I don’t like calling ~ 23 year olds “essentially still a kid.” I think that has to cut both ways; if someone is “essentially still a kid” we shouldn’t metaphorically let them use matches—by which I mean have any roles and functions that could cause significant harm if they act badly.
I do think age is mitigating in the context of the 1996 email (on top of the passage of 26 years), but I feel that phrasing goes too far.
Fair enough. :) Some headlines called the FTX leadership “a gang of kids”, which I think isn’t unreasonable, even though they were in their late 20s or early 30s. The main thing I wanted to convey is that people at this age often have limited life experience or understanding of how the world works and so often do dumb things. Youth is a time to explore weird ideas and make mistakes. Therefore, I would agree that 23-year-olds generally shouldn’t be entrusted to hold important decision-making positions unless they’ve shown a track record of unusual maturity.
I think it is bad to deny a person access to a position because of the statistical average of their group. If a 23 year old is competent, then hold them to the same standard.
It is odd to me that you would comment that highlighting differences in cognitive ability between groups should be taboo and suppressed and yet openly state that 23 year olds should have to face different standards in order to be entrusted in decision-making positions. I think you would find it utterly repugnant to say that blacks should have higher standards before we trust them.
Edit: I don’t think this is particularly bad and this attitude is relatively common. I just want to point out that I think this looks like an odd double-standard in my view, although many may disagree. Sorry if this comment comes across as aggressive.
I said that 23-year-olds should demonstrate “a track record of unusual maturity” in order to have important positions, not that they should always be denied them. In some cases, such as becoming the president of the USA, a minimum age requirement may make sense because the stakes are so high, although one could say that we should just let voters decide if any given person is qualified.
But you’re right that I support a strong prior against, say, tasking a 23-year-old to run a major organization—a prejudice that needs to be overcome with strong enough evidence of maturity and competence—in a way that it would be abhorrent to do for a member of a particular racial group.
It’s interesting to ponder the reasons for different attitudes toward racism vs ageism. My two main guesses are:
Average differences in traits based on age are sometimes quite large, enough that the value of using the prejucide for making predictions can exceed the unfairness downsides of stereotyping people. For example, my impression is that young men are on average much riskier drivers than older men, so there’s not a ton of society-level outrage about charging 16-year-old men several times more for car insurance than 55-year-old men, although I imagine that many individual young men who are cautious drivers are rightly annoyed by this situation.
Historical context leads us to treat racial / sexual / etc discrimination more seriously than discrimination based on age, height, extroversion, etc. As far as I know, there hasn’t been a lot of genocide against short people of the same race, or enslavement of them, or forcing them to use separate bathrooms, etc. A main argument for caution about racial stuff is a slippery slope concern that there’s some small chance that allowing more callousness on these issues could actually lead to a new genocide, so the expected value of worrying about it is nontrivial, even if the risk of the genocide is very low. (That said, excessive mob punishment of people for not following ever-more-demanding requirements regarding proper speech and conduct may itself pose a very small risk of genocidal outcomes, and it’s non-obvious whether this risk is smaller or larger than the racial genocide risk in the modern West. It may also be the case that the hostility between the extreme woke and extreme anti-woke camps makes both of them stronger, at the expense of moderate voices, thereby increasing both types of genocide risk at once.)
There are some types of discrimination that receive surprisingly little sympathy despite the lifelong trauma they can cause people, such as favoritism toward attractive people. Even woke Hollywood—despite extraordinary efforts to introduce diversity of race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on—rarely casts unattractive actors for leading roles. Maybe this is understandable, because those movies would usually perform poorly at the box office, and for whatever reason, there’s not enough social outrage about discrimination against unattractive people to offset that. (To the extent that one point of watching a movie is to see attractive people, maybe one could argue that unattractive people are genuinely less qualified for the job, and no amount of new evidence could overcome that fact. This would make attractiveness discrimination unfortunate but not stereotyping. OTOH, there’s some chance that if the unattractive person were given the leading role, s/he would charm audiences to a degree that the movie’s creators didn’t expect, in which case it could be similar to the case of a surprisingly wise 23-year-old.)
