As researchers age, they produce less disruptive work
nautil.us
nautil.us
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
The lack of patience from adults for learning the byzantine interfaces companies were making in the last quarter of the 20th century got generalized to a ridiculous degree.
So many people these days spend hours watching short-form videos spray endlessly from a screen while they stare dumbly at it. They aren't even picking which videos to watch, just letting the algorithm do it.
Every time I see someone doing that, I just absolutely cannot relate to what's going on in their head at all. I'm certainly not above watching some YouTube, but the complete mindlessness of it, they watch it goes on forever, and the utter stupidity of the videos. I feel like I'm watching zombies in an opium den.
But billions of people are doing that shit every day, so what do I know?
In many ways, TikTok is kinda like channel surfing. Watch a few seconds, next channel, watch a few seconds, next channel, oh this is interesting, sure I'll watch a "How It's Made" marathon.
I've been making the same comparison as well. As someone not watching the videos yet still hear the videos being played, the constant switching is very noticeable much like being the one in the room that didn't have the clicker in their hand. You're not in control of the constant switching which I think makes it even that much more annoying.
Rather than just parking on the marathon, choosing to turn it off and do something else entirely is still my preferred "old man yells at clouds" option.
As a teenager, I used to torrent content I liked and scoff at my parents generation for letting tv feed then slop :)
It's hard to understand why TikTok is addictive from the outside, precisely because if you look at the app over someone's shoulder you'll see their tailored content, not yours.
Give the algorithm a couple weeks and it WILL find the weird thing that gets you to check. Maybe you find someone restoring books relaxing, or like toy commercials from where you were a kid, or are attentive on news of potential pandemics out of fear. It will learn.
This is how TV broadcasts also work, though. You could even argue there's an algorithm behind TV broadcasts too - it's just a kinda poor human-run algorithm trying to maximize viewer numbers.
Unlike many people, I still often watch TV broadcasts to relax for exactly this reason - there's no decision fatigue since I don't need to choose what to watch. Usually there's only one channel with something that's even remotely interesting and it's kind of an obvious choice.
The trend towards personalization in media and software comes at the cost of a loss of a shared social experience we can use to relate to each other.
The other thing is watching the videos in public with the tinny speakers blaring. Judging by reactions on the trains, this is socially acceptable to most people now ???
I played Shadowrun. I am both disappointed but mostly glad it is not happening according to that game universe history! I do want cool cybereyes though...
Also solar parks are just the most ugly thing in the world. They must be banned.
IVF, gamete donation, surrogacy, gay families, various experiments with human embryos or artificial wombs, much or all of this is banned in many countries of the world mostly due to the "ick" factor. The smarter opponents tend to decorate their objections in the "we must be very, very careful" cloak, but if you dig deeper, you will find that it is indeed just a cloak in many cases and that the underlying root cause is "ick, this is against nature", and "really careful" means "erect impossibly high barriers by law".
This even isn't subject to polarization and seems to be shared across the political board.
Where I live, the religious population is under 10 per cent, but complete atheists will argue like this as well.
I suspect the "ick" factor is simply inherent here. Kids provoke instinctive protective/emotional reactions in a way that other phenomena don't.
For example, it is quite obvious that Trump faces a lot more popular backlash due to his suspected connections with Epstein than over his actual threats to Denmark/Greenland and war with Iran.
https://www.metlink.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/FAQ6_2.pd...
It's the total CO2 amount in atmosphere that determines radiative forcing.
The IPCC summarized the current scientific consensus about radiative forcing changes as follows: "Human-caused radiative forcing of 2.72 W/m2 in 2019 relative to 1750 has warmed the climate system. This warming is mainly due to increased GHG concentrations, partly reduced by cooling due to increased aerosol concentrations"
All high-income countries already trend down in emissions.
Global emissions are rising because poorer countries that were basically almost "no emission"/capita in the past are still catching up (but that catch-up is less steep than in the past because green energy is available from the get-go).
Conclusions would be: Emission reductions in rich countries need to be aaccelerated, and helping poor countries peak at a lower level would probably be prudent (but good luck selling such policies to alt-right voters).
