I haven't watched the film, but this article failed to convince me that it was prophetic at all. It came out it 2006, besides the fact that we had a clown president, things have really not changed much.
Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future
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Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future
#122Idiocracy doesn’t actually go far enough to match current-day reality. 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.
Please don't group the current administration with the previous one.
Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I even forgot about the corporate wokeism that is placated towards consumers for their 'one month a year gay pride twitter image', then not upholding the same morals year-round
It is important people feel accepted and such, but reality requires everyone participate in the meritocracy of struggling through the economy. 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 Coinb…
> 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?
Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future
#124First time I had a revelation that we are close to Idiocracy was when I saw the movie Crank which came out the same year. It a had vibe so close to "Ow my b*lls" movie featured in Idiocracy. And I was entertained.
Well, shows like Jackass and Za gaman were around long before Idiocracy. It was certainly a mirror held up to society as it was at the time.
But the mirror is also temporal. There’s a lot of trash on TV these days but it’s probably not as lowbrow outright sensationally dumb as the shock jock reality TV era that Idiocracy was created in. We’re currently living in a highbrow era of television.
Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future
#125This prophecy is flat out wrong because it ignores the future impact of genetic engineering. The rise of genetic engineering is going to allow humans to solely give birth to geniuses. This will more than counteract this idiocracy effect.
Just because someone posses intelligence does not mean they use it, or use it appropriately. Curiosity and becoming auto didactic are likely nurture vs nature. If you do have a societal shift in intelligence, then it will just change the baseline. IQ scores are relative to the mean. People will question what the point of the intelligence arms race is. Will it make life any better? Will it present more threats (more i…
Agreed that it's unclear how future intelligence will be used. My only claim is that future generations will possess far greater intelligence than current generations.
Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future
#126Idiocracy is fun, but the instinctive "OMG so true" is, IMO, wrong. The film riffs on a common fallacy more so than it's actually insightful. Statements like "people these days are so stupid/lazy/immoral" tend get an instinctive thumbs up. The slang, pop culture & consumerism of the future are the main way the film "demonstrates" that people got dumber. The premise of Idiocracy is that dumb people reproduce more and…
more like society becoming more bifurcated between the smart and successfull vs. everyone else, instead of everyone becoming dumber.
Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ronald Reagan. Donald Trump. Shit... why not Dwayne Johnson?
I'm pretty sure Arnold would become a president at some point if he was born in the US.
I don’t see why having to be born in the country you’ve adopted is a requirement.
If anything, making a choice to be a citizen and public leader is more significant an indicator of loyalty than an accident of birth.
Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the reality is much darker than this: cognitive elites have fewer children than the rest so the average population IQ drops over time (once you fix the low hanging fruits of nutrition/health care of course) . I do not see any solution to this that is not straight out of Brave New World.
While a great plot point that is entirely fantasy and fiction. The average IQ rate of every generation tends to be a few points higher, though there may be a cap. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
The Flynn Effect is actually no longer observed. [0]
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/
Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I even forgot about the corporate wokeism that is placated towards consumers for their 'one month a year gay pride twitter image', then not upholding the same morals year-round
It is important people feel accepted and such, but reality requires everyone participate in the meritocracy of struggling through the economy. 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 Coinb…
"Meritocracy" in the workplace is a myth perpetuated by those in power to justify their position. The Coinbase CEO got raked over the coals for his handling, and rightly so.
Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future
#130Idiocracy is fun, but the instinctive "OMG so true" is, IMO, wrong. The film riffs on a common fallacy more so than it's actually insightful. Statements like "people these days are so stupid/lazy/immoral" tend get an instinctive thumbs up. The slang, pop culture & consumerism of the future are the main way the film "demonstrates" that people got dumber. The premise of Idiocracy is that dumb people reproduce more and…
more like society becoming more bifurcated between the smart and successfull vs. everyone else, instead of everyone becoming dumber.
Is it the smart who are successful?