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Dr John Goodenough’s story suggests some people become more creative with age
- Frenchgeek 10y ago"Hello? Is this Google? Hello Mr Yahoo : I would like a pizza recipe for my grandkids, please. Thank you."?
- manmal 10y agoIs that ageism or do you reference something worthwhile or funny?
- Frenchgeek 10y agoI'm only making fun of "thinking like a 94 year old": There is no such thing in my opinion. ( And to be a genius you only have to work on something to the point of obsession but some may disagree )
- fahadkhan 10y agoThere are many more people who are considered obsessed with something and are not considered geniuses than there are people who are considered geniuses. An easy example is music. The world is full of professional and amateur musicians, many of who are considered obsessed and yet people considered geniuses rare, perhaps only a handful every century.
- manmal 10y agoWell, how do you know? How many 94y old non-retired professors have you interacted with yet?
- Frenchgeek 10y agoLook like the title has changed since my comment : the original one being "To be a genius, think like a 94 years old". I still think it did deserve to be made fun of.
- redwood 10y ago"Hello? What is this physical analog electronic component? Replace or mend? WHAT? Throw away; don't fix!" "Hello? Automobile engine self repairable? Impossible!" "Hello? Programming with cards? Impossible!"
- redwood 10y agoIn all honesty we've become a throw away generation without the ability to get in there and see how the machine work. Inevitable perhaps but the former generation are much more handy than we and frankly have probably in many cases got a better bottom up view of how things work under the covers
- aswanson 10y agoYeah, I think globalization has made products so commoditized, its more economical to throw them away than fix them. 4k 55' TVs for less than a grand; in the 80s that purchase would have been a projection TV for several thousand dollars (in 80s dollars!) and would have been kept for a decade or more. Now, it's toss it and upgrade. Same with PCs, etc.
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoIsn't that in large part due to income disparity. The place where it needs to be fixed has wages far higher than the place where it's made. Also that companies design stuff to break, and design things to be hard to fix. Legally mandating long warranties and long term parts availability would probably help?
- rimliu 10y agoI doubt that knowledge of a carburettor transfers well into understanding of sophisticated injection systems.
- erikpukinskis 10y ago> we've become a throw away generation without the ability to get in there and see how the machine work. You should check out YouTube. Your perception seems to be skewed, maybe by your social circle? We're living in a golden age of "ability to get in there and see how the machines work".
- zebrafish 10y agohttp://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2017/EE/C6EE02888H#!divAbstract http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2017/EE/C6EE02... Publication here.
- Kenji 10y agoThis title is extremely clickbaity. Think like a 94-Year-Old? Any 94-Year-Old? Couldn't they pick something that is relevant to the article about Goodenough's new battery research? He is the exception, not the rule. Mainstream media makes my brain hurt.
- blablabla123 10y agoThe Fields medal, the Nobel price for Mathematicians, exists already since decades and is only for people younger than 35. One point might be also that when you learn more and more, you can do more things. I think in the past there seemed to be the thinking that learning too long would be counterproductive. That's still reflected by the fact that managers earn more on average than engineers.
- PaulRobinson 10y agoThe Zuckerberg line about younger people being smarter is the dumbest line in history relating to this industry. It makes Gates' claim about 1MB being all anybody would ever need look like beautiful wisdom in comparison. However, you don't need to be 94 to be brilliant either. When you're young you have fewer commitments, more time, more energy, and an ability to recover from marathon slogs to get work done. Your lack of experience may hamper you in some fields, but it also allows you to see the World from a different angle which might, given your field, be an advantage. When you're older, you will have far more experience, insight, and the ability to allow your subconscious to bring together disparate experiences and thoughts into new ideas. However, you may be cognitively locked into seeing things a certain way, you will more likely have other draws on your time and you're less likely to be able to do (or recover from), 100-hour weeks. Both groups have something to offer, but the idea that one group is better than the other is ludicrous. Young people are not smarter. Old people are not wiser. They each just have different life experiences, abilities and ways of prioritising time.
- dsacco 10y agoIt's not definitive that Gates ever said that: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/
- aaron-lebo 10y agoOnly a sheltered 22-year old could make that statement. Dumb indeed. Old people do tend to be wiser. When you are 20 you simply can't make up for the 10 extra years of experience you are missing against someone who is 30...and someone who is 50 and has used the last 20 years improving themselves (after having a decade of their 20s to make mistakes you can't imagine)...forget about it. No matter how smart you are you can't overcome the slow accumulation of experience that time brings. I think what Goodenough says about not closing your mind as you age is key. Some old people stop learning, but if you combine a lifetime of learning and being willing to change your mind, it's remarkable what you can do. One of the great detriments to the tech industry is the youth movement. Giving college kids the world is detrimental to the world and ultimately those people. Adversity is good. You can't know what you don't know?
- Kostic 10y ago> Last but not least, he credited old age with bringing him a new kind of intellectual freedom. At 94, he said, “You no longer worry about keeping your job.” I really liked this last line. I agree. I think that I would be much more productive in my life if I didn't had to think aboud keeping my job and having enough funds for expenses. Hopefully, minimal income will become a standard thing in the future.
- aaron-lebo 10y agoMany tech workers do this to themselves because they feel like they need to keep up with the Joneses. That $120k startup job? Move to a cheaper locale, make half of that in a job that gives you more free time, and you are still making a salary that most workers would kill for. That's easier said than done, but tech workers are some of the most privileged in the world. If you can't make it by on a tech salary, an extra $10k isn't going to do you any good - and that's what basic income promises for each person if the government decides to spend 3 trillion a year. If you don't want to live off of $12k a year, you have to get another job, which you can do right now if you have decent skills. Sorry to rant, but basic income gets brought up in every thread like it's a solution, but a basic analysis of numbers says it's...going to be hard to do, realistically.