"Renewable are not helping" is not a sensible conclusion.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
Conclusions would be: it's not that renewables are not helping, it's renewables are not helping enough. We need global emissions tax. The European Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is a step in the right direction, but still a very small step because it covers only production of few carbon-intensive goods imported to Europe.
I have to say that recently I’ve been coming to the opinion that making it pointless to perfect the craft of producing music and art is against the natural order of things.
I know I’m just old and the kids will figure out a way to bend and warp the new tools but I don’t think it’s for me any more.
Don't get me wrong. The world has generally become a better place, and I would not want to go back in time. But we are so far from where we could have been. I am actually more afraid that we will revert because the rule based world order that we has created stability (at least in the west) seem to be at risk.
> 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
> 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
> 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
My experience is rather that early in your life you get "imprinted" with specific values, and then you judge technology by how it fits these values:
For example, I was "imprinted" against surveillance since I was born in West Germany, and people were telling me what evil surveillance stuff the Stasi does in "the other Germany (GDR)". Also I deeply detested authorities (I was likely born this way), and thus got attracted to hacking.
Thus, for example:
I already heard about the internet early in my life (from magazines) - say, when I was 8 years old - but I actually saw how people organized stuff "offline" against what I would consider "how the world naturally works" (believe it or not).
Smartphones were invented when I was between 15 and 35, but I immediately saw them as surveillance bugs. The same holds for the advent of social networks.
On the other hand, 3D printing got mainstreamed later than when I was 35, but I immediately got in love with it, and couldn't wait the day until 3D printing got more reliable and I earned enough money to get a 3D printer, since 3D printers fit my values very well.
So, in my experience it is typically not about the year when something was invented, but rather about whether the invention is a good or bad fit for the values that you were shaped with in your early life.
Let's take music. I clearly grew up in an environment where I think I got a rather "acquired", high-brow taste in music.
While I, as of today, do see that some of this taste that I was imprinted with can be a little bit arbitrary, I would clearly say that nevertheless my taste in music is strongly influenced by whether it fits the "taste values" with which I was shaped early in my life, similarly to what I wrote in my previous post:
> So, in my experience it is typically not about the year when something was invented, but rather about whether the invention is a good or bad fit for the values that you were shaped with in your early life.
I used to be a "tech guy" (like most people here probably) and was excited about new technology. Now my main feeling when something disruptive (like AI currently) comes up is: "why the hell do people need to rock the boat".
The thing is, I'm perfectly happy living my life as I have been living so far, concentrating on doing stuff with my children and having fun. When the world changes, stuff I need to worry about it: is this going to affect my job in the future? What is the long term effect of exposing my children to this? Is the stuff I teach my children going to be relevant in the future after this disruption has happened?
I don't want to be forced to learn new stuff. I mean, I can learn new stuff occasionally for fun, but it's not fun if my life and salary depends on it. Fuck the tech bros trying to change everything up.
I think the issue is that learning the stuff you are supposed to learn is simply not fun and a drain on your time and mental energy. If you're young you may compensate this because you have a lot of time and fewer responsibilities.
Right now most of the weights are in the FFN neural nets, but I believe we can reformulate LLM's or distill them into a format where each token/character represents either a matrix or a geometric algebra multivector. If each weight becomes token/character associated, it means we could write mindless reaction speed games: have a 2D projection of token/word/concept multivector/matrix coordinates. Let the 2D projection smoothly evolve a grand tour through the space of projections, possibly only including new dimensions if user performance on the explored dimensions suffices. 95% of the tokens/words could be rendered at their correct positions, while say 5% is at their incorrect positions. So the user sees a subset of the character/word/tokens rendered, and since they are individually placed at a correct position 95% of the time, it allows a user to learn peripherally, the user just needs to click those tokens intentionally disturbed from their true positions. Consider the hypothetical scenario that eventually all coordinates are explored and hypothetically the user scores highly (perhaps 100% or 90%) then we could say that at least the high dimensional coordinates are properly uploaded. Now you could randomly render bigrams (the new matrix coordinates being the matrix product / the new multivector coordinates being the geometric product). Next we could hypothesize that with sufficient training the user can predict the correct position of bigrams (meaning the user brain is performing the same or similar computation). From this the likelihood could be computed, and so a user would start predicting the same next tokens the model would. It wouldn't be blind belief more like a user associating the claims with what the reaction speed game insinuates. Imagine having trained on random cyrillic characters and suddenly you understand the Greek ingredients on some food packaging. There is a lot of hypothesis here, but none of the steps seem impossible to me.
