[com]

Thank you for this very honest comment. It means more to to me than I was expecting it to when I started reading it.

Were there any moments on the journey of growing up that stick in your mind as being turning points in your path from techno-determinism to whatever you describe yourself now?

I’m really interested in how we can intervene earlier in people’s journey to provide bigger horizons, rather than just waiting for enough experience to build up…

[gumby]

Thanks. I think I mainly developed more empathy.

I married an artist. She knew no physics, no advanced mathematics, but plenty of philosphy and languages as well as the technology and philosophy of representational art. She was a lot smarter than me and we spent a lot of time expanding each others' horizons, not deliberately or didactically but just through living.

Also so many things seem clear when you are young and I was repeatedly humbled by how complicated the real world is compared to academia or research (where I worked on very abstruse subjects, e.g. the denotational semantics of reflexive languages).

I think you see this in a lot of people: libertarianism and even Ayn Rand is more popular with young people ("hey I'm smart and responsible; why are there all these annoying and pointless rules getting in my way?"). I was never a libertarian but back then I was sympathetic to Rousseau. But you have fewer grown up libertarians because many learn to realise that sure, things are imperfect, but we live in a world that evolved (sometimes well and sometimes not) to work with fallable systems and lots of opinions, some well thought out and some...not so.

[bigstrat2003]

One of the interesting insights I've had recently (in my late 30s) is that young people always assume that the older generation is out of touch and can't see the obvious solutions to all of life's problems. But it seems to me now that the truth is rather different - the older generation often has the experience to understand why those solutions are not going to work, whereas the young don't yet have that hard-won experience (cause it takes time).

I myself have been (and still am tbh) fairly libertarian. But the older I get and the more I see, the more I start to understand that there are flaws in the idea. Not everyone is going to do the right thing (for various reasons), and sometimes you simply have to intervene because the cost of not doing so becomes too high. I do think that our government tends too much towards nanny-ism, but at the same time I kinda get why.