5 ms·

Idiocracy is fun, but the instinctive "OMG so true" is, IMO, wrong. The film riffs on a common fallacy more so than it's actually insightful. Statements like "p

by netcan 5y ago

Idiocracy is fun, but the instinctive "OMG so true" is, IMO, wrong. The film riffs on a common fallacy more so than it's actually insightful. Statements like "people these days are so stupid/lazy/immoral" tend get an instinctive thumbs up. The slang, pop culture & consumerism of the future are the main way the film "demonstrates" that people got dumber. The premise of Idiocracy is that dumb people reproduce more and society gets dumber. Eugenical yuckness aside, the reality is that IQ has been rising. Education too. Literacy, obviously. The average ability think through abstract concepts is on the up. Meanwhile, bookish nerdiness is more highly rewarded culturally and financially than before. It's not marginal either. People are smarter, not dumber, in this sense. Whatever "stupidity" we observe isn't IQ. It's not a simple definition of smart and dumb. I suspect what people are observing when they observe a stupidity trend is more of a dumb culture than a culture of dumb people. Maybe individuals are getting smarter but the culture is getting dumber. IDK. I have no conclusions. Just pointing out that any concrete "arguments" made by the film are actually quite fallacious, despite being pretty widely resonant.

quacked 5y ago
IQ is not rising; literacy rates are falling in the developed world. As an example, fewer people are literate in Massachusetts now than when it was founded.
- loteck 5y ago
  fewer people are literate in Massachusetts now than when it was founded I'm also sensing we may be having some trouble in the math department.
  - quacked 5y ago
    You're right. I can barely identify a number on sight.
- SquibblesRedux 5y ago
  I found a reference about literacy in Massachusetts [0] and literacy for all states [1], but nothing suggesting literacy rates are worse than over 200 years ago. I would presume literacy rates for over 200 years ago would be worse due to lack of public education, gender inequality, and jobs/trades not requiring reading and writing skills. I am suspicious of the literacy rates in [0] and [1]. It seems that someone who immigrates from a foreign country would be considered illiterate if they did not speak English, but had high proficiency in reading and writing in their native language. Not knowing one specific language is very different from being generally uneducated. [0] https://mblc.state.ma.us/programs-and-support/adult-literacy/problem-in-mass.php https://mblc.state.ma.us/programs-and-support/adult-literacy... [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/us-literacy-rates-by-state https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/us-literacy...
  - chillacy 5y ago
    The parent said the metric was “people” not a rate of people normalized by total population, so by virtue of there being more people alive today than ever, many stats like this will be technically true but imo uninteresting.
- ramphastidae 5y ago
  Citation needed …
brnt 5y ago
People are getting smarter on ever narrower domains. This is convenient for industrial and commercial processes, because how to break them down is again one such specialization and thus increasingly well understood. We are however not encouraged, and often discouraged, from transposing skills of discernation and thinking. "I'm an engineer, not a politician" and such. "IANAL". In an ever more complex human world, we are ever less able to understand or even see the big picture. We're quite happy to stay in our niches, especially when they pay well. Some of the best minds in computer science are working for companies doing tremendous damage to our minds and societies, without even seeing that they do, let alone understand.
- mixedCase 5y ago
  > People are getting smarter on ever narrower domains Sorry to border on nitpicking, but since it gets to the very heart of the discussion: Idiocracy and the discussion at large is about people getting dumber, AKA less smart/intelligent, over time due to one or more compounding dysgenic effects. This concept is also what most people believe IQ tests to measure. What I believe you meant to say is "people are focusing their knowledge on ever narrower domains", which is also a very important discussion to have, but a different one.
wsinks 5y ago
I really appreciate your comment! I just watched Don't Look Up, then Idiocracy, then Death to 2021, and ... I get why people think they're clever and create hopelessness just like you pointed out. They get the instinctive thumbs up from us because we want to feel in opposition to what we just watched. I completely agree that the internet has given us this "low context, dumb culture" because that's what gets the instinctive reactive thumbs up click. Just wanted to let you note that I really appreciate this.
mwattsun 5y ago
My problem with Idiocracy is the assumption that working class and poor breed only more dumb people. This is untrue, as many of our brightest people came from humble backgrounds. The quote evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould is most know for is “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” The progeny of smart people are not always smart. I enjoyed Idiocracy for it's commentary on dumb and vulgar culture taking over.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- frabbit 5y ago
  To me Idiocracy is a disgusting classist assault on the poor. Whenever I hear someone praise it my opinion of them drops like an aeroplane with a broken wing.
