Boldness vs. Caution

 

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Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Why are the young bold, when they should be cautious?

When you are six years old,  the time from one birthday to the next seems like forever.  It is 1/6 of your life.  When you are 70 years old, the time from one birthday to the next is an eyeblink.  It is 1/70 of your life.  The same effect in the reverse may be why the young are bold when they should be cautious, and why the old are cautious when they should be bold.

If life expectancy is 90 years old, when you are 20 years old, then each event in the future is only 1/70 of your life.  When you are 70 years old, each event in the future is only 1/20 of your life.  It becomes even more problematic when this is rounded to two decimals places. 1/70 is .0142571, which rounds to .01.  1/20 is .05, which rounds to .05.

Mastery of a subject is suppose to take 10,000 hours.  Most twenty-somethings can not be expected to have mastered any subject.  A seventy year old most probably has mastered at least one subject.

The risk of an action is the consequences of that action multiplied by its likelihood.  The consequences should be the same for both the 70-year old and the 20-year old.  If the mastery is not considered, but the life expectancy is considered, then the risk of the 20-year old is 1/5 the risk of a 70-year old.  The problem is that likelihood should be unrelated to how many time you play the game, i.e. your remaining life expectancy.  The likelihood without mastery, should be the same for young and old.  But mastery should be greater for old than young, which means that the likelihood and thus the risk, should be lower for the old than for the young.   The young may be bolder, but they should be even more cautious than the old.

The value of the future should be unrelated to your age.  But if you ignore any future that occurs after you have died, even if your group endures, you are not valuing any future events as being real. 

If the risks taken  when an individual is young are greater than the risks that same person takes when they are old, that might indicate that person only has an individual perspective, and does not have a group perspective. In those cases, youth is wasted on the young.