One in ten people are older than 65. Three in four live under a leader who is
hannahritchie.substack.com
hannahritchie.substack.com
Absolutely there are sharp people >65, but there is no question that cognitive decline starts in middle age and the risk for dementia increases dramatically past 65.
Then there is the argument, which imo is even stronger, of an inverting demographic pyramid and inter generational economic warfare to preserve pensions for people who won't live to see the effects of their policies. This is not at all sustainable and creates misery for the working class who will soon lack sufficient democratic power to vote their way out of it.
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what's for dinner, etc..
Nowadays the world changes so fast it does not make sense anymore.
My grandfather was born when radio was a luxury and died after living through another revolution, the TV. Internet was not so widespread. While after him I witnessed the rise of TV, the birth of Internet and whatever other media it spawned. It's like living through 4x the advancements of our previous generation.
We can't expect a 70-80 years old to understand the world of today.
It's a concession by governments to give the pultocrats a seat at the table, lest they decide to use their power to overthrow the ruling order. Tale as old as time.
I understand what they are defending, but it is still weird to have most of the USA presidents being born before the 50s. They don't have skin in the game. They will be dead before they see the consequences of their policies
Obviously with autocrats this isn’t applicable but there’s nothing inherently nonsensical or inexplicable about why mostly old dudes rule much of the world.
I don't think that holds as an explanation given that 1. there's not a lot of wisdom going around among the geriatric leaders of the world, 2. this is a pretty rapidly increasing trend, not some fact of history.
Historical leaders used to be younger, including after accounting for increased lifespans. Just look at the founding of the American Republic. It's much more a sign of two things. Increased decadence and civilizations that are themselves at the end of their rope, and in democracies in particular a geriatric population that keeps voting itself into power based on their own interests.
Also you can’t really talk about a geriatric population ‘voting itself into power’ if it makes up such a small proportion of the population. Young people just abstain from voting in western democracies, which is a choice just as much as voting one way or the other is. Yes, a person votes in his own self interest - that’s how that works.
You’re not really supposed to just vote in your self-interest. It’s a proxy for violence.
No, that's not how that works, some Rousseau might be in order. What early Republicans still recognized is the concept of General Will. That a polity is not just the sum of its individual interests but requires an orientation of each member towards the shared common good. A democracy that is governed by self interest, in which simply put each vote is bought is a democracy in decayed state.
That this doesn't even register with people any more and is perceived as the norm is exactly what I'm talking about when I'm saying that most current democratic nations are at the end of their life. If young people are a demographic minority and each person votes only in their selfish interest the future of the nation is, by definition, dead.That they opt out in that situation is actually rational.
Even under regimes run by young people their advisors are old people.
The average age of the Constitutional Convention was 42 years old. Life expectancy of an adult[1] at that time was only about 48 years old, and the the median age of all American adults 18+ was about 30 (today it is 48).
[1]Avg life expectancy of someone from birth during this time was 37 years old.
Where did you see that? I found this article https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2885717/#:~:text=20... which says that in 1790, a 20 year old American white male could expect to live to his early 60s. Interestingly, life expectancy in the US actually went down during the 19th century due to urbanization. One thing you have to watch out when you're looking at numbers like this is that they catalog remaining life expectancy. For example, the chart says "41.4" but you have to add 20 to get the total life expectancy since it's remaining lifespan at age 20.
As for age itself, there's also a pretty straight forward reason that we tend to pick older leaders. As people age they're generally going to find their younger selves less than desirable - naivete, gullibility, ignorance, and just generally a lack of wisdom. So I'd be terrified of having a leader in e.g. their 30s simply because I don't think they'd have anywhere near the life experience to have accumulated a reasonable base of wisdom. And I suspect as I continue to age, that 30 is going to get pushed higher and higher. Even back in Ancient Rome one could not run for Consul until you were at least 42 years old. And people likely 'grew up' much, much, faster in those times than we do now a days, simply because life was so much more testing.
