In my experience, older people have to make conscious effort to maintain critical thinking and reasoning and not start lazily regurgitating settled, memorized opinions they’ve come rely on as absolutes, intead of allowing those beliefs to be subject to fresh challenges from novel perspectives that may change those opinions. Many do make that effort, and many do not. To paraphrase my favorite fictional character, if you refuse to change your mind, then you will die stupid.
Individuals are individuals of course though. I’m of the opinion that, on an individual basis, beyond the age of around 12, age is an extremely poor metric to estimate someone’s intellect, wisdom, and insight. I’m in my mid 30s and have a master’s degree in psychology with a 3.9 GPA. I recognize that there are 18 year olds that dwarf me intellectually, and more commonly 80 year olds who’ve lived lives devoid of reflection, who will die defending their long dead pappy’s narrative about how the world works with anger rather than reason, solely because that’s what they were told to believe. I have pity for that type, but very little patience.
That is 100% some “ugh, stupid freshmen” nonsense.
Plenty of older folk are just as incapable of critical thought as kids. Spend any time doing tech support (or what people think is tech support) and you will lose all faith in humanity. Lots of people not only die stupid but are proud of it.
I will agree that it is incredibly unlikely to find someone in their teens who want to reevaluate their world views. You tend to only see that begin at college age as people begin to work real jobs or meet a wider range of people. But there are still plenty of people who think “Ha ha, you care” or “Ugh, this is so stupid. Why would anyone want to learn this?” are witty responses.
But also? Those kids might be on the verge of learning how to learn, as it were. They are starting to actually Listen to the media they consume and think about what that means. They still may be obnoxious little shits but… we all were at that age. And those of us who learned how to be better were largely from being called out for shitty stuff.
But just being older does not at all make people more likely to want to learn or listen to others.
That’s a pretty good take. Generalizing doesn’t help when we all have a chance to get the “stupid” genes at birth or get intellectually stuck at any moment of our lives.
Meh, lets not.
In my experience, older people have to make conscious effort to maintain critical thinking and reasoning and not start lazily regurgitating settled, memorized opinions they’ve come rely on as absolutes, intead of allowing those beliefs to be subject to fresh challenges from novel perspectives that may change those opinions. Many do make that effort, and many do not. To paraphrase my favorite fictional character, if you refuse to change your mind, then you will die stupid.
Individuals are individuals of course though. I’m of the opinion that, on an individual basis, beyond the age of around 12, age is an extremely poor metric to estimate someone’s intellect, wisdom, and insight. I’m in my mid 30s and have a master’s degree in psychology with a 3.9 GPA. I recognize that there are 18 year olds that dwarf me intellectually, and more commonly 80 year olds who’ve lived lives devoid of reflection, who will die defending their long dead pappy’s narrative about how the world works with anger rather than reason, solely because that’s what they were told to believe. I have pity for that type, but very little patience.
That is 100% some “ugh, stupid freshmen” nonsense.
Plenty of older folk are just as incapable of critical thought as kids. Spend any time doing tech support (or what people think is tech support) and you will lose all faith in humanity. Lots of people not only die stupid but are proud of it.
I will agree that it is incredibly unlikely to find someone in their teens who want to reevaluate their world views. You tend to only see that begin at college age as people begin to work real jobs or meet a wider range of people. But there are still plenty of people who think “Ha ha, you care” or “Ugh, this is so stupid. Why would anyone want to learn this?” are witty responses.
But also? Those kids might be on the verge of learning how to learn, as it were. They are starting to actually Listen to the media they consume and think about what that means. They still may be obnoxious little shits but… we all were at that age. And those of us who learned how to be better were largely from being called out for shitty stuff.
But just being older does not at all make people more likely to want to learn or listen to others.
That’s a pretty good take. Generalizing doesn’t help when we all have a chance to get the “stupid” genes at birth or get intellectually stuck at any moment of our lives.