Idiocracy- A prophecy

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**Techpriestsupport**

Peregrine wrote:
Yes, if you selectively pick out examples that fit your theory and discard everything that doesn't you can "prove" that kids these days are stupid and modern culture is in decline. Alas, in reality this is just the same old argument that has been made for literally thousands of years and still hasn't become any less absurd.

Just to name one obvious problem with your theory, even under the assumption of rule by corporate elites the elites still need scientific development to drive progress. You can't pacify the masses with consumer goods if you can't keep inventing the next new thing, and you can't do that without creating scientists and engineers to invent it. Capitalism requires educated people to function, and the last thing it wants to do is discourage people from becoming those useful tools and make itself vulnerable to being out-competed by rivals that do support education.

Automatically Appended Next Post:
Edit:

Moving the discussion from the other thread here:

As to your comment, TMM is a commentary about a problem that is becoming more and more serious in modern society.

No, it's a failed attempt at commentary on a nonexistent problem. It makes multiple incorrect assumptions:

1) That intelligence is primarily a heritable trait rather than one that is primarily influenced by the environment. And that, as a result, the "morons" are permanently doomed to low intelligence and education is not an option. In reality intelligence is strongly influenced by the environment. A child growing up in poverty is going to struggle in life no matter how smart they are as a result of their genes, simply because they don't have the opportunities for education and success that someone with more money would have. But give that child better access to education, enough job security and income to be able to afford to spend time on personal development, etc, and they will do much better. The supposed trap of permanent low intelligence does not exist.

2) That birth rate is a product of low intelligence rather than low wealth and standard of living, and as a result the lowest-intelligence people will out-breed everyone else. In reality birth rate drops as standard of living improves, especially in the modern world where birth control is easy to get. The birth rate problem is not an unsolvable one, improve standards of living for the masses and birth rates drop.

3) That intelligence can be quantified as a single scale, preferably evaluated with a single IQ score, and easily judged as "morons" vs. "elites". In reality intelligence is far more complicated and IQ scores are pseudoscientific garbage.

4) That modern technology is somehow damaging our intelligence, disregarding the fact that our use of tools is what makes us unique as a species and that similar advances in technology did not create a sub-race of "morons". The TMM argument has to handwave away the fact that, for example, inventing writing allowed us to store information in permanent form instead of having to remember it but nobody would seriously argue that we were better off 10,000 years ago.

In short, it's the same tired old "KIDS THESE DAYS ARE STUPID AND DO NOT RESPECT THEIR ELDERS, OUR CIVILIZATION IS CLEARLY IN DECLINE" nonsense that people have been coming up with for all of recorded history, and probably longer.

Seeing this article recently reminded me of TMM.

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/scientists-earth-endangered-by-new-strain-of-fact-resistant-humans

You do realize that this is a humor piece posted on a parody site, right?

Historically most advances are made by a small number of people, I mean real advances, not gimmicks and finding new ways to market junk. Those people will always be around. I'm talking about dumbing down the majority, which sure seesm to be going on and deliberately being fostered in american culture.

Also notice I said american culture is being dumbed down. I see a lot of new advances come from china, and that worries me given what china is like. We used to see new scientific and technological advances being made in america, but lately china has been maioking majopr ones, like a breakthru in fusion power.

As to that article about fact resistant humans being a threat to the earth, gosh, you mean it was satire? I never saw that....

I guess some people don;t grasp things like satire.

**Peregrine**

Techpriestsupport wrote:
Historically most advances are made by a small number of people, I mean real advances, not gimmicks and finding new ways to market junk. Those people will always be around. I'm talking about dumbing down the majority, which sure seesm to be going on and deliberately being fostered in american culture.

I don't think you understand how modern industry works. Aside from the fact that the "lone genius" idea is kind of limited in a world where technological advances often require things like millions of dollars worth of lab/manufacturing equipment just to build a prototype actually getting that advance from new idea to large-scale manufacturing requires a ton of highly trained people. Engineers to refine the initial idea into a finished product, industrial engineers to get the production side running, more engineers to keep things working properly once production begins, etc. And repeat this for each company across entire industries. Then add even more demand for mid-level skilled labor which, while not on the same level as the scientists and engineers and their college degrees, still requires a lot more than the mindless horde you describe. You simply aren't going to meet that demand without a functioning education system.

