As so often occurs, Gianni has given us a clear view of a complex situation, and I generally agree with just about everything, in spite of being a 78-year-old who is toward the left of the political spectrum. The biggest challenge, in many ways, will be to tap the helpful parts of the "wisdom of age" while assuring that the young and others wanting to be inventive and entrepreneurial are not impeded. Us old folks, for example, might have been more useful to recent efforts to diversify higher education and might have helped avoid the actions that prompted a huge pushback from a young right wing. I also suspect that while most older scholar's writings ignore the present for the past, every now and then we manage to find guidance from the past that can help the present. Gianni's presentation certainly allows for that, if it is read carefully. The interesting question is whether it will be easier to train us old folks to be more helpful to the energetic young or whether it will more likely to be successful if we train intelligent systems to present relevant wisdom of the past to younger inventors while filtering out the self-centered bullshit that us old farts sometimes feel impelled to include.
RLSHF (reinforcement learning through senior human feedback) must become a thing. Also, my hunch is that the elderly can function as part of the collective "system two thinking" for various topics. The point here is not one of antagonism; it is one of synergy.
Also, you are a living example of the value that can be brought by older generations - and there likely are very valuable portable lessons from your experience. What about writing an essay based on your perspective?
I'll give that some thought, Gianni. We just had an unexpected death in the family, so it won't happen overnight, but it could happen over the coming weeks.
Deep and broad essay, raising crucial questions, both bravely and sensitively; thank you!
I wonder how the subjective experience of ever-nearer mortality might affect our collective psychology, and hence our collective behavior, on the margin...
On the one hand, take people with terminal diagnoses... after they make peace with their condition, they often scramble to find ultimate meaning and clarity; they "settle their affairs" often decisively and bravely; they take risks, learn new things, power through discomfort, "make a difference", all in the little time they have left... in so many ways, they are more alive, more productive, and more entrepreneurial when their anticipated future is suddenly and brutally compressed... (Kurosawa's "Ikiru" is magnificent exploration in film of this phenomenon).
At a population level, external shocks like wars and pandemics probably work in a similar way: these existential crises unleash great creativity and fearsome productivity, and can permanently change institutions and collective expectations...
In theory, older people - especially those with savings, few obligations, and their health largely intact - should be unfettered risk takers and adventurers. The oldest among us have the least to lose, and a short and shrinking period to lose it.
But this isn't how most older folk actually age, is it? Rather, older folks become ever more insular and staid, quieter and sadder, consume rather than produce, and avoid pain and seek comfort, let alone embrace change and risk...
So how do we get older folk to act more like those facing a terminal diagnosis or other existential crisis? I think your whole argument is flipped if more older folk ended their lives with a bang and not a whimper... So why is Tennyson's Ulysses just a feelgood poem, and not a social norm?
I agree with this reversal of mindset which should be the norm. I've often wondered about our cognitive quirk which sees younger people (who have most to lose in lifespan terms) taking more risks. I feel there might be some incentives or even just changes to societal expectations which might shift this. Certainly, I feel more comfortable with certain work related risks as I get older as experience tells me that even if something goes wrong, it is probably fixable rather than a disaster.
Very good point. I also would suggest that all of our experiences of "things can be fixed somehow" are those of a society that had a good run in the last 70 years, but that's not necessarily true over more extended time periods, and especially with the threats that we have now. The fact that we haven't annihilated ourselves with nukes doesn't mean that we didn't risk big - it just means that we worked on solutions and got lucky. But I also wonder if society would have worked so hard at staying away from the nuclear brink if it wasn't dominated by young people, with a lot of life to lose at that time.
Well, the Bretton Woods institutions and culture - which, above all, guaranteed peace and unleashed prosperity - wasn't exactly instituted by whippersnappers... I suspect the shared experience of a world war, genocide, and the horror of actual nuclear explosions, kept leaders - of all ages, whatever their other disagreements - from the nuclear brink...
