It's not just us: Other animals change their social habits in old age
knowablemagazine.org
knowablemagazine.org
For an extreme example, look at professional athletes. Drew Brees still had the desire and drive to play, but his right shoulder had simply given out. The final result of an injury over a decade ago. He cannot throw right handed anymore.
A lot of these guys require knee replacements after they retire. Permanently disfigured fingers and toes. Etc.
And we all go through a version of that.
There's a reason painkillers are such a nefarious addiction; chronic pain happens to everyone eventually and has a profound impact on quality of life.
If I just got laid by a 10/10 hottie, I'd probably not care much about my kid intentionally dropping food on the ground.
If I just had a stomach issue that has me tired, out of breath, and mentally struggling, my kid dropping food makes me angry.
Its really easy to say 'let it go', 'be a stoic'. But its much harder when you are in so much physical pain, you can't even work on your life's goals.
Ppl usually getting knee replacements are couch potatoes. Its a not "wear and tear" disease like a lot of ppl belive it to be.
https://footballplayershealth.harvard.edu/for-former-players...
Just because there are more of the "general population" doesn't mean that the subset that are "professional athlete" isn't doing it at a higher percentage.
And there are other, non-extreme, things that also wreck the body. Working in the trades: plumbers, electricians, HVAC, construction, etc. will often leave you with bad backs and bad joints.
And yes, living your life at the extremes is going to have extreme effects on your body. Sedentary is the other extreme of professional athlete.
But even still, as things hurt more, we will be more cautious about endangering ourselves. Or even wondering if we are capable. If I can't walk without a limp, I'm sure as hell not running from danger. That's not cortisol driving our behavior, that's our behavior driving our cortisol.
Regarding your comment on cortisol. Plausibly the relationship between cortisol and behaviour here is bi-directional, as is common with hormones. High testosterone influences me to go to the gym and my workout influences my testosterone, etc.
Mind you, I wasn't completely sedentary before, but I guess that Garmin made me move about 40 per cent more.
I always read that older ppl get happier as they age
From the study linked (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36848104/):
>Yet, longitudinal findings vary across younger, middle-aged, and older adults. Psychological distress decreases over time among younger adults (although only until age 33 for weekly reports), remains stable in midlife, and is stable (monthly) or slightly increases (daily and weekly) among older adults. For negative affect, levels decrease over time for younger and middle-aged adults, and only increase for the oldest adults for daily and monthly affect
tl;dr self actualization brings happiness
I know what I'm good at of the things I've tried, but there's so much I haven't tried.
I'm pretty sure there are things I'd be better at than what I do, but I'm good enough at what I do to earn a pretty good living so that is what I do. I also realize that I'm in a field where even mediocre ability is outlandishly well rewarded, and I try to keep that in mind. There are a lot of people working harder than I do and better and what they do than I am but who are earning a lot less.
I've also accepted that I'll never be able to try everything, and there are some roads I didn't take when I had the chance that are now permanently closed off.
If that happens, then in that 30 year period.. anything could happen! More age extension tech, perhaps! Or copying minds to silicon. And if we get that, then it gives time to figure out the reverse.
We're so close to potential immortality. It's as if we're in a desert and we smell water. Is it a mirage, or a lake??
With the exception of reduced risk acceptance, my anecdotal experience is that a generalized sense of anxiety seems more present in people a few years younger more than older. I'd guess that if surveyed on different causes or topics of anxiety, you'd see a few spikes in certain predictable areas up to about age ~42 maybe, with a more significant gap between there and ~70
If you have a life of lived experiences it can be risky to continue to collect them when you’re less physically fit.
-Sleep -Nutrition -Exercise -Relationships
> "This [lack of movement] indicates there might be some kind of competitive exclusion going on: Perhaps more energetic, younger deer with offspring to feed are colonizing the best grazing patches."
sounds like ageism in the job market (joking).
i think there is always a simple thing behind motivation. hunger, violence, greed...humans just good at hiding the naked truth.
The sentiment variety on HN is, however, not so diverse.
