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Human behavioral complexity peaks at age 25: study

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Re: Human behavioral complexity peaks at age 25: study

#51

Post by WilliamDhalgren »

tim333 wrote: post #46
WilliamDhalgren wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ah, I'm sorry but I really don't remember. this was some years back.

Maybe http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu/530 https://www.sgutranscripts.org/wiki/SGU_Episode_530 ?

hey, that's not bad; didn't even expect SGU had such detailed transcripts.

But actually looking for it now, the particular study I had in mind seems to be from a science or fiction segment from this episode:

http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2014-1...

Interesting to see how Steve's assesment of modafinil evolved between the two episodes

Re: Human behavioral complexity peaks at age 25: study

#52

Post by NamTaf »

ue_ wrote: post #18
math_and_stuff wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One trick for breaking that is to get addicted to improving your craft. For me, it was originally starting an open source project, but there is something magical about a cup of coffee, a big stack of paper, and a math book that you have just the right prerequisite knowledge for.

My problem may be that I don't have much passion for the subject I'm studying (electronic and computer engineering), as I originally applied to do a different degree. Although I find some parts of the subject interesting (digital systems, perhaps some mathematics), others I find hopelessly hard (analogue electronics and physics). A bad part is that I don't even have a way to evaluate my knowledge against the standard…

Do some reading on how to develop willpower. Although I'm not a fan of the rest of the site, I found the Art of Manliness did a decent 3-part on how to cultivate willpower and hone it into productive pursuits.

I had it super easy in school. I was gifted enough to coast through with no study whatsoever. It was basically just an organised social life for me. Same with first-year uni, because school had taught me enough to coast through that. Come second year, however, it was new material and it wasn't forced down my throat with the structure that school provided. I crashed and burned miserably, failing 1 subject and barely scraping through 2 others (i.e.: pass by 2-3%).

It took me until 4th year to teach myself how to teach myself, and how to develop that discipline and willpower necessary to stay focused on a goal. It also took that long to learn how I learn, that is whether I learn best through reading lecture notes, watching examples, doing problems, etc. You're never really taught any of that at school, but you're expected to know it by uni to do self-guided learning. It's a hard ability to pick up, too.

With your example, I'd encourage you to watch some Khan Academy lectures. Maybe listening to and watching exmaple problems works better for you than reading textbooks or lecture notes. Additionally, maths is in particular one of those things where tonnes of practice problems will help reinforce it until it just 'clicks'. In isolation the processes may seem simple as you watch them, but the practice is what helps you identify the underlying patterns and thus know which technique to choose when, and how to identify that you've executed the technique properly.

Re: Human behavioral complexity peaks at age 25: study

#53

Post by [deleted] »

xux wrote: post #45

Did anyone even read the article. The study has nothing to do with complex behavior or "sophisticated" behavior. It's a study on your ability to generate random list of results, like "listing the hypothetical results of a series of 12 coin flips so that they would 'look random to somebody else'"

[deleted]

Re: Human behavioral complexity peaks at age 25: study

#54

Post by trevyn »

twiss wrote: post #48

In high school, my math teacher once asked us to write down a random string of zeroes and ones, similar to what they did in the study to measure "cognitive functioning". He then asked us to count the number of times we alternated between 0 and 1. He told us that while most people try to have about a 50% split between 0 and 1, many alternate too often (0101101 instead of 0100011). Maybe there are other tests that one…

This is a great question. What are the speed requirements?

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-for-a-human-to-generate...

You could probably come up with a reasonably good, fast mental PRNG algorithm, and practice that.

Re: Human behavioral complexity peaks at age 25: study

#55

Post by mercer »

Jach wrote: post #50
bootload wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm probably going to fail the final exams next week." You can improve on mental toughness to control emotion. It is not a fixed skill. Four skills needed to overcome ^fear^ and ^panic^ is through control of the limbic system: [0] - Positive self talk - Goal setting of tasks - Mental rehearsal of tasks - Arousal control (breathing) [0] "Mental Training" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ-24JtAFQw

Which is the most universal human characteristic - fear or laziness?

I've found that laziness is sometimes fear in disguise. I don't know how that contributes, but whatever I don't care to explain; I'll be downvoted anyways.

