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Notes -
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:
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
Off-topic, but what does The Motte in 1904 actually look like (let alone Tang-era China)? A republic of letters made up of philosophes writing comments to each other across Europe? A group of renegade thinkers meeting in coffee house in Paris to discuss the culture war? A resistance movement distributing pamphlets with top-level posts at the university of Munich? Dissident intellectuals spreading self-published copies of blog posts all over Russia? Come on, give me ideas; it'd make for a pretty cool cameo in an alternate history novel.
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But the East Asians were clearly pretty good at war even before 1904? Attila the Hun and the Mongols both managed to beat Europeans in their day. Notably China also developed the compass and gunpowder weapons. China was a big source of porcelain, silk and other manufactured goods.
OK and what's the root cause of that compounding then? Sub-saharan Africa had plenty of gold, ivory, arable land, they certainly had things that people wanted. But they consistently failed to produce powerful states and institutions (you need to be highly organized and orderly for that), they failed to take control of trade routes (you need advanced financial abilities, strong laws, shipbuilding and seamanship), they failed to develop advanced metallurgy/textiles for industry and weapons (you need to be smart for this). Even today, the sub-Saharan African countries still can't make any advanced technology domestically, only apartheid South Africa could make their own jet fighters, nuclear weapons or pioneer heart transplants.
They had a shield of disease that prevented more capable foreigners from conquering them, that's how they retained independence (and how they expanded to the Caribbean tbh). But the moment that quinine pierced the shield, the Scramble for Africa.
Meanwhile Poland got carved up, plundered, colonized, genocided, communismed for a few centuries and they're now highly developed, producing infrared photonics, AAA video games, high-precision plasma generators. The Ottomans were slave-raiding, plundering, raping Eastern Europe for centuries. Eastern Europe is now highly developed. They make tanks, steel, nuclear reactors, aircraft carriers, hypersonic missiles... China got wrecked for a century, then hit with a particularly bad strain of communism but they're a superpower today.
Historical compounding and catch-up growth is a consequence of innate ability. Yes, there are historical and geographical factors that matter. But they matter less than innate ability. Even under Maoism, China was a major world power that could fight the US to a draw in Korea, develop ICBMs and H-bombs. Innate ability is the key. That's the best way to explain this trend.
This scenario didn't happen in Europe. The Russians (a full army and air force) went in on Georgia and walloped them, imposing a limited defeat. It was not a small band of adventurers like Wagner that took over a whole country and exploited their natural resources.
The strongest African powers occasionally hold off the weakest European powers but almost always lose. That's the key trend. Numbers and technology are of course very important. Mobilizing that is the whole aim of the game. Any win is still a win. But it's a very different kind of win to Russia fighting a very strong European power's full offensive power (making their own weapons) and marching their troops into Paris! The Russians did not merely fend off the French, they all but conquered France. The Ethiopians never conquered Italy.
What I mean by political vs military victory is kind of the difference between Saigon becoming Ho Chi Minh city and New York becoming Vo Nguyen Giap City. That's a wholly different kind of victory, a total success at arms when all political resources were fully committed to the struggle. Some black countries achieved the former, never the latter.
Well if we introduced Africans to a very high human-capital civilization like America we'd assume the institutions would rub off on them right, they'd suddenly realize (like the East Asians did) how to do things effectively? Right? There'd be no chronic dysfunction, massively high crime rate, no poverty issues, no massive crime rate? They'd start getting STEM Nobels?
Or a US-supported black colony in Africa, with a constitution directly copied from America, shielded from any external threat by US power, that'd do well right?
Or all these black refugees/economic migrants heading to Europe, they'd be doctors and lawyers, not rapey welfare-abusers right?
But no, Liberia is a shithole, it's just the same as other West African countries. US blacks are violent, unproductive money-sinks. Europe is getting very sick of these refugees. I don't understand why centuries of poverty and brutal oppression immediately washes off Poles, Irish, Russians, Chinese, Koreans and they can immediately go out and do great things once free but blacks are somehow uniquely vulnerable to slavery and mistreatment that they'd be permanently degraded by this (in Ethiopia's case it was only a few years of Italian rule). The simplest scenario is that they're innately less capable.
I think it's much more dangerous to think that one's strength is in institutions or ideology rather than race. Racists like Stoddard (he wrote 'the rising tide of color') were extremely farsighted in predicting the power of China by observing the ability of the Chinese people. Whereas institution/culture people still deny Chinese potential, recall all the cope about how 'communists can't innovate.' We don't hear that much any more.
It's only dangerous if I'm wrong. But the predictions of racists have been proven more accurate than the anti-racists. The integrationists of the 50s and 60s thought that US blacks would be performing as if they were white, the investment would've paid off by now. But it hasn't. This is the arrogance that has cost trillions in fruitless, unjust DEI, tens of thousands of raped or murdered whites who 'didn't want to be racist', whole books like 'White girl bleed a lot' or 'Don't make the black kids angry' which are nothing but compilations of the tragicomedic failure of the antiracist worldview and the endless media/education work that's needed to prop it up.
