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randon31415 ,

You killed all of our kids!

contextual_somebody ,

Yeah, because it’s so morally defensible to eliminate all of the developmentally disabled and republicans.

WHYAREWEALLCAPS ,

cougheugenicscough

mojo ,

rip grandma

ichbinjasokreativ ,

I’d bet good money that most republicans are smarter than AOC

Squizzy ,

Given they are republicans who harp on about one member of Congress that likely doesn’t represent them, I doubt it

FooBarrington ,

You think most Republicans could graduate cum laude with a BA in International Relations and Economics?

ChaoticEntropy ,
@ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk avatar

Case in point.

Epicurus0319 ,

Considering that most are over 60 and believe in magical ecosystems that would suddenly stop burning with ever-increasing frequency and severity each summer overnight if West coast states where that happens most often elect more Republican leadership- and will now literally try to deny that it’s not raining outside- I highly doubt they’re that clever at all, let alone more so than one congresswoman who lives in their heads rent-free

onionbaggage ,

Done, how much we going in for?

rishado ,

Jokester over here

PreparaTusNalgasPorque ,

I think the whole 50% depopulation is a flawed premise, of the hundred of thousands of years modern humans have existed that would throw total population back to... 1970

deweydecibel ,

It wasn’t just humans, it was the whole universe. He wasn’t concerned with how each individual species’ populations would fluctuate, he just had a solution in his head and went with it.

Ya know, the “mad Titan” thing.

swordsmanluke ,

Yup. His movie motivation was dumbed down. The whole resources thing is stupid for exactly this reason.

In the comics, Thanos became infatuated with the Marvel Universe incarnation of Death. …And naturally he figured that if he killed half the universe at once, he’d get her attention. (cause girls love it when a boy makes a huge amount of work for them…)

Anyway, his plan was still moronic, but “manchild does stupid thing to impress girl” is a classic for a reason.

Dalvoron ,

There is an addendum to his plan that might have made it make sense. If he had said something like “I’m giving the universe the chance to make better decisions”, suddenly having half as many people means (probably a little more than) half resource consumption, half the carbon emission, and more time to figure out and implement solutions to these problems. I’m not sure how the housing crisis would pan out, I expect it would get worse. It also makes more sense that he destroys the stones after “I gave the universe its chance, now the ball is in its court”.

This also solves the doubling resource problem. His motives are to pressure people to change their ways. Giving them more stuff might cut hunger, but you’ll just have that hunger again in 50 years and we’d probably increase carbon output to boot, and destroy more environment to get these doubled resources.

I don’t know enough about the stones to say whether “infinite resources” or whatever cheat code would have worked, but they certainly could have dropped a line that it wasn’t possible, or that it would cause more problems than it solved (how does chemistry even work in this universe? If nothing ever gets used in reactions then the chemistry that makes our bodies work is borked)

But anyway, as the Russos did not put this line in, the premise was flawed

SnipingNinja ,

Maybe the classic: “Impossible to create something out of nothing”, even with the magical stones

deweydecibel ,

Would they have all still fought against him?

I know this is No Stupid Questions but…come on.

Why on Earth would the Avengers react any differently? Is the assumption that they’re morally bankrupt enough to actually reconsider in this scenario? That somehow letting “stupid” people be murdered is ever, in any way, acceptable?

RaivoKulli ,

You see the Avengers are super big into eugenics. It’s in the subtext mate

GraniteM ,

Isaac Asimov, a very intelligent person, wrote a lengthy essay to the effect that he had no idea what intelligence was. He talked about how society would generally consider him more intelligent than the nearly illiterate man who repaired his car, and yet whenever something went wrong with his car he would go to his mechanic and listen to his advice as if it was being handed down from the mountaintop by Moses himself, because Isaac Asimov knew fuck all about car repair. He talked about how he thought that supposedly objective IQ tests were generally a series of gates designed by people already considered intelligent to keep themselves in power, and that they totally disregarded huge swaths of indispensable human knowledge and talent. Isaac Asimov, who has been published in literally every section of the Dewey Decimal System, concluded that he had no firm idea as to what exactly “intelligence” even was.

In short, how could one even define “the dumbest 50%”?

And that’s why Thanos should have made everybody half as large as they once were.

Aussiemandeus ,
@Aussiemandeus@aussie.zone avatar

I love the entire story, then your very solid and succinct answer

soggy_kitty ,

The dumbest 50% is everyone but me.

deweydecibel ,

He talked about how he thought that supposedly objective IQ tests were generally a series of gates designed by people already considered intelligent to keep themselves in power, and that they totally disregarded huge swaths of indispensable human knowledge and talent.

