A distinction I read somewhere, that I think is useful, is that people tend to be either primarily conceptualist in their thinking, or they are empiricists who learn from experience. Conceptualists have their big breakthroughs before the age of 35, and empiricists have their big breakthroughs after 35.
In conceptual fields, such as math and physics, the big breakthroughs happen young. Werner Heisenberg was 27 when he came up with the Uncertainty Principle, and Einstein was 26 when he discovered relativity.
In fields where progress is primarily empirical, such as biology, the big breakthroughs tend to happen later. Alexander Fleming was 42 when he discovered penicillin and Jonas Salk was 40 when he invented the vaccine for polio.
This distinction can be extended to artists. To write a great empirical novel, one rich in observed life experience, one must live a long time, and therefore Tolstoy was 41 when he wrote War and Peace. But to write a novel where one demonstrates new techniques for grammar and structure and pacing (a novel noteworthy for conceptual innovation) then one will be young, and therefore Hemmingway was only 26 when he wrote The Sun Also Rises.
Einstein, in particular, is an interesting case. He was 26 when he had his annus mirabilis (1905) in which he published 5 ground-breaking papers in physics, including the Special Theory of Relativity.
However it took another 11 years until he was able to grasp enough of the mathematics to finally formulate the General Theory of Relativity in 1916, at age 37. Of course, if you're going to use statistics from Nobel Prize winners' works, you have to keep in mind that Einstein won not for the General Theory nor the Special Theory of relativity with which we usually associate him. He won for his paper on the photoelectric effect, one of the other papers he published in 1905...at age 26.
Edit: It's probably also worth pointing out that, someday in the future, it's not inconceivable that we may eventually place the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox in the same league as Relativity. That paper was published in 1935, when Einstein was already 56 years old. If it is not currently considered of the same merit as Relativity, that is only because we still don't have a good handle on the full implications of that work. (And, yes, I realize that ultimately EPR will likely prove to be wrong, but a great scientist teaches as much by being wrong as by being right.)
So Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen were sitting around (presumably) looking over the mathematical foundations of Quantum Mechanics, when they noticed something. In certain situations, you could end up with one wave function describing two physically separated particles in a mutual superposition of states. The consequence is that altering the state of one particle would instantaneously cause the state of the other to become resolved. Effectively they "discovered" quantum entanglement (which has since been verified as a real phenomenon, not just a mathematical curiosity).
What really makes the EPR paradox important, though, is what it implies about reality. Einstein, et al. realized that there were only two ways to explain quantum entanglement. One possibility is that the entangled particles contain extra information, inaccessible to normal observation, about their respective states and which way the superposition will resolve. This is the so-called "hidden variables" solution. The other possibility is that an action on one particle is, in fact, instantaneously causing an effect on the other particle. While this is not, strictly speaking, a violation of General Relativity as no information is exchanged, Einstein found this possibility so unsettling that he famously coined it "spooky action at a distance". The conclusion from the EPR paper was that the "hidden variables" solution was more likely, implying that Quantum Mechanics was an as-yet incomplete theory.
Fast-forward a couple of decades, and we're just beginning to appreciate that "spooky action at a distance" is actually more likely to be the correct explanation. As I mentioned before, what this implies about reality itself is pretty mind blowing. To go even further, we've since learned that entanglement can not only occur between particles separated in space, but also between particles separated in time. Quite literally, the future and the past may be linked by this "spooky action at a distance".
We still don't fully grasp what, exactly, this means. One possible implication of this is that our existence as sentient beings may simultaneously be a consequence and the cause of a universe that can give rise to sentient beings. Needless to say, even though it's likely that Einstein was wrong about "hidden variables", the course of investigation that the EPR paper set the physics community down is at least as important as Relativity.
Not to be "that guy", but a lot of this is terribly incorrect:
* General relativity did not come from "grasping the mathematics" of special relativity. SR can be completely understood by an undergraduate and is an internally consistent description of mechanics and electromagnetic phenomena. Like Newtonian mechanics before it, it doesn't need anything more to be consistent.
* Local hidden variables are not "likely wrong", they are provably impossible. It is impossible to have hidden variables without breaking the principle of causality.
