I didn't know it is a myth that people become more conservative with age...

[LunarRay]

When I was young a disaster would follow everywhere I'd or was about to go, tidal wave in Hawaii, earthquake in San Francisco, and of course I live in a constant state of rage and turmoil, even in Diablo 3. Why? Because God hates me. And because I deserve to be punished. What is my solution, I curse and swear at him until I'm blue in the face. I give Him His reasons for hating me. Probably hiding from myself my real sins.

I was taught that God loves us, but my parents taught me they love me only when I'm good. I think they had more pull with the way I learned to feel about myself than He did, Then too, there is all that terrible stuff in the Bible about what happens to evil doers.

So while preparing for an earthquake seems to make good sense, I think the fear of them is a projection, the deeply buried feeling that we are full of sin and deserving on punishment for it projected out there as endless named and nameless terrors. So the answer to earthquake fear in my opinion is to dredge up to a conscious level where it was that we got the feeling we are sinful, or have faith so great as to be certain at the deepest levels that we are forgiven. The Muslim has a variation I think, Surrender to the will of the greatest compassionate and merciful being for in the mind of such a believer not one thing can happen without His will. So nothing that happens can be anything other than perfect. The ego, however, in my opinion likes neither to forgive nor to surrender.

After playing WOW and Diablo with you for so many years I know one thing for sure... You've an expectation of perfection from yourself and the demand for the gear to achieve it. When you fail you blame God I guess. I'll bet God chuckles and says to herself..."it be you what pushes the buttons not me" I accept failure as part of the game. It matters not to me either way. I just like playing the game.
I figure behavior is produced from some sort of rationalization take on memory. From childhood or perhaps even beyond that - either way.
Ya know, I don't recall hell being mentioned until Jesus ventured about. I do recall that it is just ducky to kill and enslave folks in the old testament.
I don't think you are capable of committing sins. You may have been convinced somehow that you did but that can't be true.

Fear is the nuttiest concept I can imagine. I'd think folks would never venture beyond the front door for fear a tree might fall on them or like that. Statistics provides the probability of an occurrence and one should act accordingly, me thinks.

Ego... I think if one can reach back into their memory they will face their demons and smack them down cuz they generally ain't real they are inputs that somehow got misconstrued and when retrieved they affect current thinking. Your buddy N knew this and I suspect you realize this too.
I don't know if it is ok to bury painful memories or deal with them. I think what is painful to me I deal with by getting upset at the person who created the memory. When my mother split when I was two I'm not sure how that made me feel cuz my grandmother was there to replace her but knowing my father my mother gets a pass from me while he gets the blame. Trump's trainer...

 

[Moonbeam]

while he gets the blame. Trump's trainer...

Well whatever your feelings are I know that without a father you would not be here and for the fact that you are I am deeply thankful for that important bit. There is a Sufi saying that goes something like, 'if the father cannot, the son may.'

 

[gamervivek]

Was this or has this been posted?: It comes as a surprise to me. People generally become more liberal as they age.

This is just great great news and makes me feel there is hope for the world yet. Conservative thinking is a form of ego sickness in my opinion.

http://www.livescience.com/2360-busting-myth-people-turn-liberal-age.html

The decade younger study says the opposite,

http://www.vox.com/2016/7/1/12051622/brexit-vote-age-gap-aging-science-psychology

Considering the current replicability crisis in social sciences you should be leery of whatever comes out of them. Another example,

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/436424/presenting-one-most-humiliating-academic-mistakes-ever

 

[agent00f]

The decade younger study says the opposite,

http://www.vox.com/2016/7/1/12051622/brexit-vote-age-gap-aging-science-psychology

Considering the current replicability crisis in social sciences you should be leery of whatever comes out of them. Another example,

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/436424/presenting-one-most-humiliating-academic-mistakes-ever

If only genius over here can understand the rather trivial second reply in the thread.

