The argument is not just that 18-year-olds as a group are better voters than 12-year-olds as a group, but that any given 12-year-old would be a better voter in 6 years, even if they're already pretty good.
By the same argument, they'd be even better voters 10 years later. Why not give the vote at 30 years of age, say?
Because any experience requirement draws an arbitrary line somewhere, and 18 is a useful line because it's also the arbitrary line society has drawn for a lot of other milestones, like moving out of the house and finishing high school. Voting goes hand-in-hand with the transition out of mandatory formal education and the start of a new "adult life." I think it makes sense that the voting age should be set to whatever age formal education ends and most people move out, but what age those things should happen at is again debatable.
That isn't correct no matter where the parentheses go: 3^^^3 isn't 3^(3^(3^3)) or ((3^3)^3)^3.
You're right, I misunderstood - I thought it was 3^(3^27), or 3^7625597484987, but it's actually 3^^(3^27), or 3 to the power of itself 7625597484987 times, which is way bigger.
I'm not sure if this question is stupid enough, but here goes:
There is a set of skills, mostly in the arts, that are typically taken up as a child and pursued throughout life -- Musical instruments, for example, or art of varying kinds. Hence most beginners are children.
There is a set of people consisting of me that wants to take up skills of this sort (...all of them), but cannot stand being around children. Where can relatively inexpensive beginner-level training in arts-type skills be found that doesn't involve lots of interaction with kids and is available to non-college students?
This question bothers me so much that once I get to be a good enough programmer I actually want to build a website that will connect adult beginners with each other so that maximum learning can happen with minimal embarrassment and no interaction with children. A system where you can trade tutoring ("I'll teach you the violin if you'll teach me painting") or simply pay for classes, with some way to rate and view the quality of each person's teaching would be useful.
As long as there is no larger system like that, I'd suggest that your best bet is to find a friend or acquaintance who is good at whatever you want to learn and offer them something they want but wouldn't ask for, whether it's money or a favor. That way, you get to learn things at a personalized pace while building a friendship.
How do you pronounce 3^^^3?
I usually say "three to the three to the three to the three" even though that's not technically correct unless I pronounce the parentheses in the proper places.
The problem is that you have to explain why that rule is valid.
It comes from valuing future world trajectories, rather than just valuing the present. I see a small difference between killing a fetus before delivery and an infant after delivery, and the difference I see is roughly proportional to the amount of time between the two (and the probability that the fetus will survive to become the infant).
These sorts of gradual rules seem to me far more defensible than sharp gradations, because the sharpness in the rule rarely corresponds to a sharpness in reality.
While sliding scales may more accurately represent reality, sharp gradations are the only way we can come up with a consistent policy. Abortion especially is a case where we need a bright line. The fact that we have two different words (abortion and infanticide) for what amounts to a difference of a couple of hours is very significant. We don't want to let absolutely everyone use their own discretion in difficult situations.
Most policy arguments are about where to draw the bright line, not about whether we should adopt a sliding scale instead, and I think that's actually a good idea. Admitting that most moral questions fall under a gray area is more likely to give your opponent ammunition to twist your moral views than it is to make your own judgment more accurate.
"Well, some 18 year olds are immature anyway" is not a good response, but "show me your data that places 12-17 yo people significantly more immature then the rest of humanity, and taboo "immaturity" while you're at it" is.
The first two, sadly, do make more sense, but then emancipation should become qualification to vote.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is that pure experience - just raw data in your long-term memory - is a plausible criterion for a good voter. It's not that intelligence and rationality is unimportant, since rational, intelligent people may well draw more accurate conclusions from a smaller amount of data.
What does matter is that everyone, no matter how intelligent or unintelligent, would be better off if they have a few elections and a few media scandals and a few internet flame wars and a few nationally significant policy debates stored in their long-term memory. Even HJPEV needs something to go on. The argument is not just that 18-year-olds as a group are better voters than 12-year-olds as a group, but that any given 12-year-old would be a better voter in 6 years, even if they're already pretty good.
Also, 12 year olds are less mature than 18 year olds. It may be that the level of immaturity in voters you'll" get from adding people ages 12-17 is just too large to be acceptable.
