7 ms·

All the strong political opinions I had as a twenty year old came from books. Now, as a 37 year old, most of it comes from personal experience. Needless to say,

by hliyan 10y ago

All the strong political opinions I had as a twenty year old came from books. Now, as a 37 year old, most of it comes from personal experience. Needless to say, the two sets of opinions are very, very different. I wouldn't know about imposing an age on voting, but people should vote their own opinions, not ones borrowed from books. The youngest version of myself that I would now trust with any sort of policy making is my 32 year old self...

SerLava 10y ago
I would like to argue that voting rights are more about accountability than policy. Who cares who the "best" leader is - free society requires leaders who owe it to citizens.
- EGreg 10y ago
  And I would argue that voting for representatives is far inferior to polling. It's susceptible to gerrymandering, poor turnout and much more. But if you're going to vote for representatives and Presidents, at least use the Approval vote. The system used in every state except Maine suffers from spoiler effects, and devolves into a self perpetuating two party system that polarizes the population into two camps that hate each other for things that no one person can really change by voting, and deride third parties as a "waste of a vote". Sound familiar? That's why I don't want to participate in this voting system.
  - chongli 10y ago
    Polling is far more opaque and highly susceptible to corruption. Any pollster worth his or her salt can get exactly the outcome desired by tweaking the protocol and consumers of the poll results are none the wiser. I'd almost go so far as to say that polls are garbage and shouldn't even exist, let alone replace voting, but that may be going too far.
    - EGreg 10y ago
      If polls are garbage then voting is even more garbage. At least polling can use statistical sampling to esimate the true result. For the expense of elections and polling and paying for all the campaigns and media and hoopla you could have incredible amount of polling, from many organizations, and figure out what people actualy want. As it is, no matter how many people want eg certain gun control regulations, or not to go to war with a country, it will never happen due to special interests. It is far harder to fool all the people all the time than to buy off and control some of the people all the time.
- stephen_g 10y ago
  I think this is spot on. I think this is the best explanation of why more democratic systems tend to work so much better for governing large groups than other systems. It's not that large groups make good decisions, it's that the more accountable politicians are, the better they tend to govern. This is why I think direct democracy isn't a good idea. I suspect it would be far better to work on reducing corruption and increasing accountability of our representatives than to have people vote on policy directly.
  - SapphireSun 10y ago
    If you guys are interested in the underlying mechanisms of democracy, this book was pretty good: https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Despite-Itself-System-Shouldnt/dp/0262017237 https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Despite-Itself-System-Shoul... It goes into detail on aspects of crowd wisdom, accountability, and a feeling of loyalty from the elected to the electorate.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  Democracy is the form of government that is free of bloody revolutions. I'm not even sure it has any other qualities. But this one is already enough to make it better than anything else we have around. Democracy will lead to accountability only to the extent that your "collective mind" consider it worth fighting for. If it doesn't you'll get no accountability at all.
siscia 10y ago
For the youngest in the conversion such as myself, would you mind make an example? Which of your opinion changed so radically?
- rubber_duck 10y ago
  Not OP but similar experience. Socialism and associated social justice criteria vs capitalism and profit criteria. My first job was at a company with socialist background and the same management criteria lingering on (company was privatized by workers who were majority owners after the communist system). It's just like politics on a smaller scale - you see people abuse the system all over the place and the social criteria discourages actual productivity - it's very off putting if you actually want to achieve something and eventually it spiraled down to shit and got sold off. These days I think as much as money incentives can be perverted at least they have a scenario in which they work (measuring value as close to objective as you can get) - the alternative (determining value trough politics) is much worse.
- hliyan 10y ago
  I made the mistake of reading Ayn Rand as a teenager, and ended up being pro-capitalist, (and in American terms, conservative) for a decade. I've since become a lot more liberal and socialist.
adrianoconnor 10y ago
I feel the same. And I often wonder if the 60 year old versions of ourselves will feel much the same about the crazy, misguided 37 year old fools they remember once being.
chimprich 10y ago
I am also 37. My political opinions as a twenty year old weren't wildly different. I have become more pragmatic as I've realised just how hard it is to get anything complex done and how many cognitive biases people have but I'm also worried that I might be losing something in not feeling that idealism. I distrust people voting according to their opinions rather than "ones borrowed from books". In many cases younger voters vote "better" (at least according to my views). The Brexit vote, or US presidential election, for example, where older voters appeared to win the vote whilst trusting to their emotional experiences rather than the evidence. They certainly seemed less well informed for the most part.
- klodolph 10y ago
