Category: Psychology

Marc Andreessen (who is often wrong but never in doubt) has this detailed but very informative post on the relationship between our age and our “output”. Excerpt:

So what have we learned in a nutshell?

* Generally, productivity — output — rises rapidly from the start of a career to a peak and then declines gradually until retirement.

* This peak in productivity varies by field, from the late 20s to the early 50s, for reasons that are field-specific.

* Precocity, longevity, and output rate are linked. “Those who are precocious also tend to display longevity, and both precocity and longevity are positively associated with high output rates per age unit.” High producers produce highly, systematically, over time.

* The odds of a hit versus a miss do not increase over time. The periods of one’s career with the most hits will also have the most misses. So maximizing quantity — taking more swings at the bat — is much higher payoff than trying to improve one’s batting average.

* Intelligence, at least as measured by metrics such as IQ, is largely irrelevant.

So here’s my first challenge: to anyone who has an opinion on the role of age and entrepreneurship — see if you can fit your opinion into this model!

Found: here.

And after reading the full article. you should also check out Naval Ravikant’s follow-up to this article which manages to add more interesting thoughts to this topic. Well worth spending the time required to read these long articles.

This is a great post that contains insights on how our brain works, how we fit into society, and stereotypes:

It’s simply the way our brains are built. We each have a certain circle of people who we think of as people. Usually it’s our own friends and family and neighbors and classmates and coworkers (or at least the ones in your department) and church or suicide cult.

This is literally the reason society doesn’t work quite right. The people who exist outside that core group of a few dozen people are not people to us. They’re sort of one-dimensional bit characters.

[…]Or think of it this way: Which would upset you more, your brother dying, or a dozen kids across town getting killed because their bus collided with a truck hauling killer bees?

Which would be bigger news to your neighbors, those dozen mutilated bus children across town or 15,000 dead in an earthquake in Iran?

See full article. Long, but worth reading. Take some time out and read it some day.