Advice from a 104-year-old PhD student [video]

Oh, thank you. But most of the credit must go to tree v1.8.0 and markdown. I was simply lazy enough not to want to code html...

Something like this is my dream goal. I'd love to become financially independent so that I can then pursue what I want (namely, endless study in a variety of subjects) without worrying about financial pressures from the outside. Sadly, I've got close to 30 years still to wait, then to hope my retirement pays enough that I can move to a nice college town with a good library and use it and maybe audit courses/do many masters.

You may discover that some of the most interesting stuff comes from the seemingly boring stuff...

Isn't that generalizing a bit too much? There's a plethora of younger programmers, some with good discipline and some with bad discipline. I know C++ programmers with no discipline and JS/Ruby programmers with amazing discipline.

I make no pretense of being a programmer, outside of the occasional bash, awk or sed script. I usually beg off by saying I'm a tool user, not a tool maker...

What lack of discipline are you talking about? What has JavaScript to do with discipline?

I'm 45 and I'm generally impressed by the discipline in (good) younger programmers.

For the most part they follow much better processes and get better outcomes and my generation at that age.

(I don't think the JS ecosystem is great, and have mixed opinions about JS as a language, but they don't detract from the discipline of young programmers)

If you’re a working programmer using a mainstream language, then I feel that spending some time with an ML-derived language such as Haskell and a Lisp will pay dividends in your day to day practice.

There are some keen insights about computing that are revealed by these languages - and those insights are transferable to your daily work in JS, C#, Python, Java, etc to some degree.

It sounds like your problem is a certain outcome dependency. A better mindset is to learn things out of curiosity. You could level your criticism at learning anything that doesn’t help you in the cubicle tomorrow.

I started playing with Linux and C in 96. I was just an ignorant teenager. I didn’t know C was “hard”. I didn’t really care that Linux was different from Win95, I just knew Linux had fvwm2, gedit, and C compilers I needed for hacking on MUDs. I didn’t know chasing down obscure memory leaks was hard, I just linked libefence and did it. I was just playing and learning. Then I got offered a job doing web development with ColdFusion while still in high school. I was amazed at how easy the language was compared to C. Every “wow they must have a lot of time” project is often some other hacker playing and learning. Play and finding a way to make programming and computers not seem like work is how you develop a life long love of hacking and learning :) (this is not follow your passion advice, I think that is terrible advice, but if you can make your work feel like play and your play very intentional you will struggle to burn out or find it hard to sit down and write code any given day) :)

Edit: also, in 96 the Internet was very different. Many problems were solved by reading man pages, reviewing library source code, and thinking hard about what was happening. Modern Internet and stackoverflow /can/ make you more efficient in the short term but in the long term, it’s worth not rushing to google every error or weird problem. Give it a few minutes. If you’re writing a web app for example, in say Django or Rails go peek at the source code (they are beautiful projects). It’s almost a crime to not review the Go standard library source code, it is one of the cleanest out there. Etc, etc.

Hey! I'm 58 and just starting a new contracting position writing software for Software Defined Radios, which I never did before. Started working with Matlib. Need to learn/relearn some math, too. 55 is certainly not too old to learn C++.

Sounds good. Will check that out. Thanks.

This should just be normal. The idea that you study until a certain age then that's it is outdated. We are not mechanical cogs coming out of an educational factory.

Societal norms are not always right. Do what makes sense.

not yet

Aw, come on.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you're 104 and takes long walks everyday that's the more extreme element rather than cold showers. But sure a great morning routine with the adrenaline boost from cold water might give you the edge to actually take that morning walk.

there is no secret to longevity, at least not one "the secret" key to everything.

the real secret to longevity is recreating the conditions are bodies function best at and upholding those conditions. because our environment is so radically different from the past, this requires a lot of discipline, pondering, and paying attention most of all.

our bodies evolved for a certain environment, and recreating that environment would do us good. (i believe that careful people lived long lives pre-industry.)

some of these conditions are regular exercise, occasional starvation, following environmental queues, supporting a healthy biome, and avoiding stress.

our approaches to health today are comical in their attempt to simplify and reduce a billion-year-old continuously-evolving system down to one or two simple concepts while ignoring all the harm we do to it at the same time.

to use a car analogy, it's sort of like throwing away your automobile's maintenance manual and saying, "i heard the key to car longevity is changing the oil often", and filling up the engine with olive oil.

I've seen some clips of his interview on the Joe Rogan podcast. I didn't catch the cold bath part.

I imagine a cold bath means immersing most of your body in water. So another variant.

Theory sounds plausible. Curious if you happen to know any actual research that backs it up?

Huh, never associated that with Slavic culture. Cool word, "zakalka". In Polish there is "hartowanie" (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hartowa%C4%87), same meaning and also used in the context of exposing yourself to cold or difficulty. Related and a bit funny: people who swim in the winter are called "morsy" (walruses).

Stimulation, increased energy, elevated mood and self-confidence, a nice toasty feeling afterwards, quicker cooling after exercise, optimum alertness achieved faster in the day if done early.

Definitely lots of psychological benefits.

I do combine it with meditation and exercise. All three seem to have mutually-reinforcing effects.

It's certainly easier in tropical countries because you can just use the cold knob, but it's doable in colder places as well. Even using both hot and cold sources to get a comparable temperature, it isn't as easy to get into the shower when the weather is colder. I've noticed that the coldness of the water only bothers me for the first 20 seconds of the shower, so I'll use a bit more heat then turn it colder.

