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> 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,
by 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[deleted]
- trippy_biscuits 13y agoYou 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.