My theory of the brain is that it has to choose between spending energy on learning or executing, and that we start out heavily favouring learning as kids and then it shifts to execution as we age. Also ADHD would be people who doesn't properly make that shift and never stops learning, which sounds good but it isn't very valuable if you don't have any brain power left to execute.
Another thing, ADHD shows that this isn't really a choice, your brain will determine how to allocate between learning and execution without asking you.
Spirit/will has been demonstrated to possess the necessary capability to overrule the brain. It's a choice. Maybe not an easy one to make, but a choice nontheless.
There are some things controlled by your nervous system that you can't override though, like your digestive system and your heartbeat. Influence yes, but to an extremely limited degree. It seems very likely to me that there are some processes in the mind as well that cannot be consciously overridden.
That is a curious response on these boards (I'm glad to see it). My name is h0p3. It's a pleasure to meet you. I am not here to argue with you, but I would like to hear more of your thoughts and feelings on the matter.
I, completely unscientifically, think about it like your brain's language becoming more statically typed as you mature and have reached the point where your understanding of the world is as good as it ever needs to be, evolutionarily speaking. But there are aspects of older life where this is a disadvantage, and there are probably circumstances where it is mostly a disadvantage.
More and more things are defined and associated in terms of other things already known (a higher level of abstraction), compared to youth where everything runs closer to the metal.
Makes sense. You probably also spend less energy observing or caring about the consequences of your decisions the more "things already known" you used to decide.
Well duh. What mental abilities only stay the same or degrade since birth?
Our whole species is centered around the concept of learning, a more efficient mechanism for knowledge transfer than genetics, and the delivery of babies so premature they are helpless and useless for years.
The OP reports something closer to a lab study, on the scale of things.
In the following video, a Stanford professor studying aging suggests young people are faster at integrating a lot of quickly incoming information to the point of making decisions on it, but older people are emotionally more secure and can even make younger people more productive if part of the group.
My 20 year old self was much better at making fast, bad decisions. Not taking the time to think through the higher order effects of those decisions. That 20 year old self lacks all the MOOCs I have taken, all the life and professional experience, 300+ non-fiction books.
I think at 20 I would have been a better test taker if we both started a college class right now but that is about it. I am way "smarter" or "more intelligent" though at 54 vs that 20 year old self. It isn't even close.
IMO much is because we are blind to ET Jaynes Mind Projection Fallacy in this area. We think of "intelligence" as a physical property like mass that gets weaker with age like muscles or bones. It is just such a given in our thinking and language that we can't help it.
I've always wondered: how much of time-consuming mental tasks will I have automated and abstracted away via computers in my later years, since I already try to automate away everything these days (I'm 45 with a bad case of RSI and arthritic pain). I even wrote a tool to automatically generate blogposts and churn out content on-demand. It's trained on the content of 100 blogs and pulls in content from Wikipedia to sound authoritative.
It makes me wonder: how much automation is too much automation? Will it be the case that I turn on my PC, login, then it just automatically comments on Hackernews, picks the best news from Slashdot for me to read, automatically updates my blog, etc I would miss the manual effort and mental tasking of all that. Is automating everything necessarily bad or good?
I agree with a lot of this. There is a slowdown in my reaction speed to say an incident or a bug or a feature design.
But I have so much knowledge and context built up already that when I do respond, the execution is much better and leads to success (success == incident fixed, bug fixed and design fully implemented/executed and makes money).
I genuinely think that companies who don't hire older engineers do themselves a disservice. No wonder only FAANGs sustain themselves over decades, not the one-hit wonders from silicon valley.
I sometimes return to a video game that I played when I was younger and that I remember being difficult. This will be a game that I haven't touched in years. And then, yes, I will be rusty at first. But pretty quickly, it more than comes back to me: I find that it is now easier than I remember it being many years ago. It's like I am now on some new learning curve with a higher plateau. And, the striking thing is that this must entirely be transfer learning, from other things I've done in the intervening years.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 65.7 ms ] threadAnother thing, ADHD shows that this isn't really a choice, your brain will determine how to allocate between learning and execution without asking you.
Our whole species is centered around the concept of learning, a more efficient mechanism for knowledge transfer than genetics, and the delivery of babies so premature they are helpless and useless for years.
In the following video, a Stanford professor studying aging suggests young people are faster at integrating a lot of quickly incoming information to the point of making decisions on it, but older people are emotionally more secure and can even make younger people more productive if part of the group.
https://www.facebook.com/onemindorg/videos/567283167605557/
I think at 20 I would have been a better test taker if we both started a college class right now but that is about it. I am way "smarter" or "more intelligent" though at 54 vs that 20 year old self. It isn't even close.
IMO much is because we are blind to ET Jaynes Mind Projection Fallacy in this area. We think of "intelligence" as a physical property like mass that gets weaker with age like muscles or bones. It is just such a given in our thinking and language that we can't help it.
Wisdom, wisdom, where art thou?
It makes me wonder: how much automation is too much automation? Will it be the case that I turn on my PC, login, then it just automatically comments on Hackernews, picks the best news from Slashdot for me to read, automatically updates my blog, etc I would miss the manual effort and mental tasking of all that. Is automating everything necessarily bad or good?
But I have so much knowledge and context built up already that when I do respond, the execution is much better and leads to success (success == incident fixed, bug fixed and design fully implemented/executed and makes money).
I genuinely think that companies who don't hire older engineers do themselves a disservice. No wonder only FAANGs sustain themselves over decades, not the one-hit wonders from silicon valley.