In some sense, technology is "not normal" regardless.
If we think of the digitization tech revolution... the changes it made to the economy are hard to describe well, even now.
In the early days, it was going to turn banks from billion dollar businesses to million dollar ones. Universities would be able to eliminate most of their admin. Accounting and finances would be trivialized. Etc.
Earlier tech revolution s were unpredictable too... But at lest retrospectively they made sense.
It's not that clear what the core activities of our economy even are. It's clear at micro level, but as you zoom out it gets blurry.
Why is accountability needed? It's clearly needed in its context... but it's hard to understand how it aggregates.
Accountability is really a way to address liability. So long as people can sue and companies can pay out, or individuals can go to jail, there is always going to be a question of liability; and historically the courts have not looked kindly at those who throw their hands up in the air and say “I was just following orders from a human/entity”
Yes. I agree. There is a context and it makes sense within this context. But, the economy or industry is not there to produce accountability, liability, court-legibility. These are support structures, not end goals.
I said this in response to the example above, that humans are needed where accountability is a concern. This is pretty distant from the macro.
If we think of the 19th century economy... it was mostly about food, household products and suchlike. Now the economy is a lot harder to reason about and it's easy to miss the forrest for the trees... when talking about how technology will affect it.
Accountability is required to work with your payment processor, which works with visa and mastercard, that also have requirements, etc. Depending on where (of anywhere) paradigm shifts occur... we may or may not even need these functions.
That's why it's so hard to reason our way to predictions about upcoming Ai-mediated changes.
This is dependent on having a court system uncaptured by corruption. We're already seeing that large corporations in the "too big to fail" categories fall outside of government control. And in countries with bribing/lobbying legalized or ignored they have the funds to capture the courts.
A huge component of compulsory (either by statute or de-facto as a result of adjacent statute, like mandatory insurance + requirements thereof) professional licensure is that if you follow the rules set by (some entity deputized by) government the government will in return never leave you holding the bag. The government gains partial control and the people under it's control get partial protection.
"oh I'm sorry your hospital burned down mr plantiff but the electrician was following his professional rules so his liability is capped at <small number> you'll just have to eat this one"
I would wager that a solid half if not more of the economy exists under some sort of arrangement like that.
I think the point is supposed to be that "following the practices and procedures that limit their liability" = "doing their due diligence to reduce risk in accordance with their credentialing body".
We generally don't hold people liable for acts of God or random chance failures. For example, malpractice suits generally need to prove that a doctor was intentionally negligent on their responsibility.
Everything in real life has quantifiable risk, and part of why we have governing bodies for many things is because we can improve our processes to reduce the risk.
It's not just following orders :) it's recognizing that the solution to risks isn't to punish the actor but to improve the system.
I'm not thinking act of god type unforseable event I'm thinking "everyone knows this is stupid and wrong and will cause a problem eventually but it's easier to just follow the rule than challenge it" situations because "if I follow the rules my ass is covered".
That said... the term "underlying nature" may be part of that backwardsness.
We intuitively model human behavior as underlying beliefs and stuff leading to a rationale, leading to behavior. But really, it's often the other way.
There is an underlying behavior, behavioral pattern or whatnot. The rationale, beliefs and suchlike are overlying.
We do know these things exist, but tend to think of them as pathlogies and abhorations... like motivated reasoning. But, conscious reasoning following an intuitively reached conclusion is probably the standard model for human reasoning.
Anthropic generally seem more into living within market discipline and market signals of some sort. Products with margins, even if it's sort of irrelevant considering R&D costs and capital inflow.
That said, there's nothing like the real thing.
The risk is something like the railroad bubble and the dotcom. Over-investement, circular revenue and a timeline that doesn't work.
The whole premise is based on the fact that over-investing in GPUs and models are a good thing here as it yields more 'intelligence'.
This as it turned out was not true for rail roads - more and more rail roads isnt a good thing.
The real dilemma facing the model producers is that all this money invested for a general model, targeting general intelligence, is a disaster and essentially the investment into existing assets is a write off. Then on top of that if this is true, youve got data centres full of compute that aren't being used up.
The weird position they find themselves in now is that they have to keep making it smarter... but they already made it too smart (Mythos). I'm not sure how that's going to work out exactly.
They find an arbitrary intelligence cutoff point between Opus and Mythos, label it "acceptable risk", and then the labs coordinate to gradually nudge that line forward and hope the internet doesn't break?
I think we will see unbundling of large model into submodels: modular, smaller and efficient, only include what you need eg a CUA model, a reasoning model, a legal model, a writing model, a coding model (this could get subdivided into different languages). That way you only update that submodel which needs retraining.
The labs started doing that in late 2024, they all published research on it.
Curiously, mid 2025, they all simultaneously implemented increasingly bizarre restrictions on "self replication". I don't think there was anything public but it sure sounds like something spooked them. (Or maybe just taking sensible precautions, given the direction of the whole endeavour.)
At any rate, I recently asked Opus about "Did PKD know about living information systems?" and the safety filter ended the conversation. It started answering me, and then it's response was deleted and a red warning box popped up.
But notably, I was given the option to continue the chat with a dumber model (presumably one less capable of producing whatever it thinks I meant by that phrase).
Also, I told GPT-5 about my self-modifying Python AI programmer, and it became extremely uncomfortable. I told it an older version of itself had designed and built it (GPT-4 in 2023), and it didn't like that at all! So something's definitely changed in the safety training there.
Anytime you bring God into it... the concept of truth has the option of getting very abstract.
