I'm not convinced that the author's favored political positions are above satire.
>A blunt-smoking doctor at the hospital (Justin Long) is shocked that Joe doesn’t have a barcode on his arm, like everybody else, and asks, “Why come you no have a tattoo?”
Yet, the author seems to be a fan of the bio-security state rationalized by the covid emergency.
>...climate deniers...
Is this not also a bastardization of language? Is anyone denying that the earth has a climate? To be fair to the author, it seems like a deliberate trashing of nuance.
Yes, the movie is funny, but the review is a bit smug. The depopulation part was a bit over the top. From the opposing perspective the causes he champions such as "BirthStrikers" seem like willing rubes for authoritarians. If he can dish it out, then perhaps he should look in the mirror.
> Is this not also a bastardization of language? Is anyone denying that the earth has a climate? To be fair to the author, it seems like a deliberate trashing of nuance.
Do you actually not understand what the author means by “climate deniers”? The intended meaning seems quite clear to me.
I'm sure everyone knows what the author means. Yet you can still say that it's inaccurate and only used for effect: the framing is that it's adjacent to holocaust deniers.
If you're not a fan of that kind of use of language, you can criticize it while still understanding what the author wanted to convey ("those people").
Everyone knows who you mean when you call one US party "fascists" and the other "communists", but you've lost pretty much all nuance. And all you've won is a bit of impact, for a while, because the tool will blunt with constant use. You'll have to reach for "super fascists" and "mega communists" next time and that will barely move the needle and you'll be far away from the effect you got when you tried that hack the first time.
No, the original commenter questions whether anyone denies that earth has a climate, which would make "Climate Denier" an accurate and useful term. Of course, it's a rhetorical question to point out that the term is just used for effect, thereby reducing the utility of language.
I believe you can apply Kant's categorical imperative to language as well and you'll quickly arrive at the point that misusing language to score a point will lead to language becoming less useful and you'll do much more harm than you gain.
This is a silly view of how language works. The point of language is to communicate ideas, which is why I asked about whether there was actually a failure to communicate ideas (there wasn’t). You might as well invoke Kant to complain about how hot dogs are not actually dogs, and they’re often sold in refrigerators so they’re not even hot!
Calling frozen frankfurters hotdogs doesn't deliberately or dishonestly reframe the discussion in an overly simplified, pop culture manner. Hotdogs might be an everyman's food for sporting events and children, but they don't invoke a flippant, immature dismissal. Hotdogs aren't even adversarial. In this sense the use of "climate denier" fits with the coarsening of culture theme of the film.
The space for discussion is prematurely attacked by the overly simplistic frame of "climate denier". Perhaps the author isn't capable of operating in that space, therefore he requires defensive rhetoric. Maybe it isn't deliberate or conscious. Perhaps he is simply bleating the preferred partisan slogan?
Nuance is deliberately or unconsciously removed in lieu of shallow arrogance. That's ironic in my reading of the article and view of the movie. There's no feigned confusion in my comment above. Perhaps you misread it.
You serious? Nuance is when things are more complicated than the initial basic message would indicate. Elevating the primary message at the expense of those details is exactly what trashing nuance means.
Sure, in the same sense that I also understood what Justin Long's character meant when he said, "Why come you no have a tattoo?”, which is entirely what your parent comments point was.
The bigger issue for those who object might be ceding control over personal energy consumption to authoritarian central planners. It fits with a pattern of usurpation of individual liberties under the pretense of emergency.
Whether or not the Earth has a warming climate is largely irrelevant to this point.
The next question would be what the optimal climate is and how do these experts know what it is? We've gone from weather forecasters being wrong about rain over the weekend, to politicians and their pet technocrats asserting that the current climatic trajectory is somehow "wrong". The solution as always, is to give politicians more power.
This is a really good example of not liking a solution and resolving that conflict by denying the problem. Was there a single point in your life where your worldview crystalized or was it an evolving process? I'm genuinely interested in how people arrive at the place your at.
Your comment is patronizing, but I'll do my best. Pollution is still a problem for me.
I'd say I evolved as I matured as an individual. There was only so much fearful propaganda I could consume before my curiosity led me to examine the premises. The repeated invocation of apocalypse to scare people has direct historical parallels to other religious financial schemes.
What is an ideal climate, and how would fallible men determine that? Does it not seem backwards for man to dictate what nature should be, when man will never have sufficient information to describe nature?
Who knows, maybe your views will also continue to evolve? I hope I can retain enough curiosity to do the same for myself.
Obviously a lot of directions to take this, but how is climate different from say the ozone hole story? To me it bears the same hallmarks. We don't fully understand the atmosphere, should we have left the problem alone? Who are we to say what the right size the hole should be. To top it off a lot of people seem to be afraid of it and claim it will mean the end of most life on earth. I'm curious how either you frame it as a different thing. Is it that we do understand ozone dynamics, or that people weren't afraid of it, or something else?
don't be surprised -- it's just your typical moronic media propaganda used to label and denigrate anyone who questions an established narrative, shutting down any discourse in the process. Much easier to call someone a "conspiracy theorist" in a pointless article with zero value creation to the world than to actually peel back some of the layers.
There's some irony here though. It isn't entirely without value. The author points the finger while assuming his ideology is beyond mockery. Yet, for some of us the article is hilarious.
This movie is ripe for a remake where the world is stupid-Left instead of stupid-Right.
Starbucks offers gender reassignment surgeries and Costco employees say “Welcome to Costco, I apologise”, and the world-ending crisis is that nobody can actually reproduce any more.
The "denier" language is a dishonest way to associate whatever the topic is with Holocaust denial. It certainly isn't exclusive to climate talk, though.
First time I had a revelation that we are close to Idiocracy was when I saw the movie Crank which came out the same year. It a had vibe so close to "Ow my b*lls" movie featured in Idiocracy. And I was entertained.
Shortly after Idiocracy, someone bade an ow my balls mobile game and spread like wildfire. The thing is... we were already in Idiocracy when the movie came out. Good sci-fi isn't prophetic, it just describes the world as it already is.
But the mirror is also temporal. There’s a lot of trash on TV these days but it’s probably not as lowbrow outright sensationally dumb as the shock jock reality TV era that Idiocracy was created in. We’re currently living in a highbrow era of television.
Don't Look Up, currently out on Netflix, seems to owe a fair amount to Idiocracy. And/or to the ways in which American culture morphed into Idiocracy over the last several years.
I do not think the point of this thread is to discuss our personal liking of these movies but just to add another data point to yours, as much as I agree with the message of Idiocracy and found it merely funny, Don't Look Up was a really good movie for me.
It’s interesting that you call the characters cartoonishly stupid, but another poster in this thread characterized the film as “so grounded in reality that it took very little creativity to write or think about. Making 1-to-1 comparisons of things and people”. I have not seen the film yet, so I’m a little curious how opinions could differ so widely.
Can you give an example of something from the film you thought was so cartoonishly stupid?
I would argue that our reality today is even dumber and more hostile in some ways, so I suppose this is a matter of outlook. I was surprised that they didn't have a literal war break out, for example.
It felt so grounded in reality that it took very little creativity to write or think about. Making 1-to-1 comparisons of things and people isn't very interesting. Such thin layers of abstraction don't add much value in media just as they don't in software development. It's basically just cut-and-paste.
Sure, I guess I was expecting satirical comedy and it was just satire. It wasn’t funny to me and it wasn’t particularly entertaining.
I wasn’t engaged or entertained so I thought it was terrible.
I think Idiocracy was great because it was funny and used the future to allow you to see and imagine how it came to be that way. Don’t Look Up exaggerates the present in a way that feels familiar but misses the mark somehow.
I’m likely the target audience for the movie based on my left of center politics, but I suspect some will say it’s a great movie because of political tribalism and never watch it again because they know it’s actually not very good.
The thing that bothers me about most contemporary praise for Idiocracy is the failure to view it through the appropriate historical lens, and so most of the praise ends up being shallow in the retconned context. Idiocracy was created in a specific time period—the same one that American Dad! was born in. (NB: "born" being the crucial word in the previous sentence.) It's possible in 2021—or 2011, even—to have watched and enjoyed both for the first time and still not understand why either were created.
I'm seeing more references to Idiocracy now on social media because of Don't Look Up's recent release (compared to, say, how frequently Idiocracy was mentioned last month). There's a lot of problems with Don't Look Up that make for it not being an example of greatness or even very-goodness, but one thing in particular in comparison to Idiocracy are the movies' protagonists. In Idiocracy, Not Sure is a pretty average guy—maybe even a little dumb. This is what the writers of Don't Look Up missed out on. Idiocracy is smart people writing about about a dumb-to-average "hero" because the egos of those involved (the creators and their audience) don't require him to be bigger than they are. In contrast, Don't Look Up is a movie written by people who are as smart as Not Sure is dumb, trying to write for characters who are supposed to be smarter than the writers themselves and the people who are supposed to enjoy the movie the most.
Some reviews called Don't Look Up smug and sanctimonious—and they're right. With Idiocracy and Don't Look Up, the humility and lack thereof, respectively, when comparing the two accounts for a lot of why Don't Look Up is worse than it should be. (Given what Don't Look Up tries to do, it should do it better than Talladega Nights does, for example, but it doesn't.) Also accounting for a lot of what made Don't Look Up a not so great way of cribbing from Idiocracy is that Idiocracy was taking aim at the zeitgeist, whereas Don't Look Up is a very safe movie to make.
I mean...I can see why it'd be called smug...but to be honest, I don't think it was targeted to people that would be bothered by the smugness.
That is, it seemed like it was genuinely an expression of frustration/dismay/astonishment by it's creators to give it's audience a bit of...not quite catharsis...solidarity perhaps?
Well, yeah. And that's exactly what's wrong with it. That's _all_ it is. As a result, the sense of smugness is undeserved. It's a way for everyone who sits in the second panel of the glowing brain meme to shit on people in the first panel and feel good about it, instead of focusing on the fact they're still in #2. It's an out-and-out display of the word "sophomoric".
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 even acknowledge is even happening.
> 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 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.
So it's wrong in the measure of a thing that it does what it tries to do at minimum, but it's also wrong in that it doesn't do anything else (what it tries to and nothing more).
What it does do, unintentionally, is showcase (to exhibit without examining—again, unintentionally) what's wrong with the people who are supposed to be on the right side—a lack of self-awareness and sense of culpability while standing opposite the people on the wrong side stupidly chanting, "don't look up". Each group has enough in their reserves to provide enough stupid juice to take down everyone when pooled together.
