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Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

economist.com

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Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#321

Post by kradroy »

esoterica wrote: post #220
kradroy wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear trend-following worrier, For all the effort you're making know this: you'll eventually be evaluated by a Gen-X or Millennial hiring manager. We largely don't care where you went to college. We've learned that name recognition means very little. It'll get you a job, but if you're one of those kids who "does nothing" on an extracurricular team, it'll show through on the job. You won't get promoted. We fucking hate…

I mean, you might not care but where they went to school, but the Goldmans and McKinseys and Cravaths of the world still do.

Those places do care about school name to the same extent. You'll get a junior position there, if you have a Harvard/Yale/Princeton degree, but you're not advancing unless you come from a well-connected (and likely wealthy) family. Attending a top-tier school is often just a proxy for wealth and connectedness. The companies you mentioned keep the prestige of the company high by hiring from the Ivy League, but the unconnected hoi polloi end up doing shit work for a decade until they figure out they're in a dead end.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#322

Post by dcolkitt »

nabla9 wrote: post #104

Finland has mandatory military service for males. So every year you most of the young men (mostly age 18 to 20) into a controlled environment and go through standardized testing and observation. - Physical fitness has gone down, overweight goes up. - Intelligence peaked among those who were born in 70's and has been in slight decline last 18 years. Similar results can be seen in other developed countries. - Anxiety d…

One hypothesis to consider is the drastic decline in teen smoking rates. Nicotine is a powerful anti-psychotic. Smoking rates among the schizotypal are nearly double the rest of the population, even when controlling for common explanatory factors.

Social isolation, anxiety, depression, mild cognitive impairment and avoidant behavior are all signs of untreated schizophrenia. It's possible in the past that those with sub-clinical schizotypal personalities self-medicated with tobacco. Removing that would result in a sub-segment of the population becoming significantly less functional in a pronounced way.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#323

Post by jl2718 »

legionof7 wrote: post #234
franze wrote: post #14

I became a young father with 19, after way too much party starting from 15. So naturally I was concerned that my son would behave like me at that age. Or even just 50%. So I was kinda dissapaointed how well behaved he is now with 22. Mostly interested in E-Sports, Tinder and his CRM job. Said that, becoming a father at 19 was a great career move. Got a job making websites in the dot-com area as I needed money and was…

Wow big props to you though. I'm 19 right now, if I had a kid now, I'd have no idea what to do. Would probs turn out very badly.

I wish I had done it that way, although I definitely had the wrong partner at the time. I’m older now. There’s never a good time. There’s never a perfect partner. Set priorities and standards early at a minimum acceptable level and take the first match. Optimization will fail you every time. My biggest regrets are all from rejecting ‘good enough’.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#324

Post by peterangular »

t-writescode wrote: post #320
peterangular wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's liability. Letting people onto your property is liability no matter what the context. Unsupervised kids roaming my property is a no-go and not my responsibility. I get that people want to have their ideals here, but there's a whole "risk to the property owner" side to this conversation that's not happening.

Or just teach them to not go into other people's property? I didn't when I was their age. Families had fences to designate property.

Agree. In my family we weren't allowed to trespass and had designated areas that were public where we would go off and adventure. Some involved a short bike ride. We weren't allowed to just go start playing in someone else's yard.

Ninja edit: but in my anecdotal experience there are a ton of parents that don't do this and are shocked/insulted when you ask them politely to keep their kids off of your private property.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#325

Post by dodobirdlord »

411111111111111 wrote: post #266
nabla9 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intelligence researchers don't use IQ, they use raw data from testing. As you pointed out, IQ is not usable for research across time or across countries or cultures. You can only compare individuals in the same time and same population.

Its further biased by how many iq tests the testee has done before. Honestly, iq tests are pointless unless you're selecting for people that are willing to invest time into worthless knowledge in order to win in a contest. Which is a valid criteria, considering that these are the most motivated people... Its just not "intelligence", though that itself is just as pointless to measure.

IQ tests are not pointless, the scores have strong correlation with lifetime achievement and are useful for population statistics about things like educational outcomes and the harms of childhood malnutrition. The meaningfulness of the test score breaks down if someone carries out a campaign of preparation, but that doesn’t make the tests useless. IQ testing gets a lot of flak from people who seem to have an axe to grind, in much the same way that BMI measurements get a lot of flak from people who fall well within the range where it’s useful. Sure, MENSA is stupid and BMI isn’t a useful measurement for professional athletes, but so what?

