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I can identify with the feeling. Thinking back on the period of my late teens and early 20s, I had a lot of strong opinions on things. And I'd read about them. I could call upon information on those topics. I could cite the source where I read it.

In my mid-30s, I'm much less confident about just about everything. I still have some medium to strong opinions, but I've been wrong enough times about things I was sure about that it's just hard to hold such strong views on things having only read it in a book or two.

There are a couple of differences between your experience and mine though, I think. The first is that I'm about to finish my PhD and have a great deal more expertise than I did in my early 20s. So as my expertise has grown, my certainty in many things, especially those outside my field has diminished. This is largely because I realize just how much more depth most fields of knowledge have and just how much is required to really hold an informed opinion.

I also deal with a fair number of young people, college students in my department and in other contexts. I recognize some of the same certainty and optimism I used to have at their age, and I hear some of the same opinions I used to hold on such things as vegetarianism, government systems, and economic policy. I remember having those beliefs, and talking to these young adults, it's striking just how little evidence their certainty rests on. It's worse inside my field, where students come in with their "great idea" having done no research and spent all of about 5 minutes really thinking through the ramifications of their idea, but that same certainty and optimism is there.

I often wish I was as idealistic and energetic as I was 15 years ago. But I wouldn't trade it for the naive surface-level thinking that went along with it. I like seeing the depth in the world too much, even when it shows just how shallow my thinking is in most areas, and even if it means that in most areas of life I'm forced to constantly face my uncertainty and lack of expertise.

Anyway, I hope that was at least a little bit helpful.

When you are younger your learning rate of change is higher but you also don’t necessarily know what you don’t know. As you get older you start to appreciate that things are more complicated than they first appear. In school everything that you learn (besides learning how to learn) is already known. Mastery gives you confidence to approach the unknown which is life outside of formal education.

Mastery has been an incredible and incredibly humbling journey.

I'm not so bold as to propose I'm a master yet, but I've definitely hit a patch of "these problems are plaguing the industry and lots of smarter people have not managed to fully solve them yet."

What's been fascinating is I now have sufficient perspective to have thoughts and hypothesis of how to approach solving them, but the experience to have a sense of where I'll likely hit walls.

In the case of business it gets interesting because in many cases, if these problems have been solved, there's vested interests in making sure nobody else finds out how you did it, so these may actually be solved by some companies already and I'll never know.

Also, earlier in our development (in general, or in an area), we don't yet know what's known and unknown (by anyone).

Nor might we know when a teacher or mentor is communicating something textbook vs. some non-textbook insight or new idea.

This is my overall take on this. I don't think I' am getting dumber, I appreciate that experience has given me a more nuanced view on things and to be certain about something, unless that subject is really really narrow, is a type of ignorance.

Doesn't mean I don't hold a strong view on some subjects, experience has also solidified things that time has shown as essential.

> I'm much less confident about everything

This doesn't seem like a bad thing.

Maybe people just realize as they grow older how complex things really are, and eventually learn not to fall for the dunning Kruger effect on everything

Just a thought I have sometimes:

Both these accounts fit with lower levels of testosterone with age...

They'd also fit with anything else that changes over time.

Very true. But it's easy to crank testosterone, and see what happens.

Easy? How?

Options include intramuscular injection, slow-release implants, and skin creams. I prefer skin creams, because you get a ~normal diurnal cycle. And old-school cream, not Androgel or Testim. Because it's much less expensive, and leaves ~no residue.

If you actually have low testosterone, many doctors will prescribe supplements. It may take some work to find one who doesn't consider age-related decline to be "normal", and so not warranting treatment. And if you can't, then you'll need to shop online.

Strength exercise seems to help https://www.webmd.com/men/features/exercise-and-testosterone...

You really shouldn't use WebMD as a primary source for anything.

They are a content farm owned by Internet Brands and their only focus is creating content as vehicles for pharmaceutical and consumer packaged goods advertisements.

Weightlifting without a doubt increases your testosterone. After weight training consistently for about 8 months, there are definitely changes beyond muscle growth

Makes sense to me.

But there's a problem, if your testosterone level is too low. In my experience, that increases the risk of tendonitis. Also, it didn't seem that exercise did much good. At least, not for strength training.

But with testosterone supplementation, exercising builds muscle and reduces fat. And no tendonitis. Also better blood sugar management, and less acne. Maybe even darker hair. But clearly not more hair on my head.

