[HN Gopher] Age and cognitive skills: Use it or lose it
___________________________________________________________________
Age and cognitive skills: Use it or lose it
Author : nabla9
Score : 588 points
Date : 2025-03-06 12:33 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| Does that imply that it also is part of character traits? As in
| use empathy, become emphatic, stay in a non-emphatic environment,
| your brain degrades you to a sociopath?
| megadata wrote:
| I've seen people age into the classic "grumpy old man" so
| there's something to it. But there's probably a lot more to it
| too I'd think.
| tunnuz wrote:
| I always assumed that it was something to do with people
| getting increasingly frustrated with the struggle of keeping
| up with stuff.
| biofox wrote:
| Chronic pain probably plays a part too. I know I get grumpy
| and miserable when I'm unwell or in pain.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I've attributed that to a decreased ability to deal with
| novel situations as we age. E.g. the world behaved
| differently than I was expecting.
|
| One thing it's definitely possible and important to
| intentionally keep exposing oneself to!
| sgc wrote:
| I am definitely grumpy. What makes me grumpy is the fact
| that society keeps banging its head against a wall for no
| good reason.
|
| There is everything there for growth, and yet I see none.
| I get very tired of knowing well what the boring, selfish
| reaction of the person I encounter is going to be. I am
| sure I do the same thing - and don't change much compared
| to what is available to me to make changes. I do not lead
| by example at all the way I would like.
|
| Nonetheless, what makes me grumpy is lack of change, not
| the superficial appearance of change with which
| technology distracts us. Moral growth would be so
| refreshing to see, but I see none of it - despite virtue
| signalling as a veneer from _all parts_ of society.
|
| Said more colloquially, a lot of older people just grow
| tired of all our bulls*t.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| But all the objective bullshit still existed when we were
| younger! And it didn't bother us as much then.
| sgc wrote:
| I was much less aware of it when I was younger. Ignorance
| is bliss.
| Lanolderen wrote:
| I think it has more to do with getting desensitized to things
| the more you're exposed to them. With age you get more and
| more exposure to everything emotional and lose the strong
| reactions.
|
| Add to that some frustration from not being able to keep up
| with things, health issues, no one "young" having time to
| hang out and your friends dying all the time and I'd be
| grumpy too. You were once a stallion taking care of everyone
| and now you worry about falling in the shower because you
| occasionally lose balance for whatever reason. And you know
| it'll hurt like a bitch, you'll break something and it won't
| heal for a year. It's quite humiliating.
| SimianSci wrote:
| As with most research around our scientific understanding of
| intelligence, I assume this only scratches the surface. There
| may be something to your comment.
| dijit wrote:
| "You become the average of the 5 people you hang out with most"
| is a common phrase, there must be at least an ounce of truth to
| it.
| donatj wrote:
| I hung out with a friend recently I had not seen in close to
| a decade. He was at one time my closest friend and seeing him
| was kind of uncomfortable and enlightening. I saw sooo much
| of how _I used to_ talk and act still in him that it really
| had me wondering how much of that I 'd gotten from him versus
| the reverse.
| senectus1 wrote:
| personally yes. I absolutely have seen this in myself and moved
| to rectify it.
| misterpurple45 wrote:
| I think you mean empathetic, rather than emphatic.
| nialse wrote:
| There are trajectories of personality traits over the life
| span, I would hesitate to extrapolate them based on the
| trajectory of cognitive abilities though. One of the known life
| span emotional/personality trajectory is positivity bias, older
| people tend to be more positive. It is sometimes framed as
| negativity avoidance, that is older people tend to ignore
| negative things more often.
| canjobear wrote:
| Personality disorders like BPD tend to attenuate with age, so
| you would be more likely to become less sociopathic.
| amichail wrote:
| Is self-employment better able to cope with brain changes?
| aomix wrote:
| Falling off the cognitive cliff after retirement is something I
| think a lot of people are familiar with in their own lives.
| donatj wrote:
| I have seen it with my own parents and my wife's parents first
| hand. Frankly, I think the lack of social interaction is a big
| part of it.
|
| When they're working, they're regularly talking to people
| outside their comfort zone about potentially challenging
| questions. That gets largely shutdown once you retire.
|
| Both my parents were in a huge rush to retire early, and now
| they just sit at home and scroll Facebook. I don't see the
| appeal.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| And from what I've heard on the grapevine, life expectancy
| drops among those who retire relative to those that don't.
| This makes sense: many people don't seem to know what to do
| with themselves if they're not "officially employed", so when
| they retire, they become aimless, and they sort of decay and
| disengage from living.
|
| This is characteristic of _acedia_.
| paulluuk wrote:
| Though is that causation or correlation? I can imagine that
| people with all kinds of illnesses would also retire sooner
| than people who are still in peak health.
| sgc wrote:
| That is why volunteering when you are in retirement is a win-
| win. Very few others have the time for what is an absolutely
| necessary part of society, and it is great to keep your mind
| and heart active while you recall your life and use its
| lessons to give back to others. Any sort of volunteering will
| lend itself to that. For example, Jimmy Carter built houses,
| and it seems to have done him wonders.
| jajko wrote:
| Social interaction must be important, but also the fact that
| work doesn't ask you how tired you are, you have set of tasks
| and go. When being master of my own time, I can imagine I
| would veer towards more fun activities which may not have
| that forceful aspect and would be done mostly alone.
|
| And super true for those parents, my goal is to travel
| massively as much as my budget and health will allow it.
| Backpacking all around south east asia, thats what keeps me
| pushing to work on earlier retirement. Sitting at home unless
| forced, no thank you thats a downward spiral
| aomix wrote:
| I didn't appreciate this until covid and wfh. I'm an
| introvert and am in my happy place sitting in front of a
| computer or with a book. But I was losing my mind and had to
| be actively social for the first time in my life. I can see a
| decade of living like it's Covid turning my relatively
| healthy, relatively young brain into soup.
|
| Leaning into stereotypes, the older women in my family did
| just fine in retirement because they just started doing
| social activities full time. If anything they retired and got
| busier. The older men sometimes did ok but usually did worse.
| kamaal wrote:
| >>Both my parents were in a huge rush to retire early, and
| now they just sit at home and scroll Facebook. I don't see
| the appeal.
|
| My retirement plans look somewhat similar to how Knuth spends
| his time. Long hours of deep intellectually challenging work.
| Driving long distances and eating tasty food some where far
| away.
|
| Most of retirement motivation comes from feeling the sun
| during weekdays. There is little point to be sitting whole
| day at home.
| spelunker wrote:
| I (unfortunately) find myself doing this far too much after
| work, and am worried about what retirement might accidentally
| look like.
| Yxven wrote:
| Are there any guidelines for what exactly this would entail?
|
| My short term memory is falling off a cliff. What do I need to do
| to prevent that from getting worse? Are there any other bases I
| need to cover that I don't know that I'm missing?
| Zambyte wrote:
| Regarding memory, I have made a habit of assuming I have a
| faulty memory, and trying to write down anything I think I may
| want to remember in the future using a wiki style tool that
| supports back linking. The tool I use is Org Roam in Emacs, but
| there are lots of options. I have found that by doing this, I
| have offloaded a lot onto my computer, and made space in my
| mind to remember a lot of new things.
| rco8786 wrote:
| And when you're not in front of a computer?
| jjbinx007 wrote:
| Use your phone
| dwayne_dibley wrote:
| or note book which you later re-write into your knowledge
| base.
| layer8 wrote:
| One option is using voice assistants to send a message to
| your todo inbox.
| safety1st wrote:
| Lots of approaches exist, mine is Obsidian + Syncthing and
| just jotting down notes on my phone that I go flesh out
| when I'm back at my PC.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| I've found these work well:
|
| https://www.ataglance.com/p/planners-calendars/journals-
| diar...
|
| No batteries or Internet required.
| jimbokun wrote:
| We have computers we can carry around in our pockets now!
| Zambyte wrote:
| Contrary to the other comments saying to carry a pocket
| computer: my brain. Hence the improved memory. I offload my
| thoughts into my notes when I can. If it wasn't important
| enough to remember until I can find a seat at my desk, it
| wasn't important enough to write a note on.
| hotsauceror wrote:
| My phone is now full of Notes, Alarms, and timers. I can barely
| leave the house to run an errand without writing down what I
| need to do.
|
| As far as actually improving memory, I try to expose my mind to
| as much raw material as I can. The mind is a muscle, it has to
| be exercised, and as you get old you need to focus on its core
| strength rather than physique and raw strength.
|
| Rehearsal and repetition. Read constantly, get out in the
| environment and really try to observe all the things that are
| going on. Write down all the things you want to do this year,
| and when you've done them, write that down, too. Every so
| often, review the list. It will prompt your recall to a
| wonderful degree.
|
| Write down your little milestones - 'in March we found a clutch
| of tadpoles in a tire track puddle and we watered and fed them
| there for six weeks"
| lr4444lr wrote:
| > My short term memory is falling off a cliff
|
| Are you sure? I thought this was happening to me too, and then
| I realized when looking back 10 years ago that I have _way_
| more responsibilities now both in and out of work: I am not
| only getting more done at work, but also for more people. I am
| now picking and choosing which meetings to even hold, much less
| attend, because I have a higher throughput. My children 's
| needs are much more complicated now than when they were
| younger. I have a side business.
|
| I can't fathom how I would have even gotten this all done when
| I was younger simply due to how much leisure time I spent, much
| less kept all of this in short term memory back then.
| matwood wrote:
| > I thought this was happening to me too, and then I realized
| when looking back 10 years ago that I have way more
| responsibilities now both in and out of work
|
| This so much. When I was in my 20s I never forgot things, but
| I didn't have anything that I really needed to remember lol.
| killerteddybear wrote:
| It's easy to forget about how many more responsibilities we
| take on as we age, simply by nature of how those
| responsibilities slip into our lives one at a time, bit by
| bit, gradually shifting our window of normalcy.
| naasking wrote:
| I've found poor sleep really affected my memory. Maybe start
| tracking your sleep.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I feel so much dumber since having a kid :(
| kamaal wrote:
| >>My short term memory is falling off a cliff.
|
| Read the book GTD by David Allen.
|
| You are not supposed to store things in the brain, that only
| causes stress.
|
| Brain is to do thinking work, you are better off writing and
| tracking things on paper. Use the brain to think, and paper for
| planning, scheduling, tracking etc..
| jimbokun wrote:
| I wonder how much of that is due to age and how much due to
| electronic distractions.
| flpm wrote:
| I was in the same boat, but I started noticing that if I
| force myself not to do silly multitasking (like not paying
| attention to what I am doing because my mind is thinking
| about irrelevant other things) it gets better. Since I
| stopped the infinity doom-scrolling it has improved a bit
|
| Stress and lack of sleep also affect me a lot. Both are
| omnipresent, since I am a parent of young-age special-need
| kids.
| mmooss wrote:
| Emotions can have a large impact on memory, as far as I know.
| They provide the catalyst, in a way, in the process that forms
| memories. If you are depressed or otherwise not emotionally
| engaged, it can become much harder to form memories.
|
| Solve emotional problems and memory may improve. (I have no
| idea if that applies to you, of course.)
|
| > short term memory
|
| Which sort of memory do you mean? Short term memory is
| remembering a name while you write it down, not remembering it
| the next day or week.
| randcraw wrote:
| The only 'exercise' I've heard of that offers measurable
| improvement is "N-Back", kind of like the old TV game
| "Concentration". The app is available on most smartphones.
| flocciput wrote:
| Avoid weed if you don't already. Might seem out of left field
| but a programmer friend of mine is absolutely convinced their
| memory is shot because of long covid and it's like, well,
| maybe, and the trauma of the pandemic certainly put a dent in
| everyone's cognitive ability, but also the dabs can't be
| helping.
| bikamonki wrote:
| With 25 years of experience in software development, I've noticed
| that long coding sessions leave me feeling more fatigued than
| they used to. However, I've also become significantly more
| productive, as I spend far less time grappling with problems I've
| already solved. I've only just begun to explore AI-assisted
| coding, so that isn't what's driving my efficiency. Is it
| reasonable to assume that the natural decline in cognitive
| performance over time is offset by the gains in experience and
| expertise?
| lr4444lr wrote:
| If your time is spent in higher productivity work, wouldn't
| that - irrespective of age - leave you feeling more exhausted?
| j_bum wrote:
| I'm not sure it makes sense to differentiate between energy
| spend while being "productive", and energy spent whole
| trouble shooting and problem solving.
|
| After all, trouble shooting can be viewed as a productive
| thing.
|
| Interesting idea though.
| itishappy wrote:
| Productivity doesn't correlate super closely with fatigue in
| my experience. The worse sessions are when I'm banging my
| head against something and getting nowhere. When I'm flowing,
| I can go for hours.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Someone who is more efficient expends less energy to
| accomplish the same thing relative to someone who is less
| efficient.
| 0x20cowboy wrote:
| I am old and I can easily code / design all day. 10-16 hours
| if it's something I am in to. It's dealing with people /
| social issues that exhaust me.
| jimbokun wrote:
| A lot of it depends on how good your tools are.
| layer8 wrote:
| That is the conventional wisdom: decreasing stamina/energy is
| compensated by having more experience/expertise.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| i have 10++ years more, but i don't notice such.. fatigue.
| 2..5+ hours.. no problems (even with fingers-typing-wrong-
| keys/order-much-more-often). What i do notice though, and not
| only in coding, is.. kind-of creeping-boredom. Growing tired of
| certain things going the way they go, too quickly. You know,
| the deja-vu feeling when you see something developing certain
| way, and seeing it go exactly there. Thousand times..
|
| But i haven't stopped learning things, apart of the software-
| making-related, 2 years ago went into e-foiling, and some half-
| related more-technical adventures. So maybe that is keeping the
| dementia at bay..
| cutemonster wrote:
| > Is it reasonable to assume that the natural decline in
| cognitive performance over time is offset by the gains in
| experience and expertise?
|
| It depends on what you're doing.
|
| The stronger cognitive strength needed, the less it can be
| replaced with experience.
|
| Some chess grandmasters are teenagers. Maybe maths intensive ML
| research could be a bit comparable. But that's... Maths. Or
| distributed software algorithm optimizations?
|
| In the vast majority of software work (as in > 99% ?),
| experience is more important, though, if you're bright enough
| when young. Or so I think
|
| (But when closer to 80 or 90 or 100 years, that's different of
| course.)
