lollol
5d ago
Echoing @Imaginary_Knowledge but on a different tangent, in terms of garbage collection and high performance, the exception is obviously Jane Street with OCaml. Now is this the exception that breaks or prove the rule, I think only the long arm of history would be able to discern.
lollol
5d ago
In defense of Rust:
- Rust was created in a world with C/C++, it has to account for existing developers, existing workflows, existing code, existing bugs (that are now features), etc.
- Reality is inherently unsafe. Anything Rust relies on is
unsafefrom the perspective of Rust. Like even if all of technology is built from the ground up in only safe rust, well, pesky cosmic rays get in the way and flip a bit somewhere. - Because of 1 and 2, developers need to do
unsafestuff, and like always, it's git gud time. - The guarantee of Rust from my perspective is that the search radius is reduced. Critical bugs like this and the Cloudflare incident happens in and around
unsafe/unwrap. This bumps up the chances of bugs being caught before code is even introduced, during review, or even when it gets through, it's easier to find out where. - I think more stats is needed. Let's take the same time period as Rust has been in the kernel, how many lines of C code was added vs how many lines of Rust code was added. Let's compare how many CVEs were introduced by the new C code and the new Rust code. If I have to make a bet, I would bet on Rust.
I find criticisms that Rust is not good for exploratory work (data analysis, game development, scripting, etc.) much more persuasive, but then that just goes back to "find the right tools for the right job".
If there is a cultural war element to this, I think broadly people are yet again conflating their distaste of the tool (Rust/gun) with their distaste of the users (Rust community/gun owners).
And maybe a greater technology story of the usual people thinks !new_thing will solve all their problems, but actually !new_thing will only solve most problems and the remaining ones are the really complex ones (leading to a paradox of automation). And then certain people become cynical and disappointed and retreat to their old tools when others younger and newer people just adopts and proliferate the use of the !new_thing and then someday the cynical people wake up and found they missed the boat.
lollol
14d ago
Great comment, thank you! What is your opinion on the competency at varying levels of the public security apparatus? Maybe just a rating from 1-5 from the lowly traffic cop up to the FBI?
lollol
15d ago
Just wanted to note some news coming out of Vietnam
- There has been a lot of flooding in the last month or so in Vietnam.
- The incompetency of only giving 2 hour warning for residents downstream of the dam release can easily be painted as downstream of the messy re-organization that Vietnam went through, something I talked about 4 months ago
- I am myself not plugged into the situation but this is all within the context of a military vs police political fight in Vietnam. Currently the police is in ascendant because the current general secretary risen up from the police.
- A highly morbid story about consensual sexual decapitation, cannibalism, and snuff film dubbed "The Vietnamese Butcher" brew up and exploded all over the Vietnamese interwebs the last few weeks. The "Butcher" has been arrested btw.
- Which brings us to the conspiracy theory that 4 is actually just part of the fight in 3, which is to distract the masses from looking deeper into 1 and 2, because there is unconfirmed news that the "Butcher" was some kind of minor government official, possibly from the military.
Personally, I was shocked by my fellow compatriots and wondering if judging by the Japanese penchant for bizarre deaths, maybe I can enjoy good Vietnamese comics in a few decades or so.
My anecdata consists of two things that happened within the last month or so:
- An African man posting on Reddit about not eating pizza for the first time. I know that reddit has plenty of other spaces that I don't interact with, but from time to time there would be spikes/spurts from random communities into /r/all or I suppose my bubble. Like how /r/ScriptedAsianGifs can be thought of to signal the dominance of Douyin and inevitably TikTok. This isn't an African community per se, just a person from Africa that got attention, but it's enough for me to start thinking that Africa as a whole is coming online.
- A HN thread on the article "Why Solarpunk is already happening in Africa". The article is very optimistic, the thread less so, but the general vibe I get is that at the very least this is a major development that not many are paying attention to with regards to macroeconomics (similar to how the fertility crisis is not paid a lot of attention by the masses and only recently gotten into the zeitgeist).