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This is simply where I disagree with you on where the burden of proof lies, at this point in time particularly.
Genes > Institutions is simply and Occams Razor solution compared to the Diamondian History + Geography + Path Dependence > Institutions solution.
Diamondism has had the full support of the establishment and academy for over half a century at this point, and produced nothing persuasive. Instead, often entire points that are being asserted as fact are simply rebutted by looking at, for instance, the geography that actually exists or existed, or a list of animals that exist or existed in a place. When the same set of easily rebuttable set of ideas that all resemble each other are always easily wack-a-moled one by one, its not a good sign for the overarching theory or set of theories that is outputting those theories. And that is a fundamental problem for environmental and historical theories at this point.
I do agree with some of your observations, GDP is the war machine, of course. But that is limited. Everyone knows if you gave the Congo's most elite squad American equipment and drones and satellite, they couldn't protect their own President from an equal sized group of Marines if he was holed up in some cabin in the woods. Maybe if it was something overwhelmingly strategically advantageous like a mountain cabin they could do it, but Italians throwing rocks were able to deter many landings in WWI. No one thinks the Italian tech and GDP were superior to the British at the time.
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Not to turn this into a pile-on but:
The default premise of your post is that there exists somewhere an essence of parity between whites and blacks. And that this parity is obfuscated by external factors that give the appearance of an essential difference.
Which is in turn why you chastise RandomRanger for presuming an essence of racial difference.
Which is irksome, since most of the gist behind your post had already been responded to by RandomRanger to your "not very well thought out" response.
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:
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.
I was more alluding to the premises you both afford yourselves. RR makes the point that there is already a substantial amount of evidence supporting his premise. To that end his historical just so stories at least serve a supporting role and fit a broader narrative.
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I like this post, I've read all of it, and there were a few nits I wanted to pick.
First, with your point 1:
The problem with this kind of thinking is that it ignores the pace of change we have experienced. If barely a few generations counts as a brand-new experiment, then demographic replacement of 30-40% of the dominant population within the same timescale counts as a catastrophe. We're currently two generations in to the accelerating racial replacement of Europeans in Europe and their colonies. Whites, in other words, in white countries built by whites for whites, as any Mottezin of 1904 would happily tell you.
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.
Which brings us to 2.
There's no starting, stopping, fair, or equal to be considered here. We're millennia, eons, removed from the starting point, and restarting to make everything fair is functionally the same as playing to win. This also reflects on the prior point: whites went from winning bigly to being replaced. What gives? Someone else is playing, and winning, the game. All I need to take A over B is to acknowledge race as an axiom of self interest*, and the rest follows. It makes no sense to discard genes when considering path if the gene is acknowledged.
Or, race doesn't matter and none of this matters. There's that sticky thorn again.
Along to 3.
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.*
Yellow fever has been beaten, Winter is undefeated. Yellow fever was beaten in the same way as all of the other advantages were defeated: through ingenuity and innovation exhibited infrequently outside of Europe.
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 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.
For the extras.
This is true, and the response is to ask why whites are choosing not to use the tactic they're best at, the ultimate tactic that offers no recourse: war. Why fight with one hand tied behind your back when you're losing, and why leave it there until it's too late?
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. Most of this is a long disagreement that race matters, which I guess is the point. That has never made any sense to me. 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.
Overall, good OP that you disliked, good reply from you, and that's what the QCs are supposed to be for. This has taken up plenty of my time, so I don't think I'll reach this length of post again in the replies, but I understand the struggle. I don't keep working on posts for more than a day, or two at most. The best you get from me is something like this, where I start writing in the morning and then reply in the evening. It's tough to make it worthwhile, and while there's always a place for quality, often what we want is timely.
*The parallels to modern day China are illuminating.
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.
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.
True, and I also still don't see how the disparity has to be explained by race.
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.
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 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.
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.
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I consider it extremely unlikely that all prior history will turn out to be a fluke, and a continent with an average IQ of like 70 will suddenly get really good at warfare now that it's more complicated than ever. Pointing out the handful of times in the last ten-thousand years that anyone from there defeated an army that wasn't barefoot doesn't really change the equation. Africa sucks at everything and the reasons aren't actually mysterious.
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.
Listen, you claim not to be an HBD coper and I guess I believe you, but that just leaves me wondering exactly what you're coping so hard for. There's no amount of re-litigating the military historical record that's going to turn Sub-Saharan Africa into anything but a collection of primitive tribal civilizations that mostly get stepped on by everyone who comes along.
Like deadass, how much am I supposed to believe better geography or something would really do for a population missing two SD worth of average IQ?
