The 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.
>The 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.
Only it was 640K (the old IBM PC limitation), and Gates never said it (at least can't be verified from any source).
But even if he HAD said it, it's still a perfectly fine claim, since it spoke for users of the IBM PC of the time, given programs and common applications of the time. And as it's said to be told around 1980-81 it was totally write: it took half a decade or more for the limit to even matter to users. Obviously the hypothetical Gates would have perfectly known future PCs would need more memory, and there's nothing in the quote to imply it was meant as something that would be true forever.
Zuckerberg's line on the other hand is total BS. But then again his main claim is hitting the jackpot with the right crappy PHP app that appealed to the zeitgeist. So more of an "right idea at the right time" person than a real genius like Bill Joy.
Only 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.
Pulling all-nighters, working multiple 7 day work weeks, 18 hour days; those are all signs of weakness. But for some reason, some people think it's great and it shows teamwork and loyalty and blah...
It's just a poorly managed/developed project. Plain and simple.
Long days of work are often far more productive for me. It usually takes me a couple of hours to get the entirety of the problem/solution in my head. I might accomplish five or ten times what I would if that 18 hours was split across three days.
That's a different situation than what I am referring to. You're talking more about being in flow. I'm talking about poorly run projects where it becomes a requirement to work long hours and weekends. It simply isn't a sustainable way to work.
Here are some things that decline with age:
- Grip strength
- Sperm count in men
- Sperm quality in men
- Fertility in women (even before menopause)
- Skin elasticity
- Eyesight
- Muscle definition
- Aerobic capacity
- Wound healing rate
- Hair growth rate
- Sleep quality & duration
- Testosterone levels
- Thermal adaption to changes in temperature
It appears to me that every bodily system slowly degrades as you age. Care to site any scientific studies showing that intelligence does not decline with age? That is a surprising claim to make.
Read the article? Goodenough credits his old age productivity to the fact that he's been able to think about the same problem for decades, and that he's been able to learn about different fields in sufficient depth that he can find new connections between them.
All the stuff you mention, you can measure. How do you measure intelligence? The kind of intelligence/wisdom that leads to making new scientific discoveries?
I will posit that raw intellectual horsepower might decline with age (and even then, what the hell is this thing and how would we measure it?), but it's also clear to me that decades of accumulated wisdom and study can increase the likelihood of making a new discovery.
Intelligence is not a physical property, it's an information property. It's built out of time, not any physical stuff. It's software, not hardware. And increases in intelligence also increase the efficiency with which the agent gathers information... so even if the sensory bandwidth of the input devices is declining, the perceptual bandwidth can be increasing.
Of course eventually you start running up against mechanical limits and you decline. But that peak is much later than the peak in sensory bandwidth.
sol_remmy says:>"It appears to me that every bodily system slowly degrades as you age. Care to site any scientific studies showing that intelligence does not decline with age? That is a surprising claim to make."
Studies show that older people are smarter. Despite your apparent youth, I'm fairly certain you can find the relevant studies.
In intellectual and creative work, the mind is not just hardware but also software and data. It's entirely plausible that the software gets better fast enough (with the right life experiences) to dominate the hardware getting worse with age.
the question on my mind these days, is if Zuckerberg in 2017 is still that foolish. He seems to have learned his lessons about getting caught in public saying foolish things. Does he still believe foolish things though? I think he does, and that frightens me because of how much power he now has.
I think the hardest part of anyone's career is when the children are young - you do not have time. Unfortunately, it is also the time that you have the moment to spring up in your career because you have experience and energy (which you use for the kids of course and not self growth)
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.