The current issue is that there is an unprecedented percentage of elderly individuals in positions of power, and they are often reluctant to relinquish their authority. This presents a significant dilemma because many of these older decision-makers struggle to comprehend the reality faced by younger generations, including their own children and grandchildren. They frequently cling to outdated notions, such as the belief that a starter apartment costs only $400 or that well-paying jobs are readily available to anyone who simply shows up. This generational disconnect makes it challenging to address the evolving needs of society as a whole.
In Germany, there is a proposal that suggests individuals nearing retirement should work in a social service job for a year, similar to the requirement for young people who wish to avoid military conscription. This idea could potentially bridge the generational gap by reacquainting older individuals with the current societal challenges. However, it appears that the older generations, who previously favored reinstating the draft, are now hesitant to support this notion.
It's important to note that this proposal is currently hypothetical and would only be considered if mandatory military service were to be reintroduced
> there is a proposal that suggests individuals nearing retirement should work in a social service job for a year
And what about letting people live their lives without constantly micro managing their fate. What happened to freedom?
As long as I pay my taxes, don't infringe on the basic universal sane laws (you know, don't kill, steal etc) leave me the fuck alone.
I don't know for Germany but France, my country, starts to ask too much in exchange for what they're offering. Can't do this, can't do that, pot holes everywhere, prices and taxes skyrocketing, impossible to find a doctor that will receive you the same day and now they want to send us to die in Ukraine?
I think the problem is that society is not offering enough, not demanding too little.
I did my conscript service in Sweden at a time when only 8000 did. 10 years earlier, 50,000 did. I don’t think it’s a coincidence Sweden has now joined NATO. People are simply clueless about the needs of the Defense.
I have since moved to Switzerland where the military is still fully staffed by each generation. I believe this is a link that should never be broken.
Additionally, I believe countries like France and Germany are too big and should reduce in size, but that’s another discussion.
> military is still fully staffed by each generation
There was an interesting comment recently that discussed the development of a 'warrior caste' in the US military, which to no-one's surprise largely overlaps with poor people. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40787714
When you are 65 then you already have done a lot for the economy of the country. The probelm at hand is that 30% of the workforce will retire in 2030 because of the baby boom in 60s. In the 2030s there will be many open jobs for young people to show their talent and AI will help them to be even more productive. There is no need to bother old frail people into social service. Very often people in their 60s are burnt out and will not be very helpful for the society anymore.
> Very often people in their 60s are burnt out and will not be very helpful for the society anymore.
Cynical takes being de rigeur on HN, I’m not surprised to read this comment here; but it’s sad nonetheless. I suppose in a very narrow economic context of “utility”, you may be right. But it would be a truly impoverished society that marginalized the non-economic contributions of its citizens 60 and over.
I’m just shy of one of those “people in their 60s” and volunteer many hours a week at a music school. I’d like to think that I’ll continue being useful to society in that way and in other ways less formalized.
Could you provide a link to these datasets? People always talk about data but never show it. I wanted to make an opinion but couldn't find the data at all - not counting obviously opportunistic inconclusive studies designed to support a predetermined political opinion.
The topic is so complex that I don't think I can satisfy your curiosity.
AI is just the next step of technology development, so it will just increase the rate of change we see for last couple of decades in the same direction.
And while technology is indeed helping people to be more productive, it also allows megacorps to capture the added value. You can see it in different economic benchmarks - that while there was an enormous economic growth in the past decades, there is increasing gap between classes, people outside of tech feel the decrease of their purchasing power and quality of life in general throughout the developed world.
There is a powerful systems forces in play, so it is not political, but rather more like a natural force of progress and especially automation.
If you're young and work in tech, you may notice that you are being disproportionately rewarded for your effort from the rest of the world for building tech.
> When you are 65 then you already have done a lot for the economy of the country
My hunch is that in some cases boomers have been and will continue decreasing their net contribution to whichever economy they live in, which shouldn't be the most important thing in evaluating the value of someone's existence, except that in this case everyone servicing them is also being squeezed by the tax system, and the same people they're servicing. Could be living in a boomer's basement making less than them but paying 1/2 your check, or in a managed rental that's owned by a reit that's invested in by their pension fund.
This kind of shallow dismissal is very hard to take seriously for those of us who personally know soldiers from NATO countries who are currently "on vacation" (officially) in Ukraine. This approach, by the way, has been borrowed wholesale from Putin's playbook in Crimea back in 2014. But officially you are right, they are not there.
Well, I happen to know people in the US military who have been on this vacation since the beginning of the year. I am not particularly social or well-connected, so the fact that I know someone like that means it's widespread. Downvotes or no, that's reality.
it doesn't logically follow from the fact that you know about a group that there are similar groups.
for example let's say you know a few people who work for the military and they happen to work at Area 51. sure lots of people know military personnel, but your sample is still pretty special. without a good representative sample we simply have no idea.
First let’s get one thing clear: NATO sending personnel is not France sending personnel. The two are distinct and anyone who would make a valid point in a conversation about this understands that.
Second, Putin’s playbook is to sow discord by introducing a bunch of FUD into the political discourse across the world, something which you are doing here. So the remaining question here is: are you doing so willingly, or are you just prey to the same?
Because this is HN, I always believe it’s the latter. Still, your comment is unsourced, your account is four months old, and all your historical comments are systematically pro Russia and/or peddling common Russian talking points that “get people thinking”. Not a good look, huh?
Leaving you and anyone else alone - be they young, old, male, female, blue, furry or even ... American - implicitly requires the continuation of politics that will make sure that you are in fact left the fuck alone.
You are probably not going to be surprised, but things are not going great.
I think you're misinformed or showing anti-Ukraine bias. No one would send their military there, but could get sent in aid to another EU/EEA/NATO member.
Anyway, I agree that mandatory drafting should not be reintroduced.
Doesn’t matter. If a real war starts you want a lot of men and the only reliable way is conscription. No one could have fought WW2 with a volunteer military. Ukraine aren’t relying on volunteers. Israel don’t rely on volunteers. You do the best you can with what you’ve got available.
