All the strong political opinions I had as a twenty year old came from books. Now, as a 37 year old, most of it comes from personal experience. Needless to say, the two sets of opinions are very, very different. I wouldn't know about imposing an age on voting, but people should vote their own opinions, not ones borrowed from books. The youngest version of myself that I would now trust with any sort of policy making is my 32 year old self...
I am also 37. My political opinions as a twenty year old weren't wildly different. I have become more pragmatic as I've realised just how hard it is to get anything complex done and how many cognitive biases people have but I'm also worried that I might be losing something in not feeling that idealism.
I distrust people voting according to their opinions rather than "ones borrowed from books". In many cases younger voters vote "better" (at least according to my views). The Brexit vote, or US presidential election, for example, where older voters appeared to win the vote whilst trusting to their emotional experiences rather than the evidence. They certainly seemed less well informed for the most part.
There's plenty of garbage to be learned either from books or from personal experience. I'm not trying to be flippant.
As you pointed out, we all have our biases. If I were raised racist, I'd try to confirm those biases in my personal experiences. Or perhaps some kind of personal experience would shatter my biases. I could be on the lookout for things I hear on talk radio, or I could make unexpected friends. Equally, I could get my sense of morals from reading Ayn Rand, Nietzsche, St. Augustine, or the Dhammapada. I've known people who have learned atrocious or wonderful things from books, and I've known people who have invented fantastic or horrifying personal philosophies. I don't think I've uncovered any kind of pattern as to why some people think one way and others another.
The funny thing here is that in this discussion, we're using our personal experiences (anecdotes and armchair speculation) to try and analyze it.
My personal contribution is that older people have more property, and that whatever material they use for their political views (be it books or experiences) will mostly be used to support their own goals for enjoying that property. The young folks want to get property, so they vote for that instead. That doesn't explain much, but it does partly explain why younger citizens tend to be more liberal.
Polarizing question, but I wonder how many people who hold up an Ayn Rand book as a marker for their views have actually read it, and how much they read otherwise.
I think it's very rare for people who do read a lot, and read varied to not be "better" off than not reading.
Like most I was an idealist in youth, and while I have become more pragmatic, I still try to stoke that fire. I however learned in my 20s to never fear the opposition/unknown, and reading more and challenging views is never dangerous. Sometimes it challenges you to rethink your stance, sometimes it's exposed as ridiculous.
My point is that I think it's really hard to "learn garbage" from reading a lot.
Consider my viewpoint as one in opposition to your own.
My personal experience—I've met people who are well read but don't read well, if you know what I mean. People who read Nietzcshe and think that they can get by with less sleep because they're übermensch. Yes, I've actually met two people who have come to that particular conclusion. I imagine that they eventually grew out of it, but was it reading, specifically that caused this, or just the general experience of life (of which reading is one part)?
If your attitude is that you are reading to challenge yourself with views that you disagree with, then you are going to find it easier to expand your mind. But that's not why everyone reads, not everything you read will expand your mind, and that kind of attitude will allow you to expand your mind in many other ways as well (besides reading).
I'm also not sold on the idea that youth are idealists in some kind of ideological sense. I feel that it comes across that way, but only because as I get older, I am a better judge of how I can actually change the world, and I might as well devote my resources to where I can make the biggest difference. In other words, we may become more or less idealist as we get older, but being pragmatic is literally a skill that requires experience to develop.
And if you doubt that you are still idealistic, remember that you are the one arguing that it's hard to "learn garbage" from reading—perhaps an ideological standpoint, from my perspective ;-)
I'll gladly consider your viewpoint in opposition to mine, because it would mean that I grew from it, since I agree with a lot of what you're saying as I'm reading it ;)
I suppose I can't know how other people are affected by what and how much they read other than from my own experience and empathic hypotheticals.
Is it a question of the much talked about view of fixed/growth mindsets?
I knew I knew everything at 17, and obviously I was wrong. I grow less knowledgable by the year, while reading more. I'm not saying anything profound here that hasn't been said by Lao Tsu, Einstein, Aristotle, Emerson, etc.
Are you suggesting that this is not universal truth but merely true for those eager to learn? I suppose I could surrender that merely picking up a book you on the offset disagree with requires a will to be challenged.
And once again, I'm less certain of something than I was going in. Time to rebuild my world view. Thanks.
I'd like to think that the ideals/principles of youth and old are the same, except that the old have been patched over the years for real world vulnerabilities.
OP here. What a coincidence, it's precisely Ayn Rand I'm talking about, and I've read every book of hers except For the New Intellectual (by the time I got around to it, I had thankfully recovered). I even read most of Nathaniel Brandon. Please, don't try this.
Ayn Rand has some great ideas, but they make certain assumptions about human nature that are quite simply not true (which is the same problem with capitalism).
I avoided her for a long time, based on her negative reputation, then finally started reading her books a couple of years ago and was blown away. She's much, much deeper than I'd been led to believe.
I always make a point to reply whenever I see her mentioned on HN, because her philosophy helped me out of a very messy series of life crises, and I hope someone else struggling to figure things out sees my comment and is inspired to take a look.
If you're talking about a model for how an individual can cultivate a certain attitude pursue achievement and productivity, I'd agree it's a pretty decent one.
But as for how the characters behaved and reacted to each other, it seemed too robot-like and lacking empathy that The Fountainhead, for example, literally had me tossing the book across the room multiple times.
"Real people don't act like that!" I remembered saying. And that was in high school, when I was Libertarian. I still finished the book though.
If someone wants to check her out, I think Anthem is the one to read. You get all of her ideas, pretty much, with the bonus of being able to get through it in a few hours. Her other books are way too long-winded. The Fountainhead, despite being infuriating and having some excessive diatribes, I did think was a good book overall.
Personally, of all the high school reading I did, Walden had a much more lasting effect on me than Ayn Rand did.
Fundamentally, I think Objectivism is true, i.e., it is correct on all the essential points. Ayn Rand is a lot deeper than people give her credit for -- much, much deeper than the strawman "capitalism = good, socialism = bad". What sold me was her non-fiction writings on consciousness and epistemology (theory of knowledge).
Yes, and young people have little property and therefore don't have that much to lose from change. Old people are conservative because they have property - the less change the better.
