I’ve looked because it’s an interesting modesty argument: if older people reliably are more conservative and have more information, on what grounds do you not immediately become conservative yourself? (And variations thereof.)
Has anyone looked systematically at what projected older versions of themselves would think, based on what relevant groups of existing older folks think?...My dim recollection of studies is that on the whole as people age they tend to be less idealistic, more resigned to society the way it is rather than how it might be, and more constrained by realities of politics and economics (for starters).
There’s an obvious confound: the aging itself induces negative changes. ‘resigned’ can just be a synonym for ‘tired’ or ‘lacking in energy’. Aging also introduces many other negatives—your intelligence takes massive hits: http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ#aging I’m 24, so compared to my 60 year old, I’m something like 1.5-2 standard deviations smarter (disclaimers: average, z-scores over general population, I hope to do better, etc.).
My IQ is somewhere in the 130s, and a standard deviation is usually something like 12-15 points, so taking advice from my future self would be like taking advice from a normal 100 IQ person now! I don’t pay terribly much attention to what such people say… I’d still pay a lot of attention to any message from the future because my future dim elderly self has all the fruits of my higher IQ periods to draw on, but this observation is enough to largely eliminate the interest of contemporary averages.
Also interesting is politics; here the confound is simply that the 19th-20th centuries have seen widespread partisan shifts in particular directions, which means age will correlate strongly with politics unless people are completely spineless. Here the evidence favors me not shifting my liberal libertarian beliefs, because that’s the tendency of old people in general—to shift to be more liberal than their cohort began as: http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ#fn85
(This could just reflect pressure to conform by all the younger cohorts—but if you’re willing to make excuses like that, the majoritarian/modesty argument goes right out the window in general!)
My IQ is somewhere in the 130s, and a standard deviation is usually something like 12-15 points, so taking advice from my future self would be like taking advice from a normal 100 IQ person now! I don’t pay terribly much attention to what such people say… I’d still pay a lot of attention to any message from the future because my future dim elderly self has all the fruits of my higher IQ periods to draw on, but this observation is enough to largely eliminate the interest of contemporary averages.
My suggestion wasn’t that older people would be smarter or think more clearly, or even have access to some fount of wisdom that the young don’t have. It was that their values and preferences change. To take a made-up example (though more plausible than some I could think of), suppose that 95% of 60-year-olds say that they seriously regret having had any body piercings. If you at 25 are considering a body piercing, you might do your utility calculation figuring your enjoyment of it now on the plus side, and then subtracting your expected displeasure with it as you get older. This could conceivably come in to play on such questions as whether to spend those extra 2 years finishing your Ph.D. too.
Suppose 60% of practicing lawyers are miserable (because most practice of law is miserable). Bob the idealist is considering law school and expects that he will be happy practicing law. Then he learns the unhappiness rate and adjusts his expectation downward.
Is it more clear to say that Bob learned from an older cohort, or simply that Bob learned more about what the practice of law is like?
(Example changed because the piercing example equivocates possible mistakes by 16-year-olds and 25-year-olds in the 95% figure)
You can distinguish the two. Older folks can learn from younger ones based on specific experience. Consider: Bob might be considering law school as a career change at 40 and learn from a 30-year-old who started the practice of law at 25 that it was not fun.
You can certainly imagine that age itself, or things that strongly correlate with age, could bring a different perspective. Another trivial sort of example: you decide at 50 that you want to buy a home where you’ll never have to move again, and you are considering a condo that’s on the 4th floor with no elevator. The wisdom of 80-year-olds might say that’s unwise.
The point, of course, is to investigate to find less obvious examples—if any.
For some young people, there might be some discomfort in admitting this as a relevant source of data about how to live life.
The example I’ve read about of whether to finish your Ph.D. could even be relevant here. If someone did a survey showing that 75% of old folks who dropped out of Ph.D. programs wished they’d finished them, would that be relevant? It certainly wouldn’t decide the issue, but I think it would be a factor. And you’d have to factor in or out various cognitive biases.
(I was in exactly that position myself, and decided to finish the Ph.D. It made sense in my case because I didn’t have a burning passion to get on the next thing in life (nor did I know what that would be). But I was correct that I would never directly need it.).
(Example changed because the piercing example equivocates possible mistakes by 16-year-olds and 25-year-olds in the 95% figure)
You meant “equates” instead of “equivocates”? Even with that change I’m not sure quite what you mean. Maybe not that important.
For some young people, there might be some discomfort in admitting this as a relevant source of data about how to live life.
I definitely endorse this. It just wasn’t a problem for me and I was generalizing from one example when I shouldn’t.
Example changed because the piercing example equivocates possible mistakes by 16-year-olds and 25-year-olds in the 95% figure)
You meant “equates” instead of “equivocates”? Even with that change I’m not sure quite what you mean. Maybe not that important.
In terms of how likely a decision is to be regretted, there’s an obvious difference between decisions by a 16 year old and decisions by a 25 year old. Learning that 95% of 60-year-olds regret body piercing doesn’t tell us about the difference we care about (decisions by the 25-year-old) because the majority of piercing decisions are made by those (teenagers) we expect would regret just about any major decision. The argument is weaker because the statistic doesn’t show what you assert it shows.
Also interesting is politics; here the confound is simply that the 19th-20th centuries have seen widespread partisan shifts in particular directions, which means age will correlate strongly with politics unless people are completely spineless.
I strongly suspect that this effect utterly swamps any other effect. Although I’m less confident of this assertion than I was before looking at the study you cited.