Modern psychology supports this, too. IQ tests are bullshit, and intelligence is not something that can be reasonably quantified in any meaningful sense without an insane amount of asterisks.

Also…are we counting kids? Because you’d probably find kids are consistently beneath the 50% line on any generic intelligence measuring criteria someone makes up.

ButtholeSpiders ,
@ButtholeSpiders@startrek.website avatar

I agree, I took a few IQ tests and scored high and initially it made me wonder is if everyone else was as concerned as I was watching our species being driven into early graves for yearly profit projections.

Suffice to say, most people I met who scored high lacked the foresight to even think we might be screwed. Which led me to a swift conclusion that your IQ doesn’t mean jack squat, it was a biased system that was simply a biased form of dick measuring.

Perhaps I’m disillusioned, but the best summary of our species is that old video of a chimpanzee in a zoo pissing in its mouth.

KoboldCoterie ,
@KoboldCoterie@pawb.social avatar

Many IQ tests, even ones that claim to be scientific, and especially free ones, artificially inflate the scores they give, to encourage the people taking them to purchase an in-depth analysis of their results.

Like, “Your IQ is 135! That’s well above average! For $39.99, we’ll give you this in-depth, 18 page question by question analysis showing how you stacked up against everyone else, and what your answers mean!”

ButtholeSpiders ,
@ButtholeSpiders@startrek.website avatar

I’m not sure if it was like that, since it was almost 30 years ago. They might’ve still been using smoke signals lol

scarabic ,

snort “modern psychology” calls pseudoscience on someone? That’s my laugh of the day. Thank you!

feedum_sneedson ,

SHNARF

Varyk ,

Love the tag.

and good Asimov story thanks

kSPvhmTOlwvMd7Y7E ,

Lol dude is asking for scientific way to define “dumbness” in a world with infinity stones and flying people

deadbeef79000 ,

Thanos selected the 50% luckiest people. That’s good for everyone!

Larry Niven enters the chat

GnomeKat , (edited )
@GnomeKat@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I can’t get past how weirdly horny Niven was… had to stop reading the second ringworld. That being said Asimov gets weirdly horny in the later foundation novels too. Both of them really liked writing in way older men dating way younger women that just comes off as creepy now.

deadbeef79000 ,

Try Frank Herbert.

DogMuffins ,

Even with the classic definition of intelligence it’s just useless - not predictive or indicative of anything.

A student without the skills to learn isn’t going to learn much regardless of whether they’re intelligent.

Kahlenar ,

Ahhhh the GOAT. Seriously, as a smart kid everything else about me was ignored. Something wrong at school? You CAN do it, so just do it. D&D breaks up mental stats, but there’s even more out there. Int, Wis, Cha to start. Then there’s motivation, happiness, and empathy, and more. The mind is super complex and an int score of 18 being all that matters is like the saying “this hammer solves my nail problem, it will surely solve my window problem.”

HeyThisIsntTheYMCA ,
@HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world avatar

So Thanos could eat them more easily?

Willy ,

sorry to stop the circlejerk, but this is dumb. an intelligent person could learn to repair the car more easily and have more insight than a moron. intelligence exists and we all experience it everyday. the wais-r is a relatively good test, but no there is never going to be a perfect way to measure intelligence. you can say intelligence is just what the test measures which is really pretty non biased, but that’s reducing things too much. y’all know morons and people that are crazy fucking smart. experience in different subjects is distributed, but the ability to gain experience quickly is the biggest difference.

scarabic ,

Good questions from Asimov. But just like with car repair, he didn’t know this subject. It has been a field of study for a while, and researchers have worked directly on this core problem defining general intelligence distinct from specific knowledge.

This Veritassium video is a balanced overview of the topic: youtu.be/FkKPsLxgpuY?si=iY7QBEQK1DkzNhxI

Needless to say, no, the IQ test is not a conspiracy by people who are good at number sequence problems to keep themselves in charge of the world.

bouh ,

IQ of someone is not stable: it changes depending on how much you train to do it or the mental/psychological state you are in when you pass it. Thus it is not a sound scale to measure anything.

The fact that it is merely a ranking of people further push it in the realm of straight bullshit.

