It’s basically a comedy with the subtlety of a guy repeatedly screaming “I am beating you with a sledgehammer” as he hits you with a sledgehammer.
The joke is that everyone is dumb and the future and its painfully spoon-fed to the audience ad nusuesm. And now 15 years later everyone constantly brings up that movie when ever something happens and its the most over commented thing I’ve ever seen. It makes me hate the movie more. Its the peak movie for pseudo intellectuals.
I’ve seen this repeated ad nauseam on reddit in any slightly relevant threads, but it seems completely unfounded. Psychometrics is one of the subfields of psychology that doesn’t suffer from an apocalyptic replication crysis, like for example social psychology, and there’s decades of research on IQ. Please note that I’m not saying that IQ is the most important measure of a person or anything like that, but it’s a pretty good metric that demonstrably correlates to/predicts a lot of things with reasonable confidence.
In my experience, in real life it’s more common that people just don’t care about wellbeing of others who are worse off/more ignorant, than it being malice, but otherwise I agree.
I agree with this as well, and with other critics you write below. I don’t think it’s a very good movie.
But I don’t think this is the case. Firstly I don’t like the “it’s a matter of how much you want to”, because that’s very close to blaming a person for not being born smart enough. Secondly, even if what you say is true - it’s a matter of time and effort - the reality is that at some point the time and effort needed would be so huge that it’s the same as “not able to do it at all”, because an information that was acquired/way to solve a problem that was found was only relevant ten years ago and is completely useless now. Most people simply don’t have it in them to seriously work on a unified theory of physics, but most people (though a considerably smaller “most”) also don’t have it in them to be a good strategic leader of a company, who does nothing as complicated as theoretical physicists, but needs to solve problems in a smart way fast to be good for anything.
The problem is that this correlates to/predicts outcomes in systems predicated on … IQ.
“IQ correlates to success in careers,” for example. Your career path and ensuing choices in your life is heavily influenced by your SAT scores if you’re in the USA. And SAT scores are …
… drum roll …
… basically just IQ tests. So strangely enough, in a system that explicitly filters based on IQ, a high IQ correlates with success within the system. And most other nations that have modern educational infrastructure have some form of test which is IQ-adjascent: China’s is even worse than the SAT, for example, while, say, Canada’s system kind of smears out and obfuscates the IQ component … but it’s still very much a part of things.
I don’t think this is an argument against the usefulness of IQ. Firstly not all countries use standardized tests with such an influence (I’m from Czechia and we don’t, there’s a standardized high school leaving examination, but it’s only necessary to pass, the score is generally unimportant for university admission). Secondly all you’re saying is that the tests correlate with IQ. That does not make them or IQ invalid, it may just as well simply mean that they test how well a student does in school, and having a higher IQ tends to make studying easier.
But mostly, again, psychometrics is the one field of psychology that has relatively rigorous and reliable methodology. The idea that you disprove decades of research, from large scale statistic studies made with cooperation of state institutions to expensive and rare research like various twin studies, simply by saying “actually IQ doesn’t matter” is naive at best. There really isn’t a lot of reasons to say that apart from ideological ones.