 

[agent00f]

Well I don't really buy into the notion that those abstract terms are applicable to anything. I think the brain is the repository of everything the senses provided it with. The dynamics of the brain take that data and construe it into information which forms the thinking or actions we undertake providing additional stuff for the brain to house.
Adult, Parent and Child ego stuff and the like are nothing but an evaluation of behavior that occurred. Behavior occurs after the brain does its bit and that is where my circuitous route intended to get me in this thread. The interesting bit is the HOW it occurs. What makes us see the same giraffe and some say how cute while others say yuk.

Without language we'd have the image of the encounter and what ever else the senses observed, I agree. We'd probably have some notion of danger by size but without having encountered an attacking giraffe we'd not know. I'd often ask my secretary to create a retrieval system and not a filing system cuz I wanted to be able to retrieve what was filed... Language has provided the means to catalog information about the image in our brain. Someone else assures us that a hippo will harm us and we assign that to all hippos we see.
I wonder if when we ate that fruit of knowledge we grunted to our buddies, "food' or 'bad' and thus became better suited to our environment or maybe that fruit created lots of changes to an otherwise peaceful environment. I have no idea. What I think I do know is that memory is where all that we put into our brains lives. Our retrieval system is controlled by something and we seem to react to what we conjure that to be. 'L' is worried about earthquakes and I keep telling her that it might be better to figure out what you can do something about or how to mitigate the issue and if that is the best you can do... leave it there. Worry don't solve anything... I know that the odds of being eaten by a great white are about the same as dying in a plane crash - with me in the plane - so I neither go in the ocean nor do I fly but I don't care too much about a plane crashing into my house - with me in the house.

I think this is a subject wrought with paradox. If you film a giraffe you preserve on some media an image projected by reflected photons, an image that can be so perfect I would say that the image couldn't be distinguished from the real thing. But then there is the sound and feel and smell of a giraffe as would be presented to another animal like a person. You can send the image as a data stream to a computer that can put a giraffe on your monitor, but the computer while holding all the data necessary to display a giraffe will not see one any more than the camera did. What we see when we see a giraffe is a concept, a name applied to the data base stored as 'these are the properties of a giraffe. A giraffe comes into being as the product of putting names to memories and retrieving them with the giraffe data base gets tickled by incoming data that causes recognition. A giraffe is a construct of thought which is language remembered from the past. We see a giraffe because we ate the forbidden fruit of knowledge.

The question is can the mind see the present without reference to the past. Can the mind awaken from its thought dream and see without words of comparison. Can the mind experience the present without the conditioning of the past. If so there is no cute or yucky giraffe, on I and thou, only the oneness of being. Can thought and language end. I think the world was here long before we named things.

The philo source I mentioned provides substantial insight into "HOW it occurs" for language, eg. those abstract terms or any other. Unfortunately it's rather too dense for a proper tl;dr. It's pretty interesting how any of us can understand each other.

The more technical ground-up approach currently in CS/math is unstructured machine learning whereby some mapping/reduction function (ie complex data to a simpler representation) is created using tools like neural nets. For example, it seems to me what's considered intelligence described above is just what we call (reduce to simpler representation) an emergent property of a much more sophisticated instance of such a machine.

 

[Puffnstuff]

Well I find that as I age I become more liberal.

 

[Sonikku]

If true then why has America grown more conservative over the past century? If Obama is a socialist for pushing Romneycare it would make FDR god damn Karl Marx by today's standards! If a GoP candidate echoed Reagan's policies today he would probably be called not Conservative enough to be a GoP nominee, maybe even a "RINO". Even the Democrats that are considered to be Liberal here in America would be considered conservative anywhere else in the free world.

 

[Victorian Gray]

If true then why has America grown more conservative over the past century? If Obama is a socialist for pushing Romneycare it would make FDR god damn Karl Marx by today's standards! If a GoP candidate echoed Reagan's policies today he would probably be called not Conservative enough to be a GoP nominee, maybe even a "RINO". Even the Democrats that are considered to be Liberal here in America would be considered conservative anywhere else in the free world.