Maybe it's all bullshit just trying to tie a pattern to small data points, but I am inferring a positive upward trend with regards to Africa.
lollol
21d ago
Yeap, should have pulled a Batman and just say “I won’t kill you, but I don’t have to save you”
lollol
22d ago
Could it be the other way around too? They are profitable so they can spend money on marketing. Same reason VPNs and gacha games once dominated YouTube sponsoring.
lollol
22d ago
I heard this on the Odd Lots podcast and the host essentially says: "Everyone wants the real estate market to be low and cheap when they can afford it, then never low and cheap again, always increasing in price until the end of their lives". I think there are plenty of people like that now, hoping for some 2008-style crash where they can "deploy dry powder". Most people have wishful thinking on how they will successfully time the market twice (first time is not getting in the market before the crash; second is getting in the market at or right after it hits bottom). If we talk to New Yorkers, many can certainly tells you some hindsight-stories about Williamsburg in the 00s, or just anywhere in the city in general in the 80s, but that's the point, regret is powerful fuel for memories. If the tides actually goes out, companies are doing layoffs, banks are failing, societal services shutting down, buying a home would not seem like a good idea. And real estate is special because of how local it is, in case of a collapse, maybe you get 80s New York, or maybe you get 50s Detroit. Not to mention, others who are more well versed have pointed out that structurally things can be even worse and that even more can still be squeezed out of all of us. Personally, I don't bank on house prices being low over the long term, and that's even before talking about the cost of home ownership. If I can maintain and not have to liquidate my little parcel of the pale blue dot, I think that's enough to be considered as an astounding financial success.
lollol
22d ago
I think in my head, when I was thinking planet-scale, I actually want to simulate/create populations that goes to war with each other. So maybe seed un-colonized planets with different "mixes", wait a few centuries, and then evaluate the ensuing history. The initial setup will be quite important, probably babies raised by robots. A varying amount of planets, a varying amount of possible "mixes" per planet. All kinds of variations on starting points. It's a very Civilization kind of perspective based on CivBattleRoyale.
lollol
27d ago
Thank you for the response. Obviously, your OG comment, followups, and this thread has given me a lot to think about. My personal belief (so I guess a bad bet that I'm willing to commit to) is that within 10 to 30 years, we'll see major upheavals in Africa as it "comes online" so to speak. If there aren't any, obviously I would be wrong and you all are ahead of idealists like me. Even the biggest of "copers" or ideological believers would struggle after a century of evidence.
I know that we can go line by line on claims made by both side and do an "Adversarial Collaboration" like @gorge so helpfully did for me briefly downthread, but unfortunately I am not that focused on this topic. I think at the essence of it, I like my premise more than yours and I find your and others arguments unconvincing still. So howabout this, I will touch base on this topic in a year? I do need to digest and research more on the many things people pointed out. By then, either my viewpoint has changed or I would have come up with some other arguments for us all to examine together (yet again).
As for the problems of slave-descendants in America, I don't have a concrete viewpoint about it at the moment, it's probably pure vibes for me but I do think generational trauma is real, that the external (culture and institutions and ideology) are way more powerful and can overtime erase the innate.
lollol
27d ago
After this thread, I think what I will do is wait 1 year and re-visit this topic. Personally, I have an ideological attachment to "all men are created equal" and an emotional attachment to the underdog story. And yes, that's coping, but I don't think it's yet "copium".
lollol
27d ago
lollol
30d ago
I'm going to copy-paste some stuff so maybe you've already seen it.
My bailey is: "I'm not denying that civilizational differences in war exists, I'm denying that the QC comment as presented made a compelling argument that the reason for the differences is ancestry" My motte is: "I'm not denying that civilizational differences in ware exists, I'm denying that the reason for the differences is ancestry"
My 3 mostly expresses my bailey, Argument 1 and 2 mostly expresses my motte. I made a mess of the comment because I didn't clearly point out the two. But thanks for sharpening my thinking.
lollol
30d ago
I said owned and operated
Touche. So I'll examine a few Sub-saharan car manufacturers and taking out the South African ones.
- Innoson Vehicle Manufacturing Company Limited is Nigerian and doesn't showcase their leadership team on their website but I know the founder is black and a brief look on LinkedIn and I see a black-majority employee base
- Katanka Group in Ghana doesn't have a good website but at least looks like a bunch of black executives and the employees also majorly black
- Kiira Motors, best website so far, is an Ugandan State Enterprise so a bunch of black executives and black employees
- Mobius Motors in Kenya unfortunately for me has a white founder, but a pretty black-looking workforce
Scrolling through the Linkedin people listing, I see plenty of engineers, product designer, technician, etc. Are they small? Yes, but the question was are there any black owned and operated. Are they at very real risk of just being bought out by the bigger international players? Yes, but that just comes back to my Argument 2. I think these are good enough examples to satisfy your criteria.
