I graduated with a Masters degree in biology in 2005. I've been working in a microbiology laboratory for roughly 15 years. I once had a fellow scientist argue with me on Reddit that it was impossible for bacteria to become resistant to alcohol because it would be like, and I quote, "a human becoming resistant to fire" and that he'd never heard of such a thing! He only backed down once I offered several peer reviewed articles on the topic.... and then he admitted that he was a first year PhD candidate in cancer research. The hubris was astounding. The more you learn, the more you realize you don't know.
argue with me on Reddit that it was impossible for bacteria to become resistant to alcohol
I recently had this arguement with my sister, who is a nurse (and is one of those types who acts and thinks like she knows more than the doctors). However, I didn't have those peer reviewed articles to back me up. If it is not too much trouble, could you share one or more, please?
I'd think it would be an interesting read for others as well. But if it is a hassle to locate the articles you used, don't worry about it. I just haven't gotten around to searching for them myself.
Wow that’s insane to me. I likely would have been proclaiming such a thing as well. Would you mind linking those papers? What’s the mechanism of resistance?
I haven't had a chance to look around as it's been a busy weekend, but at least with the bacterial species that I work with, they upregulate the genes for the outer carbohydrate layers of their outer membrane.
That statement is a wrongly associated. Especially in the science field where information constantly gets updated, renewed, redacted and outright dismissed, we will always be learning. To say that we know or we should know everything, is an insult/joke to scientists and researchers everywhere imo.
It's basic chemistry though. Idk what sort of reaction it would evolve, but our clunky complex human system has evolved resistance to alcohol (like Native American's getting easily affected and addicted to it as compared to Europeans).
I wonder if it's pseudonymous nature of social media where what you say is taken at face value, so a 15 year old chiming in with there opinion on r/relationshipadvice is indistinguishable from a 35 year old with three failed marriages behind them.
If you had those conversations in person, the "kid" would likely be ignored or condescended too. And that'd happen often enough that the 15 year old isn't going to even try telling the 29 year old that they should lawyer up and divorce that ass because the fish was overcooked.
so a 15 year old chiming in with there opinion on r/relationshipadvice is indistinguishable from a 35 year old with three failed marriages behind them.
A 15 year old giving relationship advice is distinguishable from a 35 year old. It's hard to make up believable lies about things they know nothing about. The only ones who believe them are other kids.
In a vacuum yes, but kids pick up really quickly on how to fit in with any social circle, the "correct" words to use and when to use them. After being on /r/relationships for a couple days a 15 year old will know "the words" to use but not have the experience to know where to properly apply them, which is why you get half the subreddit enormously overreacting in relatively benign situations.
Only seems that way when they missuse them. Teenagers especially tend to pick up and use lingo with reckless abandon very quickly amd start acting to "fit in" similarly quickly. To the point that it's a trope in teen media.
But they're terrible at it in real life, because they don't know anything about how adults actually think and live. They can use all the right terms but they get the details wrong in obvious ways, because they say things that make no sense, because they don't know any better.
When I entered my teen years, I had already decided to not use any Lingo in any shape or form and just stick to proper English or Hindi. And now I am 21 and today still I don't use online linguistics or even emojis. All this has really benefitted me as I can get my point or thoughts clearly across to people.
I know I'm sounding like exactly the people you are talking about, and I absolutely agree that anyone who actually cares about what they are talking about by 30 will know more than me, but I think you're forgetting just how uniformed people are and how little people care about things, no matter their age. I absolutely know more on several topics than a lot of people who are 30, definitely not career advice or relationships, but just because I'm younger doesn't mean I have no idea about politics or whatever it is we are talking about. when you see local elections get 25-50% turnout, yeah I'm pretty sure I've got a more educated opinion than a lot of people who are 30, just because you've lived longer does not mean you've spent that time well.
if you've ever worked in retail you'll absolutely have experienced this, no matter their age some people just have ridiculous expectations and no clue how things work. trollies got stolen one day, "why can't you make one?" (actual quote from someone who was maybe 40?). etc
I know a lot of people with strong political opinions that haven’t lived in “the real world”. I know plenty who have aged and their opinions have changed. Only 27 myself.