I'm 34 and I seem to reinvent myself drastically every 7 years or so, and this includes politics.
My views on life the universe and everything stem both from direct experience and books - lots and lots of books.
At 15 I was apolitical, and a default conservative, but while I would merrily assign myself these labels my actions spoke very differently. At 22 I was a libertarian/objectivist zealot, and still an authoritarian, just a different source of authority. By 26 I had moved to classical liberalism with leftist leanings - and had become vehemently and vocally antiauthoritarian in a political rather than "fuck you, dad" manner. At this point I just sit on the sidelines and laugh at the insane symbol manipulation that seems to be the primary occupation of humans.
The thing is, while my views and degrees of misanthropy and cynicism have ebbed and flowed over the years, a constant thread can be traced back throughout - a nascent distrust of authority which grew into a rejection of all authority - and a pattern of thinking that makes people look at me cock-eyed, as I think and say things which others consider irregular. Always have.
The only thing that has changed is that I've continued to load more and more information into the system, which has given me more to work with, more precise identifiers, a more nuanced understanding of ape-men and their activities.
So - the crux is that while I rebrand myself every seven years or so, the only thing that's actually changing is the labels, the assignation - I still identify strongly with eleven year old me - although I do now prefer Trek to Wars.
I have noted too that I have a 7 year cycle. Work objectives, social circles and wildly altering life events(illness & injury) have altered my future objectives every 7 or so. My idealistic outlook has been eroded through experience and my 45yo values are almost 180° from what young & hungry me thought was most important(or, programmed through combo of pop media, peer pressure & raging hormones). The one thing that hasn't changed is my politics: PoliSci's pigeon-holing me into one club or the other never felt right and regardless which candidates win, their un/semi/fully-fulfilled promises reveal their true direct impact upon my life(approaching 0%). Life keeps progressing despite the distracting circus show's results for better & worse.
I wish 11yo me had discovered Clarke & Sagan before Gene & George, but as they say: that's life.
Regarding labels, whether one believes humans are innately good or evil I have found more telling than the more popular labels people like to assign to themselves.
That is, I think people seek pleasurable feelings through altruistic acts. Sometimes the feelings come from the act itself, of having done a good thing. More usually, it comes from other people, whether it's the gratitude of those to whom the thing has been done, or the admiration of those who observed the act, or - probably the most dubious - from feeling morally superior to other people.
Feeling morally superior can lead to moral self-licencing, whereupon you can feel free to act more selfishly or immorally because of a previous morally virtuous or selfless / altruistic act.
My axis for judgement would be closer to fair vs unfair, from a Rawlsian veil of ignorance perspective, which lends the notion of fairness a wider social dimension rather than restricting it to the fairness of individual acts, and enables more consequentialist reasoning for the outcomes of universal rules, rather than deontological reasoning.
I think that's a very limited, not to mention deeply cynical, viewpoint.
You're discounting the possibility that someone may perform an altruistic act for logical reasons - for example, because they have calculated the cost of the act they are performing is small to them but of great benefit to the other person, or have decided from a dispassionate perspective that living in a better world is better for everyone and a good reason to perform altruistic acts occasionally.
Even if we only consider altruistic acts that are performed because of emotion, I think it is far more common for acts to be performed to avoid negative emotions such as guilt or empathetic pain.
I actually agre with you but wasn't going to go there - everything is fundamentally a selfish act, as self gratification is the motivator. Even apparently selfless acts are selfishly motivated - if irrationally so - if I jump in front of this bullet I'll be a hero.
Fair vs unfair works too, and to peel back Kant's rehash of the golden rule, "do as you would be done by" appears to still be the best maxim we have come up with.
So in your opinion, there was a "right" choice to make, and a wrong choice? Why let people vote, then? The fact that a group I'll name "L." thinks they're plain right and the others are plain wrong worries me at the highest point.
> trusting the evidence
Can't you just absorb that older people voted rationally, based on evidence and distinct life choices that aren't necessarily stupid? In another world where their vote would match your vision of "right", you'd praise the elderly for having more 70 more years of experience, saluting their knowledge, etc. In the present situation, the "L." group presents older people as too senile to make "the right choice". You belong to this L. group.
One point which tips the votes is the "L." group is so dictatorial about their vision of right, and that makes a huge group tip for the alternative, the Trump/Brexit vote. The L group generally uses the "right-vs-wrong" attitude, like you just did, but also weighs the supposedly "correct" vote with plenty of dubious things: If you vote Remain in the brexit, you also vote for a huge increase in London's size which is against countryside's interest – Maybe people don't want that? Maybe a huge London also increases inequalities? If you vote Democrats you also vote for plenty of leftish/liberal laws which aren't right at all (including bribes and murders at the highest level of the government, including plain war and suffering of kids in the Middle-East using blind drones and pure horror, including the militarization of US police). Neither the Democrats nor the Remain planned to do things that convinced most of the population.
Definitely, there wasn't a right and wrong choice in Brexit and Trump. There's just a democratic choice, and people like you, at the end of the year, who still are in denial that their opponent might have a rational reasoning. Which is exactly the lack of listening that is killing our democracies. The ball is on your side.
> So in your opinion, there was a "right" choice to make, and a wrong choice? Why let people vote, then?
Of course in my opinion there was a right and a wrong choice. If I didn't think that, I wouldn't have an opinion, would I? The "better" was in quotes because I appreciate that it is subjective. I can't say with absolute certainty that one option is better than another because I don't have perfect information.
We prefer democracy because in general it leads to far better outcomes in general than the alternatives that have been tried. That doesn't mean I don't think we often vote badly in individual votes.
> Can't you just absorb that older people voted rationally, based on evidence and distinct life choices that aren't necessarily stupid?
No, I cannot. No one votes entirely rationally, and I certainly include myself. People tend to vote according to their emotions, and because of a range of cognitive biases. A case in point:
> One point which tips the votes is the "L." group is so dictatorial about their vision of right, and that makes a huge group tip for the alternative, the Trump/Brexit vote.
Casting a vote because you are annoyed at your political opponents being confident about their views makes no sense logically. This is an emotional reaction rather than a sober assessment of what is best for yourself, your country and the world. Surely the questions of jobs, climate change, scientific research, health and so on are vastly more important than punishing a certain group's mindset?
