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Age differences in learning from an insufficient representation of uncertainty
- 19283191 10y agoSynopsis: A certain age group is better at video games.
- rhaps0dy 10y agoNice snark, but one can extract more interesting insights. "learning deficits observed in healthy older adults are driven by a diminished capacity to represent and use uncertainty to guide learning" From a Bayesian, or normal machine learning, perspective: older people have collected more evidence about the world, and thus would normally reduce their learning rate, or belief update amount, for best performance. In this example, though, video games represent a different environment, and the older adults have little evidence about them. However, they fail to have a higher learning rate. Looks to me like an evolutionary adaptation that does not work anymore; the environment did not change that quickly before. To paraphrase: older people learn more slowly, and this parallels the lesser weight of new evidence when you have more accumulated evidence in Bayesian beliefs; or the reduction of learning rate in machine learning systems.
- 199182391 10y agoNot very insightful. If you're used to video games, you have an inherent advantage over any "new" problem that is posed in terms of a video game. Even simple things like automatically switching your mind off because you find video games less interesting than a blackboard (which is the case for me) have to be taken into account. This is really the same as intelligence tests that make assumptions over the cultural environment.
- hacker42 10y agoI'm wondering to which extent this effect can be attributed to illusion of competence, i.e. with age some meta learning program in our brains that is concerned with managing novel data simply becomes lazy because (1) adults really are able to handle most of the situations they are confronted with and (2) they are also expected to be able to deal with any situation. That might simply lead to a detoriation of the sort of novelty detection. Adults tend to automatically explain away things they don't understand (possibly to save face) while the young examine them. With increasing age these kinds of automatisms might simply override or detoriate learning strategies that are required to learn quickly.
- johnlbevan2 10y agoI've always thought of this as precompiled vs interpreted; i.e. the more experience someone has the more hard-wired their response to that scenario; which makes people with more experience faster at reacting to familiar situations, but less adaptable should a different response be required or to some previously unseen variation in that initial situation.
- dmichulke 10y agoTLDR; If you think you know everything already (or you don't need to learn something) then you learn less well. Older people are more often fulfilling the above premises, and thereby the above conclusion. This means: Worse learning performance is not a consequence of age per se.
- k__ 10y agolol, is this why impostor syndrome exists? 1. I think I know nothing. 2. I try to learn hard to get better. 3. goto 1.
- woliveirajr 10y ago:-) I think it's the first time I see an answer with a "goto" that didn't get downvoted!!!
- johnlbevan2 10y agoThank-you; great summary / much clearer than the paper itself.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoThe truth is, most people seem firmly in the grip of illusory competence at most times, and it's not a shock that as life progresses that becomes crippling. I'd be shocked if people somehow magically changed in old age, rather than just distilling who they've always been.
- viach 10y agoI knew that
- throwwit 10y agoSo does evoking uncertainty allow for an overall learning advantage when it comes to age in more complex scenarios?
- awkward_yeti 10y agoAlways keep a Beginner's Mind.
- DonHopkins 10y agoI'm certain that there's a learnable technique to cultivate uncertainty.
- empath75 10y agoThe wisest man knows that he knows nothing.
- DonHopkins 10y agoIs it even possible to know if there are more known unknowns than unknown unknowns?
- marcosdumay 10y agoHow could I know?
- ScottBurson 10y ago"Master, what is knowledge?" "When you know a thing, to know that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to know that you do not know it -- this is knowledge." I like this one better :-)
- conjectures 10y agoI think it is (should be) as simple as: 1) Being scrupulously honest with oneself. 2) Re-examining cached thoughts and opinions when using them.
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoMost won't get past step one.
- theoh 10y ago"Defamiliarization or ostranenie (остранение) is the artistic technique of presenting to audiences common things in an unfamiliar or strange way in order to enhance perception of the familiar." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamiliarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamiliarization
- networker 10y agoOn a related note, does anyone else remember a study (I think linked here) that measured certainty / uncertainty in individuals? The idea was that it asked open ended questions, ranging from questions such as "What is the GDP of USA" to "How many days in a lunar cycle" or "How many symphonies did Beethoven compose" and would not only present a handful of options for the answer but also ask you to self-rate how accurately you think you knew the answer. The idea was not to measure the actual responses, but to look at how well people know whether they know things. I found it very interesting and it reminded of this: I wonder how measures on that scale relate to learning agility.
- jgrahamc 10y agoSo, basically my constant saying to myself "I don't understand this" and digging in deeper until I do plus feeling like there's so much more to learn is... a good thing.
- digi_owl 10y agoSeems so. Been doing something similar my whole life myself. The biggest thing you can do for yourself, as best i can tell, is to admit you don't know, and then go digging for info rather than just accept that you don't know (or worse go on to pretend you do).
