Are older people less innovative?
laetitiaatwork.substack.com
laetitiaatwork.substack.com
Now I am way more experienced and skilled though and can realistically say, what ideas will work and can be implemented and what is just blind wishful thinking, which I had a lot. Now I just know, that a lot of my ideas of my 20s were bogus and I smile when I hear people who sound like me. (Some of my naivity has just been replaced with cynism, though). But I still can harness from those times as I made lots of notes.
"In fact we should worry more about supporting the young in their innovativeness. To harness the valuable contributions of young people in a society with a decreasing youth population, it is crucial to provide them with more resources: quality education, opportunities to build networks, funding for the businesses they create, and all the infrastructure needed to support their continued innovation tomorrow."
So yes. Youth is the engine of the world. But they do lack experience and ressources and we the older generation should provide it to them. Guiding, but not preaching.
The obvious downside being that maybe some of the assumptions you hold based on experience may not apply anymore.
Definitely one factor.
"The obvious downside being that maybe some of the assumptions you hold based on experience may not apply anymore."
For technical things I don't think so, as I keep up. The danger I am seeing, is rather that I might dismiss ideas, because I failed at implementing similar ideas in the past because I lacked the skills/ressources. I know some old people developed this habit towards the young. Since they failed at it, how could those stupid young people succeed ... so making sure they will not.
Older people tend to hang on to the past, so they are less "innovative" as per the current trends. For eg: For the love of God, I can never understand TikTok and why it is famous. There are a slew of new emojis which I don't understand. Sometimes, I feel that these are important to understand while coming up with ideas to stay relevant.
I think it is important to understand, but I don't think you should learn to like it.
Reciprocally, youth can be highly innovative because it’s more/still full of energy and discovery and randomness (or intentlessness), which favor unusual/new approaches.
Maybe I’m not yet old enough to be like this but I honestly don’t think it’s the case.
Instead - I think about how whatever I do in the next ten years is it. This is my last productive decade.
I can’t risk wasting my time. I need to work on low risk projects with short payoff times.
I’ve got half a dozen products and projects that I could launch, some of which I think could really make a difference… but I’m going to take a job in an industry I like and get a steady income, instead.
There is enormous risk in innovation and that was great for the first ¾ of my working life - not so great for the last ¼. My wife and kids don’t want to eat ramen and live in share houses for 2 years while I hustle and grind until I get PMF or die trying.
> I can’t risk wasting my time. I need to work on low risk projects with short payoff times.
Perhaps I am too young, but I rather imagine myself to be completely different when I become old: the older I get, the more risk-affine I'll become since if something goes insanely wrong, I will have less years in which I have to bear the bad consequences.
To the present day, this describes my life quite well: the older I got, the more risk-affine I became.
In those terms, if you're young and you do something high risk, and you lose all your money (or just spend 5 years not making money), you still have plenty of time to recover and make enough money to be comfortable when you're older.
But, by definition, that's not true when you're older.
The counterargument to this was exactly a point of my reply: if you are not able to recover, there exist less years in which you have to live poorly when you are older. A little bit macabre, but true.
uh, 67 yes old and adhd. the past is so yesterday and frequently not remembered unless traumatic. Innovation and new learning are weekly events.
F.E. I now use chatgpt to generate most of my code then I tweek/debug it to usefulness. clock is ticking and I'm not done yet
Definitely more ideas
Maybe no time or motivation to implement them, too much focus on the day to day life
At 20 I'd stay up for 72 hours very badly writing a full featured text editor in the one language I knew, C. That giddy, naive excitement was the engine. Most of my ideas were stupid. I had no measure of my abilities or time, and so optimistically threw myself into projects.
At 35 I had a choice of more than 10 programming languages I knew well, but used someone else's libraries to hack what I needed together in Perl in an hour. That was probably "peak hacker".
By 40 I figured out I could just customise Emacs with a line of elisp.
