> Tell me you know nothing about web development without saying you know nothing about web dev
This Twitterism really bugs me.
You took the time to write a really detailed response (much appreciated, you convinced me). There’s no need to explicitly dunk on the OP. Though if you really want to be a little mean (a little bit is fair imo), I think it should be closer to level of creativity of the rest of your comment. Call them ignorant and say you can’t take them seriously or something. The twitterism wouldn’t really stand on its own as a comment.
It bugs me that the author is "dunking on" React without knowledge on the matter (React is the tool you use to enforce consistent UI on a site; it has almost nothing at all to do with a design decision to have inconsistent UI). So I guess I "dunked on him" in response.
But ... too wrongs don't make a right. I'd remove the un-needed smarminess, if it wasn't already too late to edit.
I’m a decade+ linux power user and I still do insane things like pipe outputs into vim so I can copy paste without having to remember tmux copy paste modes when I have vertical panes open.
Sounds promising honestly. One of the scariest parts of the big AI labs is all of the exclusive training data they get through their UIs. (It’s unclear whether distillation is a feasible way to close the gap).
If there were another party involved, that would (hopefully) diversify power that (potentially) comes with those streams of data.
It’s a bit ironic that the USA has mostly abandoned interoperability after being one of the pioneers with the American manufacturing method. [0]
> Across a thousand runs through our scaffold, the total cost was under $20,000
Lots of questions about the $20k. Is that raw electricity costs, subsidized user token costs? If so, the actual costs to run these sorts of tasks sustainably could be something like $200k. Even at $50k, a FreeBSD DoS is not an extremely competitive price. That's like 2-4mo of labor.
Don't get me wrong, I think this seems like a great use for LLMs. It intuitively feels like a much more powerful form of white box fuzzing that used techniques like symbolic execution to try to guide execution contexts to more important code paths.
I’m falling into the Socratic hole [0], but in a modern civil society there is a justice system through which people seek recourse. This has all sorts of desirable effects for societies.
Please educate yourself on the basics or at least put more effort in before participating in conversations.
[0]: It’s easy to abuse the Socratic method and devolve a discussion into one of first principles. It’s extremely tiresome and a huge waste of everyone’s time.
I'm a big fan of the justice system. Can't have a functioning civilization without it. And yes, violence that is used by a democratic society following regulations is generally speaking better for society than arbitrary vigilantism motivated by personal beliefs is. But I'm not arguing that it would necessarily be good to kill Sam Altman. I'm just arguing that it's ok to find the idea of his death pleasing. I find the idea of killing all sorts of people pleasing without necessarily thinking that actually doing it would be good for society overall.
I've worked in the system for decade now. and I cannot agree. I feel nothing but regret, shame, and guilt most days. It's a cruel and vindictive system. Lady Justice carries a sword for a reason, and she loves to swing it.
I commonly refer to our system as the legal system for there is little justice.
I concur. I think the true issue is that no system can solve these types of problems. There will always be people who benefit more than others, and there will always be people who slip through the cracks.
I think our system is not the worst system available by any means. I just wish there was a bit more focus on impartiality and rehabilitation. I am not so sure why there is an obsession with punishment when data suggests it does not really deter people.
No can do, this justice system actually protects war criminals rather than prosecuting them. The US threatened the international justice system by threatening to invade the Hague when it attempted to prosecute American war criminals. It's contradictory to respect the American “justice system” whilest it actively disrespects other justice systems both in other countries and in international law.
I intentionally said “modern civil society” instead of the USA to avoid talking about specifics.
Whether the USA has a sufficiently functional justice system is another topic. My intuition is also that, in the presence of a disfunctional social system, fixing (or replacing) the system will usually lead to better outcomes than side stepping it. Not that I really want to talk about the minutia and challenges of fixing the USA’s justice system.
Yeah a company causing mass death or other disasters is maybe the single clearest signal that they should go bankrupt and someone else should take over (if the tech is really that important).
“Very likely yes”, I reply to an account that <1yr old with mostly comments in AI topics many of which violate the HN guidelines (including the one I’m responding to).
Strange gatekeeping response. Yep i comment on topics i'm interested in. Forgive me for not being on the platform for more than a year yet. That's a cute attitude
Nope, there is no “The” Turing Test. Go read his original paper before parroting pop sci nonsense.
The Turing test paper proposes an adversarial game to deduce if the interviewee is human. It’s extremely well thought out. Seriously, read it. Turing mentions that he’d wager something like 70% of unprepared humans wouldn’t be able to correctly discern in the near future. He never claims there to be a definitive test that establishes sentience.
