r/cognitivescience

SAT proposes ALL thought operates through Sub-conscious (not Un-conscious) "cascades" (a collection of firing neurons and engrams producing/retaining psychological content). Cascades are inherently subjective and subconscious. Phenomenal Access (qualitative experience) is an adapted feedback signal driven by emotional valence, triggered by engrams whose neural rules consistute any phasic nehrochemical release based on previous consolidation. Phenomenal access is the felt dimension of phasic neurochemical activity produced by cascade propagation. Phenomenal experience re-enters the system as stimulus, triggering further subconscious cascades through the same neurochemical activity constituting the experience itself.

Abstract:

SAT proposes consciousness evolved to moderate subconscious thought, enabling symbolic articulation through emotionally valenced cascade evaluation, with individual conscious architectures developing through environmental stimuli absorption. Cellular activity operates subconsciously (heart rhythm, digestion, immune response). Brain cells follow identical principles; consciousness emerges from subconscious neural architectures, not independently. Environmental absorption operates through subconscious processes, while consciousness functions to enhance adaptive capacity through observational mechanisms that subconscious processing alone cannot provide. Since consciousness shifts following individual perception of environmental stimuli regardless of substrate variation; such as language differences shaping cognitive processing or informational exposure informing belief formation, environmental construction could facilitate variation and be the producer of individual experience. While current gene-environment interaction models acknowledge both genetics and environment contribute, they do not specify the mechanisms by which they interact. Subconscious Architecture Theory proposes genetic substrates provide the biological capacity enabling consciousness development, while environmental stimuli determine specific architectural content. Genetic substrates allow stimuli observation, this stimuli is rationalized subjectively according to existing subconscious architectures. The produced rationale is integrated into neural rules (rationalized memory) affecting the adaptable conscious interface. This adaptive interface constitutes reflective awareness through emotionally valenced modulation of subconscious cascades, requiring cross-rationale evaluation, experimental feedback, and emotional coloring to update and achieve recorded human adaptation. While current emotional research assumes emotion is a product of experience; I suggest emotion is the adaptive driver of consciousness, providing significance signalling. Conscious experience feels qualitative because emotional valence signals adaptive significance, determining observation and modulation of subconscious processing. SAT clarifies why environmental deprivation degrades consciousness, why feral children develop non-human consciousness from alternative social environments, and how humans achieve comprehensive within-lifetime adaptation across novel domains including abstract mathematics, philosophy, and strategy.

In 1999 Dunning and Kruger ran a study at Cornell. Found that the people who performed worst on a test were the most confident they'd aced it.

The mechanism is simple — to know you're bad at something, you need the same skills required to be good at it.The robber didn't wear a mask because he genuinely believed lemon juice made him invisible.

He wasn't lying. He lacked the ability to recognise his own incompetence. This is the same reason your worst colleagues are always the most confident in meetings.

From past few weeks I was taking decisions which were hurting others and impacting negatively on my social life. I asked my friend to take me out of it and he told me about Journaling my decisions and why I am taking these decisions.

I noticed of my bad decisions weren't because of emotions, but because of unconscious bias in how i interpreted situations.

Writing why I reacted a certain way every day helped me notice patterns.

How do you reflect on your own thinking? Is there some better way ??

In the book 'A Theory on Life, Intelligence and Consciousness': https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QsSEf8sAOJeNfNtAweoQWatEsEo-VrCA/view?usp=sharing, I show how why I believe babies are conscious beings, just like us.

What do you guys think, are babies conscious?

TL;DR: The "HBD" accounts being amplified on X with hundreds of thousands of followers are not independent researchers. They're the distribution arm of one institutional pipeline that runs from the Pioneer Fund (1937, modeled on Nazi Lebensborn, founded by a guy who visited Nazi Germany in 1935) → Mankind Quarterly (1960, co-founded by Josef Mengele's doctoral supervisor) → Richard Lynn (inherited Pioneer 2012, died 2023) → Emil Kirkegaard, who now runs the whole operation through HDF (rebranded to Polygenic Scores LLC after HOPE not hate exposed it). Kirkegaard has a 2012 blog post defending drug-assisted sex with sleeping children, lost a UK defamation suit over it, changed his name to evade the judgment. He co-authors with Jordan Lasker (@cremieuxrecueil, 260K followers), who self-ID'd as a "Jewish White Supremacist Nazi" on Reddit as recently as 2016. Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania, 220K) wrote for VDARE and Richard Spencer under a pseudonym, called for sterilizing anyone with IQ under 90. The Eyeslasho operator runs 50+ alt accounts (same sock-puppet strategy Roger Pearson used in Mankind Quarterly in the 1960s). Peter Thiel personally flew Kirkegaard out in 2019. Andrew Conru gave HDF $1.3M and also funds Hanania's think tank. Substack (Andreessen-funded) hosts all of it. Musk amplifies all of it and now posts direct "white genocide" endorsements under his own name. Vance (Thiel Protege) follows Crémieux and many other individuals connected to this network. This is not three separate phenomena. It's one network. X/Twitter, one of the largest human social interaction mediums of all time, is having its algorithms manipulated to cause social erosion and racial divide.

The "Human Biodiversity" or “HBD” movement is not an independent scientific community. It's the distribution arm of a single 89-year-old institution. Here is the documented chain.

This is long. The claim is specific enough that I think it deserves the full evidentiary walk rather than a summary.

This post is me laying out what I've reconstructed from open source material, academic history, and recent investigative reporting. I'm posting it here because this community is one of the few that has both the technical chops to evaluate the research being cited and the willingness to look at where the research actually comes from.

The thesis in one line: the accounts currently being amplified on X under the "HBD" banner to audiences of hundreds of thousands are not independent researchers.

