Avoiding Mistakes

The Old Days (to me). My Grandma and Grandpa Pogue in 1949. My Dad is on the lower right.

People are always looking back to the "good old days." A lot of that is what we now call recency bias. Things seemed better when you were young because all the grownups were taking care of everything. Every generation has its problems. Recent generations that are now old were no exception. The good news is that as you get older you get better at avoiding stupid mistakes.

People tend to grow careful and conservative as they get older. This is sometimes criticized but in fact it is important to be careful. I have sometimes advised young people to be willing to take risks, because that is the best time to take risks. That said, you have to know when to take risks and when not to. You can make mistakes when you are young from which you can never recover, like for instance committing a major felony crime. Gaining enough experience to avoid these mistakes is wisdom.

When you get enough life experience you start to appreciate the old people. My grandparents were not sophisticated and I know they had not done everything right in their lives, but once they got to a certain age they had the ability to avoid the worse screw-ups. I don't think I'm quite there yet, but I'm getting close. I think it's probably around 55 to 60 that you get to that point.

Young people are valuable. They are the future of the human species. They are full of energy and creativity. But being honest, their input isn't particularly valuable for public policy. You can educate young people to have skills, but judgment comes only from experience, except maybe for a few rare individuals with natural talent. I'm horrified by some of the mistakes I made up into my thirties. I did not develop good judgment until I got into my forties, and I'm still working on it.

You know what else horrifies me? That people who are young now have a lot of power. I know from personal experience that they don't possess the life experience to deserve the influence they have.

When civilization was young, we needed young people to direct new things. This led to improvements. But civilization is now mature and revolutions are as likely to lead backward as forward. We have selective memory about what is given up when we take on new things. In my opinion, many problems with contemporary civilization are a consequence of not exercising correct judgment before changing things. For every new social movement and technology there are individuals harmed or impoverished, and everyone suffers from lesser, more mundane detriment. You can't change things without tradeoffs. It is a misnomer to categorically refer to change as "progress." And youth is at the center of change.

The voting age was reduced from 21 to 18 in the United States during the Vietnam War because it was legal to draft an 18 year old boy into the military. At the time the country was full of veterans of the world wars and it was normalized to them. But really, they should have done away with the draft instead, or at least raised the age to be the same as the voting age: 21. To me, it is a violation of human rights to force people into a trade of killing and potentially dying. Especially killing. It's inhumane.

When I was in college I voted for the first time. I was not confident about it. Yet I found many of my peers were confident. Indeed, college students are often politically active and enthusiastic about voting. But you know what else college students do? Wake up on somebody's front lawn after a night of drinking. Or wake up with someone they don't recognize and an unwanted pregnancy. There is no reason to allow people who make those types of mistakes to vote. It's absurd.

We need to be more honest with ourselves about the value of experience. Most of the time young people don't know what they are talking about. We should listen to their concerns but sometimes we should ignore them.