jdiiufccuskalAre We Idiocracy Yet?
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.
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
> Imho IQ scores aren’t a sufficient measure of intelligence, it’s very shaky science at best
What do you propose as a replacement metric to determine if humans are getting dumber or not?
No idea.
Why do we need to determine if humans are getting dumber or not?
Why do we need to determine if humans are getting dumber or not?
> No idea. Why do we need to determine if humans are getting dumber or not?
It seems to me, then, that your primary objection is not that IQ scores are inaccurate, but that intelligence shouldn't be measured in the first place?
Which makes me think that you don't want anyone doing research into whether human intelligence is changing at all.
> 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 told myself how lucky that was that most of the question the psychologist asked me, i already read the answers (which might have been the point), and that they used a tangram because honestly i knew i would have scored poorly on that particular test, i have trouble visualizing stuff (mild aphantasia).
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.
Invoking IQ is not really a good way to dismiss pro-eugenics concerns.
Edit: This is a brief video explaining why.
The Bell Curve
> Edit: This is a brief video explaining why.
I knew what it was before even clicking on it. The “brief video” was a strong enough clue.
After a while of going up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
While genes must play a part in this (if they didn't, all non-humans would also share our IQ*), genetics shift on a much slower timescale than the entire history of IQ tests.
* This pattern matches to the Motte-and-Bailey rhetorical technique, ergo I am suspicious of people who try to tie genetics and IQ until they're clear they're not making a racially charged claim. Last I checked, there is no real evidence that human races are a meaningful genetic category, let alone that anything usually described as "race" correlates to any genes connected to IQ scores.
How can human races not be a meaningful genetic category? Aside from the phentoypical differences, the prevalence of some diseases varies by race.
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, and will apply their intelligence as hard as they can to avoid agreeing with them.
100 is not a perfect score on an IQ test! 100 is the mean score. It's not a percentage.
I don't think that's what the GP was going for... rather, implying that flat-eartherness is uncorrelated to IQ and, thus, the average IQ of flat-earthers is the same as that of the general population.
A lot of beliefs are cultural and not directly related to intelligence. From an outsider's perspective, it can be difficult to tell which beliefs are merely fact-based and which are rooted in culture.
I think an important thought experiment here would be to really imagine people going to war, killing each other over whether or not biblical transubstantiation is literal or metaphorical. who had the "intelligent" belief in this case? I'd argue neither side and that this was pure tribalism.
Why stop at eugenics? Spoil your environment enough and it will definitely have an effect on the individuals in that environment.
Every scrotum on this forum has microplastics and phthalates in them, things shown to have effects on the endocrine and reproductive systems.
Hold on.
Turns out some scientists found out the amount of plastic was over measured because it included the plastic of their own gloves.
I've read it last week, can not found the source now. Sorry
Turns out some scientists found out the amount of plastic was over measured because it included the plastic of their own gloves.
I've read it last week, can not found the source now. Sorry
No, they showed that the gloves could have introduced microplastic-like particles in some samples depending on how they are handled. It just feels like one of those studies secretly funded by an oil company to throw shade.
https://theconversation.com/scientists-may-be-overestimating...
> It’s important to note that even if the microplastic abundance in the environment is lower than researchers originally thought, any amount of microplastics can be troublesome, given their negative effects on human health and ecosystems.
There is no eugenics angle in Idiocracy. Nobody tries to achieve some "genetic ideal" by manipulating people.
The premise of the movie is that smart people stop having kids and dumb people have lots. It's "reverse eugenics"
But it's a proven fact. Less educated people are poorer. The less educated tend to have more children. And children who grow up in poor families receive a lower quality of education.
Yes but this is not the genetic argument this is a "school system sucks" argument
Even if the creator specifically had eugenics in mind, I think he stumbled upon a greater truth.
Consider this. You can take anyone from any group in your nation, place them in a different nation, with a different culture, and they will adopt the mannerisms and accents of that culture.
We focus on race constantly, but it's clear that culture drives the norms that we see in any group. And culture may be persistent (especially now with technology allowing every culture to potentially spread everywhere), but it's not intrinsic.
With this framing, I interpreted Idiocracy's intro as being about a culture of intelligence or learning being harder to maintain in a modern world, than a culture of apathy or fun.
nailed it. I see this odd "eugenics" framing all the time, and all I can think is 'ooh la la, somebody's gonna get laid in college." you can argue the academia until you are blue in the face, but the real-world statistics show that less educated people have more children and that education quality in the US has been declining. It's not a foregone conclusion that one causes the other, but there's a cogent argument to be made that it's about the culture of poorer people vs the culture of richer people - and they even spell out that angle in the movie. They show how reticent the rich couple is to have a child, and how eager the poor couple is to do the same. It's about what their cultures value about children and legacy. It's not "dumb people make dumb kids", it's "dumb people won't educate their kids past their own knowledge who, in turn, won't educate their kids past their own knowledge." The movie even goes on to resolve with the "dumb" descendants learning (from the protagonist) when they have anyone willing to make that a point of the culture. So I can't read a clean "eugenics" take from the film; I only find that take in misreadings of the intro, personally.
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?