Time goes way faster once you get out of college. I’m only 26, but it seems like just *yesterday *it was my 21st birthday celebration.
The 5 years between now and my 21st birthday passed in the blink of an eye; there’s no comparison in terms of perceived speed to any other point in my life.
I think you have to experience this to really get it, because I didn’t.
I heard a stand-up comedian say that the speed of your life “boards the express train” after 30, so I don’t even want to think about that.
Maybe it’s like experiencing “green” for the first time. There was simply no way to infer from your experiences with “red”, “blue”, or whatever what this new “green” would look like.
If I could encode it into words simple enough for you to comprehend the concepts simply from hearing the words, I would have done so long ago.
MM, ok seriously… I think there are forms of wisdom that do come with age, and from the different perspective provided by coming from a different generational context. It’s one of the things I like about hanging out with 90 year olds (the still-sharp cognizant ones of course), and the 70 year olds (my parent’s generation) as well. Reciprocally, I learn a lot from folks in their 30s and teenagers and 9 year olds.
Yes, by pointing out your experiment stands no chance of being doable, clearly, I’m foolish. Of course, one wonders why you didn’t just come up with an experiment which could be done in the first place. It isn’t nitpicking; it’s the very core of experimentation: it must be so constructed as to test what it is one wants tested. You failed. Now that you’ve learned to think more carefully about designing your experiments, you’ve refined the technique to one which is potentially doable.
However, you interjected more than is required for the experiment, which is to say you’ve made it needlessly complex. There exists no good reason to add more to a test than is required as doing so merely renders the extra steps superfluous. That is wasteful, which isn’t particularly wise.
Well, the point you wanted to make was belied by your inability to do it well. The point you did make, however, is that you have no compunction against suggesting that others undertake foolhardy processes to make up for your inability to present a well-crafted argument.
If your ability to think things through is indicative of the experience and wisdom you hope time instills in others, I’d like no part of it. I much prefer my present situation where I’m capable of thinking things through and devising a proper test, or set thereof, to arrive at some conclusion.
Another wonderful argument of incredulity: “My mental faculties weren’t sufficiently developed at age x to understand concept y, thus others must be similarly limited.” That is simply not the case. At least not with respect to me. Just because you were incapable of understanding such a rudimentary concept it doesn’t follow that others weren’t.
Your argument about experiencing green is curious to me. It’s something I think most people have experienced very early on in their lives. One needn’t be in one’s fifties to have done so. However, I take your point to be that one must experience new things to understand them. I take issue with that.
There comes a point in one’s life in which he should have a stock of experiences to draw from to deal with new situations and concepts. I’d hate to think that it takes some people 40 years to get there since many people I know have had such experiential knowledge from their middle teens.
To Gary T and Dinsdale, I find it curious that one of you doesn’t understand that it’s a convention to write in italics something which has a foreign origin, and isn’t translated or Americanized, but is nevertheless part of the English vocabulary. I find it curiouser still that one of you things the word is used incorrectly. We’re here talking about, in that case, the ability of one to understand something. I chose penetralia because it means to penetrate to the secret places [of something]. One would think the mildly poetic license I took wouldn’t be so confusing to you.
It must be a wonderful world in which you can claim victory based on evidence you’ve created.
A person of wisdom might also, and indeed in this it is so, understand that the person with whom he’s speaking, though professing some wonderful age-related wisdom, might be full of shit. It is, of course, reasonable to start from the idea that the person with whom I’m speaking knows more than I do. But it doesn’t take long to figure that out one war or another. In the adult world, this is generally called “perception”.
Merely because a person claims to be correct doesn’t make it so. What might lend credence to their claims is either evidence, or a well-structured argument. Neither has been presented by your side.
My demand for cites? Yes, you’re darn skippy I asked for them because I was accused of saying something I’ve never said. It would seem a simple matter to disprove my claim: merely copy and paste some text which shows my assertion to be false. It should be of no moment to do this, but the cite doesn’t seem forthcoming. I’ll leave it to the readers to figure out why no citation of where I’ve said any such thing has come to light.
