My dad, 74, just picked up Nodejs because I told him it was cool. He got so excited he started migrating part of the 50k line reporting Spring/java codebase he had written 7 yrs ago to Node at the huge telecom he's at. He says he likes rewriting sw as a way to iron out bugs and refresh neurons.
My mom, 75, got her degree in law 10 yrs ago being the gramma around a bunch of college teenagers. Passed the bar exam after 5 attempts and now works at a Ngo representing women in need to get pro bono divorce and custody from their wife-beating husbands.
Apparently motivation to learn increases with age in my family. I think maybe as a way to defeat death or something.
I'm also finding that as I begin to tread into greybeard territory... I'm still super interested in learning new things. Actually interested in entire knowledge domains I wasn't before.
What seems to have changed is that I have less patience for, though, is learning ephemeral and arcane ways of doing something I already know how to do.
Learn to use microcontrollers? Sure! Never really dove in there, seems like an opportunity. Timeless mathematical knowledge? Totally game. Another front-end framework? Not really interested, maybe I'll wait and see if it survives 5 years and I can actually find people who can talk intelligently about the problems it solves rather than bearing thought-smell terms like "modern" as a fashionable totem.
My dad, above 65 years old, is in college studying all kind of subject (cars, optics, lazer,...) He's doing it for fun and stay up late at night reading text books. I'm gonna probably grow up to be like that too.
I think the main reason for our love of learning is "good" boredom. When I'm bored and have nothing fun easily accessible, then learning something is very attractive. My hypothesis is that learning motivation is a function of boredom, entertainment accessibility, and stress. More boredom, more likely to learn. More entertainment available, less likely to learn. More stressed, less likely to learn.
This applies for both young and old people. Older people just tend to have more things to entertain them in life and/or more stressed.
It’s good that they still can and act on it. Maybe it’s brain chemistry but so many have it and waste it. While others try really hard and can’t stop the decay. A lot of older folks who retire don’t know what to do with all the free time and end up not so well especially ones whose only social life was at work.
Also having a sense of purpose can be the spark to the motivation flame.
I on the other hand, at 40 with family&child, I don’t have the same patience for just anything that comes my way. Only if something sparks my interest I manage a way to make some progress. Last year I begun a slow journey into lisp/scheme and found the same flame i had when i was a junior. With other mundane things I’ll most likely get a shallow depth of knowledge to the level needed to get my work done and if needed i do some deep dives. I used to go in depth at first but lately i found that the return on investment wasn’t too appealing.
I hope to still have the acument to learn later on in life when I have more time and fewer responsibilities
A way to defeat death.. maybe. I am nearing the 40's and I am self studying math and more motivated than ever. For me, it is more satisfying an urge to know more and not waste my gifts by sitting in front of the tv the whole day.
> Apparently motivation to learn increases with age in my family.
"I was friends with one highschooler who constantly showed off his math knowledge. He much preferred to leave people (many of whom were poor) with the impression that he was superhuman, rather than proactively explaining that his father was a mathematician, his mother taught him at his Montessori grade school, and his family was very well-off..."
My grandfather was similar. He learned to code in the 1980s on a Commodore 64 when he was in his 60s, built HAM radio gear, etc. My father who is now in his 60s is also an exception, so hopefully for my sake it runs in families.
These are exceptions though. Statistically most people do stop learning as they age, and from what I've observed I would tend to suspect it is due to motivational decline more than decline in actual ability (barring dementia or other issues).
That's an incredible story. I always enjoy reading about how people have managed to stay active and learn new things well past the typical retirement age.
What does your dad work on exactly? When did he start programming?
I hope I'm able to age so well; I'd love to get a law / medical degree at 65 and start a whole new career in my 70s :)
We seem to pack most of our learning into the first quarter or third of our life, then taper off to almost nothing. That doesn't work for maintaining anything, so why would we think our ability to learn is any different? The physiological deterioration may be inevitable in some ways, but there are definitely other factors at play like habits, motivation, opportunity and lots more. Your example with your dad is incredibly rare in the general population, but probably a pretty common path amongst 67-yr-olds writing giant code bases, or 74-yr-olds still in programming jobs. I don't see it as defeating death as much as extracting everything out of life. Maybe the other side of the same coin?
Nice! I am also fortunate in this regard: my 99 year old father still does video production for an international organization as a volunteer, learned 3D animation, still travels and is active.