Turing may have won that wager (impressive), but there are clear tells similar to the “how many the r’s are in strawberries?” that an informed interrogator could reliably exploit.
Interesting. That seems to suggest that one would need to retain the prompts in order to pursue copyright claims if a defendant can cast enough doubt on human authorship.
Though I guess such a suit is unlikely if the defendant could just AI wash the work in the first place.
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.
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.
I agree the eugenics thing is tangential. It's just there as an easy way to advance the plot to the point where the real story can start without too much work.
You could drop the eugenics thing, replace it with cultural indoctrination of some sort, re-frame it to instead of shitting on white trash culture, shit all over the college educated white collar white people culture and have the same movie down to the "culture has so thoroughly run amuck that even the black president is white in a bad way" trope, the trash piling up because we don't know what to do with it and the heroes being a hooker and a lazy army private. Maybe you'd have to replace the demo derby with a committee hearing full of say nothing corporate speak and some other minor details.
I think you all understood my point but for the sake of clarity, I said "take anyone from any group," and I was really thinking along the lines of "take a new born from any group."
I wasn't going for pro or anti-eugenics, just expressing that the Flynn effect has been reversing. At least from what I've read the trend is true _within_ families, which downplays potential pro-eugenics arguments.
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.
One other thing that's interesting -- at least in my personal observations, climate deniers don't usually actually argue the science. They might do this when publishing or speaking publicly. But, at least when you're talking with them and they're at ease and speaking freely, they seem to offer a different argument.
The argument I've seen, which really sticks with me, is that climate change is false, yes, but that's sort of a given that we don't investigate. Climate change was cooked up so that "the other side" could impose all sorts of horrible restrictions on "us."
I obviously don't agree with the argument, (ie, I think climate change is real and quite urgent) but I think it's an interesting framing. It's an argument from tribalism most obviously, but I also think it does what so many people do when attempting to understand complex events; it transforms the problem into more of a personal drama. The "real issue" is that "those people" are "against us." You see this sort of framing all the time; complex problems boiled down into personal dramas because people intuitively understand personal dramas and seek them out, but not necessarily because a personal drama has the best explanatory power.
This exactly is what drew in my late father, who was a scientist (not climate, obviously!) with raw intelligence several standard deviations above average. "They" were using climate change as a stalking horse for communism / woke-ism / whatever other "big government" thing he thought was counter to the interests of people like him.
He wasn't always like that. Maybe he wouldn't have described himself as such at the time, but in his twenties and early thirties he was a Liberal. He was a Peace Corps volunteer, attended Civil Rights marches, advocated on behalf of gay people, argued for gender equality, strongly opposed the Vietnam War, and was appalled by Watergate.
Fast-forward to the last decade of his life, in which my father donated to all three Trump presidential campaigns, displayed a Gadsden flag on his mantle, rejected his trans-gender grandchild, and made (at the very least) replacement-theory adjacent noises. Oh, and preferred Ivermectin over covid vaccination, of course.
What I think happened was that he was culturally out of step with most people who otherwise shared his politics in the 1970s - he was religious, so viscerally disgusted by drug use and "extra-marital" sex - and got captured by the propaganda machine that others in this thread have described. I believe the biggest turning point was 9/11: it terrified him, even if he couldn't quite admit that to himself, and he lived the rest of his life in a state of inchoate fear - stoked, naturally, by Fox News and other right-wing media.
So, that was the (white) American Baby Boomer Experience, writ small. He did materially well, but I think was a better and wiser person in his twenties than he became later on.
Rejecting climate change ("anthropogenic climate change", my father would point out, which let him off any evidentiary hook) is only a small part of an entire ideological project, which demands to be swallowed whole.
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.
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.
Flerfers seem to be a somewhat different problem. In my experience, the vast majority of flat earthers are trolls, pretending to be stupid for the purpose of angering people.
I'm sure there are some genuine flat earthers out there, and I imagine that their IQs do average near 100 (perhaps a little lower). But I'm basing that on a general understanding of how people come to stupid beliefs, rather than from observations of individuals, because I'm not sure I've ever met a flat earther who actually believed what he was saying.
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.
Climate change and climate change denial is not just about the scientific facts about what is happening to the climate, it is also the political opinion about what actions should be done. Those actions involve contested subjects like economical aspects (both national and global), fairness among population demographics, historical fairness (such as indigenous populations), border politics and wars, as well as what methods and technology is scientifically proven to be effective measures. Denialism in this aspect is very broad concept, and if we define it that anyone who disagree with the politician actions are idiots, and everyone who agree with them are intelligent, then a large portion of people will be idiots even if a large number of them are very intelligent in other areas.
