Each generation is not a 1:1 descendant of the previous generation. Which individuals of the current generation that have children determines the attributes of the next generation. Now for 100 points guess which people (and what attributes they share) have been biggest contributors to the next generation.

I suppose I'll be the one to post the canonical recap of this concept:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZ0ZUy7P3E

There is a reason Idiocracy has been described as a documentary :)

...because the people describing it that way are ironically ignorant of world statistics?

https://www.gapminder.org/

I'm very wary of statistics. As the saying goes, there is lies, dirty lies and then there is statistic.

A typical example is GDP is going in country X, which means X is doing better!!!

Except mean salary is going down, which is a typical for a rich get richer, poor get poorer scenario.

Well, that's true, data is sometimes misleading, mis-reported, or manipulated. It really is much better to just stick to what we believe in our guts to be true.

Belief in the face of evidence to the contrary has been accomplishing great things all over the world lately.

Yes, and the reason is idiots who consider it so.

It’s telling that critics of the film never have an argument more coherent than “your dumb!”.

It's telling that some people believe that:

(a) elevating a Hollywood comedy into some sort of social study / prophecy status is "smart",

(b) calling the majority of people on earth idiots (which the parent did) is also OK,

but that only "idiots" would call them out for doing so.

Still nothing of consequence said.

Yeah, but they are mentioning aging. Do you mean that the older men having children is reducing IQ of future generations?

Older men having children probably does reduce the IQ of future generations given they will pass on more mutations, but no this is not what I meant. Think of all the people you know, think of how smart each person is, and then count up how many children each person has. Unless you you know a very small number of people I think you will see what I mean.

Statistics about how stupid people are outbreeding the smarts would be way more impressive than anecdotes.

Especially given things like the Flynn effect.

High intelligence does seem to negatively correlated with fertility rate -- one study here, but there are plenty in Google Scholar. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289607...

But "intelligence" / "IQ tests" are tangled up with a lot of correlating factors and biases so it's hard to say what this means. For instance, simply being poor affects cognitive ability considerably -- https://www.princeton.edu/news/2013/08/29/poor-concentration...

We also know that low fertility is also associated with high education levels -- http://www.jstor.org/stable/2137845 -- and income -- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=838227

I think one key here is, now that infant mortality / childhood diseases are much lower than it used to be, a much larger portion of families really want to use family planning methods to keep family sizes low, globally. This is not necessarily a bad thing. http://www.economist.com/node/14743589

So I would take a statement like "the stupids are outbreeding the smarts" as more that, for multiple reasons, access and knowledge of family planning is not as good for those with less education or income. So rather than making this a moan about dysgenics and Idiocracy, it seems a call to action to absolutely ensure these people at least have the access to the health care they need. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2835625/

Why I fully support every person having access to family planing methods as I don’t think anyone should be having children they don’t want, the relative cost of children would still cause differential changes to the population even if 100% of people had health care access.

Children are much more expensive to the highly educated, both directly through things like housing and education, and indirectly via opportunity costs. The more expensive you make something the less of it will be consumed unless it is a Veblen good.

Yeah, but your explanation conflicts with the article explanation.

Not at all as there are two effects going on.

You become dumber as you get older (I unfortunately know this from personal experience), while the average intelligence of each generational cohort can also be changing through differential reproduction.

Yeah, but you becoming dumber as you get older won't affect scores, assuming each generation is tested at same point in their life. That's why I asked about their method.

They did talk in the article about how more subjects sitting for IQ tests are 60 or older, so they must do more than just test once in a person's life, or they have been branching out and testing more people.

this seems to contradict what you're saying: http://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/older-men-have-geek...

The older men who have the opportunity to have children are not representative of all older men. The average 50 year old man is not having children, just the small percentage partnered to much young women. Have a guess what attributes they might have?

nanomoose's suggestion of "immigrants" is dead. I'm not entirely sure what your comment has that his does not.

> Don't they test each new generation at same time?

IQ scores are relative to people the same age, so it wouldn’t matter.

The article implies that this might be possible. Maybe what you are describing is only true for children and all adults are in the same category?

Perhaps as well there is a ceiling? We have instant access to almost all information at this point. At some point we have to hit the limits of human intelligence, right?