Question
Why do some people think they are right just because they are older?
Answer
Because they often are.
Ignore the strawman stuff about religion, evolution, race etc. Basically, anything to do with social truths and cultural attitudes can be ignored. Pay attention to what they say about more objective realities. You ignore their wisdom at your own peril.
What you really need is a filter for deciding when to pay attention to an older person, and when to ignore them.
The best heuristic I've ever heard about how to deal with the views of older people is this (I don't remember the source):
When an experienced person says something is possible, they are usually right. When they say something is impossible, they are usually wrong.
I am equating older with more experienced here of course.
Experience does two things: it opens up your mind to possibilities you didn't know about (that's the liberal in liberal education... a liberation of your mind), and it closes your mind to others at the same time. It's a no-free-lunch system. The closing of your mind happens because as you understand the part you've opened up to, you start to think that's the only way things could be. You confuse sufficiency with necessity.
Think of the effect through this rather clumsy metaphor (sorry, couldn't come up with a better one).
If you are born in America and think only America exists, getting older/more experienced is like learning Europe exists at the expense of believing Asia doesn't, or vice versa. You end up knowing (via existence proof), that something like the Eiffel tower is possible.
At the same time, you become increasingly skeptical of things you don't know about, and start defaulting to the view that if YOU don't know how it can be done, it can't be done at all. So you might not believe that something like the Great Wall of China is possible.
So if a kid asks you, "Is it possible to build a steel tower 1000 feet tall," you say "of course." If the same kid asks, "could people have built an 8800 mile long wall hundreds of years ago?" you say "of course not."
Perhaps language is a better example. If you only know about America and Europe, and someone asks you, "is it possible to have a spoken and written language without a phonetic alphabet" you simply can't conceive HOW that could work. In our metaphor, you probably don't even have a word for "phonetic" because that would require a concept of "ideographic" (Chinese). You would think language means phonetic language.
If you are a younger person, also born in America, who doesn't know that either exists, you should trust the older person on anything to do with Europe, and NOT trust them on anything to do with Asia.
This is a bit of a generalization. More open people age more slowly in this sense, but even they become more doctrinaire over time compared to where they started.
Ignore the strawman stuff about religion, evolution, race etc. Basically, anything to do with social truths and cultural attitudes can be ignored. Pay attention to what they say about more objective realities. You ignore their wisdom at your own peril.
What you really need is a filter for deciding when to pay attention to an older person, and when to ignore them.
The best heuristic I've ever heard about how to deal with the views of older people is this (I don't remember the source):
When an experienced person says something is possible, they are usually right. When they say something is impossible, they are usually wrong.
I am equating older with more experienced here of course.
Experience does two things: it opens up your mind to possibilities you didn't know about (that's the liberal in liberal education... a liberation of your mind), and it closes your mind to others at the same time. It's a no-free-lunch system. The closing of your mind happens because as you understand the part you've opened up to, you start to think that's the only way things could be. You confuse sufficiency with necessity.
Think of the effect through this rather clumsy metaphor (sorry, couldn't come up with a better one).
If you are born in America and think only America exists, getting older/more experienced is like learning Europe exists at the expense of believing Asia doesn't, or vice versa. You end up knowing (via existence proof), that something like the Eiffel tower is possible.
At the same time, you become increasingly skeptical of things you don't know about, and start defaulting to the view that if YOU don't know how it can be done, it can't be done at all. So you might not believe that something like the Great Wall of China is possible.
So if a kid asks you, "Is it possible to build a steel tower 1000 feet tall," you say "of course." If the same kid asks, "could people have built an 8800 mile long wall hundreds of years ago?" you say "of course not."
Perhaps language is a better example. If you only know about America and Europe, and someone asks you, "is it possible to have a spoken and written language without a phonetic alphabet" you simply can't conceive HOW that could work. In our metaphor, you probably don't even have a word for "phonetic" because that would require a concept of "ideographic" (Chinese). You would think language means phonetic language.
If you are a younger person, also born in America, who doesn't know that either exists, you should trust the older person on anything to do with Europe, and NOT trust them on anything to do with Asia.
This is a bit of a generalization. More open people age more slowly in this sense, but even they become more doctrinaire over time compared to where they started.