By Lance Welton
10/26/2019
British political scientist Dr. Noah Carl has thrown himself into his research since being fired by Cambridge University earlier this year for conducting studies which the Social Justice Warrior mob didnât like. Undeterred by the angry âWokeâ anti-scientists who successfully pressured for his dismissal, Carl has asked a fascinating question: âHave we reached peak-Woke?â
As a society, are we pre-âpeak wokeâ, at âpeak wokeâ or post-âpeak wokeâ?
â Noah Carl (@NoahCarl90) September 26, 2019
In this Clown World where biological males compete in female sports, unisex restrooms have been imposed for the sake of ânon-binaryâ people, and a âpoint of privilegeâ can be raised at political meeting against whispering and the use of the familiar term âguysâ [Democratic socialists convention erupts due to âsensory overload,' gendered pronoun usage, by Gregg Re, Fox News, August 4, 2019], can things really get any more insane?
According to Carlâs poll â in which his Twitter-follower voters had a choice between whether we were at pre-âpeak-wokeâ at âpeak wokeâ or post-âpeak wokeâ â we are at pre-âpeak-wokeââŚbut only just. In other words, things will get worse, but there appears to be a certain confidence that the tide will turn.
Of the 322 people who voted â many of whom are quantitatively trained academics, who are experienced in constructing predictive models and who thus are likely to have a nose for the direction of data â 60% felt that we are pre-âpeak woke,â 26% voted âAt âpeak-wokeââ and just 14% felt that we were beyond the heights of wokeness. In other words, a large minority of the âfinest prognosticators on twitterâ concluded that we were either at peak-woke or post-peak-woke . So it is clear in what direction these people believe society is essentially moving.
Indeed, many of the voters wished to qualify their vote. Comments, when Carl closed the poll and announced the result, included:
Others opined on what âpeak-wokeâ would look like. It could involve biological males beating females in the Olympics. Or, as one voter put it:
Wait until the millennials are in societal leadership positions in 5 to 10 yearsâ time and Gen z are all in their 20s, thatâs when weâll hit peak woke.
You might be inclined to dismiss Carlâs poll as meaningless. A group of Carlâs followers have expressed an opinion. So what?â But there are reasons to take it quite seriously.
British inventor and polymath Sir Francis Galton â a hate-figure for the âWokeâ due to his interest in heredity â is famous among other things for his concept of âthe wisdom of the crowd.â Crowds of people are more likely to reach accurate conclusions than are individuals, even if those individuals are experts.
Galton noted the most well-known example of this phenomenon: In 1906, he was at a fair in Plymouth in south west England. Eight hundred people took part in a competition to win a slaughtered and dressed ox. To win it, they had to accurately estimate its weight. Galton observed that the median guess, which 1,207 pounds, was accurate to within 1% of the true weight, which was 1198 pounds [Vox Populi, by Francis Galton, Nature, March 7, 1907 PDF].
This finding has been replicated again and again. However, crowds are more likely to be correct when there is an objective answer â such as was the case with the weight of the ox â than if the question lacks such a clear answer, as in how âwokeâ society has become.
But this brings us to the question of the kind of followers that Carl has â people whom we would expect to have reasonably high IQs and to be very interested in the objective truth. (Carl, of course, was fired for being too interested in the objective truth for his own good.)
There is a certain kind of person who is particularly good at making correct predictions and estimations. In recent years there have been attempts to identify these so-called âSuperforecastersâ systematically and work out why they so often get things right. There was even a popular book on this âGood Judgment Projectâ in 2015: Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner.
Superforecasters are the kind of people, based on thinking systematically about the issue and gathering together previous data and examples, who accurately predicted, in early 2015, that Donald Trump would win the presidency, who correctly prognosticated that Britain would vote for BrexitâŚthe kind of people for whom âshock resultsâ are not âshock resultsâ at all.
Psychological analyses of the best superforecasters has found that they tend to have high general intelligence â both fluid (solving novel problems, often based on evidence) and crystalized (solving highly abstract problems). In addition, they are highly competitive and driven. And they are happy to change their minds if new evidence implies that they should [Superforecasters: The Art of Accurate Predictions, Association for Psychological Science, November 5, 2015].
In other words, superforecasters are obsessed with the objective truth, meaning they are not very ideological. And they have masculine traits, such as drive, that have been shown to be associated with researching and being open to controversial areas of science and being fascinated by the truth.
Controversial âgeniusâ scientists, for example, who donât care about offending people in the pursuit of the truth have been shown to have these kinds of traits. (All this is discussed further in The Genius Famine, by Edward Dutton & Bruce Charlton.)
So we might cautiously expect that the kind of people who follow Noah Carl would be reasonably good at forecasting.
That, combined with the wisdom of the crowd aspect to Carlâs poll, means we can draw a tentative conclusion: Although we are not yet at âpeak woke,â the winds are changing and wokeness momentum probably diminishing. We may well reach âpeak wokeâ relatively soon.
And then we can expect the backlash to become as fierce as wokeness is today.
Lance Welton is the pen name of a freelance journalist living in New York.