I feel that the Trump/Brexit campaigns won because they were far better at manipulating these kind of reactions than because they presented better arguments. I think any objective assessment of the respective campaigns would conclude they or their supporters spread more misinformation. That doesn't mean they were with certainty the wrong choice, just that I don't like how we got there.
> Which is exactly the lack of listening that is killing our democracies.
I have the opposite opinion. The increasing emphasis on making decisions by emotion as in "our opponents aren't listening to us enough" is doing more harm to democracy. Less reliance on personal experience and more reliance on logical argument and facts please.
What I find funny is that I only ever see this argument:
"Why can't both be right?"
Because if there is a right and a wrong, it is a binary.
What I never hear is an actual argument or fact based reasoning as to why that group (which I'll call R. or A.R.) is right. It's always "My opinion is worth just as much as your facts".
Well, if someone has an opinion about the right choice on an issue, it sure makes a lot of sense to judge the rightness of voters based whether they vote that way. There's basically no other way to do it, right?
Like.. no one votes for something they don't think is right. The whole point is a difference of opinion about what right is.
Sample size = 1? Almost sounds like younger you was better off
Personal experience is a pretty terrible way to form political opinions, it leads to stuff like overestimating the rate of crime, the cost of terror etc.
> Personal experience is a pretty terrible way to form political opinions, it leads to stuff like overestimating the rate of crime, the cost of terror etc.
Isn't it the other way around? Few have significant personal experiences with crime or terrorism so it is only when they read about it that they start thinking that it is a big issues.
> Personal experience is a pretty terrible way to form political opinions
..and the very belief that personal experience is worth more than theory and data. In normal human beings personal experience is related to the amygdala which is related to emotions.
We study a great deal in our youth. Sure, we don't all go to uni or college. Do we stop learning after that? Not completely, but we peak at age 35. After that we still get more experienced. Smarter? Generally, not so much.
The senior adults and elder are voting based on their experience, and this clouds their judgement. While it is partly by choice (look at how intelligent Noam Chomsky for example still is), it is also inevitable.
What we see now is what I suspect the onset of the babyboom generation. Once they've passed away we will see more balance between the two camps.
Perhaps a single verified data point is better than a series of hypotheses? Because most, but not all books about politics, are based on hypotheses and not accurate data.
Also, if everyone voted personal opinion, shouldn't the voting process average everything out, rather than the kind of wild media-driven opinion surges/swings we observe today? (Not being rhetorical, I'm actually asking if that's a possibility)
And your twenty year old self may not trust your opinions as a 37 year old. Is either 'right'? Does having more experience make you better at making decisions or does it make you more conservative, meaning you are less likely to take risks, so you miss out on opportunities for change?
I would like to argue that voting rights are more about accountability than policy. Who cares who the "best" leader is - free society requires leaders who owe it to citizens.
I think this is spot on. I think this is the best explanation of why more democratic systems tend to work so much better for governing large groups than other systems. It's not that large groups make good decisions, it's that the more accountable politicians are, the better they tend to govern.
This is why I think direct democracy isn't a good idea. I suspect it would be far better to work on reducing corruption and increasing accountability of our representatives than to have people vote on policy directly.
And I would argue that voting for representatives is far inferior to polling. It's susceptible to gerrymandering, poor turnout and much more.
But if you're going to vote for representatives and Presidents, at least use the Approval vote. The system used in every state except Maine suffers from spoiler effects, and devolves into a self perpetuating two party system that polarizes the population into two camps that hate each other for things that no one person can really change by voting, and deride third parties as a "waste of a vote". Sound familiar?
That's why I don't want to participate in this voting system.
Polling is far more opaque and highly susceptible to corruption. Any pollster worth his or her salt can get exactly the outcome desired by tweaking the protocol and consumers of the poll results are none the wiser.
I'd almost go so far as to say that polls are garbage and shouldn't even exist, let alone replace voting, but that may be going too far.
If polls are garbage then voting is even more garbage. At least polling can use statistical sampling to esimate the true result. For the expense of elections and polling and paying for all the campaigns and media and hoopla you could have incredible amount of polling, from many organizations, and figure out what people actualy want.
As it is, no matter how many people want eg certain gun control regulations, or not to go to war with a country, it will never happen due to special interests.
It is far harder to fool all the people all the time than to buy off and control some of the people all the time.
Democracy is the form of government that is free of bloody revolutions.
I'm not even sure it has any other qualities. But this one is already enough to make it better than anything else we have around.
Democracy will lead to accountability only to the extent that your "collective mind" consider it worth fighting for. If it doesn't you'll get no accountability at all.
> The youngest version of myself that I would now trust with any sort of policy making is my 32 year old self...
This is an interesting subject matter though: We change as time goes on, but is that change correct?
Eg, i don't think my current self and my experiences have somehow made me inherently more correct than my younger self. I'm vastly different, but it seems likely that we are so quick to judge our younger selves because we're always in a state of feeling right. Whether we're 20, 30, or 60 - we're always feeling we are right, and our old selves are wrong.
While that seems logical, doesn't that also mean we're frequently/often/always wrong in the eyes of a future self? How can we be so sure to be so much better than our 20yr-self at 30, when at 40 we'll be saying the same thing about our 30yr-self.
There is no empirical right or wrong for most things like politics though, which only go to confuse the matter.. but it's interesting nonetheless, imo. (My current self is 32 btw, and my 20 self could use some advice)
"All the strong political opinions I had as a twenty year old came from books. Now, as a 37 year old, most of it comes from personal experience"
This could just as easily be spun as a negative. I.e. Anecdotal evidence & self-interest driven opinions vs dispassionate analysis based on systematically obtained data.
I feel the same. And I often wonder if the 60 year old versions of ourselves will feel much the same about the crazy, misguided 37 year old fools they remember once being.
Socialism and associated social justice criteria vs capitalism and profit criteria.
My first job was at a company with socialist background and the same management criteria lingering on (company was privatized by workers who were majority owners after the communist system). It's just like politics on a smaller scale - you see people abuse the system all over the place and the social criteria discourages actual productivity - it's very off putting if you actually want to achieve something and eventually it spiraled down to shit and got sold off.
