Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
It was just about as competent and deadly as the Beer Hall Putsch.
Another huge portion or of the population really just care about getting wealthy, with litter regard for anything else.
Seriously, if you want to be rich, all you have to do is be somewhat bright and willing to be a Republican political operative.
See Madison Cawthorn, Marjorie Taylor Green, Sarah Palin, etc.
I’ve see it myself: some of the dumbest folks I went to school with are killing it in the GOP. Dumb as rocks.
Go and talk to them yourself. You’ll see.
Yes?
Being too intelligent seems to be a social disadvantage often and probably success for a lot of people requires hiding their intelligence.
The broadcast components of our culture which must appeal to the largest cross-section of society do indeed cater more to the lower end compared to years past, because that is where the largest number of people still are. Without the middle class glue holding the top and bottom together, the center of gravity of popular culture gradually gets lower.
This tends to drown out the first trend I mentioned, the growth of the upper middle class, if you stick to broadcast media like movies, TV, and radio. But when you look at other forms of media which target cultural niches, you'll find the upper end is alive and well.
I would hardly disagree with that statement.
Larger portion of the middle class gets downgraded not upgraded.
Some parts of their life get better due to advancements we make in science, but all other aspects are worse and worse.
An example can be “property ownership” - the amount of ppl that own property and are part of the middle class is decreasing year over year in developed countries.
We are slowly getting to the point where we can consider our grandparents or parents as millionairs in current standards.
Global inflation slowly kills middle class and no - ppl are not having it better in aspects that actually matter in long term. We are at crisis now.
China by itself can skew global average by a huge margin due to sheer amount of ppl living there.
But even in China market observes middle class crisis - slowing down or ppl getting back to lower class.
Some US data: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-america... (long term, not the headline)
https://www.cato.org/blog/middle-class-shrinking-households-...
https://www.rismedia.com/2019/09/03/is-middle-class-homeowne...
It doesnt matter how much money you make, if that money cannot buy you a shelter.
You might disagree but next years are only going to make that crisis worse and worse.
And more and more families will be not able to sustain the level of life our parents had - even whwn working 5 times as hard.
And any very recent change was probably caused by pandemic and reaction to it, not a part of some trend.. to revert it, we should stop doing what we were doing for the past year or two :)
Btw iirc price to income ratio in the us is also one of the lowest in developed countries, or on par.
Long term, I think the thinning middle class narrative is closer to being merely humanities grads complaining that they cannot afford to live in NYC and SF, than to any real issue ;)
How can you say my grandpa that was able to afford a big house and feed 5 children working alone as grandma was taking care pf the house - was not living in better financial condition than me who makes 3 times as much money as he did but I cannot afford half of what he could…
The current definition of the middle class is constantly changing based on income only - which makes no sense. It should be calculated towards buying power you have.
And buying power over the years for ppl like me and younger only decreases. Thus -> middle class crisis is going to hit the fan like really soon.
It already did in China and its going to hit US too.
Anecdotes are not data. According to this (quick google): https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/ inflation adjusted median price increased by about 80-95% since ~1970 (assuming ~25 years per generation for "grandpa"), depending on whether you include the COVID spike. According to this, however: https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-... median house size since 1970 increased by ~75%. That both calls "big house" into question, and puts the increase in price into perspective. Also, inflation adjusted income has increased by ~50% in the same time frame: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-.... So, housing has become expensive somewhat faster than income (but by far not 3x that you describe), in part because the houses are now much bigger (and not half the size that you imply for the 3x cost).
To put it more bluntly than in my previous post (and for reference I did not grow up in the USA), the main difference between your US generation and grandpa's, is that yours is far more entitled, while representing a far smaller slice of world economy. And, if my West Coast experience is any indication, the sub-slices of the generation tend to feel more entitled in inverse proportion to their actual economic contribution...
I'm also sensing we may be having some trouble in the math department.
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...
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/us-literacy...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Malcolm Gladwell at Microsoft Research: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don't
intelligence is broadly heritable: https://www.nature.com/articles/mp201185
and a representative piece of a very large body of evidence that intelligence is the strongest predictor of achievement: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
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.
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
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/meeting...
In the film, people were smart enough to understand they weren’t all that intelligent. Even the president was willing to defer to someone who knew more than him.
The last couple of years have proven that to be rather naive when it comes to our real leadership.
Kidding aside, he would likely make a much better leader than the current self indulgent noise.
If anything, making a choice to be a citizen and public leader is more significant an indicator of loyalty than an accident of birth.
- "Arnold" is Arnold Schwarzenegger, an Austrian-born American actor who served as Governor of California. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schwarzenegger
- The US Constitution restricts eligibility for the Presidency to "natural-born citizens" of the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-born-citizen_clause_(U...
[0]: Awaken In 2505, Humans Devolve Into Stupid Beings And He Become The Smartest On Earth
I needed to watch it in chunks, because of how viscerally real it is. It is funny, in that it's ostensibly comedy, and the actors all have great comedic timing...but it's also a very very honest appraisal of where we're at as a society.
Also, the asteroid threat is not a good analogy for climate change, as it is supposed to be. Climate change is so difficult to deal with because its effects are uncertain, long-term and unevenly felt. None of those issues hold for an asteroid that will, per the plot, destroy the whole of human civilization in 6 months with 99.9% certainty absent intervention.
I don't think it was saying that politics and politicians as trivial -- I think it was saying that they're not necessarily smart people, and they're certainly not necessarily acting in the best interests of the people they serve.
