Ageism

[ray_quazaa]

Have any of you experienced ageism?

Yes. I think I have been discriminated against because of my age. IT's very interesting how we use "age" and "experience" as the same thing, when really they are very different. They correlate well, but it's the outliers which cause so much pain.


Do any of you commit ageism? If you want to admit to it then go ahead, if you've changed and want to tell us how then that is great to hear as well ^_^

In general, no. I think sterotyping is a form of categorization that we implicitly do. I do adjust my own language, topics, and ideas to different groups of people, and if that alone is agism (which I don't think is what you're trying to address), then I think we all have. We don't approach toddlers with Shakespeare and we don't assume legal adults haven't lived the last decade (Hey, did you know that America suffered a terrorist attack on September 11th, 2001?)

What can be done to reduce stigma with age and specific ages?

YOu heard it here second (first was at my uni.) Let me invite this theory. If what we experience (known as "your experiences") a collection of data points, and that there is only so much time to obtain data points, then how have people gotten "more intelligent" over the last... century? It's because we have been able to learn from experiences more efficiently than those in the past. For example, we need not go through the black death and reinvent Calculus. Rather, we learn from those, and skip some of the ... "ball the paper up and throw it in the trash" methods of learning.

TO the above on correlating age with experience... one can learn a lot from reading "The News." Yes, even in the age of Fox News and MSNBC, it's still possible to be more "learn-ed" than your peers by simply "reading hte newspaper" (or whatever you kids use now to learn). Sure, the science wasn't good, the statistics was horrid, but it was better than NOTHING AT ALL. (and now we have things like Crash Course on YouTube and all the educational things... I MET EMILY GRASSLIE on THe Brain Scoop. I have never been so worried in my life... X____X;;; @Braixen; I tag you here... because.)

So what we know about who we are is not a function of age necessarily. Age perfectly correlates with the amount of potential learning minutes, but someone who reads Cosmo all their life will not have the same set of experiences that a same aged person reading The Economist. (Why am I here again?)

Do you think most ageism is justified? For example do you think it's almost certain that people's driving skills go down hill with age and we should be weary of all elderly drivers?

Ho ho ho... I'm not even gonna pretend to answer this question. Philosophy. But if categorization and probabilistic decision making is not allowed, then we're all screwed. We have to be X-ism or else we'll never last a day with all the information that bombards us. But what we do when we make a mistake... that's the question.


Do you have respect for specific people who are younger than you, or older than you?

Braixen and @Pokemon Trainer Sarah. Because I want a brownie point with the brownie that I'm eating.