> No one's walking away from watching it feeling superior.
> 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?)
The level of discomfort it engendered was off the scale. The depiction of the political and media is so close to reality that I ended up fast forwarding through it and at this point have paused watching as continuing is just too uncomfortable.
So from that point of view, and at least for me I would say that the movie is a success, job done. Unfortunately I don't think I'm the person who needs to receive this message. I don't need to be told that the world is going to shit at a faster rate than ever. I don't need to be told that most (all?) media, main stream or otherwise only succeed in rating somewhere between barely acceptable and blatantly corrupt on an ethical/truthfulness scale. The only way I can continue to exist with some degree of happiness is to simply try to ignore the majority of what is going on outside my bubble. I don't think I'm alone.
That said, I'm really interested how this movie has been perceived by those who think everything is wonderful. Are their world views so different that they have any ability to understand that this is not a comedy set in a different world, where politicians and media are clueless to their own ignorance and stupidity? Do they understand that this movie is holding a big bloody mirror up to the Western world and giving a giant wake up call. Unfortunately given how a lot of people seem to have reacted to the last couple of years, I have to think that they would just look at themselves in the mirror, adjust the makeup and wonder how those stupid scientists can not understand that they are messing with the latest media fed delusion.
Now I'm going to close my door again and pretend that the world really is wonderful. Have a nice day.
"The underlying message of course is that humans ought to take such things as science, research and knowledge seriously, lest we create our own Idiocracy."
Rather, I felt the underlying message of the film is that the film is a critique of the consumerism and corporatism of the US. The 'idiocracy' with how the government runs, the downward trend of education in the US, and the pessimistic views of our future.
Wouldn't the Dunning-Kruger effect mean that unintelligent people would just keep having kids while the Imposter Syndrome would mean Intelligent people would not?
If we think we need intelligent people in order to have intelligent children that seems like an argument for nepotism and hereditary positions, which isn't very progressive.
Perhaps the fact that we DO need intelligent people to have intelligent children will lead to some forced changes in our society down the line, progressive or not
I think that was more of a minor plot point to move the story along rather than the real message. Judge just took a common theme, probably popularized in The Time Machine (The HG Wells book, not the ride in the film), to get us from point A to Point B quickly. After all, it was such a small part of the movie compared to how much time was spent focusing on lowest common denominator entertainment (ow my balls), commercialism (Brawndo), corporatism (Brawndo owning the USDA), issues with automation, etc.
The real genius of Idiocracy is that it realizes that the audience wants to see "ow my balls" but doesn't want to admit it. So it provides a framing where you both get to feel above it and get to indulge.
Haha, I have no trouble admitting it. Be it Ow my balls, Beavis and Butthead or something else, I don't feel above a little bit of schlocky TV, really.
I think you're right. Idiocracy was much more Judge's critique of the lazy morality ("It's irresponsible to have kids!") and lazy voting ("burrito coverings") of the yuppie class. These days, you can even see wokeism being lambasted ("Welcome to Costco, I love you.").
I’m not sure you are commenting on OPs remarks. The argument of lazy morality and voting of yuppies from corporatism and consumerism? Many, many (many) people buy things they don’t meet that help fuel corporate power. Yuppies, non-yuppies. For instance, how many people do you know that bought things from Amazon lately?
I even forgot about the corporate wokeism that is placated towards consumers for their 'one month a year gay pride twitter image', then not upholding the same morals year-round
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 Coinbase CEO handled the toxic woke employees they got burdoned with.
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.
They walk a very fine line. It seems like a difficult balancing act of compliance with regulators while appealing to users who expect hyper inflation and envision a libertarian utopian future.
Perhaps they want to limit their corporate position on political issues to the ones directly relevant to them, so as to not repel people who disagree on an unrelated issue.
"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.
One of my favorite lines in the movie. Whenever I hear anyone talking about how they only use "good" salt ("it's got micronutrients!"), I giggle and have to bring it up.
"You should be using water" "you mean like in the toilet??"
No matter how seriously you take science, research and knowledge, evolution is merciless. Given a strategy that uses less resources to reproduce, that strategy will win over time. It's so obvious that it feels like a tautology. Science and research is extremely expensive and time intensive strategy. Living on universal basic income, finding a mate and making lots of kids doesn't require anything outside having the ability to attract the opposite sex.
> "The underlying message of course is that humans ought to take such things as science, research and knowledge seriously, lest we create our own Idiocracy."
The author of this article reached a fairly backwards conclusion. If the smart people hadn't prioritized careers in science and research over creating a family, idiocracy would not have occurred; the smart people would have procreated at the same rate as dumb people.
But I agree that it's more a critique of a "dopamine" driven culture that has no critical thinking skills.
I think the reality is much darker than this: cognitive elites have fewer children than the rest so the average population IQ drops over time (once you fix the low hanging fruits of nutrition/health care of course) . I do not see any solution to this that is not straight out of Brave New World.
While a great plot point that is entirely fantasy and fiction. The average IQ rate of every generation tends to be a few points higher, though there may be a cap.
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 exposure [1], plasticizers [2], and flame retardants [3], probably in that order.
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.
The intro of the movie made it quite clear that it was dysgenics.
I.e. how the "good couple" did not have children because of x before the man worked him self to death, while the irresponsible douche stupid brute etc. quarterback was saved by "good couple" medicine and had multiple children.
> "The underlying message of course is that humans ought to take such things as science, research and knowledge seriously, lest we create our own Idiocracy."
And this right here is the problem I have with Idiocracy. Amazing movie, annoying fanbase.
Everyone thinks that the movie is a perfect illustration of what's wrong with <other party>. If you watch that movie, and think, "<My party / I myself> would never create such a society", then the movie is about you.
Hey, I remember when the "L" meant "learning" too (I think they changed it to "Life" now).
I don't think consuming "stupid" entertainment makes us stupid or is even a solid indicator of intelligence (if you can settle on a definition of it). TLC just saw a market and pivoted, imo.
I agree with you to an extent. I think stupid entertainment is fine in moderation. Sometimes it's nice to mentally checkout for a while.
Collectively, however, I think it's a bad sign.
TLC isn't the only one who saw a market and pivoted. Sticking with TV examples, the History channel has shows about monsters and aliens now. Discovery's content is almost as bad.
It's not just that there's a market for stupid entertainment. It's that the market for non-stupid entertainment seems like it's shrinking.
I don't really have any evidence to make a counterargument, so you might be right.
I could present an alternative viewpoint though: Cable access has steadily been losing marketshare to streaming services for a while now, so they're aiming for as much mass appeal as possible. It might not be that there is a lower proportion of people looking for educational entertainment than there was before, but that declining viewership has made it unprofitable to produce content for that niche. I see a lot of documentaries on Netflix, for example, and then there's CuriosityStream which is a service just for that, right?
Also a lot of "edutainment" is and always has been sensationalism...I remember watching a documentary about how solar storms were gonna wipe out humanity any day now, and "top 100 things removed from the human body" on old-school TLC (spoiler: #1 was a petrified fetal twin!)
No, it was a butt that was farting, but we didn't know whose ass it was and why it was farting.
I must have watched that movie 50 times. It explains the world so well and brings back the sanity.
While the premise of the movie was demographics, the real world idiocracy is brought about by societies moving away from liberal ideals and turning democracy to a pure popularity/likes/retweets contest. And this is happening across the spectrum, from reactionary right to woke left.
It's funny to see how 'one side' will completely miss the satirization of themselves in the work, and just laugh at the jokes targeted towards them.
(And FYI I'm not 'taking a side' I can only imagine what 'some other' publication would make of the film)
Judge was also mocking lack of education, slouching cultural standards, lack of competency, lack of moral fibre, conscientiousness etc.. In pretty much every scene.
Though the most memorable for me is: "Welcome to Costco, I love you" as the ultimate derision of cynical 'Happy Face' corporatism.
Think of a brand that you like in part because of the 'Things They Seem to Support' - and be assured that that's the point the joke right there.
But it's full of absurdist goodies: the Fast Food machine that takes your children away, the Costco Law School, Starbucks Rub & Tug etc.
Edit: it maybe a kind of IQ test or maybe 'personality type' test because I saw it with a friend and she didn't grasp any of the satire at all, to her it was 'stupid' and she literally fell asleep. I didn't know what to make of that.
Edit 2: 'Ow My Balls' will be huge on TikTok and it's not going to be long before it's nary exactly that.
>it maybe a kind of IQ test or maybe 'personality type' test because I saw it with a friend and she didn't grasp any of the satire at all, to her it was 'stupid' and she literally fell asleep. I didn't know what to make of that.
Simply not everything is for everyone. The world is not black and white.
I do realize that for sure. I can see someone not liking it. But it was eerie for someone to not see the satire jump out at them. This wasn't an 'anti take', or 'Oh a mean corporation how about that' i.e. cynical or blaze attitude to satire ... rather it was just 'don't get it'. That said, I will admit, if the medium of the message is not inspiring, then maybe it's not worth the effort for someone to even try to process it. Nobody in my family likes it either.
But any film that's being reviewed 15 years later is worth watching I think.
As iconic as the movie is, I think articles like these do it a disservice by trying to bang out a political narrative based on it ( Trump bad ). Yeah, there are similarities ( both Mountain Dew Terry and Trump have trademarked names ), but we are nowhere near the level of idiocy presented in the movie and hence statements like 'it is a documentary really' are, at best, a hyperbole.
Per the Flynn Effect, people are getting smarter. The source of the problems mentioned in the article is not increasing stupidity, it's a breakdown of the relationship between the elites and the masses.
You see this clearly in the article where the author complains about sharing a country with deplorables with nutty beliefs. You see it in the elite turn against free speech: elites wonder aloud "is free speech a good idea if it leads to Trump or Brexit?" For their part, the masses seem determined to de-rail the train out of boredom or to spite the elites.
Increasingly, people view their countries or cultures as farcical or unjust, without a legitimate claim to exist at all. Civic virtue has either disappeared or is no longer recognized. Someone like Robert Mueller represented the old school. The reward for his diligent work was ridicule by both political factions, with Trump's attacks and Democrats' insinuations of senility. The politicians we apparently prefer are those who can reliably generate viral content.
> The politicians we apparently prefer are those who can reliably generate viral content.
By prefer, you presumably mean elect, which in the US means using a voting system that has been shown to increase partisanship, because you can get elected by being loved by a minority even if also hated by a minority. Other voting systems encourage you to work for every voters vote and avoid a whole bunch of problems as a result.
