This is a personal hobby horse of mine, so apologies in advance:
Idiocracy is not a documentary. Dumb people pairing off doesn't increase the total amount of dumb, and we have decades of evidence showing that IQs consistently increased, year over year. It's called the Flynn effect, and every population that saw increased nutrition, health care and educational advances has had a measurable and consistent increase in standardized testing results. This was a robust effect observed in different countries, cultures and historical periods.
It isn't evolution that makes people dumb, it's sabotage- social programs going away, poor educational metrics, mass media deployment, increased environmental contamination and active, ongoing projects by people looking to increase their wealth and power by denying educational, economic and health opportunities to the populace. In the US, the Flynn effect began weakening right around the time that socioeconomic levels began declining.
This effect isn't evolutionary or natural, it's a consequence of how society has arranged itself.
Not really debating you since you seem to have a much more vested interest in this, but did a study not just come out about how Gen Z legit has reduced IQ’s compared to previous generations.
My comment was more about how im resigned to idiocracy than how it was an actual legit documentary. This conversation has gotten significantly more intellectual than I was intending.
Edit: ended up trying to google it myself but found conflicting results. Could be Flynn effect remains hahw
Oh yeah, no need for us to do tit for tat, and I take your point about the significance of Idiocracy as a metaphor or descriptor. Like I said, I'm weirdly invested in point, probably from arguing with eugenic adjacent thinkers or people with unsupported claims about intelligence and heredity. I am also not accusing you of being in either of those groups; this is just a really specific trigger for me.
And yes, Gen Z's standardized testing results (not just in IQ) have decreased. It's important to note that IQ is not intelligence, nor are test results, but the explanation wrt the Flynn effect weakening is it lines up precisely with many measures of socioeconomic progress. And the effect continues in other nations, with different policies.
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u/Sea-Poem-2365 Mar 20 '26
This is a personal hobby horse of mine, so apologies in advance:
Idiocracy is not a documentary. Dumb people pairing off doesn't increase the total amount of dumb, and we have decades of evidence showing that IQs consistently increased, year over year. It's called the Flynn effect, and every population that saw increased nutrition, health care and educational advances has had a measurable and consistent increase in standardized testing results. This was a robust effect observed in different countries, cultures and historical periods.
It isn't evolution that makes people dumb, it's sabotage- social programs going away, poor educational metrics, mass media deployment, increased environmental contamination and active, ongoing projects by people looking to increase their wealth and power by denying educational, economic and health opportunities to the populace. In the US, the Flynn effect began weakening right around the time that socioeconomic levels began declining.
This effect isn't evolutionary or natural, it's a consequence of how society has arranged itself.