  There's plenty of garbage to be learned either from books or from personal experience. I'm not trying to be flippant. As you pointed out, we all have our biases. If I were raised racist, I'd try to confirm those biases in my personal experiences. Or perhaps some kind of personal experience would shatter my biases. I could be on the lookout for things I hear on talk radio, or I could make unexpected friends. Equally, I could get my sense of morals from reading Ayn Rand, Nietzsche, St. Augustine, or the Dhammapada. I've known people who have learned atrocious or wonderful things from books, and I've known people who have invented fantastic or horrifying personal philosophies. I don't think I've uncovered any kind of pattern as to why some people think one way and others another. The funny thing here is that in this discussion, we're using our personal experiences (anecdotes and armchair speculation) to try and analyze it. My personal contribution is that older people have more property, and that whatever material they use for their political views (be it books or experiences) will mostly be used to support their own goals for enjoying that property. The young folks want to get property, so they vote for that instead. That doesn't explain much, but it does partly explain why younger citizens tend to be more liberal.
  - tormeh 10y ago
    Yes, and young people have little property and therefore don't have that much to lose from change. Old people are conservative because they have property - the less change the better.
Lewton 10y ago
"most of it comes from personal experience." Sample size = 1? Almost sounds like younger you was better off Personal experience is a pretty terrible way to form political opinions, it leads to stuff like overestimating the rate of crime, the cost of terror etc.
- Klockan 10y ago
  > Personal experience is a pretty terrible way to form political opinions, it leads to stuff like overestimating the rate of crime, the cost of terror etc. Isn't it the other way around? Few have significant personal experiences with crime or terrorism so it is only when they read about it that they start thinking that it is a big issues.
  - Lewton 10y ago
    I'd classify reading something in a newspaper under "personal experience", the news are mostly written in a way to invoke emotional responses. In contrast to, say, looking at the actual data and crunch the numbers yourself to try and get an educated view This is obviously not very practical but at least then you could hold your opinions with good conscience
- Fnoord 10y ago
  > Personal experience is a pretty terrible way to form political opinions ..and the very belief that personal experience is worth more than theory and data. In normal human beings personal experience is related to the amygdala which is related to emotions. We study a great deal in our youth. Sure, we don't all go to uni or college. Do we stop learning after that? Not completely, but we peak at age 35. After that we still get more experienced. Smarter? Generally, not so much. The senior adults and elder are voting based on their experience, and this clouds their judgement. While it is partly by choice (look at how intelligent Noam Chomsky for example still is), it is also inevitable. What we see now is what I suspect the onset of the babyboom generation. Once they've passed away we will see more balance between the two camps.
- hliyan 10y ago
  Perhaps a single verified data point is better than a series of hypotheses? Because most, but not all books about politics, are based on hypotheses and not accurate data. Also, if everyone voted personal opinion, shouldn't the voting process average everything out, rather than the kind of wild media-driven opinion surges/swings we observe today? (Not being rhetorical, I'm actually asking if that's a possibility)
rikkus 10y ago
And your twenty year old self may not trust your opinions as a 37 year old. Is either 'right'? Does having more experience make you better at making decisions or does it make you more conservative, meaning you are less likely to take risks, so you miss out on opportunities for change?
ddebernardy 10y ago
Mm... I once came across an interesting definition of intellectual maturity: > It is the when you no longer take your dreams for reality, and instead take reality for your dreams. Perhaps you crossed that line a few years ago?
notheguyouthink 10y ago
> The youngest version of myself that I would now trust with any sort of policy making is my 32 year old self... This is an interesting subject matter though: We change as time goes on, but is that change correct? Eg, i don't think my current self and my experiences have somehow made me inherently more correct than my younger self. I'm vastly different, but it seems likely that we are so quick to judge our younger selves because we're always in a state of feeling right. Whether we're 20, 30, or 60 - we're always feeling we are right, and our old selves are wrong. While that seems logical, doesn't that also mean we're frequently/often/always wrong in the eyes of a future self? How can we be so sure to be so much better than our 20yr-self at 30, when at 40 we'll be saying the same thing about our 30yr-self. There is no empirical right or wrong for most things like politics though, which only go to confuse the matter.. but it's interesting nonetheless, imo. (My current self is 32 btw, and my 20 self could use some advice)
whack 10y ago
"All the strong political opinions I had as a twenty year old came from books. Now, as a 37 year old, most of it comes from personal experience" This could just as easily be spun as a negative. I.e. Anecdotal evidence & self-interest driven opinions vs dispassionate analysis based on systematically obtained data.

by hliyan 10y ago

SerLava 10y ago

I would like to argue that voting rights are more about accountability than policy. Who cares who the "best" leader is - free society requires leaders who owe it to citizens.