It would mean both kids and adults could sync up with what LLM's claim (without blindly believing in it, but when it helps predict a lot of things around you people may lean and trust more on it, so that danger is not entirely moot), and having an LLM acquaintance in your brain to consult.
3. is more like this: You've been through 2. so many times now that it is hard to get excited about new things anymore.
Enough time has passed that some of the things you've been excited for have failed or had negative consequences. You'll stick to the things that worked in 2. and are skeptical of things that have yet to prove themselves.
In your 3., things from 2. are accepted unconditionally despite failures, making 3. inherently irrational.
> You don't see no loud mouth thirty-year old motherfuckers
— Lieutenant Charles L. Wright
How was that guy SO creative and talented on that? Truly a treasure.
Anyone can recommend books/movies with a similar style?
If you are newcomer to a field you simply don't know what is difficult and what is not. So you have a more open mind.
See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuval_Ne'eman
This guy was a soldier for 15 years before he studied physics for 3 years and discovered SU(3) and quarks before Gell-Mann did.
So switching fields opens your mind for new discoveries. If you stay very long in the same field you're mind gets just used to all the unsolved problems.
It's well documented that as we age we tend to be more conservative, less open to new ideas and more risk adverse. That encompasses anything from work, hobbies, social relations and even politics.
There's also another major factor behind age. As we get older our responsibilities grow while our time and energy budget shrinks.
E.g. I have always wanted to start my own company, and now that I'm at the peak of my capabilities and in the strongest financial situation I've ever been I just don't feel I have the energy and resilience I would've had a decade ago, when I was younger and more naive.
Or he may have been wrong. I think it was Paul Feyerabend who showed that most paradigms (yes, including that one) of how science works are falsified by counterexamples in scientific history and practice.
We love to make a discovery seem like a triumph against evil and obstruction, and sometimes it happens, but sometimes it's just a discovery.
Disclosure: Old scientist.
Ancel Keys is known for really hating the "sugar is problematic" theory and sinking careers of younger nutritional scientists who dared touch it for decades.
Sen. Richard Shelby was a huge hater of the "orbital fuel depot" concept and it only started being developed further once he retired and didn't hold sway over the American cosmic sector anymore.
But every few years I learn a new technique, and I'm sure we're not done coming up with more.
So yes there is a solution, but do we, as humans, have the ability to come up with it, who knows. I would say it's unlikely.
Like we have formulas describing how gravity works. We can test these formulas by observing the motion of the planets and galaxies. Is this theory true? There's lots of evidence for it so it feels like it's gotta be pretty close to "the truth"
We also have formulas describing how elementary particles behave. These formulas have been tested to a very high degree of precision so it seems they've got to be close to the truth as well. But if you use both our formulas for gravitation and formulas for elementary particles you can derive a contradiction. So these two theories cannot simultaneously be true. There's got to be something wrong with them.
I suppose there's the possibility that at a certain point nature simply doesn't follow any laws and you can't possibly make sense of it.
What is the gravitational field of a particle in a superposition of two different locations? What about when the superposition collapses? Does the gravity field instantly change shape, faster than light?
The consensus right now is this is so hard to measure we’ll basically never know the answer from just observations. Maybe having a gravitational influence on something at all, collapses the superposition? Maybe if you put the particles in a large enough configuration it’s impossible to maintain superposition? Maybe there’s enough background noise in our particular universe to make such a measurement permanently impossible, and we get by on a technicality? Nobody knows.
