Fail.
1) OP claims to be smart, yet can't find the 'Meta' sub-forum.
2) S/he's basically whining "I'm bored! Say something smart. I demand to be entertained!"
If you want better quality discussions, then use the search function and 'necro' a topic of your choice that you think has merit, or start a thread that's actually meaningful...
*sigh* He's talking about kids like you
I don't like it when people compare these morons to children/teenagers because they're a lot more intelligent than this the majority of the time, chances are these are 30+ year old neckbeards, spoilt traders or neo-keynesians out to do some trolling and are incapable of being told they're full of shit or they are sore losers.
Haven't you seen the kind of bullshit that our politicians and leaders get caught writing on facebook and twitter?
I am not saying that kids are dumb, but teens with less life experience pretending to know it all it irks me every time.
The equalizing effect of the internet (making feel that a teen has the same authority than a professional), plus the trolling effect that we all know, causes really exasperating situations.
I applaud any kid who has a inquisitive mind, and some of them may try to learn through arguments.
But you can really tell the mental age of someone by paying attention to the proper usage of vocabulary, terminologies and their reasoning pattern... Which is in turn always matching with their life experience.
Preteens typically make you refer to the dictionary. They have difficulties understanding that professional terminologies have specific meanings that are not reflected in vernacular usage.
Teens typically want to pretend to be cultured and most analyses are purely logical, they don't understand the difference between tautology and truth. They have hard time understanding fallacies. They heavily use rhetoric to cover their ignorance. They are still trapped in a word of definitions, but now less about semantics and more about of conceptual definitions from textbook. Male teens have a very hard time being flexible, they are still living in a world of absolutes. They may grasp conceptually but they lack understanding of fundamentals.
Existential questions abound, and their ideologies are paved with zeitgeist and 1984 instead of actual philosophy.
And those who eat better ideologies, they become fanboys. Basically because they lack of actual criteria, they are looking for authorities to respect and follow.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is fairly predominant in both preteens and teens.
Adults because of their life experience, they bring case studies and they understand the exceptions to the rule. We use models to understand the world, but we use empiricism to confirm. We learn that the world is neither black nor white, but gray.
Existential conflicts are mostly gone with puberty, although it may return at your 30's or 40's in what people call "middle life crises". But those are more in line with "what did I do with my life" instead of the teenage "why do I exist".
OP is right: your vocabulary and orthography reveals a LOT, and the way that one formulates their ideas exposes even more.
If you read enough how someone formulates their question and/or reacts, you can infer fairly accurately their educational level, and therefore estimate their (mental) age.
Now, I am not criticizing the kids, this is all part of their learning process. Also, there are very bright ones out there. But most of them are just adding noise.
Having an invite only forum would be fine, but those posts shouldn't be isolated from the public, instead it should be something like a +v channel... only those invited can reply and post. The rest just watch and listen.
