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Comment by ArikBe | Hacker News Reader

> I knew what I was doing at 12

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization

Would anyone provide a counterargument? Or have I brought up a subject so controversial as to not be worth responding to? My mind can be changed.

EDIT: People seem to be misreading me. I said that the justice system drawing an arbitrary line at 18 years of age seems odd, considering some children are mature and some aren't. Some children know what they're doing. Some don't. Why is 18 optimal? Is it just the least bad solution to a problem that has no good solutions?

Your entire argument is based on the fallacy that children knows exactly what they are doing, just because you think you did.

You must get that this boy is not even a teenager yet. Destroying his life by throwing him into a prison will only result in him learning and befriending other troubled children. This will not do anyone any good.

The solution I would suggest is a minor punishment, say a week or so in prison - just to scare the living hell out of him. Meanwhile having a professional evaluate his situation and suggest a reasonable recovery plan (therapy, forced change of school in order to find new friends, computer banishment, or whatever).

Oh, really? Throwing him into prison would be a bad idea? The person you're replying to stated that he(she?) is against prison for computer crimes. In general.

Don't twist the statements here. I guess a discussion about arbitrary cutoffs for 'Yeah, a month ago he didn't know what he was doing, but now he's mature' would be fine.

Why is 18 optimal? Is it just the least bad solution to a problem that has no good solutions?

To me, this is what it is. Determining maturity and adulthood in an institutionalized fashion with a subjective measurement would be extremely difficult. Drawing a line in the sand at 18 wildly simplifies the problem of maturity, around the time when most children's brains have mostly finished developing. As far as objective measures for when you should be considered an adult, "your brain is done developing, you now have an adult brain" seems fairly reasonable.

Also, I think people tend to project their current selves onto their past selves in their memories. I even sometimes find that I have an odd sense of having known something before I learned it, because it's difficult for me to viscerally recall my previous unknowing state.

This works in reverse, too: Adults forget how capable some children can be, because they either weren't a capable child themselves, or forget how capable they were as a kid. Probably because adults are biologically prone to shy away from thinking of children as little adults.

I think a large part of the appeal of Ender's Game was that it treats unusually bright 11-year-olds as capable moral actors - the author clearly remembered what it was like to be one to a degree few other authors do.

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