I wouldn’t consider myself conservative by any means but increasingly in 30s I’m beginning to think everyone needs to stop messing with stuff and accept imperfection.
It's true for everyone in every subject I'm afraid:)
For example, you spend years in school being instructed as efficiently as possible in the one right way to do things that was already discovered. You are only rarely or never shown the messy process of trial and error needed to get there, and many really big errors are hardly covered at all (the history of communism didn't even get a look-in when I was at school!).
Another: you're instructed near exclusively by specialists, who are definitionally always right (if you argue with the teacher, you lose).
Yet another: as you progress through the system, you're rewarded as the ideas you handle get more complex. You aren't rewarded for simplicity. You are also rewarded for bullshitting, because just like RLHF, exams don't award points for saying "I don't know" but they can award points for a lucky guess.
These sorts of systems inevitably lead to an assumption that progress is linear, mistakes rare, complexity intrinsically has value, that expertise is nearly infallible, that guessing is OK if you don't know and the situation seems important etc. The longer one spends in education the further from reality these intuitions become, until you reach academia and become a public intellectual who produces the most complex/radical ideas possible based on educated guessing and then ignores whether they work or not.
Life outside the training environment eventually starts to correct these false ideas. You see how many things are tried that fail, how nuanced and ambiguous the value of ideas really is, how complexity blows up in people's faces due to problems they didn't anticipate and so on. You start to value incrementalism, evolutionary processes, systems that gather and aggregate the wisdom of the crowds. You become less impressed with ivory tower intellectuals who think they got it all figured out in advance on a blackboard. You become conservative, and end up railing against the young radicals who have some bright idea for reshaping society by force.
Also although in the tech industry this link has been broken/inverted, there's usually a correlation between excessive risk taking (i.e. lack of conservatism) and losing all your money. In most sectors of society wealth is built up over time through care and perhaps a bit of moderate risk taking, but not too much.
My first contracting job where I had to pay quarterly tax estimates (apologies for the U.S. tax-code specific reference) literally changed the way I thought about the world. Instantly financially conservative.
By far the smartest thing the US government ever did was take your taxes out of your paycheck so you "never see it".
BTW this applies to personal taxes not corporate taxes. Still think we're going about inflation completely wrong by raising rates and not raising corporate taxes. But the U.S. has been on a genocidal campaign against the middle class for decades now and we keep electing the same politicians so I guess we get what we deserve.
For example, most companies with large software assets will at some point go through a fight between the old hands and younger devs about whether to do a rewrite in the hot new thing. Which side you're on may appear dominated by age, but it's really more about your intuition about the risks of rewrite projects. That in turn is determined by your experiences of people's ability/inability to fully comprehend complex systems.
Also I didn't try to to be neutral, hence the digs at communism and academia. If I was aiming for karma I'd have left those out. But I'm not.
This creates a bit of a blind spot for stuff like mathematics where a good idea can continue to be used and be improved on for ages, or in physics where some of the most groundbreaking stuff in the 20th century was not found by observation but by thought experiment.
There's a lot that can be gained by recognising and reusing the same good idea for centuries, but it is not really 'progress' in the 'discovering / building new stuff' sense.
I wouldn't consider myself conservative by any means, but I do find myself more reserved in my decision making - I'll take a bit more time to come to a decision rather than firing from the hip, etc.