Really, if you want a sensible target for deliberately turning culture against the one that actually benefits your hypothetical all-controlling elites is people like the elites: bankers, CEOs, etc. IOW, the people who could actually threaten their power. An engineer is a useful tool for your hypothetical elites, able to do vital work for their benefit but limited in their ability to create a successful business outside of their control. That recent MBA graduate, on the other hand, might be able to turn a useful technological idea into a viable business plan and create a threatening rival. But if everone's idea of a CEO is some pathetic character from a comedy show maybe they don't get a business degree and never start down the path of becoming a threat. So the real plan we'd expect to see is encouraging a culture of respect for scientists/engineers/etc and making sure that the most promising students get directed to those fields while bankers/politicians/etc are made the subject of every joke and only the hand-picked families of the elite (who can safely be told about the scam) have any interest.

Also notice I said american culture is being dumbed down. I see a lot of new advances come from china, and that worries me given what china is like. We used to see new scientific and technological advances being made in america, but lately china has been maioking majopr ones, like a breakthru in fusion power.

Yes, and China is exactly the point. Your theory of an elite dumbing down culture (and the average person with it) to make the masses easier to control would involve the elites committing national suicide by handing over power to China. It would be an incredibly stupid plan by the elites, far beyond the bounds of plausibility.

As to that article about fact resistant humans being a threat to the earth, gosh, you mean it was satire? I never saw that....

I guess some people don;t grasp things like satire.

Some people like you? I mean, you're the one taking this Idiocracy nonsense seriously.

**Overread**

Techpriestsupport wrote:

Historically most advances are made by a small number of people, I mean real advances, not gimmicks and finding new ways to market junk.

Don't forget that many times in science one person might take the credit for an idea, but often they were not alone. Sometimes they will have had teams of researchers working with them and alongside them. The name on the paper is just the lead researcher (or the one that managed to market and manoeuvre themselves into the newspapers attention), there can be swathes of people behind them who go totally unnoticed.
Furthermore many great ideas that are famously attributed to one person is, again, mostly a case of luck as well as discovery. Ideas like evolution were not developed by just one researcher, in fact several others were working along similar lines of investigation around the same period. Some even made phenomenal discoveries decades and generations before, but the ground work was never accepted at the time.
Also don't forget that there is a certain level of bias depending on what country you come from and, especially, history. Some countries developed and then fell far before others even developed. So a country that might boast great discoveries in their history today, might actually be shown to have copied or otherwise traded for that knowledge long in the past from other nations who fell. Even in the very early ages trade was very active and humans were trading ideas and materials across huge distances

So whilst we might think of the loan genius, we can't forget that the loan genius often isn't so much alone. That there were others alongside who helped; those who set the ground work and research before them and often others (sometimes in countries far off) who developed ideas at the same time.

Of course there are still people who work things out on their own for hte most part. They are often more limited in resources and what they can achieve and produce by working alone, and often with their own limited budget.

**LordofHats**

A good example of Overread's point is the Law of Refraction, also called Snell's Law, even though Willebrord Snellius (yes that is his real name) was the last to the punch. The Hellenic mathematician Ptolemy had already discovered refraction. he simply didn't have the angles right. Ibn Sahl however did get them right in the 10th century, and Al-Hazen not only created an accurate formula for refraction in the 11th he also dissected the human eye, named all it's parts (we still use some of them), and figured out more or less how it worked. And Snellius still basically tied with Descartes in Europe, both men publishing on Refraction at about the same time while Pierre de Fermat used the exact same math and principles to create a completely different theory (Principle of Least Time). And then Christian Huygens took Snellius' work and developed some early wave theory.

Science has never been about genius' making bold breakthroughs. Science is a successive series of smart folks smacking rocks together until one actually gets a spark and declares "I have discovered fire!"

**Overread**

LordofHats wrote:

Science has never been about genius' making bold breakthroughs. Science is a successive series of smart folks smacking rocks together until one actually gets a spark and declares "I have discovered fire!"

Only today we spend the resources of a small country to make huge coil to smack two tiny atoms together to see what happens

**AlmightyWalrus**

LordofHats wrote:

Science has never been about genius' making bold breakthroughs. Science is a successive series of smart folks smacking rocks together until one actually gets a spark and declares "I have discovered fire!"

And it's also about a bunch of people trying really stupid things and failing, repeatedly, because every now and then something stupid turns out to have been a lot less stupid than we thought.

**LordofHats**

Smacking rocks together does sound like a stupid thing someone would do because there's literally nothing to do

**Kilkrazy**

Speaking of the advance of science by team effort, the mystery of cubical wombat poo has been solved!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-46258616

This offers a potential new way to advance manufacturing technology.

