Comment by hutzlibu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hutzlibu | Hacker News Reader

Well, speaking only about myself while my beard turns grey, I can say yes. When I was younger, I was bursting with ideas. I am not sure, if I was smarter, but I definitely had more energy.

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.

It all boils down to energy and exposure to current trends.

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.

"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.

Much like evolution, the individual picks and chooses things which provide an advantage, i imagine that in most mature cases there is very little value in tiktok mating dances.

Tiktok is not just age related, tiktok is more popular among women, most communities you typically visit are probably majority men given that you are here. That makes a big difference for vote based social media, here you see male coded topics bubble up, on tiktok you see female coded topics bubble up.

TikTok’s algorithm personalizes its recommendations pretty quickly. Most the stuff I see on it is probably more appealing to men

But still many men don't feel it is for them, so there is something missing there. Not understanding tiktok is therefore not just related to age, its also that tiktok is not interesting for a large part of men in general.

Also to intent. As you get older, you need to focus your energy and your intentions. And it may very well depend on the context then that innovation is or is not the important/urgent thing.

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.

> Older people tend to hang on to the past

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.

> 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.

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.

To be clear I'm specifically talking about income earning risks, rather than say physical risks.

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.

> 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.

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.

In my case it’s not just me who will suffer, but also my family. I’m just not wired to make a risky decision for them.

I too can never get today's trends like Tiktok, Instagram, emojis and others. I'm 17 year old...

There's a reason you're on HN, I expect many people here to be outliers/outcasts for their generations, be that 67-year-old or 17-year-olds.

> Older people tend to hang on to the past

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

Perhaps you're still generating the same amount of ideas it's just that you're brain is better at filtering out the bad/impractical ones at an early stage?

The obvious downside being that maybe some of the assumptions you hold based on experience may not apply anymore.

Thebopposite is also true, with properly trained filters you are going to pursue stuff that has no chance to work. Almost like you need a healthy of people (age, sexe, culture...).

There's also a certain art to working on something that won't work, long enough that the act of failing triggers new innovations. If you know from the offset it's not possible, then you leave yourself closed to the opportunities that lay in the act of solving an impossible problem.

Unless you have a limited amount of time/energy and get it spent on fool's errands. Maybe youth is less conscious about this - time, energy, we have it all - while the older will rather throw the baby with the bathwater. Is there a golden age where these two tendencies balance each other? Or we can only get it in diverse teams?

"Perhaps you're still generating the same amount of ideas it's just that you're brain is better at filtering out the bad/impractical ones at an early stage?"

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.

Yes, that sounds like a much better explanation

I feel the opposite

Definitely more ideas

Maybe no time or motivation to implement them, too much focus on the day to day life

Yup. I'm going with the "filtering" theory as per the above comments, but with a twist. Getting older and wiser is a bit like Bill Hicks' definition of getting high: "When you're high, you can do everything you normally do just as well - you just realize that it's not worth the fucking effort."

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.

I wouldn't say I have the opposite, but I do feel I have so much more experience I can tackle ideas what I would have not even explored back in the day.

So in that sense, I explore more ideas as well.

This is mixing "energy" with "smarter" with "bursting with ideas", but these are all separate things, and to some degree personality traits.

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