Saturday, September 21, 2013

Middle Aged Breakthroughs & Taller Giants

Part of Malcolm Gladwell's '10,000 hours theory' was to say that even the very young who had achieved world class performance had typically worked very hard. I have never liked the fatalistic belief that if you haven't done something by a certain age you never will, so the theory appeals to me.

Though I haven't looked into it deeply, and many medically educated people who I know have (and disagree with me), I don't agree that someone can't learn to speak a language fluently as an adult as easily as a child. My contention is that it is simply a matter of time and distraction. Pit me against a 5 year old or a 10 year old, remove any other of my responsibilities and I will kick their ass (Not literally, I am very much against child violence).

Now this is interesting - in 'Average is Over', Tyler Cowen shows how the average age of Nobel Prize winners is increasing. In 1905, the typical winner in Physics made the breakthrough at age 37, but by 1985 the average age was 50. Science is getting more complex, to the point where it takes groups of people to validate new proofs because no one person understands the whole proof. It also takes longer to 'climb onto the shoulders of Giants' because the Giants are taller. I like this partly because young whippersnappers who do particularly well can sometimes be (unintentionally) discouraging to other people who are interested in a particular field - perhaps they give up earlier than they should have.

Science also become more of a collaborative exercise. It becomes harder/impossible to understand everything. You have to become content with understanding your bit, and that bit becomes smaller and takes longer to reach the more we learn.

Still... Exciting times.

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