Mental speed is high until age sixty
nature.com
nature.com
It's the case for some physical activities as well: almost all people's actual performance degrades way, way faster, than their potential peak performance.
It's pretty telling that these days people remain competitive up to their mid 30s even in pure athletics. For anyone under 60 who's not an elite athlete, age-related decline is probably noise compared to the difference that an hour or two of extra training per week would make. (That's not to deny that injuries etc. become more of a problem as you get older.)
Outside those two categories, caffeine is one of the most used mental stimulants in the world, and sold in forms emphasising this use.
Walk in to your doctors office and ask getting modafinil prescribed for improved work performance. What's the argument against it ? The ones I've heard are about them being there to treat conditions, etc. and giving stuff like this to boost performance of healthy individuals is very much a taboo.
I’m not even remotely qualified to so much as read and understand medical jargon, but even I can recognise that several items on this ([0]) long list of stuff that interferes with (or is interfered by) mondafil includes both food and stuff you can get without prescription from the new-age-hippie section of a supermarket. Given the dumb things my hippie mum gave me as a teenager (and my dad without telling him [1]), all I can say is that this seems to me to be unwise to make trivially available.
Perhaps I’m wrong. After all, the fact a random person like me can’t read and interpret the warnings like a professional would is as much a limit on how seriously to take my concern as it is a reason to be concerned.
[0] https://www.drugs.com/drug-interactions/modafinil-index.html
[1] at the very least Bach flower “remedies”, which would probably be harmless except for all the alcohol. She thought she was doing all of us a favour.
Well both have effects only as long as you keep taking them. If i recall correctly there's a whole lot of mind altering substances that are illegal because of that...
For me - there is no effect other than not feeling tired and being able to focus really well. It's not even feeling rested because physical aspects of fatigue still kick in (eg. back pain from sitting long, eye strain, etc.)
Caffeine is probably worse because I get hard withdrawals symptoms after I get off (light migraines first couple of days and generally tired) - I don't really notice anything different after taking modafinil and getting proper rest.
But how would you do if you took one every day?
The average age in the NBA and NFL is 26 years old. Sure there are outliers, but again, much of the success of these outliers isn't due to pure athleticism, but to understanding the game.
For every Brady, or Manning, there's a running back who lost a step and is no longer effective.
I have no idea what the NFL is by the way :) So I doubt that my comment was influenced by it.
At the running group, someone aged 55 ran a marathon at 2:55 or sth like that (it's really fast. I don't remember exactly but I was surprised)
So basically having a job in modern society?
I feel there is a huge underclass in society who do dead end jobs and feel terrible inside. But that's not the nature of work itself.
My experience is that there is plenty of high paying, high status, highly stimulating work. But there's competition for those jobs, then employers deliberately discriminate against those who don't have experience in those lines of work.
And over time the job market bifurcates.
But this is not math problem to solve - this is people problem. We collectively do not care enough to solve it. Most of us are lazy and there is too many greedy people between those who can provide and those in need.
When I look around my family and friends I do not see anyone who knows how to limit their greed - I believe that almost all of them, if given a chance, would use money and power to bring their status up, increase their consumption, and only then would share like 10% of it with the ones in real need. And when I look around those who know how to restrict themselves (some church community participants) I only see people that know how to talk and are mostly impotent - they do not know how to build systems that could bring wealth to those who need it.
Um...
If you are lucky you can pick one. If you are very lucky you can pick two.
I make median wages for "lead full stack developer" role at a company with no central office (I live in the middle of nowhere.) I also have a fairly good amount of autonomy and authority, and do work that borders on "fun" more often than not.
Maybe you could say that I have no "status" compared to some pedigreed, Fortune 500 C-suite type but that doesn't really interest me so much. I come from a working class Appalachian family so I have a pretty low bar of "status" which really just means "professional respect" to me.
> I make median wages
So it's not "high paying".
> do work that borders on "fun" more often than not
That sound a quite far from "highly stimulating work".
> I have a pretty low bar of "status"
...you made my point.
Median full-stack developer making median city wages in the country? Okay.
>> That sound a quite far from "highly stimulating work".
No it doesn't.
>> I have a pretty low bar of "status"
Yeah well, what's yours?
I assume (without proof) that the brain loses elasticity when you stop using it for decades.
I am however lazy for example to learn some things that are valued by many people but what I consider useless. But I was like that as long as I can remember myself.
It's not as if they're saving time, when they need to knock on my apartment door, and ask what's happened with their computer (the browser window was 1cm to the right of the edge of the screen so some buttons seemed to be"gone").
it's instead that ... When using the apps, they don't automatically effortlessly learn how these apps work. Whist kids do
(I have in mind my 60-70-80 years old parents and neighbors)
I assume there may still be others who never ask my wife (or anyone) for help, who learn on their own, but it's interesting to see the differences for those who do seek out help. I hope I'm in one of the latter group(s) when I get into my 60s+.
I assume (without proof) that this is because of their limited experience. They don't realize yet that there are many different solutions to any problem. They believe the first solution that comes to you is the one to stubbornly adhere to, because they are young and over-confident in their new abilities.
An array wasn't always just "some ordered collection with fixed sequential memory". It was a very specific C# implementation written out as var fooArr = new barType[]. It was confusing that in Python its fooArr = []. "Why is it different? What does it all mean? The syntax is hard to remember. What if this adds errors? I just want my code to work."