China, India, South Korea, were all very poor, and then they figured out how to build more and more technologically complex products and sell them and then they got richer.
You are right, and I don't have a good answer for this other than Argument 1. My instincts tells me that maybe there is an argument to be made of good governance appropriate for the timeframe or something about culture, there are plenty of other Asian countries that wasn't as successful. Bad for me but it seems like African countries might not be able to use the same playbook those countries used to pul themselves out of poverty](https://youtube.com/watch?v=tqZGsnUgCPA). Sorry for the chain of thought here but it's also something I'm grasping at. Time will tell whether I'm right or yall are right anyway.
PS: I agree Piston Automotive wasn't a good choice (I didn't do a deep enough dive), but to me they're clearly shows that they're black-owned but full of white workers
lollol
1mo ago
Yes but as pointed out in Argument 1, there have been long periods of history where particular groups of people also had bad track records in warfare then at some point turn things around, it seems to me that it would have been just as easy to point to "ancestry" then too. It seems easy then that the same mistake is being made now. I will always remember this comment on /r/WarCollege that argues Paul Kagame is one of the most notable military leader alive and I always wonder how a person of that skill and intellect would have fared in a non-African conflict.
lollol
1mo ago
Thank you for taking the time to reply, totally understand the cost-benefit dilemma of "should I participate?" you're talking about. Since I did make a top-level comment, I will try to reply to all that replied to me.
If race doesn't matter, then we can afford to wait around for historical time scales before passing judgement. If race matters, then the time to act is decades ago, and yesterday, and today.
That's definitely a dilemma, on one side is the possibility of inflicting injustice and persecution for who knows how long, the other side is making a civilizational-level mistake. I think I remember an AAQC that talks about how even if HBD is proven, they're not sure what would be the next steps and that some proponents of HBD does seem to be true "follow the science" types while some seems more interested in the societal engineering.
I suppose one can say that on a long enough timeline, everything will work out anyway so why worry about whether to act or not. At an individual level, migrate to majorly white societies and enact strict immigration assimilation laws. If race does matter, then over time, where suffering is stretched so thin it's minuscule, the "correct race" will win.
What happens rhetorically is that the side that made all of the guns used by both armies gets bonus points, and the side that used borrowed technology gets dinged. The losing side learned better, stopped selling out, and came back with bigger, better stuff to assert its comparative advantages.*
True, and I also still don't see how the disparity has to be explained by race.
The reason to give attribution to racial war ability is because there is first a difference in race, and a significant one. Two groups of slavs conquering each other doesn't leave much room for race. Second there is the matter of examples. Is there an African country that you think could stand up to Wagner? Probably Ethiopia at least. I won't count Egypt as I'm talking about people and not geography. South Africa used to have nukes, but "South Africa used to" could have been my whole post in four words.
I agree with you that right now I can't think of many countries in Africa that can stand up to Wagner. I've only recently gotten interested in African development so maybe I'll have a better opinion to share with all once I have more intuition on this.
I wanted to bring this part to the fore. This story is true, genes do sit at the root of everything, given you define everything as "life on planet earth." Yeah, genes really do sit at the root of everything. They're what differentiates between kelp and kangaroos, between horses and men. That's the point, that's the sore spot, that's your ultimate contention with the original post.
Why does it have to be gene? Why couldn't it be something like: god exists, who is white, and doesn't like black people? Or they were cursed ala "Midichlorians isn't the Force, it's only an indication of the Force powerscale of a person" kind of situation?
I was very unimpressed with the AskHistorians links, because they actively prune any arguments that are racial in nature. That's the water we swim in, but I notice the water. I'm not sure you do.
I thought of this as well, but it was hard to find scholarship that was digestible and that I myself feel sufficiently authoritative. I've lurked for a while but it's not necessary that I know what sources would people accept. And even then, I don't necessarily want to deny myself a source that I would often trust. TheMotte for me is the same, another water where I dip my toe in and try to synthesize "the truth" from other waters I take from.
Of course race matters, how could it not? We don't have to understand it for it to matter, after all, and we'd see it in the outcomes if it did (we do). So between saying it's not a problem, and starting with wait and see, there's not much here to sway me.
