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Absolute scattershot of datapoints
Nooo he’s so cute, I can interpolate him
Bestie, stop
Currently 29. Noticed mental decline after concussions in my youth and a few years of heavy drinking. I don’t fall on my head as much and I don’t really drink anymore, but I’m not sure how much of what I’ve lost I’m going to get back.
I have no scientific basis for this, but my suspicion is that what you do with your brain is more important to cognition than whatever raw intelligence you start with. the more languages you study, the more music you play, the more subjects you study and skills you develop and hobbies you tinker with and deep conversations you have… you learn to learn, you learn to think, it all gets wired up and cross-connected and you become more than the sum of your parts.
how much decline is truly biological vs. being stuck in a rut?
also there’s nootropics that could be helpful for concussion recovery/etc. but they haven’t been too well-studied, there’s many different ones with different sketchiness and sources aren’t always trustworthy… but piracetam (iirc) is actually prescribed in the EU for recovery from brain injury, and it’s fairly safe and well-studied. I’m not recommending it either way though.
I love that they put an error margin, which doesn’t include 90 % of all the datapoints.
That’s how a standard error with normal-ish data works. The more data points for the estimation of a conditional mean you have, the fewer of the data point will be within it. For a normal distribution, the SE=SD/√N . Heck, you can even just calculate which proportion of the distribution you can expect to be within the 95% CI as a function of sample size. (Its a bit more complicated because of how probabilities factor into this, but for a large enough N it’s fine)
For N=9, you’d expect 26% of data points within the 95% CI of the mean For N=16, 19% For 25, 16% For 100, 8% For 400, 4% Etc
Out of curiosity: What issue did you take with the error margin not including most data points?
Oops, should have multiplied those intervals with 1.96, ao here again:
9 - 49%
16 - 38%
25 - 30%
100 -16%
400 - 8%
R2 = 0.11
Edit: tried with R<sup>2</sup> but it didn’t work. :(
Edit 02: thanks to @jaennaet for educating me on proper syntax.
You have to surround the 2 with
^s:R^2^ = 0.11R2 = 0.11
Note that this’ll bork if you put spaces between the carets:
^2 2^gives you ^2 2^I know I’m late, but you can also use:
R² = 0.11Someone said it messes with screen-readers, but when I tried, everything messed with screen-readers, so I don’t see much of a difference.
I’d assume it’s easier for people to get their keyboards to cough up a couple of carets compared to Unicode superscript characters, though
I am 29, and so far I didn’t really see any mental decline, sometimes even the reverse - I become better at learning certain stuff. Although I am also more aware that I will never be on the level some very talented people are, but it’s fine.
I feel like the first time you notice that you have lost some mental capacity is a middle age right of passage.
A lot of things are easier to learn when you have a base foundation.
Also, a lot of skills have interrelated mental pathways, so once you have enough exp with one, learning the other means, you are actually plasticising your brain, less than what you would have, had you learnt the other skill without knowing the first.
I don’t think this is neuroplasticity, as much as it is having a broader experience to bring to bear. I have so much knowledge and experience with a variety of things that I can apply and relate to new skills to learn things fairly quickly.
I also find there’s a ceiling on my abilities, like you mentioned. I’m never going to learn something to the same depth as someone who learns it as a kid and carries it forwards, things just don’t seem to sink deep into intuition and instinct like that, but I can certainly pick up something well enough to enjoy it and enjoy the process of improving at it. I love learning new skills and pushing myself, and I don’t mind the idea that that’s the way to age gracefully and stay sharp.
Not sure about this. People told me I would not be able to learn piano as an adult, but after 5 years of playing 15 - 30 minutes per night I feel like I am about as good as a child or teenager who put in the same amount of time. I am starting to see how people can sight read at full speed (vs me for an intermediate piece I might be able to get 20% speed, with probably poor accuracy).
I think you might be comparing someone else’s 20 - 25+ years of experience (eg, someone who has consistently played piano their whole life) to your ability to pick up a new skill from scratch. There is just a huge time sink for a brand new topic and it takes anyone a ton of time. So if you really wanted to pick up some theoretical physics or something, but are currently bad at math, it might take 15 years just to get to the beginning to really be one someone’s level who… Started 15 years ago.
Unless I guess if there is unlearning time. Like the smarter every day video where they made a reverse turning bicycle that was impossible for people to use unless they spent forever relearning, vs his son who picked it up relatively easy. I think they had to unlearn what they knew so well.
Mhm, that’s fair. I feel like there is some degree of intuition and utter top level mastery that may be unattainable as an adult. But I’m talking about something like a second language feeling completely natural, or Olympic level mastery of a skill. And that requires a lot more than just being young as well.
