? Lastly, how does one distinguish between genuinely stupid people and people who just can’t be arsed to take these silly riddles seriously?
Bottom line is that these mean IQ by race statements are also BS, just BS employed by the people who get attacked with racism accusations.
All the evidence points to these “mean IQ by race statements” NOT being BS. But I don’t really care about that, what I care about is people accepting that outcomes vary and let’s just treat everyone as an individual. But I will not see that in my lifetime. In any case, white European civilisation seems intent on self destruction so it hardly matters.
The so-called IQ is already nothing but bullshit. It’s based on letting people solve a number of perfectly abitrary riddles someone pulled out of his posterior because it he liked them this way. Further, even assuming that this relevation of the god of sociology (because that’s what it must have been) was actually The One True Intelligence Test, it still couldn’t distinguish between people getting a low score because of lack of cognitive ability and people who didn’t want to be bothered with this stupid pasttime.
When combining this with the other preferred pasttime of these ‘ologists, namely, one-off studies of random and extremely small subsets of hazily defined large groups (there’s no objective way to assess whether or not someone is or isn’t black), which are then, without any justification, generalized to the whole group, the outcome is BS to the nth power.
And that’s it. People speculating about the unkown based on their preconceived political standpoints and garnishing that with loads of numbers and mathematical terms so that the audience will hopefully end up being awestruck by them alone.
I have no preconceived political standpoint
Africa is the least developed continent economically, by far. Why? But I don’t care, I just want the anti racism brigade to go away and your arguments simply aren’t achieving that
I was referring to Cofna’s essay (should really call this write-up). And he certainly isn’t making the anti-racism brigade go away by battling them with his own BS on their chosen field for the great bullshit shootout.
I don’t think it’s BS and I reckon most people know this. We just need more people to say it out loud.
That you really believe in something which doesn’t make sense doesn’t cause it to make sense. And viewed from the outside, the BS battle on this field tilted in favour of the other side by the other side is not being won by its opponents. The racial inequality of outcomes story is a piece of fiction designed to browbeat the so-called American right. And it’s being browbeaten.
I’m going to borrow one of Cofnas’ statements here for illustration:
Suppose you make the empirical claim that race differences in intelligence are largely the result of genetic differences. You will be told that “race” is an incoherent concept, there’s no such thing as “black” or “white,” “intelligence” is subjective, and the “nature–nurture” distinction is meaningless. Everyone’s attention is then diverted to interminable philosophical debates about the meaning of “population” or “gene,” and we never get around to examining the evidence for the original claim.
While that’s content-wise misguided (see above), its description of the tactic employed by the other side is correct. The idea is to draw one’s political opponents into fruitless debates about first principles in order to distract from the actual issue at hand. These debates ultimatively peter out inclusively, the issue which was at hand is being forgotten (for now) and – under the cover of their phrases – the woke bullshit artists continue as they did before.
Yet as protests have continued, with one senior academic denouncing Cofnas’s work as ‘abhorrent racism, masquerading as pseudo-intellect’ at a student ‘town hall’ meeting…
If this is the best critique of Dr Cofnas’ work a Cambridge don can come up with, doesn’t say much for their critical thinking or analytical skills, does it? My, how standards have fallen.
(I should declare a a minor interest here – wrote a post grad paper on positive discrimination a few years back; by today’s standards I’d definitely get cancelled!)
Nathan Cofnas is a very brave man for reporting his findings honestly, and so are all those courageous enough to defend his right to do so. Well done yet again to Toby Young and the Free Speech Union team for taking up his case.
Something can still be “offensive” to some people even if it is true, or if there is a great deal of evidence that it is true. But I maintain you can only be offended with your own consent.——– I am from Scotland, and if someone provided data that showed Scots don’t do well in particular fields I would be asking myself why that is and what could Scots do to improve that situation. ——-I would not simply take offence.
I saw this and thought of you. Unless you’ve seen it already. Very good.
”Apparently this was seen at Ibrox Park the home of Rangers today.”
https://twitter.com/DaveAtherton20/status/1787175076132950063
Yes you are right it is very funny. I had not seen it before. But I am about to send a link to a mate of mine who blindly supports the SNP for some reason no matter what they do. Some people will vote for a hedgehog as long as it isn’t a Tory or English.
Oh, that is class Mogs.
Ye gods – whatever next!!!!! His remarks are controversial and distressing!!!!!
Are these people who made the complaint so pathetic that they cannot take any views other then their own into account?
I find it appalling that such people are supposedly ‘educated’. Don’t think they would last long outside of academia.
It would be interesting to know which one exactly. It certainly can’t be the out-of-context Nietzsche quote which basically asserts that all Germans are “by birth” extreme nationalists seeking to stir up race hate and his repeated statements that “many stupid white Americans on the so-called right side of the political spectrum are just like The Germans™” (aka The Nazis®) despite that’s by far the most bigotted and hate-filled part of the whole text.
Somewhat mollified, this ‘central thesis’ could be rephrased as “While many white people are doubtlessly extremely evil because of Their Genes™, some of them, especially, me, are really not!” But that’s already pretty much bending over backwards to accomodate the woke standpoint on race.
Nathan Cofnas is correct. The five races evolved different average IQs: Africa 71, Eurasia 100, Oceania 62, East Asia 105, America 86.