Beautiful comments; lots to unpack. A couple of key reactions: there is no "average" older person - a normal retiree is very different from an octogenarian president of an autocratic regime, and the implications of their "coming to terms with mortality" (which is a truly profound concept) may be very different - and they should NOT be left to chance. My impression is that, in general, older people stop building the future, becoming both a little numb to complex and uncomfortable information and somewhat insouciant about risks that may materialize after their demise - else, the attitudes vis a vis climate change wouldn't be understandable. I fear the world hasn't had a global war for a long time. People discount the risk of things going terrible if we allow them to blunder into risky territory for too long - I am looking at identity politics, populism, and climate inactions as possible cognitive responses of an aged brain - including second-order consequences of the rise in inequality that hits some social groups (including younger white people in the US) hence inciting polarization.
Yes, older people are most diverse. I suspect the variation - in physical and mental abilities, mindsets, and productivity - within octogenarians actually dwarfs that within forty somethings...
But you've got me thinking of alternative explanations for older "insousiance" beyond the "cognitive responses of an aged brain". (Take climate change, but this might apply more broadly.) Here are three:
(1) Vividness and Recency Biases. Other existential catastrophes - global nuclear wars, famines, pandemics, etc - threaten immediate and permanent extinction or degradation in quality of life. Climate-related threats are both novel, and dispersed in time, space, and effect, making them harder to grasp and process. (You might then ask why young people largely "get it", while older people don't, and my response is that I don't think they actually do - I suspect many (if not most) younger people truly concerned about climate change have a mystical stance toward it rather than an analytical grasp of it... like a millenarian/religious fervor which gives their lives both ultimate and shared purpose and meaning in the absence of a God or church.)
(2) Etiology. Pressing the nuclear button erases human life. The cause-effect relationships attending climate change are far more complex and dynamic.
(3) Intergenerational Understanding and Empathy. If older and younger people are literally not living together in shared families and communities, sharing their lives and hopes and fears and experiences intimately and regularly, motivated and mediated by actual love and concern, they will naturally diverge into separate tribes, leaving each more suspectible to zero-sum political platforms...
Thanks; this is good. On point 1, however, I am fully unsatisfied with the hypothesis that young people have some mystical reverence for climate change. There's no logical or empirical ground for it.
I'm sure some curious kids digest IPCC reports, follow climate stories in the news, and draw conclusions from extreme weather that they personally experience. But most simply belong to a social tribe in which a story - one of unremitting climate doom - is now the orthodoxy, crystallizing into an article of faith. This story may be correct, even wise or productive, but the point is that it's now a doctrine, eliciting anxiety and fear and the sort of millenarian concerns once reserved for the black death or nuclear holocaust or the second coming. So no, I don't think young people are rationally more concerned about climate change because they know more or have longer to live...
I'm enjoying this exchange btw; hope you're having a great weekend!
Good debate. To keep the discussion grounded, I would only invoke "acts of faith" if we have proof that's the case...to your point, though - what is known is that climate change does induce psychological stress on younger people, and that might be socially transmitted, so your point about tribe likely stands. What we know for sure is the following - Assuming all beings are rational and have the same access to information (one doesn't need to grind through IPCC reports to get the scientific consensus), isn't it strange that many older people don't believe what rational sources say? Forget about the younger generation, who, irrespective of their circumstances, do align with the scientific consensus - does it take a tribe to convince people of what the scientific consensus says? How can we exclude that there's an element of self interest?
You're right - we can't rule out self interest. Indeed, much has been made of Boomers being the most self-entitled and sanctimonious generation ever...
But what we can't assume is that all people are equally motivated to know something, or to then act upon that knowledge. Are we equally exercised by every social injustice, every war, every case of human suffering, every abstract risk to our survival? Isn't our moral and intellectual grasp actually mediated by our connection to the issue or group in question?
So, for whatever reason and by whatever mechanism, young people are particularly concerned about climate change. Now their problem should, through the means of family and love, be their grandparents' problem IF we lived intergenerationally, and had more shared physical, moral, social space... but we live in ideological and cultural ghettoes, heavily correlated with age, and we caricature and malign those whom we can both teach and learn from...
"And naturally, money will be needed for the climate and energy transitions."
I think our collective brain will need an executive function. We seem to be operating with the brain stem. The coverage here of generational differences is valuable and interesting. Nonetheless, what strikes me is that there has been no effective way for the widespread understanding that serious action is needed on climate change to manifest as public and private action at the scale and tempo we need. It sound wild, but I confess that giving the younger section of the population more voting power is intriguing. Following through on that direction, don't we need a way to give those outside US/UK/EU some power?