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > Is it reasonable to assume that the natural decline in
| cognitive performance over time is offset by the gains in
| experience and expertise?
|
| Maybe up to a point. Most of the tools and languages I use
| daily are fairly recent, or at least new to me. I don't have
| much of an advantage, if any, compared to my younger
| colleagues.
|
| There are certainly things I do better now than 10 years ago
| but I think I'm slowly declining though. Fortunately, there's
| more than one way to be productive professionally so I hope I
| can keep up for a few more year.
| jimbokun wrote:
| State of the art tools and technologies today are
| implementing the features of cutting edge languages and
| technologies from decades ago.
|
| There are very few capabilities in mainstream languages
| today, if any, that weren't available in Common Lisp back in
| the 1980s or 90s.
| kamaal wrote:
| >>I've noticed that long coding sessions leave me feeling more
| fatigued than they used to.
|
| As we age, learning vs getting-paid graph first flattens, then
| either grows very slowly or not at all.
|
| Im guessing that is where the fatigue part comes. You are not
| exactly growing too much after working hard after a while.
|
| In fact reducing hours worked might correlate with happiness
| more as you can allocate free time to other rewarding tasks.
| glonq wrote:
| I find that I have "less horsepower, but smarter gears", so it
| kind of evens out.
|
| I'm less likely to code until midnight, but more likely to have
| the problem solved before clocking out at 6pm ;)
| dkarl wrote:
| > Is it reasonable to assume that the natural decline in
| cognitive performance over time is offset by the gains in
| experience and expertise?
|
| It depends on the task, but overall, for the work I do as a
| software developer, yes.
|
| I would say I have less energy, but I need less energy, and I
| produce better results in the end. I'm better at anticipating
| where a line of work will go, and I'm quicker and better at
| adjusting course. There are a lot of multi-hour and multi-day
| mistakes that I made ten and twenty years ago that I don't make
| now.
|
| The raw mental energy I had when I was younger allowed me to
| write things I couldn't write now, but everything I write now
| is something that other people can read and maintain, unlike
| twenty years ago. It's very rare that writing a large, clever,
| intricate mass of code is the right answer to anything. That
| used to frustrate me, because I was good at it. I used to
| fantasize about situations where other people would notice and
| appreciate my ability to do it. Now I'm glad it's not
| important, because my ability to do it has noticeably declined.
| In the rare cases where it's needed, there are always people
| around who can do it.
|
| Another thing that is probably not normal, but not rare either,
| is that the energy I had when I was young supercharged my
| anxiety and caused me to avoid a lot of things that would have
| led to better outcomes, like talking to other people. I'm still
| not great (as in, not even average for an average human, maybe
| average for a software developer) but I'm a lot better than I
| used to be.
| imdsm wrote:
| What I find most draining is the non-coding work I now do for
| work. I love the org I work for and it's really fulfilling
| but I do a lot of senior stuff now and I feel like the years
| slip away without always getting to build and invent as much
| stuff as I'd like to. There's so much to do and learn, it's
| amazing, we live in this difficult world but with amazing
| opportunities, and I wish I had an extra 12 hours a day (of
| energy) just to learn and build.
|
| I was young once, 25 years ago I started programming, and I
| feel as though I have at least another 25 in me, if not more.
| Teleoflexuous wrote:
| That's pretty much current state of knowledge.
|
| Terms you want to check for more detailed info are 'liquid
| intelligence' and 'crystalized intelligence', but you basically
| nailed it.
| pjmorris wrote:
| I've seen 'fluid' as well as 'liquid' intelligence, but these
| are the terms the scientific community seems to use.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| I noticed that I can still do long sessions if I have to crack
| open a problem ( I started coding around 35 and now I'm 40+),
| but the burnout may prevent me from coding for a few days.
|
| I do think it has more to do with daily chores (work, family)
| than my age. I noticed that, despite being easier to get
| frustrated nowadays (because I get exposed to more sources of
| frustration) than I was in my 30s, I'm actually more
| perseverant than myself 10 years ago. I managed to be very
| close to wrap up a side project, the first time in my coding
| life. Of course the scope is smaller than my previous projects
| but I'm surprised that I didn't back down easily, considering
| how many times I banged my head during the first few weeks.
|
| I guess being exposed to more frustrations does improve ones
| resistance to it. To be precise, I get agitated easily, but
| that agitation doesn't seem to burn me out in the middle term
| -- while in my 30s I didn't get agitated very often but every
| time it burns me down to the point I left my side projects.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| This is something that can be gamed out mathematically, for
| example time to goal minus time to refactor.
|
| As someone who has been writing software and/or managing
| operations for 20 years here is what I have noticed:
|
| * The more experienced people get the more cognizant they
| become of fatigue in that they know when to take a step back.
|
| * The more experienced people get the faster they get in that
| they know how to approach repeated problems.
|
| * People do not necessarily get better with experience. Some
| developers never fully embrace automation, especially if they
| are reliant on certain tools versus original solution
| discovery.
|
| Based on that it's natural that some older developers tend to
| decline with age while others continue to grow in capability
| and endurance. The challenge is to identify for that versus
| those who mask it.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > . Some developers never fully embrace automation,
| especially if they are reliant on certain tools versus
| original solution discovery.
|
| can you expand on that for clarity ?
| nunez wrote:
| They don't embrace AI is how I read that.
| agentultra wrote:
| Software developer of more than 20 years.
|
| I wouldn't say, "decline," to be charitable. I tend to lean
| more on mathematics and writing. That often makes up for the
| lack of stamina.
|
| When I look back on code I wrote 15, 20 years or more ago...
| it's fine but it lacks the sophistication I have now. I
| didn't know what I didn't know back then and had to learn. I
| can see in my code where I encountered a problem and instead
| of solving it I added more code until it, "worked."
|
| I wasn't university educated so that's explains a bit of it.
| I didn't start picking up pure functional programming and
| formal methods until my mid thirties (gosh, has it been a
| decade already?). I worked through Harvard's Abstract Algebra
| at 38. I'm leaning more about writing proofs and proof
| engineering in my spare time while continuing to stream work
| in Haskell on various libraries and projects. And I'm in my
| 40s -- I'm doing more programming and mathematics now than
| ever.
|
| I'm also playing in a band, practice calisthenics and
| skateboarding, and have been improving my illustration skills
| with ink.
|
| It seems like the discovery of the article is that if you
| don't use your skills they start to decline as early as your
| late 20s. All it takes is practice to maintain and improve
| them!
|
| I might get a little tired every now and then and can't keep
| every library I've used in my head all at once. But I tend to
| rely more on mathematics and specifications and writing. I
| write less code now. I remove code. And I keep programs and
| systems fast and correct.
|
| Nothing declining here!
| NewUser76312 wrote:
| It could be something similar that we see happening in seasoned
| weightlifters/bodybuilders:
|
| As your absolute strength gets stronger, the same exercises and
| workouts get proportionally more fatiguing.
|
| 5 sets of a bench press at an 80% of max load, taken within a
| rep or two of failure, done by a first-year lifter, is
| incredibly different from that same scheme being done by
| somebody who's lifted for 10 years. So more advanced lifters
| tend to do things like lighten the load and use variations of
| lifts that have more favorable stimulus-to-fatigue ratios.
|
| Anyways, I thought maybe as an advanced programmer, something
| here could be analogous. You've already done all the coding and
| thinking to figure out easier and lower-level problems. So what
| you're left with are the more cognitively challenging parts of
| coding, which should be more mentally exhausting per unit time.
| Whatever is '80% difficulty' for you is probably way more
| advanced than what you were looking at 10 or 20 years ago.
| mhandley wrote:
| I've been coding for over 40 years at this point. I'm
| definitely a better programmer than I was - not necessarily
| faster at pumping out lines of code, but I get the right
| approach first time more often than I used to. Whole classes of
| bugs are just easy when you've seen them before, but I'm also
| better at avoiding them in the first place because I know my
| weaknesses and where to spend time thinking more carefully.
|
| At the same time, I can't context-switch like I used to. Once I
| get into the zone, no problem, but interruptions affect me much
| more than when I was 20 (or even 40). I can almost feel the
| tape changer in the back of my head switching tapes and slowly
| streaming the new context into RAM (likely because all the
| staging disks have been full for years).
|
| As for long coding sessions - I relish them when I get the
| chance, which isn't as often as I'd like. Once the tapes have
| finished loading and I'm in the zone, I can stay there half the
| night. So that hasn't changed with age.
| huijzer wrote:
| Magnus Carlsen (the multiple times chess world champion) talked
| about this in his recent Joe Rogan podcast. He said he passed
| his chess peak already now at 34. He now knows more, but when
| he was younger he could win via brute mental power.
|
| > Is it reasonable to assume that the natural decline in
| cognitive performance over time is offset by the gains in
| experience and expertise?
|
| So according to Carlsen, for chess the answer is no.
|
| I personally also suspect the answer for programming is the
| same. Most, if not all, of the hotshot programmers we know
| became famous in their early 20s. Torvalds started writing
| Linux at 21. Carmack was 22 when Doom was released. Many of the
| most famous AI researchers were in their early 20s when doing
| the most groundbreaking work. Einstein's miracle year by the
| way was also when he was 26.
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| People in their early 20s are also much less likely to have
| other responsibilities "intruding" into their headspace. It's
| a lot easier to be monomaniacal when you don't (for example)
| have kids yet.
| huijzer wrote:
| I know. That's the common argument, but I don't think
| that's it. See the argument I made in the previous comment.
| As I wrote in that comment, Magnus thinks his brain was
| better when he was younger. It probably doesn't help to
| have responsibilities like children, but I don't think that
| explain everything. There are also many people without
| children for example. And if you don't have children then
| studying full time should take as much if not more time
| than a simple job.
|
| Also, Hans Albert Einstein was born during Einstein's
| miracle year.
| skwirl wrote:
| > Also, Hans Albert Einstein was born during Einstein's
| miracle year.
|
| This was in an era when fathers had little to do with
| childcare. I don't know about Einstein's specific
| situation, but even 40 years ago almost half of fathers
| had never changed a diaper.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Very little of my work needs breakthroughs or inventions.
| Nothing new under the sun, as the Romans said. So, this
| mental peak is less important than being focused and
| efficient for me.
| nickjj wrote:
| > He said he passed his chess peak already now at 34. He now
| knows more, but when he was younger he could win via brute
| mental power.
|
| The famous anti-case for this is J.R.R Tolkien started
| writing Lord of the Rings when he was about 45.
|
| Writing is not programming but they are not that dissimilar.
| Especially in this context.
|
| What I've learned over the years is life is actually not fair
| and everyone is different. You can be razer sharp and
| reasonably healthy at 83 or be in great shape and die of a
| brain aneurism at 12 with no warning.
|
| Basically don't let studies or other people's results
| persuade you into not starting or giving up.
| djeastm wrote:
| Creative writing is tremendously different from coding,
| imo.
| nickjj wrote:
| > Creative writing is tremendously different from coding,
| imo.
|
| I've had a different experience.
|
| IMO there's a huge overlap in skills when writing,
| coding, making videos and playing guitar.
|
| They all boil down to the idea of getting something out
| of your head and then refining it until you know when to
| stop refining based on whatever criteria you're
| optimizing for at the time.
|
| This is based on writing over a million words and making
| hundreds of videos over 10 years on my blog and
| programming for ~20 years while casually playing the
| guitar for about as long.
|
| What aspects make them feel different for you?
| lapcat wrote:
| > skills decline at older ages only for those with below-average
| skill usage. White-collar and higher-educated workers with above-
| average usage show increasing skills even beyond their forties.
|
| > Individuals with above-average skill usage at work and home on
| average never face a skill decline (at least until the limit of
| our data at age 65).
| jimbokun wrote:
| A lot of hiring managers need to read this.
| marstall wrote:
| Right? ageism maybe should work in reverse!
| jdefr89 wrote:
| I get that but growing older does mean less energy at the
| very least.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Does "energy" here mean "willing to work many more hours
| for no extra pay"?
| lapcat wrote:
| Citation needed.
|
| Don't say "it's obvious", because people would have said
| the same (mistaken) thing about cognitive decline before
| the submitted article.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| There's another factor here: the older the worker the less
| you can abuse them.
| risyachka wrote:
| Literally the two most important things from the article.
|
| Get better at things so you don't have to worry about decline.
| That simple.
|
| Its like a muscle - develop it early on and then you can easily
| keep it in shape without much effort until the day you die,
| without any noticeable decline (at least until like 70).
| sunami-ai wrote:
| Older coders/technical folks tend to have more wisdom than raw
| compute (relative to younger coders who may have more raw compute
| than distilled wisdom.) Wisdom takes a more reliable and more
| efficient path than raw compute.
|
| Both raw compute and wisdom will be eventually replaced by AI,
| but "deep wisdom" is largely held in the body, in the way we
| react viscerally to things, which AI as it is envisioned today
| does not factor in at all. So we still have a refuge in the
| wisdom stored in our body memory.
| jghn wrote:
| As an older developer who lately has been pairing with early
| career developers, I've been noticing lately how often wisdom
| comes into play. It feels like close to a daily occurrence
| where I suggest something is the cause, then later I'm asked
| how I knew that was the right thing to investigate, and the
| only response I have is that it's almost always the culprit.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Maybe it's time for me (40+) to go back to college. I want to
| pick up Mathematics and Physics up to the point of General
| Relativity. Since it's "use it or lose it", I better start
| reading now.
|
| But I don't really have any time. There are so many things to do,
| to learn. Younger people who happen to stumble upon this reply,
| please please prioritize financial freedom if you don't have a
| clear objective in mind -- and from my observation many people
| don't have a clear objective when they are in their 20s! If you
| can retire around 35-40, you have ample time to pursuit any
| project you want for the rest of the life.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| I was running into the same issue. I wanted to get into
| deeeplearning but my math skills had atrophied. go check out
| mathacademy.com. its no where near the level of time investment
| that going back to college is and you will learn a lot!
| ljm wrote:
| I've always toyed with the idea of studying Computer Science
| since I taught myself how to code.
|
| Hell of a lot more difficult now when I need to work and don't
| really have the same amount of time to dedicate to studying.
| Hell of a lot easier when you're younger, your whole life
| basically revolves around the education, and any job you have
| generally fits around your school life rather than the other
| way round.
| ativzzz wrote:
| Plugging Georgia Tech's online masters program - I did it
| over the course of 4 years while working - can take 1 class a
| semester - and it's very cheap for a high quality masters
| lkrych wrote:
| I'm going to second ativzzz. It's a great program. I did it
| the same way: 1 class a semester over 4 years.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Yeah it was really a surprise to me when I realized that my
| energy declined to the point that I couldn't work on my side
| projects for the down days. Then I counted how many days I
| have for the rest of my life (up to 75) and this dreaded me a
| lot.
|
| And it got worse after my son was born a few years ago. I
| would count the number of weeks available, not the days,
| because there has been whole weeks that I couldn't do
| anything. After all those are two full-time jobs.
|
| As for your CS education, I'd recommend getting into some
| side projects and explore from there. If you go to a school,
| it's going to take too many courses.
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| I'm in my late 40s and I've found that my desire for
| working on side projects after work is affected by how
| engaged I am mentally at work. When I'm building new
| features/products from scratch and I'm having to figure out
| architecture and learn more about whatever language I'm
| coding in, I get more amped to do side projects at home.
| When I'm bored and just bug fixing and dealing with more
| mundane things, I have no desire to do any more coding
| after work. Something about being more engaged gets my
| brain in a state that I can keep going for the rest of the
| day until I need to pull myself away from the computer
| because it's 2am and I should have been asleep hours ago. I
| should note that I don't have children so the only
| "obligation" I have is to spend time with my partner and
| eat dinner, which I enjoy doing, of course. She usually
| starts getting ready for bed around 10pm and that's when I
| start coding. I do have some bad sleep patterns though,
| doesn't matter if I'm coding or not, which is probably not
| healthy. I have that revenge nighttime procrastination
| thing real bad.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| I'm in the same boat.
|
| I realized that frustration from work usually spills over
| to other parts of my life, not surprising as work is
| usually the first big thing we do during a day. I'm
| exactly like you -- when I have a lot of frustration from
| work, then I wouldn't want to work on side projects. It
| has nothing to do with how many hours I have.
|
| I also have some bad sleep patterns as I only sleep about
| 5-6 hours every night most of the time.
|
| I think, it might be useful to learn some mental skills
| to compartment one's mental state. If I could somehow put
| that frustration from work into a separate space without
| it spilling all over the ship, it would definitely help a
| lot. But so far I don't know how to do it -- plus I have
| a kid so I can't chill down after work until late night.
| rapfaria wrote:
| Have you considered doing your side projects before work?
|
| It takes me one call in the morning, of me saying for the
| hundreth time in the past 8 months that the integration
| is still missing data, to get me off the rails for the
| day. I know at 10AM that I won't touch anything else
| after work.
|
| Been contemplating starting early and dedicating "the
| best hours" to myself.
| navbaker wrote:
| That absolutely works for me! I play multiple instruments
| and have found that the early morning is the best time
| mentally for me to devote uninterrupted time to practice
| and playing. I'm also fortunate enough to have a basement
| with another floor between my cacophony and my sleeping
| family
| ferguess_k wrote:
| (Not original replier)
|
| That was something I have considered for a while, but
| then figured out it is unrealistic because I have a kid.
| But original replier probably can do if he/she doesn't
| have one.
| Apofis wrote:
| Exercise goes a long way to keep up energy levels after
| work.
| WillAdams wrote:
| I've been going through various MIT OCW lecture series as I
| work on a personal programming project.
|
| Esp. good were:
|
| https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-001-structure-and-
| interpretati...
|
| and
|
| https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-042j-mathematics-for-
| computer-...
| justin66 wrote:
| > Hell of a lot more difficult now when I need to work and
| don't really have the same amount of time to dedicate to
| studying.
|
| Not really. You'll find that as an experienced programmer,
| you have a massive advantage at times in your classes.
| miamiwebdesign wrote:
| If you have the discipline, you can create a lesson plan with
| an LLM without spending an arm and a leg.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| You would still very likely need human input and help. LLMs
| will hallunicate badly on problems just a bit more difficult
| than the very standard ones (first-hand experience with
| math).
