Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

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>It sounds a lot like "kids these days" fallacy which has been the standard complaint of each adult generation since the start of history

First, pedantically speaking it's not a fallacy (as in "logical fallacy"). It's just a statement that can be right or wrong.

And this is regardless of whether it has been repeated "since the start of history". It could still:

(a) be always true (everytime it has been repeated)

(b) be always false (everytime it has been repeated)

(c) be sometimes true and sometimes true

There's no logical necessity that it has to be (b) just because it's a "standard complaint".

In fact, given what we know about periods of acme and decline, and also for periods of stability, it's obviously (c). Sometimes the complain is correct.

So, the question is whether in this case, for this period, it has been true or false -- not a facile dismissal with the non-argument that "people has been saying that since forever, so it must always be false".

When successive generations complain about "kids these days", there is a contradiction. Gen 1 says "we were great as kids, but kids these days are terrible". Gen 2 claims they were great as kids and it's Gen 3 that's terrible. Gen 1 and Gen 2 are contradicting each other. Was Gen 2 good or bad as kids? Depends on if you ask them or their elders.

It's possible that there is a constant decrease in standards, such that every generation is worse than the one before it. But I doubt it. If such a steady decline had been happening since the 8th century BC civilization ought to have collapsed several times over. Tellingly, no one ever says "kids these days are much better behaved than we were as kids", even when it's empirically true. For example, kids these days in the UK drink less than their parents did at that age, but they don't get any credit for it.

What's actually happening is likely sampling bias, where the person making the pronouncement is looking at a few bad apples as well as nostalgia biasing their recollection of their childhood.

> When successive generations complain about "kids these days", there is a contradiction

It's not a contradiction, if each successive generation is more terrible than the one that came beforehand.

> It's not a contradiction, if each successive generation is more terrible than the one that came beforehand.

The OP considered this though, to quote: It's possible that there is a constant decrease in standards, such that every generation is worse than the one before it. But I doubt it. If such a steady decline had been happening since the 8th century BC civilization ought to have collapsed several times over.

> civilization ought to have collapsed several times over.

Which it did, in some ways.

> But I doubt it.

A contradiction leaves no doubt. It's not a contradiction then. A contradiction is not just something that is unlikely or infeasible, it is something impossible. It means that your set of beliefs is flawed and that at least one premise needs to be corrected for them to become consistent.

OldSecondHand is correct that it is possible for each generation to have been worse than the preceeding one. For example, the degradation might be so minute, or we may have started from such lofty heights, or the society has become more resilient to the degradation. It is possible, and therefore no contradiction. ...just unlikely.

>civilization ought to have collapsed several times over.

uhm, didn't it?

Yeah. A few times before the 8th century BC aswell.

To the point where we abandoned civilisation and became Hunter gatherers en masse? No. There have been ups and downs for individual kingdoms and empires but civilisation as a whole did alright since the 8th century BC, Socrates’ concerns about kids these days notwithstanding.

>To the point where we abandoned civilisation and became Hunter gatherers en masse

To the point of the fall or Athens and Greek empires, the fall of the hellenistic kingdoms, the fall of Rome, all the way to WWI and WWII, and that's just confined to the Western side of the world...

The fall of Rome was not "the collapse of civilization" and the Roman empire as a political entity never quite ceased existing seeing as how it continued in one form or another all the way up to the modern day by virtue of Istanbul still existing.

> When successive generations complain about "kids these days", there is a contradiction.

There is absolutely no contradiction, because in fact they are complaining about different things. Sometimes they are complaining about kids being more violent then they used to be. Other times they are complaining about kids being more rude, more passive, more drinking. Then they complain about kids dont more sport, less sport, reading too much, not reading enough.

If you abstract it away to "kids are bad", then yes, it sounds as if the complain was constantly the same. But that abstraction is manipulative.

> Tellingly, no one ever says "kids these days are much better behaved than we were as kids", even when it's empirically true.

I have in fact said that multiple times. The "no one ever says" part is not true either.

Yes, people are more likely to comment on negatives that affect them then on positives. That is true about literally anything, including software updates. And that still does not imply that every complain about bad software update should be shut down.

>When successive generations complain about "kids these days", there is a contradiction.

Not really. It's totally logically consistent if things are going downhill with each successive generation. (In fact, it would still be consistent if different things were going downhill, Gen 2 worse on X compared to Gen 1, and Gen 3 worse on Y compared to Gen 2, and so on). Whether that's the case it's another matter.

>It's possible that there is a constant decrease in standards, such that every generation is worse than the one before it.

Exactly.

>But I doubt it.

I wouldn't be so sure.