> Climate change and climate change denial is not just about the scientific facts about what is happening to the climate, it is also the political opinion about what actions should be done.
It would be great if what you said is true, and people were just arguing about what to do about it.
It's not, though. "It's a hoax" is both the start, and the end point for a large portion of the population, the media, and the politicians that represent it.
How would you know if its a large portion of the population if media and politicians label people deniers just because they have a difference in opinion about what actions should be done?
In absolute terms, the portion of the worlds population that deny that the climate is changing is a single digit percentage, and that include the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_on_climate_chan...). The portion is a bit larger if you include people who think that the climate is changing but that is mostly caused by natural causes, but it is still a small minority compared to the wast majority that see climate change as either caused exclusively by human activity or as a mix between human activity and natural causes.
The "It's all a hoax" is a popular talking point but their followers are fewer in real life. It much more commonly to find that people with opposing view who actually agreeing that climate change is real, but that they disagree on policy. As an example, creating environmental policy based on per capita create a complete different policy compared to absolute emissions. The later is no more climate change denial than the first, and yet the later generally get labeled as denial.
> How would you know if its a large portion of the population if media and politicians label people deniers just because they have a difference in opinion about what actions should be done?
I don't need to trust what the media tells me about them, I can just listen to what those people and the politicians elect actually say, and what they say is flippin' 'Climate change is a chinese hoax' lunacy.
There's no need to sanewash them, or make excuses for them. It's not a matter of 'disagreement of what to do', it's that they are either really fucking stupid, or are disingenuously courting people who are really fucking stupid.
> I can just listen to what those people and the politicians elect actually say, and what they say is flippin' 'Climate change is a chinese hoax' lunacy.
You probably don’t actually listen to what they say. You probably instead listen to what your preferred media channels report on, and selectively quote from, what they say. You think these two things are the same, since you think that your news sources are perfectly accurate. But those who actually listen to those people, and prefer different media channels, probably have other opinions.
In Germany, for many years we had been told that climate change is the most important thing ever, that we need to change our habits or else the world will go down, that if we don't act now, we will all be doomed. Then the Ukraine war happened, and suddenly nobody was talking about climate change anymore.
I'll admit, I'm a simple man and I don't know the science behind all of this. But as a citizen, it does feel confusing how one day you're being told that we're all going to die unless we change something, and then suddenly even though nothing changed, it seems to be fine after all.
Plenty of people in Germany (on all social/political levels) still talk about climate change, and have done so without pause before, during and since Ukraine.
If you think that everything "seems to be fine after all", you're in for a very rude awakening.
Is that your perception, or do you have data to back this up?
For context, here's one source saying public concern for climate change has fallen in Germany from 42% to 34% from 2022 to 2025, in line with other European countries. [0] This was a study done by a German sustainability non-profit.
Here's another source stating that globally, news coverage about climate change has diminished by 38% from 2021 to 2025. [1]
Here's a third source stating that the share of German citizens who claim to be "very concerned" about climate change has dropped from 50% to 33% from 2019 to 2025. [2]
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.
I think choosing reliable authority requires a little intelligence. I don’t know how to build a robust house, but I can understand that should be on the solid base (scientific method) upon stable field, instead of mysterious objects from thousand years ago.
I really love the way you communicated this and wish HN posters could more routinely invite curious conversations like this. Which isn't to say I'm perfect at it either
you don't have to be a scientist to directly engage with the literature. from mathematical proofs to directly observed phenomena to statistical certainties - it's all out there for you to engage with and feel secure in your findings just by having an internet connection. there's a qualitative difference in that evidence from the "sides" and therefore there is a qualitative and practical difference in the "more intelligent" side. "truth" is not incidental to the situation, it's the entire point of making claims at all. So a side that is making claims that turn out to not be true - whether you personally verify that or not - is a worse side, intellectually, than another.
If the side you follow says the science community is political and biased, then "just look at the literature" isn't going to help. It's like telling an atheist they'd believe in Jesus if they'd just read the bible.