Propaganda works.

 

[MongGrel]

Well I find that as I age I become more liberal.

You could have been a conservative in 1980 and some people would call you a liberal these days even without a shift in values.

 

[Sonikku]

Maybe that's what they mean about saying people are becoming "more liberal". Their views haven't changed, but what passed for conservative decades ago would make you a liberal today.

 

[Puffnstuff]

Nah fellas I'm actually far more liberal than I used to be and I no longer hold fast to religous dogma because I don't agree with it so yes I am shifting to the left of the center of the road.

 

[agent00f]

If true then why has America grown more conservative over the past century? If Obama is a socialist for pushing Romneycare it would make FDR god damn Karl Marx by today's standards! If a GoP candidate echoed Reagan's policies today he would probably be called not Conservative enough to be a GoP nominee, maybe even a "RINO". Even the Democrats that are considered to be Liberal here in America would be considered conservative anywhere else in the free world.

merica hasn't gotten more conservative over the past century. A century ago women couldn't even vote.

 

[Moonbeam]

merica hasn't gotten more conservative over the past century. A century ago women couldn't even vote.

I read about some psychologist who studied kids in the 50's following them around and mapping their play territories among many other things and who went back much more recently to study the kids of those kids, finding that they were never allowed to wonder off alone or play much outside. Their activities were all organized and parents were always in attendance. I think it is the ubiquity of horror on the TV that has created a nation of people in a constant hysterical state. We used to fear the Russians and nuclear war, a fear about which we could do little. In Poland, I know, there was a saying about when the sirens wailed, to cover yourself with a sheet and crawl to the cemetery Conservatives used to rail against the communist threat to garner votes but when that collapsed they turned on liberals and created a threat within. It is a culture constantly exposed to imagined threat that causes growth of the right amygdala. The nasty thing about fear is that it can kill you. in more ways than one. If we have nothing to fear but fear itself, perhaps we should be terrified.

 

[agent00f]

I read about some psychologist who studied kids in the 50's following them around and mapping their play territories among many other things and who went back much more recently to study the kids of those kids, finding that they were never allowed to wonder off alone or play much outside. Their activities were all organized and parents were always in attendance. I think it is the ubiquity of horror on the TV that has created a nation of people in a constant hysterical state. We used to fear the Russians and nuclear war, a fear about which we could do little. In Poland, I know, there was a saying about when the sirens wailed, to cover yourself with a sheet and crawl to the cemetery Conservatives used to rail against the communist threat to garner votes but when that collapsed they turned on liberals and created a threat within. It is a culture constantly exposed to imagined threat that causes growth of the right amygdala. The nasty thing about fear is that it can kill you. in more ways than one. If we have nothing to fear but fear itself, perhaps we should be terrified.

I think they always had internal and external bogeymen, whether it's darkie men here or abroad coming after them white womens. As for kids, a playground of the mind isn't the same thing as a physical one but not necessarily worse.

 

[OverVolt]

Lunar and Moon are freaking weird.

I yelled nonsense in trade chat was the sum of my WoW experience and that got old fast. I never raided. Still was fun I guess. I did enjoy AV and arena though. I was generally always a season behind in gear but I had fun. Me and my friend won many matches where we were out-geared on our team "We're in questing greens"

 

[Moonbeam]

I think they always had internal and external bogeymen, whether it's darkie men here or abroad coming after them white womens. As for kids, a playground of the mind isn't the same thing as a physical one but not necessarily worse.

Perhaps. I don't know anything.

 

[Moonbeam]

Lunar and Moon are freaking weird.

