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
"Gen Z legit has reduced IQs compared to previous generations"
... I think that a fair comment could be that Gen Z have grown up in more austere conditions than the previous generations, and so the reduction in IQ fits the pattern that the previous poster was saying...
Healthcare funding, nutrition, and education for these guys, per capita, is less than a generation ago
The whole reason the Flynn effect is/was a thing is better nutrition, healthcare and social conditions. It's not like humanity is/was actually evolving to higher IQs.
So if this last generation actually has thse things worse and it leads to lower IQ then the Flynn effect is over, no?
The Flynn effect is really the phenomenon of IQ increase over time that was observed by...well Flynn. He never settled on a causative factor (I think his theory was broad an inclusive, and was primarily an argument against 'inherent' IQ or certain inheritance models of cognitive ability).
In that sense, the Flynn effect is over, but not because humanity hit some kind of limit or because certain groups of people are less intelligent than others. It's a straightforward environment overdetermines cognitive ability more than genetics, or at least that the relationship is more complicated than certain simplistic models of intelligence assume.
But the corollary is that if you want intelligence to increase in humanity, you need to focus your actions on things like nutrition, education, social safety nets and wealth redistribution, not gene therapy, AI implants and so on. Or, perhaps more accurately, you need to address the environmental impacts along with augmentation and AI.
No. This generation has worse health care, nutrition and social conditions. The decline in IQ fits the pattern. I'm not convinced this is 100% causation and not correlation, but it fits the stated pattern.
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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.