Old Age and Creativity
inference-review.com
inference-review.com
Namely, what, exactly, is being measured?
Everybody changes, as we age. I'm almost 60, and, as I look back on my yute (I live in New York, so I have to use the correct lingo), I am amazed at what an addlepated, compulsive, reactive, emotion-driven, knucklehead I was. When I think about what I considered "earth-shatteringly important ideals" back then, I wince. What a waste of energy.
It would be easy to say that I was "more creative" back then, because I had diarrhea of the mouth. You couldn't shut me up, and I was always spouting pseudo-intellectual claptrap. I guess, for some people, they would have considered me to be "a creative intellectual." I also spit out a lot of rather naive little projects and artworks; crowing at each one, as if it were The Mona Lisa.
I probably would have thought I was just a jerk.
These days, I get stuff done. That does mean a lot of compromises, and acceptance of limitations. I don't tilt at windmills, anymore. I hook generators to them.
Oh man, this is so important! I only recently learned the value of *being still enough*. And, I'm going through a phase of my life now (a couple of years shy of my mid-century mark) where I'm learning *how* to get to a good state of stillness in order to be more creatrive - and be more productive with that creativity.
Favourited & thank you.
Also, some of the best lessons I learned, were from ass-kickings.
"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."
--Attributed to Nasrudin, but I read it from Will Rogers
Everything has worked out, the way it needed to, in order to bring me to where I am now.
I have no regrets, but I do get a chuckle or two, from reflection.
When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go."
Some of these older fellows trained a lot of students, such as bethe or wheeler. How old were the bell labs people when they did plan 9? Is Knuth still considered active? Maybe also, art is subjective while physics or engineering “just is”
Today?? 100% of successful scientists.
When we look at the Soviet system, we don't think of it as having had much in the way of scientific or artistic accomplishments. There were some, and the practical engineering and economic achievements were nothing to sneeze at, but by and large the Soviet era is seen as somewhat of a dark age in terms of humanistic advancement, as indeed it was intended to be a transitional stage before communism, which the Soviets admitted had not been achieved.
Our period is worse. We have the same stultifying bureaucracies, governmental and corporate, but with more advanced surveillance technologies. And while a 1980s Soviet bureaucrat might have been indifferent to excellence, 2020s corporate executives and venture capitalists and war barons are actively hostile to it, because it threatens their positions.
In our era, we seem to have everything, but we are producing next to nothing, and we have gone from being one of the best-run to one of the worst-run societies in record time.
Yeah you may have some people who are still mentally stuck in the feudal age, and yes it would be nicer if they got with the times are started trying to actually be useful instead of playing idiotic status games like chimps in suits, but I think by and large humanity does manage to produce nice things in spite of them.
For example - this website. ^_^
Not sure about other people on the Plan 9 team. But presumably they were all highly skilled and experienced engineers.
The key question is who were their disciples? How much of their knowledge has been passed down to the next generation?
Given Unix and C and the rest, they made their dent(s) in the universe and we’re all better for it.
I wonder if it ever troubled him he had vastly more influence with the "first draft" than the more refined system.
This seems pretty arbitrary and anecdotal, and there are famous counterexamples.
In French, Saint-Simon (the memorialist, not the economist) wrote his masterpiece of over 3 million words between age 65 and 75, in the middle of the 18th century (he died at 80).
Victor Hugo, born in 1802, published four enormous novels after the age of 60 (Les Misérables, 1862; Les Travailleurs de la Mer, 1866; L'Homme qui rit, 1869; Quatrevingt-treize, 1874), and his most famous poetry books after age 54 (Les Contemplations, 1856; La Légende des siècles, 1859).
Chateaubriand finished writing his masterpiece, his memoirs, aged 73.
I could go on.
It's summing up a rather lengthy lecture in one sentence, and it fully admits to exceptions. The lecture's theme seems to be that an artist usually loves to work in their medium, while a writer rarely finds the same joy in the pen/typewriter.
