Finnish minister Sanna Marin, 34, to become world's youngest PM

I thought Russia doping one would at least have some matter for debate and discussion. This news is just a factoid.

The doping article is more likely to stir up drama. People have strong feelings about Russia, drugs, the olympics, etc. This article is just interesting - it may involve political figures but there's not really much politics at play. To quote the on-topic guidelines: "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".

HN, like any subreddit, has inherent bias in its moderation. I suspect the fact that Russia was involved prompted the removal of the other story -- if I were a moderator, I would just expect any thread involving Russia and international politics to be a dumpster fire. Finland is a bit easier for Americans to avoid passionate political opinions with.

To be fair (I'm the submitter) I thought of it as more of an interesting article about social progress and the leadership in some areas of countries not always in the news - rather than being a political story per se.

From the guidelines:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

(My emphasis, and I've clipped the addendum about if it would be featured on TV news it might not be relevant here).

if old people are not fighting to get the job, there 's probably not a lot of power involved

Perhaps that is because many of the Nordic countries are about the population of a large metro area. Finland, for instance, has about 5 million people.

At least in the US city councils there is often a hotbed of politics and corruption it seems. I consider the city-council/property-developer interface to be the greatest scale of corruption in the US.

He technically isn't a Prime Minister, but Chancellor.

But yes, definitely a head of government.

So the headline is literally correct, but factually wrong.

Aside from experience, there's also the notion of a change in demeanor, to something more pragmatic and measured, that happens later in life.

I don't know if there's credible research that confirms it, but it seems true...of course with notable exceptions.

your lack of confidence is actually a positive indicator if you take into account the inverse of dunning-kruger

Agreed. For a long time I had thought the age requirement for being president in the US was kind of dumb - why don't we just get the right person for the job, no matter the age? But as I've grown older I realized what you have - it's extremely difficult to run anything, and I would prefer leaders that have been in extremely high, laborious, and difficult leadership positions before over those who are outlier-level young (such as Mrs. Marin). But then again I'm basing this judgement purely on age and not on many other factors so this is a very shallow analysis.

She does have a Masters degree in political administration and experience at various levels of government. It's not like she's come in from the cold.

What life experience would qualify you to do this?

Having a person lead a country that will have to live for a longer time with their decisions doesn't strike me as bad.

Through the history, there were lots of young leaders and I don't think that age had much to with how successful they were.

On some level it could help getting another approach to governing a country.

60~70 yo people also don’t have nearly enough knowledge and/or wisdom to operate at that scale, and if we’re speaking about impacting the lives of millions of people the difference between 34 and 70 is marginal I think. It should all come down to the system they operate in and how they use it, at the end of the day.

In the United States, the minimum age was set to prevent "dynasties." Which means that today, they may have set the age even older, because of extended lifetimes.

He is still the leader of the democratic socialist party and prime minister by proxy. Actual concequences would be having a new election and reforming the government. Obviously the current government is against that since they know they are unpopular for their incompetence.