> The future is having older wise folk write out proposals to ambitious projects, and have young people fill in the necessary parts.
Absolutely not. The most brilliant of minds made their marks on history at 30 or younger. Science has shown that, over time, learning becomes more difficult and slower. The whole idea of an older person being more "wise" is more of an old wive's tale more than anything else.
Young people and old people alive can have great ideas. Inversely young and old can be great at simply cranking away at building things. The future mixes the young and old more and more making the young younger for longer and the old far more capable than ever before.
I don't disagree with you - I just mean something else by ambitious projects.
Take politics for instance - can anyone under 30 accomplish anything ambitious in politics? Probably not.
The brilliant minds who've contributed to math/science I imagine oftentimes had great teachers along the way. Not always.
The ambitious projects I have in mind go beyond solving a previously unsolved math problem - I am thinking of something more calculated and long-term like wikipedia.
If we can give a lot of people in the world the best educational materials by the best teachers - that's a massive win.
If we can secure funding for people who show promise and let them affect the real world, not just 'do research' - that's a massive win.
In other words - the problems we're facing are not really science problems, they're philosophical and societal problems that require a willingness of the current ruling class to say ok, this isn't working, let us try something new here.
That'd be nearly unprecedented - another smart kid solving another science riddle, that's cool too :)
> Take politics for instance - can anyone under 30 accomplish anything ambitious in politics? Probably not.
Maybe? It's hard to say considering we have laws preventing the young from getting into politics. President / Vice President have to be 35, 30 to be a senator and 25 for the house of representatives. Most states also have age restrictions for many other political offices that I'm too lazy to look up (some are similar to the federal ones, some are simply 21).
Making it not possible for them to do it doesn't mean they couldn't if given the ability. Many politicians are career politicians. That may not be good but the young folks can't be career politicians, at least not right away.
I would be very curious to see the data if we removed all agent restrictions then let 1-2 generations go by and see if the demographic changes much / some / none.
I'd say moreso than the laws, is just the hierarchies entrenched in every sphere of life are the real mechanisms preventing any real change.
On one hand, stability is good, but at what cost, right?
Something as small as the apple app store - everyone knows it's bad, nothing has been done about it for years.
If Apple tomorrow, came to HackerNews and said hey, we know the app store sucks, we are going to hire a 20 person team of stars to re-build it. We will give you full autonomy, high paycheques, lots of publicity and a full year to do it.
Wouldn't that be an overwhelmingly positive move? Even if a year later, the team failed to deliver, at the very least it'd generate a ton of enthusiasm and new ideas.
This is a small example of big companies not willing to do anything outside the stale old box, even when there is absolutely no downside. It's those old, bored farts earning a paycheque that are the problem every time.
Apple has the money, just not the wisdom to go outside the box every now and again. Politics is 1000x worse I imagine.
"The future is having older wise folk write out proposals to ambitious projects, and have young people fill in the necessary parts."
That's generally the past and present as well. With some notable exceptions I think that's how the world has pretty much worked through most of human history.
Hmm, sounds like the start of a typical setup-to-fail management philosophy, just needs the other side of the coin to maintain the current balance:
"This should easily be abused to keep untalented old people 'in their place' which the youngsters imagine they get all the power. We're still walking away with the profits.
Have everyone ignore the proposal, then force all to critique it - just ensure both roles are considered equally invaluable. That way no one will get a raise during performance review. And we're still walking away with the profits."
That's just having more energy than you know what to do with.
The tragedy is young people have lots of energy and are scatterbrained and old people are sometimes wise but too tired.
The future is having older wise folk write out proposals to ambitious projects, and have young people fill in the necessary parts.
Too bad it's just not 'sexy', ambitious projects are long, boring and require upsetting other people who are old, boring and don't want to listen.
Modernizing the medicine field is one simple example of such an ambitious problem.