I like the correlate with the human brain. Network structures in supermind might also develop along the lines of different brain functions, though the analogy is clearly not 1:1. But if you think of things like Active Inference, it might very well be that social structures do some of that. The issue is - older executive functions don't like to hand over power.
Great article, Gianni, you touch upon many different angles.
One angle that fascinates me is the ageing collective brain by country, by continent and by spoken language.
Some cultures are getting older much quicker then others, and in reverse, some other cultures are actually becoming younger, for example, India or Nigeria.
How this "asymmetry" in the ageing collective brain will influence innovation and geopolitics?
India is aging, too, and its politics skew older, too. That said, India is a younger country, and its new power status will translate its needs into geopolitics. Remember, however, that it is also a poor country depending on continuous economic growth, which could be imperiled by protectionism and climate change. The consequences could possibly be some destabilization of democracy. I am not sure about Nigeria, but it is clear that Africa is a younger continent overall. Two places to absolutely watch.
Great piece, Gianni. I think I read somewhere recently, that global ageing might also reduce conflict - as older people tend not to want to go to war. But also that changing demographics might force the hands of some leaders to make use of the young they have now to realise their expansionist ambitions.
Yes, there's a comment about it in the article. I don't know if that holds true in every case ...think of some crazed and aging authoritarian leader not fearing death and being willing to go "with a bang," either by using every single piece of human cannon fodder (say, to conquer a bit of Ukraine) or by deploying cyber and autonomous warfare.
This is so interesting. In the end, it seems to me that (a) old people's networks enable them to build an "influence curve" that scales with age, a type of supermind that offsets their dwindling individual capabilities and peaks much later than their individual minds (b) that impacts the overall system's productivity badly because young people can't push their ideas into the society and economy which means that (c) at some point, people run of economically generated money ("you run out of someone else's money"), and plunge the system into exploitation. It is not impossible to see how the arc plays out in the US, and even in countries where the politicians themselves are younger, but their influential stakeholder old.
I like this "influence curve" hypothesis! I guess it flows from younger people being disproportionately "sellers" - of their ideas, effort, and risk-taking - into an economy and society where older people are disporportionately "buyers" - converting their accumulated savings of cash and social capital into goods, services, and policies.
I think this is especially true in upper socio-economic echelons, ala highly-paid young political consultants working for a politician funded largely by billionaires, or youngish portfolio managers investing what are ultimately retiree savings... And to the extent middle-aged people are the nominal leadership almost everywhere, perhaps it's because they function as a crucial link between pools of "older money" buying "younger energy"...
This forces a rumination is on the different incentives and cultures attending "sellers" and "buyers." Good sellers are naturally curious, empathetic, pie-expanding, problem-solving, risk-taking, experimental, knowledgable, and strive to meet a large need... But what makes a good buyer? Perhaps clear taste and preferences (necessarily formed in a past, both physical and mental), and clear (ideally large) budgets which they optimize against both some preference set and their anticipated remaining time on earth.
Imagine a society or industry or even artistic or sporting endeavor dominated by buyers versus sellers, or vice versa, and two starkly different cultures and economies emerge....
This is an interesting perspective that I hadn't thought of. However, my point about networks is perhaps narrow but important. It concerns the fact that older people accumulate networks in the form of people who have some allegiance and respect for them and can influence decisions. Younger people don't have that power in the same proportions.
Nice framework for thinking about these things.Interesting facts. A lot to digest. I'm especially interested in the prospects for deep changes in our approach to education by pulling young people into productive work earlier. I'm not talking about putting 10yos into fast food work. I'm thinking instead of making education more meaningful and practical. In the past few decades, for example, I've worked with a few devs who were absolutely capable of leading larger projects when in their early 20s—because they started getting part-time gigs at 14 or 15. I doubt that is currently possible outside the startup world. Perhaps it could be. I suspect one element will be helping those with established positions, realize they can benefit by collaborating across generations. Many required changes will be difficult while so many are rationally fearful of losing their jobs. More security may be a prerequisite for more flexibility.
