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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3192 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 15, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How much stock do you put in the age of someone posting? How much in their "stage of life?" Does it matter to you whether a poster is in high school? University? Do you care if a poster is only in their teens or early 20s, already in their late 30s, or early 40s, or approaching senescence in their mid 50s? Does it matter whether they're married or not, whether they have kids or not? Whether they're male or female? From the first world it third world? Do any of these factors affect how you read their posts?

Some of these definitely affect me, but I can't decide whether it's a good heuristic or just a knee jerk reaction.

It just depends. Some things are very impacted by stage of life.

I can't take any man under 25 seriously when he talks about "what women are like" because he might just still need to grow up a little yet. There was a one year period where everything changed for me, I think that is very normal for young men.

Unless they intentionally reveal it, none. (If they do, now there's a political angle- the 4chan approach to that behavior is mostly correct, and I use it when appropriate.)

I didn't like "but you aren't even a human being" when people did it to me, and they were usually wrong when they did it, so I go out of my way to avoid doing it to anyone else. And while I'm not (well, I guess it's 'wasn't' now) deterred by the microaggression of "teenager", the concept (as most Progressive terms are- the fact that they just use them as an excuse to be bullies notwithstanding) is a valid one here; if it discourages someone from actually trying to use their own reason, then it's probably wrong to say and/or being used to cover up something that's obviously wrong.

Sure, if there are obvious markers of age/inexperience with a given topic it's going to color the way I respond- but I'm not going to expressly point out that I believe a blind spot is age-related since it can (will?) invite the above problem if not done very carefully. Humorously, I find that someone taking pains to explicitly call it out (or being worried about it, which is understandable considering the above) is itself a reliable indicator that someone's not particularly mature in the first place.

People under 20 or so rarely have much interesting to say. This isn't a judgment I apply on posters, just an observation. I suspect it's the same reason there are child prodigy chessmasters and musicians but not child prodigy novelists.

Otherwise I don't find age or life stage particularly relevant.

I do think these factors can't help but color comments but I generally try not to hold it against people. Experience, and because of that age, often do matter quite a bit and the young and inexperienced tend to have naïve or strange ideas about how systems they've not had much experience in actually work but those can and should be addressed on their own merits and not just assumed to be wrong based on experience or age. It's sometimes striking to me just how cynical kids who have never worked come into the office expecting to be abused and unappreciated only to end up being surprised when I tell them I absolutely do not want them working unpaid overtime or doing menial tasks. I sometimes see the same kind of idea latent in someone's arguments and if anything it softens me to them and makes me more willing to gently explain why I think they're misunderstanding systems they've only heard horror stories about.

Some experiences are relevant when commenting on a topic. I generally don't trust the opinions of people who have only worked in the government with regard to management dynamics in a corporate office, for example. I don't think people without children can have fully informed views on parenting issues due to how life-changing the experience is.

Those types of things aside, I don't much care how old people are. I'm now approaching 40 and when I think back to teenage me, I wasn't stupid, I wasn't ignorant, and it wasn't impossible for me to reason through issues and come to solid positions. At that age, I had nothing but contempt for people that said things like, "you'll feel different when you're older" without even attempting to explain why that might be the case. In the passing of decades, I've settled on thinking that I was basically right to feel that way, that people use their age and putative wisdom as a shortcut to avoid making real, cogent arguments. Life experience really can help inform one meaningfully, but not in such an immaterial way that it should be granted deference beyond the substance of an argument.

I put some stock, but far more in that I recognize the username.

Perhaps more than other users here, I tend to ignore the username. Not that I don't remember names or such, just that I don't put in the effort to remember them unless there is a strong pattern that emerges over reading many of their posts over a period of time.

I don't put much weight on the attributes of the poster. Partly because I am at a strict disadvantage there so I have to follow the Golden Rule for my own sake. I am 25, childless, and barely out of college, and will be going back to it soon, and not from the first world. Other than that just being bad argumentation.

However, depending on the conversation a person's demographic might explain a very obvious weakness/blindspot in their argument and I don't think it's too uncouth to point that out in those specific situations.

Not to put too fine a point on it, yes.

The opinion of someone with extensive life experience will carry more weight for me than those of someone who barely cleared the age of 20 or never got out of his scholastic or academic bubble. I'll listen more closely to someone with children of his own than to someone to whom kids are an abstract concept. As for women posting on an online forum, I beg their pardon but I'll be somewhat more inclined to suspect attention-seeking. I'll relate more to a European than to an American, and more to a Westerner than to a Third-Worlder.

But ultimately everyone here is a Mottizen first and whatever else second, to me. Obviously I'm influenced by their identity, in so far as they make it public, but I think I can honestly say that what someone says wins out in the end over who's saying it.

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