"Don't Look Up" captures a lot more of the actual dynamics. Instead of anti-eugenics making brains feeble, the people are just normal humans made stupid by their cultural environment, incentives and suchlike.
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 - it says 'fertility' but I think it means fecundity/actual reproduction
Or centralized SOTA LLMs.
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?
Good luck in your quest of persuasion-by-bludgeon
I'll have to watch it again, all I remember it as was a goofy movie. It didn't make me think "we have to kill all the stupid people".
Actually I'm inclined to think it's more like My Fair Lady and that much of what we call intelligence is down to opportunity and motivation.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Similarly, buildings will probably not topple over and be tethered together with oversized packaging tape
Meanwhile although there's no monster trucks on the White House lawn yet, get ready for UFC Freedom 250
Correct! It mandated eugenics in real life, in the early 20th century. I didn't say that the movie shows eugenics happening. I said "the film itself implies that the idiocracy is due to stupid people breeding more, a classic tenet of Nazism and eugenics alike." Work on your reading comprehension.
What do you propose as a replacement metric to determine if humans are getting dumber or not?
What do you think intelligence actually is? What effects do you think it has when it goes up or down in mass?
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
It seems to me, then, that your primary objection is not that IQ scores are inaccurate, but that intelligence shouldn't be measured in the first place?
Which makes me think that you don't want anyone doing research into whether human intelligence is changing at all.
Or can you point to any obvious improvements that result from having measured “intelligence” for the last 100+ years?
When my grandpa was a kid they would measure your skull and decide if you are smart or a subhuman based on that. Makes about as much sense as our current IQ tests…
You may be correct. However, if the methodology of IQ scoring didn’t change, the change in score itself is worth of investigation.
The one i did at 7 _definitely_ had a cultural component. I think it was 5 different tests, i distinctly during one of them thinking "if my parent didn't educate me on music there is no way i could have answered that, is this bullshit?". Then in the spatialization test i had a tangram, which incidentally, was a game i had since i was 4. Honestly i remember i scored high, but i also told myself how lucky that was that most of the question the psychologist asked me, i already read the answers (which might have been the point), and that they used a tangram because honestly i knew i would have scored poorly on that particular test, i have trouble visualizing stuff (mild aphantasia).
No one knows what intelligence is, all the tests are like "lets identify a group of smart people (normally it is something like a group of high performing students), find correlates and build a test measuring correlates". No good definition of intelligence and no casual reasoning, just a correlative one.
How IQ 100 becomes a median? Lets take a big enough sample, get their test score and then normalize numbers so median will be 100 exactly. The creators of tests know that you can't compare IQ numbers from different populations. You can investigate the difference, but a direct comparison is nonsense. Even comparisons between different age cohorts of the same population are questionable at very least.
It doesn't mean that iq numbers are meaningless, but we shouldn't confuse them with intelligence, and we definitely shouldn't treat them as absolute numbers. They are relative measure.
But when it comes to intelligence needed for doing maths and physics and such, it's a very good proxy. And geniuses like Tao, also happen to scope very highly.
It’s a completely useless measure
Besides the declining groups have the same education with the earlier ones.
Which doesn't matter, since they measured rich and middle class, and poor and discriminated against both before and after.
Did you think the new measurements were done at some ghetto and the earlier higher ones at Martha's Vineyard?
Are you claiming social factors have remained constant during the measuring period? Because they very obviously haven't.
If you're aware of the Peter principle, and how inequality compounds over time, then you know that the rate at which social factors change is correlated with their quantile values.
What do you propose as a replacement?
Edit: This is a brief video explaining why.
I knew what it was before even clicking on it. The “brief video” was a strong enough clue.
While genes must play a part in this (if they didn't, all non-humans would also share our IQ*), genetics shift on a much slower timescale than the entire history of IQ tests.
* This pattern matches to the Motte-and-Bailey rhetorical technique, ergo I am suspicious of people who try to tie genetics and IQ until they're clear they're not making a racially charged claim. Last I checked, there is no real evidence that human races are a meaningful genetic category, let alone that anything usually described as "race" correlates to any genes connected to IQ scores.
What gene makes someone black?
What gene makes someone native American?
To an American, race may be e.g.: {White, Black, Hispanic, Native American, Arabic, Asian}.