I think they were also saying that the media serves to reinforce denial in the general population.
The asteroid is just a plot device -- the message is that in the face of mortal danger, huge chunks of the population refuse to even acknowledge the danger so that any intervention can be made. And those in power will exploit that for their own enrichment.
We don't just see this with climate change -- we've observed it with the previous administration...some hits:
- "Lock her up" -- yes, let's just start imprisoning political rivals and see what that does for us as a society)
- "Covid will go away by april" - I suppose they didn't say which april.
- Hydroxychloroquine/Ivermectin/Vitamin C
- Vaccines have microchips
- Masks don't do anything
The list goes on -- We've seen that the population is perfectly willing to disregard any science that threatens their way of life. It's easier to dismiss than to adjust.
Collective threats of this kind have historically created a rally-around-the-flag effect the helps incumbents. Even a venal politician would not assist in the imminent destruction of the planet from which they themselves could not escape. Obviously information of that magnitude of importance would leak, as it did in the film. Meaning its only effect would be to crater the President's support when it became clear they hid the truth. Even an amaetuer political observer would understand all this, let alone a Whitehouse team that won a Presidential election.
Or how about the manner in which the astronomers announced their discovery? They went to the NYT, who inexplicably decided that they would forego running the biggest story in human history. Instead, they helped arrange for the astronomers to announce their discovery in a 2-minute segment on an infotainment news show. Neither the NYT, nor the astronomers, nor anyone would think that was a good idea. It would never, ever happen. During the interview, one of the astronomers got upset because the talk show hosts were nonchalant about the news of the possible end of civilization (!?). Returning to the NYT offices, they're told that the journalists were able to confirm their findings with well-respected third party scientists, but that because one of the astronomers got upset in air, they weren't going to run the story - again, easily the biggest story in human history, which anyone could appreciate at such.
The upshot of this never-ending string of implausible plot points is that the film ends up obfuscating how real politics works. It dumbs politics down and makes it trivial to make an easy joke, making it part of the problem that it ostensibly satirises.
Counter example: Trump new about the severity of covid and downplayed it for quite some time instead of trying to rally the country.
> Meaning its only effect would be to crater the President's support when it became clear they hid the truth. Even an amaetuer political observer would understand all this, let alone a Whitehouse team that won a Presidential election.
In light of the above, this has been shown to be false. There absolutely can be some fanatical base that will construct shared delusional propaganda to avoid the realization that they've been conned.
> Or how about the manner in which the astronomers announced their discovery? They went to the NYT, who inexplicably decided that they would forego running the biggest story in human history. Instead, they helped arrange for the astronomers to announce their discovery in a 2-minute segment on an infotainment news show. Neither the NYT, nor the astronomers, nor anyone would think that was a good idea. It would never, ever happen.
This I'm more inclined to believe. I'm not sure if it would impact the outcome though. I can't imagine there's a huge overlap in people that read the NYT versus watch morning infotainment. I've also lost all faith in humanity, so I can't rule out that it's quite possible that people would make such bad decisions.
> During the interview, one of the astronomers got upset because the talk show hosts were nonchalant about the news of the possible end of civilization (!?). Returning to the NYT offices, they're told that the journalists were able to confirm their findings with well-respected third party scientists, but that because one of the astronomers got upset in air, they weren't going to run the story - again, easily the biggest story in human history, which anyone could appreciate at such.
I think this pretty firmly falls into satirical license as a commentary on meme culture, and how people care more about the messenger than the message.
The irony is that the pandemic was such a slam-dunk easy win politically. Handled with the minimum level of political savvy, this was a dead simple way to send his approval ratings into the van allen belt, just like Bush post-9/11. I think his personal financial stake in the hospitality industry clouded his judgment and prevented him from taking advantage of the biggest election campaign tailwind in a generation.
We can only imagine how things would've turned out if we'd had leadership with an unbiased focus on national unity and the greater good. He could very easily have had a landslide re-election.
Trump neither tried to hide the existence of COVID from the public nor thought it would topple civilization and kill him personally. He downplayed it and the risk it posed, but that is a different order of lying. Trump said exactly as much as he thought he could get away with, and no more.
>There absolutely can be some fanatical base that will construct shared delusional propaganda to avoid the realization that they've been conned.
Sure, but COVID-deniers are a fringe and any political calculus that depends on denying COVID is therefore bound to fail. It is equally clear that denying the existence of an earth-shattering asteroid makes no political sense.
The president in Don't Look Up didn't think it would topple civilization and kill her personally. They thought the plan to break it up and mine it would work. They took a greedy gamble on the fate of the world and lost.
In so doing, they took for granted all of the amazing technology that we have and disregarded expert opinions.
Likewise with trump, who had worked to dismantle the existing pandemic playbook[0] took for granted how well our medical response would be. He regularly disregarded expert opinions, or simply did not speak with them[1]. He even worked to make it difficult for states to get help, because he lost the vote there[2].
In my opinion, these actions do not make sense, yet they were taken by an actual POTUS.
With that in mind, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that a POTUS would try to leverage the event for political gain, and use it opportunity for personal profit, and that a sizable amount of the population would support it.
And you're right. It makes no sense. It's mind mindbogglingly dumb. Still plausible.
[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/obama-team-left-pandemic...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/23/fauci-says-trump-hasnt-atten...
[2] https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/494807-trump-ask...
The question is: would the President, told of an imminent asteroid collision large enough to destroy human civilization, and knowing this information would leak if she did not announce it, elect to hide this information for a month until after the midterms for no particular reason?