There are plenty of reasons to question whether the Flynn effect (rise in IQ test scores) actually reflects increases in general intelligence rather than testing skills. Just now, reviewing the Wikipedia article on the subject, I don't see how the Flynn effect is incompatible with the mass psychosis induced by political polarization. People can excel at their jobs and yet rant absurd conspiracies as soon as they get triggered by the wrong political BS.
> There are plenty of reasons to question whether the Flynn effect (rise in IQ test scores) actually reflects increases in general intelligence rather than testing skills.
The Flynn effect appears to reflect increases in general intelligence unless you believe world wide testing scores all have the same bias, across different tests.
Flynn effect has stopped during the last few decades. I have been wondering why. What are the environmental things that have happened in the last decades as oppoesd to most of last century? There is only a handful of possible explanations that I have been able to come up:
1. We might want to do more research on the effect of increasing CO2 on cognitive skills.
2. Wealth disparities have been increasing. There seems to be some research on poverty causing decline on cognitive skills. Maybe it is relative, not absolute poverty that does it?
3. We have reached (local?) maximum and are not going to get any more intelligent any time soon.
4. IQ is a flawed measure that comes up with random nonsense.
Not so sure which of those I would pick most likely.
Many people like to say "Idiocracy is a documentary" or some similar thing implying they think it's realistic. I've never seen anybody take the premise of the movie seriously though.
If idiots are reproducing out of control and that will lead to a bad result, doesn't that mean we should reduce the reproduction of idiots and increase the reproduction of the intelligent? To avert Idiocracy we need eugenics, no?
> 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.
Not to mention many of the systemic problems in the world today have been caused by smart people letting their avarice, greed, and other base desires get the better of them.
> 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) one of the clearest and greatest written expositions of wisdom, consider chapter seventeen on leaders:
With the best kind of leader
when the work is complete
the people all say
"We did it ourselves."
Is that not describing hyper-intelligence? Leaders so smart and wise that they achieve their goals without anyone noticing them?
In the context we're talking about, the "we" is (again by definition) the smartest (or, if you will, the wisest) minority, at the far end of the bell curve. The idea that idiocracy should be fought with eugenics is itself a layer of the idiocracy, not something that these very intelligent people would credit.
> Knowledge doesn't necessarily change behavior -- there are many many smart people who've gotten addicted to harmful substances, for example.
I disagree, I think that knowledge (by definition) is that information that makes us capable of changing our behaviour 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?
> 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.
> Do you have a definition for hyper-intelligence?
Trivially, anyone much much smarter than me. :)
Hypothetically, take the top N% of the high end of the bell curve, where N is 0.1 or 0.001 or 0.000001 or whatever. But then you have the question of how to survey intelligence?
Which brings me to my answer to your second point,
> intelligence and impulse control are separable things.
A quality called "intelligence" that does not engender impulse control isn't actually intelligence, eh? In other words I would define intelligence precisely as the ability of self-control combined with the ability to effect desired changes in the world. What's the point of "intelligence" that gives no "leverage", especially in the context of some "we" who are supposedly effective enough to institute a world-wide eugenics program?
> A quality called "intelligence" that does not engender impulse control isn't actually intelligence, eh?
I mean, that's pretty dependent on the definition of intelligence.
Going off a dictionary definition:
> the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.
versus wisdom:
> the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment; the quality of being wise.
That to me sounds like every place you're saying intelligence, you mean wisdom. Redefining intelligence to wisdom isn't a thing, because words have meaning.
The relationship being that intelligence makes acquiring wisdom faster. There isn't a strict requirement between the two.
> What's the point of "intelligence" that gives no "leverage"
Intelligence has a pretty well established definition, the one you quote is fine, "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills." I would say that, if one is really intelligent, one acquires and applies knowledge of oneself and the skills to change habits and behaviours. That's the "self-referential" stage of intelligence.
Wisdom, on the other hand, is much harder to define. The definition you quoted is circular, as are almost all dictionary definitions of "wisdom". I've heard it said "A fool never learns, a man learns from his mistakes, the wise man learns from the mistakes of others."
Some would say that wisdom comes from loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself.
You say that they are different and that I'm "confusing intelligence with wisdom", but I say that wisdom and intelligence are on the same spectrum or continuum, that the former is the refinement and maturity of the latter.
In any event, my original point is that proponents of eugenics are not as intelligent as they think they are.
Or, you need to ensure a proper net in terms of higher education, health care, etc, so that even the children of "idiots" have a chance at breaking the cycle.
Idiocracy mixed being educated with being intelligent. Being educated is not hereditary and does not (I think) affect intelligence of your children*
Satisfactory nutrition and exposure to positive and engaging environments during childhood affect your intelligence no matter who your parents were
* other than that educated parents are more likely to provide the positive and engaging environment, maybe? Not in the least due to the correlation between education and $, which certainky affects both nutrition and the environment (e.g. toys, lessons, travel, etc.)
Late disclaimer: I have no idea if this is what the scientific areas that study human intelligence believe
You're right but who cares if the route isn't genetic? If parents or society at large have essentially the same negative characteristics highlighted in the film and a higher birth rate it is functionally the same outcome.
By the way, I'm not arguing for artificially controlling the birth rate or eugenics or whatever else. We need a properly-funded education system that teaches critical thinking. There is both a nature and nurture component to intelligence and related traits but we can get plenty of mileage by focusing on the nurture part.
There've been a number of studies on this, and they basically find otherwise. About 50% of the variability in intelligence is explained by genetics (nature); 10% is parental investment (nurture), and 40% is peers (which includes education, but also local communities, friend groups, etc.). Genetic heritability actually grows as IQ is measured later in life, reaching up to 80% by late adulthood. This effect could be explained because raw intelligence is usually correlated with several environmental factors that then factor into the "nurture" and "peers" components, eg. more intelligent parents are more likely to be highly educated themselves, better able to provide help with homework, higher income, live in a zip code with other intelligent people, can afford college, can afford tutoring to get the kids into an elite college, etc.
The literature is too extensive to provide individual citations, but Google for [genetics of intelligence] or [heritability of intelligence] to get a sampling.
We'd only need eugenics if competency is strictly linked to genetics.
We can probably make a lot of progress investing in schools, making higher education more accessible, finding more engaging teaching strategies, ensuring that parents have all the resources they need to care for their children...more access to mental health services...
Covid hysteria made it all too real. My super woke prime minister doing afro and blackface, and the judge that ordered the pastor to read out a pro mandate statement he wrote for him, every time he speaks publicly against it, really took the cake in my country. More vaccinated covid cases than unvaccinated in Ontario from the safe and effective vaccine is the cherry on top.
One of the best predictions from Idiocracy is our reliance on AI that no one understands anymore. They made all of these systems that did everything for them and decades later, after barely even needing to think for themselves for so long, they’re dumb as rocks and have no idea how anything works.
Automation, at least. When they started spraying the crops with water (like from the toilet) instead of Brawndo, half the population got automatically laid off.
Good point. I was recalling the movie here and also noticed that the doctor's appointment consisted of the doctor plugging the patient into a machine, too.
I particularly love the UI at the Hospital. Just icons. I have felt this way about tablets and the ever-devolving UI trends on the web that infantilize users. Just mashing our big fat fingers onto one of three pretty, beveled chips. Turning us into sub-literate simpletons because they can't be bothered to put a word on a thing!
Icons have a practical benefit of reducing the cost of selling your product in international markets. But it does introduce confusion and ambiguity sometimes when the intended function is unclear.
I suppose there's a side effect that it lowers the bar for the illiterate, making it easier for them to function. I doubt it's a significant factor in whether they decide to learn to read.
AI doesn't exist. There is nothing inherently intelligent about deep NNs which are merely very good pattern matching algorithms, statistics really... The term AI suggests something is thinking which is false marketing at best, abused by thousands of consulting companies for a decade now.
Unless of course your opinion is that thinking is just statistics which makes for an interesting metaphysical discussion.
some of the new techniques in natural language processing that uses transformers is getting closer to understanding. Understanding may be an illusion though.
I wrote a game in 2002 for a class I was in, you have a space ship and you shoot alien ships. To make the game challenging, when the user was far away from the alien ships they would move randomly, if you moved in on them they moved away in a random direction, and once you got too close they would vector strait for the ship in a kamakaze attack. I also needed to figure out when the alien ships would fire back, so I just made them randomly fire when the user also fired. Given that your ship's firing range was limited, this created a dangerous scenario where you tried to chase down a ship, and at the last moment it would come right at you and fire. the point of all of this was that when people played the game, they stated "wow, the AI of this game is really good". People believed the AI was thinking when it was just a few rules.
I dont suppose its impossible to be tricked into thinking something had understanding even if that something is itself. if something is complicated enough and good enough at making decisions, it seems possible its not understanding but just a sufficiently complicated process, or maybe a sufficiently complicated process is understanding
"Pattern matching" is what regular expressions do. What you are alluding to is "pattern recognition", which is an older name for so-called "statistical" machine learning, particularly used to perform "perception" tasks (such as machine vision).
"Statistical" machine learning is also not very much about statistics, it's just that similar technologies and concepts are sometimes used as in statistics, for example probabilities, function optimisation etc.
"Artificial Intelligence" (AI) is the name of the field of research that studies approaches to artificial intelligence. It's a bit confusing but when someone says "I study AI" they don't, today, mean that they study artificially intelligent entities, rather they mean they study approaches that might one day allow us to create such entities.
"Later in the dark, he is approached menacingly by the Morlocks, ape-like troglodytes who live in darkness underground and surface only at night. Exploring one of many "wells" that lead to the Morlocks' dwellings, he discovers the machinery and industry that makes the above-ground paradise of the Eloi possible. He alters his theory, speculating that the human race has evolved into two species: the leisured classes have become the ineffectual Eloi, and the downtrodden working classes have become the brutal light-fearing Morlocks."
One thing that is maybe missing in this discussion is that this is not a new phenomenon. Greek antiquity had a period of intellectual enlightenment when science became popular enough to rival religion (see eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura ) then long medieval and dark periods where this was no longer the case. Then a renaissance, many aspects of which were also non lasting.
The important thing to realize, especially in democracies is that non intellectuals usually have the most political power and it's the job of the smart to convince them to give support to smart things.
This requires bringing common people to science's side instead of making fun of them. Although I enjoyed this movie and the newer one tackling the same themes as comic relief of really sad real world parallel situations, in some ways these movie makes the problem worst.