**Techpriestsupport**

Getting back to idiocracy, this movie was actually not a worst case scenario.

I think a much worse case is an elite that deliberately dumbs down most of the population, as I think may be happening at least in 'murca, then rules over them as unaccountable dictators.

That could be a far worse scenario than idiocracy. Imagine a totally detached elite like an aristrocracy, deciding to use the majority of dumbed down morons as entertainment. Wars being engioneered so bored overlords can play real life RTS level games, genetically compatabile morons being harvested for organs, etc.

Human history shows us how ugly an aristocracy, separated from the majority, can be.

**Peregrine**

I see you're just going to ignore my post about how your theory is nonsense in favor of posting an even more nonsensical version of it?

**Techpriestsupport**

Peregrine wrote:
I see you're just going to ignore my post about how your theory is nonsense in favor of posting an even more nonsensical version of it?

Perry, you have done nothing but throw buckets of condescending excrement on every post of mine you've seen. Kindly commit a physically impossible reproductive act. There, are you happy now that I did not ignore your post?

**Peregrine**

Sorry, but if we're at the point where you're honestly suggesting that the elites are breeding a sub-race of "morons" to play real life RTS games then yes, you're going to get some condescending comments. It's tinfoil hat nonsense.

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And I'll note that your entire argument is condescending as hell towards the people you consider to be that lesser sub-race. So, probably not the best moral high ground to be complaining about condescending attitudes from.

**Overread**

Social structures can result in an elite structure, however what we have today in many western nations is totally different to what one might consider a traditional tiered society such as the Victorian or Edwardian ages in the UK. In those older systems it wasn't just money but breeding and family trees that defined boundaries of class. If you were born into a class that was where you stayed for the most part. You could move down, but moving up was very hard and wasn't just reliant on money or wealth or power.

Today that system is pretty much gone, there are some elements still kicking around, but the days when a lord or lady would never "speak" to a lower class worker in conversation are pretty much gone as a socially accepted/expected norm. The system today runs almost totally on money and wealth, so a pauper can rise up all the way to the top (look at Sir Allan Sugar for an example).
Today's system is far more fluid and whilst there are "old boys clubs" and "old money" elements still in there, its far more muted than it ever was.

Furthermore whilst we can argue that general education standard are slipping and have room to improve; the overall level of education is still pretty high for many countries (western developed at least). In addition libraries, the internet and many school systems are totally open now. Past times you had to apprentice and knowledge was often very closed off. Today knowledge is vastly more open and accessible than it ever has been in the past. So "breeding a dumb nation" isn't really a possibility. Heck most employers don't even really want employees today who don't carry some kind of degree to their name (I, and I think many of us, have seen very skilled people passed right over for promotion in favour of a fresh out of uni student just because the student has a bit of paper).

**Vulcan**

Which in and of itself is not a sign of high intelligence.

Only the foolish (of which a high proportion seem to wind up in upper management; presumably to minimize the damage done when they screw up the work that needs doing) think that learning begins and ends with schooling. Intelligent people realize that learning continues all your life, and the more intelligent a person is, the more they learn from their experiences outside of school, especially learning skills directly relating to real-life work instead of learning stuff to pass a test... and then forget by the beginning of the next class.

**thekingofkings**

Everyone is missing the main point of the movie, and that is: "UPGRAYYD GONNA GIT HIS MONEY!"

**Easy E**

Vulcan wrote:
Which in and of itself is not a sign of high intelligence.

Only the foolish (of which a high proportion seem to wind up in upper management; presumably to minimize the damage done when they screw up the work that needs doing) think that learning begins and ends with schooling. Intelligent people realize that learning continues all your life, and the more intelligent a person is, the more they learn from their experiences outside of school, especially learning skills directly relating to real-life work instead of learning stuff to pass a test... and then forget by the beginning of the next class.

I sense an anti-management bias......

**Vulcan**

Easy E wrote:
Vulcan wrote:
Which in and of itself is not a sign of high intelligence.

Only the foolish (of which a high proportion seem to wind up in upper management; presumably to minimize the damage done when they screw up the work that needs doing) think that learning begins and ends with schooling. Intelligent people realize that learning continues all your life, and the more intelligent a person is, the more they learn from their experiences outside of school, especially learning skills directly relating to real-life work instead of learning stuff to pass a test... and then forget by the beginning of the next class.

I sense an anti-management bias......

Call it a hypothesis based on observed evidence. I've worked in quite a few places, and in every one of them the corporate management has NO IDEA AT ALL how the offices that actually conduct profitable business actually function.