You say "They thought the plan to break it up and mine it would work." At the time of the decision of whether to announce the existence of the asteroid, and create a plan, there obviously was no plan. So no, she didn't think that.
>"Likewise with trump, who had worked to dismantle the existing pandemic playbook[0] took for granted how well our medical response would be. He regularly disregarded expert opinions, or simply did not speak with them[1]. He even worked to make it difficult for states to get help, because he lost the vote there[2]."
Again, this isn't the point. Even Trump never tried to deny the existence of COVID. Clearly that would not have worked and would have exploded in his face.
My understanding was they ran the story and the morning tv show was part of a media tour they set up, the response on the tv show such that they did not really want to continue with the big media blitz and publishing more stories that they had planned.
>Returning to the NYT offices, they're told that the journalists were able to confirm their findings with well-respected third party scientists, but that because one of the astronomers got upset in air, they weren't going to run the story
They had ran it by other scientists in the initial meeting who said that the data looked credible. However after the disastrous media appearance one of the things that made the NYT not want to continue with writing more articles was that they had learned the science was not 100% and they were mad they had been lied to.
Who said the science was not 100%? Dr. Jocelyn Calder the head of NASA, later Calder resigns in disgrace to shield the administration when scientist with Ivy League credentials confirm the comet is coming.
on edit: formatting, grammar
ah, yes, such blunt and heavy handed satire compared with old, subtle satire, like that one, modest, pamphlet advocating for eating poor children.
not sure why satire needs to be subtle to be good. It can go from crass to oscar-wilde-subtle, as long as it's funny and based on reality I would call it good.
Note that these groups are (for the most part) mutually antagonistic. It's not hard to find someone who agrees that politicians and media and public-health officials are all incompetent or malign or both, yet those same people absolutely idolize techno-utopian billionaires who hardly have any better claim to such adulation. That antagonism is what drives the " fragmented society that cant agree on common truths" that you mention. The problem with a movie like Don't Look Up is that everyone looks right past the offense to others, sees their own in-group being lampooned, and decides that the whole thing must suck.
Netflix has this weird habit where it's like they can't budget well. I imagine they spent so much money hiring Leonardo DiCaprio they didn't have enough to write good scriptwriters.
I really wanted to like the movie, but why would you cram so many high power celebrities in one film. Film. Idiocracy is amazing because outside of Booker T, and Scareface's cameo I had no idea who these actors were. Plus I'd argue the plot is much easier to follow. Mike Judge is a genius.
If anything Don't Look Up ends up being a demonstration of the celebrity worship it mocks.
I can understand where you're coming from. I'm a marvel fan and I'm disappointed that they went with so many celbreties for Eternals -- I haven't seen it yet, but they were really more distracting than anything in the trailers.
I didn't mind the actors in Don't Look Up though, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, and Jennifer Lawrence had some good chemistry. It did feel like Jonah Hill's character was literally the same character from Wolf of Wallstreet.
My guess is that netflix was hoping that it'd garnish more attention having many big name actors. It's also possible those actors _wanted_ to do it as a form of expression.
> If anything Don't Look Up ends up being a demonstration of the celebrity worship it mocks.
I don't really think it mocked celebrity worship. Maybe to some degree with the tech ceo (I can certainly amuse myself with how HN would probably react to some of it's hivemind's idols like Jobs or PG in that situation.
Or Elon Musk. I can almost imagine the following comment on HN: "The asteroid has enough lithium to make batteries for everyone alive for the next 200 years! Anyone who supports diverting it supports government dysfunction and unmitigated destruction of wealth. This is our one shot to jumpstart space manufacturing - humans have a chance of becoming a Type II civilization, the risk is negligible and well worth it"
If we had a meteor expected to hit Earth in 10 years I am sure we would not start to work on a plan to protect ourselves as THE only thing to care about.
There would always be discussions about budget, China/Russia/US/[pick your country] being the villains, etc.
Covid hit us very mildly and it was (and still is) a shitshow. A global disaster coming in x years (within our lifetime but not tomorrow either) wild be the end of humanity.
We know that climate changes will be terrible and we simply do not care at all, as a species.
The main difference from both is that Don’t Look Up is completely implausible. Also, it isn’t very funny. But I guess people are eager to overlook that if it validates their political biases.
Anyway, since Idiocracy couldn’t be made today due to the PC crowd yelling "eugenics", it is in a way a modern replacement, made straight for the woke crowd with pronouns in their Twitter bio.
Rather, I felt the underlying message of the film is that the film is a critique of the consumerism and corporatism of the US. The 'idiocracy' with how the government runs, the downward trend of education in the US, and the pessimistic views of our future.
A company that can afford to do identity-politics based hiring initiatives is a company that has more money than they know what to do with. Companies in the earlier stages that will go on to be successful are going to be lean and meritocratic.
FWIW, I really like how the Coinbase CEO handled the toxic woke employees they got burdoned with.
I haven't heard of this, is there a good source I can read up on it?
https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-comp...
Essentially, he bribed the toxic political radicals to leave and take the payout.
Their original memo (https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-comp...) puts it this way:
> We don’t engage here when issues are unrelated to our core mission
"It's got electrolytes!"
One of my favorite lines in the movie. Whenever I hear anyone talking about how they only use "good" salt ("it's got micronutrients!"), I giggle and have to bring it up.
"You should be using water" "you mean like in the toilet??"
The author of this article reached a fairly backwards conclusion. If the smart people hadn't prioritized careers in science and research over creating a family, idiocracy would not have occurred; the smart people would have procreated at the same rate as dumb people.