EGreg 10y ago
And I would argue that voting for representatives is far inferior to polling. It's susceptible to gerrymandering, poor turnout and much more. But if you're going to vote for representatives and Presidents, at least use the Approval vote. The system used in every state except Maine suffers from spoiler effects, and devolves into a self perpetuating two party system that polarizes the population into two camps that hate each other for things that no one person can really change by voting, and deride third parties as a "waste of a vote". Sound familiar? That's why I don't want to participate in this voting system.
- chongli 10y ago
  Polling is far more opaque and highly susceptible to corruption. Any pollster worth his or her salt can get exactly the outcome desired by tweaking the protocol and consumers of the poll results are none the wiser. I'd almost go so far as to say that polls are garbage and shouldn't even exist, let alone replace voting, but that may be going too far.
  - EGreg 10y ago
    If polls are garbage then voting is even more garbage. At least polling can use statistical sampling to esimate the true result. For the expense of elections and polling and paying for all the campaigns and media and hoopla you could have incredible amount of polling, from many organizations, and figure out what people actualy want. As it is, no matter how many people want eg certain gun control regulations, or not to go to war with a country, it will never happen due to special interests. It is far harder to fool all the people all the time than to buy off and control some of the people all the time.
stephen_g 10y ago
I think this is spot on. I think this is the best explanation of why more democratic systems tend to work so much better for governing large groups than other systems. It's not that large groups make good decisions, it's that the more accountable politicians are, the better they tend to govern. This is why I think direct democracy isn't a good idea. I suspect it would be far better to work on reducing corruption and increasing accountability of our representatives than to have people vote on policy directly.
- SapphireSun 10y ago
  If you guys are interested in the underlying mechanisms of democracy, this book was pretty good: https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Despite-Itself-System-Shouldnt/dp/0262017237 https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Despite-Itself-System-Shoul... It goes into detail on aspects of crowd wisdom, accountability, and a feeling of loyalty from the elected to the electorate.
marcosdumay 10y ago
Democracy is the form of government that is free of bloody revolutions. I'm not even sure it has any other qualities. But this one is already enough to make it better than anything else we have around. Democracy will lead to accountability only to the extent that your "collective mind" consider it worth fighting for. If it doesn't you'll get no accountability at all.

siscia 10y ago

For the youngest in the conversion such as myself, would you mind make an example? Which of your opinion changed so radically?

rubber_duck 10y ago
Not OP but similar experience. Socialism and associated social justice criteria vs capitalism and profit criteria. My first job was at a company with socialist background and the same management criteria lingering on (company was privatized by workers who were majority owners after the communist system). It's just like politics on a smaller scale - you see people abuse the system all over the place and the social criteria discourages actual productivity - it's very off putting if you actually want to achieve something and eventually it spiraled down to shit and got sold off. These days I think as much as money incentives can be perverted at least they have a scenario in which they work (measuring value as close to objective as you can get) - the alternative (determining value trough politics) is much worse.
hliyan 10y ago
I made the mistake of reading Ayn Rand as a teenager, and ended up being pro-capitalist, (and in American terms, conservative) for a decade. I've since become a lot more liberal and socialist.

adrianoconnor 10y ago

I feel the same. And I often wonder if the 60 year old versions of ourselves will feel much the same about the crazy, misguided 37 year old fools they remember once being.

chimprich 10y ago

I am also 37. My political opinions as a twenty year old weren't wildly different. I have become more pragmatic as I've realised just how hard it is to get anything complex done and how many cognitive biases people have but I'm also worried that I might be losing something in not feeling that idealism. I distrust people voting according to their opinions rather than "ones borrowed from books". In many cases younger voters vote "better" (at least according to my views). The Brexit vote, or US presidential election, for example, where older voters appeared to win the vote whilst trusting to their emotional experiences rather than the evidence. They certainly seemed less well informed for the most part.