I am 100% willing to believe that continuing to learn new things is good for brain health. But it seems to me that these examples are more like outsourcing the handling of annoyances, rather than avoiding the kind of new learning that would otherwise keep their brain healthy.
(Although, note that physically pushing too hard is just as dangerous as not enough, the shorter lifespan in the past was partly due to an over-rigorous use of the body. I wonder if there's a mental equivalent, although I haven't seen any real evidence of it.)
Lack of energy is one of the signs of aging. Staying up to 3 AM to party and going to work the next day is one end, but the other is trying to convince yourself to do more than sit in a chair all day. It’s not that people get lazy it’s that everyone slows down and learning new things or doing anything difficult just takes more out of you every single year.
Age related decline is biological and not everyone has identical DNA. The need for reading glasses varies quite a bit and is probably a good yardstick. Some people get their first reading glasses at 40 other’s 60, that’s a huge range.
As such just because some people are running marathons at 90 doesn’t mean most people could do that, it’s self selecting for people with minimal declines. The other half of this is injury/disease/height etc can make a huge difference.
It's a lot wider than that. I'm 66 and don't need glasses yet, neither for reading nor driving, but one of my children, aged thirty, does.
Seemed like they were pretty certain it was that, specifically, and not the list of other things people've blamed it on over the years.
No-one's responded to this by totally re-thinking how we do early childhood education (there's little sun in the Winter, schools have been cutting back recess time and getting much more timid about sending kids out in non-perfect weather, so I'd bet that's when most of the harm is being done) so maybe that turned out to be BS? Or maybe we just don't care about preventing a very high percentage of near-sightedness cases.
https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1007440/to-protect-kids-eyesi...
>> China’s top education authority has asked all schools to give students more sports-related assignments and less text-based work during summer and winter breaks this year to curb climbing myopia rates among minors.
>> The Ministry of Education announced the new rule as part of its Bright Action project, a five-year plan to better protect students’ eyesight by increasing outdoor activities and minimizing screen time, which have been blamed for deteriorating vision among children and adolescents.
Also, public schools have responded to No Child Left Behind legislation, in part, by drastically cutting recess time, including in very early grades—which, AFAIK given the state of the art in learning research, might actually be counter-productive, but a key sentiment driving all US behavior is that one must always be able to say that one has "done something", even if that something was worse than doing nothing, and that it's preferable to so something that an uneducated person would think looks like it should help based on gut feeling, over what experts say would help.
Fortunately I'm rather optimistic, as I think I have a relatively good energy level for people my age. In fact, I can still party until 3 AM and go to work the next day (although not for several consecutive days, like when I was 20...).
I managed to get to age 53 before needing bifocal glasses but I really should have had bifocals around age 47. Books were OK at age 46 but getting hard to read at 47. My phone screen was the final straw when I had to hold it with my arm nearly completely stretched.
Once you get them you realize it's not the "light is too dim", it's not "they make text too damn small these days!", or the font style, it's your eyes. With bifocal glasses (or just reading glasses) it's amazing to see small text again.
Vision decline in old age is frequently associated with farsightedness. Old people have more difficulty focusing on close objects, so they get reading glasses.
I've been nearsighted for most of my life. I've always worn glasses to drive a car, but glasses didn't impede my near vision until after I turned 40. Today I wear progressive bifocals when I drive so I can see the road, but also read the speedometer or the navigation app on my phone. Before I turned 40 regular glasses didn't prevent me from seeing the dashboard clearly.
I have been wearing glasses since I was young and it has very little to do with how I feel about reading glasses. Bifocals are awful if you saccade regularly instead of moving your head, add that to astigmatism correction and it’s like you’re viewing the world through the portals of a bathysphere.
I will likely always be able to just take my glasses off and read. But when I wear contacts, reading glasses are my preferred option.
Age-related vision change is a different beast.
Instead I got this book: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Eyesight-People-Gillian-Snoxal...
It's not even a book. More like a pamphlet and could fit the whole thing in a <li> almost. But it worked in my case at least. A few weeks of doing the exercises and I could read find print labels again!
Certainly I do not believe rolling your eyes or blinking or the other exercises in the book could in any way be dangerous. Some are sort of weird and I don't know how effective "palming" is for example.
But it makes sense to me you can exercise your eyes like other parts of the body (or brain for that matter). I don't see how it could be otherwise.
"Dangerous" sounds like it might be Big Optical (is there such a thing?) disinformation. I kid. Maybe.
It worked. Was not pattern recognition or anything like that, I could actually see clearer and with less effort. No idea who "debunks" this kind of stuff or if there have been trials or what those might be worth nor do I particularly care.
Just relating my experience in hopes someone else gets the same benefit.
Palming as described can be safe, but if you applying pressure to the eyes it increase the risk of glaucoma.
If so ya, that could be dangerous.
Balding isn’t universal, a friend of mine is 70 and looks 50 with a full head of hair that not full grey, it’s kind of freaky. He’s still working construction and carrying heavy loads etc. Meanwhile I started going grey at 20.
Agreed—my friend Chaz Ferrari is 70 and has no gray hairs. And swims miles every day.