But I agree that it's more a critique of a "dopamine" driven culture that has no critical thinking skills.
> the low hanging fruits of nutrition/health care
There is a multi-decade IQ drop in multiple European countries with otherwise world-leading Education systems.
More interestingly the drop is also happening intra-family which defeats the initial theory of a dumbing down of the gene pool. Currently the best theory is that there is an environmental cause.
If I'm allowed to speculate my money is on diesel engine NO2 exposure [1], plasticizers [2], and flame retardants [3], probably in that order.
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2018/06/13/health/falling-iq-scores-...
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26426942/
The study underlying that CNN article only used three decades of data and only for Norwegian males. Also note that their cohort IQ delta is < 2 points across a decade which is well within error margin.
The Norwegian phenomenon is not exclusive it has been observed in the last few decades in Denmark, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Finland and Estonia.
I.e. how the "good couple" did not have children because of x before the man worked him self to death, while the irresponsible douche stupid brute etc. quarterback was saved by "good couple" medicine and had multiple children.
And this right here is the problem I have with Idiocracy. Amazing movie, annoying fanbase.
Everyone thinks that the movie is a perfect illustration of what's wrong with <other party>. If you watch that movie, and think, "<My party / I myself> would never create such a society", then the movie is about you.
Is TLC making people more stupid or are they just giving an already foolish population what they want?
I don't think consuming "stupid" entertainment makes us stupid or is even a solid indicator of intelligence (if you can settle on a definition of it). TLC just saw a market and pivoted, imo.
Collectively, however, I think it's a bad sign.
TLC isn't the only one who saw a market and pivoted. Sticking with TV examples, the History channel has shows about monsters and aliens now. Discovery's content is almost as bad.
It's not just that there's a market for stupid entertainment. It's that the market for non-stupid entertainment seems like it's shrinking.
I could present an alternative viewpoint though: Cable access has steadily been losing marketshare to streaming services for a while now, so they're aiming for as much mass appeal as possible. It might not be that there is a lower proportion of people looking for educational entertainment than there was before, but that declining viewership has made it unprofitable to produce content for that niche. I see a lot of documentaries on Netflix, for example, and then there's CuriosityStream which is a service just for that, right?
Also a lot of "edutainment" is and always has been sensationalism...I remember watching a documentary about how solar storms were gonna wipe out humanity any day now, and "top 100 things removed from the human body" on old-school TLC (spoiler: #1 was a petrified fetal twin!)
Can't for the life of me figure out the appeal.
I mean, sure, people are morons, but everyone everywhere had to be CARTOONISHLY stupid and incompetent in the flick to make the plot work.
That worked for Idiocracy because that was the projected future. A warning.
DLU needs that level of dumb TODAY.
And yes, I lived the last 5 years, and I'm deeply cynical of humanity... but even I thought it was all a bit too much.
Can you give an example of something from the film you thought was so cartoonishly stupid?
Personally I was okay with it but some of the bits (like the vapid news show or how the titular Don’t Look Up meme comes about) were too much for me.
I wasn’t engaged or entertained so I thought it was terrible.
I think Idiocracy was great because it was funny and used the future to allow you to see and imagine how it came to be that way. Don’t Look Up exaggerates the present in a way that feels familiar but misses the mark somehow.
I’m likely the target audience for the movie based on my left of center politics, but I suspect some will say it’s a great movie because of political tribalism and never watch it again because they know it’s actually not very good.
Just my opinion.
I'm seeing more references to Idiocracy now on social media because of Don't Look Up's recent release (compared to, say, how frequently Idiocracy was mentioned last month). There's a lot of problems with Don't Look Up that make for it not being an example of greatness or even very-goodness, but one thing in particular in comparison to Idiocracy are the movies' protagonists. In Idiocracy, Not Sure is a pretty average guy—maybe even a little dumb. This is what the writers of Don't Look Up missed out on. Idiocracy is smart people writing about about a dumb-to-average "hero" because the egos of those involved (the creators and their audience) don't require him to be bigger than they are. In contrast, Don't Look Up is a movie written by people who are as smart as Not Sure is dumb, trying to write for characters who are supposed to be smarter than the writers themselves and the people who are supposed to enjoy the movie the most.
Some reviews called Don't Look Up smug and sanctimonious—and they're right. With Idiocracy and Don't Look Up, the humility and lack thereof, respectively, when comparing the two accounts for a lot of why Don't Look Up is worse than it should be. (Given what Don't Look Up tries to do, it should do it better than Talladega Nights does, for example, but it doesn't.) Also accounting for a lot of what made Don't Look Up a not so great way of cribbing from Idiocracy is that Idiocracy was taking aim at the zeitgeist, whereas Don't Look Up is a very safe movie to make.
That is, it seemed like it was genuinely an expression of frustration/dismay/astonishment by it's creators to give it's audience a bit of...not quite catharsis...solidarity perhaps?
The target audience is fucking exhausted with the never ending deluge of bullshit we're being faced with.
No one's walking away from watching it feeling superior. That's the thing, it's describing a situation that we all lose, but only some even acknowledge is even happening.
It's actually pretty soul crushing.
You're not reading me. That sense of exhaustion is as appropriate as the smugness that it's being used to justify.
> Considering that film is an art form, it "only" being an expression to it's intended audience is just fine. There's no obligation or advertisement to be anything more than that.
