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Does that mean it is not true that it becomes harder to learn new things with age?
I’m 26 and I’ve been rushing gaining knowledge and experience very much so far for fear of just not being able to fit in much more once I reach certain age.
No I’m not virtue signaling, this is fucking stressful and I will be delighted to slow down a fuckton if that’s true.
From a completely unscientific but ‘experienced’ perspective I think the problem is that life just gets in the way as you get older, and you prioritize your own life rather than trying to learn.
Whether neuroplasticity means you can learn things later or not, the opportunity to learn things later just isn’t there without effort.
Having a job, kids, a mortgage and no social obligation to learn in a structured and organized way probably impacts you more than anything neurological.
Yeah, get in what you want because in twenty years the greatest thing your brain will enjoy is not processing anything of consequence.
Could you learn cuneiform and gain a rich understanding of 18th Century Viennese intellectual culture, if you didn’t know anything about that before? Sure.
*burp* But then you’ll be like “ah, gotta bring in the trash cans and then I can sit.”
People who have tried to gain literacy later in life have had a lot more trouble learning to write than read. It seems that the fine motor skills to drive a pen are best learnt early
I’d imagine it also has something to do with becoming less practiced at learning things.
It would be interesting to test this on career paths that basically require continuous learning.
Like I would be a perfect test subject because I plan to stay in the IT engineering space my whole career.
and, like, people just straight up stop trying. they hear that it’s harder to learn as you age so they don’t even try, and that of course confirms to everyone around them that it’s true, and so everyone keeps giving up.
it drives me up the fucking wall and the spite i hold for this phenomenon is like 70% of why i have a healthy lifestyle. I fully intend to be doing acrobatics at 60 purely so i can make people feel bad for making moronic lifestyle choices like driving 2km to buy 5 liters of alcohol for the weekend
As long as you continue to learn new things, then no, it doesn’t become harder with age. In fact, studies show that people who are lifelong learners can actually increase their ability to learn as they age. Learning, for example, a foreign language in later years has been shown to be just as attainable as in childhood, and might even give some protection against dementia. Your brain can actually become more plastic as you age if you continuously push it to do so.
The idea that learning capacity naturally* diminishes with age seems to be a widely accepted myth (which may have roots in sociological and cultural biases), and the opposite may actually be true.
e: those biases and environmental stressors may also contribute to people becoming less able – or less prone – to try, though, and if you don’t use it, you might lose that plasticity. So keep learning.
Well the ‘myth’ you speak of is based on the fact that the opposite of what you describe is also true. Those who lose any interest in learning new things become progressively more rigid and stuck in their mindset and become less and less likely to learn or adapt as they age. I suspect there are more people leaning towards that than lifelong learners, but I may just be a pessimist.
I think the people who are lifelong learners don’t stand out to us as much, because they’re not pig-headed cunts. Thus the societal bias.
And perhaps I’m an optimist because all the elders in my family are the plastic sort (my 89 year old father still works as an aviation engineer and still builds his own computers, for instance).
Anyway, I was talking about potential, not statistics. e: and I mean it’s psycho-social, not biological.
I’ve seen (and experienced in my fifties) that age does affect the working of your mind. I’d compare it to sleep deprivation. You know, when you’re young and reckless and haven’t slept well for a week, maybe pulling all-nighters for fun? It affects your concentration, your reflexes, and your general memory.
Age is like a mild sleep deprivation that gets a little bit worse each decade. It takes effort to stay lucid.
I agree with you, but I wonder how much of this is that most of us are worked to our last nerve until we’re at least 65, so many of us don’t have the luxury to maintain our brain plasticity? Once we’re 70ish, if we didn’t have that opportunity when we were living hand-to-mouth, our brains are kind of set by that point.
We all have the potential, but not the opportunity until it’s kind of too late? And then add that our society feeds us the equivalent of brain junk food for much of that time, rather than fostering continuing education…
I find that I get smarter as I get older, as stupid stuff that held me back gets discarded. You do have less energy I hear, but even there I think a fit 50 year old would be more energetic than a lazy 25 year old? Obviously having kids is a huge energy drain, but that’s not technically aging, just correlation rather than causation.
So anyway even if this graphic were true, it would be irrelevant as the major factor seems to me to be a willingness to learn, only after which raw ability would come into play.
In your case the adage that now is the time to learn is true, but not for any of the reasons mentioned above. Once you shift your perspective that the time for hard work is over and the time for personal play is at hand - to watch more TV, play games, hang out with friends, etc. - then it’s incredibly hard (most people phrase that as “impossible”) to ever go back to that college mindset of “it’s study time, let’s go!!!”. That’s not even just human nature, but rather the raw physics of inertia coupled with adaptation that lowers energy requirements that were evolutionarily built into our brains and bodies.
Discipline is a mindset that is mostly independent of age, except it trends towards older as those who have seen how it works first-hand now realize its value (coupled with individual survival of those who have more rather than less of it, i.e. the most reckless die the earliest in life), plus also younger as people listen and thus benefit from the accumulated wisdom of others.
Neural plasticity isn’t exactly the same as learning but, yeah, there seems to be a thing around 27 where neural plasticity seems to plateau a bit.