When one says something that is both untrue and which they should know is untrue, what would you call it? To me, that’s a lie. It’s attempt to intentionally lead someone to draw a false conclusion. At the very best it’s deceptive.
“I’m not saying you lack wisdom, you just exhibit traits contrary to it.” Wonderful.
That I have heard your argument and rejected it because you’ve offered up nothing in the way of evidence for the conclusion you’ve reached, and have as of yet to present a cogent response, let alone a decently crafted one, doesn’t mean I lack wisdom. Indeed, it would be foolish to accept a conclusion merely because someone insists I must. To reject an argument because it lacks evidence or because the conclusion derives from premises which don’t support is, after all, a simple matter. If you want to convince me, or at least make a good attempt at it, you will have to craft an argument which doesn’t make use of so many logical fallacies.
Since you insist on arguing fallaciously, I can only surmise that you think it’s a proper argumentation technique. I will, thus, borrow one of your logical fallacies to close this response:
I’m not saying you’re an unreasonable person, you merely exhibit none of the signs of one who is. You get an extra 20 bonus points if you can name that fallacy.
Meh, it’s of no moment. People are free to be wise and smartasses. I certainly am.
It remains to be seen, but you shouldn’t doubt yourself. Recall, I haven’t submitted that I’m wiser or smarter than anyone here. I merely reject the proposal that based on age alone anyone else here is smarter, or wiser than am I.
If they are such a person, then it should take little to show it.
Of course I have. Hence my stubbed toe example. My point then was that I needn’t continually do so to verify that it hurts. Nor need I experience each type of various pain in the world to understand its nature. While my understanding of, say, childbirth might not be complete, I have sufficient penetralia into the nature of pain itself to profoundly relate.
I expect that in the time remaining in life I have, I will learn many more things. Whether it’s through experience or intellect I can’t say. But there is a finite number of things one can experience in the world. While I haven’t experienced all of them, I have experienced enough of them to be able to say with a reasonable degree of certainty how I would react in some similar situation.
Experience isn’t an intellectual enterprise. It’s about doing something, rather than thinking about something. I needn’t skydive to experience that particular cause of an adrenaline rush inasmuch as I’ve been in other circumstances which generate the same net result.
I needn’t experience every particular type of mathematical problem on the face of the Earth to be confident that I have an intellect adequate to deal with it, or at least make a good attempt. I’m not naive enough to think that I’m capable of solving all mathematical problems. No one is. Even people who are far smarter, far more intelligent and far older than I won’t be able to do it. For the moment, many things lie beyond the ability of humans to solve.
No amount of experience will change that. It will take more intellect, taken in incremental steps, than is currently in existence.
But that’s what they’re claiming: that in and of itself merely having lived for a superior number of years itself imparts that great wisdom on the one so living. while I have freely admitted that it’s a sufficient condition, it isn’t a necessary condition. I’m actually a bit stumped why this is difficult for people to grasp, and why there’s so much resistance to conceding a reasonably obvious conclusion.
This, I think, is the best go at a reasonable argument yet offered by your side. (It was offered up once before upthread somewhere, but I don’t believe it was from your side).
The cases you bring are certainly possible, but I’m not so sure that they’re probable.
I am considerably younger than all of my colleagues and yet somehow they view me as their equal. Or they patronize me for the sake of my fragile ego. Perhaps I’m just an odd case, but I think not as I have had graduate students who are quite young and very well-adjusted. I have seen no reason to think they’re unwise, particularly because they’re nearly finished with their PhD, and aren’t yet in their mid-twenties. They seem to be able to function in society and get along well. They seem able to provide for themselves, several of them have even had to work while in school. I just don’t buy that merely because I’m older than they are, I am default smarter, more experienced or wiser than are they. I might be, then again I might not be. If these guys have the same intellectual prowess I have, then I have no doubt they’ll be able to achieve similar results. It’s only a matter of them doing so.