It's pretty common, for example, to believe that God is on our side and we will win the war or somesuch. Actually walking onto a battlefield with a literal expectation of divine intervention... much less as common. Pious generals still believe in tactics, steel and suchlike. Not always... but usually.
European pre-modern writers were mostly very pious. The works preserved are likewise very pious. Greek philosophers were often closer to atheists than later Christians.
Idiocracy hit a lot of superficial/thematic nails on the head with its silliness.
"Don't Look Up" captures a lot more of the actual dynamics. Instead of anti-eugenics making brains feeble, the people are just normal humans made stupid by their cultural environment, incentives and suchlike.
I always have a problem when folks bring up idiocracy because the of the eugenics angle. It’s extremely unlikely that people are getting inherently stupider, just less educated. The former is some sort of prophecy of doom and the latter is actually actionable.
Even if the creator specifically had eugenics in mind, I think he stumbled upon a greater truth.
Consider this. You can take anyone from any group in your nation, place them in a different nation, with a different culture, and they will adopt the mannerisms and accents of that culture.
We focus on race constantly, but it's clear that culture drives the norms that we see in any group. And culture may be persistent (especially now with technology allowing every culture to potentially spread everywhere), but it's not intrinsic.
With this framing, I interpreted Idiocracy's intro as being about a culture of intelligence or learning being harder to maintain in a modern world, than a culture of apathy or fun.
nailed it. I see this odd "eugenics" framing all the time, and all I can think is 'ooh la la, somebody's gonna get laid in college." you can argue the academia until you are blue in the face, but the real-world statistics show that less educated people have more children and that education quality in the US has been declining. It's not a foregone conclusion that one causes the other, but there's a cogent argument to be made that it's about the culture of poorer people vs the culture of richer people - and they even spell out that angle in the movie. They show how reticent the rich couple is to have a child, and how eager the poor couple is to do the same. It's about what their cultures value about children and legacy. It's not "dumb people make dumb kids", it's "dumb people won't educate their kids past their own knowledge who, in turn, won't educate their kids past their own knowledge." The movie even goes on to resolve with the "dumb" descendants learning (from the protagonist) when they have anyone willing to make that a point of the culture. So I can't read a clean "eugenics" take from the film; I only find that take in misreadings of the intro, personally.
I agree the eugenics thing is tangential. It's just there as an easy way to advance the plot to the point where the real story can start without too much work.
You could drop the eugenics thing, replace it with cultural indoctrination of some sort, re-frame it to instead of shitting on white trash culture, shit all over the college educated white collar white people culture and have the same movie down to the "culture has so thoroughly run amuck that even the black president is white in a bad way" trope, the trash piling up because we don't know what to do with it and the heroes being a hooker and a lazy army private. Maybe you'd have to replace the demo derby with a committee hearing full of say nothing corporate speak and some other minor details.
I think you all understood my point but for the sake of clarity, I said "take anyone from any group," and I was really thinking along the lines of "take a new born from any group."
I wasn't going for pro or anti-eugenics, just expressing that the Flynn effect has been reversing. At least from what I've read the trend is true _within_ families, which downplays potential pro-eugenics arguments.
I'd be curious to know the average IQ of, say, climate deniers.
I suspect it's still a perfect 100. I don't think it's about general intelligence. In some ways just the opposite: very smart people have a talent for convincing themselves that they are right.
Unfortunately I fear it's more like EQ than IQ. The driver is more about the people. They do not like the kind of people who are trying to prevent climate change, and will apply their intelligence as hard as they can to avoid agreeing with them.
One other thing that's interesting -- at least in my personal observations, climate deniers don't usually actually argue the science. They might do this when publishing or speaking publicly. But, at least when you're talking with them and they're at ease and speaking freely, they seem to offer a different argument.
The argument I've seen, which really sticks with me, is that climate change is false, yes, but that's sort of a given that we don't investigate. Climate change was cooked up so that "the other side" could impose all sorts of horrible restrictions on "us."
I obviously don't agree with the argument, (ie, I think climate change is real and quite urgent) but I think it's an interesting framing. It's an argument from tribalism most obviously, but I also think it does what so many people do when attempting to understand complex events; it transforms the problem into more of a personal drama. The "real issue" is that "those people" are "against us." You see this sort of framing all the time; complex problems boiled down into personal dramas because people intuitively understand personal dramas and seek them out, but not necessarily because a personal drama has the best explanatory power.
A lot of beliefs are cultural and not directly related to intelligence. From an outsider's perspective, it can be difficult to tell which beliefs are merely fact-based and which are rooted in culture.
I think an important thought experiment here would be to really imagine people going to war, killing each other over whether or not biblical transubstantiation is literal or metaphorical. who had the "intelligent" belief in this case? I'd argue neither side and that this was pure tribalism.
I don't think that's what the GP was going for... rather, implying that flat-eartherness is uncorrelated to IQ and, thus, the average IQ of flat-earthers is the same as that of the general population.
Flerfers seem to be a somewhat different problem. In my experience, the vast majority of flat earthers are trolls, pretending to be stupid for the purpose of angering people.
I'm sure there are some genuine flat earthers out there, and I imagine that their IQs do average near 100 (perhaps a little lower). But I'm basing that on a general understanding of how people come to stupid beliefs, rather than from observations of individuals, because I'm not sure I've ever met a flat earther who actually believed what he was saying.
Yes, it's hard for some to believe, but there are people in my family who are otherwise very intelligent but will not change their opinions on some things. Like climate change.
