Hacker Cinema
Idiocracy
2006 · Film · 85 min
Directed by Mike Judge
ComedyScience FictionAdventureThriller
To test its top-secret Human Hibernation Project, the Pentagon picks the most average European-Americans it can find - an Army private and a prostitute - and sends them to the year 2505 after a series of freak events. But when they arrive, they find a civilization so dumbed-down that they're the smartest people around.
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619 comments on Hacker News
It still should be. Any educator worth their salt should be able to connect the dots on where all of this leads.
I always joke with my wife and invoke a line from this [1] Art Bell episode "the disasters that are coming..."
People really don't seem to consider that our civilization is remarkably fragile and dependent on humans. Any given system can just fail at a moment's notice and you need people around who know how not to panic and what to do.
We seem to be adamant at disproving this reality for some weird reason (money, duh), but life isn't going to be fun when a large portion of the population needs a chat bot to do any form of work. And it's worth asking: what population will be left if we submit all of our faculties to LLMs? My guess is one that's either limited in size or practically inert.
An outright idiocracy doesn't have to happen, but we sure as hell seem to be speed-running our way there. It's actually worth watching Idiocracy and Wall-E and just contemplating "do I really want to live in this world?" Because, at least right now, we're charting course directly toward that.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkPHMEvp-Tk
I had a similar experience logging in to FB to delete my account which was inactive for almost a decade. It’s legit was like the movie Idiocracy. Casino vibes, over stimulation, people saying stupid thing, trying to sift through lots of garbage to find the thing you’re looking for.
Except the strange dysgenics reason for the downfall of high civilization in Idiocracy it is a interesting movie. It should have talked more about cultural enshittification.
I'm sure if you looked at fertility rates across the globe, broken down by location/race/religion and other demographics, you'd find plenty of differences - some very large.
Yes, ability to fend off a tiger attack is not much of a factor nowadays, but even something as simple as a religion that encourages having large families, and encourages marrying within religion (you don't need to live on an island to be somewhat genetically isolated) will have an effect.
In the modern world there is also a lot of truth to the premise of the nominally satirical movie "idiocracy", where it's not things we regard as positive (strength, intelligence, etc) that drive reproductive success, but in fact the opposite, with birth rates among the unintelligent often higher than that among the intelligent (who are prone to worrying about having kids).
What tends to drive evolution the most seems to be occasional rapid shifts in the environment rather than stable selection pressures. For example, we were lucky that COVID-19 wasn't worse than it was, but by definition those who died were those with immune systems less well prepared for the new threat, and the human species as a whole has now slightly "evolved" to be better able to survive that selection pressure.
I agree that the overall premise is somewhat eugenics-y, but I overlook that on the basis that it's a comedy movie from 2005 and it's easier to swallow than something like "aliens abducted all the world's smart people"[0] or something. There are still some good themes on over-reliance on automation without understanding it.
The Idiocracy line that I think about the most these days is "Brawndo stock dropped to zero and the computer did that auto-layoff thing to everybody."
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lllrpcd8vbk
Satire pokes fun at what is happening right now; it's not predicting anything. Just like 1984 warned of the dangers of totalitarianism that was already happening, Idiocracy was about current U.S. culture at the time. It wouldn't have been funny if our culture weren't already like that 20 years ago.
The premise is just a silly one so that there's a plot-based reason to show an exaggerated version of what was already happening culturally. It's not intended to be the point of the movie.
Idiocracy's mechanism isn't as solid as it seems though even if high educated people do tend to have have less kid. The movie basically suggests "smart people have smart kids, dumb people have dumb kids, repeat forever." But you'd expect kids of very high or very low IQ parents to land closer to average in general. The "compounding" thing the movie relies on isn't really how it works in life.
And even if the premise of Idiocracy were true, less intelligent people aren't worth less than more intelligent people. That's the "eugenics-y vibe" problem mentioned earlier that makes the movie uncomfortable for some people.
Yeah, Idiocracy isn't wrong on the facts about our current day scenario. The issue is where it takes that: poor, lower educated people will inevitably have poor, lowered educated children who will in fact get less and less educated as time goes on, and they will take over, leading to... idiocracy.
There's a whole conversation to have about the assumptions in that. Is the implication it's genetic? The children of lower educated people aren't capable of moving to greater things? Or is it societal, that our education system fails the poor and doesn't give them the tools they need to thrive?
The movie isn't really interested in interrogating any of that and I don't think it needs to. Like I said, I see it as a fun movie that isn't that deep. But there's a common thread of opinion on the movie that holds it up as a biting satire ("Idiocracy is a documentary!" is essentially a meme at this point) and those folks don't seem to engage with the topic either. A worrying number of people seem to have a takeaway of "poor people shouldn't procreate as much".
Anyway, to bring it back to the actual topic at hand (and why I originally replied): I think something like VAST goes directly against what Idiocracy implies. We're all potential victims to distractions that reduce our capacity for executive function. A more accurate movie might show people of all financial and educational achievement glued to endless social media feeds.
The current situation was foretold 20 years ago in the prescient documentary named Idiocracy.
District 9 was a decent action film, and felt like something different. Like Idiocracy, District 9's actual political commentary was very on the nose, but that didn't detract from it. It was very reminiscent of "Alien Nation" in some ways.
> Actual muscles need exercise to stay in shape (let alone grow), so does the brain. Can we really be sure that thoughts, opinions, taste will still come out sharper and faster after five, ten, 20 years of using these tools almost every day?
It occurred to me recently how because the LLMs have to potential to lead to intellectual/skill atrophy, they are a factor which could lead to an Idiocracy-esque [0] situation.
And while it's a well-established Fermi Paradox [1] hypothesis that AI could lead to the violent destruction of a civilization, I think it's also worth considering that they could non-violently lead to their decline due to intellectual atrophy.
[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
Pi has way too many batteries included, including a bunch I don't want, and lacked the batteries I did want. Pi is a bit like the movie Idiocracy in that the idea is much better than the execution.
Incidentally, I also have zero supply chain attack surface as I have zero dependencies in my agent, just go stdlib. Pi, again, has 130+ transitive dependencies asking me to trust the security of my system to 150+ additional people I've never met in exchange for a bunch of bloat I do not want.
It's somewhat ironic coming from someone that openly states they use AI all day, everyday. Regardless, the message is correct. I don't think that people have become dumber over the last 15 years. At large, they were always dumb. People got access to social media which exposed their stupidity and that was seen as a success(which I still find baffling). Until it wasn't: milking the influencer economy only gets you so far. The new wave is people who believe that slopping something together is them doing the work and that they are the smart ones. In practice, I constantly see people genuinely believing they know what they are doing while some slop machine floods their screens with text. Just go over some "I vibe coded this thing in a weekend", run some basic security tests on it and the results are almost always frightening. All of this is the whole plot of Idiocracy (holy shit, that movie was ahead of it's time and optimistic af for saying that was 500 years away). Slop that appears to work on the surface is quickly becoming the single point of failure for entire industries. And honestly, I am all for it: if the house has to burn down for things to get better, let it burn.
I used to get irked when people would say America is on the path that was portrayed by the film Idiocracy. But the path from "fighting pit on the White House Lawn" to "Extreme Court arena battles featuring monster trucks with giant dildos" increasingly looks like a straight line.
"Idiocracy (2006)" wasn't supposed to be a documentary!
The original idea I think was they were biological components in a digital/biological computer complex. The Matrix sets up scenarios, and the human brains interact with them in human ways which are sometimes of use to the machines. Meanwhile, the machines see all of it and can monitor for problem humans. ISTR this was tossed as too intellectual for an action movie.
Another option to either The Matrix or Star Trek is Idiocracy, only there’s an elite group of humans and AI in charge over the deteriorating masses. Let’s not count out The Hunger Games or Elysium.
Also... Money is Theft and The Economy is a Lie. Education inoculates you against new facts. Our meritocratic democracy ensures government by the mediocre.
As Paul Virillo once quipped, "the invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck." And we appear to have shot the ensign who was looking out for icebergs.
"They Live" was a documentary. "Idiocracy" is far too optimistic to be accurate. Reflexive modernity has made Ballard's "High Rise" into a love story.
The guy who created SV actually WAS a software dev in SV back in the late 80s though (albeit briefly). And obviously had a career of fairly subversive, out there humor (Beavis and Butthead, Office Space, King of The Hill, Idiocracy).
BBT was created by someone who just did a bunch of other sitcoms.
I couldn't stand BBT either, but I knew by default that Silicon Valley was going to be good.
I'm not sure what 'film' America is trying to be but I've seen plenty of real life references that could have come straight from either the Handmaids Tale, Idiocracy, The Dead Zone or Civil War the past few years. Life does seem to imitate art sometimes.
The joke is beyond tired and run so deep into the ground at this point it might come out the other end but...
'Idiocracy' lookin' more a like a documentary every day.
The thesis of Idiocracy is that society gets dumber in the future because intelligence is mostly genetically-determined
I don't remember the movie taking side on the nature vs nurture debate. The thesis is that intelligence is _inherited_.
Friendly reminder that plenty of nurture is inherited too.
because intelligence is mostly genetically-determined
None of the points of Idiocracy depend on whether intelligence is by nature or by nurture. The premise of the movie stays exactly the same if you replace those two minutes of backstory with a dysfunctional education system, the return of child labour, an increase in teen pregnancies, and anti-intellectualism in general.
Here is a problem, I am not arguing "Idiocracy: the process as presented in the movie"; I am arguing "Idiocracy; the resulting dumbed down populace". Admittedly, it is a mental shortcut and a bad one since it clearly did not land as I had hoped.
The thesis of Idiocracy is that society gets dumber in the future because intelligence is mostly genetically-determined and smarter people systematically have fewer children than dumber people, i.e. literal evolutionary selection against human intelligence over many human generations. This is clear in the first several minutes of the movie. People who recognize that this is what that movie is saying often then condemn it for being Nazi-adjacent pro-eugenics propaganda.
In the logic of Idiocracy, the way that an AI would "allow" the future society portrayed in the movie is by letting dumb people systematically have more kids than smart people, and "not allowing" this would entail some kind of coercive eugenics policy aimed at getting smart people to have more kids than they would otherwise be inclined to.
There was the best university in the world -- Costco University, in the movie Idiocracy.
Yes, the documentary movie 'Idiocracy' comes to mind
>Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?
They went over this, in the documentary titled "Idiocracy".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFRzIOna2oQ
> America didn’t mandate eugenics in the movie
Correct! It mandated eugenics in real life, in the early 20th century. I didn't say that the movie shows eugenics happening. I said "the film itself implies that the idiocracy is due to stupid people breeding more, a classic tenet of Nazism and eugenics alike." Work on your reading comprehension.
The film wasn't about education, it was about genetics, as the intro makes abundantly clear. And the Redditors who get themselves hot and bothered about this film aren't laughing, they're congratulating themselves on being the intelligent ones instead of the dysgenic stupids while crowing about how "Idiocracy is a documentary" -> stupid people are overbreeding.
A good movie makes you love the people more. Such moves are rare. "Idiocracy" or "Don't Look Up" are not like that. (Satire is a low genre in general.)
It's not a eugenics-y vibe. The inciting incident is dysgenics, and the in-narrative apocalypse would have been prevented by eugenics.
It doesn't preclude the movie from being enjoyed or appreciated. The movie also came out at a time when test scores, literacy rates, and whatnot were all _increasing_, so that was the more salient lens to criticize it by.
That trend has reversed now, though. I don't agree with the dysgenic narrative, but I have often found myself thinking, "Gotta hand it to the movie Idiocracy, it's feeling familiar".
For all its flaws, I was a child at the time saturated in post-Y2K optimism that tomorrow would always be better than the day before. It was one of the first things that made me seriously consider, "What if humanity is not on a linear path of improvement"?
The thing about Biden was that the bureaucracy was still intact, so most government functionality carried on just fine regardless what Biden himself was doing. Trump gutted the bureaucracy in favor of autocracy, replacing the domain experts with sycophantic yes-men. So when Biden got a terrible idea that would unquestionably harm the country, the response would have been something like "We'll look into that" or even an outright "no". Whereas when Trump gets a terrible idea (which lets be honest is a few times a week), the only answer is "yes sir".
If you're comparing dementia styles, Biden was effectively the type that is happy to sit on the couch and stare off into space while his family does things around him. Trump is the combative kind that is always trying to find the keys to the car to drive away and assert his own independence, and violently rejects help and concern.
As for your larger comment, you're probably closer to right in that bureaucratic authoritarians were much more like Idiocracy. President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho had better leadership, speaking ability, policy planning, honesty, work ethic, intelligence, humility, and outright patriotism than the piece of pig shit currently staining our White House could ever hope for. He also didn't rape trafficked underage girls or pardon Upgrayedd for a bribe. The movie makes me long for simpler times.
If you think watching Idiocracy feels too on point for current events, try giving a (re)watch to The Hunger Games movies, too.
Given the number of people in this thread saying “it’s a documentary” I don’t think there’s a significant difference. And there’s also plenty of criticism of Idiocracy on Reddit too.
"Public education" is exactly the thing that will guarantee Idiocracy, that was practically the whole point of the movie
Eh. I don't really see anything wrong with that. Every industry flubs things because the people creating the product aren't the same demographics consuming it. No big deal IMO. I think it's just a product of your typical Hollywood filter bubble. The Average American(TM) isn't so stupid as to not see the glaring "left to it's own devices middle america would turn the whole country into white trash, also with literal trash everywhere" undertone even if they can't quite put their finger on it.
You could make essentially the same movie about how impenetrable and unaccountable bureaucracy and abstraction of responsibility away to 3rd parties is going to make society grind to a halt (e.g. trash piling up because all disposal methods have been declared not environmentally friendly enough, etc, etc) and someone who just doesn't give enough shits to ask permission can be the hero of the story and frame it to offend all the people who specifically identify as the opposite of the dumb people in idiocracy.
That said I think it's a great movie and they struck a good balance.
There are quite a lot of dubious matches.
Brawndo is considered a match with "Nestlé CEO says water isn't a human right". Beyond that it has nothing to do with agricultural malpractice, the Nestlé guy is just correct. It doesn't make sense to talk about human rights that way.
"Ow my balls" is considered a match because "YouTube's most popular content is often people hurting themselves", which is just wrong. It's stuff like music videos, children's songs and MrBeast. All quite wholesome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-viewed_YouTube_videos
"Costco law degree" is considered a match because ... there are companies that offer credentials which aren't universities. That isn't evidence of stupidity.
"Trash piles are massive" is considered a match because third world countries have giant trash piles. But they always did. Idiocracy was a film about America.
Even the first match is a giant stretch. Elizondo was only a TV star, and he did that work whilst in office. Trump wasn't (just) a reality TV star, he was first and foremost pre-politics a real estate developer. Quite different levels of challenge and respectability. And I don't think the show he did could be described as reality TV anyway.
It definitely activates something within people. Maybe I'm just terminally online, but there is always _always_ someone who will say "Idiocracy isn't satire, its a documentary."
Hence the "WTF" shared glances between myself and the filmmakers at that Idiocracy screening. The audience reaction was more memorable than the film, it was like the film did not end and the audience picked up the storyline.
> Instead of anti-eugenics making brains feeble,
I didn't read Idiocracy as eugenics/anti-eugenics. It wasn't saying that stupid people breeding made the population stupid, it was saying that the less educated breeding resulted in the more educated being pushed to the periphery and eventually fading out.
The people of the film's future were not stupid, just massively uninformed and misinformed. They were able to grasp the problem and solution in the end.
Unless I'm misremembering, and it did make direct reference to intelligence rather than education and access to it. It is a good few years since I last watched it. There is the title, of course, but educationally-disasavantaged-ocracy would not have been catchy enough!
I feel Idiocracy is irresistible bait for 'not like the other girls'-types.
Everytime this movie comes up, droves of people mention how they get it, while others don't. It's becoming a trope in itself.
- "Brought to you by Carl's Jr. They pay me every time i say it" vs "Mysterious trading patterns follow Trump into war"
- "Florida's in Georgia, dumbass" vs "We setled Aberbaijan and Albania"
- "Secretary of education is kinda stupid, but he 's president's brother" vs "Donald Trump's White House is a family affair"
I ve been watching Idiocracy over and over for years, as a documentary.
In many ways the movie is more merciful than reality. Frito , a really dumb man who purchased his "lawyer degree" in costco, could afford his own comfy apartment and car. He was not addicted on his phone all day , constantly worried about what others think of him. The govt would take care of your neglected kids. Employment by brawndo kept the world quiet. Leaders were too dumb to make wars. People too dumb to make culture wars. Their president was smarter.
The misspellings in signage though, is comedically reminiscent of AI image generators.
Because the film itself implies that the idiocracy is due to stupid people breeding more, a classic tenet of Nazism and eugenics alike
I attended an audience testing screener for Idiocracy before the film's final edit. I could not believe my eyes and ears, I loved it unlike anything I'd seen before, it was the hardest US culture satire I'd seen up to that point. Then the lights came up and the audience started giving their reviews, in an open mike fashion. They all identified with the "idiots" and were indignant insulted, and angry. I remember making eye contact with Mike Judge like "WTF!" It was an early screener and I think that reaction was a surprise to the film team. I own a copy and watch it more than once a year. One of my favorite hard satires.
> The primary point of idiocracy was to imagine a world where people were acting in increasingly stupid ways over time.
...and in doing so, it depicts a world that is not at all reminiscent of the one in which we live.
The white house is not occupied by idiots, but by thieves and murders and sexual predators. The American landscape is not a Brawndo-dustbowl, but a highly profitable, productive, and delicious-but-toxic bounty of subsidized factory farms, stemming not from a misunderstanding of botany, but a misapplication of that understanding.
The same is true of the medical industry, the justice system - literally every institution portrayed in the entire film, with the possible exception of waste disposal / the trash avalanche.
> If he was living in an era of abundance like Trump,
That's exactly the point: the world of the film is, in every way that matters, the opposite of the reality in which we live. So how are these strained comparisons useful?
> then I wonder how sincere and transparent he'd be.
Obviously we can't know, because the universe of Idiocracy is on rails toward stupidity and poverty, and never even considers greed and abundance as features of its janky political lens. In the first few minutes of the film, it establishes that poor, stupid people are to blame for every societal ill, and then it depicts a future in which no character ever even grapples with any other antagonist than the poverty and stupidity of his ancestors.
Is that today's world?! For who? Are the poor people in Iran and Gaza and Yemen who are dealing with explosives raining down on them (rather than Brawndo) stupid? Do you think their fate is attributable to the proclivity of previous generations to breed in inverse proportion to their material wealth?
It's just such an asinine premise it's hard to even understand what would qualify as a sound comparison, but it's certainly not any of those listed on this website.
It isn't really the fact that the president is a movie actor that's damning there. It's the fact that the president uses wrestling catch phrases and behavior (Trump was even in WWE). Back when Idiocracy came out, the very idea of President Camacho seemed absurd. Nobody would bat an eye at that anymore.
Yes, the movie was a satire and took the current observations to their logical extreme. The point is that we're pretty darn close to the extreme right now.
This is just silly to portray idiocracy as a prediction of the future.
Yes the current president of America is a movie actor, this was not idiocracy predicting the future, Ronald Reagan was a movie actor president before idiocracy came out.
The movie satirised what was already happening, there is nothing special about nowadays.
I hear people make this comparison all the time, and while it is facially a bit funny I guess, I really don't think it holds up in any serious way.
What is so similar about our world to that of idiocracy? In almost all the ways that matter, it seems like we are going in the opposite direction.
* The primary plot point of idiocracy is that poor (and thus, stupid - the film never explains why this correlation exists in that universe, though) people are the only ones who reproduce. For this reason, there is evolutionary pressure toward decreased intelligence. It's an odious premise on its face IMO, and certainly not what is happening in the USA: our birth rates are declining _because_ people are not economically stable.
* President Camacho is the exact inverse of Trump: he is stupid, uninformed, disconnected, and has few resources to address the challenges he faces, but he makes good-faith efforts to do so at every turn. And he seems to be sincere and transparent. Trump's illusion runs precisely counter to this: he has every resource he can possibly need, but chooses to enrich himself and his friends instead of advancing the public interest.
Virtually every plot point of Idiocracy can be broken down this way. I see very, very little of the film universe that is consistent with our sociopolitical trajectory.
If you want a Mike Judge film that shines light on uncomfortable truths about 21st-century America, the obvious choice is Office Space.
[Responding to all the comments, so you may need to read through the thread again if I miss context here]
> The war isn't happening as long as you don't look at it.
I'm not ignorant of the war, and yes I follow it; however my mentality stems from the sheer number of months of bad news happening somewhere. I can only give so much of my attention to The World when there's things at the local level to worry about. So I don't engage in "all of it" on the Internet. I have those conversations in person.
> But the answer is not about drowning yourself in pleasant fiction on Amazon Prime or ignoring current events.
I disagree, but also not drowning. Rather engaging online in the manner pre-COVID. You know, like Walking Dead "How would I survive a zombie apocalypse" or Game of Thrones "who's next to die". The 24/7 Internet chatroom known as "the comments section" just wants to deviate the conversation back to politics. I also disagree with the sentiment that we're in "Idiocracy", but I still enjoy the film.
> The fast moving clickbait media of Twitter and Facebook is trash. It's often incorrect, it's full of propaganda
So is every aggregator site. Agenda-Setting Theory [1] dictates what information you're receiving on any given day, and smaller scale Discords with self-promotion know how to gamify Trending algorithms (since most rely on some degree of 'velocity' based on time since post). Couple that with how we've over engineered attention by A/B testing thumbnails [2] and how the mind reads TEXT LIKE THIS [3] (which was also A/B tested for email campaign clickthroughs), I'm left with a curiosity of "what headline text is emotionally anchoring a sentiment"?
Heck, GET OFF THE INTERNET isn't even yelling [4], it's just me abusing that all caps does thing in brain.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda-setting_theory
[2] https://netflixtechblog.com/selecting-the-best-artwork-for-videos-through-a-b-testing-f6155c4595f6
[3] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.685756/full
[4] Reddit Version: https://v.redd.it/hlo2z6a6rctg1, Twitter Version: https://x.com/amgaweda/status/2040744192020717592; Gotta work on encoding cause something made my audio out of sync with the video
Hot take: It's about to become a lot more common and as strange as it may sound, I don't blame governments nor corporations - the people are to blame. Everyone with a functioning brain saw that coming decades ago: If the long haired 12 year old punk, that I was in the early 2000s, could see a problem, chances are, you don't need to have 20 PhDs to figure it out either. But most people ignored it and carried on sharing every single thing about them 24/7. I have a friend who is furious about it now and when I call him out, being constantly on facebook/instagram/whatever, he still refuses to accept that it's his fault. His argument is that he needs it cause he has a music band. Here's the kicker: he's had multiple over the nearly 2 decades that we've known each other. And the reality is, he's never made any living or money out of it and acknowledges that he never will and he's only doing it for fun while investing his own money into what is effectively a hobby. He's made a couple of hundred bucks at most and much of those have been from close friends of his as a form of support and personally in my case purely out of support since the music he makes is not my cup of tea. And yet, every time he farts, he posts it on some social media. "I'm sure we are not far being tracked on the roads and if we exceed the speed limit by 2km, we get a fine instantly". I'm genuinely starting to think that people are not capable of making the connection between cause and effect. Best case scenario, they see those as a coincidence. A few weeks ago I logged into linkedin from an anonymous account and I was horrified: random posts from people I've never heard of: "We created the best performing AI that can do {something}. Comment on this post and we will give you an early access to our product."
And dozens of comments underneath, as you might have thought. The company - one 19 year old kid running a node frontend on vercel. First comment - from a marketing manager at some FAANG. If this is not a sign that we are cooked, I don't know what is.
People keep sharing everything they do online, rely on cloud based llms which clearly collect their information. And everyone and their dog understands that AI companies operate at huge losses and promises they will never be able to fulfill. Sooner or later the investors will start asking questions. Governments are in this bizarre place where they are part of this on two fronts. At large because governments are lead by people in their 60's and 70's and have no goddamn clue what AI is beyond magic that can do anything (or so they are made to believe). So they are pouring money into AI companies to do some ridiculous tasks for them, while also pouring money into collecting data. To their minds, it's probably "we have the data and we have access to the all-seeing and all-knowing ai". And while that is happening, sloppers ask that same AI to write their code, where to buy dinner, use it as a therapist, relationship consultant and all that, adding more highly personal data into the bag of data that should remain personal. Forget how bad corporations have been at preventing data leaks. When the investors start knocking on the door, asking for their money and a government asking for a JSON containing your medical records, private information and whatnot, guess who won't think twice about it and happily take the briefcase full of cash.
Ultimately, Idiocracy was supposed to be a comedy, not a documentary but here we are.
They capitalized “Idiocracy” so it seems pretty likely they’re unfortunately, whether they know it or not, endorsing the eugenics-based thesis of the movie.
I look forward to reading studies in 10 years how we all became stupider thanks to this "feature". One step closer to the movie Idiocracy.
Idiocracy was a documentary sent to us from the future.
This is a very different conclusion from the one in the scientific documentary "Idiocracy"
The plan is a show of power. Trump will leave in 2 years, leaving much of the world in disarray because he had no plan whatsoever, and his staff is literally out of the movie Idiocracy. Nothing of lasting value will come out of the horrors that happened in the past 3 years, and in 10 years we (the world) will look back into the present with disbelief.
It's like someone saw an episode of Black Mirror and Idiocracy and went, "That's it! That's what we need to do!" and began using them as a playbook.
Yeah, I'm sure this won't drive massive adoption of ad blockers or anything.
I can't believe I have to say this, but Idiocracy is a fictional movie.
There’s a documentary explaining both, it’s called “Idiocracy”.
This is world wide, look around us, everything is broken. Early 2000s is when humanity peaked, the technology is making some people dumber.
Kids cannot speak and yet have access to tablet. Students cannot study without AI anymore. Teachers saying not even giving them the answer helps, they don't know what to do.
If you never watched the movie 2006 Idiocracy, do it!! It was supposed to be a comedy movie but sadly, it describes the world we are living right now.
Just because a high skilled programmer can use an LLM with some effectiveness doesnt mean someone with less skills will be able to match their ability. You LLM-kiddies are worse than nft people in 2021 claiming they're making art.
I really cant wait until the inference providers 5x their prices and you guys realize you're completely incompetent and that you've tied your competency 1:1 to the quality and quantity of tokens you can afford. You're going to be a character from the movie idiocracy.
Of course you'll still be coping by claiming you're so productive using some budget kimi 2.5 endpoint that consumes all your personal data and trains on your inputs.
yup, all these folks claiming AI is the bees knees are delegating their thinking to a roulette that may or may not give proper answers. the world will become more and more like the movie idiocracy
Glad you said that because frankly you put it better than I was going to.
It’s the same nonsense as people going “Idiocracy is a documentary.“ Of course none of them think they’re the idiots.
Technocracy is probably not the right word for what you mean. Oligarchy is probably a better one. This will probably evolve into idiocracy if you have seen the similarly named documentary .
I think you should watch the 2006 film of Idiocracy. You will certainly not regret watching 2006 documentary, isocracy
>Since when do we need study for that?? Look around us!!
>Watch 2006 Idiocracy movie, you won't regret.
Having anecdotal evidence, and a fictional film is exactly the issue with the consensus that social media is bad.
Since when do we need study for that?? Look around us!!