That's interesting you attribute low testosterone to tendonitis because high testosterone does the same thing. In fact, that's why steroids (testosterone ethanate) can increase the chance of injury in abusers because the muscle grows in strength far faster than the tendons so they tear. However, the benefits of testosterone supplementation vastly overweight the cons if you are naturally low and I suspect that it starts a positive re-enforcement cycle where increased testosterone increases muscle which then stimulates more testosterone production until a good equillibrium is met.

That's actually a very interesting observation. I've taken herbal supplements that (supposedly) increase testosterone in the past. In particular, Longjack extract led to a marked increase in stubbornness, argumentativeness, and using extreme language in my arguments - e.g., "There's no way this ISN'T true!" or "There's no other reasonable way to see it." I had to stop taking it as this was causing interpersonal problems.

On the other hand, this effect doesn't seem to be limited solely to men, so while I may have mellowed with age, I don't think that's the only thing going on here.

I think PhDs suffer the most from narrowly studying an area.

In my experience, learning better how to learn was far more valuable than the knowledge itself.

I think this is a common feeling, but I also think it's usually wrong.

It's no surprise that most 22 year olds think they're brilliant. But are they actually? Sometimes, yes, but usually, no.

I think with age comes a bit more humility about one's own brilliance. Perhaps because we find the limits of our own knowledge and we also meet others that truly are brilliant in some regard, which makes us question our own brilliance.

When looking back, it's normal to take our old high self-regard as real -- and compare it to our current, more realistic self-regard. But in fact, our youthful cockiness was often unearned.

This feels like the truest answer.

I was very opinionated and had a bunch of random knowledge to back up my opinions when I was young. I had a lot of confidence that I actually knew a lot.

Then at some point, some people started saying that I was almost right, but not quite. I didn’t have all the info. Just some. Sometimes I was just wrong. Was I getting stupider, or was I finally being called out?

I think learning you don’t have all of the answers and restraining your opinions is an important part of becoming a sensible adult.

Sensible adults don't give opinions because they are wary of politics.

It's fine to be opinionated if your opinion is backed up with experience. Young people by definition lack that experience.

It's not fine to be opinionated if your opinion would cause politics. Even if you're right - you're screwed.

There are also a lot of institutions interested in making 22-year-olds feel brilliant in exchange for their creative output. Once you leave the institution or find yourself at a different place within it, you may lose some of this feeling—not because anything changed about you, but because of your changing relationship to the thing which was supporting your self-image.

> There are also a lot of institutions interested in making 22-year-olds feel brilliant in exchange for their creative output.

There seem to be a few motivations for promoting someone else's (not just 22yos) self-image of being "brilliant". Ones I've seen so far:

* A teacher/mentor might offer encouragement, so that a person will keep working on learning/doing something that needs effort, rather than think they're not cut out for it. (Though it's maybe better to expressly attribute accomplishments to effort rather than innate qualities.)

* A manager might also do it for good morale/atmosphere, and even a genuine expression of appreciation for a positive contribution and effort.

* An employer, investor, or university might "recognize" and echo-chamber "brilliance", to attract people and extract work/tuition/rankings from them. (Don't you want to go where people are "brilliant" and, perhaps after hazing to reinforce that, they accept you as one?) (Also, flattery costs less to give than dollars do.)

I read somewhere: "Marurity is answering more a more often with a 'it depends ...'"

This resonates me a lot. Ageing has made me very alergic to strong opinions, black and white approaches and naive enthusiasm.

Counter-opinion: over-complication is very much en vogue! Our academia, media, business, etc. are awash with post-structuralist influenced thinking that seeks to deliberately undermine previously accepted pillars on which our culture was founded, e.g. men and women are defined by biology, strength is preferable to weakness, etc. Sometimes debating shades of grey serves no purpose other than to undermine progress.

I feel exactly the same. I am still surprised by the broadness and complexity of software projects I engaged in when much younger (under 18). At some point I was writing a videogame (programming a sprite editor from scratch in Borland Pascal, writing the game in Borland C), designing and writing a multi-tasking operating system in Z80 (where I remember having to come up tricks such as pushing the address to jump to on the stack and using "ret" because there was no mechanism to jump to a runtime defined address) and participating in programming contents at the national level (where, in one instance, I "invented" backtracking without even realizing what it was until much later). I could learn a new programming language in a month, write thousands of lines of code in a few more weeks and make connections between the different languages, styles, challenges and come up with solutions based on the broadness of that knowledge. To this day (20 years later) I still reference things I learned back then when I find patterns/similarities in day to day programming work. Haven't been able to broaden my knowledge much since, motivation has taken a huge dive and I spend almost no time at all improving these skills outside of work.