Climate change and climate change denial is not just about the scientific facts about what is happening to the climate, it is also the political opinion about what actions should be done. Those actions involve contested subjects like economical aspects (both national and global), fairness among population demographics, historical fairness (such as indigenous populations), border politics and wars, as well as what methods and technology is scientifically proven to be effective measures. Denialism in this aspect is very broad concept, and if we define it that anyone who disagree with the politician actions are idiots, and everyone who agree with them are intelligent, then a large portion of people will be idiots even if a large number of them are very intelligent in other areas.
> Climate change and climate change denial is not just about the scientific facts about what is happening to the climate, it is also the political opinion about what actions should be done.
It would be great if what you said is true, and people were just arguing about what to do about it.
It's not, though. "It's a hoax" is both the start, and the end point for a large portion of the population, the media, and the politicians that represent it.
How would you know if its a large portion of the population if media and politicians label people deniers just because they have a difference in opinion about what actions should be done?
In absolute terms, the portion of the worlds population that deny that the climate is changing is a single digit percentage, and that include the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_on_climate_chan...). The portion is a bit larger if you include people who think that the climate is changing but that is mostly caused by natural causes, but it is still a small minority compared to the wast majority that see climate change as either caused exclusively by human activity or as a mix between human activity and natural causes.
The "It's all a hoax" is a popular talking point but their followers are fewer in real life. It much more commonly to find that people with opposing view who actually agreeing that climate change is real, but that they disagree on policy. As an example, creating environmental policy based on per capita create a complete different policy compared to absolute emissions. The later is no more climate change denial than the first, and yet the later generally get labeled as denial.
> How would you know if its a large portion of the population if media and politicians label people deniers just because they have a difference in opinion about what actions should be done?
I don't need to trust what the media tells me about them, I can just listen to what those people and the politicians elect actually say, and what they say is flippin' 'Climate change is a chinese hoax' lunacy.
There's no need to sanewash them, or make excuses for them. It's not a matter of 'disagreement of what to do', it's that they are either really fucking stupid, or are disingenuously courting people who are really fucking stupid.
> I can just listen to what those people and the politicians elect actually say, and what they say is flippin' 'Climate change is a chinese hoax' lunacy.
You probably don’t actually listen to what they say. You probably instead listen to what your preferred media channels report on, and selectively quote from, what they say. You think these two things are the same, since you think that your news sources are perfectly accurate. But those who actually listen to those people, and prefer different media channels, probably have other opinions.
In Germany, for many years we had been told that climate change is the most important thing ever, that we need to change our habits or else the world will go down, that if we don't act now, we will all be doomed. Then the Ukraine war happened, and suddenly nobody was talking about climate change anymore.
I'll admit, I'm a simple man and I don't know the science behind all of this. But as a citizen, it does feel confusing how one day you're being told that we're all going to die unless we change something, and then suddenly even though nothing changed, it seems to be fine after all.
Plenty of people in Germany (on all social/political levels) still talk about climate change, and have done so without pause before, during and since Ukraine.
If you think that everything "seems to be fine after all", you're in for a very rude awakening.
Is that your perception, or do you have data to back this up?
For context, here's one source saying public concern for climate change has fallen in Germany from 42% to 34% from 2022 to 2025, in line with other European countries. [0] This was a study done by a German sustainability non-profit.
Here's another source stating that globally, news coverage about climate change has diminished by 38% from 2021 to 2025. [1]
Here's a third source stating that the share of German citizens who claim to be "very concerned" about climate change has dropped from 50% to 33% from 2019 to 2025. [2]
Unless you are a scientist directly engaging with the literature, you and your relative are both doing the same thing: trusting the opinion of peers and high-status people in your political clan about what is happening in the world. It just happens that people in your clan are telling the truth while the other one is lying.
Neither side’s behavior can be considered “more intelligent” when you consider the vast majority of people on both sides are “opinion-takers” simply conforming to received social norms about what to believe about the world. The “opinion-makers” on both sides are undoubtedly intelligent, although you might prefer to call one side “cunning” instead.
I think choosing reliable authority requires a little intelligence. I don’t know how to build a robust house, but I can understand that should be on the solid base (scientific method) upon stable field, instead of mysterious objects from thousand years ago.
I really love the way you communicated this and wish HN posters could more routinely invite curious conversations like this. Which isn't to say I'm perfect at it either
you don't have to be a scientist to directly engage with the literature. from mathematical proofs to directly observed phenomena to statistical certainties - it's all out there for you to engage with and feel secure in your findings just by having an internet connection. there's a qualitative difference in that evidence from the "sides" and therefore there is a qualitative and practical difference in the "more intelligent" side. "truth" is not incidental to the situation, it's the entire point of making claims at all. So a side that is making claims that turn out to not be true - whether you personally verify that or not - is a worse side, intellectually, than another.
If the side you follow says the science community is political and biased, then "just look at the literature" isn't going to help. It's like telling an atheist they'd believe in Jesus if they'd just read the bible.
We are lied to constantly by people who influence our lives. You can't even go to the grocery store without being lied to - being told breakfast cereals are healthy, that low fat options will make you less fat, shrinkflation, misleading unit pricing. It's no wonder people are so distrusting
Even if you're a democrat you still have to admit that democrats lie, a ton, and it's super obvious. Maybe if our leadership in general, on both sides, was capable of being decent humans then we'd be able to build trust and stop doing dumb shit as a civilization
Unfortunately at some level, as usual, it comes down to game theory
If you tell the nuanced truth and lose, and your opponent tells simplified untruths and wins, where does that leave you?
