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Are We Idiocracy Yet?

idiocracy.wtf

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Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#271

Post by Frieren »

coldtea wrote: post #205
thousand_nights wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then you need to watch comedies made decades ago.

> Then you need to watch comedies made decades ago.

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.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#272

Post by ordu »

orwin wrote: post #200
reliabilityguy wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imho IQ scores aren’t a sufficient measure of intelligence You may be correct. However, if the methodology of IQ scoring didn’t change, the change in score itself is worth of investigation.

Depends on the IQ test i guess? 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 tol…

The first IQ test was developed by Binet and Simon in France, and it was all about predicting academic success of children. Virtually all IQ tests are predicting academic success. Cultural component is a big part of it. For example music education is associated with better grades. Maybe no one knows how it works, but it does.

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.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#273

Post by shoxidizer »

justin66 wrote: post #184
xattt wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It breaks my heart when I hear people outraged about Onion stories, not because that they fall for them, but because they know they have a hard time telling truth from fiction.

I’m honestly not sure whether I believe these comments, or understand how to put them in context. Not for the first time I’m aware I do live in a cultural bubble, but: it’s hard for me to image anyone getting outraged by an Onion story (other than a religious right person stumbling across the “Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?” piece, or something like that). Similarly, hard to imagine someone identi…

> hard to imagine someone identifying with the over-the-top stupid people in Idiocracy.

Presumably they identify with cultural elements (e.g. amateur football, professional wrestling) and then interpret the rest as "this is how dumb I think you are" and "you are not fit to rule yourselves".

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#274

Post by Intermernet »

RajT88 wrote: post #235
prerok wrote: post #50

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.

I know one guy who can't watch Silicon Valley because it triggers him. He had a tech startup himself in the valley back in the day.

I couldn't watch Silicon Valley when I was working in tech. It constantly triggered rage as it was way too close to my actual experience. After I left tech, I found it to be amazing.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#275

Post by Gigachad »

RajT88 wrote: post #235
prerok wrote: post #50

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.

I know one guy who can't watch Silicon Valley because it triggers him. He had a tech startup himself in the valley back in the day.

I was never in a startup and I found the show incredibly stressful to watch.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#276

Post by FrustratedMonky »

bdashdash wrote: post #155
bsenftner wrote: post #87

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 feel Idiocracy is irresistible bait for 'not like the other girls'-types. Everytime this movie comes up, droves of people mention how they get it, while others don't. It's becoming a trope in itself.

Not just 'other girls'. That happens, but also, it's a theme that has been around a long time. The 'Maga' movement existed before Trump. This is 1992

Was also in Snow Crash.

"All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice…With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be.

The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers.

But as long as you have that fourwheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream.

"

Snow Crash Chapter 39 (Hiro's observation as he drives along the Alaska Highway)

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#277

Post by semiquaver »

wombat-man wrote: post #226
jfengel wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be curious to know the average IQ of, say, climate deniers. 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,…

Yes, it's hard for some to believe, but there are people in my family who are otherwise very intelligent but will not change their opinions on some things. Like climate change.

Unless you are a scientist directly engaging with the literature, you and your relative are both doing the same thing: trusting the opinion of peers and high-status people in your political clan about what is happening in the world. It just happens that people in your clan are telling the truth while the other one is lying.

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.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#278

Post by cucumber3732842 »

jacquesm wrote: post #112
bsenftner wrote: post #87

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…

> They all identified with the "idiots" and were indignant insulted, and angry. That is sort of the point of the movie. It is a satire, but it is also a documentary packaged as a satire and the wrapping paper isn't all that thick.

Eh. I don't really see anything wrong with that. Every industry flubs things because the people creating the product aren't the same demographics consuming it. No big deal IMO. I think it's just a product of your typical Hollywood filter bubble. The Average American(TM) isn't so stupid as to not see the glaring "left to it's own devices middle america would turn the whole country into white trash, also with literal trash everywhere" undertone even if they can't quite put their finger on it.

You could make essentially the same movie about how impenetrable and unaccountable bureaucracy and abstraction of responsibility away to 3rd parties is going to make society grind to a halt (e.g. trash piling up because all disposal methods have been declared not environmentally friendly enough, etc, etc) and someone who just doesn't give enough shits to ask permission can be the hero of the story and frame it to offend all the people who specifically identify as the opposite of the dumb people in idiocracy.

That said I think it's a great movie and they struck a good balance.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#280

Post by servo_sausage »

davemp wrote: post #88
netcan wrote: post #33

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 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.

This to me is one of the most apparent failures of modern taboo infecting people's ability to communicate, or even reason.

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?

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