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Thanks. I definitely will teach myself some of the pre-
| requisites before registering in University. I need to prove
| to myself that I can sit down, take some course, complete the
| coursework + assignments + exams on MIT courseware, before
| committing anything that costs $$.
| sn9 wrote:
| Math Academy is really all you need. 30 minutes per day is
| enough, though more time will mean faster progress.
| Luc wrote:
| I found 'So You Want to Learn Physics...' helpful:
| https://www.susanrigetti.com/physics
|
| Agreed on prioritizing financial freedom.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Thanks. I did read that but found it to be too broad. I set a
| very narrow target and hopefully everything can be wrapped up
| in 8-10 Math/Physics courses.
| meindnoch wrote:
| It is impossible to truly understand General Relativity after
| the age of 35.
| zusammen wrote:
| I strongly doubt this. It's rare and we have all sorts of
| credible theories about why it's rare, but the decline of so-
| called fluid intelligence is mostly Flynn Effect: people are
| getting better at taking tests.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Is the joke because Einstein published his findings on
| General Relativity at 36?
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Devil's advocate: how many years did it take him to get to
| publishing this work?
| ferguess_k wrote:
| It is a possibility I actually agree with, because a true
| understanding probably requires a lot more than taking some
| classes. It probably needs a PHD on Cosmology or something
| else.
|
| But let's say a shallow understanding is good enough...even
| just completing a General Relativity graduate course with
| good mark is good enough.
| obbie3 wrote:
| You should not have entertained that comment.
|
| There is absolutely zero evidence that 35 is some mystical
| cut off for "understanding." That poster has NO clue what
| they are talking about. Seriously, feel free to ignore that
| comment.
|
| As for practical advice for learning, you should look into
| learning how to learn and then spend about 1-2 year
| habituating to the proper way to acquire knowledge. The
| science says your (not just you, practically everyone)
| current intuitions and habits are incorrect; as evidenced
| by almost everyone in this post. Youtuber Justin Sung is
| pretty much second to none in terms of a practical program
| for acquiring these skills.
|
| If you want general guidelines to follow to determine who's
| telling you the truth and who isn't use the following
| wikipedia article to guide you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/Active_learning#The_principles...
|
| Note: Simply reading that article and "understanding" what
| it is saying is not equivalent to having a study program
| that implements these things, and having a program that
| implements these things is not the same thing as actually
| executing on and habituating to said program. This process
| takes many months to years.
|
| Best of luck.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| > please please prioritize financial freedom
|
| This advice could really backfire badly if taken literally by
| young people.
|
| Optimizing for financial reward early in your career could be
| the surest way to end up in a dead end from a
| mission/purpose/domain/skills perspective.
|
| 20 years later, you realize you burned two precious decades
| accumulating money that, honestly, does not help you _at all_
| make sense or use of the next two.
| road_to_freedom wrote:
| > honestly, does not help you at all make sense or use of the
| next two.
|
| Why?
| lxgr wrote:
| Money can't buy you a sense of purpose, especially if that
| purpose would largely involve non-monetary aspects.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| The thing, being poor doesn't buy one a sense of purpose
| too. Money for sure doesn't solve the issue, but it gives
| you all the freedom to solve it for the rest of your
| life.
|
| Damn I wish I had a million so that I could just drop my
| job and twitch my coding and gaming streams 12/7. I can't
| do that.
| lxgr wrote:
| Absolutely. Money (at least some amount, at least for
| most people) is necessary, but not sufficient for a
| fulfilled life.
| brulard wrote:
| I believe most people having that million wouldn't spend
| it to find the fulfillment in life, but would end up
| increasing their life style by slacking off, drugs,
| expensive cars and items, etc. And the million would be
| gone in months and you would be left with just bad
| habits, dopamine hangover and no idea of the further
| direction in life.
| lxgr wrote:
| 20 years of bad habits facilitated by a given lifestyle can
| also be very hard to break. Not many can manage duly
| accumulating the savings while completely isolating
| themselves from what they work on, who they work with, and
| how all of that impacts their worldview.
|
| And that's not even considering health. 20 years of being in
| a bad mental place (stress is bad, but a perceived lack of
| purpose and agency might well be worse) will leave its marks.
| cwalv wrote:
| There's also a non-zero chance you'll die before year 20. I
| agree with the premise that seeking financial independence
| should be a significant factor in career/life decisions,
| but if you would be filled with regret by finding out it
| will be cut short at year 18, you're too singularly
| focused.
| elzbardico wrote:
| It depends a lot of where you came from. If you are coming
| from a poor background, without any perspective of the
| occasional help from parents or a possible inheritance, I'd
| say prioritize financial security. Of course, you can accept
| the occasional lower salary but with better career prospects
| here and there, but sometimes this is a mirage, and a lot of
| time, better pay comes with better career prospects.
|
| If you didn't come from a somewhat privileged background
| chances are you started your career with more professional
| debt, without a rich contact network, you're probably a bit
| too humble to negotiate wages and even narratives like "when
| I started my business I had come from a working class family,
| and had to scrap by raising 80k from my relatives to start my
| business" are out of your reality. So, prioritize being
| financially secure first.
|
| This angst about a sense of purpose is basically a privileged
| class malady, if you are poor our friend Maslow will ensure
| you have more pressing issues to care about first.
| close04 wrote:
| > you realize you burned two precious decades accumulating
| money that, honestly, does not help you at all make sense or
| use of the next two
|
| You are describing some extreme case of money chasing and/or
| complete ignorance to everything else. Having the "luxury" to
| be covered financially for the rest of your life allows you
| to pursue whatever goals you have in mind at mid-life. If you
| are susceptible to not knowing what you want, having less
| money won't help you find out but having more money might.
|
| Is it any better to know what you want to do for the next 2
| decades and not ever be able to afford do it? From a
| practical perspective you are still missing the opportunities
| you want or dream of, except you're also doing it with little
| or no financial buffer for the things you need.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| It might backfire for sure, but being financially independent
| gives you freedom to figure that out for the rest of the
| life.
|
| IMO it's a lot better than the situation I myself am in right
| now, when I can clearly see myself working my ass off for the
| next 20-25 years in domains I totally hate, and then
| hopefully I can start working on interesting things when I'm
| ... 65?
|
| I'd further argue that the only downside of my strategy is
| that you already have a clear non-monetary objective but
| decided to go with the money for 20 years. That's definitely
| a bad thing, and that's why in my original reply I rooted
| this out -- if you already have an objective, go for it.
| bluGill wrote:
| Only if you get a rest of your life. While most do I've
| known more that one person who didn't make it to 40. Worse
| those that do all srart reporting their body is starting to
| fail. If you have not done some things by 40 it may be too
| late to ever do them.
| ryandrake wrote:
| You can't forego savings because "I might die at 40".
| That's really not a sensible plan. It's a balancing act,
| but I'd rather have saved too much and die a little
| early, than not save enough and somehow live to 100.
| brulard wrote:
| But accumulating and saving always comes at a cost. Is it
| worth to earn more money, but spend less time with your
| family for example? It's a delicate balancing act and you
| never know where the right balance is
| bluGill wrote:
| I agree 100%. There is a balance you want enough savings
| for 'a rainy day' and also enjoy the rest of your life.
| retirement is only part of enjoping your life.
|
| the important point is don't get so lost in saving money
| that you don't enjoy now.
| Red_Comet_88 wrote:
| Won't expound on my life story, but this is massively
| overlooked. You can't just prioritize money without
| taking into account the massive sacrifices it will
| require in your life. I spent a long, long time becoming
| successful in careers that I hated, only to burn out and
| do the career I knew I wanted to do since I was old
| enough to think and remember. Except now I have wasted
| decades of my life that I will never get back.
|
| The majority of your life is spent working so you
| absolutely MUST find it fulfilling or you will burn out
| (at best) or destroy your body and mind as a sacrifice to
| the insatiable Mammon.
| dkarl wrote:
| > 20 years later, you realize you burned two precious decades
| accumulating money that, honestly, does not help you at all
| make sense or use of the next two.
|
| Ah, but it does. Speaking as someone approaching fifty, you
| feel every penny. Everything about your financial situation
| weighs into your decision-making, makes different options
| possible or impossible. It changes which jobs you can take,
| and which jobs you can turn down. It affects how much time
| you can take between jobs. It affects how much energy you
| pour into keeping your job or chasing a promotion versus
| investing your energy in education or other things you find
| satisfying.
|
| People worry that they will accidentally pursue money with
| such single-minded focus that they turn off every other part
| of their soul, and miss out on what they "really" want to do.
| But I don't think that's possible. Replace money with
| anything else: fame, family, intellectual achievement,
| hedonism. If you try to dedicate yourself 100% to one thing
| when something else is important to you, you'll hear the
| voice in the back of your head. You'll feel what it is, and
| if you ignore it then, that's on you.
|
| If you don't hear that voice yet, lay down the foundation
| that will give you the freedom to follow it when you finally
| do.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| You're absolutely right. I realize my comment could be
| understood in many various ways.
|
| My point was that, _at some point_ , money has a negative
| effect on your career. Shooting for the top percentile of
| revenue can take you off track for life.
|
| But you are saying that having a few hundred thousands
| bucks when you hit 40-50 is a life-changer and you are
| absolutely right as well.
|
| Our point of views are not incompatible and were not
| captured by my first comment.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, there is a huge distance between "saving enough money
| to retire comfortably" and "letting wealth accumulation
| dominate every decision you make." And, honestly, most
| people don't even get to the first one.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Having the money is far, far better than _not_ having money
| to help you "make sense or use of the next two decades". If
| you don't, both the sense and use are narrowed to being
| chained to a job indefinitely into the future.
| nilkn wrote:
| I made a lot of sacrifices and experienced some serious
| personal pain to achieve modest financial independence by age
| 35 (not "FAT" by any means, but well beyond the average
| American), and it was worth it. I'm still working, but only
| because my former career momentum has carried me into a
| position where I'm paid a small fortune. I would never do any
| kind of normal engineering job for a normal income these
| days.
|
| My attitude and the way my brain processes things is
| completely different. Getting laid off or fired goes from
| something you might fear or see as a bad thing to a neutral
| or even positive event that just encourages you to go spend
| your time in a different way for as long as you want.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I see this argument a lot, i think no one is right. you just
| need to pick a away to approach life and deal with it.
| jpmattia wrote:
| > _up to the point of General Relativity._
|
| Putting in a plug for MIT OCW 8.962 [1]. I also had this itch,
| and was able to find time during the pandemic to work through
| the course (at about 1/2 speed). But true to what others are
| saying, life intruded for the last few lectures, so still have
| some items on my todo list. I thought Scott Hughes laid out the
| math with terrific clarity, with just the right amount of
| joviality. It is not for everyone, but if you have a suitable
| background it may turn "scratch an itch" into the obsession
| that it has done to me.
|
| And to make the obligatory on-topic comment: I'm 61yo. Now get
| off my lawn.
|
| [1] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/8-962-general-relativity-
| spring-...
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Thanks! Yeah I planned to use MIT OCW for my education, at
| least the first 3-4 pre-requisite courses, before I even
| consider registering in an independent program in some
| University.
|
| BTW I hope you are going to get more free time in a few years
| so that you can come back and enjoy the education again.
| Bloating wrote:
| More proof that old boomers don't get what its like to be a
| modern, young adult. I was just texting with friends about this
| at the coffee shop this morning while making plans for this
| weekend. Boss is interruping by goat-yoga mindfullness session,
| asking me to come into the office an hour this month. Who has
| time for this?
|
| You olds have all the money, all the time.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| I wish I had all the money and all the time! I don't, alas...
|
| I know it sounds stupid but I started to but lottery tickets,
| not to win, because statistically it is impossible, but just
| to give me hope, because lottery is the only thing in the
| world that can land a mountain of cash in one shot, with a
| very small investment. Nothing else can do that.
|
| That's why humans purchase lottery tickets all the time
| throughout history. It's too cheer themselves up.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| I found a cheaper way. I walk around the city for a couple
| hours every weekend with the hopes of randomly finding a
| winning lottery ticket.
| cudgy wrote:
| Why not buy out of money options in companies that you know
| with spare money? Better odds and good payouts if you hit
| it right.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Needs too many correct bets or too much $$ to get a few
| million of returns. You can win a lottery of 50 million
| with just a few dollars! But I do think this is an
| interesting strategy. I might try it out just for fun.
|
| Anyway I'm half joking. I do buy lottery but it is just
| to improve the mood of the day. Oh a good mood for a few
| hours is so important to keep being sane.
| yojo wrote:
| If you're going to try this route, I'd also recommend
| prioritizing your family and/or life partner with all your
| remaining energy.
|
| Grinding is soul-sucking, and having someone at home was the
| only way I made it through the roughest patches.
|
| I semi-retired in the 35-40 range, but if my choices were being
| retired and single or working but with my family, I'd 100% take
| the latter.
| semireg wrote:
| Yay, do it! I'm in linear algebra right now (midterm in 40
| minutes) and I'm over 40. I went back because I always
| regretted not taking more higher level math. It's been a lot of
| work, but very rewarding. My kids (age 7 and 5) think it's
| pretty cool to see dad working on his TI-89 and Notability on
| iPad.
| 725686 wrote:
| "If you can retire around 35-40" really? If you can retire that
| young, you probably don't need any advice.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| You can't blame an old man trying to give advices to people
| who don't need them...
| kccqzy wrote:
| Achieving financial independence and early retirement does
| not mean one no longer needs any advice about life. Indeed,
| because those people have a longer retirement, they might
| ponder things like the meaning of life much more than someone
| who's living paycheck to paycheck and has to devote all brain
| cycles to survival. And there are so many options for those
| who retire at 40 that they genuinely need advice about what
| to do, how to find what matters most to them, and how to go
| about doing the things they had always wanted to do but
| couldn't.
|
| These people have succeeded in making money and that's all.
| But life is so much more than just making money.
| matwood wrote:
| I'm over 40 and even though I mostly manage/lead now I have
| time to do programming and plenty of math. I still see
| improvement mentally (not so much physically anymore), but also
| a lot of improvement in skills I neglected when I was younger
| like interpersonal skills and sales. I'm also learning a new
| language and read more than ever. Sometimes I feel like I'm
| less sharp, but I wonder if that's because I'm doing so much
| more.
