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

[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.