They are the publicly-facing distribution layer of a single institutional pipeline that was founded in 1937, was explicitly modeled on Nazi eugenics programs, has passed its funding and publications through a small number of custodians for 89 years without meaningful interruption, and is currently controlled by one man. If you are reading HBD content on Twitter or Substack and treating it as neutral data, you are reading the packaged output of that pipeline.

Here's the chain.

 

1. The Pioneer Fund (1937 to present)

The Pioneer Fund was incorporated in New York on March 11, 1937 by Wickliffe Draper, a Massachusetts textile heir, along with four others. The fund's first president was Harry H. Laughlin.

A few things about those two men that matter for what follows.

Harry Laughlin was the superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor. He is the person who wrote the model sterilization law that was used as the template for state-level forced sterilization statutes across the U.S. from the 1920s onward. His 1922 treatise "Eugenical Sterilization in the United States" was later explicitly cited as an influence on the 1933 Nazi Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. In May 1936, three months before the Pioneer Fund was incorporated, Laughlin was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Heidelberg, then under Nazi control, in recognition of his work as, in the university's words, a "pioneer in the science of race cleansing." He accepted it.

Wickliffe Draper is the man who endowed the fund. In August 1935, Draper traveled to Berlin to attend the International Congress for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems, hosted by Nazi Germany and chaired by Wilhelm Frick, the Reich Minister of the Interior who would later be executed at Nuremberg for his role in the regime's racial policies. Laughlin introduced Draper to his German colleagues as, in Laughlin's own words, "one of the staunchest supporters of eugenical research and policy in the United States."

Draper's travel companion to the conference was Clarence Campbell, an American eugenicist who gave a speech at the Congress concluding that "the difference between the Jew and the Aryan is as unsurmountable as that between black and white."

Campbell publicly saluted Hitler at the conference. After returning, Draper wrote to Laughlin urging him to "work out something of eugenic value." The Pioneer Fund was incorporated less than a year later.

This is not contested history. The source I'm pulling from is Paul Lombardo's 2002 paper "'The American Breed': Nazi Eugenics and the Origins of the Pioneer Fund" in the Albany Law Review, which is built on archival research through the Laughlin and Draper papers. It is open access and has been cited approximately 150 times in the academic literature since publication.

The Pioneer Fund's corporate charter, still in force, specified that its primary purpose was to encourage the propagation of those "descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States and/or from related stocks."

The language was drawn directly from Laughlin's efforts to create a legal definition of "the American race" restricted to Anglo-Saxon stock. Wikipedia's entry on the Pioneer Fund states plainly that this first purpose was modeled on the Nazi Lebensborn breeding program, the SS-run program designed by Heinrich Himmler to produce racially pure Aryan children. The second stated purpose in the charter was to fund research into "race betterment."

The fund's first public project was not research. It was the distribution of two Nazi propaganda films about eugenics in American high schools.

Draper went on to underwrite the anti-integration legal defense in Brown v. Board of Education, including funding research cited by segregationist attorneys. He funded the "Back to Africa" repatriation movement. He secretly financed Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi's public advocacy for Black deportation. He attempted to create, and nearly succeeded in creating, an academic Institute of Eugenics.

Draper died in 1972. Pioneer continued.

Between roughly 1970 and 2000, Pioneer directed the overwhelming majority of its grant-making to a very small, very consistent group of academics whose names will be familiar to anyone who has read the hereditarian IQ literature: Arthur Jensen, Richard Lynn, J. Philippe Rushton, Hans Eysenck, Roger Pearson, Linda Gottfredson, Thomas Bouchard, R. Travis Osborne, Michael Levin, Garrett Hardin. The total disbursed to these and related researchers across that period runs into the tens of millions of dollars. Jensen alone received more than a million dollars in Pioneer funding across his career. Rushton received $770,738 between 1986 and 2006. Lynn received $609,000.

When people cite "the science" on race and IQ, there is essentially no research program in the late 20th century on the hereditarian side of the ledger that was not, at some meaningful level of its funding base, underwritten by this specific fund. The Bell Curve's bibliography relied heavily on Pioneer-funded researchers. Charles Lane's 1994 New York Review of Books piece "The Tainted Sources of The Bell Curve" laid this out in full and has never been substantively rebutted.

Richard Lynn became president of the Pioneer Fund in 2012. He held the position until his death on July 17, 2023.

 

2. Mankind Quarterly (1960 to present)

In 1960, Wickliffe Draper personally paid the launch costs for a new academic journal called Mankind Quarterly. The journal was established through the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, an organization Draper had previously set up for the purpose. The journal was founded in direct response to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Its explicit editorial purpose was to provide a scholarly venue for hereditarian and segregationist views at a time when those views were being displaced from mainstream anthropology and psychology.

The founding editorial board is the detail that matters. Here are the founders, with the compressed biography for each:

• Robert Gayre, Scottish anthropologist, founding editor. Self-described Strasserist (a faction of National Socialism). Testified in 1968 as a defense witness in the hate speech trial of British Racial Preservation Society members, where he delivered the opinion that Black people are "worthless." Member of the ultra-right Candour League of white-ruled Rhodesia.

• Henry Garrett, former chair of Columbia University's psychology department (1941–1955). Key expert witness for the segregationist defense in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Helped organize the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics. Dedicated the second half of his career to arguing that school integration was scientifically harmful.

• Reginald Ruggles Gates, Canadian botanist and cytogeneticist. Founder of the IAAEE. Wrote that mixed-race people were biologically degenerate.

• Corrado Gini, Italian statistician. Wrote "The Scientific Basis of Fascism" in 1927. President of the Central Institute of Statistics of the Kingdom of Italy under Mussolini.