Peace-time armies will not ask for that, that’s for sure, but when a real war is on the table (like it looks to soon be the case here in Europe) then things change.
This is definitely one of those citation needed comments.
Firstly, professional armies are recruited from the general population and are on average no better or worse than conscripts.
Secondly, the above comment completely sidesteps the moral aspects. Why should the burden of military service fall predominantly on the poor and the desperate? Why should decision makers be able to only send other people’s children to war?
To your first point, it really ought not require a citation to understand that people who have been training full-time for years make better soldiers than people you pull out of civilian life and ship off to the front after a few months, and who want nothing more than to exit the service.
There is no modern, professionalized army that wants conscripts. None. Conscripts are a liability, and a measure of last resort.
To your second, it’s far from just the downtrodden that fill the ranks of professional armies. In many countries, e.g. France (where I served), the upper classes of society (grande bourgeoisie and nobility) are over-represented in the ranks.
> Firstly, professional armies are recruited from the general population and are on average no better or worse than conscripts.
This isn’t true. The US and UK conscript armies of WW1 and WW2 were significantly healthier and better educated than the general population. Lots of people grew up in wretched poverty and had deficiency diseases or were malnourished or had parasites. Those people were rejected.
It is illegal for the US military to accept recruits with an ASBAB score of ten or below, roughly equivalent to IQ 83. The military is in some sense representative but it is not a random sample.
Why do you imply that non mandatory conscription means that the poor or desperate will be the ones to enroll?
In Romania around 2008 mandatory drafting was removed from the constitution and yet we still have an army. The reason why we have such a small army is in a significant part due to pervasive corruption in all of the state's structures, low salaries and abusive higher ups. We have an interesting documentary about the subject (has english subtitles) about the ridiculous state of the army due to reasons mentioned. https://youtu.be/0_YnxJJcC7M?feature=shared
That's a very un-European view that would mark you as crazy here. Nobody goes to the army to get a job, not even those who can't find a job, and the unemployment office won't try to suggest it - it's not considered a job here, it's a service duty.
In my country we don't have mandatory military service. The "employer of the last resort" is the unemployment office and welfare, not army. I have never heard of anybody going to the army for any other than duty/ideological reasons, desperation for a job might even disqualify you - they want people who are motivated to join the army, not poor desperate people looking for money.
I am in the United States. It isn’t a categorical truth here, but many people here have and do join the US military because that is the “ticket out” that they have access to. I saw it a lot in my high school. I had some friends who were good people but they were not terribly academically gifted, their families were poor, and college wasn’t a realistic option for them. Several of them joined the military in part due to the recruiters that would visit the school. During my senior year of high school one of those guys ended up being the recruiter that visited my high school. It was interesting to see a bit of a cycle there.
It’s almost a trope here. I expect that’s why the original commenter said that the military is the employer of last resort. In the US that is often the case for many young people.
Yeah I know it is in the US, but military recruiters visiting a school class would be a major nationwide scandal here, comparable only maybe to visits of some political or religious figures. The only approvable way is a moderated discussion where both positives and negatives are (must be) voiced in age-appropriate way.
The entire culture around the separation of state, its components and citizens is very different here. We really don't want another 40 years of dictatorship - best to stop it right at the beginning.
Different culture and society. Here you get paid better as a supermarket clerk with overtimes than a soldier, or clearly better if you get promoted from a clerk to/pick another role (shift manager, or warehouse work). And our desperate also use the travel flexibility to work in Greece, Spain, Italy, Germany, Denmark, than here. We used to be the source of manual labour during summer in many of those countries.
This topic was talking about conscription though, a measure of last resort.
If we really reach a point where conscription is required, it also means that carrying an uterus is probably irrelevant: it's either kill or be killed.
Hopefully that's never going to be a thing again in as many countries as possible
Yikes. You can't post like this to HN, and we ban accounts that do.
I'm not going to ban you right now because you have a sizeable history here and don't seem to have been in the habit of breaking the site guidelines, but please don't do this again.
Thanks for your kind words. Could you please show me the sentence or paragraph in the guidelines where 'post like this' is mentioned? Or must I assume that because this is an anglosaxon site, automatically the political correctness illness takes effect?
I’m fine with personal freedoms "American style" but you’re a fucking dangerous redneck if you ignore red lights. I see morons like that all the time and, thanks to them (not you I hope), I’m almost killed once a year.
I live now for a decade in a country where traffic lights are just a non-binding recommendation, and I never got almost killed or even hurt for that. You just have to drive slowly and watch and communicate with the other traffic participants. In some cases, morons are made, not born.
I think you are completely ignoring the single most important factor here, ge reason why more older people are in power.
The demographics in the West are heavily skewed towards older generations who had a lot more kids than their kids, who are now having less kids than their parents. The power discrepancy directly follows from that and in my opinion so does the disconnect between the generations.
The "retiree draft" is just an absurd proposal which will do exactly one thing: increase resentment and further disconnect.
It's not just demographics.
People tend to make social abd economic connections over time, and to be actual mover and shaker you do need key supporters.
That's where democracy also fails. The shorter you're around, the lower chance people heard about what you've done and who you are, no matter how good or bad you are at something.
(Same applies to functionaries often enough.)
But young people, who are more ambitious and less established are also more willing to take a chance on young and ambitious people. I don't see how this is unconnected to demographics.
Demographics play a part still having 70% of our government officials over the retirement age (*Germany) of normal people is a clinging to power problem.
It's only a terrible job if you want it to be we have more than enough government officials in the back ranks that miss 80% of sessions and get payed really well to just vote with their party. They should just have to retire when everyone else HAS to retire based on laws they introduced...
> unprecedented percentage of elderly individuals in positions of power, and they are often reluctant to relinquish their authority
Why are they reluctant? Because you eventually realize as you age that slow societal change is better than fast change. The young demand fast change aka “revolution”. Revolutionary change creates volatile societies and volatile societies don’t create progress that sticks.
When I was in my twenties, I was impatient and demanded immediate change. Now approaching my sixties, I want progress, but know that a slow trickle is better and would rather be patient to get there.