As so often occurs, Gianni has given us a clear view of a complex situation, and I generally agree with just about everything, in spite of being a 78-year-old who is toward the left of the political spectrum. The biggest challenge, in many ways, will be to tap the helpful parts of the "wisdom of age" while assuring that the young and others wanting to be inventive and entrepreneurial are not impeded. Us old folks, for example, might have been more useful to recent efforts to diversify higher education and might have helped avoid the actions that prompted a huge pushback from a young right wing. I also suspect that while most older scholar's writings ignore the present for the past, every now and then we manage to find guidance from the past that can help the present. Gianni's presentation certainly allows for that, if it is read carefully. The interesting question is whether it will be easier to train us old folks to be more helpful to the energetic young or whether it will more likely to be successful if we train intelligent systems to present relevant wisdom of the past to younger inventors while filtering out the self-centered bullshit that us old farts sometimes feel impelled to include.
RLSHF (reinforcement learning through senior human feedback) must become a thing. Also, my hunch is that the elderly can function as part of the collective "system two thinking" for various topics. The point here is not one of antagonism; it is one of synergy.
Also, you are a living example of the value that can be brought by older generations - and there likely are very valuable portable lessons from your experience. What about writing an essay based on your perspective?
I'll give that some thought, Gianni. We just had an unexpected death in the family, so it won't happen overnight, but it could happen over the coming weeks.
I am sorry about your loss Alan. All the best in this moment to you and yours.
Thank you, Gianni.
Deep and broad essay, raising crucial questions, both bravely and sensitively; thank you!
I wonder how the subjective experience of ever-nearer mortality might affect our collective psychology, and hence our collective behavior, on the margin...
On the one hand, take people with terminal diagnoses... after they make peace with their condition, they often scramble to find ultimate meaning and clarity; they "settle their affairs" often decisively and bravely; they take risks, learn new things, power through discomfort, "make a difference", all in the little time they have left... in so many ways, they are more alive, more productive, and more entrepreneurial when their anticipated future is suddenly and brutally compressed... (Kurosawa's "Ikiru" is magnificent exploration in film of this phenomenon).
At a population level, external shocks like wars and pandemics probably work in a similar way: these existential crises unleash great creativity and fearsome productivity, and can permanently change institutions and collective expectations...
In theory, older people - especially those with savings, few obligations, and their health largely intact - should be unfettered risk takers and adventurers. The oldest among us have the least to lose, and a short and shrinking period to lose it.
But this isn't how most older folk actually age, is it? Rather, older folks become ever more insular and staid, quieter and sadder, consume rather than produce, and avoid pain and seek comfort, let alone embrace change and risk...
So how do we get older folk to act more like those facing a terminal diagnosis or other existential crisis? I think your whole argument is flipped if more older folk ended their lives with a bang and not a whimper... So why is Tennyson's Ulysses just a feelgood poem, and not a social norm?
I agree with this reversal of mindset which should be the norm. I've often wondered about our cognitive quirk which sees younger people (who have most to lose in lifespan terms) taking more risks. I feel there might be some incentives or even just changes to societal expectations which might shift this. Certainly, I feel more comfortable with certain work related risks as I get older as experience tells me that even if something goes wrong, it is probably fixable rather than a disaster.
Very good point. I also would suggest that all of our experiences of "things can be fixed somehow" are those of a society that had a good run in the last 70 years, but that's not necessarily true over more extended time periods, and especially with the threats that we have now. The fact that we haven't annihilated ourselves with nukes doesn't mean that we didn't risk big - it just means that we worked on solutions and got lucky. But I also wonder if society would have worked so hard at staying away from the nuclear brink if it wasn't dominated by young people, with a lot of life to lose at that time.
Well, the Bretton Woods institutions and culture - which, above all, guaranteed peace and unleashed prosperity - wasn't exactly instituted by whippersnappers... I suspect the shared experience of a world war, genocide, and the horror of actual nuclear explosions, kept leaders - of all ages, whatever their other disagreements - from the nuclear brink...