I do believe Argument 1, though the most abstract, is the most likely to instill some pause. Argument 2 and 3 aren't really attacking HBD itself but more the epistemology of the OG comment. From the vibes, I know that there's "not much here to sway" you, but maybe there was a slight flutter of the wings of a fly at least.
War does sharpen us, and so does culture war. I know that these are well-trodden grounds for you and others, it is probably tiring to debate and communicate over and over, so I really appreciate that you engaged with my comment.
lollol
1mo ago
It's alright, thank you for your response and sympathy. I knew that I was coming in with a point of view that would come under attack AND that I am under equipped for the battle. But I do want to be the one who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again. I did look at RandomRanger response to mine at the time but I think it's a continuation of Argument 3. For example, I can examine this sentence:
Not a single STEM Nobel has ever been awarded to a black person.
Well conveniently for me there is W. Arthur Lewis who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. I can already imagine the counters, "Economics isn't a hard science", "It's not even a real Nobel prize", etc.. However, taking the sentence at its face value, for me it's a lapse in data.
Thank you for your response, here's what I think of it
GDP (or rather, what GDP is actually trying to measure, economically valuable output), doesn't compound. Countries hit points of diminishing returns, hit points where they are up against the edge of technology and the pace slows down, hit points of bad government, and other countries catch up because they don't have to invent anything new, they just rapidly adopt other inventions. Hence, how Japan caught up with the West in about 70 years, or how China is now blowing past the USA.
I'm really confused and maybe I need you to explain further but I am firmly of the belief that GDP compounds. It's also easy from my perspective that early wins/advantages leads to "snowballing" or sustained comparative advantage. And extension from that is others can close the gap if they don't have to go through the slower innovation/invention process and can achieve "faster compounding". I would attribute to China blowing past the USA in terms of manufacturing and certain technologies is because clearly they put way more focus and intentionally built the foundation for it in the past and now the future. Also we have to account that currently China has more people than the USA, that is undoubtedly an advantage.
If a country has good government, economic output converges toward what smart fraction theory would predict.
Ok, I would like to invoke my Argument 1 and say I will wait for an African polity that "has good goverment". I actually think that time isn't too far away, optimistically it will happen soon (so 1 or 2 decades), at worst I do think it will happen before I die (which should be about 40-60 years away). The invading part though I'm not sure would ever actually happen.
Consider this simple fact though: out of a billion plus people in countries all around the world, in countries of all different economic situations, in countries that were never colonized, or threw off colonial oppressors long ago, or had gentle transitions from colonialism, all different circumstances, there is not a single black owned and operated company that can produce an engine block (nor anything more technologically sophisticated than an engine block, like a jet turbine or a CPU). It's going to be pretty hard to be good at war without engine blocks and jet turbines.
Unfortunately I don't know mechanic skills, but I do believe a "powertrain" is more complex than an "engine block". I found Piston Automotive which is black-owned and "supplies powertrain systems, front-end cooling systems, chassis systems, BEV and PHEV battery packs, and interior systems for the automotive industry." and is a pretty big company. I'm sure I can find more. We can also find multiple car manufacturers in Africa that are black-owned (the first one I picked had a white-ish looking founder actually but the second and third one are very black-looking). You are right that there are currently no black-owned aircraft manufacturer that I can find. I do find lots of black-owned companies in the tech world. I think my Argument 2 is strong here, automotive industry is known to be capital-intensive, requires high vertical integration, if we just talk Africa, that's a lot of demand for a continent where 40% still living below the poverty wage.
Being good at modern war requires intelligence, and the lower average intelligence of subsaharan Africans is hardly tenuous, but this is well-trodden ground for people on this forum. You can start with Chapter 13 and 14 of the Bell Curve, a book that was "argued against" but never "debunked" (after spending a very long time evaluating the arguments from both sides, many years ago, I came to the conclusion The Bell Curve actually understates the case).
Let me attempt at a rewording of my conclusion:
- My bailey is: "I'm not denying that civilizational differences in war exists, I'm denying that the QC comment as presented made a compelling argument that the reason for the differences is ancestry"
- My motte is: "I'm not denying that civilizational differences in ware exists, I'm denying that the reason for the differences is ancestry"
My Argument 2 and 3 mostly expresses my bailey, Argument 1 mostly expresses my motte. Unfortunately, HBD is not well-trodden ground for me so thanks for the linked book. I've only occasionally read HBD stuff because of the usual QCs around it, but I didn't focus or really think about them. I suppose as of the last year I have been focusing on great powers competition (in the current world) so the QC comment crossed my bailey.
