
Dr John Goodenough’s story suggests some people become more creative with age - sonabinu
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/opinion/sunday/to-be-a-genius-think-like-a-94-year-old.html
======
Kostic
> Last but not least, he credited old age with bringing him a new kind of
> intellectual freedom. At 94, he said, “You no longer worry about keeping
> your job.”

I really liked this last line. I agree. I think that I would be much more
productive in my life if I didn't had to think aboud keeping my job and having
enough funds for expenses.

Hopefully, minimal income will become a standard thing in the future.

~~~
aaron-lebo
Many tech workers do this to themselves because they feel like they need to
keep up with the Joneses.

That $120k startup job? Move to a cheaper locale, make half of that in a job
that gives you more free time, and you are still making a salary that most
workers would kill for. That's easier said than done, but tech workers are
some of the most privileged in the world. If you can't make it by on a tech
salary, an extra $10k isn't going to do you any good - and that's what basic
income promises for each person if the government decides to spend 3 trillion
a year. If you don't want to live off of $12k a year, you have to get another
job, which you can do right now if you have decent skills.

Sorry to rant, but basic income gets brought up in every thread like it's a
solution, but a basic analysis of numbers says it's...going to be hard to do,
realistically.

~~~
leggomylibro
Yeah, it does seem hard to make the numbers work. I always get tripped up
because I usually wind up around $2-4 Trillion per year, which is like the
whole federal budget. Let's see if I'm remembering that wrong.

So we'll give every adult in the United States a basic annual income of
$10,000. It's hard to live off of that in many parts of the country, but we
should start small. There are about 250 million adults in the USA as of 2016
(245.3 according to wikipedia, but let's keep it round.)

So...yep, that's $2.5 Trillion a year. You can argue that you'd pay for it
with a tax on upper earners, but I haven't seen any actual numbers to support
the theory that you could raise that amount via taxes on the wealthy. And I
don't feel like looking into tax brackets and wages and crap right now.

I also think you're right that your average tech worker should be able to
scrape together a 5-figure unemployment/job-hunting backup fund fairly
quickly.

~~~
chongli
_which is like the whole federal budget_

Don't forget the state and municipal budgets. Leaving those out can really
skew your comparison to other countries which may be structured very
differently. State budgets in the US combine to another $1.9 trillion [0],
with some states like North Dakota having a budget as high as $18,760 per
capita! Now I'm not saying it's possible to simply sacrifice all of those
budgets on the altar of basic income, but it seems pretty reasonable that we
might find a more efficient allocation of resources. After all, California's
budget per capita is only $4,366.

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_budgets](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_budgets)

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forgotpwtomain
What's the reasoning behind altering the submission title? It is most
definitely click-bait: _To Be a Genius, Think Like a 94-Year-Old_ and was
appropriately being flagged by users precisely for that.

More so a single isolated case of a researcher with an entire lab of young
students is not particularly good supporting evidence of _some people become
more creative with age_ either -- if the intention is to write about the later
an actual over-view of the field or related fields should be required.

~~~
oh_sigh
The article talks about the average age of Nobel prize winners, of patent
holders, and so on.

------
Confusion
I'm very much looking forward to the longevity/healthspan movement succeeding:
I there is an immense amount of good that will come from having healthy 150
year olds around, who still have the stamina to pound a fist on the table. I
expect there will be a lot less ageism and their wisdom will be worth gold for
businesses willing to listen.

Imagine someone of the calibre of Feynman at 150!

~~~
maxerickson
The darker take is that olds end up completely capturing the economy.

(Like the Meths in Altered Carbon)

~~~
kitsunesoba
It could be a problem in science and politics too. Science already has issues
with new ideas being very strongly resisted until the generation in power
flops over. In a world where people live healthily to 150 and beyond, the
young would quickly become a permanent minority with little voice. Risk of
stagnation would dramatically increase across all fronts.

------
PaulRobinson
The Zuckerberg line about younger people being smarter is the dumbest line in
history relating to this industry. It makes Gates' claim about 1MB being all
anybody would ever need look like beautiful wisdom in comparison.

However, you don't need to be 94 to be brilliant either.

When you're young you have fewer commitments, more time, more energy, and an
ability to recover from marathon slogs to get work done. Your lack of
experience may hamper you in some fields, but it also allows you to see the
World from a different angle which might, given your field, be an advantage.

When you're older, you will have far more experience, insight, and the ability
to allow your subconscious to bring together disparate experiences and
thoughts into new ideas. However, you may be cognitively locked into seeing
things a certain way, you will more likely have other draws on your time and
you're less likely to be able to do (or recover from), 100-hour weeks.

Both groups have something to offer, but the idea that one group is better
than the other is ludicrous.

Young people are not smarter. Old people are not wiser. They each just have
different life experiences, abilities and ways of prioritising time.

~~~
sol_remmy
Here are some things that decline with age: \- Grip strength \- Sperm count in
men \- Sperm quality in men \- Fertility in women (even before menopause) \-
Skin elasticity \- Eyesight \- Muscle definition \- Aerobic capacity \- Wound
healing rate \- Hair growth rate \- Sleep quality & duration \- Testosterone
levels \- Thermal adaption to changes in temperature

It appears to me that every bodily system slowly degrades as you age. Care to
site any scientific studies showing that intelligence does not decline with
age? That is a surprising claim to make.

~~~
giardini
sol_remmy says:>"It appears to me that every bodily system slowly degrades as
you age. Care to site any scientific studies showing that intelligence does
not decline with age? That is a surprising claim to make."

