Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Old Age and Creativity

inference-review.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 75 posts

Re: Old Age and Creativity

#41

Post by malloryerik »

Archelaos wrote: post #28
bambax wrote: post #17

> He drew some surprising conclusions: the writers were less likely to carry on, whereas some of the greatest artists, Michelangelo, Titian [etc.], became, if anything, more productive and liberated from convention as they went into old age This seems pretty arbitrary and anecdotal, and there are famous counterexamples. In French, Saint-Simon (the memorialist, not the economist) wrote his masterpiece of over 3 millio…

Just two other examples: Goethe: West–Eastern Diwan (age 70), Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years (age 72) Marienbad Elegy (age 73). Thomas Mann: Doctor Faustus (age 72) I have randomly picked a few people from the list of Nobel Prize Laureates in Literature[1] who have made it to old age, and most of them seem to have been quite productive even then. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Lit...

Aeschylus wrote The Oresteia when he was 65. I believe Sophocles wrote Oedipus the King at age 68, and continued writing through Electra (probably) and Philoctetes (which took first prize in Athens) in his mid- to late-80s.

Re: Old Age and Creativity

#42

Post by flobosg »

Qem wrote: post #37
flobosg wrote: post #4

> Mathematicians, a different breed entirely, had Leonhard Euler and Carl Friedrich Gauss who kept going until a very old age, for their times—76 and 77—despite starting very early, as mathematicians seem to do. This is not a universal trend: in the twentieth century, David Hilbert at 81 and André Weil at 92 are the only exemplars that come to mind. What about Paul Erdős?

Nice point. I think they still started very young. I wonder if there are examples of late bloomer mathematicians, that did great work despite not learning any advanced maths before their 30s or 40s.

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_bloomer#Mathematics

Re: Old Age and Creativity

#43

Post by jleyank »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #38
jleyank wrote: post #2

How many academic scientists end up being buried in managing science, particularly seeking funding? There’s way fewer aristocrats funding scientists as they would a zoo. Maybe the most visible advances come from those hungry enough and with time enough to do it? Some of these older fellows trained a lot of students, such as bethe or wheeler. How old were the bell labs people when they did plan 9? Is Knuth still consi…

Ken Thompson was around 49 years old when Plan 9 was first released. Not sure about other people on the Plan 9 team. But presumably they were all highly skilled and experienced engineers. The key question is who were their disciples? How much of their knowledge has been passed down to the next generation?

Everybody who read their books or hacked Unix or Linux could be considered their “students”. Their code was published, eventually, and in any event they left tracks to follow for those recreating it. They created an ideal to strive for, along with the original MIT hackers and those who emulated them at other sites. Remember, it used to be way more collegial working on machines in the early days.

Given Unix and C and the rest, they made their dent(s) in the universe and we’re all better for it.

Re: Old Age and Creativity

#44

Post by Aidevah »

bambax wrote: post #17

> He drew some surprising conclusions: the writers were less likely to carry on, whereas some of the greatest artists, Michelangelo, Titian [etc.], became, if anything, more productive and liberated from convention as they went into old age This seems pretty arbitrary and anecdotal, and there are famous counterexamples. In French, Saint-Simon (the memorialist, not the economist) wrote his masterpiece of over 3 millio…

While like you, I am not convinced that writers tend to end their careers earlier than painters (the three greatest living American novelists, DeLillo, Pynchon and McCarthy, all well in their 80s, have all published relatively recently), I have to say that Chateaubriand represents a special case. A large portion of his memoir was written well before his death and he relied on notes which he wrote in his youth. From Rosen's "Romantic poets, critics, and other madmen":

>Chateaubriand alone of these writers was able to continue to produce work in later years comparable to his first masterpieces. His case is exemplary: what he did was to continue to publish and develop his earliest work. He returned from America aged twenty-four carrying an enormous manuscript (he claimed improbably that it later saved his life during the wars against the young revolutionary government of France by stopping a bullet). He extracted one book after another from this, starting with the Essay on Revolutions, The Genius of Christianity, and The Voyage to America.

>The late autobiographical work, however, retains much of his youthful power: considerable portions had been written much earlier, and the title. Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb, is revealing—Chateaubriand wrote as if already dead and he had less need to compromise.

Re: Old Age and Creativity

#45

Post by 21723 »

techas wrote: post #12
jleyank wrote: post #2

How many academic scientists end up being buried in managing science, particularly seeking funding? There’s way fewer aristocrats funding scientists as they would a zoo. Maybe the most visible advances come from those hungry enough and with time enough to do it? Some of these older fellows trained a lot of students, such as bethe or wheeler. How old were the bell labs people when they did plan 9? Is Knuth still consi…

> How many academic scientists end up being buried in managing science, particularly seeking funding? Today?? 100% of successful scientists.

