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> I can't understand any other context for drafting 18 year olds other than taking advantage of their youth and incomplete development

18-year-olds have been volunteer recruited and drafted for perhaps the entire history of organized armies. Child soldiers also have (and in some countries still are) enlisted also. I suspect this is only out of extreme necessity, as the moral and practical drawbacks are overwhelming.

When the United States has instituted the draft, it has encompassed 18-to-45 year-olds for immediate enlistment. 18-25 year-olds comprise the largest age group of new volunteer enlistees in the US. The largest barriers to military service qualification are health reasons and family situations. It would follow that younger enlistees would have lower likelihood of physical injuries and being the sole caretaker of a dependent.

Your post made sense until your bizarre digression to armed service being linked to incomplete prefrontal cortex development. It can be appealing to find sinister motivations behind institutions you dislike, but there isn't a basis in fact here. The explanation is tradition, health, and lack of obligations.

It's hardly bizarre, but it's not put in terms of cortical development either. It is however a bit of, "Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she will be mine for life."

Ignoring that reality, and why 12 year olds are more likely to pick up a machete than a 30 year old, is what's bizarre.

Is it true that 12 year olds are more likely to pick up a machete than 30 year olds?

In a general context, or in the context of what we're talking about here? In general, I don't know, in context... yes. You can get most kids on board with almost anything, and those you can't, you can generally abuse or otherwise force to submit. They're not set in their ways, they don't have as clear a sense of the world, and their impulse control usually stinks.

There's a reason that everyone, for better or worse, wants to get to kids early, and often. Advertisers, religions, people trying to teach kids how to deal with advertisers and religions, militaries, etc... all see the value in "getting them young."

Humans are beastly, violent primates with marginal cognitive advantages over our cousins. Empathy is learned. I don't know if a 12 year old is more likely to kill than a 30 year old, but the former certainly has had much less social normalization toward empathy than the older one, other things being equal.

Also kids are easily guided to do just about anything. They're easily impressed and even the brightest lack the experience to temper their judgement of what is a good idea versus what isn't.

No, healthy people are born with empathy. Which is why childhood animal mutilation is a standard test for sociopathy.

> No, healthy people are born with empathy.

Most of the reading I've done seems to suggest that that's something that's developed at a very young age, and very sensitive to early childhood environment, rather something people are born with.

It's a normal part of childhood development. The original comment suggests that hate is inborn and empathy is learned - no real evidence for that.

Empathy is a far more complex emotion.

Dogs have empathy.

No, healthy people learn empathy, they aren't born being empathetic. They should learn it very early, and certainly should demonstrate some empathy by the time pre-K rolls around.

This back and forth sounds a great deal like "NO U" being shouted on 4chan.

Are there any sources, papers or studies indicating whether it is learned, innate or both?

Sources and empiricism are what we should be resorting to, not down-votes.

A down-vote instead of a link, I don't know what I expected.

You're not going to find a lot of people jumping through that hoop, given that 5 seconds with Google is all that it takes. This isn't some controversial developmental theory, and this isn't a formal debate.

I am not taking sides. I may even have done some reading up already, but I want to remain neutral.

I want to know why the people going back and forth think one way or the other. If I rely on my own research I might not get the nuance that a psychologist or other person with a vested interest would be able to share.

There seems a great deal smoke but no light in this discussion. This is uncommon here on hacker news, normally sources are appreciated and I frequently see them brought in well before an argument begins, even on extremely casual topics. They often earn an few upvotes too.

Then shed some light on it, don't spend a handful of posts complaining about it while cryptically suggesting the value of your own neutrality and what you might or might not know. Again, this isn't a controversial topic, and just a case of one poster who didn't seem to know about the topic in general, as indicated by believing that one aspect of the Macdonald triad being diagnostic for a child.

So again, if you want to add to the discussion, add to it, don't try to control it.

As a general rule, in scientific circles anyway, the person making an assertion is the one who gets to support it. Asking "Why do you believe that?" is always valid.

That question was asked, and answered by several people. "Why do you think that?" and "You haven't cited to my satisfaction, although I've done my research... which I'm not sharing for... reasons..." isn't the same thing at all.

Lets not pretend that it is.

[citation needed], people generally need to pass a crank test or be ignored as not worth the effort of speaking to.

In this context someone explaining themselves would be nice, even without citations (they would be nice though). Instead I was getting downvotes for asking "why" just with a few more words.

At the moment there is no reason to believe either side and plenty of reasons to dismiss both, not as cranks, but at least as cranky.

/I assume the thread is dead so..

Complaining on a form inherently lowers it's quality. As a rule Down-vote, Flag, or say nothing don't clutter up HN with posts that make for poor reading.

And yes, mass downvoting both sides of a thread is often better than getting in the middle of a heated debate.