This only makes sense as a defense if we can say that it tries to do something, does it, and doesn't do anything else. The problem is that the movie and those reacting most positively to it in public certainly pretend that it's more than it is.
So it's wrong in the measure of a thing that it does what it tries to do at minimum, but it's also wrong in that it doesn't do anything else (what it tries to and nothing more).
What it does do, unintentionally, is showcase (to exhibit without examining—again, unintentionally) what's wrong with the people who are supposed to be on the right side—a lack of self-awareness and sense of culpability while standing opposite the people on the wrong side stupidly chanting, "don't look up". Each group has enough in their reserves to provide enough stupid juice to take down everyone when pooled together.
> No one's walking away from watching it feeling superior.
That's simply not true.
Asking genuinely inquisitively: Why do you think the sense of exhaustion is inappropriate?
> This only makes sense as a defense if we can say that it tries to do something, does it, and doesn't do anything else. The problem is that the movie and those reacting most positively to it in public certainly pretend that it's more than it is.
What do you think the public is pretending it is? (Or re-articulating it, if you feel I'm not understanding you?)
The level of discomfort it engendered was off the scale. The depiction of the political and media is so close to reality that I ended up fast forwarding through it and at this point have paused watching as continuing is just too uncomfortable.
So from that point of view, and at least for me I would say that the movie is a success, job done. Unfortunately I don't think I'm the person who needs to receive this message. I don't need to be told that the world is going to shit at a faster rate than ever. I don't need to be told that most (all?) media, main stream or otherwise only succeed in rating somewhere between barely acceptable and blatantly corrupt on an ethical/truthfulness scale. The only way I can continue to exist with some degree of happiness is to simply try to ignore the majority of what is going on outside my bubble. I don't think I'm alone.
That said, I'm really interested how this movie has been perceived by those who think everything is wonderful. Are their world views so different that they have any ability to understand that this is not a comedy set in a different world, where politicians and media are clueless to their own ignorance and stupidity? Do they understand that this movie is holding a big bloody mirror up to the Western world and giving a giant wake up call. Unfortunately given how a lot of people seem to have reacted to the last couple of years, I have to think that they would just look at themselves in the mirror, adjust the makeup and wonder how those stupid scientists can not understand that they are messing with the latest media fed delusion.
Now I'm going to close my door again and pretend that the world really is wonderful. Have a nice day.
I suppose there's a side effect that it lowers the bar for the illiterate, making it easier for them to function. I doubt it's a significant factor in whether they decide to learn to read.
I thought it was just lazy developers who don't want to internationalize their strings.
Unless of course your opinion is that thinking is just statistics which makes for an interesting metaphysical discussion.
I wrote a game in 2002 for a class I was in, you have a space ship and you shoot alien ships. To make the game challenging, when the user was far away from the alien ships they would move randomly, if you moved in on them they moved away in a random direction, and once you got too close they would vector strait for the ship in a kamakaze attack. I also needed to figure out when the alien ships would fire back, so I just made them randomly fire when the user also fired. Given that your ship's firing range was limited, this created a dangerous scenario where you tried to chase down a ship, and at the last moment it would come right at you and fire. the point of all of this was that when people played the game, they stated "wow, the AI of this game is really good". People believed the AI was thinking when it was just a few rules.
I dont suppose its impossible to be tricked into thinking something had understanding even if that something is itself. if something is complicated enough and good enough at making decisions, it seems possible its not understanding but just a sufficiently complicated process, or maybe a sufficiently complicated process is understanding
"Statistical" machine learning is also not very much about statistics, it's just that similar technologies and concepts are sometimes used as in statistics, for example probabilities, function optimisation etc.
"Artificial Intelligence" (AI) is the name of the field of research that studies approaches to artificial intelligence. It's a bit confusing but when someone says "I study AI" they don't, today, mean that they study artificially intelligent entities, rather they mean they study approaches that might one day allow us to create such entities.
"Later in the dark, he is approached menacingly by the Morlocks, ape-like troglodytes who live in darkness underground and surface only at night. Exploring one of many "wells" that lead to the Morlocks' dwellings, he discovers the machinery and industry that makes the above-ground paradise of the Eloi possible. He alters his theory, speculating that the human race has evolved into two species: the leisured classes have become the ineffectual Eloi, and the downtrodden working classes have become the brutal light-fearing Morlocks."
(And FYI I'm not 'taking a side' I can only imagine what 'some other' publication would make of the film)
Judge was also mocking lack of education, slouching cultural standards, lack of competency, lack of moral fibre, conscientiousness etc.. In pretty much every scene.
Though the most memorable for me is: "Welcome to Costco, I love you" as the ultimate derision of cynical 'Happy Face' corporatism.
Think of a brand that you like in part because of the 'Things They Seem to Support' - and be assured that that's the point the joke right there.
But it's full of absurdist goodies: the Fast Food machine that takes your children away, the Costco Law School, Starbucks Rub & Tug etc.
Edit: it maybe a kind of IQ test or maybe 'personality type' test because I saw it with a friend and she didn't grasp any of the satire at all, to her it was 'stupid' and she literally fell asleep. I didn't know what to make of that.
Edit 2: 'Ow My Balls' will be huge on TikTok and it's not going to be long before it's nary exactly that.
Simply not everything is for everyone. The world is not black and white.
But any film that's being reviewed 15 years later is worth watching I think.
It was certainly a mirror held up to society as it was at the time.
> "The Marching Morons" is a science fiction story by American writer Cyril M. Kornbluth, originally published in Galaxy in April 1951.
