2021-04-10 Twitter After much thought, I have been dragged along by the fact that many cases are called “[problems caused by the elderly (esp. gerontocracy, and elderly people’s control over the young)” in the world, but I have come to think that my interest is in “human bugs,” and age is irrelevant. I am now beginning to think that my interest is in “human bugs” and not in age. Often observed cases of “buggy people” and want to know the cause of the bug because I don’t want to be the “buggy person.”

And I just have a feeling that the bug is “likely to increase in frequency as the body deteriorates over time,” so the “old” part is just a hypothetical level. In that light, I still think the term “old” is misleading.

The “I don’t want to be a buggy person” needs a little more explanation: human cognition is full of bugs to begin with. And while operating the buggy system, the internal state of the system may become strange for some reason, and as a result, strange output will appear. We want to avoid this strange output.

And it’s a typical human bug to see someone in this situation and think, “That person was the type of person who would do that, I’m different” Fundamental attribution error.

When you talk about a person’s internal state going haywire and producing strange output, there’s schizophrenia. I had never thought of old age and schizophrenia in relation to each other until now.

It’s similar to when an only child toddler usually gets a lot of attention from his parents, and when he goes to a family gathering or something, he expects that the other adults should naturally pay attention to him, but he feels uncomfortable when the adults leave him alone and talk among themselves, so he does something bad on purpose to draw attention.


This page is auto-translated from /nishio/老害ではなく人間のバグ using DeepL. If you looks something interesting but the auto-translated English is not good enough to understand it, feel free to let me know at @nishio_en. I’m very happy to spread my thought to non-Japanese readers.