Older people have much lower "give a darn" so we do still need younger clueless people to show us the way we were when we were young, and that whatever that thingy was-- it was important.
These "outdated notions" are based on decades of experience and working knowledge. One should not discount that. One should never base quality on age alone. New is not always better.
EDIT: Of course, now I read the article which pretty much says the same thing.
The disconnect was always there in 20th century too, if you actually cared to look hard enough at your / peers previous generation. The more you steered from some basic life path the more friction there was, and not even going into various social minorities who can now actually live a decent life.
The idea that now young have it much tougher is simply not a reality in my surroundings, I had 1% of the options my children had and ie path to just freedom was where you risked your actual life. Some young just have little patience and want it all immediately, or otherwise they are failing in life and some form of communism needs to be installed promptly. Cant comprehend that social networks arent showing a reality, just few marketaeble slices of it. But this is largely failure of parents failing to explain to kids how world runs, what to expect and how to get what you want out of it.
Previous generations lived through world wars, famines, and other devastation. Those born in the wrong place also face unimaginable hardship today, but most of us have not been that unlucky. Still, youth unemployment in the south of Europe has been 20%-40% for the past two decades. You can’t blame people for feeling their prospects are grim when they see all their friends struggling in young adulthood, even when objectively speaking previous generations had to deal with far worse problems. The paradox is that when everybody has a lot of opportunity then competition becomes proportionally more fierce. That gives rise to the impression that things are getting worse when people should conclude the opposite: more people getting more opportunities means more competition. You can’t have upward mobility without commensurate downward mobility.
Problem is world isn't fair, some people do get it all for free, absurd/perverse scenarios happen all the time.
I think what's different in this generation is that it's becoming much more visible to everyone, so even if these are the outliers everything is judged accordingly. Also it's kind of making extremes more acceptable slowly because they are always in the attention sphere. Just look at the political spectrum - Trump really changed the game even here in Europe, politicians lost so much shame - stuff that would previously cause you to resign - now they just do some stupid spin, double down and get even more support from the tribe.
I'm mid 30s and I feel things have changed considerably in last 10 years, loss of shame in particular - once you get stuff chewed up by social media as the latest shock fad - everyone gets used to it so fast and it becomes almost normalized (not shocking at least).
They don't have it much tougher in life comforts, for sure, but it's not because of that they should be grateful and accepting of all the issues and injustices that plague societies.
People have always wanted a better world, and the young have a very different lens than you to judge that, it's absolutely common to become more conservative when you grow older because you lived through how the world was before, that world is gone and the before of the youth's future is right now, they will strive to make it better just like you might have had in your past.
An old man sitting down and pointing fingers at how the youth is corrupted compared to their golden days is a tale as old as time, you're just playing your part of this endless cycle...
Aristotle ~400 BC:
> “[Young people] are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of circumstances.
> They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it.”
Horace ~20-50 BC:
> Our sires' age was worse than our grandsires'.
We, their sons, are more worthless than they;
so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.
> The beardless youth… does not foresee what is useful, squandering his money.
You'll find many, many many many more examples of the same rhetoric across all human writing.
Old man yells at cloud, let the youth carry the fire of bettering societies, you already got comfortable and scared.
This is the first time in modern history where the younger generations are materially worse off than their parents were at the same time on a massive scale—as in, not just in localized areas due to specific circumstances, but in most of the western world.
Yes the proposal is quite interesting. But do you really think a 60 year old software developer will want to work in a social service job? He was working his ass off for 40 years in daily scrums or so and then he should be doing social work in a retirement home or hospital? Retirement is done of a special reason, because people want to stop working and not because they want to change into a social service.
My suggestion: Let people start part time retirement with 55 and train and consult the next generation that comes after them. Then the loss of knowledge is avoided and when they are 65 just leave them alone in their retirement. They have deserved it well. If someone wants still to work, good for him, but a mandatory social service sounds to me like slave labour and the votes at the next elections will come in. There is a reason why the ultra right are so strong in the east of germany.
The main issue is the health care system is pretty good at fixing physical hardware and quiet inept at upgrading mental software. There is another German propsal to stop funding hardware fixes if software upgrades can't be done. I personally think this is the right path.
The other issue is accumulated toxic damage we cannot fix at all.
When did we phase out leaded petrol?
(We haven't fully, but you get the idea...)
When did people mostly stop smoking carcinogens and heavy metals?
When did we start, or stop, using toxic azo dyes for clothing?
Or particular fireproofing or plasticizing chemicals that are endocrine poisons?
Or the latest plague, which hit a lot of people in the brain?
While any of those things is not predictive enough at individual level due to genetic variance, statistics of big numbers show delayed correlations that heavily imply causation, while high dose studies show obvious toxicity of this kind. And when such chronic damage happened 20-30 years ago there's not that much our medicine can do yet.
We cannot even reactivate a thymus (major gland of the immune system) well yet en masse. Or fix or reliably help livers.
I interpreted the post as an indication that hospitals have got good enough at keeping mentally absent old people alive until they die. It rings true. Certainly, not all of them are 'not there', it does not seem like a small chunk of the population either.
Every 10 years or so I'll look back on my life and cringe at all the stupid stuff I said and believed over the past 10 years and how I naively thought that I knew everything. And then I'd breathe a sigh of relief now that I finally do know everything.
"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."
The vast majority of people growing old have not spent their lives learning; while enchanting to look at the 60-70+ year olds that are undoubtedly exceptional (think Warren Buffet or the older COBOL dev you think is cool), the reality is they're in the extreme minority.
The author thinks everyone is like him (or us commenting for that matter) and just think of the possibilities in 30-40 years!
Most people are just not that impressive and I wouldn't falsely assume that by just having spent time on the Earth while it spun around the sun over 60 times they're automatically a pillar of wisdom.
I used to be disappointed when encountering elderly people that were petty and shortsighted and self involved. Eventually I realized that simply getting through the bulk of your life is not necessarily associated with learning and growth.
Then, I saw that reaching old age without wisdom and equanimity produces a suffering and ugly person whose last years will do nothing but spread misery all around.
It’s an under appreciated reason to always try to better oneself: to avoid the carnage that will result in old age, should one fail to do so.