I think it's true that many writers hate writing, and that's not the same with performers. I said as much here, about a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27114757
Curious to see if the lecture offers some kind of explanation.
Goethe: West–Eastern Diwan (age 70), Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years (age 72) Marienbad Elegy (age 73).
Thomas Mann: Doctor Faustus (age 72)
I have randomly picked a few people from the list of Nobel Prize Laureates in Literature[1] who have made it to old age, and most of them seem to have been quite productive even then.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Lit...
>Chateaubriand alone of these writers was able to continue to produce work in later years comparable to his first masterpieces. His case is exemplary: what he did was to continue to publish and develop his earliest work. He returned from America aged twenty-four carrying an enormous manuscript (he claimed improbably that it later saved his life during the wars against the young revolutionary government of France by stopping a bullet). He extracted one book after another from this, starting with the Essay on Revolutions, The Genius of Christianity, and The Voyage to America.
>The late autobiographical work, however, retains much of his youthful power: considerable portions had been written much earlier, and the title. Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb, is revealing—Chateaubriand wrote as if already dead and he had less need to compromise.
I'm not sure where the OP got the idea of "writers less likely to carry on" but it's not in the text of the conference.
There was a study done, years and years ago, that I remember reading about that suggested men are most productive, creatively — at the cutting edge in demanding fields — before they start families. The suggestion was that the demands of marriage and family life interfere with creativity. Put another way, the lone genius stops being one when he's no longer lone.
About painters and other visual artists, it's true that many were still working and producing in their final years. OTOH it was often the case that in old age they worked in relative obscurity as younger artists with "modern" styles had become the ones sought after and celebrated.
I've come to understand that the merit of most contemporary visual artwork won't be decided until 50 or 100 years down the road. In his time Rembrandt was known mainly for his magnificent etchings, printmaking was his main business. Now we celebrate his paintings as much or more, but we have the luxury of centuries to have honed our esthetic metrics.
My hunch is that creativity among physicists is the product of a special kind of insight, a moment when a number of seemingly disparate (and possibly mundane) phenomena suddenly align within a brilliant mind. Maybe this is a pretty common experience, but in most instances the insight isn't about anything really important to the rest of the world. Mostly it's something that happens early in life, young adult years most likely. Careers are about working out the details and reducing it to words (and equations) others can understand, a very hard task to accomplish.
While much has been written about creativity we really know very little about what magical things make it happen in those rare and enchanted brains.
It likely begins to decline even prior to that, as our ability to measure it is very rough and imprecise, which seems to align well with ages when physics/math geniuses peak, ~30s.
I recently went back to university, and they tend to have exams that favor the young: lots of memorization and much more questions than there is time to answer. So I probably would have done academically better with my younger brain, however, I feel like I understand the material and the context much better than I would have before.
There's a tendency for exceptions to drive the narrative, which leads to a sense of mathematicians peaking earlier than they actually do. Mathematicans do indeed peak "young", relative to other fields, but most often in their early to mid 40s. Of course, at that point they're ineligible for the Fields Medal, but that doesn't mean they're no longer productive.
Writers peak around 55, but the drop-off can be steep, not because they lose the ability to write, but because revision and publishing can themselves be brutal processes. Revision is brutal because of perfectionism combined with the inability to hold a whole book's worth of context in your head. You can't look at the whole thing in one sitting, as with a painting. You have to edit at specific levels (themes and story arcs; then subplots and characters; then scene structure and transitions; then paragraphing and flow; then line edits; then copy edits; then grammar) but they sometimes compete for your attention. Writing work that's good enough to publish and sell is easy; writing work of literary quality is much harder. Publishing... well that changes every generation. These days, self-publishing is the right play for 99% of authors, but that brings its own challenges.
