For a long time I could not comprehend the contempt for Baby Boomers. Now I realize it is just a backlash people have when encountering an alien presence.
Baby Boomers consistently increased the world's amount of everything. Especially knowledge. That's the feature that intimidates later generations.
Imagine you owned a company in the 1990's. All of your machinists, chemists, foremen, metallurgists, engineers, accountants, managers, programmers, etc are Boomers. They are in their 40's. You are having problems with all of the younger people you hire and they are not dependable. What happens to the company when all the Boomers retire and die off? Will the company collapse?
Someone had the idea that we could record the Boomer's knowledge in Expert Systems. It was a fore runner of AI.
You have people who understand why things work and why things do not work. You want to replace them with younger people who do not have a real education and cannot understand those "whys".
If you cannot understand a technology, it may as well be magic. You don't need knowledge you can't use. You need a recipe.
So Expert Systems were written to capture the Boomer's knowledge about everything. Even if they only captured the most important 20 percent it was a lot better than depending on younger people to figure it out on their own.
As the Boomers retired and died off, there was a big loss of curiosity and inventiveness and thirst for knowledge. The remaining population could not conceive of living a life of abundance that the Boomers had provided. They became comically alienated to any concept of learning and experience because "that's what Boomers did".
So they can't really connect to a real life Boomer who is like an alien to them.
63 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 6 Oct
If you add blank lines between your paragraphs your writing will be easier to read:
this:
For a long time I could not comprehend the contempt for Baby Boomers. Now I realize it is just a backlash people have when encountering an alien presence. Baby Boomers consistently increased the world's amount of everything. Especially knowledge. That's the feature that intimidates later generations.
becomes: For a long time I could not comprehend the contempt for Baby Boomers. Now I realize it is just a backlash people have when encountering an alien presence.
Baby Boomers consistently increased the world's amount of everything. Especially knowledge. That's the feature that intimidates later generations.
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Thank's @k00b I edited to add the blank lines.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 6 Oct
Nice.
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Ok boomers
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As a boomer, I have to disagree. Our parent's generation considered us lazy, entitled, stoned hippies who would destroy the world they had worked hard to create. My grandparents thought my parents spoiled us kids by not disciplining us enough. The world keeps on turning.
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I agree. From one generation to the next, "The world keeps on turning."
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53 sats \ 1 reply \ @Satosora 6 Oct
Right, each generation thinks the next will fail or flounder. But the world does keep spinning.
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Yeah. Every generation is confronted with challenges peculiar to it. And, every generation is saddle with the responsibilities of solving their problems. For I don't even expect the boomers to solve the problems which their generation created, rather, I expect them to fight against any force trying to change their (boomers') status quo. Those at the receiving end of the catastrophic effect of fiat money/systems will be the ones to transform the world into what/how they want it to be. One of the most important steps in this direction is the creation of bitcoin.
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destroy the world they had worked hard to create
Yes they did destroy that world, and they raised themselves from the poverty of their ancestors.
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This take is an odd one. The Boomers, if guilty are anything, are guilty of allowing their idealism to die off. Subsequent generations have fragments of ideals in all the wrong places for the most part. The big "sleeper generation" is probably X. They aren't boomers, and their work ethic is different entirely from that generation.
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Fiat money made the boomers, fiat money destroyed the livelihood of subsequent generations. The foundation to continue building a better world was destroyed by boomers. They embraced paper currencies that steals, destroys, and kills the future of the subsequent generations.
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yes, it's boomer hubris to think otherwise
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Boomers are willing to transfer the knowledge. You just need to show the willingness to learn.
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When the world you knew was built on lies, would you still want that "knowledge" to be transferred to you?
But, yet, I must admit that we acquire wisdom from them.
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Not everything are lies. Some knowledge is just knowledge. Sometimes asking is better than experiencing it so you become prepared for the situation.
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True.
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millenials shall transfer the dank memes.
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what does this mean?
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i think that memes are like the gateway to the knowledge, the "why and what" packed into some attention-grabbing medium.
first we present the memes, then sit back and wait for further inquiries.