I have the same capacity to well-advise all of my students as do any of my other colleagues. I don’t see how the advice coming from them or me would be any more believable because I’m not in my 60s. Good advice is good advice; the source is irrelevant.
Here’s where I think you falter a little bit. Why wouldn’t it be the case that this mother wouldn’t have earlier on in both their lives shared this with her daughter? That to me sounds like a form of manipulation: keep my child ignorant of certain things so that I’ll always be relevant and needed. Love isn’t predicated upon such a thing.
The people in my life are here because I want them here. They aren’t in it because I value what they can do to improve me; I keep them around because I value them, faults and all.
The people whom I no longer value for the various reasons they’ve shown themselves unworthy of my time are no longer in my life. Like my mother. Merely because people are related by blood doesn’t impose some duty on one to tolerate the other if the other is a fundamentally unpleasant person. We don’t get to pick our families; we get to pick our friends. I don’t consider it particularly smart to keep negative people in my life. Experience has shown me that emotional vampires need to be shooed away.
Of course, I know someone’s going to say that I owe my mother my love and respect. Of course, they’d be wrong. Respect isn’t due to someone merely because they’re alive; respect is earned. At least respect beyond the basic respect we should extend to all humans (don’t kill them, don’t rob them, and so on). I think it would show a lack of wisdom to keep harmful people in one’s life. But I guess I’ll see how the answers come here.
Really, ashman165, the thing that doesn’t pass the smell test here is that in all your claimed education and years you don’t seem to have picked up a single shred of diplomatic tact or, really, the ability to present your ideas in a way tailored to your audience. Most of us figured THAT out at our first job.
So either you don’t care about convincing anyone, you don’t realize that you’re tone comes across as overblown and theatrical, or both.
I mean, seriously. “Penetralia”? As a “common” word?
Strangely, of the people in my life your style reminds me of, the closest one was a finance professor I had–who absolutely hated teaching undergrad, and went out of his way to make a plethora of classroom rules (along the lines of “I will fail you for the semester if I see you even in possession of the campus newspaper, because I hate it”) that were solely for the purposes of enlightening us as to how we could be like him when we were older. Which is odd, since in that one way it’s pretty much the exact opposite of the position you’re arguing here.
The other person you remind me of in my previous experience is myself and my buddies, age 15, when we’d get online and vehemently claim to be older and more educated in a vain attempt to get people to pay attention to us. The phrasing, the ten cent words, the convoluted nature of your paragraphs, and most particularly the way you “totally destroyed” the “save this and read it in twenty years” argument based on the literal nature of it, instead of taking it for what it was–one of those things most of the rest of us learned from experience is that there’s a time for informality and rhetorical shortcuts in debate and that nitpicking the way you did isn’t at all conductive to actually discussing the issue.
Add in the stuff about “respect must be earned” and cutting off your mom, and the overall impression is of a philosophy student who just finished his first year with a C and is trying to fart above his ass.
I hope it does not violate the board’s rules to observe that this may well be the most pretentious and condescending comment I have ever perceived directed at me. Thank you, ashman. I have needed to live a full 48 1/2 years to this point before experiencing it’s like!
To answer the OP: Some older folks’ experience is meaningful, some’s aren’t. Here’s an anecdote that came to mind when I read the OP:
When I was 19-20, I worked in a small steel yard. One day, an older gentleman, (in his 60’s) came in with a small trailer and bought a few pieces of angle iron. After I loaded his trailer, I took the ticket back to the office. The boss and I were standing in the office looking out the window while he struggled to secure the load to his trailer. He didn’t seem to know where to place the rope or how to tie the knots. The boss said, “It’s a shame for a fellow to get that old and not have learned how to do that.”
