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SarahC comments on How to Be Happy - Less Wrong
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I think you can explain almost all of this by the fact that within the rules of academia, middle-aged professors do MUCH more administration, grant-writing, editorial work, and "management" in general than people in their 20's and early 30's. The scientific world appears to need management, and we've decided to allocate the management work by age/seniority. My experience with senior professors is not that they've gotten too dim or lazy to do research (ha!) but that they wish they had more time to devote to research.
That's the standard explanation (at least among people who don't buy the traditional magical theory of youth), and was my previous theory.
Actually, really, they're theories of different phenomena. People who don't do as much research simply because they're busy administrating aren't really "declining with age"; they just literally aren't spending as much time. The hypothesis I presented above was an attempt to explain the nature of specifically-age-related (but non-medical) intellectual decline, such as it exists.
The two cases can be distinguished by observing whether the senior professors return to pre-administration levels of productivity after they become emeriti.