Hacker News Reader

Comment by belltaco | Hacker News Reader

>it's a bit arrogant that you would try to assert that "old" people are not capable of forming their own opinions or seeking out others. There will come a point in time where applying labels where they don't belong will no longer work to silence opposing views that you don't like.

It's a fact that older people tend to fall victim to false information disproportionately at higher rates than younger people.

https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2019/10/scams-and-older-co...

>Your quote from Rush is actually one of the few things that I actually agree with. The better response to this would have been to do absolutely nothing at all

Ironic given the above, because now you're saying it's worth killing a lot of old people for some economic gain, not to mention hospitals getting overloaded resulting in deaths of younger people from road accidents and other treatable illnesses etc.

View on HN

The link you provided does not support your statement.

It is about financial scams, and not disinformation per se. Specifically it reports, "Older adults were the least likely of any age group to report losing money to scams. But when older consumers experience consumer fraud, their reported financial losses were greater than what younger consumers reported.".

They also report on the specific scams older people tend to fall prey to, namely: "older adults were more likely than younger consumers to report losing money on tech support scams, prize, sweepstakes & lottery scams, and family & friend impersonation. Phone scams did the most financial damage. And while gift cards became the payment of choice for scammers, wire transfers still take the top spot for total dollars paid.".

How did you generalize all of this into saying that "older people tend to fall victim to false information disproportionately at higher rates than younger people."? Do you have direct evidence for that?

I think we have to be careful when trying to paint an entire group of people in this discriminatory way, especially without evidence, which is probably what parent comment was getting at.

> Ironic given the above, because now you're saying it's worth killing a lot of old people for some economic gain, not to mention hospitals getting overloaded resulting in deaths of younger people from road accidents and other treatable illnesses etc.

It's not "...worth killing a lot of old people for some economic gain..." and it was never about that. The unintended consequences of this circus brought on by both parties has resulted in more death. We've allowed politicians and prominent figures to make negligent decisions that have resulted in deaths that could have been prevented.

People die from a wide range of things, some preventable and some not so much. Keeping everyone inside and preventing them from socializing has resulted in more deaths than a virus with a significantly low mortality rate. Why don't we shut the world down for other causes of death that have been happening in greater numbers? The sensible thing would have been to isolate populations with compromised immune systems and maybe make vitamin D supplementation a priority.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com