That started a train of thought that comes and goes with me for the last 25 years. A person really can get older and not get wiser. I still wonder how it happens and I have some ideas. Some of the upstream posts touch on some of these ideas. Basically, if you get so full of yourself that you don’t admit your mistakes and aren’t willing to learn from others, you’ll just get old.
For myself, I’ve learned that I don’t know everything. Heck, I know very little. But, I’ve learned that I can sure figure it out if I try hard enough. I haven’t died from any of my mistakes yet and I haven’t killed anyone from my mistakes, as far as I know.
Here’s another anecdote that’s relative: I have a neighbor I call Good Neighbor Dennis. I’ve posted about him here before. He’s quiet inept at home maintenance and repair. However, he’s not a bit bashfull about asking me to do it for him. Many times, I’ve been tempted to tell him, “No”, because I was too tired or didn’t have the time, but I’ve always tried to accomodate him.
Last weekend, I was doing some plumbing repair and I had to sweat solder some copper pipe. I’ve never done that before and it wasn’t going well. Good Neighbor Dennis saw me working outside and wondered over to see what I was doing. Turns out, he knows something about sweat soldering and he showed me what I was doing wrong. The moral of the story is - you can learn a little something from just about anybody.
Like Chowder mentioned upthread, when I stop learning new things, it’s time for me to go. If life doesn’t hold the opportunity to make new mistakes and learn new things, then it’s time to go.
Is it your experience that education somehow requires one to be either diplomatic or tactful? You’ll pardon me if my writing at a high school level here has seemed pompous to you. At what level would you prefer me to write so that I can best touch my audience in a fashion to which they’re accustomed? This is an audience, I might add, which is presumably allied in the fight against ignorance. I see little foundation for you to disparage someone for using (what is obviously to some) an usual word. Some might take that as occasion to learn something. And, on the other hand, some might take it as a reason to get all uppity and decry someone using an SAT word.
Yes, I can see the theatrics to it now. I’m dubious as to your claim, but I won’t write a convoluted paragraph discussing it.
It’s funny you mention that, actually. I went out last night with some friends, and regaled them with the story of penetralia causing such response. We had a good laugh about it. One of my friends suggested that if someone is going to take umbrage with penetralia, then there’s an entire litany of words said person should refrain from using because they’ve not been Americanized, but are still part of the English language. Anyway, thank you for the story.
I’m glad I could bring back such warm memories for you.
Well, I’m sorry that as a child you had some need to appear to be more than you are. Let’s hope you’ve grown beyond that, as dishonesty isn’t a trait I hold high esteem.
The reason I “totally destroyed” his purported “experiment” is merely because he proposed it to be pompous. I have no problems with such per se. But, if one is going to do as much, it’s one’s best interest not to propose such a ridiculous experiment. It only shows ignorance to propose a test which can’t be met, very nearly in like fashion to one “Dr.” Kent Hovind. Which is to say that I’ll show my mental superiority by proposing a test to prove my case but I’ll devise it in such a way that it can’t be done. Because, you know, doing as much really paints one’s intellect in the light one wanted.
As a general premise, I wouldn’t have bothered. However, it would have been perverse to let such a flawed test stand without challenge only because he was attempting to show what all his years of wisdom and experience enable him to bring to bear. If such a test is an apt example of this mental firepower wrought through experience, it’s wholly inadequate to the task he attempted to undertake. Refuting such an absurd test was meant to show just that.
Now if I understand you correctly, it must be some type of phenomenon that philosophy students who are average are prone to cutting off their mothers. Is this really the case? I was unaware of this, but I shall give such an erudite observation its due consideration.
I do appreciate, though, your attempt to disparage me for my actions in a situation about which you are manifestly ignorant. Is this what you’ve learned in all your years: jump to conclusions and pass judgment without the benefit of learning the first detail of the situation? Is it often the case that you let your ego and personal contempt of someone retard your ability to evaluate things properly? Is this really the best way to prove your point that experience of age is great because you can pass judgment and hurl insults (dimwitted as they are) at people? I must say that I can’t wait to reach a point in my life where I’ll see the reasoning behind such action. Of course, it’s worth noting that I am older than you, so reason would have it (if many people in this thread are to be believed) that by virtue of that alone, I might just well have a greater supply of experience in the matter than you. After all, who are you to question your seniors?
