= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
SarahC comments on How to Be Happy - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (201)
Actually, I'm starting to suspect it is. (Well, not literally "just", of course.)
My current theory is that people who do great work in their 20s don't do so later mainly because: (1) their status is already secure, and they don't have to work as hard to maintain it; and (2) continuing to work on the highest level would require them to study the ideas of (and thereby subordinate themselves to) lower-status younger folk.
This theory came to me when I observed that some older academics appeared to have lost their intellectual curiosity, not just their physical stamina (or whatever variable people think it is that causes the [alleged] phenomenon).
That said, my comment was actually about why we don't see people do great work later after failing to do so in their 20s, not why we do see people who do great work in their 20s fail to do so later. The point was that, after some had done great work early, having-done-great-work-early became a coveted, even necessary, status signal.
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.