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Idiocracy doesn't explicitly connect intelligence to economic levels, it just consistently shows poor people in the modern context as having low IQ's, and people of high IQ being upper middle class or better. In a world run by fools everyone has the same stuff, which also generally happens to be the same as the poor, dumb people shown in the earlier parts of the film. Surely that is incidental, and in no way should be seen as creating a connection between intelligence and wealth.

I guess IQ measurements might just be an invention to reinforce core-periphery distinction (and of course core dominance).

Without MENSA, how will we know that we are better than 98% of everybody else?

 d-usa wrote:
Without MENSA, how will we know that we are better than 98% of everybody else?

What does a german cafeteria for students have to do with intelligence?

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:
Seeing as one of the themes of the film was anti-intellectualism and extrapolating its possible effects on a future society then pointing out a difference between poor people and dumb people is quite important. Unless of course you think that intellect is tied to money.

First up, you're simply wrong in thinking Idiocracy is about extrapolating the possible effects of anything on anything. The film isn't about the future at all. It's one great big rant about modern society, about one smarter than average guy's frustrations with the stupidity he faces every day. The dystopian future presented isn't a prediction of what might be, its a parody of modern society, with a quick sci-fi explanation to justify putting us in that world.

Second up, no, I don't think intellect is tied to money. But I know what lots of other people think, and how the idea of 'stupid people breed more' works. When people make that complaint, not one of them is thinking of Paris Hilton. They're thinking of welfare queens and the like.

Well rather than respond in kind with an equally thinly veiled insult, maybe you can tell me what you got out of the film.

There was nothing thinly veiled about it. I left it out of my original post, as there's no reason to make fun of someone for missing the point of a movie (especially when that movie is more than a little confused in how it makes its own point). But when you responded with an inane comment on a really silly sub-issue and ignored the greater point, then yeah, I figured why not have a chuckle.

And what I got out of Idiocracy is a lot of good laughs about the frustrations of dealing with idiots.

sebster wrote:Every couple of years they have to adjust IQ tests to make the average 100 score a little harder to achieve. This is because we're getting much, much better at taking those tests. If you took the average person from the 1930s and gave them the test we have today, they'd be deemed developmentally slowed by modern standards.

So no, we're not getting dumber.

Source please.

Also consider that decline in intelligence might be a geographical/societal thing. That some socities are lowering there standards. The reason I say this is that in the US there is pretty clear evidence of a decline in intelligence when you consider the fact that our college entrance exams have been dumbed down twice in the past 20 years just in order to maintain the "500" score average for each section of the SAT's.

US intelligence as measured by our entrance exams peaked from 1972 - 1985. Ever since there has been a steady decline.

If you want a source, I'm using data from the US dept of education. If you ask for a link, I'll dig it up and post it in the next couple of days.

sebster wrote:Yeah, a lot of the rise in autism is due to how much better we are at detecting it and giving them better care. And there's also a likely connectiom to people having children later in life.

While improved diagnostic abilities have helped, they do not explain the geographical variations in such a rise. There are countries with medical systems that are the equal of the US's but they are not seeing the same explosion.

Honestly, I think that the increase is due to a combination of reasons that include:
Improved diagnosis
Over zealous medical systems that treat anything out of the norm as a disease/disorder(Asbergers) rather than normal outliers on the scale
And
Enviromental reasons, such as genetically modified foods, pesticides, over exposure to synthetic material(phalates) and other such.


In answer to the OP's question, "Is Human Intelligence Really On The Decline?"

I can't say this is true every where but it is true in the US. Funny, the decline in the US seems to match up with when we abandoned our old model of education and began adopting a new model based on a variety of techniques that we imported from countries with less effective educational systems.

In reality, I feel the decline is based upon our government playing politics with our educational system and focusing on making our public schools more about indoctrination that about imparting knowledge.

 focusedfire wrote:
Source please.

Also consider that decline in intelligence might be a geographical/societal thing. That some socities are lowering there standards. The reason I say this is that in the US there is pretty clear evidence of a decline in intelligence when you consider the fact that our college entrance exams have been dumbed down twice in the past 20 years just in order to maintain the "500" score average for each section of the SAT's.

US intelligence as measured by our entrance exams peaked from 1972 - 1985. Ever since there has been a steady decline.

If you want a source, I'm using data from the US dept of education. If you ask for a link, I'll dig it up and post it in the next couple of days.

For the same reason Japan's education system looks better on a cursory examination of the numbers: we make/strongly encourage everyone to take the tests, instead of allowing/forcing those who don't have the skills to score highly to refrain from taking them. If we kicked all the low-performing students out before they could drag down the averages, we'd look like we were getting smarter on average (on paper that is), while actually making the population even more uneducated and generally incompetent.

