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The entire premise behind this Twitter fight is Africa doesn’t have 150 million smart people. The average IQ in America of Africans is considered to be 85 and those Africans have significant Caucasian genetic component. So pure African Iq would be 80. 1 standard deviation of IQ has been estimated at around 15. To design advanced weapons you would need to be 4 standard deviations above average or in the top 99.9937%. That’s approximately 1 in 20,000 people. That gives Africa maybe 10k people to develop everything. Jews have an estimated IQ of 115. A little less than 2 standard deviation intelligence gets you to advanced weapons building intelligence. About the top 95% of the population. Grok is telling me European Jewish population in 1939 was 9.6 million. At advanced weapons building IQ level the Jews alone provide about 480k people of sufficient intelligence. Nobel Prizes have been around 35% Jewish. So let’s say other Europeans have the same amount of advanced weapon building IQ. That gives Europe like 1 million people IQ >140.
Per year you have 100x the scientific ability In Europe than Africa. So a tech gap of 80 years actually sounds very feasible for the Europeans to close since they have a 100x high IQ population advantage.
And 10k high IQ Africans would need to be heavily utilized just to keep the existing weapons working.
And this is very rough math. The gap wouldn’t be quite this broad as the racists would view S Africa as having a higher rate of geniuses. And North Africa being more Arab also a high rate.
Why do HBD people always assume that intelligence is normally distributed across racial categories, when racial categories are composed of different endogamous subgroups that plausibly each have their own distributions? If a country's peasant class are 85 IQ on average, that might reproductively advantage intelligent elites more than a country with 100 IQ peasants, so the "stupider" country has a similar or even greater amount of high IQ elites.
The short answer is we don’t. India I recognize has a lot of sub-populations that only reproduce within caste. So it’s actually hundreds of different bell-curves within India.
For a message board discussion you can’t write a book every time but need to make simplifying arguments. We can’t debate novels until we all had brain implants and can read 400 pages in a second.
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The great thing about designing something is that someone only has to do it once and then everyone else can copy them. As per Grok, the number of people working on the Manhattan Project:
Even if Africa can only muster a very small percentage of very intelligent people to do top design tasks, the two projects I’ve outlined should be well within their capabilities. Taking the top ten percent of an eighty IQ population must surely get you some sort of microcosm of a subpopulation equal to that of a normal advanced country if not even superior by a bit, so it seems highly unlikely they wouldn’t be capable of research, design, production, and maintenance for these military projects. Indeed, I think their bottlenecks are more likely to be more on the manufacture side of things in terms of producing stuff at huge scale rather than the design end.
And concerning your notion that the Europeans would have an easier time clearing an eighty year technological gap, that is IQ essentialism taken beyond all limits of plausibility. Even with extremely high intelligence, they’d find the physical limitations of having to run experiments and test things out imposing highly inelastic fixed time costs on their efforts. Technological development requires high intelligence as an input, but it’s only one of many. The rest would severely hamstring the Europeans.
Also bringing up Jewish Nobel wins has a flaw in it, in that it doesn’t account for all the confounders involved. Jews cluster in cities for reasons involving but also going beyond high intelligence, and they also have all sorts of social and economic resources that likewise stem from multifarious factors. For instance, part of their wealth comes from being an urban, banking-adjacent population in an age in which banking and other urban fields skyrocketed in significance. So an unadulterated look at all their rewards doesn’t give a clear grasp of their true capabilities. It likely inflates them a fair bit.
You think modern warplanes can be made by 10k high IQ people? There’s like thousands of parts in a modern airplane. They would have access to zero of the current international supply chain.
Plus weapons systems. You need microchips for modern airplanes. Jet engines. Of note China can’t exactly make modern jet engines. You need guys who understand aerodynamics. Materials engineers. Metal stamping. This project is 100% chance out of the reach of Africa.
Nuclear though I do think is easier once you have access to nuclear physics. Iran(has a smart caste) and S Africa (small white population) achieved this. Conceivably you could design a bomb that can go on their existing modern aircraft’s and helped for distance by their 6 refueling aircrafts to reach a lot of Europe to deliver bombs. ICBMS are basically out of the question for Africa. So for the nuclear end game Europe now with their fully intact group of Jewish nuclear scientists would have the bomb by around 1944. Germany had some rockets in WW2 so could conceivably be nuking S and N Africa by about 1944. Supposedly all of S Africas nuclear scientists have died but I guess it’s conceivable they could get a new supply chain up and running in 3 years. So they could win the nuclear path.
I just want to point out that if you think 10k high IQ people can make modern planes then you have no understanding of the technological challenges in making planes.
All the Jewish infrastructure that created 35% of Nobels was basically non-existent in 1945 when those guys started to get born. They were mostly holocausted then.
That 10k number is for top level design tasks. The very tip of the pyramid. The whole supply chain of course requires much larger amounts of talent, but the intellectual requirements go down as the pyramid fattens out.
Skimming the top 10% of a low IQ population should give you a subpopulation closer in its average to a regular country. 10% of 1.5 billion is 150 million, which is close to what Russia has to work with. Russia can design and build missiles, warplanes, nukes.
You are still doing math wrong on this. Most of Africa is 80 IQ. The US African population is average IQ of 85 but that’s 30% on average white DNA. A 2 standard deviation move gets you to 110 IQ. That’s 2.1% of a bell curve. So your 150 million is suddenly reduced to 30 million. Though I’m also assuming the same standard deviation as white populations which is about 15 IQ points. This may be a smaller standard deviation.
The best evidence for Africa not being able to maintain any advanced systems is the real world. They haven’t maintained any advanced systems.
Can you point to just 1 African who’s done any advanced science? Only one I come up with is Robert F Smith whose PE firm was one of 3 that developed a model for taking bloated software companies and firing a lot of people to improve margins.
Also it would take a lot of time to build your “smart people” city to focus talent before they could even get off the ground doing stuff.
You probably are correct that Africa would need to focus there talent in one city. It seems when you have mixed low-IQ with high IQ populations it harms the high Iq peoples production. This explains a lot of the lack of productivity in India and Brazil.
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