The Cognitive Upside to an Extended Adolescence | Hacker News Reader

The Cognitive Upside to an Extended Adolescence

theatlantic.com

83 pointsohaikbai34 comments

Further reading, youthful mental characteristics appear to keep the brain plastic and adaptable to change. Remain childlike, with the accompanying sense of wonder and engagement in the world to retain your intellectual vigor:

https://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/ed-boygenius.html

From an evolutionary perspective, humans very much resemble juvenile chimpanzees physically. There is something about this neoteny that might give insights to our highly adaptable intelligence.

It's almost like the Taoist masters were on to something. ;)

The article uses the 1950s a reference point for the age at which people leave the home and parents, but the 1950s are actually an anomaly, weirdly young for marriage and household formation, at least for Western Europe culture.

...anomaly for the recent past, not biologically, obviously.

Not so fast, "obviously".

I believe that "neolocal" households are unique, mostly, to post middle age Western Europe. And the 1950s are anomalous within that time scale.

Otherwise we see patri- or matri local multi generational households in which adulthood is not correlated with setting up a new household at all. You would marry someone and the move into their parents house. Sure you would start having children, but there isn't the same leaving adolescence thing.

Why is that time scale interesting to you as opposed to e.g. the last 150k years?

I don't think we can say anything meaningful about peoples behaviors 10k-150k years ago, and even approaching 10k quickly get's sketchy.

Humans have a long period between when it's possible to get pregnant and when it's safest to get pregnant. This may suggest prehistoric females tended to wait around a decade after puberty, or there was huge selective pressure and we still ended up like this.

Er. The usual marriage age for a girl in premodern and early modern western European culture (and many other cultures worldwide) was "the onset of menses," or about 12 to 14 years old. ("Romeo and Juliet" takes place just before Juliet's 14th birthday.) Even in the modern era, the typical marriage age for women was 16 or 17 well into the 20th century in most of the western world.

The reference point of the 1950s to the present is an anomaly because it's weirdly old in western culture, not weirdly young.

> The usual marriage age for a girl in premodern western European culture (and many other cultures worldwide) was "the onset of menses," or about 12 to 14 years old.

The wikipedia article [1] doesn't agree with you. It suggests marriage in the mid twenties was most common, although there was regional variation. Noblewomen, such as the fictional Juliet, married younger.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_patt...

That article says, "[in western Europe], about half of all women aged 15 to 50 years of age were married at any given time, while the other half were widows or spinsters" which is entirely consistent with what I wrote: over half of women aged 15 were, or had been, married.

There is a large literature supporting the parent comment, started by Hajnal, not your somewhat sophistic argument. In the Western part of Europe, people married late and there were a lot of spinsters.

The passage you quote says little or nothing about the distribution of ages of married women within that range and the ages of those women married when they first married. On one hand, the married half of women in the age range could largely be the older half. On the other, the typical age of a newly married woman might be much younger than the typical age of an already married woman.

Correct. As I said, it is "consistent with" what I said -- not that it outright proves what I said is true. It's ambiguous.

I am sorry, but what you said about the age at marriage is wrong, whether or not you can twist the argument about what wikipedia said. Really, you either need to read some books about demography or, umm, leave it to the experts. If you read some books about demographic history, you will be interesting to argue with.

The 12-14 age for puberty is kinda modern. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puberty#Historical_shift) It's been happening earlier and earlier. With the 1840 reference point on wikipedia, depending on location it was more like 15-17.

(1) You are wrong, at since the middle ages in Europe. See child comment on Western pattern of marriage. I would be interested in your sources besides Romeo and Juliet, where if I remember correctly, they are told they are too young.

(2) The referenced article isn't really about marriage, but about the transition from adolescence to adulthood. There is a difference between a person getting married/ starting to have children versus setting up a household in which a person has an "adult" role; in the recent, Euro-derived West they are one and the same, but not so universally. And in the West, late age for marriage, and lots of non-married is the norm, and that pattern is pretty unique in the world.

If you do a graduate degree in demography, you learn all this. There isn't really any debate about it anymore, though it is very cool and interesting to discuss because it challenges our received knowledge about "normal". Don't get me started on fertility rates for women over 40 and their historical trends....

Among poor people in the US it is fairly common for a girl to have her first baby when she is 17 / 18/ 19 but still live at home; she has hardly left adolescence even if the boyfriend/ husband is also around...