It feels crazy to assert that you can’t learn any skill as an adult though. It’s absolutely hard to make the time like you could as a kid, but if you make it a priority, I feel like pretty much anything is possible. I certainly think you can learn more than enough to be satisfied and have a great time and impress others and all that good stuff. I don’t need to be a prodigy or an Olympian at something to take joy in learning and doing it.
I’m never going to learn something to the same depth as someone who learns it as a kid
Lack of time to study or research in my opinion
same for rebuilding muscle memory in games.
Played a reflex-based video game against a teenager lately?
Im in my thirties and still average reflex speeds around 150-175ms ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I feel like reflexes are different than learning. Motor control definitely gets worse over time.
Played a fiddle vs the Devil?
I don’t really play competitive video games, because I have always seen them as waste of time, and I easily get angry,but recently I nearly did get all retroachievements for NES Terris (just one remaining), so I guess my reflexes are not horrible yet.
This. I could have produced a more insightful scatter plot with a barn door and a twelve gauge.
kinda, yeah. i noticed less dots in the middle parts of the graph right away.
i don’t know what this study is (or what i’m doing), but it seems they have sampling issues maybe?
That’s stupid, though. If you can explain 11% of the variance of some noisy phenomenon like cognitive and behavioral flexibility, that’s noteworthy. They tested both linear and quadratic terms, and the quadratic one worked better in terms of prediction, and is also an expression of a meaningful theoretical model, rather than just throwing higher polynomials at it for the fun of it. Quadratic here also would coincide with some homogenizing mechanism at the two ends of the age distribution.
Yet it’s one single sample, and possibly not a great one. Few things could cause the shape seen like sample selection of healthy people ignores a lot more of the 65+ community than the younger, and also stuff like those born around the 50’s have higher lead levels could cause more of a dip, or like… plenty of stuff. After some repetitions sure but even then… that’s 11% hell I could probably put in an exponential with a negative exponent and be as accurate or better.
Sure, you could do some wild overfitting. But why? What substantive theoretical model would such a data model correspond to?
A more straightforward conclusion to draw would be that age is far from the only predictor of flexibility etc., but on the list nevertheless, and if you wanna rule out alternative explanations (or support them), you might have to go and do more observations that allow such arguments to be constructed.
I mean, that shape is mostly a cone (oop realize I said negative exponent not negative with an exponent but, yeah that plus some other stuff to actually shape it a bit better), just showing… as you get older it could either get worse (if you essentially stop using it) or better (if you continue to use it). But I mean that idea is certainly less provocative than what they’ve got.
Whether you’re right or wrong, starting your argument with “that’s stupid, though” is unlikely to convince many.
That’s stupid though. People should change their minds when better information is presented regardless of tone!
Maybe, yeah, but I kinda get annoyed at this kinda dismissiveness - it’s a type of vague anti-science or something like that. Like… Sure, overfitting is a potential issue, but the answer to that isn’t to never fit any curve when data is noisy, it is (among other things) to build solid theories and good tests thereof. A lot of interesting stuff, especially behavioral things, is noisy and you can’t expect to always have relationships that are simple enough to see.
You’re probably right. But also, I was annoyed, not trying to convince. Maybe not the best place to post from. :)
well it convinced me, but I’m stupid and already made up my mind that I wanted to see a reply like that
But I have eyes and the curve they picked as best fit is really poorly fitting. It’s such a poor fit that is almost in a dead zone of the random points.
I dunno, the point cloud looks to me like some kinda symmetric upward curve. I’d’ve guessed maybe more like R^2=.2 or something in that range, though.
But also: This is noisy, it’s cool to see anything.
It’s a line fitted to a shotgun blast. R2 = 0.11, LOL.
wtf is up with that confidence interval(?) though
It’s a 95% CI, presumably for the expected value of the conditional (on age) population mean. It looks correct, given the sample size and variance, what issue do you see with it?
To expand a little: you get a 95% ci by taking the expected value ±SE*1.96 . The SE you get for a normal distribution by taking the sample SD and dividing that by the sqrt of the sample size. So if you take a standard normal distribution, the SE for a sample size of 9 would be 1/3 and for a sample size of 100 it would be 1/10, etc. This is much tighter than the population distribution, but that’s because youre estimating just the population mean, not anything else.
Capturing structured variance in the data then should increase the precision of your estimate of the expected value, because you’re removing variance from the error term and add it into the other parts of your model (cf. the term analysis of variance).