Beautiful comments; lots to unpack. A couple of key reactions: there is no "average" older person - a normal retiree is very different from an octogenarian president of an autocratic regime, and the implications of their "coming to terms with mortality" (which is a truly profound concept) may be very different - and they should NOT be left to chance. My impression is that, in general, older people stop building the future, becoming both a little numb to complex and uncomfortable information and somewhat insouciant about risks that may materialize after their demise - else, the attitudes vis a vis climate change wouldn't be understandable. I fear the world hasn't had a global war for a long time. People discount the risk of things going terrible if we allow them to blunder into risky territory for too long - I am looking at identity politics, populism, and climate inactions as possible cognitive responses of an aged brain - including second-order consequences of the rise in inequality that hits some social groups (including younger white people in the US) hence inciting polarization.
Yes, older people are most diverse. I suspect the variation - in physical and mental abilities, mindsets, and productivity - within octogenarians actually dwarfs that within forty somethings...
But you've got me thinking of alternative explanations for older "insousiance" beyond the "cognitive responses of an aged brain". (Take climate change, but this might apply more broadly.) Here are three:
(1) Vividness and Recency Biases. Other existential catastrophes - global nuclear wars, famines, pandemics, etc - threaten immediate and permanent extinction or degradation in quality of life. Climate-related threats are both novel, and dispersed in time, space, and effect, making them harder to grasp and process. (You might then ask why young people largely "get it", while older people don't, and my response is that I don't think they actually do - I suspect many (if not most) younger people truly concerned about climate change have a mystical stance toward it rather than an analytical grasp of it... like a millenarian/religious fervor which gives their lives both ultimate and shared purpose and meaning in the absence of a God or church.)
(2) Etiology. Pressing the nuclear button erases human life. The cause-effect relationships attending climate change are far more complex and dynamic.
(3) Intergenerational Understanding and Empathy. If older and younger people are literally not living together in shared families and communities, sharing their lives and hopes and fears and experiences intimately and regularly, motivated and mediated by actual love and concern, they will naturally diverge into separate tribes, leaving each more suspectible to zero-sum political platforms...
Thanks; this is good. On point 1, however, I am fully unsatisfied with the hypothesis that young people have some mystical reverence for climate change. There's no logical or empirical ground for it.
I'm sure some curious kids digest IPCC reports, follow climate stories in the news, and draw conclusions from extreme weather that they personally experience. But most simply belong to a social tribe in which a story - one of unremitting climate doom - is now the orthodoxy, crystallizing into an article of faith. This story may be correct, even wise or productive, but the point is that it's now a doctrine, eliciting anxiety and fear and the sort of millenarian concerns once reserved for the black death or nuclear holocaust or the second coming. So no, I don't think young people are rationally more concerned about climate change because they know more or have longer to live...
I'm enjoying this exchange btw; hope you're having a great weekend!
Good debate. To keep the discussion grounded, I would only invoke "acts of faith" if we have proof that's the case...to your point, though - what is known is that climate change does induce psychological stress on younger people, and that might be socially transmitted, so your point about tribe likely stands. What we know for sure is the following - Assuming all beings are rational and have the same access to information (one doesn't need to grind through IPCC reports to get the scientific consensus), isn't it strange that many older people don't believe what rational sources say? Forget about the younger generation, who, irrespective of their circumstances, do align with the scientific consensus - does it take a tribe to convince people of what the scientific consensus says? How can we exclude that there's an element of self interest?
You're right - we can't rule out self interest. Indeed, much has been made of Boomers being the most self-entitled and sanctimonious generation ever...
But what we can't assume is that all people are equally motivated to know something, or to then act upon that knowledge. Are we equally exercised by every social injustice, every war, every case of human suffering, every abstract risk to our survival? Isn't our moral and intellectual grasp actually mediated by our connection to the issue or group in question?
So, for whatever reason and by whatever mechanism, young people are particularly concerned about climate change. Now their problem should, through the means of family and love, be their grandparents' problem IF we lived intergenerationally, and had more shared physical, moral, social space... but we live in ideological and cultural ghettoes, heavily correlated with age, and we caricature and malign those whom we can both teach and learn from...
Beautiful essay Gianni! So much food for thought!
"And naturally, money will be needed for the climate and energy transitions."
I think our collective brain will need an executive function. We seem to be operating with the brain stem. The coverage here of generational differences is valuable and interesting. Nonetheless, what strikes me is that there has been no effective way for the widespread understanding that serious action is needed on climate change to manifest as public and private action at the scale and tempo we need. It sound wild, but I confess that giving the younger section of the population more voting power is intriguing. Following through on that direction, don't we need a way to give those outside US/UK/EU some power?