There could be ways to turn a lot of people around to support good causes and to prevent them from falling pray to dangerous manipulators. There are tons of common folks who's views are constantly shifting based on primal emotions and there is no reason they couldn't be shifted towards following science and truth if those who represented those concepts showed more respect. With elections often very close, just a few percentage points could make a huge difference.
The people caricatured are often easy to manipulate, not very smart and are often aware they are not very smart. They are often looking for leaders to guide and shepherd them. They won't however follow intellectuals who punch down on people who don't have academic aptitude. Showing contempt for these people makes them ripe to instead be plucked by villainous politicians, fueling the power of evil.
Not everyone has the aptitude for academic thinking and they deserve no less respect. The fact that they confront the world as best as they can despite this handicap is worthy of praise. The common person is inherently vulnerable compared to the smart elite.
It's not about educating. Scientific arguments don't get you very far with people that can't grasp them.
These are people that only grasp the basics of morality and often only if they get help and reminders from moral guides and belief groups every sunday. Churches are their crutch, their wheelchair. Solving the sociological issues might require more participation and support of faith groups, helping improve them and shaping them. I cannot imagine anything that would work better to send shivers down anti-science politicians than if the pro-science would start gaining more influence inside faith groups.
This might require sometimes lowering the bar on standards of morality, empathy and rationality when dealing with these people. Advanced morality about things like race and gender is complex and not within everyone's reach. Advanced empathy involves multilevel recursive counterfactual meta-cognitive logic ( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4eDzqS2rbcBDsCLZ/unrolling-... ) and sometimes academic understanding of past history. Though it seems natural to some humans, it's so complex that even the most advanced AIs cannot even begin to do it. Asking some of these people to understand these things is asking people in wheelchairs to run and run away they will.
In the US common folks having power is even enshrined in the constitution which starts with "We the people", "the people", having a long history of being a polite way to refer to the less intellectually abled. Only recently did "populism" turn into a dirty word (see h...
Orwell said, "There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them."
Given the record of technocratic missteps, misguided social engineering, bad policies and wars, one could make the case that we could collectively do a lot better if intellectual elites could be taught some common sense and humility.
this is where certain "smart" politicians completely drop the ball. Look at Hillary Clinton - she mocked and insulted nearly half of the US population by calling them "deplorables". Not the way to get them to follow her!
She was misquoted on this point so often that it’s even being repeated here. In hindsight she shouldn’t have said it that way or at all.
Trump’s supporters were and are not the whole of the Republican Party and so it was never about half of the population even if that’s how it was understood and played up by conservative media.
> “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
She said the other half of Trump’s supporters “feel that the government has let them down” and are “desperate for change.”
“Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well,” she said.
Idiocracy doesn’t actually go far enough to match current-day reality.
In the film, people were smart enough to understand they weren’t all that intelligent. Even the president was willing to defer to someone who knew more than him.
The last couple of years have proven that to be rather naive when it comes to our real leadership.
Reagan at least accured some political experience and held lower elected office before running for president. Trump used his celebrity status to compensate for his lack of experience and went straight for the presidency. Time will tell which path, if any, The Rock will follow. Although judging by the current political mood, my money is on the Trump path.
For all his flaws, Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (had to write his name in full) is actually a good leader who genuinely wants the best for his people.
I envision a sequel to Idiocracy where the main character discovers a hidden wondrous island city of intelligent people who recognized the problem and hid there rather than deal with the ever-reproducing morons.
The irony for me here is that the author adds no additional intelligence or insight of their own - this is a simple retelling of the story of the Idiocracy film - framed as a prophecy coming true - simply to add eyeballs to the content machine that pays their salary.
also the irony is that the author's take is the idiocy isn't from the bad decisions of the government, its from those 'idiots' who just wont believe everything they say and comply.
There's always an underlying "those OTHER people are them dumb ones" in any and all of this sort of criticism. The thing is though, to sell it to the masses, not-so-smart characters need to be elevated to appearing intelligent, and straw men need to be employed in rapid fire. The truth is that these sorts of movies "Idiocracy" and "Don't Look Up" are there to give people of middling intelligence validation and reinforce their belief that they are the smart ones.
> 'Observing that “evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence”, the narrator explains that “with no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most – and left the intelligent to become an endangered species”.'
As a counterexample, there are the people in the top 1 000 or so of the Forbes ranking. All pretty clever and not really endangered at all.
The article reads more like trying to get attention by scaring people instead of being insighful
I encourage everyone to watch Don't Look Up. In many ways it struck me as the spiritual successor to Idiocracy.
I needed to watch it in chunks, because of how viscerally real it is. It is funny, in that it's ostensibly comedy, and the actors all have great comedic timing...but it's also a very very honest appraisal of where we're at as a society.
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, as it is supposed to be. Climate change is so difficult to deal with because its effects are uncertain, long-term and unevenly felt. None of those issues hold for an asteroid that will, per the plot, destroy the whole of human civilization in 6 months with 99.9% certainty absent intervention.
I don't think it was saying that politics and politicians as trivial -- I think it was saying that they're not necessarily smart people, and they're certainly not necessarily acting in the best interests of the people they serve.
I think they were also saying that the media serves to reinforce denial in the general population.
The asteroid is just a plot device -- the message is that in the face of mortal danger, huge chunks of the population refuse to even acknowledge the danger so that any intervention can be made. And those in power will exploit that for their own enrichment.
We don't just see this with climate change -- we've observed it with the previous administration...some hits:
- "Lock her up" -- yes, let's just start imprisoning political rivals and see what that does for us as a society)
- "Covid will go away by april" - I suppose they didn't say which april.
- Hydroxychloroquine/Ivermectin/Vitamin C
- Vaccines have microchips
- Masks don't do anything
The list goes on -- We've seen that the population is perfectly willing to disregard any science that threatens their way of life. It's easier to dismiss than to adjust.
Let me take a couple of specific examples. Upon being told that an asteroid large enough to destroy human civilization was on course to hit the earth in 6 months, the President decided that it would make strategic sense to delay announcing or acting on the threat until after the midterms - a month or so later. This was conspicuous for the fact no reason was given, which had to be the case as it makes no sense.
Collective threats of this kind have historically created a rally-around-the-flag effect the helps incumbents. Even a venal politician would not assist in the imminent destruction of the planet from which they themselves could not escape. Obviously information of that magnitude of importance would leak, as it did in the film. Meaning its only effect would be to crater the President's support when it became clear they hid the truth. Even an amaetuer political observer would understand all this, let alone a Whitehouse team that won a Presidential election.
Or how about the manner in which the astronomers announced their discovery? They went to the NYT, who inexplicably decided that they would forego running the biggest story in human history. Instead, they helped arrange for the astronomers to announce their discovery in a 2-minute segment on an infotainment news show. Neither the NYT, nor the astronomers, nor anyone would think that was a good idea. It would never, ever happen. During the interview, one of the astronomers got upset because the talk show hosts were nonchalant about the news of the possible end of civilization (!?). Returning to the NYT offices, they're told that the journalists were able to confirm their findings with well-respected third party scientists, but that because one of the astronomers got upset in air, they weren't going to run the story - again, easily the biggest story in human history, which anyone could appreciate at such.
The upshot of this never-ending string of implausible plot points is that the film ends up obfuscating how real politics works. It dumbs politics down and makes it trivial to make an easy joke, making it part of the problem that it ostensibly satirises.
> Let me take a couple of specific examples. Upon being told that an asteroid large enough to destroy human civilization was on course to hit the earth in 6 months, the President decided that it would make strategic sense to delay announcing or acting on the threat until after the midterms - a month or so later. This was conspicuous for the fact no reason was given, which had to be the case as it makes no sense.
Counter example: Trump new about the severity of covid and downplayed it for quite some time instead of trying to rally the country.
> Meaning its only effect would be to crater the President's support when it became clear they hid the truth. Even an amaetuer political observer would understand all this, let alone a Whitehouse team that won a Presidential election.
In light of the above, this has been shown to be false. There absolutely can be some fanatical base that will construct shared delusional propaganda to avoid the realization that they've been conned.
> Or how about the manner in which the astronomers announced their discovery? They went to the NYT, who inexplicably decided that they would forego running the biggest story in human history. Instead, they helped arrange for the astronomers to announce their discovery in a 2-minute segment on an infotainment news show. Neither the NYT, nor the astronomers, nor anyone would think that was a good idea. It would never, ever happen.
This I'm more inclined to believe. I'm not sure if it would impact the outcome though. I can't imagine there's a huge overlap in people that read the NYT versus watch morning infotainment. I've also lost all faith in humanity, so I can't rule out that it's quite possible that people would make such bad decisions.
> During the interview, one of the astronomers got upset because the talk show hosts were nonchalant about the news of the possible end of civilization (!?). Returning to the NYT offices, they're told that the journalists were able to confirm their findings with well-respected third party scientists, but that because one of the astronomers got upset in air, they weren't going to run the story - again, easily the biggest story in human history, which anyone could appreciate at such.
I think this pretty firmly falls into satirical license as a commentary on meme culture, and how people care more about the messenger than the message.
> Counter example: Trump new about the severity of covid and downplayed it for quite some time instead of trying to rally the country.
The irony is that the pandemic was such a slam-dunk easy win politically. Handled with the minimum level of political savvy, this was a dead simple way to send his approval ratings into the van allen belt, just like Bush post-9/11. I think his personal financial stake in the hospitality industry clouded his judgment and prevented him from taking advantage of the biggest election campaign tailwind in a generation.
I remember when asked about what to say to the American people about the pandemic who are scared. His response was to lash out. It was such a easy slam dunk question, I was almost inspired to create a you tube video asking people to remix it and answer the question like a president.
I think this scenario was a textbook example of why the traditional norm for incoming presidents to divest from their businesses exists. His head was probably spinning like a gyroscope over his business empire cratering and his loans coming due.
We can only imagine how things would've turned out if we'd had leadership with an unbiased focus on national unity and the greater good. He could very easily have had a landslide re-election.
Mulling it over, he could have made sooo much by reconfiguring them into humane quarantine centers, without the need to have FEMA-camps, or things like that.
>Trump new about the severity of covid and downplayed it for quite some time
Trump neither tried to hide the existence of COVID from the public nor thought it would topple civilization and kill him personally. He downplayed it and the risk it posed, but that is a different order of lying. Trump said exactly as much as he thought he could get away with, and no more.