Even if attitudes move towards mainstream among older cohorts faster than among younger cohorts, I get the impression that the mainstream is moving faster than the attitude change. A difference between first and second derivatives of attitude? Or am I still relying on stereotype?
There’s an obvious confound: the aging itself induces negative changes. ‘resigned’ can just be a synonym for ‘tired’ or ‘lacking in energy’.
In this context, I always think of this quote, and test any “mature wisdom” that i hear (or find myself about to say) against it. (I’m almost the same age as Bart119.)
I’ve looked because it’s an interesting modesty argument: if older people reliably are more conservative and have more information, on what grounds do you not immediately become conservative yourself? (And variations thereof.)
There’s an obvious confound: the aging itself induces negative changes. ‘resigned’ can just be a synonym for ‘tired’ or ‘lacking in energy’. Aging also introduces many other negatives—your intelligence takes massive hits: http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ#aging I’m 24, so compared to my 60 year old, I’m something like 1.5-2 standard deviations smarter (disclaimers: average, z-scores over general population, I hope to do better, etc.).
My IQ is somewhere in the 130s, and a standard deviation is usually something like 12-15 points, so taking advice from my future self would be like taking advice from a normal 100 IQ person now! I don’t pay terribly much attention to what such people say… I’d still pay a lot of attention to any message from the future because my future dim elderly self has all the fruits of my higher IQ periods to draw on, but this observation is enough to largely eliminate the interest of contemporary averages.
Also interesting is politics; here the confound is simply that the 19th-20th centuries have seen widespread partisan shifts in particular directions, which means age will correlate strongly with politics unless people are completely spineless. Here the evidence favors me not shifting my liberal libertarian beliefs, because that’s the tendency of old people in general—to shift to be more liberal than their cohort began as: http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ#fn85
(This could just reflect pressure to conform by all the younger cohorts—but if you’re willing to make excuses like that, the majoritarian/modesty argument goes right out the window in general!)
My suggestion wasn’t that older people would be smarter or think more clearly, or even have access to some fount of wisdom that the young don’t have. It was that their values and preferences change. To take a made-up example (though more plausible than some I could think of), suppose that 95% of 60-year-olds say that they seriously regret having had any body piercings. If you at 25 are considering a body piercing, you might do your utility calculation figuring your enjoyment of it now on the plus side, and then subtracting your expected displeasure with it as you get older. This could conceivably come in to play on such questions as whether to spend those extra 2 years finishing your Ph.D. too.
Suppose 60% of practicing lawyers are miserable (because most practice of law is miserable). Bob the idealist is considering law school and expects that he will be happy practicing law. Then he learns the unhappiness rate and adjusts his expectation downward.
Is it more clear to say that Bob learned from an older cohort, or simply that Bob learned more about what the practice of law is like?
(Example changed because the piercing example equivocates possible mistakes by 16-year-olds and 25-year-olds in the 95% figure)
You can distinguish the two. Older folks can learn from younger ones based on specific experience. Consider: Bob might be considering law school as a career change at 40 and learn from a 30-year-old who started the practice of law at 25 that it was not fun.
You can certainly imagine that age itself, or things that strongly correlate with age, could bring a different perspective. Another trivial sort of example: you decide at 50 that you want to buy a home where you’ll never have to move again, and you are considering a condo that’s on the 4th floor with no elevator. The wisdom of 80-year-olds might say that’s unwise.
The point, of course, is to investigate to find less obvious examples—if any.
For some young people, there might be some discomfort in admitting this as a relevant source of data about how to live life.
The example I’ve read about of whether to finish your Ph.D. could even be relevant here. If someone did a survey showing that 75% of old folks who dropped out of Ph.D. programs wished they’d finished them, would that be relevant? It certainly wouldn’t decide the issue, but I think it would be a factor. And you’d have to factor in or out various cognitive biases.
(I was in exactly that position myself, and decided to finish the Ph.D. It made sense in my case because I didn’t have a burning passion to get on the next thing in life (nor did I know what that would be). But I was correct that I would never directly need it.).
You meant “equates” instead of “equivocates”? Even with that change I’m not sure quite what you mean. Maybe not that important.
The trouble with deciding whether to finish a Ph.D. is that the world changes. The value of a Ph.D. might be a good bit higher or lower in 50 years.
I definitely endorse this. It just wasn’t a problem for me and I was generalizing from one example when I shouldn’t.
In terms of how likely a decision is to be regretted, there’s an obvious difference between decisions by a 16 year old and decisions by a 25 year old. Learning that 95% of 60-year-olds regret body piercing doesn’t tell us about the difference we care about (decisions by the 25-year-old) because the majority of piercing decisions are made by those (teenagers) we expect would regret just about any major decision. The argument is weaker because the statistic doesn’t show what you assert it shows.
I strongly suspect that this effect utterly swamps any other effect. Although I’m less confident of this assertion than I was before looking at the study you cited.
Even if attitudes move towards mainstream among older cohorts faster than among younger cohorts, I get the impression that the mainstream is moving faster than the attitude change. A difference between first and second derivatives of attitude? Or am I still relying on stereotype?
Yes. The old people are still conservative-er, although they’ve moved a lot towards the younger cohorts’ attitudes.
Or positions can shift, on the scale of decades, due to arguments that actually make sense, even in normal people.
Radical notion, I know.
In this context, I always think of this quote, and test any “mature wisdom” that i hear (or find myself about to say) against it. (I’m almost the same age as Bart119.)
Upvoted for two reasons: links to interesting data sets, and discussing the stated topic rather than the ending example.
Or willing to update?
One man’s update is another man’s groupthink. Regardless, unless people are completely malleable in their opinions, age will correlate with politics.