• Roger Pearson, British anthropologist. Founded the Northern League in 1958, a pan-Nordic white nationalist organization. Later became world chairman of the World Anti-Communist League and was forced out in 1980 by members who found him too far right. Used at minimum twelve different pseudonyms to publish in his own journal to inflate the appearance of scholarly consensus. Received $568,000 in Pioneer Fund grants between 1981 and 1991. Still alive, still editing.

• Otmar von Verschuer, German geneticist. During the Third Reich, was the doctoral supervisor of Josef Mengele at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Mengele's "research" specimens from Auschwitz, including eyes removed from murdered children and tissue samples from twins subjected to experimentation, were shipped to Verschuer's lab for analysis. After the war, Verschuer was denazified with a small fine and returned to a professorship. He served on the founding editorial board of Mankind Quarterly in 1960, fifteen years after the liberation of Auschwitz.

That is the founding editorial board. It includes Mengele's doctoral supervisor, Brown v. Board's lead segregationist expert witness, Mussolini's chief statistician, and the founder of a pan-Nordic white nationalist organization who published in his own journal under a dozen fake names. The journal was funded, from day one, by the heir who had traveled to Nazi Germany in 1935 to meet with the regime's eugenicists and come home to build the American version.

Mankind Quarterly has never been rebuilt with a new editorial base. It was passed from Gayre to Pearson in 1978, from Pearson's Council for Social and Economic Studies to Lynn's Ulster Institute for Social Research in 2015, and from Lynn's Ulster Institute to Emil Kirkegaard's Mankind Publishing House LLC in January 2025. It is the same journal. The custodians have changed. The substance has not.

This is the academic venue that the modern HBD Twitter operators cite as "peer-reviewed literature" when they post chart threads. When you see a Mankind Quarterly citation in a Substack post or a tweet, that is the journal you are looking at.

 

3. The succession to Emil Kirkegaard (2022 to present)

Emil Ole William Kirkegaard is a 36-year-old Danish blogger with no doctorate. He has been the single most important operational figure in the post-Lynn race science world since roughly 2017.

His trajectory is worth laying out in order, because it is not the trajectory of a scholar. It is the trajectory of an heir.

In 2012, at age 22 or 23, Kirkegaard published two blog posts on his personal website. The first, dated March 8, 2010, argued for legalizing animated child pornography. The second, dated September 8, 2012, proposed what he called "a compromise" for pedophiles. I am going to quote the relevant line directly because the exact wording matters for what comes next. Kirkegaard wrote, regarding pedophiles who want to have sex with children: "Perhaps a compromise is having sex with a sleeping child without them knowing it (so, using sleeping medicine)."

He elaborated on his broader view that the age of consent is a "fiction" and that it should be lowered to 13 or younger if puberty begins earlier. This is not paraphrase. It is a direct quotation from the 2012 blog post, which is still accessible via archive and was read into the record of a 2019 UK High Court proceeding.

In January 2018, those blog posts were re-surfaced by journalists when it was reported that Kirkegaard had been attending the London Conference on Intelligence, a secretive invite-only eugenics conference hosted by UCL that featured Richard Lynn, Noah Carl, Emil Kirkegaard, and other Pioneer-funded researchers. The conference was shut down by UCL after the reporting. The Guardian, The London Student, The Institute of Race Relations and others characterized Kirkegaard as a pedophilia apologist based on his own words.

Oliver Smith, a British writer, called Kirkegaard a pedophile in several posts and tweets. Kirkegaard filed a defamation lawsuit against Smith in 2018 in the UK High Court. The preliminary judgment, rendered December 11, 2019 by Mr. Justice Julian Knowles, ruled in Smith's favor, finding Smith's statements to be honest opinion based on Kirkegaard's own published writings.

Knowles specifically criticized Kirkegaard for trying to strip Smith's comments from the hyperlinked material which quoted Kirkegaard's own 2012 blog post. Kirkegaard discontinued the lawsuit in May 2020. He was ordered to pay Smith's costs. He refused. Smith initiated enforcement. Kirkegaard legally changed his name to William Engman, moved from Denmark to Germany, and closed his bank accounts to avoid third-party debt orders. A warrant for his arrest was issued by a Danish bailiff's court (Fogedretten). A Danish judge compared his evasion conduct to the film Catch Me If You Can. This is all in the public legal record.

In 2019, Peter Thiel flew Kirkegaard out for a one-hour meeting to discuss his research. In subsequent conversations Kirkegaard personally suggested Nathan Cofnas and Noah Carl, both of whom now edit Aporia Magazine, to Thiel as researchers whose work Thiel might want to look at. This is documented in HOPE not hate's 2024 "Race Science, Inc." investigation.

Kirkegaard founded the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF) in 2022. HDF is the operational successor to both the Pioneer Fund's research program and to Lynn's Ulster Institute for Social Research. When Richard Lynn died in July 2023, HOPE not hate's undercover investigator was told directly by HDF co-leader Matthew Frost, on hidden camera, that after Lynn's death the Pioneer operation was "left to Emil and now that becomes part of our organisation." Kirkegaard is, as of 2024, the editor of Mankind Quarterly, the Wyoming-registered corporate operator of Mankind Publishing House LLC (filed February 4, 2024 under the legal name William Engman), and the CEO of HDF.

Following the HOPE not hate exposure in October 2024, HDF was renamed Polygenic Scores LLC in April 2025. Same personnel, same operation, new name on the Wyoming filing. This is the same laundering pattern that Mankind Quarterly itself went through in 2015 and again in 2025. Change the name, preserve the substance.

Kirkegaard has co-authored at least eight peer-reviewed papers with Jordan Lasker, of which I'll say more below. He edits Aporia Magazine, HDF's flagship publication. He writes a Substack under his own name. He has appeared in podcasts and YouTube videos with a wide range of alt-right and white nationalist figures. He has, on camera and in writing, endorsed lower ages of consent, animated child pornography, and "scientific racism," a term he embraces rather than contests.