Ultimately, perhaps there is a trend, but my observations simply do not match the premise of people monotonically accumulating wisdom as they age, and in fact there are certain types of gullibility that seem to increase with age, such as the willingness to disregard and disparage scientific or objective fact in favor of personal beliefs, and to prioritize social status over signals of expertise/intelligence when judging authority. And don't forget that 80%+ of successful scams are against older people.
I think there are almost definitely tradeoffs between cognitive flexibility versus cumulative lifetime experiences, and we shouldn't discount the former - just look at how utterly dysregulated tech industries are because of out-of-touch representatives who listen to elites over experts in the field.
But none of these things are going to be brought to us because of politics or politicians. They're being brought to us through technological and economic advancement. And I think the only risk we have along the way is ourselves. So at this point I couldn't care less what a politician's values are - I simply want somebody who won't get us into WW3 or bring us to the verge of it. So if you assume I'm looking for worldview alignment, my 'worldview' would come down to 'please don't screw up so badly that you cause the extinction of humanity.'
And I wish I shared your optimism about the future AI enables. Without some massive societal transformations, it's on its way to doing what all prior automation did - disproportionately benefit the oligarchy as they use it to capture more and more of the wealth of our civilization by disempowering people who have increasingly less and less leverage.
Also, I genuinely think that a WW3 might not even be top 3 of our biggest worries between the constant war against privacy and AI that would make it possible to finally realize a truly all-seeing, irreversibly authoritarian dystopian state, or even just models purpose-built to create content and adjust algorithms after end-to-end "how does this affect a person's worldviews?" training. That's basically mind-control.
Or even "only" almost all wealth and power being concentrated in the hands of those who control AI and resulting automation.
Nevermind the extremely real extinction risk.
War would definitely be a far worse short-term tragedy, but it's inherently polarizing against itself and doesn't carry the risk of insidiously bringing about a potentially irreversible dystopian state in itself.
And then he'd go on to bomb a ton of countries, sign indefinite detention without trial of anybody accused of terrorism into law, and more. And this has played out repeatedly. Similarly for the crisis of the day. Something is always an imminent threat unless some urgent action is taken over some timeline that's short enough to be scary, but long enough for most people to forget when the timeline passes and nothing happens. It all destroys political optimism and breeds cynicism.
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One of the many reasons I'm optimistic about LLMs is that the tech can't really be monopolized. Right now you can run open weight frontier level models on a $1600 'tier' video card, and that cost tier keeps going down rapidly. In the near future we're going to be running frontier models on plain old computers, if not phones. For the effects of this you need to consider how the economy will adjust in response to cognitive working being able to be automated at a price approaching $0. All that means is that the economic value of said work is also going to approach $0. It's going to radically reshape the economy in much the same way the Industrial Revolution did.
People in an agrarian society prior to the Industrial Revolution might have predicted 'super farms'. And those super farms did come to pass. But the value of agriculture (as a percent of the economy) began rapidly trending towards $0 to the point that those farms became a practically inconsequential aspect of the new structure of the economy. I expect this is what we'll also see with LLMs. The things we expect to dominate the world in the future will likely become ever less relevant. The tricky part, and trillion dollar question, is in our new economic equilibrium, what will be valued?
While AI inference is far less dependent on large scale organization than most other forms of automation, it is not intrinsically independent the way e.g. being able to get a 3D printer is - at least until they ban those on grounds of potentially facilitating gun fabrication or such.
And today's models will be relatively obsolete in the future, yet they are already enough to do a lot with. I think the acceleration theory, that is - that the head company will gain an ever increasing edge due to recursive self improvement, is a scam to draw in naive investors. The far more likely scenario, and one that seems to match current trends way better, is that LLMs have an approximate peak of capability and we're going to asymptotically approach that peak.
Even if we're ever able to achieve true AI which I think is likely impossible for LLMs, there will likely be an asymptotic peak because at some point you can't just think your way to progress, but reach a point where you need more data (observation, experiment, etc) to keep moving forward.
