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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

I really love how young people don't give a damn about old tropes.

Like CLASSIFIED or something. Dude, secrets will get leaked. Stamping red capital letters on it, making up cringe words like treason that belong more in warhammer 40k than real world and punishing people by taking away their freedom for speaking won't change that.

Leaked secrets is really your fault for even having them.

If you can't ever have your thing in the open maybe you shouldn't be having it at all? No matter how many gray hairs you have and how nice your suit is.

Young are way more resilient towards narrative verbal bs that kept our generation and previous in line.

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>If you can't ever have your thing in the open maybe you shouldn't be having it at all?

This variant of "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide" shares the same naïve worldview of those who do not understand there are pragmatic reasons for privacy both for individuals and nation-states. One would do well to reflect on the old chestnut that knowledge is power and consider who or what should have that power over, say, one's country.

As for narratives for the young, the obvious education is to have a clear and immediate consequence for a specific action. It's what they call "fucked around and found out" nowadays.

> "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide"

This narrative is fine if you start at the top not at the bottom of society.

Impractical? Yes. Naive? Perhaps. But not wrong.

> If you can't ever have your thing in the open maybe you shouldn't be having it at all? No matter how many gray hairs you have and how nice your suit is.

Nice in theory, but doesn't stand up to basic scrutiny. I have secrets. Hundreds of them. Mostly passwords. And I mostly keep them secret because if I don't, naughty people will take the things I need from me or generally cause chaos for me and my family.

You're absolutely right that young people are more likely to question traditional narratives, but they are less likely to have the context (or apply it, anyway) necessary to form a coherent narrative in its place, which will often lead you to at least some variation on a traditional narrative.

I think where young people often do good by questioning authority is when a traditional narrative used to apply but in recent history no longer does for some reason or another. If you're an old, you've likely already mentally examined some idea or process and found it to be sound, and now you're less likely to come back and question it later. Young people come along later and question it and find it to not be sound anymore, and the olds realize they might be right.

For most other things... You don't have to be young to smell the bullshit.

Those are secrets because only you know them. And that's fine. What's not fine is that you could have organisational shared secret in this day and age that won't ever leak. That's dumb fantasy and attempts at making it real are laughable and should have holes poked into them.

> You're absolutely right that young people are more likely to question traditional narratives, but they are less likely to have the context (or apply it, anyway) necessary to form a coherent narrative in its place, which will often lead you to at least some variation on a traditional narrative.

How strongly narratives affected people historically is downright frightning. Millions have died because of philosophers. I hope that in the future humanity will gain much more relislience toward narratives just by tearing them apart and restiching in chaotic competeing manners. I hope LLMs will help with that by examplifying how easy it is to produce any bs narrative that even hunk of silicon can do it. I hope people who grow up in this environment will no longer be able to be cheated by single bs narrative for decades of their life.

> For most other things... You don't have to be young to smell the bullshit.

The fact you can smell it doesn't matter you'll have audacity to complain about the smell or imagine a world without this smell or even find that smell bad enough to get off the couch.

> I really love how young people don't give a damn about old tropes.

The vast majority of young people with access to secret information aren't leaking it. The inane, incredibly naive trend you are suggesting simply doesn't exist (thank goodness.) Most of them take their jobs seriously and have a lot more sense than you.

It exists in a sense that there weren't those leakers decades ago. Everybody was playing spy/patriot mental game. And now there are people who no longer give a damn.

All of that is security circus. And the fact that most comedians can keep straight face throughout their whole performance doesn't make it less so.

Yeah, back in the day people only sold intel to the enemy instead. The truly patriotic stance.

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