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Are older people less innovative?
- the-dude 3y agoCan't do without : Science progresses one funeral at a time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
- saberience 3y agoBetteridge's law of headlines: No, older people are not less innovative. I would also add that I really dislike clickbaity titles like this intending to be somewhat "controversial" to promote clicks.
- hef19898 3y agoI don't read articles when the title asks a question, I don't read substack nor medium.
- dusted 3y agoGood point, got me thinking.. No matter the headline, audience will filter by it.. In this case, the question form, might be the more neutral, where the alternatives would lead more to echo-chambering. The question is unresolved, so no matter if you want it to be true or not, you'll need to click and expose yourself to the arguments put forth. These are my thoughts on it, wrong as they may be: if the article was called: "Older people are not less innovative!" Then people who hate/dislike older people (as seem to be the current fashion seeing the amount of hatred directed towards our parents and grandparents generations) will dismiss it off the cuff and never be exposed to the arguments on why it might be the case. While people who wants this to be true won't read it either because they've had their existing opinion enforced, maybe based on different arguments/ideas. The question however, leads both those who wants it to be true and false to read.
- saberience 3y agoYeah it's interesting... I really dislike titles of this form though and on principle usually refuse to read them, similarly to videos which have equally provocative titles. I would prefer something like: "A discussion of whether innovation varies with age" or "Analyzing the data on innovation by age group." For me, these imply thougtful analysis. When I see "clickbaity" titles I assume the content isn't worth reading (and is low quality) since the author needs to use emotional trickery to drive clicks, and usually this assumption is correct.
- The_Colonel 3y agoWe have some decent evidence, though. The most innovative ideas in mathematics were discovered by mathematicians in their 20s and 30s, even though older tenured mathematicians should in theory have more knowledge, experience, and time / resources for deep work.
- fhd2 3y agoI wonder to which degree this is because of the academic structures. As you get older you've got students to teach/support, a department to run, grants to apply for, ... And on top of that often a family to feed. This is true in many fields: The risks for going after something crazy instead of some iterative improvement / maintenance increase. Personally, not a mathematican, but I recently started investing in side projects again, the kind that aren't exactly a sure path to return on investment. The only reason why I can do this in-between earning enough to feed a family and family / household duties is because I started a consulting business where I work 3-4 days per week for clients. I don't think my brain at almost 40 is that different from when I was 20. The amount of money I need to earn and the amount of time I have is vastly different though.
- The_Colonel 3y ago> As you get older you've got students to teach/support, a department to run, grants to apply for I believe such problems are even more urgent in 20s and 30s. You're not established yet, you need to do a lot of things unrelated to your passion to make ends meet. Caring for young children is usually more time intensive than for older ones. By the 40s, academics have tenures and financial security. The children are older and don't require so much care. Yet statistically there's not much groundbreaking work appearing from older mathematicians. > The risks for going after something crazy instead of some iterative improvement / maintenance increase. That's not a big factor in mathematics where going after crazy things doesn't carry significant financial risks.
- drewcoo 3y agoMathematics is an outlier. Possibly because "innovation" in math doesn't involve bringing anything new into a world larger than that of a very few ivory tower mathematicians. Consider instead Nobel laureates: https://www.nber.org/digest/dec05/great-inventions-come-later-life https://www.nber.org/digest/dec05/great-inventions-come-late...
- hutzlibu 3y agoWell, speaking only about myself while my beard turns grey, I can say yes. When I was younger, I was bursting with ideas. I am not sure, if I was smarter, but I definitely had more energy. Now I am way more experienced and skilled though and can realistically say, what ideas will work and can be implemented and what is just blind wishful thinking, which I had a lot. Now I just know, that a lot of my ideas of my 20s were bogus and I smile when I hear people who sound like me. (Some of my naivity has just been replaced with cynism, though). But I still can harness from those times as I made lots of notes. "In fact we should worry more about supporting the young in their innovativeness. To harness the valuable contributions of young people in a society with a decreasing youth population, it is crucial to provide them with more resources: quality education, opportunities to build networks, funding for the businesses they create, and all the infrastructure needed to support their continued innovation tomorrow." So yes. Youth is the engine of the world. But they do lack experience and ressources and we the older generation should provide it to them. Guiding, but not preaching.
- indy 3y agoPerhaps you're still generating the same amount of ideas it's just that you're brain is better at filtering out the bad/impractical ones at an early stage? The obvious downside being that maybe some of the assumptions you hold based on experience may not apply anymore.
- hef19898 3y agoThebopposite is also true, with properly trained filters you are going to pursue stuff that has no chance to work. Almost like you need a healthy of people (age, sexe, culture...).