Which is ironic because I am younger than most HNers and Substackers who espouse this opinion and find it to be a weird form of ageism.
To me, a 45 year old and a 65 year old are equally out of touch or "old", so it feels like a pot calling a kettle black.
My dad's at retirement age yet continues to work on bleeding edge harness engineering and cloud security work, yet there are plenty of 30 and 40-somethings on HN that don't know the difference between a CNI and kube-proxy let alone are bordering on unemployable due to personality and educational skill deficiencies.
And my granddad's still physically active as a farmer in the old country. And his parents were alive and active into their 90s (also as farmers).
A lunatic, who's also clearly stupid is a far more pressing concern.
The issue is that this particular group of people older than 65 at this particular time in world history (which you happen to be living in) are Boomers who are probably the most child-like, foolish, and ignorant generation of people in world history, due to the circumstances of their upbringing (post-WW2, high technology, opulence, drug use, sexual revolution, peace in the developed world).
This isn't ageism, since normally old people do tend to have more wisdom and knowledge than young people.
There is something that really went wrong with the Boomer generation. The goal of every society is basically to survive their Boomer generation which many are not really seeming to manage.
The rest, off the rails.
2/5 stars.
I'm not necessarily declaring what I'm saying to be insightful but what you're describing is what a typical reaction to insightful social commentary looks like.
For emperors: out of 80 only 14 were over 65. 2 resigned/died at 66, 1 at 67, 2 ruled only few months, so really 9 out of 80. Rome is not the place to look for old rulers
The executive being young and legislative/judicial being old was pretty typical across the ancient world.
Also people tended to not live as long in old age as they do now, we have lots of advanced medical interventions we can do to keep our old people alive and accumulating power and wealth.
Also Rome had a much healthier triangle-shaped demographic/population pyramid so they had more youngish people to draw on for elite qualities. They also had an active military culture so young people could actually prove themselves in leadership positions and make a name for themself. In the developed world in the current period that is not the case.
So are they the worst ever, or, like, just probably? If you are going to say something, don't weasel.
Sadly, such long-tenured politicians also happen to be old. The old-ness is mostly not actually the problem. It is the constraints.
That, and people who are old enough to collect social security are rich.
Combine those two facts.
You claim that as a fact. Seriously? I can’t tell if you’re joking, obviously there are many poor old people.
What they do that young people tend not to do is vote. Young people go on social media and tell you to burn down a Wal-mart instead of voting in a rigged system… then they don’t burn down a Wal-mart and they don’t vote.
See I can talk in unfounded generalities too.
[1]: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-has-wealth-distribution-in...
It is also true that oldsters vote more. We can speculate on why that is. I say it's because they don't have jobs or anything else to do besides bingo night.
Next question.
I wanted to follow the rules and try to be charitable, but you’re making it impossible to conclude that you’re worth talking to.
"The flaw of averages" strikes again!
Maybe the US should look at copying it? Well, Trump has expressed interest in doing so. [1] But, Australia has had something like this since the 1990s, so even if the US adopted the Australian model tomorrow, it would take a few decades for it to really make an impact.
[0] https://www.thesenior.com.au/story/9346972/age-pension-spend...
[1] https://www.ncpers.org/blog/what-trumps-interest-in-australi...
Social security is fine, whatever, no one likes living off it so industrious people will work hard and save on top of it. I am more annoyed when people say America has no social safety net when it spends absolute gobsmacking amounts on social security, Medicare and Medicaid.
But more fundamentally, SS is more of an age pension[1]. Super is the step above that, akin to forcing all americans to fund their 401k / IRA.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_security_in_Australia#A...
It's funny that most politicians promise taxes on the wealthy to support social programs without mentioning that the overwhelming majoring of said programs involve forcing young people who don't own homes and aren't having families to give UBI to millionaires.
[1]: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-has-wealth-distribution-in...