Perceived Age | Hacker News Reader

Perceived Age

suryad.com

90 pointssdan26 comments

I know this is slightly off-topic, but the study referenced for the first graph [1] seems absurdly badly designed. Subjects were divided into arbitrary age groups, but all subjects were given the same task, so why divide at all? Why not give a scatter plot of age vs. perceived seconds? It's so unnecessary -- it's basically just to get an ANOVA -- that it makes me think it is p-hacking to try to find significance rather than actually measuring anything of interest.

[1] https://www.scielo.br/j/anp/a/d6SvJK5tM6kCFPTmpVj5pSz/?forma...

The `Make the world sparkle again` episode of the podcast Hidden Brain podcast (https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/making-the-world-sparkle-aga...) talks about the same topic. They interview Tail Sharot a neuroscientist and author of the ` Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There` book.

Similar advice, learn new things, take smaller (3 dayish) but more frequent vacation instead of longer ones, change your environment.

Chronic stress (or cortisol?) also seems a factor in the perception of time, and so does stimulants.

Saw just moments a go a thread on the subreddit for cutting down caffeine people observing that time seems to pass slower[1]. It's one of several[2][3]. There are also scientific studies to the effect[4] Having recently cut down myself, I share the observation.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/decaf/comments/1eo95yk/days_are_slo...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/decaf/comments/ya8yvn/does_caffeine...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/decaf/comments/wawfx5/how_does_quit...

[4] Arushanyan, E.B., Baida, O.A., Mastyagin, S.S. et al. Influence of Caffeine on the Subjective Perception of Time by Healthy Subjects in Dependence on Various Factors. Human Physiology 29, 433–436 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024973305920

My brother told me a theory many years ago that time perception is based on the number of memories we have and how they're stored.

Imagine your brain being like a filing cabinet, which is empty to start with. Memories are stored as folders with as much space between them as possible. Time perception is created by the distance between memories. So the more memories you have, the faster time seems to have passed and be passing.

No research or anything to back it up, just fun for me to think about.

I always thought the less memories you have the faster time has passed. The older you get the less new events are stored in your memory and therfor you have large gaps of nothing. A year has passed without much. As a teenager you have new experiences every day and therefor time feels slower.

"Large gaps of nothing"? Haha 8-)

You have obviously not experienced being "older" yet. I'm 64 and continuing to accumulate new memories and experiences everyday.

And yes, a year seems like a month from middle age. So, just because you've reached the "old age" of 40yo, you've really just barely started middle age.

It's amazing how millennial-centric the content is at HN.

This also highlights why marketing is so focused on youth (which in the modern world runs until ~40yo). Lack of extended experience makes decision making irrational and able to be emotionally swayed.

It's pretty clear to me (anecdotally) that the reason time seems to pass more quickly with age is because of the shrinking percentage of a person's total life that each new year represents.

My totally unscientific model is that memories are run length encoded, so the monotonous periods' length is compressed, whereas if they are more diverse, the more info you have, so it needs an expanded storage which is proportional to the perceived time elapsed.

This is my pet theory too. Routine home-work-home days pass by without much that makes them memorable, but there are weeks where so much happens they feel endless. It feels like we cram similar days in the same place as if memory space was precious.

My understanding is that this is how it works. When you are younger, everything is novel, and therefore your brain is making and timestamping more memories. We therefore have a high resolution timescale of memories.

As we age, we have less and less novelty. We learn less, have fewer first time experiences. Therefore, we lose resolution to our timescale as weeks, months, and for some, even years blend together.

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann is basically a fantastic account of this phenomenon.

Oddly around 49 I became highly adaptable and became quite willing to put myself in another's hands, radically change the way I do anything at all, etc. It was associated with something that I realized, later, was a mental health crisis.

After things came to a head, I retreated. One day I read something I'd read many times and not really understood (something I've experienced often when doing research to help friends who were troubled by never got a proper psychodiagnosis) and I got it and finally understood how I was different from other people and why things went the way they have for me.

