this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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The problem with comparisons between the movie and real life is that there are still plenty of people of intelligence behind the scenes making our lives miserable.
The world of idiocracy is basically the result of accidental eugenics. "Smart people" don't have babies, so only dumb trailer trash has babies, so the world gets dumber. That's not how the real world works, people who were born to families living in trailer parks or low-income housing have just as much of a chance to be smart as those born to the rich... as long as they have the same opportunities. For the most part, they don't, but there's a minority that still gets grants and scholarships and just luck to become the "smart elite" that don't exist in the world of Idiocracy.
This is a bit of a controversial topic that's surely bigger than this thread, but I'm going to leave it here anyway for other people reading this.
You talk about trailer parks/low income families vs rich families, but I think that Idiocracy is not about income, it's about being dumb. Part of which is just cultural (ignorance), but part of it seems to be intelligence. And as far as I know, there's no evidence that any kid can become as intelligent as anyone else with proper raising and education. Research seems to pretty clearly show that IQ is heritable to a significant degree, and while it can be needlessly lowered in many ways (like malnutrition or high stress in critical development phases), in the absence of these issues no enrichment is able to raise it.
Despite how controversial it is in some circles, the Wikipedia article on the topic seems to be pretty good.
However, since the movie really is not deep, it's possible that its whole point was just that the idiocy is cultural, and in that case the above obviously doesn't apply. I'm just saying what it seemed like to me.
IQ isn't even a good metric of intelligence, just of the ability to do well at IQ tests.
The point of the movie is to show how stupid people are everywhere, and it's their fault that the world is going to shit. Which is an elitist, shitty argument. It completely ignores the direct involvement of those with a vested interest in keeping people ignorant of the world around them.
Sure, you can make an argument that a certain level of intelligence is inheritable... but not to such a degree that is implied by the movie, or by how people interpret it. Sure, you may not have quite the same ability to quickly consume and interpret information... but most everyone has the ability to do it eventually. It's just a matter of how much you want to. Many people, especially those in the American culture presented in the movie, have been trained to not do that, and that's what people see when they look around and find idiots all around them. The unfortunate truth, though, is that those who judge others based on that vapid criteria suffer from the same lack of intelligent thought. They don't put any effort into interpreting the world around them, and thus just assume those around them are a bunch of idiots who cause all the problems in their life.
I've seen this repeated ad nauseam on reddit in any slightly relevant threads, but it seems completely unfounded. Psychometrics is one of the subfields of psychology that doesn't suffer from an apocalyptic replication crysis, like for example social psychology, and there's decades of research on IQ. Please note that I'm not saying that IQ is the most important measure of a person or anything like that, but it's a pretty good metric that demonstrably correlates to/predicts a lot of things with reasonable confidence.
In my experience, in real life it's more common that people just don't care about wellbeing of others who are worse off/more ignorant, than it being malice, but otherwise I agree.
I agree with this as well, and with other critics you write below. I don't think it's a very good movie.
But I don't think this is the case. Firstly I don't like the "it's a matter of how much you want to", because that's very close to blaming a person for not being born smart enough. Secondly, even if what you say is true - it's a matter of time and effort - the reality is that at some point the time and effort needed would be so huge that it's the same as "not able to do it at all", because an information that was acquired/way to solve a problem that was found was only relevant ten years ago and is completely useless now. Most people simply don't have it in them to seriously work on a unified theory of physics, but most people (though a considerably smaller "most") also don't have it in them to be a good strategic leader of a company, who does nothing as complicated as theoretical physicists, but needs to solve problems in a smart way fast to be good for anything.
The problem is that this correlates to/predicts outcomes in systems predicated on ... IQ.
"IQ correlates to success in careers," for example. Your career path and ensuing choices in your life is heavily influenced by your SAT scores if you're in the USA. And SAT scores are ...
... drum roll ...
... basically just IQ tests. So strangely enough, in a system that explicitly filters based on IQ, a high IQ correlates with success within the system. And most other nations that have modern educational infrastructure have some form of test which is IQ-adjascent: China's is even worse than the SAT, for example, while, say, Canada's system kind of smears out and obfuscates the IQ component ... but it's still very much a part of things.
I don't think this is an argument against the usefulness of IQ. Firstly not all countries use standardized tests with such an influence (I'm from Czechia and we don't, there's a standardized high school leaving examination, but it's only necessary to pass, the score is generally unimportant for university admission). Secondly all you're saying is that the tests correlate with IQ. That does not make them or IQ invalid, it may just as well simply mean that they test how well a student does in school, and having a higher IQ tends to make studying easier.
But mostly, again, psychometrics is the one field of psychology that has relatively rigorous and reliable methodology. The idea that you disprove decades of research, from large scale statistic studies made with cooperation of state institutions to expensive and rare research like various twin studies, simply by saying "actually IQ doesn't matter" is naive at best. There really isn't a lot of reasons to say that apart from ideological ones.
IQ tests can be studied for. Someone taking an IQ test cold will get a lower score than that same person taking just a second test after knowing how the IQ test works. Further, you can actually train for higher IQ scores. This kind of indicates that there is a measurable learned skill component in this "metric". Teasing that learned component out from something intrinsic (and it's utterly ludicrous, incidentally, to conceive of "intelligence" as a single thing that can be boiled down into a single number!) is a problem that has thus far proved intractable.
