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Comment by svnt | Hacker News Reader

“Likely lead-poisoned grumpy pants?”

And no, I think the age of a person is very relevant to their willingness to change based on what we know scientifically about the way our brains wire and prune over our lives. But it’s a sacred cow here.

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"Science" says old people are less willing to change their language to suit politically correct fads? I wonder what it must say about people too young to recognize the first fashionable wave of politically correct zealotry they happen to get caught up in. There's probably a word for how they feel looking back at themselves later.

There are definitely people overplaying the woke position but language evolves.

I’m likely as old as you. Your arrows missed their target here.

If Jerry weren’t so identified with his language he might have read the paper and found a middle ground. Instead he’s located himself further in the opposite direction of where we are headed. Not that the paper’s authors know exactly where that is, either.

I can't speak for all generations and all political movements, but the "politically correct zealotry" of my generation is now widely understood to have been on the correct side of history, and, in the eyes of the cultural mainstream, the language we were looking to change has come to be seen, at best, as outdated and slightly embarrassing.

That said, I saw it go the other way for some of the issues that one of my older siblings was excited about back in the day.

It's just possible that, "This idea seems to be most popular among young people," doesn't actually function as a stunning rhetorical coup de grace for any side of any cultural debate.

>> the "politically correct zealotry" of my generation is now widely understood to have been on the correct side of history

Maybe you're right, but if you were in that kind of wave - I guess you mean the American civil rights movement of the 1960s, not the widely mocked PC movement of the 80s? - you were exceptionally lucky from a world-historical point of view. Currently, the same words might also be uttered by one of the hostage takers in the Iranian revolution, any member of the Taliban, or one of the older prison guards at a concentration camp in Xinjiang. (Really. Imagine each of those people saying that sentence). Point being, those words usually sound absurd to anyone who doesn't share your political and cultural frame of reference.

Synaptic pruning mostly ends before the age of 20 and any relationship pruning has to the psychological concept of 'willingness to change' seems like a wild conjecture you just now plucked from thin air.

Yeah I should have gone even more generic with my term than pruning probably as it implies synaptic pruning when what I actually meant was like a plant: all of the reductions of connectivity that come with age including the reduction in neurons and increase in glial cells, etc.

Depending on how these networks are structured they may not be able to change much, but if they are structured in better ways then aging is less impactful.

I definitely could have been better in this thread.

Clearly it's not impossible for older people to change or learn new things, as there are many examples of this.

That on average the ability to do this decreases with age is irrelevant when judging a single person. Judging individuals by general population statistics (which are often – though not always – true) is pretty much what discrimination is.

I judged him first by his ranting use of language and his argument, then by his other posts, and also frankly by that domain name, before doing research and finding he was… seasoned.

Are we meant to hide our biases for some higher purpose? We all have them.

So your refutation is ableism via ageism?

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