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Why is it so difficult for the younger folks to concede that older folks have something solely by the virtue of being old? From John Ciardi “About Crows” (Fast

Why is it so difficult for the younger folks to concede that older folks have something solely by the virtue of being old? From John Ciardi “About Crows” (Fast & Slow, March 1975, 3): The old crow is getting slow; the young crow is not. Of what the young crow does not know, the old crow knows a lot. At knowing things, the old crow is still the young crow’s master. What does the old crow not know? How to go faster! The young crow flies above, below, and rings around the slow old crow. What does the fast young crow not know? Where to go!

derleth 13y ago
> older folks have something solely by the virtue of being old? Not always, no. Sometimes, old people are just plain stupid. Not necessarily bigoted, hateful, and mean, all of which can be explained if not forgiven, but stupid. Age only brings experience if you're smart enough to gain experience from what happens to you. If you're not, you don't have thirty years' experience, you have one year of experience repeated thirty times. Now, add to that the Cult Of Age, the idea that old people deserve special respect simply because they're old, and the unchallengeable idea that old people must be wise because they're old. (We can go back and forth on whether respect is deserved or earned, because the two camps of people on that issue are apparently not operating from the same definition of 'respect'. What I'm talking about is the idea that, whatever 'respect' is, old people deserve more of it simply because they happen to be old.) Throw in a little bit of people disrespecting anyone younger than them, especially when the young person is more right than they are, and you get a lot of anger.
- deleted 13y ago
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- trippy_biscuits 13y ago
  You make some fair points. I don't believe stupid gets constrained by age. In counterpoint I offer the truism, "you don't know what you don't know," using the collective you while referring to someone with a given point of view. A person that's ignorant of a certain body of knowledge may not even be aware of that ignorance let alone its size and scope. Generally, the younger the person, the exponentially larger the size and scope because that body of knowledge is not academic, it's earned through life experiences. I know an 80+ year old former farmer. He does not have a smart phone and cannot operate a computer or any other advanced technology. He's not stupid by any means even though many points of view could judge him so. Despite any rubric that measures him as stupid, he knows things that cannot be learned through experience because things just aren't done that way anymore. He knows the how and why of something in many more ways than someone half his age can even fathom. Take the older sys admin that used to build firewalls and sendmail.cf files by hand, for example. Just because there's no need to do that anymore doesn't mean that the experience is null and void. Older folks often know how and why something works (technology, human relations, etc.) while the younger folks just know how to repeat observed actions until it looks like it works. Granted, this behavior isn't just limited to the young (some people never learn). Don't discount someone's ability to contribute meaningfully just because of age. That's exactly what the sampling from stackoverflow revealed.
6d0debc071 13y ago
> Why is it so difficult for the younger folks to concede that older folks have something solely by the virtue of being old? It's difficult to talk about this sort of stuff without sounding like I'm a kid throwing a fit, but I guess it's worth a shot: Growing up it feels like older people should be, fairly uniformly from the perspective of a child, incredibly formidable. You've had three or four times our experience and you should really know your stuff. You should have done your homework on your opinions and actions, you should be more self-controlled, more insightful, more... everything that doesn't relate fairly directly to muscles really. And you don't exactly try to deny that either - build up this image of yourselves as people whose judgement should be deferred to and ... when does any of it ever get backed up? When we talk to an adult, it's very rare to feel like we're dealing with someone more knowledgeable or experienced than us at all, let alone three or four times so. Adults lock kids up in school for the a lot of their waking lives and even your average kids still manage to get up to a competitive standard with your average adult in a year or so. The difference on forty years of age should not be a single year. Maybe part of that's selection bias, adults just never get to do anything particularly difficult in front of us - but I don't think so in this case. Unlike many people my age in this country, I've worked a real job before - doing things that require thought - and the job wasn't hard to learn or anything like that. The people there, while friendly and nice, didn't strike me as being people with positive multiples of my own skills, despite some of them being multiples of my age. Which isn't to say that some old people can't be incredibly formidable, from time to time you run into such people and can learn a lot from them - but most people seem to get to, say, their first job after school and some of the damage that school did them fades a bit, and then they just stop growing. If a kid like me can match or exceed most of the older people she meets, then there's something very wrong in the idea that you get something extra just from being old. An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur? You don't get better by ageing, I think - at least, not solely by virtue of being older. Age represents opportunities to seek out new experiences and knowledge, and thus to get wiser. However, lots of people never take them and make much of themselves at all. My fifty year old father's response to locking his washing in the washing machine was to run another wash cycle, and when that didn't work to run the spin cycle - it was only when I came along and released the child-lock that he was able to get his washing. The manual was right there besides the machine. And he's not suffering from dementia or anything like that. It's tempting to think he is but he isn't. He's just spent all his life working the same mediocre arts job and sitting in front of the TV every spare moment he gets. Respect that, as better than me just because he's older? It's like looking at a cripple. But... he's still meant to be healthy, he was always that smart. And so many adults are like him. There doesn't seem to be anything biologically wrong with them. And I love him dearly, but what does he have that I don't? And if he doesn't have anything just by virtue of being older, why should I assume that anyone else does -- if age is the sole criteria?

