[magikaram]

"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.

[ErikVandeWater]

> "The underlying message of course is that humans ought to take such things as science, research and knowledge seriously, lest we create our own Idiocracy."

The author of this article reached a fairly backwards conclusion. If the smart people hadn't prioritized careers in science and research over creating a family, idiocracy would not have occurred; the smart people would have procreated at the same rate as dumb people.

But I agree that it's more a critique of a "dopamine" driven culture that has no critical thinking skills.

[malchow]

I think you're right. Idiocracy was much more Judge's critique of the lazy morality ("It's irresponsible to have kids!") and lazy voting ("burrito coverings") of the yuppie class. These days, you can even see wokeism being lambasted ("Welcome to Costco, I love you.").

[wyldfire]

But "Welcome to Costco, I love you" isn't a critique of wokeism. It's the false affection you get from a "greeter" at the door.

[magikaram]

I even forgot about the corporate wokeism that is placated towards consumers for their 'one month a year gay pride twitter image', then not upholding the same morals year-round

[champagnois]

It is important people feel accepted and such, but reality requires everyone participate in the meritocracy of struggling through the economy.

A company that can afford to do identity-politics based hiring initiatives is a company that has more money than they know what to do with. Companies in the earlier stages that will go on to be successful are going to be lean and meritocratic.

FWIW, I really like how the Coinbase CEO handled the toxic woke employees they got burdoned with.

[fnimick]

"Meritocracy" in the workplace is a myth perpetuated by those in power to justify their position. The Coinbase CEO got raked over the coals for his handling, and rightly so.

[Manuel_D]

That was not my impression at all of the reception. An extremely small segment of the workforce left, despite generous exit packages. The impression I got from my coworkers and peers was mostly a sigh of relief and wishing their own companies would follow suit. The opinions of a vocal minority on Twitter are often not the opinions of the workforce.

[autokad]

> FWIW, I really like how the Coinbase CEO handled the toxic woke employees they got burdoned with."

I haven't heard of this, is there a good source I can read up on it?

[champagnois]

Summarizing the event from memory, it seemed during the BLM virtue signalling craze -- he told his staff, "Coinbase exists to make money and not to be political. If you are unhappy about the lack of political expression and you need to leave because of discomfort over this -- the employer will apologize with a parting gift of a large sum of money."

Essentially, he bribed the toxic political radicals to leave and take the payout.

[8note]

It's kinda strange that coin base would choose such a political sphere to make money in if they don't want to be political.

[yakshaving_jgt]

I believe it's a reference to this open letter:

https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-comp...

[hall0ween]

I’m not sure you are commenting on OPs remarks. The argument of lazy morality and voting of yuppies from corporatism and consumerism? Many, many (many) people buy things they don’t meet that help fuel corporate power. Yuppies, non-yuppies. For instance, how many people do you know that bought things from Amazon lately?

[tpoacher]

Agreed. If anything, it greatly criticised the rampant use of science-soundbytes devoid of proper context.

"It's got electrolytes!"

[temp0826]

>> "It's got electrolytes!"

One of my favorite lines in the movie. Whenever I hear anyone talking about how they only use "good" salt ("it's got micronutrients!"), I giggle and have to bring it up.

"You should be using water" "you mean like in the toilet??"

[rightbyte]

The intro of the movie made it quite clear that it was dysgenics.

I.e. how the "good couple" did not have children because of x before the man worked him self to death, while the irresponsible douche stupid brute etc. quarterback was saved by "good couple" medicine and had multiple children.

[jrs235]

I felt the underlying message was "Intelligent people, stop focusing on career and start having more kids (we really are in a race to the bottom)!"

[dfxm12]

I think that was more of a minor plot point to move the story along rather than the real message. Judge just took a common theme, probably popularized in The Time Machine (The HG Wells book, not the ride in the film), to get us from point A to Point B quickly. After all, it was such a small part of the movie compared to how much time was spent focusing on lowest common denominator entertainment (ow my balls), commercialism (Brawndo), corporatism (Brawndo owning the USDA), issues with automation, etc.

[im3w1l]

The real genius of Idiocracy is that it realizes that the audience wants to see "ow my balls" but doesn't want to admit it. So it provides a framing where you both get to feel above it and get to indulge.

[dfxm12]

Haha, I have no trouble admitting it. Be it Ow my balls, Beavis and Butthead or something else, I don't feel above a little bit of schlocky TV, really.

