
Age differences in learning from an insufficient representation of uncertainty - danieltillett
http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms11609
======
iliketosleep
As people get older, their minds tend to filter out most things around them as
a consequence of familiarity. Hence, they become oblivious to details of their
environment. They lose their sense of wonder and their minds become less
active and eventually stale.

When I was young, I often wondered why adults seemed so "stupid" when it came
to learning things, and I do think this is a big part of it. As we get older,
it's necessary to make a conscious effort to pay attention to details of our
environment, and to be acutely aware of the great uncertainty found all around
us, even in everyday life. This is the difference between a person who becomes
a "stupid" adult, and one whose mind is still sharp as a razor at age 70.

~~~
mr_tristan
Anecdotally, I've noticed a very big difference in elderly people who have
lived in several places, especially abroad, versus those who have mostly spent
their life in one home. They are usually much more lucid and easier to
communicate with. Less prone to social miscues, that sort of thing.

There seems to just be more awareness since you are forcing yourself to learn
to deal with new environments.

I wonder if there's been any kind of study on frequency of moving or travel on
the brain.

~~~
ranit
Relevant: Bilingualism delays age at onset of dementia, independent of
education and immigration status

[http://www.neurology.org/content/early/2013/11/06/01.wnl.000...](http://www.neurology.org/content/early/2013/11/06/01.wnl.0000436620.33155.a4)

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dmichulke
TLDR; If you think you know everything already (or you don't need to learn
something) then you learn less well.

Older people are more often fulfilling the above premises, and thereby the
above conclusion.

This means: Worse learning performance is not a consequence of age per se.

~~~
k__
lol, is this why impostor syndrome exists?

1\. I think I know nothing.

2\. I try to learn hard to get better.

3\. goto 1.

~~~
woliveirajr
:-) I think it's the first time I see an answer with a "goto" that didn't get
downvoted!!!

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whiddershins
This article is really thought provoking.

One thing I wonder, though, is how they can ever adjust for the strong
possibility older adults just can't care about a make-believe test the way
younger people might.

My observation, as I age, is I have a harder and harder time getting
interested in hypothetical scenarios, or taking on someone else's agenda as
being super important.

So I really wonder if older adults just test worse than younger people, simply
because they care less about the test.

If that's true, it wouldn't hold in the real world. Except that older people
can seem less smart, when in reality they think whatever you're trying to get
them to learn is not important in the grand scheme of things.

~~~
infectoid
Your comment is kind of buried but I feel like this is what has happened to me
as I've aged. Where once I was consumed by the depth of a problem I now find
that I am more consumed with the breadth of it. In that sense I tend to
consider the practical outcomes more than I used to.

But I am also sure that maintaining novelty in my life, whether through
education or travel, is key to maintaining healthy schemas in my mind to help
understand the world.

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bakhy
nobody seems interested in looking at the thing from the other perspective -
why was it an evolutionary advantage for older people to develop this
uncertainty-blindness? i would guess that perhaps with age the importance of
making a decision rises, even if not the best decision. perhaps it's an
evolutionary adaptation to reduce analysis-paralysis in developed adults and
improve their self-sufficiency? in any case, it's interesting how we all
jumped to "fixing" it. a cute reflection of the culture here.

~~~
eivarv
There doesn't need to be an evolutionary advantage for everything (e.g.
vestigal features) - this "uncertainty-blindness" could have just not been
exposed to evolutionary pressure.

~~~
nommm-nommm
Very few 70+ year olds are reproducing so evolutionary advantage doesn't make
sense in that age group as they have already reproduced (or not) by then.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Historically the aged sat around the fire and taught the young. Which
encouraged their genes' propagation. Since Humans became social, its not been
all about reproduction.

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dschiptsov
Causation is a strong claim here.) Correlation is known for ages.

"The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts,
while the stupid ones are full of confidence". (Who said Java?)

The same notion is related to the concert of "the beginner's mind" popularized
by D. T. Suzuki and S. Jobs. Packers call it "thinking out of the box". J.
Krishnamurti call it 'freedom from the "known"' (people call all kinds of
nonsense "knowledge").

Children learn so quickly and efficiently because they are not habitually
pattern matching against personal experiences, cultural conditioning and
popular memes - the way most adults do, but are still building the map of the
world out of so called primordial awareness, or the Buddha Nature.

But "the map is not the territory".

And finally - “Trust those who seek the truth but doubt those who say they
have found it.”

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manishsharan
There is a learning to learn course on Coursera
[https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-
learn](https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn)

I strongly recommend it for engineers over 40.