This.

When we look at the Soviet system, we don't think of it as having had much in the way of scientific or artistic accomplishments. There were some, and the practical engineering and economic achievements were nothing to sneeze at, but by and large the Soviet era is seen as somewhat of a dark age in terms of humanistic advancement, as indeed it was intended to be a transitional stage before communism, which the Soviets admitted had not been achieved.

Our period is worse. We have the same stultifying bureaucracies, governmental and corporate, but with more advanced surveillance technologies. And while a 1980s Soviet bureaucrat might have been indifferent to excellence, 2020s corporate executives and venture capitalists and war barons are actively hostile to it, because it threatens their positions.

In our era, we seem to have everything, but we are producing next to nothing, and we have gone from being one of the best-run to one of the worst-run societies in record time.

Re: Old Age and Creativity

#47

Post by bambax »

bambax wrote: post #17

> He drew some surprising conclusions: the writers were less likely to carry on, whereas some of the greatest artists, Michelangelo, Titian [etc.], became, if anything, more productive and liberated from convention as they went into old age This seems pretty arbitrary and anecdotal, and there are famous counterexamples. In French, Saint-Simon (the memorialist, not the economist) wrote his masterpiece of over 3 millio…

After reading the actual text of the conference by Kenneth Mackenzie Clark (linked to in a comment below), it turns out that the author doesn't discuss writers in general, but specifically poets, and that he thinks poets stop writing poetry (or, sometimes, good poetry) in old age because poetry requires "fire", which doesn't burn as bright then.

I'm not sure where the OP got the idea of "writers less likely to carry on" but it's not in the text of the conference.

Re: Old Age and Creativity

#48

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Like many of these types of sweeping inferences, I suspect that the devil is in the details.

Namely, what, exactly, is being measured?

Everybody changes, as we age. I'm almost 60, and, as I look back on my yute (I live in New York, so I have to use the correct lingo), I am amazed at what an addlepated, compulsive, reactive, emotion-driven, knucklehead I was. When I think about what I considered "earth-shatteringly important ideals" back then, I wince. What a waste of energy.

It would be easy to say that I was "more creative" back then, because I had diarrhea of the mouth. You couldn't shut me up, and I was always spouting pseudo-intellectual claptrap. I guess, for some people, they would have considered me to be "a creative intellectual." I also spit out a lot of rather naive little projects and artworks; crowing at each one, as if it were The Mona Lisa.

I probably would have thought I was just a jerk.

These days, I get stuff done. That does mean a lot of compromises, and acceptance of limitations. I don't tilt at windmills, anymore. I hook generators to them.

Re: Old Age and Creativity

#49

Post by 21723 »

nosianu wrote: post #33
inter_netuser wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal theory on early peaking in physics and math is that the best proxy for intelligence, working memory, begins to measurably decline in your 40s. It likely begins to decline even prior to that, as our ability to measure it is very rough and imprecise, which seems to align well with ages when physics/math geniuses peak, ~30s.

Here's my contrarian perspective, I'm 49. I'm only going to give a small part of my thoughts, there's more, but let's keep a narrow focus for the forum format. I'm less and less willing to submerge myself deep into fields far removed from daily life. I can still do it, and actually easier than ever before. I just don't want to. I feel it's not because I'm dumber, quite he opposite. It's because I understand and see s…

One thing I've noticed with age is the reduced interest in competing. When you're young, you want to know how you measure up to your peers, what your percentile ranking is, et cetera. When you're older, you realize that very few things actually worth doing fit into a competitive frame, because if something can be objectively evaluated, then it's probably already been done a million times.

I don't think chess players peak at 35 because they're losing their touch. I think they develop other interests; the ones who aren't going to be professionals realize it and downshift, and the truly elite ones achieve what they set out to do and move on to things they see as more interesting.

This is probably why the corporate thugs are so ageist. They know it's easy to pit people in their 20s against each other. Once people are older and have more perspective, it's hard to make them compete over scraps.

Re: Old Age and Creativity

#50

Post by s0teri0s »

I don't think it's fair to compare artists (painters) to poets and writers. Old famous painters can get away with anything. Deser says older artists 'aren't as restrained by convention;' I take that to mean there is less intellectual rigor in older works (that is older works of senile artists are more akin to finger painting), which art dealers have a financial interest in promoting as works of advanced genius, easier to do with artworks than bad writing.

So what I'm saying is there's not as much difference as Deser suggests between old artists and old writers.

As for physics practitioners, the redundancy in articles I read on subjects like quantum physics suggests a certain amount of stagnation in the research, but it seems to me like we're always finding new ways to learn a little more about gravitational phenomena.

Post reply on HN