Gaming isn't and never will be an issue in our society, now, social media??? 100%
* Teens in Western countries don't wanna study because they wanna be "social media influencer" (whatever that means).
* Students at Uni and schools are using ChatGPT to do the thinking for them meaning, they are getting dumber and dumber.
* if you never watched 2006 Idiocracy movie, it was a warning about the future, not a comedy movie. Strongly recommend you to watch it. DO IT!!!!
* Social media is not affecting just teens metal health but everything, look around us, birthrate is all time low and declining. Women no longer need men they say, marriages all falling apart because of social media, they think they deserve better because neighbors grass is greener. Decades old marriages, gone! Dating?? Non existent and not worth anymore so guys are walking away so birthrates is going worse by the day.
* Hollywood got into some insane plastic surgery epidemic right now, social media is allowing it to spread, teenagers are using cosmetics and surgery to blend into the social media trend, something 40s and above used to do, not 15-20s.
Now with the AI, chatbots, fake accounts, fake videos, fake everything, watch our society doomed. It already started, like I said, birthrates is gone, students cannot read, they cannot do anything without asking ChatGPT. Food is nothing but plastic, chemicals and everything in between.
Watch 2006 Idiocracy movie, you won't regret.
> DFW, Neal Stephenson, and Idiocracy seemed funny 25 years ago. Not so much now that they seem to have predicted where we have arrived.
Idiocracy did not predict things accurately: in that movie the President acknowledges that he does not have all the answers and asks questions (and listens) to people he recognizes as knowing more from him. That is not the situation currently.
Idiocracy is a very interesting documentary but I do wonder why the Portuguese wikipedia article was posted here.
The day before the night I first saw Office Space, way after becoming an underground hit, I had my first encounter with the TPS communication barrage. It made the movie funnier and my work life sadder.
Similar thing happened with Idiocracy recently...
We're on our way to making Idiocracy (the movie) a prophetic documentary.
Golden age!!
Try now to convince a young person to become a doctor or an engineer, when an OF individual can make in a day what they will make in 40y, assuming they found a job anyway. Idiocracy was a glimpse into the future, not a movie.
Idiocracy was a documentary.
Did the film Idiocracy have any other hot tips?
https://archive.ph/q4g2P
And the HN front-page overlords fell for it, hook line and sinker.
Well played.
Edit wow this some five-dimensional trolling: the github user's avatar is from the movie Idiocracy https://github.com/A1CST
Watch the opening scene of the movie Idiocracy
I'm sorry to be a pedantic about this, but we are absolutely not living through Idiocracy. In the movie, the President wants to better the material conditions of his people, then seeks and listens to the advice of the smartest person in the world, who successfully delivers.
If you want a movie, we are actually living in Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator.
The "Idiocracy" movie is now a documentary from the future.
This once again shows that idiocracy was an overly optimistic movie.
When you go through a problem and have to solve it, you learn to see patterns (of mistakes) and develop a sense for similar problems. Outsourcing the thinking will speed you up for known problems but won't develop your thinking ability.
The gap between those who can solve new problems (and so earn money with it) and those who can't will only increase, with all the social consequences of it. Idiocracy[0] becomes more and more a documentary.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
imagine what it'll be like in 10 years time
Microsoft: the film Idiocracy was not supposed to be a manual
You are correct.
I think many here have no idea what exactly MCP is, and think it's some sort of magic sauce that transcends how LLMs usually work.
“But Brawndo has what plants crave! It's got electrolytes! '...Okay - what are electrolytes? Do you know? Yeah. It's what they use to make Brawndo.' But why do they use them in Brawndo? What do they do?''They're part of what plants crave.'But why do plants crave them?'Because plants crave Brawndo, and Brawndo has electrolytes.” ― Idiocracy Movie
Ever watch the movie Idiocracy? Was a stupid "comedy", today it seems to be a prophetic documentary.
Or the Idiocracy movie where 'doctors' don't understand neither the tech nor the procedures.
When I first watched Idiocracy decades ago, I thought it was a funny comedy.
As the years came, I started to see it as a prophecy.
And then, here we are, and we finally found out that Idiocracy is now a documentary.
If I want to know about the law, I'll ask a lawyer (ok, not any lawyer, but it's a useful first pass filter). If I want to know about plumbing I'll ask a plumber. If I want to ask questions or learn about writing I will ask one or more writers. And so on. Experts in the field are way better at their field than 95% of the population, which you can ask but probably shouldn't.
There are many 100's of professions, and most of them take a significant fraction of a lifetime to master, and even then there usually is a daily stream of new insights. You can't just toss all of that information into a bucket and expect that to outperform the < 1% of the people that have studied the subject extensively.
When Idiocracy came out I thought it was a hilarious movie. I'm no longer laughing, we're really putting the idiots in charge now and somehow we think that quantity of output trumps quality of output. I wonder how many scientific papers published this year will contain AI generated slop complete with mistakes. I'll bet that number is >> 0.
I thought that book was pretty dull, and had a terrible romance subplot. But I do have to say it pops in my head more and more often, just like Idiocracy. Someone should definitely do a movie so the illiterates know what they're missing at least.
In general forums it's quite often like you've been stuck in an episode of Idiocracy. If we extrapolate the current trajectory it feels like we'll be communicating online with grunts and emojis in a couple of years.
Idiocracy movie as a template? :)
I remember watching the movie Idiocracy and laughing, thinking something like that could never happen to us. I can’t watch it anymore because it’s too close to reality
Has anyone seen the movie Idiocracy? Because the whole premise of this movie is exactly what you wrote. Watch the first 5-10 minutes of the movie if nothing else.
It is hilarious :) "Idiocracy" is where the "only sky deity worshippers pro-create" movie ends.
I happen to have religious friends. They invited me once to a Christmas dinner - about 5 families. My and my wife were the only ones who did not have at least 2 kids (we had no kids at that time). My wife was the only woman working, and I was the only one who was not working construction - one of the guys made this remark, not me.
During the dinner the male host started playing on a keyboard. There was a chorus of women singing religious hymns around him (I am not making this up). One of the guys tried to convert me. All in good nature and polite and with no confrontation - these are all good people and we saw each other after that. But I skipped Christmas at their house the following year :)
Watch the movie Idiocracy for the entertaining answer
Vast piles of shit destroying jobs of ordinary people and their own jobs to make billionaires richer. Idiocracy and Elysium are both unintentional documentaries.
Reminds me of the movie Idiocracy. Why would anyone do this deliberately to themselves is beyond me.
I'm sorry but as a non American I can only think about Rehab Officer Tylenol Jones from the Idiocracy movie since that's the first time I heard about Tylenol without knowing it's a drug, and in the movie everyone had well known American brands as their names due to overreach of corporate marketing into society, but that part of the satire went over my head as a European kid back then, thinking Tylenol was just a person's name and not a drug.
I wonder if Americans know how much of their society and culture bled incompletely into other countries via movies. Like for example after communism fell the youth here got hooked on American rap and hip-hop so we were using slang from those songs like friends calling each other the N word without knowing the context behind it since that's how black rappers addressed each other and they were rock stars here.
Disclaimer: I'm not a researcher in this topic and I have no idea what I'm talking about, just putting my thoughts here
I think that depends on how you define stress? The brain is all electrical signals, so from this simplistic point of view there shouldn't be such thing as "stress", but from my understanding the connections, even though electrical, produce chemical by-products which have to be "flushed away" by the gray matter. This and just human experience suggests brain can get "tired".
However, I don't think the societal problems throughout history had much relevance to the individual stress brains my experience, but more caused by cognitive dissonance when you try to put two conscious beings together, as every brain is different so produces different outputs to same input. Additionally, we still are very much driven by our animal instincts, even though we like to pretend we've "ascended" and have free will.
Now the question is, where can we evolve from here? What evolutionary pressure is there to evolve? We've pretty much peaked as lifeforms, we can dominate any and every environment we want to the point of being detrimental to the Earth itself.
Also this highly scientific documentary I re-watched recently called "Idiocracy (2006)" suggests that higher brain function doesn't necessarily increase the chance of passing genes along, and I tend to agree.
As an avid hiker and weight-trainer, I couldn't agree more. Limiting exposure to these algorithmically curated (ultra-processed) stimuli is the best general advice.
It's just that, sadly, the economic drivers (atm) for social media, food, news, and (most) traditional media are at odds with creating products for healthy consumption.
In the interim, we can counter that exposure when requisite interaction is mandated with tech (ad-blocking, nutrition information, etc.).
I do have hope that many of these economic drivers are starting to wane and there's still a chance of avoiding "Idiocracy" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy ) as a documentary.
> I don't care if someone knows how many times I've watched Idiocracy.
I come from Germany, from East Germany. And some people there wanted to know if you had seen certain films and how often. And ‘Idiocracy’ would have been very high up on their list.
Not all films were banned right from the start (‘The Legend of Paul and Paula’ [1]), but right from the beginning the Stasi found it very interesting who had watched the film.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Paul_and_Paula
Sounds like Idiocracy to me. We really are speed-running into that movie world.
Makers of machinima used video games and the control of their characters to make long-running successful series, e.g. Red vs. Blue with Halo. But the writing was still done by humans. Using AI to control 3D characters seem feasible enough, but can AI do compelling plots, or great humor?
Then again, since Idiocracy is a documentary, there's probably enough audience for utterly dumb unfunny humor.
The movie Idiocracy comes to mind almost every day for me as of late.
Have you seen Idiocracy, specifically the very beginning of the film?
These excuses sound similar to those made by the “prosperous yuppie couple” (who end up never having children)—contrasted with “trashy” couple, who churn out progeny without a care in the world.
https://thescriptsavant.com/movies/Idiocracy.pdf
Most countries today are losing population (below replacement value).
The US is at 1.62, Taiwan is at 0.85.
There are a lot of economic factors required for having children that are simply not there anymore for quite a lot of people. Third-party malign interference has never been higher. Those dating apps all the women are using, they aren't matching people up to have babies.
They are matching people up who won't ever have babies.
What makes this worse unfortunately over time is intelligent people don't have children if they can't support them; so if you have growing inequality with no social mobility upwards, you have an evolutionary skew towards the dumb similar to the movie idiocracy.
A lot of cultures have some sort of starving relic.
Maybe a simple national dish made with very cheap ingredients, or an old story around a very important staple crop. Some deep, deep memory that persists for a long time.
These are the opposite of thanksgiving, or other harvest and abundance cultural relics.
I don't think the USA has that starving myth. This cold war episode is as close as they get, and it is from the perspective of "the other". Maybe the dust bowl?
Cinema is not shy exploring ideas adjacent to this concept (Wall-E, Idiocracy, Demolition Man, Interstellar, to name a few). It, somehow, self-acknowledges that absense of a starving myth by reversing what their abundance means. Almost as if it wanted to have it, and it's ashamed of being spoiled.
Yes, that's part of it but helping to ease the economic burden of child rearing would definitely help.
The documentary Idiocracy has some interesting insights into the issue -- it's worth the watch.
> As the educational impact of LLM use only begins to settle with the general population, in this study we demonstrate the pressing matter of a likely decrease in learning skills based on the results of our study.
Fast forward 500 years (about 20 generations), and the dumbing down of the population has advanced so much that films like 'Idiocracy" should no longer be described as science fiction but as reality shows. If anyone can still read history books at that point, the pre-LLM era will seem like an intellectual paradise by comparison.
They made a documentary about this actually. You can probably find it on Netflix or something. It's called Idiocracy.
It's a race to the (AI-slop) bottom. But most of the inhabitants of the world will barely notice.
I have to wonder if movies will improve or not with AI, because some really stupid franchises have seen stupid amounts of money, while most people barely watch the actually good creative stuff. We're already swamped with unwatchable schlock, but I'm not sure it will improve if we automate it. It's the same people spending the money to make, promote, and distribute movies, the AI doesn't have any money to make a movie or the impetus. But if most people cared about art, creativity, and good storytelling, there probably wouldn't be a race to the bottom in the entertainment industry.
Idiocracy was a documentary, and "ASS" https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kJZjU2k5abs is what the AI will calculate we want to see, and it will win awards.
Sometimes I feel that Idiocracy is a documentary :)
Recently watched Mickey 17 and it reminded me a bit of Idiocracy. Maybe someone is looking for related movies.
My favorite piece of Idiocracy trivia:
When the costume designer was thinking about the kinds of shoes the people in this 'idiotic' future would be wearing, she found a small startup that made some pretty ridiculously looking and cheap shoes that she was sure were safe to use for the movie because they were definitely not going to catch on.
Those shoes were Crocs.
> Idiocracy was released as scheduled but only in seven cities (Los Angeles, Atlanta, Toronto, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, and Mike Judge's hometown, Austin, Texas),
When they say “Los Angeles” I think they mean some random theater in the middle of nowhere north of the Los grapevine canyon.
I lived in Ventura when idiocracy came out and a friend happened to be driving San francisco to San Diego that weekend so we met and saw the movie in that theater. There were only a couple of other people there - but it was a mid-afternoon showing.
It really felt isolated. Maybe on the edge of Santa Clarita.
Skip the reading (it's too hard) - watch the documentary version instead, Idiocracy (2006)
It’s the plot to the movie Idiocracy as well.
You might not be aware. After we grew up that word became somewhere vaguely in the same classification of 'radioactive' as the N word people from the 1940s used to use all the time.
It kind of tints movies like Idiocracy (a movie I fear increasingly describes a possible future rather than a satirical one) that made a joke out of someone who was only moderately not-smart as just the last 4 letters rather than all 6.
> You may have missed that Idiocracy is a pro-eugenics film
I kinda see how you got there, but man.
This is the same guy behind Office Space and Bevis and Butthead. He's poking fun at out of touch intellectuals and consumption. Calling it pro-eugenics though...
You may have missed that Idiocracy is a pro-eugenics film, in which the populace got stupider by way of being fecund. It's not about this problem, really.
It's worse than that. In the movie Idiocracy, they were searching for the smartest man alive to put him in charge to fix things. That's not what governments are doing now.
Look to Idiocracy for a documentary of what happens if this keeps going unchecked?
I concur. Aside from user hostility, these purely algorithmic feeds with no search, mid-video snap-cut ads, and blink-attention-span content is retarding reasoning skills and already having a negative gestalt effect on society.
For, perhaps only once in multiple generations, all the "old folks" raging against "the kids" with their new media are correct.
More and more, the movie "Idiocracy" is becoming a documentary.
Fair enough point. However, any species (or subpopulation of a species) that reproduces below replacement level is going to die off. Long-term, that means cultures, mindsets, and so on that reproduce at or above replacement level will eventually dominate and cultures that reproduce below that level will eventually cease to exist.
The film Idiocracy is a good exhibition of this.
Let your children watch the movie Idiocracy - it’s more eloquent than you’ll ever be in answering that question.
Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes
— Idiocracy [movie]
I feel like this is one of those prescient movies like Pleasantville and Idiocracy we should force voters to watch again before voting.
> Did you even notice that you only spoke of the significance of having kids in terms of what it means for "you"
It was a direct response to your "point", which was even quoted.
> You speak as if they are extensions of your being, and not actual completely new individuals. In my book, such lack of theory of mind towards even those who are closest to you, is exactly "total psycho" behavior.
Wow. One of us is definitely psycho.
> Sorry, but it's not your kids' job to "change your life" or "make you a better person", that's entirely on you.
You're putting words in my mouth. As I said, this is in direct response to your "point" which was directed at the unenlightened "you". I never said it was your kids responsibility (or job). What a convenient leap of logic.
I don't even know how to address your paragraph of your word salad. I will say only that I have kids, they are lovely, they definitely changed me and I wouldn't trade them for the world. Luckily we weren't deterred by sanctimonious parenting slop.
Clevon is a reference from the movie Idiocracy.
> Lemme guess, nobody told you that you could've given your kid a real name instead of not betting their entire identity on a contingent societal norm of mutual acceptance that we now see falling apart in real time?
Whew... you've owned me now I guess? You might need a break my dude.
The plot from the "Idiocracy" movie gets more real everyday.
It's subtler compared to Idiocracy (most things are), but in the scale of movies, it's still pretty blunt.
When Idiocracy the comedy film becomes a documentary.
>I fully acknowledge that it will result in mistakes,
The people arguing the other side are not talking about reversible mistakes with minor fallout. They are claiming that taken as a whole the damage will be very difficult to undo. Countering this simply by accepting that there will be mistakes doesn't quite suffice. As pg tried to remind Musk on twitter (I'm paraphrasing): Countless startups come into being and die within the system. But this is the system we're talking about. There is only one.
I take it you want the others to believe this administration geniunely cares about providing the public efficient services without fraud and corruption by establishing highly-efficient meritocratic institutions. There's overwhelming evidence in the events of the past few weeks that this not the case. Just looking at the Eric Adams fiasco and, say, the cabinet picks of Hegseth, Gaetz, Bondi (straight of the movie Idiocracy) show this administration does not care about fighting corruption or hiring people that are most qualified for the job.
Idiocracy is a documentary.
The people. The people changed.
This forum (HN) attracts certain population that wants to do things, to understand, to share relatively well based opinions and have a discussion.
But look around, look at the new hires in the other departments. And by new I mean young, in their 20. A lot of them welcome this kind of things, they evaluate by popularity and likes. The marketing begin the AI bubble knows this, and so it pushes for it. Make it popular is more important than make it useful, because there is a tipping point were is popular enough that we capitulate.
Turns out that Idiocracy is not that far behind (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/)
Worth watching Idiocracy for more details: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
That’s hilarious. It could be straight out of the “Idiocracy” movie script.
That article misses that TikTok gets effective negative feedback: they know when you don't like a video. Contrast that to the interface that YouTube cribbed from [1]. When you show people a list of ten videos on the side you can't come to any conclusion of whether or not people liked the videos they didn't click on, in fact, I'm frequently frustrated because I also wanted to watch another video that was recommended and now it's lost. If Facebook had a "dislike" button that worked that would fix many of the things wrong with it. [2]
I read many papers on "negative sampling" which is used in western recommender algorithms to guess at what you didn't like because there's no dislike button: I always thought "I can't believe it works" and fact is, it doesn't or it doesn't work very well.
My RSS reader gets a thumbs up/thumbs down and gets AU-ROC of 0.79, TikTok gets 0.84 or so and has a lot more data and 1000x the budget.
I'd almost say "throw the western recommendation literature in the trash and treat it as a classification problem [3]" except that when you have less than <1000 data points for a user there is a cold start problem. You could throw AI and the computational power of a Dyson sphere at the problem and it won't do as much as a dislike button that speaks with authority.
[1] https://montevallotimetravel.wordpress.com/2012/05/03/idiocracy-supplemental-film-viewing/
[2] would be good for people who don't like hysterical posts about politics but it's an existential threat to the advertising economy, influencers, etc...
[3] calibrated, even
So in response it wrote a heroically tall mountain of bullshit, laced with falsehoods of the sort that even some neanderthal natcon would be unable to dream up, then served it as an abysmally long, overdubbed narration to the next Top Gun movie set in the same future as Idiocracy.
Remember when Idiocracy was just a movie?
You are ignoring the externalities. We end up with an ignorant society that ultimately harms all of us. I hate to use a movie trope here, but we're barely a step above Idiocracy when it comes to the ability of the average American to function and make decisions. This ultimately becomes self destructive.
Love that "UPGRAYED-D" sound. Inspired by the movie "Idiocracy"?
Scare tactics designed to confirm what I already fear. The fact that the comments are full of the same Idiocracy "jokes" that people have been making since that movie started airing constantly on Comedy Central means the belief that the younger generation is stupider does not rely on the existence of ChatGPT to be held.
However, the inability to consider possible societal impacts of technology before rolling it out into the world free of regulation was the story of the 20th Century and I guess it's going to be the story of the 21st. Underneath the fear-mongering about AI is an honest belief that maybe we're not considering where this is all going. I'm not afraid of a super smart Gen AI that controls humanity, I'm afraid that people are going to outsource all decision-making to extremely stupid LLMs because we're seemingly evolutionarily wired to cut corners until we accidentally cut our fingers off.
"America's funniest home videos" got dumbed down to "AFV" and the content was mostly "ow, my balls!". They even added a warning to the viewers to submit "wows, not ows".
Although to be fair,some of that happened before Idiocracy came out.
With the public money used for sports stadiums, that element of the movie to have government sports teams is slowly coming true also.
Every year it becomes clearer that Idiocracy was indeed a documentary.
Idiocracy was not supposed to be a documentary.
Welcome to Costco, I love you
"Utilize" always makes me uncontrollably giggle due to its use in the movie Idiocracy.
I see this as a dog-whistle in its most benign form. Which is why hiding behind the 'just asking questions' defense feels like expansion of the 'bad faith'.
Additionally, I don't think it's 'bad faith' to call what they're proposing like the basis for the movie Idiocracy.
The problem is that like, every version of this ends up being racist somewhere down the line. But because it's a dog-whistle my options are to engage with it, and have them hide, or to call it out for what it is, and attempt to have them explain their take and clarify their bad position to the point of not hiding behind the 'just asking questions' defense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence <- Someone called out this link in response to my comment. All of the old versions of this use IQ, which was primarily developed to distinguish between the intelligence of "white people" and "other people" these days we couch it in 'class' basing the assumption that 'poor' = 'stupid', and 'rich' = 'smart'. But this also tends to be a proxy for race in a lot of meaningful ways (so-called 'model minorities' being the exception that makes the rule).
Now, I can call all of that out, and admittedly I have here. But they're not going to stake out their position if I do. They're going to run and hide because I've said the scary things that let them know they're in the wrong and that they should pretend like they weren't dog-whistling.
Admittedly over topics that aren't dog-whistles I appreciate the appeal to: https://xkcd.com/386/ But this reads like a dog-whistle to me.
Ah yes, the "Idiocracy was/is a documentary" take.
That's a strong claim. Do you have sources to back up that claim?
Show them the movie _Idiocracy_ at a young age?
Maybe set up a society where intellectual effort and achievement is rewarded and teachers get paid well enough to make being knowledgeable seem a laudable thing?
I’m thinking it will only be a matter of time before (if it’s not already the case) that things like self-checkout systems that do HQ faces level video for facial recognition and identification, akin to any number of dystopian novels/movies where some protagonist cannot move around without face covering because there are scanners, or even something like Idiocracy where the public is so conditioned that they immediately report someone who does not obey the government regime’s requirement to have some barcode.
> and the script was bad because it made the characters do idiotic, incompetent things that should only be seen in a B-grade horror movie
I took it as a meta-commentary on how humanity degrades with time. ("Idiocracy"-style.) Remember these clowns were supposed to be the cream of Earth's human crop.
> There was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are society "heros".
Is this true today? It's repeated pretty often, but I have my doubts. It almost seems like it's one of those things that gets repeated through the years ("back in the day, it was cool to be smart, but now we have Idiocracy IRL") over and over.
I might be wrong, but I'm guessing I'm on the younger side here (given your reference to the 70s), having graduated college a few years ago. From looking at my generation and interacting with our successors I get the impression that culture has (for a long time now) kinda shifted towards it being fine and good (if not cool per se) to be smart / a nerd / whatever. If anything it seems like, IDK, 70s and 80s? pop culture had the whole "the jocks vs. the nerds" thing, there were stereotypes of smart people having no friends, it was a social death sentence to have a geeky hobby, etc. That doesn't seem like it's the case anymore. Part of this is probably down to schools not really having centralized, stereotypical "popular kids" anymore, but if I had to pick out popular people from my high school, they were plenty smart. And it was never seen as uncool or weird (outside of jokes) to play video games, play DnD, do theater or robotics, or whatever.
The way people talk about this stuff you'd think the whole 80s movie stereotype of "he's reading a book, what a nerd!" and giving someone a swirly still exists in real life. I don't think I ever saw anything close to that, nor do I ever get that impression from people younger than me. Obviously, this is all super regional and dependent on socioeconomic groups and all that stuff, but I'm just sharing my perspective.
There is, of course, a distinction between being smart/nerdy/geeky/whatever and having crappy social skills. They overlap, obviously (and probably correlate), but they are distinct. The latter was never cool or admirable, and I wonder if people miss that and conflate the two.
The Mueller Report was such a joke that Mueller himself, when testifying about it, publicly to congress, said he had never heard of "Fusion GPS", which was the primary company involved in supposedly uncovering the key evidence. You couldn't put that into a comedy film, because people would say it's too ridiculous even for a comedy film. Straight out of Idiocracy.
Idiocracy was a documentary
>Idiocracy come to life
I'm not the only one think of this movie recently
sounds like the scene in movie Idiocracy where roomba is stuck in corner and keeps repeating 'floor is now clean'.
It was a reference to Idiocracy (movie). If you haven't seen it, it may surprise you.
Would the film Idiocracy have been as funny if instead of making fun of Costco, Starbucks, and Carls Jr., they referred to them as Costinc, Sunbucks, and Carlos Sr.?
Parody doesn't necessarily require that you make significant alterations to a symbol or name. Only imbeciles would think that the fictional "Fuck you - I'm eating" slogan actually represents the Carls Jr. company in real life.
Holy Jobs, these Ads as if straight from the Black Mirror episode or that The Circle movie, unreal and sad, to the level of Idiocracy (2006) movie cringe.
If you look at the complete collapse of fertility rates in the developed world, that is probably the strongest evolutionary pressure humans have faced for millennia.
It is a bit weird to me that the scientific press doesn't talk more about how evolutionary pressure applies here. I think that people are wary to talk about this because it can end up sounding like social Darwinism, or that they believe "Idiocracy" was a scientific documentary.
But it's inescapable, for example, that education rates are now strongly negatively correlated with fertility. While "level of education" is obviously not inherited genetically, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to hypothesize that genetic factors play a role in someone's educational attainment. And, currently, the more education you get, the less likely you are to reproduce (statistically, of course).
Sex evolved to feel really good because for most of human history having sex would usually, eventually lead to babies. Reliable birth control has fundamentally broken that link. Similarly, when a major factor preventing you from reproducing was starving to death, being smarter or cleverer was an evolutionary advantage. I'd argue that advantage no longer exists.
Another simple anecdote: I recently went to my uncle's funeral, and his family was very religious (Catholic). My father, on the other hand, rejected religion and raised us all atheists. My father has 6 descendants, my uncle 24. Again, "religiosity" is not a genetically inherited trait, but I think it would be foolish to believe genetic predisposition plays 0 role.
I say all this just to highlight that, eventually, the "collapse in birthrates" will take care of itself - people with a strong desire and ability to procreate will outcompete, at least in terms of offspring survival, their peers. This will have a huge, profound effect on world society that most academics are too scared to talk about.
In some ways, ancient Egyptian culture was more progressive than modern puritan derived pop cultures.
Victorian era London loved to steal mummified cats and corpses to use in early medicinal rituals. Now instinctively one would assume they were primitive savages too, but the antibacterial properties of the pitch used to preserve mummies was recently discovered to be an effective disinfectant.
In general, culture was propagated through literacy, religion, trade, slavery, and wars. Even the ancient Greeks wrote about wandering Troglodytae.
Note people have on average dropped an estimated 23 IQ scale corrected points since the Victorian era. One may find some comfort in knowing the crass film Idiocracy was a documentary about the present. =3
Fair that perhaps they (the director specifically) thought that (they look like something nobody would want to wear) about Crocs. Heck, I thought that back then, many did. So perhaps that's why Snopes is saying it's true.
But Crocs had actually become somewhat popular already before Idiocracy.