So your Dad is moving from a working, type-safe advanced language he understood well to Javascript which he's learning at the same time? That sounds like a mistake tbh.
I don't want to minimise what your mom does, but part of the problem is that it is only being talked about abusive men and people may think the women cannot abuse. It seems like it is where equality needs to be improved as men do not have access to help as good as women.
I find that as I get older I have less time to learn the latest and greatest new shiny tech, while I really want to focus on deepening my understanding of topics I've already invested in. I feel annoyed when tech changes because I spent time learning the old thing and I can't get that time back. I think the core idea here is that with more demands on my time, I've become more choosy about how I spend it.
This study isn't about that. They've found an area of the brain in mice that seems to be related to motivation to make decisions with complex cost benefit analysis. This type of decision making is impaired when under stress, by mental health diagnosis, or, according to the study, by an aged brain. If any conclusion is worth drawing here it's the increased importance of mental health as we age.
This is not an argument for all of us to try to keep up with the shiny new language/framework/whirlwind.
Programming and IT in general is such a bummer in that regard. 20 years of relearning how to do the same thing differently wears on you. I learned JavaScript 15+ years ago, and I’m still having to relearn that nonsense every couple years. “JavaScript on the server now!? What? Why? Ok, fine. Here we go again.”
Learning a new tool when you have limited set of current tools is a good investment. But there is a aspect of marginal returns that comes into play here.
It's not just the increased demands on your time, but the knowledge that it's ticking away... As you get older you get more critical/anxious about wasting time and more reticent about investing in something that has no compelling return on investment.
>In probability theory, the multi-armed bandit problem (sometimes called the K-[1] or N-armed bandit problem[2]) is a problem in which a fixed limited set of resources must be allocated between competing (alternative) choices in a way that maximizes their expected gain, when each choice's properties are only partially known at the time of allocation, and may become better understood as time passes or by allocating resources to the choice.[3][4] This is a classic reinforcement learning problem that exemplifies the exploration–exploitation tradeoff dilemma. The name comes from imagining a gambler at a row of slot machines (sometimes known as "one-armed bandits"), who has to decide which machines to play, how many times to play each machine and in which order to play them, and whether to continue with the current machine or try a different machine.[5] The multi-armed bandit problem also falls into the broad category of stochastic scheduling.
>In the problem, each machine provides a random reward from a probability distribution specific to that machine. The objective of the gambler is to maximize the sum of rewards earned through a sequence of lever pulls.[3][4] The crucial tradeoff the gambler faces at each trial is between "exploitation" of the machine that has the highest expected payoff and "exploration" to get more information about the expected payoffs of the other machines. The trade-off between exploration and exploitation is also faced in machine learning.
I can learn many new things for fun but I already know a lot of things I'm fond of, which one should I give away given that time is finite? I didn't know anything when I was little and much less than now when I was half my age. Furthermore there are a few things I like and I became reasonably good at, professionally or for fun. I won't give them away unless I have to.
Learning involves being wrong, and being wrong is stressful. The older you are, the more stressful it is. In humans, there is a strong ego component, but I imagine that there is also a physiological resistance that comes from a lifetime of learned skills, models, behaviors, and traumas. Having gotten cuts, scrapes, bruises, and maybe breaks while learning to ride a bicycle, which still continues to work just fine for getting you where you need to go, it's a hard sell to suffer or risk another set of cuts/scrapes/breaks to learn to ride a bikeprime, even if it's a qualitatively better tool--it's not essential. And we also learn over the decades that our bodies and minds at 64 are not as flexible and resilient as they were at 4 or 34.
If there were just one new bikeprime every few years, it would be easier to settle in for the pain and benefit. But the pace of technological change is much much faster, and along with intense marketing, it seems like there are dozens of new bikeprimes every year. Many of these turn out to be mostly hype, so it's hard to know where to invest energy. And every time a supposed bikeprime turns out to be more pain than it's worth, there's a real lesson that's learned about the value of bikeprimes in general. And so we become older, more skeptical, more rigid.
I also think there is some aspect of survivorship bias in the value of "learning new skills". For every person who invested the time in learning a skill that turned out to be valuable for them overall, there are other people who spent years investing in a skill that turned out to be a dead-end.
