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I always have a problem when folks bring up idiocracy because the of the eugenics angle. It’s extremely unlikely that people are getting inherently stupider, ju
by davemp 6mo ago
I always have a problem when folks bring up idiocracy because the of the eugenics angle. It’s extremely unlikely that people are getting inherently stupider, just less educated. The former is some sort of prophecy of doom and the latter is actually actionable.
- anonymars 6mo agoFair point, but why jump to genetics instead of culture (upbringing)?
- marxisttemp 6mo agoBecause the film itself implies that the idiocracy is due to stupid people breeding more, a classic tenet of Nazism and eugenics alike
- Filligree 6mo agoBut is it true or false?
- pbhjpbhj 6mo agoIt's true though, isn't it? The response is what typifies Nazi and similar positions. It is curious that there's no reported disgenic effect though - that seems counter to evolutionary theory? Perhaps it's only limiting the rate of growth of IQ/intelligence. There's a classic sci-fi story in which we rely on computers, the population gets dumber to the point noone knows how to make/fix the computers. I think in that there's a computer glitch that then wipes out humanity; but it's from the time when there were monolithic computers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence - it says 'fertility' but I think it means fecundity/actual reproduction
- lelanthran 6mo agoAre you talking about the one called "The Machine Stops", published like a hundred years ago?
- rob74 6mo agoI think there are lots of sci-fi stories on this topic, one I can think of is "Pump Six" by Paolo Bacigalupi (https://books.google.de/books?id=HoSXDAAAQBAJ&pg=PT125&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=1#v=onepage&q=pump%20six&f=false https://books.google.de/books?id=HoSXDAAAQBAJ&pg=PT125&sourc...), which is from this century...
- actionfromafar 6mo agoThat story is incredible, with insights into what technology would mean.
- coldtea 6mo ago>but it's from the time when there were monolithic computers. Or centralized SOTA LLMs.
- marxisttemp 6mo agoWhat sort of a response do you think a movie whose premise is “dumb people have overbred and made the world worse” is intended to provoke?
- anonymars 6mo agoLaughter? Is Dennis the Menace a treatise on corporeal punishment? If we want to treat Idiocracy as a policy paper, why not take away as a lesson to think beyond merely themselves when the well-educated decide whether to raise children?
- cindyllm 6mo ago[dead]
- marxisttemp 6mo agoThe film wasn't about education, it was about genetics, as the intro makes abundantly clear. And the Redditors who get themselves hot and bothered about this film aren't laughing, they're congratulating themselves on being the intelligent ones instead of the dysgenic stupids while crowing about how "Idiocracy is a documentary" -> stupid people are overbreeding.
- anonymars 6mo agoIf most people in the thread have different takeaways, and you're laser-focused on seeing eugenics and superiority (especially when you keep making condescending remarks like "hope this helps" or "work on your reading comprehension"), I don't think that reflects on the film
- marxisttemp 6mo agoYeah, the consensus of a plurality of users of a Silicon Valley startup incubator heavily associated with the right wing is definitely the only opinion that matters about the subtext of a film.
- rob74 6mo agoThat's ironic seeing that nazis (or the far right in general) usually need stupid people to vote for them so they get into a position where they can undermine a democratic system...
- coldtea 6mo agoAll kinds of people voted for the Nazi party, including very intelligent and respectable professors, and there was no special split in intelligence between either side voters (or measure of that). What's ironic is using nazi-like thinking (the idiot masses who vote far right vs the enlightened people who vote left), instead of treating it as a complex political matter, and accepting that perfectly intelligent people can just as well fall for that shit.
- marxisttemp 6mo agoVoting for the right as a member of the working class is truly idiotic. Not that most people on this site have ever dipped below PMC treatlerite comfort.
- coldtea 6mo ago>Voting for the right as a member of the working class is truly idiotic Or not everybody shares your priorities and ideological outloook, or even pragmatic assessment of how more fucked they are with the right vs the left in power in the past, and it's the above that's naive. Perhaps they're adverse to people so apolitical and self-righteous that think nobody can't vote anything else than what they're selling, unless they're stupid or immoral.
- marxisttemp 6mo agoEvery single quality of life improvement for the working class, from minimum wage, to overtime, to weekends, was delivered by the left. Please tell me one thing that the right has accomplished for laborers.