derleth 13y ago

> older folks have something solely by the virtue of being old? Not always, no. Sometimes, old people are just plain stupid. Not necessarily bigoted, hateful, and mean, all of which can be explained if not forgiven, but stupid. Age only brings experience if you're smart enough to gain experience from what happens to you. If you're not, you don't have thirty years' experience, you have one year of experience repeated thirty times. Now, add to that the Cult Of Age, the idea that old people deserve special respect simply because they're old, and the unchallengeable idea that old people must be wise because they're old. (We can go back and forth on whether respect is deserved or earned, because the two camps of people on that issue are apparently not operating from the same definition of 'respect'. What I'm talking about is the idea that, whatever 'respect' is, old people deserve more of it simply because they happen to be old.) Throw in a little bit of people disrespecting anyone younger than them, especially when the young person is more right than they are, and you get a lot of anger.

deleted 13y ago
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trippy_biscuits 13y ago
You make some fair points. I don't believe stupid gets constrained by age. In counterpoint I offer the truism, "you don't know what you don't know," using the collective you while referring to someone with a given point of view. A person that's ignorant of a certain body of knowledge may not even be aware of that ignorance let alone its size and scope. Generally, the younger the person, the exponentially larger the size and scope because that body of knowledge is not academic, it's earned through life experiences. I know an 80+ year old former farmer. He does not have a smart phone and cannot operate a computer or any other advanced technology. He's not stupid by any means even though many points of view could judge him so. Despite any rubric that measures him as stupid, he knows things that cannot be learned through experience because things just aren't done that way anymore. He knows the how and why of something in many more ways than someone half his age can even fathom. Take the older sys admin that used to build firewalls and sendmail.cf files by hand, for example. Just because there's no need to do that anymore doesn't mean that the experience is null and void. Older folks often know how and why something works (technology, human relations, etc.) while the younger folks just know how to repeat observed actions until it looks like it works. Granted, this behavior isn't just limited to the young (some people never learn). Don't discount someone's ability to contribute meaningfully just because of age. That's exactly what the sampling from stackoverflow revealed.

6d0debc071 13y ago

> Why is it so difficult for the younger folks to concede that older folks have something solely by the virtue of being old? It's difficult to talk about this sort of stuff without sounding like I'm a kid throwing a fit, but I guess it's worth a shot: Growing up it feels like older people should be, fairly uniformly from the perspective of a child, incredibly formidable. You've had three or four times our experience and you should really know your stuff. You should have done your homework on your opinions and actions, you should be more self-controlled, more insightful, more... everything that doesn't relate fairly directly to muscles really. And you don't exactly try to deny that either - build up this image of yourselves as people whose judgement should be deferred to and ... when does any of it ever get backed up? When we talk to an adult, it's very rare to feel like we're dealing with someone more knowledgeable or experienced than us at all, let alone three or four times so. Adults lock kids up in school for the a lot of their waking lives and even your average kids still manage to get up to a competitive standard with your average adult in a year or so. The difference on forty years of age should not be a single year. Maybe part of that's selection bias, adults just never get to do anything particularly difficult in front of us - but I don't think so in this case. Unlike many people my age in this country, I've worked a real job before - doing things that require thought - and the job wasn't hard to learn or anything like that. The people there, while friendly and nice, didn't strike me as being people with positive multiples of my own skills, despite some of them being multiples of my age. Which isn't to say that some old people can't be incredibly formidable, from time to time you run into such people and can learn a lot from them - but most people seem to get to, say, their first job after school and some of the damage that school did them fades a bit, and then they just stop growing. If a kid like me can match or exceed most of the older people she meets, then there's something very wrong in the idea that you get something extra just from being old. An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur? You don't get better by ageing, I think - at least, not solely by virtue of being older. Age represents opportunities to seek out new experiences and knowledge, and thus to get wiser. However, lots of people never take them and make much of themselves at all. My fifty year old father's response to locking his washing in the washing machine was to run another wash cycle, and when that didn't work to run the spin cycle - it was only when I came along and released the child-lock that he was able to get his washing. The manual was right there besides the machine. And he's not suffering from dementia or anything like that. It's tempting to think he is but he isn't. He's just spent all his life working the same mediocre arts job and sitting in front of the TV every spare moment he gets. Respect that, as better than me just because he's older? It's like looking at a cripple. But... he's still meant to be healthy, he was always that smart. And so many adults are like him. There doesn't seem to be anything biologically wrong with them. And I love him dearly, but what does he have that I don't? And if he doesn't have anything just by virtue of being older, why should I assume that anyone else does -- if age is the sole criteria?