Poll: How old are you?

The older I get, the more interested I am in the thoughts of people from another time. I discovered long ago that there is far less continuity of wisdom than young people realize. There is a common assumption among young people that the best ideas of the past are carried forward while the failed ideas are left behind. This is true to some extent, but it is much less true than most young people seem to think.

People vastly underestimate the gap between their theories and reality. Experience forces them to change some of their theories to ideas that seem less plausible but that turn out to correspond better to reality. When they try to pass these improved ideas on to younger people without the same experience, they are often rejected. They sound less plausible than what they and their young peers take for granted.

If the younger people go on to have the same experiences as their parents, they might eventually recognize the wisdom of their elders' ideas, but if not, they might never realize how wrong they are and will easily pass the plausible-sounding bad ideas on to their own children. At some point, most of society can have a good chuckle at the old people's "out of date" ideas.

Since each generation faces different experiences, we have a mechanism whereby wisdom born of experience keeps being lost and replaced by plausible-sounding bad ideas.

You also have the mechanism whereby people point at one area that has clearly improved as evidence that today's ideas are better than those of the past. After all, today's telephone hardware is vastly better than the Lisp Machine of 50 years ago, so the design of HTML/CSS/Javascript platform must represent a substantial improvement on the best ideas from Common Lisp with the bad ideas removed.

No? Well then there's another mechanism whereby wisdom born of experience in the past can be replaced by worse ideas that just happen to end up carried to popularity by historical circumstance.

Just as I study how old-time engineers solved technical problems without using today's technologies, I try to study the writings of "old people" from ancient times to modern, and I try to learn from the "out of date" ideas that came from experiences I've never had. I find it contains more real wisdom than the taken-for-granted trendy theories popular among today's young elites. That of course makes me "feel different" and my thoughts "out of date", too.

Perhaps sharpness impairs wisdom.

You have multiple fundamental cultural conflicts that I think will effectively provide enough noise to cover up any signal.

The first one is intelligence metrics are only permitted WRT aging which makes them impossible to intelligently compare. Culturally verboten to discuss the same metrics WRT class, race, pretty much anything else. So there's numbers... and we have no idea what they mean, if anything, in the bigger picture. OK then.

I suspect there are no large collection of serious peer reviewed numbers to back it up. A vague cultural belief of "everyone knows" but no one's really measured or documented it with enough detail and repetition to prove much of anything. Or its a statistical anomaly.. men who make it to age 20 have always lived to 60s-80s. The reason average lifespan exploded in the last century or two is 4/5ths of the kids stopped dying. Therefore the avg specs over the centuries means little to anyone already an adult. Might very well be the same effect. So no data and no critical analysis.

Another cultural problem is pigeonholing. Teen screws up, well its just hormones. Slightly older, must be on recreational drugs. A little older, well, he's the new guy. Bit older, the baby is keeping them up all night can't blame him. Now he's worried about his teenagers. Same old screwup who still screws up at the same rate as when he was 5, finally reaches a well seasoned age with no excuses left, well, his screw ups must "NOW" be because he's old, LOL. Even if a graph of "screwup-full-ness" is a perfect flat line for his whole life.

Another interesting distortion is changing jobs. Generally our culture doesn't give kids big picture jobs and old people entry level jobs. Odd how their demanded performance seems to match the stereotypical expectations.

Final cultural barrier you have to power thru is the classic, teens energy and ignorance rebel against parents wisdom and experience. I donno if you're going to be able to power past that, its a heck of a roadblock to correct for. Much like a recreational sport, the "conflict" might solely exist for fun/cultural reasons. There may be no actual difference at all, but humans love to "other" each other and get all dramatic, and this sounds like a fun topic to fight about, so...

Crap, sorry about the down vote. I fat fingered my phone.

I got a job. With real customers who needed real solutions. That opened my world.