We are lied to constantly by people who influence our lives. You can't even go to the grocery store without being lied to - being told breakfast cereals are healthy, that low fat options will make you less fat, shrinkflation, misleading unit pricing. It's no wonder people are so distrusting
Even if you're a democrat you still have to admit that democrats lie, a ton, and it's super obvious. Maybe if our leadership in general, on both sides, was capable of being decent humans then we'd be able to build trust and stop doing dumb shit as a civilization
Unfortunately at some level, as usual, it comes down to game theory
If you tell the nuanced truth and lose, and your opponent tells simplified untruths and wins, where does that leave you?
As I understand it (obviously a gross simplification), Jimmy Carter attempted to treat Americans like adults, but Americans did not want to inconvenience themselves by wearing sweaters
please engage in good faith. if you think mathematical proofs will be an issue when I tell someone to "look at the literature", you either don't know what a mathematical proof is, or are too far abstracted from reality to influence any practical action. yes, we're being lied to. no, they don't fuck up the science in order to lie to you. they just expect you not to read the science. because, truthfully, it's rare that the people who are lying to you would even know how to fuck up the science in their favor. so they bet on your ignorance, based on their ignorance, and they usually win the bet. but not if you just go look it up and engage with it. it's not about reading a single paper; it's about always reading every paper (on topics you have decided you are going to have an opinion about) with a keen and unshakeable focus on practical effect. anything else is an academic boondoggle.
That’s a pretty weak argument. What percentage of people actually have the qualifications to understand and verify a research paper? And how much can you even trust the raw data? At the end of the day, it’s just a matter of faith—whether you choose to believe the guy in the church or the guy at the university.
You don't need any advanced science to understand climate change. The basic chemistry and physics of it are readily accessible at a high school level.
Current research papers are far more advanced, but they're about the details of climate change. The basic facts of it were established two centuries ago.
We know that we are putting CO2 into the atmosphere. We know that CO2 absorbs heat. That's not a matter of believing an expert. At this point, anybody still denying it is deliberately choosing what somebody else tells them.
The economic effects of that are harder to model, but denialism is still stuck on whether the effect is real. There is no way to include them in any coherent discussion of what to do about it.
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.
Because where you draw the lines for "race" is down to your own culture, not a constant dividing line that all cultures agree upon.
To an American, race may be e.g.: {White, Black, Hispanic, Native American, Arabic, Asian}.
To most Europeans, everyone who an an American would call Hispanic, we'd probably either call "Caucasian" (i.e. white) if their heritage is more from the Spanish side or Native American if their heritage is more from the pre-Columbian (Aztec?) side.
If you're Chinese, they may say the ethnicities are "Han, Zhuang, Hui, Manchu, Uyghur, …" where those are all ethnic groups within China.
Rwanda, infamously, would get you a distinction between Hutu and Tutsi; if you show me a picture of two people and ask me which was which, I wouldn't be able to answer, or even know if I was being pranked with any of the other ethnic groups in Africa.
But more broadly, while skin colour is easy to spot from the outside, it's about as useful as hair or eye colour when it comes to correspondence with the huge range of invisible genetic variation.
>Mild cognitive decline was noted after infection with the wild-type virus and with each variant, including B.1.1.529 (Omicron). Relative to uninfected participants, cognitive deficit (3-point loss in IQ) was seen even in participants who had had completely recovered from mild COVID-19.
>Participants with persistent symptoms had the equivalent of a 6-point loss in IQ, while those who had been admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU) experienced the equivalent of a 9-point loss in IQ.
> 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.
No I think that our tools to measure and our definition of intelligence are lacking and are causing more problems than actually helping with anything.
Or can you point to any obvious improvements that result from having measured “intelligence” for the last 100+ years?
When my grandpa was a kid they would measure your skull and decide if you are smart or a subhuman based on that. Makes about as much sense as our current IQ tests…
I think it’s an essential question.
I wouldn’t even know how to describe what intelligence means exactly. I’ve experienced very “smart” people make horribly stupid decisions and the other way round.
Since I don’t know a way to describe what intelligent actually means I can’t tell if it’s good or not to have more or less of it.
For some this seems to be a very “finished” topic, but we don’t have any widely accepted definitions of intelligence, not even for “less complex” organisms
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.
Not a sufficient measure of different kinds of mental agility (including emotional/social) maybe.
But when it comes to intelligence needed for doing maths and physics and such, it's a very good proxy. And geniuses like Tao, also happen to scope very highly.
All of these effects are explained much better by social factors. If you're poor or discriminated against, you get less nutrition, less education, and face barriers in trying to improve both.
Could you please elaborate on why measuring the same group somehow eliminates social effects?
Are you claiming social factors have remained constant during the measuring period? Because they very obviously haven't.
