You all know the type of guy – either in real life or here on the board – can give exhaustive and to-the-point answer to pretty much any topic. I wonder whether it is only more experienced (i.e. older) people who had had enough time to accumulate all the knowledge, or if it’s just that someone is smarter and digs deeper, while some people are more like intellectual dilettantes at any age.
So my question would be how do you perceive these “knowledgeable” people in relation to age. Do you know many young knowledgeable people? (I would like to note that it may be a good idea to disregard people that are knowledgeable only in their professional field, for obvious reasons, i.e. they are doing it for their living, so of course they know a lot about it.)
My next question is for those that are perhaps a little bit older and may regard themselves as knowledgeable: Have you been like that all along? Or did it come only with age? And how did it happen? Reading a lot? Having a lot of hobbies? Also, how broad actually your knowledge is? To what percentage of topics here on SD can you give a good informative comment?
When they have their first psychedelic experience…
I think when a person wants to learn more about the world as opposed to being forced (this degree equals big money so I’ll learn it) they’re on their way. Years and decades with this mentality gives a person a wealth of knowledge in a pretty broad range of subjects.
Some people cash out and never pick up a book after high school. Keeps dancing with the stars and american idol in business. They might be smart enough to make a living and come up with a few scams but trying to solve the worlds problems? Not so much.
I’ve also heard this about the age= knowledge thing
“Even thieves and whores grow old.”
I’m 42. On the one hand, when I occasionally take a look at some notebook I kept when I was 17 or 20 years old, I am surprised at how already “formed” I was then, and imagine I could have “held my own” on the SDMB, should it have existed at the time.
On the other hand, looking at certain things I did, thought, or said last week (say), I am sometimes struck by my embarrassing naïveté or poor judgment.
So, it works both ways. But if I had to give a factual-ish answer to your question, I’d say “about 17 years old”. So, yeah, whoever mentioned “first psychedelic experience” got it right.
In some important ways, though, “puberty” is (for me) a huge divide. Any memory I have after that time “feels like me” – in a deep way, I feel like I’m the exact same person I’ve been since I was twelve, while memories from before then feel like they refer to things which sort of happened to a different person.
There isn’t really an age one can pinpoint. As other have noted, that kind of breadth of knowledge is dependent upon experience. You have to couple this with the desire to continually learn new things. In time, that produces a very well read, fairly knowledgeable person. You need both book learnin’ and street smarts. The former gives you the facts, the latter puts them in perspective. It could be attained by a person in their mid twenties or so with effort.
I hate myself for being told I’m the smartest person at my school all the time, and then knowing how much I don’t actually know. I still read everyday and learn new things even though I have a pretty good broad knowledge of the world. I could give you generalized answers about a lot of things and a lot of philosophy of life is just made up and opinionated. It takes an expert to actually come on here and give a specific quantum physics answer or a really detailed historical answer.
I guess it depends all in your definition of “knowledgeable.”
Of course there’s a correlation with age, the average 30-year-old knows more than the average 13-year-old knows more than the average 3-year-old, but that’s a misleading correlation. Knowledge is much more closely related to education, curiousity, and interest than age. Obviously there’s a pretty close correlation between age and education for the first 20 some years, but after that, there are still some people who continue to learn and gain more knowledge and some who stagnate because the former keep learning after high school or college and the latter don’t.
Another thing that is interesting is in what people’s interests tie to. Someone may seem really knowledgable about everything, but it may only seem that way because you share common interests. That is, if you’re interested in science and that person is also interested in it, that will be a lot of what you two talk about and he’ll seem smart about everything. But then some time later you see them in a discussion about the fine arts or history or religion or something and they come across as fairly normal or even kind of ignorant. Sure, there are some people that know at least a little bit about everything, but those are more the trivia types, and again, that seems more related to those people specifically seeking out that knowledge rather than any sort of tie directly to their age.
