I note that the date on the tweet is June 28, the day after the Trump-Biden debate. It mentions the office of President and concludes with arguments in favor of having an 80-year-old president with no serious arguments against.
I give 95% odds the tweet was causally downstream of the debate: either directly inspired, or a result of arguing with people about old age and cognitive decline, for whom the subject came up because of the debate.
I’m not entirely sure if, or how, it was meant to be a comment on the debate. It could be that he wanted to downplay any perceived downsides to having his favored candidate as president. It could be that the topic was in the air and he had a take and wrote it up. (It is in-character for him to double down on his contrarian take, expressing doubts about an entire field of research in the process—for all that he’s said about “used to be extremely confident”. [To be sure, his criticisms are often valid, but going from “here are valid criticisms of his opponents” to “the opposite of what his opponents believe is the truth”, or “you should throw out everything you thought you believed and just listen to the arguments he’s making”, is a risky leap.]) Who knows.
On the subject itself, he mentions slow memory recall, but not faulty memory, nor dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and so on. Those are real and substantial problems. Perhaps a more rigorous thesis would be “Old people who are not affected by dementia, Alzheimer’s, etc., including any subclinical levels thereof, can be intellectually very strong”, and one can think of examples bearing this out. However, it’s also true that the background probability of an 80-year-old having one or more of these issues is fairly high.
I note that the date on the tweet is June 28, the day after the Trump-Biden debate. It mentions the office of President and concludes with arguments in favor of having an 80-year-old president with no serious arguments against.
I give 95% odds the tweet was causally downstream of the debate: either directly inspired, or a result of arguing with people about old age and cognitive decline, for whom the subject came up because of the debate.
I’m not entirely sure if, or how, it was meant to be a comment on the debate. It could be that he wanted to downplay any perceived downsides to having his favored candidate as president. It could be that the topic was in the air and he had a take and wrote it up. (It is in-character for him to double down on his contrarian take, expressing doubts about an entire field of research in the process—for all that he’s said about “used to be extremely confident”. [To be sure, his criticisms are often valid, but going from “here are valid criticisms of his opponents” to “the opposite of what his opponents believe is the truth”, or “you should throw out everything you thought you believed and just listen to the arguments he’s making”, is a risky leap.]) Who knows.
On the subject itself, he mentions slow memory recall, but not faulty memory, nor dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and so on. Those are real and substantial problems. Perhaps a more rigorous thesis would be “Old people who are not affected by dementia, Alzheimer’s, etc., including any subclinical levels thereof, can be intellectually very strong”, and one can think of examples bearing this out. However, it’s also true that the background probability of an 80-year-old having one or more of these issues is fairly high.