* Entanglement does not break the principle of causality. "Spooky action at a distance" is not an "effect" in a well-defined physical sense. It cannot be used to send information or cause things to happen.
* All of this could be--and was--understood without the EPR paper. Relativity was the most important thing since Newton. EPR was minor in comparison.
* I have no idea what connection you're trying to draw between sentient life and QM.
> * General relativity did not come from "grasping the mathematics" of special relativity.
I wrote that he had to "grasp enough of the mathematics to finally formulate the General Theory of Relativity". Human language is neat in the way it allows for ambiguities, but if you understood "the mathematics" in that sentence to be a reference to SR, then that is because it is what you read into it. I was referring to the time it took for Einstein to fully understand/appreciate the work of Minkowski.
> * Local hidden variables are not "likely wrong", they are provably impossible
> * Entanglement does not break the principle of causality. "Spooky action at a distance" is not an "effect" in a well-defined physical sense. It cannot be used to send information or cause things to happen.
Funny, I thought I wrote: "While this is not, strictly speaking, a violation of General Relativity as no information is exchanged." Oh wait, I did.
> * All of this could be--and was--understood without the EPR paper. Relativity was the most important thing since Newton. EPR was minor in comparison.
Yes, and Einstein also wasn't the only physicist to come across the field equations in GR. He just happened to be the only one to appreciate their full impact. No scientific discovery stands in isolation, so it's really not worth debating this point much. I have noticed, however, that many in the QM community seem to look down on EPR and much of Einstein's other work in QM, probably (not entirely without justification) because of the rather dim view Einstein held on much of their work.
> * I have no idea what connection you're trying to draw between sentient life and QM.
Not me. You should go talk to John Archibald Wheeler about the Participatory Anthropic Principle.
Note local hidden variables is impossible. The pilot wave theory is the theory of "hidden variables" that led Bell to his theorem. Basically, EPR shows that either nature is nonlocal or there were hidden variables. Bell showed that hidden variables had to have something nonlocal about them. So Einstein created relativity and helped to highlight how nature has an aspect that seems incompatible with it (basically, there is a "now" which, however, may be undetectable and is not our "now").
For those curious, the nonlocal hidden variables are the positions of the particles. Very hidden. So hidden, they are the only thing we see in experiments!
The particles are guided by the wave function. This resolves all the weird paradoxes such as Schrodinger's cat. It provides a great way to understand and investigate nonlocality, spin, identical particles, etc. in a very precise theory that even has broadly applying existence and uniqueness of solution theorems, unlike classical mechanics.
Hi! I'm a mathematician, I've always been curious about physics, but I've never understood some of the concepts of QM, such as what is "observation" in the Schrodinger's cat paradox, why QM means the universe is not deterministic, why hidden variables cannot exist, ... mostly because every physicist that I was able to talk to has been unable to properly explain these concepts. Do you know any books/articles/sources about QM that could understand these concepts, without going in unnecessary mathematical and physical details (i.e. using the least physics and mathematics necessary to explain the paradoxes of QM)?
Tough question. The reason you probably did not understand them is that there are reasons are faulty.
The textbook QM says that when experiments happen, the continuous wave function evolution stops and a new wave function is used in its place, chosen randomly based on a prescription using probabilities coming from the original wave function's decomposition in terms of an operator's (matrix) eigenvalues. This is a postulate in their view and that's that.
It makes no sense since what is an observation? They don't explain. They just know it. They use it when doing their experiments and it works well enough. Attempting to formalize it leads to wrong conclusions.
Bohmian mechanics/pilot wave theory is a deterministic, hidden variable theory that works. Within that context, you can understand the rise of operators as observables and the entire collapse rule which turns out to be a convenient approximation to reality in this theory; no actual collapse occurs. There is just one wave function on configuration space (3n dimensional space, n being the number of particles in the universe) evolving continuously via Schrodinger's equation and the particles themselves being guided by the wave function. It is the configuration space for the wave function where nonlocality arises from. Understanding its role in relation to relativity is the key question to understand.
The wave function evolves with lots of its branches being irrelevant which is why we can effectively get rid of them, i.e., collapse the wave function.