~~~
rimantas
I strongly recommend it for everyone. Especially for those workaholics and
one-(brain)-hemishpere individuals who think that knowing only one narrow area
is OK.

------
networker
On a related note, does anyone else remember a study (I think linked here)
that measured certainty / uncertainty in individuals?

The idea was that it asked open ended questions, ranging from questions such
as "What is the GDP of USA" to "How many days in a lunar cycle" or "How many
symphonies did Beethoven compose" and would not only present a handful of
options for the answer but also ask you to self-rate how accurately you think
you knew the answer.

The idea was not to measure the actual responses, but to look at how well
people know whether they know things.

I found it very interesting and it reminded of this: I wonder how measures on
that scale relate to learning agility.

------
DonHopkins
I'm certain that there's a learnable technique to cultivate uncertainty.

~~~
empath75
The wisest man knows that he knows nothing.

~~~
DonHopkins
Is it even possible to know if there are more known unknowns than unknown
unknowns?

~~~
marcosdumay
How could I know?

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awkward_yeti
Always keep a Beginner's Mind.

------
DanielBMarkham
I think that many times we don't give enough credit to how amazingly lazy our
brains are. Whatever they can generalize, they generalize. They don't track
images, they track edges and movement (I oversimplify, of course). They can
hear garbled speech in a crowded room and somehow figure out what the words
are -- even if those aren't the actual words.

To some degree this is good. We don't want to go around testing every chair we
come across to make sure it's good to sit in. But it has its downsides as
well.

~~~
Declanomous
Maybe I don't need to test everything to see if it is a chair, but I
definitely test every chair before I sit in it. I learned that I should do
that after breaking a few chairs, and a bench.

I'm not even particularly heavy. I'm 180#, which is pretty much spot-on for my
height.

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greenmountin
This headline (on yc) is missing a key verb from the actual paper's headline,
making it confusing. The actual title is:

"Age differences in learning _emerge_ from an insufficient representation of
uncertainty in older adults"

~~~
danieltillett
Yes. Unfortunately YC limit of 80 characters prevented me from including the
full title. I hope the change is not too confusing and captures the intent of
the original title.

~~~
bradlys
Actually, it was confusing and I was searching for this comment alone. I
wouldn't have clicked on it if it wasn't for the points it already has.

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androtheos
So does one have to remain open to learning about everything, including
subjects they don't find interesting or can you simply continue to wonder and
learn about things that actually interest you. Do you have to force yourself
to learn things as we were "forced" during our early education? For example a
developer is annoyed/bored with re-learning frameworks /languages/concepts and
takes up a hobby they find interesting where they are still hungry for
knowledge. Say homebrewing :)