> The story follows John Barlow, who was put into suspended animation by a freak accident involving a dental drill and anesthesia. Barlow is revived hundreds of years in the future. The world seems mad to Barlow until he discovers the 'Problem of Population': due to a combination of intelligent people not having children and excessive breeding by less intelligent people and coupled with the development of more sophisticated machinery that makes it less important to possess intelligence in one's working life, the world is full of morons
The people of the future:
1) Noticed that a guy they sent to jail was competent
2) Promptly assigned him a role with responsibility appropriate to the competency
3) Didn't understand but at least TRIED to listen to what he had to say
4) When he bypassed the bureaucracy to demonstrate ways to solve problems they noticed, listened, and rewarded him for it.
I don't think our current government is that mindful and self-aware.
Friends and colleagues who had children were sometimes offended (I think that really put a lot of people off), but the movie implicates us all as idiots drawn to spectacle. There's a marvelous scene in which Frito, Not Sure, and Rita peer around a corner as police surround Frito's car. The police open fire on the vehicle and as the fusillade intensifies, Frito is increasingly enthralled and delighted by the destruction until the car explodes under rocket fire and Frito exclaims in joy. And then the realization of what happened sets in, and as a viewer I became aware of how I was sucked into that bizarre scene. The joke was on me ;-)
The reason to be this pointed about it is the cognitive style of articles like these is to seduce readers with sympathy for their smallest and cruelist sentiments. It's as though media appointees imagine themselves as fomenting a better calibre of angry mob or inciting the right kind of superstitious villager. Appealing to Idiocracy as a parable of caution for our times seems a bit rich, especially when the very cause of the idiocy in the movie was that the society in the story had been completely coddled and unchallenged by the very people whose job it was to provoke some kind of thoughtfulness and reflection.
I know the premise of this book is different, but they do touch on the fact that siblings usually have the same level of intelligence.
This is a very controversial book. Any thoughts anyone would like to share?
You see this clearly in the article where the author complains about sharing a country with deplorables with nutty beliefs. You see it in the elite turn against free speech: elites wonder aloud "is free speech a good idea if it leads to Trump or Brexit?" For their part, the masses seem determined to de-rail the train out of boredom or to spite the elites.
Increasingly, people view their countries or cultures as farcical or unjust, without a legitimate claim to exist at all. Civic virtue has either disappeared or is no longer recognized. Someone like Robert Mueller represented the old school. The reward for his diligent work was ridicule by both political factions, with Trump's attacks and Democrats' insinuations of senility. The politicians we apparently prefer are those who can reliably generate viral content.
By prefer, you presumably mean elect, which in the US means using a voting system that has been shown to increase partisanship, because you can get elected by being loved by a minority even if also hated by a minority. Other voting systems encourage you to work for every voters vote and avoid a whole bunch of problems as a result.
The Flynn effect appears to reflect increases in general intelligence unless you believe world wide testing scores all have the same bias, across different tests.
As tests were less important a few generations ago, it's perfectly possible that people were unprepared for them.
1. We might want to do more research on the effect of increasing CO2 on cognitive skills.
2. Wealth disparities have been increasing. There seems to be some research on poverty causing decline on cognitive skills. Maybe it is relative, not absolute poverty that does it?
3. We have reached (local?) maximum and are not going to get any more intelligent any time soon.
4. IQ is a flawed measure that comes up with random nonsense.
Not so sure which of those I would pick most likely.
If idiots are reproducing out of control and that will lead to a bad result, doesn't that mean we should reduce the reproduction of idiots and increase the reproduction of the intelligent? To avert Idiocracy we need eugenics, no?
Where have you looked? People have been talking about this for awhile now.
> If idiots are reproducing out of control and that will lead to a bad result
Yeah...
> doesn't that mean we should reduce the reproduction of idiots and increase the reproduction of the intelligent?
Who's "we" in that sentence? Intelligent people are unlikely to adopt foolish plans, by definition.
E.g. consider the (as yet fictional) Bene Gesserit.
You're confusing intelligence with wisdom. Intelligent people are likely to recognize a plan as foolish. They may or may not have the wisdom to avoid adopting it. Knowledge doesn't necessarily change behavior -- there are many many smart people who've gotten addicted to harmful substances, for example.
Well, to a first approximation wisdom is second-order intelligence, intelligence-about-intelligence, eh? Put another way, I see a continuum from mere cunning to intelligence to self-referential intelligence to sublime wisdom.
E.g. the Tao Te Ching is (IMO) one of the clearest and greatest written expositions of wisdom, consider chapter seventeen on leaders:
With the best kind of leader
when the work is complete
the people all say
"We did it ourselves."
In the context we're talking about, the "we" is (again by definition) the smartest (or, if you will, the wisest) minority, at the far end of the bell curve. The idea that idiocracy should be fought with eugenics is itself a layer of the idiocracy, not something that these very intelligent people would credit.
> Knowledge doesn't necessarily change behavior -- there are many many smart people who've gotten addicted to harmful substances, for example.
I disagree, I think that knowledge (by definition) is that information that makes us capable of changing our behaviour at will. Intelligence is operational. Smart people that become addicts and can't stop are obviously less intelligent than those who avoid it in the first place or who find ways to stop, surely?
Do you have a definition for hyper-intelligence?
> I disagree, I think that knowledge (by definition) is that information that makes us capable of changing our behavior at will. Intelligence is operational. Smart people that become addicts and can't stop are obviously less intelligent than those who avoid it in the first place or who find ways to stop, surely?