To most Europeans, everyone who an an American would call Hispanic, we'd probably either call "Caucasian" (i.e. white) if their heritage is more from the Spanish side or Native American if their heritage is more from the pre-Columbian (Aztec?) side.
If you're Chinese, they may say the ethnicities are "Han, Zhuang, Hui, Manchu, Uyghur, …" where those are all ethnic groups within China.
Rwanda, infamously, would get you a distinction between Hutu and Tutsi; if you show me a picture of two people and ask me which was which, I wouldn't be able to answer, or even know if I was being pranked with any of the other ethnic groups in Africa.
But more broadly, while skin colour is easy to spot from the outside, it's about as useful as hair or eye colour when it comes to correspondence with the huge range of invisible genetic variation.
I suspect it's still a perfect 100. I don't think it's about general intelligence. In some ways just the opposite: very smart people have a talent for convincing themselves that they are right.
Unfortunately I fear it's more like EQ than IQ. The driver is more about the people. They do not like the kind of people who are trying to prevent climate change, and will apply their intelligence as hard as they can to avoid agreeing with them.
Neither side’s behavior can be considered “more intelligent” when you consider the vast majority of people on both sides are “opinion-takers” simply conforming to received social norms about what to believe about the world. The “opinion-makers” on both sides are undoubtedly intelligent, although you might prefer to call one side “cunning” instead.
We are lied to constantly by people who influence our lives. You can't even go to the grocery store without being lied to - being told breakfast cereals are healthy, that low fat options will make you less fat, shrinkflation, misleading unit pricing. It's no wonder people are so distrusting
Even if you're a democrat you still have to admit that democrats lie, a ton, and it's super obvious. Maybe if our leadership in general, on both sides, was capable of being decent humans then we'd be able to build trust and stop doing dumb shit as a civilization
If you tell the nuanced truth and lose, and your opponent tells simplified untruths and wins, where does that leave you?
As I understand it (obviously a gross simplification), Jimmy Carter attempted to treat Americans like adults, but Americans did not want to inconvenience themselves by wearing sweaters
Current research papers are far more advanced, but they're about the details of climate change. The basic facts of it were established two centuries ago.
We know that we are putting CO2 into the atmosphere. We know that CO2 absorbs heat. That's not a matter of believing an expert. At this point, anybody still denying it is deliberately choosing what somebody else tells them.
The economic effects of that are harder to model, but denialism is still stuck on whether the effect is real. There is no way to include them in any coherent discussion of what to do about it.
It would be great if what you said is true, and people were just arguing about what to do about it.
It's not, though. "It's a hoax" is both the start, and the end point for a large portion of the population, the media, and the politicians that represent it.
In absolute terms, the portion of the worlds population that deny that the climate is changing is a single digit percentage, and that include the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_on_climate_chan...). The portion is a bit larger if you include people who think that the climate is changing but that is mostly caused by natural causes, but it is still a small minority compared to the wast majority that see climate change as either caused exclusively by human activity or as a mix between human activity and natural causes.
The "It's all a hoax" is a popular talking point but their followers are fewer in real life. It much more commonly to find that people with opposing view who actually agreeing that climate change is real, but that they disagree on policy. As an example, creating environmental policy based on per capita create a complete different policy compared to absolute emissions. The later is no more climate change denial than the first, and yet the later generally get labeled as denial.
I don't need to trust what the media tells me about them, I can just listen to what those people and the politicians elect actually say, and what they say is flippin' 'Climate change is a chinese hoax' lunacy.
There's no need to sanewash them, or make excuses for them. It's not a matter of 'disagreement of what to do', it's that they are either really fucking stupid, or are disingenuously courting people who are really fucking stupid.
You probably don’t actually listen to what they say. You probably instead listen to what your preferred media channels report on, and selectively quote from, what they say. You think these two things are the same, since you think that your news sources are perfectly accurate. But those who actually listen to those people, and prefer different media channels, probably have other opinions.
I'll admit, I'm a simple man and I don't know the science behind all of this. But as a citizen, it does feel confusing how one day you're being told that we're all going to die unless we change something, and then suddenly even though nothing changed, it seems to be fine after all.
If you think that everything "seems to be fine after all", you're in for a very rude awakening.