In fact, the US education system, despite its flaws, is one of the best in the world. We just avoid rigging the stats by removing the under-performing students, and so look worse when it comes to the average scores of standardized tests.

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:

In fact, the US education system, despite its flaws, is one of the best in the world. We just avoid rigging the stats by removing the under-performing students, and so look worse when it comes to the average scores of standardized tests.

This. So much of the 'concern" over education is a pile of hookum for the great cultural war against Public Education.

That being said, our HS drop-out rate is deplorable.

If there is a decline in human IQ it is likely because we live in a society of instant gratification that doesn't engender a culture of thoughtfulness.

To develop an intellect you need to sit and ponder, that requires an attention span. Modern technology particularly the heavily proliferated mass communication tools has declined the attention spans of modern humans in western society considerably over just a generation. We now have a very marked generational literacy gap in the UK, and while some of that can be linked to mismanaged education policies and immigration form developing nations, societal change in general is the larger cause.
I am not going to laugh this off. Changes in communications technology has had its side effects for a long time. The ancient Egyptians are first known to have recorded it. There is a legend which goes thus:

Pharaoh prayed to Ra the Sun God and said.
"Father Ra, I have invented the wheel."
and Ra replied
"Very good my Son. Now you will be able to build chariots and subdue all your enemies."

Pharaoh went away pleased with himself and did as he was advised.

Later he prayed again saying,
"Father Ra, I have invented irrigation."
and Ra replied
"Very good my Son. Now when the Nile's flood waters have ebbed you will be able to feed the people of Egypt with lush ground."

Pharaoh went away pleased with himself and did as he was advised

Later he prayed again saying,
"Father Ra, I have invented hieroglyphics."
and Ra replied
"My Son, you are a fool. Now you teach men to forget."

Now not everyone then as now had the bardic gift of memorising large amounts of information. However due to modern society the few western barding traditions we have left such as the Manx bards and those in Western Ireland are fading with no one to recite the old tales too. This also while a steep human loss is just symptomic of a larger problem, the more we rely on technology to communicate and the faster and easier communication becomes the less the human mind develops. I can see a direct correlation with dropping standards of literacy and the increased use of social media, and that goes far beyond chavspeak.

 Breotan wrote:

 Spyral wrote:
Don't forget that the pope is a reptilian and he's only stepping down because he needs to regenerate his tail

Wait a sec... you mean the The Da Vinci Code was about Raptor Jesus? o.O

I don't know about you, but Jesus-saur sounds pretty rad

 Orlanth wrote:
This also while a steep human loss is just symptomic of a larger problem, the more we rely on technology to communicate and the faster and easier communication becomes the less the human mind develops. I can see a direct correlation with dropping standards of literacy and the increased use of social media, and that goes far beyond chavspeak.

I agree with this. I see it all the time on message boards. People ask a question that could have been quickly and easily answered by looking it up themselves with a search engine, but instead they expect someone else to do their work for them. It's one thing to post a question if you can't find the answer, but something else if you never bother to look in the first place.

This thread is evidence that Human IQ is dropping.

I know mine just did.

 sebster wrote:
There was nothing thinly veiled about it. I left it out of my original post, as there's no reason to make fun of someone for missing the point of a movie (especially when that movie is more than a little confused in how it makes its own point). But when you responded with an inane comment on a really silly sub-issue and ignored the greater point, then yeah, I figured why not have a chuckle.

So rather than share your opinion on what you got out of the movie you'd rather make snide comments to another member of the community? That speaks volumes.

I'm just going to leave this here: http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/509194.page

Alas the link will no longer function for you ! Weep for humanities loss !
Reds8n

There's also a big discussion going on right now about perhaps there's a need to recognise different kinds of intelligence more.

For example, talking about the difference between the traditional need to remember correct information whereas you could see there's a greater requirement now to know how to find correct information.

EG, not just reading wikipedia and using that verbatim, but reading wikipedia, then referring to their sources pages and being able to make a judgement call on that.

 Compel wrote:
There's also a big discussion going on right now about perhaps there's a need to recognise different kinds of intelligence more.

For example, talking about the difference between the traditional need to remember correct information whereas you could see there's a greater requirement now to know how to find correct information.

EG, not just reading wikipedia and using that verbatim, but reading wikipedia, then referring to their sources pages and being able to make a judgement call on that.

Hey now, this thread isn't about actual discussion and careful consideration. It is about complaining that things aren't as good as they used to be in the past (such a popular event it has been going on since we as a species could communicate with each other) and projecting a feeling of superiority over other humans. May have to flag you for going off topic in OT.