The more realistic full picture explanation being that they chose something that they or someone on their staff, like many "look at those idiots" types (myself at the time included), already knew and considered a stupid trend is much more likely. It doesn't at all negate that they in fact thought nobody with taste would wear those shoes, but I don't think that choice was entirely made in isolation not aware of the trend.
The effect of watching the movie and seeing Crocs worn was yet another of those pieces of evidence that the stupid people of today connect to that fictional future world, like all the other stuff on the movie dialed all the way to the top (energy drinks, corporate sponsorships, etc.)
The mere fact that someone knew of Crocs, thought of them, and chose them because of their ugliness, means they were popular/successful enough to pop up on someone's radar, despite them ostensibly not being something that would be worn by anyone. Perhaps they didn't know how much more popular Crocs would become but they for sure must have picked them as an artifact of things already going in a weird direction (Why can you get this? Who would want this? Someone must, these will be the stupid people of tomorrow.)
But also, actually, so what?
Look at some of the fashion of past decades older movies. Some of it is cool but a lot of it is super ridiculous.
And if you look at Crocs, are they really objectively stupid? Treating them as a high fashion item probably is. But they are versatile and robust, good for many types of use cases were people used to wear other types of cheap plastic sandals. People wearing leather shoes surely thought sneaker were stupid until they became so mainstream that they were evaluated more objectively.
Citing idiocracy and Crocs seems like a very weak argument to your case and even Idiocracy's point (fashion choices don't indicate the world is getting stupid). Mind you I'm not disagreeing that things have gotten worse in many ways and social media is definitely not helping. OTOH, Facebook actually was somewhat reasonable for a long time, and useful to connect with people. Only once the Twitterification of it started did it get so bad. But somehow Twitter never gets the bad reputation.
Nope, I am quite rational here and if I wouldn't witness change in society, I wouldn't believe it. I am seriously worried for humanity, as what I am seeing today is: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808 (and this was shot in pre-facebook era)
Fun fact, they didn't have large budget for shooting so they were searching for footwear that would look futuristic. They found some unknown company producing cheap "shoes" so horrible that the director wasn't worried for it to succeed as "no one would wear that". The company was Crocks.
https://media.snopes.com/2023/09/idiocracy.png
Anyway, this whole thread is actually proving my point. It wouldn't happen before Facebook.
Sideways
Back To The Future
Cinema Paradiso
Spaceballs
Up In Smoke (Cheech & Chong)
The Incredibles
Indiana Jones 1-3
Indiana Jones: Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (Rifftrax only)
Falling Down
Office Space
Man Bites Dog
Nothing To Lose
Idiocracy
Space Mutiny (MST3k)
Goodfellas
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Groundhog Day
Barbie
Full Metal Jacket
Mallrats
Flight Of The Navigator
The Founder
One Hour Photo
---
I'm pretty certain I've rewatched Sideways more than any other film.
Movies I think I truly great I usually only watch once, sometimes twice. If a movie ends and I just sit there thinking to myself… “wow”… I will probably never watch it again.
Movies I watch over and over again are movies that I relate to in some way or find comforting. These are ones I’ve watched at least 5 times, and some I’d bet more than 30 times.
- Back to the Future
- Home Alone
- What About Bob?
- It Could Happen to You
- Matilda
- As Good as It Gets
- Office Space
- Cruel Intentions
- Boiler Room
- Finding Forrester
- Training Day
- Super Troopers
- 8 Mile
- The Transporter
- Elf
- Bad Santa
- Mean Girls
- Saved!
- Garden State
- V for Vendetta
- Thank You for Smoking
- Stick It
- Little Miss Sunshine
- Idiocracy
- Hot Rod
- Run Fatboy Run
- The Other Guys
- Wreck-It Ralph
To name a few.
> I cannot imagine a more hilariously negative way to reduce a title than to say someone is the Taco Bell professor
Reminds me of the scene from the movie Idiocracy where the main character's lawyer said he went to Costco Law School[1] and that he was lucky since his dad pulled some strings to get him in.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdNmOOq6T8Y
> and yet it is twisted and wrong
Have you seen the movie Idiocracy? IMO it's a way more likely dystopia than 1984 or Brave New World, and it's explained here[1]. I would argue that that future is twisted and wrong, and is partly enabled by (mis)use of medicine.
Now I do think that nature's approach, while extremely robust, does result in a lot of collateral damage--e.g. the fit don't always survive (most of us know people who died young due to no genetic conditions and due to no fault of their own), and the unfit don't have to die, they just need to not reproduce.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTMybQuRZ6E
This reminds me if scenes from the movie Idiocracy. They were mostly right about our future society (the movie is from 2005).
One thing they got wrong though. It did not take humanity 500 years to reach this depicted state.
Idiocracy is such an on-point movie that it made my educated, high-earning, early 30s wife consider having more than one kid. Watching it in the 2020s with knowledge of today's fertility rates is quite something.
Second best documentary ever made, after Idiocracy.
It probably truly was ligntning in a bottle. I can't comment on his other movies, but very very few works become so sensationalized that a collective generation all remember viewing the same thing in school. Especially in video format. Supersize me stands alongside Bill Nye, Magic Schoolbus, and maybe Idiocracy as "something everyone my age/country has seen", no matter where we grew up.
I say sensationalized simply because I don't think the quality of the documentary really influenced that. Maybe his other movies are much better from a critical lens (especially in wake of criticism over his experiment). It was truly the right place at the right time
Pov: in the movie Idiocracy, the show "Ow My Balls" was made possible by the protective micro plastics that just naturally built up in human testicles over 500 years.
In 2024, human balls are 0.1% micro plastic. By year 2500, human balls are 33% plastic. This makes them relatively indestructible.
In the movie Idiocracy, a lot of people end their sentences with a sponsor statement - "brought to you by Carl's Jr"
I predict a near future where AI agents will do the same.
> Idiocracy
I definitely enjoyed this movie, and it's understandable that people of any era, starting with ancient Greece, enjoy lamenting at how stupid people are becoming. However, as long as videos explaining quantum physics and 4-hour long interviews with historians and engineers are still one of the most popular kinds of content on Youtube, I would suggest that it's not a documentary, at least not yet.
If you extend the window a little bit, along Yes Minister, Idiocracy and Demolition Man (the last two being a documentary of our time filmed 20y ago).
Isn't this the exact premise of the movie Idiocracy?
> The future will still have Mormons and Muslims and evangelical Christians.
Do you want Idiocracy[0]? Because that's how you get Idiocracy
[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
These are just my favorites, and in the order of which the popped into my mind.
- Office Space, 1999 (especially for people who work at offices) - The Matrix, 1999 - Fight Club, 1999 :)
Umm, what else? - Spirited Away, 2001 (and many others from Miyazaki) - Requiem for a Dream, 2000 (Very Heavy addiction-related film! I actually got watery eyes just by typing this, I've seen it too many times.) - Joker, 2019 - Full Metal Jacket, 1987 (and many others from Kubrick, such as Dr. Strangelove and The Shining) - Django Unchained, 2012 (and many others from Tarantino, at least Pulp Fiction) - Alien, 1979 - The Silence of the Lambs, 1991 - Saw, 2004
I made a bit longer list, so that I can share the link to my friends.
Actually there are many quirky ones which came to my mind, such as Borat, the South Park movie, Team America, Airplane! (alternatively titled Flying High!), Idiocracy and Hangover, but I wouldn't say these are in the must-see category. Actually I wouldn't even recommend these to most people, if I didn't know what kind of humor they like.
Therefore, Idiocracy was a science fiction film about how to talk to not be confused with an AI =)
> That doesn't mean we're doomed to live out the idiocracy future, but it explains this blog post.
We're already living in the idiocracy future. Actually, the film needs a sequel something fierce, smartphones and now AI is fast making our reality post-idiocracy.
Let's not forget Idiocracy which also has been called a documentary in recent years.
> but they continued to force junk on me that I don't need
With all the built in advertising Windows reminds me of Frito's TV in Idiocracy. What an augural movie, btw.
> Linux is still crap software
Ubuntu is rock solid and easier to use than Windows. Linux Mint, Fedora and Pop!_OS too.
There was a documentary that explored this: Idiocracy.
Huh. If only you knew the difference in the western slope of the Colorado Rockies, and Pasadena right next to LA :-) It's insane! Because of the involved distances in Colorado, and the variety of quality. In case of metropolitan LA it's just the scale, like in the movie Idiocracy :-)
I haven't been to that Globus in a while, have just been there shortly after it openend in the summer, and 2 times after that. It really reminded me of my childhood, because then there was another Globus elsewhere, where I went, and it was always fun because there was stuff to sample. Like there was in this new one. Instant flashback! While the sortiment isn't that overwhelming, it tops Kauflands and probably most Rewe easily, Edeka not so sure. What they do have though, is freshly pressed pomegrenade juice. Where else do you get that? Oh, not to forget, also a large (real) bakery IN STORE where you can look into, which is always busy, and gives the outside air a really nice smell at 4AM in the morning. Which is very rare nowadays.
Whatever. Enjoy the ride ;-)
Almost like that scene from the movie Idiocracy
Counterpoint:
1) There are population groups which are exponentially growing
2) There are ones which are declining
This is not taken into account in models. Economic growth shifts bucket 1 into bucket 2, but genetically-speaking, we favor people who want a lot of kids. The exponential growth groups will eventually overtake the exponential-decline or the plateau groups.
For a silly exploration of this phenomenon, see the movie Idiocracy.
Trigger warning: This movie is nearing 20 years old, and has a lot of things which might trigger the types of people who expect trigger warnings.
Idiocracy, the best accidental documentary of our generation, strikes again
Most new technical forums on the Internet, while they are still small and relatively unknown -- are great places for discussions with highly intellectual people of "like mind".
Then they become more popular.
Once they become more popular -- they start to attract all kinds of people of "less like mind" shall we politely say, all kinds of people who would rather unfairly criticize and detract from discussions with one or two line carefully worded, yet malicious in intent, comments.
Then they start to attract AI bots -- both non-malevolent research bots, and agenda-driven Deep State AI bots -- foreign and domestic.
The net effect is, now there's a cacophony of stupidity created by AI chatbots and idiots alike.
Observation: There really isn't too much of a difference between a dumber chatbot and a smarter idiot -- sort of like how rangers at Yellowstone National Park discovered "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists": https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/security_is_a_t.html
Anyway, this cacophony of one and two-line stupidity dumbs down the value of any discussion, and ultimately dumbs down the value of the online discussion forum...
You know, like in Billy Madison: "Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."
Well, every time I see a one or two line snarky or indirectly sarcastic comment with malicious intent and/or intent to derail a discussion -- I just want to reply to them with "Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard..." -- but out of politeness, I never do...
Point is, there are good forums out there -- but you have to find them! (You know, "Seek and ye shall find", "Leave no stone unturned in your quest for, well, whatever you're questing for!", etc., etc.)
Once you've found a good one -- keep it secret as long as possible -- and then finally when it is broadly discovered by the public -- then that's the time to move on to a new less popular undiscovered one!
Stay a step ahead of the crowd!
Sort of like the way that the Rich and Affulent -- will stay in a country until it becomes so popular that it attracts hordes of people -- then they will leave for a relatively unknown, less popular new country. (Side observation: America doesn't have an illegal immigration problem -- it has a too much popularity problem! :-) <g>).
Well, same concept -- but with online discussion forums!
Anyway, wishing you luck in your online forum search!
Oh, and also, if you find a good one -- don't let me know about it! :-) <g> :-)
Related:
130+ Types of Internet Troll and Online Provocateurs:
(Note: This list was created in 2014 before AI bots were widespread)
https://ipredator.co/troll/
Human/Bear Security Trade-Off
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/security_is_a_t.html
Billy Madison:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112508/
Idiocracy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
Eternal September:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
This movie doesn't work tonally. It tries to be both serious and satirical. And it fails to make both of those world work together.
In the Idiocracy what made it work is that the satire applied to the whole world except of the main character that we as audience identified with. You explore the boundaries of the new absurd reality with them.
There isnt anything like that in Dont Look Up, its a strange mix of our current day reality with crazy illogical morons.
I miss the cheesy but wholesome comedies and parodies of the 1990s and 2000s: Anger Management, Rush Hour, The Cable Guy, American Pie, Scary Movie, Bruce Almighty, Eurotrip, Tropic Thunder, Hot Shots, Borat, Idiocracy, How High, White Chicks, etc.
We can't have any like those in this age because someone on Twitter will claim to be offended. Good thing to back-up those old gems as well before they get cancelled/edited to comply with modern sensibilities.
> Choose your parents wisely.
Or accept that your parents are your parents and they decided to have you.
From the point of view of the parents, suddenly things change: I fully knew I'd have the money to all least raise my kid well. Do all parents even think about that?
Mike Judge's Idiocracy movie is always a good watch.
Idiocracy wasn't a documentary? Have you worked with people?
This sounds like someone sitting in their study, by the fire, smoking a pipe, adjusting their monocle and saying "hmm, Indubitably".
Think you are taking extreme opposite view, like humans have some holy essence that can't be understood or duplicated. Which is also not correct. Of course, technology that is not-understood can appear as magic. But nobody said anything of the sort.
The discussion was around AGI, will AI be as 'intelligent(loaded term)' as human. And I'm saying, a lot of people aren't doing anything that takes much 'intelligence' and current AI is already good enough to replace a large chunk of humans. Right now it is fragmented, there is AI that can beat GO, there is AI that can outfly an F-16 and beat human pilots, there is AI GPT/LLMs. It wont take much to start tying together technologies and have something that 'appears' human. And if it is indistinguishable, then how can we prove it isn't conscious, or opposite, prove that we are.
Yes, it has all been documented in a movie named idiocracy.
I think you mean - Is Idiocracy actually a documentary?
> We live in polarized times, which means that for every ‘Idiocracy is a documentary!’ take that goes around, there’s also a critique that argues that Idiocracy is a celebration of eugenics. Have you thought about that interpretation of it? Well, yeah. I mean I’ve actually read that a couple of times. But to me, I thought the opening made it very clear that whatever side you take, nature and nurture are both covered in that. That guy is clearly not a good father. I mean, there’s a kid with a motorcycle in the front yard, and no one’s paying attention to this. He’s just irresponsibly knocking up different woman, and proud of it. It’s not like he’s a good, upstanding role model for the kid. So I think it’s pretty clear here that, whichever one it is, [nature or nurture], there’s some combination of both. I obviously don’t believe in eugenics. I think you could look at it both ways—you have this couple that’s trying to be so responsible that they end up never having kids. Then there’s another couple who just irresponsibly keeps having them and not raising them right. So, you know, if the other couple adopted the other kids. I’m sure they would probably be better off.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3064328/mike-judge-on-the-10th-anniversary-of-idiocracy-and-predicting-the-near-future
I have very little of substance to add beyond 'you should really think about it, and do it for your own reasons alone.'
Kids aren't something you owe the world, and Idiocracy is just a movie.
You need to watch Idiocracy
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
When some people stop procreating and educating the next generation, the world population does not simply go down. Instead it gets replaced by those who do continue multiplying.
I had hopes that we would be modifying them genetically to help everone have productive places in our society. Instead, we seem determined to live out the movie Idiocracy while simultaneously living out Bridge on the River Kwai.
Edit: Movies, unsorted, from the top of my mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_of_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_East_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter%27s_Bone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_(2011_film) , seen before Covid, deemed to be realistic, and therefore better than stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warning_Sign_(film) somewhere in between. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_IV_(1974_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_(film) The remakes of the Planet of the Apes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Days_Later , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Weeks_Later a little less so, though it had some great scenes of flying into London City Airport and the modern parts around that. Bladerunner in the original versions, the remake not so much. 2001: A Space Odyssey, the intro and first parts, spaceflight to the moon and such, the rest not. Too boring. I liked the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two better, actually. Avatar. Part one only. All of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(franchise) with the exception of the crossover stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film) for the almost cyberpunkish fuckedupness of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_Untold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beach_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2005_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THX_1138 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropia_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollerball_(1975_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southland_Tales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Survivalist_(2015_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_(2000_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(2007_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_(1987_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Zero_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangar_18_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_(2001_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timecop Ron Silverman Badass! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Blonde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_the_Night_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(1997_American_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowing_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Zone_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_(1998_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adjustment_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeforce_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Protocol_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_(2009_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Countdown_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypher_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_Conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anderson_Tapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parallax_View https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Seduction
TV-Series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(1975_TV_series) and the remake linked from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Train_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_(2006_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strain_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayward_Pines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_(American_TV_series) and its prequel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_(TV_series)
WESTWORLD!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_(TV_series) Praimfaya! Yeehaa! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpart_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon_(TV_series) All of Black Mirror! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Skies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devs_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_by_Wolves_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_83 and sequels. ÄXZÄLLÄNNT! JAWOLLJA! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humans_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Night_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_(2019_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gods_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Dome_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(2009_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica
This all began about 2006 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_series) after having abstained from possessing a TV, or watching that by other means (with some exceptions for news and documentaries) since 1996, and mostly no cinema either.
That stuff rehooked me in a binge-watching session. Shit happens :-)
Do yoo vanna häff fries wiff thät?
/nerdsnipe off
The future is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmUVo0xVAqE
The film Idiocracy reviewed:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
Maybe, but over my 30 years every piece of anecdotal evidence I’ve seen *and* the movie Idiocracy says the exact opposite.
When I talk to people about my love for the movie Office Space (and Mike Judge), they always tell me about Idiocracy. I still haven't seen it, but I feel like this kind of thing would have a place in that movie (or perhaps even Beavis and Butthead).
The reproduction here sounds like the movie Idiocracy. The one who is intelligent enough to teach kids properly doesn't have any biological kids themselves, but the poorly teaching ex and addict sister have 4 kids between themselves.
> humanity has been functionally removed from natural selection for hundreds of years.
Evolution of humans is still happening. It's determined by how many of your children survive long enough to reproduce. If you don't have children, for whatever reason, your DNA is edited out of the future.
The factors that drive this have certainly changed over the centuries, but they're always going to be in play (until people are able to customize DNA).
See the movie "Idiocracy" for one take on this.
Degeneracy is positioned as "tolerance" while traditional morality is repositioned as "hate".
"Reality TV" shows like "Ridiculousness" (hour upon hour of groin-shots) resemble what the movie "Idiocracy" portrayed in 2006 ("Ow! My Balls!").
When "hits" like "Jackass" are given platform and marketed toward youth who partially identify with Steve-O and his band of drop-outs, even though they aren't shown as heroes the emphasis is on the humor of their hijinks not the disastrous consequences of having given themselves wholly to wanton self-destruction.
"The Bachelor/Bachelorette", "Married at First Sight", "Real Housewives of [place]", etc - play on the commoditization of intimate relationships, reducing life partners down to nothing except the degree to which they approximate the standard as presented within the media - a status symbol: as either a Sex Object or a Success Object, and only to the degree that it fits with one's need for narcissistic validation.
I didn't see "Cocaine Bear" but I have heard of "Straw Man" - maybe it's the same thing.
This reminds me of the funniest scene in the movie Idiocracy, where he loses track of which cable goes in the mouth vs ear vs butt. A laugh a day keeps the doctor away, enjoy :-)
https://youtu.be/zop3VG_K9HU?si=k8LDptGhvQDxtsTB
Blindboy Boatclub has on one of his podcasts an entertaining take on kayfabe and US politics. For example, "Trump" is former US president Donald Trump's kayfabe name, and we play along by using that nickname (while he's not the first president to colloquially go by their last name, he seems to be playing a role in a movie (Idiocracy, for example) more than the other presidents that come to mind). It was a fun non-American perspective.
> That never made sense to me because you still have to have some smart, curious, creative people somewhere to keep things moving. Our society is quite dependent on the people who silently keep things running in the background.
Regarding Idiocracy, once of the background conceits of the film is those kinds of people set up automation to keep things going before they died out (for the reasons clearly explained at the start of the movie). If you pay attention everything in that world is automated: a diagnostic machine with a playskool interface (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmUVo0xVAqE) is what's actually doing the doctor's job, a major company is run by a computer the CEO doesn't understand (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBFREFtFEgs), etc.
>> it's that they'll cause a lot of economic devastation to people who make a living through labor requiring skill and knowledge, especially future generations of skilled labor.
Occasionally I would see clips from or read reactions to Idiocracy, and be left scratching my head, because somehow, somewhere, there have to be the people who are thinking. The whole conceit of the film is that there are no smart, curious people because it's being bred out of the population. That never made sense to me because you still have to have some smart, curious, creative people somewhere to keep things moving. Our society is quite dependent on the people who silently keep things running in the background.
I can however envision a world where early curiosity is discouraged, and supplanted by a technology that can fill the holes of the entry-level smart people. When everyone is discouraged from starting, and the existing participants age out, then maybe you can get a world where there are no new smart, curious people.
Have you ever seen Idiocracy? I first watched this movie only because of the 10 minute intro (How did we get to this point?), which I thought was pretty brilliant. The rest of the movie I felt was pretty gross, and one of the chief problems in the fictional future world was the inability of humankind to dispose of their garbage properly. What about WALL-E? Not exactly the same, but it's still there. As I get older and I observe the world around me, (and also accumulate junk myself), it seems I was wrong. We do have a junk problem, big time, already.
My armchair version of the main driver of this phenomenon is very simple: we just acquire too much junk. We produce too much junk, we buy too much junk, we throw away too much junk. Or we throw away not enough junk?! It's in the best interests of most companies and their marketing departments for us to want to do this.
One other human psychological effect I've observed: Trying to get people to recycle for the last 50 years or so has left us with a breed of "Garbage-averse" (my term) individuals. These people do completely irrational things like set half-empty bottles of water beside the trash can, because there's no recycling bin nearby. Now it's somebody else's problem. I understand this, because I was brought up this way as well. For now, I mostly overcome the aversion. Hoarding by older people is the same. "I'll just keep this until it becomes someone else's problem." It will always happen eventually.
Yes, technically it will improve ‘equity’ by dumbing down everyone. I believe this is the script of the movie Idiocracy playing out in real time. We all laughed and now we will cry because politicians decided that they’ll be inspired by the movie.
You misspelled "person", with overall phrasing suggesting "FUD" (i.e., propaganda / rhetorical techniques).
Science, in terms of the scientific method, is about the only thing we can trust. In fact, for those who really want to know something about the external, the scientific method is the way to do so. Now, even this phrase has been propagandized, in recent years. But, the workflow is something even children work out and use implicitly. E.g., hypothesis: "I believe my parents won't notice if one extra cookie has been eaten"; test: on different days, sometimes I eat an extra cookie, sometimes I don't (imagining the "advanced" "juvenile delinquent" / "budding 'scientist'"); result: what days did my parents notice, yell at me, etc.
In the world more generally, one of the ways we correct for the error introduced by crappy human beings / information (unintentional and not), is repeatability. This is incessantly drummed into people who choose science as a career-path, at any credible institution. And, it's a key factor, especially in the face of continuing efforts by propagandists of all stripes to turn the world into "Idiocracy" - a reference I make not for rhetorical purposes vis-a-vis its title, but rather because the actual content of the film truly matches what current trends, taken decades out, realistically likely turn the world into.
Nobody thought of doing an "Idiocracy" style movie about AI. It might be the perfect time!
Right, I could say some nonsense about how your politically polarised mindset blinds you to obvious facts. It'll be very persuasive I'm sure. Instead I'll believe a bunch of dentists who have no expertise in neuroscience to put aside their egos and come to a consensus. Just a couple more decades no worries. It's like some Idiocracy thing where some group convinces a population to put a neurotoxin into the water supply. Art imitates life I guess, the movie did come out later than this.
Almost the premise of the movie Idiocracy.
If idiocracy (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/) ever happens (or has already happened ;-), it is primarily because of the "smart" set doing exactly this. I was shocked at how few of the students in my evolutionary biology graduate program were planning to have kids. Having two kids or less is the definition of unfit parents (unless you are propagating clonally).
"the overwhelming amount of people would choose to work on something, even if they didn't have to. they would choose the arts, or work on inventing some new thing they want, etc."
I used to believe that when I was young, and that's pretty much the argument I made to my dad, who responded that most people would rather stay home, drink beer, have sex, and watch tv.
As I've grown older, I've come over to my dad's side, as I learned that most people don't have a creative bone in their body, have no desire to be productive in any way, and would rather spend their time entertaining themselves and consuming above almost anything else.
At least that's the case in much of the US, which is heading relentlessly towards the world predicted by the movie Idiocracy. Maybe in some other countries it's better.
From the documentary Idiocracy: Idiocracy director Mike Judge revealed that they went with Crocs both because they were cheap and that "no one would ever wear them." To the surprise of Judge and Idiocracy's wardrobe department, by the time the film came out after a delay, Crocs were all over the place.”
In fact you could save more money by wrapping your feet in used burlap sacks. Just need to be creative.
A conversation about fertility isn't complete without a link to The Idiocracy (2006) opening scene: https://youtu.be/sP2tUW0HDHA (length 4:39)
It's surprisingly accurate, even if it's very exaggerated, because that's the premise of the movie.
tl;dw "Smart/Rich" people put off having kids to the Perfect Time in their life and never end up having kids or maybe just the one. "Stupid/Poor" people just keep having kids all the time.
My brain parsed that first as "less nutritious grasshoppers." Ew!
Speaking of the accelerating impacts of the carbon climate crisis -- esp on ecosystems and the food supply -- I've been building an educational comedy adventure game [SB: see below] (set about 80 years in the future) which makes several assumptions about the food supply as a core premise. Assumptions not unlike those in the films Mad Max or Idiocracy.
Namely that several new types of artificially grown/manufactured food are created and promoted. Among them, a fictional slimy, fruity white "slurm" drink and a mystery meat-like goo named "glerm." Both or which smell and taste awful, of course, yet are loaded with healthy nutrients and vitamins. Most importantly, easy to mass produce and distribute, esp in a world with poisoned soils and degraded logistical infrastructure.
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[SB] - https://synystrongames.itch.io/slartboz
My understanding is that there's been a big rise in mental illness, anxiety and stress in general, over the last 10 yeats or so. And its true across professions, ages, race, gender or sexuality.
A lot of factors pushing for it:
1. the general madness and chaos of the Trump presidency ("When I wake up in the morning will I learn Trump has launched nukes at North Korea? Or vice versa?" etc etc, ad nauseum for 4 years)
2. COVID lockdowns and economic swings
3. apparent explosive rise in gun mass shootings -- "Will I or my loved ones be next?"
4. social media's toxic effect on peace of mind, in general
5. active efforts by various actors to spread lies, sow tensions and trigger violence (eg. stochastic terrorism)
6. carbon climate crisis... a biggie
Therefore I've been building a sci-fi post-apoc, educational game lately [SB: see below] which happens to take as its premises that:
7. humanity (or at least the US) fails to save democracy
8. humanity fails to act boldly enough or fast enough to save us from the worst of climate change's most dystopic effects
9. and therefore, due to all of above, there's a yet further MASSIVE rise in mental health disorders (all the way up to full blown de facto "insanity") -- eg. like many of the survivors you see in the Mad Max films
From a purely entertainment standpoint I loved watching films like Idiocracy and Mad Max Fury Road. As a person in the real world and a patriotic citizen I don't want to see us descend to that level of insanity, struggle and suffering. Our existing mental health systems are already inadequate today. If we start losing more doctors, nurses & therapists to anxiety/depression or over-work fatigue (speaking in broad terms), and also scientists, engineers, teachers, etc, then it will get MUCH worse.
