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Comment by vlan121 | Hacker News Reader

'The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.' — ̶S̶̶o̶̶c̶̶r̶̶a̶̶t̶̶e̶̶s̶ ̶ (Kenneth John Freeman, 1907 [thanks to morsch])

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For all we know Socrates was correct, and the attitudes did change during his lifetime. History is turbulent, and there is not a straight line from his time to the present. There's plenty of examples of people, children included, behaving differently through a change in time and place. E.g. the difference between a Victorian boarding school and a typical US high school, or the difference before and after the Cultural Revolution in China. Or the difference in behavior between meth addicts and non-addicts.

If meth became widely used, and someone noted the effect this had on how children are behaving, would we also just quote Socrates at them as 'proof' that nothing has changed, because people have been complaining since forever?

Even if we pretend the quote is real (it was invented in the 1900s), then as you suggest, Socrates might have had a point: Athens was pretty much done for as a meaningful political or even cultural entity within a couple generations of Socrates.

Socrates two most prominent students took power with help of the enemy state, dismantled democracy and installed fairly cruel tyrantship. Socrates himself was against democracy, altrought did not participated nor directly supported the tyranny.

For all we know, his quote refers to these political conflicts where he preferred hierarchy and young preferred democracy.

Apparently, Kenneth John Freeman, 1907. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/

Careful about bogus “ancient” quotations on this topic, though., the article warns.

Apocryphal and also irrelevant. If someone were to have made an unwarranted criticism in 5th century BCE Athens, that would not invalidate that class of criticism forever through the end of time.

Plus, we have hard data about reduced attention spans so this is not even about moral panic.

Note: The author is aware of this comparison (His reference is Gilgamesh). You may still find it relevant.

This is such a boring fallacious argument. Are you seriously suggesting that over the last 2,500 years there have never been any changes to any generation of children/youths due to any circumstances? Of course not; that's a ridiculous preposition.

Maybe there's a bit of complaining from old coots throughout the ages, but that doesn't mean there are never any structural problems ever. Maybe there are real problems today. And maybe there were real problems in Socrates' time too. Merely posting this without any thought is just dismissive nonsense.

Certainly for the situation today, there are huge changes to how kids are raised. Maybe that has zero effect. Or maybe it does. Either way, whatever Socrates did or didn't say has absolutely no bearing on it.

this post is ironic given that we're talking about an article where a professor is complaining about people's poor reading comprehension. the post you're replying to did not explicitly make any argument, they only quoted someone, and no the quoting of someone with no additional commentary is not an argument - lol

Exactly. There are always the people who complain and the people who defend. They are both not indicative of actual social changes. They're just statement factories. Think deeper about what a statement is actually saying instead of dismissing it for falling under some camp. If it is vapid even on its own, then dismiss it.

On this paticular topic, my take is that as technology has advanced, we have gone from the "technology is harmless" side to the "technology is harmful" side sharply. Books and whatnot are great. TV, ehhh. Video games, mobile phones, social media, LLMs: dangerous, or more optimistically, very tricky to get right. I think it's not strange that these three categories I've laid out occupy vastly distinct time spans. It's exactly the power of a technology that ties into both its development and its impact. I certainly don't get similar experiences from reading a book and watching short form video.

I think it won't be far-fetched to say the current generation of children possibly has the lowest impression of their elders as compared to all previous generations in human history.

Not that you can blame them, honestly, looking at the state of the world despite all wisdom and knowledge being more accessible to everyone than it has ever been...

from the literal posted article:

> Worse is the resistance to original thought. What I mean is the reflexive submission of the cheapest cliché as novel insight.

what a world we live in...

I feel like this quote exists to be used as an excuse for parents to deploy whatever arbitrary discipline is necessary to make their tyrant children get in line and comply.

I mean the way it's worded just makes you want to strike back at contemptuous kids instead of digging down deeper as to why they might behave this way.

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