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Being super smart doesn't magically translate into knowing how to build turbofans or how to do nuclear reactor metalworks.
If you'd ever worked in the semiconductor industry you'd realize that being surrounded by brilliant people doesn't automatically make you competitive.
I understand the idea is that the number makes these hypothetical people almost magically smart, but intelligence still has to contend with logistics and more than half of them do not know how to read, let alone have a basic education.
In that situation you'd want to catch up as quickly as possible, which is precisely what Meiji was about. What exactly is passive about actively modernizing your country to compete on the world stage?
because you're competing with another team of brilliant people, not with midwits that were somehow sitting on a pile of factories and IP.
Logistics? Do they need to import brand new learning boards (or whatever is in fashion now) from Netherlands to get education? Half of them are illiterate because they are ~65 IQ, not because their soil is poor in education micronutrients and their government refuses to import these education micronutrients. It takes much more effort to hammer literacy into heads of 65 IQ people rather than IQ 180 people. By the way, the younger generation of Liberians has much higher literacy rate, it's shifting even without hypothetical IQ boost. 180 IQ people will build everything needed for literacy quickly, it's not AMSL machine for 3 um fab plants.
Precisely, you handwaived my objection that Meiji Japan imported knowledge from societes whose phenotypic IQ with higher (at the time) rather than 80 points below! Several millions of 180 IQ Liberians won't import knowledge -- they'll steal it faster than you notice. Better pray that conflicts of competing 180 IQ clans don't involve undermining your country or making it to go at war with another.
It reminds me Russia xenophiles who say that Russia never did anything by itself. But then, Sergei Korolev didn't say "USSR needs to wait for a western country, like USA or France to launch sattelite and man into space, and then USSR can license technology from them".
Genghis Khan wasn't literate and were none of his generals, and never sieged any fortified cities. But they found a way to defeat many enemies who had read Sun Tzu and the likes.
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