It's also easier to overlook one's aging when one is not competing with youth. I'm 58, and I pair-program at my company, and the intellectual elasticity of the twenty-year-olds continues to astound me: they can read through code & digest it much more quickly than I can, my years of experience notwithstanding.
> Lack of energy is one of the signs of aging
True! I remember when I was 49 and had to resign from the rugby team. "This is my last season," I told the coach. "I'm tired all the time from practice and games, and I can't do it anymore. It's too much." I was forced to acknowledge that at 49 I could no longer do what I could at 48. But that doesn't mean that life is over: I play old boy's rugby, and it's a blast.
Intelligent and cognitive ability are not scalars, they are vector spaces. Some dimensions start dropping off in your 20s and some not until your 80s. I feel like my emotional intelligence could peak in my 50s or 60s.
On the other hand, my brain feels like it has marinated in 37 years of general experience, such that I can take on projects of significant complexity and not think too hard about it.
As a 34 year old this scares me the most. I don’t want real life to accumulate and accrue around me so I don’t have the energy for curiosity and intellectual pursuits. But the harder I fight, the more cruft there is to think about.
Cut things that aren't such a high priority out completely. Reconsider division of labor in your household. Outsource. Batch process. Block time out on your calendar to do things you want to do, on a repeated schedule so you don't have to find time again. Put them in the form of classes, if social pressure helps. Yeah it's a job but if it gets your life back, isn't it worth it?
I could be wrong but I feel like this would improve a lot if I didn’t have to work a job for a while. The bulk of each day’s mental energy goes into writing code, which doesn’t leave much for other things.
Then again, outside of sports, nothing in my youth was taxing (particularly not school). The only real mental investment I had to make was verbal sparing with friends, and video games.
It was easier to do math in my head but I had been doing it regularly for years (full stack web apps call for very little), and it was much easier to keep momentum on something like Tolstoy (could also be health related though).
What about you? Any specific things you think you could incontrovertibly do better in your youth that aren't likely confounded by other variables?
I wonder about this too. Goodness knows that sleeping for ~4 hours or pulling all-nighters, eating the cheapest things on the shelf, and not getting in much physical activity late in high school and through college weren't sound decisions and are likely to haunt me for the rest of my days.
> if being lower on the Dunning-Kruger curve had some distinct advantages earlier in life (i.e. I expect things to be harder now which adds an additional mental obstacle and fatigue)
This isn't that much of a problem for me. In fact when it turns out that things put up less resistance than expected it's kind of refreshing and helps pull me along. The trick is getting to that point in the first place.
> What about you? Any specific things you think you could incontrovertibly do better in your youth that aren't likely confounded by other variables?
Hard to answer, really. Maybe sitting down and getting lost in the process of doing something creative… it came extremely naturally to me in my teens and early 20s but there are so background processes associated with being a responsible somewhat functioning adult running in my head now that it's considerably more difficult. Probably fixed by removing the need for those background processes to run, but that's not exactly practical.
I'm confident I nailed the former (I thought I was better at things than I was in reality when I was younger, and am now more likely better than I think I am in those same domains today).
If you referring to the latter, it's tricky for me. It's like the famous two humped camel in programming aptitude. It seems to be useful in describing experiential observations but didn't (doesn't?) replicate. I've stopped using it at this point because I don't want to mislead people.
DK also has the appearance of explanatory power at a minimum, and utility in communicating the simple form of the concept. I don't like the replicability issue but wonder how bad the down side is if all I'm really saying is we aren't often humble enough about new things, and aren't confident enough about things we've dedicated time to?
Welp, that justification for promoting something potentially falsifiable surely isn't going to come back to bite me and expose my hypocrisy elsewhere...
And yes, not everything is just repeated, but it was an aspect I hadn't seen anyone else talk about.
I'm keenly aware of the skills that I spent hours and hours practicing that are now second nature to me on keyboards (such as scales, chords, names of notes) that I need to learn for guitar. Intellectually I understand how things work on guitars, but in order to get decent, I need to start putting in the time to practice playing scales, learning the fretboard, and even just teaching my fingers how to move in certain ways.
And it's not any harder to do this stuff than when I was a kid - in fact, in some ways it's easier. But it takes time and dedication. I have to keep reminding myself that I am actually making a ton of progress. But the tiredness / busyness can make it difficult to put in the time.
...but a piano or keyboard is not very portable, and not everything is a good fit for keys. I especially love the portability of the tenor uke.
When I was younger I'd tunnel vision on things and get insanely good really quickly. The price was that everything else in my life was totally neglected. But I could totally afford to spend 6 hours after school, and entire weekends, on whatever I was into.
I just picked up guitar last year as an adult. I'm consistently practicing, but man progress feels slow! It feels weird not being able to tunnel-vision on a hobby
I had a similar problem. Getting 8 hours of sleep every night, no exceptions, helped immensely.
It’s really hard. I even have a self-imposed rule that I always send my kids to sleep away camp in the summer. It’s necessary to escape the grind and take care of myself for a few weeks.
But if you look at medical research, it’s absolutely insane how sleep is related to everything.
The idea isn't that you aren't effective when you are old, just that you are slower.
Some studies showed a slower rate of decline in execs and people doing interesting/creative work, which implies that the "not doing anything new" is at least partially at fault.
