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Friday Fun Thread for October 16, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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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.