Peter_de_Blanc comments on The Litany Against Gurus - Less Wrong

23 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 18 December 2007 08:11PM

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Comment author: Peter_de_Blanc 20 December 2007 05:43:41AM 1 point [-]

Chris:

I'd agree that mathematicians probably peak somewhere around 40. I can see two things contributing to the subsequent decline: mental degeneration, and an increasingly irrelevant skill set; if your specialty is narrow enough, you may have solved all the easy problems in your microfield. I expect life extension technologies to fix the former problem. For the latter problem, Feynman recommends changing fields every 7 years. Of course, he's Feynman; maybe 10 years is better for us ordinary folks.