I'm 51 and have never been happier nor more balanced in my life. I can't run as fast nor program as long into the night as I could a decade ago (or maybe I can but I know better now) but as far as my approach towards people and life in general I'm feel much advanced over my neurotic 900 mile an hour have to show everyone how smart I am younger years.
http://apps.usd.edu/coglab/schieber/psyc423/pdf/IowaTrailMak...
This is why I wish system would allow for more young politicians and leaders, lower voting age of 16, and maximum voting age of average lifetime expectancy - 16.
If we ever make “K-16l” schooling free I suspect it will come about in tandem with increasing the perceived age of adulthood.
Meanwhile I do believe that 14-18 year olds should be provided far, far more agency than they currently are.
Having voted before does not make you a better voter in the future. I don't think the fact that I had to wait with my first vote for almost full voting cycle longer because there were elections right before my 18th birthday that I couldn't take part in had influenced my political stances in any way.
- And maximum age of US public officials (especially presidents) set to a similar limit.
Speaking of age, there's an interesting research that found: "that conviction rates increase by about 1 percentage point for each year increase in the average age of the jury pool"
If 16 year olds are allowed to vote, they will wind up on juries.
Assuming jurors are selected randomly from the electorate, with exclusions only in very unusual instances, would you support 16 year olds being part of juries?
People who protect their intelligence and creativity, damn the consequences, tend to keep them for a long time. People who buy in to the corporate system turn into morons. The problem is that they don't notice it happening, and that, as one gets older, it gets harder to recover.
In that time I’ve gotten over 30 certifications including three AWS certifications last year.
Your take on corporate jobs is completely foreign to me. I’m sure it exists somewhere but I’m wondering - how long have you been doing corporate work?
* a "big five" accounting firm
* a major aircraft manufacturer that isn't Boeing
* a leading ISP that isn't Comcast
My experience in corporate work is exactly as the comment you replied to. Endless drone work doing much the same things day after day. I did it for 3 years, learned basically nothing beyond what I came in the job with, then went out on my own. In the time since I have learned so much more than what I did in that corporate job, there is just no comparison. Also, I strongly suspect they literally try to keep you stuck in one spot and too dumb to move out of it on purpose; you are less likely to leave or ask for a raise. They want predictable drones in corporate work, and yes, getting certificates is one way you make drones feel like they are doing something.
One job, three years. Perhaps you had a bad job. But try this one on, too: perhaps you lacked the wisdom to recognize opportunities where they appeared, and you're better at it now.
I've never stayed at an unfulfilling job - how pointless. I've made a point to network outside my immediate group - and most importantly be nice as well as helpful to others. It really makes a difference; people notice. All of my jobs, including my current one, came to me based on my reputation. There was no luck involved, just honesty and steady work. I won't even say hard work because it was always work I enjoyed.
I know all of this is anecdotal, you can go ahead and preface every sentence I wrote with "I think/In my opinion..." but in this case n really does equal 1, I only have 1 life to live. Even if there is absolutely no correlation between my observations and reality, with this strategy I'm only at risk of a life well lived.
I understand that social contact is a part of healthy aging. If you are feeling alone, make time for people! Though it sounds like you are enjoying yourself thoroughly.
An average 30 year old who is not doing sports will not lose muscle mass by itself.
An average 50 year old will lose 1% per year or so.
If you get older you have to work just to keep the status quo.
>An average 50 year old will lose 1% per year or so.
Sure, but the average is what it is because most people barely exercise, especially when they're older. If everyone lived a much more active life with more strenuous exercise, the average would look completely different.
Given some of the research on anti-aging, it's not clear that this is the case.
The point is the baseline will increase. Someone who strength trains seriously could easily be at least twice as strong at age 40 as somebody without any training. Even if they unavoidably lose 50% of their strength over the next 20 years, that just means at age 60 they'll have the same strength level as a 40 year old who never strength trained (and twice the strength of a 60 year old who never trained, assuming it decays linearly).
The 'hubris of 20 something' is mostly just ignorance.
When you have the experience to have witnesses all sorts of outcomes, you think of things in different ways.
I find myself far more 'unsure' of things because of 'all the angles' - and 'trying to thin of the unseen one's.
It's like C++:
You start by writing code. And think it's good, but it's not.
Then idiomatic code, because you realize the mess of your earlier code.
And then start to see 'all the things that could go wrong' in the horror of the code you wrote before.
Then you spend the rest of your career worrying about every few lines of code, about all the things that could go wrong, with obvious diminishing marginal returns on that.
So if you're 20 and making a dating app, it doesn't mater that much, you can thrash and burn through code.
For many things, that doesn't work and many of those projects do not fit the pattern of 'high growth VC' so they have to get done another way, hopefully at companies with surplus budget and a bit of vision and people willing to still do stuff instead of collecting a paycheque.
A data point of one proves nothing, of course. But my experience at the very least provides no counterexample to the article's hypothesis.
As for the physical - sure, you can maintain a greater peak performance than what most people do, as you age. But regardless of the effort, it's pretty much going to go down hill - strength, reaction time, coordination - after you're 30. You can slow it down, maybe dramatically if you're on the tail of the curve and put enough effort in (c.f. Tom Brady), but you can't stop it. And the effort required per "retained ability" just goes up.