I like the correlate with the human brain. Network structures in supermind might also develop along the lines of different brain functions, though the analogy is clearly not 1:1. But if you think of things like Active Inference, it might very well be that social structures do some of that. The issue is - older executive functions don't like to hand over power.
Great article, Gianni, you touch upon many different angles.
One angle that fascinates me is the ageing collective brain by country, by continent and by spoken language.
Some cultures are getting older much quicker then others, and in reverse, some other cultures are actually becoming younger, for example, India or Nigeria.
How this "asymmetry" in the ageing collective brain will influence innovation and geopolitics?
India is aging, too, and its politics skew older, too. That said, India is a younger country, and its new power status will translate its needs into geopolitics. Remember, however, that it is also a poor country depending on continuous economic growth, which could be imperiled by protectionism and climate change. The consequences could possibly be some destabilization of democracy. I am not sure about Nigeria, but it is clear that Africa is a younger continent overall. Two places to absolutely watch.
Great piece, Gianni. I think I read somewhere recently, that global ageing might also reduce conflict - as older people tend not to want to go to war. But also that changing demographics might force the hands of some leaders to make use of the young they have now to realise their expansionist ambitions.
Yes, there's a comment about it in the article. I don't know if that holds true in every case ...think of some crazed and aging authoritarian leader not fearing death and being willing to go "with a bang," either by using every single piece of human cannon fodder (say, to conquer a bit of Ukraine) or by deploying cyber and autonomous warfare.
Perhaps of interest to this thread:
https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/the-gerontology-of-power/
This is so interesting. In the end, it seems to me that (a) old people's networks enable them to build an "influence curve" that scales with age, a type of supermind that offsets their dwindling individual capabilities and peaks much later than their individual minds (b) that impacts the overall system's productivity badly because young people can't push their ideas into the society and economy which means that (c) at some point, people run of economically generated money ("you run out of someone else's money"), and plunge the system into exploitation. It is not impossible to see how the arc plays out in the US, and even in countries where the politicians themselves are younger, but their influential stakeholder old.
I like this "influence curve" hypothesis! I guess it flows from younger people being disproportionately "sellers" - of their ideas, effort, and risk-taking - into an economy and society where older people are disporportionately "buyers" - converting their accumulated savings of cash and social capital into goods, services, and policies.
I think this is especially true in upper socio-economic echelons, ala highly-paid young political consultants working for a politician funded largely by billionaires, or youngish portfolio managers investing what are ultimately retiree savings... And to the extent middle-aged people are the nominal leadership almost everywhere, perhaps it's because they function as a crucial link between pools of "older money" buying "younger energy"...
This forces a rumination is on the different incentives and cultures attending "sellers" and "buyers." Good sellers are naturally curious, empathetic, pie-expanding, problem-solving, risk-taking, experimental, knowledgable, and strive to meet a large need... But what makes a good buyer? Perhaps clear taste and preferences (necessarily formed in a past, both physical and mental), and clear (ideally large) budgets which they optimize against both some preference set and their anticipated remaining time on earth.
Imagine a society or industry or even artistic or sporting endeavor dominated by buyers versus sellers, or vice versa, and two starkly different cultures and economies emerge....
This is an interesting perspective that I hadn't thought of. However, my point about networks is perhaps narrow but important. It concerns the fact that older people accumulate networks in the form of people who have some allegiance and respect for them and can influence decisions. Younger people don't have that power in the same proportions.
Nice framework for thinking about these things.Interesting facts. A lot to digest. I'm especially interested in the prospects for deep changes in our approach to education by pulling young people into productive work earlier. I'm not talking about putting 10yos into fast food work. I'm thinking instead of making education more meaningful and practical. In the past few decades, for example, I've worked with a few devs who were absolutely capable of leading larger projects when in their early 20s—because they started getting part-time gigs at 14 or 15. I doubt that is currently possible outside the startup world. Perhaps it could be. I suspect one element will be helping those with established positions, realize they can benefit by collaborating across generations. Many required changes will be difficult while so many are rationally fearful of losing their jobs. More security may be a prerequisite for more flexibility.