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Comment by jb1991 | Hacker News Reader

jb1991

> And by the time you’re in your mid-teens, you’re probably as smart as you’re going to be – not as worldly or wise as you will be later, but the raw brainpower is mostly there.

I strongly disagree with this. I don't know if it is genuinely true in a biological sense, but in my life experience it is not even close to true. There are lots of things I do that are so far beyond my abilities as a teenager. It could be due to other factors, but my gut suggests those other factors are much more important than this comment about mere brain power leads us to believe.

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Fluid intelligence drops with age:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4906299/

You weren't an idiot as a teenager. You were just uneducated and inexperienced.

Personally, my decaying mental performance over the years is almost palpable. I feel like I am half-dead now compared to who I was 20 years ago. Sure I was nuts due to the powerful emotions, but that just means I was alive, not a talking corpse that I am now.

Yes but when does it start dropping? Not likely in the teens. As I'd always heard and other commenters also suggest, peak brain power is usually ten years later than this article proposes. Brains are still developing in our teens, and are not at their peak yet.

The chart in the linked paper shows sharp drop between 20 and 30 years already. I remember another chart that I cannot find now, which showed wider age range and more components of intelligence and that one showed some peaks between 12 and 20.

Brain morphology is irrelevant. "Development" might just mean aging. Measurable performance is all that matters.

Yes, the scientific consensus right now is that the prefrontal cortex does not generally finish developing until the mid to late 20s, and this is the main locus of executive functioning. Perhaps according to some very narrow definition of “raw brain power” one could say, as TFA does, that this is all done in one’s teens - there seems to be consensus that IQ peaks around 19-20, though even short term memory (which I think would be unambiguously classed amongst “raw brain power”) is thought to peak in the mid 20s.

It seems to overly intellectualize a problem that has a whole spectrum of factors outside of being "smart". Long term thinking, risk/reward, motivations, emotions, hormones, all that stuff is either first forming or in total chaos and it's in no way as simple as smarting your way out of it.

AFAIK the human brain matures around mid to late twenties, so you'd probably be right about this from a biological sense too

I think the neuroscience here has really gone through the pop-sci wringer. The original research was specifically about impulse control and not anything else. I think there has been some more evidence about pattern recognition etc recently.

It's always struck me as funny when people say 25 is when you're fully mature. After this point, you start to experience declines in ability. It's not maturity; it's the moment you start dying.

While you make a good point that the mid-twenties maturity is in terms of impulse control, that's kind of a defining trait for getting a scheme like this to effectively work.

Beware of unquantifiable words like "matures". It might just mean minor ongoing changes. Or it might even mean deterioration. In the end, performance is what matters, not morphology.

There's no sense in rationalizing with folks who want to quantify intelligence in the first place. They're chasing statistical phantoms. Even if we take a generous view of what they said and interpret it to mean that brain development finalizes in the mid-teens, it's still a completely myopic view of what it means to be "smart."

People quantify sports abilities down to the ten-thousandth of a second.

Have you played sports? Most sports fans and players know that determining which players are better than others in their domain is an endless debate that is in the end, still completely subjective. The only thing approaching objectivity are events like the Olympics, parts of which are still subjectively scored.. on top of that, for the ones that aren’t, better performance on a particular day in a particular event doesn’t mean one is a better athlete. To summarize: better performance at a combine 40 yard dash means nothing when it comes to performance in a game.

Author is just another grifter peddling pop-psychology/bro-science nonsense like thousands and thousands of others, since it generates like, views and even conversation (like at HN).

None of it is worth paying attention to.

Yeah my teenage self was an idiot, there's no nice way to put it.

Join the club.

Your post reminded me of this article from almost a decade ago. Using James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem as a great example:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/big-break...

I got a lot better at learning new material during my time in college. Did I get any smarter? Nope. Simply put, I learned how to learn.

It's analogous to athletics. Sure, you can have a talent for running. But you're not going to win races unless you train.

A mind is plastic, adaptable, and hence can be trained.

IQ studies show IQ caps at 25, so... yeah no remotely close.

commitment, leverage, delegation and compounding are hard to understand at that age or at least follow thru on

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