I think a lot of that comes down to taking care of one’s own health, the whole life long. Maybe a bit zany comparison, but: That 60’s old timer car that’s still in good shape and can drive - it’s seen a lot of care and likely no accidents (a result of being careful).
I prefer this Douglas Adams quote to the Boris Johnson one, but it has much the same thought behind it:
"One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was so — but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence, the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous."
As a 50-something I'd say the chance to spot patterns one has encountered before is the super-power and getting in a rut is the kryptonite.
Oh and my brain does like to spend time at 2am thinking about embarassing and humiliating mistakes I have made. Those accumulate, so there's something to dwell uncomfortably upon as one (at any age) looks to the future. I guess it gives one an incentive to make fewer...
Oh — yes. I’m familiar with that. I don’t think (if you actually read the original source of the quotes rather than just finding the language offensive, which it seems almost no one does) it quite warrants the term ‘racist’, though.
This will sound like I’m being needlessly perverse, but: no.
Intent is what matters. Quite clearly, the word you mention can be used in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons — not all of them racist.
Conversely, you can be the most awful racist without ever saying an offensive word. And there are plenty of those sorts of people too.
However, as for the specific example you mention: I know Americans tend to feel very strongly about that word and I understand that. But to most other English speakers, whilst it’s a horrible word, its mere usage isn’t itself always considered a terrible crime. In fact, it commonly occurs in literature studied in schools — and yes, the teachers and students will in that case have licence to use (or read aloud, if you like) the word.
I don't know if "perverse" is the word... maybe "avoidant". I can try to be more specific. Is it racist for a white person to use the n-word to refer to black people in casual conversation? As in, "I was walking to the shop and passed some n***s playing football."
If your question is whether mere use of language implies racism, I think I’ve answered that above.
If I heard the sentence you give, I would quickly assume the speaker might be racist. But it’s clearly not an assumption that is always valid, because I can equally imagine someone using the word (ill-advisedly, of course) as a joke.
It’s like saying ‘a person walking around with a knife in public must be a violent criminal’. Yes — the likelihood is that they are.
If you think the sentence you gave is racist (a priori), you should consider whatever definition of racism you want to use and work out how it applies to that case.
I get that what I’m saying is an unpopular view, but personally I think we shouldn’t give mere words such power. Their use in a situation that has separate indicators of prejudice is what we should really hope to avoid — going for the word itself is just naive.
> personally I think we shouldn’t give mere words such power
I sort of get where you're coming from. You don't want to live in a world where speech can be sanctioned and censored for its own sake,. But I wonder if taking this view to its logical conclusion risks neglecting the fact that words do have power in our society. The "n-word" is offensive because its historical usage was intimately tied to the oppression of black people. As a consequence, black people today feel unsafe and hated if someone from those oppressors' background uses it (perhaps outside of extremely sensitive circumstances).
The question then is whether it's right sanction speech based on it making those people feel unsafe and hated. And in the UK we do; we have hate speech laws. By contrast, the US is relatively laissez-faire in what it allows legally, but - perhaps as a consequence - there are very strong, polarising cultural norms on speech.
Going back to Boris Johnson's speech. In an article criticising Tony Blair's focus on foreign policy, he writes:
> What a relief it must be for Blair to get out of England. It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies; and one can imagine that Blair, twice victor abroad but enmired at home, is similarly seduced by foreign politeness.
> They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird. Like Zeus, back there in the Iliad, he has turned his shining eyes away, far over the lands of the Hippemolgoi, the drinkers of mares' milk. He has forgotten domestic affairs, and here, as it happens, in this modest little country that elected him, hell has broken loose.
The only defense Johnson provided here is that the quotes were "satirical" and "taken out of context". Reading them in context, I'm still perplexed as to why he employed derogatory slurs and invoke racist stereotypes. Perhaps he was saying that both the Queen and Tony Blair have a racist, paternalistic view of the commonwealth? I have definite doubts about this, as it's very unlike BoJo to take potshots at the Queen, and he himself apparently has a fondness for the colonial era (e.g. quoting a pro-imperialist Rudyard Kipling poem in a temple in Myanmar). Even if we grant him the satire defense, simply replacing "picaninnies" with "children" achieves the same effect without invoking crude stereotypes.
It would be tremendously helpful if young people were told that next to stories and fairytales, there is entropy, randomness and incompetence.
It took me a few years of life experience to understand that the latter three typically explain life better than the first two.
I suppose that for every individual there are things that they overtrained early on in life, for which it then takes a lot of time to unlearn them. In that respect, keeping an "open mind" can be helpful, but having it opened a bit too much makes one an annoying person as well.
I think you've actually touched on something more interesting than you might realise. Prior to around 2000 we didn't have the internet and there wasn't close to as much transparency in society about how the mechanics functioned.
We've seen a collapse in respectability of politicians, for example. Not because the politicians have changed even slightly, but because we have much better visibility into what they're actually like and how the political sausages are made. Pre-internet I'm not even sure how I'd be supposed to get my hands on things like the Hansard records. Billionaires are under similar pressure, look at the difference in image of Musk vs someone like Gates who was world's wealthiest before the internet got big.
I don't think the fairytales of entropy, randomness and incompetence exist. But I do think there is an excellent reason for that - up until around 2000 almost nobody knew how big a factor those things were. The discourse was gummed up by propaganda which was mainly myths of competence in the halls of power and it wasn't feasible to pick apart the mess because communication was hard.
2000 is also the year the Supreme Court decided the presidential election and by 2002 we were invading Iraq and Afghanistan. That I see as a big turning point.
for me, the turning point was 1981 when the US conservative lying machine really got traction. (the power people were mostly bridging late greatest generation to early boomers, the rest of us were ignorant fucks) then came the neoliberal brainwashing. the rest, as they say, is history
I wouldn't argue your turning point at all. Reagan and deregulation is what I believe touched the current greed mentality. I think that it does lead to the conclusion that it has been one distorted view and effort since at least Nixon...
I can’t rant about Reagan without pointing out he created homelessness as it exists today. One of his programs emptied out many of the institutions that housed people that couldn’t function.