It seems the older I get, the more my life fills up with obligations. The bits left over are lower and lower quality. It used to be that an entire evening would be unplanned; I would grab something out of the fridge for dinner, sit down, and think about if I wanted to read a book or write some code or watch a new movie I was excited about. Even if I was "lazy" and chose the movie 50% of the time, I was still getting through a couple of books a month. Now at 6pm I am wanted for something, guaranteed. If it is not something specific, it is to be available for interruptions. At the end of the evening, when I really should be asleep already, I am released from interruption duty, and sometimes I can get an hour or more to myself, depending on how much sleep I want to rob myself of. At that point I would be sleepy if I wasn't stressed out, and I've probably had a couple of drinks, but that's when I hack on a personal project, or (more likely) switch to YouTube if I am not coherent enough to write code that actually works. And if I watch something like 3Blue1Brown or a software presentation then I count that as "learning."
Ha, that's an apt way to put it. It seems to me as well that we aren't living in the information age insomuch as we are living in the interruption age.
A lot of the motivation to learn comes from being insecure about not knowing. Especially when your young. As you get older you become less insecure about not knowing and have less to prove, so motivation to learn declines.
This research addresses only learning in mice, who are unlikely to deliberate why they no longer have their old passion for running mazes or tapping levers for sugar water. So I think it's a bit fanciful to equate senescent mouse substantia nigra with human ennui.
I feel that as I get older there is no lack of motivation or ability to learn at all. In fact, I'd say I have become more efficient at it through getting better at the meta.
I most certainly have become more critical of what to learn. I prefer diving deep into subjects of substance rather than threading water learning the syntax of yet another niche programming language that arguably marginally improves on use case X if all the stars allign or leaning the quirks of yet another framework Y that is flavor of the month and just a rehash of a fashion of 5 years ago.
Yeah, i feel less motivated to spend effort on things Im pretty sure won't have any pay off in the end.
What I'm slightly worried about is being to critical and writing everything off as a waste of time. There's not a a lot of good ways to tell not learning something was a good idea or not, so you don't get feedback.
It seems these researchers have potentially zeroed in on the specific neural regulatory system behind the adage that 'you can't teach an old dog new tricks'.
That they are able to administer drugs to manipulate the gradual deadening of this risk/reward learning mechanism is incredibly cool. I wonder if there is an adaptive reason for this circuitry to cool with age, and if there will be any serious unintended side effects from artificially boosting it. In any case, this new finding is exciting, with potentially broad applications for future medicine, and the tantalizing ability for more people to continue to live life to the fullest in older age.
We are constantly learning, every day, pretty much almost every second we are awake/alive.
This might be conflating academic studying with actual learning.
We learn names of people, we learn their stories, we learn the news and tons of other stuff that we don't even notice or realize that we are learning all the time.
My father who is 53 years of age called me up and said he’s enrolling for GeorgiaTech Web Developer boot camp. He’s a functional consultant and is pissed off at the way developers whiz past him and dominate during client conversations.
I thought there's also a selection effect at play.
People who get to be successful in life and live a good old age (you tend not to talk to or see the opposite) -- with all those years of experience behind them, they start to think that the traits and opinions that got them there are probably correct.
And that radically different or new things that they might benefit from learning, probably in their mind aren't going to be more successful (or of much potential benefit) than what worked for them already.
There's basically a full slate of things that made them successful. And that's not a bad thing! People couldn't survive so well without a sense of what good things worked for you.
But I think as you get older (unless you're exceptionally alert and open-minded), this confirmation bias of your own success starts to close your mind off to new, different thoughts and pathways. Unless you actively make it a point of erasing and making space for new ideas, you fall back on the old and don't seek out the new to fill your mind.
I know a lot of people including my dad and several of his friends who picked up music and programming after retiring from their 30 year old accounting job at the age of 62. Also many people like to term this as an exception rather than rule, but know that it is not. My observation has been that people who lack the motivation are either the ones who are constantly stressed with their job and life, or who are content with what they know.
Take some time off from work, meditate, be idle. Your mind will automatically want to do something that is productive. Most of these researches are averaged out observations which say no more about your ideal bp than I can by looking at you. So please learn all you want and please don't base your decision to learn new things based on a generic research result. And no MIT is not an authority on your life. If you really want to know your brain health, go get an fmri, but please don't let your desire to learn be dictated by what others say.
Reading all the comments about "I want to learn something deeper instead of just shinny things" (I completely agree on that) makes me think that one thing does not exclude the other.
