A Look at Idiocracy

[Riedquat]

Without the tutoring I probably wouldn't have even understood some of the questions. How is an 11-year-old kid supposed to know what "A is to B as C is to ?" means? What sort of insane maniacs came up with these tests? Seriously...

Isn't that part of the test, the ability to work out all the questions? As you say there's a problem in that you can train for them; I suppose the idea was to try to work out a test that relied on intelligence rather than knowledge.

[TulipQulqu]

I suppose the idea was to try to work out a test that relied on intelligence rather than knowledge.

I think the harder thing is designing a test of general intelligence instead of any particular set of skills.

Skills can be much more easily instilled into someone than general intelligence, probably.

[Muzer]

Without the tutoring I probably wouldn't have even understood some of the questions. How is an 11-year-old kid supposed to know what "A is to B as C is to ?" means? What sort of insane maniacs came up with these tests? Seriously...

Isn't that part of the test, the ability to work out all the questions? As you say there's a problem in that you can train for them; I suppose the idea was to try to work out a test that relied on intelligence rather than knowledge.

Don't think that's the idea, or if it is they do a very bad job of it. The actual questions themselves I think are much more about testing intelligence (though I'm not sure how successfully they do that); I don't think understanding weird uses of the English language is really an intentional part of the test. Even the verbal reasoning is much more things like relations between real-life concepts or properties of the words themselves than it is about language use/meaning/reading comprehension, at least from my memory of it (I'm going back a few years now!).

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Also, I gotta say that IQ is useless. IQ itself was created by eugenicists to prove that certain types of people were better than others, and you get radically different results just by repeating the test at different times.

Actually, IQ was invented so special needs children could be identified and helped. A child with an IQ of less than 100 is behind on their academic abilities and thus needs more attention, a child with an IQ above 100 is doing great and can be left to self-direct some. Child IQ also changes decently rapidly over time.

Adult IQ is the one that ends up producing deeply messed up racial and eugenicy views.

Alfred Binet did nothing wrong. He was trying to get it so kids would be given special needs education instead of being sent to asylums.

I stand corrected. Thank you for teaching me something new.

[Beastro]

Also, I gotta say that IQ is useless. IQ itself was created by eugenicists to prove that certain types of people were better than others, and you get radically different results just by repeating the test at different times.

Actually, IQ was invented so special needs children could be identified and helped. A child with an IQ of less than 100 is behind on their academic abilities and thus needs more attention, a child with an IQ above 100 is doing great and can be left to self-direct some. Child IQ also changes decently rapidly over time.

Adult IQ is the one that ends up producing deeply messed up racial and eugenicy views.

Alfred Binet did nothing wrong. He was trying to get it so kids would be given special needs education instead of being sent to asylums.

I stand corrected. Thank you for teaching me something new.

Not just what Tulip said, but he predicted people would misapply any intelligence test and warned of it before he died. What Terman did to his test is exactly what he didn't want people doing with it.

Trouble with the IQ tests is the questions are so bloody esoteric that it's not the sort of thing you can just pick up with zero practice. And the kids who get the most practice are rich kids. So while IQ tests in a vacuum may well test intelligence, in real life they test intelligence heavily weighted by socioeconomic class. In the UK some counties still have selective state schools ("grammar schools"), and at least when I went, the "11 plus" test to get in was basically just an IQ test. There was a chap in my primary school class who was just as clever as I was, but my family could afford tutoring for the IQ test and his couldn't, so I passed the test and he didn't. Without the tutoring I probably wouldn't have even understood some of the questions. How is an 11-year-old kid supposed to know what "A is to B as C is to ?" means? What sort of insane maniacs came up with these tests? Seriously...

Whatever issues you have with it it's validity has a basis. One interesting thing is that the average IQ of the world has been increasing over the past century indicting that good things are being done to help people's minds grow, whether it be better nutrition, more focus on stimulation in infancy (effectively expanding one's mind early for it to be filled with more, easier, later) and many other factors which effect it which we now know of.

[Captain Crimson]

Finally broke down to watch this review. I don't see anything ugly in the theory that genetically, we're all getting dumber. I have to wonder on some level if it's due to the mass of information media disseminated to us in all forms at nearly every point in our lives, not just prescription drugs or economic or political conditions, because who knows what effect that's having on our evolution? I wish I could say. I mean, TV and movies have been mainstream for almost a century now.