Studies show that older people are smarter. Despite your apparent youth, I'm
fairly certain you can find the relevant studies.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intelli...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intelligence)
:

"In psychology, fluid and crystallized intelligence are factors of general
intelligence, originally identified by Raymond Cattell."

Fluid intelligence peaks around 18 years of age, then declines.

Crystallized intelligence is your accumulation of knowledge and skill. It
increases until age 65 then slowly declines.

~~~
brlewis
_Crystallized intelligence is your accumulation of knowledge and skill. It
increases until age 65 then slowly declines._

Readers should be careful not to interpret this as meaning you're washed up at
age 66. It means you're still close to your peak.

------
MilnerRoute
A few years ago the New York Times' science writer published a book called
"The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-
Aged Mind. She summarized the latest medical research, which was concluding
that brain performance didn't really taper off as we aged, and there were
actual spikes in performance in specific areas.

While there were smaller declines in things like remembering names, one theory
was that what we know gets consolidated, allowing older brains to make greater
leaps in logic more quickly. While older brains are distracted more easily,
one study suggested people learn to compensate by using the left and right
brain together to maintain focus and progress, and this results in bringing
more "firepower" to bear on the tasks at hand.

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TheOtherHobbes
Recently I realised something that sounds like it should be obvious, but
isn't: there's a fundamental difference between creativity, in the sense of
true originality, and technical talent, in the sense of being good at some
selection of the arts or sciences.

We tend to think of creativity as a generic ability to build or imagine new
stuff - probably in the arts, sometimes in engineering or the sciences.

But in fact technical creativity is mostly about copying existing techniques
and practices - i.e. competently repeating what other people have done,
perhaps with some minor twists.

Free original thinking/expression is an unrelated talent, and much less
common.

You can have either, or neither. Only very rarely do you get both.

~~~
jamesrcole
> _technical creativity is mostly about copying existing techniques and
> practices - i.e. competently repeating what other people have done, perhaps
> with some minor twists.

> Free original thinking/expression is an unrelated talent_

Unrelated? If you think the latter is completely unrelated, what do you think
it involves?

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a3n
I wonder how many more people would "become more creative with age" if they
were merely not ignored.

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zebrafish
[http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2017/EE/C6EE02...](http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2017/EE/C6EE02888H#!divAbstract)

Publication here.

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Mz
I am 51. I think my best years are ahead of me, not behind me (assuming I
don't throw myself in a river between now and June -- kidding, not kidding).

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bambax
The article seems to conflate intelligence with creativity. They're
orthogonal.

~~~
coldtea
Obviously not totally orthogonal, just loosely correlated, but significantly
so below some threshold.

E.g. it's not like someone with an IQ of 80 can be totally creative -- except
if by "creative" we just mean "has lots of imagination".

But what we casually call creative is not just being imaginative in abstract,
but coming up with innovative solutions and important works. Which requires
intelligence -- especially if those works are of the engineering and
scientific kind.

~~~
bambax
Maybe it's difficult to be really creative without being intelligent --
Einstein being a good example of someone who was extremely intelligent and
extremely creative.

However, it's very easy to be immensely intelligent and have zero creativity,
indeed to be conformist to an absurd degree. Elite bureaucrats are exactly
like this, at least in many European countries.

Is it possible to be very creative and dim-witted? I'd be very tempted to say
yes but I have to admit I can't provide lots of examples.

------
Kenji
This title is extremely clickbaity. Think like a 94-Year-Old? Any 94-Year-Old?
Couldn't they pick something that is relevant to the article about
Goodenough's new battery research? He is the exception, not the rule.
Mainstream media makes my brain hurt.

~~~
blablabla123
The Fields medal, the Nobel price for Mathematicians, exists already since
decades and is only for people younger than 35. One point might be also that
when you learn more and more, you can do more things. I think in the past
there seemed to be the thinking that learning too long would be
counterproductive. That's still reflected by the fact that managers earn more
on average than engineers.

------
Frenchgeek
"Hello? Is this Google? Hello Mr Yahoo : I would like a pizza recipe for my
grandkids, please. Thank you."?

~~~
redwood
"Hello? What is this physical analog electronic component? Replace or mend?
WHAT? Throw away; don't fix!"

"Hello? Automobile engine self repairable? Impossible!"

"Hello? Programming with cards? Impossible!"

~~~
redwood
In all honesty we've become a throw away generation without the ability to get
in there and see how the machine work. Inevitable perhaps but the former
generation are much more handy than we and frankly have probably in many cases
got a better bottom up view of how things work under the covers

~~~
aswanson
Yeah, I think globalization has made products so commoditized, its more
economical to throw them away than fix them. 4k 55' TVs for less than a grand;
in the 80s that purchase would have been a projection TV for several thousand
dollars (in 80s dollars!) and would have been kept for a decade or more. Now,
it's toss it and upgrade. Same with PCs, etc.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Isn't that in large part due to income disparity. The place where it needs to
be fixed has wages far higher than the place where it's made.

Also that companies design stuff to break, and design things to be hard to
fix.

Legally mandating long warranties and long term parts availability would
probably help?

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627467
While the last named author is usually the "CEO" of the research, there are 3
other researchers on that paper. The first author, a woman. Damn, the research
findings, if replicable are groundbreaking. But the "trending-topic of the
moment" is the author's advanced age. It's just poor journalism.

~~~
spot
the result itself was already extensively covered. this isn't poor journalism,
it's just not the story that you are looking for.

