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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

He had a point. He just phrased it in a way that alienated a lot of people. But there is a certain energy and willingness to see things in unconventional ways that most people lose as they get older.

I also think the world is changing to value it more. Math, for example, is famously a young man's game. And I think the world is changing so that more things are like math.

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Paul Erdos was prolific into old age. I contend it is a lack of focus that prevents older people from innovating, not age:

"Paul Erdos never learned to tie his shoes, never drove a car or sliced his own piece of fruit"

http://teenink.com/Past/1999/10666.html

Math seems to becoming less of a young man's game. There is simply to much to learn now before you reach a field still ripe with unsolved problems. There still lots of said problems, they are just built on top of other things.

http://www.slate.com/id/2082960/

Math is hard. I have about as much formal education in math as I do in CS (about to finish undergrad as a double major). Yet I can pick up nearly any CS research paper and breeze through it, but my eyes will glaze over at 90% of math research.

Yes, math is hard and successful academics in the field are super smart. And yes, mathematical ability declines with age.

However, I don't see that math is really all that important for 99% of web 2.0 startups.

I don't think the OP meant specifically that math is important, just that the same energy that makes young people better at math also makes them better at startups.

Very few people are good at math. You need more than energy and enthusiasm to succeed in that field.

Anyway, older people bring critical skills to a startup such as creativity, which can improve over time as you try and observe all sorts of ideas.

I'm a CS major but by the time I'll graduate I'll have taken more math than CS courses (degree requirements are funny that way). I would tend to agree with you about the relative difficulty if CS and math but this could be partially a consequence of how it is taught. If some school was crazy enough to offer a "real" (see Dijkstra[1]) program that would compare more favorably.

But this sort of proves the original point. Since cs/programming has lower barriers to entry (cool new stuff is still "easy") there are many more opportunities for young people.

[1] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html

I don't understand the relevance of your point about CS curricula. My comparison was with respect to my ability to read research papers written by professors, not to do classwork at my current level. I'm observing that math papers are much more difficult to understand and inferring that the state of the art in math is more complex than the state of the art in computer science.

It was partially a tangent prompted by your comment. I meant "the stuff CS people do and think about" not just homework or research. Through whatever accidents of history, practical concerns, or being a young field, the stuff CS people do tends to be easier than the stuff math people do, but that doesn't necessarily need to be the case.

I think he meant smart as in that their more apt to know what is 'cool'. It's obviously being blown out of proportion though. A comparison is with music. In high school and college everyone knows the music scene and all of the up and coming bands. It's all around you and you can't avoid it. When you're a little older it's harder to stay on top of those new artists and underground musicians.

Unless I missed a subtlety he meant "smart" as in intelligent. He later clarified that one should never compromise intelligence for experience when hiring.

Intelligent along what dimension(s)? Or is he a believer in the g factor?

He didn't specify.

Notes: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dczgjp36_7c78dgn

Does it worry you when working on Arc? Do you think you could have done better when you were 25?

I think that open-ended creativity has little to do with math. Yes, most people get worse at math as they age, but some get better at open-ended creativity.

For most web 2.0 startups, I would say that creativity is more important than math.

As for the actual programming part, well many people can do that. It's not that big of a deal.

Point or no point, he sounds like an ass.

Yeah, but don't you think it's more important to care about people having points than people being asses? I'd certainly rather live in a place where everybody had a point but was an ass than where nobody was an ass but also had no points. (similarity to places real or imagined entirely coincidental)

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