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Comment by huijzer | Hacker News Reader

Magnus Carlsen (the multiple times chess world champion) talked about this in his recent Joe Rogan podcast. He said he passed his chess peak already now at 34. He now knows more, but when he was younger he could win via brute mental power.

> Is it reasonable to assume that the natural decline in cognitive performance over time is offset by the gains in experience and expertise?

So according to Carlsen, for chess the answer is no.

I personally also suspect the answer for programming is the same. Most, if not all, of the hotshot programmers we know became famous in their early 20s. Torvalds started writing Linux at 21. Carmack was 22 when Doom was released. Many of the most famous AI researchers were in their early 20s when doing the most groundbreaking work. Einstein's miracle year by the way was also when he was 26.

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> He said he passed his chess peak already now at 34. He now knows more, but when he was younger he could win via brute mental power.

The famous anti-case for this is J.R.R Tolkien started writing Lord of the Rings when he was about 45.

Writing is not programming but they are not that dissimilar. Especially in this context.

What I've learned over the years is life is actually not fair and everyone is different. You can be razer sharp and reasonably healthy at 83 or be in great shape and die of a brain aneurism at 12 with no warning.

Basically don't let studies or other people's results persuade you into not starting or giving up.

Creative writing is tremendously different from coding, imo.

> Creative writing is tremendously different from coding, imo.

I've had a different experience.

IMO there's a huge overlap in skills when writing, coding, making videos and playing guitar.

They all boil down to the idea of getting something out of your head and then refining it until you know when to stop refining based on whatever criteria you're optimizing for at the time.

This is based on writing over a million words and making hundreds of videos over 10 years on my blog and programming for ~20 years while casually playing the guitar for about as long.

What aspects make them feel different for you?

People in their early 20s are also much less likely to have other responsibilities "intruding" into their headspace. It's a lot easier to be monomaniacal when you don't (for example) have kids yet.

I know. That's the common argument, but I don't think that's it. See the argument I made in the previous comment. As I wrote in that comment, Magnus thinks his brain was better when he was younger. It probably doesn't help to have responsibilities like children, but I don't think that explain everything. There are also many people without children for example. And if you don't have children then studying full time should take as much if not more time than a simple job.

Also, Hans Albert Einstein was born during Einstein's miracle year.

> Also, Hans Albert Einstein was born during Einstein's miracle year.

This was in an era when fathers had little to do with childcare. I don’t know about Einstein’s specific situation, but even 40 years ago almost half of fathers had never changed a diaper.

I listened to Magnus and I took that quite differently.

I took that he said that others have caught up and he is just not motivated to do the type of studying to improve even further at this point.

There is a process we don't really have a name for that was best summed up by the boxer Marvin Hagler:

“It's tough to get out of bed to do roadwork at 5am when you've been sleeping in silk pajamas”

The demotivation of success. Of course, that is also going to correlate with age and be very hard to disentangle. At the same time testosterone levels will be past peak, adding another variable in the mix. Plus actual mental acuity past peak.

In other words, as someone pushing 50. Getting old kind of sucks systemically.

Very little of my work needs breakthroughs or inventions. Nothing new under the sun, as the Romans said. So, this mental peak is less important than being focused and efficient for me.

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