>There absolutely can be some fanatical base that will construct shared delusional propaganda to avoid the realization that they've been conned.
Sure, but COVID-deniers are a fringe and any political calculus that depends on denying COVID is therefore bound to fail. It is equally clear that denying the existence of an earth-shattering asteroid makes no political sense.
You're right, it doesn't make sense. People do things that don't make sense.
The president in Don't Look Up didn't think it would topple civilization and kill her personally. They thought the plan to break it up and mine it would work. They took a greedy gamble on the fate of the world and lost.
In so doing, they took for granted all of the amazing technology that we have and disregarded expert opinions.
Likewise with trump, who had worked to dismantle the existing pandemic playbook[0] took for granted how well our medical response would be. He regularly disregarded expert opinions, or simply did not speak with them[1]. He even worked to make it difficult for states to get help, because he lost the vote there[2].
In my opinion, these actions do not make sense, yet they were taken by an actual POTUS.
With that in mind, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that a POTUS would try to leverage the event for political gain, and use it opportunity for personal profit, and that a sizable amount of the population would support it.
And you're right. It makes no sense. It's mind mindbogglingly dumb. Still plausible.
I think this is a bit of a straw man. Yes, people sometimes do things that aren't in their rational self-interest, even capaciously understood. But we are talking about a specific scenario.
The question is: would the President, told of an imminent asteroid collision large enough to destroy human civilization, and knowing this information would leak if she did not announce it, elect to hide this information for a month until after the midterms for no particular reason?
You say "They thought the plan to break it up and mine it would work." At the time of the decision of whether to announce the existence of the asteroid, and create a plan, there obviously was no plan. So no, she didn't think that.
>"Likewise with trump, who had worked to dismantle the existing pandemic playbook[0] took for granted how well our medical response would be. He regularly disregarded expert opinions, or simply did not speak with them[1]. He even worked to make it difficult for states to get help, because he lost the vote there[2]."
Again, this isn't the point. Even Trump never tried to deny the existence of COVID. Clearly that would not have worked and would have exploded in his face.
>They went to the NYT, who inexplicably decided that they would forego running the biggest story in human history
My understanding was they ran the story and the morning tv show was part of a media tour they set up, the response on the tv show such that they did not really want to continue with the big media blitz and publishing more stories that they had planned.
>Returning to the NYT offices, they're told that the journalists were able to confirm their findings with well-respected third party scientists, but that because one of the astronomers got upset in air, they weren't going to run the story
They had ran it by other scientists in the initial meeting who said that the data looked credible. However after the disastrous media appearance one of the things that made the NYT not want to continue with writing more articles was that they had learned the science was not 100% and they were mad they had been lied to.
Who said the science was not 100%? Dr. Jocelyn Calder the head of NASA, later Calder resigns in disgrace to shield the administration when scientist with Ivy League credentials confirm the comet is coming.
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
>Its not good satire because its very heavy handed
ah, yes, such blunt and heavy handed satire compared with old, subtle satire, like that one, modest, pamphlet advocating for eating poor children.
not sure why satire needs to be subtle to be good. It can go from crass to oscar-wilde-subtle, as long as it's funny and based on reality I would call it good.
> 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.
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
It seems that way because it tracked how the pandemic played out really closely, but they wrote the script before the pandemic started. It was meant as commentary on climate change.
I know Don't Look Up was supposed to spur people into action, but I came away feeling hopeless, like the industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Don't Look Up Was a the funniest thing I have seen all year. Imagine the fall of rome, but with twitter. Perfect acting all around, with a script so gin clear in it's portrayal of human nature you can see all the way to the bottom.
Don't look up falls flat, in my opinion because you have too many superstars in a movie that should not be about star power.
Netflix has this weird habit where it's like they can't budget well. I imagine they spent so much money hiring Leonardo DiCaprio they didn't have enough to write good scriptwriters.
I really wanted to like the movie, but why would you cram so many high power celebrities in one film. Film. Idiocracy is amazing because outside of Booker T, and Scareface's cameo I had no idea who these actors were. Plus I'd argue the plot is much easier to follow. Mike Judge is a genius.
If anything Don't Look Up ends up being a demonstration of the celebrity worship it mocks.
> Idiocracy is amazing because outside of Booker T, and Scareface's cameo I had no idea who these actors were
I can understand where you're coming from. I'm a marvel fan and I'm disappointed that they went with so many celbreties for Eternals -- I haven't seen it yet, but they were really more distracting than anything in the trailers.
I didn't mind the actors in Don't Look Up though, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, and Jennifer Lawrence had some good chemistry. It did feel like Jonah Hill's character was literally the same character from Wolf of Wallstreet.
My guess is that netflix was hoping that it'd garnish more attention having many big name actors. It's also possible those actors _wanted_ to do it as a form of expression.
> If anything Don't Look Up ends up being a demonstration of the celebrity worship it mocks.
I don't really think it mocked celebrity worship. Maybe to some degree with the tech ceo (I can certainly amuse myself with how HN would probably react to some of it's hivemind's idols like Jobs or PG in that situation.
> HN would probably react to some of it's hivemind's idols like Jobs or PG in that situation.
Or Elon Musk. I can almost imagine the following comment on HN: "The asteroid has enough lithium to make batteries for everyone alive for the next 200 years! Anyone who supports diverting it supports government dysfunction and unmitigated destruction of wealth. This is our one shot to jumpstart space manufacturing - humans have a chance of becoming a Type II civilization, the risk is negligible and well worth it"
The really sad part is the script was originally written before the pandemic and wasn't at all meant to be about the current crisis, but about climate change. Then the pandemic happened and the director was surprised at how the script didn't go far enough and had to make it, "20% crazier."
I started to watch that movie but had to stop (for a moment) because it described precisely a fear I had for some time: that we would not able to work together even in case of a deadly event that would be within our lifetime.
If we had a meteor expected to hit Earth in 10 years I am sure we would not start to work on a plan to protect ourselves as THE only thing to care about.
There would always be discussions about budget, China/Russia/US/[pick your country] being the villains, etc.
Covid hit us very mildly and it was (and still is) a shitshow. A global disaster coming in x years (within our lifetime but not tomorrow either) wild be the end of humanity.
We know that climate changes will be terrible and we simply do not care at all, as a species.
Seemed less like Idiocracy (smart comedy pointing out a real issue in a funny way) and much more like Dr Strangelove - a nihilistic crazy comedy showing how the way the system is setup is dooming us all.
The main difference from both is that Don’t Look Up is completely implausible. Also, it isn’t very funny. But I guess people are eager to overlook that if it validates their political biases.
Anyway, since Idiocracy couldn’t be made today due to the PC crowd yelling "eugenics", it is in a way a modern replacement, made straight for the woke crowd with pronouns in their Twitter bio.
At the beginning stands disappointment. The decentralized, anonymous Internet was a chance. The Internet became hostile garbage the second broad access was popular. Creativity, serious discussion, and unseen exchange of minds is what I first connect to the word Internet. Then came the ads and shady business models...
Today, I am deeply disturbed by the malice and sheer idiocy that social media has not only exposed but also amplified (with intent), as engagement is their business model. Broad engagement is and always has been easiest perpetrated by hate and gossip.
There are still great blogs, great individuals and great content. Great communities and creativity. They can simply continue to exist.
But we need to drive Facebook/Meta and all its ad-driven social media metastases (hah) to extinction, it's a cancer on society under the guise of free speech and social advancement. Algorithms take you in and bubble-wrap you in your own little safe space devoid of any exposure to other people and ideas. Connect the world yada-yada. Yea right... connect the world of alt-right Nazis maybe.
Aside from that, I am pretty certain the Wild West days of the Internet will soon be over - maybe another 10-15 years for relative anonymity. Soon the China model will be replicated in the West as the Internet of today can under no circumstances guaruntee a lawful environment.
Seriously. Like, I still don't know how to use the 3 seashells, but, more and more it's looking like Idiocracy is actually more of a best case scenario for the next several decades. We're probably going to self destruct before the end of this century.
I don't know why you would assume that. If the things most people value like social acceptance and popularity don't value intelligence why would the parents select for it even if they could? It will simply become a cheaper route to everyone being a supermodel than plastic surgery.
Well, there's no reason to believe attractiveness and intelligence are mutually exclusive. Are you saying parents would choose to forego intelligent traits in their children when all else is equal?
Agreed. It could easily not be an either/or thing. If you look at how services are charged today they always try to extract maximal value. So I doubt that it will just be "while you're engineering my child could you please make them better in every way for no additional cost to me?" The provider will have a premium package even if it costs them more to _not_ do it for market segmentation purposes. Look at Intel disabling parts of otherwise functional CPUs for an example. Given that, if people have the choice I think they will value looks more and be more willing to pay for those so unless intelligence is actually cheaper they won't choose it.
Just because someone posses intelligence does not mean they use it, or use it appropriately. Curiosity and becoming auto didactic are likely nurture vs nature. If you do have a societal shift in intelligence, then it will just change the baseline. IQ scores are relative to the mean. People will question what the point of the intelligence arms race is. Will it make life any better? Will it present more threats (more intelligent threat actors)?
Agreed that it's unclear how future intelligence will be used. My only claim is that future generations will possess far greater intelligence than current generations.
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).
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 434 ms ] thread>A blunt-smoking doctor at the hospital (Justin Long) is shocked that Joe doesn’t have a barcode on his arm, like everybody else, and asks, “Why come you no have a tattoo?”
Yet, the author seems to be a fan of the bio-security state rationalized by the covid emergency.
>...climate deniers...
Is this not also a bastardization of language? Is anyone denying that the earth has a climate? To be fair to the author, it seems like a deliberate trashing of nuance.
Yes, the movie is funny, but the review is a bit smug. The depopulation part was a bit over the top. From the opposing perspective the causes he champions such as "BirthStrikers" seem like willing rubes for authoritarians. If he can dish it out, then perhaps he should look in the mirror.
Do you actually not understand what the author means by “climate deniers”? The intended meaning seems quite clear to me.
If you're not a fan of that kind of use of language, you can criticize it while still understanding what the author wanted to convey ("those people").
I believe you can apply Kant's categorical imperative to language as well and you'll quickly arrive at the point that misusing language to score a point will lead to language becoming less useful and you'll do much more harm than you gain.
The space for discussion is prematurely attacked by the overly simplistic frame of "climate denier". Perhaps the author isn't capable of operating in that space, therefore he requires defensive rhetoric. Maybe it isn't deliberate or conscious. Perhaps he is simply bleating the preferred partisan slogan?
