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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Exactly the same experience. My AP Physics teacher in high school was incredibly better than university.
UT is research focused. Depending on the department, they make the professors teach classes, which is often not aligned with their interests at all. Sometimes I think they are actively trying for bad reviews from students to incentivize the university from making them take on course load.
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.
community colleges are... like... there for the community. and you feel that community.
a lot of big universities have people there for research. there is money to be made, grants to be given, and degrees to be minted. and you can feel that too.
source: got out of the military and went to one, then the other.
I had a long winding road through academia. Went to a big selective R1 state school in a different state after high school. Had an existential crisis, moved back home with my parents and went to community college for a year, finished my undergrad at a large, less selective R2 and then did grad school at a large, very selective private R1. I would rank the quality of instruction:
1. Community College
2. Probably a tie between the R2 and grad school. However, that grad school focused a lot on grad students, so it's possible the undergraduate experience isn't quite as good.
...
3. After a very large drop off the R1 state school.
You obviously can't extrapolate too much from my personal experience, but it does seem to line up with man others.
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.
> 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.
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.
I like your point about feedback. That's how I describe my difficulties with proofs, too.
There is no way of knowing a proof is right without knowing it's right. (Or maybe I am just missing the point)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
I've used an LLM for tutoring, but it doesn't replace the experience of biking across campus, ordering a coffee, unpacking my TI-89/iPad, cracking jokes with the professor and other students, paying attention, taking notes, and having to remember the material until exam day. This process is culture, and it's honing my mental blade. Then, as a solo-entrepreneur, I go home and use Cline+Sonnet to hack on a few side projects. These two processes compliment each other, greatly. Like I've mentioned in other replies, this is for "#2 fun" and to see if the "old guy (me) has still got it."
> 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?
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.
>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.
The other comments are great but I wanted to touch on why I seem to be struggling in a reality that generally provides enough today.
It's because as hard as it is to believe, especially for young people: life these days is decent despite the status quo, not because of it.
In other words, had we continued on the trajectory we were on before loosely 1980 and trickle-down economics, we could have had moonshots to solve each of humanity's problems in the order of need rather than profitability. We could have consulted academics to invent 25% efficient solar panels for under $1 per watt and had them installed on over 50% of homes by 1990. We could have invented lithium iron phosphate batteries at that same time and had $10,000 electric cars, because they simply aren't that complicated. We could have had blue LEDs, and WiFi, and flatscreens, and everything else we enjoy today, decades earlier. Stuff that doesn't even exist right now but should, like affordable public buffets, mass transit in small cities and single-payer/public healthcare. Robotic hydroponic greenhouses. Living closer to work (I know, inconceivable).
Instead, I had to watch everything roll out at a glacial pace under a risk-averse private system that allowed the Dot Bomb to happen around 2000. That defunded nearly all pure research and outsourced the jobs that provided a healthy work/life balance. That marginalized eBay businesses and online advertising and the resale market so that influencers and the ultra-wealthy could capture all of that low-hanging fruit while the rest of us have to work. And boy did I have to work, at jobs that sapped every bit of my passion, motivation and self-determination, leaving me too exhausted to pursue my side hustles fast enough to get to market before someone else beat me to it or a deregulated recession wiped me out again.
When you've watched progress flounder for as long as I have, it becomes obvious that sabotage is where the money's at. The powers that be denied innovation at every turn, in order to prop up aging industries centered around a 20th century fossil fuel economy that still dominates our lives today.
And now suddenly AI falls in our lap because a billionaire finally decided to fund it. Now you see what happens with a moonshot. Things change so rapidly that we're left reeling with their implications. The luddites come out. Politics devolves. Time runs backwards to the 1950s, the 1940s, the conditions that fanned the flames that turned into world wars.
Now they gleefully say "see! we should have kept stifling innovation! ignorance is strength!"
It's.just.so.exhausting.
I find that people fall very strongly into 2 camps, which could be loosely mapped to left and right: those who suffer knowing what could be, and those who defend what is to deny their own suffering.
> 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.
> 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.
"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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
I just want to say that, while I am about a decade your junior, I feel the same way.
It is weird to live in a world of shallow pursuits, wanting to learn and teach and build and seeing everyone going crazy about 'line goes up'. It also pains me the contortions that are required to afford to exist when we have so much wealth and knowledge and so many still have to suffer.