  - coolspot 5y ago
    There known occurences of airplanes landing after losing a wing, especially during WW2. High-powered acrobatic airplanes produce more lift by engine than wings, they can basically descend like a helicopter. Also, poor people reproduce like there’s no tomorrow and kids usually follow the path.
  - squarefoot 5y ago
    The movie isn't making the assumption that poor=idiot anywhere (one of the dumbest characters in the movie is a lawyer, the other works for the POTUS) but especially at the beginning, that if you have the resources to raise, cure and send to school say two kids, and you make 8, in today's society you just made six or more potential homeless or criminals, assuming they don't die sooner for starvation and absence of cures. Making more kids than usual for poor people isn't unnatural as in nature it is very normal to fight weakness with numbers, but that shouldn't be the case for humans. Insects are among the weakest species out there, a moderate storm can kill them by the millions (billions?) but their number is so large that they're not going to be extinct anytime soon. But again, they aren't people and live in their world in which you just have to reach the closest flower to make the day.
SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
> The premise of Idiocracy is that dumb people reproduce more and society gets dumber. Eugenical yuckness... Agreed, but after watching Idiocracy a few days ago, I saw that the background imagery of the the year 2505 in Idiocracy is dystopian: there is desertification, food scarcity, decaying buildings, traffic accidents, garbage heap collapses, lack of sanitation, poor medical care, etc. it doesn't actually look anything like a risk-free environment that rewards witlessness. I'm sure we can think of the current situation that endangers the survival chances practitioners of stupid behaviour as well.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
Relevant xkcd: https://m.xkcd.com/603/ https://m.xkcd.com/603/
- freen 5y ago
  Counterpoint: Biff Tannen as president was explicitly an allegory for what it would be like if Donald Trump was president.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
    Yes, his character was literally based on Donald Trump, who had been publicly talking about running for president since the 80s.
8note 5y ago
Isn't IQ defined by coercing test results into a normal curve with a mean of 100? The reality can't be that IQ is rising, because IQ is always 100. Even without that, IQ is a measure of people's ability to take IQ tests; it's not particularly correlated with being smart or stupid, but instead your familiarity with the language used in the test, and practice at doing tests, especially IQ tests
senectus1 5y ago
>The premise of Idiocracy is that dumb people reproduce more and society gets dumber. Eugenical yuckness aside, the reality is that IQ has been rising. The movie reminded me of the Despair. inc poster "Meetings: None of us is as dumb as All of Us" https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/meetingsdemotivator.jpeg https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/meeting...
throwbynight38 5y ago
I consider this movie kind of like a slap-stick comedy, and I know others who regard it in the prophetic sense, and I have always had the feeling that it was a way to make themselves feel a bit superior, as if they don't have a part in the big comedy too.
jeffreyrogers 5y ago
> Eugenics aside, the reality is that IQ has been rising The Flynn effect has probably reversed recently for the developed world[0]. It's probably still occurring in the developing world due to better access to nutrition (among other things, but nutrition is probably most important). [0]: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/26/6674 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/26/6674
- civilized 5y ago
  Interestingly, though, your PNAS article says the recent downtrend in IQ is environmentally caused and claims to rule out dysgenic fertility as the driver: > the large changes in average cohort intelligence reflect environmental factors and not changing composition of parents, which in turn rules out several prominent hypotheses for retrograde Flynn effects.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
hamiltonians 5y ago
more like society becoming more bifurcated between the smart and successfull vs. everyone else, instead of everyone becoming dumber.
- throwvirtever 5y ago
  Is it the smart who are successful?
  - freen 5y ago
    Yes, but the dumb vote in droves for a buffoonish reality tv star they think will fire enough people in Government so that they don’t have to pay taxes anymore. The orange one also hates brown people as much as they do and is unafraid to say it out loud. Also, it’s just a bonus that their reality tv star really, really pisses off those rich educated folks in the city who “look down” them.
    - bckr 5y ago
      I look forward to when not everything is about that man. But we're not there yet, are we?
      - freen 5y ago
        Ahh, yes. Ascendant fascism. Soooo boring.
        gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
        Oh stop it with the pearl clutching; fascism has been ascendant in the US since 1945, le orange man (bad) is just the latest stop on the train ride from Joe McCarthy.
        freen 5y ago
        Did you forget about the violent coup attempt on January 6th? It was just about as competent and deadly as the Beer Hall Putsch.