Reagan (and Thatcher) also amplified that attitude that “freedom” means I should be able to do whatever the fuck I want, and to hell with society! An attitude you can even find in the comments here today. This “toxic individualism” has gotten worse over the decades, noticeably worse during COVID and has culminated in our current political climate where some people’s entire political outlook can be summarized with the middle finger.
> Prior to around 2000 we didn't have the internet and there wasn't close to as much transparency in society about how the mechanics functioned
[Citation needed]
Investigative journalism existed, stuff like "manufacturing consent" was published in the '80s, and I'm pretty sure you could always obtain records of parliament sessions, I know in Italy they were all broadcast on the radio (they still are).
Things are easier to access without intermediation but it's not such a qualitative change, IMO.
> I'm pretty sure you could always obtain records of parliament sessions, I know in Italy they were all broadcast on the radio (they still are).
Are you joking? The quality of that is nowhere near what we have today. I can't very well ring the radio station up to ask them to broadcast a speech I'm interested in from 3 months ago on my lunch break or stick to a specific candidate's record for an evening peruse. Even if they were willing to the scaling properties of that approach are unworkable.
> Investigative journalism existed
Assange dumped more information in a fortnight than an investigative journalist could cover in a decade. We're talking orders of magnitude improvements here.
If you're not seriously interested in politics I can see how nothing much has changed, but for anyone taking a deep interest the world is completely different now.
Gaining access to vast quantities of raw information while as the same time losing the addition of analysis by experts, verification of sources and empirical facts, and the context those can provide (rather than complementing them) is in most respects a large net negative to real knowledge in a society.
Over half of people get information from algorithmically driven and typically anonymous human-curated feeds of stories and opinions, and for a major portion of them, this has displaced journalism entirely -- with the notable exception of anyone claiming to blow the whistle which in itself has been perverting incentives.
Expecting people to read beyond the headlines has always been a tall order, but the practice is currently facing extinction while media quality is in a race to the bottom competing for the same attention.
One could for instance be dedicated to events and anecdotes by or about the dozens of people struck by lightning every month and present a credible-seeming case that lightning strikes are escalating and now an eminent danger to people at large. The reality of this has been happening across the board for even much rarer events in the last few years, in a way that some might say exploits confirmation bias.
Maybe it's a pendulum swing that will return, but at the moment the long term trend is towards a return to oral tradition and a pre-telegraph level of shared common knowledge of current events, recent history, and so on.
I think the difference is the speed at which we arrive at the societal consensus. Case in point, recent debate. The thing had real time memes and reactions ( including BPU one ) and immediate damage control on various fora ( and fascinating stuff on reddit where stuff is already prone to be an echo chamber ) and all of that coalescing into the meta-conversation we are having today mere days after a, I would argue, a big political event, whose waves are yet to wash ashore.
Manufacturing consent helps to understand the mechanics of how it works, but it did not really change; it just got quicker.
> We've seen a collapse in respectability of politicians, for example. Not because the politicians have changed even slightly, but because we have much better visibility into what they're actually like and how the political sausages are made.
Some of that, perhaps, though I suspect most people don't care too much — most people don't read beyond the headlines, from what I've heard.
I'm assuming you mean US politicians in particular? Because in the UK, Johnson and Truss were genuinely exceptional in how bad they were. (And I'm currently living in the half of Berlin which used to be DDR, which had a government so bad the country stopped existing independently).
For the USA, I remember mocking GWB when he was your president (I even got quoted on the radio for it); the political Overton window I grew up in doesn't, can't, include either of your main parties, but even so, Trump does seem evil compared to GWB's nice-but-dim Forrest Gump.
> look at the difference in image of Musk vs someone like Gates who was world's wealthiest before the internet got big.
Late 90s, I was a teen, friends were talking about how evil he was, sharing pictures with Gates' face pasted onto WW2 dictator's rallies, etc.
> Because in the UK, Johnson and Truss were genuinely exceptional in how bad they were.
How are you measuring that though? What about the politicians that managed to set the British Empire into terminal decline? In hindsight they must have been a bit below average. It isn't crazy to say that the least competent politicians turn up at the nadir of the UK's international importance, but logically speaking the people who mucked up at the peak were probably making worse decisions.
First, that most of that decline is relative power rather than absolute: the UK is no longer astride the world, but because so many others have gained power to kick my parents and grandparents' generations out of their countries, not (in all cases) because the UK became objectively weaker.
Second, that the politicians who caused the decline were doing a lot of smaller mistakes over a longer period.
Those other politicians probably were indeed as you say below average, but Johnson and Truss weren't just scraping the bottom of the barrel, they were the wood of the barrel itself and the floor underneath it.
I'm not sure if politics and media have changed all that much. Is it a possibility that your perspective has changed, now that you are wiser and see more than before?
I was using the internet in the early 1990s (I can still find stuff archived on the web dated 1991).
I was involved in party politics in the 1980s and I saw how the sausage was made. I can tell you it's not like you see on the web today: there a lot more information available today than there was 30 years ago and it's of orders of magnitude lower quality. Don't confuse more crap with better crap.
Prior to the waves of garbage fed the masses by the internet almost everyone knew how big a factor things were. Now, discourse is gummed up by propaganda which is mainly myths of inhuman incompetence or else extremely competent conspiracy and it's not feasible to pick apart the mess because communication is hard.
Too much information make communications as difficult as too little.
There should really be a course or a way to prepare you to deal with the incompetence. I was incredibly lucky not to have to deal with the incompetence at the workplace for the first 10 years of my career.
But at the current job, it's everywhere, and I don't know how to properly deal with it. I'm thinking of leaving, despite having an excellent compensation package.
Back when comp.lang.lisp was a thing, I once misread a post by Erik Naggum to state that incompetence should be punishable by law. I'd love to live in a world like that.
> What kind of tricks under their belts do people in their 50s, 60s, 70s have? What kinds of crazy heuristics and meta-heuristics they’ve got in their minds, hearts, and muscles after decades of poking the world?
