What if everyone was smart?

Containment

The book sounds kinda backwards to me as I would think the world flying into a "stupid zone" would do more harm then one that makes you smart. It almost sounds like a dream come true to me honestly. Just think about it you would no longer see stupid people running around shooting each other. Instead it would be genius's running around shooting each other how could that be worse?

turbo

Charly was the best movie ever! My mother and I went to see it together, and I never saw her cry so hard about a movie. Very moving. I read the book later, but the movie was even more immediate and emotionally gripping, IMO. One of the very few examples of when a film adaptation might overshadow the novel. Cliff over-did himself on this one. Sometimes, the Academy should award two Oscars, not just one.

phoenix:\\

Not everyone would be at the same level of "smartness" as there are limitations of an individual's brain. We'd still be where we are, but in a different sense in my opinion.

uperkurk

Tried to download that film but can't seem to find it :(

Gew

Thanks for the tips on Charly.
I'd totally missed out on this film.

Cheers~

mathwonk

as a start, check out the uses of the subjunctive tense. (the word "was" suggests consideration of a past time when this was indeed the case, rather a hypothetical situation which does not exist.)

atyy

isn't "was" accepted nowadays as having the same meaning as the subjunctive in this context?

to consider a situation that did not exist, but could have been, wouldn't one use "had been"?

netgypsy

What if we all be smart??? (nothing like subjunctive hehe)

Any human who is not brain damaged for one reason or another is smart and much smarter intellectually than the species used to be when it lived in caves.

The smarter a person is, the more they realize just how little they know and just how inadequate their intellect is.

Really smart people are not uniformly smart. (Example: Stephen Hawking's comment on women - soooo dumb)

I wish the English language would adopt a non gender specific singular personal pronoun. In these days of gender sensitivity I really get tired of writing he/she so default to their which is of course incorrect. BLAH.

Char. Limit

I use 'it'. Technically correct.

netgypsy

But not personal. People tend to be offended when referred to as an "it".

Char. Limit

That sucks for them, doesn't it? If they don't like it, they can up and tell me their gender.

Evo

The modern human brain has been around for ~50k years, so a caveman's brain was basically the same as ours. Did you mean that modern humans are more educated?

rootX

Just reading the first few OP lines, Poul Anderson doesn't seem to be the smartest person on the planet.

I think "smart" here implies everyone think similar to you and everyone has similar priorities in life. I don't want to live in that kind of place.

netgypsy

Good point about the brain size. Here's an interesting article about FLO and includes info on comparative brain size.

quote Still, the biggest shock is the fact that Flo’s puny brain—no bigger than a chimpanzee’s—was so capable. “The hobbit discovery challenges the idea that intelligence is directly proportional to brain size,” Morwood says.

http://discovermagazine.com/2011/may...tart:int=2&-C=

No I didn't mean educated. Education is very significant but "smartness" is more related to how fast your learn rather than how much you know. But modern man has such a stimulated environment and such a myriad of problems to solve on a daily basis. This is probably why I said today's homo sapiens sapiens is smarter. More problems that have to be solved faster, a much larger social group and the necessity to communicate with large numbers of diverse people.

Again, as many have mentioned, it's the definition of "smartness" that's the kicker.

For most people smartness is related to the ability to solve problems quickly and correctly, communicate their solutions clearly and reproduce the solutions, understand cause and effect. It also indicates the ability to understand others quickly and correctly and respond in like manner. So you wouldn't call a world class cellist "smart". You'd call them talented, skilled, amazing, but not smart, unless they had other skills that demonstrated what you perceived as "smartness".

Consider a whale compared to a human. Most humans think they are more intelligent than whales although of course we can't survive as long in the ocean.

I remember an anthropology course that indicated that when a society doesn't need anything extra to survive, they develop amazing language and complex interpersonal behaviors, using their intelligence in a very different way. And the south sea island cultures are examples. They have all the food, shelter, comfortable climate, already in their environment. They don't need buildings or inventions so their intellect goes elsewhere. What Europeans consider primitive, is quite comfortable, and I'm sure the Islanders considered Europeans most primitive in their human relations skills. So it's quite possible that since whales have no need for any of the complex things we create, that they use their massive brains in ways we can't comprehend, that are no less "smart" by their standards.

I've never understood the need to send our location into space not knowing what might be out there when we cannot yet adequately communicate with other intelligent species on our own planet.

So if people were suddenly "smarter" using the definition of being able to solve problems more quickly, understand cause and effect, communicate more clearly and quickly, understand communication from others more quickly, why should this do anything more significant than overwork the internet and hopefully reduce misunderstandings?

Danger

That is my second favourite movie of all time, next to "Birds of Prey". The original short story "Flowers for Algernon" was the best short story that I ever read. It actually made me cry (keeping in mind that I was very young and unarmed at the time). It was so well liked that the author, Daniel Keyes, was asked to expand it into a full novel. I expected it to suck, but be damned if he didn't pull it off and make the novel even better than the short. It was something that I (as a professional writer and screenwriter at the time) considered to be unfilmable... and there they went proving me wrong. The only Science Fiction movie in history to win a Best Actor Oscar award, and it was well deserved. Cliff Robertson absolutely owned that role.

Curious3141

Read Asimov's short story, "Profession". Covers this exact idea in detail along with the pitfalls.

Curious3141

I had read the short story version first, then seen the movie, then read the novel later in life. The novel is one of my favourites, possibly my all-time favourite. The movie "Charly" is good, but the "psychedelia" scenes (perhaps inevitable in a '60s movie, but out of place here) and their take on the "quiz" scene where Charlie Gordon shoots snarky smart-arse answers back at the audience spoil it for me.

There's a more modern TV movie by the name "Flowers for Algernon" starring Matthew Modine. Much more faithful to the source material, and I think it's highly underrated.

There's another movie (possibly also a made-for-TV movie) with a female lead and a similar plot; though I think her regression wasn't absolute, so the ending was less tragic. Can't remember the name of this movie.

Then there was the film adaptation of "The Lawnmower Man" by Stephen King. That had an IQ-enhancement theme, too. I remember thinking how crappy this movie was, and I haven't ventured to rewatch it.

There's news that Will Smith's thinking of remaking FFA with himself as director and lead, that should be interesting. Hopefully he won't train-wreck it.