The last thing this forum needs are long AI assisted gish-gallop posts based on stuff the poster did not even read, think about, verify, and synthesize.
Let me expand.
- There are more AskHistorians links that I've read and not used, and of those I've linked, I did read, think about, and synthesize. But I did not verify because generally I believe in that sub)
- Some I just want to get the choice quotes and the surrounding larger context wasn't necessary so I linked directly to that quote. I definitely had to do research to find the right quote so I've read and synthesized. But I did not think nor verify.
- Some links are mostly color and context (like links to Wikipedia)
- I can think of one link that I feel regret on that I should have read more which is the one on Central Africa Republic instability that I just read the abstract and took that as enough for me to link to.
- I could go deeper and deeper and deeper, but I felt this was enough time and effort put in. Maybe my behavior would change based on your feedback, but that has to be seen next time.
Sounds good. It's harsh to hear but it's good to know one's own audience (whether they're receptive to AI usage and how much). I'll keep it in mind for next time. I could share all my conversations with AI so others can see for themselves how much I use it but I'll be better about that the next time I participate.
lollol
1mo ago
Thanks for the feedback and also letting me expand more on my points.
- In retrospect, maybe yes, the "the comment has flaws in its logic" is the core, and "the comment is not QC worthy" is more of a secondary point. I think I wanted to highlight it though because when it comes to motivation for even writing and participating then the order is flipped. I have had times where I read a comment in this forum and thought "the comment has flaws in its logic" but didn't participate, it's only because the OG comment was marked QC that I thought I should make an effort and make a response. For the future though I would keep in mind that people find such complaint as tedious and not as effective for long-time members of the forum. Maybe it would be my version of "Carthago delenda est".
- Funnily enough, the AI even warned me and recommended me to take out mentioning it. It says that mentioning the use of AI would lead to mottizens of mistrusting and more easily dismiss the piece. I elected to still include that point because I wanted to be upfront, sincere, and candid as I believe communication (and in this case, "culture warring") is best when we all try to be truthful to ourselves and to each other. Also, I believe many would have sensed something not quite right about the tone shift from time to time (AI gets flowery and likes to list thing more than I do). So it's better to be honest than leading to some kind of "reveal" later.
- I would like to assert a difference between "quality of logic" and "quality of writing". My complaint about the OG comment is about the "quality of logic" (and tbh, the "conclusion") and I definitely had to resort to AI to better my "quality of writing" (grammar, spelling, style, tone, flow, structure, etc.). That's not to say that I didn't ask AI to help me with my "quality of logic", I did, and in more of a "I wrote this, try to find flaws in it" way. I do believe that's a good use of AI and doesn't detract from the value of what I want to say. Bad writing though for sure, but like I mentioned, I didn't want to drag out responding.
- It would be unfortunate that others might flag me as "that guy who uses AI" but I do believe my use of AI has been beneficial to me so it's worth it.
- I thought of the same point, the fact that the comment dragged a response like this from me meant that I improved my own reasoning and communication. But I do think AAQC are maybe 60-80% popularity based (in a kind of "wisdom of the crowd" way) so the best thing I can do is to add my voice to the choir and let others see and wrestle with the same question I had of whether the OG comment should have been QC.
lollol
1mo ago
War, Genes, History, Capital, Data
Opening
I’m making a top-level response to the Quality Contribution (QC) of RandomRanger for the week of September 8, 2025: "But let's put sports to one side, what about the subject that sport emulates and trains for: war?". This will be blunt, but I’m open to being moved.
My stance: It shouldn’t have been a QC. The Motte defines QC as: "interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered." and the comment is certainly polished. But the bar that made me join here was higher: QC is a comment/post that explains something counter-intuitive, or something that changes my mind, or at the very least makes my view of the world more nuanced (and yes I know that I just repeated the same thing three times). This QC does the opposite: it uses an eloquent voice to sell a very strong claim about “racial war ability” that its own evidence doesn’t actually support.
