My dad went from being an auto mechanic to learning to code when he was 63 and he's 77 now and argues with me about Drupal vs Joomla over dinner. It's only one sample but I'm convinced him switching careers extended his neural plasticity considerably.
I'm not saying you do, but I have found the general public vastly underestimates the intelligence of many auto mechanics--especially today's mechanics.
I guess they have always been an easy target in movies, etc.?
I have a feeling your dad could learn anything if given the right structure. Mechanics are underpaid, expected to continually learn on their time, provide $20,000-30,000 grand worth of tools; and the owner is the only one making a real living.
Once-upon-a-time-time auto mechanic, long time software dev here. It's not just the owner making a living, when I was active it was a decent middle-class living (25 years ago, could be different now). I'm talking professional, can diagnose your problem without throwing parts at it, owns a torque wrench and knows how to use it, not the vocational school students you find at Jiffy Lube. No one I knew was making BMW payments on their salary, but plenty had a nice house in a nice suburb, and a boat or other toy for the weekend. I would have been content to keep at it, but I like making software, too.
It was fun, too; much like debugging code with your hands. Okay, what evidence do I have to work with? Of these several hypothesises, which are the most likely? And, just like code, sometimes you spend the afternoon going down what you thought was the right path only to find out you're wrong.
As with software, there are hot shots that just seem wired for the task, and there are those that can merely competently do the job without screwing it up (and, like software, there are those few you don't want anywhere near your stuff). Just like software, I was one of those that fell in the middle. :-)
Tell ya what though, unlike software, I had very few bad days as an auto mechanic. Decent money, I enjoyed the work, and when the weather was nice we open the bay doors and you're practically working outside. Rarely did anyone second-guess my decisions (and when they did, it was to make my job easier so I don't do it the hard way), and I rarely had to convince anyone of my estimates as we had a big book that already estimated how long a competent mechanic should take to do the job.
One big difference is that incompetence is harder to hide as an auto mechanic. You're not going to be doing any copy-pasta from StackOverflow when you're an auto mechanic.
Smart? Eh, like anything, it's hit or miss. Since the repair bays are right next to each other, and you don't have to expend a lot of cycles thinking through hash table algorithms, there's plenty of talking. Mechanics are a reflection of the general population, some guys (and they were all guys back then; girls worked up front behind the desk) I knew could probably write philosophy books, others probably won't be moving to Microsoft to write kernel code any time soon.
In summary, the public underestimates the intelligence of just about everyone but themselves, so mechanics don't get a pass. Nor do the mechanics care about what you think, at least this one didn't. I was happy where I was at at the time, I didn't need anyone's approval. And the money was good.
> It was fun, too; much like debugging code with your hands. Okay, what evidence do I have to work with? Of these several hypothesises, which are the most likely? And, just like code, sometimes you spend the afternoon going down what you thought was the right path only to find out you're wrong.
Reminds me of reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
Then you'll understand why I've actually worn out paperback copies of ZAMM. ;-) "Gumption traps", oh, I know exactly what Pirsig was talking about.
Seriously, it's a book that really spoke to me, and probably largely because of being both a mechanic and motorcyclist. So it's no coincidence if some of the stuff I write sounds like something out of ZAMM, because I'm probably just (poorly) paraphrasing something I read years ago, flavoring it some real-life experience.
>You're not going to be doing any copy-pasta from StackOverflow when you're an auto mechanic.
That's an interesting comparison - why couldn't you use StackOverflow for mechanics. I don't know anything about cars other than they have generally have 4 wheels and use fuel but from the hardware work I've done on computers whenever I was troubleshooting stuff I would first look for symptoms then I would search and find random things to try on the internet. I don't see why this wouldn't apply to cars - people sharing their cases and being able find relevant ones could be a time saver.
Well, sonny, back then we had no easily-accessed Internet. :-) But there are sites much like SO, just not under one umbrella. For instance, for our BMW motorcycles, there are several web forums I can troll for answers. Our Scion xB has at least one or two sites where one can get help for mechanical questions. And, hell, there probably is an auto-related Stack Exchange site for all I know (a quick glance shows a bicycle-related one, so there's got to be one for cars.)