Did you happened to take on many more life responsibilities in the intervening years, e.g. parenting & home ownership?

Home ownership consumes a much larger amount of time than I could have ever envisioned.

Simple things like going to one washer and dryer vs using an apartment's laundry facility increase the amount of time and attention the weekly chore requires. Doing projects you are capable of takes just as much time as coordinating the ones you cannot

Decision fatigue is a real thing and home ownership requires a lot of decisions.

The price we pay to try and capture 20-40% of our income in equity instead of it enriching someone else!

I used to scoff at various art forms (paintings, music, dance, etc). I too am at your place. Extremely involved in a multitude of activities in youth, cold pressed into an engineering job at a big company.

> I feel like my intelligence has been reduced to the next lowest standard deviation

I used to have this same feeling. Especially after watching my junior engineers work through stuff, both in office and online. A lot of self doubt crept up into me regarding my capabilities.

Then I started getting into stuff like arts, politics, physics, etc. I have a natural love of paintings. Reading books about paintings, learning their history, etc. to keep me occupied has helped me a lot. I can't pin point exactly, but I felt more confident. I expanded my leisure by completely stopping any TV or videos (I avoided buying a new TV when moving away from my parents house) and just reading and listening a lot about a wide variety of topics. Engineering, Astro Physics, Painting, Culture, Politics (But not sports, I hate sports). I do it just for 30 - 45 minutes a day.

Maybe it's just me, but I feel more confident. I am not even sure if that's the reason for the confidence.

Could you give some recommendations on culture/art books worth reading?

Not the OP, but as an engineer I dug into art history too to broaden my outlook with this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/280190.Art_History

Not a cover to cover thing, but it was fascinating cherry picking periods in history I was interested in and seeing the art of the time and of course visiting local museums and seeing the art works mentioned in the book.

Thank you, very helpful resource.

This is not what I experience. For a couple of years I studied really hard and all I did was eat, sleep and study. During these times I definitely recognize what you have experienced. It's a form of narrowing down your world because you focus.

After studying hardcore, I slowly opened up again (read: I did less and less). This partially had to do with a mild depression (self-diagnosed, take it with a grain of salt). I noticed that during this period, I simply reflected more. I asked questions about other things.

And that's how I felt smarter and more intellectual again. simply because I had the time.

I wonder how you would experience a gap year. It may be the case that your 'original intelligence' comes back.

Working a lot, especially on one thing, makes us stupid, I think.

"Geniuses" are frequently people with unusual sets of interests. This is probably not simply a reflection of their mind, but also a shaper of their thought processes.

Think of it this way: If you have ten programmers in the office and nine of them play video games as their hobby and the tenth knits as their hobby, the knitter will probably come up with very different ideas from the other nine when facing similar problems at work.

Now scale that up further. If ninety percent of all programmers have a lot of similar hobbies and interests, the ten percent with "odd" interests for their profession will be the ones with wildly different takes on any given problem at work.

I come from a working class family. We use to think that people who were Fortune 100 programmers didn't need supplementary income, just more time to spend "all that money they get paid." I do not have the intelligence or social skills to be a programmer or any Fortune 100 position. Why do you need supplemental income? (I ask because I am curious about a world I will never enter.)

This is my take on it.

The world is a really interesting place with lots of things to do, but many of the most interesting things have a high risk of not paying out, or are just inherently unprofitable, and everyone needs something to eat and a place to sleep. The more money you have, the longer your runway, and the more risks you can take on.

Want to leave your job and go overseas for three months to a bootcamp? Start a company? Start a charity? Get a PhD.? Organise a music festival? Catalog the butterflies in your area? These things are all pretty risky compared to staying at your job - if you were going to do them, you'd want to have a savings account to dip into.

> The more money you have, the longer your runway, and the more risks you can take on

This resonates for me. It wasn’t until I significantly curbed my spending habits on frivolous luxuries and learned how to save that I was able to do the things I wanted to really do.

I wish they taught basic book keeping and financial common sense stuff in school. I mean they taught us week after week in home economics how to bake and cook, surely some financial lessons there would’ve been a good idea.