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It's like prodding a snake.
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memes are stupid for transferring knowledge.
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for transferring knowledge, silly yes, but they make an enticing book cover.
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Although I agree all the way, and also believe that these "expert systems" will all fail, I have seen another pattern as well.
Whenever I get real deep into almost any subject I tend to find the generations before boomers far superior, especially since I'm always interested in really knowing how something works, how it can be replicated with as base materials and/or principles as possible, and also how you'd develop the skills while recreating its whole.
A good example is when I bought my first boat in 98, beautiful, super classic racing yacht from maybe the mid to late 1920's. Picture the archetypical sailboat.
Well, the fore part of the keel was so rotten that after the first season I literally used two hammers to pull it out!
I spent most of the winter going through all the pieces, how the forces would be absorbed and spread by the joints that were involved, how I'd recreate it, as well as asking around.
Come spring I got a huuuuuge beam of oak from a sawmill, I even think they cut the tree down for my specific order. When they loaded it up on the roof of my 61 Ford Anglia it almost tipped over haha!
When I got it on water it was all watertight and well, and after a while I got the "exam result": from the way the paint creased around the planking of the hull as well as observing it directly it was plain to see that the forces were now not concentrated around the mast, but spread evenly through the hull as intended :-)
If I'd gotten deeper into wooden boats by now I would have recreated a lot of old knowledge and procedures, of course aided by the internet in major ways. But this was before the internet really, although I was online by then of course, it was still a process of doing everything hands on, extracting knowledge from many people, but still trusting my self and that there would be old, missing pieces that I knew was there from the beginning, but which were forgotten.
When it comes to getting real deep into fields in this way I've found that the internet is a huge help in terms of sort of re-extracting things that were forgotten.
Another example is when I was totally immersed in photography from around 89 to 94, I got so deep that I started mixing chemicals from their basic component, even making my own weight that I could calibrate down to ~1/100th of a gram.
This took me thousands of hours, then later when I ran a shared studio space right after the GFC I came across equally dedicated people who were able to learn more or less the same in months, not years. All because they could meet equally dedicated people in all sorts of forums online.
I haven't got too much experience with the current crop of wild eyed enthusiasts, maybe they're few and far between, but there will always be some who go for deep, real learning!
And many will discover the same: to really learn you have to go all the way back to the very creation of the field you choose to do a deep dive into :-)
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I tend to find the generations before boomers far superior
These are the people who taught the Boomers from birth.
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Yep!
One of my grandfathers was a worker, staircase carpenter, sane, stable and down to earth. The other was a real technocrat, I read his copy of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World Revisited a decade or more after he died...
Now both their realities back then are sort of in the background of everything I experience, have to balance out, and also write about!
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Also lots of the newer generations have been caught up in a safety first bubble and lost the common sense factor. My heavy equipment industry there is so many little injuries now that apparently weren’t a thing “ back in the day” also heard a good saying from the wise elders “don’t put your hand where you wouldn’t put your d!*k”
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30 sats \ 1 reply \ @siggy47 7 Oct
This isn't completely relevant, but I'll tell the story anyway. My boomer brother in law worked for 30 years building a construction/paving business. It was physically tough on his body. He decided to take a job as a trucker since he had a class A commercial drivers license and he didn't have the physical stamina anymore. Within a few months he was considered the top driver, getting his choice of truck and routes. I congratulated him, saying what a great job he did switching jobs at his age. He laughed and said he didn't deserve congratulations. He said " these kids in their twenties and thirties just don't show up for work, or they fail the drug test." The manager told him he never had such a reliable driver before.
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LOL I think it's relevant!
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30 sats \ 1 reply \ @SatsMate 7 Oct
I think it could be a cultural thing as well. If the young generation in america is unwilling to learn about the processes of boomers, in certain businesses, I'm sure they can outsource alot of that work to Vietnam, Indonesia or another developing country where they are hungry to work.
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Hence the need for the Expert Systems to provide guidance while learning.
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