Tag Archives: Age

Aged Wisdom

By Robin Hanson · September 28, 2011 6:40 pm · Comments (38)

At lunch recently, Bryan asked: what wisdom do we old folks have to pass on to young folk, if only they would listen? A few possibilities:

1) You might look inside yourself and think you know yourself, but over many decades you can change in ways you won’t see ahead of time. Don’t assume you know who you will become. This applies all the more to folks around you. You may know who they are now, but not who they will become.

2) You are more flexible than you realize. You may think now life that would not be worth living without your preferred city, career, partner, or hobby. But you really would adapt to most big changes, and have an ok life without most of what you now hold precious. Old folks with weak bodies and fading minds still love life.

3) Human lives are long. You might be unpopular when young, but with decades of work you could become popular when old. If you have something you are just dying to do, a lifetime can fit many failures before an eventual success. While it can be reasonable to take a few years of failure as a sign you might prefer something else, if this is really what you most want, you’ll have many more decades to keep trying.

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Some Good News

By Robin Hanson · May 9, 2011 3:25 pm · Comments (21)

It has been a long time since I read something that made me this hopeful about the future:

Fully 42 percent of seniors say greed and speculation are behind higher gas prices, compared with just 13 percent of adults aged 18 to 29. Young adults are twice as likely as seniors to say economic factors and overseas developments are the primary causes. (more)

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Act Young To Live Long

By Robin Hanson · April 10, 2011 12:45 pm · Comments (22)

People often think I look younger than I am; I usually quip that is because I cultivate an aura of irresponsibility. Turns out, I may actually live longer because I look and act younger. Apparently, thinking of yourself as younger actually makes you live longer:

First, women who think they look younger after having their hair colored/cut show a decrease in blood pressure and appear younger in photographs (in which their hair is cropped out) to independent raters. Second, clothing is an age-related cue. Uniforms eliminate these age-related cues: Those who wear work uniforms have lower morbidity than do those who earn the same amount of money and do not wear work uniforms. Third, baldness cues old age. Men who bald prematurely see an older self and therefore age faster: Prematurely bald men have an excess risk of getting prostate cancer and coronary heart disease than do men who do not prematurely bald. Fourth, women who bear children later in life are surrounded by younger age-related cues: Older mothers have a longer life expectancy than do women who bear children earlier in life. Last, large spousal age differences result in age-incongruent cues: Younger spouses live shorter lives and older spouses live longer lives than do controls. (more)

The paper speculates that this might contribute to rising lifespans – are we overall healthier today because overall we look and act younger than our ancestors? More quotes: Continue reading "Act Young To Live Long" »

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Less Mature With Age

By Robin Hanson · December 26, 2010 9:35 pm · Comments (20)

Our personalities tend to become more “mature” as we age from teens into adults, and then into older adults. But our personalities become less mature as we age from kids into teens:

Hypotheses about mean-level age differences in the Big Five personality domains, as well as 10 more specific facet traits within those domains, were tested in a very large cross-sectional sample (N = 1,267,218) of children, adolescents, and adults (ages 10–65) assessed over the World Wide Web. The results supported several conclusions. First, late childhood and adolescence were key periods. Across these years, age trends for some traits (a) were especially pronounced, (b) were in a direction different from the corresponding adult trends, or (c) first indicated the presence of gender differences. Second, there were some negative trends in psychosocial maturity from late childhood into adolescence, whereas adult trends were overwhelmingly in the direction of greater maturity and adjustment. Third, the related but distinguishable facet traits within each broad Big Five domain often showed distinct age trends, highlighting the importance of facet-level research for understanding life span age differences in personality. (more)

Many like to think that we become more “mature” as we age because our experience with life teaches us the wisdom of mature behavior. They then presume that teens would be better off acting more maturely, and should be forced to do so if necessary.  However, this “maturity as learning” theory conflicts with the fact that we become less mature as we become teens.  An alternate theory, that better accounts for the above patterns, is that we are programmed to have different personalities and attitudes at different ages, because for our distant ancestors those attitudes were useful at those ages.  Beware too easily assuming that others would be better off if they were more like you.

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Naked Classism

By Robin Hanson · November 17, 2010 11:00 pm · Comments (49)

When San Francisco banned the McDonalds Happy Meal, Adam Ozimek said that illustrated the slippery slope of paternalism; if we’ll ban that, what won’t we ban? Now the US Feds offer a bigger example:

The Food and Drug Administration said it had concluded that adding caffeine to alcohol was unsafe and unapproved. … The products … have become a favorite among college students. … Treasury Department officials announced … the companies would be told that the products had been mislabeled and were therefore illegal to be shipped. And the Federal Trade Commission told the companies that marketing the products might violate federal law.

cans1

Federal officials were facing increasing pressure to take action in the wake of a series of high-profile incidents. … Students … ended up in the emergency room after consuming the most popular of the drinks, Four Loko, including some with alcohol poisoning. In other incidents, deaths and fatal car crashes have been blamed on the drinks. …

The drinks … contain high levels of alcohol and caffeine, making it difficult for people to realize how intoxicated they are, experts say. … Consuming one can of Four Loko is the equivalent of drinking as many as five cans of beer and a cup of coffee. …

Four Loko [said] … “If it were unsafe, popular drinks like rum and colas or Irish coffees . . . would face the same scrutiny that our products recently faced.” … It had previously added multiple warning labels to its cans.