No, because intelligence and impulse control are separable things.
Trivially, anyone much much smarter than me. :)
Hypothetically, take the top N% of the high end of the bell curve, where N is 0.1 or 0.001 or 0.000001 or whatever. But then you have the question of how to survey intelligence?
Which brings me to my answer to your second point,
> intelligence and impulse control are separable things.
A quality called "intelligence" that does not engender impulse control isn't actually intelligence, eh? In other words I would define intelligence precisely as the ability of self-control combined with the ability to effect desired changes in the world. What's the point of "intelligence" that gives no "leverage", especially in the context of some "we" who are supposedly effective enough to institute a world-wide eugenics program?
I mean, that's pretty dependent on the definition of intelligence.
Going off a dictionary definition:
> the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.
versus wisdom:
> the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment; the quality of being wise.
That to me sounds like every place you're saying intelligence, you mean wisdom. Redefining intelligence to wisdom isn't a thing, because words have meaning.
The relationship being that intelligence makes acquiring wisdom faster. There isn't a strict requirement between the two.
> What's the point of "intelligence" that gives no "leverage"
Self enrichment/gratification/entertainment.
Wisdom, on the other hand, is much harder to define. The definition you quoted is circular, as are almost all dictionary definitions of "wisdom". I've heard it said "A fool never learns, a man learns from his mistakes, the wise man learns from the mistakes of others." Some would say that wisdom comes from loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself. You say that they are different and that I'm "confusing intelligence with wisdom", but I say that wisdom and intelligence are on the same spectrum or continuum, that the former is the refinement and maturity of the latter.
In any event, my original point is that proponents of eugenics are not as intelligent as they think they are.
Satisfactory nutrition and exposure to positive and engaging environments during childhood affect your intelligence no matter who your parents were
* other than that educated parents are more likely to provide the positive and engaging environment, maybe? Not in the least due to the correlation between education and $, which certainky affects both nutrition and the environment (e.g. toys, lessons, travel, etc.)
Late disclaimer: I have no idea if this is what the scientific areas that study human intelligence believe
The literature is too extensive to provide individual citations, but Google for [genetics of intelligence] or [heritability of intelligence] to get a sampling.
We can probably make a lot of progress investing in schools, making higher education more accessible, finding more engaging teaching strategies, ensuring that parents have all the resources they need to care for their children...more access to mental health services...
The important thing to realize, especially in democracies is that non intellectuals usually have the most political power and it's the job of the smart to convince them to give support to smart things.
This requires bringing common people to science's side instead of making fun of them. Although I enjoyed this movie and the newer one tackling the same themes as comic relief of really sad real world parallel situations, in some ways these movie makes the problem worst.
There could be ways to turn a lot of people around to support good causes and to prevent them from falling pray to dangerous manipulators. There are tons of common folks who's views are constantly shifting based on primal emotions and there is no reason they couldn't be shifted towards following science and truth if those who represented those concepts showed more respect. With elections often very close, just a few percentage points could make a huge difference.
The people caricatured are often easy to manipulate, not very smart and are often aware they are not very smart. They are often looking for leaders to guide and shepherd them. They won't however follow intellectuals who punch down on people who don't have academic aptitude. Showing contempt for these people makes them ripe to instead be plucked by villainous politicians, fueling the power of evil.
Not everyone has the aptitude for academic thinking and they deserve no less respect. The fact that they confront the world as best as they can despite this handicap is worthy of praise. The common person is inherently vulnerable compared to the smart elite.
It's not about educating. Scientific arguments don't get you very far with people that can't grasp them.
These are people that only grasp the basics of morality and often only if they get help and reminders from moral guides and belief groups every sunday. Churches are their crutch, their wheelchair. Solving the sociological issues might require more participation and support of faith groups, helping improve them and shaping them. I cannot imagine anything that would work better to send shivers down anti-science politicians than if the pro-science would start gaining more influence inside faith groups.
This might require sometimes lowering the bar on standards of morality, empathy and rationality when dealing with these people. Advanced morality about things like race and gender is complex and not within everyone's reach. Advanced empathy involves multilevel recursive counterfactual meta-cognitive logic ( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4eDzqS2rbcBDsCLZ/unrolling-... ) and sometimes academic understanding of past history. Though it seems natural to some humans, it's so complex that even the most advanced AIs cannot even begin to do it. Asking some of these people to understand these things is asking people in wheelchairs to run and run away they will.
In the US common folks having power is even enshrined in the constitution which starts with "We the people", "the people", having a long history of being a polite way to refer to the less intellectually abled. Only recently did "populism" turn into a dirty word (see https://taibbi.substack.com/p/kansas-should-go-f-itself?r=79... ).
The way to manage this is to live with respect alongside non-intellectuals and help shepherd them towards the good so they aren't captured by villains.
Given the record of technocratic missteps, misguided social engineering, bad policies and wars, one could make the case that we could collectively do a lot better if intellectual elites could be taught some common sense and humility.
Trump’s supporters were and are not the whole of the Republican Party and so it was never about half of the population even if that’s how it was understood and played up by conservative media.
> “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
She said the other half of Trump’s supporters “feel that the government has let them down” and are “desperate for change.”
“Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well,” she said.
https://time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorabl...
The rise of genetic engineering is going to allow humans to solely give birth to geniuses. This will more than counteract this idiocracy effect.
But if somehow they manage to understand organic balance and go for a more heterogeneous composition of inteligences, than it might work out as intended.
I guess the best approach is to just reinforce and even boost the genes that are already there in the gene pool of the human being.
