To accompany this (which I’m treating as a very valuable work-in-progress [sic]), some initial straggly commentary.

(1) Conceptual genealogists will insist on a link to this, so here it is. There’s a lot of discussion stimulation there. Some other time.

(2) Probably 90% of the ‘Cathedral’ discussion so far — insofar as this has over-spilled the NRx dikes — has consisted of “why don’t we call it the Synagogue?” Tedious as this may be, it’s a crucial question, because it effectively draws the NRx contour. If the cooptation of Judaism by the main cladistic trunk of dynamic modernity is not understood, nothing has been. ‘The Cathedral’ is a term that captures the exclusive insight about which NRx coalesces.

(3) Nydrwracu’s diagram, and Radish’s, are no doubt incomplete, but they are fully adequate to the most decisive point. The Cathedral is an information system — even an ‘intelligence’ system — that is characterized, through supreme irony, by a structural inability to learn. The minimal requirement for any Cathedrogram is that it displays a radical deficiency of significant feedback links to the control core. Every apparatus of information gathering occupies a strictly subordinate position, relative to the sovereign Cathedral layer, which is defined exhaustively by message promotion. Core-Cathedral is a structure of read only memory. It is essentially write-protected. The whole of its power (and also its vulnerability) is inextricable from this feature. It is pure cultural genetics (and zero pragmatics).

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It’s not about white people.

Scott Alexander shows an acute appreciation for Nydwracu’s Fnord hunting (my own was far too cursory). It’s rare to see the innovation of a method (with a purpose), and it’s something more noteworthy than any but the most exceptional idea.

Someone with the requisite technical skills should implement this method in convenient software. As a quick-and-dirty way to excavate real messages, it’s hard to beat.

Dissatisfied with this, so I’m taking the unprecedented step of pushing it under the fold, and replacing it.

Despite some intense competition (see comments), I’m going for the classical approach. People could actually get away with wearing this, without being beaten to a brain-damaged wreck in the streets, and the message could not be more crucial. So here we go:

E > V

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Duck Enlightenment (jokeocracy) hashtags this as an #instantclassic. It is. (Also, make sure not to miss Stirner‘s potted-history of Neoreaction in the comments.)

… and it looks as if we’re stealing the Black Sun too:

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Scharlach has an innocent question for Jerry Coyne:

What is the current understanding of animal behavior? Is animal behavior generally understood as a collection of phenotypes that emerge at least partially from their genes? All the work on animal domestication, in particular, seems to point toward that conclusion. But I could be wrong. What’s your sense of it? 

If behavior of animals — and I don’t just mean mammals, of course — is believed to have not much to do with genes, then clearly, I see no reason to connect the two in humans.

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It looks as if the NYT has canned Nicholas Wade. Another stereotype conspicuously un-busted.

John Derbyshire, who know a thing or two about the social consequences of exorbitant truthiness, rounds up the reviews (prior to the axe falling).

ADDED: Wade says the DC is lying about trying to contact him (i.e. this crucial assertion: “Neither Wade nor his former employer returned requests for comment”). Since that’s the key evidence for the DC article, it makes the whole thing go away.

Wade:  “I retired from the Times about two years ago. There’s a stupid story you may have seen in the blogosphere. It is completely untrue. The writer just made that up. The fact that he saw the words ‘former Science editor’ in the piece I did in Time. He assumed that I had been fired by the Times. There is nothing to the story at all. I myself wrote the word ‘former’ in because I saw that the Time editor in putting the tag line on had said that I was Science editor of the Times. Since that was some time in the past, and is no longer true, I inserted the word ‘former’ and the writer in the Daily Caller just made the story up out of thin air. He made absolutely no attempt to contact me and not a word of it is true.”

To the precise extent that an apology is due to the New York Times, curse the Daily Caller. (Thanks to commentators below for clueing me in — although Twitter got there first.)

Some concentrated Handle-awesomeness unleashed in a Tyler Cowen comments thread (on Nicholas Wade):

1. You are not going to learn any new Science

2. You are going to learn what happens in your society when a distinguished and relatively prominent Science journalist publishes a prominent book in which he shows a bit of courage and gets as close as possible to promoting an unorthodox and taboo truth without risking utter ostracization.

3. You will learn who cannot risk publically aligning with that position in order to maintain their position and current and future influence. And you will learn the techniques they must employ in order to walk the narrow path between sacrificing their integrity promoting the erroneous orthodoxy itself, and supporting the accurate contrarian position. Don’t hold anything against Prof. Cowen, he’s doing good work, but sometimes he writes a post the purpose of which is not to be a reflection of his genuine understanding or position, but, essentially, to allow Sailer to write in the comments section and do the actual updating of priors.

Asking why people successfully avoid the subject and remain respectable by constantly talking about the Flynn Effect just might be relevant to this lesson.

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This has to be the greatest comedy sequence yet seen in the history of Twitter:

Oops. Just deleted my last Tweet. & would like to apologize to seniors & sufferers of Lyme disease. I was out of bounds.

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) May 7, 2014

Yikes. Had to delete another Tweet. I crossed a line on that one. Also, I thought 12 YEARS A SLAVE and THE BUTLER were brilliant.

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) May 7, 2014

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Charles Murray has written a magnificent review of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. He sees the publication of this book as a major cultural event, but the impact he forecasts remains carefully hedged:

… as of 2014, true believers in the orthodoxy still dominate the social science departments of the nation’s universities. I expect that their resistance to “A Troublesome Inheritance” will be fanatical, because accepting its account will be seen, correctly, as a cataclysmic surrender on some core premises of political correctness. There is no scientific reason for the orthodoxy to win. But it might nonetheless.

So one way or another, “A Troublesome Inheritance” will be historic. Its proper reception would mean enduring fame as the book that marked a turning point in social scientists’ willingness to explore the way the world really works. But there is a depressing alternative: that social scientists will continue to predict planetary movements using Ptolemaic equations, as it were, and that their refusal to come to grips with “A Troublesome Inheritance” will be seen a century from now as proof of this era’s intellectual corruption.