The research on young and successful isn't really showing any causation.
Maybe being young and concentrating on a single thing makes you more obsessed about it? So you end up spending a lot of time on just it.
Maybe the older you get the less obsessed you can be, having the interest spread around on family, work, and other thoughts?
Maybe accumulated knowledge makes you slower at learning and playing because you're more cautious due to the mistakes you made before?
The research showing the decline is really weird. As I've got older I felt I learned stuff much more quickly than when I started college. I know so much that this knowledge allows me to avoid traps. Far sooner I have a feeling of understanding and can demonstrate it to someone else.
If your whole life is oriented on learning and improvement it's weird to think that will slow down.
People, as they age, lose interest in learning and rarely become obsessed about something, for most it is right after highschool, for some after college. No wonder the performance drops and IQ too. No one is using that brain as hard as it was used before.
"As I've got older I felt I learned stuff much more quickly than when I started college."
Drifting into a personal monologue, I know I am a lot better at learning now than I was 15 years ago. Learning advanced mathematics now is much easier than it was then (measured in the rather subjective unit of "amount learned / time taken"). Languages also are much easier. The only difference is the amount of time I put in now compared to the amount of time I put in then. If I was in full-time education now (instead of a half hour to an hour a few times a week) I would be yomping through textbooks and courses.
I think some of it is that I just know so much more now, and I've got so much more experience of joining knowledge up and making use of the combined result. I've also got so much more confidence in my ability to learn, and I know that if I'm struggling, grinding through does get results. I don't get demoralised, I don't wonder if I'm ever going to be able to understand it; I just do it.
At around 40, I'm now learning things like math quicker, but then I forget them a year later, whereas the things I learned in college I still remember now.
Is this normal, I wonder?
You might say, well, if you're forgetting them a year later then you didn't really learn them, but I disagree. I feel more complete mastery of a subject matter more now than I did in my teens. No, I forget things I learn much more quickly now, and the only way to not forget them is to practice them at least each week, and that rapidly becomes a time sink.
This might be as simple as the fact that you're spacing your learning out less. In college you learned things over a span of 15 weeks, giving you many opportunities for spaced repetition, which is one of the most effective methods to make material stick. Now I'm assuming you learn material in much less time than a semester, so there's less repetition and therefore less long term retention.
This is an expected result of a storage system that has finite capacity being tasked with storing a lifetime of useful information.
Research on this topic points to the notion that the brain is pretty actively trying to ignore things and toss out information that is no longer useful. It seems that the heuristic the brain uses to determine what should be kept and what should be discarded is related to how well some new information fits with information already in memory and how often an area of memory is revisited.
If you were tasked with fitting a lifetime of useful information on a 100 petabyte hard drive, how would you go about it? When you inevitably run out of free space, how would you continue to store new information?
I agree completely about learning math faster, or maybe easier. My thinking has been that now we have a much better scaffold to construct knowledge on. Calculus, linear algebra, proofs, thinking in arbitrary numbers of dimensions, etc. are all much more ingrained than they were in undergrad, and as a result you don't have to spend as much effort on the details.
I wish I could say I didn't forget things when I was was in university, but I still remember the frustration of coming back from summer vacation and having forgotten half of what we learned last semester.
Same here. Machine learning wasn't in vogue when I graduated, but now I'm actually able to help my younger brother through the last courses in college. Quite surprising, because I'd have sworn when I was that age it would take weeks to understand something like Random Forest.
I reckon part of the reason is that when there's no pressure on you, you can explore around a question (how do you classify this particular thing...) rather than try to steer right towards the answer as fast as possible. Which isn't actually as fast as when you read around.
That would mean that all the GM's very well documented decline after 35 has to with lack of obsession at that age, which seems a rather strong claim.
Maybe amateurs learning at different ages is a different phenomena than the top competitors decline, but the research showing the decline of professionals is certainly not weird, and probably not even research, since they are easy to lookup facts.
Not all GMs decline immediately after 35. Anand is 46 and still right at the top. His peak rating came at age 41 and he held on to his world champion title until age 43 (when he lost to Carlsen).
Viktor Korchnoi gave his expert opinion that most chess grandmasters hit their peak around age 40, maybe a little after. He also tried to analyze what gave various people the drive to work hard enough to become a grandmaster.
Also, Anand would arguably be world champion right now if he had the stamina. His knowledge of the game is probably the deepest of anyone, but he runs out of energy as th game progresses.
Physical fitness is given a lot of attention by players at the very top of chess. Here is a quote from an article that talks a bit about it.
“Anand has been pretty active as well,” says the Bad Sodener Zeitung. “He bought a season ticket for the swimming pool in Bad Soden and swam about 1000 metres per day. He would also run 10km every day and has also been spotted on a bicycle in the beautiful hills around Bad Soden. He lost about six kilos this summer. Most of the time, though, Anand prepared for the match in the Chess Tigers Training Centre with his seconds.”
Chess, and perhaps Go, might be outliers here, in that both are designed to exceed the human mind's possible ability.
But for everything else, I agree with you. I'm able to learn new skills considerably faster now than in my twenties. Part of that is practice learning, and part of that is having a lot of things to relate any new concept to.
> ...and part of that is having a lot of things to relate any new concept to.
This is an interesting way to put it that I haven't thought about before. I have found it hard to explain that sometimes new things are easy to learn and sometimes hard.