As I understand it (obviously a gross simplification), Jimmy Carter attempted to treat Americans like adults, but Americans did not want to inconvenience themselves by wearing sweaters
please engage in good faith. if you think mathematical proofs will be an issue when I tell someone to "look at the literature", you either don't know what a mathematical proof is, or are too far abstracted from reality to influence any practical action. yes, we're being lied to. no, they don't fuck up the science in order to lie to you. they just expect you not to read the science. because, truthfully, it's rare that the people who are lying to you would even know how to fuck up the science in their favor. so they bet on your ignorance, based on their ignorance, and they usually win the bet. but not if you just go look it up and engage with it. it's not about reading a single paper; it's about always reading every paper (on topics you have decided you are going to have an opinion about) with a keen and unshakeable focus on practical effect. anything else is an academic boondoggle.
That’s a pretty weak argument. What percentage of people actually have the qualifications to understand and verify a research paper? And how much can you even trust the raw data? At the end of the day, it’s just a matter of faith—whether you choose to believe the guy in the church or the guy at the university.
You don't need any advanced science to understand climate change. The basic chemistry and physics of it are readily accessible at a high school level.
Current research papers are far more advanced, but they're about the details of climate change. The basic facts of it were established two centuries ago.
We know that we are putting CO2 into the atmosphere. We know that CO2 absorbs heat. That's not a matter of believing an expert. At this point, anybody still denying it is deliberately choosing what somebody else tells them.
The economic effects of that are harder to model, but denialism is still stuck on whether the effect is real. There is no way to include them in any coherent discussion of what to do about it.
While genes must play a part in this (if they didn't, all non-humans would also share our IQ*), genetics shift on a much slower timescale than the entire history of IQ tests.
* This pattern matches to the Motte-and-Bailey rhetorical technique, ergo I am suspicious of people who try to tie genetics and IQ until they're clear they're not making a racially charged claim. Last I checked, there is no real evidence that human races are a meaningful genetic category, let alone that anything usually described as "race" correlates to any genes connected to IQ scores.
Because where you draw the lines for "race" is down to your own culture, not a constant dividing line that all cultures agree upon.
To an American, race may be e.g.: {White, Black, Hispanic, Native American, Arabic, Asian}.
To most Europeans, everyone who an an American would call Hispanic, we'd probably either call "Caucasian" (i.e. white) if their heritage is more from the Spanish side or Native American if their heritage is more from the pre-Columbian (Aztec?) side.
If you're Chinese, they may say the ethnicities are "Han, Zhuang, Hui, Manchu, Uyghur, …" where those are all ethnic groups within China.
Rwanda, infamously, would get you a distinction between Hutu and Tutsi; if you show me a picture of two people and ask me which was which, I wouldn't be able to answer, or even know if I was being pranked with any of the other ethnic groups in Africa.
But more broadly, while skin colour is easy to spot from the outside, it's about as useful as hair or eye colour when it comes to correspondence with the huge range of invisible genetic variation.
>Mild cognitive decline was noted after infection with the wild-type virus and with each variant, including B.1.1.529 (Omicron). Relative to uninfected participants, cognitive deficit (3-point loss in IQ) was seen even in participants who had had completely recovered from mild COVID-19.
>Participants with persistent symptoms had the equivalent of a 6-point loss in IQ, while those who had been admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU) experienced the equivalent of a 9-point loss in IQ.
> No idea. Why do we need to determine if humans are getting dumber or not?
It seems to me, then, that your primary objection is not that IQ scores are inaccurate, but that intelligence shouldn't be measured in the first place?
Which makes me think that you don't want anyone doing research into whether human intelligence is changing at all.
No I think that our tools to measure and our definition of intelligence are lacking and are causing more problems than actually helping with anything.
Or can you point to any obvious improvements that result from having measured “intelligence” for the last 100+ years?
When my grandpa was a kid they would measure your skull and decide if you are smart or a subhuman based on that. Makes about as much sense as our current IQ tests…
I think it’s an essential question.
I wouldn’t even know how to describe what intelligence means exactly. I’ve experienced very “smart” people make horribly stupid decisions and the other way round.
Since I don’t know a way to describe what intelligent actually means I can’t tell if it’s good or not to have more or less of it.
For some this seems to be a very “finished” topic, but we don’t have any widely accepted definitions of intelligence, not even for “less complex” organisms
The one i did at 7 _definitely_ had a cultural component. I think it was 5 different tests, i distinctly during one of them thinking "if my parent didn't educate me on music there is no way i could have answered that, is this bullshit?". Then in the spatialization test i had a tangram, which incidentally, was a game i had since i was 4. Honestly i remember i scored high, but i also told myself how lucky that was that most of the question the psychologist asked me, i already read the answers (which might have been the point), and that they used a tangram because honestly i knew i would have scored poorly on that particular test, i have trouble visualizing stuff (mild aphantasia).
The first IQ test was developed by Binet and Simon in France, and it was all about predicting academic success of children. Virtually all IQ tests are predicting academic success. Cultural component is a big part of it. For example music education is associated with better grades. Maybe no one knows how it works, but it does.
No one knows what intelligence is, all the tests are like "lets identify a group of smart people (normally it is something like a group of high performing students), find correlates and build a test measuring correlates". No good definition of intelligence and no casual reasoning, just a correlative one.
How IQ 100 becomes a median? Lets take a big enough sample, get their test score and then normalize numbers so median will be 100 exactly. The creators of tests know that you can't compare IQ numbers from different populations. You can investigate the difference, but a direct comparison is nonsense. Even comparisons between different age cohorts of the same population are questionable at very least.