|
| My tricks that I don't always follow, is work out every day,
| get enough sleep, and stay off of most short form social media.
| I realized when I was on short form social it would zap a lot
| of time and kill any focus I had.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I got excited to do this a couple years ago. (early 30s) Time
| and energy were a real killer.
|
| Physics and Math in a formal setting like school is rigorous,
| not fun. I found it really hard to stay motivated. I don't know
| how I would practically use that knowledge, i would never
| contribute anything scientific. It would take years of grinding
| through foundational math and physics to get there.
| jdefr89 wrote:
| I often ponder if I have the energy to go back to school. I am
| employed by MIT at one of the labs where I do research for
| embedded security. As a consequence, they offer free classes
| you can pick up. I am yet to actually take advantage of that
| yet but your comment has me thinking the same thing. I turn 36
| in a couple days!
| marstall wrote:
| This makes so much sense. I've been programming every day since I
| was in my twenties and there are definitely some concepts that
| seem much easier for me to get my head around now (I'm in my
| 50's) than earlier.
|
| Right now I'm reading through a college textbook on the biology
| of learning and memory with ease and good retention. Never got
| this deep into any subject in my school years.
| cheema33 wrote:
| > I've been programming every day since I was in my twenties
| and there are definitely some concepts that seem much easier
| for me to get my head around now (I'm in my 50's) than earlier.
|
| Same same.
|
| I figured this is because I have less energy, but a little more
| wisdom. I have much broader understanding of related concepts.
| So, things click a lot faster.
| bloopernova wrote:
| My mother in law did many mind puzzles every day.
|
| She still got Alzheimer's and died a couple of years later.
|
| She had multiple incidents that she hid because she was too
| scared to find out, and too stubborn to lose her ability to
| drive. She could have had some treatment if she'd approached a
| doctor earlier.
|
| Alzheimer's is utterly evil. Robbing people of their unique
| spark, killing the person before the body dies.
|
| Sorry for the rant
| jorts wrote:
| Sorry to hear that. My FIL was just diagnosed with dementia and
| it's heartbreaking to watch it progress.
| RajT88 wrote:
| My neighbor passed away from dementia recently. We first
| moved in maybe a year after his diagnosis and had to watch it
| progress. Horrible.
|
| Now a friend of mine who is the best programmer I know has an
| early onset diagnosis. I have noticed him starting to pick
| fights regularly with people on LinkedIn over programming
| topics.
|
| It's a really, really hard thing to watch someone go through.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| I hope we have the compassion as a society to get to the point
| where I can say, "If I am unable to recognize my children,
| please kill me." At that point I would have died regardless of
| the condition of my body.
| nradov wrote:
| I hope we have the compassion as individuals not to ask
| others to kill us. That's a heavy weight to put on someone
| else. It's not abstract "society" conducting the euthanasia:
| individual healthcare providers would have to decide that you
| met the criteria and then administer the drugs.
| armada651 wrote:
| Forcing someone to live through a disease when they have
| already lived a full life is simply cruel. Why should
| someone have to suffer on their way out?
| nradov wrote:
| Who is doing the forcing here? Are you personally
| volunteering to kill anyone who decided that they wanted
| to be killed if diagnosed with severe dementia? What if
| they change their mind (even if no longer of sound mind)
| and say they no longer want to die? Would you go ahead
| and kill them anyway?
| simoncion wrote:
| > I hope we have the compassion as individuals not to ask
| others to kill us.
|
| When I've had to kill my pets, I didn't do it myself. I
| called in a professional to do it.
|
| Surely you don't believe that OP is asking their friends to
| knife them in the chest if they're too far gone to ask to
| be euthanized? Surely you believe that OP is asking their
| friends to ask a doctor or nurse come in and do it, if OP
| is no longer capable of asking for it to be done?
| nradov wrote:
| Did you even read my comment? Healthcare professionals
| are people, too.
|
| A human is not a pet.
| kalaksi wrote:
| Isn't that still less awful than having to administer other
| kind of drugs again and again for suffering and slowly
| dying patients that want to die? The situation is just bad
| regardless.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Exactly. The way we treat terminal cancer looks an awful
| lot like sadism.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| So long as people can freely choose whether they will do it
| or not I don't see a moral problem. There would be a very
| big problem if healthcare providers were mandated to
| provide such a service. And note that while the evaluation
| certainly needs to be by a doctor a nurse is quite capable
| of doing it. Look at the Canadian method--for the most part
| it's something that's actually done quite routinely in
| emergency rooms across the world. Sedation followed by a
| paralytic. Usually that's a prelude to intubation but if
| you walk away in the middle it kills. Canada then pushes
| potassium chloride just in case as the paralytics wear off
| pretty fast.
|
| And we are better off as individuals if we have the option
| of having external providers do it as that removes any
| dependency on actually being able to do things. There also
| is the benefit that it brings an external evaluation into
| the system that can recognize that maybe the evaluation was
| wrong. (I'm thinking of a case I heard about--woman thought
| she had lung cancer, chose to not treat it, simply work
| until she dropped. Autopsy said TB, not cancer.)
| hondo77 wrote:
| I don't want to wait that long. If I get diagnosed with
| Alzheimer's, I am taking a quick farewell tour of family and
| friends and then I'm done. I don't want to wait so long that
| I need someone else to off me. I wish that all wasn't
| necessary but this country (US) isn't going to get smarter
| anytime soon.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You always have the option to die whenever you want to. Why
| would you put the burden of ending your life upon other
| people? That's utter cowardice.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| In my opinion, there is a line that needs to be crossed and
| that line is extremely hard to define. To be safe, you have
| to go past the line so any blurriness is removed. I would
| ask the people I love the most to shoulder this burden and
| I would offer to shoulder the same burden for them. This is
| how love works.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| No, you don't have the option. To have the option you must
| have the ability. Consider the hypothetical that started
| this: "if I don't recognize my children". At that point the
| ability to do it yourself is gone.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Yep, first thing I thought, too. I'm terrified of age-related
| degeneration, so I try to stay active and mentally alert, just
| like my father did. He got out and played golf every chance he
| had, did duo-lingo to try to learn to speak Spanish, played
| bass in his church band, kept working even though he didn't
| need the money... and still got Alzheimers. Now he can't drive,
| can't be trusted to go out and take a walk by himself, can't
| even work the TV, so all he can do is sit and watch DVD's that
| my mom changes for him - at least while she still can.
|
| I'm still going to try to fight it for myself, though.
| DCH3416 wrote:
| Hopefully a cure comes as a form of vaccine so some folks can
| be totally against that.
|
| I don't think mental stimulation correlates to the development
| of alzheimers anyway. The papers I've touched on the subject
| seem to suggest a mechanical failure in proteins essentially
| choking off and killing brain structure. Although the lucidity
| period shortly before death is interesting.
| swinglock wrote:
| What kind of incidents, if you don't mind?
| bloopernova wrote:
| Hallucinating while driving, seeing people or animals that
| weren't there. That happened multiple times over several
| years before the diagnosis.
|
| Unfortunately she didn't share what other incidents she had,
| I really wish she had.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Alzheimer's is a disease, you can get it in your 40s. If
| somebody recommends exercise to keep your legs healthy, they
| don't mean that if you have a staph infection in your legs that
| exercise will make it go away.
|
| My grandfather had vascular dementia, and keeping him thinking
| and using his brain absolutely helped. Makes sense for a
| problem of blood flow that thinking new, hard stuff might
| direct some more blood supply to the brain.
|
| Also, 1) you don't know for sure if you have Alzheimer's until
| you're gone, and 2) it seems that vascular dementia co-occurs
| with Alzheimer's a lot. So I can't imagine that it would ever
| be a good idea to stop using your mind if you felt it slipping.
| Dowwie wrote:
| This study needs to capture the affects of sleep deficiency. I'm
| in my mid-forties and don't sleep enough anymore (6-7 hours at
| best).
| kanbankaren wrote:
| What matters is quantity of deep sleep and REM sleep.
|
| REM sleep seems to be related to archiving of events( memory
| formation ) while lack of deep sleep affects the brain itself.
|
| Pickup a smartwatch and track the sleep stages with Apple watch
| being the most accurate.
| risyachka wrote:
| Thats why I don't do vibe coding and try not to use LLMs to
| generate code.
|
| Because it literally speeds up your cognitive decline as your
| brain shuts off and offloads all the heavy lifting.
| semireg wrote:
| This is sweet news. I'm over 40. I enrolled at my local
| university in January and I'm studying (literally right now) for
| my linear algebra midterm [0] which is in 45 minutes! I'm on HN
| to calm my nerves.
|
| I graduated high school in the early 2000s and graduated college
| with major in computer science and a minor in math. My goal is
| 5-8 more classes for a second degree in math (major).
|
| Wish me luck!
|
| [0] Study guide:
| https://course1.winona.edu/bperatt/M311S25/Tests/Test%202/te...
| Course:
| https://course1.winona.edu/bperatt/M311S25/Administrative/M3...
| saganus wrote:
| Off-topic but this is a pretty interesting study guide format.
|
| Maybe it's standard in lots of places, but I've mostly seen
| study guides where they just list a ton of topics and that's
| it.
| semireg wrote:
| It's been twenty years so my opinion is skewed and my memory
| is quite faded, however, I've got opinions on the guide and
| class in general.
|
| The main thing is there are no surprises or tricks. The exams
| are straightforward and EXHAUSTIVE. I do all the assigned
| homework twice. Once when we cover the material and again
| before the exam. Let's hope that strategy pays off again.
| saganus wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it will. Sounds like you are putting some
| real effort so I don't see why you won't do just fine.
|
| Good luck!
| gmays wrote:
| Good luck! You should check out Math Academy, it's more
| effective/efficient/cheaper but also a good supplement since
| it's accredited.
|
| I recently turned 40 myself and I'm working through their
| Foundations courses (made to help adults catch up) before
| tackling the Machine Learning and other uni courses.
| teeray wrote:
| Have you found Math Academy better than just prompting
| ChatGPT/Claude/etc. to be a math tutor?
| gh0stcat wrote:
| Not OP, but I have found MathAcademy to be infinitely
| better. I really liked the assessment portion which levels
| you and gives you an idea of where you are are at the
| present. As someone who graduated with an engineering
| degree a while ago, there were things I realized I didn't
| know as well as I thought I did and I probably would not
| have prompted an LLM to review.
| gmays wrote:
| Yes, much better. ChatGPT/Claude/etc. are useful the times
| I want extra explanation to help connect the dots, but Math
| Academy incorporates spaced repetition, interleaving, etc.
| the way a dedicated tutor would, but in a better structured
| environment/UI.
|
| Their marketing website leaves a lot to be desired (a perk
| since they are all math nerds focused on the product), but
| here are two references on their site that explain their
| approach:
|
| - https://mathacademy.com/how-it-works
|
| - https://mathacademy.com/pedagogy
|
| They also did a really good interview last week that goes
| in depth about their process with Dr. Alex Smith (Director
| of Curriculum) and Justin Skycak (Director of Analytics)
| from Math Academy:
| https://chalkandtalkpodcast.podbean.com/e/math-academy-
| optim...
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| I used an early e-learning platform not because I wanted
| to but because I was one of its developers. I didn't
| develop the course-content just the technical
| implementation.
|
| What I didn't like about the content is I often had
| questions about it but there was no-one to ask the
| questions from. Whoever wrote that material was no longer
| around. It's a frustrating feeling when you can't really
| trust what you're studying is factually correct, or is
| misleading.
|
| I assume AI will have a huge improvement in this respect.
| abhink wrote:
| I'll tell you my experience as someone who's been using
| Math Academy for past 6 months.
|
| Math Academy does what every good application or service
| does. Make things convenient. That's it. No juggling heavy
| books or multiple tabs of PDFs. Each problem comes with
| detailed solution so getting them wrong doesn't mean
| looking around on the internet for a hint about your
| mistake (this is pre ChatGPT era of course, where not
| getting something correct meant putting down MathJax on
| stackexchange).
|
| > better than just prompting ChatGPT/Claude/etc
|
| The convenience means you are doing the most important part
| of learning maths with most ease: problem solving and
| practice. That is something an LLM will not be able to help
| you with. For me, solving problems is pretty much the only
| way to _mostly_ wrap my head around the topic.
|
| I say mostly because LLMs are amazing at complementing Math
| Academy. Any time I hit a conceptual snag, I run off to
| ChatGPT to get more clarity. And it works great.
|
| So in my opinion, Math Academy alone is pretty good. Even
| great for school level maths I'd say. Coupled with ChatGPT
| the package becomes a pretty solid teaching medium.
| Werewolf255 wrote:
| Given my ChatGPT and friends experience has been one of
| overwhelming frustration due to incorrect information, I
| would say Math Academy is in an entirely different galaxy.
| ChatGPT is great if you want to learn that pi is equal to
| 4.
| fuzztester wrote:
| b-b-b-but the next supercalifragilistic ChatGPT version
| will be able to tell you that pi is between 3.1 and 3.2.
| that will be a Quantum improvement, asymptotically close
| to AGI.
|
| at least, i think i heard alt samman say so.
|
| you plebs and proles better shell out the $50 a month,
| increasing by $10 per day, to keep dis honest
| billionaires able to keep on buying deir multi-million
| dollar yachts and personal jets.
|
| be grateful for the valuable crumbs we toss to you,
| serfs.
| pchristensen wrote:
| I haven't used it, but there was a big thread about it
| yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43241499
| jacksnipe wrote:
| Math is something that should be taught in an opinionated
| way with an eye toward pedagogy. Self study with GPT is an
| excellent tool in math, but only for those who have enough
| perspective to know which directions to set out on. I don't
| think anybody who doesn't know linear algebra should be
| guiding their studies themselves.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| Cool, good luck!
| Propelloni wrote:
| Good luck!
| geniium wrote:
| Nice, good luck
| thom wrote:
| Good on you! Of course even after 40, it's still not the end of
| the world if you don't get what you're hoping first time, but I
| hope it goes well.
| janwillemb wrote:
| Good luck! You can do it! I started doing statistics classes
| three years ago when I was 45, continued doing a MSc degree,
| which I finished successfully a few months ago. I am now
| looking into doing a PhD. This is more fun than I ever imagined
| (fair enough: I was a teenager when imagining it).
| TheHideout wrote:
| Good luck! I'm over 40 and just had my midterm for General
| Linear Models (statistics + linear algebra).
|
| This YouTube playlist was invaluable for me:
| https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmM_3MA2HWpYYo7QExaRvor_u...
| barrenko wrote:
| Appreciating the link!
| taeric wrote:
| Kudos! Curious how you got back into classes? If you are
| getting another degree, sounds like you went back through
| admissions?
| semireg wrote:
| Yes, through admissions. Getting a degree in math, maybe...
| depends on how much stress this adds to my life. If I were
| retired I'd just take a full load, but raising a family and
| running my business I can only take it one class at a time.
| tsumnia wrote:
| Keep making those pushes! I was a non-traditional graduate
| student because around 10 years I got very serious about going
| for my doctorate. I literally scheduled times with my friends
| to watch Khan Academy videos on upper level maths and spent
| time practicing those skills. Then grad school is just one
| intensive learning session.
|
| Years of martial arts ingrained that sense of being a life-long
| learner. I was taught the mantra of "Progress comes to those
| who train" and "Practice makes permanent" and even though those
| phrases were focused on learning to beat someone up, I've
| carried them on into other parts of my life.
| thrwwy001 wrote:
| > graduated college with major in computer science and a minor
| in math.
|
| Me too. High five!
|
| > My goal is 5-8 more classes for a second degree in math
| (major).