These days I think as much as money incentives can be perverted at least they have a scenario in which they work (measuring value as close to objective as you can get) - the alternative (determining value trough politics) is much worse.
I made the mistake of reading Ayn Rand as a teenager, and ended up being pro-capitalist, (and in American terms, conservative) for a decade. I've since become a lot more liberal and socialist.
Imagine if we followed the numbers, the empirical evidence, like insurance companies do. In this case the legal age would be raised from 18 to 25. This wouldn't make any real difference to politics because young people don't vote. It would be huge to consumer spending. Consider the following:
* Age to get a credit card, file a DBA, open a bank account, or get an apartment.
* Age to purchase tobacco and pornography (yes yes, I suspect most people get their porn for free online regardless of age now).
* FBI already refuses to hire field agents below the age of 24.
* You could not be tried as an adult in criminal court until age 25. The number of adult violent offenders in prison might decrease as much as 70%.
* You cannot get married until the age of adulthood. I suspect states would compromise on this one and allow permissible parental consent as young people will still continue to have children.
---
My personal opinions are that people would be much better prepared for life, there would be fewer lost souls to the criminal justice system, and the consumer debt industry would be largely eliminated from all but proverty classes (like the payday loan vultures).
Changing the legal age in this manner would have had serious negative effects on my life. Frankly this idea horrifies me.
Let me explain:
-A job I had in highschool enabled me to buy my own car and pay for insurance at 17 (added as a driver to my parents plan of course).
-I got my first credit card at 18 when I went to college, I have never carried a balance on it month to month (I'm now 26)
-The last time I lived with my parents was the summer after my freshmen year in college
-I graduated with an engineering degree at the age of 21
-I've had a steady fulfilling engineering job for 4.5 years since graduation
-I met my current wife freshmen year of college and we got married a year after graduation
-In 2014 I bought a house based purely of my personal credit history and employment status
-I have voted in every presidential election despite not being actively involved in politics
I'm sure I fall well outside the typical statistics for someone of my age, and I've been very lucky so far. Lots of my coworkers are in a similar situation as me, but there's also lots of people in the opposite situation.
Do you see why this horrifies me? Do you think these ideas would be positive for the young adults that have found success in life?
Agreed, let's not infantilize the people who can function as adults just to coddle those who can't!
I moved out of my parents house at age 17. Although they are good parents, responsible people, and I love them, I was miserable and suicidal when I lived with them. I wasn't able to learn how to be happy and social until I moved out on my own, to a city where there were more people like me, and gained some independence. I've never had any debt or trouble paying bills, I've voted in every election as well. I got all my binge drinking out of my system when I was 19. If I had been forced to remain under my parents control until age 25 (just 2 years ago!) I would have been miserable, resentful and angry about it. It would definitely have destroyed my relationship with my parents.
I came here to say the exact same thing. I'm pretty much following the same timeline as you where I'm 23 at the moment. I couldn't wait to take on responsibilities of my own. Bills, rent, everything.
I've always wondered if these stats are partially affected by the 'legal age' itself. If it were changed would the age groups for risky drivers, high probability of crime and debt shift with it?
Nothing he said contradicts the data. What he showed was what you miss when you treat a distribution as if it were a single data point.
A younger person is more likely to be irresponsible than an older person, but that is just an average. There are many young people who are responsible, and to disregard the impact of such a policy would have on them would be disregarding important data.
More to the point, data doesn't make decisions. It gives you the ability to make positive statements, i.e. how the world is or what the result of some policy would be. Normative statements, i.e. how the world should be or what should the goal of our policy be, depend on your personal subjective values. Like, how much you value freedom vs prosperity vs safety, etc.
I feel like only the most naive statistician would make any assumptions based solely on averages so it's kind of meaningless to point that out. The comment just seemed reactionary to me and was mostly anecdotal.
1) Our military is largely composed of 18-24 year olds. We would be sending legal children to war.
2) The purpose of democratic voting is not to decide policy, it is to give legitimacy to policy decisions. When you disenfranchise a large number of people who believe themselves capable of decision-making, and who tend to disagree with the majority opinion, you risk revolts.
Note in particular the disastrous consequences of the product of these two issues.
The article mentions that logical thinking, such as that used when voting for political candidates, is fully developed by 16. Therefore, it would be reasonable to lower the age of citizenship to the age of 16, citizenship being the right to vote and the right to join the armed forces. The author of this article and the scientist who published this research share the same conclusion.
It is emotional processing that goes undeveloped until the late 20's.
>It is emotional processing that goes undeveloped until the late 20's
Emotion tends to trump cold hard logic -- especially in the young. Actually, hell, not just the young! I'm almost 30 and can't do any meaningful thinking if I'm emotionally upset about something.
I'm just saying, I'm not sure how much value I'd place on the logic of a 16 year old in something as emotionally charged as politics.
> I'm not sure how much value I'd place on the logic of a 16 year old in something as emotionally charged as politics.
I think the overtly emotional nature of politics is exactly why it doesn't matter if you allow 16 year olds to participate. It's such an extreme that virtually all participants are affected, regardless of how much control they have over their emotions.
I wonder if lowering the voting age would shift the "young people don't vote" window lower, or if it wouldn't change at all because it's not that young people don't vote as much as it is that as you grow older you become more invested in your lifestyle and are therefore more likely to vote to protect/preserve/enhance/whatever it.
Emotion is how we process reality. Just because we spend a lot of time with computers that only understand logic doesn't mean that that works for real life.
The problem is lack of information, not emotion. Politics is immensely complicated and hard to understand without the right heuristics, and, from what I've seen, age doesn't help here much at all. People just tend to believe whatever most in their bucket believe regardless of age or even education. Logic doesn't seem to do squat, which is actually not surprising if you think about it.
> The article mentions that logical thinking, such as that used when voting for political candidates, is fully developed by 16.
The idea that logical thinking predominates in voting for political candidates (even for people much older than 16) is distinctly at odds with reality; voting is very often driven by emotion and creating emotionally arousing appeals is a central element of political campaigning.
Responsible voting requires well-developed capacity for logical thinking and emotional maturity * and* the ability to integrate logic and emotion. The article describes 16 year olds as adult in the first of these areas, but not the other two. (In fact, it notes that people, in general, aren't adult in regard to dealing with emotionally arousing circumstances well into their twenties.)