**Techpriestsupport**

Vulcan wrote:
Easy E wrote:
Vulcan wrote:
Which in and of itself is not a sign of high intelligence.

Only the foolish (of which a high proportion seem to wind up in upper management; presumably to minimize the damage done when they screw up the work that needs doing) think that learning begins and ends with schooling. Intelligent people realize that learning continues all your life, and the more intelligent a person is, the more they learn from their experiences outside of school, especially learning skills directly relating to real-life work instead of learning stuff to pass a test... and then forget by the beginning of the next class.

I sense an anti-management bias......

Call it a hypothesis based on observed evidence. I've worked in quite a few places, and in every one of them the corporate management has NO IDEA AT ALL how the offices that actually conduct profitable business actually function.

There's a thing called "The peter principle" that holds a person is promoted until he reaches his level of incompetence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

**Vulcan**

I've heard of that before, and it seems incomplete.

I've watched idiots get promotion after promotion, just to get them out of the way of the work being done at each level. Sadly, the people who hired/promoted them each time refuse to admit they messed up by hiring/promoting them in the first place... and refuse to just fire the bloody idiots and save the rest of us a lot of trouble.

**Peregrine**

Vulcan wrote:
I've heard of that before, and it seems incomplete.

I've watched idiots get promotion after promotion, just to get them out of the way of the work being done at each level. Sadly, the people who hired/promoted them each time refuse to admit they messed up by hiring/promoting them in the first place... and refuse to just fire the bloody idiots and save the rest of us a lot of trouble.

I doubt this is happening at all frequently. As you said, firing a person solves the problem much more effectively if you want to get a disruptive person out of the way. The much more reasonable explanation is that promotion is near-inevitable if you stay in a job long enough, unless you screw up badly enough to convince everyone you don't deserve to go higher. So you keep going higher and higher, with the promotion looking like a reasonable reward for good work, until you reach a level where you no longer look competent (or are one of the rare few people who are truly competent at the highest levels) and stop getting promotions.

**Howard A Treesong**

What I’ve seen is that getting promoted is often about looking clever and saying the right things, rather than a reward for genuine competence. It doesn’t mean they are stupid, but sometimes people who don’t have a high level of skill can get promoted up to a position putting them out of their depth and from there they tend to move sideways if their position becomes untenable.

No one is looking to employ someone ineffective at their job. But everyone has done job interviews or applied for positions or seen those around them go through the process and wondered why the hell they picked the person they did for the job. And that’s not hubris to have that observation, it’s known that interviewing people is a poor way to select candidates, you get people in HR who select candidates according to their imagined criteria when they don’t consult with the department that will be working with the new person. A lot of interview panels receive no training, so you get utter nonsense asked of applicants or one person on the panel has a particular agenda which overrides the logical best choice.

So it’s no surprise that genuinely capable people will get overlooked when you have some quick talking smartass who appeals to the easily impressed. Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of crude brown-nosing. If you can talk the talk, the unremarkable can go places, short of being clearly incompetent.

**Overread**

Howard A Treesong wrote:
A lot of interview panels receive no training, so you get utter nonsense asked of applicants or one person on the panel has a particular agenda which overrides the logical best choice.

Tell me and this is very important, if you were a vegetable which would you be, a carrot, banana or a cabbage

And other generally nonsensical (and sometime trick) questions; found from a random website googled the night before. That said I also feel that if a workplace moves someone from Job A to Job B, then its up to the employer to ensure that the person is trained in Job B. You tend to see this FAR more in jobs that require formal certifications or tool use. Moving someone up in chainsaw work from ground cutting to felling wider trees isn't just a case of promotion, but of ensuring they've got the right training tickets (at the very least its "best practice" and if you don't your insurance likely won't cover you).

Management roles though tend to slip the net, even though management is a skill and is very different from many lower jobs where you're in production or development or another line of work.

It's not that those promoted are incapable, its that they are often promoted and then left high and dry without proper support to enable them to best perform their job. Plus we have to remember the inexperienced don't know what they don't know so they can't as easily self-learn as they might not realise the things that they are messing up on.

**Kilkrazy**

I've got a degree in management, which I studied for at night school, as well as a bunch of professional training and real life experience. It definitely made me a better manager, but it didn't help get me promoted. I realised you need to have a desk as close as possible to the boss, agree with what he says, and generally be 'pally' with the top table people.

**LordofHats**

Howard A Treesong wrote:
What I’ve seen is that getting promoted is often about looking clever and saying the right things, rather than a reward for genuine competence.

