As researchers age, they produce less disruptive work
nautil.us74 points by Brajeshwar 17 hours ago
74 points by Brajeshwar 17 hours ago
I prefer the full quote by Douglas Adams.
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
Feel the third so much with LLM's. But I get the sense younger generations aren't a fan of where it's moving the world either.
Folks! This is a quip from a novelist! Take it with a grain of salt. It has to be punchy, not accurate.
This comment helped to kick my "but but but!" instinct to the curb, haha. Thanks :)
I don't know about number 3. As a 53 year old Gen X'er, I still haven't come across things that see against the natural order. The main things I don't understand are things like the Humane AI pin, which didn't seem against the natural order, I just didn't see the appeal or usefulness of it. Maybe it just doesn't seem like there is much new being invented.
I am GenX and also an avowed fan of Douglas Adams and that quote.
I have to say that recently I’ve been coming to the opinion that making it pointless to perfect the craft of producing music and art is against the natural order of things.
I know I’m just old and the kids will figure out a way to bend and warp the new tools but I don’t think it’s for me any more.
A lot of boomers thinks windmills are against the natural order and will end the world.
Also solar parks are just the most ugly thing in the world. They must be banned.
A lot of younger people think that building of solar power and wind power in the past years caused decrease of global CO2 emissions. In reality, global CO2 emissions have been increasing each year.
The per region and per capita graphs do tell something you might want to consider.
My experience is that some people (of all generations) react really strongly against anything that involves birth and family.
IVF, gamete donation, surrogacy, gay families, various experiments with human embryos or artificial wombs, much or all of this is banned in many countries of the world mostly due to the "ick" factor. The smarter opponents tend to decorate their objections in the "we must be very, very careful" cloak, but if you dig deeper, you will find that it is indeed just a cloak in many cases and that the underlying root cause is "ick, this is against nature", and "really careful" means "erect impossibly high barriers by law".
This even isn't subject to polarization and seems to be shared across the political board.
I think that if the pattern exists, it is strongly muted for GenX because everything we are seeing (and more) was virtually promised to be here “any day now” during the hay day of science fiction media. If anything, 2026 in the real world isn’t futuristic enough compared to what was “supposed” to have happened by now.
>hay day of science fiction media
I played Shadowrun. I am both disappointed but mostly glad it is not happening according to that game universe history! I do want cool cybereyes though...
> I still haven't come across things that see against the natural order.
So many people these days spend hours watching short-form videos spray endlessly from a screen while they stare dumbly at it. They aren't even picking which videos to watch, just letting the algorithm do it.
Every time I see someone doing that, I just absolutely cannot relate to what's going on in their head at all. I'm certainly not above watching some YouTube, but the complete mindlessness of it, they watch it goes on forever, and the utter stupidity of the videos. I feel like I'm watching zombies in an opium den.
But billions of people are doing that shit every day, so what do I know?
> So many people these days spend hours watching short-form videos spray endlessly from a screen while they stare dumbly at it. They aren't even picking which videos to watch, just letting the algorithm do it.
This is how TV broadcasts also work, though. You could even argue there's an algorithm behind TV broadcasts too - it's just a kinda poor human-run algorithm trying to maximize viewer numbers.
Unlike many people, I still often watch TV broadcasts to relax for exactly this reason - there's no decision fatigue since I don't need to choose what to watch. Usually there's only one channel with something that's even remotely interesting and it's kind of an obvious choice.
With the (somehow sadly) added value that the TV broadcast algorithm is kinda known by everyone (morning programs, prime time etc), and that if there wasn't nothing interesting to watch, we would just do something else.
I don't want to defend short-form video feeds too much, but "They aren't even picking which videos to watch" is overstating it. Essentially nobody behaves like: watch 100% of a video, swipe, watch 100%, swipe. The expected behavior is that you swipe away if you're not interested, which is often done within a fraction of a second. Accordingly, Tiktok's content selection algorithm heavily weighs watch time as a signal of interest in related content. That actually can create a bit of a perverse incentive; if you linger on a video long enough to report it (as in for a TOS violation) or to click the "show less like this", it can lead to being shown more videos like that.
In many ways, TikTok is kinda like channel surfing. Watch a few seconds, next channel, watch a few seconds, next channel, oh this is interesting, sure I'll watch a "How It's Made" marathon.
> In many ways, TikTok is kinda like channel surfing.
I've been making the same comparison as well. As someone not watching the videos yet still hear the videos being played, the constant switching is very noticeable much like being the one in the room that didn't have the clicker in their hand. You're not in control of the constant switching which I think makes it even that much more annoying.
Rather than just parking on the marathon, choosing to turn it off and do something else entirely is still my preferred "old man yells at clouds" option.
