Have you found it harder or easier to write thoughtful+intelligent posts as you've grown older?...

As a very young person myself compared to some others (just 23), I can't say I have much insight into this issue. But I'll shed what light I may.

I can say that over the last 10 years (I've always been a heavy reader & writer), my technical skills haven't improved very much from my perspective. My prose style used to be more show-offy and complex than it is now; I'm not sure what lesson to draw from that. (It is not as if my WM or IQ plummeted when I turned 19; if anything, with n-backing, it is probably higher.)

What has improved is my ability to think up real-world examples, and ability to add citations. My essays used to be full of holes and occasional non sequiturs, but as I read more and more and the Internet became more useful, they started getting better and I began to be able to offer useful comments.

For example, I first emailed SL4 in October 2004 with a useless contribution, and most of my early emails are marginal comments I would neither up nor downvote if I saw them as comments here. And in another example, I thought up a really good insurance idea, wrote a little essay on it, and years later read of something identical; I had reinvented a standard form of insurance. These days, I think I am doing better; some things on gwern.net I am not even ashamed of.

Additionally, do old authors write any less well than younger authors? Especially authors who are very old? Jacques Barzun, in particular, wrote his last book at age 99. But it seems that most people have stopped producing by that age. It is said that Hans Bethe was the only nonagenarian physicist who produced a top-calibre publication in his 90s, for example. Of course, many of these effects are average, and beating the average is pretty easy if we're motivated enough to do it (simply because many others aren't motivated, and also because intellectual stimulation helps stave off brain shrinkage). But even in the end, beating the average may not be enough to prevent decline.

Need to break out what you mean by writing. Technically, I'd say writers usually only improve. Gene Wolfe's prose seems to be getting smoother and subtler by the decade.

Idea-wise, they can often go downhill. Take Gene Wolfe again. He's pretty prolific and only has grown in critical acclaim. But never the less, the books the fans and critics keep coming back to are some he wrote 30 or 40 years ago, The Book of the New Sun. The Book of the Long Sun and The Book of the Short Sun are its stylistic peers, but they get only a small fraction of the attention & love of New Sun. There's no obvious reason why they aren't more popular. They just aren't. Some magic is missing. (And on some respects, they are distinctly inferior: his world-building is growing outdated, his politics have grown increasingly obtrusive & shrilly conservative, and his puzzles obtuse and difficult to solve. On urth.net, the consensus is that we don't understand An Evil Guest or Pirate Freedom at all, and with The Sorcerer's House, the puzzles seem simplistic enough that we're not sure we're missing the forest for the trees.)

Or more obviously, there's Frank Herbert. Dune and its universe marches on, apparently untouched by time. But when was the last time you even saw any of his other novels like The Dosadi Experiment or Dragon in the Sea discussed? Only fans read those, and I can attest that even we don't read them often or deeply; as well, there seems to be a real trend toward them getting worse.

Have you found it harder or easier to write thoughtful+intelligent posts as you've grown older?

I'm 63. I think I'm a better writer now - mostly because I have learned to make my writing less dense. As a thinker, I'm pretty sure I have lost some ability to think deeply - to understand new and complex ideas. But in compensation, I have a better ability to evaluate broadly - to quickly see the various implications of simple ideas in a complex context.

I'm not sure I was ever very good at producing long works - more than 5 paragraphs, say. But I do notice more now that I don't really have the patience for finishing big projects. Or for suffering fools gladly.

First whack at the question: I think my ability to write comments-- I've never done a lot of posts-- is at least as good as it was 30 years ago. I'm 57.

I get approximately the same amount and kind of respect.

The only change I see is that I think I've got a more emotional range in what I write.

One interesting paper about this topic I once skimmed is T.A. Salthouse, "When does age-related cognitive decline begin?" (Ungated link here.) The paper presents some figures similar to the graph in this post, with roughly similar magnitudes. (Maybe it is in fact among the sources of data?)

This is assuming the z-score in the graph is reported relative to the distribution of the scores over the entire (all-ages) sample. Which is pretty scary, when you think about it.

If anyone is curious about the source of the image, http://gizmodo.com/#!5495086/this-is-your-faulty-brain-on-a-microchip says:

"Lead image adapted from Park, DC; Lautenschlager, G; Hedden, T; Davidson, NS; Smith, AD; Smith, PK. (2002). Models of visuospatial and verbal memory across the adult life span. Psychology and Aging, 17: 299-320"

This made me thing of two topically related claims:

• I've heard (for example here) that verbal prodigies are exceptionally rare compared to mathematical and musical prodigies. A novel proof can be delivered at 16, but to write something really amazing you have to have something to say first and that generally requires experience and reflection.

• In Human performance, psychometry, and baseball statistics Craig Heldreth talked about the age of peak performance for different sports and professions, and noted (without a citation I could track easily) that business executives peak at about age 60. This suggested to me that instrumental rationality takes a long time to peak and is likely to be more related to crystallized intelligence than fluid intelligence.

I've seen unpublished work showing fluid intelligence also declines more rapidly for those with higher initial scores.

This is terrific graph. Do you have a source? I had no idea the relationship was so strong.

I haven't found an exactly appropriate segue in the post or comments (which are too specific about domains and don't mention this one), but this post nevertheless seems like an appropriate context to mention that composers appear to be a fairly strong counterexample to the conventional wisdom about creativity declining with age: they not only tend to be most productive, but also usually do their best (and even sometimes most innovative and radical) work, in late age, whether "late age" means 30, 50, or 90.

That phenomenon so dreaded in mathematics, namely doing some brilliant piece of work in one's twenties and never doing anything significant again despite trying, just doesn't seem to exist in music.

Currently I know not the causes nor the implications of this difference.

At 42, I keep learning new things about how to communicate clearly. I seem to be better at it than I was at 20, though I haven't systematically tested.

There's a hypothesis that some thinkers start out with a high level of productivity and skill at a young age, and gradually decline from there, and some start out at a lower level of skill and productivity, and gradually improve over time, before hitting a decline at very old age. I believe Wikipedia has an article on it, but I can no longer remember what it's called. If anyone can remember, I believe the page discusses the body of evidence for it.

I haven't seen too many writers get worse as they get older. Piers Anthony's writing has gotten consistently worse over time, in my opinion, but I can't think of any other specific examples.

Thanks for all the interesting responses, everyone!

Here's another question: Do you find that academic books and papers take longer to read as you grow older? Or not at all?