Ok let me reframe it like this: the collective intelligence of a random group of people is bounded by the collective intelligence of its top N% members, ranked by intelligence, where N is some relatively small number.”
If you assume a bell curve for intelligence, then it is primarily the people who are two standard deviations and up from median that are driving innovation, assuming the group allows such individuals to do so. In a small group this might be just one person, in a nation of hundreds of millions it would be single digits of millions, etc.
If the whole group is actively hostile towards this or there is a systematic barrier to it, such as the intelligentsia purge under Stalin, then there is probably going to be another factor that is much stronger at bounding the maximum intelligence.
I postulates that this holds true for any group where the average intelligence is close to 100 IQ or any other metric you want to use to designate the median intelligence in the human population overall.
If you get together a group of people who are already all over two standard deviations up from the overall median you will probably get a different calculation for the upper bound because higher order terms will become more significant, such as specialities, age, experience, etc. But when we are talking about societies, you are always talking about comparing to the median. As far as I know something like a median intelligence slowly trends up in humans over centuries but it is slow enough that there aren’t societies where their median intelligence is a lot lower or higher than any other society in existence at the same time.
Ants are a terrible example due to using a completely different intelligence model. They are incapable of recognizing innovation, so even if you throw in a group of Fermat ants into the mix, they will still end up working as just slightly more efficient drones. This fits into the model above as the society being set up with an active barrier to allowing its smartest members to innovate.