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[SB] - https://synystrongames.itch.io/slartboz
Coming soon: The engineers who design the airplanes you're flying in, or the bridges you're driving across, or the airbags in the car you're driving... all graduating from universities who do not evaluate students on their ability to perform a task correctly and proficiently, working for companies who give them glowing performance reviews because it makes them feel good regardless of their competence. Future doctors, lawyers, historians, politicians, all raised with no objective standards of quality and performance.
Idiocracy was a documentary.
> But it appears that human intelligence is on a reverse trend
A dangerous myth. Idiocracy was an entertainment film with a side order of eugenics, not a documentary.
We call that Capitalism. If you don't have a plan to stop it, assume it's going to happen. I'd like to refer you back to the documentary idiocracy. There is line in that film that seems to resonate with many humans especially Americans, "I like money, you like money too? We should hang out"
One step closer to the TV programming in Idiocracy[0]: https://te.xel.io/img/posts/2016-05-14-facets-of-greatness-the-unknown-monumental-accidents/idiocracy.jpg
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
This is the kind of forward thinking we need. The issue is explained, in great detail, what happens in the future in the documentary called “Idiocracy” by the prophet Mike Judge.
I'm betting people are going to be screaming at the chatbot thinking its a real person on the other end.
This gives me the whole Carls Jr vibe from the movie Idiocracy.
You have an optimistic view of ChatGPT. What I see happening is the movie 'Idiocracy' becoming a reality.
It seems like the dystopian world shown in the movie Idiocracy is inevitable.
And Idiocracy is a hopeful movie -- it shows how an enlightened leader (Herbert Camacho) can actually help society move out of a collapse (that feels more and more likely to happen in real life).
They must have seen that documentary, Idiocracy.
Twin studies provide evidence that there is a biological component to intelligence. They do not tell us how much more biologically likely it is for high-IQ parents to produce high-IQ kids—which is usually what people mean by the “heritability” of IQ.
In plain English: the twin studies show us how similar twins are, but they don’t tell us how true the movie Idiocracy is.
It's a horror movie.
I've tried to watch it twice and I can't get more than 20 minutes in because it's my life. I've been living in the Idiocracy since I was eight years old.
Everyone seems so slow. Their problems are trivial. They only reason they don't live well is because they just aren't interested.
- - - - -
I have high hopes that the talking computers will make good rulers...
There is this movie called Idiocracy. When I saw it the first time I thought it was hilarious. But over time I've stopped laughing and I now more or less realize that the makers may well have intended something funny but accidentally ended up making a prophesy. Or maybe the intended that from the get-go but they dressed it up as something funny for budget reasons.
It's scary how many of the things that are in that movie as caricatures you can now find IRL.
Idiocracy was a documentary. The intro scene about having children is still 100% valid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA
A movie was filmed to answer your question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
A comedy, but based in fact - e.g. educational attainment is inversely correlated with fertility. For a less individual view, you can visit Wikipedia's list of countries by fertility rate, and sort them by said rate.
I'm not sure how reliable these results are but I can't help but think of the film Idiocracy
I'm terrified of AI for the same reason the movie 'Idiocracy' scares the shit out of me
What a world we live in, where a person can't write a coherent blurb of text without being suspected of using ChatGPT. Anyone remember Idiocracy? That movie is starting to sound more and more like a prophecy.
Ignore history at your own peril
We are seeing the decline in real time, the documentary from time travlers in idiocracy clearly outlines our future.
"Idiocracy" is our universe: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
Unless we plan to make the movie Idiocracy a documentary, we need to continue to learn how to learn.
The scene from the film Idiocracy where the main character is being triaged in a doctor's office comes to mind.
It's a reference to Brawndo marketing campaign, a sugary soda drink from the movie Idiocracy. The marketing campaign discouraged buyers from using water for drinking and irrigation which caused famine because the audience was not good at critical thinking but very susceptible to marketing tricks. Whenever there was a question of using water s.a. to water the crops, everyone would ask with disgust if they intend to use the same water that's used in the toilet.
This is the attitude I've encountered a lot when dealing with trends in technology. For example, there's hatred of XML suit of tools and formats. And it is so entrenched and especially more so with people who have a very superficial understanding of the subject, who also happen to be the majority of the target audience. Thus, every time when a project requires a simple to parse format with schema validation, powerful querying mechanisms, extensibility... while XMLs easily checks all those boxes, developers will tie themselves into knots only to avoid using it making all sorts of ridiculous claims about XML.
I'm not specifically advocating for the use of XML, and I believe there are better formats... unfortunately those would be an even harder sell :) I'm just using XML as an example of something that should've been a no-brainer for many trivial tasks, and yet it's been avoided like a plague for superficial reasons.
I don't really get the love for Idiocracy. You know the amusement ride with the really obviously bad history? The whole movie is basically that. They know their audience doesn't know much history so they need to make mistakes dumb enough so everyone will get it.
It's a cynical movie that knows its audience isn't so smart, so they need to make sure the idiots watching know who the real idiots are. That way the audience can enjoy watching a lot of really dumb stuff while feeling above it instead of targeted.
How did he get away with Idiocracy? I thought it was a good movie and somewhat prescient, but if you peel back the layers it is basically advocating some kind of population control or eugenics policy. Or it is just a comedy, but I hear it frequently cited as a dramatized version of a plausible future.
> paper maps targeting the somewhat advanced users
Since when did using a map become an "advanced" life skill? Is "Idiocracy" becoming a documentary?
I agree, but I fear that might involve selecting for some undesirable traits.
It seems that many people today who never have kids do so for a good reason, such as unstable personal economy, not owning their home, not knowing as much as possible that their future children will have good lives.
The people that continue to have kids today are often the overly religious, the financially or generally irresponsible who lack self awareness, or just plain stupid people. These are not traits we want to evolutionarily select for. See the movie Idiocracy for an example.
For non-Americans who have no idea what this is about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion-dollar_coin
All I can say is wow. Idiocracy was a visionary documentary.
If the majority of young people feel the same as you, the future will probably be very similar to the movie 'Idiocracy'.
Yeah, I’m aware of the Idiocracy take. But, Idiocracy is just a movie and Atlas Shrugged is just a book.
I think we all underestimate, that in reality, there are many abstract motivators that will continue to fill that bucket (status, reputation, for example).
These are my all-time favorites. Sorry if not fitting your "watched in 2022" criteria.
Brother Can You Spare a Dime (1975) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072742/
Thank You For Not Breeding (10+ years ago) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abDpktpk7Is
The Atomic Cafe (1982) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083590/
Born Rich (2003) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0342143/
Bonus documentaries (reality projections):
Idiocracy (2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
Koyaanisqatsi(1982) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085809/
Brazil (1985) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
My new thesis is that an increasing number of problems is caused by human stupidity. We are entering a world as depicted by the movie Idiocracy.
Who knew, Idiocracy was actually a documentary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ig446isvXlI
This! The opening scene of the movie Idiocracy depicts this in a great way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA
I've only watched European TV but if you say US TV is even worse... it must be like in that movie Idiocracy
I find it interesting that Idiocracy was released the same year. Two very different films, but I think two of the most prophetic of their time, and I enjoyed them both a lot, but I always say that "Children of Men" is the best movie that I'll never watch again.
Perhaps relevant, posted today:
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-fbis-transformation-from-national
In the incident that led to Friend’s suspension, the FBI wanted to execute a SWAT raid on a subject who’d been communicating with the Bureau through an attorney and almost certainly would have come in voluntarily. Or, Friend thought, he could have been picked up in another, less dangerous way. The FBI however wanted a show.
“We’re gonna hit this house at six o’clock in the morning and throw flash-bangs and knock the door down and drive a Bearcat up on the front lawn,” recalls Friend, who had extensive SWAT experience and even worked the raid of Michigan militia members suspected of plotting to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
He recounts a detail straight out of the movie Idiocracy: the armored Bearcat vehicles the FBI uses in SWAT raids are fitted with special battering-ram-type devices agents call dongers. (No joke. Washington Field Office agents even nickname their Bearcat accessory “DOJ,” for Dong of Justice). Friend describes the lunacy of a federal posse riding into the suburbs to take a door in one of these phallic tanks. “You’re driving down the road with this long extension pole on the front,” he says, laughing. “And I’m thinking, ‘These things were built by the lowest possible bidder.’”
He didn’t laugh so much, however, when he started to get the sense the FBI was opening cases, knocking on doors, and using tactics like SWAT for reasons other than operational necessity.
I know I’m not the only person who watched the movie idiocracy, but “the ‘conomy” is polling at the top of the list of issues for this election cycle.
Just once I’d like to see an actual economist debate some politicians who love act like them, despite having no qualifications and nothing but a list of talking points to back them up. We can all hope that this new crop of temperature readers will help educate JP and the fed about monetary policy.
not too far from reality though, with dramatic flair & exaggeration for comedy thrown in. BTW I did not realize it was directed by the same guy who did Idiocracy (Mike Judge). when it came out I thought 'not in a millennia' and now it seems .. passable ;-).
I personally think people get the movie Idiocracy wrong when they see it as a warning of what could happen. I personally take it as a story of how, if you took someone 100 years ago and moved them to today, they would feel very much like they were already in that world. The movie is just using even further exaggerations of what America has become today, in order to shine a light on what's already happened: we've become idiots in many ways. Idiocracy is already here, we already do a ton of useless crap for comfort and aesthetics, but we all just got used to it and don't see how fucked the country has become. We've already gotten to the point where adding classes pre-college about dis/misinformation would probably be considered indoctrination of some kind, so we kinda lost.
I'm seeing how society is going to something like Idiocracy film every day and it is terrifying
People always keep saying idiocracy is like the worst case scenario for the future. Are you kidding me? That movie is close to the best case scenario. Everyone in the movie is just having fun doing whatever they want, and importantly, quite literally everyone is actually nice and just trying to do the right thing. There’s literally no villain just some misunderstanding.
Even the evil corporations actually turn out to be evil just because of incompetence (carls junior actually takes over child care if it deems their parents unable; the soda company genuinely was shocked that their soda shouldn’t be used to irrigate).
Except the one genuinely evil person (the pimp) who turns out is not from that time, and thankfully only pops up in the end to set up the sequel.
I would choose idiocracys universe to whatever we have even today, where a good fraction if not the majority of the world population has decided that selfishness and bigotry are the way to go.
> Professors like me have to fill articles like this with yoga photos to keep people’s attention. And it’s only going to get worse. Our politicians are going to get dumber. Our youth are going to get more restless and desperate. Misinformation is going to get more outlandish. That’s our future, as predicted by the movie Idiocracy.
It's a pretty good article, if you read the whole thing. People seem to be getting hung up on the "girls in yoga pants" non-sequiturs. The author spells it out near the bottom of the article:
> Meanwhile, we’ve systematically defunded classrooms... It has consequences... Professors like me have to fill articles like this with yoga photos to keep people’s attention. And it's only going to get worse. Our politicians are going to get dumber. Our youth are going to get more restless and desperate. Misinformation is going to get more outlandish. That’s our future, as predicted by the movie Idiocracy.
In other words, she did it for the clicks. It's either a mildly clever rhetorical device or rage-inducing clickbait, depending on where you fall on the "easily angered" spectrum.
> The biggest risk right now to our genetic success is overwhelmingly the fact that the people most likely to reproduce are the ones with the least amount of education.
Idiocracy wasn't a dystopia, it is a documentary...
Sarcasm aside: A low amount of education is not really related to genetics (some forms of inheritable mental health issues aside). There are, however, extremely strong correlations with poverty:
- poor families tend to live in areas with underfunded and thus lower-quality public schools, whereas rich people have better schools and can afford after-school private education
- poor families tend to have issues with food security, which was brutally shown by covid as schools had to stay open simply so that the children could have at least one warm, somewhat healthy meal a day
- poor families often tend to send their children off to work as soon as they can and are legally allowed to, simply to help make ends meet. That leaves them less time for homework and learning (leading to lower grades), and not being able to pursue higher education at all because having a job to survive is more important, which in turn locks them out of higher-paying careers and sets them up for being poor for life
The sophistication of modern audiences is now so high that the level of enunciation and clarity in older movies now sounds comical to modern audiences.
My mind immediately went to that scene in idiocracy - "You talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded"
Idiocracy. Best documentary about us humans right now.
> we are heading towards idiocracy
This tired kids-these-days complaint was a dead horse before the movie left theatres.
Idiocracy ;)
In that movie, Costco pretty much does everything.
Idiocracy was a documentary
I don't think anyone is blaming the kids. I mean, the decisions to have the kids were made by adults. I'm in favor of blaming the adults.
That said, us nerds probably shouldn't stop reproducing.
The intro to Idiocracy (2006) is quite relevant today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA
I heard Mike Judge on a podcast about a month ago (JRE) saying that the ability to make that intro was a large factor in his motivation of making the Idiocracy movie in the first place.
The world you are describing has been depicted in the movie Idiocracy.
I have long viewed Mike Judge[0] as the anti-Scott Adams. He works with many of the same topics but the result is far, far funnier. And he does not try to shove any particular political point of view at the expense of basic humor.
In reviewing Idiocracy, Salon stated, "Judge's gimlet eye is so ruthless that at times his politics seem to border on South Park libertarianism".[73] A writer for the libertarian magazine Reason seems to agree, comparing King of the Hill to the anti-authoritarian point of view of South Park and The Simpsons, though he calls the show more populist, noting the disdain King of the Hill seems to have for bureaucrats, professionals, and big-box chains.[74]
Still, Judge denies having political messages in his shows, saying in an IGN interview about King of the Hill:[72]
"I try to not let the show get too political. To me, it's more social than political I guess you'd say, because that's funnier. I don't really like political reference humor that much. Although I liked the episode "Hank's Bully" where Hank's talking to the mailman and he says, 'Why would anyone want to lick a stamp that has Bill Clinton on it?' To me that's just like more of a character thing about Hank than it is a political joke or anything. I don't want to do a bunch of stuff about the war, particularly." [Wikipedia]
[0]King of the Hill, Office Space, Beavis and Butthead, Idiocracy, Silicon Valley
As told by the intro to Idiocracy movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA
> [...] which is so easy and interesting to consume, that anything that takes work and time is postponed, and eventually conditioned to be ignored. This is true for porn, fast-food, caffeine, or what have you - easy, gratifying, effortless dopamine rushes will destroy the positive (and ultimately more gratifying) activities that the brain chemicals were supposed to encourage in the first place.
I read this to the backdrop of the movie "Idiocracy" playing in my mind. Especially the "porn, fast-food, caffeine" (aka Starbucks in the movie :P)
Seems like the system gave her a lot of chances, still ends up in a tent by the freeway. Very irresponsible to be reproducing in such situations. I’m housed and employed and I still feel I can’t give a child a decent life. Holly wood’s finest? More like that movie Idiocracy in action. What an absurd world. Ribonuleic acids will find a way to replicate, regardless of the suffering of their emergent sentience.
I was ranting about this 2 years ago and a lot of people laughed it off...
I cited an auto start feature o VOLVO cars that required a siriusXM membership.
It's unfathomable that we reached this point of monthly subscriptions being implemented on things that we've already paid for. It's the first sign that we're in for a wave of not feudalism, but outright economic slavery. There is no rational consumer protection against many predatory business practices, and many are eager to be a part of monthly subscriptions for useless services for lord knows what motivational reason.
Mike Judge was a genius for making the movie Idiocracy, it's our future. No way around it now. :[
"Intentionally campy and satirical" and "chillingly predictive" are not mutually exclusive. The movie Idiocracy has probably become the canonical example in that space.
In any case, speculative fiction is usually more about the present than it is about the future. The original Star Trek, for instance, dealt quite a bit with the racial politics of the 1960s, even though it was set in the 2260s. The hypercapitalism in Snow Crash (and other cyberpunk works around that time) reflected the trend of American society in the 1980s and 90s. It was less "telling lies" and more logical extrapolation of the existing trend, which hasn't really been arrested since, either.
Idiocracy: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
"documentary" is an interesting way to describe the plot of Idiocracy (2006)...
Idiocracy a documentary?
>Is that so? From where I sit, it doesn’t seem access to the world’s information has been a factor in how “smart” people are at all.
So there are other factors other than 'smart' like blood pressure, stress, distraction, addictions. I'm not saying mobile phones have not come without troubles.
50 years ago the 'smart' people were your jeopardy folks who had tons of facts memorized. You can just google all those things instead and be just as smart. It is a reality that today someone with a cellphone is tremendously smarter. Better yet, simply having advanced science our facts are even better.
>Slight aside, can you look up a single education metric improving since the creation of the Dept of Education?
When the movie idiocracy came out it was common to show this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
Not even taking cellphones into effect people are tremendously smarter today.
You're also probably seeking: https://www.oecd.org/education/ where they track these things. They've expanded to other stuff that I don't necessarily agree with but to each their own.
“ Weird, why would mass of people try to escape reality instead of watching more documentaries and getting inspired to change the world for better? This truly is a conundrum.”
it’s more that this shit gets shoved down people’s throats intentionally because it’s a way to prevent people from organizing to improve their lives and stop being exploited. if all anyone has ever seen is capeshit, they’re going to be less mentally capable to deal with the complexity of real life. same reason why china bans blood in video games: so you don’t have a language to even express what is happening to you, so you can’t even start to do anything about it. think about why the movie idiocracy got shat on. they didn’t market the movie bc they wanted it to fail bc they don’t want people to see it bc they don’t want them to be self aware bc they want them to be stupid because it’s easier to control people that way. it’s the same reason why the NPC meme was banned from twitter: because it’s too accurate and too problematic for the people who know all to well how accurate it is and whose full time job is manipulating braindead npc-like morons that use twitter.
Just in case you're not familiar with the reference, it's from the movie Idiocracy.
I thought I was reading the introduction to the movie Idiocracy for a moment ;)
Fact checkers have been proven wrong over and over again throughout the past few years. You need VERY intelligent people to check facts but there are too many corruptible, educated idiots posing as intelligent people... Also, there aren't enough truly smart people in positions of power to be able to select smart people to do fact-checking. The elites are just not smart enough. You can see how society is falling apart because of it.
Our problem is that reality is more like in Planet of the Apes than Idiocracy; the big angry monkey lord cannot surround himself with smart individuals because he himself is not smart enough to identify and select them (cannot separate idiots from geniuses). He will surround himself with idiots because he can't tell the difference; the idiots are more similar to himself so he will choose them because of his ego. It's also like in the film Amadeus; the king is not very talented in music so he is unable to understand that Mozart is a musical genius, instead, he repeatedly promotes Salieri who is closer to his own skill level.
In Idiocracy, the president is an idiot but he knows how to identify smart people by relying on an IQ test. It doesn't work like that in reality. IQ is not reliable for identifying critical thinking, also, almost nobody uses it for recruitment purposes anyway.
No it wasn't a joke but also you are also blowing out of proportion my reasoning for having children. There have been dozens of reasons why I had kids. One of them, very small compared to the others, is the Idiocracy movie. The idea that smart people have less kids is dangerous for society and I wanted to "be the change that you want to see in the world". Now if you want to take that and blow it out of proportion and say THE ONLY REASON WHY YOU HAD KIDS IS WATCHING THE IDIOCRACY movie you are using Reductio ad Absurdum, you are enlarging my claims until they are absurd. Try instead to watch the movie and then comment on whether Idiocracy is applicable to real world or not.
"I'm having kids because of the movie Idiocracy, and inspired because Elon Musk did the same" has to be peak Poe's law[0].
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
The article fails to mention France which is managing the low children crisis better than most. Macron moved down the compulsory school age start from 6 (primary school) down to 3 (kindergarten).
Governments should help families by providing easier access to daycares and kindergartens. Helping young parents get some rest with their first child(ren) will encourage them having more children.
I'm a parent of two young children, a 3 years old and a 6 months old. This is the hardest period of my life since high school. I'm 34 and in our circles I'm the youngest dad. Most of other dads' are in their late 30s all the way to early 50s.
Yet I do feel I'm making a difference, especially considering that I'm Italian (high longevity + few children). I've been also inspired by my choices of parenthood by the movie IDIOCRACY:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBvIweCIgwk I was delighted when I red in the Elon Musk biography that he had also saw the movie and that was also one of the reasons for being a parent of multiple kids.
This is why the suicide rates will continue to climb.
They voted to keep the clock still, but used the wrong time.
I just wish the movie Idiocracy would stop turning into a f*&cking documentary. Is that so much to ask?!?!?!
Every week, I read some new grotesque story about NFC. Every time I'm reminded of the movie Idiocracy.
We have 2 billion people in poverty. Climate change threatens our sedentary civilizations. We still have no clue what's going on in the universe and how to make sense of it.
And yet somehow enough of us participate in this circus that it make the news, and I have to witness pathetic drama stories about screenshot-ing monkey drawings, people spending 250M dollars to encode a book onto a chain, NFT marketplaces centralizing into traditional model while operating on a technology that literally and non-ironically requires "gas fees" for simple transactions because of how inept the tech is.
Gas fees. In the same world that holds COP events every year to try and get us to not self-extinct from our own waste products.
What a sad show this is.
idiocracy was a documentary
3000 seems very generous. Look how fast the dumbing down pointed out by the movie Idiocracy is progressing. It was supposed to be 500 years...
Very sad to see her go.
Mike Judge's (of King of the Hill and Idiocracy fame) Tales From the Tour Bus episode on her was excellent.
>This isn't censorship, it's trying to build an experience that doesn't actively turn people away from your platform.
i'm here to tell you that the cutesy shit drives certain people away.
'Funny' isn't some objective quality that things can be neatly sorted into with any level of accuracy, except in cases of the worst most generic/juvenile types of humor that are guaranteed to get a chuckle from 'some idiot' out there.
The parody show 'Ow! My Balls!' in the movie 'Idiocracy' comes to mind.
> … this can’t be sustainable.
Cue the film _Idiocracy_
Idiocracy was not meant to be a documentary.
And right there, you have the thesis underlying the plot for Idiocracy, a time-shifted documentary masquerading as a comedy, in which the value of t is claimed to be 500 years, but is actually unknown (and current data suggest far lower value).
For those lost, this is a quote from the must-watch movie Office Space[1] (which was painfully accurate, though its probably a bit dated now). While you're at the TV, also watch Idiocracy[2], by the same writer/director.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Space
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
Someone told that Idiocracy was actually a documentary.
>The premise of Idiocracy is that dumb people reproduce more and society gets dumber. Eugenical yuckness aside, the reality is that IQ has been rising.
The movie reminded me of the Despair. inc poster "Meetings: None of us is as dumb as All of Us"
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/meetingsdemotivator.jpeg
If I were looking for a poignant pause, I'd compare anything Christopher Hitchens wrote for the Guardian a decade ago to what we're commenting on now, and consider whether this article about the prophecy of Idiocracy might land a bit closer to the writer than to the mark.
The reason to be this pointed about it is the cognitive style of articles like these is to seduce readers with sympathy for their smallest and cruelist sentiments. It's as though media appointees imagine themselves as fomenting a better calibre of angry mob or inciting the right kind of superstitious villager. Appealing to Idiocracy as a parable of caution for our times seems a bit rich, especially when the very cause of the idiocy in the movie was that the society in the story had been completely coddled and unchallenged by the very people whose job it was to provoke some kind of thoughtfulness and reflection.
The point of Idiocracy is a finger directed at everyone.
Friends and colleagues who had children were sometimes offended (I think that really put a lot of people off), but the movie implicates us all as idiots drawn to spectacle. There's a marvelous scene in which Frito, Not Sure, and Rita peer around a corner as police surround Frito's car. The police open fire on the vehicle and as the fusillade intensifies, Frito is increasingly enthralled and delighted by the destruction until the car explodes under rocket fire and Frito exclaims in joy. And then the realization of what happened sets in, and as a viewer I became aware of how I was sucked into that bizarre scene. The joke was on me ;-)
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
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.
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.
Just my opinion.
Idiocracy is in indeed the easy case. Notice there is no villain in the movie. Even the sports drink company isn't pressing hard.
Idiocracy is fun, but the instinctive "OMG so true" is, IMO, wrong. The film riffs on a common fallacy more so than it's actually insightful. Statements like "people these days are so stupid/lazy/immoral" tend get an instinctive thumbs up. The slang, pop culture & consumerism of the future are the main way the film "demonstrates" that people got dumber.
The premise of Idiocracy is that dumb people reproduce more and society gets dumber. Eugenical yuckness aside, the reality is that IQ has been rising. Education too. Literacy, obviously. The average ability think through abstract concepts is on the up. Meanwhile, bookish nerdiness is more highly rewarded culturally and financially than before. It's not marginal either. People are smarter, not dumber, in this sense.
Whatever "stupidity" we observe isn't IQ. It's not a simple definition of smart and dumb.
I suspect what people are observing when they observe a stupidity trend is more of a dumb culture than a culture of dumb people. Maybe individuals are getting smarter but the culture is getting dumber. IDK. I have no conclusions. Just pointing out that any concrete "arguments" made by the film are actually quite fallacious, despite being pretty widely resonant.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Boy, society sure has devolved into Idiocracy-world during the last couple of years" has been the claim since just after the movie came out.
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?
ow alert alert, too many spoilers
> 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.
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.
"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.
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.
We had 60 years of TV getting to that 18 minute mark per 1 hour show.
I wonder how many minutes of advertising or signups will be involved after 60 years of internet.
I can imagine a 20 years from now - to continue watching Netflix Original Series "Idiocracy Now: Season 2 Episode 7 - Jim invents plastic soil mulch" sign up for this exclusive opportunity to get a new AI robot dog....
We are more detached from real life than ever. Looks like Idiocracy was a documentary, not comedy.
Putt's Law: "Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand."
Putt's Corollary: "Every technical hierarchy, in time, develops a competence inversion."
Related:
o Parkinson's Law
"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
o The Peter Principle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
"People in a hierarchy tend to rise to a level of respective incompetence."
o The Dilbert Principle
"Companies tend to systematically promote incompetent employees to management to get them out of the workflow."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle
Also related:
Idiocracy
2006 dystopian sci-fi comedy film written by Mike Judge and Etan Cohen:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnLxc954ipo
I hate to break it to you, but Idiocracy wasn't a documentary.
Have you seen that movie Idiocracy? Our modern society is hollowing out the gene pool in the vast median of our cultural middle classes
Check and check, now all we need is the “Idiocracy was a documentary“ comment to complete the “well, I can’t come right out and say that I think eugenics makes sense” veiled discussion. I’m sure all the people that agree with you are lockstep in thoughts an ideology with their parents, right?
Slowly progressing towards Idiocracy [1].
[1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
Scrum ceremonies reminded me scenes from the Idiocracy (2006) movie.
It's so idiotic I was shocked when I first experienced it.
>Given the current demographics related to birth rates, calling idiocracy a documentary is blatantly racist and classist.
Ironically, low intelligence people calling reality racist just serves to prove my point.
There are dozens of better choices to use for the sake of comparison if you want to say that you find the majority of people to be far beneath your brilliance and virtue.
The decay of civilization in idiocracy was directly and exclusively due to two things:
- intelligence is genetic
- smart people bred themselves out of the gene pool
I have literally heard people be chastised when they tell others they chose not to have kids, because have you seen idiocracy?
The basic premise of the movie is so fundamentally flawed it is beyond offensive.
Idiocracy was fine for entertainment, but if you are looking for a moral, it is pure elitist garbage.
The basic premise that intelligence is purely driven by genes and that only dumb people will be left is practically hateful.
Given the current demographics related to birth rates, calling idiocracy a documentary is blatantly racist and classist.