I yelled nonsense in trade chat was the sum of my WoW experience and that got old fast. I never raided. Still was fun I guess. I did enjoy AV and arena though. I was generally always a season behind in gear but I had fun. Me and my friend won many matches where we were out-geared on our team "We're in questing greens"

LR deleted his Paladin because he got stuck in a pond. I relive moments of that game on a regular basis though I haven't played WOW in years. It rewards bad behavior. I used to love to blow the Alliance off cliffs and bridges with my Druid causing them to fall to their deaths, and swooping down in bird form to snatch a herb from under the nose of some poor soul who had to dismount was heaven on wheels.

 

[0roo0roo]

A lot of effort and obfuscation to play with words based on a 2007 study which doesn't get brought up much because it simply does nothing more than describe the shift in the overton window.

These are slippery words which is the problem, what is "liberal"
An egalitarian is an conservative when compared to a radical feminist.

Do old people take more risks?

What's conservative about banging the war drums against russia to start a new cold war?


Like hitchens, started liberal, switched sides, which makes him..."liberal"
HERITAGE FOUNDATION: "How Modern Liberals Think"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaE98w1KZ-c

 

[MongGrel]

A lot of effort and obfuscation to play with words based on a 2007 study which doesn't get brought up much because it simply does nothing more than describe the shift in the overton window.

These are slippery words which is the problem, what is "liberal"
An egalitarian is an conservative when compared to a radical feminist.

Do old people take more risks?

What's conservative about banging the war drums against russia to start a new cold war?


Like hitchens, started liberal, switched sides, which makes him..."liberal"
HERITAGE FOUNDATION: "How Modern Liberals Think"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaE98w1KZ-c

You seem to have an unhealthy obsession with the word "liberal" to begin with.

Maybe you should see a psychiatrist about your misogynistic issues.

 

[gamervivek]

If only genius over here can understand the rather trivial second reply in the thread.

Of course, your reply was trivial. RTFA and you'd see why the two are at odds. Clueless as usual.

 

[Moonbeam]

The philo source I mentioned provides substantial insight into "HOW it occurs" for language, eg. those abstract terms or any other. Unfortunately it's rather too dense for a proper tl;dr. It's pretty interesting how any of us can understand each other.

The more technical ground-up approach currently in CS/math is unstructured machine learning whereby some mapping/reduction function (ie complex data to a simpler representation) is created using tools like neural nets. For example, it seems to me what's considered intelligence described above is just what we call (reduce to simpler representation) an emergent property of a much more sophisticated instance of such a machine.

I looked a bit at what you referenced, the how of it, and found what little I can understand to be quite fascinating. I am, however, not so much on about how we understand each other, how we know what words mean, but the fact that words can be used to cause us to feel things, pain in particular. As children we are dependent on our guardians for both survival and the self validating sense that we are worthy of love. When we learn language we learn to associate via words, to feel the threat of loss of love and support, the to fear annihilation via rejection, if we do not conform. We have all been programmed by put downs, made to feel the worst in the world, told that only by believing in this or that, conforming to this or that standard, that we can be worth anything. No child can survive in constant psychic agony so we pretend, buy into any lie and forget, repress the painful memories. We had to mask our psychic death to stay alive.

What I am talking about then is that we have been put into a prison built on ideas created by words, the feeling that we are worthless that is hidden from us by the masks we wear, the pride and haughtiness of our shinning conforming very good deserving of love childhood ego. We are motivated by unconscious feelings, by ideas that are ingrained and taken as true without examination, a dominant concealed prejudice, the bars of our cage. Who seeks a jail break who is unaware of his real condition.

Do you know the story of the Princess and the Pea, identified as a real princess because a pea buried under 39 mattresses would prevent her from falling asleep, or Neo, haunted by the Matrix.

 

[agent00f]

Of course, your reply was trivial. RTFA and you'd see why the two are at odds. Clueless as usual.

The OP says people do not change their absolute positions much with age, which is true, and your article says people become more conservative relative to the rest of society with age, which is also true, and the two claims are not mutually exclusive.

Regrettably you're too stupid to understand the nuance in the preceding sentence, and no amount of explanation will improve that situation.

