This is dismissive of gained wisdom over time, and probably the most unapologetic generalization about a group I’ve read recently.

My guess is having lots of older voters would make it so people stop falling for the same scams over and over, and are less prone to hysteria.

If that were the case, governance should improve dramatically.

> would make it so people stop falling for the same scams over and over

As evidenced by... the ever present red-scare in the US? It has been decades and people still going on with this bullshit.

It’s very easy to observe how older generations have a hard time getting rid of their zeitgeist.

This doesn’t mean they suck, because there are things that lose impact over time and older generations are the to say: listen, it was way worse then it seems, I was still a child when that atomic bomb fell and the repercussions were immense.

So I think they are valuable voters, but because they’re scam-resistant. On the contrary, they’re historically charged and can help us remember relevant stuff, but their emotionally bagged opinions are almost immutable and a vulnerability.

Have you heard the phrase “science advances one death at a time”?

Older people — not all of them, there are many exceptions, but as a group — are more rigid in their thinking and less open to new ideas. Some of this is due to acquired wisdom, but it is also due to decreased ability to imagine the world any other way.

My own personal experience of aging is that the opposite is true. Young me thought in very black-and-white terms and knew everything. I now live in the grey and although I find it more difficult to deal with new ideas (partly because of age, partly because of the grey), I’m a lot more open to those ideas and willing to give them serious and fair consideration. YMMV, but a blanket statement that old people generally are stuck in their ways doesn’t match with my personal experience and when I think of the old people I know, to the extent that it’s true it’s true for a minority.

The referent as it relates to science probably has to do more with corruption, incentives, and careers being built on certain ideas and having pre-existing knowledge rather than anything specifically age-related.

In any case, whatever longevity treatment is applied may actually reverse or reduce whatever part of your claims have some physiological truth. It could mean more wisdom and less curmudgeonry.

New ideas aren't always great ideas.

And to counteract it, a sufficiently long-lived humanity might actually have to deal with the consequences of their own actions. Right now, there's quite a lot of folks who are of the mindset that they'll die in ten to twenty years, so why should they care? It's a generational pass-the-buck.

here is an idea: age weighted voting. starting at voting age, give every X years interval Y% votes.

if there is a lot of old people their vote matters less. if there is a whole lot more younger people their vote matters less.

i’m sure this would work great. also sure i’m the first person to have thought about this. /s

> My guess is having lots of older voters would make it so people stop falling for the same scams over and over, and are less prone to hysteria.

A major part of Fox News’ business model is built around creating FUD amongst senior citizens. They seem to be very successful at it.

I don't think age has anything to do with it, and Fox News has plenty of younger viewers as well.

I think education, ideology, and sensationalism have more (everything?) to do with it.

According to POS: https://pos.org/whos-watching-a-look-at-the-demographics-of-...

The only big difference between Fox and other networks is that they have way less college educated viewers as a percentage of total viewers.

Not sure how good of a source that is, though. There's several (not great) sources online I can see that say the average FOX News viewer is >65. I also see that the average CNN & MSNBC viewer is >59.

But according to that POS survey, only 20% of viewers are >65 - which must mean a significant portion of their viewers are REALLY old like 80+ (or the surveys are just bad).

538 gives POS an A- for polls: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings/public... - which is pretty good. So who knows?

This is a correlation at best. An interesting one, but no more interesting than "ice cream sales and shark attacks follow the same curve".

There's probably no real way of knowing exactly why Fox News has the viewers it does. We can only guess.

Your argument is fundamentally wrong in that it assumes age is a good approximation of wisdom.

Just because someone is N years old does not necessarily mean they have N years of experience from which to derive wisdom. They could very well have done nothing but meet the most basal needs to sustain life for N years, having nothing to contribute to a greater dialogue.

Setting aside other common issues like senility with age which could impact a person's competency to vote, do you hold a similar prejudice for people born before desegregation of schools and other institutions?

I have two thoughts on this:

- old people should have less voting power bacause they wont live to see the results of their votes

- old people should have more voting power because they are older and have seen more of history

I guess they balance out and everyone gets an equal vote.

But most people's account of any national, state, or city history for any event whatsoever cannot beat a quick search on Wikipedia. I'm not sure how much value there is in informal recollections of past events.

Have you ever heard a great retelling of history? It always seems to come from those who have invested Serious Effort to master a historical narrative, especially when they work with a community of fellow peers.

Surely the whole of the human experience is, in the end, “informal recollections of past events”?

What tells you more about poverty — learning that an individual lives on less than a dollar a day or, say, spending 24 hours without food and shelter?

I would argue that the experience of lived history and the “facts” of history cannot be separated, and both must be equally valued.

The "whole of human experience" is a formal concept, since you surely don't believe any of us can informally experience it. Societies formalize it by collecting data and debating theories. And big human stories are the ones which are difficult to intuit.

There are those who do nothing more than collect information on homeless people, documenting them for various organizations or gov't agencies, sometimes paid. They are doing the fundamental work of demonstrating a phenomena whose scale would otherwise be belittled or denied. Some would say SF is actually pretty nice, with only a small homeless population.

When experiences disagree with each other, how should we move forward with discussion? With personal experience or with data?

Yeah, why ask the person who was in WWII what it was like. Just jump on wikipedia and it'll be like your on Omaha beach.

It’s not about specific historical events and narratives.

It’s about the general tendencies of humans, patterns, that you start to be able to perceive when you live a lot of life.

A story of history, humans, patterns on race and class, told without any mastery of any specifics in history? I mean, sure, but I'd just call that canned gossip. And don't we All have something to say about human sexuality?

Older people have more children and grandchildren that will live with the results of their voting.

This raises an interesting point.

I think we already live with this kind of tension much more than in the past, as made clear by the voting patterns of young vs old.

Sharing a country with people of such different values is hard. Particularly when the older generation is always the shrinking demographic and feels its way of life is at risk.

What can alleviate this? More federalism? More geographic clustering by age? A culture that puts empathy over shame?

Along those lines: given how quickly things change these days, I can imagine that living to 120 would be quite bewildering, even if you you could be healthy and mentally coherent at 100.

I don't think it would be uniquely bad for old people to vote though, plenty of brand new ideas are terrible too.

Not sure I want 18 year olds voting either.

On the contrary, we could finally raise the voting age to 60.