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jgrahamc
So, basically my constant saying to myself "I don't understand this" and
digging in deeper until I do plus feeling like there's so much more to learn
is... a good thing.

~~~
digi_owl
Seems so. Been doing something similar my whole life myself.

The biggest thing you can do for yourself, as best i can tell, is to admit you
don't know, and then go digging for info rather than just accept that you
don't know (or worse go on to pretend you do).

------
steinsgate
another TL;DR : Making mistakes is a great way of learning. To learn from
mistakes, the first step is to identify that you have made an error. The
second step is to correct it. When we grow older, we become worse at the first
step i.e. identifying the error. Without identification, there can be no
correction and no learning.

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throwwit
So does evoking uncertainty allow for an overall learning advantage when it
comes to age in more complex scenarios?

------
ryanofsky
I don't think the study supports many of the conclusions being drawn in the
comments here.

What the study measured was that older people tended to be worse than younger
people at adjusting their predictions after making small errors (theoretically
because of lower uncertainty levels), but better than young people at
adjusting predictions after making large errors (theoretically because of
higher surprise sensitivity).

What the study did was fit each person with one of the curves in figure 2, the
curves being functions of how much a person was willing adjust their new
prediction ("learning rate" value on Y axis) in response to seeing different
amounts of error on their previous prediction ("relative error" value on X
axis).

\- In the "normative" case (best case), a person has a perfect S curve, where
they don't adjust their predictions too much after small errors, but greatly
increase willingness to swing their predictions after errors reach a
threshold.

\- In the "surprise insensitive" case, where a person is unable to be
surprised by large swings in data and update their predictions accordingly,
the steep rise in their S curve is flattened out. These people are bad at
learning after large errors.

\- In the "low hazard rate" case, where a person is able to be surprised by
large swings in data, but their threshold for surprise is too high, their S
curve is shifted to the right. These people are bad at predicting after
moderate errors, but fine at predicting after small and large errors.

\- In the "low uncertainty case", where a person is too sure of themselves at
low error levels, the S curve is depressed at the left end. These people are
bad at learning after small errors, but good at predicting after medium and
high errors.

\- In the "reduced PE" case, where a person isn't good at understanding
magnitudes of prediction errors at all, their S curve is vertically
compressed, and their predictions are worse across the board, at low, medium,
and high error levels.

Figure 6 shows outcome of the experiment, with age being correlated with
higher "uncertainty underestimation" ("Unc") and higher "surprise sensitivity"
("SS") in the fitted curves.

This happens because older people are worse at learning from small changes in
data, but can compensate somewhat be being more willing to change their
predictions after large swings in data.

"Insufficient uncertainty" might be a reasonable explanation for this, but
it's easy to imagine other possible explanations as well. Maybe "insufficient
attention" or "insufficient caring" could be factors, with older people maybe
being more willing to stick to rough predictions without sweating the details.
It would have been interesting if the study tried to measure self-confidence /
certainty levels more directly, instead of just relying on fitting to a
theoretical model.

~~~
chendies
Maybe older people are better at rationalizing low errors.

e.g. if there is a small error, older people can convince themselves that they
were right and the world is wrong. (My reasoning was correct, but the answer
was wrong by chance. Therefore I won't change my reasoning).

However, younger people are less able to rationalize these small errors,
forcing them to accept the conclusion that _they_ are wrong.

------
viach
I knew that

------
19283191
Synopsis: A certain age group is better at video games.

~~~
rhaps0dy
Nice snark, but one can extract more interesting insights.

"learning deficits observed in healthy older adults are driven by a diminished
capacity to represent and use uncertainty to guide learning"

From a Bayesian, or normal machine learning, perspective: older people have
collected more evidence about the world, and thus would normally reduce their
learning rate, or belief update amount, for best performance. In this example,
though, video games represent a different environment, and the older adults
have little evidence about them. However, they fail to have a higher learning
rate. Looks to me like an evolutionary adaptation that does not work anymore;
the environment did not change that quickly before.

To paraphrase: older people learn more slowly, and this parallels the lesser
weight of new evidence when you have more accumulated evidence in Bayesian
beliefs; or the reduction of learning rate in machine learning systems.

~~~
hacker42
I'm wondering to which extent this effect can be attributed to illusion of
competence, i.e. with age some meta learning program in our brains that is
concerned with managing novel data simply becomes lazy because (1) adults
really are able to handle most of the situations they are confronted with and
(2) they are also expected to be able to deal with any situation. That might
simply lead to a detoriation of the sort of novelty detection. Adults tend to
automatically explain away things they don't understand (possibly to save
face) while the young examine them. With increasing age these kinds of
automatisms might simply override or detoriate learning strategies that are
required to learn quickly.