Which isn't to argue against the idea of expanding the franchise to 16 year olds, but that's more because of the social benefits of their early engagement outweigh the costs of their potentially immature use of the frnachise than because they are fully mature in the respects relevant to voting (which, incidentally, is also true, IMO, of allowing 18 year olds to vote.)
This happens anyways. I joined the US Army at age 17. I think your second point is reactionary to the extreme. It would be more valid if young people participated (actually by voting and/or petitioning the government) instead of just bitching about it on social media. That said young people can revolt just the same regardless of voting age.
I thought there was some caveat like you can join but you can't be sent off to combat until 18?
And his point was that if your army is composed of people who aren't allowed to vote you are setting yourself up for higher risk.
When you join the armed forces they don't just stick a gun in your hand and fly to you Iraq, the training you receive will bring you to 18 before you are deployed.
This presupposes that the brain development between 18 and 25 would still happen if 18-25 was still childhood. Do we have reason to believe that people can mature fully before being allowed to make decisions, that it's 100% about time and 0% about practice?
Note, debt is a huge problem for people don't have earning power yet. If 25 is the new 18, we should expect 25-year-olds to have the same financial instability as current 18-year-olds as they will be on similarly shaky ground in the workforce.
And a lot of 18-25 year olds would be prohibited from living independently. This would be terrible, for example, for people in abusive households. And it would merely suck horribly for anyone who simply chafes at not being treated like a person.
I don't see how that would make any difference. Typically many 18 year old require a co-signer or sponsor to get an apartment on their own. If you are in an abusive household call the authorities (you can do this at any age).
In this case the legal age would be raised from 18 to 25.
Isn't this the opposite of the conclusion that one of the scientists interviewed came to?
Dr. Steinberg agreed with Dr. Somerville that the maturing of the brain was proving to be a long, complicated process without obvious milestones. Nevertheless, he thinks recent studies hold some important lessons for policy makers.
He has proposed, for example, that the voting age be lowered to 16. “Sixteen-year-olds are just as good at logical reasoning as older people are,” Dr. Steinberg said.
Some sixteen-year olds are able to vote in some municipalities, for what it's worth. I would personally support having different ages for different things instead of a catch-all age of 18 for adulthood.
I think there's a reason we do not just blindly follow the numbers. They can lie just as much, sometimes more. I'm a bit alarmed that this comment is upvoted so highly, given the criticisms of fMRI studies just below. Haven't we learned something from all the replicability issues?
If you want people to be prepared for life, you need to prepare them for life. This life is hard to live, and we mostly just throw people to the wolves and act surprised when they get eaten. Waiting extra years will not magically impart them with missing wisdom, and all the people who end up in the criminal justice system likely have poor families and will only be worse off having to spend even more time with them.
I would, to the contrary, would like to see more means for independence. I'm still not sure why parents need to subsidize everything.
This might be an edge case but it's worth bringing up that this would just delay the amount of time before kids in a myriad of bad situations at home can escape. There are kids in situations where abuse is difficult to prove and the longer they're near them the harder it can be for the child to leave or remove their harmful influence. A parent with narcissistic personality disorder for example.
Turns out I was wrong. Youngsters aren't 6% of the vote, but closer to about 9%. Still tiny though. The data indicates people who are registered voters are about twice as likely to become a voter after the age of 25.
If you mean table 3, make sure you read the following associated quoted part:
"This statistic is affected by two factors: youth turnout and the age structure of the whole population. (Youth share could rise, for example, if turnout remained constant but
the population became younger.)"
Also, my quoted data is from 18-29, and approx 40-51%. If 18-24 is only 6-9% then the group from 24-29 is either far smaller, or is having some really insane turnout of more than 71%.
> The OP was engaging in discussion, not seriously advocating a course of action.
This is an important distinction to make, but it's not a black-and-white one. And while OP didn't literally say "I think we should take rights from 18-24 year olds", they do seem to be arguing in that direction.
> When you're older, you won't take offense so easily.
> You cannot get married until the age of adulthood. I suspect states would compromise on this one and allow permissible parental consent as young people will still continue to have children.
Course you can. The US doesn't have a monopoly on marriage.
Scotland has historically had more lax requirements for marriage than England (and still to this day the age of unconditional age of marriage is 16 in Scotland but 18 in England). So English couples who couldn't get their parents' permission just went to Gretna Green past the Scottish border to get married.
A significant number of people never become truly responsible adults. Even just narrowing it down to political engagement, lots of voters are poorly informed about the issues they vote on.
Even if you disenfranchise young people there will be countless stupid, ignorant and hateful people voting. Even worse, they'll mostly have the biases of old people because you'll have entirely removed the opposing biases of young people.
Finally, on a personal note, I was working and paying taxes from the age of 16. No taxation without representation.
You forget that the empirical evidence is influenced by our cultural norms (such as children not leaving home until 18). If you (further) shelter/protect/structure young twenty-somethings, they'll grow up even slower, and fifty years hence a poster like you will be suggesting we raise the age of adulthood from 25 to 30.
Perhaps we should help kids grow up faster by giving them more experiences and responsibilities.
As long as there was a standardized, transparent way to emancipate yourself and prove your readiness before that age, I'd support your proposal. In fact, why not get rid of the "automatic adulthood at given age" system at all so that everyone could attain adulthood only through the emancipation process?
I have no idea what that means. Statistically young people don't vote. I think its close to around 6% of 18-24 year olds vote in presidential elections with a statistically insignificant amount voting in other elections.
I don't know where you got those numbers from. The lowest I can find is in the 30% range for a presidential election. It's a bit disingenuous to write that off completely.
Turns out I was wrong. Youngsters aren't 6% of the vote, but closer to about 9%. Still tiny though. The data indicates people who are registered voters are about twice as likely to become a voter after the age of 25.
You are confused about the difference between percentage of youngsters who vote, which is 40%, and the percentage of the total vote that are youngsters, which is 9%. But 18-24 is probably only 10% of the voting population.
> This wouldn't make any real difference to politics because young people don't vote
What can young people change in the midterm future anyway? The population is becoming more and more a inverted pyramid where the old people are the majority and the young people are the minority.
A voting system which adjusts the voting power based on the age would be interesting. If old people are a minoity the get more voting power until they are equal and vice versa. I believe with something like that the brexit vote would not have happened.