At 50 I figured: if it's not already an obvious feature or extension then I'm probably misunderstanding what I think I want.
Wisdom frees up time and effort to focus on innovations which are grander/complex, happen on a slower timescale, need more help and collaboration with others, require more reflective thought, and have to be matched to my known abilities and time.
So in that sense, I explore more ideas as well.
However, the big difference, is energy and motivation.
I was a machine in my 20s, but these days a late night hacking session ends with me paying the price the following day. Execution is everything.
Sorry. Could not resist.
And of course sometimes things like LLMs do come along and I incorporate the apparent capabilities into my toolbox as something with serious, non-hype, potential application. Though I am also jaded from watching far too much get hype like IoT and crypto. Watching companies waste billions on valueless innovation tends to do that.
I used to, and still do think a lot about products, startups, business, etc.
10 years ago, everything seemed possible and easy and profitable.
Now, with experience working in industry, interacting with people, knowing what I know, the way I evaluate an idea has drastically changed. I am more skeptical, conservative in my estimates, cautious in growth prospects.
I still think myself to be innovative. But reality has grounded me.
People grow more humble as they age so they stop trying to change the world, while young people focus more on the big things because they still believe they are special. Or something, many different reasons that happens, but we know it happens.
Yes, I know Discord isn't an open forum website like Reddit/HN. The younger generations seem to like it that way I guess.
Also, you often have more to protect as you grow older. You may have kids, a wife, children, a house etc. Everything costs money so you get more careful in making life altering decisions since you have a lot to lose if you fail. Usually I think people have worked their way into a state they are comfortable with and thus don't want to change too much because change doesn't have to be positive.
However, I think there is something to be said about the disruption angle; when you have experience, you could indeed miss a great disruptive idea due to the worldview you establish over the years. I think that younger people, despite their often-bad ideas, will from time to time have a great, disruptive idea that I'd filter out at this point in my life. That's why it is important, when you're young, to explore your novel ideas and take some risks by building or working at a startup.
Innovation is more than ideas, though. Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything.
And the average age of successful founders is 45:
https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
Change that environment and there is no limitation for the older group as well
People naturally pattern match a problem to a known solution.
And as you get older, your mental repository of seen patterns gets quite large.
The problem with this is, it’s difficult to come up with an innovative solution if you’ve already seen a prior pattern for the problem you’re solving.
And as such, you become less “innovative”.
The flip side to this is, it’s common for someone earlier in their career to “reinvent the wheel”, because they hadn’t seen a pattern yet for the problem they are solving.
Sometimes though, they will reinvent it in an innovative way.
I just hit 40 last month and I notice that people younger than me can make innovative leaps faster, but people older than me see the problems and solutions faster.
I also encounter a lot of structurally conservative young people, in certain settings more so than older people (corporate strategy, for example).
No, older people are not less innovative.
I would also add that I really dislike clickbaity titles like this intending to be somewhat "controversial" to promote clicks.
In this case, the question form, might be the more neutral, where the alternatives would lead more to echo-chambering.
The question is unresolved, so no matter if you want it to be true or not, you'll need to click and expose yourself to the arguments put forth.
These are my thoughts on it, wrong as they may be:
if the article was called: "Older people are not less innovative!"
Then people who hate/dislike older people (as seem to be the current fashion seeing the amount of hatred directed towards our parents and grandparents generations) will dismiss it off the cuff and never be exposed to the arguments on why it might be the case. While people who wants this to be true won't read it either because they've had their existing opinion enforced, maybe based on different arguments/ideas.
The question however, leads both those who wants it to be true and false to read.
I would prefer something like: "A discussion of whether innovation varies with age" or "Analyzing the data on innovation by age group." For me, these imply thougtful analysis. When I see "clickbaity" titles I assume the content isn't worth reading (and is low quality) since the author needs to use emotional trickery to drive clicks, and usually this assumption is correct.
The most innovative ideas in mathematics were discovered by mathematicians in their 20s and 30s, even though older tenured mathematicians should in theory have more knowledge, experience, and time / resources for deep work.
