I will grant you that intelligence is very difficult to quantify in absolute terms and is very context dependent. If it was easy I would give you a mathematical proof instead of hand waving hypotheticals. IQ is not a great measure of it either and you also have to account for intelligence as in the ability to learn new things, create new concepts, recognize patterns, connect the dots, and having the wisdom when to do and not do certain things. In the context of this conversation we were talking about a society’s ability to innovate. I postulated that innovation in a society is not bounded by the median intelligence (or perhaps more accurately ability to innovate) of its members but by the intelligence/ability to innovate of its top members as ranked by intelligence/ability to innovate. I have not seen anything so far that disputes this hypothesis. A corollary to this hypothesis is that the median for a society can be, in theory, dumb as an ant and that society can still produce innovation at an impressive rate. Think of it as min-maxing your D&D party if that helps.

Ants do not feel so it doesn’t matter what the smartest ants feel. A CPU is infinitely more complex than an ant hill in its function, and is equally as predicable. Ants do not innovate any more than a laser etched chunk of silicon. They are a bad analogy to a conversation about innovation.

But I am also explicitly saying that there are ways a society can hamper its ability to innovate. One such way is to not create the organizational structure to set up its most able innovators for success. Another is to try to systematically eliminate them. A third is to separate them so that you do not get the synergistic effects of multiple experts in different fields being able to cooperate. All of these can happen in a society with a low median ability to innovate as well as a high ability to innovate.

The only truly unique thing you get in a society with low literacy in terms of innovation is that someone of very high intelligence as defined not by education but by ability to learn, would not be able to find the education they need to proceed. Before Fermat was a genius of his age he had to learn from some perfectly average people +/- one deviation. If there are no average teachers then your geniuses cannot be recognized as such. You see this same phenomenon in sports. Countries that do not have kids playing soccer for fun produce fewer world class soccer player per capita because there are fewer opportunities for the most talented players to get the experience and recognition. But even so, you can get exceptions. In basketball you still get Yoa Ming out a country that does not emphasize basketball in the same way the US does.