The need for health insurance absolutely deterred me from taking more risks, leading me to take the safer job with benefits.

Why are you selling yourself short like that (last sentence)?

He may have debts, or live in an expensive area, or maybe he just loves money and will do anything to put some extra dollars into investments on top of his primary income.

The big money is made by top tier FANG ( and really just FA) programmers. Not generic fortune X companies.

Debatable, there's certainly lots of money to be made in finance software positions that are both incredibly lucrative and demanding.

This feels all so familiar to me. My biggest pain point is the loosing ability to think about things as the speed at which things shall be delivered seems to increase with every month / iteration.

However I recently started to repair random things, mostly those which have a reputation for being the building blocks of our welfare, like water pumps, generators, old stationary engines. This provided me with the need to deeply engage in research hos stuff works and improvisation as many spare parts cant be bought new any more. Working with my hands also gives me a good feeling of having actually done something.

> I never got particularly good at anything except programming and native plant identification

What a coincidence, those used to be my points of interest too!

> However I recently started to repair random things, mostly those which have a reputation for being the building blocks of our welfare,

This is something I'd love to be good at. Any tips on where to start?

In some things I see where you're coming from, but while I work two programming jobs and have 4 kids and very little time, I think I'm generally more knowledgeable than in the past. I don't have as much _potential_ simply because I spent the last 15 years writing code instead of trying to make it as an artist or an athlete or an academic, but I have continued to grow in those areas, albeit slower than I might have if I had made different choices.

How does the two job situation work for you? Can you describe your day to day routine, for example?

Haha, it is a grind basically. Often times I have to choose between getting enough exercise or getting enough sleep.

Basically I do 6am-10am twice a week for the part time job and then try to fit in a couple more hours either during an evening session or over the weekend.

The day job I probably don’t technically put in 40 hours every week, but I just make the best use of the time that I can. It’s not like you can write code for 40 hours a week anyway so I try to be prepared for what I’m going to crush “today” up front so I don’t waste much time.

Until I started doing this I would basically get bored every 18-24 months and switch jobs. Doing 2 at once seems to be enough variety to keep me interested and challenged basically all the time. But I do have to guard heavily against burn out.

Younger people suffer from the Dunning Kruger effect. I had strong opinions about a wide range of things in my 20s. As I aged, I became very good at a few things and in doing so, I became less sure of my convictions on most matters. In some cases, I completely reversed my beliefs.

That's not brain damage; it's the realization that there is a near-infinite amount to know about any given subject, and that the world can be a much more deceptive and deeper place than we're taught about in school. As you become really good at a few things, you realize the same depth exists in all subject matter, and that if you are coming to strong conclusions based on cursory knowledge, you are probably also an idiot.

You might call it wisdom...

> Younger people suffer from the Dunning Kruger effect. I had strong opinions about a wide range of things in my 20s. As I aged, I became very good at a few things and in doing so, I became less sure of my convictions on most matters.

You aren't describing the Dunning-Kruger effect. Essentially, D-K can be summarized as "people's opinion of their own relative confidence tends to be drawn toward the 70th percentile, with those whose actual competence is lower being overconfident and those whose competence is higher being underconfident."

You seem to be describing the popular misconception of D-K as if it were the actual D-K effect, that is, that the least competent were not merely the most overconfident but actually the most confident -- the idea that those who think they are very competent are actual the most incompetent. Whereas in the actual D-K effect, those who have the highest opinion of their own competence are actually even farther above average than their self-image suggests.

I can relate with you a lot here but I don't think we necessarily suck more.

I think as we become subject matter experts, our standards for what it takes to have opinions advance to the point that our dilettante interests in varied subjects no longer impresses. It especially does not impress the experts of the subjects in question who are the only people really capable of holding a discussion that could impress us back.

I sense a kind of urgency to achieve career success only to be able to say I'm finished with it all so that I can go back to the mentality I had earlier in my life when I was interested in so many more things.

I can completely relate to this.

I feel like the extent of my problem solving and social skills has slowly been hemmed in by my hyper-focused work. Year by year I've started struggling to adapt to new situations. If I run into a challenge outside of work that is even mildly complex I have a hard time figuring out where to start. That has definitely made me think differently about my career and I'm starting to come to terms with the idea that success in a really narrow niche has some unexpected consequences.

>Because I didn't have to work for a living, I could spend more time meddling in various subjects and activities.