We are a social species so we pay more attention to one another. We are also pattern-seekers. Combine these traits and we have humans seeing magnified differences in other humans.
I'm skeptical that we are less diverse than other species. In a herd in nature, exposed to the wild, exposed to predators and food scarcity, there is not much room for diversity: you must be able to survive. In human society, on the other hand, we live in an artificial environment insulated from those risks, and where any number of skills are sufficient for survival: you can be funny, musical, logical, artistic, patient and caring, mathematical, strong, good at fighting etc.
So it depends how you define "diversity". I can see how from your view (range of life choices) humans today are more diverse than most species. However, if you go back not so long ago, there are species of ants with more worker roles (40+)than your typical midieval village.
Our randomness might actually be adaptive given the complexity of our societies. There is nothing close among other animals.
Those survival risk were and in some places still are present, stronger would simply have higher survival chances compared to weaker. Those skills you list wouldnt matter that much 4000 years ago in most cases, not on survival level.
If that were true, the modern world centered around consumerism wouldn't exist. We wouldn't have the obesity epidemic, environmental degradation or the genocide of dozens of native nations. Feels like short-term thinking where it's at.
our very emotions, instead of being some ineffable magical thing, can be described as monomaniacal neural nets trained via a genetic algorithm to optimise for survival and reproduction based on a dataset from the palaeolithic and earlier. greed, jealousy, lust, even the beatified versions like love and grief, are explainable this way.
people don't like it when you explain that sort of thing though. they prefer to believe it's all magical.
If you haven't looked into it already I recommend Blindsight by Peter Watts followed by the short story The Colonel and Echopraxia.
They talk a lot about human consciousness and it's importance or lack thereof. With an actually original and scary alien contact (related to the topic at hand), scary non cringe hard scify vampires (also related), in my opinion really good prose and in general high density of interesting concepts per page. With bonus real life papers at the end that extrapolated could explain the ideas presented in the books.
I'm gonna stop because I'm far past the point that Watts should pay me ad money.
It's licenced under Creative Commons. You can get it for free here (epub link at the top or read it straight from the page): https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
I would tell you to donate/buy it if you like it but maybe if he feels the pressure in his bank account he finally writes the next one. jk please pay him, he deserves it.
And It's been a year since I read it and I still think about it often. I have some backlog I wanna go through first but I feel a reread is due already.
All you’re doing is forcing people to choose something other than magic. You could name almost anything and they’d have to choose it over magic since magic doesn’t exist.
This is not convincing at all.
As far as I can tell humans are already able to survive and reproduce to the limits of what the physical human form is capable of. Optimization can only optimize so much. Where do you see "paleolithic" emotions being a limiting factor that leaves room for further optimization? What "modern" emotions do you envision to improve on those metrics?
Human emotions do not appear to be cohesive from person to person, so it seems the generic algorithm is still doing its thing, but if the mutations are no more effective than the "paleolithic" emotions with respect to survivability and reproduction, there isn't much evolutionary pressure to see them become dominant.
Things like accepting a surgeon and anesthesiologist putting us into suspended animation and opening our hearts we have learned to not freak out about. Or that a single person could nuke the entire planet including our families and we go about our lives. I propose those are recent learned emotional responses. Nevethertheless, it still seems too slow to compare it to a neural net.
So, if we have reached the limits of survivability and reproducibility, only further hindered by other biological processes, what pressure on the generic algorithm would there be to see new traits start to become dominant? If you effectively stop training the NN, you wouldn't expect inference to change.
Perhaps the advent of modern contraception will eventually reveal some mutation that is advantageous enough to overcome the modern setback we've seen in reproduction, bringing to light a different emotion/set of emotions that become dominant. But, realistically, we're only talking a few generations of training on that change to the state of the universe. That's nothing for a genetic algorithm. GA-based training methods are not very efficient with respect to training speed even on computers, and worse in real life when a single generation takes ~30 years to spawn the next.
does that mean you believe the Coelacanths should have evolved feet by now?
evolution does not work that way. usually new structures are laid out on top, new behaviours come about that can override older ones at certain times and at other times, "instinct" takes over, and an old program is running again.