This is a symptom of the problem of gravity/spacetime being a handled as a classical field, not really the problem itself. The electromagnetic field for example has this exact same problem, but it's handled by the electromagnetic field being quantized. The problem is that nobody is able to fully quantize gravity.
[1] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/07/do-we-need-theory-...
Also the claim "toward the tail end of Einstein’s life, he argued strenuously against the concepts undergirding the emerging field of quantum mechanics" downplays that Einstein was pivotal in emerging the field in the first place.
Indeed, its a pretty easy case to make the Einstein has more to do with QM as it currently exists than Bohr does. The major interesting work on QM after the 1960s or so is entirely dependent upon Einstein's work on QM and locality. The entire narrative in fact comes from Bohr's hissy fit after Einstein pointed out that QM is non-local and that seems very wrong.
(Article quote in question: "But toward the tail end of Einstein’s life, he argued strenuously against the concepts undergirding the emerging field of quantum mechanics, the ideas that are shaking up physics yet again and may lay bare even more of our universe’s mysteries.")
I'd really love to see some researches on scientists who NEVER marry/have kids against people who married and have kids.
Older people have influence, power, control to direct where resources are allocated.
No 25yo scientists has the werewithal or experience to challenge that until later in life.
It’s kind of like asking why old people have all the assets.
In today’s fast-paced scientific landscape, it’s crucial to recognize that innovation is not just about ideas — it’s about access, infrastructure, and thought leadership.
Einstein disrupted the status quo, but today’s emerging researchers must first navigate a robust ecosystem of grants, incentives, and legacy stakeholders before they can move the needle.
Food for thought.
/s
I suspect that sustained creativity may be a result of continuous exposure to new experiences and concepts (which younger people are naturally situated to encounter quite often), so I try to consistently add novelty to my life as I get older, specifically targeting things way outside my comfort zone or previous interests.
For example, I’ve always been sort of uneasy with flying, so I figured I would sign up for general aviation classes and learn to fly myself, which is something I never would have had the slightest inclination toward when I was younger. I ultimately didn’t go through with it, as while signing up, my wife strongly insisted that I find a different form of “novelty” to pursue, but I think it decently illustrates what I was attempting to accomplish.
Some more mundane examples include listening to music that I don’t enjoy, completely mixing up how I dress after decades of wearing the same thing, reading books opposite my interests, taking classes in fields different than what my degree was in, and trying to constantly meet people who are very different from myself.
I guess we’ll see if this has any effect or not.
It seems to me that being young and stupid has the advantage of making people hungry for success damn the consequences in a way that is more subdued as we age. This partly is a thing of biology, I think, and partly a thing of understanding consequence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
And of course if you haven't read that book, it's insightful and easy
The photoelectric effect definitely was more solid to give out the prize on.
Saying this I think the Nobel prize is becoming less relevant, especially as nowadays one person is rarely the reason advancements are made.
It seems appropriate to also recognize that it's simply tiring to be to be in constant opposition to most of the social environment, and most people can't keep doing it at undiminished intensity for a full lifetime.
On the other hand, there was lot of disruptive work did survive, or we can call them “hallucinations”.
Hindsight is 20/20.
Just watch Veritasium[1] take on this claim. Eistein claimed that QM in Copenhagen interpretation is non-local. Bohr claimed he proved Einstein wrong. And then came Bell and ruled out local hidden variables, proving the QM is non-local, at least in Copenhagen interpretation. Pity neither Einstein nor Bohr lived to that moment, so we can't know what they would say on that.
But in any case Einstein was right all the time.
Veritasium tries to uncover all the story of the myth of old demented Einstein who was unable to accept QM. And it seems to be a very unfair myth. They say "the history is written by victors" (in this case by Bohr), and I tend to agree.
> Did Einstein ever say that QM is non local, and therefore it is wrong?