>So far, Idiocracy remains a cynical comedy and not a documentary.
Many of us hold the opposite opinion.
> So far, Idiocracy remains a cynical comedy and not a documentary.
The jury is still out on that, even for the optimistic amongst us. Current events/culture/elections/social commentary beg to disagree...
People have been saying the same thing about TV since its inception, and that has a larger scale than the internet. So far, Idiocracy remains a cynical comedy and not a documentary.
> Our average viewer is 65 years old and watches TV while doing the dishes, we must not show things that cannot be understood by them
So like, sticking only to the first and second derivative in soap opera plots about retired civil engineers?
No late-period Beethoven sonatas as background music?
That must be difficult for you as a German.
Meanwhile, here in America we're perhaps a few years away from something like the movie "Ass" from Idiocracy winning an Oscar.
Just watch the movie Idiocracy, and you'll understand where it all comes from.
Check out Youtube's Free with Ads movies. Seriously. They've got a good selection of great movies (especially comedies) from the 80s and 90s on there.
Naked Gun series, Oh Brother Where Art Thou?, Raising Arizona, Idiocracy, The Terminal, Major League, Top Secret!, Hot Shots!, Beavis and Butthead Do America, The Terminator, Delirious, Robin Hood Men in Tights, Captain Ron (crap, it's not free anymore), original Robocop, Secret of Nimh, Ghost, I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, Silence of the Lambs, Teen Wolf, to name a few.
It's a smaller selection and they don't seem to stay Free for more than a few months, so you have to keep checking it, but there's some good stuff on there.
oh, i just realized that maybe you don't know i'm referring to the movie "idiocracy".
The writing on this website makes me believe the transition depicted in the film Idiocracy is well underway.
I can thoroughly recommend the movie Idiocracy.
Brawndo is the product the drone would be advertising.
Too many things in US culture remind me of the movie Idiocracy by Mike Judge (and a bunch of other people).
I'd forgotten that TV UI from Idiocracy. Now that I see it it certainly does seem a bit prescient: https://scifiinterfaces.com/idiocracy-tv/
(Then again, sadly, a lot of that movie seems prescient...)
Regarding Idiocracy, I think it gets more than enough attention. It's a funny movie, and a lot of its satirical barbs land, but its basic premise is a eugenicist lie that would cause a lot of damage if people took it too seriously. Moreover, even as social critique, it is rapidly becoming dated; broad-brush anti-intellectualism is certainly a problem, but it's not the problem - the political events of the past half-decade have reaffirmed that it's just one of a variety of types of toxic irrationality.
I wonder how many people familiar with OBEY iconography variations[0] or OBEY Clothing actually watched They Live.
It's a pretty corny movie, but it's quite good.
And regarding warnings, I can't help but feel Idiocracy is also one we're not paying attention to.
[0] I own a t-shirt with futurama's hypnotoad, and I love it
That's pretty much the premise for the movie Idiocracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBvIweCIgwk
Because that answer was pretty weak, I resorted to an easier question... taken from the prison IQ test from the movie Idiocracy.
You have one bucket that holds 2 gallons and another bucket that holds 5 gallons. How many buckets do you have?
The answer was complete nonsense.
https://youtu.be/jbmq9P-8FiM?t=17
When I worked at a defense contractor (years ago, before any of this stuff was even on the horizon) I'm pretty sure HR would have been had a "I am living the movie idiocracy" moment if that happened.
Silence is violence rings pretty hollow when your company deals in the loud explody kind of violence.
I couldn't stop thinking about the movie Idiocracy while reading this.
It is called "regression towards the mean" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean). If someone is at a particular extreme, and the trait is hereditary in less than 100% (biologically or cultural), it is likely that their offsprings will be less extreme.
On the contrary - I find it sad that more intelligent and more accomplished people have fewer offsprings on average than others. While the process is not surprising socially, either there is no hereditary factors in intellectual abilities at all (which does not hold water), or step by step, we decline. Let's hope that technological augments to our mental capabilities develop faster than the biological process.
Once I compared the trajectory to "Idiocracy" (from 2006). Yet, a friend said it is an optimistic movie - since they still choose the smartest person as their president.
I agree. Total bullshit.
I remember starting my career as a front end developer actually having to write code. Those days are long gone. Invented here syndrome is the reality.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here
Code that written by anybody you actually know is not trusted. I actually saw a channel op in ##javascript of Freenode just this morning refer to people who write original code as a form of Dunning-Kruger over confidence.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
I also remember earlier in my career people reading resumes. Those days evaporated early in my career. A good fix was having open source contributions as people would really look at those. Those days are gone too. Reading code is just too hard, so project readme files are the new resumes to ignore.
So now the industry is stacked with developers who can neither read nor write code, can’t evaluate candidates, and fear anything that isn’t externally prepackaged. It’s like watching that movie Idiocracy, and yet people complain about talent shortages.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
I find this somewhat counter intuitive because while many software developers seem generally of low confidence about actually doing the work of their jobs they seem generally over confident about security, as in information security. It’s weird because that confidence is the the most clear example of Dunning-Kruger and it isn’t based on anything.
Now, my learning from interviewing and reading job posts is this:
* Use React.
* Don’t bother with open source or a portfolio.
* Resumes are required but they are just weapons to be used against you at a later time. Include education, contact information, and job history only.
Where did the low-skilled people in the movie Idiocracy (2006) get their money from?
This is the majority reaction.
Computer says no = okay it’s your fault.
It’s the equivalent of ‘works on my local’ so get lost you deal with it.
Computers may be binary but the people who make them aren’t.
This failing of understanding and with the advent of easy ML will only add to the problem.
Askimov’s multivac would end the human race before it helped it.
Applications are starting to get to the point of dogma for many of us at a certain level.
Still love the film ‘Idiocracy’ becoming more and more prescient.
We got a movie about that! Idiocracy (2006)... I’m a huge fan
The scenario of not wanting to bring a child into an environment that isn't stable is exactly one of the points of the intro to the movie Idiocracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA
I definitely understand 100%... I just thought it sounded extremely familiar. In my personal scenario, I had my first kid (unplanned) when I was 25. It definitely changed the trajectory of my life, and in a good way in my case. Once I knew I was having a kid I really started to take things more seriously and tried to set up as good of an environment as I could. That meant studying a lot, surrounding myself with good families, moving into a place with more exposure to nature, etc. We never owned a home, had retirement saved up, or a lot of the other things one would consider good "nest egg" scenarios. We just made it work when we had to, and have 2 awesome teenagers now.
Followed by the documentary titled Idiocracy
> are much better at having children,
Also see Idiocracy ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ )
This talk also ties in very strongly, albeit much more seriously, with the movie Idiocracy. I know, that gets brought up quite often, but the prospect of us 'forgetting' how to build and maintain the foundations of modern artifacts seems not so far-fetched anymore.
Civilization may not be a mistake, but it is clear that 90% of people in a civilization is dragged forward kicking and screaming by 10% of people into a Civilization it is not equipped to handle and unprepared for.
I think that more than anything is the underlying lesson and danger from the idiocracy documentary
We are injecting tools, and technology into civilization that we are not ready for with no concern or care for the damage it does
Remembering the start of the film Idiocracy and how many resources have been spent on erection pills...
Now append some eco to your leanings and see that this sort of free market experimentation isn't sustainable, if you don't want to end under the great garbage avalanche like in the movie "Idiocracy". Or be filled with microplastics, which contain endocrine disruptors, which are not good for anyone/thing.
Those who fail and get poor reproduce faster than the riches and within a few generations you put salt on your fields... Your comment reminded me of the movie Idiocracy
So much this. Networking(where you went to school and work) and luck(your country, your nationality, your ethnicity, your skin color, your looks, your accent, being at the right place and the right time) are worth more than your CV and side projects but this is rarely mentioned in this field as it's always touted that tech is a pure meritocracy.
One can often read sour vents on reddit on devs who lose hope, get depressed and burn out after being unemployed or stuck in dead end jobs for so long while they keep grinding leetcode and churning projects on github because the internet told them that SW development is a meritocracy and the key to success is putting enough hard work in your free time even though there's devs coasting on six figure jobs who haven't written a line on github in their life on their free time.
Nope, it's definitely no meritocracy, the tech world is just as unfair as the rest but has much better PR about it: watch Silicon Valley TV series made by the satire comedy genius Mike Judge(Office Space, Idiocracy) where billionaire tech magnate Gavin Belson would always sugarcoat his hostile business decisions with talks of buddhist spirituality, endangered animals and making the world a better place while his true motivation was only the accumulation of more fame, wealth and power.
That's the oft-forgotten other half of the premise of the film Idiocracy. Everybody talks about the (inaccurate and unrealistic) premise of natural selection favouring unintelligence, but overlook how the future society is supported by ageing high-tech easy-to-use machinery which is falling apart.
Maybe Idiocracy was right, but not for the reason most people assume...
Intro of the movie "Idiocracy" sums it up pretty good ;)
> Internet companies capitalize on this by bringing an optimized stream of stupidity for your viewing pleasure. Take a look at the front page of Reddit (logged out, default subs): Half of the content highlights stupidity of others: /r/IdiotsInCars shows the worst drivers from around the world, /r/insanepeoplefacebook shows the most bizarre clips from social media, /r/choosingbeggars highlights the dumbest negotiation attempts, /r/trashy and /r/iamatotalpieceofshit are selected stories of bad behavior, /r/whatcouldgowrong and /r/instantkarma are videos of people making bad decisions and suffering the consequences, /r/publicfreakout is videos of people fighting. Contributors hunt for the most egregious examples to post to Reddit in the hopes of getting upvotes.
Scene from the movie Idiocracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Idiocracy&oldid=983648346):
https://youtu.be/1hj_7U40z5I?t=19
I m entertaining the idea that it is indeed expanding. Well not expanding , but that intelligence is regressing to the mean which is equally bad. People thrive under constraints and struggle. It's what makes games fun to play. Maybe the ease of modern life makes humans complacent. I mean i can't explain why i see so many people struggle when they use an old computer program which used to be commonplace in its day/ observing them shows a clear laziness to do deep-thinking. I m afraid i m becoming one of them too -- the horror!
I can't help but think that we 're lacking the genius giants for which the last century is notorious. Where are the kolmogorovs, the von neumanns, the einsteins, the fred sangers of the past ~40 years? Is there a big gap in the higher end of intelligence? What about the lower end of intelligence? If both are lacking that means we are indeed regressing to become average idiots.
I like to think we already live in idiocracy. People forget however that in that movie, the biggest idiot wasnt President Camacho, it was the people, the way-below-average joes, who are evenly distributed across the political spectrum. (In fact the blind belief that politics alone can bring progress is kind of dumb in itself). Could it be something in the way we eat? There is a well established and colossal drop in testosterone levels in the past ~50 years. After all we are just neurochemical intelligence generators.
(Also why is everyone focusing on social media? That's just a symptom)
As usual, _Idiocracy_ is a documentary from the future.
https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/idiocracy.jpg
Simple slution: don't buy "Smart" TVs, And the day all TVs will be "Smart" just don't connect them to the Internet (and don't leave open hotspots nearby or they'll do by themselves). They're becoming business platforms rather than devices the user can control, just like "Smart" phones and computers with non free operating systems.
Anyone remembers that TV screen in the wonderful Idiocracy docu... er.. movie? That is going to happen, soon or later.
https://i2.wp.com/scifiinterfaces.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IDIOCRACY-TV.png
This was predicted in the movie "Idiocracy". Unfortunately most people mistook it as a comedy.
It's like the movie Idiocracy.
Movies with great impact on me:
1. Untouchable - must see
2. Gattaca - are we going there?
3. 1984 - must see
4. Idiocracy - initially looks like joke/stupid movie, but it's more real then we may want to agree
5. Life of others (made in Ge)
6. Amelie Poulain (made in Fr)
7. Turtles can fly (made in Ir)
8. Stalker - the russian original (3 parts) (made in Ru)
9. Metropolis
Other good movies:
Lost Horizon
The Bucket List
The Truman Show
Solaris 1972
Enemy at the Gates
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Tips for good movies in general: take countries one by one and search best ever movies from that country.
_Idiocracy_ of course. Most prescient movie ever.
And maybe the ridiculous Jesse Eisenberg movie I saw last night, _Vivarium_. It changed my opinion on how reasonably good actors can do horrible movies, obviously not for the money because there isn't going to be any.
Because they don’t think things through (morons) or don’t care (evil). Have you seen the movie Idiocracy? It covers this pretty well: https://youtu.be/icmRCixQrx8
"Good" and "Bad" are down to perspective and is very subjective. Especially when talking about this issue.
There is a strong correlation also with educational levels and birth rates. the more educated the person, means both they are more successful monetarily, and they are less likely to have children, or have only a single child which is less than replacement (every child has 2 parents)
So is large numbers of uneducated people having children that statically will also be uneducated as well a "good" thing for humanity? I dont know have you watched the movie Idiocracy?
Natrually then most people will say "well we just need to educate that generation, get those nations / people educated" , this however does not solve the problem of birth rates because as you educate more and more people, as you bring more and more people to success they will also stop having children. If you reach the utopia where everyone in society has equal levels of education, then it is very likely you will see population crash.
Now technology could solve for that, extended life / extended fertility span for women for example would certainly inverse the population issue.
mostly because it's way too on the nose
You say that and yet so many of its critics at the time did not get it. It is among the most blatant of all satires (right up there with Idiocracy) ever made, yet it still flew over the heads of critics like Roger Ebert [1].
Ebert claimed to have memorized the novel as a child. Right out of the gate, he calls it "true to its source." No, it's completely antithetical to its source! Verhoeven hated the source novel so much he turned his adaptation into a farce intended to depict how banal and juvenile he thought Heinlein's idea of a militaristic society was. Now, plenty of people disagree with Verhoeven and love the novel, but it's completely incorrect to call the movie a faithful adaptation.
The film was simply operating on a level that people were not prepared for at the time. Today, it's a different story. Of course, it borrows heavily from Huxley's Brave New World which itself is terrifyingly prescient (and also faced criticism at the time). Some stories might just be ahead of their time. Over-the-top satires of contemporary society seem to be particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon.
[1] https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/starship-troopers-1997
The expanded view of my argument is meant to be more productive, not to soften. As I said in the expansion 'almost like good versus evil'.
It is certainly true that any individual or group of people may be happy to do some thing (spend money and do something). Whether it is rob a bank, get drunk and drive a car, or cure cancer people will always be happy to do some thing (referring to your point 'someone always happy to pay for a thing) as if this is the signal of some thing is OK). Just because the sensation of novelty happens doesn't mean we are doing well (see: basically any shitty thing humans do for a while and regret being assigned value through this mechanism).
I'm trying to look at this from a higher altitude and say that with the levels of intellect and passion I'm aware of (and apologies for the lack of hard evidence or citations) I believe we are capable of better things.
I believe in capitalism. I believe in the motivation to better ourselves to improve our circumstances through effort and education followed by returns due to providing things that people need or want. The sunglasses example in my view is a kind of prostitution of what the intention of capitalism is. In other words the hackers approach to capitalism. (I professionally and academically identify with and appreciate a hackers mentality, except in an economic social organizational sense due to it's regular self serving at any cost cultural grey areas). The mentality to circumvent standards and the creativity required to see pathways through a system is critically valuable to our species, but how in this case. In an attempt to open to you knowing/or having better view and resources on this than I do, please share a read, or whatever you expected me to provide?
It feels like a waste of time, a waste of materials, a waste of human thinking, a pure waste of a reason to do anything when something is done just to synthesize value.
For a light hearted 'citation': I see that the more pervasive this kind of behavior becomes in our world the closer to a scenario like the film Idiocracy we will become.
This movement is so stupid. It's like the novlang in 1984. Master meaning is very large:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/master
Yes, some times it was used in the master/salve context but it is far from its most common meanings. It's not even its meaning in the case of a git branch.
With all of that, I think that the world is on the straight line of the future described in the Idiocracy movie!
> it displaces "human worth" onto _individual_ fertility and offspring
I think the word "worth" could be an anthropomorphization. I read the concept through the lens of survivability. Hypothetically, a societal identity which does not ensure biological reproduction could be evolutionarily outcompeted by one that does. Even, or especially by a fertility cult. I remember this being one of the central, disturbingly dystopic outcomes that Mike Judge's Idiocracy tried to address.
A lot of progressive technocrats look at model citizens with technologically harnessed upward mobility. They observe and want to enable global movement towards this. But if the environment that enables the financial prosperity of these model citizens also disables their ability to reproduce their way of life, how does it successfully compete in "the marketplace of ideology" against opponents who out-produce them by default? Wouldn't that be a local maximum? Without some kind of mechanism in place to address that, the progression has no guarantee of continuing. And this could lead to the dystopic scenario outlined in the film.
Every time a doom thread like this comes up, and I read a comment from someone who has taken the initiative to limit their own damage, I think back to Idiocracy and the beginning montage of that film with the educated, professional couple. I can't help but feel sorry for the couple because in the end, they are the ones who tried the hardest to "make things right" and have suffered the most. Now I'm reading this comment and I'm wondering - what is the lesson here, really?
Again in my country (this is where I know the situation best) "lower class" means you get money from the government to have kids, as a percentage of total income it can be quite significant, up to 100%.
The government is practically killing the population in a Darwinian sense, discouraging intelligent and educated people to have kids and encouraging the others to. It is the way to the movie Idiocracy.
Reminds me of a great movie called Idiocracy :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKyoSS3bwjA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZHCVyllnck
I understand what you mean but I'm always frustrated when I see Idiocracy brought up in these discussions. Idiocracy is fine if you view it as a light satirical comedy but if you take it seriously to talk about politics it has very sinister undertones.
For one thing it's extremely classist, throughout the movie popular culture is seen as fodder for dumb people while high culture if for clever people. Beyond that it also says that, effectively, dumb people and poor people are the same thing (as exemplified by the "white trash" segment at the start of the movie) and that dumb, poor people are bound to breed dump, poor people (and apparently they do that a lot) while clever people would breed other clever people (but they don't do it because... reasons). So social determinism taken to the limit.
I mean just look at this intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZ0ZUy7P3E
What are examples of clever people? Darwin, Beethoven and Da Vince.
Examples of "degeneracy"? A girl in skimpy clothes, wrestling and a... woman with boxing gloves? Because clearly "panem et circenses" is a novel concept.
Then we go to say "with no natural predators to thin the herd, we began to simply began to reward those who reproduced the most and left the intelligent to become an endangered species". So we're now talking full-on eugenics. Also Beethoven was well known for fending packs of wolves in his youth, proving his evolutionary superiority.
And I'm this point I'm literally one minute into the movie and I could go on and on and on. At best it's elitist, at worst it's much darker than that.
If you like the movie as a funny comedy then be my guest, but please stop bringing it up in political discussions. If anything it's a symptom of the very thing you're decrying: a dumbed down, unnuanced caricature of political discourse.
Trivia bit: The writer behind Idiocracy feels the same way, saying he never expected it to become a documentary.
Details in https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/270642-idiocracy-writer-i-never-expected-my-movie-to-become-a
The Ponzi scheme that is the economy is not going to work unless there are lots of new entrants. We either need a) lots of births or b) lots of immigration.
I don't know about other people, but the idea of trying to have a child is unfathomable to me because I am very, very far away from being (economically) in a place where I feel comfortable breeding. As someone who doesn't fit the mold society wants me to be (i.e., a real contrarian but not in the hip cool SV way), there's simply no way I can participate in the one thing that being human is really about: procreation.
PS[edit]: Idiocracy is a great film and everyone should watch it.
I wonder if that's why people seem to have gotten less intelligent over the past few years (IQ scores seem to confirm this). I thought it was because of social media but maybe high CO2 is to blame.
I would never have thought that the movie Idiocracy would become reality; it seemed so ridiculously far-fetched at the time... Even with its 500 year timeframe... Now it looks like it may actually happen for real in only a few hundred years.
I wonder if I watched that movie again today if it would come across more as a drama than a comedy.
There are all kinds of response to this insanity but ignoring distracting details and not trying to comprehend the worst of society, something I've noticed over the decades is whatever hoax, whatever conspiracy theory that pops up, the common denominator to the most destructive responders is poor education and poor critical thinking skills.
Once a society has lost those fundamentals, it's over. It's also why the movie "Idiocracy" seems to slowly become reality.
Idiocracy was oddly prescient. I really enjoyed that movie. Now that it's reality, not so much...
Idiocracy (2005)
What could go wrong over 500 years if you keep making stuff user-friendly? It's an American movie, but Americans may find it insulting. The female half of the protagonists got a very disappointing role.
It's like I'm living in a simulation or the movie Idiocracy and I desperately want out.
That’s because you have very few exposition to 1890 writing. When I read published book from a hundred years ago (in French), I’m often stroke by how much clearer it is than say, newspaper garbage for instance. No only in style, but also how they write to inform instead of writing to hide facts.
It’s even more striking when watching archive videos from the 60’. People speak more slowly, are more composed and use wider vocabulary. It might not be as caricatural as the movie Idiocracy portrayed it, but in a way I feel we’ve slided into what they predict.
> I went to see a movie, and instead I saw the future
When I read this title I was sure the author had gone to see Idiocracy.
The whole list reminded me of the film Idiocracy. Any/all of these would fit perfectly into that movie.
They're doing it wrong. The documentary "Idiocracy" showed the perfect solution. A recliner with a built in toilet and food dispenser. Add a swing-arm-shelf to put a laptop and the employee will never have to get up again. Recline the chair and the employee may take the allocated sleep time. No need to go home, ever again.
This clip contains the actual “mistake”, ironically a bug: https://youtu.be/XGge4rj4v_Y
Edit: idiocracy is a great film. However watching these dystopian films as a software engineer is somewhat stressful :)
There's this absolutely perfect scene in the movie 'Idiocracy' where just interacting with the system will get your name mangled so the lead character ends up with 'Not Sure' as his legal name.
Marvel movies are very low brow, and there is nothing wrong with that. Some of my favorite movies are low brow, like Jackass 3D, Idiocracy, and Return of the Living Dead.
But there are different sorts of low-brow, obviously. With some sorts of low-brow entertainment, no fans will be upset when somebody like Scorsese says "That's not cinema." Because they know it, and they're okay with it. Everybody knows Jackass 3D is low brow, and as the sort of person who enjoys it, hearing that said would just make me wonder why somebody was bothering to state the obvious.
I'm not sure if the problem originates with the MCU itself or the MCU fans, but one way or the other the fans seem to take it very seriously and get very cross when somebody voices their dislike of it. Before Scorsese started catching flak for it, Pewdiepie similarly voiced his dislike of MCU and got a lot of very similar angry backlash. (I think the contrast between Scorsese and Pewdiepie is amusing.)
I think maybe part of the problem is the MCU is power fantasy media, where the audience frequently insert themselves into the role of one of the super heroes. Perhaps this involves their ego whenever somebody criticizes that character by way of criticizing the franchise. So perhaps in a way, when somebody insults the MCU they're effectively insulting MCU fans. That's just me spitballing though.
I listened to NWA and 2Live Crew 20, no 30 years ago, gulp.
Most folks have always been morons. Might want to watch the movie Idiocracy fo a glimpse of the future.
Nihil sub sole novum, nothing new under the sun, in latin. You know, from 2000 years ago during the Roman Empire.
The best movie on this topic is “Idiocracy,” a fantastic documentary.
Brave of you to admit it, even here.
I have a similar problem: I'm so goddamned intelligent that this world seems like the movie "Idiocracy" to me. ( I can't watch it: it's too painful. )
When I was younger, this advice from the Book of the Subgenius helped me a lot to get by, "Act like a dumbass and they'll treat you like an equal."
Eventually, I calculated the existence of God, called out "Ollie Ollie Oxen Free", and He showed up and Shook my hand.
Since then my intelligence has been idling: there's nothing further to compute. That, combined with diligent administration of THC, has brought my general intelligence level down to that of an average smart person.
Here's the thing: now that I experience it for myself, normal intelligence is terrifying. It's no wonder everyone is always so stressed out and worried. Their brains are not adequate to the complex artificial world we have built for ourselves. (Are you familiar with the "Peter Principle"? That's what we've done: not promoting people to level their level of incompetence, rather the world has grown complex to the point where most people are now incompetent, through no fault of their own.)
Robert Anton Wilson points out, "Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being."
What I'm saying is, pity them, they know not what they do.
I think it´s funny with that much comments, none of them are really on the core issue here.
Just imagine if Tim Berners-Lee banded together with Mark Andreessen to create a closed and centralized platform, were they could centrally control everything.
Thats why i think the mobile phone plataforms are a real danger to a world were the information flows freely and were no government or company can control.
People are giving to much power to those companies, and when they do what a lot of people know they would do, they just wip, and try to contact his digital lord to just have mercy.
Dont neal, dont help them kill the spirit behind a world were people can access the things they want without any sort of centralized control.
Its beyond me how many people are so worried about government controlling their freedom, but are ok with companies doing it.
We do not need to accept this. The problem is in the app store model.. (they could create it, as long other could compete, but they could NEVER choose what you can access) and guess what, now our governments are too are weak to regulate them.
They can spy on us, know what we are doing, help shady government agencies, control what you see, listen, access and in the end shape what you think (Remember all the mess the simple 'like' Facebook algorithm did to the world.. its too dumb. It reminds me "Donnie Darko" with that shady coaching of "everything should be on the hate-or-love axis").
The despotic government of the future for me is a bunch of big tech companies who control information, and the lives of all of us united to have a world were they will be all powerful and always relevant.
People dont seem to know the dangers we are facing. This is very serious, and its a glimpse of the future. Think how much of what you understand as your right will be suddenly terminated by despotic tech companies who are too powerful to be controled or regulated.
It´s even worse, if you think we are in the dawn of the AI and what a very powerful player can do to keep the control.
You can think im exagerating, and i really hope im wrong, but its a real possibility, and we should not let this awful future be materialized because we did not see how this could be possible.
And to help you figure it out, if you travelled back in time to tell your 2010 self how the world would be in 2019, do you think he would believe it? We are living in idiocracy all over the world, and we use to laugh to those sort of movies. (Dr. Strangelove will soon look a lot like a documentary of the modern days)
Are we witnessing the birth of a new idea, something like "there is no right or wrong if it hurts people's feelings"? will "non binary truth" emerge as law?
You have the right to say anything that's wrong, and nobody can say it's wrong because that would be discriminatory, but if you say something that's right, nobody should say it's right because it would be binary thinking and discriminating? yet you can say it's wrong, because it's hurting your feelings.
Let's try to abolish logic! It will surely lead to immense happiness.
We're at the tipping point where Idiocracy becomes real (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/)
The more Fulton Sheen shows I watch, the more I realize that Idiocracy doesn't have to continue to become a documentary. But that's going to require a moral change, especially among our youth. That's not the main reason I study morality and train my children in it, but if more parents do likewise, we'll have a very real chance of turning the country around. Unfortunately, most adults I've met believe the same thing I was taught growing up: there are no absolute truths or absolute morals, you have to come up with them yourself, etc. That's how you get Trump for President.
So what your saying is the movie "Idiocracy" already happened??
(Plot- the smartest people stop reproducing, only lower rings of society have kids. An average guy wakes up hundreds of years in the future and is a genius)
The lowest common denominator in all of this, then and today, are the people we vote into office.
Local elections about 20% turnout.
Presidential about 50%?
The movie Idiocracy doesn't seem like satire anymore.
It might be controversial to mention, but isn't there an underlying feeling of "us versus them"?