We that are over 40 may want to stop chasing trends because is wasteful and we have learned that brings little value, but maybe also because our brains are wired to think that way.
I think that I would not notice the difference of changing what I learn because I though about it or because my though changed because underlying physical changes in the brain.
If I could take a pill and re-active the "brain circuit that is critical for maintaining this kind of motivation [for learning]" that would be awesome. I would be able to compare my reasoning before and after the pill. That's an experience that I would like to have.
Yes, I studied mathematics quite late, I didn't graduate until I was 49. If I'm being honest I was pretty sick of it by the end and just wanted to get it done.
This was quite a contrast to learning technology earlier in my life and I'm sure it says more about my age than anything else.
A surplus of curiosity kept me in college for a lot longer than I needed to be there. That curiosity never left me. I'm very sure that's true of many if not most people, in both the arts and sciences.
Maybe it's a personal thing, but I suspect strong curiosity inborn in most of us. We all had to learn a very complex language after all. Necessity may keep many from feeding it --cultural factors may also discourage it -- a crappy educational environment may foster cynicism - then maybe it goes away if it isn't nurtured. A lot of (well-known human) educational researchers came to similar conclusions.
If a study of brain circuits in rodents finds otherwise, well, rodents aren't human.
1st the people on HN are not a random sample of the population. For those in computer science, programming, and science, learning is THE job in a sense...and there is definitely evidence for use-it-or-lose it and the brain. So all the personal stories here won't tell us much about what happens to the average human as they age...and even then it will happen to us at some point.
Also, pontificating on how stressful it is for older people to be wrong without empirical evidence is rich.
Overall, the quality of HN posts about non computer/ML topics is quite poor.
Go learn to skateboard or snowboard? A pass--where would I go with that at my age? Learn something new related to computers? Your bar to clear to motivate me on that is huge (but it does occasionally clear). Go back and push my Quantum Mechanics or Solid State Physics to another layer? Nah, not without a good reason.
I’m 58, and I have spent the last three years, “retooling” myself. It’s worked out well. I’m currently well underway (alone) with one of the biggest projects I’ve ever been involved with, and I worked in pretty big teams.
I learn something new (often, multiple somethings) every day.
In fact, I seem to learn faster, and more comprehensively(understanding why, as well as what). I think that my experience helps to create a good baseline, that was missing, when I was younger.
[+] [-] ojosilva|5 years ago|reply
My mom, 75, got her degree in law 10 yrs ago being the gramma around a bunch of college teenagers. Passed the bar exam after 5 attempts and now works at a Ngo representing women in need to get pro bono divorce and custody from their wife-beating husbands.
Apparently motivation to learn increases with age in my family. I think maybe as a way to defeat death or something.
[+] [-] wwweston|5 years ago|reply
What seems to have changed is that I have less patience for, though, is learning ephemeral and arcane ways of doing something I already know how to do.
Learn to use microcontrollers? Sure! Never really dove in there, seems like an opportunity. Timeless mathematical knowledge? Totally game. Another front-end framework? Not really interested, maybe I'll wait and see if it survives 5 years and I can actually find people who can talk intelligently about the problems it solves rather than bearing thought-smell terms like "modern" as a fashionable totem.
Reserve new learning for new capabilities.
[+] [-] thanhhaimai|5 years ago|reply
I think the main reason for our love of learning is "good" boredom. When I'm bored and have nothing fun easily accessible, then learning something is very attractive. My hypothesis is that learning motivation is a function of boredom, entertainment accessibility, and stress. More boredom, more likely to learn. More entertainment available, less likely to learn. More stressed, less likely to learn.
This applies for both young and old people. Older people just tend to have more things to entertain them in life and/or more stressed.
[+] [-] tartoran|5 years ago|reply
I on the other hand, at 40 with family&child, I don’t have the same patience for just anything that comes my way. Only if something sparks my interest I manage a way to make some progress. Last year I begun a slow journey into lisp/scheme and found the same flame i had when i was a junior. With other mundane things I’ll most likely get a shallow depth of knowledge to the level needed to get my work done and if needed i do some deep dives. I used to go in depth at first but lately i found that the return on investment wasn’t too appealing.
I hope to still have the acument to learn later on in life when I have more time and fewer responsibilities
[+] [-] Natales|5 years ago|reply
Your parents show it doesn't have to be that way! Hats off to them. They're an inspiration.