IQ tests have major cultural components. IQ tests made for Chinese people (culturally Chinese, not ethnically) are different from those made for American people which are again different from those made for German people. Culture is not intrinsic to the brain, so again it seems IQ is not measuring something intrinsic. It is measuring something related to its cultural milieu.
IQ test results vary by the quality of education available. People who were privileged enough to have good schools, private supplemental tutoring, etc. get higher IQ scores than people whose background was shit neighbourhoods with terrible schooling and no money for extra tutoring. Again, this strongly indicates that IQ is not intrinsic but at least partially cultural and educated (and a rather large part).
IQ numbers have been rising over time to the point that someone who got an IQ score of 140 in the 1970s would score as a borderline idiot today. Judging by the behaviour of people and their proclivity to believe stupid things, there has been no real change in actual ability to think and process information over that time (if anything it might be a negative trend, given American politics in particular!). Yet if there wasn't a built-in corrective factor applied that changes each year IQ scores would be rocketing skyward. Again this hints at something learned, and not intrinsic.
So IQ measures something ... but nobody can say what it is. The only thing we can know for certain is that IQ tests measure with 100% accuracy your ability to write IQ tests.
So that's four non-ideological reasons to be suspicious of IQ tests. Please feel free to dismiss this as "naive" or "ignorant" or "ideological" if you wish; it will strongly show your own ideology.
IQ has its uses, but sadly those uses aren't the ones commonly associated with it. (The original use that proto-IQ tests were intended for were to highlight students who were struggling and needed extra assistance, a role in which they were nearly perfect.) But then the US Army latched onto it as a measurement of "intelligence" and things went to Hell almost immediately thereafter.
(shortened your quotes, message was too long)
As far as I know, for properly administrated tests the scientific consensus is that this is not true, with a few small sample size studies showing some improvement and a lot of larger studies repeatedly failing to show anything. You provide no evidence, which in this particular case (something that goes against most of IQ research) would be warranted imo, so I can only guess what you mean in particular. As far as I know, even with potentially neglected children from environments with not enough stimulation, where the theoretical potential clearly exists, the results have been mixed.
I don't think this is a popular claim in psychometrics and I haven't said so either.
A lot of effort went into mitigating this issue, and while it cannot be erased, it doesn't really invalidate IQ as a concept in any way. It is one of the reasons why we don't call people from more significantly different societies that one might very crudely describe as "primitive" unintelligent (and yes, some meanings of IQ can lose relevance in such societies), but afaik available evidence shows that there's not much difference between the results and usefulness of IQ in the US, Germany or China.
Without more information you cannot say whether it indicated what you say or whether it indicates that more intelligent people tend to be more successful, which creates generational wealth/education differences on its own.
I am not claiming either, but let me give you a counter anecdote: Czechia doesn't really have bad neighborhoods and terrible schooling, we were forced to all be equally poor during 40 years of communism, which has only been changing quite slowly - there are about 2 real "ghettos" in the whole country, it's safe everywhere and schools are paid from state tax money, wages set by law etc. So there's almost no difference in funding between a school in a poor area and a "rich" area (with significant quotation marks), and most schools are on a similar level of quality.
Despite that, the studied qualities of IQ still apply here, and have done so since IQ research started here, even during communism where the societal differences were even smaller outside of the ruling class.
The obvious exception: you're too poor to provide proper nutrition to your children, you for live under constant existential stress etc. These likely lower your IQ and likely contribute the Flynn effect (see below).
This is incorrect and all it would take to know that is opening the wikipedia page on Flynn effect. Since different tests measure different types of intelligence and are standardized individually, it's not easily possible to say "IQ xxx in 1970 would be IQ yyy in 2020". But it seems to change by about 3 points per decade, the change has been slowing down and in some cases even reversing in some developed countries in recent decades, and the change has always been the most prominent in the lower end of the scale and not very visible in the high end.
Based on that we can be reasonably sure that a person with an IQ score of 140 in the 1970s would still be considered gifted at the least, and it is possible that they would score around 140 today as well. I'm sure that with some effort you could find some mathematician or physicist who was measured around that score in the 1970s and is still considered obviously briliant.
See above. I'm too lazy to go find if the US suffers from reverse Flynn effect, but there have been researchers claiming that median IQ has been going down, though I think it's not a mainstream consensus opinion. In any case, IQ has not been skyrocketing in the US for some time as far as I know.
Furthermore, the Flynn effect is an effect widely studied by actual scientists, it's not a thing that disproves psychometrics, it's an area of research of psychometrics.
Literal books have been written on this. You just have to read them. The IQ is used because we know that it's a useful metric for many things, it's pretty much as simple as that.
It is the best way we have to measure g factor. IQ is highly correlated with life outcomes, so the argument that it only measure one’s ability to do IQ tests well is clearly specious. It’s measuring g factor, and g factor enables one to work more productively and delay gratification, meaning less crime. The average IQ in prisons in America is something like 85. That’s near the cutoff for the army, because not even they can teach such a person to peel potatoes. The ramifications of this are obvious: we’ve built economies which require intelligence. Someone with an 85 IQ (more than 10% of the population) can’t even be trained to run cash registers at McDonald’s. What does one do if they can’t work? Crime, poverty, self harm, and chronic welfare. We need to figure out what to do with these people, and the first step is acknowledging that not everyone is equally capable of contributing to society. Then we can have an honest discussion about welfare and UBI for these vulnerable people. Pretending they’re not severally disadvantaged is harming them immensely.