Personally, not a mathematican, but I recently started investing in side projects again, the kind that aren't exactly a sure path to return on investment. The only reason why I can do this in-between earning enough to feed a family and family / household duties is because I started a consulting business where I work 3-4 days per week for clients.
I don't think my brain at almost 40 is that different from when I was 20. The amount of money I need to earn and the amount of time I have is vastly different though.
I believe such problems are even more urgent in 20s and 30s. You're not established yet, you need to do a lot of things unrelated to your passion to make ends meet. Caring for young children is usually more time intensive than for older ones.
By the 40s, academics have tenures and financial security. The children are older and don't require so much care. Yet statistically there's not much groundbreaking work appearing from older mathematicians.
> The risks for going after something crazy instead of some iterative improvement / maintenance increase.
That's not a big factor in mathematics where going after crazy things doesn't carry significant financial risks.
https://www.nber.org/digest/dec05/great-inventions-come-late...
Yes, but more illustrative of the innovation, because it's pure creativity, you don't need many resources apart from pen, paper, and time (at least historically that was the case).
Which is very different from many other sciences where you often need high level access to expensive equipment or other resources, which you won't get right away, but typically after you prove your worth (which takes years).
Most innovation actually involves applying recent technological advancements to various problems. This is the same regardless of the age of the person.
So most of these disruptions do not require some big leap or fresh new perspective.
For example, I was around 35 when Docker was really becoming popular. The immediate idea that occurred to me was to build an IaaS business around it. I believe that lots of other people in their 20s or whatever age had the same idea.
Because the idea was really just about applying the new technology in a fairly obvious way. Since it was already a disruptive technology, that was enough to be disruptive in that domain it was applied to.
So again, I think the vast majority of innovation is in this category. Maybe because those types of innovations are much more accessible than fundamental research.
When I saw what ChatGPT could do last year I immediately started trying to figure out how to use it to build a code generation startup. I know that many people who were not 45 like me and instead were in their 30s or just out of college or in college or high school or 50 or 60s or whatever had a very similar idea. I literally saw demos of software that was very similar to my own tests along with articles about how they had just finished college or whatever.
I also have seen young people in a particular domain that is obviously being disrupted ignore the disruption. You can be entrenched in something just as easily as a 23 year old. Whereas someone like me who has always been excited about applying new technologies was quite interested in shifting focus onto how the new technology really changed that area. The younger and older people who had been invested in this specific activity and were not by nature primarily into innovation were unaware or at least unexcited about abandoning their existing domain for something that was related but new.
It's really about mindset and skillset. Someone who has technology skills in certain areas and has made a habit of, for example, picking up new technologies and applying them, is going to be much more likely to do that and keep doing that, than someone who is younger and doesn't have those skills and habits. It's about an orientation embracing technologically-driven change. That isn't determined by age. It's a worldview and type of skillset.
One other thing that matters is going to be your circumstances. I have a twin brother who has a family and a real job. I have either avoided that or just not managed it, depending on how you interpret things. But at least part of it is my attitude and my identity.
As our society ages, I predict that attitudes towards ageism, even in the technology world, will shift towards less tolerance for it.
But the article is saying the same things as you do?
Overall, although she mentioned things like circumstances that overlap with some of what I said, she also reinforced a lot of ageist stereotypes and then in the end tried to make the article about sexism instead. I think that combating sexism is noble also, but the article does not do a good job of supporting either cause.
But don't worry, once you hit 30 you will realize that as well.
Obviously so, with experience people are less likely to fall for productivity porn and are less likely to be abused by companies asking for 60 hour weeks, crunch time and the like.
Feel free to look up yourself why measuring hours is the worst way to estimate productivity.
> Hours are affected. Since hours are not really related to productivity, a family is not impacting it.
You've looking from the lens of a male leaving all the childcare and planning to his wife or someone else. That's a very privileged background.