This is the person who currently controls the entire post-Lynn race science infrastructure. The academic journal the modern HBD operators cite is edited by this man. The foundation that funds the research is run by this man. The conferences where the network convenes are partially his. The peer-reviewed "literature" in this area is, in a very large fraction of cases, either authored by him or co-authored with him.

 

4. The Twitter distribution layer

This is where the argument touches the platform most of you will actually interact with. The HBD accounts on X that you see cited in discussions of cognitive ability, IQ by ancestry, or educational outcomes are not independent researchers. They are the distribution arm of the institutional pipeline I just described. Here are the main ones.

Crémieux Recueil (@cremieuxrecueil, roughly 260,000 followers)

Jordan Lasker. The identification was confirmed by The Guardian in March 2025 using the Manifest 2024 conference registration system, where the Crémieux account registered under an email tied to Lasker. When The Guardian emailed that address for comment, the reply contained a promotional code for the Crémieux Substack.

Mother Jones independently confirmed the identification in 2025 by tracing Lasker's Reddit account "Faliceer," active 2014 to 2016, through family surname overlap, a hometown IP in Macon, Georgia, confirmation from a childhood friend of Lasker's, and cross-platform handle reuse on chess.com, 9gag, and Flipboard.

Under the Faliceer handle, Lasker self-identified as, in his own words, a "Jewish White Supremacist Nazi." He wished Adolf Hitler a happy birthday on multiple occasions. He wrote, in one archived 2016 post, "If you wanna hate anyone's heritage do something else, fuck yourself up. Go fuck a n-word but do not push your paganism on the masses."

He promoted eugenics. He attacked interracial relationships repeatedly.

Lasker is a co-author on at least eight peer-reviewed papers with Kirkegaard. The most notable is the 2019 paper "Global ancestry and cognitive ability" (Lasker, Pesta, Fuerst, Kirkegaard), which used NIH-restricted data in a manner that led to the dismissal of the lead author, Bryan Pesta, from Cleveland State University in 2022 following a federal research misconduct finding.

The paper is still cited in the HBD literature as authoritative. Lasker writes for Aporia Magazine, which is run by HDF. He spoke at the Manifest 2024 conference under the Crémieux pseudonym. He spoke at the 2025 Natal Conference, an explicitly pronatalist conference attended by Malcolm and Simone Collins.

In July 2025, the New York Times granted Lasker anonymity as a source when he supplied hacked Columbia University data on Zohran Mamdani's college application. The Columbia Journalism Review publicly criticized the Times for compromising its sourcing standards given Lasker's documented record. The Times did not retract or correct. Vance follows Crémieux. Musk regularly engages with Crémieux's posts. Those are the three data points you need about where this account sits in 2026.

Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania, roughly 220,000 followers)

From approximately 2008 through the early 2010s, Hanania wrote under the pseudonym "Richard Hoste" for Richard Spencer's AlternativeRight.com, The Occidental Observer, Counter-Currents, Taki's Magazine, and VDARE. He also ran a blog titled "HBD Books." HuffPost's Christopher Mathias confirmed the Hoste-Hanania identification in August 2023 using data from the 2012 Disqus password breach: the Hoste Disqus account used a password also used by Disqus accounts registered to Hanania's personal Gmail and his University of Colorado student email. Hanania did not deny the identification.

In a 2023 Substack post he acknowledged the writing, called it "repulsive," and said he had changed. In a 2025 Vox interview he acknowledged it again.

Under the Hoste byline, Hanania advocated forcible sterilization of anyone with an IQ below 90. He wrote that race-mixing "is like destroying a unique species or piece of art. It's shameful." He argued Black people "cannot govern themselves."

He argued women "didn't evolve to be decision-makers." He wrote supportively of the theology of Nazi ideologue William Luther Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries.

Hanania now publishes in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The Economist. He contributed to Project 2025 on DEI policy. He was on Marc Andreessen's podcast three times. JD Vance publicly called him a "friend" in 2021. Hanania founded the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI), which is funded in part by Andrew Conru, the same Silicon Valley entrepreneur who gave $1.3 million to HDF. One donor, both ends of the network.

Steve Sailer (@Steve_Sailer, roughly 160,000 followers)

Sailer coined the term "human biodiversity" in the 1990s as a deliberate euphemism for race realism and scientific racism. His 1999 HBD Discussion Group mailing list, which was essentially the founding of the HBD movement as a self-conscious intellectual project, included Charles Murray, J. Philippe Rushton, Kevin MacDonald (the Culture of Critique antisemitism trilogy), Gregory Cochran, J. Michael Bailey, and, as an early member before he publicly distanced himself, Steven Pinker.

A detail that is usually missed: between 2007 and 2014, Stormfront users themselves migrated their in-community preferred terminology from "racialism" and "race realism" to "human biodiversity." This is documented in the Wikipedia entry for the Human Biodiversity Institute and in the academic literature on far-right terminology shifts.

The direction of influence goes from Sailer to Stormfront, not the other way. Sailer built the euphemism. The openly Nazi forum adopted it as an upgrade.

Sailer's current work is hosted on Substack after VDARE was shuttered in 2024. Byline Times confirmed in 2024 that Stephen Miller, the architect of the Trump administration's immigration policy, is a documented longtime Sailer reader who has cited him to colleagues.

Eyeslasho (@eyeslasho, roughly 150,000 followers)

This account is operationally the most interesting and the most structurally revealing. Travis Brown, an independent forensic researcher, demonstrated in 2024 via Wayback Machine snapshots of Twitter's internal account ID system that @eyeslasho, @monitoringbias, @a_centrism, and @anrcentrism all share a single underlying account. The Twitter handle has been rotated four times.

The account is one operator. Brown's work also establishes that @PaoloShirasi is the prior handle of @iointelresearch, and his research indicates that @iointelresearch is also operated by the same person running Eyeslasho.