|
| But why? Wouldn't it make more sense to go for a master in
| computer science? Are you going to use it for work. Otherwise,
| aren't you going to "lose it" anyways? Also, is your job paying
| for the degree or are you paying out of pocket?
| acedTrex wrote:
| An academic pursuit can be done for sake of knowledge.
| Forcing your mind to constantly flex is never a bad idea.
| amelius wrote:
| It could be both, though.
| semireg wrote:
| I'm self employed and this is "for fun." My wife is a
| professor in another department and I've got a tuition
| waiver.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| No doubt, a lot of us are greatly relieved to read this.
| avgDev wrote:
| I will be 40 in 2 years and I also plan on going back for a
| masters in something :). Maybe CS, maybe business who knows.
|
| Best of luck on your pursuit.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I went to the University of Texas but I took summer courses in
| Houston Community College (calculus II, physics II, and more --
| those classes were SO bad at UT).
|
| It was insane how much better the courses were in the community
| college. Tiny class of 15. $300 or something. Amazing professor
| that you could ask questions to like you could in high school.
| Normal 20-30 question textbook homework where you just work
| basic problems and build confidence that you know the material.
|
| Meanwhile UT was the opposite. I think I paid
| $1400/class/semester (and that's a bargain). Lecture halls
| where you couldn't possibly ask a question. Weird math/physics
| homework that was like 3-5 super hard questions that I often
| couldn't figure out, demoralizing. Often a TA that could barely
| speak English. It's actually quite insulting.
|
| I sometimes think about enrolling in a local college for fun,
| the experience was that good.
| timr wrote:
| I had a similar experience -- took physics at a community
| college when I was in high school. The 'up-side' of the
| overproduction of PhDs is that many people from elite
| backgrounds end up teaching at community colleges.
|
| The only negative for me was that the students were pretty
| checked out.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > The only negative for me was that the students were
| pretty checked out.
|
| I didn't put a lot of thought into where I went to school
| but if I could do it over again this is something I would
| have considered when I applied. The school I ended up at
| did not have many serious students. It was a night and day
| difference taking courses with even one or two students who
| were similarly engaged with the material, but most of those
| students ended up transferring to better schools after a
| year or two.
|
| You also run into the issue later on that the people you
| went to school with wash out of industry (or never work in
| it to begin with) at much higher rates in comparison to
| those who went to more serious schools.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| Large universities are focused on research, and they incur a
| lot of expenses due to administrators' egos (build build
| build), the number of administrators, and the range of
| microstate services offered, like their own health care
| system and mental health counseling (a major thing in
| universities now). Community colleges are focused on
| teaching.
| bsder wrote:
| > their own health care system and mental health counseling
| (a major thing in universities now)
|
| Which would be a non-issue if the US simply had single-
| payer or universal healthcare.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| > Weird math/physics homework that was like 3-5 super hard
| questions that I often couldn't figure out, demoralizing
|
| Had this experience at an elite uni as well for math courses.
| At the time I felt like it pushed me to really grow, and it
| was absolutely necessary to do well in that specific course
| (tests often had questions that ~required you to know how to
| do all the uber-hard homework problems), but I wonder what
| the research actually says about this sort of homework vs
| your more standard variety.
| layman51 wrote:
| I have wondered this too as a person who has attended a
| regular (non-honors) Calculus II course at a fairly top-
| rank private university and then again at a community
| college.
|
| From what I remember, the university course also had some
| rote exercises for homework so it isn't like everyone is
| only focusing on working the trickier exercises.
|
| This also reminds me of the story Donald Knuth has around
| working every exercise in the book for a calculus class.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| I had classes with take-home tests of three impossible
| questions, and standard tests of disguised regurgitation.
| The impossible questions are the ones that will really test
| your understanding of the fundamentals. It's the different
| between "add two numbers together", and "what does adding
| mean"?
|
| I found out I can't stretch my brain to truly understand
| the fundamentals, so I stopped after a bachelors and don't
| use my degree at all. I don't mind. It takes truly special
| people to push the limits, and a lot of not so special
| people to keep the world running for them.
| throw_nbvc1234 wrote:
| I think it also depends on what the professor's and the
| student's goals are; and if they're aligned.
|
| Is the course about learning the material at hand, or
| laying the foundation for graduate level courses in the
| same subject? About teaching the most efficient way or
| getting a student used to deriving equations when there's
| not a plug and play formula.
|
| I'm sure we can draw similar parallels between csci college
| courses, big tech interviews, and professional software
| development. Even though it's all the same pipeline, each
| stage/stakeholder has different goals, motivations, etc...
| If you're having a discussion about the pros and cons of an
| approach, you have to make sure the goals are aligned else
| you'll just be talking past each other.
| lubesGordi wrote:
| I had the same experience where community college teachers
| were vastly superior to my university teachers. Vastly.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| It's possible that people who end up as teachers in
| community colleges actually like teaching and see it as a
| challenge they are willing to tackle.
|
| Whereas in big universities the professors really don't
| much want to teach they want to accomplish scientific
| breakthroughs, themselves.
| analog31 wrote:
| One possible reason is that the community college teachers
| -- at least in my state -- are unionized. This makes
| teaching as a career possible.
| bitwize wrote:
| I went to a somewhat highly regarded (not MIT or CalTech
| tier) tech school, and then to a state university.
|
| The tech school considered it a boast that it had more
| graduate students than undergrad. It was clear where the
| professors' emphasis was. I recognize the lecture halls where
| you couldn't ask questions, and the barely-anglophone
| instructors. (Everyone in the EE department, in particular,
| seemed to come "fresh off the boat" from China bringing
| precious little English knowledge with them. The prof for my
| introductory EE course mumbled on top of it.)
|
| Then I went to state school. Ho-lee shit. Complete
| difference. The bad profs were incompetent chucklefucks who
| couldn't cut it in real academia. The good profs actually
| cared about teaching undergrads.
|
| I learned a lot about choosing a college -- a few years and a
| few tens of thousands of dollars too late.
| MyHypatia wrote:
| I had this experience too! My math professors in community
| college were much better than at my significantly more
| expensive university.
| mmooss wrote:
| Great for you; that's really fantastic and by posting about it,
| I hope you make a lot of other middle-aged people comfortable
| with persuing education.
|
| > My goal is 5-8 more classes for a second degree in math
| (major).
|
| Why not get a masters degree?
|
| Edit: answered here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43282629
|
| > Wish me luck!
|
| You don't need it. :)
| semireg wrote:
| A masters in CS doesn't interest me as much as pure math.
| Maybe when I'm 50...
| dehrmann wrote:
| > My goal is 5-8 more classes for a second degree in math
| (major)
|
| Do colleges usually let you do this when you're adding to a
| degree you earned 20 years ago?
| semireg wrote:
| This college requires something like taking 30 credits from
| the institution to award a degree. That's somewhere between
| 7-10 classes (mix of 3/4 credits each).
| dsiegel2275 wrote:
| Congrats! It is never too late to be doing this type of study
| and work.
|
| I'm doing something similar: I just turned 50 and have been
| taking graduate ML classes where I work (at Carnegie Mellon).
| When I finish the graduate certificate program in generative AI
| and LLMs that I am enrolled in, I will be only two semesters
| away from earning a full masters degree.
| sztanko wrote:
| How did it go?
| semireg wrote:
| I didn't ace it, but knew immediately what I had done wrong
| as I rode my bicycle home. I kept checking my linear
| transformation matrix and the Eigen values didn't compute...
| Looked again at the TI-89 when I got home and realized I
| swapped the orientation on the Jordan constants. I wrote all
| the equations out, so maybe my professor will have mercy on
| me. Oh well, another case of elevator wit -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27esprit_de_l%27escalier
| Tade0 wrote:
| Is calculus included in your classes?
| bitwize wrote:
| This sounds like a line from a _Silicon Valley_ type TV
| series used to establish "character am smart"... and I
| love it.
| lanstin wrote:
| I hope it went well! I am in my fifties and enrolled in a
| master degree program for pure mathematics about 2 years ago (I
| don't need the degree, so I"m just taking all the classes they
| offer, so not about to graduate). It definitely took some time
| to get my brain sharper, but I am better each semester.
|
| I hope people don't take away the negative side of the article,
| brain slows down, but the positive side: brain gets better with
| usage. Its uncomfortable, I can churn out programs as complex
| as programs I've already written and go to review meetings and
| planning meetings without much effort. But being able to solve
| PDEs reasonably quickly and accurately, I cannot, or have not
| without a great deal of practise. It's unconfortable in some
| weird mental but physical sense. But I'm sharper in everything
| else I do.
|
| One interesting thing about software as career followed by math
| classes is that there's no compiler - you can type any janky
| thought into LaTeX and if you don't detect that it's bogus,
| nothing will, until you show it to a professor.
|
| Also, the information density of maths notation is way higher
| than (good) code. We want code to be readable by some that
| doesn't know it; a lot of math seems to be readable when you
| sort of 80% already are familiar with all the prereqs. So no
| just skimming and then hitting compile/test/run (whatever
| validation you do). It's typing letter by letter and taking the
| mental effort to actually see and decipher the letter (at
| least, for me in my current stage; I'm trying to do novel
| research, but my demonstrated understanding of the details of
| the previous research is embarrassing low).
|
| Also, weirdly, I still have the same fear of professors that I
| did as a young person. I manage it better with my decades of
| maturity (really) but it is still a part of my social
| interactions.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > But being able to solve PDEs reasonably quickly and
| accurately, I cannot, or have not without a great deal of
| practise.
|
| No one - young or old - does well in math without a great
| deal of practice :-)
| JadeNB wrote:
| A related ancient XKCD with a slightly different take:
| https://xkcd.com/447/
| semireg wrote:
| The information density is incredible. A 2x2 matrix (Jordan
| constants) containing enough information to produce a slice
| of a hyperbolic paraboloid. Leaves me mesmerized...
|
| It's funny, at the end of each lecture I just want to yell...
| "NO! Don't stop! I must see how this ends!"
|
| Very similar to when I stop our children's movie and tell
| them to go take a bath.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > One interesting thing about software as career followed by
| math classes is that there's no compiler - you can type any
| janky thought into LaTeX and if you don't detect that it's
| bogus, nothing will, until you show it to a professor.
|
| The formal proof community is very interested in exactly this
| problem! It's not my specialty, but I believe that Lean
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_(proof_assistant)) is one
| of the very active communities.
| AndyKelley wrote:
| Good luck! I'm 36 and still hoping to master Digital Signal
| Processing at some point even though I find the math extremely
| difficult.
| hecanjog wrote:
| Good luck! Are you in Winona, too? I live near the campus and
| have been considering taking some classes there, this was a
| nice surprise to see. :-)
| semireg wrote:
| Yes! I'll send you an email.
| wut-wut wrote:
| Break a leg and Good luck!
| noobly wrote:
| Your school allows you to add a degree retroactively like that?
| semireg wrote:
| We will see. A degree is just the ends to justify taking math
| classes. My goal is to learn, if they give me a degree
| that'll be a bonus!
| kadushka wrote:
| Why take classes if you can learn everything with latest llms?
| Unless you actually need a formal degree in math ?
| orphea wrote:
| you can learn everything with latest llms
|
| That's a good idea if your goal is a degree in
| hallucinations.
| kadushka wrote:
| Can you provide an example where a top llm (sonnet 3.7,
| grok-3, o1, gpt-4.5) hallucinated a linear algebra answer?
| stevetron wrote:
| I'm skeptical. I was in my 40's before I graduated from a
| college. Before that, I did some serious electronics with a
| background from my local community college, have worked
| production lines, taught myself assembly language when I was
| engineering my first microprocessor-based design at work, then
| when I couldn't get re-employed years later, a lot of potential
| employers simply not believing my resume content because my
| 'formal education' was lacking, so I went back to school, got my
| BS in 1999, and my MS in 2006, then continued working on personal
| projects and learnign new coding languages on my own since now
| nobody wanted to take a chance on hiring an 'old' man. Their
| loss.
| cheema33 wrote:
| > I couldn't get re-employed years later, a lot of potential
| employers simply not believing my resume content because my
| 'formal education' was lacking..
|
| I am 53 years old. I don't have a college degree. I have never
| been unemployed and have had good software development jobs all
| my adult life, including now.
|
| It is possible and likely that your lack of a degree was not
| the issue.
| jt2190 wrote:
| > Two main results emerge. First, average skills increase
| strongly into the forties before decreasing slightly in literacy
| and more strongly in numeracy. Second, skills decline at older
| ages only for those with below-average skill usage. _White-collar
| and higher-educated workers with above-average usage show
| increasing skills even beyond their forties_. Women have larger
| skill losses at older age, particularly in numeracy. [emphasis
| mine]
|
| So, it seems like workers with above-average usage of literacy
| and numeracy continue to increase their ability, while those in
| fields that don't emphasize those would need some kind of mental
| "exercise".
|
| (I also note that some commenters here are rushing to add _more_
| cognitive work to their daily routine through additional studies,
| but I wonder if they'd be better off focusing on commonly
| neglected areas like physical activity.)
| canjobear wrote:
| Correlation/causation. People whose faculties are still intact
| are more likely to do and enjoy activities requiring those
| faculties.
| optymizer wrote:
| For those who don't feel like taking math courses in a formal
| setting, making games from scratch is a fun way to learn and
| apply linear algebra and calculus.
|
| I never really needed determinants in my life until I tried
| moving a spaceship towards another object. Trying to render
| realistic computer graphics gets you into some deep topics like
| FFTs and the physics of light and materials, with some scary-
| looking math, but I can feel my mind sharpening with each turn of
| the page in the book.
| cxie wrote:
| I think there's a valid concern about cognitive fatigue. It could
| be mentally exhausting to constantly "exercise" our brains just
| to maintain cognitive abilities as we age!
|
| Maybe AI could be our mental gym buddy here - not replacing our
| thinking but offering just the right level of mental challenge to
| keep us sharp without burning us out. Picture an AI that knows
| when to push your intellectual boundaries and when to back off
| based on your energy levels.
|
| And Neuralink-style brain interfaces? They could be like
| cognitive training wheels - gently supporting neural pathways
| while letting us do the actual pedaling. Instead of "downloading
| knowledge" (which sounds exhausting in its own way), they might
| subtly enhance natural learning processes or help maintain neural
| connections that would otherwise weaken with age.
|
| The goal shouldn't be turning our golden years into endless
| mental marathons, but rather finding that sweet spot where
| cognitive maintenance feels engaging and enjoyable rather than
| like another chore on the to-do list!
| stego-tech wrote:
| Echoing the sentiments of others here, this is why I firmly
| believe that public college should be free, for all, for life.
| Formal education just works better for some of us than video
| tutorials or self-paced learning, and ensuring everyone is able
| to learn new things and practice their skills in a consequence-
| free environment benefits society as a whole.
|
| Think about the tech nerds (me) who never learned how to cook,
| and are in their thirties. Or lawyers and Doctors who are sick
| and tired of feeling like they don't understand how computers
| work, and want to learn. Or an accountant who loves maths, and
| wants to get into the scientific side of the field. Or the
| homemaker who wants to re-enter the workforce now that their kids
| are grown, and wants to pick up carpentry and welding to become a
| tradesperson.
|
| If cognitive decline comes from failing to practice it regularly,
| then the cheapest solution is free education for life to
| encourage as many people as possible to keep learning new skills
| and remain cognitively engaged.
| jdefr89 wrote:
| I am 100% with you. I am great engineering wise.. Have no clue
| how to eat and live healthy!