>They aren't even picking which videos to watch, just letting the algorithm do it.
As a teenager, I used to torrent content I liked and scoff at my parents generation for letting tv feed then slop :)
It's hard to understand why TikTok is addictive from the outside, precisely because if you look at the app over someone's shoulder you'll see their tailored content, not yours.
Give the algorithm a couple weeks and it WILL find the weird thing that gets you to check. Maybe you find someone restoring books relaxing, or like toy commercials from where you were a kid, or are attentive on news of potential pandemics out of fear. It will learn.
This feels apt in more than just science/technology. It matches my experience with culture as well, e.g. music and movies.
It's way more apt with culture than with science or technology.
The lack of patience from adults for learning the byzantine interfaces companies were making in the last quarter of the 20th century got generalized to a ridiculous degree.
I knew I was officially old when I had to start trying to decipher what a teen was saying to me. All of the words were spoken in the language I speak, all of the words were heard by me, but their use of those words were not a use I was familiar.
It's even worse when you live in a small country with high amount of immigration. Half of the new words are borrowed from other languages or internet memes and there's no way to decipher their meaning without looking it up.
I feel like many younger people still listen to music from the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s etc, as an exception (?)
That's in the rule - for them it's "just a natural part of the way the world works".
I'm not sure this is true?
3. is more like this: You've been through 2. so many times now that it is hard to get excited about new things anymore.
Enough time has passed that some of the things you've been excited for have failed or had negative consequences. You'll stick to the things that worked in 2. and are skeptical of things that have yet to prove themselves.
In your 3., things from 2. are accepted unconditionally despite failures, making 3. inherently irrational.
I disagree with
> 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
> 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
> 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
My experience is rather that early in your life you get "imprinted" with specific values, and then you judge technology by how it fits these values:
For example, I was "imprinted" against surveillance since I was born in West Germany, and people were telling me what evil surveillance stuff the Stasi does in "the other Germany (GDR)". Also I deeply detested authorities (I was likely born this way), and thus got attracted to hacking.
Thus, for example:
I already heard about the internet early in my life (from magazines) - say, when I was 8 years old - but I actually saw how people organized stuff "offline" against what I would consider "how the world naturally works" (believe it or not).
Smartphones were invented when I was between 15 and 35, but I immediately saw them as surveillance bugs. The same holds for the advent of social networks.
On the other hand, 3D printing got mainstreamed later than when I was 35, but I immediately got in love with it, and couldn't wait the day until 3D printing got more reliable and I earned enough money to get a 3D printer, since 3D printers fit my values very well.
So, in my experience it is typically not about the year when something was invented, but rather about whether the invention is a good or bad fit for the values that you were shaped with in your early life.
I feel this more and more as I age. Especially after having children.
I used to be a "tech guy" (like most people here probably) and was excited about new technology. Now my main feeling when something disruptive (like AI currently) comes up is: "why the hell do people need to rock the boat".
The thing is, I'm perfectly happy living my life as I have been living so far, concentrating on doing stuff with my children and having fun. When the world changes, stuff I need to worry about it: is this going to affect my job in the future? What is the long term effect of exposing my children to this? Is the stuff I teach my children going to be relevant in the future after this disruption has happened?
I don't want to be forced to learn new stuff. I mean, I can learn new stuff occasionally for fun, but it's not fun if my life and salary depends on it. Fuck the tech bros trying to change everything up.
As for 3, I think by the time you're in that age bracket, you've seen enough to not be fooled as much by the marketing so that a sale from a brochure alone is much less likely. Take the crypto fad as an example. To me, it was obvious that the "good" use would be limited and by far exceeded by the "bad" use. Current AI hype train is leading me in the same direction as nothing has quite lived up to what's printed on the tin. It just has that same icky pump&dump feel. At least AI has a some products that have a wider range of use than crypto
It seems obvious to me that younger people are more predisposed towards building their reputation (and taking some serious risk to do so) and older people are more predisposed towards maintaining what they've built. This feels like a pretty standard evolutionary psychology approach. It's not as if no one can disrupt in their older years, but in general people get more cautious as they get older. They're less interested in offending and upsetting, and less prone to intentionally diving into the most divisive topics.
I am not disagreeing, but is a possible additional factor that younger, more naive, people just don't have what is and isn't possible so deeply ingrained in their minds?
The disruptive part of the startup ecosystem kinda runs on that, right?
Einstein spent his later career trying to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics. He failed. So has everyone after him. It's not about Einstein being old. It's that it's a really hard problem.