- ndneighbor 6mo agoI think the intent of Mike Judge's joke was less so an outright promotion of eugenics and more so mocking the upper crust of American society's approach to family planning. (That of which Judge was intimately familiar with during his time in SV when he worked for a graphics card company.) A lot of his work with KotH analyzed the same dynamics of educated and uneducated America and the interplay and I think Idiocracy is essentially the terminus of the observations he would make where if the idiots got their way. (A semi-common plot point with Hank in KotH where he would be pit against rediculous circumstances.)
- Froztnova 6mo agoI mean yes but the point at the end of the day was that the people who were breeding in Idiocracy had genetically inferior intelligence.
- anonymars 6mo agoDid the movie ever say anything about genetics or IQ?
- Froztnova 6mo agoIt does explicitly reference IQ and, at one point, shows an adult taking an intelligence test and trying to put a square peg into a round hole. There is nothing in the movie that suggests that the decline in average intelligence is a result of cultural factors or education.
- wiseowise 6mo ago> There is nothing in the movie that suggests that the decline in average intelligence is a result of cultural factors or education. Have you skipped start of the movie or did we watch different editions? They literally open the story with redneck family breeding and spreading their redneck ways through family ties while “smart” family waits for the perfect moment.
- coldtea 6mo agoNazis also thought smoking is bad. The problem is their applied genocidal eugenics. Not whether they thought IQ is hereditary.
- dist-epoch 6mo agoIs Darwin natural selection eugenic? Was the rise of humans from chimps an eugenic like event?
- IAmBroom 6mo agoHumans didn't "rise" from chimps, and natural selection doesn't promote "rising".
- marxisttemp 6mo agoNo, because that’s natural selection, not artificial selection by an authoritarian government. Hope this helps!
- dist-epoch 6mo agoThere was no artificial selection by a government in this movie.
- marxisttemp 6mo agoThe movie obviously doesn’t depict a eugenics program, but it makes the core argument of eugenics: if human breeding is left uncontrolled it will lead to “stupid” people breeding more.
- wiseowise 6mo agoWhich authoritarian government, lmao.
- marxisttemp 6mo agoNazi Germany and America, for two, lmao
- wiseowise 6mo agoAmerica didn’t mandate eugenics in the movie and what does this even have to do with Nazies?
- wiseowise 6mo agoEugenics is artificial. Who’s forcing smart stupid to not breed in the movie and stupid to breed?
- everdrive 6mo agoNot claiming that Idiocracy is accurate, however IQ scores have been declining. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/3283/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/3283/
- MidnightRider39 6mo agoImho IQ scores aren’t a sufficient measure of intelligence, it’s very shaky science at best
- lelanthran 6mo ago> Imho IQ scores aren’t a sufficient measure of intelligence, it’s very shaky science at best What do you propose as a replacement metric to determine if humans are getting dumber or not?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- MidnightRider39 6mo agoNo idea. Why do we need to determine if humans are getting dumber or not?
- lpcvoid 6mo agoBecause it would explain what's happening in the world after 2019.
- pixl97 6mo agoWhat an odd question. What do you think intelligence actually is? What effects do you think it has when it goes up or down in mass?
- MidnightRider39 6mo agoI think it’s an essential question. I wouldn’t even know how to describe what intelligence means exactly. I’ve experienced very “smart” people make horribly stupid decisions and the other way round. Since I don’t know a way to describe what intelligent actually means I can’t tell if it’s good or not to have more or less of it. For some this seems to be a very “finished” topic, but we don’t have any widely accepted definitions of intelligence, not even for “less complex” organisms
- tokai 6mo agoHow is it unlikely? Several researchers has pointed to the Flynn effect reversing since the turn of the millennium.
- jacquesm 6mo agoWhy stop at eugenics? Spoil your environment enough and it will definitely have an effect on the individuals in that environment.
- FlufferTheGreat 6mo agoEvery scrotum on this forum has microplastics and phthalates in them, things shown to have effects on the endocrine and reproductive systems.
- permalac 6mo agoHold on. Turns out some scientists found out the amount of plastic was over measured because it included the plastic of their own gloves. I've read it last week, can not found the source now. Sorry
- coldtea 6mo agoOne group covering some cases. Others?
- throwaway173738 6mo agoNo, they showed that the gloves could have introduced microplastic-like particles in some samples depending on how they are handled. It just feels like one of those studies secretly funded by an oil company to throw shade.
- phtrivier 6mo agohttps://theconversation.com/scientists-may-be-overestimating-the-amount-of-microplastics-in-the-environment-and-the-culprit-is-lab-gloves-258545 https://theconversation.com/scientists-may-be-overestimating... > It’s important to note that even if the microplastic abundance in the environment is lower than researchers originally thought, any amount of microplastics can be troublesome, given their negative effects on human health and ecosystems.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- fainpul 6mo agoThere is no eugenics angle in Idiocracy. Nobody tries to achieve some "genetic ideal" by manipulating people.