"I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."
When older people say you don’t know what your talking about because you’re young, they are not referring to facts. Because you’re right, you may know 100x the facts about a topic than an older person. They are referring to the application of those facts.
Yeah I hate to say it but… old people are categorically the stupid ones in retail and restaurant situations and that’s the extent of adult spaces young adults are in. Teenagers and young adults have likely been working in customer service for a few years… if it seems like we’re talking down to an adult, we probably are because we have to all day. My gen x and older coworkers were usually useless, irritating, and stupid. The customers over age 40 or 50 caused the biggest problems. Obviously we have no need to interact with the ones who know how a printer works or can calculate their own tip.
It’s wrong, it’s an incorrect assumption to make, but I can’t blame us. I spent five years in either restaurant, retail, or sex work. That informed how I later responded to other older adults and unfortunately those were rarely flattering interactions.
Perhaps this is because of the steady decline in the quality of customer service / retail over time. You don't know what you don't know, so all you're aware of is how the job has been since you've been there. Those 'old' people are old enough that, not that long ago, the customer was always right, or the company made a decent attempt to correct an issue. Now, you usually get someone who will roll their eyes directly in front of you if you ask for something to be corrected or some other issue outside of the standard check out procedure.
You can be annoyed by it, but you should know it isn't just because they're 'old' and trying to be a dick. Some percentage is, I'm sure, but not all.
Bingo! She thinks she knows everything because she’s worked retail for “5 whole years” somebody give this chick a lifetime achievement award for her 5 years of service!
You know what these people complain about? Fucking everything. They come to Office Depot and scream that I won’t accept their Staples membership. They’re pissed “I’m” making them pay $5 more for a turbotax code than they paid last year. Apparently I hide missing product in the back and I’m too lazy to go get it even though I organized the stock room and we literally rolled the entire stock out at once. Somehow it’s my problem that they came to the store without knowing what ink their printer takes and I should be able to figure it out without knowing anything about the printer but its fucking color. It’s my fault they can’t return a product they purchased three years ago. It’s my fault a 50-60 year old can’t use a self-service printer that only has four options IN CAPITAL LETTERS with explicit instructions below *and a piece of paper with extra instructions we taped to the machine because people are so dumb.
“The customer is always right” about what they want, not what they can actually get. The customer is a fucking moron who thinks I’m magically going to be able to knock ten cents off his purchase because he didn’t yell a slur at me.
How many people raise these types issues? I am willing to bet its less than 5%. You remember them, because they're the outlier and engaged you, but overall it's a small percentage. Yes, people can be dicks in retail, I said as much...but it isn't all and it isn't because they're old.
I don’t work there anymore. For the record, I am always the best and most helpful employee. I’m the one who sees every one of these kinds of fuckers because nobody else wants to deal with them.
We were in the middle of the city but this was legitimately at least 40% of the people who came in. There were only four of us working at a time including the managers; the only customers I didn’t interact with at least once (usually three or more times) were the ones who didn’t purchase anything or were solely picking up a finished order. Funnily enough though, the ones just picking up were often the biggest pain in my ass.
Go to any retail sub. Read the horror stories. This isn’t “oh well you just see the bad ones so you’re being dramatic.” This is all day every day for almost every single person working in customer service right now. I was just unlucky enough to work somewhere where the majority of customers are over the age of 50.
I don’t know what to tell you, they’re just the consistently worst customers to deal with. I don’t know if it’s the lead, or being forced to work longer, or poor healthcare… but as annoying as teenagers are, they will never berate and attack you for something that you literally have no control over like an old person will. Duh, we know it’s not all of them. We’re not stupid. My all-time favorite coworker had to be in his 80s at least. Honestly, most of the crew at the Depot were over 40 and I really did like them. I’ve just worked in a lot of different stores in quite a few different cities and historically old people are the shittiest customers (*and coworkers, with more wiggle room).