I also like to remember that at no time are we really using what capacity we have to the fullest. An activity like chess for instance requires 100% focus over the course of the game to really do well - that kind of workout has got to good for brain health, but it's extremely rare in modern life. Compare with everyday survival say 10,000 years ago, which might have required 100% focus for much of the day.
1: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abe5017
> [energy expenditure] remains stable in adulthood (20 to 60 years), even during pregnancy; then declines in older adults.
You may doubt this now, but you will see how life changes for you after age 50, and again how life changes for you after age 60.
It is all fine, it really is, but you will find yourself saying "that didn't used to hurt", and you will also find yourself shoving people away from your mouse because they want to click on something that you haven't decided to click on yet.
It's just nature. Yes, some people abuse their bodies and their minds, but even the most careful are going to see changes. Just life, just how it goes.
I've pushed my way through a 400 page nursing textbook, dozens of scientific papers and a 900 page freshman neuroscience textbook (currently at page 90).
I never took any bioscience class after high school software chem.
There have been ups and downs. Mentally comparing myself to when I was in school and reading comparable material, I feel my ability to master it was at or above that - at its best. However the amount of time I spend "at my best" in general is MUCH lower than when I was that age.
Today I have trouble sleeping many nights. An old hip injury and also anxiety.
A night I don't sleep well is definitely not going to be followed by a day where I gain understanding of neuronal membrane chemistry.
Didn't have those issues when I was 17 - any time was study time.
So I guess this goes along with the thesis of the story. Mental powers are there, but other body systems aren't able to support the brain's demands at quite the same level.
Which one, and would you recommend it?
59 here, and with an autistic 16 year old who has great difficulty with communication. We're trying speech therapy, ABA therapy, but it seems to be both practical and parental to try to engage more deeply... with whatever is left of my fluid (vs. crystallized) intelligence.
Regarding your son - have you looked into sulforaphane at all? It's a tantalizing substance for my son's diagnosis (Kabuki Syndrome) and I noted this study as I was doing my research, which appears to show promise in 18+ autistic people ... https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1416940111
It's easy to get a little bogged down without a teacher-equivalent tracking the pace, at least for me. Which also means I spend more time subjectively experiencing struggle than I would otherwise, regardless of how it's going objectively.
Which I guess just maps to "increased decision-making caution" in the paper.
However meanwhile I found my ability to learn new language has dramatically diminished. Unless it's something naturally appealing to me, any hard memorization has become extremely challenging.
Response speeds in simple decision-making tasks begin to decline from early and middle adulthood.
However, response times are not pure measures of mental speed but instead represent the sum of multiple processes.
Here we apply a Bayesian diffusion model to extract interpretable cognitive components from raw response time data. We apply our model to cross-sectional data from 1.2 million participants to examine age differences in cognitive parameters.
To efficiently parse this large dataset, we apply a Bayesian inference method for efficient parameter estimation using specialized neural networks.
Our results indicate that response time slowing begins as early as age 20, but this slowing was attributable to increases in decision caution and to slower non-decisional processes, rather than to differences in mental speed.
Slowing of mental speed was observed only after approximately age 60.
Our research thus challenges widespread beliefs about the relationship between age and mental speed.
Sorry, don't have access to the fulltext.
Examples of things might include motor speed, like the speed required to press the button, etc.
Once you are settled in this routine, there are no forced challenges anymore. You need to keep looking for them. ;)
This is exactly what the study disproves. It breaks out "slowness" into the multiple components. Caution is one of these.
Taking a bit longer to think before speaking / acting is not the same as avoiding challenging / novel situations.
We confiscate a significant portion of the income of the young and productive, and direct it so that a certain generation can sit rich and idle for decades.
We would be better to abandon pensions, and direct the savings to eliminating sales and payroll taxes, to reduce Cost of Living and encourage work.
The expectation should be that you keep working until you are physically incapable of doing so (where a medical disability payment is available), whilst being able to enjoy the fruits of your labor from lower taxes. There's significant evidence that work maintains the body and mind in old age anyway.
I mean, they all might be outliers for as long as they live and the general conclusion (of decline) applies to us regular folks.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rOAvKVR_dyC...
Remembers all dates of US wars at 90+!
I mean, Erdos did it and he was productive until his 70's.
- Common sense
- Life experience
- Intelligence
- Ability to listen to others
- Curiosity
- Empathy
211 - Employees are the rungs on the ladder of success. Don't hesitate to step on them
If we have minimum age for participating in politics, there should be a maximum age. Set it at like 70% of life expectancy.
Alternatovely, remove minimum age - I would rather have a 16 year old in parliament than a 90 year old, maybe some problems with schools will actually get addressed.
Maybe true, not sure, but outcomes surely do not correlate with age.
"Scientists can publish their best work at any age"
So if older people take longer to come up with sensible solution, it could be too late
Kennedy was 46 years old during Cuban missile crisis, he has shown restraint when many generals, significanlty older than him, advocated use of force and likely would cause a global nuclear war.
Today young people overwhelmingly show the will to deal with climate change, and older generation overwhelmingly wants to continue to ignore it.
It's not like russia is a nuclear armed threat actively leading a war that everyone is afraid to intervene in right now...
The rest of your comment here is just nonsensical name calling and assuming anyone older is automatically homophobic and racist. This kind of childish behaviour is why there are minimum ages for offices.