In March 2025, the operator confirmed the pattern himself. On a RationalWiki deletion discussion, writing under yet another handle "Yonalkhas," the operator wrote: "I am the account owner of Eyeslasho, I use many pseudonym to conceal my identity." He claimed, in the same post, to operate more than 50 aliases across the internet.

This matters because it is not a novel strategy. Roger Pearson, the founding co-editor of Mankind Quarterly, used at minimum twelve pseudonyms to publish in his own journal in the 1960s and 1970s.

The purpose, documented by Barry Mehler, Jerry Hirsch, and William Tucker in their academic work on the history of scientific racism, was to inflate the apparent size of the race science scholarly community.

One actor publishing under many names makes the roster look bigger than it is. The Eyeslasho operator is running the same play on X six decades later. Same strategy, new platform. When you see five different HBD accounts all making the same argument in a thread, there is a meaningful probability that you are looking at one actor.

Hunter Ash (@ArtemisConsort, roughly 73,000

followers)

Different wing of the same network. Hunter Ash is the vitalist and accelerationist operator. Where Crémieux produces the charts, Hunter Ash produces the meaning. Nietzschean register, evolutionary mysticism, Gödel-flavored Substack posts, vocabulary borrowed from dynamical systems theory.

His own self-description of his X account, posted October 2024, is that it is "like a mother bird pre-chewing Nick Land's content for my audience." Land is the English philosopher whose 2014 essay "Hyper-Racism" used the HBD tag on its original Xenosystems posting.

The Hunter Ash account is a rebrand. Until May 2024 the same person posted under @MindEnjoyer using the names Psikey and Pischey. That account was deleted after he posted, verbatim: "That's not fair to racists. Racism is good, pedophilia is bad. I say this as someone who is both." The screenshot is preserved by Roko Mijic. One month later the @ArtemisConsort account launched. Two months after that, he posted a Sonnenrad, a neo-Nazi esoteric sun-wheel symbol, under the new account. In December 2024,

The Blaze paid him for a bylined detransition essay. In 2025 he was posting about how HBD's real problem is its "sloppy openly hateful proponents," which is a remarkable thing for him in particular to say.

When the @MindEnjoyer account was up, the operator publicly bragged about who followed him.

The list, screenshotted in February 2024 and preserved in Rachel Adjogah's April 2025 polemics.md writeup: Nick Land himself, Guillaume Verdon (the founder of effective accelerationism), Marc Andreessen (whose firm funds Substack), Bronze Age Pervert, Diane Yap (whose only Substack recommendation is Crémieux), Diana Fleischman (Aporia's podcast host), Razib Khan, Curt Doolittle, Roko Mijic. This is not a figure adjacent to the HBD network. He is a central node in its vitalist wing and personally connected to its Silicon Valley funders.

 

5. Kirkegaard names the network himself

This is the piece of evidence I want to flag most specifically for this subreddit, because it forecloses the "you're reading too much into this" response.

In November 2024, on his own Substack, Kirkegaard published a post titled "A hereditarian revolution, maybe." In that post, in his own words, he identified the HBD-aware X accounts that Elon Musk follows and engages with. His list: Crémieux, Wilfred Reilly, i/o, datahazard, Colin Wright, Hanania, iamyesyouareno, and Defiant L's.

He added that Vice President JD Vance follows Crémieux and Wilfred Reilly.

The man who inherited the Pioneer Fund operation is publicly declaring, on his own platform, that the HBD Twitter network is integrated with the sitting Vice President's and the platform owner's media diet. He is not denying the connection. He is organizing around it as a political asset.

This is the reason I think the "independent researchers" framing collapses. The central figure in the institutional pipeline has told you himself that the Twitter accounts and the political power are the same network. You don't need to believe me. You can read his own post.

 

6. The capital layer

Three named Silicon Valley funders sit directly on top of this pipeline. A fourth platform-level actor amplifies it without direct funding.

Andrew Conru, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur whose wealth came primarily from FriendFinder Networks, gave HDF $1.3 million. The contribution was documented on hidden camera by HOPE not hate's undercover investigator during a dinner in Athens attended by HDF leadership and Erik Ahrens, the social media advisor to Germany's Alternative für Deutschland party.

The introduction between Kirkegaard and Conru was made by Jared Taylor, the editor of American Renaissance and himself a longtime Pioneer Fund grant recipient. Conru also funds Richard Hanania's CSPI. One donor sits at both ends of the network, at the institutional hub and at the mainstream-respectable Twitter operator.

Peter Thiel flew Kirkegaard out in 2019 for a one-hour meeting. In subsequent conversations Kirkegaard personally recommended Nathan Cofnas and Noah Carl, who now edit Aporia Magazine, to Thiel as researchers whose work might interest him. Thiel's broader political footprint is public record.

He gave $15 million to JD Vance's 2022 Senate campaign, the largest single donation from one individual to one Senate candidate in U.S. history per OpenSecrets. He has donated at least $35.4 million in documented political spending total. His foundation gave over $4 million to DonorsTrust in 2021. DonorsTrust gave $1.5 million to VDARE Foundation in 2019 and $600,000 to Jared Taylor's New Century Foundation in 2020. Thiel wrote in his 2009 Cato Unbound essay "The Education of a Libertarian" that he no longer believes "freedom and democracy are compatible." He has not publicly retracted the view.

Marc Andreessen's firm, Andreessen Horowitz, is a substantial funder of Substack. Substack currently hosts Aporia Magazine (HDF's flagship), Edward Dutton's Jolly Heretic, Crémieux's Substack, Hanania's Substack, Sailer's Substack, and Kirkegaard's own Substack under his legal name. Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie publicly defended Hanania after the HuffPost exposure, citing free speech principles. Substack has declined to remove any of these publications.