Now this should be an xkcd
To be honest, I doubt Munroe wants to say “if the effect is smaller than you, personally, can spot in the scatterplot, disbelieve any and all conclusions drawn from the dataset”. He seems to be a bit more evenhanded than that, even though I wouldn’t be surprised if a sizable portion of his fans weren’t.
It’s kinda weird, scatterplot inspection is an extremely useful tool in principled data analysis, but spotting stuff is neither sufficient nor necessary for something to be meaningful.
But also… an R^2 of .1 corresponds to a Cohen’s d of 0.67. if this were a comparison of groups, roughly three quarters of the control group would be below the average person in the experimental group. I suspect people (including me) are just bad at intuitions about this kinda thing and like to try to feel superior or something and let loose some half-baked ideas about statistics. Which is a shame, because some of those ideas can become pretty, once fully baked.
As a subject I cam confirm. No
Does that mean it is not true that it becomes harder to learn new things with age?
I’m 26 and I’ve been rushing gaining knowledge and experience very much so far for fear of just not being able to fit in much more once I reach certain age.
No I’m not virtue signaling, this is fucking stressful and I will be delighted to slow down a fuckton if that’s true.
Im in a hurry to learn and do everything possible before either the world collapses, I get some sickness, die randomly, or have to take care of a loved sick one for the rest of my life. Im right in a window of freedom now. Makes it very hard to ever relax lest I “waste” my few remaining years.
My pragmatic understanding of this as someone who is a life scientist (but not a neuroscientist) is that neuroplasticity itself is sort of like a skill, and if you don’t use it, you lose it. That is to say that you needn’t rush to cram in new knowledge, but you should continue to indulge your hunger for knowledge. If you keep expanding your horizons and ways of thinking, you’ll maintain a high level of neuroplasticity as you age
I started doing Capoeira and learning Portuguese with 40 years. I am fluent in Portuguese now after three years. My Capoeira skills are still pretty basic, but I progress and for the first time in my life I feel like I really have a grasp on any kind of sports.
I also changed from marketing to IT last year and I am getting really good at what I do.
It helps if you have a reference system for your new knowledge. I studied computer science which helps in my new job and I had French in school which helps with Portuguese.
So don’t worry. Keep learning, avoid stress and drugs and prioritize getting enough sleep. You’ll be fine!
From a completely unscientific but ‘experienced’ perspective I think the problem is that life just gets in the way as you get older, and you prioritize your own life rather than trying to learn.
Whether neuroplasticity means you can learn things later or not, the opportunity to learn things later just isn’t there without effort.
Having a job, kids, a mortgage and no social obligation to learn in a structured and organized way probably impacts you more than anything neurological.
I’d imagine it also has something to do with becoming less practiced at learning things.
It would be interesting to test this on career paths that basically require continuous learning.
Like I would be a perfect test subject because I plan to stay in the IT engineering space my whole career.
and, like, people just straight up stop trying. they hear that it’s harder to learn as you age so they don’t even try, and that of course confirms to everyone around them that it’s true, and so everyone keeps giving up.
it drives me up the fucking wall and the spite i hold for this phenomenon is like 70% of why i have a healthy lifestyle. I fully intend to be doing acrobatics at 60 purely so i can make people feel bad for making moronic lifestyle choices like driving 2km to buy 5 liters of alcohol for the weekend
Yeah, get in what you want because in twenty years the greatest thing your brain will enjoy is not processing anything of consequence.
Could you learn cuneiform and gain a rich understanding of 18th Century Viennese intellectual culture, if you didn’t know anything about that before? Sure.
*burp* But then you’ll be like “ah, gotta bring in the trash cans and then I can sit.”
People who have tried to gain literacy later in life have had a lot more trouble learning to write than read. It seems that the fine motor skills to drive a pen are best learnt early
I’ve read a decent amount of his stuff. If I had to guess from the information here, he’s dismissive because the correlation is weak. Just because you technically can draw a line of best fit doesn’t mean it’s a good fit.
Look how many dots all over are nowhere near that line.
As long as you continue to learn new things, then no, it doesn’t become harder with age. In fact, studies show that people who are lifelong learners can actually increase their ability to learn as they age. Learning, for example, a foreign language in later years has been shown to be just as attainable as in childhood, and might even give some protection against dementia. Your brain can actually become more plastic as you age if you continuously push it to do so.
The idea that learning capacity naturally* diminishes with age seems to be a widely accepted myth (which may have roots in sociological and cultural biases), and the opposite may actually be true.
e: those biases and environmental stressors may also contribute to people becoming less able – or less prone – to try, though, and if you don’t use it, you might lose that plasticity. So keep learning.