 Tannhauser42 wrote:

 Orlanth wrote:
This also while a steep human loss is just symptomic of a larger problem, the more we rely on technology to communicate and the faster and easier communication becomes the less the human mind develops. I can see a direct correlation with dropping standards of literacy and the increased use of social media, and that goes far beyond chavspeak.

I agree with this. I see it all the time on message boards. People ask a question that could have been quickly and easily answered by looking it up themselves with a search engine, but instead they expect someone else to do their work for them. It's one thing to post a question if you can't find the answer, but something else if you never bother to look in the first place.

Though to be fair and honest, some people have grown their capabilities through use of social media by evolving and adapting. I (just off of quick little test) managed to type 83 correct words in a minute. When I was in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade, I could barely type 30 words per minute and was failing my typing classes. When I got to high school my honors English teacher suggested everyone create an AIM account and practice their ability to type fast by avoiding leetspeak, chat speak abbreviations, etc... By doing this, we were conditioning our minds to communicate like real people through a technology that we as youngsters would be using anyways. I'm still not the fastest typist, but I'm far better than I was 10 years ago. Albeit with the importance of technology, the need to type quickly and effectively is becoming far more important than hand writing and cursive. So not all technology and social media is the downfall of our intelligence. Most of the youngsters are using it to get their message across in as few characters as possible. As an avid user of twitter, and Dakka (let's be honest this is a form of social media), I try my hardest to type out as much of a complete thought as I can... Yet, I also know when it's appropriate to through out the occasional lol and .

It all depends on how much discipline you apply to these "detriments of language." In fact, I personally enjoy reading the various "Twitter Novels" which forces someone to write a "novel" in 140 characters or less. While these are basically nothing more than a complex sentence or two, it's a writing exercise that can be used to help creative writers learn to get their point across, something that everyone could use practice in.

It's all in how you use it, which goes back to the knowledge on finding information is becoming more important than retaining information.

 focusedfire wrote:
Source please.

It's the Flynn Effect.
"In his study of IQ tests scores for different populations over the past sixty years, James R. Flynn discovered that IQ scores increased from one generation to the next for all of the countries for which data existed."
http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/flynneffect.shtml


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Easy E wrote:
This. So much of the 'concern" over education is a pile of hookum for the great cultural war against Public Education.

Absolutely. The US education system, while certainly not faultless, cops a ridiculous amount more than it is due. It is a good, but imperfect system, much like you see everywhere else in the world.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:
So rather than share your opinion on what you got out of the movie you'd rather make snide comments to another member of the community? That speaks volumes.

No, I was happy to discuss the movie. Then you responded with a silly comment that focused on tiny part of my post (poor or stupid) and ignored the greater message. Given your effort, what did you want in return?

If you wanted an honest discussion about the movie, why didn't you try to have one?

Orlanth wrote:However due to modern society the few western barding traditions we have left such as the Manx bards and those in Western Ireland are fading with no one to recite the old tales too.

What a shame. If only they'd have written those tales down...

Writing is the greatest technological advancement we have ever and will ever make. Praising someone for being able to memorize Canterbury Tales in a literate age is like giving someone a medal for powerlifting right beside a forklift.

 azazel the cat wrote:

Orlanth wrote:However due to modern society the few western barding traditions we have left such as the Manx bards and those in Western Ireland are fading with no one to recite the old tales too.

What a shame. If only they'd have written those tales down...

Writing is the greatest technological advancement we have ever and will ever make. Praising someone for being able to memorize Canterbury Tales in a literate age is like giving someone a medal for powerlifting right beside a forklift.

Exalted!

 azazel the cat wrote:
Writing is the greatest technological advancement we have ever and will ever make. Praising someone for being able to memorize Canterbury Tales in a literate age is like giving someone a medal for powerlifting right beside a forklift.

Yeah, well said. It really does feel like people are starting with the assumption that people are dumber, and are then going out looking for skills that have declined in order to justify it.

Huh, I was just having this conversation with myself while at work the other day. Have people gotten less intelligent?

A thought I would like to share, more is expected of people now. To get the same career as 50 years ago with a highs school degree, you now need a 4 year college degree.

Shadowseer_Kim wrote:Huh, I was just having this conversation with myself while at work the other day. Have people gotten less intelligent?

A thought I would like to share, more is expected of people now. To get the same career as 50 years ago with a highs school degree, you now need a 4 year college degree.

Likely more so, honestly.

 Shadowseer_Kim wrote:
Huh, I was just having this conversation with myself while at work the other day. Have people gotten less intelligent?

A thought I would like to share, more is expected of people now. To get the same career as 50 years ago with a highs school degree, you now need a 4 year college degree.

That's a major part of it. We are more educated than we were. A hundred years ago less than 10% of kids graduated from high school, but now more that rate is more like 80%, and 20% of people are expected to end up with a bachelor's degree or higher.