Historical context leads us to treat racial / sexual / etc discrimination more seriously than discrimination based on age, height, extroversion, etc. As far as I know, there hasn’t been a lot of genocide against short people of the same race, or enslavement of them, or forcing them to use separate bathrooms, etc.
I agree with your comment in general, but I’m not quite sure about this point. I think age-based discrimination has been / is quite severe (though perhaps it is also often justified, since age does make a lot of difference to people’s abilities):
Children are often forced to go sit in a small room all day, subject to the arbitrary whims of a single adult with little oversight, and often have to endure criminal violence from other children with little recourse, in a way that would be unacceptable for older people.
Young men have been repeatedly conscripted to fight in wars with high mortality rates.
Old people might face compulsory redundancy.
Young people have to pay taxes to fund benefits for older people, even if those retirees did not have to pay those taxes when they were young, and these retirement benefits may not be available by the time the young retire.
Many facilities do ban children, and people often complain about children being allowed on planes etc.
In many places babies can be killed by their parents without legal consequence.
Older people are often targeted by younger criminals because they are vulnerable.
In some places older people may be pressured to commit suicide to free up resources.
Many laws are passed that systematically disadvantage younger people (e.g. NIMBY rules on homebuilding).
I think school is vastly less bad than, say, slavery, with some possible exceptions like if there’s extreme bullying at the school.
You’re right that the violence children endure from each other (and sometimes from their own parents) would be unacceptable if done to adults. If one adult hits another, that’s criminal assault/battery. If a kid hits another kid, that’s just Tuesday.
Children are also subject to the arbitrary whims of their parents, and are made to do unpaid labor against their will, though usually parents don’t treat their own children extremely badly. (Of course, some parents do horrifically abuse or neglect their children.)
In any case, as you said, to some extent the lack of freedom for children is inevitable. (Actually, there is a way to avoid it entirely: don’t have children, which is the antinatalist solution. If sentient beings didn’t exist, none of the problems we’re discussing here would be problems anymore.)
It’s definitely right to look at historical and other social context to explain current and past attitudes towards discrimination as explanations. A utilitarian framework is probably not the right approach, nor most other ethics systems.
I doubt there was ever a time in the modern era where attitudes were consistent, and there’s loads of social conditioning going on. I don’t think many women felt angry in the 19th century when their heads of government were (almost?) invariably men, because “that’s just how things are” and nobody else was getting angry about it anyway.
My favorite example of current discrimination that totally flies under the radar of the collective ire is height discrimination. 6 of 46 US presidents[1] have been of below average height, a result this extreme or more has less than a 0.005 chance occuring due to randomness (i.e. your chances of becoming president are 2 orders of magnitudes lower if you are short). This is not totally unknown, occasionally there’s a paper or article about height advantages, but people perceive it as a mere curiosity. Personally speaking as a short guy, this absolutely fails to anger me either.
Average differences in traits based on age are sometimes quite large, enough that the value of using the prejucide for making predictions can exceed the unfairness downsides of stereotyping people.
Even if there were no average differences in maturity between age groups, it still might be rational to prefer older people for important roles like president or CEO for pure credentialing reasons. The reason is simple. 23 year olds have had less time to prove their maturity. Even if they were highly mature, their track record would be brief, and thus not conclusive.
Also, we all once were, are, or expect to be 23 years old at some point. That’s not a complete justification for many reasons, but it makes me relatively less concerned about age-based classifications than classifications where the burden is not felt close to equally by everyone over time.
I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s an excellent point and probably is a big part of the explanation. There are a few cases where it might not apply, such as if a mother stays at home with her kids during her 20s and 30s, enters the workforce in her 40s, and faces ageism because she’s not as sharp as the younger people. In that case, she never once was a sharp young person in the workplace. But these kinds of cases also tend to be ones where people feel that ageism is more of a problem.