My college student son assures me caffeine doesn’t keep kids from knowing they are drunk, and it is easier to track drinking with a few big cans than with lots of little shots; they usually limit themselves to one or two cans a night. Those who want to binge can do so just as easily without the cans. But the facts don’t seem to matter.

cans2The FDA likes to present itself as a paragon of scientific rigor, but there is no rigor here. No randomized experiments or even careful regressions. Just public pressure to “do something” about vivid examples of “those people” hurting themselves.

Little remains of the rule of law precept to treat people equally. The exact same chemical combinations which are fine to serve rich old folks at cocktail receptions, are banned in cheap cans from convenience store coolers. Clearly the goal is to target particular vaguely-imagined classes of people, and regulators would be fine with having the law specify the color of the cans, the geographic locations, time of purchase, form of financing, whatever it took to get to “them” without overly bothering “us.”

And this is where the slippery slope of paternalism leads: naked classism. When we the good people notice that those distrusted others do things that don’t seem proper to us, well we should just pass whatever laws it takes to make them toe our line. Surely it wouldn’t be responsible to just let them do stuff we wouldn’t, right?

Added 8a: mtraven points us to a CDC fact sheet, which cites exactly one randomized experiment with 26 subjects, whose abstract says:

When compared with the ingestion of alcohol alone, the ingestion of alcohol plus energy drink significantly reduced subjects’ perception of … impairment of motor coordination. However, the ingestion of the energy drink did not significantly reduce the deficits caused by alcohol on objective motor coordination.

They saw no difference after 30 minutes, but after 120 minutes the perception of altered motor control under alcohol was 15 +/- 15 (0 is none, 100 is max), while under alcohol plus energy drink was 11+/- 12, and under energy drink alone was 6 +/- 12.  They pooled the later two groups to get a 5% significant difference from the first group!  That’s not remotely kosher.

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Teen Sex Deals

By Robin Hanson · November 8, 2010 2:00 pm · Comments (2)

A new paper on who gets what in teen ties confirms prior results:

Data include an in-school survey of almost 90,000 seventh to twelfth grade students at a randomly sampled set of 80 communities across the United States. …

Women are having sex more than they would like and men are having sex less than they would like. … Conditional on being in a relationship, the fraction of 12th grade women who are having sex is much higher than the fraction who would like to be having sex. This is in contrast to 9th grade women whose preferences for sex are similar to what actually occurs. For men, it is the 12th grade men whose preferences align with what actually happens in their relationships while 9th grade men in relationships are having substantially less sex than they would like. … Increases in the outside options [of other women to date] for male partners increasing the chances of sex occurring [in a relationship.] …

Sex is valued above and beyond the relationship itself. … Males have stronger preferences for sex than females. For males, but not for females, grade of the partner influences the utility of sex with men preferring to have sex with older partners. Those who have had sex in the past also have a much stronger preference for sex in the present. … Women prefer to be matched with older men and … this preference is stronger than the preference by men to have sex with older women rather than younger women. In contrast, men only prefer older women when the relationship is accompanied by sex.

Individuals also prefer to be matched with those in the same grade and the same race. … Both sides of the market are sacrificing their preferred relationship terms to increase their chances of matching.

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New Vs. Old Guard

By Robin Hanson · November 1, 2010 10:00 am · Comments (23)

Jon Stewart can pretend all he wants that the point of his big rally Saturday was just for chuckles, or just to encourage a more reasonable, substantive and civil tone in American politics. The reality is that his own audience on the Mall had an additional agenda, and it was decidedly partisan and decidedly liberal. … It’s self-defeating and even delusional to think progressive policies are going to be achieved just by agitating nobly for a more positive style in politics. (more)

So why is the U.S. left suddenly so eager to emphasize its civility and maturity compared with the right?

In both primitive tribes and modern board rooms, incumbents play out a standard script when arguing with upstarts. When a new guard bids for more influence relative to an old, the new suggests the old is weak, corrupt, out of touch, and past their prime, while the old suggests the new is immature, inexperienced, unrealistic, and untried. The old guard tries to sound calm and reasonable and suggest things are ok, there’s no need for disruptive change, or perhaps that we can’t afford to change captains midstream in a crisis. The new guard will suggest a crisis, with problems getting worse until we change tact, or perhaps that only new leadership can take full advantage of new opportunities.

We are so habituated to expect these patterns that we use these arguments, and are persuaded by them, even when they are unlikely to apply. For example, in a modern two party political system, the party out of power is probably nearly as corrupt and mature as the party in power. Nevertheless, the out party will complain of corruption, while the in complains of immaturity.  The circle of autopilot-thought life continues.

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Improve Your Gal?