"Maturity" isn't obviously a desirable thing. What people tend to describe as 'maturity' seems to be a developed ability to signal conformity and if anything is negative causal influence on the application of reasoned judgement. People learn that it is 'mature' to not ask (or even think to ask) questions about why the cherished beliefs are obviously self-contradicting nonsense, for example.
I do not expect a country that allows 12-17 year olds to vote to have worse outcomes than a country that does not. Particularly given that it would almost certainly result in more voting-relevant education being given to children and so slightly less ignorance even among adults.
"Maturity" is pretty much a stand-in for "desirable characteristics that adults usually have and children usually don't," so it's almost by definition an argument in favor of adults. But to be fair, characteristics like the willingness to sit through/read boring informational pieces in order to be a more educated voter, the ability to accurately detect deception and false promises, and the ability to use past evidence to determine what is likely to actually happen (as opposed to what people say will happen) are useful traits and are much more common in 18-year-olds than 12-year-olds.
12 year olds are also highly influenced by their parents.
And 75-year-olds are highly influenced by their children. (And 22-year-olds are highly influenced by their friends, for that matter.)
(I'm not saying we should allow 12-year-olds to vote, but just that I don't find that particular argument convincing.)
I don't find arguments against letting children vote very convincing either, except the argument that 18 is a defensible Schelling point and it would become way too vulnerable to abuse if we changed it to a more complicated criterion like "anyone who can give informed consent, as measured by X." After all, if we accept the argument that 12-17 year olds should vote (and I'm not saying it's a bad argument), then the simplest and most effective way to enforce that is to draw another arbitrary line based on age, at some lower age. Anything more complex would again be politicized and gamed.
But I think you're misrepresenting the "influenced by parents" argument. 22-year-olds are influenced by their friends, yes, but they influence their friends to roughly the same degree. Their friends do not have total power over their life, from basic survival to sources of information. A physical/emotional threat from a friend is a lot less credible than a threat from your parents, especially considering most people have more than one circle of friends. The same goes for the 75-year-old - they may be frail and physically dependent on their children, but society doesn't condone a live-in grandparent being bossed around and controlled the way a live-in child is, so that is not as big a concern.
I have a question about the first logic puzzle here. The condition "Both sane and insane people are always perfectly honest, sane people have 100% true beliefs while insane people have 100% false beliefs" seems to be subtly different from Liar/Truth-teller. The Liar/Truth-teller thing is only activated when someone asks them a direct yes or no question, while in these puzzles the people are volunteering statements on their own.
My question is this: if every belief that an insane person holds is false, then does that also apply to beliefs about their beliefs? For example, an insane person may believe the sky is not blue, because they only believe false things. But does that mean that they believe they believe that the sky is blue, when in fact they believe that it is not blue? So all their meta-beliefs are just the inverse of their object-level beliefs? If all their beliefs are false, then their beliefs about their beliefs must likewise be false, making their meta-beliefs true on the object level, right? And then their beliefs about their meta-beliefs are again false on the object level?
But if that's true, it seems like the puzzle becomes too easy. Am I missing something or is the answer to that puzzle "Vs lbh jrer gb nfx zr jurgure V nz n fnar cngvrag, V jbhyq fnl lrf"?
Edit: Another thought occurred to me about sane vs. insane - it's specified that the insane people have 100% false beliefs, but it doesn't specify that these are exact negations of true beliefs. For example, rather than believing the sky is not-blue, an insane person might believe the sky doesn't even exist and his experience is a dream. For example, what would happen if you asked an insane patient whether he was a doctor? He might say no, not because he knew he was a patient but because he believed himself to be an ear of corn rather than a doctor.
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I'm not sure if this question is stupid enough, but here goes:
There is a set of skills, mostly in the arts, that are typically taken up as a child and pursued throughout life -- Musical instruments, for example, or art of varying kinds. Hence most beginners are children.
There is a set of people consisting of me that wants to take up skills of this sort (...all of them), but cannot stand being around children. Where can relatively inexpensive beginner-level training in arts-type skills be found that doesn't involve lots of interaction with kids and is available to non-college students?
I found a website that might be useful: butterfly.com connects tutors to teachers with live online lessons in areas like music and cooking.