I have read it and I must have missed the part you refer to. He was a strong proponent of pilot-wave theory though towards the end he also started to like GRW which itself consists of two distinct ontological possibilities.
In as much as QM makes predictions, pilot wave theory makes the same predictions. But pilot wave theory has the advantage of being an honest theory that actually does make predictions. QM suffers from needing an external agent to collapse the system, an agent that is never specified, particularly on the universal level. Bell puts it very eloquently about whether one needed to wait for the first form of life to do it or perhaps one with a PhD to collapse the universe. He concludes it must be happening more or less all the time and that the mechanism needs to be explained in the theory. We can either change Schrodinger's equation as in GRW or we can add additional variables such as positions of particles as in pilot wave theory. Or we need to accept that most of reality is unlike our actual experience of a single reality such as in many worlds.
The EPR paradox was resolved a while ago, strongly in favour of Einstein's "spooky action at a distance". The first experiments were done in the 70's. See:
Yes, but as with most things in physics, the first signs that an idea is dead usually come decades before the ghost is truly given up. Take, for example, this work from 2012 that was still dealing with a variation on the "hidden variables" formulation: http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/10/quantum-entanglement-...
A theory is (as Heisenberg explained in his book "Physics and Philosophy") an interpretation of data based upon unscientific, non-falsifiable, a priori assumptions on the part of the theorist. You can't really disprove something as nebulous as "hidden variables." That's not a falsifiable statement. What you can do is disprove some theory based on hidden variables. Such evidence does not apply to the possibility of other theories of hidden variables that are yet unformulated.
"What's more, people who excel in abstract fields, like art or physics, tend to be younger than those who win prizes in fields that require more context, like history or medicine. Another 1977 study found that physics Nobel winners were 36 on average when they did their prize-winning work, while chemists were 39 and medical doctors were 41."
This is the thesis of David Galenson's "Old Masters and Young Geniuses", which is a good read. He also talks about how trying to find a single average age of peak creativity hides other possibilities, such as the one he suggests, where there are clusters among the young (conceptual innovations) and old (experimental innovations).
A distinction I read somewhere, that I think is useful, is that people tend to be either primarily conceptualist in their thinking, or they are empiricists who learn from experience.
Galenson's book Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity discusses this point extensively, in addition to being a pleasure to read on its own.
>What's more, people who excel in abstract fields, like art or physics, tend to be younger than those who win prizes in fields that require more context, like history or medicine.
Precisely the ideas discussed by S. Chandrasekhar (White dwarfs; Chandra X-ray telescope) in his book "Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivation in Science"[0]. The book draws a large number of examples from (astro)physicists, but he also expands into Beethoven and Shakespeare among others.
A must read if such ideas interest you. And even if they don't, it is an awesomely well written book, well worth a read!
The conceptualist // empiricists seems to apply heavily to me as well, in my entrepreneurial career. Despite thinking I have good business concepts down, I've learned far more through practice than I have through books. For me, I have to apply something to truly learn it.
As someone in my late 30s I think the main reason is this- Its time then to stop fking around and just get it done. It dawns on you at this age where you are in your life, how far you've got to go and it annoys you that thus far you didn't get 'it' done yet.
You're not staring death in the face but you're close enough to feel its influence. If not now when? That spurs you on, beyond any motivation you ever had at any age before. The experience helps, the realisation that those before you weren't any more special than you helps, but the ticking clock motivates like nothing else.
Here's my own personal motivator that has meant the most at this age.. — 'Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.' - Henry David Thoreau. That should scare the hell out of you, unless you're not old enough yet.
That's a really heavy load to put on your kids. They should be free to live their lives as they want to live them and not shoulder the weight of mommy & daddy's unfulfilled dreams.
I know what you mean, but kids normally shoulder a huge wad of parental expectations - its called culture and we couldn't live without it. Rename 'unfulfilled dreams' as 'values' and now it can be a good thing.
Unlike the other respondants, I am going to be supportive but still a bit critical. They do have a point that when "cool" is too narrowly defined, everyone misses out.