By Robin Hanson · October 26, 2010 8:00 am · Comments (37)

A woman often marries a man for his potential. If women married men for who they actually were, there would be far fewer marriages. When a woman loves a man, she says to herself, ‘I could improve him. Once we’re together, things will be different.’ Since I began my [couples therapy] practice in 1977, I’ve heard this refrain hundreds of times. I try to get it across to the woman that what she sees is what she gets. This is him. …

Men tend to resist change. In fact, one of the most prized characteristics of a man’s friendship with other men is total acceptance. When a woman begins to encourage a man to live up to his potential, he misunderstands that as her overall dissatisfaction with him. … The man may initially improve according to her recommendations — remember, he has a lot invested in what she thinks of him. But over time, he becomes slower to respond. …

When the marriage is on the brink of breakup, the woman drags him into my office. That’s when I hear what almost any therapist can tell you is the most repeated phrase among men: “No matter what I do, I can never please this woman.” (more)

I have many questions:  Why don’t men try as hard to improve their women?  Is it that he cares less what she will become, or would she more resist the pressure to change?  If he cares less, is this because men peak later in life, and we care more about our spouses qualities near their peak than their trough?  If she resists more, is this because example the median woman is more dominant, the median man more submissive?  Is the above pattern world-wide, or mainly in the US?

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Rah Old Indian IVF Moms

By Robin Hanson · August 14, 2010 7:10 pm · Comments (37)

Thursday the Post lamented the fact that India (population 1.2 billion) is growing twice as fast as China (population 1.3 billion), and may soon have by far world’s most in vitro fertilizations, perhaps 600,000 a year (~2% of India births), costing about $2500 each.

The Post reserved its strongest disapproval (between the lines, but still pretty clear) for the fact that many Indian IVF moms are 60 and 70 years old, and so are taking on bigger health risks. Supposedly regulation is needed to keep such women from succumbing to “cultural pressures.” Apparently, since Post reporters know no colleagues who would consider taking such an action, they conclude that elderly Indian IVF moms must be suffering from some horrible patriarchy. (No further evidence of illicit pressure is given.)

This seems to me cultural arrogance of the worst sort. Yes, new people induce some negative externalities, such as congestion. But overall economists’ best estimate is that new people give others a net benefit, especially via increased innovation. Thus creating (and raising) a new person is an incredibly altruistic act. The new person gets to have a life, and the rest of the world gains as well.

Yes, creating more people may reduce per-capita wealth in the short run, but if [most] everyone benefits, what’s wrong with that?  Yes, a high enough mom health risk could make this a net bad deal. But the Post quotes a 60% baby success rate, and I’ll bet mom mortality is below 6%, which means there’s at least a ten to one life gain ratio. And the gain ratio must be far larger in quality-adjusted life years.

These Indian women are not taking advantage of some overly-generous health insurance loophole – they are paying cash from their own pockets to give life to a new person. And they are not acting on some strange perverted desires – they are expressing an extremely basic, ancient, and revered desire, the desire to mother a child. Who are US elites to tell elderly Indians that their altruistic gift is not worth the cost? Shouldn’t we be subsidizing such altruism, instead of discouraging it?

This seems a lot like the phenomena of “Looking Too Good“:

Unselfish members (those who gave much toward the provision of the good but then used little of the good) were also targets for expulsion from the group. … Social comparison tends to induce feelings of inter-personal competition. People feel driven to outdo the group member who is setting the standard. … Removal of this person would eliminate that competitive standard.

If we praised poor elderly Indian IVF moms, that would implicitly criticize rich Western women who refuse to have even one kid even when young and healthy. Rather than raise our altruism standards, we’d rather exclude these women from the group of reasonable altruists. Quotes from that Post article: Continue reading "Rah Old Indian IVF Moms" »

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Meat Philosophy

By Robin Hanson · August 6, 2010 6:00 am · Comments (45)

[We] surveyed several hundred philosophers and non-philosophers on their opinions about various moral issues; we also asked survey respondents to describe their own behavior on those same issues. … The biggest divergences in moral opinion concerned our question about “regularly eating the meat of mammals such as beef and pork”. 60% of ethics professor respondents rated mammal-meat consumption as morally bad, compared to 45% of non-ethicist philosophers and just 19% of non-philosophers. Opinion also divided by gender and age. … Fully 81% of female philosophers born in 1960 or later said it was morally bad to regularly eat the meat of mammals. To put this degree of consensus in perspective, … only 82% of philosophers endorsed non-skeptical realism about the existence of an external world. …

38% of [young female philosophers] reported having eaten the meat of a mammal at their previous evening meal — a rate not statistically different from the 39% reported rate among respondents overall. … Similarly, despite the difference in normative view, there was no statistically detectable difference in the mean age of respondents who said they had eaten the meat of a mammal at their previous evening’s meal. … 78% of those who reported that they never eat mammal meat said eating mammal meat is bad, compared to 32% of those who reported sometimes eating meat. However, it seems that among non-vegetarians there is little if any relationship between normative ethical view and actual meat consumption. (more; HT Stefano Bertolo)

So why, among all the moral issues on which one could be hypocritical, and people which could be hypocritical, is the observed worst case young female philosophers on eating meat?

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