The comment argues, and I quote, that: "there's no evidence that blacks are anywhere near as capable at warfare as whites and much to the contrary. Ye olde racist might be wrong 9/10 times but is right where it matters, regarding key civilizational abilities of which warfare is the most important".
Before I push back, I want to note what I think the QC gets right. It’s absolutely true that warfare is a brutally demanding composite of logistics, industry, organization, and abstract thinking, and that it tells more about a society’s real capabilities than feel-good representation in sports or prestige slots. I also think it’s fair to say that colonial wars were often “easy” given the power and capital disparities involved. My disagreement is not with those premises, but with the jump from those facts to a story about fixed racial essence.
In this comment I’m doing two things: (1) arguing that the specific racial thesis is not supported by the evidence presented, and (2) arguing that holding this up as Quality Contribution lowers the epistemic bar precisely where it most needs to be high.
Let's get into it. I have three rebuttals, and then some various thoughts that I put in an appendix.
1. "Too early to tell" isn't a dodge, it's history
Stephen Kotkin's "too early to tell" should be the first test for any broad assertions. Imagine The Motte in 1904, before the Battle of Tsushima, and the confident essays about how East Asians “just don’t have civilizational war in them.” Or The Motte in Tang-era China, self-secured about southerners who’d been ruled on and off for a millennium, then asks Vietnam about how permanent that looked. Hell, look at the Jews and how long did it take before they got to really rule themselves?
History routinely punishes premature essentialism. The fact that we can point to an era where one region dominates does not conclude a law of peoples for all time. And even within Africa, we’re barely a few post-colonial generations into modern state formation, compared to the half-millennium runway European and some East Asian states had to iterate on fiscal-military institutions.
On the timescales we are talking about, modern African states are a brand-new experiment. Their “industrial-era warfare record” consists of a small number of highly skewed trials, many of them fought under extreme external constraints. Declaring a permanent “war ability gap” on the basis of this very particular, very lopsided historical window is not caution, it’s overfitting.
2. "GDP not HBD” and that compound interest fights wars
War isn't about race, it's logistics, industry, and fiscal state capacity. If it can be pointed out how genetic components lead to the development of the bond market, increasing financial capacity to feed armies and wage wars, now that would be a much more compelling argument.
Right now, the examples in the QC are consistent with at least two stories:
- (A) Genes → institutions → capital → war outcomes, and
- (B) Geography, path-dependence, external shocks, and prior conquest → institutions/capital → war outcomes.
The data cited in the comment simply doesn’t distinguish between (A) and (B). If we line up a low-capital polity in 1885 against a peak-industrial empire, we didn’t measure “innate war-ability”; we measured who got to compound capital for 400 years and who got repeatedly reset or never even started.
Take a more personal compound-interest analogy. Start two players at $100k and $1M: the 8% guy with a head start beats the 8% guy without it, every time. It should be obvious to everyone here that the player without the head start has to be more hardworking, more brilliant, more cunning, more successful, and do that repeatedly over a sustained amount of time to have a chance. If one side got centuries of relatively (I acknowledge "relative" is a load-bearing word) unmolested compounding (trade routes, gunpowder iteration, fiscal states, etc.) and the other got geographical isolation, depopulation, extraction, arms restrictions, and arbitrary boundary-drawing, then you don’t need chromosomes to explain outcomes.
This is what I mean by path-dependence (see Appendix point 7): outcomes depend on the sequence of early moves, not just the static “inputs” we see today. Once one cluster of polities industrializes early and builds fiscal-military states, and another cluster is repeatedly raided, partitioned, and ruled through extractive institutions, you should expect a persistent gap even if the “human material” were identical.
If you want to argue for (A) over (B), you’d need cases where institutions and capital are roughly comparable but ancestry varies, and then show a robust systematic gap. You’d also need to say what sort of controlled datasets or natural experiments might actually distinguish “genes → institutions → capital” from “history/geography/path-dependence → institutions → capital”. The QC never even sketches what such a dataset would look like, let alone shows it. Before we invoke genes, we should at least exhaust the far more direct account in terms of path-dependent sabotage, disinvestment, and the inertia of early advantages.
3. Mutilating a dataset and how successes are flukes, failures are inherent
Methodologically, there’s a clear pattern in the comment. When an African/Black polity wins, it’s “disease,” “terrain,” “numbers,” "politics," or “European rifles.” When whites lose strategically, it’s “just politics.” When blacks lose, it’s taken as evidence about their essence. That’s not a neutral reading of history, it’s a one-way explanatory filter that can only ever point in one direction.