But that being said, what is missing in our society right now is a more reasonable form of this, which says "invest in your children's businesses, help them achieve success, and see your children's economic life as your retirement plan." Your kids may have their own lives, and very often they are going to get to define what 'cool' means. But if there is mutual support there, they are far more likely to succeed.
Yeah, a lot of motivation comes from recognizing that you've got a finite amount of time left to work with. Plus I think when you're older you may better understand the need for patience and for strategy (and have the experience needed to effectively strategize).
That's not contradictory to what the quote says. In fact, "do it now" is pretty much exactly what he's saying when he says most men die with the song still in their heart.
Moot point however, the quote is a missed one. He never said this.
Seems to be corroborated in tech by some nice examples:
Jimmy Wales: founded Wikipedia at 35 and Wikia at 38;
Marc Benioff: started Salesforce at 35;
Mark Pincus: started Zynga at 41;
Reid Hoffman: founded Linkedin at 36;
Robert Noyce: started Intel at 41 with a 39 year old Gordon Moore;
Irwin Jacobs was 52 and Andrew Viterbi was 50 when they founded Qualcomm;
Pradeep Sindhu: founded Juniper Networks at 42;
Tim Westergren: started Pandora at 35;
Robin Chase: founded Zipcar at 42;
Michael Arrington: started TechCrunch at 35;
Om Malik: started GigaOm at 39;
Reed Hastings: started Netflix at 37;
Craig Newmark: started craigslist at 42
... and the list goes on and on. check out this Quora post (source of the above) for more interesting examples: http://qr.ae/tG78W
I just finished Marvel Comics: the untold story by Sean Howe. One thing I was really surprised to learn was that Stan Lee was in his 40's and had already been a comicbook editor for 20 years before he co-created all the famous Marvel heroes like Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and The Hulk.
>According to Born into This, a documentary on Bukowski's life, Martin, offered Bukowski 100 dollars per month for life on condition that Bukowski would quit working for the post office and write full-time. He agreed and Post Office was written within a month.
Thanks. That snip doesn't make particularly clear when this happened, though from Bukowski's biography, I'd guess 1969 or thereabouts (as noted in my other comment on the value of $100/mo today).
This also somewhat calls into question what's required for genius to foster. Seems that some people are simply driven to create, and any environment in which they're free to focus on their creative efforts, and have financial concerns taken off the table (I've seen similar arguments made for tech hires: pay me enough money to not have to worry about it) is sufficient.
And that was when $100 was an equivalent of 3 ounces of gold which is about $4k today. Barrel of oil and S&P500 had roughly the same price in gold then as they do today.
Both gold and oil are poor inflation metrics as their prices are fairly volatile, albeit for different reasons. Also, it's not like Bukowski was investing his monthly Franklin in commodities.
This website suggests $656 as a more realistic figure. Enough to survive on while working furiously on your writing.
But look at the variance on those distributions. "Late 30s" is a poor description. How about "half of the winners are between 28 and 45"? Not so exciting then, I would guess.
Better yet: look at distribution of "age when paper was written", modeling the generating process is scientist X at age Y writes a paper with Z=0 if no award is won, Z=1 if award is won. Is it obvious that this distribution conditioned on Z=1 is different from the unconditional one? Not to me.
>That's assuming all labor is equivalent which seems ridiculous on the surface. I mean start-ups are hardly shoveling snow.
They hardly do anything impressive computer-science or programming wise either.
Programming like something Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr et co, including a lot of the early scaling challenges, is not that much removed from "shovelling snow".
To me, a lot of these folks are artificially limited by slow and encumbered education methodologies. The data seems to confirm that, as a physicist can more easily begin independent work, while the others need to wait until they have accreditation/equipment/funding/etc.
I think this delay of productivity would be especially avoidable in high school and undergrad programs.
If you could begin advanced fields in your early 20s, instead of your 30s, I speculate the distribution would shift left quite a bit.
I am in my middle thirties now, and I feel that I'm probably the best I've ever been. Part of this, I think, is that true understanding comes from the ability to contextualize ideas into some larger framework of knowledge. I find myself revisiting things that I've learned earlier in life, but am now able to see them in a more meaningful way because of the experience and knowledge that I've gained in the interim.