And yeah, a lot of this has meant that a job that a highschool graduate could get is now restricted to university graduates. But the follow on from that is that those jobs are much more technical than they used to be. An engineer 50 or 100 years ago had a much more limited body of knowledge than he will today. Same for accountants or any other profession.

And this also translates into a population that isn't just more skilled in their professions, but are also more intelligent in general. Hence the Flynn Effect I linked to earlier.

Thanks for that sebster, good read.

 sebster wrote:
No, I was happy to discuss the movie. Then you responded with a silly comment that focused on tiny part of my post (poor or stupid) and ignored the greater message. Given your effort, what did you want in return?

If you wanted an honest discussion about the movie, why didn't you try to have one?

I was attempting to have a discussion about the movie. The point of this thread, and what I got out of the movie, was about intelligence. Your first post ended with "It really, really isn't a warning about poor people breeding.". Now rather than ascribe an argument to you or set up a strawman to argue against I tried to clear up where you were getting poor people from. Now if my tone was off I apologise it was not my intention, some other sites I post on historically distort people's posts so I was attempting to clear up the matter before we started talking past each other. That being said, it did not give you the right to start with insults, even less so when I attempted to steer the conversation back to the film yet you persisted with trying to be insulting.

Now, we can be mature and try let this be water under the bridge and say we just got off on the wrong foot, or you can keep posting the way that you have. What I will say though is that if you want to keep going the way you have been would you at least do so in PM rather than derail this thread.

 sebster wrote:

Yeah, well said. It really does feel like people are starting with the assumption that people are dumber, and are then going out looking for skills that have declined in order to justify it.

I think it also has to do with a perceived effect of specialisation. The oldest teacher I had, Thomas De Konick, once made a big rant on how specialists were getting dumber and dumber because of overspecialisation. He told how he once went to a doctor for a knee problem, and after giving a bit of information, was refered to a specialist. Once the specialist was over with the knee he had a problem with, he told him that he also had some pain in his other knee, to which the expert told him something like '' I'm sorry, sir, but I only specialise in right knees, you'll have to see someone else for the left one''.

To my teacher, this was one of the worst case of dumb intelligence. To me, it's just that we are more intelligently intelligent. We don't create dumber people by specializing them more, we simply create less autonomous individuals, something which was inevitable with the exponential growth of knowledge these last centuries. Rationnaly subdividing the given pool of intelligence across more fields allow to globally know these fields better.

So, even if we were getting individually less intelligent, we would still be part of a much more intelligent whole.

 sebster wrote:

 Shadowseer_Kim wrote:
Huh, I was just having this conversation with myself while at work the other day. Have people gotten less intelligent?

A thought I would like to share, more is expected of people now. To get the same career as 50 years ago with a highs school degree, you now need a 4 year college degree.

That's a major part of it. We are more educated than we were. A hundred years ago less than 10% of kids graduated from high school, but now more that rate is more like 80%, and 20% of people are expected to end up with a bachelor's degree or higher.

And yeah, a lot of this has meant that a job that a highschool graduate could get is now restricted to university graduates. But the follow on from that is that those jobs are much more technical than they used to be. An engineer 50 or 100 years ago had a much more limited body of knowledge than he will today. Same for accountants or any other profession.

And this also translates into a population that isn't just more skilled in their professions, but are also more intelligent in general. Hence the Flynn Effect I linked to earlier.

It does seem like less education was required even 50 years ago. I remember reading a recent article talking about employment at NASA. During the height of the space program in the 1960s, the average age of a NASA engineer was something like late 20s. Now it's in the 40s.

 SOFDC wrote:
OP, you ask this question, but I only have this to respond to it:

1. Check your Facebook.
2. Browse a popular discussion website (4chan even, though this one is a cesspool.) for a few minutes.
3. Get on the road (Or better, a bus.) and drive out into the world and get some soda for the evening.
4. Come home and play <Insert popular online game here> for an hour.
5. Stop, come back to this thread and tell me with a straight face that you DON'T think human intelligence hit rock bottom and commenced digging.

(Seriously, I don't think the average state of human intellect is in decline...It's just that it wasn't very high to begin with. Not every Roman was engineering aqueducts, and not every Greek was creating mathematical and cultural concepts that wind up standing for ages. This article is lel.)

Youtube is enough. Or Stormfront. Yeah, Stormfront is pretty bad.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
More to the actual point:
No, I don't think human intelligence is on the decline - yet. Ask again in 10 years, and let me reply. One big problem with humanity at the moment is many people's lack of ability to survive in the wilderness, me included, which I think is a bit more worrying than human intelligence declining.

“Everyone is a genius. If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” Albert Einstein.

I believe that completely with the exception that I also believe that there are idiots, those who waste their potential doing nothing.