Colombia has a huge range of climates. His city, Medellin, is a bit chillier than what you would expect.

> minus temperatures

Nitpick: it is difficult to take a shower with water in solid form (ice).

I'm in a cold area and experienced this recently. My hair started to harden and freeze. I started just putting the heat knob just the tiniest bit.

But I guess it depends on your knobs shower knobs.

I'm in south-eastern Canada. Just now I checked the temperature of the water from my city water company I measured it at 8C. The current outside temperature is -1C. The water couldn't be lower than freezing or pipes in homes would freeze.

I agree cold, hot, warm are all relative. Somewhat related I've seen people from hot countries worry about "cold weather". To them ~20C is cold compared to 35C hot day and was blamed to be the cause of colds and flu. Often perpetuated in movies and TV too a tired old trope. So yes to someone in a hot country a "cold" shower may be considered warm to someone from a cold climate.

By his accent he is from Bogota, it may not be Canada, but the temperature can reach 6C, I wouldnt call that "warm"

Ah, I never thought to force RCT in the search to find evidence. Thanks for that.

Ah, this doesn't provide details on its effects on the skin.

Why is this being downvoted?

As an example, there was a study that eating a handful of almonds every day is correlated with a bunch of positive health outcomes. Then a follow-up paper determined that this is simply because nuts are a relatively expensive snack, so they're eaten regularly mostly by wealthier people. It's well established that being poor is bad for your health, and conversely being rich tends to allow healthy lifestyles in general.

The kind of people that take cold showers are the "health-nut" types that prioritise healthy living over comfort. They're a rare, self-selecting subset of the general population.

It's extremely difficult to do good science based on statistics of self-selecting groups, or groups highly correlated with wealth.

Correlation can arise without necessarily having a cause and effect relationship. In this case it is quite plausible to have a correlation between longevity and cold showers, but that could be because people prone to cold showers are also more likely to face discomfort and lead more active lives, which in turn has direct correlation with a reduced risk of heart disease and diabetes. Then the point changed entirely, where once the focus was on the showers, now it is on something far deeper, like the hability to be comfortable with discomfort.

Here are some studies I collected years ago:

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5025014/

- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24921042/

- https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/mnt/releases/239174#1

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2370378/pdf/can...

If you're unable to muster excitement for things you love purely because of your age, I'm genuinely sorry for you.

Before asking those questions I think we still need more context, because you can't assume mutual understanding of what the symbols in the answers might mean from the elders and the listeners perspectives.

My central hypothesis here is that globalization and the high longevity we can achieve nowadays takes a toll on the quality of the understating of what's being told by the elders. Where once not too long ago we mainly heard from elders directly available, in the village, city or country, now we have access to more people but we don't share similar cultural backgrounds as before. And to overcome this, a little immersion in the cultural context of that elder is necessary even before posing these questions.

Its not awful at all. Its the only way to do it.

This is Wim Hof’s advice.

You do lose some of the benefit tho - you need mild stress for it to be functional.

Also, hot water, especially with chlorine in it (as usual, unless you have a filter) will make it evaporate and thus you will inhale it (not good). Very damaging for the skin too as you wash up natural oils that protect it.

So its not the same.

That’s known as the Scottish Shower, perhaps because Scotland is all too often wet and cold, or perhaps as a reminder not to relax in indulgent things as there’ll soon be something along to spoil the fun!

On a more serious note, I take cold or Scottish showers all year except for the coldest part (because Japanese houses have the worst insulation you’ll come across so you’ll go from cold to cold) and it does make me feel better. Even just enduring the pain of the cold seems to bring benefits.

Guinness World Record holder Stig Severinsen just did an AMA on reddit - single breathe 22 minute swim (physical exertion).

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kppxkn/i_just_set_the...

Wow, nice find:

> Bradycardia is the response to facial contact with cold water: the human heart rate slows down ten to twenty-five percent.

I just had comments above on washing face with cold water.

I love that. Lesson: Keep talking your book right to the end!

My dad's doctor told him to stop eating so much butter. Dad said, "My uncle ate a stick of butter every day, and he lived to be 96!"

The doc replied, "See? It finally got him!"

Sure. I think there are lots of things that can incrementally increase your longevity. Don't smoke, don't drink too much, don't abuse drugs, eat food (not too much, mostly plants), watch your weight, exercise your body, exercise your mind, have sanguine outlook on life, love and be loved, etc. None are silver bullets, but taken together they probably significantly increase your chances to get to 90. But after 90, everyone is increasingly living on borrowed time.

In any case, when the reporter asks the secret of your longevity, they're not really asking "what did you do 50 years ago that contributed to your still being here today?"

> Cold showers sure have potential to reduce wrinkle formation tho

Do you have scientific papers to prove this?

Cold showers make you feel better in general and they say it helps increase your immunity.

I've been experimenting with cold showers since the pandemic began, first it was through the summer, and I summoned up courage to continue it through the winter. There were some days when I thought I couldn't take the cold, so I used warm water instead. But I remember the stark difference I felt on those days compared to the rest when I showered in cold water.

If you can bear the cold, I would recommend it. Even if you can't, take it up as a challenge (that's what I did), to get your body to adapt to it. Totally worth it.

Wow, I had not considered this at all, but it makes so much sense!

It reminds me of the Greek island of “blind” people: https://nationalpost.com/news/world/greece-zakyntos-island-o...

Yet we have unusually high faith in super old people, because it’s a sort of nostalgic dream we hope is true/replicable.

This story got me feeling all sorts of feelings.