For context, here's one source saying public concern for climate change has fallen in Germany from 42% to 34% from 2022 to 2025, in line with other European countries. [0] This was a study done by a German sustainability non-profit.
Here's another source stating that globally, news coverage about climate change has diminished by 38% from 2021 to 2025. [1]
Here's a third source stating that the share of German citizens who claim to be "very concerned" about climate change has dropped from 50% to 33% from 2019 to 2025. [2]
[0] https://fsc.org/en/newscentre/general-news/climate-change-fa...
[1] https://mecco.colorado.edu/summaries/special_issue_2025.html
I'm sure there are some genuine flat earthers out there, and I imagine that their IQs do average near 100 (perhaps a little lower). But I'm basing that on a general understanding of how people come to stupid beliefs, rather than from observations of individuals, because I'm not sure I've ever met a flat earther who actually believed what he was saying.
I think an important thought experiment here would be to really imagine people going to war, killing each other over whether or not biblical transubstantiation is literal or metaphorical. who had the "intelligent" belief in this case? I'd argue neither side and that this was pure tribalism.
The argument I've seen, which really sticks with me, is that climate change is false, yes, but that's sort of a given that we don't investigate. Climate change was cooked up so that "the other side" could impose all sorts of horrible restrictions on "us."
I obviously don't agree with the argument, (ie, I think climate change is real and quite urgent) but I think it's an interesting framing. It's an argument from tribalism most obviously, but I also think it does what so many people do when attempting to understand complex events; it transforms the problem into more of a personal drama. The "real issue" is that "those people" are "against us." You see this sort of framing all the time; complex problems boiled down into personal dramas because people intuitively understand personal dramas and seek them out, but not necessarily because a personal drama has the best explanatory power.
He wasn't always like that. Maybe he wouldn't have described himself as such at the time, but in his twenties and early thirties he was a Liberal. He was a Peace Corps volunteer, attended Civil Rights marches, advocated on behalf of gay people, argued for gender equality, strongly opposed the Vietnam War, and was appalled by Watergate.
Fast-forward to the last decade of his life, in which my father donated to all three Trump presidential campaigns, displayed a Gadsden flag on his mantle, rejected his trans-gender grandchild, and made (at the very least) replacement-theory adjacent noises. Oh, and preferred Ivermectin over covid vaccination, of course.
What I think happened was that he was culturally out of step with most people who otherwise shared his politics in the 1970s - he was religious, so viscerally disgusted by drug use and "extra-marital" sex - and got captured by the propaganda machine that others in this thread have described. I believe the biggest turning point was 9/11: it terrified him, even if he couldn't quite admit that to himself, and he lived the rest of his life in a state of inchoate fear - stoked, naturally, by Fox News and other right-wing media.
So, that was the (white) American Baby Boomer Experience, writ small. He did materially well, but I think was a better and wiser person in his twenties than he became later on.
Rejecting climate change ("anthropogenic climate change", my father would point out, which let him off any evidentiary hook) is only a small part of an entire ideological project, which demands to be swallowed whole.
>Mild cognitive decline was noted after infection with the wild-type virus and with each variant, including B.1.1.529 (Omicron). Relative to uninfected participants, cognitive deficit (3-point loss in IQ) was seen even in participants who had had completely recovered from mild COVID-19.
>Participants with persistent symptoms had the equivalent of a 6-point loss in IQ, while those who had been admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU) experienced the equivalent of a 9-point loss in IQ.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/even-fully-recovered-sur...
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
But you wouldn't deny that there are groups of people who are tall and groups who are short.
So people hear the word, and react to the word at some toddler level "it's yucky!", and stop reasoning altogether.
I didn't read Idiocracy as eugenics/anti-eugenics. It wasn't saying that stupid people breeding made the population stupid, it was saying that the less educated breeding resulted in the more educated being pushed to the periphery and eventually fading out.
The people of the film's future were not stupid, just massively uninformed and misinformed. They were able to grasp the problem and solution in the end.
Unless I'm misremembering, and it did make direct reference to intelligence rather than education and access to it. It is a good few years since I last watched it. There is the title, of course, but educationally-disasavantaged-ocracy would not have been catchy enough!
[Man Narrating] As the 21st century began… human evolution was at a turning point.
Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest… the fastest reproduced in greater numbers than the rest… a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man… now began to favor different traits.
