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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   31479 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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Leverage. Let's say you drop an IQ 200 person into a small village in the Dark Ages. How much value would you get from their IQ? Not much. Now drop the same IQ 200 person into an aristocratic London family in the 1800s and you could be virtually assured of world changing discoveries.

The reason that New York Jews outperform Israeli Jews is that high IQ people in the United States can leverage a large unified economy with ample resources. Whereas high IQ people in Israel have fewer resources to leverage on average.

And as other commenters have mentioned, Israel still punches very much above its weight.

Let's say you drop an IQ 200 person into a small village in the Dark Ages. How much value would you get from their IQ

What indeed would happen to a Yankee in King Arthur's court?

It might be an interesting update, as people are so specialized in their training, I'm not sure how many could make even pre-modern tech once separated from modern supply chains.

The titular protagonist makes black powder, copper wire, magnets, guns, steam engines, and the tools to make those things etc from memory, what fraction of the people today can do that? My bet is well under 5%.

I believe the 163x series is ongoing, among others. (First book is 1632 by Eric Flint; a small town from West Virginia in the year 2000 gets sent back in time to Germany, late 1631. Timeline divergence starts immediately.)

Should do a movie where The Rock is dropped into medieval times. He believes his greatest asset is strength, so keeps going to battles. But he just casually points out seemingly common sense things, which inspire great leaps forward. Basically a time travelling Forrest Gump. Then when The Rock comes back to the future, society is extremely technologically advanced, but he's looked down on as a dumb brute.

A dumb brute with muscles, in the nerd society he paved the way for he is seen as an exemplar of the Medieval Man and academics quiz him thoroughly about his takes on the Bayeux Tapestry.

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