One of the realization for me after a few decades was that people in their 50s~70s don't have crazy tricks nor incredibly secret wisdom.
Many are dumb, many others are clever, some came up to crazy conclusions from their experiences and others opened up a lot to the world and keep learning on to of all their knowledge.
More than anything, while we're optimizing our heuristics years over years, the world keeps changing and what we assumed to be invariants were just slowly moving phenomenons that also see sudden breakdowns from times to times.
The workplace with out old people is boring, when ever you are in an environment with only one age group you should be careful. The group think among people the same age is terrible, much worse than many ideologies. Be as scared of your own as the old people.
Na, been working with similar people a lot. You can get a lot done if you understand each other easily and it does not feel like your hands are tied behind your back. As long as the premise of your business is correct (this is something that you can decide for yourself), that's a nice place to be in.
People of different ages and background bring different perspectives. Yet for you, it seems you consider that tying your hands behind your back. Strange. I never had difficulty understanding each other with competent people regardless of age.
I don't need different perspectives if I execute a vision as efficiently and fast as possible. I need different perspectives if I want to calcify a business model (sometimes, of course, that's also worthwhile to do).
I don't see how that follows. I certainly didn't feel atomized or depressed when I was part of a highly functional team.
Maybe you mistook my comment for a statement on society at large? That was not my intention at all. My post is about small software engineering teams, not democracies.
All engineering intersects with the real world, and having multiple perspectives is crucial to making "good" strategic decisions. For example, those who executed quickly on their vision of social media and advertising lacked the alternate perspective that algorithmically strip mining human attention and relationships could, in fact, lead to a worse world.
Making companies, or individual contributors even, responsible for society's continued failing seems to distract from the real task: democratically ensuring that no profit can be made from worsening the world. Otherwise it's rational to do so, and somebody will.
Btw, my team's objective was to strengthen a specific law, beneficial for the general public. Which we did. Just to provide some perspective on your view, which seems to be that executing fast with limited impediment by diverging opinions necessarily causes bad outcomes for society. Sometimes those diverging opinions are themselves harmful, and need to be ignored.
When I was junior/mid level engineer working in a 5-8 person engineering team, there was this particular senior engineer whom I disdained. It had nothing to do with them as a person, but I always had the feeling that they just did things at work without caring for the impact of it.
The team and company grew in size over a period of 2 years and I went through a lot of first hand experiences of having to deal with unrealistic deadlines, chaotic lines of communication and multiple nights of tailing production logs to fix bugs. It was around this time, that the senior engineer during a company even got drunk and talked to me about their first few jobs.I realized that what they described, was quite similar to what I was facing right now and I came to understand why they cared so little about work they do on a daily basis.It honestly scared me at to think that I might either end up like this person or worse or burning out and quitting the field.
Right now, I am close to age the senior engineer was when I met them and even though I may selectively decide not to involve myself with things that can overstretch me, I am in no way the same as that other person.
The reason I am sharing this tangential story is to highlight my opinion about old age. It does not matter much if you have gained a lot of experience as you grow older, unless you are able to use it effectively.
To anyone in a similar situation; you might want to spend some time reflecting on the reality of your role - one of the failure modes of incompetence is using "care" as a proxy for "ability" because an incompetent person almost by definition can't assess ability directly. I fell for that once and consider myself lucky that I figured out what I was doing wrong while still a fresh-faced graduate.
The ideal engineer is not emotionally involved in their work. They aren't shareholders; they don't reap the benefits of what they do, they don't control the direction of the company. They are there to achieve specific technical goals with professionalism. Bringing emotion or non-technical factors in to the deal is an obstacle to excellence.
The ideal engineer is not emotionally involved in their work.
As much as some may profess to actually believe that it simply isn’t even close to true.
I am sure there are some unicorn exceptions (like the Spock character from Star Trek) but those who are excellent at their work also put a lot of time and effort into it, if not continuously then they’ve at least paid their dues for a span of decades. However they got there it represents a significant emotional investment involving pride and care or even a kind of love.
One can’t know everything all the time. There are ALWAYS going to be gaps in your own ability especially when you’re doing new and difficult work, and the way to bridge those gaps is to be driven by a desire to overcome them— in other words by CARING enough to keep trying.
The most successful people I can think of personally always care enough to overcome gaps in their ability. It looks like incompetence at first, then it becomes obsession, then it becomes problem solving, and it is ends with mastery, IF they CARE enough.
Maybe. But if someone is a junior employee they aren't going to be able to identify all the specific tells for that. I know a passionate engineer who's meeting presence can often be mistaken for someone that is half asleep. He doesn't have a lot of respect for meetings and doesn't engage much. Would a junior engineer in that meeting identify that his dozey lids, slack jaw and mastery of simple programming conceal a burning passion for the art of great software? I'd bet not. You need to be quite good at programming to properly assess what is going on.
I disagree that blindly executing like a robot is excellent. A truly excellent product happens when people go above and beyond, and think of the little yet related things, instead of doing everything literally and exactly as told and not giving a shit about the end result.
Sounds like he might have been acting on wisdom, and at the time you might have perceived him through a lense of naivete, which still holds. I felt similarly in my early twenties in perhaps a similar environment, but now I know all the seniors I'd have resented were decades ahead of me in terms of what they valued and why. Caring about that work was stupid, and I should have just enjoyed my time more.
Their decisions made the life of those around them miserable because they did not care about the consequences of it. Like for example, hiring an intern who had basic programming skills when there was no engineering bandwidth available to support the intern, and then bouncing them around multiple large projects every week, for the sake of showing upper management that they had people "working" on priority tickets. There is more to this story, but it's just more details painting that person in a bad light.
I, most certainly am not such a person.
> Caring about that work was stupid, and I should have just enjoyed my time more.
I agree. It's a work in progress for me to get to that state.
I think there's good points to be made about wisdom and decision making when you're older, but there is definitely still a sharp cognitive decline (which will include wisdom and decision making!) when you're hitting 75+, for most people.
Having these people in positions of power is not a good thing. As advisors sure, but not directly in power with high influence.