With age, the thing that gets hard the quickest is long-form context switching. Very few people can (or want to, or should) dedicate their lives wholesale to one pursuit. Once you start to get recognition and are invited to the parties, it gets harder to focus on writing. You spend a lot of time around non-serious players, and you become one. Lots of people turn stupid once they get popular and spend too much time with the fun people to have real thoughts anymore, and that's certainly not limited to the old. The difference is that the young can retool themselves more quickly. A 27-year-old can bounce back; he can be on cocaine-fueled benders in January, courting the nonserious players necessary to get the "tastemakers" to support one's career, and be back in his writing room by March or April. When you're older, this gets a lot harder. Older people are great when they establish momentum (leading me to question the "old people are less creative" hypothesis) but do not bounce back as well from periods of distraction or excessive comfort.
I'm only going to give a small part of my thoughts, there's more, but let's keep a narrow focus for the forum format.
I'm less and less willing to submerge myself deep into fields far removed from daily life. I can still do it, and actually easier than ever before. I just don't want to. I feel it's not because I'm dumber, quite he opposite. It's because I understand and see sooooo much more than twenty years ago. I just don't see the point as much. I had a much more narrow view in my youth, and that allowed me to concentrate on narrow and deep subjects for long periods of time. I don't want to go into the reasons because that would really explode the text volume and mix subjective and objective things that would in turn require quite some effort in untangling. I also care quite a bit less about "progress" because I lost a lot of idealism. In that sense, understanding more of the world might be counterproductive for productivity...
I think I can claim I'm a lot more capable with my brain than two decades ago. I tested it by taking numerous edX and Coursera courses, quite a few of the very challenging, and I was invited to become a C[ommunity]TA several times in courses way outside my own field, including math stuff that I had difficulties with in the past. My job is not standard stuff either.
I don't think chess players peak at 35 because they're losing their touch. I think they develop other interests; the ones who aren't going to be professionals realize it and downshift, and the truly elite ones achieve what they set out to do and move on to things they see as more interesting.
This is probably why the corporate thugs are so ageist. They know it's easy to pit people in their 20s against each other. Once people are older and have more perspective, it's hard to make them compete over scraps.
However, with older age comes ability to select where to focus better and put things in perspective. The skills gained with aging don't really help with chess, which reduces most of the time to raw calculation and focus.
When you're 20-30 something and a nobody in your field, but a privileged mind, you keep your eyes open to all posibilities. You are hardworking and then results come.
Then you gain a name and have all eyes on you and your mental processes change. Suddenly with your opinions, you've got a reputation to defend. You're aware of those supporting you and those who are not. You're reasoning gets blurred by your ego and personality. Once you publicly speak an opinion on a topic for enough time, you cannot simply go back without looking like a moron.
There are several instances of the most brilliant minds following this pattern. Geniuses giving their backs to the scientific method, to all evidence, and looking like amateurs.
Comes to mind Einstein, spending his last years trying to debunk quantum physics against all evidence, Linus Pauling and his C-Vitamin craze or Nikola Tesla and his every time crazier projects with no practical viability. I guess there might be more.
I’m not sure this had to do with ego. He just seems to have enjoyed building crazy stuff.
I suspect the ego/arrogance thing works both ways. When you're younger you're often more willing to show the finger to existing paradigms and are perhaps arrogant enough to think you can "revolutionize physics." Naturally, most people can't do that but some make history.
(Also, I'm talking out of my ass and should probably add some history of science to my reading stack).
This type of thinking does not help. There is no magic, there is no enchantment, there is only vision - the ability to see, to imagine, what others fail to imagine. Then it is an issue of communication, to tune others so they can imagine the new entity too. I believe this is a communications issue, and those individuals with intellectual gifts have an inner voice that communicates in non-complex basic ideas the gifted see transparently inside complexity.
Case in point: when first learning about normalized numbers, a friend smarter than I in the same class remarked "Oh! they are talking about my 'minis'!" - my friend had figured out, realized the value of normalized numbers when learning basic multiplication in elementary, assumed the concept was obvious and incorporated it everywhere he used multiplication - to the ire of his elementary and high school math teachers. I lost track of him, but I last was aware of him being a cross disciplinary professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
https://www.ted.com/talks/albert_laszlo_barabasi_the_real_re...