by netcan 5y ago

quacked 5y ago

IQ is not rising; literacy rates are falling in the developed world. As an example, fewer people are literate in Massachusetts now than when it was founded.

loteck 5y ago
fewer people are literate in Massachusetts now than when it was founded I'm also sensing we may be having some trouble in the math department.
- quacked 5y ago
  You're right. I can barely identify a number on sight.
SquibblesRedux 5y ago
I found a reference about literacy in Massachusetts [0] and literacy for all states [1], but nothing suggesting literacy rates are worse than over 200 years ago. I would presume literacy rates for over 200 years ago would be worse due to lack of public education, gender inequality, and jobs/trades not requiring reading and writing skills. I am suspicious of the literacy rates in [0] and [1]. It seems that someone who immigrates from a foreign country would be considered illiterate if they did not speak English, but had high proficiency in reading and writing in their native language. Not knowing one specific language is very different from being generally uneducated. [0] https://mblc.state.ma.us/programs-and-support/adult-literacy/problem-in-mass.php https://mblc.state.ma.us/programs-and-support/adult-literacy... [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/us-literacy-rates-by-state https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/us-literacy...
- chillacy 5y ago
  The parent said the metric was “people” not a rate of people normalized by total population, so by virtue of there being more people alive today than ever, many stats like this will be technically true but imo uninteresting.
ramphastidae 5y ago
Citation needed …

brnt 5y ago

People are getting smarter on ever narrower domains. This is convenient for industrial and commercial processes, because how to break them down is again one such specialization and thus increasingly well understood. We are however not encouraged, and often discouraged, from transposing skills of discernation and thinking. "I'm an engineer, not a politician" and such. "IANAL". In an ever more complex human world, we are ever less able to understand or even see the big picture. We're quite happy to stay in our niches, especially when they pay well. Some of the best minds in computer science are working for companies doing tremendous damage to our minds and societies, without even seeing that they do, let alone understand.

mixedCase 5y ago
> People are getting smarter on ever narrower domains Sorry to border on nitpicking, but since it gets to the very heart of the discussion: Idiocracy and the discussion at large is about people getting dumber, AKA less smart/intelligent, over time due to one or more compounding dysgenic effects. This concept is also what most people believe IQ tests to measure. What I believe you meant to say is "people are focusing their knowledge on ever narrower domains", which is also a very important discussion to have, but a different one.

wsinks 5y ago

I really appreciate your comment! I just watched Don't Look Up, then Idiocracy, then Death to 2021, and ... I get why people think they're clever and create hopelessness just like you pointed out. They get the instinctive thumbs up from us because we want to feel in opposition to what we just watched. I completely agree that the internet has given us this "low context, dumb culture" because that's what gets the instinctive reactive thumbs up click. Just wanted to let you note that I really appreciate this.