Re: Human behavioral complexity peaks at age 25: study

#56

Post by Jach »

ue_ wrote: post #14
Cyph0n wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent advice. At the end of my first semester at university, my Calc I professor pulled me aside after class for a chat. We talked about a bunch of things, but one piece of advice in particular stuck with me. He said: "You are lucky to be so privileged - to study at a university for free, to have a supportive family, and to be such a smart and capable student - but you are also quite unlucky. Unlike other less pr…

That's an interesting story, though I find that I oscillate between periods of perceived dread (though, as your Calc professor mentioned, I am privileged in this regard to not have it as much of an issue) and periods of a kind of laid back-ness in which I procrastinate and put things off as much as they possibly could be put off. This has been a recurring problem for me, possibly because the enjoyment of playing game…

Have you tried drugs? Seriously, even something as basic as making sure you have a minimum amount of caffeine each day (pills are cheap and don't ruin your teeth) can make all the difference, much better than reading and trying to apply the latest in Motivational Techniques or Learning to Learn or plain inspirational writing/shows/music/games. Other drugs like modafinil (http://www.gwern.net/Modafinil) have their benefits too, or melatonin supplements if you need help getting to sleep. Talk to a psychiatrist to see if you need such things yadda yadda, I don't think you'd be all that receptive to "therapy" as a solution but could be wrong. I only mention drugs because your posts reminds me of myself as well as a former close friend. I won't say drugs like caffeine are solely why I'm in a cushy software job and he's doing dishwashing or something (last I got in touch he seemed to have found a happy place in life though) but when we were close we were both chronic procrastinators, I sacrificed a lot of sleep and just managed to finish more things and doing that has a way of compounding your ability to finish more things later (even if much slower than your 'ideal self' that is fully focused all the time).

Another strategy is to study with another person, in person. It can be hard to apply if you're relatively antisocial though, or worry too much about bruising your ego by exposing ignorance. If it helps study with a person you think is 'dumber', like you're doing them a favor, though really it's for yourself, and if nothing else you might be surprised they're not so dumb.

Last thing, learn shortcuts, embrace laziness (one of the Three Virtues of Programming), and automate. Learn some math software. In your example of solving three simultaneous equations, every time I had to do that I would do it with my TI-89 calculator. And not always the same way! But usually I used a slightly different (and imo simpler when not done by hand) matrix method. For 3 equations, get them all in the form of Ax+By+Cz=D, construct a 3x4 matrix with each row containing [Ai Bi Ci Di], and compute the row reduced echelon form to leave you with a diagonal of 1s in the first 3 columns telling you x/y/z correspond to the rows in the fourth column. With the calculator, it's as easy as typing rref([A1,B1,C1,D1; A2,B2,C2,D2; A3,B3,C3,D3]) Nowadays I'd probably just use Octave, which is the same syntax except without the commas. Similarly one course in my program had a section with lots of problems involving partial fractions expansion to help compute an inverse laplace transform. I'd just let my computers do the inverse transform directly, or at least do the partial fraction for me, since doing that crap by hand is tedious and of little value.

Re: Human behavioral complexity peaks at age 25: study

#57

Post by Someone »

trevyn wrote: post #54
twiss wrote: post #48

In high school, my math teacher once asked us to write down a random string of zeroes and ones, similar to what they did in the study to measure "cognitive functioning". He then asked us to count the number of times we alternated between 0 and 1. He told us that while most people try to have about a 50% split between 0 and 1, many alternate too often (0101101 instead of 0100011). Maybe there are other tests that one…

This is a great question. What are the speed requirements? https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-for-a-human-to-generate... You could probably come up with a reasonably good, fast mental PRNG algorithm, and practice that.

Pick a phrase (name, address, phone number would do), discard white space, and convert the upper two bits to binary.

Example: "Pick a phrase" would become

  00 01 11 11 01 00 00 10 01 11 01...
That's certainly not random, but unlikely to be detectable for shorter sequences.

(Edit: it probably is a fun exercise to write a program that decodes this code that reaches >75% (lossy) compression)

Re: Human behavioral complexity peaks at age 25: study

#59

Post by etherael »

xux wrote: post #45

Did anyone even read the article. The study has nothing to do with complex behavior or "sophisticated" behavior. It's a study on your ability to generate random list of results, like "listing the hypothetical results of a series of 12 coin flips so that they would 'look random to somebody else'"

That strikes me as a poor measure of true randomness.

Re: Human behavioral complexity peaks at age 25: study

#60

Post by BlackFly »

joveian wrote: post #44
noobermin wrote: post #33

Ok, comments on fig. 2. The 95% confidence intervals are plotted, but clearly the distribution of their subjects seems to sample heavily near where they find their peak (~25 to 40 ish), and correspondingly, the drop offs are away from that area... Seems fishy to me.

Also, if you look at the right side of figure 1 there are lines on the bottom of the complexity chart for each of the tasks, presumably representing people who essentially did not do the task (although they still seem to have spent a variable amount of time not doing the task). It looks like this skews older, and just by eyeballing the chart some of the 75+ would be upward trends if not for that bottom line. I skimme…

Furthermore, the poor sampling near the edges of the plots leads me to suspect that the trend away from a flat line is due to Runge's phenomenon. The peak may be nothing other than the oscillations from this phenomenon leaking into the interior of their data set.
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