TFA also refers to just Einstein's 1905 papers. He published general relativity 10 years later. And after GE he contributed e.g. stimulated emission, Bose-Einstein statistics, Einstein-de Sitter cosmological model and the EPR paradox, among lots of other stuff.
Also the claim "toward the tail end of Einstein’s life, he argued strenuously against the concepts undergirding the emerging field of quantum mechanics" downplays that Einstein was pivotal in emerging the field in the first place.
Yes and being 'opposed' to QM contributed to expose the 'spooky action at distance' that QM implies, which is very important.. It's a pity that experimentators were able to demonstrate it only a long time after Einstein's death, what would have been his reaction??
"downplays that Einstein was pivotal in emerging the field in the first place."
Indeed, its a pretty easy case to make the Einstein has more to do with QM as it currently exists than Bohr does. The major interesting work on QM after the 1960s or so is entirely dependent upon Einstein's work on QM and locality. The entire narrative in fact comes from Bohr's hissy fit after Einstein pointed out that QM is non-local and that seems very wrong.
Seeing what came later with gauge theories and more speculative stuff like loop quantum gravity, you can't blame Einstein for thinking that the theory of everything might take the form of a set of field equations for a connection. Math was just too hard, and the answer probably doesn't look like that after all.
It should be pointed out that the math of spinning black holes which Einstein needed to reconcile GR and QM wasn't discovered/invented until the 1980s. And we still haven't really checked to see if he was on to something. A big part of this is that the young have the energy to spread their ideas. The old often don't. That has as much to do with these things as being right or "on to something".
Not a physicist, so this may be a dumb question… but do we even know for sure it’s a problem with a solution?
Not a physicist either but my understanding is that is that if you believe that we can discover all the laws of physics that explain how the world operates then it needs to have a solution.
Like we have formulas describing how gravity works. We can test these formulas by observing the motion of the planets and galaxies. Is this theory true? There's lots of evidence for it so it feels like it's gotta be pretty close to "the truth"
We also have formulas describing how elementary particles behave. These formulas have been tested to a very high degree of precision so it seems they've got to be close to the truth as well. But if you use both our formulas for gravitation and formulas for elementary particles you can derive a contradiction. So these two theories cannot simultaneously be true. There's got to be something wrong with them.
I suppose there's the possibility that at a certain point nature simply doesn't follow any laws and you can't possibly make sense of it.
According to Sabine Hossefelder, there's no scientific basis to expect that a theory of everything exists (if I remember correctly this blog post) [1]. But I also have to say that, while I do find interesting what she talks about and I agree with her about some problems in academia she often complains about, for this very reason some other physicists don't like her and say she's wrong. But my understanding is that she still gets the Physics and Math parts right, it is her complaints about academia that some academics strongly disagree with.
[1] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/07/do-we-need-theory-...
Well, the universe does something with extremely small but extremely heavy objects, unless you think that merely creating that situation will cause the universe to cease to exist.
You don’t even need that to understand the tension between QM and GR:
What is the gravitational field of a particle in a superposition of two different locations? What about when the superposition collapses? Does the gravity field instantly change shape, faster than light?
The consensus right now is this is so hard to measure we’ll basically never know the answer from just observations. Maybe having a gravitational influence on something at all, collapses the superposition? Maybe if you put the particles in a large enough configuration it’s impossible to maintain superposition? Maybe there’s enough background noise in our particular universe to make such a measurement permanently impossible, and we get by on a technicality? Nobody knows.
> What is the gravitational field of a particle in a superposition of two different locations? What about when the superposition collapses? Does the gravity field instantly change shape, faster than light?
This is a symptom of the problem of gravity/spacetime being a handled as a classical field, not really the problem itself. The electromagnetic field for example has this exact same problem, but it's handled by the electromagnetic field being quantized. The problem is that nobody is able to fully quantize gravity.
Not all interpretations of QM have collapses, which tend to be underdescribed even in purely QM terms.
Now consider that the density of an atomic nucleus is oddly similar to the density of a black hole. And this was the path Einstein was following. Too bad you need computers to study it because of all the differential equations.
Well nature follows general relativity and quantum mechanics so presumably they can co-exist. We just don't have a mathematically consistent theory as to how.
So we do know that all the tiny interactions like charge of particles etc must work side by side with all the big interactions like gravity as otherwise how would anything as we know it work. However it could as easily be neither are the right way to interpret the world and there is something we are missing, or we are right and we can find a method to combine the theory of the big and the small interactions but we are missing a section. At the end of the day we can't interact in any meaningful way with more than half the matter in the universe (it's proven to exist due to a gravitational pull), so it's clear we can't experience a lot of the universe and we definitely can't explain a lot.
So yes there is a solution, but do we, as humans, have the ability to come up with it, who knows. I would say it's unlikely.