For pros, it's not really a question of "how do I change a headlight?" Any pro knows the basics involved that would apply to just about any car. The real question is usually "how the hell do I get to the screw holding that bracket?" or "I've got all of the visible fasteners out, and it still won't budge". For that, there used to be big bookshelves of shop manuals that are now replaced with DVDs.
Are there websites to discuss and teach mechanic repair informally like SO ? I mean with a few tutorials I could probably fix a lot of things in cars by imitating the video. One big difference though, initial cost. I can't download a wrench yet, and most auto equipment is costly.
Go where the ex-pros go: YouTube. Seriously, I'm on there for a lot of jobs. Again, it's a lot like software: sure, you know how a for loop works, but how does it work in, say, Ruby? Similarly, I know how to drain a radiator, but what are the subtleties of draining one on a BMW R1200 motorcycle?
Sometimes I just need an explode diagram to see what I need to strip off to get to $PART_TO_REPLACE. Sometimes there are shop manuals online, or a dealer has parts diagrams that will do the job.
As for tools, buy what you need as you need it, not all at once. Start with a good set of metric box end wrenches, a ratchet and sockets, add from there as needed. Craftsman at Sears is a good compromise between quality and the eye-watering price of Snap-On (not that Snap-On isn't worth it if you do it all day).
so I don't know about on the professional level, but on the amateur level... just about anything you might want to do to your own car? you can find a youtube tutorial. Last time some asshole busted out my window to steal my laptop, I replaced it myself; took maybe an hour and a half and a $60 window from ebay. And a youtube tutorial. Same with replacing brakes/rotors, though those took considerably more time and effort. (have you ever replaced drum pads? Jesus. The video makes it look so easy, and I'm sure it is if you know what you are doing, but my god. Next time I'm letting the professionals handle that one.)
Even if I'm billing out at my full sysadmin rate, the cost to me of replacing the window was dramatically cheaper than the $400 my local repair shop quoted me for a new window. and considering that I pay for car repair out of post-tax money, the difference is even more dramatic. (now, this is silicon valley prices, but the window was for a decade-old toyota sienna, so it's not luxury car in silicon valley prices)
Especially if you are willing to go with 'craftsman' level brands rather than 'snap-on' level brands,[1] tools are pretty cheap compared to what you pay for auto repair, even if you want things like air tools and compressors.
All that said, while youtube is great for figuring out how to do a thing, it's less great for troubleshooting; but I think the reason why things like stackoverflow/serverfault is so great for debugging is that our error messages are printed out in text that we can search on.
And yeah, I've got an ODB2 reader, and for those errors, the internet is awesome. (I replaced my oxygen sensor at the request of my odb2 reader a while back, and that was also easy, facilitated by a youtube video again.) - but for "my car is making a funny noise" kind of errors, it's hard to search for the problem without knowing the jargon, you know?
[1]for auto tools, I really don't see much difference between the craftsman level brands and the better brands. I suspect this has to do with my skill level; I am very solidly in the shade tree school here, and I'm not ashamed to get the damn thing towed to someone who really knows what they are doing if I get in over my head, and that does sometimes happen.
For screwdrivers and other things that you use to rack up or take apart computers, I have strong opinions, and am significantly less happy if I have to do the job with my 'backup screwdriver' - also, I can tell you the difference between a phillips, pozi-drive, and JIS drivers and become agitated when someone assembles an object with fastener heads that are more than one of those.
[1]for auto tools, I really don't see much difference between the craftsman level brands and the better brands.
The difference is that you don't use the same wrench a dozen times a day, day in and day out. Same reason my home toolboxes don't have roller bearing drawers: I don't open the drawers a dozen times a day anymore, so it's a waste of money for me now.
As I said above, Craftsman is fine for the DIYer. It's the brand I frequently buy. I haven't talked to a Snap-On driver since I left the field.
