[tritchey]

I'm sliding down the other side of that distribution myself.

One evening I was having dinner with my wife and her nearly 70 year old parents. Her mom made a comment that has stuck with me:

"You know, we still think and feel the same way we did when we were your age."

[JoeAltmaier]

Yeah; but those thoughts are now 50 years out of date. That's why old people feel different; they are from another time.

[SiVal]

The older I get, the more interested I am in the thoughts of people from another time. I discovered long ago that there is far less continuity of wisdom than young people realize. There is a common assumption among young people that the best ideas of the past are carried forward while the failed ideas are left behind. This is true to some extent, but it is much less true than most young people seem to think.

People vastly underestimate the gap between their theories and reality. Experience forces them to change some of their theories to ideas that seem less plausible but that turn out to correspond better to reality. When they try to pass these improved ideas on to younger people without the same experience, they are often rejected. They sound less plausible than what they and their young peers take for granted.

If the younger people go on to have the same experiences as their parents, they might eventually recognize the wisdom of their elders' ideas, but if not, they might never realize how wrong they are and will easily pass the plausible-sounding bad ideas on to their own children. At some point, most of society can have a good chuckle at the old people's "out of date" ideas.

Since each generation faces different experiences, we have a mechanism whereby wisdom born of experience keeps being lost and replaced by plausible-sounding bad ideas.

You also have the mechanism whereby people point at one area that has clearly improved as evidence that today's ideas are better than those of the past. After all, today's telephone hardware is vastly better than the Lisp Machine of 50 years ago, so the design of HTML/CSS/Javascript platform must represent a substantial improvement on the best ideas from Common Lisp with the bad ideas removed.

No? Well then there's another mechanism whereby wisdom born of experience in the past can be replaced by worse ideas that just happen to end up carried to popularity by historical circumstance.

Just as I study how old-time engineers solved technical problems without using today's technologies, I try to study the writings of "old people" from ancient times to modern, and I try to learn from the "out of date" ideas that came from experiences I've never had. I find it contains more real wisdom than the taken-for-granted trendy theories popular among today's young elites. That of course makes me "feel different" and my thoughts "out of date", too.

[JoeAltmaier]

Pah. Why are old-people's 'experiences' not also 'plausible-sounding bad ideas' from another time? In fact, that's the only mechanism your pessimism permits.

I'd guess, instead, that these modern bad ideas are possibly good ideas that just don't jibe with your experience.

[SiVal]

Currently popular ideas are not the result of a historical meme ratchet, whereby ideas have only been replaced by better ideas. A cursory knowledge of history provides ample evidence that bad ideas have often reemerged and become the orthodoxy of the time, supplanting earlier hard-earned wisdom.

With that history in mind, the common notion that today's popular ideas are all wiser than any of the past can be seen as absurdly unlikely. Does that imply that all old ideas are better than new replacements? Of course not. It implies that some of them are.

It implies that if you are more interested in wisdom than in popularity, you should look beyond what is taken for granted as the orthodoxy of your own generation.

[jacques_chester]

"The past is a different country."

[dman]

That sounds very interesting. Any examples?

[GnarfGnarf]

Root cellars.

[tritchey]

Ooh, I like that.