I don’t like calling ~ 23 year olds “essentially still a kid.” I think that has to cut both ways; if someone is “essentially still a kid” we shouldn’t metaphorically let them use matches—by which I mean have any roles and functions that could cause significant harm if they act badly.
I do think age is mitigating in the context of the 1996 email (on top of the passage of 26 years), but I feel that phrasing goes too far.
Fair enough. :) Some headlines called the FTX leadership “a gang of kids”, which I think isn’t unreasonable, even though they were in their late 20s or early 30s. The main thing I wanted to convey is that people at this age often have limited life experience or understanding of how the world works and so often do dumb things. Youth is a time to explore weird ideas and make mistakes. Therefore, I would agree that 23-year-olds generally shouldn’t be entrusted to hold important decision-making positions unless they’ve shown a track record of unusual maturity.
I think it is bad to deny a person access to a position because of the statistical average of their group. If a 23 year old is competent, then hold them to the same standard.
It is odd to me that you would comment that highlighting differences in cognitive ability between groups should be taboo and suppressed and yet openly state that 23 year olds should have to face different standards in order to be entrusted in decision-making positions. I think you would find it utterly repugnant to say that blacks should have higher standards before we trust them.
Edit: I don’t think this is particularly bad and this attitude is relatively common. I just want to point out that I think this looks like an odd double-standard in my view, although many may disagree. Sorry if this comment comes across as aggressive.
It’s a great point, and not at all aggressive. :)
I said that 23-year-olds should demonstrate “a track record of unusual maturity” in order to have important positions, not that they should always be denied them. In some cases, such as becoming the president of the USA, a minimum age requirement may make sense because the stakes are so high, although one could say that we should just let voters decide if any given person is qualified.
But you’re right that I support a strong prior against, say, tasking a 23-year-old to run a major organization—a prejudice that needs to be overcome with strong enough evidence of maturity and competence—in a way that it would be abhorrent to do for a member of a particular racial group.
It’s interesting to ponder the reasons for different attitudes toward racism vs ageism. My two main guesses are:
Average differences in traits based on age are sometimes quite large, enough that the value of using the prejucide for making predictions can exceed the unfairness downsides of stereotyping people. For example, my impression is that young men are on average much riskier drivers than older men, so there’s not a ton of society-level outrage about charging 16-year-old men several times more for car insurance than 55-year-old men, although I imagine that many individual young men who are cautious drivers are rightly annoyed by this situation.
Historical context leads us to treat racial / sexual / etc discrimination more seriously than discrimination based on age, height, extroversion, etc. As far as I know, there hasn’t been a lot of genocide against short people of the same race, or enslavement of them, or forcing them to use separate bathrooms, etc. A main argument for caution about racial stuff is a slippery slope concern that there’s some small chance that allowing more callousness on these issues could actually lead to a new genocide, so the expected value of worrying about it is nontrivial, even if the risk of the genocide is very low. (That said, excessive mob punishment of people for not following ever-more-demanding requirements regarding proper speech and conduct may itself pose a very small risk of genocidal outcomes, and it’s non-obvious whether this risk is smaller or larger than the racial genocide risk in the modern West. It may also be the case that the hostility between the extreme woke and extreme anti-woke camps makes both of them stronger, at the expense of moderate voices, thereby increasing both types of genocide risk at once.)
There are some types of discrimination that receive surprisingly little sympathy despite the lifelong trauma they can cause people, such as favoritism toward attractive people. Even woke Hollywood—despite extraordinary efforts to introduce diversity of race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on—rarely casts unattractive actors for leading roles. Maybe this is understandable, because those movies would usually perform poorly at the box office, and for whatever reason, there’s not enough social outrage about discrimination against unattractive people to offset that. (To the extent that one point of watching a movie is to see attractive people, maybe one could argue that unattractive people are genuinely less qualified for the job, and no amount of new evidence could overcome that fact. This would make attractiveness discrimination unfortunate but not stereotyping. OTOH, there’s some chance that if the unattractive person were given the leading role, s/he would charm audiences to a degree that the movie’s creators didn’t expect, in which case it could be similar to the case of a surprisingly wise 23-year-old.)
