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Comment by psweber | Hacker News Reader

I heard an interesting idea today. "Boomers" have been criticizing "young people today" for being "snowflakes". It might be the case that with their fresher perspective on technology and culture, the younger people realized the perilous path involved in taking action now. Older, less savvy people are being caught unaware of the ramifications of certain types of speech and action in the modern world.

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I think many young people, including those referred to as "snowflakes" are hardly being cautious with their online behavior, or what they say to people.

They gave rise to Snapchat, knowing that they'd want to control what went on the record. Now they're the first to figure out the new rules of public communication.

As a young person, I have to say I agree with the "boomers". People are way too thin skinned and find excuses to become offended.

Freedom of speech and the ability to have different opinions is infinitely more important than people's feelings.

New ideas come and go.

Most of the "free love" generation came along thinking their parents were squares and that they were creating a new, better society. Drug overdoses and HIV turned that ship around quick.

Maybe it's more accurate to say that the better ideas resist change.

Entrenched ideas resist change. Some of the worst ideas in human history have been the ones that have stuck around the longest. It took over a century to adopt the heliocentric model which was centuries after Aristarchus of Samos first proposed the idea.

Ptolemaic cosmology was hardly a bad idea. It was the simplest model that fit the available evidence for a long time. The Heliocentric model didn't really make sense until Newton's theory of gravitation was developed.

https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...

Makes me wonder if there are any nutty ideas today that are right but seem to not make sense because we are missing a vital piece of theory that would explain how they work.

Dark matter and dark energy come to mind.

Those are more like the crazy complex epicycles in Ptolemaic cosmology. They point to something seriously wrong.

I'm on the fence about the revisionist view that the Ptolemaics were rational at the time, but in a way its optimistic. I have always been suspicious of the "only people in the last 500 years had brains" bias. I wonder if all ages have had that bias?

>I have always been suspicious of the "only people in the last 500 years had brains" bias. I wonder if all ages have had that bias?

This is an incredibly interesting point to consider. I would like to say that yes, every age had this kind of a bias, but perhaps that's not true. Life was rather similar during the time of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Renaissance. The daily life of average people, their wealth and tools weren't that different. They certainly have much less difference then the difference between the start of the Industrial Revolution and today. Perhaps people in previous ages didn't have this kind of a bias because they didn't see such a huge change in people's lives?

One thing that we seem to be adopting as a society is the idea that we need some kind of reasonable evidence for our beliefs. Usually this means that evidence based on the science of nature prevails, but we haven't really been able to push this onto all areas of life. I certainly think that we've managed to cover more fields than in the previous ages though.

Once I gained a sense of how deeply, horrifically stupid most people are, a lot of my questions about historical populations clicked into place really seamlessly.

Looking at the way most people (including most I know) approach both factual and moral questions, there's no belief in history that seems implausible, from chattel slavery to the humors theory to epicycles to the Inquisition. Most people really don't have the capacity to believe anything but what their social environment tells them to, and it's much more productive to consider the incentives and available information of the narrow few who are capable of doing so.

Some of the ancient justifications for heliocentrism included "fire is awesomer than earth"

> It took over a century to adopt the heliocentric model which was centuries after Aristarchus of Samos first proposed the idea.

Hindsight is always 20-20

To be fair here, back in the 1990s, when Usenet was king, one common FAQ said words to the effect that “you should never post anything online that you don’t want to be published on the front page of The New York Times”.

There’s a reason why I deleted my Twitter years ago; it just is not possible to have civil discourse and well-made arguments in 160 characters (or whatever Twitter’s limits are these days); instead it’s like a bunch of chimpanzees throwing poop at each other.

Scott Alexander recently posted a long entry where he, among other things, misses the kinds of long winded rational arguments places like talkorigins.org had over a decade ago:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godles...

Boomers were criticized by their parents for being soft and lazy.

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