- Aromasin 3y agoThere's also a certain art to working on something that won't work, long enough that the act of failing triggers new innovations. If you know from the offset it's not possible, then you leave yourself closed to the opportunities that lay in the act of solving an impossible problem.
- nercury 3y agoDo younger people have a lax definition of "innovative"?
- Jensson 3y agoIt is the opposite, older people are better at small incremental innovation while younger people are better at large world changing disruptive innovation. You can see it in the article. People grow more humble as they age so they stop trying to change the world, while young people focus more on the big things because they still believe they are special. Or something, many different reasons that happens, but we know it happens.
- hef19898 3y agoThe younger you are, the more likely you are to overestimate the impact of innovation, because of lacking experience.
- robviren 3y agoLess idealistic maybe, but I do not feel that they are less innovative. It's harder to buy into hype and noise when you have seen decades of trends come and go. I personally tend towards more "boring" solutions to my problems, but the overall problems I solve continue to be dynamic and interesting. It is possible to use simple pieces to build something complex. And of course sometimes things like LLMs do come along and I incorporate the apparent capabilities into my toolbox as something with serious, non-hype, potential application. Though I am also jaded from watching far too much get hype like IoT and crypto. Watching companies waste billions on valueless innovation tends to do that.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- onesphere 3y agoCovfefe? (sorry on my phone)
- sunpazed 3y agoI’m in my mid 40s, and honestly I have more ideas than I ever had in my 20s! However, the big difference, is energy and motivation. I was a machine in my 20s, but these days a late night hacking session ends with me paying the price the following day. Execution is everything.
- robertlagrant 3y agoI think this is it. A semi-bad (or unlikely) idea is still worth throwing your energy at it, in case it turns out to be useful to people and they start paying you for it.
- Beijinger 3y agoMy professor always said, Ideas Are Like Hemorrhoids. Every asshole sooner or later gets some. Sorry. Could not resist.
- keyle 3y agoLike I say, ideas are cheap, execution is everything. And as we get older, also mid-40s, we might prioritise better the frivolous ideas by dismissing them early, maybe.
- yieldcrv 3y agoI think the article scratches the surface at the end regarding the missing image of women innovators: there isn’t an environment for them to excel Change that environment and there is no limitation for the older group as well
- RandomLensman 3y agoIt might well be that older people have realised that in a lot of settings innovation is not wanted or rewarded, i.e., impulse for innovation is suppressed. I also encounter a lot of structurally conservative young people, in certain settings more so than older people (corporate strategy, for example).
- oreally 3y agoWell they are less productive that's for sure. There are old people who still win nobel prizes because they've kept up their productivity.
- hef19898 3y agoThat's disputable, to put it mildly.
- oreally 3y agoDo many of them not have responsibilities that take away from their productivity? There is the one rare older folk that has the perfect circumstances, but I'm talking macro scale here.
- hef19898 3y agoProductivity =|= hours present at work (office or remote) But don't worry, once you hit 30 you will realize that as well.
- oreally 3y agoIt's funny that you assume that 1) I'm < 30 and 2) that I assume productivity = hours. Instead of cute quips, how about you tell me where I'm wrong? Or are you not able to?
- hef19898 3y agoIf productivity doesn't equal hours, please explain how a family, assuming that to be the main difference between young and old, would have any impact on productivity then. Obviously so, with experience people are less likely to fall for productivity porn and are less likely to be abused by companies asking for 60 hour weeks, crunch time and the like.
- oreally 3y ago
- poulpy123 3y agomy brain is definitevely a lot less flexible and my energy level are much lower
- ilaksh 3y agoAgeism is a very serious problem and this article does not really help. Most innovation actually involves applying recent technological advancements to various problems. This is the same regardless of the age of the person. So most of these disruptions do not require some big leap or fresh new perspective. For example, I was around 35 when Docker was really becoming popular. The immediate idea that occurred to me was to build an IaaS business around it. I believe that lots of other people in their 20s or whatever age had the same idea. Because the idea was really just about applying the new technology in a fairly obvious way. Since it was already a disruptive technology, that was enough to be disruptive in that domain it was applied to. So again, I think the vast majority of innovation is in this category. Maybe because those types of innovations are much more accessible than fundamental research. When I saw what ChatGPT could do last year I immediately started trying to figure out how to use it to build a code generation startup. I know that many people who were not 45 like me and instead were in their 30s or just out of college or in college or high school or 50 or 60s or whatever had a very similar idea. I literally saw demos of software that was very similar to my own tests along with articles about how they had just finished college or whatever. I also have seen young people in a particular domain that is obviously being disrupted ignore the disruption. You can be entrenched in something just as easily as a 23 year old. Whereas someone like me who has always been excited about applying new technologies was quite interested in shifting focus onto how the new technology really changed that area. The younger and older people who had been invested in this specific activity and were not by nature primarily into innovation were unaware or at least unexcited about abandoning their existing domain for something that was related but new. It's really about mindset and skillset. Someone who has technology skills in certain areas and has made a habit of, for example, picking up new technologies and applying them, is going to be much more likely to do that and keep doing that, than someone who is younger and doesn't have those skills and habits. It's about an orientation embracing technologically-driven change. That isn't determined by age. It's a worldview and type of skillset. One other thing that matters is going to be your circumstances. I have a twin brother who has a family and a real job. I have either avoided that or just not managed it, depending on how you interpret things. But at least part of it is my attitude and my identity. As our society ages, I predict that attitudes towards ageism, even in the technology world, will shift towards less tolerance for it.
