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Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

theguardian.com

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Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#241

Post by oscargrouch »

fairity wrote: post #85

This 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.

It depends of how this will be laid out. If the future generations choose for a more homogeneous sort of intelligence it might trigger the opposite effect, as humanity might loose a sort of balance the natural world struggled to achieve.

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).

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#242

Post by champagnois »

autokad wrote: post #123
champagnois wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Summarizing the event from memory, it seemed during the BLM virtue signalling craze -- he told his staff, "Coinbase exists to make money and not to be political. If you are unhappy about the lack of political expression and you need to leave because of discomfort over this -- the employer will apologize with a parting gift of a large sum of money."

Essentially, he bribed the toxic political radicals to leave and take the payout.

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#243

Post by [deleted] »

Manuel_D wrote: post #221
fnimick wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

That was not my impression at all of the reception. An extremely small segment of the workforce left, despite generous exit packages. The impression I got from my coworkers and peers was mostly a sigh of relief and wishing their own companies would follow suit. The opinions of a vocal minority on Twitter are often not the opinions of the workforce.

[deleted]

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#244

Post by notacoward »

aseerdbnarng wrote: post #181
Emma_Goldman wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree. It attempts to satirise today's mass media by exaggerating its influence on politics to the point at which it revolves around little else, succumbing to what it is supposed to be objecting to: the idea of politics and politicians as trivial. The plotline was so wildly implausible that it ended up saying little about the real world. Also, the asteroid threat is not a good analogy for climate change…

Its not good satire because its very heavy handed (similar to Idiocracy) but its criticisms seemed spot on to me. The characters were all there from the jingoist politicians, a media focused on trivial distractions, techno utopianists, a fragmented society that cant agree on common truths and ultimately a disastrous ending that could have been avoided. Its not a cheerful movie

> jingoist politicians, a media focused on trivial distractions, techno utopianists

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.

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#245

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

freen wrote: post #220
rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relevant xkcd: https://m.xkcd.com/603/

Counterpoint: Biff Tannen as president was explicitly an allegory for what it would be like if Donald Trump was president.

Yes, his character was literally based on Donald Trump, who had been publicly talking about running for president since the 80s.

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#246

Post by 8note »

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…

Isn't IQ defined by coercing test results into a normal curve with a mean of 100? The reality can't be that IQ is rising, because IQ is always 100.

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

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#247

Post by chrsig »

carapace wrote: post #224
chrsig wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who's "we" in that sentence? Intelligent people are unlikely to adopt foolish plans, by definition. 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.

> 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. 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…

> Is that not describing hyper-intelligence? Leaders so smart and wise that they achieve their goals without anyone noticing them?

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.

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#248

Post by chrsig »

cxr wrote: post #238
chrsig wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

> The target audience is fucking exhausted with the never ending deluge of bullshit we're being faced with. 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 s…

> You're not reading me. That sense of exhaustion is as appropriate as the smugness that it's being used to justify.

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?)

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#249

Post by aseerdbnarng »

notacoward wrote: post #244
aseerdbnarng wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not good satire because its very heavy handed (similar to Idiocracy) but its criticisms seemed spot on to me. The characters were all there from the jingoist politicians, a media focused on trivial distractions, techno utopianists, a fragmented society that cant agree on common truths and ultimately a disastrous ending that could have been avoided. Its not a cheerful movie

> jingoist politicians, a media focused on trivial distractions, techno utopianists 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 antag…

Thats a great point! “I liked everything about the movie until my ox was gored” and in this case the movie goes for it leaving no one spared. The evisceration of techno John Galt and the media might be the most flagrant sins amongst professional critics’ social class

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#250

Post by DoingIsLearning »

vorpalhex wrote: post #151
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This meta-analysis from 2014 disagrees: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4152423/ 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 meta-analysis has an impressive methodology. However, it claims that the increase in IQ is pervasive across geography but if you look at the studies included, the majority of the data sampled is from the US.

The Norwegian phenomenon is not exclusive it has been observed in the last few decades in Denmark, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Finland and Estonia.

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