Complex Numbers

Regeneration

And now for my monthly (kinda) dose of confirmation bias.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/11/12/20950235/ok-boomer-kids-these-...

Why old people will always complain about young people
Prediction: Today’s “OK boomer” Gen Z will complain about the youth one day. Blame human memory.

If all this article had to offer was a rejection of arbitrary and misleading "generations" nonsense, I wouldn't bother. That's kind of my argument in the first place. But it takes a few side trips that I found compelling.

To recap, I think "generations" are bullshit because they're over-generalizing, and because, in extremis, you can get situations like a pair of twins born bracketing midnight on January 1 of the arbitrary cutoff between generations, thus forever pigeonholing them into different cohorts. There will (as this article agrees) always be older people and younger people, and they'll always complain about each other, but this whole Boomer / Gen-X / Millennial / whatever crap is mostly just useful for marketing purposes.

So I'll skip the parts of the article that I already agree with and point out some of the interesting asides.

If you’re just tuning in: “OK boomer” is a clapback...

Normally, at this point, I'd stop reading. I may have a lot of time, but I have zero time for trendy catchphrases like "clapback." But, again, since the article was going in a direction I agreed with, I gave it a chance. Kids these days and their slang... wait.

Protzko became interested in the “kids these days effect” — the tendency for older people to say the youth of today are somehow worse than youth in the past — after surveying a few hundred of the top experts in developmental psychology.

The complaints adults make about kids through the ages are always the same: “They’re suggesting young people are lazy, they’re entitled, and they act in self serving ways,” said Cort Rudolph...

That's funny, because I'm lazy, I'm entitled, and I act in self-serving ways. I guess I'm actually young. Yay!

And this particular bias starts to make some sense in light of memory science.

This is where things start to get interesting, though it's still not anything I didn't already know from other sources.

So what does memory have to do with how adults see young people? In order to make a judgment call about today’s youth, you have to try to remember how kids used to be. But that’s hard! Who has objective information on how kids used to be? Since we don’t have it all, we use information from the present to fill in the gaps.

I'd imagine there are other biases at work. While some people have bad memories of childhood, and sometimes for good reason, I think most people tend to view it as an idyllic time (with maybe a few hiccups along the way).

Other possible causes: “kids these days” is cultural trope that people are taught. Or, it could be linked to the belief that the past, overall, was better than the present.

Note to self: read on before bringing up points like that. Anyway, I've always used "kids these days" humorously, as I do with "get off my lawn!"

If anything, data shows the rising Gen Z, at least, is better in many ways than generations past: They’re doing fewer drugs, drinking less alcohol, and having sex at older ages

Yeah... I'm not sure that's "better."

The differences we see in the generations, he argues, aren’t necessarily unique to those generations. They could just be more of a general reflection of age. Young people are always more self-centered and narcissistic. Older people are always a little more set in their ways.

That's what I've been trying to say.

Without the data, we talk about generations a bit like we talk about astrological signs. “The distinction between ‘my’ zodiac sign or generation and ‘their’ sign or generation gives people an opportunity to identify with a group while differentiating themselves from others,” Rudolph and some colleagues argue in a recent paper.

Yes, because that's what we really need now: more tribalism.

That was sarcasm, by the way.

“Millennials are just like everyone else,” he says. “They’re going to grow into older people, who are just going to keep looking at kids and making the same complaints about them. [The] memory bias ... is going to keep affecting us in 1,000 years.”

Bless your heart. You think there will still be people around in 1,000 years.