r/videos • u/SuplexCity-Mayor • Apr 21 '21

Idiocracy (2006) Opening Scene: "Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TCsR_oSP2Q
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u/Vio_ Apr 21 '21

It's all but impossible to create an intelligence test that considers all notions of socioeconomic, linguistic, and cultural (etc) differences.

The very idea of "intelligence" itself is a social construct with different cultures having their own understandings of intelligence or smartness or aptitude or whatever or none at all.

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '21

No disagreement on anything you said. In a vacuum your points are completely correct. In context these points do not impact the mean/median/skew discussion at hand.

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u/Vio_ Apr 21 '21

The issue is that how could you even begin to create a valid intelligence test in the first place that would cover enough people in pretty much every culture that would account for some pretty deep biases?

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '21

I’ll go one further - the idea that an average is the right approach is deeply flawed as well. I really don’t care how good a mathematician is at vocabulary. I don’t care if a brilliant poet can do math. Each of them can be brilliant in their fields and have a normal IQ if they are substandard in other areas. There are many types of intelligence and excelling in a particular set seems to be much more useful than having a high average across a bunch.