On top of that, the metric itself is baked to produce the conclusion. “Only once did a black army inflict a major campaign-ending defeat on a white army” sounds impressive until you notice how narrow and hand-picked that category is: “black” vs “white” armies, in “major campaign-ending defeats”, under modern conditions defined by European great-power wars. If you define your dataset so that African victories mostly don’t count, then treat what’s left as a natural experiment in “racial war ability”, the result isn’t surprising—you built the maze.
Apply the same moves to European history and it becomes obviously silly. Napoleon’s march on Moscow? “Oh, that was just winter and supply lines, doesn’t tell us anything about French military competence.” Stalingrad? “Just weather and Hitler’s politics.” If you treat all your side’s failures as contingent and all the other side’s failures as intrinsic, you can prove anything you like about “innate capacity” without ever admitting you changed the rules midstream.
Now, to some of the specific cases.
Yes, the 1896 Battle of Adwa shows that forces with almost equivalent technologies (French vs Italian rifles/artilleries) but one side has the superior numerical advantage would lead to ... predictable results. That's not surprising nor evidence for some proof-of-contradiction for inherent racial ability. But notice what happens rhetorically: when Africans win at long odds against a European power, it gets filed under “numbers and technology, nothing to see here.” When Africans lose to an industrial power, it’s suddenly racial essence again. Heads I win, tails you lose.
And the 1935 Italian comeback was because of airplanes and ... chemical warfare. That's industry and international impunity, not racial revelation. The only tenuous argument that I think can be made here is why there wasn't industrialization of Ethiopia between the two wars, and well, industrialization is hard.
Haiti isn’t an asterisk, either. Attrition by yellow fever was probably the strategy as much as winter is Russia’s. I think a general who was also "well known as an 'herb doctor'" would be aware of the health advantages between his people and the colonizers. If Napoleon freezing outside Moscow counts as “Russian generalship plus winter,” it’s odd that disease in Haiti gets counted as “just disease.” Subtracting an adversary’s environmental advantages but keeping your own is a one-way filter, not an empirical method.
“Portuguese defeat were primarily political defeats, not military ones.” That’s a category error if you’re using those defeats as evidence of “innate capacity.” A great general once said: "war is a mere continuation of [politics] by other means", or in other words, to impose your will on the enemy at an acceptable cost. If your battlefield kill ratios are fine but you cannot hold territory, sustain the war, keep your coalition intact, or secure the population’s compliance, you have lost at the thing war is for. You don’t get to call tactical performance “essence” and strategic failure “mere politics” if your thesis is about civilizational war capacity. That’s not an exception, that’s just defeat.
Finally, let's jump to modern day and examine the vignette of "a fairly small Wagner force can go on safari and take a whole African country, they can go in on the Central African Republic and take their gold mines, take the country's foreign policy." Right, old-superpower-backed paramilitary group vs capital-starved country fractured by decades of external meddling. Again, not attributing industry and capital and international impunity, but assigning ancestry as the reason. If this scenario happened in Europe — say, between Russia and Georgia — we don’t suddenly say “there must be something deficient about Georgian ancestry.” We correctly treat it as a story about power, capital, and position, not chromosomes. The fact that the same kind of mismatch in Africa gets read as “racial war ability” is exactly the asymmetry I’m criticizing.
Closing
The QC claims that "there's no evidence that blacks are anywhere near as capable at warfare as whites and much to the contrary." On its own terms, it never actually establishes this. It interprets a highly skewed historical record under one favored story about essence, filters counterexamples until they don’t count, and then declares victory.
I’m not denying differences exist between peoples. I’m denying that the QC, as presented, can tell us where those differences come from, or cleanly separate history, capital, contingency, path-dependence, and politics from “innate ability.” It treats a lopsided, distorted record as if it were a clean experiment in racial war-ability, and then summarizes the result into "essence".
At best, the evidence on offer is compatible with multiple causal stories: one where genes sit at the root of everything, and one where geography, timing, conquest, and accumulated institutional and capital advantages do most of the work. Nothing in the QC even tries to tease these apart. It just assumes the genetic story, then reinterprets every data point in its light.