| stego-tech wrote:
| You're not alone! _Nobody_ knows _everything_ , and what's
| important or necessary to our thriving changes constantly
| throughout our lives. Learning to cook wasn't high on that
| list when tech salaries were great, delivery was cheap, and
| housing wasn't ( _completely_ ) unaffordable; now that I'm
| nearing my 40s and have to stretch even a six-figure salary
| further than before, suddenly learning to cook is a
| _necessity_.
|
| Good people are always changing in some way. Making public
| education free encourages lifelong learning and builds a more
| adaptable human for times of crises. It's _good survival
| strategy_ , that also just happens to create a more fulfilled
| human being.
| morning-coffee wrote:
| > I firmly believe that public college should be free, for all,
| for life
|
| I just don't understand these statements that "this or that
| should be free". Do you plan to enslave the people who would
| provide this education? Do you not subscribe to the saying "You
| get what you pay for?". Public education through High School
| (in the US) has been free for many generations. Ever wonder
| what would happen if you make the next 4 years "free"? (Hint,
| you're not going to pop-out of those 4 years with any skills
| that are differentiated enough from everyone else who took-up
| the "free" education and not be right back in the same position
| you are now.)
|
| If you don't have the motivation to prevent your own cognitive
| decline by taking advantage of a plethora of already free (high
| quality) education (e.g. https://ocw.mit.edu), then taxing the
| rest of us so you can be spoon-fed all the free "formal
| education" you want for life isn't the answer either.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Ever wonder what would happen if you make the next 4 years
| "free"?
|
| A high school diploma used to mean something because it was a
| filter. Once graduation rate became the goal, standards were
| lowered, and just showing up became enough to graduate.
|
| Higher education does some filtering. Either they filter
| aggressively at admissions and graduate everybody (Ivies),
| filter with weed-out classes and lesser degrees (respected
| public universities), both (other public universities), or
| offer a middling education and are ranked accordingly. So the
| degree means something.
| stego-tech wrote:
| I agree that degrees can be filters, but I question what
| "filter" they represent in modern contexts. From my
| experiences, the modern degree is little more than a
| gatekeeping credential to demonstrate you either took on
| substantial student debt (and thus likely to take lower pay
| or more precarious employment) or come from a wealthy
| background (stronger social networks for other rich
| folks/Capital types; a "pedigree", in other words, a la a
| caste system).
|
| You're 100% right that a modern American High School
| Diploma does not reflect any degree of basic competency,
| because standards were constantly refined downward to
| promote graduation at all costs; I argue college degrees
| (and many technology certifications) are much the same,
| providing little more than a demonstration of taking on
| debt and rote memorization capabilities, rather than being
| a functional worker.
|
| So if that's the case, and they're not of practical value
| as credentials anymore, it could be argued there's no harm
| in opening fundamental/foundational courses in skills to
| the entire populace, paid for through taxpayer money and
| restricted to State/Public non-profit Institutions. If
| we're really concerned about costs, we could implement caps
| on consumption unless part of a degree program to ensure
| those taking the advanced courses for employment prospects
| are given priority over those seeking non-professional
| growth. There's a _lot_ of wiggle room to be had, if we 're
| serious about opening this up.
| stego-tech wrote:
| > I just don't understand these statements that "this or that
| should be free".
|
| Because you're focusing on the accumulation of a finite
| resource (currency, land, etc) as the sole barometer for
| success, and then conflating "freedom for use" with "freedom
| from cost". _Obviously_ salaries have to be paid, buildings
| maintained, and improvements paid for. _Obviously_ this all
| costs money, which is a finite resource. _Obviously_ that
| money has to come from somewhere. Taxation enables everyone
| to contribute a fraction of the cost regardless of use, and
| an effective social program (like free education) distributes
| that cost effectively over time since there 's zero chance
| 100% of the population will consume that resource at the same
| time, or even in the same year.
|
| It's basic societal maths. If we accept forgoing a profit on
| the consumption of the resource (healthcare, roads, mail
| service, education, defense), we can lower the cost
| substantially and concentrate on its effective utilization.
| If we do _that_ , we can carve up the cost across the widest
| possible demographic (taxpayers), and assign a percentage of
| it as taxation relative to income and wealth. It's _how
| governments work_.
|
| > Do you not subscribe to the saying "You get what you pay
| for?"
|
| Does _anyone_ subscribe to this in the current economy?
| Everything has record high prices, yet still bombards you
| with advertisements, sells your data, and requires
| replacement in a matter of years instead of being repairable
| indefinitely. University education has boiled down to little
| more than gargantuan debt loads to acquire a credential for
| potential employment, a credential that often has no
| relevancy to the field you actually find work in.
|
| So no, I don't subscribe to that, and I haven't for a decade.
| My $15,000 used beater car is _literally_ more reliable than
| a six-figure SUV, _and_ it doesn 't keep mugging me for more
| value to the manufacturer through surveillance technology and
| forced-advertising.
|
| > Ever wonder what would happen if you make the next 4 years
| "free"?
|
| Yes. I imagine much of the populace would be better educated
| and informed about how modern, complex systems work. More
| people would be fiercely resistant to the low-wage, high-
| labor jobs that flood the market, forcing a reconciliation of
| societal priorities. I figure we'd have more engineers, and
| artists, and accountants, and tradespersons. We'd have more
| perspectives to existing problems from a broader swath of the
| economic strata, instead of the same old nepobabies from a
| lineage of college graduates making the same short-sighted
| mistakes.
|
| The question is, have _you_ considered what might happen if
| we made a four-year degree more economically accessible?
|
| > If you don't have the motivation to prevent your own
| cognitive decline by taking advantage of a plethora of
| already free (high quality) education (e.g.
| https://ocw.mit.edu), then taxing the rest of us so you can
| be spoon-fed all the free "formal education" you want for
| life isn't the answer either.
|
| Now you're just insulting people because they lack means, and
| conflating it with lack of motivation. I've _lived_ with
| people whose sole education was reading books in Public
| Libraries because they never had public education, with
| Section 8 housing recipients hammering online learning
| courses from shared computers to try and find a way upward
| and out of poverty. _None of that_ gets them a foot in the
| door, because they don 't have the _physical piece of paper_
| that says "University Graduate" and the social networks you
| build from physically attending school - which adults _cannot
| do_ without money or taking on substantial debt, that in turn
| jeopardizes their ability to survive.
|
| If you want a society where only those of monied means have
| the ability to succeed, well present-day America is certainly
| an excellent demonstration of that. I'd rather build a
| society where _all of us_ contribute a _part_ of the proceeds
| of our labor to build a more equitable society for all, so
| _everyone_ has an opportunity to found that new business,
| make those social connections, or try new ideas, without
| worrying about losing their home or paying for healthcare
| treatments.
| simoncion wrote:
| > Does _anyone_ subscribe to this in the current economy?
|
| Not anyone whose net worth is under -say- fifty- or a
| hundred-million dollars and is older than their mid-
| thirties, that's for sure.
|
| If you're not rich enough to routinely afford very well-
| made things, and you're old enough to know that very many
| things legitimately used to be far, far higher quality for
| not _that_ much more inflation-adjusted money [0], then you
| sure as shit don 't subscribe to that saying anymore.
|
| [0] And _sometimes_ , far less... especially when you
| factor in the cost of continually replacing the garbage
| that's all that you can afford.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| > _Do you plan to enslave the people who would provide this
| education? Do you not subscribe to the saying "You get what
| you pay for?". Public education through High School (in the
| US) has been free for many generations._
|
| Do you believe that the people who provide public education
| through High School are enslaved? If yes, how? If not, why do
| you assume providing free public college education requires
| enslavement?
|
| > _Public education through High School (in the US) has been
| free for many generations. Ever wonder what would happen if
| you make the next 4 years "free"?_
|
| No need to wonder. Tuition for bachelor's degrees is free in
| multiple countries, for instance Germany, Finland, Sweden,
| Scotland and Norway. What happened there?
| simoncion wrote:
| > Tuition for bachelor's degrees is free in multiple
| countries...
|
| For the longest time, it used to be free for state
| residents attending State colleges in California.
| ikrenji wrote:
| I don't understand this sentiment. You have no problem
| spending $800 billion in tax payer money on military in a
| country that hasn't fought a defensive war in 200 years but
| as soon as the same concept is applied to education or
| healthcare it's somehow wrong?
| Sxubas wrote:
| Chat gpt is already free to a very generous extent, and covers
| 80% (if not more) of the learning resources you could need for
| almost any topic, theory-wise. I'd risk saying it can adapt for
| most people's needs.
|
| For practical knowledge you just need to do it over and over. A
| good mentor/teacher would help a lot, but the very very basics
| I'd say are learnable by yourself. It's as simple as doing it
| over and over and keeping a critical eye on what went good and
| not.
|
| As a result, I don't think free public colleges would enable
| more people to -actually- learn compared to what we have today.
| However, I find it would be a great place to build community
| and find people with similar interests to you, which is quite
| rare to do without an app these days.
| stego-tech wrote:
| See, I'm worried about relying on LLMs for learning given
| their penchant for hallucinations and the early studies
| showing they're actually _bad_ for learning or cognitive
| improvement, since they remove the "research" and "critical
| thinking" phases of problem solving for entry-level stuff -
| fundamental skills that are necessary to put something into
| practice independently and learn from mistakes. Sure,
| teachers/professors can _also_ make stuff up (and often with
| more damage given their position as a "reliable authority"),
| but in a classroom setting it feels like that'd be found out
| faster than using a ChatGPT that's spitting out bad results.
|
| > However, I find it would be a great place to build
| community and find people with similar interests to you,
| which is quite rare to do without an app these days.
|
| This is what a _lot_ of detractors seem to miss about the
| benefits of in-person learning. Team projects force you to
| interact with strangers and cooperate for the benefit of the
| whole. Campuses increase the likelihood of chance encounters.
| They get you out of your home and into the community, which
| helps you feel connected to your actions and their outcomes.
|
| The knock-on effects are often greater than the immediate
| benefits.
| buzzert wrote:
| > Formal education just works better for some of us than video
| tutorials or self-paced learning
|
| I don't agree with this at all. Anecdotally, the autodidacts
| I've met are way more knowledgeable about subjects they're
| passionate about compared to those who received a formal
| education for it. This applies to both computer science, but
| also psychology majors who I've met who can't even tell me the
| difference between Freud and Jung.
| stego-tech wrote:
| I mean, you can disagree with it based on your anecdata, but
| mine backs up my assertion which is why I made (and
| qualified) it the way I did. _I specifically_ thrive in live
| sessions with an instructor knowledgeable on the material who
| can provide direct feedback, and I am not the only one.
| "Works better" is a qualifier on the _effectiveness_ of the
| education on an individual, not the effectiveness of it _on
| all individuals_.
|
| The key to learning accessibility is flexibility. Some thrive
| on self-study, some thrive on video tutorials, some thrive on
| audio lectures and others in live exercises. Heck, I wouldn't
| be surprised if this also applied to _specific topics_ :
| fundamentals of cooking might be better via live instruction,
| while iterating on a recipe is often fine with self-study or
| video tutorials.
|
| The point _is_ the flexibility, to allow people to learn in a
| way that 's best for them, so they're _more likely_ to
| continue learning throughout their lives.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I don't agree with this at all.
|
| Are you actually saying that _nobody exists_ who learns
| better when taught in the best ways we currently know how to
| teach, and in the way all formal education currently works?
| That _everyone_ is better off teaching themselves with no
| help?
|
| You are disagreeing if and only if this is what you are
| saying.
| Unearned5161 wrote:
| you're saying you don't agree with it, but then go on to talk
| about something entirely unrelated.
|
| op isn't saying self paced learning doesn't work for anyone,
| therefore it's irrelevant if you know some whizz autodidacts
| randcraw wrote:
| Over the past 40 years I've become aware of a LOT of people
| who had difficulty staying engaged in self-paced learning
| sessions, especially pre-recorded. Without the dynamics --
| questions and interactions -- that other students can pose
| (or you can pose), it's tough to maintain your attention for
| a solid 50 or 90 minutes. Not that all courses must be in-
| person, but I'd there to be a mix, with more in-person
| opportunities for course material that needs Q&A and
| interaction and examples, like courses heavy in math or
| theory, or recitation sections.
| rsanek wrote:
| I don't think I should be paying for others to study simply
| because they prefer a different modality of learning,
| _especially_ when it has been found that learning modality
| selection has nearly zero impact on actual learning outcomes.
|
| Now, if this was structured as a negative tax system, where eg
| everyone after graduating high school starts with -$10k in
| taxable income for a handful of years, perhaps that could avoid
| punishing those that choose to self-study.
| stouset wrote:
| This line of reasoning can be used, unmodified, to argue
| against essentially all of public education.
|
| An educated populace is an inherent good. There's nothing
| magic about the particular choice of K-12, and one could very
| convincingly argue that with the increasing complexity of
| modern life and increasing expectations from employers that
| ongoing adult education is _also_ a net good, even when
| you're not the recipient.
|
| Ongoing education can also be vocational for those who aren't
| inclined towards typical academia.
|
| Cynically, one can also point to the current political
| administration of the U.S. (and the comparative education
| rates for its voters) as a case in point for why education is
| important.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Very well said. Education, at its core, is about adapting
| the species to better survive the increasingly complex
| world it creates and inhabits. Failing to educate _the
| whole_ means exposing it to fracture and exploitation from
| within.
|
| It's inoculation against exploitation, a mental vaccine
| that, when done right, promotes cooperation over self-
| interest.
|
| Which is exactly why those who are threatened by it, seek
| to restrict or destroy it.
| cwiz wrote:
| What about using adderall to get an edge in cognitive skills?
| m0llusk wrote:
| And yet ranks of successful founders are dominated by people in
| their mid forties. Perhaps there is something more involved with
| social function than pure cognitive skill?
| nbzso wrote:
| For this type of research the data sample is too small.
| misterbishop wrote:
| It's time for our geriatric political class to be retired.
| soneca wrote:
| The abstract has these two statements:
|
| > _"Cross-sectional age-skill profiles suggest that cognitive
| skills start declining by age 30 if not earlier."_
|
| and
|
| > _"Two main results emerge. First, average skills increase
| strongly into the forties before decreasing slightly in literacy
| and more strongly in numeracy"_
|
| Does this mean that this study contradicts the popular common
| understanding that cognitive skills decline after 30? Or am I
| missing something?
|
| For me, personally, if feels a more impactful finding than the
| "use it or lose it" one
| zackmorris wrote:
| I'd like to see a study on how the acute stress of living in
| survival mode for a lifetime affects the brain by using it too
| much for the wrong tasks.
|
| The last 25 years have been particularly painful for people like
| me who favor academia and pure research over profit-driven
| innovation that tends to reinvent the wheel. When I look around
| at the sheer computing power available to us, I'm saddened that
| people with wealth, power and influence tend to point to their
| own success as reason to perpetuate the status quo. When we could
| have had basic resources like energy, water, some staple foods
| and shelter provided for free (or nearly free) through
| automation. So that we could focus on getting real work done in
| the sciences for example, instead of just making rent.
|
| I've been living like someone from movies like In Time and The
| Pursuit of Happyness for so many decades without a win that my
| subconscious no longer believes that the future will be better. I
| have to overcome tremendous spidey sense warning signs from my
| gut in order to begin working each day. The starting friction is
| intense. To the point where I'm not sure how much longer I can
| continue doing this to myself, and I'm "only" in my mid-40s.
| After a lifetime of negative reinforcement, I'm not sure that I
| can adopt new innovations like AI into my workflows.
|
| It's a hollow feeling to have so much experience in solving any
| problem, when problem solving itself will soon be
| solved/marginalized to the point that nobody wants to pay for it
| because AI can do it. I feel rather strongly that within 3 years,
| mass-layoffs will start sweeping the world with no help coming
| from our elected officials or private industry. Nobody will be
| safe from being rendered obsolete, not even you the reader.
