= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
David_Gerard comments on [LINK] Freeman Dyson reviews "Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything" - 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
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (19)
Crankery in old age is really sad. (And, weirdly enough, the topic of the latest SMBC strip.) I've wondered sometimes about why this happens; it seems to correlate with age but not young or middle age, so I discard the default hypothesis that a false idea finally got lucky and slipped through one's memetic defenses (since that feels like more of a Poisson distribution).
As you age, your general intelligence takes a real beating but your personality traits like Openness don't change so much (and great scientists will tend to be very Open). Openness and low IQ is also correlated with being New Agey crap and that sort of thing (IIRC, citations in Miller's Spent), and these bizarre false theories do seem New Agey in some respects ('it's all, like, circles of energy man!').
Could this be the problem? When you're young and sharp, you can keenly examine new theories and ideas, although you have the handicap of being ignorant and not having spent much time on matters; so your productivity rises in your middle age to your early 40s; but by that point, your raw intelligence has become blunt and dull, and your knowledge may be increasingly out of date, while your interest in new ideas remains the same. So you continue to seek out or look at new ideas, while you are no longer able to evaluate them.
So to test this we'd want to test the following:
Check the New Age <-> high Openness/low IQ correlation
(If it doesn't hold true in unscientifically capable or trained populations, why would it hold true for old eminent scientists?)
Test that 'weird and false ideas' do disproportionately pop up in old age
(as opposed to being adopted as impressionable grad students but only worked on & espoused in the leisure of old age/tenure/retirement, or following some 'lightning strike' model, due to say the simultaneous occurrence of emotional trauma and a meme impression)
That their rate does correlate with being Open
(If there is no such correlation, it may be that the entire effect would be IQ-related.)
That their rate does inversely correlate with IQ at that time, ideally, at the instant they accepted the false idea
(If it turned out the acceptors of false ideas had most of their IQ intact, and the more conventional ones were stupid, this would be rather odd.)
BTW, it's nice to see that Dyson is 88 and still sharp enough to write this well.
Doesn't mean too much; Dyson started off with a lot of raw ability, obviously, and if you look at the graphs, things like vocabulary or facts are the categories that decline very little or actually increase with age. I don't believe Dyson is inventing any new ideas in his writing, and the ones I hear about like geoengineering tend to be controversial and possible things that he would one day regret espousing.