If you're aware of the Peter principle, and how inequality compounds over time, then you know that the rate at which social factors change is correlated with their quantile values.
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?
No, it's taboo because actually trying to implement it requires invalidating individual human rights... And requires creating an authority who decides what traits should be passed on or removed.
So people hear the word, and react to the word at some toddler level "it's yucky!", and stop reasoning altogether.
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.
Is that because of some heritable presence/lack of intelligence or because scientists feed their children well early in life, have books in the home, and take the time to follow up on their children's education?
The ugly thing about eugenics is that someone has an artificial ideal of how people should be and then tries to enforce that. If something just happens without interference (a process), that's basically just evolution.
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
> 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.
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.
I think the intent of Mike Judge's joke was less so an outright promotion of eugenics and more so mocking the upper crust of American society's approach to family planning. (That of which Judge was intimately familiar with during his time in SV when he worked for a graphics card company.)
A lot of his work with KotH analyzed the same dynamics of educated and uneducated America and the interplay and I think Idiocracy is essentially the terminus of the observations he would make where if the idiots got their way. (A semi-common plot point with Hank in KotH where he would be pit against rediculous circumstances.)
> There is nothing in the movie that suggests that the decline in average intelligence is a result of cultural factors or education.
Have you skipped start of the movie or did we watch different editions? They literally open the story with redneck family breeding and spreading their redneck ways through family ties while “smart” family waits for the perfect moment.
I think that the movie makes it really, really obvious that the intellectual degradation goes beyond just culture. The people are presented as being borderline mentally disabled.
I rewatched the intro, and it is true that they label the character IQs. That said, I still don't think that the particular mechanism is the most important part
The movie obviously doesn’t depict a eugenics program, but it makes the core argument of eugenics: if human breeding is left uncontrolled it will lead to “stupid” people breeding more.
Correct! It mandated eugenics in real life, in the early 20th century. I didn't say that the movie shows eugenics happening. I said "the film itself implies that the idiocracy is due to stupid people breeding more, a classic tenet of Nazism and eugenics alike." Work on your reading comprehension.
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 there's a computer glitch that then wipes out humanity; but it's from the time when there were monolithic computers.
Is Dennis the Menace a treatise on corporeal punishment?
If we want to treat Idiocracy as a policy paper, why not take away as a lesson to think beyond merely themselves when the well-educated decide whether to raise children?
The film wasn't about education, it was about genetics, as the intro makes abundantly clear. And the Redditors who get themselves hot and bothered about this film aren't laughing, they're congratulating themselves on being the intelligent ones instead of the dysgenic stupids while crowing about how "Idiocracy is a documentary" -> stupid people are overbreeding.
If most people in the thread have different takeaways, and you're laser-focused on seeing eugenics and superiority (especially when you keep making condescending remarks like "hope this helps" or "work on your reading comprehension"), I don't think that reflects on the film
Yeah, the consensus of a plurality of users of a Silicon Valley startup incubator heavily associated with the right wing is definitely the only opinion that matters about the subtext of a film.
That's ironic seeing that nazis (or the far right in general) usually need stupid people to vote for them so they get into a position where they can undermine a democratic system...
All kinds of people voted for the Nazi party, including very intelligent and respectable professors, and there was no special split in intelligence between either side voters (or measure of that).
What's ironic is using nazi-like thinking (the idiot masses who vote far right vs the enlightened people who vote left), instead of treating it as a complex political matter, and accepting that perfectly intelligent people can just as well fall for that shit.
Voting for the right as a member of the working class is truly idiotic. Not that most people on this site have ever dipped below PMC treatlerite comfort.
>Voting for the right as a member of the working class is truly idiotic
Or not everybody shares your priorities and ideological outloook, or even pragmatic assessment of how more fucked they are with the right vs the left in power in the past, and it's the above that's naive.
Perhaps they're adverse to people so apolitical and self-righteous that think nobody can't vote anything else than what they're selling, unless they're stupid or immoral.
Every single quality of life improvement for the working class, from minimum wage, to overtime, to weekends, was delivered by the left. Please tell me one thing that the right has accomplished for laborers.
This Twitterism really bugs me.
You took the time to write a really detailed response (much appreciated, you convinced me). There’s no need to explicitly dunk on the OP. Though if you really want to be a little mean (a little bit is fair imo), I think it should be closer to level of creativity of the rest of your comment. Call them ignorant and say you can’t take them seriously or something. The twitterism wouldn’t really stand on its own as a comment.
Sorry for the nitpicky rant.
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