One should distinguish between necessary declines and usual declines.
Baseball players decline because their bodies wear out. This is mainly age and there is not much you can do about this. To some extent it is playing time, especially for pitchers (and in other sports, like american football). Maybe lifetime productivity could be improved by allocation of playing time. With physicists, it might be similar, that their brains wear out. Certainly, that is a factor. But are the effects that strong? I don’t think they explain the distribution of work by older people.
An alternative theory to explain the physicists is that people get stuck in a rut, unwilling to learn new things, which may well be susceptible to outside intervention. This brings us to your other point about time to mastery. I’m a fan of Steve Yegge (older), who chronicles his discovery, 10 or 20 years into his programming career, that there was a lot more for him to learn, and how he went about learning it.
Can you link to some of the relevant articles? Right now link points to some kind of parody making of fun of Java open source politics. Not especially inspiring.
I agree, I don’t think the baseball analogy is useful when thinking about fields like computer programming without more careful consideration of the differences
No they don’t. The brain atrophies when it is underused, but it does not wear out. At all. Cognitive ability, and in particular the ability to learn new stuff or adjust to new things declines with age (or “maturity”), but high mental activity protects you against this, so that your “peak” becomes longer and your mental decline slower.
One should distinguish between necessary declines and usual declines.
Baseball players decline because their bodies wear out. This is mainly age and there is not much you can do about this. To some extent it is playing time, especially for pitchers (and in other sports, like american football). Maybe lifetime productivity could be improved by allocation of playing time. With physicists, it might be similar, that their brains wear out. Certainly, that is a factor. But are the effects that strong? I don’t think they explain the distribution of work by older people.
An alternative theory to explain the physicists is that people get stuck in a rut, unwilling to learn new things, which may well be susceptible to outside intervention. This brings us to your other point about time to mastery. I’m a fan of Steve Yegge (older), who chronicles his discovery, 10 or 20 years into his programming career, that there was a lot more for him to learn, and how he went about learning it.
Can you link to some of the relevant articles? Right now link points to some kind of parody making of fun of Java open source politics. Not especially inspiring.
I agree, I don’t think the baseball analogy is useful when thinking about fields like computer programming without more careful consideration of the differences
No they don’t. The brain atrophies when it is underused, but it does not wear out. At all. Cognitive ability, and in particular the ability to learn new stuff or adjust to new things declines with age (or “maturity”), but high mental activity protects you against this, so that your “peak” becomes longer and your mental decline slower.