I agree with your comment in general, but I’m not quite sure about this point. I think age-based discrimination has been / is quite severe (though perhaps it is also often justified, since age does make a lot of difference to people’s abilities):
Children are often forced to go sit in a small room all day, subject to the arbitrary whims of a single adult with little oversight, and often have to endure criminal violence from other children with little recourse, in a way that would be unacceptable for older people.
Young men have been repeatedly conscripted to fight in wars with high mortality rates.
Old people might face compulsory redundancy.
Young people have to pay taxes to fund benefits for older people, even if those retirees did not have to pay those taxes when they were young, and these retirement benefits may not be available by the time the young retire.
Many facilities do ban children, and people often complain about children being allowed on planes etc.
In many places babies can be killed by their parents without legal consequence.
Older people are often targeted by younger criminals because they are vulnerable.
In some places older people may be pressured to commit suicide to free up resources.
Many laws are passed that systematically disadvantage younger people (e.g. NIMBY rules on homebuilding).
Good list. :)
I think school is vastly less bad than, say, slavery, with some possible exceptions like if there’s extreme bullying at the school.
You’re right that the violence children endure from each other (and sometimes from their own parents) would be unacceptable if done to adults. If one adult hits another, that’s criminal assault/battery. If a kid hits another kid, that’s just Tuesday.
Children are also subject to the arbitrary whims of their parents, and are made to do unpaid labor against their will, though usually parents don’t treat their own children extremely badly. (Of course, some parents do horrifically abuse or neglect their children.)
In any case, as you said, to some extent the lack of freedom for children is inevitable. (Actually, there is a way to avoid it entirely: don’t have children, which is the antinatalist solution. If sentient beings didn’t exist, none of the problems we’re discussing here would be problems anymore.)
It’s definitely right to look at historical and other social context to explain current and past attitudes towards discrimination as explanations. A utilitarian framework is probably not the right approach, nor most other ethics systems. I doubt there was ever a time in the modern era where attitudes were consistent, and there’s loads of social conditioning going on. I don’t think many women felt angry in the 19th century when their heads of government were (almost?) invariably men, because “that’s just how things are” and nobody else was getting angry about it anyway.
My favorite example of current discrimination that totally flies under the radar of the collective ire is height discrimination. 6 of 46 US presidents[1] have been of below average height, a result this extreme or more has less than a 0.005 chance occuring due to randomness (i.e. your chances of becoming president are 2 orders of magnitudes lower if you are short). This is not totally unknown, occasionally there’s a paper or article about height advantages, but people perceive it as a mere curiosity. Personally speaking as a short guy, this absolutely fails to anger me either.
1: https://www.thoughtco.com/shortest-presidents-4144573
Even if there were no average differences in maturity between age groups, it still might be rational to prefer older people for important roles like president or CEO for pure credentialing reasons. The reason is simple. 23 year olds have had less time to prove their maturity. Even if they were highly mature, their track record would be brief, and thus not conclusive.
Also, we all once were, are, or expect to be 23 years old at some point. That’s not a complete justification for many reasons, but it makes me relatively less concerned about age-based classifications than classifications where the burden is not felt close to equally by everyone over time.
I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s an excellent point and probably is a big part of the explanation. There are a few cases where it might not apply, such as if a mother stays at home with her kids during her 20s and 30s, enters the workforce in her 40s, and faces ageism because she’s not as sharp as the younger people. In that case, she never once was a sharp young person in the workplace. But these kinds of cases also tend to be ones where people feel that ageism is more of a problem.