Early Retirement May Speed Up Cognitive Decline: Study

>People used to know how to write in cursive too. Some skills just get obsolete.

I heard this few times. Is it actually a thing that people don't know how to write cursive? Natural writing (cursive) has been a part of primary education in most(perhaps all) countries since the beginning. Did they actually remove it recently? That would be insane. How one is supposed to be able to write quickly, as in when taking notes, without cursive?

didn't downvote but I do feel an instinctive distaste at seeing the sentiment expressed, not because it's a bad sentiment (it's actually a great one) but because of the role it plays in our public discourse.

As you pointed out, the people who share this sentiment are a minority - I'm less convinced it's tiny, what I've read suggests it's a sixth to a third, depending on how satisfied we mean. But that group is heavily weighted towards high-status professions.

As a result, a high-status minority is actively opposed to any social reforms that would increase leisure time, and I do believe we all suffer as a result. I don't think we can really put a price on Albert Einstein staying in that patent office, but I think it's very high and I think we all pay it. That's what I associate with comments like the grandparent - such a person is in a good situation, and good on them for recognizing it. But they often generalize their experience to a majority of the population where that is actually very much the wrong conclusion to draw.

One factor may well be that when you start studying a subject a large part of what contributes to new developments may well be that you bring a new angle, and lack of understanding of what is accepted.

E.g. I remember my first CS classes, and how I during my algorithm classes "invented" thing after thing just to read on to the next chapter and see my "inventions" covered. But now and again someone will come up with a genuine invention to a problem that is novel and important in part because they've not yet come to learn what the "right solution" to that problem is.

As you learn more, you tend to focus on the perceived narrow gaps of uncharted territories or at adding more at the peaks, where making progress is a massive slog.

From a different perspective, having done multiple startups, I think one of the advantages I had in terms of willingness to jump into something new when I was younger, was lack of knowledge.

I went head first into starting and ISP without knowing either the business side, or the technical side of it - I had enough knowledge to know where to start figuring it out, but not enough to know why it would be hard. And so I did it. We weren't tremendously successful, but we learned a hell of a lot, and in the end it kickstarted my career.

Today, it's far easier for me to look at an idea and think up a hundred reasons why it will probably fail because I know more. While that probably saves me a lot of misery, I've also been through enough startups to know that a lot of the objections people raise that looks fatal can be easily overcome; it's very hard to know which flaws will actually be a problem and which will not, and some even turns out to be advantages (e.g. you find a way past them but your competitors don't). In a sense it is frustrating, and I sometimes wish I could look at an idea and ignore the obvious flaws the way I would have at 20...

Another advantage was being less risk averse even when I did see the risks and flaws. I had far less to lose:

No career to ruin; no house to lose; no child I was responsible for, more time to do something else if I got nowhere.

So when we then look at breakthroughs, to determine if it is down to cognitive differences, we also need to consider how large a proportion at different ages are willing to take those risks and put in that level of effort.

My first startup was planned in a couple of weeks; we got seed funding from some random person one of us met in a bar (...); the following week I moved out from parents into a room in our new office.

I'd never be willing to move that fast today, nor live in the office, because my priorities are different. And while I strongly believe I am more likely to be successful at the things I try today, I am also a lot more cautious about the attempts I make. In the end I'm probably less likely to end up with a stratospheric success due to less willingness to take huge risks and fewer attempts, but I'm also less likely (I think, at least) to end up crashing and burning. Startups are obviously different from e.g. success in science, but I'd suggest similar mechanisms are at play - you build a reputation that depends on certain things that are easier if you stay "safe" in a niche you know you can keep publishing in than if you go for something of totally uncertain payoff; you get comfortable in a working pattern that fits your life etc.

Of course that does not rule out cognitive decline as part of the explanation as well.

There's an attitude thing there too though (while I agree with you that you can often pick things up just by being around them), between reacting to lack of knowledge by looking for someone to tell you or teach you, and just asking someone else to do it if you're not told, vs. actively seeking out the knowledge yourself.

Personally I think part of why I've learned a lot of what I know is because as an introvert I often notice that I'm willing to put in a lot of effort into figuring things out myself to avoid asking someone.

As a child I was blind to my motivations, and sometimes it made me miserable because I'd stress out over how to do something that I could have trivially asked about and where figuring out the solution was a lot of effort, but learning the skill of figuring out "anything" on my own has been incredibly valuable.

Today I'm aware of this tendency, and will often force myself to pick the social interaction based on a conscious trade-off of the relative pain of asking vs. doing, but I will still often choose to find a way to learn how to do something on my own rather than ask even when asking would be "less painful", both because it often teaches me more and because maintaining the skill of learning on my own is something I value in itself.

Not simply hobbies or interests. Sheer curiosity in the reality enveloping us all would drive me to keep the same hours I work today, but with none of the work-related stress I experience at work.

Retirement for me is merely a financial milestone abstraction. The point where monetary wealth throws off sufficient income to meet opex and reasonable capex requirements for the foreseeable future. The Banksian phrase "money is a sign of poverty" operates here though, so that milestone is just a temporary, necessary means to an end.

Like many others in this thread, retirement enables me to go tinker my interests, fueled by an >10K line Emacs Org Mode "curiuoser-and-curiuoser" list. A lot of it is redneck tinkering to be sure ("What would happen if I attached heat sinks to Tesla solar roof tiles that ran a non-corrosive, thermally-efficient carrier liquid through the body of the heat sinks into a heat exchanger in my hot water supply? Damifino, fire up the CAD/CAM-linked CNC and let's go find out!"). Some is of a more serious philosophical/research bent ("What precise factors move the Coasean Boundary of an organization?"). Some of it is of more pedestrian ambitions (learn blue water sailing and open source my findings to extend boat design along Steve Dashew's philosophies). Some is for pure utility (build a bi-fold door shipping container that is a giant toolbox that extends with another into a climate-controlled workshop). Nearly all of it requires finding allies and co-conspirators if only to share and compare notes with, so they are intrinsically highly social activities.

That list goes fractal, too. Every time I tinker around adding to my notes to scratch my itch for one curiosity, I find other avenues I hadn't initially considered, and yet more curiosities are added. Makes me want to upload my mind into a computing substrate with physical world manipulators and clone myself.

I'm never going to approach even a tiny fraction of my curiosities, but fellow co-conspirators and I are going to have a hell of a lot of fun along the way!