[Reporter] The Joey Buttafuoco case-
Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized… and more intelligent.
But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction.
A dumbing down.
How did this happen?
Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence.
With no natural predators to thin the herd… it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most… and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.
My quest to survive to adulthood and pass on my genes looked nothing like the gauntlet an Homo erectus specimen would have run.
They literally show IQ numbers in that scene.
> Trevor: IQ 138, Carol: IQ 141
vs:
> Clevon: IQ 84
You are misremembering; they had a scene of an intelligence test that had adults matching shapes (stars -. tars, squares -> squares) and getting it wrong.
Don't look!
It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans and thus intelligence declines unironically. There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true.
If it were true, then decline wouldn't have begun in the 19th or 20th century but around the time that property and currencies emerged.
But there is no need to disproof this because there is no evidence that it has any truth to it.
you seem pretty convinced that intelligence plays an important role in natural selection. I'd argue that decisiveness, confidence, looks, social skills all play a more important role. (I'm not saying that's a good thing)
I'm interested in understanding your point of view, can you elaborate on what you mean by "There is no joke in that"?
Why? Can you elaborate on that? Did the emergence of property and currency cause a negative correlation between intelligence and number of offspring?
There are other trends, there's always some groups of people who started having fewer kids earlier or later for reasons not obviously related to class - but class is the big one.
So it's a documentary?
Even the basic reproductive instinct has become "ineffective on humans".
>There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true
No, there are countless jokes in the movie that don't depend about how the world became stupid (be it cultural or genetics or combination) at all. Literally all of them are like that.
>If it were true, then decline wouldn't have begun in the 19th or 20th century but around the time that property and currencies emerged.
Why, did the movie say it's the result of "property and currencies"? And even if somebody said so, who said it's just about "property and currencies" merely being a thing that starts this decline, and not surpassing some level of development of property and currencies (e.g. late capitalism), which prevents mitigating factors from working?
So yes, eugenics was pretty much an integral part of the premise. IQ bubbles even pop up on the screen during those scenes, just to remove any shadow of a doubt.
Is that really how we use the word "eugenics", though? That scene you refer to explicitly explained that Natural Selection does not necessarily select for intelligence.
So while some people are calling it "Eugenics", it's what we more typically call Natural Selection, Evolutionary Pressure, etc.
Eugenics implies that the selection criteria was not natural. The scene you mention makes it clear that, in-universe anyway, the selection criteria was entirely natural and not a pressure imposed by humans.
I still like the movie, but like with any 20+ years old comedies, I can recognise issues with its premise which would be more-or-less unacceptable today. In 2006... not as much. The future is now, old man!
Classy
> does that scene imply that we should do something to tilt the scales in the opposite direction?
No, it did not.
> I agree that it doesn't explicitly show someone tilting the scales, but that doesn't mean that eugenics are not an integral part of the premise in a "if we don't do something about this, this is what the world will look like" kind of way.
And, to you, "Do something about this" means only one thing - forcefully stopping classes of people from reproducing?
That had a similar irony in that people complained about the racist character of Alf Garnett, but the series very much used his bigotism/racism as the butt of the jokes.
Yes. It was nice when corporate taxes were high, xenophobia was seen as something bad, and movies could focus on smaller problems satire.
I hope that we go back to the socialist era of the USA with unionization, safety nets and welfare for the working class instead of for billionaires. Movies could just be silly again.
But also I don't think movies aren't silly because they deal with all the "big problems". After all they didn't have a problem making silly movies in eras with far worse problems, social and economic. And they could make hella fun movies on heavy topics just fine (Blazing Saddles and racism for example, or MASH and the Vietnam war - even if nominally about Korea).
Modern comedies aren't silly or fun, not because times are troubled, but because they're written as shallow moralizing lectures. Any "caring" is performative. They're also walking on eggshells, and are too polite to have any edge. And then there's the derivative reboots and remakes, which many of them are.
Haven't watched it so I wouldn't know, but from what I hear of it that sounds like a pretty serious strike against it.
> I attended an audience testing screener for Idiocracy … Then the lights came up and the audience started giving their reviews, in an open mike fashion. They all identified with the "idiots" and were indignant insulted, and angry. I remember making eye contact with Mike Judge like "WTF!"