Wherein I give props to xkcd

[brynndragon]

Thank you xkcd for talking about an idea which I was willing to suspend disbelief for in order to have a laugh but have heard people actually spout as if it reflected reality. You see, in order to believe that premise you have to sincerely believe that smart people never ever do stupid things when it comes to sex. If you have such a belief, you clearly don't know any smart people (at least, you don't know them well enough ;P).

Comments

[tober.livejournal.com]

Oh man, that Idiocracy one (which was the one of the three I had not yet seen) is brilliant.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

A few things:
1. Smart people have always been on a short end of the bell curve, we've always been a minority. It's the folks in the middle, neither smart nor stupid, who make up the majority and will keep doing so into the future.
2. Intelligence doesn't govern things like access to birth control and/or education. Especially when you look beyond our borders.
3. Rabbits aren't taking over the world for a reason (Austrailia notwithstanding). There's more to long-term survival than breeding and stupid people tend to self-correct for "accidental" breeding through accidental death.
4. It's really hard for us to see human evolution because a human lifetime is *our* lifetime. This leads to errors of extrapolation - we make up a pattern because we can't observe them very well. Hell, our current theory of IQ is what, one generation old, maybe two? We haven't been measuring intelligence long enough to make predictions about human evolution based on it.
5. Compared to the upheavals and changes in human existance over the millenia, birth control and sex education are drops in the bucket. They seem huge to us because they're happening to us but compared to a real bottleneck even the Black Plague didn't make much of a difference in something as basic as intelligence ratios.

[siderea]

I would argue that the movie implies that the bell curve is shifted downward so the median IQ or better yet the median of intelligence

The single most famous and well-established unexplained phenomenon in the field of IQ testing is the Flynn Effect: that the bell-curve has been shifting upward by about 3 points per decade, continuously, linearly over time, since IQ testing began, everywhere.

For the record, that amounts to a standard deviation in 50 years. The definitions of the lower edge of "gifted" and the upper edge of "mentally retarded" are 2 standard deviations.

So this entire discussion has been utterly bizarre to me. The single most famous trend in IQ is that it's going up. Why would anyone base even a bogus argument on the idea it's going down??

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

OMG actual information! Thank you for throwing expertise onto the flames of speculation before they burned way the hell out of control. I was in this awkward space between having a sufficient understanding of evolution to know that devolution doesn't actually happen and not having the specific information that would both contextualize that knowledge and give it some credibility with people who aren't biologists/psychologists (humanologists ;P).

Re: From the article you pointed out...

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

I'm speaking outside my area of expertise, but I feel like I've heard these ideas before: "Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. . ." That road leads directly to Social Darwinism, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Please stop running headlong down that road in a misguided attempt to play devil's advocate - the term is just way too appropriate in this case. . .

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Wow, I'd never heard of the Flynn Effect, that's fascinating!

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Another problem is that the idiocracy hypothesis assumes (a) that people are fixed in one of the two categories (equivalent to no genetic drift, but on an individual basis), and (b) that there isn't any interbreeding between the two groups. Both assumptions are flawed.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Okay, I'll accept that it's a continuity, not two distinct populations. But let me clarify what I'm referring to as "drift".

Let's look at some small segment of the population with a certain amount of education. (If you like math, picture that we're looking at a distribution of population density on the y-axis and education on the x-axis, and looking at a small section of the population with a particular education we're looking a a small dx range.)

If I am understanding you and the idiocracy hypothesis correctly, you/it have postulated that there are two ways the population at this particular education level can change: birth (increases population) and death (decreases population). The premise is that birth rate outweighs death rate for people at a low level of education, and that death rate outweighs birth rate for people at a high level of education, resulting in a flow to the left (less education) on this graph.

I postulate that there are two other ways this population at a particular level of education can change: if people less educated than this segment gain more education (increases the population at this education level), and if people already in this segment gain more education (decreases the population at this education level). Because individual people can never lose education, this ability of individuals to change segments will result in a flow to the right (more education) of this graph.

So we have two competing effects: the hypothesized birth/death rate inequity that results in a flow to the left (less education), and the individual increase in education that results in a flow to the right (more education). In order for an idiocracy to take place (a net shift towards the left / less education), we need for the flow to the left to be greater than the flow to the right. I have seen no evidence that this is the case.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Individual people can lose education in the form of forgetting what they've learned or having no interest in applying it and thus losing practice even if they kinda sort of remember how to do something.

Generally "level of education attained" refers to what degrees have been awarded or what grade of primary and secondary school has been completed, NOT the amount of knowledge retained, nor the person's innate ability. The only way one could regress in level of education is for the degree-granting institution to revoke the degree, or for the K-12 school to set a student back a grade (while I've heard of students repeating grades, I haven't heard of students being sent down grades). While I haven't seen the film in question, it is this "level of education attained" that is usually linked to reproduction rates (as much due to the culture absorbed throughout the education process as anything else), and it is this statistic which I was arguing about.

If you wish to discuss knowledge retained, innate ability, a particular skill set, or IQ (which is a combination of all the above), instead of discussing the level of education attained, I admit to being less interested in these discussions.

[squibbon.livejournal.com]

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

It's sort of amazing how persistent this idea is, and how it (plus a healthy dose of racism) has been shaping the debate on reproductive rights (not just abortion) for at least a century now.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

Oh gods, I completely failed to make the connection to Social Darwinism until you said this. That kinda makes the whole thing a lot more skeevy. . .

[schmycom.livejournal.com]

I've not seen the film but cannot resist participation in this discussion.

To me, there are too many other factors of influence to leave intelligence to be determined by genetics alone. For example:
- "Smart" parents may, while trying to ensure a "smart" future for their child, inadvertently interfere with their child's education, through coddling, expectations, location of schooling decisions, etc.
- "Dumb" parents may make decisions that allow their child to experience a greater exposure to ideas, thoughts, "smart" people, etc., leading to an environment conducive to learning

Or put simply, I'm sure we all have "smart" friends that seem not to have had "smart" parents and, conversely, know some "smart" or "educated" parents that have raised some dopey or doped children.

I somehow doubt that this comedy has time to make light of all the relevant minutiae of such a far-reaching concept. Also, like an earlier poster suggested, I'm sure the film is more a comment on today's society and the concept of intelligence drift was, while insightful, more a prop to justify the commentary.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

Yes, Idiocracy was not an insightful commentary on the theory of downward intelligence drift - that was merely an means for letting Mike Judge do what he's built his career on: giving viewers the opportunity to watch stupid people do stupid shit and laugh their asses off. Which is why it's really annoying when people not only presume it's possible, but that it's even true. What, we can figure out that big robots that turn into cars is fake but we can't figure out that stupid people aren't taking over humanity?

[adaptively.livejournal.com]

"Idiocracy" was funny. The pervasive (among geeks and goons, most of all) idea that it's MY DUTY to breed a better species is terrifying.

How did people make that leap, anyway? That's like saying, "Anchorman" was funny, so nobody should ever drink milk. (MILK WAS A BAD CHOICE!)

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

Well, I'll tell you the trend I've noticed: people I know who have fornmally studied biology and/or psychology did not make that leap (and frequently got annoyed at/confused by people who did). It's almost like those who are more interested in how people work than in how computers work don't fall into that particular trap. . .