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The new nerd-sniping question is circulating on Twitter. Who would win in a war: 1939 Europe or 2026 Africa? As usual, both camps are 100% their side would win.
My bet is on 1939 Europe. As the Russo-Ukrainian and the US-Iran wars show, ammunition stockpiles run out in a couple of weeks. Africans won't have missiles for their fighter jets and shells for their MBTs, while Europeans will be cranking out bombs and strategic bombers to turn Cairo into Dresden. When German subs destroy whatever boats Africans have, French and British navies will perform naval landings, their troops armed with reverse-engineered AKs.
Here's my fantasy scenario premised on the conceit that both sides become politically centralized under a unified government in order to make this purely about military-industrial-scientific capabilities rather than political randomness.
Africa has 1.5 billion people, so they can just pool their top 150 million smartest people in some city in the interior of Africa, have them design and build warplanes and nuclear bombs for a couple of years, while funneling all the resources of Africa to that nexus and using the rest of the population as a human buffer zone for any European attempt at penetrating to that super city.
Europe's win-conditions are either to penetrate to that super city or to back-engineer advanced modern tech they capture and then scale up industrial production of it sooner than the Africans can emerge with their advanced air fleet and superweapons. Given there's a tech gap of 80 years to catch up on, fat chance of that.
Two years pass, the Africans get a bunch of untouchable modern warplanes plus a nuclear stockpile, both inventories continually being fed by production from the supercity. At that point it's game over.
The European win conditions are impossible and so they get their cities decimated by bombing raids and nuclear strikes, then the rest of Europe is mopped up as Africa improves its force projection capabilities and sends soldiers over.
Basically the Europeans would need to master jets, missiles, computers, and so forth in less time than it took the Manhattan project to run (which I think is a fair estimation of how long it would take the Africans to achieve their win condition), so it's a race of engineering and science with one side having an eighty year head start. In all fairness any modern total war scenario probably comes down entirely to nuclear weapons and strike capabilities.
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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