Consider the movie Idiocracy, where the high-IQ couple decided to put off children until they were unable to conceive - contrasted with a trashy man who had dozens of children with many different women.
Do you want the world you live in 20 years from now to be one with people like you or unlike you? Regardless it reduces to people being selfish, but I dont think it's inherently wrong to want to raise children into upstanding citizens.
Hi there,
I sometimes try to help normals relate to me by asking, "You know Sheldon Cooper from Big Bang Theory? I'm like a stupid, slighty-less-social-idiot Sheldon Cooper."
I identify with Dr. Cooper. (BTW it sucks being like that. Don't ever think we do it because we like it. There are a few perks but it mostly sucks. Also, it's like living in "Idiocracy". I can't watch that movie because it's too painful. That's my life. From my point of view y'all are running around pouring Gatorade on the plants talkin bout "It's got lectrolites!" It's getting seriously scary now IRL too: where the fuck are all the fucking insects!? We should all be fucking terrified right now.)
Anyhow, from my POV the "average" programmers should GTFO and stop peeing in the pool. I would fire 90% of working programmers. They're not needed and actively counter-productive.
Also, FP is coming on stronger today than ever before. You are in actual fact just wrong.
The linked article addresses the shortcomings of this explanation:
> One potential explanation was quasi-eugenic. As in the movie “Idiocracy,” it was suggested that average intelligence is being pulled down because lower-IQ families are having more children ("dysgenic fertility" is the technical term). Alternatively, widening immigration might be bringing less-intelligent newcomers to societies with otherwise higher IQs.
> However, a 2018 study of Norway has punctured these theories by showing that IQs are dropping not just across societies but within families. In other words, the issue is not that educated Norwegians are increasingly outnumbered by lower-IQ immigrants or the children of less-educated citizens. Even children born to high-IQ parents are slipping down the IQ ladder.
> Some environmental factor — or collection of factors — is causing a drop in the IQ scores of parents and their own children, and older kids and their younger siblings. One leading explanation is that the rise of lower-skill service jobs has made work less intellectually demanding, leaving IQs to atrophy as people flex their brains less.
There is a documentary about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
> One potential explanation was quasi-eugenic. As in the movie “Idiocracy,” it was suggested that average intelligence is being pulled down because lower-IQ families are having more children ("dysgenic fertility" is the technical term). Alternatively, widening immigration might be bringing less-intelligent newcomers to societies with otherwise higher IQs.
> However, a 2018 study of Norway has punctured these theories by showing that IQs are dropping not just across societies but within families. In other words, the issue is not that educated Norwegians are increasingly outnumbered by lower-IQ immigrants or the children of less-educated citizens. Even children born to high-IQ parents are slipping down the IQ ladder.
That's basically the main premise of the flawed, yet hilarious, movie Idiocracy.
The article covers this:
> One potential explanation was quasi-eugenic. As in the movie “Idiocracy,” it was suggested that average intelligence is being pulled down because lower-IQ families are having more children ("dysgenic fertility" is the technical term).
> [...]
> However, a 2018 study[1] of Norway has punctured these theories by showing that IQs are dropping not just across societies but within families.
The studies would seem to contradict each other, which isn't all that surprising.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/26/6674.full.pdf
I fail to see how it's filled with racism. If you're referring to the theory that it's immigrants and poor people reproducing more, you must not have read the next paragraph before you got angry about it:
>One potential explanation was quasi-eugenic. As in the movie “Idiocracy,” it was suggested that average intelligence is being pulled down because lower-IQ families are having more children ("dysgenic fertility" is the technical term). Alternatively, widening immigration might be bringing less-intelligent newcomers to societies with otherwise higher IQs.
>However, a 2018 study of Norway has punctured these theories by showing that IQs are dropping not just across societies but within families.
The article (and study) make it clear that IQs are dropping from parent to child, even.
Further more, the "Idiocracy hypnosis" assumes that:
> educational attainment is correlated with intelligence, and children's intelligence is correlated to parental intelligence
For this we have no evidence. Quite the opposite in fact -- not that this should stop anyone from enjoying a hilarious movie :)
(Just keep in mind that Idiocracy is fictional)
What are “poor people’s problems”? Do such problems go away simply by not having poor people? In that case, do you solve the first order problems, or try to solve not having the poor?
There is a general correlation between a wide range of malignancies, including lower educational attainment (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0141192950210404) and lower life expectancy (https://jech.bmj.com/content/59/2/115.short). While it's plausible that these problems could be addressed by radically revising the structure of society (for example, if parents could not influence the educational institutions attended by their offspring, educational outcomes might be much more equal), the necessary revisions don't seem plausible in most Western societies as currently constituted. Thus, simply reducing gross inequality seems like a reasonable suggestion.
Would you try to differentiate the under-moneyed from the under-inspired? Are their problems the same?
No. Who cares, anyway?
If you want to use “markets”, how do you avoid Idiocracy?
The existence of the film Idiocracy is not an argument for believing that such a society is a plausible or likely outcome of massive redistribution.
> Here is an anecdote going against this idea.
I'm not sure this goes against his thoughts (and possible experiences) on the matter. In your example, you've established a figure that is in charge for maintaining 'Law and Order'. This person is responsible for creating the rules in which others live by in this (subset of) society.
I have found, over the years, that people respect rules when applied to everyone evenly. They even respect the person charged with dispensing those rules (evenly and fairly).
OP's sentiment, I think, applies to a 'Lord of the Rings' mentality. There are no set rules for behavior that are overseen. Groupthink, group pressure, dominating (if not vulgar) voices may tend to lead. Not unlike the film 'Idiocracy'.
I think there's a documentary you might enjoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
TV in the 80s/90s was limited to a handful of channels. Now you have unlimited channels with YouTube, Netflix et al. Also gaming in the 90s was you'd play one game till the end. Today kids (and adults) jump in true adhd style between the ~100 games they got for free from the app store. Rarely finishing a game till the end.
As a kid I remember having to create my own games and toys using nature (sticks, stones, etc). Today kids get handed a toy and they play. Not much thought is given to creation just consumption. Same with TV/entertainment media.
So comparing the old days to new days is a misnomer.
One thing that's been known for a long time is that boredom breeds creativity. Hence why folks go on sabbaticals, walks etc... when your mind is constantly consumed consuming it doesn't have time to create. And these patterns lead to consumer habits. On the kids front most parents have seen what happens to their kids when they over consume media. Idiocracy (the movie) nailed this issue well.
Sounds like a sure-fire way to accelerate idiocracy...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZ0ZUy7P3E
"Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. 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"
Edit: For those that seem to think I'm calling people who have children stupid - idiocracy is a satirical movie. I would suggest you actually watch the link i posted (i.e. at least "read" the comment before you reply to it...)
I agree. Modern society will eventually die out if this world leads to something that alienates people so much that people don't socialize and reproduce anymore.
"Life will find a way." (Jurassic Park)
Speaking of movies, watch "Idiocracy": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N9nVLXMhPc
How old are you?
In the 80s and early 90s, prior to "climate change" pushing out every other environmental concern, there was a big push to recycle due to the "landfills filling up". Accompanying video would be of a bulldozer maneuvering over a field of garbage that extended as far as the eye could see, which wasn't all that far since there were so many piles of garbage. You'd get videos of cities filled with garbage (garbage service strikes were particularly helpful here), footage from the famous Gar-barge [1], and vague intimations that we're all going to be in garbage up to our knees if we didn't recycle more. Random dumping was also quite a bit more prevalent back then, and I recall walking through state forests and just coming across an impromptu trash dump by the locals, so that helped make it feel more pressing. In more modern times, see the movie Idiocracy or the beginning of Wall-E, both of which were at least visually pulling from images floating around in the 80s and 90s, albeit exaggerated.
It made for good rhetoric, but ultimately, it was pushed out in favor of the other things you may be familiar with because it's basically ludicrous nonsense. Yes, there are absolutely some tricks to building a safe landfill and it's not free, and the risks need to be accounted for and taken care of, but it's essentially inconceivable that the world could run out of landfill space. (By the time that could happen, the technological landscape must have changed so thoroughly that your other predictions about what could happen are just useless.) The threats basically abused people's inability to think volumetrically, which anybody who has done a pool-building project, or a significant concrete project, or significant landscaping project, or anything else that involves trying to think volumetrically. You learn there's always more volume than you think there is. It's true that if we had to store trash areally, we'd be in some trouble, but landfills are volumetric, and society needs a lot less than you might think as a result. Yes, we have some impressive trash piles here and there, but there isn't all that many of them, and there can't be, because even if we tried to generate enough trash to become a problem with landfills, we'd long since have strangled ourselves on the other problems that would produce. (That is, you think we've got a CO2 problem now, wait until we try to produce 1000x more "stuff". We wouldn't get far enough into that process for the landfills to be our biggest problem.)
Energy usage and the corresponding pollution, care about contamination of groundwater and such, and simply straight-up the economic advantages of efficiency are all much better reasons to take good care of our trash and try to extract as much value from every unit of resource we take from the ground via reduce, reuse, recycle before getting the next resource.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobro_4000
> I've thought this too but then you are leaving the future to those who breed more irresponsibly.
The movie "Idiocracy" addresses this very issue. It's a comedy, and I really enjoyed it.
makes sense, if you'd consider that atheists probably reproduce at a lower rate. kinda like Idiocracy (the movie).
I kind of have this feeling for most of Mike Judge's stuff. I think we've all been in an Office Space situation. Being from the same part of Texas that King Of The Hill is based on, I totally know people that I could swear Judge based the characters off of for the show. At this point, Idiocracy should be moved from the comedy category and into the prophecy/documentary category.
In office space Peter Gibbons, our white Alpha, and the only guy with any sense, tries to stay sane and hold it together in a world that has gone haywire.
In King of the Hill, our white Alpha, Hank Hill, the only guy with any common sense, tries to stay sane and keep it from all falling apart in a world that has gone Haywire.
In Idiocracy, our White Alpha, Joe Bauer, the only guy with any sense, tries to stay sane and keep it from falling apart in a world that has gone haywire.
In Extract, Joel, our down to earth White Alpha, tries to stay sane and hold it together in a world that has gone haywire.
And in Silicon Valley, well- you get the idea. I love Mike Judge films, he is an astute observer and hilarious. but his ouvre is not broad. He's got a formula, and it works, and that's fine.
This is a pretty great pop cultural analysis of American society of when Idiocracy was created.
I think the movie is a reflection of the time it was created, but it's a little less tied to that moment than you think. If you think of it as a subversion of the generic Jetsons vision of automation leading to mass complacency then it could be a more universal film than you portray it as. (Probably pre-Jetsons but '50s postwar sci-fi probably exemplifies that vision the best. Or maybe it extends further back, and the Idiocrats are just tackier versions of the Eloi from Wells.)
I think the big realization we have now is that automation is far less utopian than we expected, it comes with complications and externalities and inequality, with a lot of what we have now is just abstracting away work so that someone less well-off and farther away is doing it. Funnily enough one minor "plothole" I always had with Idiocracy is that if everyone is stupid, how were the machines still semi-functional? How did their society produce the cameramen at the monster truck death rally? Obviously, the whole movie is a satire or lampoon, but it made me think how society could culturally regress while still remaining technologically semi-functional, buoyed by artifacts of the ancient past like the Eloi or some descendent race from a fantasy setting.
I think if you were to make an Idiocracy today it would have to be focused on how social media and the 24/7 online culture have disrupted the way we relate to one another. Instead of 1001 channels of trashy reality TV it would be conspiracy theories and fringe ideas and charlatans appealing to both emotion and pseudo-logic. (Interspersed with unboxing videos and ASMR and live-streaming, sure.) It feels like anti-intellectualism today is fueled more by anger and zeal (this applies to all political stripes). The current boom feels a lot less even and people are far more desperate and stressed out. Our attention spans are even more frayed. Whereas the original Idiocracy was more about complacency birthed from prosperity, as you pointed out. (Though that rather ignores specific Bush administration policies that could be criticized as anti-intellectual, whether culture wars at home or military aggression abroad. But maybe their absence from that film makes it, as I mentioned earlier, more generic.)
When I said "Bush-era", I was talking more of the national zeitgeist during Bush's presidency and not so much about how Bush himself was perceived.
The Bush era—or rather the core of the era, from about 2002 to 2007 (i.e. after the dust from 9/11 settled and before the housing crisis), was a boom time, and much of the future situation feels like it comes from "what if this boom lasts forever?" (i.e. society becomes wealthy enough to automate everything, so people just sit around and watch Ow My Balls and drink Brawndo every day instead of having to work). Something made nowadays would probably start with a premise that comes from "Millenials can't afford anything".
Mainstream culture during the Bush era was also before the sudden explosion in nerd culture. Superheroes hadn't eaten the entertainment industry yet, nostalgia wasn't yet a driving force in pop culture, and it was still uncool to admit that you enjoy RPGs or reading comic books or doing whatever else nerds do. A parody of modern cultural memes would resemble Ready Player One more than Idiocracy, and Ready Player One wasn't even intended as parody. Instead, Idiocracy spends a lot of time lampooning shock reality TV (e.g. Ow My Balls), which was a huge thing in the mid-00s with shows like Jackass and Fear Factor but isn't big anymore. And the general culture is different. Like, you had people saying things like "you talk faggy", which sadly was common in real life during the mid-00s, and as such it was a ripe target for parody, but would be completely taboo now. Even in bro-culture you wouldn't see that in 2018 (I mean, there's still a lot of homophobia around, but you don't see those slurs dropped casually anymore), and so a parody of modern bro-culture probably wouldn't even mention it. TBH, a parody of modern bro-culture would probably involve MRAs and redpillers and pseudo-intellectuals who worship Jordan Peterson.
Like, the _idea_ of a movie about the future being full of stupid people would still be relevant in 2018 (and you can thank Trump for that), but it wouldn't be Idiocracy because Idiocracy was more about parodying mid-00s pop culture than anything else. I'd imagine a late-10s Idiocracy would involve some combination of nerd culture turned mainstream eating the world, '90s nostalgia (with "only '90s kids remember" somehow being reiterated over and over 500 years in the future), avocado toast, and nobody being able to afford a house.
Office Space and Silicon Valley, sure, but Idiocracy has aged _horribly_.
That movie is full of memes that haven't been relevant since the mid-00s (and specifically, the humor in the movie has a distinct Bush-era vibe which straight-up feels foreign in 2018... it feels like a period piece even though it's set in the future), and I lost whatever enjoyment of it that I had left when actual Neo-Nazis began using the movie to promote their pseudoscience about race and intelligence.
> 8. Should I think about how many children I have (or don’t have)?
Maybe the worst point of the whole article, here is my point of view : educated and people aware of environment change have fewer kids, people with the opposite way of thinking have more kids and have the same education. We create a world where the people who don't care outnumber those who care, since the most praised government system is Democracy the power goes to the number.
Path to idiocracy (great message for a comedy movie).
Well, that would be an argument if you have bothered made it. Taleb, for one, has.
The reference is all wrong though. People in Idiocracy are just idiots -- the simple kind. That's the very base of the money.
Whereas people doing "genetically modifications" while they might not know all the implications of are not idiots, just smart people who commit hubris.
Different thing, different movie. Try "Jurassic Park" or "Frankenstein" for your kind of message.
I don't know anymore if Idiocracy is a movie or not. It's like I'm living a bad dream where common sense is at a premium.
I wonder how this is going to evolve. Are we going to get used to see garbage everywhere (like in the movie "Idiocracy"), or will we take action?
I noticed a similar comment here the other day:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17721496
Blogs are such a waste. I dont need to hear your life story and opinions. Post the situation, the plan, and details/documentation.
I do not have the time to read a literal 6,000 words.
I for one, do enjoy reading a long article and if I'm busy I will bookmark it/add to reading list for later. Everything doesn't need to be crammed into 280 characters or less. Maybe I'm just old fashioned and should embrace our race to the future presented in the movie Idiocracy?
> Germany's birth rate is 1.5
> It seems to be inversely correlated with first world living status and education more than anything.
Well, at least for Germany I can provide some anecdata: either you're on welfare and have the state fund your life including kids or you're rich. The middle class and especially the young (20-30y) population in the major cities simply often cannot afford kids, not with the exploded rents and the trend to unpaid (!) internships, year-limited contracts, "gig work" and other things making my generation's life a living hell. I'm 27 and lucky to have landed an unlimited employment contract. The whole situation reminds me more and more of the setting of Idiocracy, and that without the US president in that movie being obviously inspirational for the current real world one.
In addition the young population that fled the rural areas (due to e.g. job availability, the lack of public transport, any form of Internet faster than ISDN, ...) but left their parents/grandparents behind cannot rely on them to help with bringing up a child, further lowering the birth rate.
For Italy, the situation is even worse - depending on the source and demographic target, up to 70-80% of young people still live with their parents because they cannot afford their own home (https://www.thelocal.it/20161024/two-thirds-of-italian-millennials-live-with-their-parents). Hard enough to... uh, get going with your partner when your parents are next room, much less actually wanting to raise a child.
Seriously. It's scary how accurate the movie Idiocracy is becoming.
(That would be Idiocracy, a movie by Mike Judge from 2006. I enjoyed it quite a bit, go see it if you get the chance.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/)
That’s what the intro to the movie Idiocracy says :P
Reminds me of the opening scene of the movie Idiocracy. It makes sense that those that can afford the greater priced homes are thoughtful enough not to have lots of children.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZ0ZUy7P3E
There's a really nice scene in the movie Idiocracy about that sort of phenomenon.
The movie Idiocracy is an example.
The didn't list idiocracy. My favorite movie, but pretty bleak vision of the future.
Have you ever seen the film "Idiocracy"?
The world of Idiocracy is a utopia. They're not only willing but eager to appoint the smartest man in the world to high office. President Camacho steps aside as soon as he realises that there is someone better qualified to be president. The movie shows a world that is deeply dysfunctional, but also devoid of any signs of bigotry, hatred or totalitarianism. There are no death camps, no migrations of starving people, no persecuted minority being scapegoated for the food crisis. We should envy those happy idiots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmZOZjHjT5E
Ever seen the movie Idiocracy? I feel like society is becoming more and more like that. Laws like these are being passed and people are too numb to care.
I don’t understand why it’s such a taboo. Sperm donors are already selected based on favorable traits. If you’re a loser with no job or have a family history of diseases and cancer they do not want your sperm. And there’s nothing stopping people with poor genetics from breeding promiscuously with multiple women anyway, leaving behind single mothers in their wake. The Darwin Awards are a dark celebration of people dying in stupid avoidable ways and thus “removing themselves from the gene pool”.
People with excellent genetic traits need some sort of advantage to meet each other. The movie Idiocracy may have been a satirical comedy, but its message is actually not far from the truth of where we’re heading if someone doesn’t do something about improving the gene pool. To me, that is way more terrifying than genetically conscious dating.
And just yesterday, I was thinking no one here would need to explain who Mike Judge is to the general audience.
"It's got what plants crave" is a line from his movie Idiocracy. It is directly relevant the discussion at hand, but it's also a zero-effort joke that contributes nothing new.
There is a movie called Idiocracy which has some version of this. Pretty hilarious.
I love "Idiocracy", but it is so painful to watch today. It's more a documentary than a comedy.
Akira is one of the greats. It’s essentially the story of post-WWII Japan retold as a sci-fi story.
Idiocracy (2005?) was a cult film for years and has recently become less obscure.
Anything with Sharlto Copley in it is going to be good. Or at least his role in it will be good. What a great and under appreciated actor.
This "toilet water" part really reminds me of the movie Idiocracy...
This administration and the direction we are heading reminds me of the movie Idiocracy.
I'm torn between wanting to agree with you ("Idiocracy is a documentary!", et al), and the cognitive dissonance of the greater and greater scientific and technological achievements we continue to create.
Maybe there's an analogue at work here; like financial/wealth inequality, but for intellect (that feels incredibly elitist to 'verbalize').
This sounds like the Idiocracy plot summary, which is still predicting the future more accurately than I'd prefer.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
"And that would be the end of equity compensation in startups as we know it."
Good. This entire industry is a lottery. We all laughed at the slot machines in the hospital in the movie "Idiocracy". "You could win free health-care!" And yet we're all hoping to win a life of luxury on the start-up lottery.
Not necessarily. This works for developed countries too. As an illustration, see e.g. the premise of the movie "Idiocracy".
So you're saying the movie Idiocracy is where we will end up? Guess I had better start investing in Gatorade.
I shudder to think what happens in 20 more years, when the last potato peelers are gone :-/ The movie "Idiocracy" inevitably comes to mind [1] :(
However I do think it's something more than just the burden or unburden of our new technology. Logical thinking should be an universal trait, no matter what the environment is like.
However one thing which is eating into that equation, is logical thinking is almost never promoted in modern education. Even in a declining IQ environment, promoting and teaching logical thinking would reverse a lot of the seeming "stupidity" in our society.
But I still do think there is something more going on. It's not just (lack of) education.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAqIJZeeXEc
There is a reason Idiocracy has been described as a documentary :)
The movie idiocracy comes to mind. Apparently the flynn effect slowed down. Some people hypothesize that the wellfare state has a dysgenic effect by redistributing income from high IQ (high income) people to low IQ (low income or wellfare recipients)... It effectively creates disproportionate economic incentives for having children, and some indications put heritability of IQ above 0.7
Some days ago I watched the movie Idiocracy which is set in a future where Gatorade is used for everything and water is only known as something used to flush the toilet. I didn't realize we're this close.
The film Idiocracy is a prediction not satire.
That's people attending school, not having reading comprehension -- which isn't just getting something from the text, but understanding precisely what it says and doesn't say -- or having much of an attention span. Just an cursory listen and read to the gibberish in marketing, TV, movies, on youtube, not to mention people in real life, while not showing me a trend, shows me there's lots of FUBAR accepted as normalcy. Idiocracy was optimistic I think, no way is it going to take 500 years.
Reminds me of the movie "Idiocracy"
That's well and good that you feel that way personally, but the grandparent was suggesting that anyone who doesn't share that opinion could play a role in the movie Idiocracy.
But to address your point specifically, respectfully, 'giving your kids a fighting chance at getting a good job and having a good life' doesn't require very much money - pretty much nothing beyond healthy food, clothing, a roof over their head located someplace with decent public schools, and doing your best to instill them with the right character and values.
You don't need to live in the Valley and make six figures to have a good life. There are millions of happy people working in productive mid-five-figure jobs across the country right now. Do you really believe that, right now, you couldn't raise a kid who could accomplish that? There are people in awful areas with awful schools, who can't, sure, and real poverty engenders social conditions that make that difficult, but is that true for you, right now?
I don't mean to try to convince you to have kids, but I feel like a lot of people believe that if they have kids, they have to provide them with every material advantage possible to compete in a rat race/keep up with the Joneses, and I think that's unhealthy for society and even for individuals - after all, having kids later in life dramatically increases the rates of virtually every adverse medical condition kids can have.
To some parents, this matters a lot and it matters even more to the individual making this choice because they free themselves of a huge burden put on them by expectations of society/family.
I always considered it weird how "getting children" is the default choice for so many people, even when they are clearly in no good position for anything like that, a certain scene from the movie Idiocracy always comes to my mind when I think about that.
It's incredulous how people can find git daunting; especially the simple usage most make of it. Yet, I constantly see people refer to such simple and easy to use CLI tools as an obstactle in CS courses, not a helpful tool. Welcome to the fulfilled prophecy of the movie Idiocracy. This is why MIT had to stop teaching SICP and why many courses uses Java instead of C... Good luck learning pointers and assembly then. Good luck ever knowing how to create and manipulate data structures, how to create a filesystem, database, OS, scheduler, etc; or how to develop/improve and implement algorithms used in ML and AI (to be fair, this is math... and which is why programmers need to stop avoiding math, it's another issue, but related. stop avoiding complexity, because it's a fucking big and scary monster lurking beneath everything you're working with, just waiting in the dark...)
What we need is people who understand the complexity we constantly throw more shit on top of; it's only going to get worse the more data points and networking we have to deal with. Pretty soon we're going to have a massive network of autonomous vehicles on physical, country-spanning networks of roads. For this we need systems people. Not front-end developers. The sad thing is that most programmers are absolutely useless when shit hits the fan.
When I saw the movie Idiocracy, I said this is a bit exaggerated. Well, we are heading there in acceleration.
It's astounding how little people care about the many walks of life.
Correct language usage is not a previous -> current generational issue. We are witnessing the dumbing down of culture or in other words: Idiocracy is becoming a documentary.
Swap regular water for Brawndo. It's got electrolytes.
Watch the movie "Idiocracy"
I agree that most managers aren't very bright. It's like in the movie "idiocracy" except with the added frustration that being intelligent doesn't get you noticed or promoted.
I couldn't agree more about your analysis of Idiocracy. While the movie is entertaining, I found it surprising that it ignored the developing world (where intelligence/IQ/appropriate-proxy is increasing and poverty decreasing).
The whole movie seemed to be a cheap dig on stereotypes of rural/redneck behavior rather than any meaningful look at society. The conclusion that it hand-holds the audience is that the "wrong" kind of Americans don't respect intellectuals enough and they will ruin the country. The movie literally ends by the educated savior being respected for being smart.
I don't agree with your indictment of satire in general; I consider Idiocracy to be pretty ham-fisted in that regard. Especially compared to much better Mike Judge works like Office Space and Silicon Valley.
I disagree. Idiocracy IMHO was designed to show one possible result - in satirical form - of the race to the bottom that we see every day.
If it's a "cheap way to feel smart", then perhaps those that feel smart merely by watching the movie don't realize they are part of it.
Others don't need to feel smart, and simply find it funny and disquieting. I thought it was a brilliant satire when I watched it some years ago.
One problem with satire (or cynicism in general) is that it's a cheap way to feel smart about one's self. Idiocracy really seems to have been designed to encourage this in people. However, the movie is divided into two parts, the first five minutes and the next eighty-five. The first part is basically an advertisement for eugenics, and the rest is slapstick. People always feel smart because they "get" the second part.
I agree this would make sense in countries with high birth rates, but applying it to countries with low birth rates would just accelerate their extinction. Also partially related, but movie "Idiocracy" (http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/) comes to mind here.
> What happens to civilization/nations/etc when this all anyone is fed for a generation?
Have you seen the movie Idiocracy? Probably some variation of that, but worse.
I thought Mike Judge's movie Idiocracy was an amusing reducto de absurdum of a population that's doesn't believe in reasoning, though it's becoming eerily similar to the present direction of the USA these days... this article in point.
Reproduction has a very well-earned taboo thanks to the terrible eugenics trends of the early 20th century. But, this taboo prevents us from seeing some things clearly. One of those things we tend to avoid thinking about as a society is the who/when/why of parenting, and the long-term effects of those decisions (or lack thereof).
The movie Idiocracy satirized one aspect of this, but it still doesn't get much discussion in terms of family planning on a societal scale -- whether to encourage or discourage childbearing, whether some groups should be encouraged more than others and the moral questions thereby raised, etc.
So, acting shocked and invoking "privilege" doesn't move the conversation forward, when there is ample underexplored territory in which to do so.
It's hard to take seriously an article and media outlet that claims the Number 1 "explosive allegation" is this:
information allegedly includes a videotape of Trump watching several Russian sex workers urinate on the bed the Obamas slept in at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow.
Really? Who cares.
As to the second point, how dramatic. Russia rigged the US election? I far simpler explanation is that US politics really is on the path suggested in the film Idiocracy. You don't need an external enemy to account for your bizarre politics, yourselves will suffice.