And the weird thing is, I see everything as learning. From fields learning to interact and persist 'particles' to ecosystems learning to dissipate energy to humans learning to collaborate. And we are literally building machines capable of learning. In a deeper sense, software is machine learning: general computers are the first machines we built that are pure learning potential. A loom can only make fabric but by making them capable of learning different patterns without the need of a human making every little decision we sparked a fire that is now consuming everything.
I don't think LLMs will shortcut software building. But I do think that existence itself is about learning. Seeing it hijacked by people obsessed with grabbing more resources for the sake of it is truly sad.
But then again, that is the root of suffering. Maybe what pains me the most is knowing how much I still hold on to in my own way. Maybe the best lesson I can take from all this is that the more I let go of the more I can lessen my suffering and participate in the great universal journey of learning. As a singer I greatly admired sang: if your cup is already full it's bound to overflow.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
If I may so bold as to refer to you as "my friend" (having never met you)...
My friend, I think I understand what you mean. I am about the same age too.
I would like to propose an idea to you - and it is something I have been exploring very deeply myself lately.. maybe the thing we need to start spending our time on is exactly this meta problem now. The meta problem is something like (not perfectly stated): we as humans have to decide what we value such that we can continue to give our existence purpose in the future.
I don't think AI is going to be the be-all-end-all, but it is clearly a major shift that will keep transforming work and life.
I can't point yet at a specific job, or task - but I am spending real time on this meta problem and starting to come up with some ideas. Maybe we can be part of what gets the world, and humans, ready for the future - applying our problem solving skills to that next problem?
I mean all of the above in 100% seriousness and I am willing to chat sometime if interested to compare notes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
The only way I've been able to get things done is to first allocate time for the things I want to study right when I wake up, then do as much as I can to learn them. The only requirement is to try to understand the material. Putting deadlines and/or milestones in the beginning can sometimes discourage people from starting.
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.
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.
People's financial goals range wildly, which also impacts on when they can retire. Some people don't care about some combination of having a car, or expensive living quarters, or fancy food, or a family.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oftentimes they're not even rigorous. At least in the math setting, many professors excuse their student's lack of comprehension on complex material when it's really bad teaching. Some attempts at explaining proofs are laughable and although their conclusions may be correct, because the covered theorems were proven by those much smarter than them, the steps taken to get there rarely follow the tight logical sequencing needed by those learning the material.
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!
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.
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!
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 $$.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
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?
> Do you plan to enslave the people who would provide this education?
There's a concept called public money which can build roads, dams and other cute concrete things. Why can't you use that for payroll in higher education? Not everybody can learn the same way, not everybody has a separate and chill space in their homes to study without interruption.
Roads serve the needs of now, knowledge builds roads to the future.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“i don’t think i should be paying” - if it could benefit your community or the country, then why not? It gives people options.
Not everything is a zero sum game. That’s just a fact of living in a society. Some people pay in to the system much more than you, and you benefit from that. And vise versa, there’s someone paying less and they benefit from your contributions (taxes, etc). That’s what society is about. A system that allows citizens to thrive. It’s not supposed to be about ME ME ME.
Just my 2 cents…as an american that’s tired of this attitude. Capitalism with small guardrails is garbage in my opinion.
On a somewhat related note - many americans think free healthcare is not worthwhile because it’s a net negative for them PERSONALLY. I struggle to understand that as well. Like “oh i don’t want to pay for that”. Meanwhile most of your fellow americans can’t afford basic care.
What’s the end game??? You’re entitled to your opinion of course but i don’t _understand_ it.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I listened to Magnus and I took that quite differently.
I took that he said that others have caught up and he is just not motivated to do the type of studying to improve even further at this point.
There is a process we don't really have a name for that was best summed up by the boxer Marvin Hagler:
“It's tough to get out of bed to do roadwork at 5am when you've been sleeping in silk pajamas”
The demotivation of success. Of course, that is also going to correlate with age and be very hard to disentangle. At the same time testosterone levels will be past peak, adding another variable in the mix. Plus actual mental acuity past peak.
In other words, as someone pushing 50. Getting old kind of sucks systemically.
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.
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..
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
> 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).
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).
This is my biggest fear of retiring from programming and doing something else. At 55, I feel like programming keeps my brain elastic. I fear leaving that and going into slow decline.
I'm worried about this with my dad. He's recently retired from a career of hardcore engineering in the optical physics industry. Now in his mid 60s he's inside all the time playing baseball games on his iPad and watching TV shows with my mom. I've been trying to figure out ways to spark his curiosity again. Thought LLMs would blow his mind, and they would have 15 years ago... but it was just passing interest.
