Comment by userabchn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by userabchn | Hacker News Reader

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We like to believe that the problem is just "our own adult psychosis", but I spend my days around many people over quite a range of ages (including elderly) and it is very obvious to me that cognitive abilities decline in the way shown in the charts you have probably seen (or, it feels to me, even more dramatically) and that it is apparent at an earlier age that we would like to think. Old people lose the ability to infer - if they know two Johns and I say something about one of them (just referred to as "John"), they will be confused even though it should be easy to infer which I meant. That might not be a surprise, but from my experience the same effect can be traced back linearly to much earlier ages, to those mature students in your university class, who were probably only 40, and who continually caused us to roll our eyes by asking questions with obvious answers - even at that age they had lost some of the ability we had to infer the answers from what we had already been taught. Such abilities are useful when coming up with ideas for new products, so I have no doubt that the likelihood of doing it successfully declines rapidly with age.

The example from University is not a good one. There are bright and not-so-bright young people too, but older people typically have fewer misgivings about asking "dumb" questions that may have obvious answers.

Also, I think older people have seen more exceptions through experience, and know that sometimes, "dumb" questions don't have obvious answers.

There's an interesting phenomenon where middle IQ people see bright people as rather stupid. They can't see the extra layers of complexity and possibility that bright people can, so they read "Yes but...?" questions as naive and uneducated.

Obviously I'm not suggesting all mature students are hyper-intelligent, but I do think it's not as easy to tell as it might seem to be.

Reminds me of Dan Luu's post about how people think he's pretty stupid.

https://danluu.com/look-stupid/

> Old people lose the ability to infer - if they know two Johns and I say something about one of them (just referred to as "John"), they will be confused even though it should be easy to infer which I meant.

Old people have been bitten by the “A 95% inference will be wrong 1 in 20 times” thing a lot more, and also have been exposed to a wider array of experience where they might often judge an inference as being less certain than someone with a narrower range of experience would.

I thought your mental faculties peak in their abilities in your 40's?

I don't have a specific reference but if you google it, you should find what I mean.

> I thought your mental faculties peak in their abilities in your 40's

different abilities at different ages, on average, but IIRC, some as early as late teens, some as late as the 40s.

EDIT:

Actually, some as late as 50+. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/when-do...

You have inferred something that may well be untrue.

A 40 year old mature student was last in school more than 20 years ago. Younger students were last in school as recently as 1 year ago. Learning is a skill and it's perfectly possible to be out of practice. There may also be some knowledge gaps because recent practices and knowledge are different to common knowledge 20 years ago.

It's also possible that mature students are more assertive about asking questions.

And also - what some of the students in a class consider "obvious" is not at all obvious to all of the class.

Of course if someone is showing clear evidence of dementia, that's a different issue.

Good communication has long been known as difficult to achieve. I could easily infer answers. But by asking questions with "obvious" answers I regularly uncover miscommunication. Try it.

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