141–150 of 582 posts
Idiocracy hit a lot of superficial/thematic nails on the head with its silliness. "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.
i couldn't finish "Don't Look Up", it felt like sitting through a political lecture. all i wanted from a comedy was some laughs.
Don't look!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not claiming that Idiocracy is accurate, however IQ scores have been declining. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/3283/
Imho IQ scores aren’t a sufficient measure of intelligence, it’s very shaky science at best
You may be correct. However, if the methodology of IQ scoring didn’t change, the change in score itself is worth of investigation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, same. I also felt like this when watching Office Space and Sillicon Valley. Hits too close to home. I know that through comedy you are supposed to get a sense of catharsis and a sort of relief, but to me it was just frustratingly sad. I guess I just take life too seriously.
Silicon Valley probably wouldn’t work as well today since they would vibe code everything and a lot of the drama would be removed that way.
I attended an audience testing screener for Idiocracy before the film's final edit. I could not believe my eyes and ears, I loved it unlike anything I'd seen before, it was the hardest US culture satire I'd seen up to that point. 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 makin…
I guess that explains the lack of promotion around this film?
I'm guessing that we (those of us who have seen it despite the lack of promotion) are lucky that they didn't just can it completely, or demand it get cut to ribbons and reformed as something else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always have a problem when folks bring up idiocracy because the of the eugenics angle. It’s extremely unlikely that people are getting inherently stupider, just less educated. The former is some sort of prophecy of doom and the latter is actually actionable.
Not claiming that Idiocracy is accurate, however IQ scores have been declining. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/3283/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always have a problem when folks bring up idiocracy because the of the eugenics angle. It’s extremely unlikely that people are getting inherently stupider, just less educated. The former is some sort of prophecy of doom and the latter is actually actionable.
Not claiming that Idiocracy is accurate, however IQ scores have been declining. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/3283/
Edit: This is a brief video explaining why.
Idiocracy hit a lot of superficial/thematic nails on the head with its silliness. "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.
> 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!"
I think you could have done this in the 1980s and 1990s and found a lot of fits: MTV, reality shows, daytime TV, junk food everywhere, pop music becoming increasingly trite and simple, newspapers and commentary declining toward grade school level vocabulary. In the 50s you would have had suburban conformity and doctors recommending cigarettes. In the 60s you had people trying to become enlightened by taking drugs and…
Then maybe we need to kill mass media once and for all. Keep the global communication network, but let it be all small-scale communities.
The answer is to be your own survivorship bias. Go dig and find good stuff.
"A character is literally named 'Upgraydd' with creative spelling. In the future, names have become increasingly absurd — just random syllables, product names, and numbers." Upgraydd was from our time wasn't he
There's a scene where Rita, in the future, tries to call Upgraydd, but there are 9726 listings for people called Upgraydd at that point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the film itself implies that the idiocracy is due to stupid people breeding more, a classic tenet of Nazism and eugenics alike
It's true though, isn't it? The response is what typifies Nazi and similar positions. 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…