[chrisseaton]

If we think we need intelligent people in order to have intelligent children that seems like an argument for nepotism and hereditary positions, which isn't very progressive.

[FredPret]

Perhaps the fact that we DO need intelligent people to have intelligent children will lead to some forced changes in our society down the line, progressive or not

[disgruntledphd2]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean

[erikerikson]

Maybe: the way we structure professional life is incompatible with a healthy society.

[lkxijlewlf]

Wouldn't the Dunning-Kruger effect mean that unintelligent people would just keep having kids while the Imposter Syndrome would mean Intelligent people would not?

[ruined]

guess you'd better not have kids then. don't worry, i'll do extra

[dllthomas]

You think you know more about the Dunning-Kruger effect than you do.

[runlevel1]

The Learning Channel (TLC) once aired documentaries but is now a heartbeat away from "Ow, My Balls!"

Is TLC making people more stupid or are they just giving an already foolish population what they want?

[allo37]

Hey, I remember when the "L" meant "learning" too (I think they changed it to "Life" now).

I don't think consuming "stupid" entertainment makes us stupid or is even a solid indicator of intelligence (if you can settle on a definition of it). TLC just saw a market and pivoted, imo.

[runlevel1]

I agree with you to an extent. I think stupid entertainment is fine in moderation. Sometimes it's nice to mentally checkout for a while.

Collectively, however, I think it's a bad sign.

TLC isn't the only one who saw a market and pivoted. Sticking with TV examples, the History channel has shows about monsters and aliens now. Discovery's content is almost as bad.

It's not just that there's a market for stupid entertainment. It's that the market for non-stupid entertainment seems like it's shrinking.

[allo37]

I don't really have any evidence to make a counterargument, so you might be right.

I could present an alternative viewpoint though: Cable access has steadily been losing marketshare to streaming services for a while now, so they're aiming for as much mass appeal as possible. It might not be that there is a lower proportion of people looking for educational entertainment than there was before, but that declining viewership has made it unprofitable to produce content for that niche. I see a lot of documentaries on Netflix, for example, and then there's CuriosityStream which is a service just for that, right?

Also a lot of "edutainment" is and always has been sensationalism...I remember watching a documentary about how solar storms were gonna wipe out humanity any day now, and "top 100 things removed from the human body" on old-school TLC (spoiler: #1 was a petrified fetal twin!)

[bjt2n3904]

> "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.

[127]

No matter how seriously you take science, research and knowledge, evolution is merciless. Given a strategy that uses less resources to reproduce, that strategy will win over time. It's so obvious that it feels like a tautology. Science and research is extremely expensive and time intensive strategy. Living on universal basic income, finding a mate and making lots of kids doesn't require anything outside having the ability to attract the opposite sex.

[zarkov99]

I think the reality is much darker than this: cognitive elites have fewer children than the rest so the average population IQ drops over time (once you fix the low hanging fruits of nutrition/health care of course) . I do not see any solution to this that is not straight out of Brave New World.

[vorpalhex]

While a great plot point that is entirely fantasy and fiction. The average IQ rate of every generation tends to be a few points higher, though there may be a cap.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

[DoingIsLearning]

The Flynn Effect is actually no longer observed. [0]

There is a multi-decade IQ drop in multiple European countries with otherwise world-leading Education systems.

More interestingly the drop is also happening intra-family which defeats the initial theory of a dumbing down of the gene pool. Currently the best theory is that there is an environmental cause.

If I'm allowed to speculate my money is on diesel engine NO2 exposure [1], plasticizers [2], and flame retardants [3], probably in that order.

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2018/06/13/health/falling-iq-scores-...

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26426942/

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25493564/

[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31952890/

[vorpalhex]

This meta-analysis from 2014 disagrees: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4152423/

The study underlying that CNN article only used three decades of data and only for Norwegian males. Also note that their cohort IQ delta is < 2 points across a decade which is well within error margin.

[DoingIsLearning]

The meta-analysis has an impressive methodology. However, it claims that the increase in IQ is pervasive across geography but if you look at the studies included, the majority of the data sampled is from the US.

The Norwegian phenomenon is not exclusive it has been observed in the last few decades in Denmark, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Finland and Estonia.

[im3w1l]

Random mutations means that children are on average a little less fit than their parents.

[foobiekr]

You should actually read that page. It has slowed, stopped and possibly reversed since as early as the 1970s.

[FredPret]

Might well be down to:

> the low hanging fruits of nutrition/health care