Hacker News Reader

Comment by breezybottom | Hacker News Reader

As always, named "generations" are completely arbitrary and meaningless. They're made up by marketers to sell products.

Just because something is arbitrary doesn't mean it is meaningless or useless. In this context named generations are useful because they allow us to discuss the experiences of people born at different times. Certainly there are alternatives like going back to dividing things up by decades ("80s kid", "child of the 90s", etc.); however, that doesn't make named generations useless.

No it doesn't. I have little in common with a Japanese rice farmer born in the same year.

The named generations are generally used in the context of specifically American culture or at least English speaking culture. They were never intended to say you have generational similarity to someone in a completely different culture.

So now it only refers to Americans? The arbitrary goal post shifting continues.

It's not goal shifting, that's what it has always meant. I'm sorry that you didn't realize that.

https://www.emerald.com/books/edited-volume/17969/chapter-ab...

Wrong.

A generation is a time that people were born between and useful because it embodies much of the cultural context that people share.

No, it doesn't. The baby boomers represented an actual demographic change, that's why they're tracked by the Census Bureau. Everything since then is marketing and astrology.

you are just nitpicking.

People get used to understand what generation 'name' they got from society, thinktanks and co and its not that hard to know what the younger generations are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation#List_of_social_gene...

Astrology is just garbage.

It's the same, you're just substituting years for months.

The name of the generation gives you birth years. It also tells you "hey the generation 2010-2020 are getting hit by AI a lot more than the previous ones.

This not astrology at all. Astrology is 'magic thinking'.

The difference is that named generations don't claim that any differences are due to supernatural influence. Instead they are arguing that the differing circumstances in which people grow up and live influences their experiences and how they see the world. That is a MUCH more defensible position.

It would be defensible if it worked that way. Instead they work backwards: define the groups for marketing purposes, and then try to identify the similarities.

That's irrelevant to what I wrote. Whether it was made up by marketers or anyone else doesn't change the fact that unlike astrology it doesn't make an appeal to magic.

Named generations are a marketing tool, it’s a concept as garbage as astrology

Its a name for a generation a decade wide. I really don't get your hate for it?!

BS. While I agree the cutoffs are arbitrary, marking a cohort by, say, "people who graduated highschool before the advent of smart phones" or "people who went through childhood in the early years of social media" are valid groupings.

As a Gen Xer my childhood was soooo different from what kids today experience. And literally every single Gen Xer I know is glad and feels relief (sometimes mixed in with remorse) that our childhood was before the consumer Internet took off.

If you want these cohorts to have statistical significance you have to add more details, such as the geographic location, language, etc. But you can create cohorts with pretty much anything, in itself that doesn’t validate the concept of generations as pitched by marketing agencies

Luckily for us, the cohorts don't need to have statistical significance because people aren't talking about statistics. They are talking about the broad shared experiences of most people born in a given range of years.

Correct. It is another way to divide people again, just like people who are pro-AI vs anti-AI.

Do not fall for it.

You are conflating "divide people" in the sense of "turn people against each other in order to divide and conquer" with "divide people" in the sense of "define groupings so that it is possible to have conversations about differing experiences". One is discussing a goal while the other is discussing a tool. Notably that tool does not necessarily need to be used for evil and often isn't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com