35% over 50. Is that an inverted pyramid? Seems like a regular pyramid. I think voting demographics indeed has to be explained by "young people don't vote".
couldn't people offending at a higher rate between 18-25 compare to beyond 25 be a kind of survival bias thing. like if you are more likely to commit a crime then you are more likely to be in jail >25 than 18-25.
> Age to purchase tobacco and pornography (yes yes, I suspect most people get their porn for free online regardless of age now).
You didn't include alcohol which is already at the age of 21 in USA, but not everywhere else in the world (in my country, it is 18). Yet driving, is age 16 in USA, 18 here as well. My point is that the world is bigger than just a few countries, with different age limits. We should attempt to study the pros and cons of each before drawing to conclusions.
Also, the fact something (e.g. alcohol) is illegal to purchase doesn't mean it cannot be obtained. With driving a car that is going to be more difficult because the car is licensed to a person, and learning driving via obtaining driver's license is important.
On the longer term, driving a car becomes irrelevant though, but I suspect the same is true for tobacco.
You also didn't mention that other hot subject, firearms.
> This wouldn't make any real difference to politics because young people don't vote.
Really? Do you have data to back this up?
I know that, from personal experience, I voted as soon as I became 18.
> open a bank account
I think I was able to open a bank account at age 12. Not that there was a whole lot on it. That's OK, it allows youth to learn how financials work and managing money. What is not OK is allowing youth to get in debt.
The only loans a student (read: 18+) is able to get is via the government, for studies, and they gotta be paid back. I don't see a problem with that system, in the sense that is must be abolished.
I think it is great to have young people work. It teaches them what they want, and not want to do. It stimulates them to start a study, put their heart and soul in it, and finish it. Because who wants to pluck berries for the rest of their life? Only those who never done it before.
> * You could not be tried as an adult in criminal court until age 25. The number of adult violent offenders in prison might decrease as much as 70%.
How are you going to hold those of age below 25 accountable? The justice system exists to find balance between 'damage received', and 'damage done'. If those who cause damage are not going to be held accountable in any way then that does not seem justifiable to me.
However I would agree that a young person should receive, generally, less penalty than an older one. We got a reasonable system for that already: we punishing recidivists more heavy.
My opinion on the whole matter: the term young adult exists for a reason. Part of puberty and being a teen is getting lose from the stigma and lack of responsibilities associated with being a child. We need to let our children taste how it is to be an adult and all of the above are part of exposure. If we treat young adult as if they're children, they are going to remain children and will get a revelation when they reach adult age (in your PoV that should be 25).
> We should attempt to study the pros and cons of each before drawing to conclusions.
Already done. This has been studies exhaustively by the insurance industry and the criminal justice system. The age (of perpetrator) at which adult violent crimes most commonly occur is 18, which is the age of adulthood in most of the US. Secondly, it is 19. Then 20 and so forth up till the age of 24 after which there is no discernible pattern of violence to age. This pattern is largely attributed to the missing link between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system of the brain.
I don't have any problem with alcohol and firearm sales being pushed to 25. If you want to shoot earlier then get private land outside a city, join a police department, join the military, or have a parent or guardian as a co-signer.
> Really? Do you have data to back this up?
Yeah, I think something like 6% of eligible voters aged 18-24 actually vote in presidential elections with a statistically insignificant amount of those voters voting in other elections.
> How are you going to hold those of age below 25 accountable?
Separate the 18-24 population into senior juveniles. Too old to be incarcerated with the violent children and too young to be bonded with the career criminals. Violent offenders absolutely should do time, but if they aren't adults should also have the opportunity to expunge their criminal record so as to allow them to obtain real jobs later.
> I don't have any problem with alcohol and firearm sales being pushed to 25. If you want to shoot earlier then get private land outside a city, join a police department, join the military, or have a parent or guardian as a co-signer.
I'm baffled at how at one side you argue the legal age should be raised, while you suggest youth should join the military or the police. Jobs which include firearms, and a high sense of responsibility. At the same time, you want to remove accountability from said youth? If you take away so many responsibilities from youth, why keep police/military around for them?
I really don't believe 6% (or, for that matter 9% (50% more)) of eligible voters ages 18-24 in my country vote. Perhaps the problem is local or US specific. Also, we don't know the why. I would like to see the US data cross referenced with data from other countries.
I also read that heroin has overtaken gun shootings in cause of dead. Heroin, an illegal drug. We can make services illegal if they require a government license, but goods? Difficult to make illegal.
> Separate the 18-24 population into senior juveniles. Too old to be incarcerated with the violent children and too young to be bonded with the career criminals. Violent offenders absolutely should do time, but if they aren't adults should also have the opportunity to expunge their criminal record so as to allow them to obtain real jobs later.
An interesting point, but nonetheless if you put criminals together you beget criminals. Instead, all the progressive research I've seen is that investing in people integrating in society has a much lower chance to stop recidivism. Although in the US there's little to no interest in such because the US profits from people incarcerated via cheap/free labour.
> At the same time, you want to remove accountability from said youth? If you take away so many responsibilities from youth, why keep police/military around for them?
Accountability is not an earned quality. Accountability is an appointed quality. By raising the age of adulthood you are deferring the age of accountability (in the realm of individual responsibility) to a later age when the individual is better prepared and perhaps more responsible.
As far police and military individual responsibility is less a consideration because you are on a job with extensive training and constant supervision. Additionally, people in these job classes are held to higher legal standards and are punished more harshly for violations of the public trust.
> I would like to see the US data cross referenced with data from other countries.
I suspect a lower percentage of the population in the US votes compared to other equally democratic nations for all age demographics.
> Instead, all the progressive research I've seen
I really think this is more a separate conversation, but certainly there are many various huge opportunities for improvement in how the US manages its criminal population.
> Accountability is not an earned quality. Accountability is an appointed quality. By raising the age of adulthood you are deferring the age of accountability (in the realm of individual responsibility) to a later age when the individual is better prepared and perhaps more responsible.
Yes, if accountability must be earned we can bind the term adult to someone who finished school system, and who is working. Then we can bind, say, the license to buy alcohol to these factors. If someone loses their job, they lose the ability to buy alcohol. And not merely alcohol. I think we can much further than merely that. The problem is that once we go down the road of it being earned, we are not non-discriminatory enough for that, since we're after all human.