Being terrified of people who are smarter, wiser, more competent that you is not a healthy reaction. The world is not a hunger games (at least, not yet), so someone being better than you is not an immediate threat to you. However, the writer seems to be a self-centered and hyperambitious kind of person, in which case someone else's success can be seen as a diminishment of one's own accomplishments ("How am I going to climb to the very top if there are some many older people who are better than me?"). But that's obviously unhinged.
There's a good chance this guy will cringe hard once he rereads this post in 10-20 years.
Yes. Also, one of the pearls of wisdom gained with age is that young people will inevitably overestimate themselves. So all OP’s cleverness was at the time probably received with a mixture of annoyance and sympathetic chuckling. I know that’s how I feel when the next 25 year old tries to sell me some profound insight that’s been repackaged by consultants and gurus for 40 years. But it’s fine, enjoy your youth and make your discoveries. We all have to, it’s what makes life fun.
He is not literally terrified. Reading his post there is no actual terror there. He's impressed with them and how much they've learned, and appreciating the amount of change and growth that happens over a lifetime.
> Which makes me think: I have like 5 years of experience of real life. What kind of tricks under their belts do people in their 50s, 60s, 70s have? What kinds of crazy heuristics and meta-heuristics they’ve got in their minds, hearts, and muscles after decades of poking the world? I have no clue and this is what makes me really worried about them.
The jiu-jitsu of older people (not really counting 50s) is simply that they know what they can and can't achieve, because they've mostly done whatever they're going to do. Sure, some over-60s have great things before them; but that's unusual.
So on the whole, older folk aren't struggling to prove themselves; and they pretty much know who they are. Also, they've taken the knocks: they've faced physical injury, the pain of rejection, and often the kinds of illnesses that young people rarely get. They carry the scars and bruises.
Perhaps what scares the author isn't old people as such, but rather the experiences they've had that the author has yet to face.
He’s not talking from a place of fear. He’s in awe after having just realized the gap might be wider than he thought, and that looking at his past interactions with old people, where they’re usually intentionally hiding this gap, he fears how he can never know when he’s being foolish while thinking he’s the smartest person in the room.
I don’t know about Hunger Games, but older people’s interest in maintaining their socioeconomic position in society explains a ton of politics around the world, and the struggles young people find themselves in.
There are a greater and greater proportion of people that need to be able to get labor from a smaller and smaller proportion of younger people, which basically means a need to make rents go up either via taxes or investments. The investments portion is seen as devaluation of currency.
Although, that is not what the linked article is talking about.
Not to be a hater but what exactly is the point of posts like this
Nothing factual presented. Not a unique, stimulating, or even really coherent viewpoint. Just a self-confident stream of consciousness with no real takeaway.
> Again, the only way to get these connections is to literally just wait.
I have several 20+ years long close friendships, but it’s definitely not because I just waited. It’s a ton of time, sacrifice, and even more patience and empathy. People change, and sometimes it’s very difficult to handle to what they become. But at the end, these occasions definitely help you to understand people.
Unfortunately, this cost also a lot of money, because you need to travel a lot. After 15-20 years almost all of these kind of my friends live far away from each other. I had to cross even the Atlantic every 2-3 months because of this for a while.
One for sure, If you just wait, you’ll loose close friendships.
> figuring out if people I just met were (1) right for the role, (2) work well with me, (3) I work well with them.
I recommend figuring out if: (1) they are good at doing what they'll be responsible for, (2) they enjoy doing it, and (3) if you can live with each other.
(1) You want to know that they will succeed in whatever you delegate to them.
(2) Can they persist over the long term, seeing their tasks to completion and success?
(3) Especially with a lower headcount, it's similar to a second marriage, and you might end up spending time with them more than the professed love of your life. Can you overcome conflicts?
> If I’m starting a company today, I’m simply not doing it until I have an incredible operations person on board from day 1.
I'm coming round to the same opinion. A better-than-good ops person can have one of the largest influences on success. If we view success as parts preparedness, execution, and luck, they provided an outsized boost to all 3.
> I’ve always thought that I was very competent. Now I at least realize that I have no fucking clue how anything works. Which makes me think: I have like 5 years of experience of real life. What kind of tricks under their belts do people in their 50s, 60s, 70s have?
I wonder if there is a kind of overfitting that keeps the playing field level for young people. Like you read more books, have more experiences, etc, but in the end you’re less capable than the naive approach.
He mentions having more connections as you get old. I think of Bill Belichick’s final years with the Patriots, and how he never seemed to be able to hire the right guys, stuck on old friends and colleagues. You might overfit to “I once hired a left handed guy on a Tuesday to write the backend, maybe I should do that again…”
While I agree with most in article but I really fear for the US having the choice between 2 extremely old people to run their country.
I would take a 35 yo over an 80+ year old to run something any day.
Hi I‘m 55.
You are on the right path.
The day you‘re not embarrassed by what you did yesterday is the day you stopped progressing!
And don’t be terrified: A lot of „old“ (what that means changes) people are not wiser than you - they‘re still terrible incompetent, because they focused on „being happy“ instead in “getting wiser“. You did the right thing, and if you keep doing it, this feeling that you were stupid yesterday will stay - and this is fabulous!
“wanting to impress people is the result of not knowing what you want”
That’s quite reductive unless you’re overloading “impress” with “awe”.
Because making strong impressions and influencing specific action is the whole point of sales, whether it be convincing your parents about something meaningful as a child. An employer the value you’ll bring. A bank or VC a safe or fantastic long term ROI.
Get some older friends, they are fun, they have a lot of info, they are generally less scared of consequences so they let you do stupid stuff, they give you room to grow and get wiser, they generally have more money and cause better opportunities.
As young person I always were around the generation of my parents and I never regret it, it provided me with the baggage to get through life without too much problems.
When middle aged make younger friends to keep you young and to be able to pass on the culture to young people that want to be around older ones.
I concur. I recently dug up my old diary from my late teens and while it was fascinating it was also kinda horrifying. The things I cared about were, well, kinda dumb. My thought process was sloppy at best. I can see the kernel of person I am, but it is still a very weird experience.
