5 ms·

It’s so weird, I used to be much more of STEM triumphalist, the kind of person who used to think the past was evil and the future can’t come fast enough. I wou

It’s so weird, I used to be much more of STEM triumphalist, the kind of person who used to think the past was evil and the future can’t come fast enough. I wouldn’t consider myself conservative by any means but increasingly in 30s I’m beginning to think everyone needs to stop messing with stuff and accept imperfection.

riffraff 3y ago
As the adage goes, things that are new when you're a kid are the norm, things that are new when you're a young person are exciting, things that are new when you're older are unnecessary, confusing, or scary. It's true for everyone in every subject I'm afraid:)
- hef19898 3y ago
  Even when young, new stuff is scary. Look at any community, ranging from RPGs (new rule editions, new meta plots (those are in the example I think of getting worse, objectively ;-)) to stuff like World of Warships (new classes and ships introduced after person started bad). Nothing to do with age, but rather emotional attachment. I try to avoid that kind of attachmemt, especially with regarda to my work. The odd time I stumble across something I didnyeaes ago more often than not I embarassed to thebpoint wantin to deprecate it myself! The rare, even odder, exception notwithstanding.
revelio 3y ago
That's the usual path of becoming conservative as you grow up. Or phrased another way, becoming normal. The training process humans go through leads to a lot of weird biases, just like how RLHF contributes to models getting bad ideas as well as good. For example, you spend years in school being instructed as efficiently as possible in the one right way to do things that was already discovered. You are only rarely or never shown the messy process of trial and error needed to get there, and many really big errors are hardly covered at all (the history of communism didn't even get a look-in when I was at school!). Another: you're instructed near exclusively by specialists, who are definitionally always right (if you argue with the teacher, you lose). Yet another: as you progress through the system, you're rewarded as the ideas you handle get more complex. You aren't rewarded for simplicity. You are also rewarded for bullshitting, because just like RLHF, exams don't award points for saying "I don't know" but they can award points for a lucky guess. These sorts of systems inevitably lead to an assumption that progress is linear, mistakes rare, complexity intrinsically has value, that expertise is nearly infallible, that guessing is OK if you don't know and the situation seems important etc. The longer one spends in education the further from reality these intuitions become, until you reach academia and become a public intellectual who produces the most complex/radical ideas possible based on educated guessing and then ignores whether they work or not. Life outside the training environment eventually starts to correct these false ideas. You see how many things are tried that fail, how nuanced and ambiguous the value of ideas really is, how complexity blows up in people's faces due to problems they didn't anticipate and so on. You start to value incrementalism, evolutionary processes, systems that gather and aggregate the wisdom of the crowds. You become less impressed with ivory tower intellectuals who think they got it all figured out in advance on a blackboard. You become conservative, and end up railing against the young radicals who have some bright idea for reshaping society by force.
- TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
  Well, becoming small-c conservative, to a certain extent, is probably fairly normal, though perhaps not inevitable. Capital-C Conservative, not so much: that doesn't come with age, it comes with wealth.
  - revelio 3y ago
    These things are conflated because it usually takes time to accumulate wealth especially if self-made, so older people will tend to both be richer and more small-c conservative. Also although in the tech industry this link has been broken/inverted, there's usually a correlation between excessive risk taking (i.e. lack of conservatism) and losing all your money. In most sectors of society wealth is built up over time through care and perhaps a bit of moderate risk taking, but not too much.
    - TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
      Older people being richer is actually a relatively modern phenomenon. Ref: "Have the Boomers Pinched Their Chiren's Futures", David Willets, Royal Society lecture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuXzvjBYW8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuXzvjBYW8A
  - nervousvarun 3y ago
    Anecdotally speaking it came with paying taxes not with accumulating wealth (though I wish it were the latter). My first contracting job where I had to pay quarterly tax estimates (apologies for the U.S. tax-code specific reference) literally changed the way I thought about the world. Instantly financially conservative. By far the smartest thing the US government ever did was take your taxes out of your paycheck so you "never see it". BTW this applies to personal taxes not corporate taxes. Still think we're going about inflation completely wrong by raising rates and not raising corporate taxes. But the U.S. has been on a genocidal campaign against the middle class for decades now and we keep electing the same politicians so I guess we get what we deserve.
- lbriner 3y ago
contravariant 3y ago
For better or worse STEM in the English speaking world is still slightly stuck in the empiricist mindframe where inventing new technology and discovering new things by observation is the main method of advancement. This creates a bit of a blind spot for stuff like mathematics where a good idea can continue to be used and be improved on for ages, or in physics where some of the most groundbreaking stuff in the 20th century was not found by observation but by thought experiment. There's a lot that can be gained by recognising and reusing the same good idea for centuries, but it is not really 'progress' in the 'discovering / building new stuff' sense.
Klonoar 3y ago
There's a difference in the modern era with the term "conservative", and you may find the term "reserved" fits what you're describing here better. I wouldn't consider myself conservative by any means, but I do find myself more reserved in my decision making - I'll take a bit more time to come to a decision rather than firing from the hip, etc.

