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posted by
martyb
on Friday November 25 2016, @05:53PM
from the when-you-can-no-longer-shine-a-light? dept.
from the when-you-can-no-longer-shine-a-light? dept.
When are brilliant scientists the most brilliant? What age are you likely to be when the Nobel committee comes calling? Pick one of the following answers:
- You need a lot of expertise and wisdom to make a big breakthrough. You need professional connections, lots of research money, and big laboratories. Scientific breakthroughs come from people in middle age, or maybe even at the end of their careers.
- It's the young upstarts who have lots of energy and fresh ideas. After all, the old scientists are stuck in ideas from the past. They're already past their prime. They're tired and don't have much energy any more. Am I talking about myself at the ripe old age of 56? I didn't get much sleep last night, and my knees are kind of sore :)
A new study gives us the answer: None of the above. There's no relationship between age and creative scientific contribution. The authors of the study analyzed 2,856 physicists, working from 1893 to the present. They found that the best predictor of exceptional creativity is productivity. It's lots of hard work. The scientists who do the most experiments, and test the most hypotheses, are the ones with the big contributions. The researchers found that once they'd controlled for productivity, age doesn't add any additional predictive power.
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How Old is Too Old to Be Brilliant?
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @06:08PM
As I recall, mathematics has a pretty steep age cutoff for making earth-shattering contributions. Not that you can't make meaningful contributions, but you won't revolutionize the field.
I myself feel my faculties slowing down. Not that I am incapable, but it does take more effort and time than when I was younger. The plus side is a have a pretty expansive base to make associations and recognize patterns. And maybe a little less ego, so it is easier to engage in the work for sake of the work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @06:20PM
No, see my post above you [soylentnews.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Friday November 25 2016, @07:06PM
Yes, so you come up with a heliocentric cosmological model, calculate the relative sizes of the Sun and the Moon, and then no one expects much of you when you are almost 2400 years old. But it may be that age teaches modesty, and the importance of not being seen, so that the contributions of the aged are not so ostentatious, but can still be very ground breaking.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday November 26 2016, @01:09AM
Plenty of ageism in chess. Very frequently, a new world champ is someone in his early 20s.
(Score: 2) by fubari on Saturday November 26 2016, @09:11PM
r.e. ageism: that word many not mean what you think it means.
tldr; good (effective) people are good regardless of age.
Ageism would be blocking someone from competing purely because of, well, age.
In other words, if a hiring manager finds it difficult to actually evaluate candidates' abilities they may decide it is easier to be ageist: use age as a proxy for "can't do the job." Could be "too young", could be "too old". Let's focus on "too old" now...
There are age related performance differences in many activities.
Here is an article [washingtonpost.com] about which Olympic sports skew young and which allow for more longevity.
Some sports (to my surprise) have 50+ year old competitors (archery, sailing, shooting and equestrian), while other sports do not.
No sports have 80+ year old athletes competing - is that ageism? No, because the 80+ year crowd simply doesn't perform at the level of the younger crowd. I'm pretty sure if there was an 85 year old who could out-swim everybody else they'd be in the Olympics :-)
Games (chess) and Olympics (sports) are pretty much non-ageist by definition, because it is easy to test candidates and see who performs best. I believe (stop me if I'm wrong) that competitive chess organization is not ageist: I'm pretty sure anybody can attempt to work their way up in the rankings regardless of age.
Skills like math or programming are more difficult to test.
My hunch is that because they're difficult to test it is tempting to use age as a proxy.
I have read that for software jobs many applicants can't actually program, and it sounds like many hiring managers don't bother testing programming ability: Why Can't Programmers.. Program? [codinghorror.com] (worth a read if you work in software).
<anecdote>
I know really good young programmers.
I know really good old programmers (60+).
I've also known really bad programmers, both young and old. :-)
</anecdote>
That leads to the really interesting point in the fine article, which was the observation about what they call "Q":
The "Q" thing is much more interesting to me than simple age.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday November 27 2016, @02:50AM
Okay, I was not being strictly accurate. Most chess players are at their peaks at relatively young ages, but you're right, that doesn't make the players or the game ageist. Just that chess struck me as an example of an activity (or sport if you like) that requires mental brilliance and which is dominated by young players.
The read about programmers was interesting. Seems a lot of people who can't program want to call themselves programmers anyway. I wondered how many had CS degrees, and the article mentioned that many of these bad programmers did, even graduate degrees. Astonishing that a simple problem like that "FizzBuzz" one is enough to sort them out. I wondered if the issue was merely popularity and money. In the late 1990s, lots of wannabe programmers of very little to no ability jumped into the field for the easy money and plentiful job openings, then were weeded out in the Dot-com crash. And yet, I recall a senior level CS class that was given a lecture on programming paradigms such as structured programming and OOP, and when asked to give an example of a programming structure, could not. So then they were asked to give an example of a data structure, and after a painfully long pause, someone finally mentioned "stack", and then came "queue", "linked list", and "tree", then asked again for a programming structure, and still couldn't answer. This was a second or third rate college. I learned that many of their CS seniors could not write simple programs, and when I asked how they managed to get all the way to the senior level, was told they had never been asked to write any programs! Then what the heck were they doing for homework?! I was told that was the mystery. Woof.
(Score: 2) by fubari on Monday November 28 2016, @07:12AM
r.e. ageism: To be fair, I probably overplayed the pedantic card (which can happen when I'm trying to defer studying).
r.e. coders: I swear to Turing, after reading that coding-horrors post a while ago I started making fizzbuzz part of the tech interviews I conduct. Or some simple problem you could describe on an index card.
me: "So, you have a quite a few languages on your resume. Which one is your favorite?"
candidate: "Java."
me: "Ok, can you write out fizzbuzz on the whiteboard?" (hand them a sheet w/the "specifications").
candidate: "...."
Happens a LOT more often than I would have guessed.
fwiw, if somebody gets part-way there, maybe some logic errors (I don't mind trivial syntax errs on a whiteboard) it still gives me a chance to check chemistry: "plays well with others" doing a code review and so on. If they can amend the code as we talk through it to fix any issues then that is a plus.
I try to make it a point to only dig into things somebody says they're strong in.
Heck, I'd be delighted to have somebody say "Oh let me write fizzbuzz in Haskel" or what have you.
Would be educational for me: maybe not so much for me to learn Haskel, but to see how they can explain things.
Oh well, I tend to ramble on. I appreciated the CSci story... they sounded long on theory, very short on practice. :-)