Idiocracy is a 2006 movie by Mike Judge. The plot of the film starts with intelligent people declining to reproduce.
I might be missing something, but this sounds like an idea taken from the movie Idiocracy.
s/high-consuming/high IQ/
Yes it does. Idiocracy is a far-future documentary, not a comedy. We absolutely need to encourage the highly intelligent to breed.
"It had a guy playing electric guitar on top of a giant flamethrower"
I'm reminded of the movie Idiocracy.
Watch the documentary called Idiocracy by Mike Judge for a good idea of where it's going.
^ Idiocracy (the movie) to anyone who missed the reference.
I'm not so sure about that.
Robots will not be immediately cost-effective for all production and it may be 30 years before they permeate manufacturing. Until then humans will serve.
I've complained on HN about the low quality of many goods (e.g., nail clippers) and about how the supply chain to US consumers today is no better than it was in my youth more than 50 years ago. Most of you were not yet around to know what the supply chain was like 50 years ago so please suspend your disbelief.
QC in some countries appears impervious to consumer feedback; they couldn't produce a decent set of pliers 20 years ago and they cannot today. They may never succeed due to their unique social and political histories. Lack of communication and competitive feedback in non-free markets inhibits quality. In contrast USA manufacturers 50 years ago and earlier produced very high quality goods (many still in use!).
I expect the USA to bring back production of high-quality goods and a more robust supply chain. Until someone invents a Star Trek replicator, I expect JIT inventory management to be discarded in many industries; it's primary benefit was bigger bonuses for MBAs.
No education I know of available today will prepare youth for the future they face. Once machine learning and AI become widely embedded in manufacturing and commerce, skills required will be beyond the ability of most. Meanwhile grades are falling and testing becoming more lenient.
Someday almost no one will have a job. We should plan accordingly.
Just for fun, see the movie "Idiocracy ":
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Thread on IMDB discussing the relevance of "Idiocracy" to Trump's victory today:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/board/nest/257141945?ref_=tt_bd_2
Trump runs as the anti-establishment candidate and with his charisma does a good job selling it. His candidacy reminds me of the movie Idiocracy.
I really think the movie Idiocracy nailed the scary potential future of democracy. If elections continue and build on this trend of featuring reality tv show style candidates and media that lives off hyperbole, eventually we'll just start electing the most popular celebrities.
Reminds me of the beginning of the movie Idiocracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unoMMru4-c0
Ha, that's the starting premise of Idiocracy http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
The sun clearly does have a causal relationship with traffic, as traffic is exclusively the product of humans who are not sleeping, and is powered by the decayed products of photosynthesis. You may wish to choose a better example.
Also the study is apparently proposing that natural selection is favoring low educational achievement. This, not incidentally, is the fundamental premise of the movie Idiocracy, and certainly has a plausible logic to it, though I am wholly unqualified to judge the methodology of this study.
Hear, hear!
It truly amazes me, though I can confirm witnessing them (old and new users to the internet mostly), that there actual people who click on "One Weird Tip to Lose Ten Pounds"...
But even they eventually learn like the rest of us to be wary of them from what I have learnt.
My conjecture is that ultimately when new internet user growth rate slows enough, ads will no longer be a viable and naturally die out! The alternative, is that nothing changes, and that ads continue to derive value by consusensus of excessively consumerist and stupid people similar to the cult classic film, Idiocracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
Not sure, but I think that may have been a reference to "Idiocracy", the film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
The president of the future is a professional wrestler, iirc.
I know Idiocracy, and I like Mike Judge, but I don't really believe that (much of) intelligence is heritable, at least in the way the film suggests.
I base my prediction that feminist will die out not so much on abstract theories of information transfer and evolution, but on what I observe in the world.
where did Feminism come from
This is an interesting question, and I could comment at length on this subject, but maybe HN is not the right venue for this subject matter, especially as what I'd say goes against the ruling SJW orthodoxy.
Interesting ideas but I have some big doubts about the last statement.
> In the long run social conservatives will win though, because they have way more children than feminists (male and female). Feminist attitudes will simply die out.
You know the film Idiocracy? It's a hilariously satirical scifi story based on the premise of "intelligent people reproduce way less than stupid people, therefore intelligence will die out".
Which is a very funny idea, but it's just not how selection works.
Your example is doubtful for slightly different reasons. Historically, the selection pressure on pieces of information (Feminist attitudes) has always been strongly tied to the reproductive ability of the medium it is embedded in (people). However, that is changing, information is getting loose, first as artifacts, writing, but today it even has forms of agency (computing). The world population will stagnate, which also factors into it. Spreading your genes used to be, but really is no longer a guarantee to also spread your ideas.
Or maybe look at it the other way, if things work the way you describe, where did Feminism come from in the first place? How could it ever gain mainstream traction in an environment filled with reproducing conservatives? It's a bit absurd. Also, if the process you describe only affects "the long run", what's stopping Feminism from popping up over and over again in the short term?
I think the confusion comes from defining what is a "fitter" organism?
and if we keep to trend, its quite likely we will bring Idiocracy[1] to fruition
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
What I've seen and heard of SV reminds me of when I posted an article by "Fake Lennart Poettering" (me), about getting around lkml hostility to systemd kernel suggestions by building systemd as a unikernel that chain-loads Linux and intercepts some of its system calls and replaces them with more systemd-friendly versions.
Someone replied: "This is like the movie Idiocracy: so close to reality that it isn't funny."
A dubious vindication of Mike Judge's satirical skills: reality catches up so quickly with his satire that it fails at comedy.
It's also the ending of Idiocracy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/) :P
Of course, everyone should know that Idiocracy is a time-displaced documentary...
No mention of Idiocracy?! This movie predicted our fate: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
Edit: I read the IMDb blurb – ”… five centuries in the future …”. I guess we’re 500 years ahead of schedule.
Not sure Idiocracy is that obscure.
Just wait for Starbucks to catch up to the movie...
[ Obscure Reference, Apologies ]
I can't help but be reminded of the Carls Jr. self service kiosks in the movie Idiocracy.
Anyone remember the movie Idiocracy?
It was a fun suggestion but going with it would have reminded me of the world exemplified by the movie Idiocracy. We are heading in that direction with the likes of adult colouring books, but I think it's a good sign that there is still some form of resistance.
The idiocracy movie covered this very well: "lead, follow or get out of the way"
The picture painted by the classic sitcom universe and essays like Paul Graham's "Revenge of the Nerds"—the one described so casually that it's almost as if agreement about it is expected to be a foregone conclusion—is something I found totally unrelatable growing up. It was something I always just chalked up to bad tropes that were holdovers from from sitcoms from an era past.
I was brainy in school, but none of the axes that groups split on resembled the ones you see in the movies, so most of my friends weren't. No jocks vs nerds. Nobody was intimidated or otherwise pressured as a result of doing well in class. More often than not, people were likely to be down on themselves for feeling dumb or when they felt they weren't keeping up. The best predictor of clustering habits was usually outgoing vs timid, and then those in the middle. But mobility within those clusters meant that even those were pretty fluid.
The type of humor my class most valued was, if not intelligent, then at least quick. Contrary to what the article lays out, in my view, Matthew Perry's Chandler Bing is probably one of the biggest influences there.
Aside from standard relationship drama, most everybody in my class got along. I wore glasses for a year starting in 4th grade after I began getting headaches at the end of the day. Once shortly after getting my prescription, a classmate called me "four-eyes" after lunch, and I just laughed in his face. He'd really meant for that one to sting, and he was a lot tougher than me, but that just wasn't a thing.
Anti-intellectualism was something that I noticed became a big thing after 9/11, to the point that I found it genuinely alarming, but it showed up clearer in the world I was seeing than the one I was living. Thankfully, the insanity died down (at least from where I'm standing), but we have Idiocracy and American Dad as artifacts. I've tried referencing that era since then, but I have difficulty, especially in regards to using words to recreate the world at that time in order to have a conversation about exactly why something like Idiocracy was originally made. My family and acquaintances who lived through it seem to just see the last 20 years as one homogeneous blur. "Shit was crazy" is what I've resigned myself using and is how I described it a few weeks ago to a friend of mine from Iraq.
After I'd graduated and moved out of state for school, I read a longform article about the death of irony that I thought was on-point in describing the world I grew up in vs the world I saw on TV growing up, but it's none of the ones that show up when I search for it now. The best and most direct treatment of the topic that I've seen since then is in the scene in 21 Jump Street when Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum first run into Dave Franco and his friends on the first day of their assignment (even though they fudged the timeline a bit).
My high school graduating class was something like 40 people, and I graduated in 2007. This all happened in a public school in a small town in North Texas (Collinsville).
I was fairly sure that my hometown wasn't special and this was just the way the world worked now, compared to the sitcom holdovers. Went to the University of Oklahoma (it's ranked first in National Merit Scholar enrollments for a public university, and they give out lots of money). Freshman year I was mostly weirded the fuck out, especially by the other people on my floor in my dorm and in the CS program. ("This isn't how people act in real life anymore, right? Nobody really buys into these tropes, do they?") Ended up having a pretty bad time there for as long as I stayed, and I left less sure about how the much the world differed from TV after all. I'm in neither Oklahoma nor North Texas anymore. What I've seen since suggests that Norman, Oklahoma is an anomaly; every now and then I'll meet someone with the same alma mater and the weirdness comes back. As far as predictors go, that has turned out to be a pretty good one for whether I'll be able to get along with someone or be totally at a loss for how to interact and connect with them. (Some false positives about whether someone will pass, but zero false negatives so far, unfortunately.)
Oh no, not another argument about the world is going downhill/being less appreciative of intelligence/whatever because of some TV show. I mean, I'm genuinely surprised it wasn't referring to either The Simpsons or Idiocracy, but the point's always the same.
There was no 'golden age' where nerds were popular and intelligence was always the most valued part of society. People aren't morons because they read about celebrity gossip or buy a ton of stuff or interact on social media. There was always a sizeable portion of the population who didn't care for intellectual parts of life, even back in the days of newspapers and radio broadcasts. Go back even further, and well, you were often deeply unpopular (at best) for having views considered 'dangerous' to society.
At least nowadays, it's easier to get involved in subcultures and groups for things you're interested in rather than being limited by geography. At least a lot of things previously considered 'for geeks' are now mainstream in some way. At least there's now a potential option for an intelligent outsider to make their fortune without having to be born into wealth or popular in a large company.
Anti intellectualism is not new, it's not increasing and it's certainly not bringing the 'downfall' of western civilisation.
The issue is people. When we ripped out the back end manual fax process in favor of a better system with OCR, APIs et al we also had to change the interface phone number from ph#1 to ph#2. Changing that alone proved to be a bigger headache than building the technology. Not to mention the education part of people. lol.. I think the movie Idiocracy was onto something ;-)
I agree, and I think the flood of low-quality games has actually had the opposite effect that people were predicting.
Rather than drowning out good games, it is becoming easier to tell which games have some love put into them. It reminds me of the movie Idiocracy[0]. What might have been a C game before Greenlight suddenly looks pretty damn good compared to all the F's floating around them.
[0]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
i remember reading the controversy surrounding corporations' offering an egg freezing plan and thinking to myself, 'i was unaware that was even a thing'
then some time later i was having a reviewing of idiocracy and i realised i had heard of egg freezing plans before
because i know i had seen the film before and the film was referencing the option
There are many arguments in favor of income equality/social democracy, and some of them make sense (less crime for example). However, I've never heard anybody point out before that it's not genetically sustainable in the very long-term. Well, ok, there was that movie Idiocracy...
Reminds me of the movie 'Idiocracy', in terms of quality analysis
I think it is hard to get progress when number of Americans unsure about evolution increased from 7% to 21% from 1985 to 2005 [1].
I think Idiocracy prediction [2] is what we are getting.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16902112 [2] http://uproxx.com/movies/2014/10/the-many-signs-that-mike-judges-idiocracy-is-almost-upon-us/1/
Those were paintings made for cigar boxes. Of course they are not supposed to be accurate. They are jokes, visions of the future in the same way that Idiocracy is a vision of the future. (Okay, that might be a sensitive topic for some, since there actually are people who do take that movie seriously for some weird reason, including believing its basic premise to have any basis in reality.)
Of course Idiocracy reflects some of the beliefs about how we think the future might be, but in the service of creating a fantastical, entertaining and funny picture the image of the future it draws is also deliberately grotesque and weird and as much about the present as it is about what we belief the future to be.
I don’t think those paintings are all the different. They should not be taking as a really serious attempt to predict the future, I think.
This reminds me of the movie "idiocracy", where the protagonist got his law degree at Costco.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
Idiocracy rules! See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
And of course Idiots Rule. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrUUd-30Bzw
Idiocracy is a movie, it's entertainment. There's also two sides to it, one of which a lot of people don't seem to pick up on. The protagonist of the story, the smart guy in the future of idiots, never really applied himself, he was content with being smarter than the average idiots, and he thought that was good enough. It wasn't until he got off his ass and engaged with the world that things started to get better.
Besides which, it's fictional. While there is some truth to the fact that "less educated" people tend to reproduce at a comparatively higher rate than the more educated, it's a fallacy that somehow this is resulting in a "dumbing down" of the human race. For example, raw IQ test scores have been increasing over time quite dramatically (IQ is always normalized to the mean so 100 IQ is by definition the average).
Idiocracy is an entertaining story, and it holds some lessons worth taking to heart, but it is not the truth.
> It's kind of a joke, but also really not. It's frightening.
It is a joke.
Idiocracy relies on the assumption that the "more intelligent" people are snobs and too busy and too perfectionist with their life to have children, while the "less intelligent" people are mostly having sex and are too lazy to apply contraception properly.
Essentially, the first half of the movie is a justification for elitism.
I'm less afraid of Idiocracy to become true, but more afraid of politicians acting as if they believed in this movie.
The second half of this movie is more interesting, though. It may be interpreted as an analogy of how the most gifted people (in the sense of "intellectual giftedness") may feel living in today's world. (by putting today's "normal" people into a dumb world) But even that is, of course, a funny hyperbole, and nothing to take too seriously.
Why are you assuming that the sheer number of first-round offspring generated is the only winning strategy for genes? It's a heck of a lot more complex than "who can pop the most babies the most quickly".
What about the multi-generational odds of survival and reproduction? What about surviving famines or predators? What about competition in sexual selection?
Idiocracy was an amusing movie, but it's underlying premise was never realistic.
Guess so. That's the premise of "Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter" by Steven Johnson (http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Bad-Good-You-Actually/dp/1594481946). Though Idiocracy is a great underappreciated film.
I really liked all of them, but episode 2 was probably my favourite of season 1. It is over the top compared to other parts of the series, but not compared to other experimental far future or alternate universe scifi. For example: Dark City, Idiocracy, Cube, Moon, Battle Royale, Maze Runner.
Just go watch the movie "idiocracy" and there's the language that will be used even before 3000AD.
Edit: On further research, it appears you're pretty much precisely right. This is part of a White Nationalist group with strong ties to eugenics, fascist, neo-Nazi, and other racist organizations.
________________________________
(Earlier)
The notion of a weakening of intelligence or other traits is one that's been kicked around a lot over the years. You'll find it in movies like Idiocracy as well. It's definitely present in a lot of racist / white superiority writings over the years, and some comments below link the Ulster Institute for Social Research with racist fringe elements. I didn't know that when I posted this item.
Turns out that the Ulster Institute for Social Research is the creation of white nationalist Richard Lynn, and has some decidedly racist associations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynn
Given that, I'd really be interested in seeing what those with actual backgrounds in genetics and intelligence have to say about the research and methods here.
But as people will still be people, ability to get what we want easily also drives culture.
Deep inside we all are shockingly selfish and lazy little animals. We all take the easiest road, at least what for our selfish desires seems to be the easiest road. Sometimes, it's looks like a hard or unselfish road on the outside, but needed to fullfill our own selfish needs. Even buddisths are selfish, as they try to be free from selfish desires for the selfish reason of reduce pain in their live.
There's always a melt down of higher cultures. People having all the tools to fullfill their basic needs loose the drive to achieve. That's why I generally see this "we make the world a better place with all our great services" direction quite sceptical. It was never easier to distract ourselves with mobile devices, but do we benefit? No, Apple, Google, FB, MS and Amazon do.
BTW: One of my favorite movies is Idiocracy :-)
There is a comedy movie that plays that scenario. 500 years from how people use technology but nobody understands how it works. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
Idiocracy was still a bad movie.
Widely-cited movies often mean different things to different people. Their indeterminacy increases citations. Idiocracy parodies advertising, GMO farming, psychotropic mists dispensed by ATMs to calm down annoyed customers, and many other topics. Is that more or less helpful to society than vampire romance or robot mayhem movies?
This is an awful lot of analysis on the social implications of a movie created by the guy who crafted Beavis and Butthead. If you are cultivating your outlook of the future from Idiocracy, then you probably care not about the real prospects of the future anyway. The author is taking this much too seriously.
Maybe the overall IQ has lowered since we set the standard of 100? :)
As the movie "Idiocracy" put it, evolution does not necesserily reward intelligence.
Technology has a tendency to distill everything to its essence. This is just another step towards a world in which the number one film in the country is called "Ass" [1].
I'm 50/50 on this happening within a decade.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
Do you know the movie Idiocracy? That is basically propaganda for that idea.
You have to see that in context, this was before the second world war and he wasn't aware that in the future you can manipulate/analyze genes.
Today he would probably just be an advocate for that kind of technology.
Definitely not an easy topic, but also not black and white.
Maybe there is more from him, but your source indicates an opinion like that.
And don't forget "Idiocracy", the finest documentary ever made about SoCal.
This slightly reminds me of the movie named idiocracy.
Hmmmm ... I think I believe both articles! Higher education and social media are both in decline. Who needs critical thinking and the ability to gossip 24/7? I'm going to go rewatch Idiocracy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/).
There is a really great movie on this topic from 2006 called Idiocracy.
Note that the death of expertise may only be something that applies to the culture of the USA, not other countries. Or at least, not most other countries.
Problem is they might override the AI's (more-likely correct) judgment. See the table labeled "Predictive modeling vs. the experts" at the bottom of the article "Predictive Modeling Holds Promise of Earlier Identification, Treatment":
http://www.managedcaremag.com/archives/0109/0109.predictive.html
Here's the original article:
50 years of successful predictive modeling should be enough: Lessons for philosophy of science (2002) by Michael A. Bishop , J. D. Trout: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.217.949
In the end, we'll rely on the AI. We'll _want_ to rely on the AI. Doctor's roles will be reduced to that of nurses. Care will improve. See it all described in the 2006 movie "Idiocracy":
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/?ref_=nv_sr_1
> Everyone laughed about how I "talked faggy".
This totally reminded me of movie Idiocracy.
You can buy a smoke alarm with a "Hush" button separate from the test button. Press the hush button and the alarm won't go off for the next 15 minutes. Easy & cheap. Since alarms are usually mounted near the ceiling, it helps to be tall.
Some smoke alarms have the battery holder in the front - pressing a button opens the battery holder and turns off alarm power. This is a de facto hush feature, albeit less safe than a hush button (because people will often forget to close the battery holder, leaving the alarm disabled).
I do not understand why people buy the cheapest possible smoke alarms for $8 rather than spend $13 to buy one with a hush button or $20 to buy one with hush + lithium battery (~10 year) built-in, e.g.,
http://www.homedepot.com/p/Kidde-10-Year-Lithium-Battery-Operated-Smoke-Alarm-21008067/100156058
In a very small condo I have two smoke alarms upstairs, two downstairs and an extra one that I just put here and there for fun (for instance, in it's current location it tells me when my neighbor is smoking outside his back door adjacent to my unit). I also have a CO alarm that _never_ goes off unless I'm testing it.
When I was a condominium association president I first offered free smoke alarm batteries. I soon realized that some would not ask for batteries and others would remove them from units. So instead I offered them an upgrade: new smoke alarms with hush + lifetime lithium battery which they could not disable without destroying. Problem almost solved: when in a unit I would sometimes find the new smoke alarm lying on a counter, uninstalled. I then offered to install alarms.
I was, of course, not surprised to read today's drudgereport headline: "FEDERAL GOVERNMENT: American adults dumber than average human". We now seem to live in an idiocracy:
http://www.imdb.com/find?q=idiocracy&s=all
I felt the same way (as a less empathic person). Things like this always make me think of that movie Idiocracy.
> It is wrong and the leadership should be ashamed. Period.
They should... had they any feelings. They do not, though, and the only two languages they speak is money and violence. If you cannot speak neither then they will run you over and you will be forgotten about.
Let's face it, even with all of the NSA spying and drone attacks... how many US citizens are _really_ up in arms? A minority. The majority will continue to care more about their mortgages or where to get their next 420 high than they do about anything the government and the government's owners are want to do to the populace.
Idiocracy was a documentary.
+1 to this! Also consider the endless entertainment available via the internet. Today for about $50 per month I have access to a plethora of streaming movies and television shows via Netflix, practically unlimited news to read, and many more forms of entertainment at my finger tips. Just 20 years ago I might have paid $4 per move rental at the video store. I'm honestly wondering if the fall in crime is due to the rise of the super couch potato lifestyle similar to that portrayed in the movie Idiocracy.
Watch and your questions shall be answered.
http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Idiocracy/70028899?locale=en-US
I'm certain there are positions for cadets with high IQ's. Maybe not low level positions like traffic cop. But I'm sure they'd make great detectives or digital forensic analysts.
Reminds me of Mike Judges movie Idiocracy. I hope it's not where we're headed. Just a couple of months ago John McDougall, President of the National Research Council of Canada said "Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value"
I watched Idiocracy [1] last night for the first time. The story is very clever in parts. Certainly the description of a film that was considered the best because it was just a picture of someone farting. Is taking the style of Youtube to the extreme.
The original article is pointing to that future, where Generation C's attention is on the low brow entertainment and traditional production cannot sustain itself.
Like journalism today is fighting for survival (who's going to pay for a full time reporter when you can get information off twitter?), television production will also be fighting in 10-15 years time as the next generation of adult switch off the satellite/cable TV in favour of Youtube style content.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
Why have a peer-reviewed journal when we can talk about the documentary?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
Jokes aside, I guess I will have to read the article, would this not been the case from the beginning? How drastic are changes in IQ averages over hundreds of years? Is it possible that there highest IQ holders were not a very slim strata of society, or are we to suppose over time that the margin and spread is getting wider?
Idiocracy – Basically an ordinary comedy, with an above average plot, but overall nothing special or interesting. Overrated.
Agreed. I found it surprising when some relatives started overusing the jokes contained on the movie, as if they were part of the idiotic society portrayed on it.
Maybe the movie is a joke about itself, but I am afraid that's not the case.
Opinions on some of the movies from the list I've seen:
Idiocracy – Basically an ordinary comedy, with an above average plot, but overall nothing that special or interesting. Overrated.
Fight Club – One of my favourite movies, perhaps in my top 10. Really loved it.
The Game – Another great movie from David Fincher, I love the mysterious atmosphere of his movies.
The Man From Earth. – Huge disappointment, I never understood why people like this movie. It's basically one guy telling a predictable and boring story. One of the most overrated movies ever. (I mean overrated in subjective sense obviously.)
Traffic – One of the best movies about drugs and organized crime.
Inception – Above average but overrated, logically inconsistent, nothing really special about this movie. The Cell is another movie where people enter someone else's dreams and even though it has only 6.2 on IMDB, I think I enjoyed it more. The depictions of the dreams were definitely more creative and looked more dreamy.
Of the top of my head I would recommend these:
* Something from David Lynch – Lost Highway, Blue Velvet or Mullholland Drive.
* Requiem for Dream
* Evil (2003)
* Sin City
* Crank – not very known, but wow, this is the best action movie ever.
* Elite squad – another great action movie, very realistic, borderline documentary.
He's right, yet to anyone who's seen the movie Idiocracy the problem is obvious. The "hicks, vatos, and homeboyz" aren't going to stop breeding.
Before someone posts "releveant XKCD,"[2] I'd like to head it off by asking what XKCD thinks is wrong about Idiocracy. Are people with higher IQ really having more kids, unlike the movie says, or is the Flynn Effect[1] pushing IQs up despite people with higher IQ having less kids?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
[2] http://xkcd.com/603/
Idiocracy is such a stupid movie. Worst: People take it seriously. As in: As if it actually had some sort of meaningful or true message (even in satirical form). That’s just sad.
This is straight out of "Idiocracy" !
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/quotes
Narrator: The years passed, mankind became stupider at a frightening rate. Some had high hopes the genetic engineering would correct this trend in evolution, but sadly the greatest minds and resources where focused on conquering hair loss and prolonging erections.
Agree, technology for the sake of technology and growth for the sake of growth does not a business (or social good) make.
I love so much of what YC does but I wish their motto was not "Make something people want" but rather "Make something people need" because the two can often be diametrically opposed. Kinda like how a parent should not always give their child everything he/she wants (candy at every meal, constant attention, making a mess/scene everywhere you go, etc).
If we as startups only tried to make stuff people "want" then the world might end up looking like the dystopian society in the 2006 film "Idiocracy".
For anybody who feels that there may be something to this, I highly recommend the movie "Idiocracy" with Owen Wilson.
Such software has been available for decades, been shown to be superior to human diagnosis, and yet has not been accepted by the medical community. Doctors will likely continue to push back. It may require restructuring of the medical education community (perhaps a' la the movie Idiocracy) to bring about utilization.
"50 years of successful predictive modeling should be enough: Lessons for philosophy of science (2002)"
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.217.949
Idiocracy, the movie
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
And Idiocracy.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
It's a reference to the movie Idiocracy, which is set in a future where (among other changes) Starbucks is an erotic massage parlor: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fmUAFjqIPc4/T8aZMNekMfI/AAAAAAAAFBU/RShaeqZmGpg/s1600/1c7e6_idiocracy-starbucks-exotic-coffee-for-men.jpg
I mostly agree with what you are saying, and I don't feel like it is in conflict with anything that I said in my comment. One point about our trash - is it "simply thrown on a big pile", or is it "strategically centralized so that future people can effectively recycle it when it becomes economically feasible"? In a post apocalyptic wasteland, you will find me making runs to the "grocery store" that is the trash dump.
I think it appealed too much to "the masses" to be enjoyed by "sophisticated" people. And I think that the satire bits were much too sparing to really be absorbed by "unsophisticated" watchers. No one under the age of 18 that I talked with has any idea that this movie is a "withering criticism of where we are". Here's why:
I do agree with you that the movie had satiric elements, and I agree that it pointed out the specific issues that you say it pointed out. But if you watch the movie, these issues are only briefly mentioned, they are not explored or analyzed. If the film was pared down to the satire bits, it would be about 7 minutes long. The plot of the film was Luke Wilson the time traveler saving the world, the serious satire elements were the setting. Well if the plot doesn't get the message through, we can use the characters, right? Unfortunately, the low IQ people in the film were incapable of talking about their problems in a sympathetic way that most people can understand. Few people recognized that the characters were actually caricatures, because they were so dumb and happy about their lot in life. When you watch Schindler's List, do you relate to the characters that are unsympathetic oppressors or to the characters that are sympathetic and oppressed?
My friends and family were effected much more by the satire in Planet of the Apes, which is very similar movie to Idiocracy. The main thrust of both plots is "a hero saves the day," and the satire elements are mostly setting. PotA works as satire because some of the ape and human characters had problems that they were struggling with, just like you and I! None of the lower IQ people in Idiocracy was struggling with anything; the "dystopia" was NOT a nightmare for them, because they had IQs too low to express any anguish and garner any sympathy.
