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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| Post subject: Young people are the dumbest demograhic |  |
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"Young people are the dumbest demographic"
I saw that quote earlier today and, after a bit of thought, I can live with it and that's not specifically related to the current generation (although you could build a convincing case) but overall.
Think about it. At pretty much each stage of life, you can look back at your younger self and recognise how dumb you were when you were younger, despite thinking at the time that you knew it all.
At 16, you thought you knew it all and your parents were idiots. Then you grew up.
in your mid 20's, you realise what a dick you were at 16, can see more of your parents perspective but still think you know more. The you grew up.
In your 30's it's a more subtle jump but you know think your parents may have been onto something after all. You think your 20's self was a dick and can't even recognise your 16 year old self as being you. Then you grew up.
In your 40's, you're becoming your parents and think the younger generation are lazy, self absorbed, self opinionated, ignorant tools.
And so on.
Maybe we should raise the voting age to 30?
The verdict is in, the young are the dumbest demographic.
Discuss.
_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Skids 
Quitting drinking will be one of the best choices you make in your life.
Joined: 11 Sep 2007
Location: Joined 3/6/02 . Member #175
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You gain life experience but, grow up?
Not me, I still carry on like I did in my early 20's. The young blokes I work with have no idea what to make of me.
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Don't count the days, make the days count. |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| Thanks for the information. |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| Skids wrote: | You gain life experience but, grow up?
Not me, I still carry on like I did in my early 20's. The young blokes I work with have no idea what to make of me. |
hah, I can relate.
But, do you reckon you're smarter now than you were in your 20's?
_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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This may disprove or confirm your hypothesis, depending on your perspective...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37920950/who-voted-for-trump-not-young-people-say-exit-polls
Age tends to (but not always) bring experience, maturity and perspective, so the average 40-year-old might well be a little smarter than the average 25-year-old; but intelligence is such a broadly distributed thing that the average 21-year-old is probably already well within the main section of the bell curve. So while it might make some sense to raise the voting age from 18 to 20, it makes no sense at all to raise the voting age to 30 as by that stage you'd be excluding a great many intellectually capable people.
Of course, there are many different kinds of intelligence and not all kinds are necessarily measurable but it's interesting to note that one trait, fluid intelligence, actually declines after one's early 20s (while crystallised intelligence seems to slightly increase or stay stable):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intelligence
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All watched over by machines of loving grace
Last edited by David on Tue Nov 22, 2016 7:40 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| stui magpie wrote: | [quote="Skids"]You gain life experience but, grow up?
Not me, I still carry on like I did in my early 20's. The young blokes I work with have no idea what to make of me.[/quote]
hah, I can relate.
But, do you reckon you're smarter now than you were in your 20's? |
Where are you located? |
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Morrigu 
Joined: 11 Aug 2001
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Now David have you not learnt anything by the "polls" recent spectacular failures 
_________________
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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| stui magpie wrote: | | Skids wrote: | You gain life experience but, grow up?
Not me, I still carry on like I did in my early 20's. The young blokes I work with have no idea what to make of me. |
hah, I can relate.
But, do you reckon you're smarter now than you were in your 20's? |
Hmm. Define smart!
When it comes to IT stuff and phones the kids run rings around me, and I'm not bad at it! (I'll post the link to the club website I've been working on when it's live!). Yeah I know more about some stuff, but I've forgotten a lot of stuff too, (the only thing I remember from studying Indonesia for a year is how to pronounce the teachers name, which had about 100 letters in it, and that's only because someone asked if we could shorten it and she said 'I had to learn it, so can you!')
I'm certainly wiser and not such a soft touch when it comes to how people treat me now. I still get shocked that not everyone is as friendly and forgiving as me, but I think it's good to expect the best from people, rather than the worst.
Brain smart, hmmm. Well I skipped a year, but struggled socially with the older kids. Junior struggled early, but I kept helping her til I figured out the problem, and she actually got better scores than her naturally smart sister. For me it's always been about effort, and it still holds true, in everything in life.
And I reckon that's half the problem today. I saw a good post yesterday, "I was lucky, I grew up before the electronic age'. And I agree. Also 'hey kid, don't laugh because I don't know what yolo means, I passed school with no help from google"!
Common sense smart is what they are missing. Which way to turn a nut. I remember the eldest ex boyfriend asked hubby which way you undo a nut when he was on a job with us. 18 years old, scary! But he's really high up in IT at just 22, so I guess he pays someone to do it!
Interesting question. I don't like to judge it to be honest, because it's different times. My kids are smarter in some ways, and I'm smarter in others. At the same age? Well I didn't have a doting mum helping me out too much like my kids do, I had to do stuff for myself. In our day if you wanted a trail bike or even a push bike, you had to learn to service/ fix it, and my dad did give me that. I do show the girls though, how to check the oil, change a tyre. If we don't show them how do they learn it? No tech classes at school now. A big loss IMO.
I don't think anything can take the place of life experiences. You can't teach it, you can't buy it. Like shaking paint cans I guess!
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either!