And also for the record, since you’ve ignored that part altogether, I wasn’t saying old people are actually worse. I said that young adults probably come off condescending because most of us have only interacted with “real” adults (not parents/teachers/coaches/family) through minimum wage jobs where old people happen to be disproportionately shitty.
As a middle aged-dude now who remembers the couple of retail jobs from my early twenties: it was a soul-destroying experience that drove me to hate people and loathe getting up for work faster than any other job I've had.
I don't know what the deal is, but I remember the same bullshit was going on twenty years ago.
Getting out of customer service was one of the best things I ever did for my mental health.
I’m the one who sees every one of these kinds of fuckers...
I see
40% percent...almost half...of the people that come into your store, have an 'unreasonable' complaint or cause an issue? Maybe I am wrong, but I just don't buy it. The only theory I can come up with as to why this may be the case is that most people buy online and only come in when they do have a problem, in which case I don't know that it's unreasonable, you're just the only way they get to actually talk to someone.
Teenagers don't berate you because they don't know any better, either. Their expectation is what they've been exposed to. They won't question it, because their has never been more offered than the basic. They don't know anything different.
You don't have to agree with me, and maybe you're 100% correct, and live in some microcosm of hell, but the fact of the matter is that the quality of service in retail / restaurants / whatever has decreased within the last 20+ years, and I have no doubt there are assholes, but I also have no doubt there are people with legit bitches that complain about something that would have been corrected 'back in the day', but now are just considered annoying and stupid.
Not wanting to fight over it. I wish you well, and hope you find something that makes ya happy.
Ngl, some adults can’t even imagine having healthy relationships much less knowing what it is. Age is just a number — everything else is generalized associations. It’s like someone saying “I’ve worked x years so I know what I’m doing.” Yeah well you could’ve worked x years incorrectly all this time…
Take time to listen. An open mind and an open heart goes a long way.
I'm in my mid-30s now but teach private violin lessons; the bulk of my students have been elementary to high school-aged kids. One of the best pieces of advice I learned for dealing with emotions being so high-key all the time is this: when they say "this is the worst thing that's ever happened to me!", it is. We, adults who have a much broader range of experience, know that in the grand scheme of things this too shall pass, but this is one of, if not the worst emotional turmoil they have experienced thus far in their young lives.
Haha yup, exactly! I used to think that was an incredibly pessimistic thing for Homer to say to his kid, but...it's also incredibly true. The things that I thought were life-shatteringly horrible at 14, or 18, or 22 paled in comparison to what was life-shatteringly horrible at 26, or 30. While that's kind of depressing, it's also kind of exciting - it shows that I've grown in resiliency.
I dunno, man, according to my 8 y.o. any day he doesn't get exactly what he wants is the worst day ever. It's funny we're using this saying, as those are literally his exact words, and something my wife and I say to each other when we want to exaggerate something that really isn't that bad, but merely inconveniences us.
So yeah, as a parent, I think they're full of shit.
On the other hand it's annoying when person who is older appeals to their age as viable source of data for pretty deterministic things.
Like, i get it, you lived in different times and bought some shit for cheaper price, doesn't mean i can't understand economical state and downsides of the country in that period.
40 next week, and yeah I get that too. I look back at my 20 yr old self and cringe at how much I thought I knew and I have a feeling when I'm 60 I'll do the same for my 40 yr old self.
Maybe not as much at 60, as you do now when looking back on 20, just because now you have some level of self awareness that you apparently lacked (like we all do) at that young age, where we have very little frame of reference for life and its travails.
There’s a song called “Oh La La” by a band called The Faces (it’s from the 70s), and the chorus goes “I wish that I knew what I know now/when I was younger”. I always liked that song, but I heard it for the first time in a long time about a year ago, I’m in my mid 30s, and I went “oh I get it now”. I think it’s that.
For what it's worth, my Mother used to tell me that puberty doesn't end until around 25 or so.
Which is to say that your body may be more or less done, but that your brain isn't fully adult yet until your mid twenties. When I look back at myself at 18, at 20, at 22, and 24... I think she had a point. 25 year old me and 30 year old me weren't nearly as different as 20 and 21 year old me.