Nuance is deliberately or unconsciously removed in lieu of shallow arrogance. That's ironic in my reading of the article and view of the movie. There's no feigned confusion in my comment above. Perhaps you misread it.
Whether or not the Earth has a warming climate is largely irrelevant to this point.
The next question would be what the optimal climate is and how do these experts know what it is? We've gone from weather forecasters being wrong about rain over the weekend, to politicians and their pet technocrats asserting that the current climatic trajectory is somehow "wrong". The solution as always, is to give politicians more power.
I'd say I evolved as I matured as an individual. There was only so much fearful propaganda I could consume before my curiosity led me to examine the premises. The repeated invocation of apocalypse to scare people has direct historical parallels to other religious financial schemes.
What is an ideal climate, and how would fallible men determine that? Does it not seem backwards for man to dictate what nature should be, when man will never have sufficient information to describe nature?
Who knows, maybe your views will also continue to evolve? I hope I can retain enough curiosity to do the same for myself.
Starbucks offers gender reassignment surgeries and Costco employees say “Welcome to Costco, I apologise”, and the world-ending crisis is that nobody can actually reproduce any more.
What makes you think it isn’t currently both?
The movie is clearly a caricature of the stupid-Right.
The world is indeed currently both stupid-Right and stupid-Left.
It was certainly a mirror held up to society as it was at the time.
Can't for the life of me figure out the appeal.
I mean, sure, people are morons, but everyone everywhere had to be CARTOONISHLY stupid and incompetent in the flick to make the plot work.
That worked for Idiocracy because that was the projected future. A warning.
DLU needs that level of dumb TODAY.
And yes, I lived the last 5 years, and I'm deeply cynical of humanity... but even I thought it was all a bit too much.
Can you give an example of something from the film you thought was so cartoonishly stupid?
Personally I was okay with it but some of the bits (like the vapid news show or how the titular Don’t Look Up meme comes about) were too much for me.
I wasn’t engaged or entertained so I thought it was terrible.
I think Idiocracy was great because it was funny and used the future to allow you to see and imagine how it came to be that way. Don’t Look Up exaggerates the present in a way that feels familiar but misses the mark somehow.
I’m likely the target audience for the movie based on my left of center politics, but I suspect some will say it’s a great movie because of political tribalism and never watch it again because they know it’s actually not very good.
Just my opinion.
I'm seeing more references to Idiocracy now on social media because of Don't Look Up's recent release (compared to, say, how frequently Idiocracy was mentioned last month). There's a lot of problems with Don't Look Up that make for it not being an example of greatness or even very-goodness, but one thing in particular in comparison to Idiocracy are the movies' protagonists. In Idiocracy, Not Sure is a pretty average guy—maybe even a little dumb. This is what the writers of Don't Look Up missed out on. Idiocracy is smart people writing about about a dumb-to-average "hero" because the egos of those involved (the creators and their audience) don't require him to be bigger than they are. In contrast, Don't Look Up is a movie written by people who are as smart as Not Sure is dumb, trying to write for characters who are supposed to be smarter than the writers themselves and the people who are supposed to enjoy the movie the most.
Some reviews called Don't Look Up smug and sanctimonious—and they're right. With Idiocracy and Don't Look Up, the humility and lack thereof, respectively, when comparing the two accounts for a lot of why Don't Look Up is worse than it should be. (Given what Don't Look Up tries to do, it should do it better than Talladega Nights does, for example, but it doesn't.) Also accounting for a lot of what made Don't Look Up a not so great way of cribbing from Idiocracy is that Idiocracy was taking aim at the zeitgeist, whereas Don't Look Up is a very safe movie to make.
That is, it seemed like it was genuinely an expression of frustration/dismay/astonishment by it's creators to give it's audience a bit of...not quite catharsis...solidarity perhaps?
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 even acknowledge is even happening.
It's actually pretty soul crushing.
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 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.
So it's wrong in the measure of a thing that it does what it tries to do at minimum, but it's also wrong in that it doesn't do anything else (what it tries to and nothing more).
What it does do, unintentionally, is showcase (to exhibit without examining—again, unintentionally) what's wrong with the people who are supposed to be on the right side—a lack of self-awareness and sense of culpability while standing opposite the people on the wrong side stupidly chanting, "don't look up". Each group has enough in their reserves to provide enough stupid juice to take down everyone when pooled together.
> No one's walking away from watching it feeling superior.
That's simply not true.
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?)
The level of discomfort it engendered was off the scale. The depiction of the political and media is so close to reality that I ended up fast forwarding through it and at this point have paused watching as continuing is just too uncomfortable.
So from that point of view, and at least for me I would say that the movie is a success, job done. Unfortunately I don't think I'm the person who needs to receive this message. I don't need to be told that the world is going to shit at a faster rate than ever. I don't need to be told that most (all?) media, main stream or otherwise only succeed in rating somewhere between barely acceptable and blatantly corrupt on an ethical/truthfulness scale. The only way I can continue to exist with some degree of happiness is to simply try to ignore the majority of what is going on outside my bubble. I don't think I'm alone.
That said, I'm really interested how this movie has been perceived by those who think everything is wonderful. Are their world views so different that they have any ability to understand that this is not a comedy set in a different world, where politicians and media are clueless to their own ignorance and stupidity? Do they understand that this movie is holding a big bloody mirror up to the Western world and giving a giant wake up call. Unfortunately given how a lot of people seem to have reacted to the last couple of years, I have to think that they would just look at themselves in the mirror, adjust the makeup and wonder how those stupid scientists can not understand that they are messing with the latest media fed delusion.
Now I'm going to close my door again and pretend that the world really is wonderful. Have a nice day.
Rather, I felt the underlying message of the film is that the film is a critique of the consumerism and corporatism of the US. The 'idiocracy' with how the government runs, the downward trend of education in the US, and the pessimistic views of our future.
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 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?
https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-comp...
Essentially, he bribed the toxic political radicals to leave and take the payout.
Their original memo (https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-comp...) puts it this way:
> We don’t engage here when issues are unrelated to our core mission
"It's got electrolytes!"
One of my favorite lines in the movie. Whenever I hear anyone talking about how they only use "good" salt ("it's got micronutrients!"), I giggle and have to bring it up.
"You should be using water" "you mean like in the toilet??"
The author of this article reached a fairly backwards conclusion. If the smart people hadn't prioritized careers in science and research over creating a family, idiocracy would not have occurred; the smart people would have procreated at the same rate as dumb people.
But I agree that it's more a critique of a "dopamine" driven culture that has no critical thinking skills.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
> the low hanging fruits of nutrition/health care
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 exposure [1], plasticizers [2], and flame retardants [3], probably in that order.
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2018/06/13/health/falling-iq-scores-...
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26426942/
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25493564/
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31952890/
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 Norwegian phenomenon is not exclusive it has been observed in the last few decades in Denmark, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Finland and Estonia.
I.e. how the "good couple" did not have children because of x before the man worked him self to death, while the irresponsible douche stupid brute etc. quarterback was saved by "good couple" medicine and had multiple children.
And this right here is the problem I have with Idiocracy. Amazing movie, annoying fanbase.
Everyone thinks that the movie is a perfect illustration of what's wrong with <other party>. If you watch that movie, and think, "<My party / I myself> would never create such a society", then the movie is about you.
Is TLC making people more stupid or are they just giving an already foolish population what they want?
I don't think consuming "stupid" entertainment makes us stupid or is even a solid indicator of intelligence (if you can settle on a definition of it). TLC just saw a market and pivoted, imo.
Collectively, however, I think it's a bad sign.
TLC isn't the only one who saw a market and pivoted. Sticking with TV examples, the History channel has shows about monsters and aliens now. Discovery's content is almost as bad.
It's not just that there's a market for stupid entertainment. It's that the market for non-stupid entertainment seems like it's shrinking.
I could present an alternative viewpoint though: Cable access has steadily been losing marketshare to streaming services for a while now, so they're aiming for as much mass appeal as possible. It might not be that there is a lower proportion of people looking for educational entertainment than there was before, but that declining viewership has made it unprofitable to produce content for that niche. I see a lot of documentaries on Netflix, for example, and then there's CuriosityStream which is a service just for that, right?
Also a lot of "edutainment" is and always has been sensationalism...I remember watching a documentary about how solar storms were gonna wipe out humanity any day now, and "top 100 things removed from the human body" on old-school TLC (spoiler: #1 was a petrified fetal twin!)
> is a single unbroken shot of a naked butt
No, it was a butt that was farting, but we didn't know whose ass it was and why it was farting.
I must have watched that movie 50 times. It explains the world so well and brings back the sanity.
While the premise of the movie was demographics, the real world idiocracy is brought about by societies moving away from liberal ideals and turning democracy to a pure popularity/likes/retweets contest. And this is happening across the spectrum, from reactionary right to woke left.
(And FYI I'm not 'taking a side' I can only imagine what 'some other' publication would make of the film)
Judge was also mocking lack of education, slouching cultural standards, lack of competency, lack of moral fibre, conscientiousness etc.. In pretty much every scene.
Though the most memorable for me is: "Welcome to Costco, I love you" as the ultimate derision of cynical 'Happy Face' corporatism.
Think of a brand that you like in part because of the 'Things They Seem to Support' - and be assured that that's the point the joke right there.
But it's full of absurdist goodies: the Fast Food machine that takes your children away, the Costco Law School, Starbucks Rub & Tug etc.
Edit: it maybe a kind of IQ test or maybe 'personality type' test because I saw it with a friend and she didn't grasp any of the satire at all, to her it was 'stupid' and she literally fell asleep. I didn't know what to make of that.
Edit 2: 'Ow My Balls' will be huge on TikTok and it's not going to be long before it's nary exactly that.
Simply not everything is for everyone. The world is not black and white.
But any film that's being reviewed 15 years later is worth watching I think.
You see this clearly in the article where the author complains about sharing a country with deplorables with nutty beliefs. You see it in the elite turn against free speech: elites wonder aloud "is free speech a good idea if it leads to Trump or Brexit?" For their part, the masses seem determined to de-rail the train out of boredom or to spite the elites.
Increasingly, people view their countries or cultures as farcical or unjust, without a legitimate claim to exist at all. Civic virtue has either disappeared or is no longer recognized. Someone like Robert Mueller represented the old school. The reward for his diligent work was ridicule by both political factions, with Trump's attacks and Democrats' insinuations of senility. The politicians we apparently prefer are those who can reliably generate viral content.