>Don't get me started on fertility rates for women over 40 and their historical trends....

Don't leave this hanging. At least point in the direction you're going.

I'm under 25, pay my own bills, own a house and company and remain childlike.

It has nothing to do with unemployment. It's about how you use your time.

Is it just me, or are 40-year old "adolescents" kind of terrifying?

We're not all that bad.

You shouldn't be down voted, but you should probably elaborate on your feeling here a bit better.

I meant as a mass phenomenon. For most of history, an 18 year old was a fully grown man, capable of military command, albeit inexperienced.

Now we are mass-infantilizing those men in their most fertile years.

(Rare mavericks we've always had, of course, and a few may turn out enormously 'lucrative', so to speak, for society.)

It would probably be fair to call Henry “aimless.” After he graduated from Harvard, he moved back in with his parents, a boomerang kid straight out of a trend piece about the travails of young adults.

Despite graduating into a recession, Henry managed to land a teaching job, but two weeks in, he decided it wasn’t for him and quit. It took him a while to find his calling—he worked in his father’s pencil factory, as a door-to-door magazine salesman, took on other teaching and tutoring gigs, and even spent a brief stint shoveling manure before finding some success with his true passion: writing.

Henry published his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, when he was 31 years old, after 12 years of changing jobs and bouncing back and forth between his parents’ home, living on his own, and crashing with a buddy, who believed in his potential. “[He] is a scholar & a poet & as full of buds of promise as a young apple tree,” his friend wrote, and eventually was proven right. He may have floundered during young adulthood, but Henry David Thoreau turned out pretty okay. (The buddy he crashed with, for the record, was Ralph Waldo Emerson.)

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/01/when-are-y...

From immaturity straight to infertility.

44 year old successful programmer into the latest tech (Elixir/Phoenix) and gamer into the latest games (Overwatch, Fallout, etc.) here. No kids (adds to my "immaturity," I guess), live with a girlfriend. A little offended/saddened at your comment, actually. Tech ageism at its finest, I guess.

You'll eventually figure out that as you age, it's just your body aging mainly. You will continue to learn things and get "wiser," but your personality is immutable data, basically. I first noticed this at my 20-year high school reunion... I grew up without Facebook so this was the first time I had seen many people in 20 years... and I didn't recognize many of them (usually the ones who gained a bunch of weight... note, I did not)... until I looked into their eyes, and/or until they cracked a joke or said something, and then suddenly it was like OMG THAT IS THE SAME EXACT FUNNY PERSON THEY WERE IN HIGH SCHOOL, clear as day.

> A little offended/saddened at your comment, actually. Tech ageism at its finest, I guess.

Think we may be a bit quick to jump on the parent commenter.

If an "adolescent" is someone still financially dependent on their parents, then I think most of us would agree there's something not quite right with that situation at 40-years old.

If it means being a responsible adult (a loaded phrase), but partaking in hobbies we enjoyed back in our teens, then who cares?

You're right, the term requires some clarification perhaps.

Generally tech ageism runs in the other direction.

Tech ageism runs against younger people? Since when is this?

No? It runs against the outward signs of maturity, like looking older, not wanting to stay up all night writing code and playing ping-pong, having a family, and so on.

That's what I was originally suggesting, since the original comment was about older "adolescents" being creepy

The world makes much more sense when you pretend that every person is a child, regardless of how many candles on their cake or wrinkles on their face.

As far as nature of humanity is concerned you pretty much make that argument, we are guided on so many levels by our adolescent evolutionary complexity that shaped us and don't even realize it for the most part. When people understand the collective "we" with all the culture and societal playground and think that means they know themselves it is misguided perception. It easy to think that we are in control, that we know how we would react in particular situations in life because we can project it with our simulation of reality by our mental capacity. In many ways it's an illusion albeit useful one. Self deception is a tool, it's powerful one at that, it allows you train other people to serve your purpose, spread ideas that might benefit the humanity or might benefit your own wealth. That's way we have a choice to be a cult leader or debunk pseudoscience. Our minds are to malleable to external ideas and that makes us a dangerous species capable to start wars, revolutions and tyrannies of the chosen few.

No. I can't imagine how a person living a life with no impact on mine could terrify me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com