I don’t actually know the extent to which each of those things were or weren’t considered common sense in any given year in any given location, so it may be correct or false or even every combination of both, but in any case it is a very different claim.
(Did you wake up on the wrong side today :-))
You're basically saying you mostly care about problems you have experienced, while complaining that other generations don't understand you (without any basis, I might add). That's pretty self-centered.
I would support a maximum voting age, give the reins over to the next generation and let it go already.
> the generation that we call the Baby Boomers have been in control of their respective societies for over forty years
So they grabbed control when they were in their 20s and didn't let go? That's a bit unlikely, isn't it? And most of the people in that generation had no power whatsoever.
> You can see the age
If you define a group by its age, of course you bloody can see the age. Do you add sentences in the hope that a random true one strengthens other ramblings?
> and the apathy
Strange. In the last years, apathy under adolescents and young adults seems to be getting out of control. Or are you calling them boomers too?
If you deny that people with actual experience of the subject matter are better placed to resolve the issue, I am not sure our comprehention of the world is compatiable.
> complaining that other generations don't understand you
Have you seen Marz Zukerberg's senate hearing? Do tou think Senate has succesfully held him to account for the shenanigans Facebook was pulling? Do you dispute that if everyone in that chamber was a 40-year old proffeshonal who could remmber studying IT, and some of them w Veing recent IT proffeshionals, they would be able to do a better job?
Do you feel that in that hearing anybody at all of the older senators, say over 75, has demonstrated how their wealth of life experience has enabled them to do a better job?
Or a test: do you know where Canada is located? The largest country (area wise) on each continent? Can multiply two double digit numbers? And some other basic things -- one would need to pass such a test to get to vote.
Would reduce the likelihood that the voters change their country to a dictatorship
As if the people who actually vote are going to disenfranchise themselves. Also, your 0.7 of life expectancy is about 55-57 in the US and UK. Is that really where you think people are probably incapable of making decisions for themselves?
Seems silly.
You don't hold public office to make decisions for yourself, you are making decisions for everyone else.
Well we can argue where exactly the boundary lies, but why do you think most scams and fraudulent schemes target older peopl? They are also considered vulnerable cusotmers by UK competitions and market authority.
(1) just following the retirement money
(2) student loans… crypto… mlm… home loans… plenty of scams target people at other stages in their lives. (I won’t even mention religions.)
I am talking about criminal fraud, the kind that send you to jail. Either you are being disengineous and are equating crime with questionable investment strategies.
Or you believe that the US government is complicit in defrauding an entire generation? I mean the latter could be a good argument for cancelling student debt.
Does that tell us more about intelligence or the testing?
> Common sense
We're having a frigging climate crisis and still not acting on it. So - nope.
> Life experience
From different era where world was a bit different, slower paced and pretty much black and white with two genders, fossil fuels and without those pesky women, gays and other minorities raising their voices.
> Ability to listen to others
This would presuppose empathy.
> Curiosity
As on having open mind to new ways of doing things? Nope.
> Empathy
Straight out nope again. Much, if not most of world's problems are exactly because of the lack of empathy for our fellow man and disregard for the future i.e. their own children. Nope, empathy is nowhere to be seen.
Geriatrics in power seem to make very slow and very wrong choices.
Consult the calendar. When Joe Biden was young, the Sixties were in full swing and the voices you mention were already pretty loud. They didn't have overwhelming results yet, but the path towards them was already being very visibly trod.
What you describe was an even earlier world - and we do not have that many centenarians in positions of power. Queen Elizabeth is pretty much the only important head of state to be still surviving from that period.
Even then, the Quiet Generation built things; roads, schools, libraries, arenas and institutions that are being destroyed by under-funding and neglect.
> We're having a frigging > climate crisis and still > not acting on it. So -nope.
Last time I was at a tech conference (fortunately years ago) the bulk of the audience and speakers were people in their 30s or younger and a lot of them had traveled long distances to get there. A few were frequent conference speakers traveling several times per year, all in very climate-unfriendly airplanes.
I see a lot of people under 30 who get expensive ICE cars as they progress in their careers, not to mention that if they have a good career in terms of revenue they’re most likely involved in something that negatively affects climate. I could go on.
> From different era where > world was a bit different, slower paced and pretty much black and white with two genders, fossil fuels and without those pesky women, gays and other minorities raising their voices.
Civil rights are surely not an invention of the current young generation. I’d argue that if we have a more vocal civil rights/social justice movement now it is thanks to all the people who are now over 70 or even dead and who were fighting that fight in more conservative times. This is also not something that’s uniformly distributed in the world or even in “civilized” places (sadly, I’d add), as I keep stumbling upon very young (decades younger than me) bigots far more frequently than I’d like (ok, to be honest, I’d like that frequency to be 0).
> This would presuppose empathy.
If all the young people you interact with are emphatic you’ve no idea how lucky you are. Suffice to say that school continues to be hell to a lot of weird kids right this very moment, that ain’t a problem that went away. That’s because most people are bigoted regardless of their age. If anything, I’ve seen a-holes become a bit less of that as they grow older.
> Geriatrics in power seem to make very slow and very wrong choices
I’ll take the role of unsolicited editor to your comment and suggest that you just say “People in power seem to make very slow and very wrong choices”, that would make it accurate.