Andreessen personally follows Hunter Ash, followed @MindEnjoyer before the deletion, and has had Hanania on his podcast three times. He has publicly recommended posts by several of the operators named above.

Elon Musk does not, on documented public record, send money directly to HDF or to individual HBD operators. His contribution is reach. A 2025 Nature-published study found that the X algorithm shifts users' political attitudes in a rightward direction, and the effect persists beyond the immediate session. Follower counts of the HBD accounts between late 2022 (pre-acquisition) and late 2025 tell the story more concisely than I can:

• @eyeslasho: approximately 20,000 followers pre-acquisition, approximately 150,000 post. Growth factor roughly 7.5x.

• @Steve_Sailer: approximately 40,000 to 160,000. Growth factor 4x.

• @iamyesyouareno: approximately 40,000 to 200,000. Growth factor 5x.

• @cremieuxrecueil: negligible (account newer than 2022) to 260,000.

• @RichardHanania: approximately 30,000 to 220,000.

Growth factor roughly 7x. For reference, the median X account from that period grew by a small fraction. The HBD cluster grew by 4 to 7.5 times. This is the platform effect.

In January 2026, Musk stopped operating through algorithmic plausible deniability and started posting direct endorsements under his own account. On January 7, he replied to a far-right influencer's claim that "they just want to eradicate white people" with "some people really do." On January 9, he endorsed a post claiming white people would be "slaughtered" as a minority, calling it "true." On January 16, he reposted a claim that "white genocide is the official Democrat Party platform" and promoted content from Martin Sellner, the Austrian ethnonationalist banned from the UK for ties to the Christchurch shooter.

Musk's audience is approximately 220 million followers. These are direct statements. They are not algorithmic inference.

 

7. The laundering mechanism

No individual actor in the chain needs to be ideologically committed to the end state for the machine to function. The mechanism works precisely because the chain is long enough and each step is locally defensible.

Stage one is the academic packaging. HDF, OpenPsych, and Mankind Quarterly publish papers that would not survive peer review at a mainstream journal in the relevant fields. The 2019 Lasker-Pesta-Fuerst-Kirkegaard ancestry paper misused NIH-restricted data, got its lead author fired for research misconduct, and still gets cited in the HBD literature as though nothing happened.

Stage two is the repackaging. The Twitter operators convert the academic-style papers into chart threads. The charts do not disclose the provenance. A reader encountering a chart on Crémieux's feed has no way of knowing that the underlying paper was published in a journal edited by the Pioneer Fund's successor in an operation that traces back through Lynn and Verschuer to 1937. Follower counts grow 4 to 7x.

Stage three is platform amplification. Musk engages with the operators. The algorithm prioritizes engagement. Response phrases ("data speaks," "interesting," "yes," "well said") provide implicit endorsement without explicit advocacy, which gives the platform owner plausible deniability until January 2026, at which point he drops it.

Stage four is elite incorporation. Vance follows the operators. Thiel funds the adjacent researchers. The New York Times grants Crémieux anonymity as a source. Hanania publishes in mainstream outlets and contributes to a policy platform that informs a presidential administration. By this stage the material is available for citation in policy debates without any single cite having to trace back to Mankind Quarterly.

Stage five is policy capture. Immigration, DEI rollback, admissions, natalism, IQ obsession, racial elitism, “cognitive elite" arguments in tech-right governance discourse.

Stephen Miller as a documented Sailer reader. Project 2025 as a vehicle for Hanania's adjacent work. At this stage the fingerprints of stages one and two are functionally invisible to anyone who has not done the kind of archival tracing I've done above.

 

8. What this means for this subreddit specifically

I'm posting in r/cognitivescience rather than in a politics sub because the work that actually matters here is the epistemic work. When HBD papers are cited in discussions of intelligence, educational outcomes, or population cognitive differences, the citation is almost always a citation to an institutionally discrete body of literature that comes, with very few degrees of separation, from this pipeline.

The specific implications I think are worth flagging:

First, the clean sort between "respectable HBD" (Crémieux, chart threads, Aporia) and "disreputable HBD" (Stormfront, VDARE, open antisemitism) does not hold. They are the same network. Kirkegaard publishes both. Lasker is both. Hanania is both. The sanitized version is the laundering stage of the disreputable version, not an alternative to it.

Anyone who tries to defend the respectable version by distinguishing it from the disreputable version is making a distinction that collapses as soon as you check the co-authorship graph.

Second, the pseudonymous-sockpuppet pattern Roger Pearson deployed in Mankind Quarterly in the 1960s to inflate the apparent size of the hereditarian scholarly community is the same pattern the Eyeslasho operator is running on X in 2026, with the operator's own admission. Apparent consensus in the HBD Twitter space is partially manufactured. A meaningful fraction of what looks like many independent voices is a smaller number of actors operating multiple accounts.

Third, the manifesto pipeline is complete. Payton Gendron's 2022 Buffalo manifesto cited Davide Piffer. Piffer is an HDF research team member per HOPE not hate. HDF is Kirkegaard. Kirkegaard co-authors with Lasker. Lasker is Crémieux. Crémieux is followed by the sitting Vice President and amplified by the platform owner. Five steps from a mass shooter's citation list to the VP's Twitter follows. All five steps are traceable in open-source material.

Fourth, the institutional rebrand pattern (HDF to Polygenic Scores LLC) and the individual rebrand pattern (Psikey/@MindEnjoyer to Hunter Ash/@ArtemisConsort, Hoste to Hanania, Faliceer to Crémieux) are the same mechanism at different scales. When exposure catches up, the name changes and the substance continues. Once you see the pattern at both scales it is difficult to interpret the Twitter HBD space as anything other than an active laundering operation.