Well, kinda, but not exactly. He said that Copenhagen interpretation of QM is non-local. Not QM itself, Veritasium cites some Einstein's letter to Bohr where Einstein explicitly accepts the math of QM, because it works, but opposes "spooky action at distance". Should we interpret it as Einstein claimed that QM is wrong? I'm not entirely sure, he hoped that if they fixed that non-locality thing of QM, they will be able to bridge QM and GR. (Probably, his previous experience of fixing non-locality of Newton's gravity led to this prediction.)
You see, Einstein had one wrong presumption. He thought that if QM non-local then it would lead to contradictions. But it turned out that it doesn't lead to contradictions: a measurement and a wave-function collapse lead to non-local consequences, but they cannot be used to transfer information. So no contradictions. Despite this wrong presumption, I didn't hear Einstein saying QM is wrong, he was pretty careful about what he said, and you'll probably can't catch him on a single wrong claim. He pointed to non-locality and said "it smells". He proposed hidden variables as an alternative removing the smell. It is all. None of these claims were wrong.
I believe he was seeking some thought experiment that can show contradictions, but he failed. But he had found experiments that can show non-locality without any doubt.
> maybe focusing on what their thoughts about locality were could be missing the forest for the tree.
I don't think so. It fits perfectly. Einstein spent ~10 years fighting gravity, mostly due to the reason of non-locality of Newton's gravity. Non-local gravity couldn't work with relativity, it leads to contradictions. Einstein fought non-locality for 10 years, and it fits perfectly that he noticed non-locality in quantum-mechanics instantly, when others didn't (it was even not because Einstein was a genius, he was just primed to non-locality and highly sensitive to it). It fits perfectly that Einstein was very concerned by it and sought ways around it.
For example he proposed hidden variables as a way around it. Just think about it: his hidden variables didn't try to make quantum mechanics into a deterministic theory, values of hidden variables meant to be non-deterministic. Eistein tried to make QM local, by fixing hidden variables way before "wave-function collapse".
At the same time your claim that Einstein was against non-deterministic nature of QM, doesn't fit facts, AND it fits perfectly with people not really understanding what Einstein think is wrong with QM. Bohr had written an obscurantist's answer to EPR paper, in which he claimed that he won the dispute, but I'm not sure there was at least one person who really understood how. This smog of war naturally leads to people hypothesizing and coalescing to some easily understandable hypothesis. And hypotheses of Einstein's aversion to non-determinism is an easily understandable hypothesis.
So my (probabilistic) judgement is: the story told by Veritasium is highly probable. It relies on some sample set of facts. The sample can be non-representative, but the whole story fits in a way that I don't believe anyone can fit artificially, even if they tried really hard.
Note: the actual title of the article is "Is This Why Science Advances One Funeral at a Time?" and was on the front page recently.
Perhaps more important is simple mental capability. This peaks around the age 25-35. I look back at some of the research I did around age 30, and - wow. Now, at age 60+, there is absolutely no chance that I could duplicate that level of sheer concentration and achievement.
A lot of time is lost in maintenance and overhead. Pundits and fundraisers don’t do research.
The disruptive part of the startup ecosystem kinda runs on that, right?
This is probably why old people in highly competative fields take HRT, Dopamine Agonists, Stimulants or Psychedelics
However, what if they are grad students, or the best of the best product people/devs, which is what YC tries to harvest?
That improves the chances of the naive finding some actual disruption, does it not?
I would agree with this. Every high school valedictorian and college president always say the same thing in their commencement speeches: "Go out and change the world! The future is now, YOU ARE THE FUTURE!!"
And then you go dropped into the real world all bright eyed and bushy tailed. Within a few years, you either find your path, or realize corporate America is a total meat grinder and you become a soulless, scarred, hardened person. Or you somehow are able to navigate a lane for a career and realize where you can be happy without rocking the boat.
Now in my late 40's, I'm of the same mind. Stick to your lane, take your paycheck and find happiness and fulfillment outside of my 9-5.
So maybe this tells you more about the funders and their vision than it does about the researchers and their vision?
It’s like being a billionaire; you stop getting “no, that’s stupid” feedback and it rots your brain.
Does not mean you have well working models outside these. Or that those same models will work well in entirely distinct contexes.