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#326

Post by throw149102 »

alexhutcheson wrote: post #242
vegetablepotpie wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish adults understood the realities of being young in 2020. Even when I graduated HS in 2007 I could tell my experience and the academic expectations I needed to live up to were much higher than it was for my mom. After I graduated I saw younger friends take more AP classes than I did and do more leadership activities than I did. Expectations are always ramping up. It is no party. Our laws and bureaucracies haven’…

FWIW, this isn't so much a story of "being young in 2020" as it is "being young in 2020 in the hyper-competitive culture of major coastal metro areas of the US". This phenomenon is actually pretty unique to a handful of metro areas, which happen to be over-represented on HN. In most of the country, bright high school students are focused on getting into their state's flagship public university, and exceptionally succ…

I think there's still things that ring out to me as true even though I didn't have that experience (Grew up in Iowa). So I'll agree that it's not always the hyper-competitive aspect of it, but it's the need to have a personal brand and to push that out on social media. And the desire to escape from our current economic conditions by credentialing is still there, even though it's not nearly as intense, and not all people here feel it equally.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#327

Post by alexhutcheson »

closeparen wrote: post #304
alexhutcheson wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, this isn't so much a story of "being young in 2020" as it is "being young in 2020 in the hyper-competitive culture of major coastal metro areas of the US". This phenomenon is actually pretty unique to a handful of metro areas, which happen to be over-represented on HN. In most of the country, bright high school students are focused on getting into their state's flagship public university, and exceptionally succ…

This is the segment of every part of the country that aspires to those costal metro areas. The driving motivation is "get me the hell out of this godforsaken place." The personal cost was immense, but I'm glad I did. I got to do fun and high-impact work at a fast-rising startup while my title and TC leapt up by $50-$100k each year. I got to meet friends from all over the world, travel, hike, run outdoors year-round,…

NYC, SF, Silicon Valley, Seattle, LA, etc. are all full of successful people who went to public universities that didn’t require crazy high school credentials to get into.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#328

Post by _bxg1 »

idoby wrote: post #307
_bxg1 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I graduated HS 10 years ago and it was pretty similar in my experience, maybe a bit less extreme. There were some "stereotypical teens" at my school but they were a minority. Everyone I was surrounded by was trying to squeeze in as many AP courses as they could, as many officer positions in different extracurricular organizations (NHS, band/choir/orchestra, yearbook, athletics, etc) as they could. Our valedictorian a…

> the "popular kids" at school were the overachievers, not the jocks This may be a silver lining in an otherwise very gloomy comment page? When I was in HS (though not in the US), popularity was highly correlated with wealth and/or political activism.

Yes and no. It's not great that people start the rat race so young now. Especially since it doesn't actually make that much of a difference: extra "accomplishments" in HS are only loosely associated with better colleges, and the college you go to is only loosely associated with how well your life actually goes afterward. The things that really end up mattering are a) choosing a field that the economy happens to want at that point in time, b) developing a good network, and c) being able to think for yourself and problem-solve (this doesn't only apply to STEM). But instead people burn themselves out chasing accolades that aren't actually all that important, sometimes neglecting these more important factors.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#329

Post by lotsofpulp »

qqssccfftt wrote: post #292
lotsofpulp wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think mandatory military service is the only way to get sufficient people interested in participating and educating themselves about current issues to have a functional democracy.

Mandatory military service is nothing more than nationalistic brainwashing.

I think all this praise for people that go into the military as having “served” and whatnot is nationalistic brainwashing. I really don’t see any other option for Americans to start caring about what their politicians do than to make them personally feel it.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#330

Post by esoterica »

kradroy wrote: post #321
esoterica wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you might not care but where they went to school, but the Goldmans and McKinseys and Cravaths of the world still do.

Those places do care about school name to the same extent. You'll get a junior position there, if you have a Harvard/Yale/Princeton degree, but you're not advancing unless you come from a well-connected (and likely wealthy) family. Attending a top-tier school is often just a proxy for wealth and connectedness. The companies you mentioned keep the prestige of the company high by hiring from the Ivy League, but the unc…

That's really not true at all and I don't know why you've convinced yourself that it is. Obviously having connections can give you a leg up but most successful people in these industries don't have family in high places and it's not a prerequisite to ascend through the ranks. Why would so many people enter finance and consulting if they thought it was a dead end? Are you arrogant enough to believe that it's because they are dumber and less enlightened than you, and unlike you they don't know what they are doing with their lives?
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