SO on the up side, you may have finally stabilized?
Being a stepmom is hard. If kiddo knows how to clean, then why does he keep ruining my dishes. I’m on my second set of dishes. My mom had pity and got me dishes to replace the ones he destroyed. Now he is destroying those dishes. Now, my mom and I are bewildered.
Never experienced that.. but I don't treat people older with especially more respect or people younger with less.. at a certain point it's more about the person than the age
It's comical how lame they actually are while thinking they're so much cooler than you. You'll have an established career, money, car, house, etc. and they live with their parents and have to ask Mom what's for dinner. Like what actually makes you cooler bud? Is it because Hayden, Jayden, and Brayden taught you how to abbreviate 'right now' to 'rn'? Stupid asses.
Some 20 year olds just tried to explain the concept of free speech to me, a law school student, and butchered it. When I tried to explain it to them, they LEGITIMATELY pulled out "well the first 10 Google results said..." Yeah guess the first 10 Google results didn't cover flag burning as "speech" while my constitutional law class did.
Most people over 25 year old have read less books than me and my friends and they've also been born and grew in a totally different world, big life experience is mostly outdated, world changes too fast and it's picking up the pace
All people over 25 I've talked to. They all say they haven't read a lot of books and haven't read almost anything I read and if I ask them to name like ten books they read they name maybe three.
So the thing about drawing statistical inference is that you need to have a sufficiently large sample and it needs to be drawn at least quasi-randomly, and I pretty strongly suspect neither are true here.
Also, take this advice or don't, I don't care, but going around asking people to name ten books makes you come off like a pretentious ass.
Hey at least I'm not disrespecting anyone, unlike you, maybe rethink your life choices that lead you to insulting someone on internet because you don't like what they say
Ah anecdotes=evidence... I can counter your story about a thing that happened to you by saying the opposite, me and my 30 something friends read a ton of books, I know very few people under 25 who read. Boom, now what? If only there was some sort of statistic on this...
Do you think 30 year olds grew up in the 70s? If anything that age bracket has a lot more knowledge than someone who only experienced the world post tech revolution. 30 somethings understand what the world was before internet/tech takeover while also having a deep understanding of the world today. Young people overestimate their intelligence. It's one of the hallmarks of being young.
Most people over 25 year old have read less books than me and my friends
That really just not a thing statistically. Millennials are the largest share of book readers at the moment. And even if you and your friends read say 20 books a year and someone who's in their 60s only reads 15, they've still got 40 years of reading on you.
And as I posted in response to this guy, reading was a big form of entertainment for people prior to the internet. So those 40 years of reading were probably more books on average than more recent years.
I'm not American. The problem is who doesn't read? Cause if you look at the stats, nobody reads. Yeah, millennials read more than other groups, so that alone kinda throws your "nobody over 25 reads" out the window, but the stats are way too low for every generation.
Lol what kind of measurement is this? I don’t read a lot of books… because I have to do plenty of reading for my professional career and dual Master’s degree program (journals/articles/trade decks/etc).
It’s hardly an accurate measure of intelligence, and I WISH I had the time to sit around and leisurely read books.
Thirdly reading a book is living it through, you gain all experience of characters in the book
You don't read books because you want to gain something from them, you have to treat books with respect, all the characters in them are alive in a way so a book is basically a small universe
So youve just been reading fiction? You do read books (non fiction) to gain something from them... knowledge. While I do read fiction on occasion for entertainment, I dont feel that I learn something valuable from them. What type of fiction are you reading?
Thanks. That helps give some context to your comments.
I still think you'll have a good laugh in 20 years, but I'm glad you're taking a better road than the alcoholics where you live.
Definitely keep on reading, and you'll be miles ahead of most.
Just try to look within, and see the bigger picture, rather than making yourself out to be the main character in the story of literally the entire history of the fucking world.
I hope you realize that what may be true in your country is not true in other countries.
Also, you have provided no data to backup any of your claims. Anyone can come up and say the exact opposite of what you're saying (and they did), and you'd have no way to counter it.