- neon_electro 10y agoCan you expand on how you don't see basic income as a solution?
- aaron-lebo 10y agoI thought the post said it? $12k is the cited number that you see a lot in basic income discussions. That's just over the poverty level. That's not enough to live on and it's practically a bonus for some members of this site. It's not enough to do anything with. But just to do that in the US you are talking about 3 trillion dollars (300 million x $10k for easy math) that you have to find in the budget. Now basic income advocates will say you can make up some if not most of that by cutting welfare programs, but given the nature of welfare programs - good luck. That stipend is also not enough to pay for healthcare, so you can't cut that. How exactly do you convince a nation which already isn't willing to pay for healthcare to pay for basic income, too? I'd love to be wrong, but I've never seen any numbers that are workable, especially in a political climate anything like today.
- Confusion 10y agoI'm very much looking forward to the longevity/healthspan movement succeeding: I there is an immense amount of good that will come from having healthy 150 year olds around, who still have the stamina to pound a fist on the table. I expect there will be a lot less ageism and their wisdom will be worth gold for businesses willing to listen. Imagine someone of the calibre of Feynman at 150!
- maxerickson 10y agoThe darker take is that olds end up completely capturing the economy. (Like the Meths in Altered Carbon)
- kitsunesoba 10y agoIt could be a problem in science and politics too. Science already has issues with new ideas being very strongly resisted until the generation in power flops over. In a world where people live healthily to 150 and beyond, the young would quickly become a permanent minority with little voice. Risk of stagnation would dramatically increase across all fronts.
- 627467 10y agoWhile the last named author is usually the "CEO" of the research, there are 3 other researchers on that paper. The first author, a woman. Damn, the research findings, if replicable are groundbreaking. But the "trending-topic of the moment" is the author's advanced age. It's just poor journalism.
- spot 10y agothe result itself was already extensively covered. this isn't poor journalism, it's just not the story that you are looking for.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoRecently I realised something that sounds like it should be obvious, but isn't: there's a fundamental difference between creativity, in the sense of true originality, and technical talent, in the sense of being good at some selection of the arts or sciences. We tend to think of creativity as a generic ability to build or imagine new stuff - probably in the arts, sometimes in engineering or the sciences. But in fact technical creativity is mostly about copying existing techniques and practices - i.e. competently repeating what other people have done, perhaps with some minor twists. Free original thinking/expression is an unrelated talent, and much less common. You can have either, or neither. Only very rarely do you get both.
- petra 10y agoIs inventing stuff, in the meaning of truly breakthrough technologies or great patents really just copying stuff with minor changes ?
- jamesrcole 10y ago> technical creativity is mostly about copying existing techniques and practices - i.e. competently repeating what other people have done, perhaps with some minor twists. > Free original thinking/expression is an unrelated talent Unrelated? If you think the latter is completely unrelated, what do you think it involves?
- dwaltrip 10y agoYour first point about technical skill vs creativity makes sense to me, but I'm a bit confused by your notion of "technical creativity". As I know it, the concept of creativity is much more than "copying existing techniques with a minor twist".
- a3n 10y agoI wonder how many more people would "become more creative with age" if they were merely not ignored.
- forgotpwtomain 10y agoWhat's the reasoning behind altering the submission title? It is most definitely click-bait: To Be a Genius, Think Like a 94-Year-Old and was appropriately being flagged by users precisely for that. More so a single isolated case of a researcher with an entire lab of young students is not particularly good supporting evidence of some people become more creative with age either -- if the intention is to write about the later an actual over-view of the field or related fields should be required.
- oh_sigh 10y agoThe article talks about the average age of Nobel prize winners, of patent holders, and so on.
- Mz 10y agoI am 51. I think my best years are ahead of me, not behind me (assuming I don't throw myself in a river between now and June -- kidding, not kidding).
- bambax 10y agoThe article seems to conflate intelligence with creativity. They're orthogonal.
- coldtea 10y agoObviously not totally orthogonal, just loosely correlated, but significantly so below some threshold. E.g. it's not like someone with an IQ of 80 can be totally creative -- except if by "creative" we just mean "has lots of imagination". But what we casually call creative is not just being imaginative in abstract, but coming up with innovative solutions and important works. Which requires intelligence -- especially if those works are of the engineering and scientific kind.
- bambax 10y agoMaybe it's difficult to be really creative without being intelligent -- Einstein being a good example of someone who was extremely intelligent and extremely creative. However, it's very easy to be immensely intelligent and have zero creativity, indeed to be conformist to an absurd degree. Elite bureaucrats are exactly like this, at least in many European countries. Is it possible to be very creative and dim-witted? I'd be very tempted to say yes but I have to admit I can't provide lots of examples.
- mythrwy 10y agoBut are they an order of magnitude orthogonal? :)
- MilnerRoute 10y agoA few years ago the New York Times' science writer published a book called "The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind. She summarized the latest medical research, which was concluding that brain performance didn't really taper off as we aged, and there were actual spikes in performance in specific areas. While there were smaller declines in things like remembering names, one theory was that what we know gets consolidated, allowing older brains to make greater leaps in logic more quickly. While older brains are distracted more easily, one study suggested people learn to compensate by using the left and right brain together to maintain focus and progress, and this results in bringing more "firepower" to bear on the tasks at hand.