So true.

And that’s not hubris to have that observation, it’s known that interviewing people is a poor way to select candidates

The first study was in Italy, but others in other countries have followed, all affirming that it's actually more effective to promote at random than to promote via interviews.

Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of crude brown-nosing. If you can talk the talk, the unremarkable can go places, short of being clearly incompetent.

It's literally been the bane of human organization since the dawn of time. Entire Empires have been felled by crude brown-nosing idiots who soothed the egos of the undiscerning.

**Kilkrazy**

What I remember from my management degree is that interviewing has a coefficient of correlation with job performance of about 0.2, which isn't very good but it's better than (for example) graphology which has a coefficient of 0.

There are cognitive psychology theories to explain this.

So. There are better methods of selection but they are a lot more expensive, and interviewing remains a kind of default.

Of course, measurement of job performance is a dicey proposition anyway.

The modern opinion of interviews is that it's a way for the company to give information to the candidate about the realities of the role, so it's a lot less to do with selection by the company and a lot more to do with acceptance by the candidate.

With current UK law defining an employed person as someone who has done 1 hour's employed work in the last fortnight (I think we can see here a correlation with the current record high level of "employment") one might question the realistic agency of a candidate for a job to refuse it based on an interview.

(Signed, an old cynic with a degree in management and 38 years experience in the UK job "market".)

[Drinks a whisky drink.]

**Techpriestsupport**

If you;re in england why do you have a Japanese flag next to your name?

Oh, if you're an anti piracy officer, catch me if you can!

**Overread**

Kilkrazy wrote:

With current UK law defining an employed person as someone who has done 1 hour's employed work in the last fortnight (I think we can see here a correlation with the current record high level of "employment") one might question the realistic agency of a candidate for a job to refuse it based on an interview.

Reminds me of when my sister was working retail, a lot of shops were using random hours. So yes you were employed, yes you had a job, but it didn't eat up all of the working week. Thankfully they wanted her for more than an hour a week, but the result was that you'd have a lot of days and random hours where you wouldn't be working. But because its random hours it means a person doing such work can't seek a second job easily and run two part-time jobs (which is effectively what random hours equates too).

And heck if government considers 1 hour every 2 weeks as employed no wonder the employment rate is going up if the "standard" is going down so far. 1 hour every 2 weeks isn't enough to pay for anything meaningful unless you've got that magical job that pays a fortune per hour. It really should be at least several days per week to be considered employed.Then again it might be linking that concept into other departments like benefit calculations and the like

Funny story on that last one I knew a chap who was on disability allowance who was doing photography. He basically couldn't charge a fair rate for his work because if he started drawing even a modest income his allowance would be significantly cut. The sad thing is the cut isn't proportional to the work pay in any way. So the system actually works against any who want to work, because they basically have to make quite a significant income to cover the loss of their disability allowance. Otherwise they can be working and productive, within the limits of their disability, and being punished for it. It might have improved in the years since I spoke to him, but that it was like that to start with clearly shows why many people can end up on disability or other allowances and are not encouraged to work; because taking up the entry level jobs and pay can put them financially behind where they were doing nothing.

**Crispy78**

Kilkrazy wrote:

So. There are better methods of selection but they are a lot more expensive, and interviewing remains a kind of default.

I used to work for a company that specialised in psychometric tests and competency tests. Their argument was basically it was a lot cheaper to do the testing and recruit the right people.

If I remember rightly, before I actually interviewed to join them (in IT support), I took an Occupational Personality Questionnaire (psychometric test), a numerical reasoning test, a verbal reasoning test, a spatial awareness test and a logic / problem solving test...

**Kilkrazy**

There is a fairly low coefficient of correlation between personality type and actual job performance, except in very extreme cases such as major introverts being employed as circus ringmasters and that kind of thing.

The tests for reasoning and so on are more useful, though of course you can prepare for them. When I worked at Sony, we had a standard programming test for any programmer applicants.

**Easy E**

In my years of management (about two decades) I have hired a lot of people. Most of the time you give them a battery of tests that you never look at UNLESS you can't decide between two candidates.

I agree that most companies give 0 support, skill training, or development in an organized way to people they hire. That costs money and takes time. Instead, they try to hire someone who has all ready done the job before somewhere else and has been really successful so they do not have to spend a dime on them. Of course, why is someone like that looking for a new job?

In my mind, there is a crisis in corporate Training and Development. That is always the first area cut to boost the share price or to help with the turn around.