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Africa is _the_ underrated continent. Just as many smart and driven people as anywhere else without the capital investment. Go Africa!

smabie 6y ago
Having lived in Africa (Tanzania), I don't really agree. People their aren't very smart, for a variety of factors: poor nutrition, parasites, life history factors, terrible education system, limited access to books and technology, limited access to factual information, a terrible suppressive government, etc. Of course I can't generalize to all of Africa, but saying everyone is equal intelligence everywhere doesn't make any sense. Like as a thought experiment, if I locked a kid in a box and didn't teach them anything, or interact with them at all, would they be as smart as the kid who wasn't in the box? Probably not.
- greendude29 6y ago
  The above two comments are why I hate this website. People with very narrow views of the world making vast generalizations. No wonder Silicon Valley's ability to innovate has faded. We've taken people with mediocre intelligence, and told them they're the smartest in the world. yuck.
- Cieplak 6y ago
  Let's not conflate abilities with capabilities. Clearly abilities depend on economic factors. I interpret this thread's root comment to refer to capabilities. To add more anecdotes to the mix, I work with a few Africans on a daily basis and they are highly talented, more so than myself. Perhaps this is skewed by immigration; that would lead me to believe that intrinsic capabilities approximately average out between the continents and hence my agreement with the root comment.
tiew9Vii 6y ago
A friend has been running online training courses for some not so trivial stuff. A large proportion of his delegates are from Europe/US but surprisingly he also had an unexpected large number from Africa. It seems there is a lot of non profits running code camps in Africa to help with education and a way out of poverty. Also more surprising was the courses my friend is running are not your hack a nodejs app together in 24hours but some advanced Scala and functional programming courses. I don’t know much about Africa but if they are training up highly skilled devs and not just people writing small Python/Nodejs scripts us western countries are then all the better for them.

smabie 6y ago

Having lived in Africa (Tanzania), I don't really agree. People their aren't very smart, for a variety of factors: poor nutrition, parasites, life history factors, terrible education system, limited access to books and technology, limited access to factual information, a terrible suppressive government, etc. Of course I can't generalize to all of Africa, but saying everyone is equal intelligence everywhere doesn't make any sense. Like as a thought experiment, if I locked a kid in a box and didn't teach them anything, or interact with them at all, would they be as smart as the kid who wasn't in the box? Probably not.

greendude29 6y ago
The above two comments are why I hate this website. People with very narrow views of the world making vast generalizations. No wonder Silicon Valley's ability to innovate has faded. We've taken people with mediocre intelligence, and told them they're the smartest in the world. yuck.
Cieplak 6y ago
Let's not conflate abilities with capabilities. Clearly abilities depend on economic factors. I interpret this thread's root comment to refer to capabilities. To add more anecdotes to the mix, I work with a few Africans on a daily basis and they are highly talented, more so than myself. Perhaps this is skewed by immigration; that would lead me to believe that intrinsic capabilities approximately average out between the continents and hence my agreement with the root comment.

tiew9Vii 6y ago

A friend has been running online training courses for some not so trivial stuff. A large proportion of his delegates are from Europe/US but surprisingly he also had an unexpected large number from Africa. It seems there is a lot of non profits running code camps in Africa to help with education and a way out of poverty. Also more surprising was the courses my friend is running are not your hack a nodejs app together in 24hours but some advanced Scala and functional programming courses. I don’t know much about Africa but if they are training up highly skilled devs and not just people writing small Python/Nodejs scripts us western countries are then all the better for them.