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Comment by sweetcherrypie | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, a teenager should have triple the voting power of a 40 year old

Perhaps, perhaps not. But I see little reason that somebody over 70 at the oldest should be allowed to vote at all (let alone do something even more serious like hold public office!)

If you and your friends were trying to decide what to do next weekend, would you give a vote to the friend who was going to be out of town that weekend? People should not have a say in matters they won't be around for. I'm not allowed to vote in Canada, nor should I be, because I don't live there. Similarly if I am near death, I should not be allowed to cast a vote on matters pertaining to the future because I won't be there.

That's a fair point, but you can also flip it the other way: someone with 5 years left on Earth might be much more interested in improving things for future generations. Thinking about how your impact will live on after your death is an enduring human strategy for dealing with the terror of impending nonexistence. Another way to flip it: someone who's 40 has plenty of time left to live hedonistically without having to face really long-term consequences of their actions.

It's also worth noting that short-vs-long-term planning is just a paradigm for thinking about your politics; in practice, absolutely horrible things can arise from both strategies. Long-term thinking can manifest as clinging to tradition (since you now feel ownership over future generations and want to impose your own world-views on them). It can manifest as early optimization. Both of these things can be good (maintaining culinary/aesthetic culture, infrastructure investment) or bad (maintaining brutal and oppressive traditions, prematurely and hence inefficiently optimizing things at tremendous economic/social cost).

I'm not saying the status quo is anywhere near optimal. I think it's a very interesting (read: hard) and probably culturally-dependent question of what age groups are able to minimize the societal happiness cost function (and of what that cost function even is). It's incredibly difficult to say anything generally meaningful about how you might do this well. The one-person-one-vote system is at least a simple solution that seems acceptable to most, which is an important feature (not that each person's vote counts the same in practice in USA, but that's a whole other problem).

The assumption that age comes with wisdom is a gross oversimplification. Age is strongly correlated with dementia. Rather than they elderly having greater than normal lucidity, they often lack it, sometimes completely.

We don't let teenagers vote because they're known for being hotheads, but when an 90 year old man forgets the names of his children, we still let him vote. That's nuts, and it shows that what we have right now is not a 1-person-1-vote system. We already have a system of selective enfranchisement, but it's not been configured in a rational way. It's not been configured in a way designed to give good results. In fact, it's proven itself quite harmful. Go ask any climate scientist what our future on this current trajectory looks like. Trying to stay the course is suicide.

> That's nuts, and it shows that what we have right now is not a 1-person-1-vote system.

How does that show any such thing? Unless you're defining someone with dementia as "not a person".

> Go ask any climate scientist what our future on this current trajectory looks like. Trying to stay the course is suicide.

Ah. You're against old people voting because they don't vote the way you want on your hot-button issue. And you're willing to sacrifice the right to vote on the altar of climate change. No thanks. (But it makes me wonder what else you're willing to sacrifice there...)

> "How does that show any such thing? Unless you're defining someone with dementia as "not a person"."

Are 17 year old people "not persons"? Of course not. Who is talking about non-personhood?

We currently forbid 17 year olds from voting (while allowing them to sign up for the military..) but where are the objections when a 75 year old with dementia and the mentality of a 5 year old votes? The 17 year old is unquestionably more qualified to vote than a senile pensioner who thinks Jimmy Carter is still in office and forgets to walk to the bathroom when nature calls. That's the case even if you disregard the "skin in the game" argument, or even if you somehow convince yourself that democracy is more important than bracing humanity for catastrophic climate change.

Ah, I now understand your argument. Well, if you want senile people prohibited from voting, then do it on the basis of senility, not on the basis of age. My mother is 91, and she's as qualified to vote as you are.

But if you want old people disqualified because you don't like the way they vote, get lost.

Somebody over 70 has seen some things in their life. For a concrete example: There are people alive who experienced the Great Depression. Should none of them be allowed to vote? Is that really a good idea? Should people who lived through World War II not be allowed to vote?

Or would it be better to have some of those people, as voters, to be able to say "wait a minute" to some stuff that sounds good to people who haven't been through similar things?

I think his point is that "old people" won't live with the outcome of their votes. It's not a generally correct point, but it makes sense from the perspective that they don't have skin in the game.

Right, all old people are for killing their children.

It's almost like black and white statements are just bad stereotypes.

The results speak for themselves and public opinion polling confirms it (https://news.gallup.com/poll/234314/global-warming-age-gap-y...). Old people voting is disastrous for the environment.

Are they malicious? Maybe, maybe not. But at the end of the day it doesn't matter if they're malicious, senile, or just plain old apathetic.

(Perhaps you can find a political issue for which young people throw caution to the wind and old people exercise appropriate caution, but I can guarantee you that the impact of that issue will not be as severe as climate change.)

"We don't think they vote the right way, so we should deny them the right to vote" is a really shaky moral foundation for actions that rapidly destroy democracy.

And you don't like it when the other side does it...

If democracy needs to be temporarily compromised to save the planet, so be it. The dogma of universal suffrage should not be our top priority (not that we currently live by it anyway!)

You are willing to "temporarily compromise" democracy. I doubt that it would be temporary; I doubt that it would be merely "compromise"; and I do not join you.

Most past seemingly good reasons to temporarily compromise democracy turned out in hindsight to not be worth it. This one might be actually worth it, or maybe the next once will, but we're generally well served by a taboo against dismantling democracy.

A revolution could well not go the way you want, and end up in a system where no one can even defend fighting climate change, or worse, everyone has to enthusiastically pretend we're doing a heroic effort that is well on track to solve the problem.

Yeah. The one who winds up in power is whoever is best at using the situation to take power. This does not have any correlation with who is best at actually solving the problem.

Listen to the authoritarian roar!

> But I see little reason that somebody over 70 at the oldest should be allowed to vote at all (let alone do something even more serious like hold public office!)

On the other hand, someone over 70 might be more likely to vote for the general good rather than their selfish interests.

Evolutionarilly speaking, the reason humans have old people at all is that they contribute wisdom. Otherwise, people would tend to die soon after their children reach adulthood. There's no incentive for evolution to favor useless organisms that aren't able to reproduce - so old people aren't useless.

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