In some ways, the idea that knowledge in combinatorial is perfectly obvious, but it can be really encouraging to realize that the things you learn today are making you more capable of learning and internalizing new things later.
I'd like to see this data evaluated across different time frames. Maybe prodigy was more pronounced at a young age in the past century because people, well, became full adults and died at earlier ages? Now that in today's Western democracies, we've essentially delayed adulthood to at least the mid-20s, marriage until the 30s, and retirement into the 70s...this time delay, plus the fact that the discoveries we make now are more specialized and require more domain knowledge...it seems that the average age for breakthroughs will continue to rise.
Dying between 15 and 40 was almost never statistic-perturbingly common in human societies that were stable enough to support anyone doing creative work that survived to be noticed later.
Most variation in average lifespan is explained by infant mortality and life estension of the elderly.
Did you read the article? It addresses exactly that point and has a graph.
Innovators have been peaking slightly later in life as the 20th century has progressed, in part because today's scientists have more to learn than their predecessors did ...
Actually, Khazan is losing the plot. The whole point of the research she's referencing through 3 levels of indirection (the Atlantic, NBC News, Nature News, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) is that key breakthroughs in Phyiscs are occurring at ever increasing age with time.
Granted, the research looks only at Nobel Prize winners in physics, but the general reason stated: that there's more information to learn and assimilate, suggests a general principle of increasing complexity and decreasing returns to innovation, which is a key point raised by Joseph Tainter (The Collapse of Complex Societies).
Also highlighted in an earlier Nature News item on W&J is the increasing reliance of breakthroughs on expensive equipment, not always accessible to the most junior researchers, an observation also consistent with increasing complexity and diminishing returns with time:
Other experts in scientific creativity welcomed the study but note other reasons why the age of laureates might have increased, such as improvements in health or the fact that, in many fields, research now requires expensive equipment. "21- and 22-year-olds simply don't get access to this kind of equipment," says Paula Stephan at Georgia State University in Atlanta, who provided some data for the Nobel study. She adds that it isn't always possible to pinpoint "one magic date" when scientists made their discoveries.
As a 27 year old, I can't help but wonder how much of the article was written to be aimed at the older millennial/Reddit crowd's insecurity of aging. But I welcome the prognosis and look forward to my days as a 37 year old still pwning young noobs in Dota2/League/CoD/2K.
My thought is that if the achievements of a 40 year old took 20 years to accumulate, then they must have been working at something for 20 years.
That sort of achievement is one that is earned, rather than coming from luck. Which means it is the sort of success one can emulate, but only if we have the personality and determination to put the work in.
The 22 year old that got bought out by yahoo for 1bn probably did nothing other start-up founders didn't. There is little that can be learned from him, except to throw the dice more often.
The 44 year old who slowly built a property portfolio by living cheap and seizing opportunities (cheap mortgages, cheap properties) that come around only every decade or so, simply by playing the game so long... I could copy his example, but then I wouldn't be able to buy nice things with that money, or use it as startup runway. I'd have to make sure I was always in a stable (boring?) job to support the credit rating needed for several mortgages.
So the difference between the two kinds of success is important, and we can learn from the second. But if what we learn is that you can spend your life buying success, is that cost too much?
It goes without saying those achieving breakthroughs have been building up to that moment basically all their adult (and most likely teenage) life.
As a soon to be 40 year old jack of many trades but master of none, I am still looking for someone achieving anything meaningful starting from scratch later in life.
What I mean by this is someone achieving a mastery of some skill, when one has not done deliberate practice previously.
I suspect the answer is that unless you have been building your inner pattern recognition for basics of your field of expertise since late teens/early twenties, you are unlikely to get very far starting at the later age.
For example Einstein already had fluid mastery of calculus at 15 (just like Feynman), which was a nice building block for later work. I am not even going to start on Von Neumann.
Is it possible that studying Nobel Laureates skews these numbers? It would be extremely difficult to receive a Nobel for an achievement late in life because of the usual lag time between the achievement and the award and the fact that Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously.
It's possible. Furthermore, the article talks about noted achievements -- the case where someone's work is recognized as particularly good.
