[tedks]

...but the optic nerve of a 20 year old is the same from a scientific perspective in almost all respects to the optic nerve of a 30 year old. Maybe if that optic nerve signaled some horribly deep work of literature like 100 years of solitude, the older brain behind it would interpret it differently, but that nerve is the same.

When you remember the amazing swelling feelings of being ~adult~ you had when you last read 100 years of solitude, your semantic and episodic memory systems are, functionally, identical to what they were when you read it the first time. Maybe your fluid intelligence is a little less fluid, but that doesn't really start until you've aged a lot.

I'm sure you've changed as a person. I'm sure you have a wealth of new experiences and are entirely different from your past self. This is irrelevant to the physics, chemistry, and psychology of your body.

[pacaro]

In general I agree with you. It is important to separate experience from capability (there's probably a better word here).

Much of the social psychology may not fit easily into that division though. To pick on a common whipping boy in these arguments, Milgram's obedience study, what is the role of experience in any set of choices like those given to the participants. The asymmetric responsibilities when there is a power dynamic is something that some people learn somewhere along the line.

I'm rambling a little but I feel that some of the observed effects in these experiments may be things for which experience may provide a learned immunity

[tedks]

Milgram's obedience study was tested on adult men, between ages 30-40 IIRC. There were 19 later experiments, you wouldn't call them replications because they weren't exactly the same, but they were all consistent, and they sampled diverse (for the 50's) populations.

If you didn't know that, and were assuming it was tested on undergrads exclusively, you should recognize that your assumption was wrong, and propagate that through your belief graph.