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Comment by mwattsun | Hacker News Reader

My problem with Idiocracy is the assumption that working class and poor breed only more dumb people. This is untrue, as many of our brightest people came from humble backgrounds. The quote evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould is most know for is “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” The progeny of smart people are not always smart. I enjoyed Idiocracy for it's commentary on dumb and vulgar culture taking over.

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Idiocracy said dumb people breed more dumb people, not that poor people breed dumb people.

it is true however that in the west, education is inversely correlated with fertility, that education is closely linked to intelligence, statistically, and that intelligence is at least 50% accounted for by heritability, as shown by many large studies.

Malcolm Gladwell says it's often an accident of birth, circumstances and a system that provide fertile ground for achievement, a cultural belief system that encourages intellectual achievement or at least does not discourage it and most of all -- hard work

Malcolm Gladwell at Microsoft Research: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don't

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcMKLwVlpJk

these things are absolutely important but they are at most half of the picture.

intelligence is broadly heritable: https://www.nature.com/articles/mp201185

and a representative piece of a very large body of evidence that intelligence is the strongest predictor of achievement: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

Gladwell is making the case in his talk that Asians aren't better at math or are more intelligent. He speaks directly to your point: Westerners believe that you are born with math skills or you're not. Asians believe you can be good at anything if you work at it. Gladwell says it's because Asians had to work harder than Westerners to feed themselves, since rice is a very labor intensive crop. I'm not supporting or disputing Gladwell - I'm still pondering it.

I agree with you that intelligence is inheritable. I was thinking about the development of that intelligence.

To me Idiocracy is a disgusting classist assault on the poor. Whenever I hear someone praise it my opinion of them drops like an aeroplane with a broken wing.

There known occurences of airplanes landing after losing a wing, especially during WW2.

High-powered acrobatic airplanes produce more lift by engine than wings, they can basically descend like a helicopter.

Also, poor people reproduce like there’s no tomorrow and kids usually follow the path.

The movie isn't making the assumption that poor=idiot anywhere (one of the dumbest characters in the movie is a lawyer, the other works for the POTUS) but especially at the beginning, that if you have the resources to raise, cure and send to school say two kids, and you make 8, in today's society you just made six or more potential homeless or criminals, assuming they don't die sooner for starvation and absence of cures. Making more kids than usual for poor people isn't unnatural as in nature it is very normal to fight weakness with numbers, but that shouldn't be the case for humans. Insects are among the weakest species out there, a moderate storm can kill them by the millions (billions?) but their number is so large that they're not going to be extinct anytime soon. But again, they aren't people and live in their world in which you just have to reach the closest flower to make the day.

Sounds like you've lost the plot on what the movie was actually about.

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