[HN Gopher] Some mental abilities seem to improve as we get older
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Some mental abilities seem to improve as we get older
Author : StartupSven
Score : 104 points
Date : 2021-08-22 07:28 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencealert.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencealert.com)
| nine_zeros wrote:
| I agree with a lot of this. There is a slowdown in my reaction
| speed to say an incident or a bug or a feature design.
|
| But I have so much knowledge and context built up already that
| when I do respond, the execution is much better and leads to
| success (success == incident fixed, bug fixed and design fully
| implemented/executed and makes money).
|
| I genuinely think that companies who don't hire older engineers
| do themselves a disservice. No wonder only FAANGs sustain
| themselves over decades, not the one-hit wonders from silicon
| valley.
| DeadBeatDad wrote:
| I've always wondered: how much of time-consuming mental tasks
| will I have automated and abstracted away via computers in my
| later years, since I already try to automate away everything
| these days (I'm 45 with a bad case of RSI and arthritic pain). I
| even wrote a tool to automatically generate blogposts and churn
| out content on-demand. It's trained on the content of 100 blogs
| and pulls in content from Wikipedia to sound authoritative.
|
| It makes me wonder: how much automation is too much automation?
| Will it be the case that I turn on my PC, login, then it just
| automatically comments on Hackernews, picks the best news from
| Slashdot for me to read, automatically updates my blog, etc I
| would miss the manual effort and mental tasking of all that. Is
| automating everything necessarily bad or good?
| Jensson wrote:
| My theory of the brain is that it has to choose between spending
| energy on learning or executing, and that we start out heavily
| favouring learning as kids and then it shifts to execution as we
| age. Also ADHD would be people who doesn't properly make that
| shift and never stops learning, which sounds good but it isn't
| very valuable if you don't have any brain power left to execute.
|
| Another thing, ADHD shows that this isn't really a choice, your
| brain will determine how to allocate between learning and
| execution without asking you.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Spirit/will has been demonstrated to possess the necessary
| capability to overrule the brain. It's a choice. Maybe not an
| easy one to make, but a choice nontheless.
| WJW wrote:
| There are some things controlled by your nervous system that
| you can't override though, like your digestive system and
| your heartbeat. Influence yes, but to an extremely limited
| degree. It seems very likely to me that there are some
| processes in the mind as well that cannot be consciously
| overridden.
| jrootabega wrote:
| I, completely unscientifically, think about it like your
| brain's language becoming more statically typed as you mature
| and have reached the point where your understanding of the
| world is as good as it ever needs to be, evolutionarily
| speaking. But there are aspects of older life where this is a
| disadvantage, and there are probably circumstances where it is
| mostly a disadvantage.
| HPsquared wrote:
| More and more things are defined and associated in terms of
| other things already known (a higher level of abstraction),
| compared to youth where everything runs closer to the metal.
| jrootabega wrote:
| Makes sense. You probably also spend less energy observing
| or caring about the consequences of your decisions the more
| "things already known" you used to decide.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| I sometimes return to a video game that I played when I was
| younger and that I remember being difficult. This will be a game
| that I haven't touched in years. And then, yes, I will be rusty
| at first. But pretty quickly, it more than comes back to me: I
| find that it is now _easier_ than I remember it being many years
| ago. It 's like I am now on some new learning curve with a higher
| plateau. And, the striking thing is that this must entirely be
| transfer learning, from other things I've done in the intervening
| years.
| telside wrote:
| My 20 year old self was much better at making fast, bad
| decisions. Not taking the time to think through the higher order
| effects of those decisions. That 20 year old self lacks all the
| MOOCs I have taken, all the life and professional experience,
| 300+ non-fiction books.
|
| I think at 20 I would have been a better test taker if we both
| started a college class right now but that is about it. I am way
| "smarter" or "more intelligent" though at 54 vs that 20 year old
| self. It isn't even close.
|
| IMO much is because we are blind to ET Jaynes Mind Projection
| Fallacy in this area. We think of "intelligence" as a physical
| property like mass that gets weaker with age like muscles or
| bones. It is just such a given in our thinking and language that
| we can't help it.
| [deleted]
| inglor_cz wrote:
| At 43, I suspect I am much better at making slow, bad
| decisions.
|
| Wisdom, wisdom, where art thou?
| politelemon wrote:
| My analysis paralysis prevents me from any kind of decision
| making. Perhaps it's for the better!
| mgh2 wrote:
| "Think fast, slow" anyone?
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Well duh. What mental abilities only stay the same or degrade
| since birth?
|
| Our whole species is centered around the concept of learning, a
| more efficient mechanism for knowledge transfer than genetics,
| and the delivery of babies so premature they are helpless and
| useless for years.
| datameta wrote:
| Some "duh" things get proven true and some get proven untrue.
| That's science.
| a9h74j wrote:
| The OP reports something closer to a lab study, on the scale of
| things.
|
| In the following video, a Stanford professor studying aging
| suggests young people are faster at integrating a lot of quickly
| incoming information to the point of making decisions on it, but
| older people are emotionally more secure and can even make
| younger people more productive if part of the group.
|
| https://www.facebook.com/onemindorg/videos/567283167605557/
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