Funny though the super flexibility came back (without the delusions) and today I find reinvention easier than I ever did. Now I'm the kind of guy who has an argument with his RSS reader over why soccer sucks compared to the NFL and then I start thinking about feature selection and an ontology of sports articles and then next thing I know I am one of those people who gets up at 9AM on a Saturday to watch the Premier league, goes to MLS games, roots for the Red Bulls, etc.

That particular result can be explained without any difference in perception.

If you ask people to count at a certain speed, you measure a skill. One that can be mastered at any age. Of course unprepared participants of younger age are better prepared to tell the difference between 90 and 120 seconds. Their reward for being good at that is much higher. They are much more likely to take a short run and catch the train anyway.

Split the participants into groups where they carry their watch (wrist, pocket, none) and you can "prove" that certain clocks have the power to create local time dilation.

This effect is very interesting.

Veritasium covered this effect in a video [1] for the interested.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIx2N-viNwY (2016)

the key reason why half the life ends around 23+ is children.

This is a nice piece. But as a random dutch guy, going to the authors about page, seeing that this 22 year old kid has started multiple companies, ai stuff with 500k users, and is writing about all these Large Life Lessons, (and seeing that he grew up in cupertino)... sometimes it realy feels like hackernews is a portal to a completely different world, one that parodies itself occasionally. (Im pretty jealous too of course, wish i had been a bit more productive when i was younger, and i especially wish i had written more)

Why do you wish you had written more? To have a window into your past self?

You cannot be an influencer unless you write, create videos or podcasts.

Because I feel like Ive changed a lot I suppose, and I feel that even if I had written slightly pretentious blogposts that Id roll my eyes at now, it would be nice to slightly reexperience what i was like back then. I sometimes think the only way you ever get to see yourself as other people see you is to look at the way you were a long while ago.

> sometimes it realy feels like hackernews is a portal to a completely different world

HN is very silicon-valley centered, and SV itself is a fairly isolated and unique world.

Keep in mind that this is likely survivorship bias; for every 22 year old that did all that, there's millions that didn't. This kid is the 0.001% or less, and it's unreasonable for anyone to feel like they missed out. I get it though, it's guilt or the pang of missed opportunity, "if only I worked harder", "if only I wasn't so lazy at the time", but honestly... it's fine. Be glad where you are. Because for every one 22 year old that achieved all that, there's millions that never got that old, millions that ended up in poverty, millions that ended up worse off than you, etc.

Here's something I hadn't thought of: there's been 10–12 thousand generations of people, stretching back ~250000 years. And, yet, you could (in theory) meet ~7% of all humans who've ever been alive right now.

Comparing yourself to extreme outliers that had all the ability, persistence, support and an amount of luck that out dwarfs all of that is a recipe for some real misery.

As long as you're alive you're able to go out and do what you can and work towards what you want. Croc made McDonalds into a franchise practically as he was about to retire after a life of nothing notable at all. And well, peaking too early comes with its own psychological torture, how do you live knowing that you'll never do anything as impressive as you did when you were like 16?

Maybe in 10 years from now, noone would die anymore. Plenty of time to get back to where you wanted to be :)

You might be impressed by his achievements, but you may also feel some comfort in knowing that this random poster finds those inflated statistics a bit off-putting.

I prefer a modest introduction followed by a pleasant surprise, but that's probably not the best way to become a billionaire.

I'm a modest guy.

I would be happy being a hundred-millionaire.

I think when you dig into people's self-promotion pitches you often find they're less impressive than they initially appear, so taking them at face value might be bad for your morale.

I have no problem with a 22 year old blowing their own trumpet to get along in the world, but as an example from that bio, the AI generated news site with 4m views is effectively just a load of SEO spam so is going to get a lot of views in 5 years. It has 2 linked articles about it. I can't read one, but the other is completely trashing it both as a concept and in its execution. If I'd made it at 22, I'd probably be pleased enough to put it on my bio of course.

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