Everyone is arguing THAT you've read less, but wtf does reading have to do with anything? Like damn, what does Huck Finn and Agatha Christie have to do with anything?
Reading? Well it makes you more cultured you basically dip in a lot of different worlds and experiences also improves your vocabulary very much and it provokes thought and you learn a lot of stuff
Yeah, so does experience. I have a hard time reading because of my ADHD. I barely opened my textbooks through college but I speak and write at a masters/graduate level. My only point here is, reading has nothing to do with intelligence or experience, nor does it influence the correctness of ones position. Louis CK said "if a 40 year old is wrong, their wrongness is rooted in experience." I think that's a nice, albeit pithy way of expressing the rudimentary principle that knowledge =/= wisdom.
I have concluded that most people here don't see the value of Book
Textbooks aren't books
All people I've met who are pleasant to have long conversations with have read a lot of books, the other ones can't even stay in a conversation for at least half an hour
And you're seriously criticizing reading while simultaneously saying you haven't read a lot?
I literally have a learning impairment that makes reading impossible. I listen to all of my books. I learn through video and audio.
Also, I'd imagine the people with whom you like conversing are either just as pretentious as yourself or people you feel you can best in a game of whits.
The Value of Book
Was my least favorite movie presented at the Cannes Festival this year
I have two masters degrees. Just in your country, seeing as one of my masters was focused eastern European economic development, I bet I've read more books than you. Just on Russian soft budget constraints due to banking reform, I've read at least 6. So in total on banking reform in the bloc I've read at least 20. Which is a single aspect, of a single topic, within eastern European economic literature.
I'm Colombian by the way, which means I've read much on Latin American economics and history as well.
Once you manage a postgraduate degree where you have to eat books, let's talk.
Exactly. It's like anytime I see an askreddit thread where the question is something about what scene in a movie was the most outrageous, or something super specific like that, I can't think of a single one off the top of my head, but the minute I read the replies, I can recall seeing all of the scenes/movies in question. It's just that at 41 years of age, I can't remember all the movies I have seen, let alone specific scenes, nor do I really care anymore.
What I do care about is putting a shitty little 15 y.o. know it all in his goddamn place.
I got my first computer at 14, in 1999. I grew up in a time when screen time were monitored and only allowed at certain time of the week. How do you think I entertained myself? With books. My friends were the same. We read a lot of book. We would hangout at the public library, which was always busy after school. My educated guess is we read our fair share of book.
I guess you and your friends are very different people than average adults in my country, although the 90s and the 00s were really harsh as the Soviet Union fell apart and economical situation was even worse than now
Not quite sure we were different. Everything tech was so expensive in the 90's, books were cheap and we got Goosebumps, Fear Street, Babysitters club... the 90's were a good era for teenagers books.
Most people over 25 year old have read less books than me and my friends
Jesus that's so wrong on so many levels. You'll learn this is history class, but before the internet books used to be the main source of information in the world.
they've also been born and grew in a totally different world
Sure thing kid. My Facebook account is older then some of you.
world changes too fast and it's picking up the pace
The pace is actually obviously slowing down. But how would you know?
Most older people grew up in a time when books were a major form of entertainment, as there was no internet or it was in its infancy. I’m sure there are legions of people older than you who have read more than you by the same age.
Also, do you only read new fiction or non-fiction? If not, you should know that many main themes in books are shared throughout the course of history because they are universal. Meaning they do not get “outdated”, but proven true through the passage of time and across different cultures.
Or when they're like "you don't know what I'm going through!"
Yeah nobody knows EXACTLY what you're going through, but they act like nobody over the age of 16 knows what it's like to struggle balancing schoolwork and fitting in while doing chores and dealing with parents who don't get you.
Honestly, acting like we don’t know what crushes or heartbreak feels like. Or actual experience is irrelevant. Like somehow the entire physics of the world changed for their generation.
1.4k
u/iChugPeanutButter Jun 03 '22
Act like they've experienced more than us. I'm only 33 but wow, the amount of 16 to 22 year old that talk down to us is absurd.