6 ms·

Fairly startling stuff, in my opinion. > Over several generations, there is no doubt that dysgenic selection lowered the quality of genes for intelligence and

by rory 5y ago

Fairly startling stuff, in my opinion. > Over several generations, there is no doubt that dysgenic selection lowered the quality of genes for intelligence and increased migration had an adverse effect. > Looming over all is their message that the pool of those who reach the top level of cognitive performance is being decimated: fewer and fewer people attain the formal level at which they can think in terms of abstractions and develop their capacity for deductive logic and systematic planning. So, as often as we hear the joke, is Idiocracy actually happening?

kryptonomist 5y ago
Someone told that Idiocracy was actually a documentary.
Retric 5y ago
Idiocracy ignores what happens at the other end of the intelligence scale. Being 4 standard deviations above the norm may be detrimental, but being 4 standard deviations below the norm is a much larger hindrance. On top of this the ratios change as the environment changes. Studies after WWII found a positive correlation between reproduction and intelligence though that seems to have swapped more recently.
all2 5y ago
Yes. Some sectors of society argue that this is on purpose. The Coddling of the American Mind talks about a sliver of this. You can find articles [0] that talk about infiltration of ideologies that destroy people's reasoning capabilities. You can find quotes from those in the US education's past [1], [2] that talk about their vision for students of the future. All that to say, there's a sector of the conservative right that sees something sinister and they've been shouting about it for a half century. [0] https://www.worldviewweekend.com/worldviewpedia/transcript/john-dewey-1859-1952-father-modern-education https://www.worldviewweekend.com/worldviewpedia/transcript/j... [1] https://steelonsteel.com/quotes-from-progressive-elites/ https://steelonsteel.com/quotes-from-progressive-elites/ [2] https://nwvstore.com/product/weapons-of-mass-instruction/ https://nwvstore.com/product/weapons-of-mass-instruction/ --- Some quotes for the curious: From [0]: John Dewey, Karl Marx, Aldous Huxley, B. F. Skinner, and Benjamin Bloom were interested in a student’s academic achievement only if it would in some way benefit the State. Before a student's cognitive knowledge could be used to its full potential, however, the student's attitudes, values, feelings, and beliefs must conform to that of the State. In his book, My Pedagogic Creed, John Dewey explains: "I believe the true center of correlation on the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's social activities. . . . I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. . . . The teacher's business is simply to determine, on the basis of the larger experience and riper wisdom, how the discipline of life shall come to the child. . . . All these questions of the grading of the child and his promotion should be determined by reference to the same standard. Examinations are of use only so far as they test the child's fitness for social life." From [1]: Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every American public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday schools, meeting for an hour once a week, teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching? -Charles.F. Potter: (1930) In the New Order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society… -Antonio Gramsci (1915) From [2]: John Taylor Gatto’s Weapons of Mass Instruction focuses on mechanisms of familiar schooling which cripple imagination, discourage critical thinking, and create a false view of learning as a by-product of rote-memorization drills. Gatto’s earlier book, Dumbing Us Down, put the now-famous expression of the title in common use worldwide. Weapons of Mass Instruction promises to add another chilling metaphor to the brief against schooling.
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  Why on earth would this have a global impact? US education policy only directly affects 3/8 of a percent of the world population (less really, since this assumes away the existence of private and charter schools) and it also varies by state. Also, according to the abstract, the US actually sustained positive gains longer than other OECD nations, except South Korea.
  - spacemadness 5y ago
    Because some people on HN will use any excuse to post right-wing propaganda.
    - all2 5y ago
      I'm curious as to how quoting people is propaganda? In essence my goal was to say "this is what a sector of the population thinks, here's some quotes showing why they think that". Surely there is merit in sharing conclusions and reasoning for those conclusions?
      - Apocryphon 5y ago
        What puts these personages in the same sector other than some superficial correlation in views as illustrated by pithy quotes rather than actual policies advanced? To group Dewey, Marx, and Huxley is completely fatuous, as well as pairing humanism with socialism. And what is the conclusion based on these quotes? This is begging the question. As Voltaire said, "A witty saying proves nothing."
        all2 5y ago
        I've been pondering your reply since I saw it yesterday. I'm bothered a great deal by "bumper sticker politics", or the "reducto ad absurdum" that seems to have taken over most political conversations. Aside from a master's thesis, I'm unsure as to how I ought to address the philosophical claims made by the above authors.
gopalv 5y ago
> is Idiocracy actually happening? The way in which things are trending, an Idiocracy is unlikely because of an AGI singularity. That even if we might all descend into idiots, we won't be running the world much before that happens. To quote Douglas Adams - "There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
- viscanti 5y ago
  > The way in which things are trending, an Idiocracy is unlikely because of an AGI singularity. The way in which things are trending, an AGI singularity is unlikely because of the IQ decline over time.
- georgeecollins 5y ago
  I guess if you think about it like that then you really don't need to think about any problem in the future because the singularity will solve it for us. People also think the rapture is around the corner. I can't predict or discount either but I do notice a similarity.
- mellosouls 5y ago
  The way in which things are trending, an Idiocracy is unlikely because of an AGI singularity. As discussed in this forum many times, there has been no obvious progress towards AGI.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    IMHO there are two distinct paths towards AGI. One is understanding intelligence - I believe that if we "just" knew how to make the "brain software" (and we're really far from that), our current compute power could support many human-or-higher-power AIs at a relatively cheap price. And the second is pure raw brute force, either through simulation-without-understanding of brains, or perhaps it will turn out that sufficient intelligence may be reachable simply through a sufficiently large critical mass of e.g. simulated cortical columns. We're also really far from that, however, one aspect is that the latter approach is progressing even if there's literally zero progress in understanding intelligence and AI; as long as we can sustain an exponential increase of FLOPS/$, we will eventually reach it.
fluidcruft 5y ago
My mother-in-law recently retired as a public school teacher. She recently stated that it's her opinion that the quality of teaching has gone to the toilet over the decades. Her explanation is simple: smart women don't go into teaching anymore because they have vastly better options than having to chose between nursing vs teaching. Something to consider since labor can only be as good as the pool of candidates allows.
- bb101 5y ago
  Perhaps as technology progresses, we'll see the equivalent of Neal Stephenson's Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from his book The Diamond Age. The primer is an AI-backed story interface, designed to teach and entertain a child whilst also becoming more complicated as the child ages. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/827.The_Diamond_Age https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/827.The_Diamond_Age