riffraff 3y ago

As the adage goes, things that are new when you're a kid are the norm, things that are new when you're a young person are exciting, things that are new when you're older are unnecessary, confusing, or scary. It's true for everyone in every subject I'm afraid:)

hef19898 3y ago
Even when young, new stuff is scary. Look at any community, ranging from RPGs (new rule editions, new meta plots (those are in the example I think of getting worse, objectively ;-)) to stuff like World of Warships (new classes and ships introduced after person started bad). Nothing to do with age, but rather emotional attachment. I try to avoid that kind of attachmemt, especially with regarda to my work. The odd time I stumble across something I didnyeaes ago more often than not I embarassed to thebpoint wantin to deprecate it myself! The rare, even odder, exception notwithstanding.

revelio 3y ago

That's the usual path of becoming conservative as you grow up. Or phrased another way, becoming normal. The training process humans go through leads to a lot of weird biases, just like how RLHF contributes to models getting bad ideas as well as good. For example, you spend years in school being instructed as efficiently as possible in the one right way to do things that was already discovered. You are only rarely or never shown the messy process of trial and error needed to get there, and many really big errors are hardly covered at all (the history of communism didn't even get a look-in when I was at school!). Another: you're instructed near exclusively by specialists, who are definitionally always right (if you argue with the teacher, you lose). Yet another: as you progress through the system, you're rewarded as the ideas you handle get more complex. You aren't rewarded for simplicity. You are also rewarded for bullshitting, because just like RLHF, exams don't award points for saying "I don't know" but they can award points for a lucky guess. These sorts of systems inevitably lead to an assumption that progress is linear, mistakes rare, complexity intrinsically has value, that expertise is nearly infallible, that guessing is OK if you don't know and the situation seems important etc. The longer one spends in education the further from reality these intuitions become, until you reach academia and become a public intellectual who produces the most complex/radical ideas possible based on educated guessing and then ignores whether they work or not. Life outside the training environment eventually starts to correct these false ideas. You see how many things are tried that fail, how nuanced and ambiguous the value of ideas really is, how complexity blows up in people's faces due to problems they didn't anticipate and so on. You start to value incrementalism, evolutionary processes, systems that gather and aggregate the wisdom of the crowds. You become less impressed with ivory tower intellectuals who think they got it all figured out in advance on a blackboard. You become conservative, and end up railing against the young radicals who have some bright idea for reshaping society by force.

TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
Well, becoming small-c conservative, to a certain extent, is probably fairly normal, though perhaps not inevitable. Capital-C Conservative, not so much: that doesn't come with age, it comes with wealth.
- revelio 3y ago
  These things are conflated because it usually takes time to accumulate wealth especially if self-made, so older people will tend to both be richer and more small-c conservative. Also although in the tech industry this link has been broken/inverted, there's usually a correlation between excessive risk taking (i.e. lack of conservatism) and losing all your money. In most sectors of society wealth is built up over time through care and perhaps a bit of moderate risk taking, but not too much.
  - TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
    Older people being richer is actually a relatively modern phenomenon. Ref: "Have the Boomers Pinched Their Chiren's Futures", David Willets, Royal Society lecture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuXzvjBYW8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuXzvjBYW8A
- nervousvarun 3y ago
  Anecdotally speaking it came with paying taxes not with accumulating wealth (though I wish it were the latter). My first contracting job where I had to pay quarterly tax estimates (apologies for the U.S. tax-code specific reference) literally changed the way I thought about the world. Instantly financially conservative. By far the smartest thing the US government ever did was take your taxes out of your paycheck so you "never see it". BTW this applies to personal taxes not corporate taxes. Still think we're going about inflation completely wrong by raising rates and not raising corporate taxes. But the U.S. has been on a genocidal campaign against the middle class for decades now and we keep electing the same politicians so I guess we get what we deserve.
lbriner 3y ago

contravariant 3y ago

For better or worse STEM in the English speaking world is still slightly stuck in the empiricist mindframe where inventing new technology and discovering new things by observation is the main method of advancement. This creates a bit of a blind spot for stuff like mathematics where a good idea can continue to be used and be improved on for ages, or in physics where some of the most groundbreaking stuff in the 20th century was not found by observation but by thought experiment. There's a lot that can be gained by recognising and reusing the same good idea for centuries, but it is not really 'progress' in the 'discovering / building new stuff' sense.

Klonoar 3y ago

There's a difference in the modern era with the term "conservative", and you may find the term "reserved" fits what you're describing here better. I wouldn't consider myself conservative by any means, but I do find myself more reserved in my decision making - I'll take a bit more time to come to a decision rather than firing from the hip, etc.