The next generation being born now will see the current "young people" as "old" in twenty years. What people in their 20s today who are terrified of "old people" will grasp quickly is that nobody is immortal and every older person generally feels embarrassed and stupid about things they did/thought in their younger years. Some will even have blogs to look back on to enhance their cringeworthy utility.
When you’ll be 50, do you think you’ll like the 20-year-you who made the major decisions for your life, or do you think you would have preferred the 50-year-you to make those decisions?
This is an argument for traditionalists. Listen to your 50-year-you, aka your parents, your community seniors, etc.
But reversely, if we tilted more towards listening to the elder-you, would there be enough renewal in society? Enough happiness at 20 years old?
50-year-you has lots of experience in the domain of 'you' and knows the future (via your lens) from when you were 20. 50-year-olds when you're 20 will lack those things.
Also, everyone has holes in their knowledge/perspective. Could be the older people in your orbit when younger have thoughts that are too limiting compared to where you end up when making decisions as a 20-year-old.
Well, IMVHO the issue is not a matter of age (38 myself) but about education: ruling classes formed schools to produce the kind of Citizens they want, witch was the goal when reforms was set, but things change and most people are formed to be unable to adapt because if you are in power you want to hold your position so the ideal society you try to achieve is one frozen with you in power. As a results every ruling class demand conformism and conformism demand "stability" and stability means in general being unable to change.
Long story short most of the people are born in a model, have absorbed that and are unable to move. When the time passes we need to change and the "old" generations are simply from another time, unable to be citizens of the present.
The current state of thing is a previous generation born on high growth after a world war, in a high competitive society, a society with strong emotions but also oppression, younger generations are born in a degrading society with much less vivid emotions but much more cooperation, so it's normal to have inter-generational issues where the old generation fear to loose a competition because they ware grown as running horses, if you stop you are dead, while the younger one do not understand why they are so harsh and focused. Back then to keep people subjugated in a fast growing world the rule was "always do the same, trust the system" (at least in most EU) while today the rule is "always doubt and reason on anything, be ready to change" because we are in a degrading society who need to change to reborn.
Unfortunately while most people are kind and honest, most are also mentally unable to evolve and that's why we derail, the world change, the population strive to avoid the change instead of do their best to direct it.
I sometimes have the following thought (disclaimer: cringe is not the most adequate word for the concept in my mind, but since you've already used it, I guess it's okay): If I look back at my 10-year-younger-self and cringe (at the things I did/said/created/liked/hated/etc. and I obviously do cringe), does that mean that I am being cringe right now? Or at least, how can I have some level of confidence that I'm not being cringe right now and that in 10 years I'm not going to reject everything and anything I'm saying today? And if I was cringe 10 years ago, and if I'm cringe right now, will I be also be cringe in 10 years too? What about 20? 30? Will it ever stop? Will I ever reach a point in which I will not cringe?
Another one is like this: There are people who I respect/admire for the things they did, and now they are doing something obviously completely stupid. Were those things they did just random results I got to see, compared to a bunch of other stuff they probably did I did not get to see, thus creating this sort of false image of their intellect (or character, or something like that), or are they actually right in believing in this new thing, and I'm just being oblivious? How come some really smart people do some really dumb stuff (while believing they are doing the right thing)? I believe I'm somewhat smart, but what does that even mean if it doesn't prevent me from doing some really, really dumb stuff.
At some point, my friend told me something like (or at least this is how I understood it) - it is good that you realize that good/smart people do bad/stupid things, and vice versa; the fact that you start from this belief that you might be wrong gives you a greater chance of being less wrong, at least in the long run.
I don't think it is intentional, but the consequences are certainly quantifiable. Everyone thinks the asymmetry of power structures is unfair... right up until perspectives shift when they take on the same roles...
Reading this makes me think his pendulum has swung to the other extreme.
Experience has decreasing marginal returns. Being 40 doesn't make you 4 times as experienced as an adult as a 25 year old. Being 80 doesn't make you 8 times as experienced.
Being a 25 year old you actually have learned a lot about being an adult, and you shouldn't think that time on its own will increase that. It's more the variety of experience that teaches things than time itself, especially if you repeat things for a long time.
> and by the time you’re 50 or 60 or 70 you do know what you want.
I'm on the plus side of 50 and, from personal experience as well as observing my contemporaries, this is relatively rarely true.
Its quite possible to waste^Wuse years chasing stuff that you only thought you wanted. Its also quite possible to spend years being busy with work or child raising or whatever - and then you find yourself washed ashore on the metaphorical beach of your later life and you have to figure out how to make a shelter and survive there. And this still may not beat any insight into your head.
That old cliche: an old person is just a young person looking at them self and going "huh? what the...?"
> I also suspect that the declining intelligence measurements of old people are mostly attributable to slower-lookup and “shallow” reactions rather than any actual decline in quality of decision-making.
My limited experience and insight from introspection is that you lose raw cognitive power but gain experience. I feel like the latter is more useful for the challenges of middle and later life, but you have to be increasingly mindful of confirmation bias. The challenge is distilling your experiences into wisdom, somehow.
Life is so rich, as Scott Galloway says, but I know next to nothing
Obviously theres a context to this article in Biden's recent debate performance. As a non-USian observing it all, I understand the concern. But I wish people would remember that a national leader is just the head of of a decision-making team. They don't decide everything themselves, they lead the team and set the direction. And they almost never ever have to make decisions alone at the tempo of an adversarial debate. Its possible to imagine scenarios where Biden would have 30 seconds to make a nationally existential decision, but such things only happen in films, not real life.
Wisdom not raw power.
But his opponent is an extremely dangerous individual, so I get the concern.
I am terrified of young people fresh out of our public school system who are entitled, raised by the state and aren’t half as productive as the ‘old people’.
In Germany, there is a proposal that suggests individuals nearing retirement should work in a social service job for a year, similar to the requirement for young people who wish to avoid military conscription. This idea could potentially bridge the generational gap by reacquainting older individuals with the current societal challenges. However, it appears that the older generations, who previously favored reinstating the draft, are now hesitant to support this notion.
It's important to note that this proposal is currently hypothetical and would only be considered if mandatory military service were to be reintroduced