Human Intelligence Sharply Declining
No, it's not just you — people really are, per a number of surveys, way less intelligent than they used to be.
I wonder if you could analyze internet discussions for an effect.
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Idiocracy keeps becoming truer and truer every year.
Unfortunately, that movie's main message was about eugenics. I am not arguing that anti-intellectualism is not spreading like a cancer, but that movie is not the best thing to reference.
I don't think it ever actually promoted eugenics. It just explored the natural consequences of two facts in a comedic way:
It never tries to push any eugenics-based agenda. It would have if they tried to say that dumb people shouldn't be allowed to have kids, but they never went anywhere near that.
Yeah as the smart child of two dumbfuck parents who can barely read please stop repeating this dumb shit.
Two smart people don't always make a smart baby. Two dumb people don't always make a dumb baby.
It is eugenics.
It is simpler than all that. Elite parents send their children to elite schools and universities. Their children then learn how the world works and are equipped with the skills to engage with the people running things.
The lower classes do not value education in this fashion. Their children do not have parents at home who understand how the world works or how our society is organized. Even if those children are smart or gifted they have no idea how to learn the skills they need or how to properly use their gifted abilities.
If you automatically assumed that intelligence having a hereditary component to it meant that I was trying to say that all dumb people's children were also dumb 100% of the time, you might not be as smart as you think.
Wealth has a hereditary component.
- Intelligence has a hereditary component to it.
That is eugenics. https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism
If one believes the accuracy of film’s central premise—that the dumb are reproducing at a higher rate than the smart, which will lower the world’s intelligence until idiocy reigns supreme—it’s only natural to want to stop that from happening. From there, it’s not at all that great a leap to begin believing that maybe there should be some kind of policy only allowing intelligent people to reproduce—in other words, sterilize the dumb.
This is just the author asserting their own absurd leaps in logic as the intended message behind the movie, which it clearly isn't.
A 2015 Pew study looked at how many kids that women with postgraduate degrees have given birth to over the past half-century. In 1994, 30 percent of women with a master’s degree or higher were childless, a number that’s since dropped to 22 percent. In 1976, 10 percent of said women had one child, while in 2014 that numbers up to 18 percent; those with two kids rose even more dramatically, from 22 to 35 percent.
The author draws the wrong conclusion from this data. Just because women with degrees are having more kids now than in the past doesn't mean that women without degrees haven't always had more kids than women with degrees. It's very telling that they never bring those numbers up.
The issue is the thought that people cannot grow and learn. Regardless of upbringing, anybody can choose to persue knowledge. The horrible state of public education is most likely the root cause, in my opinion. The US has chose not to invest in it's people and now we are seeing the results.
You're absolutely right that access to education can greatly improve intelligence. Critical thinking skills are just that - skills that must be learned. Genetics are just one of countless factors involved in how intelligent someone ends up being.
I saw Idiocracy a while ago, so I can't remember every detail to bring up examples, but I think the characters surrounding the main character did show growth and a willingness to try to learn things. I don't think we see much of an education system in that movie's portrayal of the future either.
It's also worth noting that while your genetics absolutely affects your brain structure and chemistry, parents can pass on stupidity or intelligence to their children in more ways than just genetically. After all, most people learn more from their parents than from anyone else.
I would recommend rewatching it. I tried to rewatch it with a friend and didn't get more than 30mins in before they were done.
What stood out to you as particularly bad on your rewatch?
How heavily it leaned into eugenics as the "root problem".
Shit. I know shit's bad right now, with all that starving bullshit, and the dust storms, and we are running out of french fries and burrito coverings. But I got a solution.