- cmiles74 10y agoI'd say, "reminding myself I don't understand this." Like you say, you can always dig deeper and it's almost always rewarding.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- iliketosleep 10y agoAs people get older, their minds tend to filter out most things around them as a consequence of familiarity. Hence, they become oblivious to details of their environment. They lose their sense of wonder and their minds become less active and eventually stale. When I was young, I often wondered why adults seemed so "stupid" when it came to learning things, and I do think this is a big part of it. As we get older, it's necessary to make a conscious effort to pay attention to details of our environment, and to be acutely aware of the great uncertainty found all around us, even in everyday life. This is the difference between a person who becomes a "stupid" adult, and one whose mind is still sharp as a razor at age 70.
- nabla9 10y ago>adult, and one whose mind is still sharp as a razor at age 70. I have never met sharp as a razor person at 70 who is not showing signs of reduced learning in new situations. They learn new stuff faster than most of other people in their age, but they still do it slower than younger people. What they have is large crystallized intelligence (Gc-factor) they can apply successfully to learn new things. This makes them usually great people to learn from and hang around. I suspect that if we didn't expire the gravity of this accumulated cognitive perspective – habits of thinking, tough patterns, overfitting – would become intellectual disability even for the best of us.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago> I suspect that if we didn't expire the gravity of this accumulated cognitive perspective – habits of thinking, tough patterns, overfitting – would become intellectual disability even for the best of us. We are "designed" to exist only for a limited time. The patterns are everywhere, including in the way the brain works.
- Fordrus 10y agoI call bullshit! And it's not because of the teleological implication you're making - it's because you're overfitting a pattern - limited existence - where you have no data to observe the correctness of your conclusions! You think you see reasons why an overly long-lived human would encounter difficulties because of limitations you perceive that they'll encounter, but your observation set is so limited that your conjectures must be treated as conjectures, not as solid understanding! The limitations on learning we observe in older human could easily be due to a huge number of factors, almost all of which are extremely solvable. The one mentioned here, that crystalized intelligence, which is an advantage in some ways becomes a liability in this case - that one is not immediately solvable in my view - But when I discuss radically increased lifespans for humans, and I discuss it often because I want to see it happen and am already participating in a startup whose success I believe will hasten that effort, I often hear people giving reasons much like yours are reasons why my efforts are not worthwhile. Honestly, seriously, people are using justifications like yours to avoid investing in efforts like mine, and it's maddening to hear such an unsure, ephemeral hypothesis - and I honestly regard the conjectures you've made above to be among the most uncertain hypotheses in history of humankind - to be used as a reason to deprive concrete efforts of concrete investment. Absolutely maddening, especially because I don't even necessarily disagree, but if the actual pattern for humans is that after, say, 1,000 or 100,000 years, we've got too much cruft as a part of us to continue, we'll never know unless we investigate it, and we can't investigate it if everyone just blindly trusts in silly design pattern hypotheses!!!
- DanielBMarkham 10y agoI think that many times we don't give enough credit to how amazingly lazy our brains are. Whatever they can generalize, they generalize. They don't track images, they track edges and movement (I oversimplify, of course). They can hear garbled speech in a crowded room and somehow figure out what the words are -- even if those aren't the actual words. To some degree this is good. We don't want to go around testing every chair we come across to make sure it's good to sit in. But it has its downsides as well.
- Declanomous 10y agoMaybe I don't need to test everything to see if it is a chair, but I definitely test every chair before I sit in it. I learned that I should do that after breaking a few chairs, and a bench. I'm not even particularly heavy. I'm 180#, which is pretty much spot-on for my height.
- steinsgate 10y agoanother TL;DR : Making mistakes is a great way of learning. To learn from mistakes, the first step is to identify that you have made an error. The second step is to correct it. When we grow older, we become worse at the first step i.e. identifying the error. Without identification, there can be no correction and no learning.
- androtheos 10y agoSo does one have to remain open to learning about everything, including subjects they don't find interesting or can you simply continue to wonder and learn about things that actually interest you. Do you have to force yourself to learn things as we were "forced" during our early education? For example a developer is annoyed/bored with re-learning frameworks /languages/concepts and takes up a hobby they find interesting where they are still hungry for knowledge. Say homebrewing :)
- bakhy 10y agonobody seems interested in looking at the thing from the other perspective - why was it an evolutionary advantage for older people to develop this uncertainty-blindness? i would guess that perhaps with age the importance of making a decision rises, even if not the best decision. perhaps it's an evolutionary adaptation to reduce analysis-paralysis in developed adults and improve their self-sufficiency? in any case, it's interesting how we all jumped to "fixing" it. a cute reflection of the culture here.
- rz2k 10y agoA wealth of experiences can be a source of wisdom, and a good basis for decision making. Instead of rejecting that advantage in all situations, I think people are exploring ideas about how to learn when prior assumptions should have less bearing. From my experience teaching older people when I was younger, and myself no longer being 20 anymore, the challenge is figuring out which assumptions to question. Let's say I'm reading a math proof, and don't really understand a statement. If I pretend I understand it well enough and keep going it might make sense, or maybe I'll get further lost. I feel like I had a better sense both of how not to get bogged down, and when to slow down when I was younger.