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).
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.
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.
I'm still in my 30s, but I wonder how much mental decline is actually due to physical decline. I notice I feel more sluggish, sleepy, less sharp and motivated during periods when I'm more sedentary. And while exercise is tiring, I feel it gradually improves not only physical stamina, but mental stamina as well. Clearly a large part of our brain power is spent controlling our bodies, for when a stroke happens, becoming paralyzed in an area of your body can result. And clearly our body caters to our brains needs (e.g. nutrition), so if the body declines, then it shouldn't be surprising to see mental capabilities decline as well.
>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.
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.
Readit News
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...
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.
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.
The only negative for me was that the students were pretty checked out.
UT is research focused. Depending on the department, they make the professors teach classes, which is often not aligned with their interests at all. Sometimes I think they are actively trying for bad reviews from students to incentivize the university from making them take on course load.
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.
a lot of big universities have people there for research. there is money to be made, grants to be given, and degrees to be minted. and you can feel that too.
source: got out of the military and went to one, then the other.
1. Community College 2. Probably a tie between the R2 and grad school. However, that grad school focused a lot on grad students, so it's possible the undergraduate experience isn't quite as good. ... 3. After a very large drop off the R1 state school.
You obviously can't extrapolate too much from my personal experience, but it does seem to line up with man others.
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.
No one - young or old - does well in math without a great deal of practice :-)
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.
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.
I will look into Lean that is mentioned here.
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.
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.
This YouTube playlist was invaluable for me: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmM_3MA2HWpYYo7QExaRvor_u...
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.
> 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. :)
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.
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.
Do colleges usually let you do this when you're adding to a degree you earned 20 years ago?
Best of luck on your pursuit.
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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?
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.
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.
A quick search returned some articles. Here’s one: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7525587/
A Ted talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/rutger_bregman_poverty_isn_t_a_lac...
It's because as hard as it is to believe, especially for young people: life these days is decent despite the status quo, not because of it.
In other words, had we continued on the trajectory we were on before loosely 1980 and trickle-down economics, we could have had moonshots to solve each of humanity's problems in the order of need rather than profitability. We could have consulted academics to invent 25% efficient solar panels for under $1 per watt and had them installed on over 50% of homes by 1990. We could have invented lithium iron phosphate batteries at that same time and had $10,000 electric cars, because they simply aren't that complicated. We could have had blue LEDs, and WiFi, and flatscreens, and everything else we enjoy today, decades earlier. Stuff that doesn't even exist right now but should, like affordable public buffets, mass transit in small cities and single-payer/public healthcare. Robotic hydroponic greenhouses. Living closer to work (I know, inconceivable).
Instead, I had to watch everything roll out at a glacial pace under a risk-averse private system that allowed the Dot Bomb to happen around 2000. That defunded nearly all pure research and outsourced the jobs that provided a healthy work/life balance. That marginalized eBay businesses and online advertising and the resale market so that influencers and the ultra-wealthy could capture all of that low-hanging fruit while the rest of us have to work. And boy did I have to work, at jobs that sapped every bit of my passion, motivation and self-determination, leaving me too exhausted to pursue my side hustles fast enough to get to market before someone else beat me to it or a deregulated recession wiped me out again.
When you've watched progress flounder for as long as I have, it becomes obvious that sabotage is where the money's at. The powers that be denied innovation at every turn, in order to prop up aging industries centered around a 20th century fossil fuel economy that still dominates our lives today.
And now suddenly AI falls in our lap because a billionaire finally decided to fund it. Now you see what happens with a moonshot. Things change so rapidly that we're left reeling with their implications. The luddites come out. Politics devolves. Time runs backwards to the 1950s, the 1940s, the conditions that fanned the flames that turned into world wars.
Now they gleefully say "see! we should have kept stifling innovation! ignorance is strength!"
It's.just.so.exhausting.
I find that people fall very strongly into 2 camps, which could be loosely mapped to left and right: those who suffer knowing what could be, and those who defend what is to deny their own suffering.
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.
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.
"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/
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.
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.
It is weird to live in a world of shallow pursuits, wanting to learn and teach and build and seeing everyone going crazy about 'line goes up'. It also pains me the contortions that are required to afford to exist when we have so much wealth and knowledge and so many still have to suffer.