By prefer, you presumably mean elect, which in the US means using a voting system that has been shown to increase partisanship, because you can get elected by being loved by a minority even if also hated by a minority. Other voting systems encourage you to work for every voters vote and avoid a whole bunch of problems as a result.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4152423/
The Flynn effect appears to reflect increases in general intelligence unless you believe world wide testing scores all have the same bias, across different tests.
As tests were less important a few generations ago, it's perfectly possible that people were unprepared for them.
1. We might want to do more research on the effect of increasing CO2 on cognitive skills.
2. Wealth disparities have been increasing. There seems to be some research on poverty causing decline on cognitive skills. Maybe it is relative, not absolute poverty that does it?
3. We have reached (local?) maximum and are not going to get any more intelligent any time soon.
4. IQ is a flawed measure that comes up with random nonsense.
Not so sure which of those I would pick most likely.
If idiots are reproducing out of control and that will lead to a bad result, doesn't that mean we should reduce the reproduction of idiots and increase the reproduction of the intelligent? To avert Idiocracy we need eugenics, no?
Where have you looked? People have been talking about this for awhile now.
> If idiots are reproducing out of control and that will lead to a bad result
Yeah...
> doesn't that mean we should reduce the reproduction of idiots and increase the reproduction of the intelligent?
Who's "we" in that sentence? Intelligent people are unlikely to adopt foolish plans, by definition.
E.g. consider the (as yet fictional) Bene Gesserit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bene_Gesserit
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.
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) one of the clearest and greatest written expositions of wisdom, consider chapter seventeen on leaders:
Is that not describing hyper-intelligence? Leaders so smart and wise that they achieve their goals without anyone noticing them?In the context we're talking about, the "we" is (again by definition) the smartest (or, if you will, the wisest) minority, at the far end of the bell curve. The idea that idiocracy should be fought with eugenics is itself a layer of the idiocracy, not something that these very intelligent people would credit.
> Knowledge doesn't necessarily change behavior -- there are many many smart people who've gotten addicted to harmful substances, for example.
I disagree, I think that knowledge (by definition) is that information that makes us capable of changing our behaviour 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?
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.
Trivially, anyone much much smarter than me. :)
Hypothetically, take the top N% of the high end of the bell curve, where N is 0.1 or 0.001 or 0.000001 or whatever. But then you have the question of how to survey intelligence?
Which brings me to my answer to your second point,
> intelligence and impulse control are separable things.
A quality called "intelligence" that does not engender impulse control isn't actually intelligence, eh? In other words I would define intelligence precisely as the ability of self-control combined with the ability to effect desired changes in the world. What's the point of "intelligence" that gives no "leverage", especially in the context of some "we" who are supposedly effective enough to institute a world-wide eugenics program?
I mean, that's pretty dependent on the definition of intelligence.
Going off a dictionary definition:
> the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.
versus wisdom:
> the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment; the quality of being wise.
That to me sounds like every place you're saying intelligence, you mean wisdom. Redefining intelligence to wisdom isn't a thing, because words have meaning.
The relationship being that intelligence makes acquiring wisdom faster. There isn't a strict requirement between the two.
> What's the point of "intelligence" that gives no "leverage"
Self enrichment/gratification/entertainment.
Wisdom, on the other hand, is much harder to define. The definition you quoted is circular, as are almost all dictionary definitions of "wisdom". I've heard it said "A fool never learns, a man learns from his mistakes, the wise man learns from the mistakes of others." Some would say that wisdom comes from loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself. You say that they are different and that I'm "confusing intelligence with wisdom", but I say that wisdom and intelligence are on the same spectrum or continuum, that the former is the refinement and maturity of the latter.
In any event, my original point is that proponents of eugenics are not as intelligent as they think they are.
Satisfactory nutrition and exposure to positive and engaging environments during childhood affect your intelligence no matter who your parents were
* other than that educated parents are more likely to provide the positive and engaging environment, maybe? Not in the least due to the correlation between education and $, which certainky affects both nutrition and the environment (e.g. toys, lessons, travel, etc.)
Late disclaimer: I have no idea if this is what the scientific areas that study human intelligence believe
The literature is too extensive to provide individual citations, but Google for [genetics of intelligence] or [heritability of intelligence] to get a sampling.
We can probably make a lot of progress investing in schools, making higher education more accessible, finding more engaging teaching strategies, ensuring that parents have all the resources they need to care for their children...more access to mental health services...
I suppose there's a side effect that it lowers the bar for the illiterate, making it easier for them to function. I doubt it's a significant factor in whether they decide to learn to read.
I thought it was just lazy developers who don't want to internationalize their strings.
Unless of course your opinion is that thinking is just statistics which makes for an interesting metaphysical discussion.
I wrote a game in 2002 for a class I was in, you have a space ship and you shoot alien ships. To make the game challenging, when the user was far away from the alien ships they would move randomly, if you moved in on them they moved away in a random direction, and once you got too close they would vector strait for the ship in a kamakaze attack. I also needed to figure out when the alien ships would fire back, so I just made them randomly fire when the user also fired. Given that your ship's firing range was limited, this created a dangerous scenario where you tried to chase down a ship, and at the last moment it would come right at you and fire. the point of all of this was that when people played the game, they stated "wow, the AI of this game is really good". People believed the AI was thinking when it was just a few rules.
I dont suppose its impossible to be tricked into thinking something had understanding even if that something is itself. if something is complicated enough and good enough at making decisions, it seems possible its not understanding but just a sufficiently complicated process, or maybe a sufficiently complicated process is understanding
"Statistical" machine learning is also not very much about statistics, it's just that similar technologies and concepts are sometimes used as in statistics, for example probabilities, function optimisation etc.
"Artificial Intelligence" (AI) is the name of the field of research that studies approaches to artificial intelligence. It's a bit confusing but when someone says "I study AI" they don't, today, mean that they study artificially intelligent entities, rather they mean they study approaches that might one day allow us to create such entities.
"Later in the dark, he is approached menacingly by the Morlocks, ape-like troglodytes who live in darkness underground and surface only at night. Exploring one of many "wells" that lead to the Morlocks' dwellings, he discovers the machinery and industry that makes the above-ground paradise of the Eloi possible. He alters his theory, speculating that the human race has evolved into two species: the leisured classes have become the ineffectual Eloi, and the downtrodden working classes have become the brutal light-fearing Morlocks."
The important thing to realize, especially in democracies is that non intellectuals usually have the most political power and it's the job of the smart to convince them to give support to smart things.
This requires bringing common people to science's side instead of making fun of them. Although I enjoyed this movie and the newer one tackling the same themes as comic relief of really sad real world parallel situations, in some ways these movie makes the problem worst.
There could be ways to turn a lot of people around to support good causes and to prevent them from falling pray to dangerous manipulators. There are tons of common folks who's views are constantly shifting based on primal emotions and there is no reason they couldn't be shifted towards following science and truth if those who represented those concepts showed more respect. With elections often very close, just a few percentage points could make a huge difference.
The people caricatured are often easy to manipulate, not very smart and are often aware they are not very smart. They are often looking for leaders to guide and shepherd them. They won't however follow intellectuals who punch down on people who don't have academic aptitude. Showing contempt for these people makes them ripe to instead be plucked by villainous politicians, fueling the power of evil.
Not everyone has the aptitude for academic thinking and they deserve no less respect. The fact that they confront the world as best as they can despite this handicap is worthy of praise. The common person is inherently vulnerable compared to the smart elite.
It's not about educating. Scientific arguments don't get you very far with people that can't grasp them.
These are people that only grasp the basics of morality and often only if they get help and reminders from moral guides and belief groups every sunday. Churches are their crutch, their wheelchair. Solving the sociological issues might require more participation and support of faith groups, helping improve them and shaping them. I cannot imagine anything that would work better to send shivers down anti-science politicians than if the pro-science would start gaining more influence inside faith groups.
This might require sometimes lowering the bar on standards of morality, empathy and rationality when dealing with these people. Advanced morality about things like race and gender is complex and not within everyone's reach. Advanced empathy involves multilevel recursive counterfactual meta-cognitive logic ( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4eDzqS2rbcBDsCLZ/unrolling-... ) and sometimes academic understanding of past history. Though it seems natural to some humans, it's so complex that even the most advanced AIs cannot even begin to do it. Asking some of these people to understand these things is asking people in wheelchairs to run and run away they will.
In the US common folks having power is even enshrined in the constitution which starts with "We the people", "the people", having a long history of being a polite way to refer to the less intellectually abled. Only recently did "populism" turn into a dirty word (see h...
Given the record of technocratic missteps, misguided social engineering, bad policies and wars, one could make the case that we could collectively do a lot better if intellectual elites could be taught some common sense and humility.
Trump’s supporters were and are not the whole of the Republican Party and so it was never about half of the population even if that’s how it was understood and played up by conservative media.
> “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
She said the other half of Trump’s supporters “feel that the government has let them down” and are “desperate for change.”
“Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well,” she said.
https://time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorabl...
In the film, people were smart enough to understand they weren’t all that intelligent. Even the president was willing to defer to someone who knew more than him.
The last couple of years have proven that to be rather naive when it comes to our real leadership.
Kidding aside, he would likely make a much better leader than the current self indulgent noise.
If anything, making a choice to be a citizen and public leader is more significant an indicator of loyalty than an accident of birth.
- "Arnold" is Arnold Schwarzenegger, an Austrian-born American actor who served as Governor of California. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schwarzenegger
- The US Constitution restricts eligibility for the Presidency to "natural-born citizens" of the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-born-citizen_clause_(U...
[0]: Awaken In 2505, Humans Devolve Into Stupid Beings And He Become The Smartest On Earth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnLxc954ipo
As a counterexample, there are the people in the top 1 000 or so of the Forbes ranking. All pretty clever and not really endangered at all.
The article reads more like trying to get attention by scaring people instead of being insighful
I needed to watch it in chunks, because of how viscerally real it is. It is funny, in that it's ostensibly comedy, and the actors all have great comedic timing...but it's also a very very honest appraisal of where we're at as a society.
Also, the asteroid threat is not a good analogy for climate change, as it is supposed to be. Climate change is so difficult to deal with because its effects are uncertain, long-term and unevenly felt. None of those issues hold for an asteroid that will, per the plot, destroy the whole of human civilization in 6 months with 99.9% certainty absent intervention.
