[HN Gopher] Perceived Age
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       Perceived Age
        
       Author : sdan
       Score  : 58 points
       Date   : 2024-08-09 17:46 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (suryad.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (suryad.com)
        
       | andrewla wrote:
       | I know this is slightly off-topic, but the study referenced for
       | the first graph [1] seems absurdly badly designed. Subjects were
       | divided into arbitrary age groups, but all subjects were given
       | the same task, so why divide at all? Why not give a scatter plot
       | of age vs. perceived seconds? It's so unnecessary -- it's
       | basically just to get an ANOVA -- that it makes me think it is
       | p-hacking to try to find significance rather than actually
       | measuring anything of interest.
       | 
       | [1]
       | https://www.scielo.br/j/anp/a/d6SvJK5tM6kCFPTmpVj5pSz/?forma...
        
       | Fraterkes wrote:
       | This is a nice piece. But as a random dutch guy, going to the
       | authors about page, seeing that this 22 year old kid has started
       | multiple companies, ai stuff with 500k users, and is writing
       | about all these Large Life Lessons, (and seeing that he grew up
       | in cupertino)... sometimes it realy feels like hackernews is a
       | portal to a completely different world, one that parodies itself
       | occasionally. (Im pretty jealous too of course, wish i had been a
       | bit more productive when i was younger, and i especially wish i
       | had written more)
        
         | johnmaguire wrote:
         | Why do you wish you had written more? To have a window into
         | your past self?
        
           | warkdarrior wrote:
           | You cannot be an influencer unless you write, create videos
           | or podcasts.
        
           | Fraterkes wrote:
           | Because I feel like Ive changed a lot I suppose, and I feel
           | that even if I had written slightly pretentious blogposts
           | that Id roll my eyes at now, it would be nice to slightly
           | reexperience what i was like back then. I sometimes think the
           | only way you ever get to see yourself as other people see you
           | is to look at the way you were a long while ago.
        
         | JohnFen wrote:
         | > sometimes it realy feels like hackernews is a portal to a
         | completely different world
         | 
         | HN is very silicon-valley centered, and SV itself is a fairly
         | isolated and unique world.
        
         | Cthulhu_ wrote:
         | Keep in mind that this is likely survivorship bias; for every
         | 22 year old that did all that, there's millions that didn't.
         | This kid is the 0.001% or less, and it's unreasonable for
         | anyone to feel like they missed out. I get it though, it's
         | guilt or the pang of missed opportunity, "if only I worked
         | harder", "if only I wasn't so lazy at the time", but
         | honestly... it's fine. Be glad where you are. Because for every
         | one 22 year old that achieved all that, there's millions that
         | never got that old, millions that ended up in poverty, millions
         | that ended up worse off than you, etc.
        
           | thechao wrote:
           | Here's something I hadn't thought of: there's been 10-12
           | thousand generations of people, stretching back ~250000
           | years. And, yet, you could (in theory) meet ~7% of all humans
           | who've ever been alive _right now_.
        
         | moffkalast wrote:
         | Comparing yourself to extreme outliers that had all the
         | ability, persistence, support and an amount of luck that out
         | dwarfs all of that is a recipe for some real misery.
         | 
         | As long as you're alive you're able to go out and do what you
         | can and work towards what you want. Croc made McDonalds into a
         | franchise practically as he was about to retire after a life of
         | nothing notable at all. And well, peaking too early comes with
         | its own psychological torture, how do you live knowing that
         | you'll never do anything as impressive as you did when you were
         | like 16?
        
         | holoduke wrote:
         | Maybe in 10 years from now, noone would die anymore. Plenty of
         | time to get back to where you wanted to be :)
        
         | smokel wrote:
         | You might be impressed by his achievements, but you may also
         | feel some comfort in knowing that this random poster finds
         | those inflated statistics a bit off-putting.
         | 
         | I prefer a modest introduction followed by a pleasant surprise,
         | but that's probably not the best way to become a billionaire.
        
       | jackbravo wrote:
       | The `Make the world sparkle again` episode of the podcast Hidden
       | Brain podcast (https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/making-the-world-
       | sparkle-aga...) talks about the same topic. They interview Tail
       | Sharot a neuroscientist and author of the ` Look Again: The Power
       | of Noticing What Was Always There` book.
       | 
       | Similar advice, learn new things, take smaller (3 dayish) but
       | more frequent vacation instead of longer ones, change your
       | environment.
        
       | PaulHoule wrote:
       | Oddly around 49 I became highly adaptable and became quite
       | willing to put myself in another's hands, radically change the
       | way I do anything at all, etc. It was associated with something
       | that I realized, later, was a mental health crisis.
       | 
       | After things came to a head, I retreated. One day I read
       | something I'd read many times and not really understood
       | (something I've experienced often when doing research to help
       | friends who were troubled by never got a proper psychodiagnosis)
       | and I got it and finally understood how I was different from
       | other people and why things went the way they have for me.
       | 
       | Funny though the super flexibility came back (without the
       | delusions) and today I find reinvention easier than I ever did.
       | Now I'm the kind of guy who has an argument with his RSS reader
       | over why soccer sucks compared to the NFL and then I start
       | thinking about feature selection and an ontology of sports
       | articles and then next thing I know I am one of those people who
       | gets up at 9AM on a Saturday to watch the Premier league, goes to
       | MLS games, roots for the Red Bulls, etc.
        
       | apitman wrote:
       | My brother told me a theory many years ago that time perception
       | is based on the number of memories we have and how they're
       | stored.
       | 
       | Imagine your brain being like a filing cabinet, which is empty to
       | start with. Memories are stored as folders with as much space
       | between them as possible. Time perception is created by the
       | distance between memories. So the more memories you have, the
       | faster time seems to have passed and be passing.
       | 
       | No research or anything to back it up, just fun for me to think
       | about.
        
         | holoduke wrote:
         | I always thought the less memories you have the faster time has
         | passed. The older you get the less new events are stored in
         | your memory and therfor you have large gaps of nothing. A year
         | has passed without much. As a teenager you have new experiences
         | every day and therefor time feels slower.
        
         | imjonse wrote:
         | My totally unscientific model is that memories are run length
         | encoded, so the monotonous periods' length is compressed,
         | whereas if they are more diverse, the more info you have, so it
         | needs an expanded storage which is proportional to the
         | perceived time elapsed.
        
       | activatedgeek wrote:
       | This effect is very interesting.
       | 
       | Veritasium covered this effect in a video [1] for the interested.
       | 
       | [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIx2N-viNwY (2016)
        
       | mtsolitary wrote:
       | The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann is basically a fantastic
       | account of this phenomenon.
        
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       (page generated 2024-08-09 23:01 UTC)