You mean you wonder what this one outlier smart guy might have done if he had existed among a population capable of maintaining an advanced civilization. Yeah that's kind of the whole point.
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If you're talking about the entire continent, I think it's worth observing that Cannae is generally considered to be one of the most tactically successful battles in recorded history.
Yeah, the Arabs/Berbers did manage to conquer the Spanish, the Tunisians did manage to go around slave-raiding and raping the Mediterranean (they even got to Iceland at one point IIRC), the Moroccans managed to beat Portugal badly at one point... but really he means sub-Saharan Africa not North Africa or Phoenicians in Africa. It's tedious to constantly add sub-Saharan though.
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Africa almost always means Subsaharan Africa. Carthage was a Phonecian (Lebanese) settlement. The more meaningful division between Europe and Africa isn't the Mediterranean, it's the Sahara.
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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. If a country has good government, economic output converges toward what smart fraction theory would predict.
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.
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).
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.
Thank you for your response, here's what I think of it
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.
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.
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.
Let me attempt at a rewording of my conclusion:
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.
Let me expand.
Well after World War II, northeast asian countries were maybe 60/40 for good government? China and North Korea bad, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan decent. And then a generation later, China got a decent government. How come African countries have flipped tails 50 or 100 times in a row? That said, I think there have been African countries with decent enough government.
I said owned and operated. Are the engineers black? Are the technicians black? That they are have a black front-man and are bragging about being "minority owned business" (a designation which potentially gives them all sorts of bonus points in getting various contracts) does not mean anything. It's pretty telling there are no photos of anyone but the owner... Maybe Linkedin, can help us out, yep, here is the VP of Engineering: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-miller-48350a12 The actual workforce looks very white: https://www.linkedin.com/company/piston-automotive/people/
What I mean is that there is no company with blacks at every important position in the engineering and production of some complex technological product.
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.
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No comment on the rest of your post, but I will comment on this.
First, complaining that a post you didn't like or think was deserving received a QC is one of the most tedious of complaints. QCs are necessarily subjective. Not everything that gets nominated is selected for a QC, I assure you. There are people who automatically AAQC any post that expresses a view they agree with. Even the shittiest boo outgroup hot take will get some AAQCs from certain people, just because it validates their feelings and they love seeing their outgroup get shat on. @naraburns is the one responsible for choosing which nominated posts actually get listed. Obviously that means the list leans towards what he deems to be worthy, but I know he does not just choose posts he likes or agrees with.
You thought a particular QC wasn't interesting enough or didn't really support its argument? Okay. Whatever. That's just, like, your opinion, man.
But more importantly, it inspired you to write this long post in response, which is very much the raison d'etre of the Motte. To get people to test their ideas and receive effortful responses. Now, we've seen the argument before "If a terrible, low effort post provokes a lot of discussion, doesn't that make it a good post?" Well, no, but on the other hand, you complaining that a QC didn't measure up and then writing a long rebuttal to explain why... sort of does make that argument.
I also want to add that your mention of using AI made me raise my eyebrow, because a lot of this text looks kind of like AI generation. I don't think you wrote it entirely with AI, but if you are using AI to "fill out" the volume of your post, then you don't really have any standing to be complaining about the quality of someone else's post.
Thanks for the feedback and also letting me expand more on my points.
Well, FWIW, I unfortunately have now flagged you as "that guy who uses AI" and I will skip over your posts without reading them from now on, unless I am required to skim them because you've been reported.
It's one thing to use AI to do grammar checking or even bounce ideas off of. But it's pretty clear you used AI to do large chunks of your writing for you.
Right now our rules about AI usage are sort of fuzzy; someone obviously posting an AI-generated post is going to have that post removed, but it's hard to prove something is AI-generated, and we don't really have a rule about how much AI is too much. You deserve credit for owning it, but you need to know most people don't want to read what an AI thinks, or what an AI writes after you typed what you think into a prompt.
Is this not a prime example of such a post?
Debatable. It looks like he wrote or edited some of it himself, and like I told him, we don't really have a rule about how much of your post can be written with AI assistance. Also, since I've already talked to him about it, it seems kind of unfair to go back and delete the post now.
If he keeps doing this, the mods will discuss it and we will likely remove such posts in the future.
Just because smh rationalizes his AI usage with "well I wrote some of it myself" doesn't mean we need to take that excuse from just anyone -- this post is the very definition of AI slop; if you're going to let that slide there might as well be no rule at all. Enjoy your 10k word back-and-forth posts as people point their AIs at each other, I guess.
Monsieur's dissatisfied snapping of fingers is duly noted.
Tres drole -- what actually is the exact rule about AI posting? I forget, but I thought it was theoretically not allowed on grounds of low effort. (other than the "but I was just using it to help me edit" excuse/loophole, which is clearly not true with this guy -- have you been reading his replies?)
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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.
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