Would they have all still fought against him?
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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
I love the entire story, then your very solid and succinct answer
The dumbest 50% is everyone but me.
Love the tag.
and good Asimov story thanks
Do you happen to know where Asimov published this opinion and what its title was?
Found it!
The essay is “Thinking About Thinking,” ©1989, collected in the book Magic: The Final Fantasy Collection.
Thank you very much! (Let’s hope this comment gets federated.)
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…
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.
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.
They’d still be appalled and try to stop him given their strong moral code. And given that they’d be at full strength they’d probably find a way to stop him and reverse things faster than they did in OTL
I’m frankly astonished anyone could genuinely think the Avengers would ever somehow be more ok with letting Thanos kill “only the stupid people”. Like…that’s a very strange read on these characters to think they’d ever react any differently in this scenario.
But even if they were so morally and ethically bankrupt to think it may not be such a bad idea, the truth is killing “the dumber 50%” is still causing catastrophic secondary effects. People would lose loved ones. That’s enough of a reason to go Avenging.
Hell, how are we defining “dumb”? Because you may have just murdered every child under a certain age.
You think none of the Avengers is in the “dumb” 50%?
Of course not, didn’t Drax have a calculus scene in guardians 3?
Deep cut
And given that they’d be at full strength they’d probably find a way to stop him and reverse things faster than they did in OTL
Good point. But I dunno. Thor is a big power loss, and unless Captain America gets a free pass for emotional intelligence counting, they’re short in leadership, too.
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.
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.
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.
That wouldn’t have impressed death. He is into goth girls.
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.
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.
If they were half as large, they’d need less than half as many resources, as their volume would decrease by considerably more.
Actually a good point. He should have just done that.
Yeah, Dan Brown dealt with it in a much better manner.
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?
You see the Avengers are super big into eugenics. It’s in the subtext mate
Yeah, because it’s so morally defensible to eliminate all of the developmentally disabled and republicans.
cougheugenicscough
rip grandma
I’d bet good money that most republicans are smarter than AOC
You think most Republicans could graduate cum laude with a BA in International Relations and Economics?
Given they are republicans who harp on about one member of Congress that likely doesn’t represent them, I doubt it
Case in point.
Done, how much we going in for?
Dude, he killed Vision and Gamora and other people close to the member of Avengers, no way they gonna let him off the hook.
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.
he was the Mad Titan not the Reasonably Thought Out Plans Titan
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.
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.
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!”
His method was stupid
He would be part of the dumbest 50%.
But then you don’t get to massacre people
I always wondered if your goal is to reduce population. Why not just make half the people infertile?
Too slow
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Maybe the classic: “Impossible to create something out of nothing”, even with the magical stones
I don’t think the hulk would have reacted at all, since he’d be gone. But does that mean Banner would stay somehow?
Hulk is not dumb, he just was born 30 years later than Banner.
We know that given the time Hulk also proves to Bea genius of his own.
Isn’t the hulk a scientist?
Banner is
You killed all of our kids!
Would they all still exist?
I can’t think of an Avenger or even sidekick who I would put in the bottom 50% of the earth’s population. Even the dumbest are probably in the top 10-15%.
Draxx believed he was invisible if he stood still, he even thought he was invisible while eating a bag of chips. I’m not sure he’s gonna make it.
Let the man try!
naw I’d say Drax, Starlord maybe, and Hulk if he was in Hulk mode are all written to be comically stupid
but yeah that’s probably it, most would survive
There’s a lot of generosity toward Thor in this thread. And I think that’s great.
Even though he’s going to rule Asgard someday, while his brother is clearly more qualified. /s
deleted by creator
Banner is still around, but Hulk is gone.
Maybe Thor, too.
Quinn definitely is gone. So is Drax and many characters from GOTG.
There are plenty of dumb avengers, though a lot of them have not been featured in the movies yet.
Drax isn’t stupid, he’s just hyper-literal. If it comes off as stupidity, it might be poor writing or some assumptions made.
He’s not just hyper-literal, he is slow to adapt, rarely displays any strategy beyond direct attack (which gets them into trouble repeatedly) and, you know, thinks he can’t be seen because he’s very still. Drax is loyal and courageous, but intelligence is not among his gifts.
Quinn?
Quill?
Starlord. I always mess his real name up 😖
Yeah. The interesting money seems to be on Thor. Could break either way. Place your bets everyone.
It wouldn’t shock me if Hawkeye disappeared. But then again who’d notice?
Clint isn’t a stupid guy. In the show, he’s hard of hearing, which some people might mistake for being dumb if they saw him on the street, for example. But remember how scary he was in The Avengers. Guy could shoot an arrow into the wind and knew it would blow up an engine. You know there’s some crazy subconscious math going on there. Also, his counter-terrorism rampage in Endgame wouldn’t have been nearly as successful if he wasn’t a great planner and tactician.
Also, his counter-terrorism rampage in Endgame wouldn’t have been nearly as successful if he wasn’t a great planner and tactician.
I hadn’t considered this. You’re right. This is a man with no powers whatsoever. Meticulous preparation was essential. A mindless killing spree would have been suicidal.
This makes that scene much more unsettling.
He would definitely be gone.
Hang on, do you mean “with the least capacity to be smart,” or is he killing all the babies and children?
I mean, the average newborn is smarter than the average politician, so maybe it’s not as bad as we think.
Bruh babies cant even talk or have object permanence, don’t try to spin that as being smart.
I once convinced a 9 year old that dogs are just cats but older. Little humans are smart as hell 😎
The real question is which avengers would be gone. Putting my money on Thor
Thor, Starlord, Drax, and Mantis would all be toast. Steve, Bucky, and Falcon are tossups because I think their intelligence is supposed to be about average.
Not necessarily any Avengers would be gone.
Good point, technically. But… We all know Thor would be gone. There’s no way the rightful heir to the throne of Asgard is in their top 50% intelligence.
If anything, I’d say eco terrorism is a far more defensible motivation than eugenics.
Keep in mind that people are part of the eco being terrorismed