It doesn't mean that iq numbers are meaningless, but we shouldn't confuse them with intelligence, and we definitely shouldn't treat them as absolute numbers. They are relative measure.
Not a sufficient measure of different kinds of mental agility (including emotional/social) maybe.
But when it comes to intelligence needed for doing maths and physics and such, it's a very good proxy. And geniuses like Tao, also happen to scope very highly.
All of these effects are explained much better by social factors. If you're poor or discriminated against, you get less nutrition, less education, and face barriers in trying to improve both.
Could you please elaborate on why measuring the same group somehow eliminates social effects?
Are you claiming social factors have remained constant during the measuring period? Because they very obviously haven't.
If you're aware of the Peter principle, and how inequality compounds over time, then you know that the rate at which social factors change is correlated with their quantile values.
This to me is one of the most apparent failures of modern taboo infecting people's ability to communicate, or even reason.
Eugenics is not ethical, for a variety of very good reasons; that does not mean that it's unscientific.
We know that intelligence is heritable; we have observed epigenetic group trends like the Flynn effect to the point where they plateau...
The biggest unknown in my opinion is how stable the gains we have made are. If we have our education systems disrupted, or some nutrition crunch, does the population average drop to the point where the complex systems we depend on are not maintained?
No, it's taboo because actually trying to implement it requires invalidating individual human rights... And requires creating an authority who decides what traits should be passed on or removed.
So people hear the word, and react to the word at some toddler level "it's yucky!", and stop reasoning altogether.
But it's a proven fact. Less educated people are poorer. The less educated tend to have more children. And children who grow up in poor families receive a lower quality of education.
Is that because of some heritable presence/lack of intelligence or because scientists feed their children well early in life, have books in the home, and take the time to follow up on their children's education?
The ugly thing about eugenics is that someone has an artificial ideal of how people should be and then tries to enforce that. If something just happens without interference (a process), that's basically just evolution.
Hold on.
Turns out some scientists found out the amount of plastic was over measured because it included the plastic of their own gloves.
I've read it last week, can not found the source now. Sorry
> It’s important to note that even if the microplastic abundance in the environment is lower than researchers originally thought, any amount of microplastics can be troublesome, given their negative effects on human health and ecosystems.
No, they showed that the gloves could have introduced microplastic-like particles in some samples depending on how they are handled. It just feels like one of those studies secretly funded by an oil company to throw shade.
I think the intent of Mike Judge's joke was less so an outright promotion of eugenics and more so mocking the upper crust of American society's approach to family planning. (That of which Judge was intimately familiar with during his time in SV when he worked for a graphics card company.)
A lot of his work with KotH analyzed the same dynamics of educated and uneducated America and the interplay and I think Idiocracy is essentially the terminus of the observations he would make where if the idiots got their way. (A semi-common plot point with Hank in KotH where he would be pit against rediculous circumstances.)
> There is nothing in the movie that suggests that the decline in average intelligence is a result of cultural factors or education.
Have you skipped start of the movie or did we watch different editions? They literally open the story with redneck family breeding and spreading their redneck ways through family ties while “smart” family waits for the perfect moment.
I think that the movie makes it really, really obvious that the intellectual degradation goes beyond just culture. The people are presented as being borderline mentally disabled.
I rewatched the intro, and it is true that they label the character IQs. That said, I still don't think that the particular mechanism is the most important part
The movie obviously doesn’t depict a eugenics program, but it makes the core argument of eugenics: if human breeding is left uncontrolled it will lead to “stupid” people breeding more.
Correct! It mandated eugenics in real life, in the early 20th century. I didn't say that the movie shows eugenics happening. I said "the film itself implies that the idiocracy is due to stupid people breeding more, a classic tenet of Nazism and eugenics alike." Work on your reading comprehension.
It's true though, isn't it? The response is what typifies Nazi and similar positions.
It is curious that there's no reported disgenic effect though - that seems counter to evolutionary theory? Perhaps it's only limiting the rate of growth of IQ/intelligence.
There's a classic sci-fi story in which we rely on computers, the population gets dumber to the point noone knows how to make/fix the computers. I think in that there's a computer glitch that then wipes out humanity; but it's from the time when there were monolithic computers.
Is Dennis the Menace a treatise on corporeal punishment?
If we want to treat Idiocracy as a policy paper, why not take away as a lesson to think beyond merely themselves when the well-educated decide whether to raise children?
The film wasn't about education, it was about genetics, as the intro makes abundantly clear. And the Redditors who get themselves hot and bothered about this film aren't laughing, they're congratulating themselves on being the intelligent ones instead of the dysgenic stupids while crowing about how "Idiocracy is a documentary" -> stupid people are overbreeding.
If most people in the thread have different takeaways, and you're laser-focused on seeing eugenics and superiority (especially when you keep making condescending remarks like "hope this helps" or "work on your reading comprehension"), I don't think that reflects on the film
Yeah, the consensus of a plurality of users of a Silicon Valley startup incubator heavily associated with the right wing is definitely the only opinion that matters about the subtext of a film.
That's ironic seeing that nazis (or the far right in general) usually need stupid people to vote for them so they get into a position where they can undermine a democratic system...
All kinds of people voted for the Nazi party, including very intelligent and respectable professors, and there was no special split in intelligence between either side voters (or measure of that).
What's ironic is using nazi-like thinking (the idiot masses who vote far right vs the enlightened people who vote left), instead of treating it as a complex political matter, and accepting that perfectly intelligent people can just as well fall for that shit.
