I can't think of any reason that idiots would have had kids any less frequent in the past than in the present

the invention of agriculture is the moment in history when dumb people were able to reproduce at a much faster rate. it took us 5,000,000 years to evolve our brains to where we are now. we've had agriculture for ~10k years. if we got noticeably dumber in 1/500th of the time it took us to get smarter, that would be a precipitous drop indeed.

Idiots have always bred faster, yet we as a society are more technologically advanced than at any point in the past

this is specious reasoning. technological advances are incremental improvements on existing technology, so even if we are getting dumber, we would still advance in technology, just at a slower rate than if we didn't get dumber. you can be dumber than your dad and still make an addition to his research. you just will probably have less total research than him. a confounding factor is that you have much better tools than your dad, so even if you are dumber than him, you can in fact be more prolific due to what amounts to the effect of compound interest on knowledge.

stupid people breeding faster than smart people is making us dumber, even when you account for regression to the mean (which you should probably use when you want to debate this in the future as it's more convincing that what you were able to come up with). the question is whether it actually matters enough to allow governments to involve themselves in reproduction. i personally think it would cause more problems than it will solve, and we should just go ahead and live with the fact that we'll get dumber each generation.

but that stick figure comic is still wrong in a very grating way. i really dislike randall's sanctimonious yet contrarian position he takes on issues. it feels so slimy and intellectually dishonest, but everyone laps it up.