But I’m wondering if that’s more the effect than the cause. Perhaps it’s because a lot of people, up until they’re around 25-30, have a very quickly changing life. Schools are changing, jobs are changing, people are changing. But when you start to get into late twenties, early 30’s, most people already have a routine of some sort. And it would seem logical to me that it could mean lowered neural plasticity.
And perhaps it could come just as well if you started having as much variance and stimulation as earlier in your life. Perhaps not as much.
But yeah I don’t think there’s any sort of biological limit that you just can’t learn things anymore. Never too old.
Keep learning, and it’ll stay easier than if you didn’t. See if you can find changes for the structure of what you’re learning so you don’t get too ossified about that, either. Like, have a decade where you focus more on sciences, one more for arts, one more for languages, one more for understanding people who are very different from you… Maybe a decade is too big a chunk, but you get the idea.
That’s stupid, though. If you can explain 11% of the variance of some noisy phenomenon like cognitive and behavioral flexibility, that’s noteworthy. They tested both linear and quadratic terms, and the quadratic one worked better in terms of prediction, and is also an expression of a meaningful theoretical model, rather than just throwing higher polynomials at it for the fun of it. Quadratic here also would coincide with some homogenizing mechanism at the two ends of the age distribution.
But I have eyes and the curve they picked as best fit is really poorly fitting. It’s such a poor fit that is almost in a dead zone of the random points.
Whether you’re right or wrong, starting your argument with “that’s stupid, though” is unlikely to convince many.
That’s stupid though. People should change their minds when better information is presented regardless of tone!
Maybe, yeah, but I kinda get annoyed at this kinda dismissiveness - it’s a type of vague anti-science or something like that. Like… Sure, overfitting is a potential issue, but the answer to that isn’t to never fit any curve when data is noisy, it is (among other things) to build solid theories and good tests thereof. A lot of interesting stuff, especially behavioral things, is noisy and you can’t expect to always have relationships that are simple enough to see.
You’re probably right. But also, I was annoyed, not trying to convince. Maybe not the best place to post from. :)
Your frustration is understandable, but yeah, I agree with the last sentence of your post.
I will acknowledge, in this case, that your post certainly drew engagement.
This. I could have produced a more insightful scatter plot with a barn door and a twelve gauge.
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guess the correlation, looks about like a solid 0.1. Whoever put that regression line in there is crazy, the confidence interval is insulting.
How do you think a case of “this explains some of the differences in the population, but not a lot” should look?
And that looks potentially fine for an error bar. For a mean estimate, SE=SD/√N , so depending on what error band they used this looks quite plausible.
Also, the R^2 is even in the picture: .11
Take a look at these examples of regression. See how any one of the conclusions is absurd? Mind you the data in that example is far less random!
I recommend finding a different statistics teacher, preferably one who isn’t a comic and one who knows what the difference between a standard deviation, a standard error, and a 95% interval is. Those should not be too hard to find, it’s relatively basic stuff, but many people actually kinda struggle with the concepts (made harder by various factors, don’t get me started on the misuse of bar charts).
I post the picture because it gets the point across, not because that is “my teacher”. The point is that you can choose smart any random regression function and they all fit just as “good”.
Was about to say that. It’s sad that your comment is the very last in this thread.
1: it’s not last, and 2: it’s not sad, because 3: people aren’t reading the source material. I love xkcd, too, but that doesn’t apply here.
Just because results don’t match expectations doesn’t mean we should throw pies of satire in their face. That’s like the response in the OP of ‘no’. This is actually interesting.
https://doi.org/10.1111/bjc.12505 the paper
Nuh-uh.
Goddamnit Taleb.
What is this, a black swan event you could not have predicted as being within the realm of possibility, and thus have no idea how to react?
God Damnit, Taleb.
Taleb’s mind just isn’t antifragile enough. Or maybe too antifragile. Idk I didn’t read his book
I read a couple Teleb books about 15 years ago, they’re very funny. You go in thinking they’re these books about systematic collapse, but mostly its just about how he’s so smart he gets to be friends with Benoit Mandelbrot.
The theme of Anti-Fragile is “don’t be a sucker” which is really good advice tbh, but if you’re not a sucker you wouldnt have fallen for the apocalyptic framing of a book about how he’s so smart because he read some entry-level philosophy at some point, while Paul Krugman is a fucking moron and the nobel prize for economics is a joke
But we know for a fact that plasticity does drop with age, that’s why it’s so difficult to learn foreign language after childhood.
this is like saying you can’t run after 30, yeah sure it generally becomes less trivial but if you actually try to do it and don’t do it in the worst way possible it’s absolutely doable without much struggle.
kids absorb language like a sponge, adults are like silica gel, just expose yourself to the target language often and you’ll learn it. The problem is that many people are horrendously impatient and try to brute force language learning in like 2 months by memorizing individual sentences and shit, which isn’t how our brains work…
Neuroplasticity does drop with age, but the drop is smaller than it was previously assumed to be, especially outside of early childhood (you may note that eg. this graph starts at 20 years old)
For a fact, until it isn’t for a fact. Unfortunately things may change like how majority of physics was disproven in the early 1900
Absolute scattershot of datapoints
Nooo he’s so cute, I can interpolate him
Bestie, stop