 

[agent00f]

I looked a bit at what you referenced, the how of it, and found what little I can understand to be quite fascinating. I am, however, not so much on about how we understand each other, how we know what words mean, but the fact that words can be used to cause us to feel things, pain in particular. As children we are dependent on our guardians for both survival and the self validating sense that we are worthy of love. When we learn language we learn to associate via words, to feel the threat of loss of love and support, the to fear annihilation via rejection, if we do not conform. We have all been programmed by put downs, made to feel the worst in the world, told that only by believing in this or that, conforming to this or that standard, that we can be worth anything. No child can survive in constant psychic agony so we pretend, buy into any lie and forget, repress the painful memories. We had to mask our psychic death to stay alive.

What I am talking about then is that we have been put into a prison built on ideas created by words, the feeling that we are worthless that is hidden from us by the masks we wear, the pride and haughtiness of our shinning conforming very good deserving of love childhood ego. We are motivated by unconscious feelings, by ideas that are ingrained and taken as true without examination, a dominant concealed prejudice, the bars of our cage. Who seeks a jail break who is unaware of his real condition.

Do you know the story of the Princess and the Pea, identified as a real princess because a pea buried under 39 mattresses would prevent her from falling asleep, or Neo, haunted by the Matrix.

That's probably true, though language & mental constructs work in a more complex interplay of which only some aspects contribute to the referenced phenomena, and not necessarily in identical fashion for all people. That's why accurate communication can be difficult, like for example between men & women, or similarly other pairs from differing cultures.

In general, humans weren't built for the complexity of modern civilization and it's only through a learned process that we reasonably function in a system unlike the smaller primitive groups the brain actually evolved for. However flaw our mental tools are though, it's still worth realizing that in the scheme of things they're still fairly effective at first world outcomes all things considered.

 

[Moonbeam]

That's probably true, though language & mental constructs work in a more complex interplay of which only some aspects contribute to the referenced phenomena, and not necessarily in identical fashion for all people. That's why accurate communication can be difficult, like for example between men & women, or similarly other pairs from differing cultures.

In general, humans weren't built for the complexity of modern civilization and it's only through a learned process that we reasonably function in a system unlike the smaller primitive groups the brain actually evolved for. However flaw our mental tools are though, it's still worth realizing that in the scheme of things they're still fairly effective at first world outcomes all things considered.

I think I agree but I am not sure what a first world outcome is. I believe, for example, that depending on the culture, the dominant concealed prejudice may vary, some amorphous riff of something terribly evil and worthy of condemnation. I believe that the prison we live in, our unconscious false assumptions that remain ever so because of the pain it would mean to confront them, can be described as a kind of sleep or mechanically or automation that protects us from real light as I also believe is always available occasionally visible as with the arrival of the three Abrahamic religions. Moses brought the law by which virtue and self worth can be had which soon was corrupted by the notion that obedience was all that was needed, the letter rather than the spirit, This led to the notion of condemnation for sinners, so Jesus came with forgiveness, that those in sin could be saved. This lead to the notion that all one needs to do is believe that Jesus is the way and confession to be forgiven, a shallow notion that forgiveness can be had without redemption. Anyway, Islam balances these things.

The point, however inept or incorrect my details may be is that the light is always reduced to something mechanical that occludes the intention to awaken us from our sleep. We sleep because we have knowledge of things about which we also have associate feelings we do not know we have. We do not know, we do not want to know, and we do not want to know we do not want to know. Occasionally it happens that somebody does anyway or so I believe.

 

[gamervivek]

The OP says people do not change their absolute positions much with age, which is true, and your article says people become more conservative relative to the rest of society with age, which is also true, and the two claims are not mutually exclusive.

Regrettably you're too stupid to understand the nuance in the preceding sentence, and no amount of explanation will improve that situation.

Me not understanding nuance when it's you who doesn't get why the two articles are at odd? What a joke.