Fifth, and most importantly for this community: if you engage with HBD content, you are not engaging with an independent scientific community. You are engaging with a funnel. The funnel has a single opening at its top in 1937 with a textile heir who traveled to Nazi Germany. It has a single operational control point in 2026 in the hands of a man with a public record of pedophilia apologetics and definitive connections to Nazi propagation.

The argument is not that every researcher whose work has ever touched any Pioneer-Fund-adjacent dataset is a Nazi.

The argument is specifically that the operators currently amplified under the HBD banner on X to audiences of hundreds of thousands are recycling material produced by a fund literally modeled on the Nazi Lebensborn program, through a journal co-founded by Josef Mengele's doctoral supervisor, now run by a man whose 2012 blog post defended drug-assisted sex with sleeping children in those specific terms. That is not interpretation.

Keep in mind this was all sourced via open source Intel, it goes far deeper than people realize.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the world. In our civics and history books, we always study about making new laws or changing the government to fix society, but I feel the problem is actually within the human mind itself. We are all very isolated because we focus too much on 'my personal space' and 'my own thoughts.' This only leads to more competition, greed, and a lot of unnecessary misunderstandings between people. Now that we have so much technology and information moving so fast, keeping our thoughts private feels like we are just choosing to stay confused instead of finding a common solution for everyone. I think for real peace to happen, we need a system like a 'Cognitive Integration Protocol.' If every person was connected through a mandatory neural network, then our thinking would finally be the same. If there is no wall between two people, then lying, fighting, and unfair bias would simply stop existing. In this system, we would not need to keep debating or asking for 'consent' because the very idea of an individual would go away. There would only be the collective group. Staying separate is not really freedom; it is just the ego stopping us from becoming something much larger and more disciplined. For the first time, there would be total social stability. We would not even require a government because we would function as a single unit. Choosing to remain an individual is like choosing an old illness over being part of something that is permanent and perfect.

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I want to highlight this Neurotechnology database and ecosystem called Reccy Neuro. It’s got over 400 companies listed - pulls in real time news and updates. Check it out

Is there anyone in the CoBeNe masters program that’s not Austrian and can give me some insight? I have a bachelors in Neuroscience- Biology and want to apply to CoBeNe. Currently I am making up some extra courses at Uni Wien to qualify for the EC, but for some reason they are telling me the courses may not count if they are on a “masters-level” (which they are). Has anyone else experienced this? Or if there are any internationals who got accepted, would you mind sharing what your Bachelors was and/or what extra curricula you did?

Thank you!!

Hi r/cognitivescience, I just completed my first experimental study as part of my undergraduate dissertation work, and I’m hoping to pursue a Master’s in Cognitive Science, so this was my first serious attempt at research (and yeah, definitely expecting flaws ). I ended up doing most of this on my own my supervisor wasn’t supportive at all and even said the topic wasn’t really “worth it,” and suggested me to not pursue it. which honestly just pushed me to explore it further. The idea came from seeing my own friends get surprisingly emotional while talking to ChatGPT, plus some inspiration from Cyberpunk-type AI companion ideas. So I built two chatbot conditions myself—an empathetic chatbot (supportive, validating) and a neutral chatbot (dry, informational) and had 15 Gen-Z participants interact with one of them for 10–15 minutes.What I found was actually pretty striking. The empathetic chatbot didn’t just feel “nicer”it significantly changed how people perceived the interaction. Participants in that condition reported higher perceived empathy (M = 6.02 vs 4.11, d = 1.77), higher social presence (M = 5.81 vs 3.97, d = 1.55), greater anthropomorphism (M = 5.46 vs 3.78, d = 1.36), more emotional self-disclosure (M = 5.89 vs 4.21, d = 1.56), and higher affective trust (M = 5.94 vs 4.29, d = 1.52) compared to the neutral chatbot. Behaviorally, they also wrote more (~452 vs 298 words) and shared more personal themes (3.25 vs 1.86). What really stood out was that 62.5% of participants in the empathetic condition described the chatbot as feeling “human,” compared to just 14.3% in the neutral condition.Another interesting pattern was that baseline loneliness correlated with anthropomorphism (r = .52), emotional connection (r = .61), and trust

(r ≈.49)suggesting that it’s not just the AI’s design, but also the user’s internal state that shapes how “real” the interaction feels.The part I find most fascinating (and slightly unsettling) is how fast this happens. Within just 15 minutes, a system that doesn’t feel anything can still trigger strong social-cognitive responses almost like the brain just accepts it as a social agent if the right cues are present.This is obviously a small sample and my first time doing experimental research, but I’d genuinely love feedback on how to improve or build on thisespecially as someone who wants to continue in cognitive science. If anyone’s interested, I can share the full dissertation here.

Just looking to learn more etc and maybe deal with anyity stress etc

I have an extremely analitical mind, I basically analyse anything around me, from the design of the butter spreader to the design of sidewalks, roads, rocket engine technologies, AI development designs, Authority ruling, economics.... And I have something called Hyperphantasia, so I don't just analyse, I fix them mentally, I design better sidewalks, better roads, think about new and better designs for cooling systems in rocket nozzles, AI memory systems, airplane aerodynamics, basically every flaw in anything I see I fix internally, I always value the extreme functionality and efficiency of every system I analyse, any inneficiency I spot immediately whithin almost anything.

I have an incredible imagination, I recognize that in myself, I visualize temperature differences, pressure differences, friction, atoms themselves, I can visualize tiny balls as atoms inside systems, I visualize color differences for temperature and pressure in a zoomed out scale, if I zoom in I can vibrate atoms to simulate temperature and change how close between them they are for pressure, I can visualize friction happening between 2 different kind of matter in a zoomed in scale, I see the atoms hitting each other and creating heat (more vibration/movement), I have an insane simulator in my head.