by rory 5y ago

kryptonomist 5y ago

Someone told that Idiocracy was actually a documentary.

Retric 5y ago

Idiocracy ignores what happens at the other end of the intelligence scale. Being 4 standard deviations above the norm may be detrimental, but being 4 standard deviations below the norm is a much larger hindrance. On top of this the ratios change as the environment changes. Studies after WWII found a positive correlation between reproduction and intelligence though that seems to have swapped more recently.

all2 5y ago

Yes. Some sectors of society argue that this is on purpose. The Coddling of the American Mind talks about a sliver of this. You can find articles [0] that talk about infiltration of ideologies that destroy people's reasoning capabilities. You can find quotes from those in the US education's past [1], [2] that talk about their vision for students of the future. All that to say, there's a sector of the conservative right that sees something sinister and they've been shouting about it for a half century. [0] https://www.worldviewweekend.com/worldviewpedia/transcript/john-dewey-1859-1952-father-modern-education https://www.worldviewweekend.com/worldviewpedia/transcript/j... [1] https://steelonsteel.com/quotes-from-progressive-elites/ https://steelonsteel.com/quotes-from-progressive-elites/ [2] https://nwvstore.com/product/weapons-of-mass-instruction/ https://nwvstore.com/product/weapons-of-mass-instruction/ --- Some quotes for the curious: From [0]: John Dewey, Karl Marx, Aldous Huxley, B. F. Skinner, and Benjamin Bloom were interested in a student’s academic achievement only if it would in some way benefit the State. Before a student's cognitive knowledge could be used to its full potential, however, the student's attitudes, values, feelings, and beliefs must conform to that of the State. In his book, My Pedagogic Creed, John Dewey explains: "I believe the true center of correlation on the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's social activities. . . . I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. . . . The teacher's business is simply to determine, on the basis of the larger experience and riper wisdom, how the discipline of life shall come to the child. . . . All these questions of the grading of the child and his promotion should be determined by reference to the same standard. Examinations are of use only so far as they test the child's fitness for social life." From [1]: Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every American public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday schools, meeting for an hour once a week, teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching? -Charles.F. Potter: (1930) In the New Order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society… -Antonio Gramsci (1915) From [2]: John Taylor Gatto’s Weapons of Mass Instruction focuses on mechanisms of familiar schooling which cripple imagination, discourage critical thinking, and create a false view of learning as a by-product of rote-memorization drills. Gatto’s earlier book, Dumbing Us Down, put the now-famous expression of the title in common use worldwide. Weapons of Mass Instruction promises to add another chilling metaphor to the brief against schooling.

