Conversation

There is a kind of age-related cognitive decay that’s like needing reading glasses. Thoughts lose precision the way fields of view blur. You have to hold ideas at arms length to process them, but then you lose resolution and can’t process small font size (intricate logic)
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Dunno what to call this. Blurred cognition? It’s not getting dumber, slower, or more forgetful, though that happens too of course. And I see it all around, nearly universally. Most “wisdom” is patterns of strategic compensation for this blurring.
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Wisdom = cognitive reading glasses for the blurred thinking of an aging mind. Like making bolder, rougher approximations and thereby getting to the right answer 80% of the time faster than more cautious younger people who can calculate faster to greater precision
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What people think of as experience beating raw cognitive ability is a case of a 45 year old System 1 (fast analogical reasoning) beating a 25 year old System 2 (slow logical reasoning) that’s faster on *both* S1 and S2 given enough data.
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This is Big Data wisdom of age. Compete where the young cant deploy their faster system 1s because they lack the data, and are forced to system 2. A sort of arbitrage.
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Replying to
Hmmmm this reminds me of the old conventional wisdom that mathematicians peak in their 20's. Andrew Wiles and many other disprove that though? I see it more as switching to reasoning by analogy -- comparison, metaphor etc. -- rather analytical parts
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