This is my understanding as well. What the article described has been cannon for almost a century, but it may not be an accurate representation, and we still don't have the answers to address Einsteins' concerns.
(Article quote in question: "But toward the tail end of Einstein’s life, he argued strenuously against the concepts undergirding the emerging field of quantum mechanics, the ideas that are shaking up physics yet again and may lay bare even more of our universe’s mysteries.")
>>> It was the Nobel laureate and quantum physicist Max Planck who wrote that “science advances one funeral at a time” (which is actually a somewhat artful translation of his original statement, in German) about revered gatekeepers and their nostalgia for insights past that keep leaps in scientific understanding from happening. Turns out, he may have been right.
Or he may have been wrong. I think it was Paul Feyerabend who showed that most paradigms (yes, including that one) of how science works are falsified by counterexamples in scientific history and practice.
We love to make a discovery seem like a triumph against evil and obstruction, and sometimes it happens, but sometimes it's just a discovery.
Disclosure: Old scientist.
A sufficiently obstinate person in a position of power can block any progress in a certain direction for a long, long time.
Ancel Keys is known for really hating the "sugar is problematic" theory and sinking careers of younger nutritional scientists who dared touch it for decades.
Sen. Richard Shelby was a huge hater of the "orbital fuel depot" concept and it only started being developed further once he retired and didn't hold sway over the American cosmic sector anymore.
Surely we want impact to be seen in our lives and not after our funeral. In such a case it is easier to think about huge things in the first part of the career as attainable, but later in life you might have 15 years left for which you will optimize your chosen battle to be able to see it to fruition.
They hit the nail on the head in the first paragraph.
Older people have influence, power, control to direct where resources are allocated.
No 25yo scientists has the werewithal or experience to challenge that until later in life.
It’s kind of like asking why old people have all the assets.
I found Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" helpful on this topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
I was shocked that the article did not mention Kuhn as the source for the two paradigms. Has he been forgotten already?
And of course if you haven't read that book, it's insightful and easy
It’s almost like a corollary to the Douglas Adam’s principle referred to in the article - if there’s a theory about social behavior formulated before you’re born, it’s fair game to reformulate it.
As much as I enjoy DA, Kuhn takes it a little further- it's almost like folks live in completely different worlds because the worlds are made up of fundamentally different basic parts...
> Even the greatest minds, such as Einstein, transitioned from disruptor to gatekeeper when quantum mechanics threatened his nostalgic view of the universe
Just watch Veritasium[1] take on this claim. Eistein claimed that QM in Copenhagen interpretation is non-local. Bohr claimed he proved Einstein wrong. And then came Bell and ruled out local hidden variables, proving the QM is non-local, at least in Copenhagen interpretation. Pity neither Einstein nor Bohr lived to that moment, so we can't know what they would say on that.
But in any case Einstein was right all the time.
Author must not have heard of Nobel Disease - many laureates go on to propose absolutely batshit insane theories. Sounds disruptive to me…
They’re usually outside their field of expertise, though.
It’s like being a billionaire; you stop getting “no, that’s stupid” feedback and it rots your brain.
This happens in lots of different fields. I feel like people need to start developing pseudonyms when they achieve success, so that they still get feedback. Either that, or they have to carefully cultivate a group of no people to hang around and tell them which ideas are stupid.
Ironically the article claims scientists become less radical as they get older. I suppose it depends what you consider radical.
Radical in their area of expertise. If you have spend decades building certain mental models and then theoretical models that most likely work well(as you were rewarded for them) you are likely get stuck in following those.
Does not mean you have well working models outside these. Or that those same models will work well in entirely distinct contexes.
I desperately want to slap a huge “citation needed” on that first paragraph.
Disruptive work nowadays is not very popular with institutions and doesn't win you grants. What does win grants is plodding along on a same path usually towards some end goal that is the latest buzzword. Those who stay in academia all start aspirational and wish to change the world, but the system sucks it out of them.
nowadays? It's never been popular.
Yes, as nowadays we have the ability to simulate or experiment theories at a great speed. A century ago it was a lot harder so scepticism made sense as you couldn't easily prove your theory. You feel we should be able to take more risks now, but if anything we take as many or fewer, therefore I fear mavericks have become even less popular.
I was surprised that the article did not mention that Einstein was not originally given the Nobel prize for relativity because the Old guard did not like the work...
A nobel prize was very rarely given for theory, especially one that hadn't been stringently experimented on until the 50's to the -70's.
The photoelectric effect definitely was more solid to give out the prize on.
Saying this I think the Nobel prize is becoming less relevant, especially as nowadays one person is rarely the reason advancements are made.
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