Examples? Sometimes interest in particular types of "new" ideas is just naivete, and seeing those "new" ideas fail or not live up to the hype can lead to a new appreciation of certain aspects of the status quo.
Getting hired by a FAANG is the antithesis of doing a startup, or doing some original research, or even working on a clever hack just for the joy of it.
This is just one example of how this type reacts to particular issues, the full impact is pervasive throughout the whole site.
Yes, I know there is an irony in me generalizing about this type of person, but I'm unsure how else to talk about it.
Some people have the patience and curiosity to develop a more nuanced understanding of a topic and refuse to generalize in discussion, which has the effect of excluding those with a less nuanced understanding of the topic; others generalize faster, possibly for rhetorical purposes and to align with people lacking a more nuanced understanding of the topic. This leads to an amplification of the least nuanced position that the majority of people support. You see this effect in almost any community.
To avoid this, you'd have to devise a way to exclude people who refuse to develop a more nuanced understanding of any given topic (i.e. lack curiosity).
>> Examples?
> If we are continuing with the generalization about this 'type' of person, you can point to just about any controversial topic posted here. The mental gymnastics these people use is as old as history...
> This is just one example of how this type reacts to particular issues, the full impact is pervasive throughout the whole site.
Your reply doesn't actually contain any examples. It's, as you said, just "[you] generalizing about this type of person."
I think I have become more rigid with experience although I don't feel inclined to be sorry for reacting differently to a new version of Blender than to a new NFT scheme. Random example, but I think the idea is clear.
Also I can fully understand and am certainly guilty of being prejudiced against certain ideas depending on the source. An example is Google here. The ad industry is so hostile to user privacy that I cannot really laugh that away if Google proposes something helpful, which they still often do. But ultimately that is a price they have to pay.
Why would discussions about those topics go any other way? The options are well known, and have well-understood pros and cons. It's not surprising that most people have made up their minds.
I mean, do you think it's realistic that thread about, say, Soviet-style central planning to proceed with "discussion or curiosity," like it was some new, fresh idea?
Maybe a bit of it is just me getting older, but I think most of it is observing that a lot of things are actively getting worse, and thus prioritizing "stopping the bleeding". A concrete example of this would be Biden as a politician, 5 years ago I would have hated him as useless (not improving things) and mildly corrupt, now I don't mind him as useless (not making things worse) and only mildly corrupt - with the unfortunate reality that that is the best option the US had.
PS. Let's try and keep this thread from becoming a debate about Biden and politicians, he's a useful example but not the point, I don't expect everyone to agree with my assessment.
When you're young, you don't know anything, so you look at every new idea in its purest form.
When you're old, you can't not make comparisons to known history, and so look at every new idea with a shadow gallery of similar ideas. Which probably ultimately skews favor towards conservative approaches (things that look like things that have previously worked) than novel one (things that look like nothing else, or like other things that have failed).
Which is to say, to react to new ideas as though you were young, once you're old, takes effort and self-reflection. It's a valuable skill to cultivate, but it also doesn't happen naturally.
This got me thinking about what exactly I mean by status quo, I don't think it's quite as obvious as it seems at first glance.
One important distinction is status-quo as a goal, vs status-quo as a solution. Status quo as a goal often makes sense - when the current state of affairs isn't that bad and it would be easy for things to get worse, keeping things the same is a good thing. Solutions however rarely make sense, because solutions operate in a changing environment, and keeping doing the same thing is basically pretending you're maintaining the status quo, when you're actually yielding different results.
To use atmospheric CO2 as an example, status quo atmospheric CO2 would be a remarkable achievement. Status quo energy generation obviously fails to achieve that, because the baseline amount of atmospheric CO2 keeps going up.
Another thing to ask is status quo of "what", status quo of atmospheric CO2 would be remarkable, status quo of change in atmospheric CO2 over time wouldn't solve the crisis, though it would be a great improvement over what we have right now. IIRC status quo of the second derivative of atmospheric CO2 over time (i.e. how fast the rate at which we output it changes over time) is about what we currently maintain. It follows that status quo of the third derivative would be a major step backwards.
I think the conclusion I've been coming to over the last few years, is that "status quo of quantities that aren't rates is usually a good default for a goal". For atmospheric CO2 it would be a remarkable achievement. For geopolitical tensions is europe, it's not quite ideal, but we don't actually have a war and I'd be pretty happy if it stayed that way. For diseases, I mean, we aren't all dying, and so on and so forth. That doesn't mean it's always the right goal. If we're in the middle of a major war, we should be seeking a new status quo where we aren't in a war. Given that the new mRNA HIV vaccine actually works the goal should change to "reduce HIV" rather than "maintain the status quo" since that's now possible. It's just that status quo is a starting point for a goal and deviations from it should probably be supported by a solid argument for "we can do better" or "we can't even do that well".