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I hear people say all the time how Idiocracy is so funny because it's true. I don't think the future will ever be that way, what do you think?
| I've seen it, the future could be that way | 11 | |
| I've seen it, the future could not be that way | 6 | |
| Haven't seen it | 12 | |
| Dangit, Bobby | 5 |
Why does he squint all the time? Is there a perpetual flashlight shining in his face?
Remember the little gag you saw in the beginning of the movie? That actually holds some scientific basis. There have been studies done linking low IQ to high fertility. While I don't believe that any causation was established (or ever will be, I don't believe in it being causation anyway), there is a noticeable correlation between having a low IQ and a high fertility rate.
The movie, essentially, played off of that. Eventually, those with low IQs would produce enough offspring that would eventually weed out, for lack of better way to put it, intelligence (which is considered by many to be a genetic trait to some degree).
I DO believe that the human genome does have heritable traits, some of which increase or decrease with breeding and if you think about it, the movie did make sense. Intelligent people will usually pair off with mates of around the same intelligence and, for the sake of the argument, let's assume the findings were true, they will have fewer children which make for less partners to pair off and eventually... well, you know. However, I don't know jack shit about genetics so I can't give an informed opinion regarding how probable this is.
I liked the movie and I liked some of the concepts, but in my opinion, that would not happen. Worst case scenario, the intelligence gap widens to a point in which the intelligent are separated from the unintelligent physically and economically and have some sort of controlling power over the less intelligent. But that's just my imagination.
Idiocracy isn't the future, it's now. You can see it in reality tv, Jackass I to IX, the media, the government, the presidential race, people who are seen as celebrities like the Kardashians and their ilk who are famous just for being famous but contribute nothing to society.
I've seen it, yes. What worries me is not that it's a satire on the world in 500 years, it's a satire on the way the world is now.
I work in education and many of the academics complain that they spend the first year of a three year course teaching the things that twenty years ago would have been learned at school aged 16.
I remember similar complaints when I was at university. Thankfully not levelled at me (I was at one of the poorest schools and got stuck with the exam from the toughest board, which is why nearly everyone at my school failed). It wasn't levelled at people from good schools, either. It was at people from poor schools who'd sat the exam with an easy board.
I didn't understand the problem until I worked for a university and had lots of colleagues who work for the exam board on campus. If an exam is easier, a local education authority gets better marks in its schools and thus is given more money next year. It's that simple.
Last year I looked at papers for a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from about two years ago. I was so surprised that I started looking at the syllabus in some detail. Not only was 90% of it the content of my A-level (learned at school from ages 16 to 17), my A-level included things that weren't in the degree. Matrix mathematics, for instance. The Cayley-Hamilton theorem wasn't covered at all. The biggest worry was although it was in my A-level, it was a rehash of familiar ground because I learned it aged 14. And we're not talking a long time ago here. It doesn't feel *that* long since I left school.
If, aged 14, and in a crappy northern comprehensive school I had enough knowledge in one (of the many subjects I studied) to today pass a degree, something has gone wrong. Badly wrong.
This kind of talk draws a lot of criticism, not least from people who have just receive their exam results. I agree. They should be angry but not at me. They should be angry at a system that doesn't value them highly enough to stretch them. I should be angry too because the same thing was happening when I was studying and if I'd been born twenty years earlier, I'd have been pushed further.
Really? I learned math in high school that my parents didn't even have the option of taking.
Absolutely. It's all driven by money, not genuine excellence. My father didn't study maths after the age of fourteen but some of the things he remembers outstripped what I was knew at 17.
The only caveat is that he did undertake further education (an electronics apprenticeship) and he might have picked it up there.
My dad and I watched this movie a long time ago and while my dad and his girlfriend were on vacation in Mexico, he took ill. His girlfriend, who hadn't seen the movie at the time, said "You should drink ____, the electrolytes will help." It wasn't gatorade that she suggested, but the story was amusing nonetheless.
I haven't seen the film in a long time, but it really does say a lot about society- and for someone to not see/understand that might say something about the person..