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Comment by temp9251 | Hacker News Reader

I'm 20 now, and I think I'm smart. When I was 15 I did as well, but now I think I was pretty stupid at the time.

No doubt the pattern will continue at 25.

Related – What Mark Twain Didn’t Say:

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/10/10/twain-father/

I hated most literature when I was 18, then magically fell in love with the same novels I hated when I was 24. Still, there is more nuance I can pick up now at 30 with more study of history. If you haven't read the Iliad and a majority of the Bible, then you simply can't understand most of Western literature and those things take time.

It's interesting to see that this is a universal experience. School gave me literature before I was able to appreciate it, and it nearly turned me off to the taste.

my 15-22 year-old selves would never forgive me for the types of music I occasionally enjoy to listen to, now.

The “Knowledge Maps” used by sites like Kahn Academy [1] strike me as immensely helpful in deciding what to teach someone next, given what they've already learned.

I think it would be cool to replace the one-size-fits-all required reading assignments with something more tailored. Some way of answering the question, “what books(s) is this person likely to get the most insight from at this point in their education?”

[1] https://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard

This pattern continues to at the very least 29.

That's about when it stops. Once you hit 30, it's all about having enough information to regret everything you ever did in life.

Then you just wait to die. Why bother trying to save this mess now?

> That's about when it stops. Once you hit 30, it's all about having enough information to regret everything you ever did in life.

The NSA is on the case! ;)

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