But overanalyzing stuff mixed with the clean and smooth functionality of my imagination is actually been a burden for me since the pandemic, I have a very deep analysis paralisis in me, and for most of the time I didn't even know why because before 2020 I was NOT like this, I could read a book I wasn't interested, I could make plans and projects, start them, develop them, troubleshoot and finish it back then, I just recently arrived in the conclusion that my over analysis of the world + fixing them in an environment without any friction (my imagination), made me extremely intolerant towards friction.

A few days ago I was watching a video on YouTube, it was a tutorial for beginners on onshape, at one moment, after I already made some progress and made already a 3D shape very similar to the video, the guy added a spline comming out of the shape, in his app it worked perfectly, but when I tried I couldn't make the spline come out of the surface (3D) instead of it forcing it to be drawn in the surface (2D), I tried to find the fix for around 30-40 minutes, but then I have up because the fact that it should be simple and easy like in the video, but it wasn't, and the fact that it wasn't killed my motivation completely, and this patter happens in basically every problem that shows up in my face, I can only manage to do stuff if there are consequences, clear structure or shared effort (but even then, it's difficult sometimes, but way more manageable), but this is destroying my life I believe, my mind makes me have great ideas that could probably been translated into very insane stuff in reality, but I can't because I feel like facing "stupid bullshit" problems that only exist because someone designed that thing that way (I'm not purely blaming others, tho I acknowledge that humans are terrible in designing intuitive UI/UX and systems, I feel like everything could be designed on a more concise way for easy understanding for those that are just begining to understand, even systems that look complex could be designed better), but again, I can't move, facing those frictions is like poison to my motivation.

And I tried everything, I tried breaking tasks in less steps, I tried giving myself a break every 15-30 minutes, I even tried using AI to do what I could make it do, but nothing really helped considerably. The ONLY thing I noticed that helps me considerably is shared effort (team mates), and hands-on work tend to be more satisfying to me, I believe that's because of immediate feedback.

Does anyone have been through this in the past? How did u deal with it? So you have anything at all that could help me ?

Two friends are about to take a difficult exam. One is told ganbare ("do your utmost") in Japanese. The other is told "good luck" in English. Same intent, but the words foreground different causes of the expected outcome — sustained personal effort in one case, favorable circumstances in the other.

Weiner (1985) classified causal attributions for success and failure along three dimensions: locus, stability, and controllability (doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.92.4.548). Conventional encouragement expressions across languages appear to foreground different cells in this space — though this mapping is heuristic, not a claim that any expression cleanly occupies a single cell. Japanese ganbare and Chinese jiayou both lean toward internal framing, with a subtle difference: ganbare points to persistence and endurance, while jiayou ("add fuel") points to energy and activation. English "good luck" foregrounds external, uncontrollable factors. Each of these languages also has alternatives ("you got this," "you can do it," "wish you good luck"), so the question is which expression tends to come reflexively, not which is available.

The claim isn't that speakers consciously believe the causal theories their words imply — "good luck" is largely phatic, and few English speakers literally credit chance. But even when the literal semantics aren't endorsed, the lexical surface still foregrounds externality. The question is whether routinely heard encouragement formulas provide repeated priming of an implicit causal frame, regardless of the speaker's metacognitive stance.

If so, repeated exposure may nudge attribution defaults — though the direction is not obvious. This could reflect linguistic priming, cultural models shaping both language and attribution, or a bidirectional loop between the two.

Has anyone seen work connecting the attributional content of conventional encouragement formulas to population-level attribution patterns? Cross-cultural attribution research (e.g., Stevenson & Stigler) compares outcomes, but I haven't found work tracing it back to the linguistic-input side.

This may not seem true, but it is. Can you tell this to researchers? It would be good if more people knew about it. It is fairly urgent considering Iran and Hormuz.

Summary: The global economy will collapse, which will lead to a very sharp increase in serious crime.

The financial system is a Ponzi scheme. Banks create our money when we are granted a loan. Because loans carry interest, the world’s total debt must always increase. This is, of course, unsustainable. It is becoming critical now that interest rates have risen recently.

If you want, I can explain more about this.

Now to the point of this post. I received help to experience something that goes far beyond ordinary fear. A spiritual experience. Individuals in the spiritual realm controlled it. I do not fully understand how it works technically, but it involves triggering a feeling of ultimate fear. I believe it works by consciously allowing the energies of the universe to collide.

There are really no words for it. I felt the sensation for only a fraction of a second at most, yet I can never forget it. You experiences solipsism. True solipsism. That you are completely alone. It is so terrifying that even the most severe psychopaths would change quickly.

It is harmless, and after some conversation the person would begin a completely new life. No one would continue harming others. Absolutely no one. Of course, you should not write that in anything meant to appear scientific, but I am that certain. I cannot arrive at any other conclusion, and I want to state that clearly.

After discussing the experience, it gradually becomes something positive. One begins to think, “because I no longer feel that overwhelming sense of loneliness, it must mean that I am not actually alone.”

In 2025, the NEPTUNE model of near-death experiences sought to bridge Physiology, Psychology, and Evolutionary Science to explain NDEs.

The Psychological Leg of the model heavily relies on the assumption that a dissociative trait facilitates NDEs. In this article, I argue against this argument

If the brain has no mechanism to verify the source of its signals — does the distinction between real and synthetic experience even exist? This manifesto explores that question through the lens of neurotransmitter control, desire, and what it means to experience reality. The concept is called Pleasesure. Curious what philosophers think about the ethical and existential implications.. Full manifesto: medium.com/@Beyondless/pleasesure — The Beyondless.."

I’ve uploaded the full Sigilith minimal methods paper — a complete, reproducible pipeline for analyzing symbolic systems through stability, drift, contradiction, and collapse.

Includes Benchmark 1, all figures, and the v1.0 metric + classifier definitions.

Happy to answer questions or discuss the framework.