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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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)
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.
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.)