Lets get just one intelligence characteristic for instance that will be sort of harmless to boost in everyone: give us more memory..
Except for the fact that forgetting about some things can do wonders to our psychology and for a human being resisting through all the years it must to..
Maybe the suicide levels will rise, and people unable to function in society will also rise, creating the opposite effect.
The thing is, this is a really complex matter, and i hope that when we are ready to do this, we live in a more advanced society (morally and philosophically) than we do now, or else the consequences of people that are unable to understand the consequences of what they are doing, do it without being really prepared for it.
For me, the the nazi-germany of the 30's is a (extreme) cautionary tale of a possible future of ours, where we are technologically advanced, but morally corrupt, and that combination will probably lead to the human kind fallout, if nothing changes..
Our technological progress is good, but we need to rethink other important things, and the movie is on spot over this (they had all the technology to solve the problem, but they had the emotional IQ of toddlers).
Isn't that a Yeats quote?
Today, I am deeply disturbed by the malice and sheer idiocy that social media has not only exposed but also amplified (with intent), as engagement is their business model. Broad engagement is and always has been easiest perpetrated by hate and gossip.
There are still great blogs, great individuals and great content. Great communities and creativity. They can simply continue to exist.
But we need to drive Facebook/Meta and all its ad-driven social media metastases (hah) to extinction, it's a cancer on society under the guise of free speech and social advancement. Algorithms take you in and bubble-wrap you in your own little safe space devoid of any exposure to other people and ideas. Connect the world yada-yada. Yea right... connect the world of alt-right Nazis maybe.
Aside from that, I am pretty certain the Wild West days of the Internet will soon be over - maybe another 10-15 years for relative anonymity. Soon the China model will be replicated in the West as the Internet of today can under no circumstances guaruntee a lawful environment.
> is a single unbroken shot of a naked butt
No, it was a butt that was farting, but we didn't know whose ass it was and why it was farting.
I must have watched that movie 50 times. It explains the world so well and brings back the sanity.
While the premise of the movie was demographics, the real world idiocracy is brought about by societies moving away from liberal ideals and turning democracy to a pure popularity/likes/retweets contest. And this is happening across the spectrum, from reactionary right to woke left.
> There is evidence that, on a population level, intelligence is negatively correlated with fertility rate and positively correlated with survival rate of offspring.[1] It is postulated that, if the inverse correlation of IQ with fertility rate is stronger than the correlation of IQ with survival rate, and if the correlation between IQ and fertility can be linked to genetic factors, then the hereditary component of IQ will decrease with every new generation, eventually giving rise to a 'reversed Flynn effect', as has been observed in Norway, Denmark, Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, France and German-speaking countries, where a slow decline in average IQ scores has been noted since the 1990s
As a counterexample, there are the people in the top 1 000 or so of the Forbes ranking. All pretty clever and not really endangered at all.
The article reads more like trying to get attention by scaring people instead of being insighful
>A blunt-smoking doctor at the hospital (Justin Long) is shocked that Joe doesn’t have a barcode on his arm, like everybody else, and asks, “Why come you no have a tattoo?”
Yet, the author seems to be a fan of the bio-security state rationalized by the covid emergency.
>...climate deniers...
Is this not also a bastardization of language? Is anyone denying that the earth has a climate? To be fair to the author, it seems like a deliberate trashing of nuance.
Yes, the movie is funny, but the review is a bit smug. The depopulation part was a bit over the top. From the opposing perspective the causes he champions such as "BirthStrikers" seem like willing rubes for authoritarians. If he can dish it out, then perhaps he should look in the mirror.
Do you actually not understand what the author means by “climate deniers”? The intended meaning seems quite clear to me.
If you're not a fan of that kind of use of language, you can criticize it while still understanding what the author wanted to convey ("those people").
I believe you can apply Kant's categorical imperative to language as well and you'll quickly arrive at the point that misusing language to score a point will lead to language becoming less useful and you'll do much more harm than you gain.
The space for discussion is prematurely attacked by the overly simplistic frame of "climate denier". Perhaps the author isn't capable of operating in that space, therefore he requires defensive rhetoric. Maybe it isn't deliberate or conscious. Perhaps he is simply bleating the preferred partisan slogan?
Nuance is deliberately or unconsciously removed in lieu of shallow arrogance. That's ironic in my reading of the article and view of the movie. There's no feigned confusion in my comment above. Perhaps you misread it.
Whether or not the Earth has a warming climate is largely irrelevant to this point.
The next question would be what the optimal climate is and how do these experts know what it is? We've gone from weather forecasters being wrong about rain over the weekend, to politicians and their pet technocrats asserting that the current climatic trajectory is somehow "wrong". The solution as always, is to give politicians more power.
I'd say I evolved as I matured as an individual. There was only so much fearful propaganda I could consume before my curiosity led me to examine the premises. The repeated invocation of apocalypse to scare people has direct historical parallels to other religious financial schemes.
What is an ideal climate, and how would fallible men determine that? Does it not seem backwards for man to dictate what nature should be, when man will never have sufficient information to describe nature?
Who knows, maybe your views will also continue to evolve? I hope I can retain enough curiosity to do the same for myself.
Starbucks offers gender reassignment surgeries and Costco employees say “Welcome to Costco, I apologise”, and the world-ending crisis is that nobody can actually reproduce any more.
What makes you think it isn’t currently both?
The movie is clearly a caricature of the stupid-Right.
The world is indeed currently both stupid-Right and stupid-Left.