Voting for the right as a member of the working class is truly idiotic. Not that most people on this site have ever dipped below PMC treatlerite comfort.
>Voting for the right as a member of the working class is truly idiotic
Or not everybody shares your priorities and ideological outloook, or even pragmatic assessment of how more fucked they are with the right vs the left in power in the past, and it's the above that's naive.
Perhaps they're adverse to people so apolitical and self-righteous that think nobody can't vote anything else than what they're selling, unless they're stupid or immoral.
Every single quality of life improvement for the working class, from minimum wage, to overtime, to weekends, was delivered by the left. Please tell me one thing that the right has accomplished for laborers.
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!
> Unless I'm misremembering, and it did make direct reference to intelligence rather than education and access to it.
You are misremembering; they had a scene of an intelligence test that had adults matching shapes (stars -. tars, squares -> squares) and getting it wrong.
I'm afraid you are misremembering. The movie is explicitly eugenicist. The people of the future are explicitly biologically stupid. The opening transcript is unambiguous:
[Man Narrating] As the 21st century began… human evolution was at a turning point.
Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest… the fastest reproduced in greater numbers than the rest… a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man… now began to favor different traits.
[Reporter] The Joey Buttafuoco case-
Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized… and more intelligent.
But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction.
A dumbing down.
How did this happen?
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.
What is "explicitly eugenicist" in observing that the unprecedented way mankind has dominated its environment has changed the selection pressures we are subject to?
My quest to survive to adulthood and pass on my genes looked nothing like the gauntlet an Homo erectus specimen would have run.
Fair criticism. It was very lecturing. Beyond that, it was also quite funny, but really, there was nothing funny about the end. I don't think it was meant as a comedy.
Same here. There was something feeling so obviously off with Don't Look Up.. for me at least. Idiocracy did not suffer from this.. but Mike Judge is somewhat of an acquired taste I guess.
I never saw it but Scott Alexander's review made it sound like the writers of Don't Look Up were themselves idiots, who wanted to send a political message but couldn't figure out how to do it properly.
How about the British "Till Death Do Us Part" from the 1960s/70s?
That had a similar irony in that people complained about the racist character of Alf Garnett, but the series very much used his bigotism/racism as the butt of the jokes.
> Then you need to watch comedies made decades ago.
Yes. It was nice when corporate taxes were high, xenophobia was seen as something bad, and movies could focus on smaller problems satire.
I hope that we go back to the socialist era of the USA with unionization, safety nets and welfare for the working class instead of for billionaires. Movies could just be silly again.
Was that supposed to trigger me? Not from there, but I'm in favor of "unionization, safety nets and welfare for the working class instead of for billionaires" and higher corporate taxes!
But also I don't think movies aren't silly because they deal with all the "big problems". After all they didn't have a problem making silly movies in eras with far worse problems, social and economic. And they could make hella fun movies on heavy topics just fine (Blazing Saddles and racism for example, or MASH and the Vietnam war - even if nominally about Korea).
Modern comedies aren't silly or fun, not because times are troubled, but because they're written as shallow moralizing lectures. Any "caring" is performative. They're also walking on eggshells, and are too polite to have any edge. And then there's the derivative reboots and remakes, which many of them are.
I couldn't finish "Idiocracy" because the underlying eugenics nonsense made me angry enough not to enjoy the comedy anymore.
It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans and thus intelligence declines unironically. There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true.
If it were true, then decline wouldn't have begun in the 19th or 20th century but around the time that property and currencies emerged.
But there is no need to disproof this because there is no evidence that it has any truth to it.
That's like being angry at Star wars because the very first title text says "long time ago", and we know humans didn't go into space long time ago duh.
I think there's so much ill-founded assumptions in eugenics BS that it's hard to know where to start, but as a genealogist, I can personally verify that upper or middle class, wealthier people, presumably the sort eugenicists identify with, clearly had at least a 2-3 generations head start on the demographic transition where I come from.
There are other trends, there's always some groups of people who started having fewer kids earlier or later for reasons not obviously related to class - but class is the big one.
> It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans and thus intelligence declines unironically. There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true.
you seem pretty convinced that intelligence plays an important role in natural selection. I'd argue that decisiveness, confidence, looks, social skills all play a more important role. (I'm not saying that's a good thing)
I'm interested in understanding your point of view, can you elaborate on what you mean by "There is no joke in that"?
Can't remember in details that part of the film. Was it explicitly eugenics? Otherwise it could be seen as not getting the same education, depending on parental situation.
It's in the opening scene, where poor, "low IQ" couple complains about getting another child again by accident while a suburban "high IQ" couple was hesitant to start making children until it was too late (the husband dies). "Low IQ" couple's son grows up into a stupid, sexy jock and it goes on from there for generations.
So yes, eugenics was pretty much an integral part of the premise. IQ bubbles even pop up on the screen during those scenes, just to remove any shadow of a doubt.
> So yes, eugenics was pretty much an integral part of the premise. IQ bubbles even pop up on the screen during those scenes, just to remove any shadow of a doubt.
Is that really how we use the word "eugenics", though? That scene you refer to explicitly explained that Natural Selection does not necessarily select for intelligence.
So while some people are calling it "Eugenics", it's what we more typically call Natural Selection, Evolutionary Pressure, etc.
Eugenics implies that the selection criteria was not natural. The scene you mention makes it clear that, in-universe anyway, the selection criteria was entirely natural and not a pressure imposed by humans.
I agree that it doesn't explicitly show someone tilting the scales, but that doesn't mean that eugenics are not an integral part of the premise in a "if we don't do something about this, this is what the world will look like" kind of way.