Observation: If you stop working, you’ll still be living.

> I have little time for anything else besides programming for a Fortune 100 company and searching for other means of supplementary income.

I need to ask, what is the problem here? At my fortune 500 company, I make easily enough that I don't care about money.

In a few years, I'll have my home paid off, and in a few more, enough money to retire forever.

What do you want the supplemental income for?

> Working a lot, especially on one thing, makes us stupid, I think.

Quite the opposite: working a lot on one thing, usually, means deep focus and, as a result, getting deep specialized knowledge and skills. That is smart, not stupid.

But I understand why it is tempting to think that hard work is making us stupid: it is an excuse for not doing the hard work.

Did you read the rest of what I wrote? I'm not saying that deep focus on a narrow set of skills doesn't have benefits, and perhaps the word "stupid" was a poor choice of words. Of course focus on specialized knowledge is a "smart" thing. Expertise doesn't make anyone literally stupid, but the necessity of focus in my field and my experience has made me less effective and less knowledgeable about the world around me. I'm not coming up with excuses for not doing the hard work; I already did the hard work.

When you are young you are too inexperienced to realize how ignorant you are, and so you have high confidence. They used to call this being a fool.

> ... I think that people, brilliant or not, can "lose their touch" both because people simply change ...

Alazia is the word that describe that feeling.

"beginners mind"? I do think some people have to work hard to keep preconceptions at bay. And some people don't bother.

well you certainly are a standard dev or more above average ... albeit maybe not where you think your potential should be. the giveaway: great understanding of self. very few bother to reflect at all much less see past their ego. (eg most people think they are good drivers)

25 is around the age where intellect starts to decline (along with everything else) so it isn't really that much of a mystery.

> 25 is around the age where intellect starts to decline

An argument can be made that F1 racing is the most demanding endevor a human can participate in--both mentally and physically. Most F1 champions dont even hit their peak until their early to mid 30's. I understand it's about the same for fighter pilots.

I think I'd enjoy hearing your argument that F1 racing is the most demanding mental endeavor a human can participate in.

Care to share?

> I think I'd enjoy hearing your argument that F1 racing is the most demanding mental endeavor a human can participate in.

The argument is not mine, not at all, but rather that of many medical professionals including sports psychologists. The level of concentration required to pilot an F1 car or really any topline completion car at the limit of adhesion is Total--there is zero room for a concentration lapse. If your mind wanders even on the straights--you're probably taking an ambulance ride.

Race cars are not like street cars At all; they want to spin out--pretty much all the time. If you picture the brakes locking up as you're about to brake late; They Will every time. Part of the trick is to acknowledge what is likely to go wrong BUT Do NOT imagine it happening, that shit takes iron concentration.

Possibly the incorporation of and reaction to vast amounts of sensory input with a very short time window, where very small mistakes could lead to very large failures. Path planning, resource management, mental modeling of opponents, situational awareness, equipment awareness, physical modeling and prediction, would all be at maximum capacity most of the time.

I wonder how can one compare mental workload a chess grandmaster experiences to the one of F1 driver.

This is too simplistic. Certain types of intellect seem to peak around there, like mathematical ability, but other types of intellect such as emotional intelligence or verbal skills (think nobel prize winning author) peak much much later in life - certainly into our 50's.

I am not sure it is true that mathematical intelligence peaks early, people like to say it though and I'd be interested if there is evidence on it.

Here are a lot of examples of good contributions by older mathematicians.

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1059235/great-contr...

I think one factor is that young people tend to be hungry to achieve something and also aren't burdened with family or admin which means they can work harder.

Interesting... sounds to me like the difference between fluid and crystallized intelligence.

There is no good data on age related intellectual decline. Most cross-sectional studies that show a decline ignore the Flynn effect as well as things like higher levels of lead poisoning in previous generations.

You're joking, right? Cause now I have one more thing to feel insecure about.

I wouldn't worry about it. Every study I've seen on the matter has clearly stated that it's a relatively small effect and is dwarfed by improved knowledge and experience. Overall intellectual performance is still rising at that point.

https://media.springernature.com/full/nature-static/assets/v...

Those are IQ tests (mental quickness on tiny tasks), that don't cover knowledge and wisdom.

Is wisdom relevant to programming? 20 years of COBOL experience doesn't help much when writing Kotlin.

Experience of design patterns would seem to be most relevant to senior technical roles and program architecture... which is where you see older programmers.