But more overalls nerds would mean more nerd girls. And if enough nerd girls get together with enough nerd boys, it would lead to a lot of nerd sex and nerd babies.
Yes, and on the basis of that episode, I’m convinced that the only thing that would change would be the people in charge telling us how smart they are all the time instead of today, where they try to tell us they would like to have a beer with us regular folks (although not me, because I’m a supergenius 
).
They tried doing the whole overlords business, but that didn’t turn out well.
Well, American pop culture admires stupidity and brute force, not intelligence. I wouldn’t expect anything else from an American show; for the clever to be shown as evil or incompetent. How many TV shows/movies show the villain as smarter than the hero ?
For that matter, look at this thread. The idea that intelligence might actually be a good thing is just anathema for most people.
Have you ever read any “inside stories” from people who are a part of MENSA? Trust me, the idea that the smartest of the smart are any better than the “average” folks is not just based on American pop culture, but on reality.
Are you sure that is what you meant to say?
You’re right, in all my supergeniusness I think faster than I type. I meant…
Trust me, the idea that the smartest of the smart are NOT any better than the “average” folks is not just based on American pop culture, but on reality.
When you’re one in a million…
Especially if the nerd girls were wearing those nerd overalls. Girls in overalls are teh hawt.
Ok, I’m back and I have this idea. So, if everybody gets smart, you STILL have Idiocracy, or a part of it. Remember the smart people at the start, who kept finding new reasons not to breed? There ya go…
There are always more and better reasons not to have kids than there are to have kids. So the human race will disappear, unless we come up with a medical equivalent to immortality. The second factor would be an artifical womb, to remove the risks of pregnancy to women.
Why should they choose to get themselves all bloated and traumatized to deliver another rugrat?
I don’t think it works that way. Mostly they would just glance at each other awkwardly and never make their intentions known.
Corporate work will be a lot more bearable. Part of the reason mind numbing amounts of corporate beaurocracy exists is because scaling a mental process designed to work well with 12 people up to 10,000 is a really hard problem. Having more intelligent workers at the lower levels allows management to delegate more responsibility down. Having more intelligent management allows for more clear and considered decision making.
The level of political discourse goes up. Currently, what is political feasible is largely ruled by what can be condensed into a 30 second sound bite. That won’t change but the ability for the populace to comprehend more complex and nuanced ideas will allow more bold political decision making.
Scientific progress will expand dramatically. Scientific innovation will increase due to the increased number of geniuses but there will also be more simply smart people available to fill in all the gaps and translate that progress into worthwhile products and services. It’s sometimes shocking to me how some even very basic science remains yet to be done simply from a lack of manpower and such a broad range of things on the agenda.
I wonder which would balance out: there being smarter evil people who could come up with better ways to cover up their actions, or there being smarter law enforcement (for criminals) and citizens (for politicians) who could see through it?
After all, “smart” doesn’t mean “immune from arrogance and/or greed.”
Sure it does. I went to a tech college. Nerds as far as the eye could see. Nerds that probably never came within twenty feet of a girl in high school.
But at college, surrounded by nerd girls (OK, outnumbering them 2-1, but still, much better odds than HS), the nerd sex was had. Not really by me though.
In the World State of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, society has five genetically-engineered castes, ranging from the Alphas (most intelligent), used for upper management, to Epsilons (least), used for scutwork. This is not a society where the lower castes are in any way exploited for the good of the upper; all castes enjoy, indeed are compelled to enjoy, the same very high level of material comfort. All castes are, if you will, equally exploited for the good of the whole society.
At one point John the Savage (raised on an Indian reservation in the American Southwest) asks World Controller Mustapha Mond, “If you can get anything you want out of those bottles, why not make all the children Double-Plus-Alphas?” Mond says there was once an experiment where an island was colonized only with Alphas, but it didn’t work out; everybody wanted to be boss and there was incessant conflict escalating to war.
I have my doubts as to whether it would happen that way IRL, but I’m prepared to listen to contrary arguments.
At the moment we are treating the symptons of the major world problems and not the cause.
Starvation,famine,global warming,extinctions,loss of habitat,run down of non renewable resources,prehistoric water reserves and war are the result of world overpopulation the rate of which is progressively speeding up.
There are more people alive today then there has been in all of history.
The Western nations are reducing their birth rates on the whole as labour intensive industries are becoming less and less but in the U.K. for example the population has risen by six million to sixty odd million in a comparitivly short time even though our birth rate has gone down and this is due to immigration alone.
And thats not including illegal immigrants the number of which our government admits that it does’nt have any realistic idea of.
We are in the situation of trying to bail out the boat without attempting to fix the hole in the bottom of it.
In the third World the West 's aid is all about death control ie.saving lives without the comensurate attention to birth control.
There is a charity ad on U.K. T.V. that says if we paid over such and such amount we could have bought malaria nets for Africa and five million kids could have survived beyond their fifth birthday.
Heart rending I know but the fact is many of them would have starved to death instead and the survivors children in turn would have increased the strain on the system even more.
Its not so much how many dumb and how many intelligent people are getting born but the sheer number of births.
And we must remember in democracies its the bottom ninety percent I.Q wise in the population who are voting in the governments.
Democracy is all about quantities and not quality of votes.
You can bet that the bottom ninety percent aren’t going to vote themselves out of breeding.
I think there’s one very important quality-of-life factor you’re all overlooking: It’s fun to be smart! Oh, there are downsides, of course; highly intelligent people know forms of pain the average can barely imagine – but also forms of pleasure the average can barely imagine. Wouldn’t it make life richer if most people were really smart?
Ummm… Didn’t Gene Roddenbery do this already?
It may be true that dumb but motivated beats smart but lazy. We all know plenty of smart but lazy people who haven’t amounted to much.
Except, for every smart but lazy guy or dumb but motivated guy, there are about 10 dumb and lazy guys. Dumb but motivated beats smart but lazy, but smart and lazy beats dumb and lazy every day of the week. And smart and motivated beats dumb but motivated every day of the week.
I don’t see much evidence that smart people are lazier on average than dumb people. And while the smart nerds may not have been elected prom king and prom queen back in high school, the dumb jocks usually aren’t either. It’s the smart jocks that get elected prom king and queen. Being a jock doesn’t make you dumb, there are plenty of smart jocks. And, sad to say, plenty of really dumb nerds.
Intelligence and motivation aren’t neccesarily correlated, but they aren’t negatively correlated either. If 1 guy in 10 is smart, and 1 guy in 10 is motivated, you’re going to end up with 81% dumb lazy guys, 9% dumb motivated guys, 9% smart lazy guys, and 1% smart motivated guys. Guess who ends up ruling the world?
Vulcan? I’m talking smart, not logical.