>The difference is that you don't use the same wrench a dozen times a day, day in and day out.
yeah, that's kind of what I was trying to say with the bit about how I care very much about the tools for dealing with rackmount computers and how I have a favorite screwdriver. I didn't care about screwdrivers either until I started using them a lot. I would bet money that you are right and that if I worked on cars more, I would care more about getting a really nice set of automotive tools, but I don't work on cars that much, so I don't really understand how the really good tools are different from the merely "good enough" tools, because that comes with experience.
But my main point was that there are tools that are adequate for the shadetree mechanic that are cheap enough to more than pay for themselves after a single use in a shadetree level project. If you can afford to have your car fixed, you have the capital to buy adequate (maybe not really nice... but adequate) tools to get started with your automotive hobby or the beginning of your education as a mechanic.
I do imagine that like IT people, most, or at least a whole lot of mechanics start out as hobbyists. The two seem similar enough to me.
This will be unpopular here but the flipside of that is I think folks overestimate how mentally taxing "learn to code" really is. The large majority of programming tasks are pretty rote at this point, it's just all hidden behind a veneer of arcane wizardry.
Learning to code really comes down to understanding algorithms (logic flows, and decision trees), a little bit of math, and the syntax in question. That's all you need to get something done for the most part.
Getting good/great at programming means understanding more and abstract concepts in addition to features of the environment you are working in.
Most programming tasks, once an initial project is started/templated out, can be done by someone that is effective, while not being a "great" programmer. It's a trade off.
That's interesting. From what I experienced, in some of the European countries mechanics earn pretty darn good money, have pretty acceptable working conditions and are respected in general.
Unionizing doesn't seem like it would work very well in an industry of which a significant portion is entrepreneurs with small 3-man shops and the like. Or were you thinking of just the big chain shops or those attached to large dealerships? In that case I think it might have a detrimental effect on the many small business shops.
It strikes me that most professions have extremes.
There are developers, then there are developers.
There are mechanics, then there are mechanics.
etc.
There some mechanics I know who are absolutely top-notch - they know their stuff, and have had a passion for it for years. Others I run in to at repair shops are really just... they have a job. That's it. They may stay, or move on to something else later, but they're just average.
And I see that in a lot of developers (probably moreso, as I have a more critical eye for that).
But I think it's probably that way in almost every profession - some are truly passionate, brilliant, dedicated, etc. And some folks just treat it as a job.
I sort of agree, as long as you flexibly include metal machining & welding in the skillset of your archetypal mechanic. Solving mechanical problems by fabbing stuff from nothing. That's pure wizardry to most folks.
Boris Vian was an engineer working for the AFNOR (french normalization body), which he found boring out of his mind. The first draft of L'Écume des Jours was written of AFNOR engineering graph paper.
Looks like one'd describe him as an insurance adjuster:
> Kafka was rapidly promoted and his duties included processing and investigating compensation claims, writing reports, and handling appeals from businessmen who thought their firms had been placed in too high a risk category, which cost them more in insurance premiums.[41] He would compile and compose the annual report on the insurance institute for the several years he worked there.
And of course, Wallace Stevens was an insurance lawyer.
The primary skill required to be a good auto mechanic is the same one required to be a good software developer: the ability to logically diagnose and solve a problem. The only difference is the tools you use to fix the problem.
I think gp was refering to doctors being the white-collar of the three... and even with engineers they are not blue collar, mot legally at least... Exempt from overtime pay (salaried), no time and a half for OT hourly, etc. IT work is definitely white collar legally speaking.. even if considered at blue-collar by management types.
The responsibilities of a white collar job, the wages and respect of a blue collar job, and the number one target of mass skilled immigration to drive down wages.
That's what you get when our profession is distinctive for the lack of social skills and interest in organizing to protect our own interests. The country is not getting more friendly to people who know how to do things but don't know how to win favor with the government.
You can work for $100 an hour from Cairo or Sichuan as a software engineer on upwork.com if you know what you're doing. I don't really think we have any need to defend anything.