Also of note, Zeriel is your post quoted here: “This is roughly why I’ve resolved to simply be amused at the poster in question and his notational degrees.”
I haven’t before mentioned this, but since you’re getting on my nerves with some inability to reason out what I’ve actually said, I’ll take a moment to condescend to do so. If this had been the first thing you’d written in response to me on here, I would have congratulated you on your supremely clever pun in the form of “notational degrees”. The pun being, of course, that I’m a mathematician and logician so at least those degrees are predicated in large fashion on, well, notation; thus, the degrees are “notational”. However, having seen you write in response to me elsewhere, I recognized it for what it is: a malapropism. I know, I know, it’s petty to point out such a thing as I myself make typos. But this malapropism, in a long list of other solecism you’ve written out, left me simply fraught with guffaws.
To Aussie Fish:
A reasonable question if I do say.
That’s a good question to be frank. I’ve been thinking on it while writing a response to Zeriel (because countering her arguments didn’t require much effort, I had the resources left over to entertain your question.)
I’m of two minds on this, to be sure. On the one hand, no, I can’t experience exactly what it feels like to be on the Moon. However, neither could the astronauts before they went there. So, that’s a wash.
It’s worth noting, I think, that they were, nevertheless, prepared for the experience by training here on Earth in simulations. So, while they couldn’t precisely experience the exact conditions of being on the Moon without having gone there in the first instance, history records and they say, they were well-prepared for it.
So, the question then turns to how were they prepared and if I’ve had any similar experience from which to draw. I have had some which bear directly on it, but not all. I’ve experienced weightlessness, which is one of the more distracting issues in question. Our proprioceptive skills are honed around being on the Earth, and how we function in that gravity. Being on the Moon would, naturally, frustrate that to some degree because our bodies’ typical corrections to minor spatial changes would be dramatic in low gravity. Also, fine motor skills would be severely affected as would --to a less, but still noticeable degree-- our gross motor skills.
Compounding the issue is the suits they have to wear. I’ve never worn the precise type of suits they wear up there. I have, on the other hand, worn full chemical and biological quarantine gear. I don’t imagine aside from weight (which is less of an issue once they’re on the Moon) and bulk (I’m not sure how bulky their suits were back then) that the differences are large.
Now, as I’ve earlier asserted, one needn’t experience every individual phenomenon to understand it. We need only to have experienced similar phenomena to be able to profoundly relate. In this case, the specific phenomenon would be milling around on the Moon. And the general phenomena would be weightlessness, disorientation, and undoubtedly some quite weird form of ataxia, for want of a better term. Hence why they train before going up.
And then there’s the issue of having to chase one’s food about, and their bathroom facilities. I haven’t experienced of the like with respect to the food, but I don’t think much imagination is required to deal with that. I’d rather not discuss the bathroom situation as I don’t find such topics a comfortable subject for me to discuss with strangers. Or even, now that I think on it, people I know.
For these reasons, my answer is really that I have more than the mere concept. I have experienced some of what they go through up there. The task at hand then, it would seem, is to put them all together and figure out how the issues would compound themselves through their synergy. I think it’s unnecessary to get myself up to the Moon to have a pretty good idea of what it would feel like.
Now, I suppose you were leaving off the aesthetic issue of like waking up and seeing the Earth and the excitement and all that. But in case you aren’t, I’m not easily excited. I went to see Mt. Rushmore in person once and was, well, underwhelmed. The pictures I’d seen of it beforehand were more than sufficient to give me the same experience of seeing it in person. And with none of the hassle. I see no reason why being on the Moon would be any different in that regard.
