The younger ones are not the one that need an explanation, as the distribution of votes in favour of Brexit was strongly correlated with older age.

Brexit reinforces my very controversial belief that pensioners should not be able to vote. The future is not theirs. Elderly wisdom is a terrible cultural meme. People grow wiser as they age, but are not wiser in the absolute. Also, a young mind ingests many orders of magnitude more information about the world than a person with declining mental faculties and ossified beliefs.

/rant

Hmm. I am going to oversimplify a little bit.

On average, young people see the world, see that it does not work, and want to change it. Hence, they chant: "Change things!"

On average, old people see the world, they already settled on a routine that mostly works for them ( genuine survivor bias ) and do not want to change one thing for fear of losing what little they have. Hence, they chant: "Stop changing things!"

It is a question of balance. I always said that the biggest problem with democracy is its weakest link as it depends on a well informed voter. Fear is not a great advisor, but it is a great motivator.

The other huge problem of democracy is that it doesn't account for human biases, such as the Donning-Kruger effect: people with high expertise tend to see flaws in one party or the other and will tend to not vote for anybody, while people with low expertise and knowledge buy any politician's lies wholesale and thus can be easily swayed by the best liar. So on average more liars get to govern us than good politicians.

Additionally, the other issue is that the best people with the expertise to solve a country's issues are exactly those that couldn't be bothered to get into politics. Likewise, career politicians tends to be absolutely inept and unqualified to run a country.

Democracy is the least worse form of government, but it still is very very bad.

My grandfather is 98 years old.

Despite family protestations he still drives.

There is no law in my state which demands he undergo yearly driving tests to ensure he still has the capacity and mental faculties to do so.

This is not going to end well for him or more importantly someone else.

It is crazy.

He presumably remembers how to drive a car. Private pilots don't have to resit their flying tests annually beyond a certain age, but they do have to prove they're medically fit to fly. If you're allowed to fly a light aircraft after passing a regular medical examination which checks things like eyesight, chronic illnesses which would affect their ability to drive, and reaction times, a similar arrangement should be adequate for driving a car.

The oldies go slowly and tend to end up with some low speed impacts giving dented cars rather than injury. Maybe if you get 2 or 3 of those in a year it's time to stop.

The YOLO crowd have to be in their mid to late 20's at least, now, right? That seems like prime HN demographics.

What are the hn demographics? Is there a regular survey or anything? Would people be interested in a survey?

That would actually be very interesting. There’s a bunch of young idealists, but also a bunch of old geezers, and I assume everything in between.

You can roughly tell by the prevalence of Twitter compared to Snap/IG/Facebook. 30s is definitely highest proportion, not 20s by a longshot.