- eivarv 10y agoThere doesn't need to be an evolutionary advantage for everything (e.g. vestigal features) - this "uncertainty-blindness" could have just not been exposed to evolutionary pressure.
- nommm-nommm 10y agoVery few 70+ year olds are reproducing so evolutionary advantage doesn't make sense in that age group as they have already reproduced (or not) by then.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoHistorically the aged sat around the fire and taught the young. Which encouraged their genes' propagation. Since Humans became social, its not been all about reproduction.
- dschiptsov 10y agoCausation is a strong claim here.) Correlation is known for ages. "The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence". (Who said Java?) The same notion is related to the concert of "the beginner's mind" popularized by D. T. Suzuki and S. Jobs. Packers call it "thinking out of the box". J. Krishnamurti call it 'freedom from the "known"' (people call all kinds of nonsense "knowledge"). Children learn so quickly and efficiently because they are not habitually pattern matching against personal experiences, cultural conditioning and popular memes - the way most adults do, but are still building the map of the world out of so called primordial awareness, or the Buddha Nature. But "the map is not the territory". And finally - “Trust those who seek the truth but doubt those who say they have found it.”
- manishsharan 10y agoThere is a learning to learn course on Coursera https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn I strongly recommend it for engineers over 40.
- rimantas 10y agoI strongly recommend it for everyone. Especially for those workaholics and one-(brain)-hemishpere individuals who think that knowing only one narrow area is OK.
- ryanofsky 10y agoI don't think the study supports many of the conclusions being drawn in the comments here. What the study measured was that older people tended to be worse than younger people at adjusting their predictions after making small errors (theoretically because of lower uncertainty levels), but better than young people at adjusting predictions after making large errors (theoretically because of higher surprise sensitivity). What the study did was fit each person with one of the curves in figure 2, the curves being functions of how much a person was willing adjust their new prediction ("learning rate" value on Y axis) in response to seeing different amounts of error on their previous prediction ("relative error" value on X axis). - In the "normative" case (best case), a person has a perfect S curve, where they don't adjust their predictions too much after small errors, but greatly increase willingness to swing their predictions after errors reach a threshold. - In the "surprise insensitive" case, where a person is unable to be surprised by large swings in data and update their predictions accordingly, the steep rise in their S curve is flattened out. These people are bad at learning after large errors. - In the "low hazard rate" case, where a person is able to be surprised by large swings in data, but their threshold for surprise is too high, their S curve is shifted to the right. These people are bad at predicting after moderate errors, but fine at predicting after small and large errors. - In the "low uncertainty case", where a person is too sure of themselves at low error levels, the S curve is depressed at the left end. These people are bad at learning after small errors, but good at predicting after medium and high errors. - In the "reduced PE" case, where a person isn't good at understanding magnitudes of prediction errors at all, their S curve is vertically compressed, and their predictions are worse across the board, at low, medium, and high error levels. Figure 6 shows outcome of the experiment, with age being correlated with higher "uncertainty underestimation" ("Unc") and higher "surprise sensitivity" ("SS") in the fitted curves. This happens because older people are worse at learning from small changes in data, but can compensate somewhat be being more willing to change their predictions after large swings in data. "Insufficient uncertainty" might be a reasonable explanation for this, but it's easy to imagine other possible explanations as well. Maybe "insufficient attention" or "insufficient caring" could be factors, with older people maybe being more willing to stick to rough predictions without sweating the details. It would have been interesting if the study tried to measure self-confidence / certainty levels more directly, instead of just relying on fitting to a theoretical model.
- greenmountin 10y agoThis headline (on yc) is missing a key verb from the actual paper's headline, making it confusing. The actual title is: "Age differences in learning emerge from an insufficient representation of uncertainty in older adults"
- danieltillett 10y agoYes. Unfortunately YC limit of 80 characters prevented me from including the full title. I hope the change is not too confusing and captures the intent of the original title.
- bradlys 10y agoActually, it was confusing and I was searching for this comment alone. I wouldn't have clicked on it if it wasn't for the points it already has.
- whiddershins 10y agoThis article is really thought provoking. One thing I wonder, though, is how they can ever adjust for the strong possibility older adults just can't care about a make-believe test the way younger people might. My observation, as I age, is I have a harder and harder time getting interested in hypothetical scenarios, or taking on someone else's agenda as being super important. So I really wonder if older adults just test worse than younger people, simply because they care less about the test. If that's true, it wouldn't hold in the real world. Except that older people can seem less smart, when in reality they think whatever you're trying to get them to learn is not important in the grand scheme of things.
- infectoid 10y agoYour comment is kind of buried but I feel like this is what has happened to me as I've aged. Where once I was consumed by the depth of a problem I now find that I am more consumed with the breadth of it. In that sense I tend to consider the practical outcomes more than I used to. But I am also sure that maintaining novelty in my life, whether through education or travel, is key to maintaining healthy schemas in my mind to help understand the world.