Also, IMO, it's no more valid to say that Mr. Judge was a eugenics Nazi than to insist such themes also play into the '93 Super Mario Bros. movie, and I liked that one. To me, that's how you make a good bad movie. As much an oxymoron as that is. Mr. Chuck didn't cover that, since do we gotta insinuate Mr. Judge is a Nazi? Bill Maher: "'Nazi' is the new 'I don't like you.'" It's the future and we all have Nazi Tourette's.

I remember watching Idiocracy once, ten years ago. Didn't really think about it till a month ago when I saw Mr. Chuck was reviewing it, so I hunted it down and rewatched it. Don't know why it was still in my mom's old boxes we packed away when we moved. What makes me feel so amused is how lefties AND righties both have totally legitimate bases to throw this movie in the other's face. Mr. Trump is a nastier version of President Camacho, and the institutions the lefties are continuously supporting out of tribal hatred to the GOP wind up censoring and suppressing dissent, truth, and science as much as the GOP does on their platforms.

This movie is a guilty pleasure because to me it says something about society. That everyone is hooked into reality TV, we're addicted to our vices and consumer pleasures, the system is breaking down, and nobody's in charge. But there's hope! It's just never where you find it. And seriously, there is actually a few positives about the film, namely... no more tribal hatred AND racism and sexism seems to have vanished! HUZZAH! WORLD PEACE. Who knew that meant surrendering custody of the brain? But seriously, for as dumb as the 26th century turned out, honestly, the people there are ultimately well-meaning simpletons. They aren't actively malicious like certain people are today, who just seem to want to hurt you merely to hear you scream. I assume this is what the world would be like if not for that one, fatal apple bite...

Chuck missed the after credits ending where the pimp is in the future too.

There is no significance to this- carry on.

As Mr. Chuck himself observed, once you pimp, you can't wimp - out from it.

Something else that has zero significance. This movie takes place in the same century as Halo and StarCraft. No reason to state that. I just wanted to.

[Beastro]

What makes me feel so amused is how lefties AND righties both have totally legitimate bases to throw this movie in the other's face.

Judge has a knack for that. King of the Hill can be taken as a straight up satire mocking Midwestern conservatives, but it can also be seen as a validation of their principles. Hank Hill is an annoying guy, but he's a decent everyone would love to have for a neighbour even if you'd always be eye rolling at him. I know, one of my brother's is pretty much a carbon copy of him in so many ways.

The only bit to KotH that falls out of that pattern is the completely unsympathetic left-wing antagonists he keeps running into.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I think Judge is more like Crichton where he's more against incompetent social institutions. It's moderate in the broad base political spectrum.

[Madner Kami]

I found this comment on Imgur.com today, which answered to this picture:



with:

Idiocracy is an optimistic movie. In it, a popular president chooses to listen to a subject matter expert over corporate profits.

I laughed for a solid minute and felt I needed to share. And then I realized how true and unrealistic that is, as I was also watching an opinion-poll regarding the upcoming german elections, where none of the major parties are having a good candidate for the chancellor-ship and every single party that has a chance to succeed is just a cess-pool of hypocritical and corrupt cleptocrats, who don't even own the academic titles they hold and are liked by noone and yet, somehow, still are going to be elected by a majority of the population.

[TulipQulqu]

Judge has a knack for that. King of the Hill can be taken as a straight up satire mocking Midwestern conservatives, but it can also be seen as a validation of their principles. Hank Hill is an annoying guy, but he's a decent everyone would love to have for a neighbour even if you'd always be eye rolling at him. I know, one of my brother's is pretty much a carbon copy of him in so many ways.

The only bit to KotH that falls out of that pattern is the completely unsympathetic left-wing antagonists he keeps running into.

That is because Mike Judge himself is politically center right, but in a "things were good in the 1950s, before the damn hippies" kind of way. It is just that the Bush-Clinton-Bush era was so far right, even with Clinton in office, that we killed half a million people in Iraq for no good reason and somehow our society just rolled with it. With comparison to mass death on the scale of hundreds of thousands of lives, Mike Judge's "I hate hippies but also my boss is a dick" attitude just seems normal.