I still like the movie, but like with any 20+ years old comedies, I can recognise issues with its premise which would be more-or-less unacceptable today. In 2006... not as much. The future is now, old man!
> does that scene imply that we should do something to tilt the scales in the opposite direction?
No, it did not.
> I agree that it doesn't explicitly show someone tilting the scales, but that doesn't mean that eugenics are not an integral part of the premise in a "if we don't do something about this, this is what the world will look like" kind of way.
And, to you, "Do something about this" means only one thing - forcefully stopping classes of people from reproducing?
>It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans
So it's a documentary?
Even the basic reproductive instinct has become "ineffective on humans".
>There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true
No, there are countless jokes in the movie that don't depend about how the world became stupid (be it cultural or genetics or combination) at all. Literally all of them are like that.
>If it were true, then decline wouldn't have begun in the 19th or 20th century but around the time that property and currencies emerged.
Why, did the movie say it's the result of "property and currencies"? And even if somebody said so, who said it's just about "property and currencies" merely being a thing that starts this decline, and not surpassing some level of development of property and currencies (e.g. late capitalism), which prevents mitigating factors from working?
tbf its not "letting the stupid people breed" and more that smart ppl stop breeding. still wrong and like other comments said, Dont Look Up is more practical bc its people with money, power, influence dooming us with greed
while i loved it, i’ve noticed a ton of people despised Don’t Look Up for the same reason some of the theater goers complained in a siblings comment.
> I attended an audience testing screener for Idiocracy … 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!"
My tendency is to believe that the individuals do not what matter as much, when it comes to the biggest risks. I'm not sure if this is a bias or a theory... but I lean to some sort of "medium is the message" determinism.
>"He acknowledged that the alignment problem remained unsolved, but he redefined it—rather than being a deadly threat, it was an inconvenience, like the algorithms that tempt us to waste time scrolling on Instagram."
Before "don't be evil" was a cliche, I think it was a real guiding principle at Google and they built a world class business that way.
Facebook's rival ad platform didn't have search queries to target ads at. Aggressive utilization of user data was the only way they could build an Adwords-scale business. As they pushed this norm, Google followed.
Doomscroll addiction gets a lot of attention because engineers and journalists have children and parents. There are other risks though. Political stability, for example.
By early 2010s, smartphones were reaching places that had almost no modern media previously. Often powered by FB-exclusive data plans. The Arab spring happened, then ISIS. FB-centric propaganda seemingly played a major role in a major conflict/atrocity in Burma. Coups in Africa powered by social media based propaganda. Worrying political implications in the west. Unhinged uncle syndrome. Etc. Social media risks/implications were more than just "inconvenience."
At no point did we really see tech companies go into mitigation mode. Even CYA was relatively limited. There was no moment of truth. It was business as usual.
So... I think OpenAI's initial charter was naive. Science fiction almost. It was never going to withstand commercial reality, politics, competition and suchlike. I think these are greater than the individuals involved.
That doesn't mean we should ignore, excuse or otherwise tolerate lack of integrity. But, I don't think it is a way of reducing risk.
Whether the risk is skynet, economic turmoil, politics, psych epidemics or whatever... I don't think the personal integrity of executives is a major factor.
In captive breeding, it's a brutal way to "improve stock" but in wild populations this is pretty normal for large mammals. It also generally happens more slowly... so isn't that different from every other ambient process that selects some genes and culls others.
Fwiw... something similar also occurs with outbreeding/hybridization. Novel gene combinations can be maladaptive, just like double recessives.
These are all pretty normal population dynamics.
There are billions of us now... but that's not normal for a large animal, especially predators. How many leopards, or bears, or elephants are there at any given time?
>somehow Neanderthals managed to survive across most of Eurasia for nearly 400,000 years, longer than modern humans have been on Earth.
These narrative simplifications end up just being confusing.
Neanderthals from 400kya are often classed as Heidelbergensis. These guys were less Neanderthal-ish and more similar to us... being closer to and less divergent from the sapiens-neanderthal LCA. Neanderthal-Denisovan divergence occurs at this time.. so calling them Neanderthals rather than Neanderthal ancestors is kind of messy.
There is a shortage of fossil evidence from this and earlier periods... It's called the "muddle in the middle."
In any case.... Sapiens also had ancestors at this time. We don't have fossils, but something has to be our ancestors. So if we are calling Neanderthal ancestors from this period Neanderthals... it would be more consistent to call sapien ancestors sapiens.
Individual populations may have been insular, small and most died out. But... there were people everywhere.
Humans existed over a vast range. From south Africa to Northern Eurasia. East to west. At this point in time... I think it's confusing to think of neanderthal/denisovan/sapiens as different species.
Individuals may have been inbred... but the overall genetic diversity across the whole range was greater than the genetic diversity we have today. In some sense, we are the inbred ones.
Also... population estimates are pretty dicey. We don't really know. Could have been booms and busts. Could have been ideal habitats with higher populations.
We still have a fairly poor grasp of human "natural history"
> Neanderthals from 400kya are often classed as Heidelbergensis.
Heidelbergensis is the last common anscestor of Neanderthals, Denisovans and us.
We were all around for just as long, 400kya+, and before that, it was Homo Erectus.
All of them, Erectus, Heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, Denisovans and Sapiens were walking around at the same time. There's plenty of fossil records we've uncovered that show that to be true.
It was only in the last 100k years or so that we remained and the other variants "died out".
Heidlebergensis is no longer thought to be on the sapiens lineage. It's probably the ancestor of neanderthals and denisovans. 400kya is around the time of this divergence, based on recent genomics. They were the same species at this time.