I think the movie would have made an excellent short film, and I think Luke Wilson would have been brilliant in it. It would have made a fantastic Family Guy episode for those that enjoy Family Guy. It failed as a feature length film which is disappointing from such an effective artist as Mike Judge.
The question was "Is Idiocracy the greatest satirical film since World War Two?" not "Is Idiocracy the greatest satirical film since the end of the Cold War?"
Now, it's true that many aspects of the Cold War feel like really old news. Thank god.
(Though at this point, as (arguably!) a former colleague of Hans Bethe [1], I'm professionally obligated to deliver this public-service announcement: Nuclear arsenals are way out of fashion these days, and are never talked about outside of defense procurement committee meetings, but that doesn't mean they're gone. Nuclear weapons still exist and could blow you up today.)
However, even apart from the nuclear angle, Dr. Strangelove continues to be a movie about a big war that is secretly planned in advance by cabinet-level executives working with the military-industrial complex. Then the war gets kicked off by a very small cabal which engineers a highly visible attack on a handful of targets by a few rogue aircraft. Can anyone else see how this story might have remained relevant in the twenty-first century?
---
[1] I was a grad student in his department. It's a bit tenuous, really. But, for better and for worse, I consider myself inducted into the guild of people that build doom devices and later come to regret them. Sigh.
That's an opinion(so of course it can't be wrong) that I have heard, it is being debated fairly intelligently downthread along with a debate about the fantastic King of the Hill and Office Space.
Here is a list of movies that critics and non-critics consider to be much better post WWII satires than Idiocracy, according to internet ratings of these movies. Note: many of these are more humorous and brutal while being less crude and light-hearted than Idiocracy. Also many have plot, emotion, and deep characterization.
Films: American Psycho, A Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 451, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Dr. Strangelove, Office Space(also Mike Judge)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire
My main problem with Idiocracy as a satire is that the message it sends is flatly incorrect, because the rules of their world are not the same as ours. It is a satire of some alternate universe in which we are not living, it has no applicability for the world we live in.
Film's message: "If our societies ever end up giving a competitive advantage to low IQ people, time travel will be necessary to correct society's decline."
The truth:"If our societies ever end up giving a competitive advantage to low IQ people, natural selection will take care of it, since intelligence seems to be a competitive advantage for apes."
I think the true message is also a better call to arms for both intelligent people and unintelligent people. The movie Idiocracy seemed like it was made to be consumed by the citizens of the low-IQ world, in both plot and acting. I do enjoy its light-heartedness.
Much more realistic are the famous dystopian texts, especially Harrison Bergeron: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
I had the same thought, and my personal opinion is "not even close." Idiocracy was good, but very much "one note." I can think of other better films - MAS*H comes to mind, not to mention Catch-22 (though somewhat uneven, still better). Even Mel Brook's movies - Young Frankenstein, and The Producers, especially.
Nothing in Idiocracy matches "Springtime for Hitler."
Meh, 58% if you click 'Top Critics' and filter out the blog-spam critics. A solid F+.
Plus all the big national papers: the Times, Post, Journal, and LA Times, plus all the trades: Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Entertainment Weekly all shat on it, and many of the small local paper reviews that are counted as positive are mixed at best:
"Although never boring and almost continually amusing, Extract doesn't work as a movie because you don't buy a minute of it, even as silly satire."
or
"Extract has some flavor, but the comedic kick is diluted by flat characters and a thin story."
http://www.metacritic.com/movie/extract/critic-reviews
It reminds me of something Tim Heidecker said about the horrible reviews for 'Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie': "If you're a critic and you walk out of a theater wondering what the filmmakers could have possibly been thinking, maybe you missed something?"
You would think critics would give the benefit of the doubt to the guy who made Idiocracy and Office Space, especially considering the critical reappraisal each of them has gotten in the years since their release.
I consider Idiocracy to be the greatest satirical film post WWII.
If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend Judge's 2009 movie 'Extract' with Jason Bateman of Arrested Development.
It sort of inverts the Office Space formula and shows the sometimes taxing, even soul-crushing nature of entrepreneurship.
It seems to follow the pattern of Office Space and Idiocracy in being panned by critics and ignored by audiences at first, and then quickly developing a cult following and being recognized as pretty brilliant.
>I find it hilarious that Idiocracy wasn't mothballed because of its message
Are you sure about that?
>The film's scheduled release date was August 5, 2005, according to Mike Judge.[7] In April 2006, a release date was set for September 1, 2006. In August, numerous articles[8] revealed that release was to be put on hold indefinitely. Idiocracy was released as scheduled but only in seven cities (Los Angeles, Atlanta, Toronto, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, and Mike Judge's hometown, Austin, Texas),[4] and expanded to only 130 theaters,[9] not the usual wide release of 600 or more theaters.[10] According to the Austin American-Statesman, 20th Century Fox, the film's distributor, did nothing to promote the movie;[4] while posters were released to theatres, "no movie trailers, no ads, and only two stills,"[11] and no press kits were released.[12]
>The film was not screened for critics.[13] Lack of concrete information from Fox led to speculation that the distributor may have actively tried to keep the film from being seen by a large audience, while fulfilling a contractual obligation for theatrical release ahead of a DVD release, according to Ryan Pearson of the AP.[9] That speculation was followed by open criticism of the studio's lack of support from Ain't It Cool News, TIME, and Esquire.[14][15][16] TIME's Joel Stein wrote "the film's ads and trailers tested atrociously", but, "still, abandoning Idiocracy seems particularly unjust, since Judge has made a lot of money for Fox."[15]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy#Release
Well I have seen most of the episodes of King of the Hill and pretty much agree with that assessment.
It's not about the setting or the characters or even the jokes (which are both more dry and generally less funny than other projects, and I love dry humour).
It's about the complete reversal of the counter-culture commentary that made Office Space and Idiocracy popular. If you choose a boring hack writer setting (teacher wife, blue collar father, stupid son, etc, etc) for your show then you better make that choice the focus of your commentary, like the Simpsons did. The setting was chosen in order to comment on it. If King of the Hill was doing that then the commentary appeared to be "Isn't this nice. See how wonderful life can be when you don't question your place? Learning won't make you happy, conformity will. Good hard work and ignorance can be fulfilling".
I don't think anyone is wrong for liking it, but you certainly can't complain that fans of Judge's other work dislike that level of support for an anti-intellectual outlook.
Your comment made me think of Idiocracy (the movie), which is always a good thing. :)
Max Cleland is known to hate America. He was only willing to sacrifice three of his limbs in the service of the United States Army.
Saxby Chambliss, on the other hand, is a true patriot who proves this by yelling and screaming about it and never letting some pedantic BS about the "Constitution" obstruct his plans to remake America into his utopian vision as expressed by the movie "Idiocracy".
I think that's a funny movie (and just brought it up at work last week), but I don't actually believe we're getting dumber. I think there is a societal "anti-smart" sentiment right now (nerd, geek, etc), and that the media portrayal of idiocracy is more entertaining (or perhaps more lucrative - Jackass, Swamp People, etc).
I never thought the movie "Idiocracy" would be on-topic here, but for those who haven't seen it, it makes a similar argument. It starts off by saying smart people have less children than dumb people, and extrapolated for long enough, everyone is an idiot. Decent movie for those of you who haven't seen it.
For a detailed explanation, see the soon-to-be-reclassified-as-a-documentary film Idiocracy: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
Refer to the film "idiocracy" for a dystopian vision of why this is happening and what the outcome might likely be.
The movie "Idiocracy", in its first five minutes, tackles this exact same question, in hilarious fashion.
Suffice it to say, technology will evolve to accommodate (barely) the lowest-common denominator of intelligence, which has a significantly higher rate of replication than the smart people have (which is so low they will die out).
In other words, many believe the not-so-smart will do better than the "more smarter" people, by many measures.
+1 for idiocracy. There is so much of society crammed into that film it's unreal. Warning: it's by mike judge of Beavis and butthead fame so you have to look past the fart jokes.
"ow my balls" is definitely a reference to wasting time on YouTube...
It's most definitely both.
I've been really intrigued by this topic as of late because it's an easily noticed problem. The general public (that's a fun term, aye) are becoming equally insatiable as they are stupid.
There's an excellent film called Idiocracy that came out a few years back. It's meant to be a farce but makes a really great point about where we might end up in the future. Here's a clip of one of my favorite scenes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW-4LU79qbU
It's funny, but it's also sad. At this point, I don't see much of a reversal taking place. If you're an intelligent person, be thankful and try to help those around you who are less aware of Spaceship Earth.
Edit: I misspoke. I thought about it and "I don't see much of a reversal taking place" isn't true. The one thing that can reverse all of this is parents. If you have children, take the time to educate them and make them aware of their existence. Explain how systems work and the benefits/problems with them. Don't use scare tactics, just talk to them. More likely than not, they'll grow up with a head on their shoulders.
Read the section of text that I quoted. Someone who said something that's fundamentally correct is being criticized by a variety of other people who are too lazy to actually do the research themselves. That's the very premise of the movie Idiocracy.
The reason for not being optimistic is that lots of people are touting UEFI locked bootloaders as a step in the right direction (under the excuse of security) while most of the rest will look at those crippled subsidized Win8 ARM tablets and say "look! shiny!".
Sadly, "Idiocracy" is a prophetic movie...
Wow - Idiocracy was such a prophetic movie. Just waiting for the news that we're hydrating crops with Brawndo.
The author attended an "American Idol" for startups. It's hip to have a startup. The names of said startups may as well be gibberish (yet they attempt to explain the meaning behind them). Pitches consist of ridiculous buzz words and maketing speak to cover up the fact that none of these ideas are solving problems or something that people want.
tl;dr of my own reply: Have you seen that movie Idiocracy? It's like that, but startups.
Unfortunately the majority sees it in other light - "ah yeah, another space ship, whatever, let me check what stupid photos my mates uploaded recently...". It's basically the society that's rotting, and FB just takes the profit.
Really reminds me the Idiocracy movie...
Great overview of how ads work, but the rant is still valid. As the end, the environment around us will end up to be very similar to one described in the movie Idiocracy.
I really wish I had the karma to downvote this. Idiocracy was a funny story, but it's hardly a documentary. Every time someone brings it up seriously, I die a little bit inside.
That's a sad story, indeed, as are the other ones on this thread.
My Dad was educated in a country school and the older kids were expected to help the younger ones learn. According to him it worked very well. But in your case it seems you were teaching the _older_ kids.
I guess the bad news is "We're fucked." OTOH the good news is that I'll likely have a job until I don't want one anymore!8-))
Anybody seen the film "Idiocracy"? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
Thank you for the extra information! I'll add that to my reading list.
To clarify: I've always taken the plot of "Idiocracy" to be fictional fantasy, and I simply used Wikipedia articles as a short-hand to summarize the ideas advanced by the movie. I realized that such a plot is so charged with the potential to offend people, I've never had a conversation with anyone about it (after all, we all think we're on the 'sweet' side of the curve, right?). Personally, I don't think such a brain drain could occur, but I'm always interested in research about such topics.
Also: thanks for pointing out the importance of the IQ/intelligence debate. From what I've seen in my reading, IQ is really a proxy for a few things: quality of education, social advantages, etc. I agree 100% that IQ≠intelligence; the Wikipedia articles in question should be rewritten to reflect this fact.
However, while IQ does not represent intellectual horsepower, it has been shown to be that aforementioned _proxy_ for other sociological and other factors -- in that sense, it is still useful to compare IQ with fertility. I do understand your concern that the consensus regarding such studies is poorly represented on Wikipedia.
I was hoping this article would address the dysgenics-based[1] theory in the film Idiocracy: fertility decreases with rising intelligence[2], resulting in a severe "brain drain" and producing a profoundly stupid, simple society.
Regardless, I appreciated the extension of Cipolla's ideas into game theory -- stupid people can do everything from take your money to kill you.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgenic#Intelligence_dysgenics [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence
The inevitability in the movie Idiocracy is manifesting itself by having "set the clock forward" being considered an incredibly devious hacking technique and labeled as a 0day :P It's good to see that even when everyone born these days are morons that there are still going to be a small subset of people who are more creative and intelligent than the rest.
I feel that movie idiocracy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/) had a potential to convey this (although the execution of the movie was bad). The idea of the movie also had to do something with numbers. I believe that is why most of the religions of the world preach to have more children so that they can have strength by numbers.
Ever watched Idiocracy? There's a mechanism in the cop cars that forced all cars to pull over and shutdown in that movie. Just hope it doesn't turn into this afterwards: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC_H2s7rMvE
Idiocracy isn't exactly based on fact. (It's an OK movie though.) For one thing, there's no evidence, that I know of, that supports the claim that only "smart" parents have smart children, or that smart parents don't have dumb children, or that dumb parents don't have smart children, and so on.
Although genetics likely plays some role in "natural" intelligence, it's far from a simple hereditary relationship, and there's increasing evidence that the bulk of natural intelligence is actually the result of environmental factors during early child development.
You are making a huge leap from "this is an effective method of birth control" to "people will use this". See the movie Idiocracy. (actually just see the opening bit.)
Idiocracy is an entertaining movie, but it's not a very accurate critique of society: http://xkcd.com/603/
Also, don't be disheartened by the continual persistence of stupidity and triviality. There are amazing things happening all around us, never forget that. For two generations human civilization has had the unprecedented capability to cause the near extinction of mankind, and yet that hasn't occurred. Measure that in the context of history, it's fairly remarkable. Meanwhile, war is becoming less common (honestly, check the data), more and more people are getting lifted out of poverty every day, amazing innovations are occurring continually, and we continue to reach for the stars. There will always be setbacks from time to time, but you shouldn't let that dishearten you.
Within the next 30 years there is every reason to believe that there will be more developed nations, fewer people in abject poverty, yet more communication between peoples around the world, and perhaps even hundreds of people living and working in orbit and off-Earth.
In response to all the comments referencing "Idiocracy" - I can't believe so many of you are taking that movie seriously.
1. Even if the effect it claims is true, it wouldn't result in an "everyone's stupid" society, it would result in a split society with an even more distinct intellectual upper and lower class. Not desirable, to be sure, but not necessarily dangerous to the human race as a whole.
2. What we arrogantly see as the "stupidity" of the lower classes is almost entirely caused by social and environmental factors. Genetically, they're not necessarily inferior at all. Even if genetic drift COULD occur within just a few generations, which I doubt, genetic effects would be entirely dominated by environmental factors such as education, nutrition, and socialization.
If you pulled a healthy baby from the worst white trash family at birth, raised it well and gave it an education, there's no reason to think it would be any less intelligent than you.
Idiocracy wasn't a great movie, but it might be prophetic.
This sounds a lot like the beginning of the movie Idiocracy. I think we're all doomed.
Interesting data here, I don't have any apps out for sale but anybody that does should take a look.
A couple of observations:
- price elasticity, the non-linear relationship between price and consumption is something anybody that sells products on-line should study
- that's not the same as the difference between free and paid, for people to pay for something you have to cross a barrier, and even $0.99 is a barrier strong enough to stop a large number of people to download your app
- this article is from May, I'd be interested to see how it turned out in the longer term and what the total take on this app was versus what it cost to develop it
- even the most trivial stuff can make you money if you market it right
- timing is everything
Isn't OMB a quote from the movie 'idiocracy' ?
The hidden assumption of "Idiocracy" is that survival of the fittest is the only selection mechanism. Even if survival and breeding become trivial, sexual selection will continue, and many intelligent people will only want to mate with others of their kind, even if they become overwhelmed numbers-wise.
I understand, though, that the film is an allegory, and as such it succeeds admirably. In terms of the downward trajectory of our political and cultural discourse, it is disturbingly spot-on. Reminds me a little of the prescience of "Network": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_%28film%29
Far from being mutually contradictory, these concerns have actually been closely linked throughout history. The phrase "bread and circuses" is often associated with the fear of powerful elites manipulating pop-culture levers to control the masses, while the term "noblesse oblige" is common a shorthand term for the idea that powerful elites bear some higher responsibility for maintaining order in a world dominated by easily distracted masses.
Elite, high-brow HN readers wanting to know more might be interested in Eric Alterman's 2008 New Yorker article, "Out of Print: The Death and Life of the American Newspaper" (http://nyr.kr/11PL44), while the mass of low-brow HN readers might prefer the 2006 Mike Judge movie Idiocracy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/).
His comment is a quote from the movie Idiocracy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/).
Of course I can't speak for him, but the premise of the movie is a slow steady decline in education leading to the above quote, which is given to the protagonist (after he wakes up in the future) by a doctor as a diagnosis.
It's a quote from Idiocracy; a Mike Judge film from 2006.
"The world will continue getting dumber."
on same topic: recommend you see the movie Idiocracy
That's rude. First, you don't know me. Second, you assert that I hated Bush but "now love Obama for doing virtually the same thing." You have no evidence to back that up. Plus, I'm actually pretty neutral on whether there are "czars" are not -- I think in practice they are just another kind of government employee that has some responsibilities delegated to them by somebody above them. In other words, pretty common and nothing new or malevolent.
Also, I disagree with your statement that the seeds of this were planted in the Bush administration. From my reading of history, it's just a trivially different variation on something that's gone back hundreds and possibly even thousands of years. Nothing revolutionary. I'm pretty confident I know who is behind Fox News so I'm beyond feeling any irony when I hear of something new they've said or done. I just expect it. Further, the folks that think "Obama is evil" would be hilarious in my book if I wasn't sad/afraid about the fact that their vote counts just as much as mine. Democracy fails if the "demo-" are dumb. (Side note: see Idiocracy. A funny-but-true movie.)
The movie Idiocracy explains it all.
I never said it was true, and it is certainly for entertainment purposes as its primary focus. If you were to summarize its predictive nature, it would result in a one sentence statement. Brave New World and 1984 are better in their predictive aspects, but I was not comparing Idiocracy to them. I was primarily comparing it to The Time Machine and well... to itself in a way. The intent of the movie was not as a documentary on the condition of humanity, but as a plot device, it can serve the purpose of warning us of the danger of thinking we can predict everything when we cannot predict much of anything at all.
I'm gonna have to disagree. It was entertaining, but the movie was entirely farcical. Its assumption re:how the world might potentially degenerate was silly, but I'm baffled at how people think that could possibly happen. It's like watching Office Space by the same director and thinking that taking a guy's stapler will definitely lead to him burning down a building.
Comparing the influence of a cheesy movie to one of the stapleholds of science fiction is ridiculous. The fact that Idiocracy owes its existence to the concepts of The Time Machine suggests that it's a derivative work, meaning it's not as influential at all. I'm not saying The Time Machine was a good warning, either, not as much as 1984 and certainly not as much as Brave New World, which is arguably the best prediction we've seen from a book, so saying Idiocracy is as right as The Time Machine isn't saying much to begin with.
Obviously, the movie "Idiocracy" is a source of scholarly learning.
There is a lot wrong with this article, but I don't have the patience to go through all of the unstated assumptions; so I will just use one point as an example:
"And everywhere, it is changing traditional family life by enabling women to work and children to be educated."
How is it that women working outside the home is better than women working inside the home? There is an unstated assumption that working outside is better; an assertion unsupported by any data.
Concerning children's education, one need only point to US literacy rates from 1850 to the present to see that the two (women working, children educated) are not connected.
As a secondary point I will point out that demographics are not mentioned in this article, apparently the author has never viewed the movie "Idiocracy" ...
This sounds like the same fallacy that the movie Idiocracy is based on – even if you pass on your genes, that doesn't mean you pass on traits like demographic fertility, or intelligence.
One of the best predictors of a woman's fertility rate is their level of education. Higher education leads to fewer children on average. This is largely independent of the fertility of their parents.
Also, if you look at the third world, there are actually some good economic arguments for having more children, related to infant mortality. Your children are your 'Social Security', so you want to ensure that some survive. Paradoxically, reducing infant mortality can actually reduce fertility. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5192204318056302269
I would like to mention the movie "Idiocracy" as a complement to this discussion. The trailer on YouTube gives you a good sense of the movie.
just want to point out that this would be the plot to the movie "idiocracy"
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1597642154209383351 (naughty language warning).
From the comments:
I watched the movie Idiocracy with you and it hit me in the face as to one potential out come for the human race. But talking about the fact that we don't do physical chores that were done a hundred years ago, doesn't make a lot of sense. After all, things have changed. Those chores are no longer an issue.
I just saw Idiocracy yesterday (ironically, I decided it wasn't worth paying attention to so I played it on the top of the screen and coded on the bottom of the screen), and I think that assuming it's a plausible outcome is kind of silly. I doubt Mike Judge, the director, would disagree. Idiocracy is much more a critique of the present than it is of the future.
This was a terrific article, but there're a few fallacies in your argument. The one that most stands out to me is how you talk about music switching from being active to passive, and therefore taking less effort from the listener. You then bring up rock music as an instance of something that provides a big hit rather than focusing on intricacy.
The fallacy is that in the past, most people didn't listen to concerts. There is a long history of minstrel songs: music played in the street, catchy stuff for the public. The average person wouldn't listen to any concert in their lifetime. This is not a new thing. Furthermore, if you look at how many people travel to concert halls to listen to music, I would bet that more people proportionally listen to great pieces of work like Tchaikovsky or Mozart than ever have in the past. If anything, the trend is that once you have access to things easily, you are more willing to put effort into a viewing than you would be if you'd never been before. (I'm going to the Met to see a Tchaikovsky opera two weeks from now; I never would have wanted to if I hadn't torrented 2GB worth of his pieces earlier in the year.)
"Don't turn that dial!" has become cliche: whatever you do, keep your eyes peeled on this station.
That ignores the rise in TV that's actively challenging to watch. To bring up the two shows I always bring up, The Wire on HBO and BBC's The Office. Neither one is easy and clear-cut. They both attract watchers who are there to be challenged. I've watched the entire Office straight through three times in the way that I reread good books. It's not addictive per se, it's enriching.
Your argument about video games make me wonder how avid a gamer you are. I'm not a huge gamer, but the games that I do like are almost always pretty rich in environment. Portal's the cliche in gaming, and that's a game that's clever, well-written, and encourages lateral thinking. My 13-year-old brother, who dislikes most books and isn't a big math kid, got hooked in Portal's advanced challenges, which really are difficult pieces. Then there're RPGs, the best of which are superb storytellers, there are real-time strategy games, there are all sorts of games that encourage you to actively think. You can't play a game and shut off. You need to focus incredibly. My friends that play Counterstrike are the best proof of this: you need to be a special sort of brilliant to play that game well. It's addictive, but only in the way, again, that challenging books or pieces of music are. It's not a "pop" game.
Of course, I would also argue that VG composers are writing the most sophisticated orchestral music of the day. Listen to Roar of the Earth by Ko Otani if you can find sample pieces. It's rich and complex in the way good classical music is. Plus, it's attached to a video game that's pretty stimulating in and of itself - ever played Shadow of the Colossus? It's one of the few video games I will call an exceptional piece of art rather than merely a game.
(Sidebar: World of Warcraft is an exception in that yes, it's focused on addiction rather than active focus. But what a piece of art it is in and of itself! I've never played, I don't want to get hooked, but they made an entire world! This is like Tolkien realized. One of my future plans is to make an MMORPG in a much more literary sense, and to create an enormous world that really feels like fantasy - World of Warcraft opened that door for me. It's an incredible achievement in and of itself.)
The Internet is addictive, yes - but in what way is it addictive? My friend and I both competed to parody the 25 Things notes on Facebook yesterday - that requires some thinking and creative prowess. Meanwhile, while I spend hours a day in front of a computer, I'm constantly reading articles like this one, and writing answer pieces. I participate in debates. And I've found that as a result, in debate-focused classes I'm leagues ahead of classmates. It's entirely because the Internet gets my mind going. The Internet is not passive. It's not like rock music or TV shows or heroin. It's active. You consciously focus on what you're doing.
People are less fit because less tasks require physical labor than ever have before. That's why society is so focused on being thin. Now, staying fit requires conscious effort. It is no longer a passive task. It doesn't happen during the day unless you choose it to. So in a way, it's a reversal of the ideas that you're stating here. (I keep a 30-pound weight on my desk, and I exercise and have my computer read long posts out loud. It's such a wonderful system.)
Finally: things have always devoted people's lives like this. If I wasn't constantly on the Internet, I would be writing in a notebook, or practicing an instrument. That's not heroin, is it? That's an exercise in creativity. Think of it like that: anything worth doing is worth devoting time to. And most of society will always ignore those opportunities for wasted time. That's nothing new. It's a part of human nature.
They're the equivalent of the captain of the football team joining the debate team and, right in the middle of a debate, accusing his opponent of being "gay".
You need to see this movie, if you haven't: http://www.google.com/search?q=faggy+idiocracy It imagines a possible future Earth inhabited only by Fox News viewers.
It actually includes a parody of Fox News - but it wasn't easy for me to tell it was a parody. Google Images has pics: http://images.google.com/images?q=idiocracy+fox+news
One more movie quote: http://www.google.com/search?q=idiocracy+all+retarded
I also enjoyed Mike Judge's other film "Idiocracy". It's not explicitly a hacker film, but it's a sci-fi story about an average guy in a world of idiots, so it verges on hacker territory. It also has some examples of hilariously bad human/computer interface design.
(And if you're into cry-yourself-to-sleep-reality movies, there's also Outsourced, a recent comedy about a call center manager who must train his replacements in India. I found it surprisingly enjoyable. Its primary themes are culture clash and figuring out what's important in life, so it shares similarities with Office Space and Gung Ho.)
everyone should watch the movie idiocracy....that's where we are heading at breakneck speeds
Things like this always remind me of the movie Idiocracy of which the first 10min or so is best part:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
Your point was very clearly shown in the first part of the movie "Idiocracy". Very well expressed!
Idiocracy anyone? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
I'm becoming more and more convinced that "Idiocracy' was a documentary. It's truly scary to me that not only does this happen a lot, but that professors have class sizes so largest that it's literally impossible for them to get to know students well enough to put two and two together.
If you could buy "Whitest F------ Teeth" toothpaste, swear words would not convey any additional meaning and would probably be used less.
This reminds me of a beautiful movie, Idiocracy, and the "Carl's Jr. Extra Big-ass Fries". The motto of Carl's Jr. in this hilarious 26th-century dystopia is "Fuck you, I'm eating".
Very interesting, but the problems have less to do with raising life expectancy than they do with a drop in birth rates.
The former is easily enough fixed: raise retirement age. The problems of the old "blocking the way", are not a problem if there is growth.
But a drop in birth rates is a big problem that has little to do with life expectancy, most countries are built on growth. Few know how to manage things with a shrinking, or static population.
And to make it worse the higher the class of the person/country, the less kids, which is very bad. Reminds me of the idiocracy movie.
Plus those that can most afford it have the least kids, again, that's not right.
So everyone: if you consider yourself better then average, take a pledge to have lots of kids. You owe it to the future.
it reminds me of the movie idiocracy. explosions and violence make more impression on short-term than litterature or culture
You mean, just like all those Gatorade employees in the movie Idiocracy? :-)
why do people call him egotistical? is it because they are offended by his intelligent and well-rehearsed writings?
this is like the movie idiocracy where luke wilson gets called "faggy" because he has a command of the english language.
i think pg defends him so (puts him into yc, puts him in reddit etc..) because aaron has a good balance of intelligence and doing things well. he's a good weapon for anything intellectual.