To me, that shouldn’t qualify as a Quality Contribution. QC should make it harder, not easier, to confuse the complicated truth from the stories we tell ourselves. If we’re going to invoke genes and civilizational fitness, the standard of care should go up, not down. Holding this up as exemplary lowers the epistemic bar precisely where it most needs to be high.
What would satisfy me? At minimum, an attempt to say what sort of controlled datasets or natural experiments might actually distinguish “genes → institutions → capital” from “history/geography/path-dependence → institutions → capital”, and some acknowledgement of how far our current evidence is from that ideal. And even then, I’d still want an answer to a simpler question: even if Europe and East Asia did get lucky in some deep way, why must that luck be retrofitted into a story about racial essence, instead of leaving it as just that, simply luck?
Appendix of unconnected thoughts
- In the world of the fantasy webnovel epic The Wandering Inn, every race in that setting has tried to conquer the world at least once. Most came close, some even won and ruled for a while, and then gotten beaten back by the others in due time. So yeah, maybe we should wait for some black-dominant polities doing some world conquering in the next few centuries or even a millennium before making a statement.
- It is dangerous to believe that there is some inherent, innate strength by being of some particular race, biological marking when the relationship is so tenuous. That's all the steps needed before arrogance, and then ignorance, and ultimately, defeat.
- There is a saying in East Asia that "the marketplace is a battlefield". Relate that with others sayings like "war is a mere continuation of politics by other means", "everything is political" and it seems to me everything is already a war of some kind.
- A great weakness with this response is my sources. Many are just AskHistorian links, some I didn't read deeply, none did I followup on their sources. Although I suppose I am like most people where we're often swayed by "argument by link-dump" than “argument by reasoning, supported by sources.”
- I did initially have a "not very well thought out" response. I was especially surprised that the comment got a QC and then after a few weeks of pondering, finally decided to write this over the course of another few weeks.
- I did use AI to focus my writing after a decade of unused and to also fit the tone and style of this forum. I do have to say AI is really good at making snappy, quotable lines.
- “Path-dependence” here just means that outcomes depend on the sequence of events and early moves, not just on the current “inputs.” If one set of polities industrializes early, builds fiscal-military states, and compounds capital over centuries, while another set gets raided, depopulated, partitioned, and ruled through extractive institutions, you should expect a persistent performance gap even if the underlying “human material” were identical. History has memory and the path matters.
- I could have taken longer to write this and make sharper points. I am getting really good at using AI to point out the flaws in my logic and writing. But I am getting a little tired of dragging out and only working on this like 30 minutes to an hour a week so it's better to release something near-full-ass than not at all.
lollol
1mo ago
Roland Fryers Promise program in Harlem
Just want to have an addendum but from a cursory search: Promise Academy is a charter school under the Harlem's Children Zone (really an umbrella org for multiple programs/initiative) founded by Geoffrey Canada.
Roland Fryer is a Havard economics professor that did a study on HCZ and is still actively researching on education reform.
lollol
1mo ago
Where are you getting these numbers, I checked just now at 10:53 New York time and found:
- 2025 Virginia gubernatorial election - Results: Spanberger 1,963,731 to Earle-Sears 1,443,617
- 2025 Virginia Attorney General election - Results: None/blank cause official numbers aren't out yet.
Hmmm, echoing what @Amadan said, as an Easterner, I think we don't care about Jews so much as just accept that Jews are powerful. Kinda like what Amadan already said, it's like a given that "Jews control the [Western] world". At the most basic level, East Asians identify and relate with Jewish attitudes towards education and community. Albert Einstein being a Jew and then all the scientists that worked on the Manhattan project, and then the disproportionate overperformance of Jews with the Nobel prize is like sweet candy to the education-loving Asians. You know how Asian parents compare you to your successful cousins, Jews being powerful is the example of a successful race/community. And community is important to Asians because they do think continuing being "Asian" is a good thing and they look to Jews as an example of how a particular ethnic group retains what makes them them while functioning in the modern Western context.
So with all that context, I actually don't think it's a grift, I think this professor is a genuine believer in whatever he's teaching. A reduced comparison would be like if someone teaches about the Rwanda Genocide and says that power is in the hands of the Tutsi minority historically and in the present (absent of about 40 year period that culminated in said genocide). Since most Asians already have a good impression of this minority, and verifiably we see lots of Jews being big and powerful, it's not a big leap for a person to believe the grander theories as well.
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