Last edited by think positive on Wed Nov 23, 2016 7:30 am; edited 1 time in total |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| David wrote: | This may disprove or confirm your hypothesis, depending on your perspective...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37920950/who-voted-for-trump-not-young-people-say-exit-polls
Age tends to (but not always) bring experience, maturity and perspective, so the average 40-year-old might well be a little smarter than the average 25-year-old; but intelligence is such a broadly distributed thing that the average 21-year-old is probably already well within the main section of the bell curve. So while it might make some sense to raise the voting age from 18 to 20, it makes no sense at all to raise the voting age to 30 as by that stage you'd be excluding a great many intellectually capable people.
Of course, there are many different kinds of intelligence and not all kinds are necessarily measurable but it's interesting to note that one trait, fluid intelligence, actually declines after one's early 20s (while crystallised intelligence seems to slightly increase or stay stable):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intelligence |
The crack about raising the voting age was just burley in the water. 
But if you could go back and have a conversation with your 16 year old self, how would that go?
You reckon your 36 year old self will agree with where you are now?
_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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This reminds me of the famous quote : "when I was 18 I thought my father was an idiot. but by the time I was 30 I thought my father had grown up a lot...." Whoever made that up deserves a statue.
The real worry about this generation (sample size my own three children plus a lot of graduates in the workplace) is that they have grown up so addicted to screens and the hyperworld that they seem to have difficulty focusing and concentrating, flitting from subject to subject in minutes. I think it is quite possible that their brain function and pathways have been moulded by years of exposure to cyberspace. I doubt it is a good thing.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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In response to david's comments about intelligence, being intelligent doesn't mean you aren't dumb in many other ways. A 16 year old could have an IQ of 150 plus and be as dumb as a doorknob.
I have a few extremely intelligent relatives who I consider stupid as hell because they have zero perspective, they can't do (what I consider) basic problem solving and I also have to deal with the same on a daily basis.
The quote was actually in relation to the US election and how Trump lost the youth vote. Time will tell on that, but if there's anyone out there over 35 who reckons they were smarter in their 20's than they are now, I'd love to hear why.
_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| Mugwump wrote: | This reminds me of the famous quote : "when I was 18 I thought my father was an idiot. but by the time I was 30 I thought my father had grown up a lot...." Whoever made that up deserves a statue.
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My son is 26 and the father of a nearly 10 month old. He could seriously relate to that and has said as much.
_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Skids
Quitting drinking will be one of the best choices you make in your life.
Joined: 11 Sep 2007
Location: Joined 3/6/02 . Member #175
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I guess things change.... i never would of even thought of crime scene sex when i was 20 
_________________
Don't count the days, make the days count. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| stui magpie wrote: | The crack about raising the voting age was just burley in the water.
But if you could go back and have a conversation with your 16 year old self, how would that go?
You reckon your 36 year old self will agree with where you are now? |
We don't even have to imagine what this would be like; you can actually use the Nick's search function to go back to when I was 16 (October 2004 to October 2005) and see how I wrote and reasoned at that age compared to now. Indeed, if you were to take a sample of posts that I've written over my time on this forum, I think it's fair to say there was a pretty steep climb in my ability to express ideas until about the age of 20 or 21, followed by a more gradual increase since then. To be honest, I read some stuff I wrote around then and wonder if I've actually become less intelligent (and no, this isn't an invitation for another free character assessment, Stui... ).
The truth is that I've probably gained in some areas and lost in others. In particular, the stress and distraction of becoming a parent feels like it has taken a few notches off my mental capabilities, while the experience has aided me in other ways I'm a much better multi-tasker now than I ever was before.
Will I have changed significantly again at 36? One would certainly hope so! But I expect that change will be much more gradual, and probably less an upwards trajectory than a sideways one which is to say, I don't expect my IQ will have skyrocketed or necessarily even improved at all, but I do expect that my views on various subjects and attitude about life will have altered. Which is as it should be: if the prospect of personality change is scary, intellectual stagnation should be infinitely more terrifying.
Does that mean that I'll look back at myself at 28 and think, "Jesus, what an idiot?" Perhaps; after all, that's something that most people feel at some point about their younger selves. But I wouldn't necessarily take the existence of that sentiment as evidence of its own truth: I can look back at myself as a 16-year-old and cringe, but it's easy to forget what it was actually like to be that age, with all the stuff buzzing around one's head and the genuinely open-minded intellectual curiosity that only a teenager can feel. The common presumption as to why we so often feel smarter than we used to be is that we're actually getting smarter; an alternative explanation might be that we're constantly falling for the old mistake of overlooking our own current failings at the expense of overestimating those of other people (in this case, the person we were in the past). To borrow a Biblical analogy, perhaps we always carry a plank in our eye but only tend to notice it in hindsight.
I think it's likely that this attitude of looking back at one's younger self with a superior sense of being "so much smarter now" is really just a bit of a conceit; just as arrogant and near-sighted as dismissing another person's intelligence without having access to the full picture. Distance tends to caricature people, and time is just another form of distance. We're told that we ought to have empathy for others; perhaps we also need to be better at having empathy for who we used to be.
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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watt price tully 
Joined: 15 May 2007
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| Mugwump wrote: | This reminds me of the famous quote : "when I was 18 I thought my father was an idiot. but by the time I was 30 I thought my father had grown up a lot...." Whoever made that up deserves a statue.
.... |
I was about to quote Mark Twain but you sort of got there before me:
"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years".
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“I even went as far as becoming a Southern Baptist until I realised they didn’t keep ‘em under long enough” Kinky Friedman |
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