> I am acquiring greater wisdom with age as I ought, but the average age of the typical person I encounter stays the same so they cannot keep up. I’m noticing the contrast increasing but misattributing it.
My money is on this. You wouldn't typically argue with a kid, but on the internet you probably are.
If you're out and about and a person comes up to you and shouts about how the world is controlled by goats in cow suits, your brain will quickly assess the trustworthiness of this person. Is the person wearing clothes? Is the person rambling/coherent/visibly intoxicated? Are the person's eyes shifting around/manic looking? Does the person smell weird? (I am making up random examples, but I am sure there are many things that every person will look at to gauge trustworthiness).
Most of the above goes out of the window on the internet. Even the shouting part does not usually manifest itself into a website comment (ALL CAPS is less offensive than someone actually shouting in your ear/many people don't know the connotation).
If someone was on your street rambling and raving, you wouldn't invited them in your house to have an argument. Yet, we figuratively do this when we reply to (and even seek) negative and angry arguments, leaving us fuming in our living rooms.
Definitely to some degree. I see younger people learning lessons that I learned 20 years ago right here on HN. It's not that they are stupid, ignorant, or didnt get the memo way back then. It's that learning is a life long adventure and they aren't as far along yet. Ok, so they did just get the memo but because they were 5 when I read it, and it's been around far longer than that.
I doubt this considerably. Aside from the fact that it is almost assuredly a combination of multiple of the hypotheses, from my in-person experience (i.e. not on the internet), age does not directly correspond to intelligence (specifically referring to the term as I believe the author would define it). When considering the entire population (i.e. not just the highly educated and the intellectually interested), I'd argue they are essentially entirely unrelated (though I know some would probably argue they are actually inversely related).
That is one thing that frustrates me on discussion boards. You have no idea who is behind the nickname. Is this an adult with a college degree, corporate job, kids, mortgage, etc.? Or is this a 12 year old masquerading as someone older? Sometimes people argue against things that seem so obvious as an adult that I really really want to know who is on the other side.
I think people incorrectly assume that a child will type in a childish manner and be easy to spot.
I used to post online when I was 12. I wanted to be part of the conversation and feel like an adult. What usually happened is that people would label me a "troll" and tell others to ignore me. I would genuinely use the phrase "I'm just asking questions", and people would treat me like I was intentionally trying to inflame the situation.
This is perhaps why we see spelling and grammar called out so often on the internet. We're trying to lift the veil the fiber cables put in front of our eyes and reveal the idiot on the other end, but there's not much to go off of and we cling to whatever evidence we can.
The whole notion of spending time sharing thoughts to random strangers on the internet seems pretty silly on the surface. With introspection, however, it becomes apparent that the return on investment, so to speak, is that it provides a platform to challenge your understanding of the world.
It is easy to fall into misunderstood or outdated ideas. Sharing those ideas with others prompts them to correct any errors in thought as a service to you. In turn, they will receive similar corrections for their misunderstood and outdated ideas as they share them. Collectively, this improves the shared understanding of everyone. The foundation of education.
Spelling and grammar corrections come part and parcel in that. They are given because they equally want to be received. There is really no greater feeling than being able to learn something new, and realizing that you were spelling something wrong, to be able to spell it correctly in the future, fulfills that as much as realizing your understanding of some complex subject was off.
On that note, those of us involved in the software industry know that software testing is greatly benefitted from testing invalid inputs as much as valid inputs. When challenging your ideas, it can be equally useful to try and take an alternative perspective – invalid input, if you will – and see what kind of correction data is returned. If the correction data is poor, what was seemingly incorrect input may be closer to being correct than you originally thought. This can be just as useful in correcting your understanding as simply posting what you hold as being true.
The old adage about asking "How do I do X in Linux?" will yield no response, but stating that "Linux sucks! It cannot do X." will solve your problem nicely captures what online message boards serve. To try and apply a human element to who sits behind the "Linux sucks" statement misses the point.
This has been my pet theory for a while now that I've seen people start to wake up to lately (perhaps I manifested it). How can one believe any discourse on the internet when the other person on the other end could easily be an unsupervised 9-year-old. For this reason, I'm terrified of the fact that Q-Anon has gained any traction at all.
> How can one believe any discourse on the internet when the other person on the other end could easily be an unsupervised 9-year-old.
I think you'd be able to spot a 9-year-old attempting to engage in "discourse on the internet."
However, I think it's common to engage with people who are in their late teens to early 20s, who are at the point in their lives where their intellectual self-confidence has increased far beyond where their actual understanding is, but they've yet to realize that. They're fluent enough with adult language that they're hard to spot, but they've basically only absorbed one or two big ideas which they mistake for the gospel truth of everything.
I wasn't convinced they had gained any traction, regardless of all the noise, until I saw them holding a "Save Our Children" protest at a local (rural southern Missouri) courthouse. Yikes.
I can definitely sort people into "growing" and "static" groups, and definitely the static folks tend to be not very smart. Part of being smart is realizing you don't know very much, and wanting to rectify that.
My money is on this. You wouldn't typically argue with a kid, but on the internet you probably are.