And to answer your second question, no, I wouldn’t tell him that any more than I’d tell anyone else what their experiences were like. That’s entirely the province of their own mind and heart, places where I’m not free to go. In another post on here, I was lamenting one type of person I hate: namely those who read a book and then tell you about it ending with, “You should read it; you’ll like it.” I think that’s an asshole move on their part to presume to tell me what I will and won’t like. In a somewhat similar manner, I wouldn’t dare tell someone else what they experienced because it’s hubris in its purest form.
To Dinsdale (and any moderator who might think to sanction him), I have problems with your response. I do not take it as an insult.
I do, on the other hand, have a question for you: what part of it was pretentious? I’m not particularly sure how condescending fits either. I surely didn’t stoop to anyone’s level so as to be understood. Nor have I implied in any way along the way that I’m superior to anyone here, which would tend to frustrate the application of the word with respect to me. I mean, it’s not as though I’m coming on high and and implying that I know I’m superior but will lower myself to answer anyone or anything like that. I have outright said that I’m not superior to anyone here; I just reject the implication that anyone here is superior to me.
I don’t care to get into this any further with you. There are some gifted young people, and some stagnated older folk. Fine. But in the opinions of just about everyone here (other than apparently you), those are the exceptions rather than the norm.
I don’t have the largest vocab around and am not the most widely read fella, but I’m no slouch in either department. Pretty close to 100% of the time when I am confronted with a word I am entirely unfamilar with, chances are pretty good it is either pretty obscure or a term of art within some specialty.
After looking up penetralia, I see no definition other than a plural noun referring to “the innermost spaces.” Okay. Which you use with “mild poetic license” to denote “a manner of knowing.”
Okay, I admit my vocab deficiencies. Maybe pretention and condescenscion aren’t the best words for pretending (and maintaining) that such a word is “isn’t that unusual,” but whatever you are expressing is not something I desire to engage.
Yes, again, you’ve read out of what I’ve written specifically what I’ve written into it. Thank you for completely removing certain central parts of my argument so that you can then attack a position I haven’t maintained. I have said that some young folks are smarter/more intelligent/experienced/whatever than some older folks. Some older folks are smarter/more intelligent/experienced/whatever than some younger folks. My central argument has been that age isn’t the determining factor: ability and desire are.
For that, I get a lot of drivel about “I’m older than you and thus my view carries more weight because I’m older!” If the view of my opposition were true and correct, one wonders why I’m not of that opinion as it is my very nature to seek out knowledge and truth to the exclusion of almost everything else.
It’s also of no moment how many people agree with a particular opinion. An opinion isn’t made stronger merely because so many people hold it; after all, if ten thousand people say a stupid thing, it’s still a stupid thing. No amount of agreement on their part that something must be true actually imbues the something with truth. It only means that x many people believe it, which isn’t the gold standard for truth.
Well, that’s a good thing. I encourage people to expand their vocabularies.
The issue being discussed in that response by me was on understanding something. To understand something, I’d submit, it’s necessary to have a working knowledge of its nature, which is necessary something kept at the center. The center of an object or idea, I’d submit, is the “innermost” place possible.
He also said: Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul. Along with: Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
You win with Wisdom War™ - which seems pretty important to you.
How about this:
OP - Boomers: Are older people really more experienced (in a meaningful way)?
Summary answer gleaned from this thread: [ul]
[li]Life experience can be deeply meaningful - if you are open to the wisdom it contains[/li][li]Therefore, the older you are, the more opportunities you will have had to gain wisdom through experience[/li][li]Everyone is different - some folks are open to the wisdom of experience earlier in their lives, some later - and some never[/li][/ul]
Are you for real? In what universe is penetralia (I am not italicizing it) a common word?
Searching Google News, the word penetralia does not appear in any news story archived by the site in the last month. While that’s a foolproof method, it’s a pretty good snapshot of what words are and are not used in everyday communication.