"Ability to listen to others" and especially "Empathy" are the very opposite attributes of people "running all major world powers right now"
Even the worst politicians, those that I personally hate with vitriol, those whom I doubt even have a rich inner mental world, absolutely do demonstrate listening to the person in front of them. It may not be real empathy, just affectation, but the effect of the affect is the same on the support base they need in order to get elected, or in some cases even chosen as a candidate.
I was pointing to the fact the paper is not measuring those traits, and they are certainly more important than mental speed. And even that, the paper says until 60 only decreases as older persons take more time to more carefully consider their decisions.
OP seemed to be worried that as they are older, the paper would imply their mental ability was somewhat diminished or less capable, and I pointed to other traits very important, the paper does not analyze.
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/minds-business/the...
When you have to think where to spend $20Mil or more you probably don't have to come up with stuff on the spot.
Not really. If you watch a debate show like Question Time, everything that's said is utterly predictable. Politicians have spent years trotting out the same arguments. Everything is a set piece because you know what the topic is, and you have ample time to prepare. It's actually like this in most debates, it's only thinking if you haven't been there before. If you are just smart and you run into a person with is properly prepared, you will get demolished by well tested arguments backed up with established facts.
If you get really old and your memory goes then you'll have a problem, but most of the talking head types are not that old yet, and they just give a canned response.
These are processes that make a democracy tick, if they don't think, id they can't follow whats happening, the system doesn't work
Seems like you skip a word in the GP's comment. Politicians has to think slowly, deliberately and (hopefully) correctly, which is to say that mental speed might not be the relevant factor at all.
I don't think I will ever retire. It is just simply not for me.
Be curious.
Seek out interesting problems.
Never stop learning.
I don't think I am any slower today than I was at the start of my career.
This has to be the saddest thing I've ever read. Modern culture/capitalism/whatever has replaced an individual's family, friends, purpose, identity, etc with their job. Truly, "arbeit macht frei".
> Be curious.
"I will stop work the day I die. I don't think I will ever retire. It is just simply not for me."
Sounds like the most "non curious" life possible. But people should lead the life they want.
> I don't think I am any slower today than I was at the start of my career.
You are. Not only are you mentally slower, you are physically slower. But it's okay since your decline in one aspect is offset by accrued wisdom and experience. At least hopefully.
To deny you are slower today is as silly as denying you are wiser and more experienced. It's part of life and aging.
Here on HN a lot of people are lucky enough to be able to work on their own terms and on things they enjoy so you probably should not rush to that conclusion.
I grew up, very rural, plenty of family, not a lot of work. To me it was suffocating. Couldn't use my brain for anything. Work has given me the opportunity to travel, see other places, build some useful things (hopefully) that other people value and so on.
This is why none of the answers here make any sense.
Many seem to want to blame this on desk jobs and sitting. Others on not learning new things.
Then you have examples of super-high cognitive workload and stress saying this is the problem.
These things don't fit together.
I hold a US CPL and work as a programmer at a desk job. Where exactly does that leave me?
In terms of individual peak production the greatest pop stars, physicists and poets (say) are done by 25. Your average decent coder can pretty much go on producing for decades.
Only at the extremes is this going to have a massive effect. Most of us don't live there and we maybe over-worry about it.
Now they are in their 60s and same work they did all their life (leading economical department of 3 high schools with various rental properties, manager at metal engineering company having at one time 300 subordinates), they would barely manage. Memory starts to go down too.
At this rate, it will last them well into 90s to be OK for anything ordinary life can bring, but to ignore this is to ignore reality right in front of me.
Maybe there is some other factor, like constant hard training of the brain by having ever-evolving creative work instead of kind of same office work, or some other aspect.
I am young, so I hopefully have not caused any permanent issues with my time of isolation - I shudder to think what it would do to me if I were 60 and facing the physical decline of old age.
Hugely unethical, but also not scientifically sound.
COVID infection itself has already been demonstrated in various papers to cause mental decline (TL;DR there seems to be a correlation between how "sick" you got and the amount of decline).
There is also the unknown of long-term post-COVID-infection consequences on the brain.
So you would have a bit of a hard time trying to seek to attribute lockdowns to mental decline. Especially, as we know, COVID can manifest itself as an asymptomatic disease.
You then have the additional question of what are you going to count the infectious isolation period as ? It would not be ethical to count it as "lockdown".
Basically it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible to achieve any sort of statistical segregation between "lockdown" and "COVID".
Thus your input data would be messy, and per the GarbageIn-GarbageOut rule, so would your "conclusion".
"Lockdowns" are also inherently subjective, social and difficult to study in any sort of meaningful way. Not least because different governments implemented them differently, and different populations adhered to them differently. So you'll never really get a clean dataset - and that's assuming people tell you the truth anyway about how compliant they were with the rules.
I think a more reasonable perspective would be to wait until we know more about COVID and (especially) long-COVID. Once the world knows more about the cognitive effect of COVID, then would be the time for secondary analysis on lockdowns.
Afterall, it may well be that lockdowns were more preferable to getting infected with COVID in terms of cognitive decline. Or it may be that both "options" were more or less equal in terms of decline. But for all that we need more time to study COVID itself.
I agree.
