I once watch Idiocracy on commercial TV … scary … I couldn’t tell when the movie stopped and the commercials began. “I have seen the future and it is now”
If you agree to take the test, I’ll agree to write it.
What’s that? You don’t want life or death decisions based on some set of questions selected by someone you don’t even know?
I guess I misunderstood the premise.
Yeast? Kaiser? Cinnamon?
(Sorry, that was just really low-hanging fruit and I am ashamed for picking it.)
These people become Darwin Award winners.
Ashley Montagu and Edward Darling commented on this in *The Prevalence of Nonsense. * They asked, “And who’s next? Maybe the nonconformist, depending on who’s running the shop.” 
No, no, we’re selecting for intelligence, not souls.
In fact, IIRC from population trends, the smartest people (generally speaking, the financially ost successful) are reproducing less. Most first-world countries are reproducing below replacement levels. This is a side-effect of socio-economic circumstances - kids are expensive, and the middle-class modern lifestyle pretty much needs two incomes to sustain it. Fortunately some countries are importing the relatively smarter population groups from third-world countries (based on immigration selection criteria) to help sustain our population.
It’s the lower class - which selects more often for poor intelligence, poor learning skills, etc. - that is more likely to have larger families. (However, see Freakonomics’ discussion of the effect or readily available abortion over the last 30+ years - the bottom class that typically produced children that grew up to be criminals - has been able to limit their level of reproduction also.)
But as for forced eugenics - why? To quote Ted Knight in Caddyshack - “the world needs ditch-diggers too…”. Even Brave New World, the user manual for Eugenics, imagined a class of dumb muscle. Someone’s gotta be the left tackle or bar bouncer.
George W or Sarah Palin notwithstanding, nobody in the top level of politics (not even Trump) is really, really stupid - yet the world unfolds as it does, despite the efforts of smart people, many misguided. Previous posters have pointed out the flaws - one person’s definition of “smart” may not match another’s, and the process can be abused. I recall an interview with a woman who was put in amental hospital and also sterilized many decades ago, because the school and social services had gotten into their heads, based on her social circumstances, that she was mentally retarded. Once the (“smart”) doctor had confirmed his preconceptions, there was no changing his mind. How does a seven-year-old with limited education even begin to argue her intelligence?
besides, when would you do it? 13 year olds get regnant (usually, the less intelligent ones). If the snip date was 16, there’s be a big incentive to pop one out early. You going to test 11-year-olds to verify their potential?
Plus, there’s plenty of stories of poor people’s children becoming success stories. Not every child of unsuccessful (does that mean stupid?) people is stupid. Similarly, not every successful, smart rich person’s kid measures up to the parents. I’m sure we can think of a few in our experience.
What, like, a disease that causes sterility and only strikes the stupid?
I rather think the genetic-engineering capacity for such a thing is decades away if not forever. We don’t really know what combinations of genes control intelligence anyway.
Not that the notion isn’t tempting, sometimes. I’m sure almost every Doper has felt that way at one time or another.
Since the average IQ is, by definition, 100, and by definition the entire population of hum an beings must have about as many people below 100 as above, the OP’s idea logically results in the extermination of the entire human species until you’ve got two smart people left, each strangling the other.
Two smart people would declare a tie.
People in poor countries are not stupid. They’re poor.
The endless claim that “The dumb ones are outbreeding us!” (I note nobody making this claim fails to make it clear they are in the smart group) is not supported by any objective evidence that the population is getting dumber.
You’re not thinking of the positives. Look at all the sex I could have without worry of getting a chick pregnant.
Slowly? What are we, lazy?
I doubt the idea is practical, but it is interesting. IQ is about 50% inherited and 50% environmental. If we could only breed from those whose IQ is inherently higher it could bring the average up over time.
In some ways it is being implemented now - it appears that the population of people with Down syndrome has been reduced by roughly 30% by abortion following pre-natal diagnosis (cite). It’s not because of any public policy, though.
Regards,
Shodan
Trump is the apparent front-runner - what more do you need?
Regards,
Shodan
I just feel sorry for the rest of you poor slobs
That still doesn’t make it okay for you to continue sleeping with your immediate family members.
Tell the woman that first and see what it gets you.
If they’re sterilizing the women also, they don’t to worry about it in the first place.
Pshew. Made the cut.
Let them eat cake.
What is wrong with not smart people? or are you talking about mentally retarded people? People who are mentally retarded, when they do have children, which is not usually, don’t tend to have retarded children, because most forms of retardation are not genetic. Hypoxia at birth, prematurity, and the use of alcohol during pregnancy cause WAY more cases of retardation than genetic causes, and that includes chromosomal causes, like Down Syndrome, which is a fairly common cause.
I worked with disabled people for years, and I knew many, many retarded people. Not one had parents who were also retarded. A few had parents who weren’t very bright. Some had parents who had Ph.Ds. Parents of retarded people pretty much fell along the bell curve, just like you’d expect.
So, if we aren’t targeting retarded people, just people with low IQs, what are we talking about?
We’re talking about normal, healthy people. No one has ever shown that in normal, healthy people, IQ is an inborn, immalleable characteristic. It’s much better to target at-risk children for nutrition, head start-type programs, mentoring, and after-school activities that are stimulating. You can “get rid” of low IQ people by raising IQs. Now, you will still have ow IQ people, because IQ is based on a percentile ranking: if everybody goes up by 5%, everyone’s score remains the same, even though everyone is 5% smarter.
FWIW, a “stupid” person probably has better general knowledge than an erudite person from say, the year 1250, and I’m not even talking about knowing thing like the sun is the center of the solar system. I mean a person with an 8th grade education, who is a C student, probably knows more math than Chaucer did, can read a local map (even if he doesn’t know where Iraq is, or what the capital of Poland is), and can read well enough to text while driving.
Keeping low IQ people from reproducing won’t do anything. There will always be an underclass of undernourished, undereducated people, who probably could be accomplishing more had they been born in different circumstances, and may not test well, and might get targeted for the next 10%, or whatever, who don’t get to reproduce, but people don’t get smarter on average, if that’s the goal, and why is that a goal, anyway? there is already a competition for resources, why make resources even more scarce by creating even more competition?