Btw, one of the most brilliant engineers/architects I met a Microsoft, now a distinguished engineer at Amazon, started his career as an auto mechanic (he attended trade school for this). He is also the principal architect of IBM's DB2. His name is James RH. See this: (Why Amazon Hired a Car Mechanic to Run Its Cloud) http://www.wired.com/2013/02/james-hamilton-amazon/
Am I correct getting this impression that what's being said is that auto mechanic work is somehow not "brain work"? Because for solving a lot of car problems it takes brains. If you're good at troubleshooting car problems, you will actually probably be good at programming.
It's definitely brain work, but it is concrete, physical 3D space kind of thinking.
Programming, and especially software architecture, tends to be more abstract thinking.
FWIW, the Kolbe test methodology [1] has a good way of quantifying this sort of natural aptitude. 90% of programmers I know who have taken the test [2] are very good at abstract thinking, and not as good at the physical kind.
[1] kolbe.com
[2] Maybe 2 dozen programmers. So, not a huge sample, but enough to see a trend.
why would you think it's concrete thinking only? car mechanics seems basically the same as software debugging, yes, there is a bit of physical thinking when it's time to take parts out and put parts in, but if the car is not turning on you have to figure out in your mind the "algorithm" that is going on from the key turning to the engine working, and debug each step.
There might be a bit of 3d thinking in figuring out how to, say, measure that in location X of the engine there is current Y, but it's not like you can figure out you have to check the current in that spot without having a clear mental picture of what is going on.
Not to mention remembering that car model X tends to develop fault Y which sometimes causes observable behavior Z, which can be identified by checking A, B, C etc. etc. seems very similar to software engineering to me.
> switching careers extended his neural plasticity considerably
I find this very interesting & uplifting. Would you be comfortable sharing more on what motivated him to switch careers at that age and your general observations throughout the process. I'm perhaps your age but I've experienced switching careers significantly is like hitting F5 in your life, or like a complete system re-install. Everything feels fresh & new. You feel energized to learn a lot of new concepts. However, it's usually very difficult to convince someone who's 60+ to learn to code. Usually people are intimidated by programming if they've only interacted with a browser for most of their lives.
Well I started in computers when I was 15. My dad was very worried and upset when I quit my first job flipping hamburgers at Wendy's and started programming full time.
Over the years he grew tired of his job, he went into management and that was just worse. He said he missed the problem solving of the day to day mechanic job. My mom had went back to school at 40 to get a degree in art and was having a lot of fun with computer graphics and over the years my Dad would tease her about paying the bills.
One particularly hard day my Dad handed his keys to his boss and walked out of the shop, never to look back. He ran into a project to help his church with their headquarters website and he said "It can't be any harder than working on a 318". And off they went, from that one to the next, now my mom makes eReader magazines and my dad sits and bashes away at sites and debugs problems.
One time he tried to tell me how smart I was and I laughed, I told him I've watched him tear a car down to the studs and find one broken part and put it back together from memory. Never looking at a manual, reading diagrams or even pausing to guess where one of a thousand parts went. He's brilliant, he taught me to break problems down to single variables, test and iterate. Clearly he's way smarter than I am, I'm just trying to mimic him. :-)
"Switching careers" also implies that he found a job as a programmer. I imagine it's really difficult to convince someone to employ someone who is 60+ and just learned to code.
It depends, I've known of people to "break in" by offering to work the first week or two free, then negotiate. Generally you aren't going to work for a fortune 500 company as your first real job... but there's plenty of businesses that need someone to get work done, and can't afford market rates...
Beyond that, the self-starter is often a safer bet than a fresh college grad.