I usually attribute this to the difficulty of the concept, but maybe it's that I'm not really learning the easy things but finding a very similar concept to relate it to that I already know.
Bot can be made where one doesn't have to parse commands.
The author of the article could have collected all the conversations and learned a bot that would correctly converse with people asking similar questions.
there's no reason that having the same question asked in different ways should be a problem.
language is structured. structured learning and prediction exists for more than two decades and just recently there have been very nice improvements to known methods (learning to search, neural networks for structured learning etc.).
one can try to summarize an answer to a question from relevant fetched documents. summarization is a structured prediction task.
for example, in the conversations with a bot, you store all of the questions and your answers.
your answers were formed by using documents that contain the needed information. now you're trying to find a mapping that will successfully fetch the relevant documents for the question, and then summarize all of the documents to as close as possible summarization (summarized text should be similar to your stored answer).
structured prediction techniques use simple methods such as pos tagging and then pruning the dependency parse tree of sentences in document to shorten it, excluding whole sentences or text-between-commas or unneeded-adjectives etc. (these methods are based on statistical machine learning, not some silly rule based technique, one can incorporate word2vec features or other neural network magic)
it's not impossible, given enough data, to build a bot that would interact successfully.
sarcasm, and emotions are still a bit away, mostly because they require knowledge about the world, and if your world is a small set of documents you won't successfully get the sarcasm or emotions. this is also the case with people when they come to a different culture.
I'd warn people not to pay too much attention to the advice that the american diabetes association provides. The targets it recommends are well known to cause damage to the body (you should be avoiding anything above a BG of 140 at any time) and it's dietary recommendations are contrary to the advice I've ever received from anyone that has had good results maintaining diabetes. Just to pick up on the two points you mention, I would never consume fruit unless accompanied by exercise and a low-carb diet is recommended by any consultant or nutrionist that I've ever spoken to.
There is no evidence. This whole thread is filled with misinformation and anecdotal evidence. The article lays its foundation on Lustig claims while his Bitter Truth talk had outright wrong claims.
There have been studies pointing out fruits even help decrease symptoms of diabetes.
This one has a mainly fruit diet for its participants. 2500kcal of fruits per day. No one had any serious side effects.
These "not man-made", paleo, keto, low-carb and other diets are all fads. All of them. They promote an unhealthy relationship with food. Not unhealthy as in philosophy but unhealthy scientifically (orthorexia + the humongous evidence that food is not poison).
It's a much higher chance that the American population is extremely orthorexic and that they avoid fruits and veggies thinking that pesticides and sugar will kill them. This unhealthy relationship results in overeating highly caloric foods like meat, dairy, eggs, drinks etc.
Eggs aren't all that high calorie. 3 eggs swimming in added cooking fat (2 tablespoons of butter) would be about 450 calories and would constitute a significant portion for all but the heartiest eaters.
There is of course no need to bath them in fat, 1 egg has ~80-90 calories, they are mostly water.
They are certainly higher in calories than vegetables, but if you consider the typical diet, they are not towards the high end of calorie density.
Yes, consuming high amounts of fructose on a daily basis has some serious side effects. Consuming the same amount of glucose doesn't.
This just means that the amount of fructose intake should be moderated.
Seems to be that the majority of this community believes there are concept such as healthy food, unhealthy food, superfood etc. These concepts are scientifically non-existent.
There's such a thing, scientifically, as an unhealthy diet and healthy diet.
Sugar can be a part of a healthy diet. So can hamburgers, so can everything else.
There's been bunch of evidence for UK and Australia (where fructose intake decreased over the years) but they still got fatter and fatter.
Sugar tax is idiotic.
Lustig: Sugar makes people obese.
Reality: Carbs, fat and sugar makes people obese.
American population started eating ridiculously huge amounts of food. They'll get fat no matter what they eat if the caloric intake is 3700kcal per day.
It's interesting that in the USA the calorie consumption rose from 80s to 00s from 3100 to 3600.
In the UK and Australia they eat less fructose but more calories.
Everyone keeps on getting fatter.
There's not a single food to blame. Any food can't be healthy or unhealthy. Diets can be healthy or unhealthy. Thinking otherwise is a sign of unhealthy relationship with food. Avoiding stuff because it is carcinogenic (processed meat) or correlates with cancer (red meat) is ridiculous.
Eating large amounts every day (which is what most of the obese do) isn't?
I don't care if apples have cyanide or 60g of fructose will give me liver disease. I won't eat 50 bananas a day, I won't eat 100 apples a day, I'll eat agave syrup all over my pancakes and won't feel a thing. It's food. I enjoy it. Having fructose in it, or animal products just means I can easily overdose if I consume it every day but I won't.
Maybe being young and concentrating on a single thing makes you more obsessed about it? So you end up spending a lot of time on just it.
Maybe the older you get the less obsessed you can be, having the interest spread around on family, work, and other thoughts?
Maybe accumulated knowledge makes you slower at learning and playing because you're more cautious due to the mistakes you made before?
The research showing the decline is really weird. As I've got older I felt I learned stuff much more quickly than when I started college. I know so much that this knowledge allows me to avoid traps. Far sooner I have a feeling of understanding and can demonstrate it to someone else.
If your whole life is oriented on learning and improvement it's weird to think that will slow down.
People, as they age, lose interest in learning and rarely become obsessed about something, for most it is right after highschool, for some after college. No wonder the performance drops and IQ too. No one is using that brain as hard as it was used before.