My point is that with your system we have people who are almost adult, almost accountable, yet they're 0% of either. Then boom 25 and suddenly they gotta cope with all that because research on the prefrontal cortex. But that is also the time until you can still change things like personality issues. I'd argue it is better to find a middle road. Give young adults trial runs to prove their responsibility, and give them positive feedback while not ignoring the negative. The role is partly given to parents, and parents are already doing this. Why should we move it all completely to 25 y.o.? Isn't the inexperience going to backfire?
> As far police and military individual responsibility is less a consideration because you are on a job with extensive training and constant supervision. Additionally, people in these job classes are held to higher legal standards and are punished more harshly for violations of the public trust.
I don't believe the chance they get caught is high enough. You say "extensive training and constant supervision" extensive training, yes, I agree; but the same is true for a driver's license. In Germany, a theory part of a drivers license is very, very difficult but the practical part is easy. In The Netherlands, it is the entire opposite.
The USA has not been held accountable for war crimes it committed in Vietnam or Iraq (this problem is not limited to the USA though). Police are getting away with racism, or harassment. Again, not only in the USA, all over the world.
If I were to need help from the police, I'd rather get an older guy than a young one. Why? He's more experienced. Only if it was computer crime would I not want someone >= 50 age because those people are generally terrible when it comes to anything IT related. There's a reason rookie and junior are called rookie and junior.
> I really think this is more a separate conversation
These studies are THE WORST. Your brain "changes" from 20 to 30. Does this change make it better? Is it even meaningful? No evidence is presented. Instead, we go on a detour into fMRI pseudoscience, which should properly be regarded as an extension of phrenology.
I would argue that the unsaid assumption of this article, that 30 year olds have superior judgement to 20 year olds, is debatable. Most people over 30 are risk-averse in the extreme, and will for example remain in a lousy career for their lives rather than take the risk of switching to a new track or moving to a new city.
Exactly, it's like saying that your heart isn't "mature" until you're in your 60s, because before that point the arteries around it are still hardening.
Edit: I dunno about your "people over 30 are risk averse" comment, though. My 30s started off with me quitting my well-paid job to burn all my savings starting a company.
Well, I'm 38 now and can say with confidence, that during most of my 20s I was a naive idiot that could not see the forest for the trees. So, in my case, yes, I do have superior judgement in my 30s.
My experience has been the same. I'm 33 and sometimes it seems that I was not even fully conscious in my 20s as I am now. Hopefully this trend will continue and someday I'll look back and think I was a naive idiot at 33. :P
Being more risk averse in your 30s? I'll beleive it. But why? Maybe not biological, hormonial, or genetic, but probably because in your 30s your parents are nearing retirement and need your help. You are starting a family and need stability. You are dating/marrying and need to be more dependable.
Why is this being downvoted? The parent poster complained about the article not presenting any evidence and then goes on to state that most people over 30 are extremely risk averse - without presenting any evidence.
Aren't we allowed to make any assumptions as to why that might be or if it is even true at all?
There are well-known problems with fMRI studies and particulary with how they are interpreted, see e.g. http://www.edvul.com/pdf/VulHarrisWinkielmanPashler-PPS-2009... (PDF) for a good critique. It's an intrinsically low-resolution tool as well, "there seems to be a lot of blood flow in vaguely this area of the brain", that is sold as if it were high tech and the only/best way to learn about human cognition.
I think it's important to point out that papers like that usually are pointing out statistical pitfalls (and often provide solutions), but they don't really cast doubt on fMRI as a tool for measuring brain function.
That's true and I don't think anybody disputes that fMRI is a good way to measure brain function, but (1) the improved statistical methods you talk about are often not adopted and (2) brain function is at a different level of abstraction than cognition and emotion, and making inferences about the latter based on the former is really hard, and would still be hard even with better statistics.
I became a total cynic toward the entire field of fMRI studies the day I found out that they found a dead salmon [0] could tell what emotions humans were depicting in photos.
This is a prime example of what I described. The problem is not with fMRI as a tool, but with what statistical modeling assumptions are made when making inferences. In this case, it's about statistical thresholds and how to avoid false positives--something that is a concern for any experiment, not just one that using an fMRI. To make this clear, here's the discussion:
"Can we conclude from this data that the salmon is engaging in the perspective-taking task? Certainly not. What we can determine is that random noise in the EPI timeseries may yield spurious results if multiple comparisons are not controlled for. Adaptive methods for controlling the FDR and FWER are excellent options and are widely available in all major fMRI analysis packages. We argue that relying on standard statistical thresholds (p < 0.001) and low minimum cluster sizes (k > 8) is an ineffective control for multiple comparisons. We further argue that the vast majority of fMRI studies should be utilizing multiple comparisons correction as standard practice in the computation of their statistics."
The authors don't cast doubt on the entire field of fMRI, just in what conclusions we can draw from certain statistic tests of high dimensional data in the presence of noise...
To this reader, the point of the article seemed to be that while we understand some aspects of brain development, there is a lot of work ahead. They link to a Neuron paper, which is closer to what I think you were expecting:
Or the realization that your 20s are not your best years, and that you still have up to 2x as many years ahead of you than behind you (or 5x the number of adult years). Risky behavior becomes less attractive when you understand the costs.
This is an interesting case study in how science interacts with sociology. Biologically, "fluid" intelligence (raw, general-purpose brain power) has an average peak in the late 20s:
So, for example, an average 10-year-old will have the same fluid intelligence as an average 80-year-old. (Not the same knowledge, of course, but the NYT is talking pure brain mechanics here.) However, in our society, children have low social status, and the elderly have high status. Hence, in a 10-year-old (or, per this article, even a 22-year-old just a few years from their lifetime peak), lower average intelligence is a sign of being "immature", "undeveloped", or "not an adult" (= a person competent to make their own life decisions). Meanwhile, no one would ever dream of (say) revoking the voting rights of anyone over 80, because their "brains don't work anymore". It's acceptable to take power away from the low status, but never the high status, so the scientific data is "interpreted" through that lens.
