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Comment by tehmillhouse | Hacker News Reader

I think there's definitely something to the neuroplasticity thing. Learning does take longer as we age, that's just a biological fact.

> Man what a frustrating journey it has been ! I keep telling myself I'm a seasoned senior dev...

This right here, that's something you're misunderstanding. Learning something new is supposed to be uncomfortable. To learn most effectively, you want to shape your mental behavior to minimize surprise (i.e. grok things) while shaping your outward behavior to maximize surprise (i.e. challenge / update your understanding). That's frustrating. Even if you've learned other things before.

The only thing you're missing is a healthy set of expectations. Accept and welcome the discomfort, and you'll learn like you've never learned before. Thinking you should be exempt from this just adds internal resistance to an already uncomfortable process.

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I think neuroplasticity is bullshit and is a convenient scapegoat for a shared experience many people have.

No different than phrenology explanations for differences in cognitive behaviors, an explanation that is now deprecated.

The most clear example is the incentives. Change the incentives and people learn quickly. Find anybody that rationalizes their technophobia with their age, and look at the difference between them and someone of the same age that had no problem adjusting to new technology or that specific technology.

70 year olds texting or using smartphones? I know many people that used to make excuses about not being able to do that. As soon as their friends started communicating that way they figured it out. The same incentive children have and do.

I find it genuinely disheartening when a very real physical decay is masked with plastic social kayfabe. Maybe I'm not western enough and lack proper social grace.

Instead of striving to find real ways to help our seniors avoid a tragic fate of illness and decay, you whip up several white lies. All the more tragic, given your apparent intelligence. Can you imagine, how many individuals have to receive sub-par IQs through no fault of their own to "roll" just one of you?

We are all in the same boat, after all. Might as well help each other.

> Instead of striving to find real ways to help our seniors avoid a tragic fate of illness and decay, you whip up several white lies. All the more tragic, given your apparent intelligence.

am I supposed to be defensive here, seems too easy when I really have no idea what you're talking about. You think I made white lies, ok. what I detailed is a valid experience that co-exists with other forms of physical decay.

> Change the incentives and people learn quickly.

Not necessarily, I definitely got slower at learning new stuff at 40+ than when I was younger. My memory just doesn't work as good as it used to, and I also have less of "mental energy" to get into the zone and stay there digging until I figure things out. I don't know is it my age, or life style, or health and genetics, or just having a lot more other things going on now than before (wife, kids, running business, etc.). However I'm positive it's not a technophobia, first because I love tech and learning new stuff just as much as I used to, and also because I see this in other, non-technical, areas like with learning a foreign language. And if it's (a lack of) incentives then again it's an external limitation of my capacities to motivate myself which I can't solve and I feel it has to do with the age too.

I think the neuroplasticity angle is vastly underestimated, and we should seek (and also design, research & fund if there is none) neuroplasticity-upregulating drugs & therapies.

As far as this field goes, this is a remarkable paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24348349/

That looks suspect. n=23

2 groups of 12. (one person's data was lost).

No baseline pre-treatment data.

Each group did two trials: VPA then placebo, or vice versa. The VPA-first group did well on VPA, but the VPA-second group did not. Improvement was suggestive but slight.

>Thinking you should be exempt from this just adds internal resistance to an already uncomfortable process.

Wow, thanks ! That sounds like real practical advise ! I think you hit the nail on the head here !

> To learn most effectively, you want to shape your mental behavior to minimize surprise

If you don't mind, could you expand on this part ? I'm not 100% clear on what you mean ?

You've already got that part down pat. "Shaping your mental behavior to minimize surprise" is just a really complicated way of saying "attempting to understand a thing". There's no secret technique here, I was just trying to tie the process of learning back to surprise.

Not my experience at all (50+). Having 25+ years of experience in many different technology stacks makes it easy to cut through the BS and understand the core of what a new technology/stack/framework/library is. When you do that you realise that most “new” stuff is old stuff with a new lick of paint and excited evangelists promoting it.

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