The nature vs nurture debate will go on. But I think the question needs to be framed differently. Its not about comparing one person with the other but the approach that best maximizes ones own potential. When framed this way, the answer becomes very clear - you have to believe that you can become smarter. This is not just blind belief but is practically the way brain works (neuroplasticity)and we see it every day. If you can learn to play the guitar at 60 means you can change your brain. I am sure there are 60 year olds who are smarter than 20 year olds just like there are 60 year olds who can run for longer than 20 year olds. As engineers we tend to downplay psychological factors compared to physiological factors. But the connection has been established beyond doubt in neuroscience. It hasn't gotten to a point where we can formulaically impact outcomes through calibrated intervention but the linkages are clear. Our definition of smartness is very narrow. Here is a conversation between a 50 year old scientist and a 70 year old poet https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/04/27/when-einstein-met-t...
"six weeks of brain training, with 10-minute sessions three times each week" - this seems so insignificant amount of practice that no reasonable person would expect it to have any effect. More interesting thing would be measure person's IQ before and after doing their quantum physics PhD studies - few years of intense work should do the trick of making you smarter.
This isn't even enough time to significantly increase your strength at a gym, which we know is possible and observable. Why anyone would think this is enough training to produce noticeable effects baffles me.
More imporantly, unless there's a hidden software in brain that responds precisely to that particular training, you'd expect that anything that can yield significant results by doing it 3x a week for 10 minutes would be already discovered purely by random chance.
Sure, but would they have recognized it? Would they put 2 and 2 together - "I ate a hamburger every Tuesday night for a year, and now I'm smarter...Eureka!"
Of course they would, that's how we've invented pretty much anything, scientific method included. People are pretty observant, there are lots of them and they've been taking notes for many thousands of years.
Snap! I a very fat man who can do 45 pushups without stopping. The idea of going for 10 minutes is unfathomable to me. But more important, you really dropped that 10 minutes into perspective for me. Thank you.
The number of push up doesn't matters, do an exercise for 10 min even if you can't do a single push up if you spend 10 min trying and resting and do it over 6 weeks while keeping to a single rule that you must improve (do at least 1 more) over the previous day you'll see quite an amazing improvement over a period of 6 weeks.
You can also do 5min of pushups, 5min situps can't drop much beyond that but still unless you are in stellar shape you'll see an improvement over 6 weeks (even 2 week).
I've seen plenty of people going from 0 pushups to 10-20 within a week by trying to do it daily for only a couple of minutes, like with most exercises the results of the first 4-8 weeks are the most noticeable.
That's of course doesn't mean that you can get into shape by spending 10min a day, but the for a single exercise that's more than enough when you spend 1-2 hours at a gym you rarely put in more than 10min per exercise unless it's aerobics.
So the brain analogy can hold because you are training your brain to do certain things, and you get better at it, it doesn't necessarily mean that you get smarted just that your brain gets more adapted to performing certain tasks. Solving sudoku is very hard at first but after several weeks of doing it daily you get quite good at solving such problems, same goes for crossword puzzles and other similar things.
P.S.
On a psychological level that's one of the easiest ways to convince some one to do it because it takes nothing from them and they can see almost an immediate improvement dragging some one to the gym and forcing them to stick isn't easy, showing them that they can noticeably improve over weeks can give many people that moral boost they need to actually start investing more effort into it.
The purpose of the analogy (as I understood it) was that there are important, extremely large effects that are caused by behavior X (in this case, exercise). But if we put exercise to the same test, we would fail to notice those important and extremely large effects. So by using so little training, we learn little about what effects it _could_ have -- it could work, but we wouldn't know unless it worked 10-100x faster than other important systems we rely on.
So, I don't mean to imply that there is a units equivalency -- 1 minute of exercise is not the same or similar to 1 minute of some type of mental activity. It's no good to say "this experiment doesn't use at least N minutes of intervention, where N comes from this totally different process and unit system having to do with the effects of e.g. bench presses". But that isn't what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is, if you give an intervention of thirty minutes of activity a week and see no change, it's a pretty reasonable to conclude "30 minutes a week for six weeks is not an effective dose" and not jump all the way to "This intervention has no effect". This is why I highlighted how low the 'dose' of the intervention was.
[I also am relying on my understanding of Dual N-back, language learning, and other mental tasks, and the turnaround time for them is substantially longer -- and thus requires a higher dose -- than starting from a similar place in exercise. This context is useful only for general dose estimates {{ even 10 hours a week might not be enough to learn a language, certainly not in six weeks }}, but not necessary for the comparison.]