mwattsun 5y ago

My problem with Idiocracy is the assumption that working class and poor breed only more dumb people. This is untrue, as many of our brightest people came from humble backgrounds. The quote evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould is most know for is “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” The progeny of smart people are not always smart. I enjoyed Idiocracy for it's commentary on dumb and vulgar culture taking over.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
frabbit 5y ago
To me Idiocracy is a disgusting classist assault on the poor. Whenever I hear someone praise it my opinion of them drops like an aeroplane with a broken wing.
- coolspot 5y ago
  There known occurences of airplanes landing after losing a wing, especially during WW2. High-powered acrobatic airplanes produce more lift by engine than wings, they can basically descend like a helicopter. Also, poor people reproduce like there’s no tomorrow and kids usually follow the path.
- squarefoot 5y ago
  The movie isn't making the assumption that poor=idiot anywhere (one of the dumbest characters in the movie is a lawyer, the other works for the POTUS) but especially at the beginning, that if you have the resources to raise, cure and send to school say two kids, and you make 8, in today's society you just made six or more potential homeless or criminals, assuming they don't die sooner for starvation and absence of cures. Making more kids than usual for poor people isn't unnatural as in nature it is very normal to fight weakness with numbers, but that shouldn't be the case for humans. Insects are among the weakest species out there, a moderate storm can kill them by the millions (billions?) but their number is so large that they're not going to be extinct anytime soon. But again, they aren't people and live in their world in which you just have to reach the closest flower to make the day.

SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago

> The premise of Idiocracy is that dumb people reproduce more and society gets dumber. Eugenical yuckness... Agreed, but after watching Idiocracy a few days ago, I saw that the background imagery of the the year 2505 in Idiocracy is dystopian: there is desertification, food scarcity, decaying buildings, traffic accidents, garbage heap collapses, lack of sanitation, poor medical care, etc. it doesn't actually look anything like a risk-free environment that rewards witlessness. I'm sure we can think of the current situation that endangers the survival chances practitioners of stupid behaviour as well.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago

Relevant xkcd: https://m.xkcd.com/603/ https://m.xkcd.com/603/

freen 5y ago
Counterpoint: Biff Tannen as president was explicitly an allegory for what it would be like if Donald Trump was president.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
  Yes, his character was literally based on Donald Trump, who had been publicly talking about running for president since the 80s.

8note 5y ago

Isn't IQ defined by coercing test results into a normal curve with a mean of 100? The reality can't be that IQ is rising, because IQ is always 100. Even without that, IQ is a measure of people's ability to take IQ tests; it's not particularly correlated with being smart or stupid, but instead your familiarity with the language used in the test, and practice at doing tests, especially IQ tests

senectus1 5y ago

>The premise of Idiocracy is that dumb people reproduce more and society gets dumber. Eugenical yuckness aside, the reality is that IQ has been rising. The movie reminded me of the Despair. inc poster "Meetings: None of us is as dumb as All of Us" https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/meetingsdemotivator.jpeg https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/meeting...

throwbynight38 5y ago

I consider this movie kind of like a slap-stick comedy, and I know others who regard it in the prophetic sense, and I have always had the feeling that it was a way to make themselves feel a bit superior, as if they don't have a part in the big comedy too.

jeffreyrogers 5y ago

> Eugenics aside, the reality is that IQ has been rising The Flynn effect has probably reversed recently for the developed world[0]. It's probably still occurring in the developing world due to better access to nutrition (among other things, but nutrition is probably most important). [0]: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/26/6674 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/26/6674

civilized 5y ago
Interestingly, though, your PNAS article says the recent downtrend in IQ is environmentally caused and claims to rule out dysgenic fertility as the driver: > the large changes in average cohort intelligence reflect environmental factors and not changing composition of parents, which in turn rules out several prominent hypotheses for retrograde Flynn effects.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

hamiltonians 5y ago

more like society becoming more bifurcated between the smart and successfull vs. everyone else, instead of everyone becoming dumber.

throwvirtever 5y ago
Is it the smart who are successful?
- freen 5y ago
  Yes, but the dumb vote in droves for a buffoonish reality tv star they think will fire enough people in Government so that they don’t have to pay taxes anymore. The orange one also hates brown people as much as they do and is unafraid to say it out loud. Also, it’s just a bonus that their reality tv star really, really pisses off those rich educated folks in the city who “look down” them.
  - bckr 5y ago
    I look forward to when not everything is about that man. But we're not there yet, are we?
    - freen 5y ago
      Ahh, yes. Ascendant fascism. Soooo boring.
      - gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
        Oh stop it with the pearl clutching; fascism has been ascendant in the US since 1945, le orange man (bad) is just the latest stop on the train ride from Joe McCarthy.
        freen 5y ago
        Did you forget about the violent coup attempt on January 6th? It was just about as competent and deadly as the Beer Hall Putsch.