klodolph 10y ago
There's plenty of garbage to be learned either from books or from personal experience. I'm not trying to be flippant. As you pointed out, we all have our biases. If I were raised racist, I'd try to confirm those biases in my personal experiences. Or perhaps some kind of personal experience would shatter my biases. I could be on the lookout for things I hear on talk radio, or I could make unexpected friends. Equally, I could get my sense of morals from reading Ayn Rand, Nietzsche, St. Augustine, or the Dhammapada. I've known people who have learned atrocious or wonderful things from books, and I've known people who have invented fantastic or horrifying personal philosophies. I don't think I've uncovered any kind of pattern as to why some people think one way and others another. The funny thing here is that in this discussion, we're using our personal experiences (anecdotes and armchair speculation) to try and analyze it. My personal contribution is that older people have more property, and that whatever material they use for their political views (be it books or experiences) will mostly be used to support their own goals for enjoying that property. The young folks want to get property, so they vote for that instead. That doesn't explain much, but it does partly explain why younger citizens tend to be more liberal.
- tormeh 10y ago
  Yes, and young people have little property and therefore don't have that much to lose from change. Old people are conservative because they have property - the less change the better.

Lewton 10y ago

"most of it comes from personal experience." Sample size = 1? Almost sounds like younger you was better off Personal experience is a pretty terrible way to form political opinions, it leads to stuff like overestimating the rate of crime, the cost of terror etc.

Klockan 10y ago
> Personal experience is a pretty terrible way to form political opinions, it leads to stuff like overestimating the rate of crime, the cost of terror etc. Isn't it the other way around? Few have significant personal experiences with crime or terrorism so it is only when they read about it that they start thinking that it is a big issues.
- Lewton 10y ago
  I'd classify reading something in a newspaper under "personal experience", the news are mostly written in a way to invoke emotional responses. In contrast to, say, looking at the actual data and crunch the numbers yourself to try and get an educated view This is obviously not very practical but at least then you could hold your opinions with good conscience
Fnoord 10y ago
> Personal experience is a pretty terrible way to form political opinions ..and the very belief that personal experience is worth more than theory and data. In normal human beings personal experience is related to the amygdala which is related to emotions. We study a great deal in our youth. Sure, we don't all go to uni or college. Do we stop learning after that? Not completely, but we peak at age 35. After that we still get more experienced. Smarter? Generally, not so much. The senior adults and elder are voting based on their experience, and this clouds their judgement. While it is partly by choice (look at how intelligent Noam Chomsky for example still is), it is also inevitable. What we see now is what I suspect the onset of the babyboom generation. Once they've passed away we will see more balance between the two camps.
hliyan 10y ago
Perhaps a single verified data point is better than a series of hypotheses? Because most, but not all books about politics, are based on hypotheses and not accurate data. Also, if everyone voted personal opinion, shouldn't the voting process average everything out, rather than the kind of wild media-driven opinion surges/swings we observe today? (Not being rhetorical, I'm actually asking if that's a possibility)

rikkus 10y ago

And your twenty year old self may not trust your opinions as a 37 year old. Is either 'right'? Does having more experience make you better at making decisions or does it make you more conservative, meaning you are less likely to take risks, so you miss out on opportunities for change?

ddebernardy 10y ago

Mm... I once came across an interesting definition of intellectual maturity: > It is the when you no longer take your dreams for reality, and instead take reality for your dreams. Perhaps you crossed that line a few years ago?

notheguyouthink 10y ago

> The youngest version of myself that I would now trust with any sort of policy making is my 32 year old self... This is an interesting subject matter though: We change as time goes on, but is that change correct? Eg, i don't think my current self and my experiences have somehow made me inherently more correct than my younger self. I'm vastly different, but it seems likely that we are so quick to judge our younger selves because we're always in a state of feeling right. Whether we're 20, 30, or 60 - we're always feeling we are right, and our old selves are wrong. While that seems logical, doesn't that also mean we're frequently/often/always wrong in the eyes of a future self? How can we be so sure to be so much better than our 20yr-self at 30, when at 40 we'll be saying the same thing about our 30yr-self. There is no empirical right or wrong for most things like politics though, which only go to confuse the matter.. but it's interesting nonetheless, imo. (My current self is 32 btw, and my 20 self could use some advice)

whack 10y ago

"All the strong political opinions I had as a twenty year old came from books. Now, as a 37 year old, most of it comes from personal experience" This could just as easily be spun as a negative. I.e. Anecdotal evidence & self-interest driven opinions vs dispassionate analysis based on systematically obtained data.