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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

> skills decline at older ages only for those with below-average skill usage. White-collar and higher-educated workers with above-average usage show increasing skills even beyond their forties.

> Individuals with above-average skill usage at work and home on average never face a skill decline (at least until the limit of our data at age 65).

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A lot of hiring managers need to read this.

Right? ageism maybe should work in reverse!

I get that but growing older does mean less energy at the very least.

Does "energy" here mean "willing to work many more hours for no extra pay"?

Fair point. I would say no. Even getting paid extra for extra work.. I would still be at an energy deficit because our tethering of energy to the amount of money we make is somewhat artificial.. There are limits on how much control we have of ourselves no matter how much money someone gives us. To make things extreme for the sake of clarity.. Whether I am paid a billion dollars a day or one dollar a day, I know I will need at least eight hours of sleep either way (to operate at full capacity)...

Citation needed.

Don't say "it's obvious", because people would have said the same (mistaken) thing about cognitive decline before the submitted article.

There's another factor here: the older the worker the less you can abuse them.

Literally the two most important things from the article.

Get better at things so you don't have to worry about decline. That simple.

Its like a muscle - develop it early on and then you can easily keep it in shape without much effort until the day you die, without any noticeable decline (at least until like 70).

This is my biggest fear of retiring from programming and doing something else. At 55, I feel like programming keeps my brain elastic. I fear leaving that and going into slow decline.

I'm worried about this with my dad. He's recently retired from a career of hardcore engineering in the optical physics industry. Now in his mid 60s he's inside all the time playing baseball games on his iPad and watching TV shows with my mom. I've been trying to figure out ways to spark his curiosity again. Thought LLMs would blow his mind, and they would have 15 years ago... but it was just passing interest.

Yeah my mom plays solitaire all the time on her iPad and just gets fuzzier and fuzzier. She was doing sudoku and some thing that at least seemed to be a little challenging. But she seems to have stopped. At least she still gets regular exercise with my stepdad.

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