Well the ‘myth’ you speak of is based on the fact that the opposite of what you describe is also true. Those who lose any interest in learning new things become progressively more rigid and stuck in their mindset and become less and less likely to learn or adapt as they age. I suspect there are more people leaning towards that than lifelong learners, but I may just be a pessimist.
This one little paragraph just explained my mom, myself, and the reason the relationship between us is so contentious.
She grows ever more closed-minded every year, while I attempt to learn a new skill every year. We never saw exactly eye-to-eye, but we’re now at a point where we might as well live in different universes. :(
This exactly describes me and any family member over 50. About Every single one is sucked into FOX brainrot. I can think of 1 relative out of 30 that actually has clear thoughts on societal issues.
With my own father and some others I know, I feel like the problem is less with being unable to learn new things than with being unable to unlearn things either which are no longer valid, or which were never valid but it should have become increasing obvious.
I think the people who are lifelong learners don’t stand out to us as much, because they’re not pig-headed cunts. Thus the societal bias.
And perhaps I’m an optimist because all the elders in my family are the plastic sort (my 89 year old father still works as an aviation engineer and still builds his own computers, for instance).
Anyway, I was talking about potential, not statistics. e: and I mean it’s psycho-social, not biological.
I think the people who are lifelong learners don’t stand out to us as much, because they’re not pig-headed cunts
Stupidity and ignorance makes people confident.
Well, your comment is a better variant of mine, i should have checked. :o) Thanks!
I have to learn new things all the time for my job, and I find as long as I never run out of caffeine, it’s not really a problem. I’m approaching 40, so take that as you will.
Keep learning, and it’ll stay easier than if you didn’t. See if you can find changes for the structure of what you’re learning so you don’t get too ossified about that, either. Like, have a decade where you focus more on sciences, one more for arts, one more for languages, one more for understanding people who are very different from you… Maybe a decade is too big a chunk, but you get the idea.
I’ve seen (and experienced in my fifties) that age does affect the working of your mind. I’d compare it to sleep deprivation. You know, when you’re young and reckless and haven’t slept well for a week, maybe pulling all-nighters for fun? It affects your concentration, your reflexes, and your general memory.
Age is like a mild sleep deprivation that gets a little bit worse each decade. It takes effort to stay lucid.
I agree with you, but I wonder how much of this is that most of us are worked to our last nerve until we’re at least 65, so many of us don’t have the luxury to maintain our brain plasticity? Once we’re 70ish, if we didn’t have that opportunity when we were living hand-to-mouth, our brains are kind of set by that point.
We all have the potential, but not the opportunity until it’s kind of too late? And then add that our society feeds us the equivalent of brain junk food for much of that time, rather than fostering continuing education…
We may never know. Functionally, capitalism describes what is “normal”, even if outside of that it could have been different.
Neural plasticity isn’t exactly the same as learning but, yeah, there seems to be a thing around 27 where neural plasticity seems to plateau a bit.
But I’m wondering if that’s more the effect than the cause. Perhaps it’s because a lot of people, up until they’re around 25-30, have a very quickly changing life. Schools are changing, jobs are changing, people are changing. But when you start to get into late twenties, early 30’s, most people already have a routine of some sort. And it would seem logical to me that it could mean lowered neural plasticity.
And perhaps it could come just as well if you started having as much variance and stimulation as earlier in your life. Perhaps not as much.
But yeah I don’t think there’s any sort of biological limit that you just can’t learn things anymore. Never too old.
I find that I get smarter as I get older, as stupid stuff that held me back gets discarded. You do have less energy I hear, but even there I think a fit 50 year old would be more energetic than a lazy 25 year old? Obviously having kids is a huge energy drain, but that’s not technically aging, just correlation rather than causation.
So anyway even if this graphic were true, it would be irrelevant as the major factor seems to me to be a willingness to learn, only after which raw ability would come into play.
In your case the adage that now is the time to learn is true, but not for any of the reasons mentioned above. Once you shift your perspective that the time for hard work is over and the time for personal play is at hand - to watch more TV, play games, hang out with friends, etc. - then it’s incredibly hard (most people phrase that as “impossible”) to ever go back to that college mindset of “it’s study time, let’s go!!!”. That’s not even just human nature, but rather the raw physics of inertia coupled with adaptation that lowers energy requirements that were evolutionarily built into our brains and bodies.
Discipline is a mindset that is mostly independent of age, except it trends towards older as those who have seen how it works first-hand now realize its value (coupled with individual survival of those who have more rather than less of it, i.e. the most reckless die the earliest in life), plus also younger as people listen and thus benefit from the accumulated wisdom of others.
