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Comment by quijoteuniv | Hacker News Reader

It would be interesting to probe the political orientation of the people who understand and those who don’t and see if there is some correlation there.

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My thesis is that no-one understands. So there's no political orientation.

Your suggestion suggests that a little bit of technical education would change political allegiance. Alas that is incorrect. Politics is about worldview (me and mine versus you and yours) and a world view cannot be changed by something as mundane as education.

Each person has both a self-centered side, and a community-centered side. For some it's mostly self centered. For others mostly community centered. Politics is about finding out which side the population has swung to.

A bit of a tangent, but I don't think it's really fair to say it's about self vs community. I think the main reason that people start to lean in a different direction as they age is because you start to see cracks in the ideals you held when younger. The internet is a good example. Many of us lived through the birth of the mainstreaming of the internet. And our perspectives of what the future held at that moment was generally just exceptionally naive. For those who are a bit younger, a similar phenomena played out with the rise of social media as well.

And as you see how reality and society tend to 'really' work, wisdom in other words, it tends to result in a shifting perspective on the ideal way forward for society. I'm certainly much more socially minded than when I was younger now. And I also think that's fairly typical - like most young people I was completely self absorbed which makes 'real' social mindedness quite uncommon. Yet my political leaning is gradually shifting ever more towards the 'self centered' orientation, in your terminology.

The problem is that convincing yourself that you are smarter than your younger self with opposite views, means that you are right about the politics now, is just a fallacy.

The change doesn't come from thinking one is smarter or dumber, but you simply having much more information to work with. We form extensive opinions and views about the world relatively young, but it's largely based on things we have 0 personal knowledge or experience of.

Again I think the internet/social media are perfect examples. Predicting what would happen isn't about being smart or dumb. It's a matter of just not having enough real world experience to even begin to formulate meaningful views. And so the views and expectations we did form were quite out of touch with what really happened and indeed what we probably 'should' have expected to happen all along.

This is an universal experience which wouldn't explain the vast difference in worldviews.

I'd separate worldview from ideology. I think worldviews, for people who have all seen a comparable share of the world over a comparable time era, are going to fall quite close. But ideologies are something distinct from that. Worldviews should influence ideology, but in practice it's the other way around for many people - even as they age. In any case, without that world experience - the values we formulate when younger are going to be based on assumptions that will ultimately prove to be false.

I‘ve seen lots of people go the other way, moving towards a more self centered view of the world as they age.

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