Given that this is your response, and you've chosen not to shed some light on the subject yourself, the options left to describe your motives are not positive.

It's a complex emotion, and we don't have good tests to measure any but the most basic emotions in infants. But we do have good indicators that 12 month old babies show empathy.

As well as dogs. Dogs have empathy, even for humans.

So yeah, the idea that an 18 year old is struggling with an emotion that babies and dogs don't have much trouble with is a silly proclamation IMO.

It's not a test, it's not diagnostic, it's part of a hypothetical triad of indicators, in the context of an adult's childhood history. You can't even diagnose a child as antisocial, at best you'd have "Conduct Disorder".

Well, trigger warning: discussion of child soldier recruitment, and deadly violence.

Recruitment of child soldiers usually involves drugging the targets. 12 year olds are probably less susceptible to be able to realize that they're being drugged and to have the mental fortitude to retain their self through the grooming process. I suspect that even when drugged, a 30 year old will have a better sense of being drugged and is less likely to be brainwashed. There are also other shock-inducing factors that have a greater dislocating impact on 12 year olds, such as killing their parents (both it happening in front of them, and/or in some cases, them being forced to do it as part of the indoctrination process). I suspect that a 30 year old would be more likely to channel their anger at the "recruiter" than a 12 year old would.

That is atrocious. Do you have any citations to back those up?

http://www.accord.org.za/conflict-trends/understanding-recru... https://www.hrw.org/news/2000/05/31/sierra-leone-rebels-forc... https://childrenandarmedconflict.un.org/effects-of-conflict/... http://www.unicef.org/sowc96/2csoldrs.htm https://childrenandarmedconflict.un.org/effects-of-conflict/...

Personally, I am less likely to take risks as I age because I have invested more in myself over time. It seems natural to value that which you have dedicated money, time, and effort. Before adulthood that investment came primarily from my mother and she valued my life waaaaay more than I did.

I get that this is a dissociative POV.

So often these discussions are about youthful feelings of immortality, more courage, foolishness, etc., but that never rang true personally.

> Personally, I am less likely to take risks as I age because I have invested more in myself over time. It seems natural to value that which you have dedicated money, time, and effort.

No no. Prefrontal cortex development. Who needs an entirely plausible rational explanation when you can point to mysterious and poorly understood brain-physical reasons?

Drafting 18-year-olds: well, they are less likely to have employment in strategically important industries, they are less likely to be supporting a family, and they are seldom in mid-college, i.e. to be held aside for a commission upon graduation. Those, that I can think of, were the three big sources of deferment in the WW II draft.

They are also approaching peak physical fitness, both as to capacity for difficult physical work, and to the ability to recover from severe trauma.

[Edit: one should probably not exaggerate the idealism of draftees. Maybe it was there in WW I, but the accounts of WW II and since suggest that it fell off.]

> I can't understand any other context for drafting 18 year olds other than taking advantage of their youth and incomplete development

Physical fitness surely? Isn't 18 or 19 around the physical fitness peak? I'm guessing that people are on average are significantly stronger and more robust at 18 than they are at 28. I think the British Army has 26 as the limit for joining in the first place for officers at least.

Also people are married by 28. At 18 they're generally single and more able to deploy.

18-year-olds are also inexperienced in the travails of supporting yourself in life, and as a result of this, are much easier to sway with ideals rather than pragmatics.

I'd say the peak strength must be 22-26, because 18-years-olds are really thin and lean (source: I love men ;)) – unless they've been practising musculation, but once again, if they practice musculation at 24, they'll be much bigger. But it takes well above 2 years to train a professional, so profesional recruitment takes them earlier. However, concerning draft followed by almost-immediate use on the battlefield, given this subjective data, it makes little sense to me, physically, to draft them so young.

It kinda depends on what kind of strength. For things where the athlete is rather lightweight/small and does some kind of fast/twitchy power moves you peak out somewhere before 30. But when all you need is pure strenght you have 30 to 40 year old world champions in many sports (you still have to start training when a lot younger to make it though) for example in power lifting where you have a lot of todays world champions born in the late 70s/early 80s.

One of the advantages (and disadvantages) of sending 18-20 year olds into battlefield is that if they die society spent less money/effort into teaching them some other valuable skill that would have been lost without getting the benefit out of it (due to the person being dead)

Based on my cursory research men peak physically in their mid to late 20's.

It may be that it takes less effort to get you to sufficient fitness at that age, but it's nowhere near your peak. Unless you follow an elite athlete training program, it'll take you well over a decade of exercise to max out your potential. E.g. for muscle strength, most peoples bodies simply isn't capable of synthesising muscle fast enough in even a decade to max out your potential unless you use performance enhancing drugs.

You may have a point about average fitness and rate of improvement, though.