What has discipline got to do with it? I feel it’s pretty independent or may even get in the way of learning. If you force (discipline) yourself to learn something, it will feel much harder than if you do it out of joy. But maybe I didn’t fully understand what you were saying.
I am glad that you checked then:-). I meant discipline as in a set of practices that you intentionally set up for yourself, not necessarily something like physically flogging yourself for choosing to take a nap rather than study something interesting but you were just too tired to do it in that moment. I agree you are totally correct that it should ideally be our of love rather than sense of duty. ❤️
Going beyond one’s limits is a way to cause damage - possibly even to the very desire to remain curious - so should be limited to only high-value scenarios e.g. to make an external deadline that offers an accomplishment that you decided that you wanted. So even there, “discipline” (force) can be useful, so long as “discipline” (intentional practices) keeps the former within acceptable levels.
guess the correlation, looks about like a solid 0.1. Whoever put that regression line in there is crazy, the confidence interval is insulting.
Why does that fucking Thing require my Google account?
No idea, sorry.
Was about to say that. It’s sad that your comment is the very last in this thread.
1: it’s not last, and 2: it’s not sad, because 3: people aren’t reading the source material. I love xkcd, too, but that doesn’t apply here.
Just because results don’t match expectations doesn’t mean we should throw pies of satire in their face. That’s like the response in the OP of ‘no’. This is actually interesting.
The data does not support the conclusion. A simple “no” is okay. Take a look at these examples of regression. See how any one of the conclusions is absurd? Mind you the data in that example is far less random!
How do you think a case of “this explains some of the differences in the population, but not a lot” should look?
And that looks potentially fine for an error bar. For a mean estimate, SE=SD/√N , so depending on what error band they used this looks quite plausible.
Also, the R^2 is even in the picture: .11
Take a look at these examples of regression. See how any one of the conclusions is absurd? Mind you the data in that example is far less random!
I recommend finding a different statistics teacher, preferably one who isn’t a comic and one who knows what the difference between a standard deviation, a standard error, and a 95% interval is. Those should not be too hard to find, it’s relatively basic stuff, but many people actually kinda struggle with the concepts (made harder by various factors, don’t get me started on the misuse of bar charts).
I post the picture because it gets the point across, not because that is “my teacher”. The point is that you can choose smart any random regression function and they all fit just as “good”.
Goddamnit Taleb.
What is this, a black swan event you could not have predicted as being within the realm of possibility, and thus have no idea how to react?
God Damnit, Taleb.
Is this the guy who calls everyone imbeciles?
Taleb’s mind just isn’t antifragile enough. Or maybe too antifragile. Idk I didn’t read his book
I read a couple Teleb books about 15 years ago, they’re very funny. You go in thinking they’re these books about systematic collapse, but mostly its just about how he’s so smart he gets to be friends with Benoit Mandelbrot.
The theme of Anti-Fragile is “don’t be a sucker” which is really good advice tbh, but if you’re not a sucker you wouldnt have fallen for the apocalyptic framing of a book about how he’s so smart because he read some entry-level philosophy at some point, while Paul Krugman is a fucking moron and the nobel prize for economics is a joke
Some beliefs are more antifragile than others
Wait so… his own brain isn’t antifragile (neuroplastic) enough to consider the idea that some other people his age have brains that actually are antifragile (neuroplastic)?
You could probably make a 5 or 10 minute sketch, for econ nerds, out of how absolutely absurd this is.
https://doi.org/10.1111/bjc.12505 the paper
Nuh-uh.
Lol
But we know for a fact that plasticity does drop with age, that’s why it’s so difficult to learn foreign language after childhood.
It helps a lot that they’re completely immersed in the language, by people who want to help them learn, and they desperately need to tell us things with no alternative.
For a fact, until it isn’t for a fact. Unfortunately things may change like how majority of physics was disproven in the early 1900
Neuroplasticity does drop with age, but the drop is smaller than it was previously assumed to be, especially outside of early childhood (you may note that eg. this graph starts at 20 years old)
As far as I can tell. They have just drawn a line on a random distribution.
If it’s a random distribution, then we can’t say that neuroplasticity drops, either.
this is like saying you can’t run after 30, yeah sure it generally becomes less trivial but if you actually try to do it and don’t do it in the worst way possible it’s absolutely doable without much struggle.
kids absorb language like a sponge, adults are like silica gel, just expose yourself to the target language often and you’ll learn it. The problem is that many people are horrendously impatient and try to brute force language learning in like 2 months by memorizing individual sentences and shit, which isn’t how our brains work…
I’m not sure that analogy holds since running is an almost entirely physical task, and the brain’s plasticity is relatively unique and different than how the muscles in your legs degrade.