[+] [-] izgzhen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blablablerg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bergstromm466|5 years ago|reply
"I was friends with one highschooler who constantly showed off his math knowledge. He much preferred to leave people (many of whom were poor) with the impression that he was superhuman, rather than proactively explaining that his father was a mathematician, his mother taught him at his Montessori grade school, and his family was very well-off..."
[+] [-] api|5 years ago|reply
These are exceptions though. Statistically most people do stop learning as they age, and from what I've observed I would tend to suspect it is due to motivational decline more than decline in actual ability (barring dementia or other issues).
[+] [-] commonturtle|5 years ago|reply
What does your dad work on exactly? When did he start programming?
I hope I'm able to age so well; I'd love to get a law / medical degree at 65 and start a whole new career in my 70s :)
[+] [-] nogabebop23|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] x87678r|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksd482|5 years ago|reply
Please share this story with a lot of people. It may inspire many to follow the same path.
[+] [-] lethologica|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] varispeed|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manmal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RickJWagner|5 years ago|reply
Please write again every few years, let us know how your folks are doing. More power to them.
[+] [-] jarbus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] renw0rp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] intrepidhero|5 years ago|reply
This study isn't about that. They've found an area of the brain in mice that seems to be related to motivation to make decisions with complex cost benefit analysis. This type of decision making is impaired when under stress, by mental health diagnosis, or, according to the study, by an aged brain. If any conclusion is worth drawing here it's the increased importance of mental health as we age.
This is not an argument for all of us to try to keep up with the shiny new language/framework/whirlwind.
[+] [-] abootstrapper|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dwd|5 years ago|reply
It's not just the increased demands on your time, but the knowledge that it's ticking away... As you get older you get more critical/anxious about wasting time and more reticent about investing in something that has no compelling return on investment.
[+] [-] sbierwagen|5 years ago|reply
Ctrl+f "explore" in the HN comments: 0 results.
The generalized disinclination to learn towards the end of your life is known as the explore-exploit tradeoff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
>In probability theory, the multi-armed bandit problem (sometimes called the K-[1] or N-armed bandit problem[2]) is a problem in which a fixed limited set of resources must be allocated between competing (alternative) choices in a way that maximizes their expected gain, when each choice's properties are only partially known at the time of allocation, and may become better understood as time passes or by allocating resources to the choice.[3][4] This is a classic reinforcement learning problem that exemplifies the exploration–exploitation tradeoff dilemma. The name comes from imagining a gambler at a row of slot machines (sometimes known as "one-armed bandits"), who has to decide which machines to play, how many times to play each machine and in which order to play them, and whether to continue with the current machine or try a different machine.[5] The multi-armed bandit problem also falls into the broad category of stochastic scheduling.
>In the problem, each machine provides a random reward from a probability distribution specific to that machine. The objective of the gambler is to maximize the sum of rewards earned through a sequence of lever pulls.[3][4] The crucial tradeoff the gambler faces at each trial is between "exploitation" of the machine that has the highest expected payoff and "exploration" to get more information about the expected payoffs of the other machines. The trade-off between exploration and exploitation is also faced in machine learning.
[+] [-] pmontra|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns
I can learn many new things for fun but I already know a lot of things I'm fond of, which one should I give away given that time is finite? I didn't know anything when I was little and much less than now when I was half my age. Furthermore there are a few things I like and I became reasonably good at, professionally or for fun. I won't give them away unless I have to.
[+] [-] rabidrat|5 years ago|reply
If there were just one new bikeprime every few years, it would be easier to settle in for the pain and benefit. But the pace of technological change is much much faster, and along with intense marketing, it seems like there are dozens of new bikeprimes every year. Many of these turn out to be mostly hype, so it's hard to know where to invest energy. And every time a supposed bikeprime turns out to be more pain than it's worth, there's a real lesson that's learned about the value of bikeprimes in general. And so we become older, more skeptical, more rigid.
I also think there is some aspect of survivorship bias in the value of "learning new skills". For every person who invested the time in learning a skill that turned out to be valuable for them overall, there are other people who spent years investing in a skill that turned out to be a dead-end.
[+] [-] dkarl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtberatwork|5 years ago|reply
Ha, that's an apt way to put it. It seems to me as well that we aren't living in the information age insomuch as we are living in the interruption age.