- singpolyma3 6mo agoThe premise of the movie is that smart people stop having kids and dumb people have lots. It's "reverse eugenics"
- numitus 6mo agoBut it's a proven fact. Less educated people are poorer. The less educated tend to have more children. And children who grow up in poor families receive a lower quality of education.
- singpolyma3 6mo agoYes but this is not the genetic argument this is a "school system sucks" argument
- numitus 6mo agoIn every country, if your parents are scientists, you will be in average smarter, than if your parents are peasants.
- wiseowise 6mo agoWoah, woah, stop right there with your facts Mr. Eugenics. /s
- abenga 6mo agoIs that because of some heritable presence/lack of intelligence or because scientists feed their children well early in life, have books in the home, and take the time to follow up on their children's education?
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- clejack 6mo agoEven if the creator specifically had eugenics in mind, I think he stumbled upon a greater truth. Consider this. You can take anyone from any group in your nation, place them in a different nation, with a different culture, and they will adopt the mannerisms and accents of that culture. We focus on race constantly, but it's clear that culture drives the norms that we see in any group. And culture may be persistent (especially now with technology allowing every culture to potentially spread everywhere), but it's not intrinsic. With this framing, I interpreted Idiocracy's intro as being about a culture of intelligence or learning being harder to maintain in a modern world, than a culture of apathy or fun.
- catapart 6mo agonailed it. I see this odd "eugenics" framing all the time, and all I can think is 'ooh la la, somebody's gonna get laid in college." you can argue the academia until you are blue in the face, but the real-world statistics show that less educated people have more children and that education quality in the US has been declining. It's not a foregone conclusion that one causes the other, but there's a cogent argument to be made that it's about the culture of poorer people vs the culture of richer people - and they even spell out that angle in the movie. They show how reticent the rich couple is to have a child, and how eager the poor couple is to do the same. It's about what their cultures value about children and legacy. It's not "dumb people make dumb kids", it's "dumb people won't educate their kids past their own knowledge who, in turn, won't educate their kids past their own knowledge." The movie even goes on to resolve with the "dumb" descendants learning (from the protagonist) when they have anyone willing to make that a point of the culture. So I can't read a clean "eugenics" take from the film; I only find that take in misreadings of the intro, personally.
- cucumber3732842 6mo agoI agree the eugenics thing is tangential. It's just there as an easy way to advance the plot to the point where the real story can start without too much work. You could drop the eugenics thing, replace it with cultural indoctrination of some sort, re-frame it to instead of shitting on white trash culture, shit all over the college educated white collar white people culture and have the same movie down to the "culture has so thoroughly run amuck that even the black president is white in a bad way" trope, the trash piling up because we don't know what to do with it and the heroes being a hooker and a lazy army private. Maybe you'd have to replace the demo derby with a committee hearing full of say nothing corporate speak and some other minor details. Good thing I'm not a producer or I'd do it.
- servo_sausage 6mo agoThis to me is one of the most apparent failures of modern taboo infecting people's ability to communicate, or even reason. Eugenics is not ethical, for a variety of very good reasons; that does not mean that it's unscientific. We know that intelligence is heritable; we have observed epigenetic group trends like the Flynn effect to the point where they plateau... The biggest unknown in my opinion is how stable the gains we have made are. If we have our education systems disrupted, or some nutrition crunch, does the population average drop to the point where the complex systems we depend on are not maintained?
- davemp 6mo agoEugenics is a taboo because there is a tempting trap to over simplify and make assertions that are not actually supported by the data. We know that IQ is hereditary to an unknown degree. We have some evidence that IQ relates to intelligence. We don’t know really know which genetic variables are responsible. Even simple features like height are thought to have ~12k variables. We don’t even really have a good definition of intelligence (see any AGI comment chain). I would say that assuming we have good enough data or models to base important decisions on is unscientific. Decisions like improving education and nutrition don’t really need to help.
- numitus 6mo ago> Even simple features like height are thought to have ~12k variables. But you wouldn't deny that there are groups of people who are tall and groups who are short.
- servo_sausage 6mo agoNo, it's taboo because actually trying to implement it requires invalidating individual human rights... And requires creating an authority who decides what traits should be passed on or removed. So people hear the word, and react to the word at some toddler level "it's yucky!", and stop reasoning altogether.