Feathercrown ,

How can you possibly measure intelligence separately from the mental state of the person taking the test

bleistift2 ,

In Summer the Eiffel tower is higher than in Winter. Does that mean meters are not a sound scale to measure length?

bouh ,

The metter is not determined by the average height of the eiffel tower. The average height of the effeil tower is measured with the meter. That is the important difference. The meter is also based on constant of physics, and has a very precise definition. You can’t say the same of IQ.

bouh ,

The definition for intelligence changed over the last 2 centuries because we keep discovering how an animal can fit the definition, and intelligence was used to separate humans from animals. Now it’s even worse because people are trying to separate AI from humans.

I like the concept laid out by Delany: in a novel he describe 3 levels of intelligence based on the understanding of various point of views, but it’s not a ranking.

The first stage is simplex: people don’t understand the science of the world, so everything is kind of magical but this concept of magic make the world hold itself and they can grasp everything and use everything with this conception of magic.

Second stage is complex: people have an understanding of science and they can explain many things, but not everything. And when they can’t explain something, they can’t cope with it, because they don’t have the conceptual tools for it. Thus they will either deny this thing existence of plug it into their existing concepts by ignoring the feature that can’t fit.

Third and last stage is multiplex : people can accept that there are theories different than the ones they know, ideas also. Point of views can shape the way you see the world, and even the scientific theories you have to explain the world can be seen as a point of view on the world, so changing this point of view can bring a new or different understanding of a phenomenon or thing or person. These points of view all coexist at the same time, none of them is more true than the other. Like the concept of magic, this allows to grasp, use or accept even the ununderstandable and the unknown, but with a better ability to understand than the simplex stage.

I like this model. But it’s more a model for open-mindedness than intelligence. But maybe that’s the thing.

RememberTheApollo_ ,

I really appreciate Asimov’s thoughts. Ethical hat off for a second - I would suggest removing the most destructive 50%. If someone is truly stupid they might just as well be harmless. However, removing the swathe of the population that engage in violence, greed, etc. would be a far better use of the finger snap than some metric of stupidity.

feedum_sneedson ,

I would characterise that as “ethical hat on”.

RememberTheApollo_ ,

It would be more ethical to give these things to the planet for free. They benefit the world.

FaeDrifter ,

Multiverse Thanos where he tries to wipe out the 50% most destructive, but snaps himself out of existence first because even by trying he made himself the most destructive person in the universe.

RememberTheApollo_ ,

Win-win?

bleistift2 ,

Do you happen to know where Asimov published this opinion and what its title was?

GraniteM ,

Found it!

The essay is “Thinking About Thinking,” ©1989, collected in the book Magic: The Final Fantasy Collection.

bleistift2 ,

Thank you very much! (Let’s hope this comment gets federated.)

MajorHavoc ,

And that’s why Thanos should have made everybody half as large as they once were.

Holy cow. However intelligence is defined, you’re smarter than I am. That would have been a really short film.

…and I’m just realizing that universe would look pretty much exactly like those little kid Marvel Adventures shows…

morphballganon ,

Avengers would have been much better prepared. T’challa, Hank, Janet, Dr Strange could have all helped plan the response. Bucky, Sam, Hope, Peter Parker could have all helped execute the plan.

Also Scott since he wouldn’t have been trapped in the QR.

Drax and Quill are still goners. The rest probably aren’t snapped.

Vision, Gamora, Loki, Heimdall unchanged since they died before the snap.

cerement ,
@cerement@slrpnk.net avatar

would’ve still fought him because their job isn’t to stop evil, it’s to maintain the status quo

Cryophilia ,

See this is why I hate when people are like “just watch this 20 minute long video!” The video just restates what you said in one sentence that took me 5 seconds to read. It states it over and over again, slowly, interspersed with reading long quotes, slowly, for 20+ minutes.

twelvefloatinghands ,
@twelvefloatinghands@lemmy.world avatar

Exactly the same

otter ,

Not an answer to the question, but relevant communities that could use more activity

!asksciencefiction

!whowouldwin

fiat_lux ,

Can we please not hypothesise about eugenics and people's reactions to eugenics, with the current global climate?

Cryophilia ,

Pls touch grass

morphballganon ,

Entertaining how to react to fictional atrocities is useful in shaping our real-world responses to actual atrocities.

fiat_lux ,

Entertaining for the people who are certain that they're not a member of an arbitrarily defined group. Whether their certainty is well-placed is a different problem, I guess.

morphballganon ,

I’m using the word entertaining as a verb. It’s a synonym of considering.

fiat_lux ,

My mistake, I misread.

