how is someone’s age relevant? Is a 55 y.o. Software engineer who spent 20 years in a bureaucratic wheel any better than a bright 20yo mind? They both suck in a different way! Writing an entire article with ageism as a center piece is truly pinnacle of American journalism
Kids tend to miss a reasonable doubt and tend to hate sincerely. This why they are good in rapid cutting regardless of consequences. Any amount of brilliance will not compensate even 10 years of experience.
A 55 year old learns to keep their hot-headed militant opinions to themselves. But from my experience in the insides they’re no different. And the 55 year old has held those opinions for 40 years and they’re not gonna change.
Agree. It seems largely they are just writing code to make sense of the enormous amount of data and unravel the tangled mess that is the US federal budget.
How do you know that they are largely writing code? Is that because the appropriate oversight has indicated as such? What visibility do any of us have to what they are doing? And why should we trust any result they produce?
The lack of critical thinking in this entire comment section is breathtaking?
George Washington led a revolution at 44 years old, and those guys were 32, 36, 31, and 29 when the constitution was drafted and the federalist papers were written. I guess the upside from the comparison could be that 11 years from now these kids might realize how badly they fucked up the federal government and try again with a more balanced approach.
Good point. I didn't mean that the founding fathers solely led the revolution, but that being "founding fathers" meant that they led significant part of the revolution. For instance, Hamilton was a chief staff aide to Washington, and Madison was in some state's legislature. Of course, they may not qualify as "leading" at that time, but at least they were participating, right? And that is similar to those 19-year olds in DOGE: they are employees in DOGE, and they are led by someone more senior.
You are of course conveniently leaving out all the people who were much older. Washington was 44, Jefferson 33, Adams 41, Hancock 39, Franklin 70, and many more. Those were just the top ones I could think of. And a quick click-through on the Wikipedia article shows that people under 30 were the exception, not the rule.
Why is it a lie? Isn’t it obvious that some people were older and where the kids' superiors? And at least the younger ones were still our founding fathers, while the 19-year olds in doge are employees. Isn’t the entire cabinet of Trump much older than these 19-year old? Aren’t Musk and his lieutenants older than the 19-year olds? We’re talking about qualification for participating a job, not solely being responsible for it, no? If anything, I offered a stronger argument by comparing founding fathers, or political geniuses at their times, to merely some tech whizes under layers of management.
> On top of that, I would not automatically assume Musk's staff have the skills and talent of the people you mention
Me neither. I was arguing the opposite: we should not assume that one does not have experience to the point that it is outrageous, just because that person is young. Such a young age should make us more doubtful, but should not give us complete conviction.
19 year olds are much more malleable. They can be fanatic, and follow orders easily. They aren't educated. They have a limited grasp of morality, and can't oversee the consequences of their actions. They have no other obligation in life than to this holy task.
Somewhat ironic to claim a "limited grasp of morality" and a lack of education when the instutions doing said education have been preaching moral relativism for a while now.
If you'd said cultural relativism, yes, some institutions (in particular sociology and the like) did preach that, but moral relativism? Those institutions certainly preached morality.
However, engineering schools have not been affected, AFAIK.
I’m not disagreeing with you but let’s ask the question “experience for what”? Is it making a couple of dashboards, extract data from legacy systems into something more queryable, or generating a couple of expense reports? Or will they be making actual significant decisions affecting millions? How likely would that be?
Regardless, they seemingly have access to tons of financial data that they are basing brash decisions on with zero context. That combined with the fact they are reporting to a manchild that is demonstrably stupid as shit when it comes to "improving" such systems (see Twitter and the play by play of his first days there).
It takes tenure to know what sorts of discretion are required when reporting to such an extremely senior "leader", and to not get caught up in the hype of being involved in something.
None of them have seemingly ever held more than 1 full time job. Age is discussed, but experience is clearly lacking. Your argument skips over that entirely.
I think it is more about how Musk needs to surround himself with young easily impressed and gullible minds, because anyone else would probably see through him all day. These young guys are probably afraid to speak out against him, or are sucking it aaaaall up as ordered by Musk. He will have chosen who gets to tag along.
Experience - which comes with age - is absolutely critical in all intellectual pursuits, including programming, government, and just about everything else. Experts and lifetime learners learn more each day. A 20 year old simply has not had the time to be exposed to the same breadth or depth of ideas, or to critique them seriously. Younger people are also far more vulnerable to hormonal impulses, manipulation, and more likely to have been exposed to a much more limited world view.
I can’t imagine anyone but insufferably arrogant - and really fucking wrong - young people making an argument to the contrary. Not that there aren’t benefits to youth - being unburdened by complexity, ignorant enough to be especially bold - but these aren’t actually that useful. And we have good evidence to support that; older founders do better, for example: https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/younger-old...
Their experience is relevant. If they're being brought into build data analysis systems to make sense of data of various organizations there's zero chance they've worked on a project of that scale let alone do they understand all the gotchas you need to deal with working on a project of that scale.
You're offering a completely false dichotomy here.
Yet it is encouraged that everyone votes (distributed system affecting the lives of many) and are given weapons of war to kill people (military, cops).
We have a minimum age on the Presidency. They work at the discretion of their employers.
Not all 20-year olds are mature. No mater how bright they might be when it comes to topics in STEM. Their minds haven't matured enough, especially the male mind.
They do immature shit because there's prestige dangling in-front of them, or because they've been convinces by Musk et. al. that this is the cause to fight for.
There's a reason organized crime preys on young people. They're malleable, do what they're told, blindly ambitious, and want to please their superiors at all costs.