Does that address the substance of your objection?
"six weeks of brain training, with 10-minute sessions three times each week"
Average couch potato could do miracles to his/her oxygen uptake with that amount of hard aerobic training. Ten minutes running uphill at full speed, stop when you're out of breath. Catch breath, do again. If you started with coopers test result of 1500m, you could probably hit 2500m at the end of the training.
This is more dreadful, than ageism. From linked paper:
For example, longitudinal studies have reported between 1% and 2% annual hippocampal atrophy in adults older than 55 years without dementia (e.g., Jack and others 1998). Other regions also atrophy in late adulthood, including the prefrontal cortex, caudate nucleus, and cerebellum, at estimated rates between 0.5% and 2% per year.
Do you look at everyone around you who is 55 and think of them as slowly becoming brain dead? Do you look at people in their 70s and think none of them is enjoying life? 32 is way too early to be terrified of aging.
My mother is 70, and she runs her own website, mentors people online, hosts all kinds of guests at home, maintains a food garden, writes on sunny days in a gazebo she had built for her, cycles through creating small side businesses, pirates movies, goes on long strolls around her village...
I must remember to ask her if she's too old to enjoy life.
Let's aim for the so-called life extension escape velocity then. The cure may be even a 1000 years from now, but as long as you can keep extending your life to still be around then, it's fine.
'Even partially'? Such cures are found every day in the form of treatments for disease, healthy living rules, improvements in diet and exercise regimes.
If that. Many people say the reason cancer kills everyone eventually is that cells in our body wants to be free and it takes that this many generations to declare their independence and rebel against the perfectly tuned totalitarian system that is our body.
Does anyone else have a little bit of a problem with the assumption that the "benchmark test" is enough of a gauge of general intelligence to be determinative in studies like this?
Additionally, the discussion is mostly revolving around the physical size of the hippocampus, but instead of measuring that (arguably a difficult task), they instead rely on a "benchmark test" and base their results on that alone.
What are the indicators that the benchmark test and hippocampus size are closely correlated?
I certainly agree with the author's concluding sentence: "Forget the smart drugs and supplements; put on your shorts and go exercise." When he set up the opposing viewpoint earlier in the article, it made me cringe:
"I know, exercise is work, so you undoubtedly want to know if there is a smart pill, like Adderall or Ritalin, that will do the trick."
What an awful idea.
The mathematical and geometrical genius H.S.M. Coxeter lived to age 96. He attributed his continuing mental agility through old age to never being "bored", and to doing 50 push-ups a day.
Why is a pill that makes you more like what you want to be an awful idea?
I'm not making any statement about the effects of the drugs in question; if they don't work or have bad side effects, obviously, that's bad, but my point is that people seem to think that drugs, even when they work and have reasonable side effects are a somehow bad or shameful route to self-improvement, and I don't see why that is.
If we're talking about famous people, what about Erdos?
Sorry, I should be more precise. I don't think the pill itself is an "awful idea". What is a bad idea (IMO) is relying on a pill specifically because you don't want to exercise, which has been shown to work, and has too many interrelated benefits to mention.
I think stimulants are fine--Erdős took amphetamines, lots of kids take Adderall, and most mathematicians probably drink tea of coffee.
ah. yeah. From what I read nothing is as effective as exercise. I recently stopped bicycling to work... and am a lot worse for it. Just sayin' if there was a pill that was as effective as exercise, I'd take it.
All subjects took a benchmark cognitive test, a kind of modified I.Q. test, at the beginning and at the end of the study. Although improvements were observed in every cognitive task that was practiced, there was no evidence that brain training made people smarter. Scores on the benchmark test, for which subjects could not train, did not significantly increase at the end of the study.
I wonder how necessity affects neuroplasticity? I think of foreigners who are forced to to learn a new language and culture at an older age. I can't help but think ones mind needs "jolt" to become smarter.