- coldtea 3y agoYes, they're more about substance than novelty for the sake of it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kumarvvr 3y agoI am turning old. Approaching 36, to be exact. In 10 years, I will be square in the middle of mid-life, and hopefully not in a crisis. I used to, and still do think a lot about products, startups, business, etc. 10 years ago, everything seemed possible and easy and profitable. Now, with experience working in industry, interacting with people, knowing what I know, the way I evaluate an idea has drastically changed. I am more skeptical, conservative in my estimates, cautious in growth prospects. I still think myself to be innovative. But reality has grounded me.
- gweatidea 3y ago[flagged]
- ecmascript 3y agoI would say yes obviously because it's very natural. As you get older, you get experience in what seems to work and what does not. Even if something could work people learn by experience that they do not. I don't think it's the body that makes us biologically less innovative but rather a side effect of all the other shit that's going on. Also, you often have more to protect as you grow older. You may have kids, a wife, children, a house etc. Everything costs money so you get more careful in making life altering decisions since you have a lot to lose if you fail. Usually I think people have worked their way into a state they are comfortable with and thus don't want to change too much because change doesn't have to be positive.
- alberth 3y agoPattern Matching. People naturally pattern match a problem to a known solution. And as you get older, your mental repository of seen patterns gets quite large. The problem with this is, it’s difficult to come up with an innovative solution if you’ve already seen a prior pattern for the problem you’re solving. And as such, you become less “innovative”. The flip side to this is, it’s common for someone earlier in their career to “reinvent the wheel”, because they hadn’t seen a pattern yet for the problem they are solving. Sometimes though, they will reinvent it in an innovative way.
- jfoster 3y agoA lot of comments here seem to be written by people who are already beyond their 20s or 30s. Is there an equivalent of HN or Reddit for that people in their 20s are more likely to be using? If it's just Instagram, SnapChat and TikTok, I'm a bit worried for the future of humanity.
- midoridensha 3y agoNo, for tech-minded 20-30-somethings, it's Discord. Yes, I know Discord isn't an open forum website like Reddit/HN. The younger generations seem to like it that way I guess.
- ilaksh 3y agoI'm a 45 year old who finds Discord to be quite important and logs into it every day.
- Jensson 3y agoHN requires quite a lot of experience before you can post without worrying about downvotes, so its mostly older people here yeah. But at the same time that is why this community can stay so far ahead other forums, you wont find anything like HN with younger people.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- glimshe 3y agoIn my 40s, I feel that I don't think as fast as I used, but I do a much better job at "deep thinking" and filtering out bad ideas, which leads to a higher percentage of useful things coming out of my mouth. However, I think there is something to be said about the disruption angle; when you have experience, you could indeed miss a great disruptive idea due to the worldview you establish over the years. I think that younger people, despite their often-bad ideas, will from time to time have a great, disruptive idea that I'd filter out at this point in my life. That's why it is important, when you're young, to explore your novel ideas and take some risks by building or working at a startup.
- Simulacra 3y agoSpeaking for my team, I have several older engineers and it's not so much that they are innovative, but that their experience is incredibly invaluable to those of us who feel like we are innovating, but not in the right way. I just hit 40 last month and I notice that people younger than me can make innovative leaps faster, but people older than me see the problems and solutions faster.
- drewcoo 3y agoOlder people have had a chance to sample and even deep dive into several disciplines. Assuming they've done that, with open minds to seeing cross-connections, they should be better cross-pollinators. And cross-pollination seems to be the key to most real innovation (as opposed to branding the old thing as new again). Innovation is more than ideas, though. Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything. And the average age of successful founders is 45: https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-successful-startup-founder-is-45 https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]