[+] [-] rvn1045|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randcraw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] novocaine|5 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice calls out headlines like this regularly.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] PeterStuer|5 years ago|reply
I most certainly have become more critical of what to learn. I prefer diving deep into subjects of substance rather than threading water learning the syntax of yet another niche programming language that arguably marginally improves on use case X if all the stars allign or leaning the quirks of yet another framework Y that is flavor of the month and just a rehash of a fashion of 5 years ago.
[+] [-] tayo42|5 years ago|reply
What I'm slightly worried about is being to critical and writing everything off as a waste of time. There's not a a lot of good ways to tell not learning something was a good idea or not, so you don't get feedback.
[+] [-] ghostcluster|5 years ago|reply
That they are able to administer drugs to manipulate the gradual deadening of this risk/reward learning mechanism is incredibly cool. I wonder if there is an adaptive reason for this circuitry to cool with age, and if there will be any serious unintended side effects from artificially boosting it. In any case, this new finding is exciting, with potentially broad applications for future medicine, and the tantalizing ability for more people to continue to live life to the fullest in older age.
[+] [-] ta1234567890|5 years ago|reply
This might be conflating academic studying with actual learning.
We learn names of people, we learn their stories, we learn the news and tons of other stuff that we don't even notice or realize that we are learning all the time.
[+] [-] godelmachine|5 years ago|reply
That’s my point.
[+] [-] godelmachine|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] supernova87a|5 years ago|reply
People who get to be successful in life and live a good old age (you tend not to talk to or see the opposite) -- with all those years of experience behind them, they start to think that the traits and opinions that got them there are probably correct.
And that radically different or new things that they might benefit from learning, probably in their mind aren't going to be more successful (or of much potential benefit) than what worked for them already.
There's basically a full slate of things that made them successful. And that's not a bad thing! People couldn't survive so well without a sense of what good things worked for you.
But I think as you get older (unless you're exceptionally alert and open-minded), this confirmation bias of your own success starts to close your mind off to new, different thoughts and pathways. Unless you actively make it a point of erasing and making space for new ideas, you fall back on the old and don't seek out the new to fill your mind.
[+] [-] johnnujler|5 years ago|reply
Take some time off from work, meditate, be idle. Your mind will automatically want to do something that is productive. Most of these researches are averaged out observations which say no more about your ideal bp than I can by looking at you. So please learn all you want and please don't base your decision to learn new things based on a generic research result. And no MIT is not an authority on your life. If you really want to know your brain health, go get an fmri, but please don't let your desire to learn be dictated by what others say.
[+] [-] Hokusai|5 years ago|reply
We that are over 40 may want to stop chasing trends because is wasteful and we have learned that brings little value, but maybe also because our brains are wired to think that way.
I think that I would not notice the difference of changing what I learn because I though about it or because my though changed because underlying physical changes in the brain.
If I could take a pill and re-active the "brain circuit that is critical for maintaining this kind of motivation [for learning]" that would be awesome. I would be able to compare my reasoning before and after the pill. That's an experience that I would like to have.
[+] [-] rootusrootus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|5 years ago|reply
This was quite a contrast to learning technology earlier in my life and I'm sure it says more about my age than anything else.
[+] [-] vmception|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|5 years ago|reply
Maybe it's a personal thing, but I suspect strong curiosity inborn in most of us. We all had to learn a very complex language after all. Necessity may keep many from feeding it --cultural factors may also discourage it -- a crappy educational environment may foster cynicism - then maybe it goes away if it isn't nurtured. A lot of (well-known human) educational researchers came to similar conclusions.
If a study of brain circuits in rodents finds otherwise, well, rodents aren't human.
[+] [-] SubiculumCode|5 years ago|reply
Also, pontificating on how stressful it is for older people to be wrong without empirical evidence is rich.
Overall, the quality of HN posts about non computer/ML topics is quite poor.
[+] [-] taffronaut|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsder|5 years ago|reply
Learn another foreign langauge? Sure, why not. Learn machining? Sure, why not.
Go learn to skateboard or snowboard? A pass--where would I go with that at my age? Learn something new related to computers? Your bar to clear to motivate me on that is huge (but it does occasionally clear). Go back and push my Quantum Mechanics or Solid State Physics to another layer? Nah, not without a good reason.
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|5 years ago|reply
I learn something new (often, multiple somethings) every day.
In fact, I seem to learn faster, and more comprehensively(understanding why, as well as what). I think that my experience helps to create a good baseline, that was missing, when I was younger.