nonameiguess 5y ago
Why on earth would this have a global impact? US education policy only directly affects 3/8 of a percent of the world population (less really, since this assumes away the existence of private and charter schools) and it also varies by state. Also, according to the abstract, the US actually sustained positive gains longer than other OECD nations, except South Korea.
- spacemadness 5y ago
  Because some people on HN will use any excuse to post right-wing propaganda.
  - all2 5y ago
    I'm curious as to how quoting people is propaganda? In essence my goal was to say "this is what a sector of the population thinks, here's some quotes showing why they think that". Surely there is merit in sharing conclusions and reasoning for those conclusions?
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      What puts these personages in the same sector other than some superficial correlation in views as illustrated by pithy quotes rather than actual policies advanced? To group Dewey, Marx, and Huxley is completely fatuous, as well as pairing humanism with socialism. And what is the conclusion based on these quotes? This is begging the question. As Voltaire said, "A witty saying proves nothing."
      - all2 5y ago
        I've been pondering your reply since I saw it yesterday. I'm bothered a great deal by "bumper sticker politics", or the "reducto ad absurdum" that seems to have taken over most political conversations. Aside from a master's thesis, I'm unsure as to how I ought to address the philosophical claims made by the above authors.

gopalv 5y ago

> is Idiocracy actually happening? The way in which things are trending, an Idiocracy is unlikely because of an AGI singularity. That even if we might all descend into idiots, we won't be running the world much before that happens. To quote Douglas Adams - "There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

viscanti 5y ago
> The way in which things are trending, an Idiocracy is unlikely because of an AGI singularity. The way in which things are trending, an AGI singularity is unlikely because of the IQ decline over time.
georgeecollins 5y ago
I guess if you think about it like that then you really don't need to think about any problem in the future because the singularity will solve it for us. People also think the rapture is around the corner. I can't predict or discount either but I do notice a similarity.
mellosouls 5y ago
The way in which things are trending, an Idiocracy is unlikely because of an AGI singularity. As discussed in this forum many times, there has been no obvious progress towards AGI.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  IMHO there are two distinct paths towards AGI. One is understanding intelligence - I believe that if we "just" knew how to make the "brain software" (and we're really far from that), our current compute power could support many human-or-higher-power AIs at a relatively cheap price. And the second is pure raw brute force, either through simulation-without-understanding of brains, or perhaps it will turn out that sufficient intelligence may be reachable simply through a sufficiently large critical mass of e.g. simulated cortical columns. We're also really far from that, however, one aspect is that the latter approach is progressing even if there's literally zero progress in understanding intelligence and AI; as long as we can sustain an exponential increase of FLOPS/$, we will eventually reach it.

fluidcruft 5y ago

My mother-in-law recently retired as a public school teacher. She recently stated that it's her opinion that the quality of teaching has gone to the toilet over the decades. Her explanation is simple: smart women don't go into teaching anymore because they have vastly better options than having to chose between nursing vs teaching. Something to consider since labor can only be as good as the pool of candidates allows.

bb101 5y ago
Perhaps as technology progresses, we'll see the equivalent of Neal Stephenson's Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from his book The Diamond Age. The primer is an AI-backed story interface, designed to teach and entertain a child whilst also becoming more complicated as the child ages. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/827.The_Diamond_Age https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/827.The_Diamond_Age