"... it created the impression to us that creativity equals youth, which is painful, right?"
"... is it really true that creativity vanishes as we age?"
Relevant to HN, there's also a segment on startup success.
The distinction drawn between Productivity/Performance and Success is insightful and clarifies how the latter does not follow as a matter of course from the former.
What I mean is that, as I have aged (and I am by no means old), the most obvious relationship between "creativity" and "age" has been the ever-raising bar that must be reached in order for me to think of something as creative.
Growing up I always thought it was so odd how indifferent my parents (and older people in general) felt towards all the newest music/movies etc., but now I realize that none of it was really new at all! It's the same stories/tropes/punchlines being regurgitated over and over. I was just young and hadn't yet had the breadth of experience to know what creativity actually looked like.
Maybe it's not that getting older makes us less creative in an absolute sense, rather, that as we get older we find it harder and harder to be creative in a relative sense? And so efforts that we may have found "worth it" at 25 no longer appeal at 65, and are therefore not even attempted (despite containing some creativity).
I am now referring to myself as a ‘gentleman scientist’ and I am most interested in Hybrid AI so that will be my non-paid vocation. I am in the process of switching my personal tech stack from Common Lisp to Haskell with hasktorch, etc. - a process that I expect will take 2 or 3 months.
BTW, getting old is not so bad, I recommend it.
Also thanks for the mention of hasktorch, did not know of this interesting project.
Correlation does not imply causation
sounds like a creative way of saying that old age depletes creativity.
Those are very different causes with very different implications.
Correlation is not causation. Renowned scientists and writers have plenty of reasons to do less groundbreaking work that have nothing to do with age
What about Paul Erdős?
The author also seems to forget recently departed physics genius Steven Hawking, still working until his death at 76 afaik.
Raymond Smullyan got his BSc in his late 30s and went on to write highly acclaimed textbooks and teach at universities, although I'm not exactly sure about his research accomplishments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Smullyan
EDIT: see also this list https://mathoverflow.net/questions/3591/mathematicians-who-w...
Reading this piece I was struck by the thought - "hey shouldn't this be about creativity, and now he's off to talking about physics and math in stead?"
It's true that while working in "problem solving" fields you may sometimes feel that you are doing something creative. I mean, you actually come up with this solution to that issue which did apparently not exist previously. So, you did "create" something.
However, a painter (and/or a writer, or dancer, musician, any other "pure creative") does not have that luxury of a pre existing problem that is in need of a solution. S/he has to invent both the problem and the solution - and more often than not (IMHO) such problems are extremely abstract, to the point that one that observes the solution (eg a painting) will hardly be able to even guess which general type of problem that solution may offer a perspective on.
So, that was one thing. Another is that being a painter is not a career. Physics, math, sciences in general has a lot of different career paths to choose from, so if you have that general inclination you will no doubt be able to support yourself (get food) while doing stuff related to your interests. In painting, not so. The best you can hope for is that someone will note your work long after you're dead and gone. It does not pay the bills (except for rare exceptions which are just that).
I think that would be my two cents
So what I'm saying is there's not as much difference as Deser suggests between old artists and old writers.
As for physics practitioners, the redundancy in articles I read on subjects like quantum physics suggests a certain amount of stagnation in the research, but it seems to me like we're always finding new ways to learn a little more about gravitational phenomena.
- [Ageing: Mental speed stays high until age 60 | New Scientist](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2308810-your-brain-does...)
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/191929/are-there-any-seri...
of _having_ a market. Not all art is put forth, sought after, or marketable.
And it's the same for science. With how academia/publishing/industries works now, there is a market for science too. But not all of it either.
However, as to "quantifiable merits and results" that is very applicable to the art scene in general. An artist is above and beyond all else identified by his/her accumulated body of work.
- my belief in what I'm doing is creative has
- my interests in chasing the above somehow evaporated