|
| So I have my faculties, I have potential, but I've never felt
| dumber or more ineffectual than I do right now.
| navbaker wrote:
| I think (from personal experience) talking with a good mental
| health professional would really help with your current state
| of mind and the pressure you're feeling.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Really? And how exactly?
|
| "Just man up", maybe?
|
| Sorry for the snark but I don't think they can just magically
| make you feel better. An example or two could change my mind.
| mmooss wrote:
| > "Just man up", maybe?
|
| That's the toxic stuff you get from society, which leads to
| you hiring mental health professionals that can teach you
| healthy, effective ways of dealing with stress.
| pdimitar wrote:
| This much I know and have heard. Still curious about some
| examples though.
| mmooss wrote:
| Responding to your earlier comment, it's not magic and
| they don't do it, you do it. They help you learn how but
| it's up to you.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Every case is different. Therapists are brain debuggers. We
| don't know what the bug is yet.
| 392 wrote:
| Look up "how to reduce salt" on YouTube. And remember, you
| can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Cognitive Behavior Therapy can help with a wide range of
| issues. If there are worries that are not productive for
| you, that you can't get out of your head, a therapist can
| teach you how to use some basic tools to control that. And
| you'll probably only need a few visits. You can also read
| books, but given what you've stated I think you should
| start with a human.
|
| My son went to a few sessions and completely got his OCD
| under control. He doesn't have to go anymore. I used
| similar technique to quit smoking 30 years ago after at
| least a half-dozen serious tries by other means failed.
| Still off them. It applies to all kinds of issues though,
| its also very effective for depression. According to the
| literature studies I did twenty years ago, it was the only
| technique that actually showed sustained benefit for
| depression other than medication.
| pdimitar wrote:
| My depression comes from super severe learned
| helplessness. I have been extremely stupid with money and
| career choices and nowadays things got hard, I have
| several chronic health conditions and the difficulty got
| up not by 2x, more like 20x. I just can't muster the will
| to even do one job interview, financial reserves are
| dwindling fast and, you get the picture.
|
| I have zero faith any therapist can help me. They'll
| likely start with "but it's for your own good!" and I'll
| just say "yeah yeah, like 200 other things I have been
| told and zero of them turned out to be true". That's how
| I imagine it.
|
| I am not against paying professionals. Obviously. I just
| don't believe in therapy at all.
|
| What would you do to start with, with a guy like me? (I
| am aware you are not a therapist yourself.)
| jasonshen wrote:
| I am also not a therapist but I am a former tech founder
| turned executive coach so I do talk to people who are
| facing what feels like overwhelming challenges, risk, and
| uncertainty.
|
| Even in the language you used "severe learned
| helplessness" and "extremely stupid", you are revealing a
| state of mind (cynicism, self-flagellation) that is not
| oriented to improving your condition.
|
| You know you have a strong bias against therapists--given
| your seeming lack of knowledge about them, where do you
| think that bias came from? Fundamentally, we are a social
| species and evolved to live with strong connections to
| small groups.
|
| Our society is no longer set up like that. So
| professionals like therapists and coaches provide the
| essential value of a caring, supportive, and helpful
| relationship that we lack. Like getting an essential
| nutrient that your diet lacks.
|
| Do you have health insurance? Many of them cover mental
| health--the site Headway can help you find one that takes
| insurance. Try a few and gather some first-party data
| before writing them off fully. The downside is a few
| hundred dollars. The upside is a much brighter and
| materially better future.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| I think its important to understand that CBT is a system,
| a set of tools for managing your thought patterns.
| Therapists who specialize in it are largely in the
| business of educating their clients, not having them lie
| on a couch and talk to the ceiling about their childhood.
| I'm not saying you won't have generic "talk-therapy" kind
| of conversations - those are still necessary for them to
| understand the specific issues you need to work on - but
| its not just someone helping you find insights that don't
| change anything.
|
| If you are completely against meeting with a therapist
| though, you can start with books. I wish I could
| recommend one that I've used, but this is an example of
| one that looks really promising to me, with a practical
| approach: https://www.amazon.com/Retrain-Your-Brain-
| Behavioral-Depress...
| saltcured wrote:
| To try to complement what other replies already said...
|
| I think an important result of successful intervention is
| to awaken (or reawaken) the mind to the idea that
| thoughts and perceptions are internal and not always
| accurate representation of an objective, external world.
| Much psychological stress comes from these internal
| experiences, and subtle shifts in your mental posture can
| change this environment.
|
| That's not to say that real stressors and stimuli don't
| exist. It's just that often times a person can spiral in
| a way that makes their internal reactions
| counterproductive and harmful to well being.
|
| Another important result is learning better coping and
| adaptation strategies, so you can start to shift your
| mental posture or even change lifestyle and environment
| to reduce chronic stress.
|
| It's not always easy, not magic, and not perfect. But, it
| can help...
| wruza wrote:
| The worst thing here is, from the beginner perspective it
| seems like simply reframing bad in a positive way, when
| bad was almost completely in their mind and didn't exist
| _that much_. After the results you can see how twisted
| you were. I had my moments when I looked at the scheme of
| my mind on a whiteboard and had to admit how delusional I
| am, with zero pressure to do so.
| wruza wrote:
| This is not how therapy works. Although, tbf, it's not
| hard to find a pseudotherapist who practices
| stereotypical bs.
|
| _What would you do to start with, with a guy like me_
|
| IANAT either, but mine would start with asking how I feel
| and then why. Then we'd talk about my vision of practical
| ways to stay afloat, the ways I maybe don't see due to my
| focus, what exactly makes it hard to push through, in
| both known and never-tried situations. There would be
| some belief, avoidance, anxiety, algorithm, or a set of
| these. In CBT there's a clear formalized method for each,
| which you can pick and work with until the next week or
| two. Examples are: logging your emotional responses,
| compiling a list of "musts", start doing un-usual things,
| asking what exactly is wrong with something that seems
| bad.
|
| That is, if my depression was on low. If on high, we'd
| address that first. Last time I pushed through it by
| following physical regime, a few supplements and lots of
| anger against it (depression can't turn off _my_ anger,
| ymmw as well as methods).
| namshe wrote:
| How do you know someone is a European? They think therapy
| and mental health issues are a silly American "trendy"
| fixation.
| CannonSlugs wrote:
| Trust me, us Europeans are not exempt from the "everyone
| should see a psychologist" trope blasting social media
| the last decade. We are not blind to every Hollywood
| actor having a personal therapist either.
|
| I think the main difference (speaking as a northern
| European) is that when you Americans speak of therapy you
| seem to mean the stereotypical "talk therapy" where as
| basically every therapy here is cognitive behavioral
| therapy.
|
| Can cognitive behavioral therapy help someone who has a
| bit of existential dread about his tech job? Maybe. I
| don't think it's silly on it's face though to say
| "really?" if the poster's life is in order otherwise.
| pchristensen wrote:
| You're not the only one that has had those kind of feelings,
| and I really relate to the movies you referenced.
|
| Try to remember, AI is a tool, not a solution, and there will
| always be new problems. There's a strong case that unlike every
| other time people said that technology will kill all the jobs,
| this time it actually will. But a helpful framework comes from
| Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Solution (not the much more
| famous Innovator's Dilemma) - whereas a business has well
| defined needs that can be satisfied by improving products,
| customers (i.e. people) have ever evolving needs that will
| never be met. So while specific skills may lose value, there
| will always be a demand for the ability to recognize and
| provide value and solutions.
| coffeemug wrote:
| What makes a labor market for agents that recognize problems
| and provide solutions special or different from markets for
| other kinds of labor? If AIs get to a point where they
| dramatically outperform humans in other forms of labor, why
| not in this one?
| jeremyjh wrote:
| I think some humans will be doing it well enough to keep
| themselves afloat the rest of our lifetime, and some will
| get fabulously rich building products as a one-man
| operation leveraging AIs. But there will be far more people
| failing at it. It will be like Youtube creators or
| Instagram influencers where there are few winners who take
| virtually all the rewards.
| dingnuts wrote:
| compared to the broadcast era aren't there way more
| winners -- with a smaller pieces of the pie -- nowadays?
|
| it's still a Pareto distribution, I'm sure, but mega-
| stardom kinda died and was replaced by all these mini-
| stars, as far as I can tell. I'm not sure it supports
| your hypothesis.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Sure, there is some truth to this.
|
| I'm not really in touch with other genres, but I like to
| watch chess videos/streams on Youtube and Twitch. The
| vast, vast majority of views and revenue are captured by
| about ten people.
|
| I like those people too, but I've also watched a lot of
| smaller acts, even some amateur players not much stronger
| than me. So I get those recommendations, and I see their
| view counts. They aren't making anything at all.
|
| There are other people who have some followers, but even
| 50,000 followers would be a dream for most people doing
| it and they will make next to nothing from that. I'd
| guess there are at least 30x the number of strong, titled
| players in the 50k group as there are in the 1MM+ group.
| These are all people who were chess prodigies as kids,
| won every scholastic tournament in their state, took gap
| years or went to colleges that let them basically major
| in chess, travelled the world for tournaments, with awe-
| inspiring skills, and they are not making anywhere close
| enough to live on.
|
| And the thing is, I think software might even be tougher
| in twenty years. Its hard to get people to change from a
| system they use to another thing, much harder than
| recommending a new face on Youtbue.
| tempestn wrote:
| Maybe someday they will. But the current run of LLMs are
| fantastic at regurgitating and synthesizing existing
| knowledge, and getting better all the time, but not so good
| at coming up with new ideas. As long as you keep to the
| realm of what is known, they can seem incredibly
| intelligent, but as soon as you cross that boundary there's
| a clear change - often to just meaningless bullshit. So, I
| personally don't think we're going to be outsourcing idea
| generation to LLMs (or AI in general) anytime soon. Though
| to be fair, I'm only about 75% confident in that, and even
| so, it doesn't mean they won't be hugely transformative
| anyway.
| linguae wrote:
| As a researcher who changed career paths to teaching at a
| community college, I empathize. Twenty years ago when I
| graduated from high school, I was inspired by the stories I've
| read about Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and early Apple and
| Microsoft. I wanted to be a researcher, and I wanted to do
| interesting, impactful work.
|
| Over the years I've become disappointed and disillusioned. We
| have nothing like the Bell Labs and Xerox PARC of old, where
| researchers were given the freedom to pursue their interests
| without having to worry about short-term results. Industrial
| research these days is not curiosity-driven, instead driven by
| finding immediate solutions to business problems. Life at
| research universities isn't much better, with the constant
| "publish-or-perish" and fundraising pressures. Since the latter
| half of January this year, the funding situation for US
| scientists has gotten much worse, with disruptions to the NIH
| and NSF. If these disruptions are permanent, who is going to
| fund medium- and long-term research that cannot be monetized
| immediately?
|
| I have resigned myself to the situation, and I now pursue
| research as a hobby instead of as a paid profession. My role is
| strictly a teaching one, with no research obligations. I do
| research during the summer months and whenever else I find
| spare time.
| su8898 wrote:
| This is a rather simplistic view of life IMHO. What's wrong
| with people working for rent or groceries? What do you expect
| everyone to work on?
| mmooss wrote:
| > What's wrong with people working for rent or groceries?
|
| Many people are compelled to do that, but almost everyone
| wants more out of life. Strong evidence is that they take
| more whenever they can get it.
| deadbabe wrote:
| If you could get whatever you want out of life, right now,
| with no effort, what would you want exactly?
| tempestn wrote:
| I'd travel the world, taking in diverse centers of
| culture, history, and nature. I'd try to learn new
| languages. I'd do more track days, karting, and Ultimate.
| I'd buy a shell and try to get back into rowing. I'd play
| more computer games. I'd play ping-pong, foosball, and
| board games with my kids. I'd coach kids' sports. I'd go
| to more plays and concerts. Even movies. I'd volunteer.
|
| Of course I wouldn't do ALL of that, since even without
| work there are only so many hours in the day. But I
| certainly wouldn't want for things to do!
| deadbabe wrote:
| Some people do all that and still work, you probably just
| need better time management. You could study a language
| before work in the morning, and then go row for a bit.
| Then go to work. Then you could play computer games from
| 5 to 6, play ping pong with kids from 6 to 6:30, eat a
| dinner, coach kids soccer from 7 to 8, volunteer open
| source from 8:30 to 9:30, catch a movie at 10.
| ok_dad wrote:
| So simple! Just as easy to do it as saying it right?
| hanspeter wrote:
| Exactly, saying it's the easy part.
|
| But even without a job, you still need energy and
| motivation. The tax of switching between tasks (or
| hobbies) doesn't magically disappear. Neither does the
| time suck of social media.
| mmooss wrote:
| > with no effort
|
| I want effort, lot's of it, but let's not nitpick ...
|
| Off the top of my head: Nobel Prize winning, world-
| beneficial research; lots of loving, open, deeply
| connected relationships; grow rapidly; be someone people
| turn to for support (because I help them), ...
|
| I already do at least one of those things. :)
| operationcwal wrote:
| I think if you let your imagination wander and you end up
| seeing the scale of potential we have and what we could
| really achieve, stuff like paying for rent and groceries
| starts to feel archaic and wasteful, or as some kind of
| artificial constraint holding us back as a species.
| bsder wrote:
| > What's wrong with people working for rent or groceries?
|
| Why should people _have_ to work to be able to afford rent
| and groceries?
|
| Poverty is difficult enough to escape--not having to worry
| about rent and groceries would sure help.
|
| There is a reason why school meal programs are such a
| success.
| andai wrote:
| Well, even if we agree that's the best we can aim for as a
| species (how sad), soon we won't even have that luxury.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > What's wrong with people working for rent or groceries?
|
| There's nothing wrong with people who have the ability to
| work for groceries being compelled to work for groceries. The
| rent issue is complicated by the fact that land ownership
| prioritizes those who have already had time to accumulate
| wealth over those who have not. There are some issues with
| abandoning prices on land entirely (e.g. if land has no cost,
| how do we decide who gets to live in the most desirable
| locations?), but there's a compelling case to be made that
| the contemporary system of real estate financialization is
| similar to the enclosure movement both in terms of its
| structure and impact. It becomes a question of those with
| good credit (typically the rich and old) being able to (in
| aggregate) buy up all of the desirable land and thus to set
| monthly claims on the income of those with bad credit over
| and above the level of claim that would be possible if the
| property purchases could not be financed by loans.
|
| There is a legitimate cost to constructing a building and
| renting it out, but there is no real cost to land except the
| cost the market assigns to it. This might not be the worst
| thing (recall our example of allocating land in desirable
| locations), but when prospective landlords can take out loans
| against the property, the property's value is driven up
| beyond what any reasonable person would be willing to pay for
| the property's use. If you couldn't derive rental income from
| property, it would not make economical sense to finance these
| purchases beyond what you needed for your own use. This would
| (in theory) lead to lower prices.
|
| Henry George is the figure to look at here.
| ericmcer wrote:
| AI didn't really mesh seamlessly with my work until I used
| Claude, I highly recommend it. If your current workflow
| involves googling, reading documentation and examples on github
| until you can put together a solution then AI should slot into
| your work nicely. It just does all those things but faster and
| can often surface what I want in 30 seconds instead of 30
| minutes of research.
|
| I wouldn't worry though, if the last 4 years are any indicator,
| we will continue to see LLMs refined as better and better tools
| at a logarithmic rate, but I don't really see them making the
| jump to replacing engineers entirely unless some monumental
| leap happens. If AI ever gets that good it will have replaced
| vast swathes of white collar workers before us.
