Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future • Hacker News Board

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#171

Post by Apocryphon » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #145

fortyseven wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DLU didn't know WHAT it wanted to be, so it tried to be both a comedy AND drama. Sucked at both, imo. Great cast. Lousy execution. 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 du…

It’s interesting that you call the characters cartoonishly stupid, but another poster in this thread characterized the film as “so grounded in reality that it took very little creativity to write or think about. Making 1-to-1 comparisons of things and people”. I have not seen the film yet, so I’m a little curious how opinions could differ so widely. Can you give an example of something from the film you thought was s…

It’s more like the protagonists are grounded in reality, and the villains are cartoonishly stupid, so there’s some dissonance.

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.

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#172

Post by quacked » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 5:50 PM UTC

alphabettsy wrote: post #153

chrsig wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you describe how you felt it was terrible?

Sure, I guess I was expecting satirical comedy and it was just satire. It wasn’t funny to me and it wasn’t particularly entertaining. 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.…

Why didn't you like it?

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#173

Post by alphabettsy » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 5:51 PM UTC

fnord77 wrote: post #98

BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #45

One thing that is maybe missing in this discussion is that this is not a new phenomenon. Greek antiquity had a period of intellectual enlightenment when science became popular enough to rival religion (see eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura ) then long medieval and dark periods where this was no longer the case. Then a renaissance, many aspects of which were also non lasting. The important thing to rea…

this is where certain "smart" politicians completely drop the ball. Look at Hillary Clinton - she mocked and insulted nearly half of the US population by calling them "deplorables". Not the way to get them to follow her!

She was misquoted on this point so often that it’s even being repeated here. In hindsight she shouldn’t have said it that way or at all.

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...

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#174

Post by chrsig » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 5:54 PM UTC

cxr wrote: post #159

chrsig wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean...I can see why it'd be called smug...but to be honest, I don't think it was targeted to people that would be bothered by the smugness. 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?

Well, yeah. And that's exactly what's wrong with it. That's _all_ it is. As a result, the sense of smugness is undeserved. It's a way for everyone who sits in the second panel of the glowing brain meme to shit on people in the first panel and feel good about it, instead of focusing on the fact they're still in #2. It's an out-and-out display of the word "sophomoric".

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.

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.

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#175

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

neuronic wrote: post #91

battles wrote: post #40

One of the best predictions from Idiocracy is our reliance on AI that no one understands anymore. They made all of these systems that did everything for them and decades later, after barely even needing to think for themselves for so long, they’re dumb as rocks and have no idea how anything works.

AI doesn't exist. There is nothing inherently intelligent about deep NNs which are merely very good pattern matching algorithms, statistics really... The term AI suggests something is thinking which is false marketing at best, abused by thousands of consulting companies for a decade now. Unless of course your opinion is that thinking is just statistics which makes for an interesting metaphysical discussion.

"Pattern matching" is what regular expressions do. What you are alluding to is "pattern recognition", which is an older name for so-called "statistical" machine learning, particularly used to perform "perception" tasks (such as machine vision).

"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.

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#176

Post by brnt » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 5:56 PM UTC

netcan wrote: post #103

Idiocracy 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…

People are getting smarter on ever narrower domains. This is convenient for industrial and commercial processes, because how to break them down is again one such specialization and thus increasingly well understood.

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.

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#177

Post by freen » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 5:56 PM UTC

throwvirtever wrote: post #130

hamiltonians wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, but the dumb vote in droves for a buffoonish reality tv star they think will fire enough people in Government so that they don’t have to pay taxes anymore.

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.

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#178

Post by 999900000999 » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 5:56 PM UTC

chrsig wrote: post #78

I encourage everyone to watch Don't Look Up . In many ways it struck me as the spiritual successor to Idiocracy. 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.

Don't look up falls flat, in my opinion because you have too many superstars in a movie that should not be about star power.

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.

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#179

Post by wsinks » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 5:58 PM UTC

netcan wrote: post #103

Idiocracy 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…

I really appreciate your comment! I just watched Don't Look Up, then Idiocracy, then Death to 2021, and ... I get why people think they're clever and create hopelessness just like you pointed out. They get the instinctive thumbs up from us because we want to feel in opposition to what we just watched.

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.

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#180

Post by beefield » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 5:59 PM UTC

slibhb wrote: post #27

Per the Flynn Effect, people are getting smarter. The source of the problems mentioned in the article is not increasing stupidity, it's a breakdown of the relationship between the elites and the masses. 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…

Flynn effect has stopped during the last few decades. I have been wondering why. What are the environmental things that have happened in the last decades as oppoesd to most of last century? There is only a handful of possible explanations that I have been able to come up:

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.