And the weird thing is, I see everything as learning. From fields learning to interact and persist 'particles' to ecosystems learning to dissipate energy to humans learning to collaborate. And we are literally building machines capable of learning. In a deeper sense, software is machine learning: general computers are the first machines we built that are pure learning potential. A loom can only make fabric but by making them capable of learning different patterns without the need of a human making every little decision we sparked a fire that is now consuming everything.
I don't think LLMs will shortcut software building. But I do think that existence itself is about learning. Seeing it hijacked by people obsessed with grabbing more resources for the sake of it is truly sad.
But then again, that is the root of suffering. Maybe what pains me the most is knowing how much I still hold on to in my own way. Maybe the best lesson I can take from all this is that the more I let go of the more I can lessen my suffering and participate in the great universal journey of learning. As a singer I greatly admired sang: if your cup is already full it's bound to overflow.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
If I may so bold as to refer to you as "my friend" (having never met you)...
My friend, I think I understand what you mean. I am about the same age too.
I would like to propose an idea to you - and it is something I have been exploring very deeply myself lately.. maybe the thing we need to start spending our time on is exactly this meta problem now. The meta problem is something like (not perfectly stated): we as humans have to decide what we value such that we can continue to give our existence purpose in the future.
I don't think AI is going to be the be-all-end-all, but it is clearly a major shift that will keep transforming work and life.
I can't point yet at a specific job, or task - but I am spending real time on this meta problem and starting to come up with some ideas. Maybe we can be part of what gets the world, and humans, ready for the future - applying our problem solving skills to that next problem?
I mean all of the above in 100% seriousness and I am willing to chat sometime if interested to compare notes.
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.
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-...
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.
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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.
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.
Esp. good were:
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-001-structure-and-interpretati...
and
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-042j-mathematics-for-computer-...
Not really. You'll find that as an experienced programmer, you have a massive advantage at times in your classes.
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.
These people have succeeded in making money and that's all. But life is so much more than just making money.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why?
Agreed on prioritizing financial freedom.
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.
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.
This. To Infinity.
Please prioritise financial freedom. I missed a few steps, but as I get old, I realise this is the biggest blocker to almost anything.
Money == Free time.
You olds have all the money, all the time.
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.
But let's say a shallow understanding is good enough...even just completing a General Relativity graduate course with good mark is good enough.
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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.
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.
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?
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.
There's a concept called public money which can build roads, dams and other cute concrete things. Why can't you use that for payroll in higher education? Not everybody can learn the same way, not everybody has a separate and chill space in their homes to study without interruption.
Roads serve the needs of now, knowledge builds roads to the future.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Not everything is a zero sum game. That’s just a fact of living in a society. Some people pay in to the system much more than you, and you benefit from that. And vise versa, there’s someone paying less and they benefit from your contributions (taxes, etc). That’s what society is about. A system that allows citizens to thrive. It’s not supposed to be about ME ME ME.
Just my 2 cents…as an american that’s tired of this attitude. Capitalism with small guardrails is garbage in my opinion.
On a somewhat related note - many americans think free healthcare is not worthwhile because it’s a net negative for them PERSONALLY. I struggle to understand that as well. Like “oh i don’t want to pay for that”. Meanwhile most of your fellow americans can’t afford basic care.
What’s the end game??? You’re entitled to your opinion of course but i don’t _understand_ it.
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.
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.
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.
op isn't saying self paced learning doesn't work for anyone, therefore it's irrelevant if you know some whizz autodidacts
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
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.
I'm still going to try to fight it for myself, though.
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.
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Unfortunately she didn't share what other incidents she had, I really wish she had.
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.
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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.
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.
I'm less likely to code until midnight, but more likely to have the problem solved before clocking out at 6pm ;)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I took that he said that others have caught up and he is just not motivated to do the type of studying to improve even further at this point.
There is a process we don't really have a name for that was best summed up by the boxer Marvin Hagler:
“It's tough to get out of bed to do roadwork at 5am when you've been sleeping in silk pajamas”
The demotivation of success. Of course, that is also going to correlate with age and be very hard to disentangle. At the same time testosterone levels will be past peak, adding another variable in the mix. Plus actual mental acuity past peak.
In other words, as someone pushing 50. Getting old kind of sucks systemically.
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..
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.
There are very few capabilities in mainstream languages today, if any, that weren’t available in Common Lisp back in the 1980s or 90s.
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.
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.
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!
can you expand on that for clarity ?
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.)
Terms you want to check for more detailed info are 'liquid intelligence' and 'crystalized intelligence', but you basically nailed it.
After all, trouble shooting can be viewed as a productive thing.
Interesting idea though.
> 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).
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.