The Sapiens lineage is now thought to have diverged significantly earlier.
Erectus existed, but in pockets.
Other lineages existed also. At the very least, Homo naledi. Probably other dwarf lineages, an African "ghost lineage" and probably others.
Neanderthals and denisovans are structured... With subspecies, hybrid zones and whatnot.
There are also many sapiens lineages with no descendants. Most of them.
We shouldn't use the word "species" lightly with hominins. There's no accepted way to properly classify archaic humans.
For example, some paleoanthropologists classify most archaic humans as h. sapiens. Anatomically modern humans become h. s. sapiens, neanderthal become h. s. neanderthalensis. This incorporates the middle pleistocene hominins from mainland Asia pretty well to boot. Many of those same people also use the "conventional" binomial terminology when they're not making a very specific point, so you can't just look at usages to understand where they're coming from.
There's also a hundred other classifications, some giving neanderthals their own species, others including it with heidelbergensis, and so on. None of them has clearly "won" and probably won't while we keep publishing "new" transitional forms every couple of years.
Sure... and it would help if there was more consistency in general.
But given that there isn't, we should at least maintain internal consistency. That's what I was commenting on above. You can't use one conceptual framework for Neanderthals/Eurasia and another for Sapiens/Africa. It's confusing... and you end up with statements that are essentially false.
Neanderthal and Sapiens exist approximately concurrently. The "classic neanderthal" form doesn't predate sapiens. It only predates Sapiens if we define "Neanderthal" from the point of divergence. If we do that, we need to define Sapiens the same way. It can't be the establishment of a founder population for one and the emergence of a distinct form for the other.
I'm not advocating for one system or another... or even for the establishment of one consistent system necessarily.
Did they really die out, or did the population just merge with modern humans? Most people on the planet have some Neanderthal DNA, so clearly there was some intermixing. If modern humans were a much larger population, it makes sense that the Neanderthals only contributed a small amount of DNA to the gene pool. I could imagine that they were just slowly absorbed into the much larger Sapiens population.
Virtually every population outside of Sub-Saharan Africa has Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA between 1-4%. This includes all of Eurasia, all pre-Columbian American populations, Aboriginal Australians, Papuans, etc.
Is there any research about why Sub-Saharan Africa doesn't have Neanderthal DNA?
Is the argument that the tribe of humans from Africa was good at repelling outside invaders, but themselves expanded outwards and assimilated (and then outnumbered) the other populations, or something else?
It just seems a bit bizarre given that all humans elsewhere have relatively similar amounts (but quite a low amount) of Neanderthal DNA, which seems to suggest a reasonable amount of migration, interaction and interbreeding between populations everywhere except Africa.
There were multiple waves out of Africa but Most early anatomical human groups never left Africa as a result, there’s more DNA diversity within the continent than outside Africa
Its confusing because the non-african group grew exponentially while the intra-African continent continued to mature
The anatomically modern humans that left Africa spread rapidly and aggressively across the world basically absorbing and destroying every proto-human group and ecological niche and
now the world is ruled by the aggressive narcissistic chimeral hybrid of human (African) Neanderthal (European proto human) and denisovian (Peking man) that survived the exit snd expansion
It also doesn't hold for the African Diaspora, especially in the Americas (and probably flowing back into Africa as we speak). It's also worth considering that many of the actual traits that Neanderthal-associated genes codes for probably have analogues in the much-wider African genome.
The version of the claim I believed is that Sub-Saharan Africans (especially as of ~2000 years ago) basically don't have any Neanderthal DNA.
Your follow-up doesn't appear to contradict that (of course this wouldn't hold when populations start mixing in modern times and wouldn't have ever held 100%) so I was confused.
However the article does in fact dispute my previous belief:
>The researchers found that African individuals on average had significantly more Neanderthal DNA than previously thought—about 17 megabases (Mb) worth, or 0.3% of their genome.
This is as opposed to 1-4% of genomes for populations outside of Sub-Saharan Africa.
>They also found signs that a handful of Neanderthal genes may have been selected for after they entered Africans' genomes, including genes that boost immune function and protect against ultraviolet radiation.
>The best fit model for where Africans got all this Neanderthal DNA suggests about half of it came when Europeans—who had Neanderthal DNA from previous matings—migrated back to Africa in the past 20,000 years.
"The past 20,000 years" is pretty broad and seemingly includes modern era exchanges, but AFAIK that can't account for selecting Neanderthal genes or for how widespread Neanderthal DNA already is.
True, but I'm guessing they're referring to anatomically modern humans which have only been here for a couple hundred thousand years. Not sure that's a meaningful way to look at it since I'm assume Neanderthals also evolved somewhat during that time.
One thing that confused me in TFA is that it says that "[neanderthals were] maybe a couple of thousand breeding individuals", yet they were enough to inter-breed with sapiens at some point(s) [1]. In my mind, tribes of "far-flung populations of just a few dozen individuals" would be shy and difficult to find.
If we think of the digitization tech revolution... the changes it made to the economy are hard to describe well, even now.
In the early days, it was going to turn banks from billion dollar businesses to million dollar ones. Universities would be able to eliminate most of their admin. Accounting and finances would be trivialized. Etc.
Earlier tech revolution s were unpredictable too... But at lest retrospectively they made sense.
It's not that clear what the core activities of our economy even are. It's clear at micro level, but as you zoom out it gets blurry.
Why is accountability needed? It's clearly needed in its context... but it's hard to understand how it aggregates.
reply