Humans are greatly affected by something called loss aversion[1], where we naturally see losing X as a much more extreme turn of events than gaining X. In this particular example, revoking the rights of the elderly (who've been able to vote for decades and decades) will seem much harsher than delaying the rights of the young.
He has proposed, for example, that the voting age be lowered to 16. “Sixteen-year-olds are just as good at logical reasoning as older people are,” Dr. Steinberg said.
As if logical reasoning were sufficient.
Your typical 16-year-old doesn't know a thing about history yet, or the real-world practical effects of political choices over time, or just how confounding crowd effects and herd instinct can be, or any of the other weird shit about human behavior and governance that defies the kind of logical reasoning that many 40-year-olds are capable of, let alone 16-year-olds.
A 500 GHz CPU with no data to work with is just an impressive lump of silicon.
> Your typical 16-year-old doesn't know a thing about history yet
Your average 40 year old doesn't know shit about history or politics either. They just feel like 20-25 years of adult life makes their opinions hard-earned and valid, even if they're just long-held beliefs.
When I was 16, and dinner table debate with my adult family members got heated, it always ended with the ad hominem "you'll understand when you're older and have worked for 25 years like me". Now I have (ish), and I still largely hold the same opinions. There's just not enough in that 20-25 year period that makes your average joe a special insightful snowflake.
It's just like every fucking parent who believes having a child, and muddling through parenthood, somehow makes their beliefs on internet censorship more rational.
> It's just like every fucking parent who believes having a child, and muddling through parenthood, somehow makes their beliefs on internet censorship more rational.
There's nothing special about parenthood in this regard - most people need some justification for their positions, personal experience is weak evidence, but it's better than no evidence at all
>Your typical 16-year-old doesn't know a thing about history yet, or the real-world practical effects of political choices over time, or just how confounding crowd effects and herd instinct can be, or any of the other weird shit about human behavior and governance
To be fair neither do the majority of adult voters. Politics is not quantum physics. There are plenty of intelligent 16 year olds out there who can understand the subtleties of political rhetoric and what's at stake.
Again, it's not like 16 year olds are compelled to vote. But for teens who are politically active and passionate about changing the world- I feel they need to have as much right to vote as some conspiracy-theory believing, infowar reading 60 year old.
After all, the effects of climate change are going to hit the youngest people the hardest and the baby boomers the least.
Germany has a drinking age of 16 (for beer and wine, spirits are 18+), a driving age of 18 (there is assisted driving at 17, where you need to have a parent/relative in the passenger seat until you turn 18), and voting age of 18 for federal elections (state and local elections vary, some states allow 16-yr olds to vote). It was lowered from 21 to 18 in 1970.
Different speed limits for different drivers could result in a "lower-class" driver being an obstruction for others. I don't think that would work out. That said, motorcycle licenses in the EU are separated into several classes with various maximum engine sizes (16+ for 11kW/15hp, 18+ for 35kW/47hp, and 20+ unlimited). They're separate tests.
> Different speed limits for different drivers could result in a "lower-class" driver being an obstruction for others. I don't think that would work out
what i'm really saying is that you should be able to test for a higher speed limit in the US. slow drivers will be slow regardless of what the limit is, and unsafe. i've driven on the autobahn in the no speed limit sections (primarily around munich) and there were still slower, unsafe morons occupying lanes they shouldn't have been. maybe tourists.
remember, in the US we have very low speed limits of ~100kph pretty much anywhere. i think it should be higher. people routinely drive 145kph here in southern california, enforcement of 100kph is arbitrary, which is not healtyh for respect for the law in general.
Well wouldn't better driver's ed solve most of those issues? A tiered license system seems like an overly complex solution.
I've driven in both Germany and the US (DC area, while on holiday), and found US driving a lot more relaxed. There are some odd rules here and there, but in general it was less unpleasant. Driving on the Autobahn can be quite stressful when you have a few people who want to drive really fast. Those kinds of speed differences reduce road capacity significantly. I'm not saying these people are necessarily unqualified to drive at such speeds, they may be the best drivers in the world, but everyone would reach their destination sooner if those folks were to stick to 130-140km/h.
That said, the posted speed limits in the US are definitely on the low side. The same roads would have a higher speed limit in Germany.
Adding a delay to the votes of the current young voters experiencing the latest form of reality by 60-16=44 years. It could make quite some difference w.r.t. the time gradient of policy..
I'm guessing you're thinking of America in which I would agree. In Sweden and other European countries though, we have a lot of more parties because our system is designed differently. In Sweden for example, we have 8 parties in Riksdagen (the place where the represented politicians vote for shit).
How that works is pretty simple. Here is the short version:
Instead of one party (like democrats or republicans) winning each state, we have 3 elections each election. 1 election for each municipality, one for each county and one nation wide. The percentage of each is seperate and decides how much deciding power (seats) you will get in each instance. Since Sweden is pretty much ruled by each municipality governed by the country laws (essentially made by Riksdagen) you can retain some power in a municipality or county even if you don't get that many seats in Riksdagen.
This creates some interesting scenarios, since I can vote for a tax-lowering party in my municipality but vote on a completely different party in the nation wide election. For example, I may want to reduce Swedens immigration and can thus vote for such party to Riksdagen that maybe have more socially goals for the society.
But in a sense, yes, as long as direct democracy isn't a thing your specific voice won't be heard.
I'd wager the second half of your wager is wrong. Very few people do any policy research, but they don't just do what they're told - instead they vote for the candidate they identify with most closely. In a representative democracy this is probably the most sensible strategy, as you're choosing the person who will do what you would do in any given situation
the voting age should be around 21 nowadays, that's probably closer to the average age people get a real job, move out of home and have to make some actual hard choices
I see it the other way around. I don't think "real world experience" should be a requirement to vote. I'd be in favor of anyone who passes a Turing test to get a vote. Since that's impractical I'll propose the age of 10 because that's a nice number. Additionally I'd like to give an additional proxy vote to parents for each child under 10. I'd be in favor of the additional proxy votes even if the actual voting age was never changed.
Yet, they pay tax and laws still apply to them. There are people in every age bracket who don't know a thing about history nor much of what you've listed.
I agree. There is also empathy, which is entirely orthogonal to logical reasoning. And there is evidence that 16-year-olds often don't have the same level of empathy as 25-year-olds.