|
| I am somewhat optimistic, tech adoption is only going to go up,
| and the number of students pouring into CS programs is cooling
| off now that there aren't $100k jobs waiting for anyone who can
| open up an IDE. My ideal future is people who really love tech
| are still here in 10 years, and we will have crazy output
| because the tooling is so good, and all the opportunistic money
| seekers will have been shaken out.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| > When we could have had basic resources like energy, water,
| some staple foods and shelter provided for free (or nearly
| free) through automation.
|
| I was inspired to get into programming by Star Trek in the
| early 2000s because I thought I could contribute to automation
| that would lead towards that kind of society; much like you've
| stated here. Some will say we're naive and unrealistic, but all
| the ingredients for having society function in this way are
| attainable with a bit of a cultural shift. I was fine with the
| idea that society could take baby steps towards it, but it
| seems the last 25 years have been a mixture of regressing and
| small incremental improvements to things that don't contribute
| towards that goal. Just like you, my expectations have been
| utterly destroyed and my outlook for the future is grim.
| justonceokay wrote:
| The Star Trek future does seem out of reach. On the other
| hand canonically they only got to fully automated luxury
| space communism after fighting a global nuclear war against
| eugenisists.
| andsoitis wrote:
| In Star Trek, people do actually work and have
| responsibilities with little (or no) leisure time or say over
| how they spend their days.
| andai wrote:
| In Star Trek money exists but there isn't much use for it
| because technology has made material abundance cost
| approximately nothing.
|
| Star Trek doesn't show the 50 billion landwhales watching
| Netflix all day, because it makes for bad television. It
| shows the 1% who still work even when they don't have to,
| who work because they _want_ to.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > but all the ingredients for having society function in this
| way are attainable with a bit of a cultural shift
|
| It's awfully naive to think that you can solve the
| information problem with a "small cultural shift". Statements
| like this strike me as deeply ignorant of economics and the
| history of attempts to plan society. People are messy and
| their needs are hard to predict in any meaningful and
| responsive way that respects their preferences.
|
| Imagine answering the question how many washing machines
| should we make. Assuming you could figure this out, you need
| to consider the different kinds of washing machines people
| may want and need. Apartment dwellers need small efficient
| one, and people with a lot of kids want big ones. This in
| turn has baring on the number of motors you have to make,
| feet of copper wire you need to product, plastics, rubber,
| and on and on. And don't forget that's just washing machines.
|
| Now you need to figure out how to get these washing machines
| to people.
|
| You just can't plan and automate everything, its far too
| complicated.
| lurk2 wrote:
| He's talking about automating labor, not economic planning.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Milton Friedman's essay on making a pencil:
|
| "Look at this lead pencil. There's not a single person in the
| world who could make this pencil. Remarkable statement? Not
| at all. The wood from which it is made, for all I know, comes
| from a tree that was cut down in the state of Washington. To
| cut down that tree, it took a saw. To make the saw, it took
| steel. To make steel, it took iron ore. This black center--we
| call it lead but it's really graphite, compressed graphite--
| I'm not sure where it comes from, but I think it comes from
| some mines in South America. This red top up here, this
| eraser, a bit of rubber, probably comes from Malaya, where
| the rubber tree isn't even native! It was imported from South
| America by some businessmen with the help of the British
| government. This brass ferrule? [Self-effacing laughter.] I
| haven't the slightest idea where it came from. Or the yellow
| paint! Or the paint that made the black lines. Or the glue
| that holds it together. Literally thousands of people co-
| operated to make this pencil. People who don't speak the same
| language, who practice different religions, who might hate
| one another if they ever met! When you go down to the store
| and buy this pencil, you are in effect trading a few minutes
| of your time for a few seconds of the time of all those
| thousands of people. What brought them together and induced
| them to cooperate to make this pencil? There was no commissar
| sending ... out orders from some central office. It was the
| magic of the price system: the impersonal operation of prices
| that brought them together and got them to cooperate, to make
| this pencil, so you could have it for a trifling sum.
|
| That is why the operation of the free market is so essential.
| Not only to promote productive efficiency, but even more to
| foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world."
|
| https://thenewinquiry.com/milton-friedmans-pencil/
| nonethewiser wrote:
| >I'd like to see a study on how the acute stress of living in
| survival mode for a lifetime affects the brain by using it too
| much for the wrong tasks. The last 25 years have been
| particularly painful for people like me who favor academia and
| pure research over profit-driven innovation that tends to
| reinvent the wheel.
|
| I suspected something very different based off the first
| sentence. Like someone living in a high crime area and trying
| not to get dragged into it. Or constantly struggling with
| poverty, food insecurity, etc.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| > I'm saddened that people with wealth, power and influence
| tend to point to their own success as reason to perpetuate the
| status quo. When we could have had basic resources like energy,
| water, some staple foods and shelter provided for free (or
| nearly free) through automation
|
| What you stated is true, but my disappointing observation is
| that the people with wealth/power are only marginally smarter
| than the rest of us on the topic you mentioned. And then I
| suspect that even if one had a rich benefactor, pulling that
| off is not easy. It takes a threshold number people who have a
| holistic view of things to pull of what you mentions i.e nearly
| free basics of life. Check my profile etc. - some of what I
| wrote may strike a chord with you.
|
| Also the proponents on Technocracy (Hubbert etc.) about a 100
| years back, essentially touched on the subject you state. Note:
| The word technocracy today has a different connotation.
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| Perhaps your life is on the easy setting? Hungry people work
| really hard. Fearing destroying an entire family by losing my
| job allows me to find strength and courage.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| I'm very sympathetic to your experience and agree with most of
| what you say, but as someone who has spend half his life in
| academia and half outside, "who favor academia and pure
| research over profit-driven innovation that tends to reinvent
| the wheel", I must say that 'reinventing the wheel' is _at
| least_ as prevalent in academia than it is in business.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > acute stress of living in survival mode for a lifetime
|
| For some perspective, bone evidence of pre-Columbian Indians
| showed that they regularly suffered from famine. There was also
| the constant threat of warfare from neighboring tribes.
|
| The American colonists didn't fare much better, their bone
| evidence was one of extreme overwork and malnutrition.
| runjake wrote:
| I wonder how much of the "age-related" decline is due to the
| brain functioning on autopilot. After over 5 decades, I have
| experienced most of the issues I'm going to experience in life.
| More often than not, I'm addressing issues with mental playbooks
| based on past experience.
|
| As I get older (now in my 50s), I find myself reflecting on how
| many aspects of my life and decisions are operating on autopilot.
| I figure it's worse now with social media where people are
| constantly bombarded with dopamine hits, while boredom and idle
| thoughts have largely become things of the past.
|
| Perhaps counterintuitively, I am trying to break this pattern and
| consciously engage with my experiences by asking a few basic
| questions, such as:
|
| - What am I seeing here?
|
| - What's going on?
|
| - What am I missing?
|
| - How can I approach this differently to achieve the same or
| better outcomes?
|
| Additionally, I am making a concerted effort to notice more new
| details during routine tasks, like commuting or shopping. I can't
| count how many times I've discovered something new and
| interesting on my work commutes. Actually, I can: it's every
| time.
|
| Edit: Also spending more time with long-form content over short-
| form, be it reading or watching videos. It forces me to consider
| a topic for a much longer period. Short form knowledge is a trap,
| unless you have some system that hits you with high rates of
| repetition (eg Anki).
| sowbug wrote:
| You might also be able to avoid the subjective acceleration of
| time that happens to many of us as we age.
| runjake wrote:
| This is another thing I've been exploring, but I haven't had
| a whole lot of luck in actually slowing down time.
|
| The "fix" seems to be:
|
| - Add more activities to your day, every day.
|
| - Try to break up routines. Eg. you may run every day, but
| you don't have to take the same route.
|
| - Be actually present during those activities. Engage in
| conscious thought about those activities.
|
| - Take photos, videos, recordings to recall those activities
| and jog the brain.
| sowbug wrote:
| I bet you can even accomplish some of this retroactively
| with the right group of friends. The question "What did you
| do this weekend?" can be answered in so many levels of
| detail.
| shandor wrote:
| In my humblest of opinions, you are probably spot on about the
| autopilot vs. actually experiencing things.
|
| As a concrete example, someone in this thread mentioned their
| older relative spending a lot of time with puzzles daily. I too
| watched my grandpa doing sudokus and crosswords, but in the end
| if there's nothing much else, those too will quickly become
| uninspiring routine.
|
| I really believe truly experiencing life does require some
| introspection so that you have agency.
| runjake wrote:
| Interesting points.
|
| And agreed, at one time I really got into Sudoku and
| Minesweeper, but my nerd mind quickly turned them into
| brainless pattern matching routines that required effectively
| no thinking. Don't get me wrong. I appreciate those
| abilities, but there's a time and place.
| timewizard wrote:
| For me. I started making enough money that all my old routines
| stopped being relevant. I started to drift into comforts and
| lost touch with my surroundings.
| _dain_ wrote:
| _> Additionally, I am making a concerted effort to notice more
| new details during routine tasks, like commuting or shopping. I
| can't count how many times I've discovered something new and
| interesting on my work commutes. Actually, I can: it's every
| time._
|
| This is one of the underrated pleasures of commuting by
| bicycle. You aren't abstracted away from the world in a bubble
| of steel and glass. You see, hear, feel, countless little
| details, and you can reach out and touch them if you want.
| Potholes, pedestrians, birds, the wind and rain and sun, smells
| of food and flowers and weird chemicals, street music and
| overheard fragments of conversation. Millions of faces.
| nottorp wrote:
| Same as for muscles / physical skills, after all...
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm 63, and still learn new stuff, every day.
|
| I write code, pretty much every single day, and also, solve
| problems, every single day (7 days a week).
|
| I think solving problems is important. Not just rote coding, but
| being presented with a bug, or a need to achieve an outcome,
| without knowing the solution, up front, is what I like.
|
| Basically, every single day, I'm presented with a dilemma, which,
| if not solved, will scrap the entire project that I'm working on.
|
| I solve every one (but sometimes, by realizing it's a red
| herring, and trying alternate approaches).
| worldisme wrote:
| I me my I do I am I did I'm [age] I will I think Me
|
| Every comment in this shitass thread thx for your contribution
| didip wrote:
| It has never been easier to pickup a subject and start learning
| on Youtube or similar streaming platforms. Just Do It, folks! You
| can do it!
|
| At nights and weekends, I have been learning home improvements,
| home automations, piano, Korean, and LLM toolings. All from
| streaming platforms.
| lbrito wrote:
| I'd like to see how much of the decline is correlated not with
| age but with Parent Brain.
|
| The mental energy occupied by and spent with parenting is
| palpable, not to mention long-term continued stress, physical,
| mental and emotional exhaustion. I wouldn't be surprised if
| having kids (which is of course correlated with age) is much more
| of a factor than age itself.
|
| I for one feel dumber than pre-kids.
| jader201 wrote:
| As someone who plays a lot of board games -- particularly heavier
| board games -- and hopes to do even more of that in retirement,
| I'm wondering if/how that is helping/will help fight cognitive
| decline.
|
| I can imagine at the very least it won't hurt, and intuitively it
| makes sense. But I'm not sure studies have been done specifically
| to understand how board gaming -- or the problems being solved
| with board gaming - helps with cognitive skills.
|
| Curious if others that are closer to this field have thoughts.
| netbioserror wrote:
| I love me some board games, but I prefer depth and decision
| space to complexity -- and the industry is dominated by
| stupendously complex beasts full of unnecessary mechanics that
| slow things down or extend setup without adding too much. A
| perfect example is TI4's expansion Prophecy of Kings, nearly
| all of which I despise for bloating a beautiful base game. I'm
| also always flabbergasted by how starved and railroaded I feel
| in games like Dune Imperium or Cole Wehlre's collection.
| Despite a wealth of mechanics, my choices are few and far
| between.
|
| Complexity has its place, especially for engine builders like
| Terraforming Mars where complex interactions are the point.
| Many designers seem to be throwing in the kitchen sink
| arbitrarily. We're in a "bigger is better" paradigm.
| standardUser wrote:
| Recreational travel is the only thing that routinely works for me
| in terms of slowing down time and fully engaging my brain. It's
| something I can incorporate into my life multiple times per year
| and it guarantees a massive amount of new stimulation (assuming
| travel to new and interesting places). Even the most rudimentary
| trip to Europe will have you grappling all day long with a
| different language and culture and environment in ways that are
| completely taken for granted in our day to day lives.
|
| There's lots of things that can make an even bigger impact, like
| moving to a new place or starting a new career or school, or a
| new relationship. But those are things that sometimes only happen
| a handful of times in our entire lives.
|
| Everything else I find eventually becomes routine, no matter how
| stimulatingly it can be at the start. Not that we shouldn't try!
| Some stimulation is a whole lot better than none, and I have a
| terrible feeling that many people get little-to-no stimulation
| for weeks and months at a time (beyond a new TV show or podcast
| or political drama).
| mertleee wrote:
| Idk, at 29, 30 and 31 I became significantly smarter - it just
| had to do with things I was intensely interested in. Things that
| could hold my focus just no longer matter. Fortunately I'm
| interested in engaging things that are hard.
| mmooss wrote:
| If you are older, I think the trick is to watch (or remember!)
| what younger people do and follow (or revert to) that behavior,
| as much as you can.
|
| Comparing cognitive abilities between older and younger people
| fails to control for the inputs - behavior, experience, etc. Try
| the same inputs (using some big generalities):
|
| * Exploration: Younger people love to explore, even just for
| exploration sake, and are also compelled to try things - and they
| also fail. Exploration is their mode, because so much of the
| world is new to them, because doing something new and innovative
| is socially admired, and especially because so many major changes
| happen - leave home, serious romantic relationships, first job,
| etc. A lot of that happens, ready or not.
|
| * Learning: Similarly, younger people are compelled to learn lots
| of very challenging things, whether they want to or not; they are
| compelled to use cognitive skills that they are uncomfortable
| with. Their job is to learn, daily, for 12-16+ years. Remember
| school? Remember your early years at work when had little choice
| of what you did? Remember struggling with all those things?
|
| * Playing: Young people love to play and are socially admired for
| playing better and more creatively.
|
| What, you're past all that? Nobody is going to make you study
| things you're not interested in? Don't want to make any big
| changes? Dignity too big to play? Ego too big to explore and to
| fail? When you're older, you can say no and 99.99% (I think
| that's about accurate) take advantage of that and refuse to do or
| even talk about things they aren't already comfortable with. Does
| all this sound too hard? Then don't complain about losing those
| skills.
|
| I think a big part of the problem is the same that affects CEOs -
| there is nobody to hold them to account.
| hassleblad23 wrote:
| This is a reason public college should be free.
| botswana99 wrote:
| So, this explains the average aging Trump voter's cognitive
| impairment? Well, at least it's not leaded gasoline or reality
| TV.
| WalterBright wrote:
| My uncle went back to university when he was 70 to get a degree
| in vulcanology.
| sadcodemonkey wrote:
| For myself, while the learning curve is "longer" as I've gotten
| older, it also shoots sharply upwards as the time spent on the
| skill acquisition increases. Age has a magnification effect at
| the tail end.
|
| I'm in my late 40s and I do pick up new technical skills a bit
| slower than younger folks. But because I have a lot of
| experience, I'm able to more quickly grasp various contextual
| aspects of those skills: how/why they are useful, how they
| compare to previous skills that tried to solve the same problem,
| the hidden costs and implications, etc. These matter a lot in the
| practical, everyday application of skills.
|
| I find that younger people have a really hard time with those
| contextual aspects, or they don't think it's that important...
| until they discover they do.
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