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Comment by turbojet1321 | Hacker News Reader

> too young to lie or corrupt

In my experience, youth has little to do with honesty or corruptibility.

Young people often are hopelessly ideological, in the same way a dogmatic religious person would be. Both are less corruptible than your average person.

But can that also make them more gullible?

> But can that also make them more gullible?

Oh definitely. They often don't have the experience to question what they're told or see the holes and deceptions in it. For instance: they'd be more easily fooled by a fake deadline. Or in this case, they may trust and follow their leader like a little zealot, even when he's wrong and doing bad things.

As fresh graduate at your first job, I suppose you follow the instructions from your boss a bit more and still have faith in your boss and upper management, a bit more than a senior, more experienced employee. Just look at the military, it's quite easy to scream at 18 year old recruits and have them crawl in mud and being screamed insults at. Try the same with a 45 year old.

Enron was staff by young people hired fresh of school. It is easy to manipulate young people into a new set of values. Army knows that, monks know that etc. These likely believe Musk is second coming of god.

It makes them more corruptible. They will perform corrupt acts while believing it the right thing to do. They're too naive to know better.

They won't do graft. They will follow orders. Even and especially when the orders are corrupt.

Exactly; it's not that the young ideological think-they-are-doing-the-right-thing are not serving a corrupt system (perhaps unwittingly). They are effective because the corruption they serve diligently comes from the central party and not from local considerations?

Corruptible is relative to the goal you're trying to achieve.

If you're the king of a nation, anyone trying to convince your knights to overthrow you is a corrupting force. But at the same time you could be a brutal ruler corrupted by power, and it is the knights that are trying to upturn the corrupt system.

>>Both are less corruptible than your average person.

I honestly believe, cheating is a primal trait. Age has little to do with it. In fact young cheats are likely to cheat with more enthusiasm and energy than elder cheats.

Safe enough to say, age has nothing to do with this.

I completely disagree with you. Very ideological people might be given to lie about or simply ignore things that challenge their ideology.

> In my experience, youth has little to do with honesty or corruptibility.

It has a lot to do with naivete and not having the confidence to stand up when needed.

There's a lot of easily indoctrinated, exploitable idealistic youth out there. A lot of organizations run on them.

isn't it more like "too young to speak up" ? How many Snowdens do we have after all.

I mean their social experience is usually not enough to conduct sophisticated rent seeking or reach some comprise with local officials.

Young grads from big urban usually don’t do well with local mid aged bureaucrats. That type of human nature tension is what’s being leveraged here.

Makes sense, I also imagine the incentives were different. These young grads had no incentive to lie while local gov officials had plenty.

The only one would be for the grads to take bribes from the local gov officials, but if the central government sent enough grads it would be too many to bribe.

It seems that when push comes to shove right now its the young people who are simply removing people who don't kowtow.

Of course it is easy to imagine that the people they are removing are those who made principled stands rather than the corrupt who keep their heads down. As in they are removing the people who thought their job was to serve the public rather than line their own pockets?

It is not clear if that is the effect the chiefs want or not.

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