6 ms·
Can I ask why you think that young people are inherently less disciplined?
by alexbanks 6y ago
Can I ask why you think that young people are inherently less disciplined?
- RandoHolmes 6y agoMost children do not take on the responsibility of setting an alarm, getting up in the morning, cooking for themselves, and then walking to the bus stop to take the bus to school (or their own car). Pretty much every adult does this as a matter of course.
- gbear605 6y ago...perhaps other than the breakfast part, that’s exactly what most teenagers do every morning (at least in non-COVID) times. Certainly children don’t, if you’re only talking about prepubescent children, but they’re also not particularly relevant to a discussion about working from home.
- RandoHolmes 6y ago> Certainly children don’t, if you’re only talking about prepubescent children, but they’re also not particularly relevant to a discussion about working from home. Then I think it's pretty clear that's not what I meant when I said children... It becomes even more clear when you realize I said "or their own car", or did you think it was my belief that 5 year olds were driving themselves to school?
- gbear605 6y agoI had covered teenagers earlier in my comment, and so I wanted to cover younger children with the rest of the comment.
- alexbanks 6y agoRight but we’re not talking about children. We’re talking about recently hired software engineers? And if you’re saying “pretty much every adult”, doesn’t that include those engineers?
- RandoHolmes 6y agoAre you claiming that a 21 year old engineer is obviously going to be as experienced at life as a 40 year old engineer? Because that's what you're implying here, and I don't think any reasonable person would make the claim that's obvious.
- alexbanks 6y agoI didn’t think we were talking about life experience, I thought we were talking about the nebulous term “discipline.” And you’re switching back and forth between “young people”, “children” and now “21 year olds.” I’m trying to understand where this bias comes from, is all.
- frankpf 6y agoI think it's been observed by many psychology studies that conscientiousness (the personality trait that determines self discipline and self control) tends to increase with age. Excerpt from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2562318/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2562318/: "Agreeableness demonstrated a fairly linear increase with age whereas the pattern for Conscientiousness was curvilinear: scores increased up to a peak somewhere between the ages of 50 to 70 and then declined."
- petra 6y agoAccorindg to your link, mean Conscientiousness raises by only 16% over age, with the standard deviation stays the same. Doesn't sound that large. But intuitively, people who have families will work significantly harder than a teenagers. So i think we're measuring something incorrectly here.
- RandoHolmes 6y ago> But intuitively, people who have families will work significantly harder than a teenagers. So i think we're measuring something incorrectly here. Exactly right. The sort of discipline I'm discussing here isn't conscientiousness. Someone who scores low in conscientiousness, but then has children, is going to be a lot more responsible than they were before they had children. Someone else accused me of reverse ageism. As if I'm biased against young people because I believe that people generally get better at life the more life experience they have. My rule of thumb is that if you're dealing with someone 10+ years older than you, it's generally good to assume they can read you better than you can read them.
- alexbanks 6y ago> My rule of thumb is that if you're dealing with someone 10+ years older than you, it's generally good to assume they can read you better than you can read them. This is giving a lot of people undue credit, is the problem.
- chii 6y agoI will facetious say that it's (reverse) agism against young people by older people.