I don't necessarily buy the "loneliness" argument for cognitive decline.
However I certainly buy the importance of keeping mentally and physically active.
Infact I would go as far as saying people who use the "loneliness" term are actually just using it as a lazy synonym for "lack of mental and physical activity". You don't necessarily need to surround yourself with people to achieve it.
Whether its still working in a job, or doing non-job activities such as gardening, travelling, photography, I think keeping your brain busy and your body moving is the key.
If you revert to the cliché retirement image of taking long naps during the day, stopping only to eat and watch daytime TV, then IMHO that's where the problems start.
Last summer, he took upon a project of building a protocol converter between a GPS device and some kind of sailing computer in his sailboat. I politely listened to many details, which I immediately forgot, but there was a Rasperry Pi and some protocols on serial buses and making sense of binary logs. His system works and is in use.
Either he was really, really fucking smart 25 years ago, or there was no steep decline so far. I'm betting it's the latter.
I have a suspicion that a lot of it comes down to diet. After a while it catches up to you. And I don't think what mainstreams doctors consider to be a healthy diet is necessarily what we should be eating.
Are they still working or not?
The brain expands and shrinks over time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31048591 - April 2022 (46 comments)
Brain charts: mapping the rapid growth and slow decline of the brain over life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30943370 - April 2022 (27 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31048591
How did I know we'd get this article today? Am I clairvoyant? So many people in denial about aging.
If a job has a requirement and someone doesn't meet it then they simply won't be able to do the job.
Did they bother to break it down male/female?
https://github.com/stefanradev93/DataSizeMatters/blob/main/I...
"This article was reviewed on the error bar podcast episode 25: https://theerrorbar.com/?e=25 & story 106: https://theerrorbar.com/?s=106. The review was done in the light of newspaper headlines about the article. The slightly-edited transcript is copied here:
headline: BRAIN DOESN'T SLOW DOWN UNTIL 60
tweet: analysis of 1.2 million responses on the 'implicit association test' finds that adults' mental processing speed is totally good & constant until age 60. that's good news for all adults over age 35. until you look at the data.
description: in a story likely comforting to middle aged scientists & journalists, the Guardian & Independent reported last week that, Good News: the brain does not slow down until we are aged 60. what did they mean?
the result comes from a quite complicated analysis of an enormously huge set of data. a social psychology project in the USA has collected nearly 2 million responses from people who were asked to categorise things on a computer screen as, for example, 'good' versus 'bad' or as 'black' versus 'white'. they did this 120 times each.
in general, the results of this so-called 'implicit association test' are able to reveal people's unconscious attitudes - in this example, that white things are good & black things are bad. this test is a classic & it relies on people responding as quickly as possible.
in the new study, researchers in Germany downloaded 1.8 million test responses from the free online database. they analysed how people's responses changed as they age, from 10 to 80 years old. using some sophisticated (& unnecessarily complicated) analyses, the researchers reported that, while the total time spent doing the task changes a lot over life, one conclusion is that, in fact, our 'mental processing speed' remains good & strong until age 60.
phew!
evaluation: does mental speed stay high until age 60?
no.
this is not a hard one. with a total of nearly 1.2 million responses, all openly available online & clearly-presented in this paper, it is a fantastically-simple task to fact-check this claim. all we need to do is look at the data.
i've annotated the image to accompany this story on the error bar website. what the image shows is a gradual & continuous increase in mental speed between age 10 to a peak at about 35, then a gradual & continuous decrease to age 80. it's true that the speed of change seems to be different at different ages, but the strong claim that mental speed is 'high & constant until age 60' is contradicted by just looking at the data.
how did it come to this? the error bar dug deeper.
first, this is a massive dataset - which is great - but quite a lot of data were removed, for example anyone performing the task without making errors was excluded. that's a bit odd, if the best responders are removed.
second, the task itself is quite subjective - is something good or bad? or is something black of white? - & although a well-studied task, it's just one task, so conclusions about mental speed in general must be extremely limited.
third, the data are not a good measure of mental processing speed. to test mental speed, we need volunteers to be fully-focussed & making responses as quickly as possible. but the authors included 'response times' as long as nearly 6 seconds, the average times were around 1 second & there were some massive - and unexplained - differences between men's & women's responses.
fourth, one claim in the report is that the 'merely mechanical' processes of seeing the stimuli on screen & making the keyboard press response take as long as half a second in the oldest adults. this is a pure fiction - the study provides no sensible measurement of these sensory & motor processing speeds.
fifth, & amusingly, the authors chose a particular kind of deep, machine-learning analysis because they said it was "not possible" to analyse all the data in a different, simpler, but more computationally-expensive way. but the new analysis only took 32 hours to run on a computer, which makes me wonder how long the full analysis would take & why was there such a rush to get it done?
sixth & critically, the conclusion that mental processing speed is high and constant until age 60 relies only on the authors' choice of how to put a best-fit line on the data. the analysis used requires all the people to be divided into two or more different age groups. for error bar nerds: the data were fit with three straight lines for three age groups. but age is a continuous variable, so why did the authors not just fit a single, continuous curve?
well, listeners, i downloaded the data, sharpened Occam's razor & fit that single curve. it provides a very slightly worse explanation of the data, but that's what you would expected, as it is also a much less-complex explanation."
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