Note also that since there are no permanent eternal standards standing outside of history, each generation only has to be worse by the standards of its previous generation, for the accusation to be true...

"It's possible that there is a constant decrease in standards, such that every generation is worse than the one before it. But I doubt it."

On the contrary, that has been my interpretation of these signals since I first started hearing them.

All living things (cats, societies, lizards, civilizations) are born, have an adolescence of growth and development, then decay and die.

So there must be some brief period in the adolescence of a civilization where "kids these days" cannot be applied. Society is growing, developing and integrating.

After that brief period it may then, indeed, be possible for each successive generation to correctly identify and decry the decay of their (society/civilization).

>kids these days in the UK drink less than their parents did at that age, but they don't get any credit for it

Illegal narcotics would like a word.

"It's not a contradiction, if each successive generation is more terrible than the one that came beforehand."

If ancient Mesopotamians were the pinnacle of civilisation, and we were degrading for a hundred generations, we ought to be living in caves by now. It would be measurable in wealth, IQ, rates of murder, crime, literacy, etc.

Every statistics avaliable indicates that we used to be more ignorant, more violent and less literate. So this complain belong in the same box as:

"back when I was young we used to talk to school 12 miles, through a blizzard, uphill, both ways!"

>If ancient Mesopotamians were the pinnacle of civilisation, and we were degrading for a hundred generations, we ought to be living in caves by now.

That doesn't follow.

Civilization != technology.

And those previous generations weren't lamenting "kids these days have less technology than us", but "kids these days are worse in X, Y, Z" regarding ways of living.

So kids are worse in some 'X Y, Z', but in any of hundreds of statistics we collect they are better. Except the fact that younger generation has less sex, but that seems to run contrary to the spirit of the complaint.

Whats the difference between elusive 'X, Y Z' we can't define or measure, and 'X, Y, Z' that doesn't exist?

>So kids are worse in some 'X Y, Z', but in any of hundreds of statistics we collect they are better.

That's more of an argument that one can't really trust statistics. Or that they don't always measure what matters...

>Whats the difference between elusive 'X, Y Z' we can't define or measure, and 'X, Y, Z' that doesn't exist?

Well, we can define, and it does exist. Not sure if we can measure (not everything that exists can be measured in some meaningful way. Some things matter in qualitative ways).

So, for some concrete examples, the roman generations that followed the acme of Rome and steered it towards the decline had certain very specific characteristics. Less inclined to work for common good, more selfish, having less children (lamented by roman critics of the time, and which less to a big problem with economic dynamics, the army, and so on), more concerned with greed and self-indulgence, less interested in civic matters (which was the bread and butter of earlier generations), and so on.

You are making a few mistakes:

* technology accretes even if the quality of the average worker is declining across time. Thus tomorrow will still be better than today, at least from the point of view of things like technical advancement, regardless of what is happening within each person.

* population increases, so the smartest can still be smarter even if the average is declining

* Even if population is not increasing, improvements in communication and replication technology can mean that an increasingly smaller share of the brightest people anywhere in the world can design products that are replicated or simply assembled by masses of others, whereas in the past this required local designers. Think of how many people are truly needed to keep advances in jet engines happening. You have basically three companies that supply all the engines to the entire world.

* And one can even make up for the other -- e.g. in previous times all shoes were handcrafted, now they are mass produced. Thus a lower skilled person in a later period can still outproduce a higher skilled person in a previous period.

Now I'm not saying I necessarily buy the decline thesis. It's an intriguing thesis, basically that you can be pretty dumb and still thrive well enough to keep reproducing whereas in hunter gatherer societies you would have starved to death and so the population would on average be smarter due to the challenges they had to overcome. Maybe this is true, maybe it's not, but the objection that knowledge accretes does nothing to prove or disprove this hypothesis.

"technology accretes even if the quality of the average worker is declining across time."

I cannot fathom how you possibly write this - surely you cannot be claiming that dumber and dumber workers develop better and better technology, or technology is some independent quantity that develops without human intervention, like a divine gift of some sort?

"a lower skilled person in a later period can still outproduce a higher skilled person in a previous period."

The last bloke operating the machine doesn't produce anything on his own, you have to compare the whole value chain, including the folks making the leather, making the tools and machines, etc. I am sure the old process includes plenty of people doing unskilled groundwork, although I would not bet my house on which way the dice would fall

Yes, some times it's correct, some times it's wrong.

The complaint itself is always there (absolutely always), and should be dismissed every time because it carries no information at all. This does not technically make it a logical fallacy (ironically, most logical fallacies carry more useful information), just a useless waste of time.

>(c) be sometimes true and sometimes true

Of course meant "and sometimes false".

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