I don't think it was saying that politics and politicians as trivial -- I think it was saying that they're not necessarily smart people, and they're certainly not necessarily acting in the best interests of the people they serve.
I think they were also saying that the media serves to reinforce denial in the general population.
The asteroid is just a plot device -- the message is that in the face of mortal danger, huge chunks of the population refuse to even acknowledge the danger so that any intervention can be made. And those in power will exploit that for their own enrichment.
We don't just see this with climate change -- we've observed it with the previous administration...some hits:
- "Lock her up" -- yes, let's just start imprisoning political rivals and see what that does for us as a society)
- "Covid will go away by april" - I suppose they didn't say which april.
- Hydroxychloroquine/Ivermectin/Vitamin C
- Vaccines have microchips
- Masks don't do anything
The list goes on -- We've seen that the population is perfectly willing to disregard any science that threatens their way of life. It's easier to dismiss than to adjust.
Collective threats of this kind have historically created a rally-around-the-flag effect the helps incumbents. Even a venal politician would not assist in the imminent destruction of the planet from which they themselves could not escape. Obviously information of that magnitude of importance would leak, as it did in the film. Meaning its only effect would be to crater the President's support when it became clear they hid the truth. Even an amaetuer political observer would understand all this, let alone a Whitehouse team that won a Presidential election.
Or how about the manner in which the astronomers announced their discovery? They went to the NYT, who inexplicably decided that they would forego running the biggest story in human history. Instead, they helped arrange for the astronomers to announce their discovery in a 2-minute segment on an infotainment news show. Neither the NYT, nor the astronomers, nor anyone would think that was a good idea. It would never, ever happen. During the interview, one of the astronomers got upset because the talk show hosts were nonchalant about the news of the possible end of civilization (!?). Returning to the NYT offices, they're told that the journalists were able to confirm their findings with well-respected third party scientists, but that because one of the astronomers got upset in air, they weren't going to run the story - again, easily the biggest story in human history, which anyone could appreciate at such.
The upshot of this never-ending string of implausible plot points is that the film ends up obfuscating how real politics works. It dumbs politics down and makes it trivial to make an easy joke, making it part of the problem that it ostensibly satirises.
Counter example: Trump new about the severity of covid and downplayed it for quite some time instead of trying to rally the country.
> Meaning its only effect would be to crater the President's support when it became clear they hid the truth. Even an amaetuer political observer would understand all this, let alone a Whitehouse team that won a Presidential election.
In light of the above, this has been shown to be false. There absolutely can be some fanatical base that will construct shared delusional propaganda to avoid the realization that they've been conned.
> Or how about the manner in which the astronomers announced their discovery? They went to the NYT, who inexplicably decided that they would forego running the biggest story in human history. Instead, they helped arrange for the astronomers to announce their discovery in a 2-minute segment on an infotainment news show. Neither the NYT, nor the astronomers, nor anyone would think that was a good idea. It would never, ever happen.
This I'm more inclined to believe. I'm not sure if it would impact the outcome though. I can't imagine there's a huge overlap in people that read the NYT versus watch morning infotainment. I've also lost all faith in humanity, so I can't rule out that it's quite possible that people would make such bad decisions.
> During the interview, one of the astronomers got upset because the talk show hosts were nonchalant about the news of the possible end of civilization (!?). Returning to the NYT offices, they're told that the journalists were able to confirm their findings with well-respected third party scientists, but that because one of the astronomers got upset in air, they weren't going to run the story - again, easily the biggest story in human history, which anyone could appreciate at such.
I think this pretty firmly falls into satirical license as a commentary on meme culture, and how people care more about the messenger than the message.
The irony is that the pandemic was such a slam-dunk easy win politically. Handled with the minimum level of political savvy, this was a dead simple way to send his approval ratings into the van allen belt, just like Bush post-9/11. I think his personal financial stake in the hospitality industry clouded his judgment and prevented him from taking advantage of the biggest election campaign tailwind in a generation.
We can only imagine how things would've turned out if we'd had leadership with an unbiased focus on national unity and the greater good. He could very easily have had a landslide re-election.
Trump neither tried to hide the existence of COVID from the public nor thought it would topple civilization and kill him personally. He downplayed it and the risk it posed, but that is a different order of lying. Trump said exactly as much as he thought he could get away with, and no more.
>There absolutely can be some fanatical base that will construct shared delusional propaganda to avoid the realization that they've been conned.
Sure, but COVID-deniers are a fringe and any political calculus that depends on denying COVID is therefore bound to fail. It is equally clear that denying the existence of an earth-shattering asteroid makes no political sense.
The president in Don't Look Up didn't think it would topple civilization and kill her personally. They thought the plan to break it up and mine it would work. They took a greedy gamble on the fate of the world and lost.
In so doing, they took for granted all of the amazing technology that we have and disregarded expert opinions.
Likewise with trump, who had worked to dismantle the existing pandemic playbook[0] took for granted how well our medical response would be. He regularly disregarded expert opinions, or simply did not speak with them[1]. He even worked to make it difficult for states to get help, because he lost the vote there[2].
In my opinion, these actions do not make sense, yet they were taken by an actual POTUS.
With that in mind, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that a POTUS would try to leverage the event for political gain, and use it opportunity for personal profit, and that a sizable amount of the population would support it.
And you're right. It makes no sense. It's mind mindbogglingly dumb. Still plausible.
[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/obama-team-left-pandemic...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/23/fauci-says-trump-hasnt-atten...
[2] https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/494807-trump-ask...
The question is: would the President, told of an imminent asteroid collision large enough to destroy human civilization, and knowing this information would leak if she did not announce it, elect to hide this information for a month until after the midterms for no particular reason?
You say "They thought the plan to break it up and mine it would work." At the time of the decision of whether to announce the existence of the asteroid, and create a plan, there obviously was no plan. So no, she didn't think that.
>"Likewise with trump, who had worked to dismantle the existing pandemic playbook[0] took for granted how well our medical response would be. He regularly disregarded expert opinions, or simply did not speak with them[1]. He even worked to make it difficult for states to get help, because he lost the vote there[2]."
Again, this isn't the point. Even Trump never tried to deny the existence of COVID. Clearly that would not have worked and would have exploded in his face.
My understanding was they ran the story and the morning tv show was part of a media tour they set up, the response on the tv show such that they did not really want to continue with the big media blitz and publishing more stories that they had planned.
>Returning to the NYT offices, they're told that the journalists were able to confirm their findings with well-respected third party scientists, but that because one of the astronomers got upset in air, they weren't going to run the story
They had ran it by other scientists in the initial meeting who said that the data looked credible. However after the disastrous media appearance one of the things that made the NYT not want to continue with writing more articles was that they had learned the science was not 100% and they were mad they had been lied to.
Who said the science was not 100%? Dr. Jocelyn Calder the head of NASA, later Calder resigns in disgrace to shield the administration when scientist with Ivy League credentials confirm the comet is coming.
on edit: formatting, grammar
ah, yes, such blunt and heavy handed satire compared with old, subtle satire, like that one, modest, pamphlet advocating for eating poor children.
not sure why satire needs to be subtle to be good. It can go from crass to oscar-wilde-subtle, as long as it's funny and based on reality I would call it good.
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.
Netflix has this weird habit where it's like they can't budget well. I imagine they spent so much money hiring Leonardo DiCaprio they didn't have enough to write good scriptwriters.
I really wanted to like the movie, but why would you cram so many high power celebrities in one film. Film. Idiocracy is amazing because outside of Booker T, and Scareface's cameo I had no idea who these actors were. Plus I'd argue the plot is much easier to follow. Mike Judge is a genius.
If anything Don't Look Up ends up being a demonstration of the celebrity worship it mocks.
I can understand where you're coming from. I'm a marvel fan and I'm disappointed that they went with so many celbreties for Eternals -- I haven't seen it yet, but they were really more distracting than anything in the trailers.
I didn't mind the actors in Don't Look Up though, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, and Jennifer Lawrence had some good chemistry. It did feel like Jonah Hill's character was literally the same character from Wolf of Wallstreet.
My guess is that netflix was hoping that it'd garnish more attention having many big name actors. It's also possible those actors _wanted_ to do it as a form of expression.
> If anything Don't Look Up ends up being a demonstration of the celebrity worship it mocks.
I don't really think it mocked celebrity worship. Maybe to some degree with the tech ceo (I can certainly amuse myself with how HN would probably react to some of it's hivemind's idols like Jobs or PG in that situation.
Or Elon Musk. I can almost imagine the following comment on HN: "The asteroid has enough lithium to make batteries for everyone alive for the next 200 years! Anyone who supports diverting it supports government dysfunction and unmitigated destruction of wealth. This is our one shot to jumpstart space manufacturing - humans have a chance of becoming a Type II civilization, the risk is negligible and well worth it"
If we had a meteor expected to hit Earth in 10 years I am sure we would not start to work on a plan to protect ourselves as THE only thing to care about.
There would always be discussions about budget, China/Russia/US/[pick your country] being the villains, etc.
Covid hit us very mildly and it was (and still is) a shitshow. A global disaster coming in x years (within our lifetime but not tomorrow either) wild be the end of humanity.
We know that climate changes will be terrible and we simply do not care at all, as a species.
The main difference from both is that Don’t Look Up is completely implausible. Also, it isn’t very funny. But I guess people are eager to overlook that if it validates their political biases.
Anyway, since Idiocracy couldn’t be made today due to the PC crowd yelling "eugenics", it is in a way a modern replacement, made straight for the woke crowd with pronouns in their Twitter bio.
Today, I am deeply disturbed by the malice and sheer idiocy that social media has not only exposed but also amplified (with intent), as engagement is their business model. Broad engagement is and always has been easiest perpetrated by hate and gossip.
There are still great blogs, great individuals and great content. Great communities and creativity. They can simply continue to exist.
But we need to drive Facebook/Meta and all its ad-driven social media metastases (hah) to extinction, it's a cancer on society under the guise of free speech and social advancement. Algorithms take you in and bubble-wrap you in your own little safe space devoid of any exposure to other people and ideas. Connect the world yada-yada. Yea right... connect the world of alt-right Nazis maybe.
Aside from that, I am pretty certain the Wild West days of the Internet will soon be over - maybe another 10-15 years for relative anonymity. Soon the China model will be replicated in the West as the Internet of today can under no circumstances guaruntee a lawful environment.
The rise of genetic engineering is going to allow humans to solely give birth to geniuses. This will more than counteract this idiocracy effect.
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).