I agree that discussion is important in deciding responses, but discussions like these are also used as testing grounds for gauging acceptability. It's how places like 'active clubs' recruit and promote far-right extremism, they start with gauging the response to lower-level discrimination and slowly escalate to larger acts.

morphballganon ,

I don’t want to live in a world where we can’t engage in thought experiments.

fiat_lux ,

And I'm sick of living in a world where thought experiments are used to casually label people as dumb, disposable, but they're ok because they mention superheroes and that makes the whole thing outlandish. Until the atrocities occur, again and then it's "why didn't someone do something sooner?".

morphballganon ,

OP didn’t perform a snap. No one irl did.

You have to be able to discuss hypotheticals if you want to know what kind of person you are.

The fact that this hypothetical makes you uncomfortable is ok, it just means you have compassion and that’s valid.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t participate. I’m sure Steve Rogers felt the same way. He participated.

SpiralSong ,

I always wondered if your goal is to reduce population. Why not just make half the people infertile?

SpaceNoodle ,

Too slow

lazylion_ca ,

Has to be more than that. People can have multiple children and probably would have more just because they can. It’d need to be cut to at least one third or less.

SimpleMachine ,

Non-zero chance that the distribution of infertility does not match the distributions of male to female. Could result in complete population collapse pretty quickly.

Annoyed_Crabby ,

Dude, he killed Vision and Gamora and other people close to the member of Avengers, no way they gonna let him off the hook.

RightHandOfIkaros ,

I mean, he could have just created 200% more resources as well. Or he could have equally redistributed all the resources. The problem he was trying to solve would still eventually happen again, because solving the problem relies on everyone working unselfishly, which is simply not possible when humans are involved.

Thief OP ,
@Thief@lemmy.myserv.one avatar

Actually a good point. He should have just done that.

lazylion_ca ,

I think he should have cut the pregnancy rate to a third of what it is now. No one would notice. No one would die or be missed. There’d just be a lot less people within fifty years.

AngryHumanoid ,

OK while that would be a better idea the thought that no one would notice is laughable. We have detailed pregnancy rate records going back 75 years, an immediate 30% change would definitely raise a lot of red flags.

CrabAndBroom ,

I think he should have made everyone half size. Then they would have only needed half as many resources plus there’s a little tiny, angry Spiderman jumping around.

MrZee ,

I kinda like the idea of randomly distributing how much each person gets shrunk. Each person ends up anywhere from 99.9% to 0.1% of their original size. Think of the added chaos it would create.

Chriszz ,

This would make a great short story. People would probably divorce and marry based on size

MrZee ,

Yeah, I feel like it would create a hell of a lot more chaos than half the world disappearing. And hijinks. And genocide.

KoboldCoterie ,
@KoboldCoterie@pawb.social avatar

If they were half as large, they’d need less than half as many resources, as their volume would decrease by considerably more.

HessiaNerd ,

That wouldn’t have impressed death. He is into goth girls.

damnthefilibuster ,

Yeah, Dan Brown dealt with it in a much better manner.

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

Why couldn’t Thanos just wish for unlimited resources? Or universal peace? Or literally any number of things that would have solved the problems he was trying to solve without anyone getting hurt or never existing? His method was stupid.

SpaceNoodle ,

But then you don’t get to massacre people

people ,

His method was stupid

He would be part of the dumbest 50%.

DudeBro ,

I think that the motive should be allowed to be dumb, and their mistake was making Thanos appear lucid and competent. They really should have leaned into “the mad titan” thing and made him act more like an unhinged despot.

WHYAREWEALLCAPS ,

Right? Nothing about him seemed really that insane or unhinged. Even killing Gamora, his adopted daughter that he appeared to care for, can be explained as him doing whatever it takes, not being insane. Even what he did to Nebula came off, to me, as just him being extreme in his desire for her obedience and perfect, like any other obsessed and controlling parent.

Honestly, he came off more as the “annoyed Titan” than anything else.

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

That would have at least made his non-sense make sense. If he’s crazy, he gonna do crazy shit. That may even be why I have always preferred the over-the-top cartoon villains. They were insane, and their plots didn’t have to make sense because they were insane.

“I’m gonna blow up the world!”

“But, um… aren’t you part of the world?”

“Shut up, you and pull the lever!”

underisk ,
@underisk@lemmy.ml avatar

If anything, I’d say eco terrorism is a far more defensible motivation than eugenics.

twelvefloatinghands ,
@twelvefloatinghands@lemmy.world avatar

Keep in mind that people are part of the eco being terrorismed

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