Your best or most-creative work isn't necessarily the most-recognized.
Being better-recognized probably also correlates with having built a network of connections, understanding institutional politics, having built up social capital (favors to call in), and so on. And it wouldn't be shocking if that tends to skew stronger among older, more experienced people.
Here's an interesting exception :
The poet Rimbaud wrote all of his poetry before the age of 20 and is considered to be one of the greatest poets of all time.
"Last December 13th, there appeared in the newspapers the juiciest, spiciest, raciest obituary it has ever been my pleasure to read.
"It was that of a lady named Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel, who had, in her lifetime, managed to acquire as lovers practically all of the top creative men in central Europe. And, among these lovers, who were listed in the obituary, by the way, which is what made it so interesting, there were three whom she went so far as to marry: One of the leading composers of the day, Gustav Mahler, composer of "Das Lied von der Erde" and other light classics, one of the leading architects, Walter Gropius, of the "Bauhaus" school of design, and one of the leading writers, Franz Werfel, author of the "Song of Bernadette" and other masterpieces.
"It's people like that who make you realize how little you've accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years."
I co-founded my first startup at 19, and several more before I was 25. I've done a couple since. I'm now nearly 39. Not had the big payoff, but I'll try again sometime.
To me, it feels like the biggest thing is the combination of willingness to take risks coupled with outlook on life and experience.
At 19 I had no business experience, no experience at the business I went into (4 of us started an ISP), had never set up a router or a Linux server. We all had to learn everything from scratch. I ran board meetings, did phone sales, configured Cisco routers, took support calls from users using Trumpet Winsock - a program I'd never seen on anything but screenshot - using Windows 3.x, an OS I'd never spent more than 10 minutes consecutively with. I negotiated with suppliers, and creditors at times. I negotiated contracts with partners. And so on.
Five years later, I knew just how unprepared we had been. Had I known what I did then about how tough it was at 19, I would likely not have started the company (but had I known what it led to in terms of contacts and opportunities - I still would have; did not get an exit, but it still paid off). Had I had the knowledge and experience I have now on the other hand, with the willingness to take a risk and life situation I had then, I'd have jumped right into it.
What has changed apart from having had 20 years to learn is partly that I make far more money and have far greater outgoings, and a family. I can't take the same risks, and my potential loss if a company can't pay a good salary is far greater.
I'm also more risk averse simply because my experience makes me far more likely to spot fatal problems with many potential startups I might have jumped at in my youth. But of course there's also the risk that I'll overlook things because of changes in perspective or because I misjudge the risks, or because I would have gotten lucky if I'd taken the risk.
Another major change is simply life outlook. While I was never the totally reckless type, and never all that obsessed with money, today the money just isn't particularly important. I want enough to ensure security, and it'd be nice to have enough to just work on my own projects, but I don't particularly care if I get rich. That changes my assessment of any startups drastically - I'm no longer prepared to jump at an opportunity to get rich if it's not something I'm sufficiently excited by. I don't feel I'm in a hurry to prove anything. I have what I need, and then some. I'm far more secure in myself in every way than I was at 19. I'm not going to pretend like I wouldn't love to get that multi-million exit, but it's not something that matters to me now (I'm sure it'd matter to me if it happened, though).
Instead, what I do think about, are ideas that fascinates me. And some of those ideas have been germinating for 20 years. Maybe none of them, nor any new ideas will ever click. If so, no big deal. But if something "clicks" I am vastly better prepared, and I believe I'd be far more likely to succeed.
I created 4 reasonably successful companies in my life, and about 12 that fell flat. The first success was in high school. But the first million+ was at age 34. At first I thought the article was a little too academic, but... honestly it fits my life pattern. So... there you have it.
Consider that the vast majority (something like 9/10) of companies fail within 2-3 years. If you're not willing to deal with failures, chances are you'll stop trying long before you get to 12. If you deal with the odds, you keep going as long as you get something out of it
Also, even companies that "fall flat" may be worth it. For my part, a large part of my current salary is down to my experience and contacts from my various startups. And each one of them have been fun for the most part.
A 25-year old brain may have more raw "horsepower" than a 45-year-old brain, which would make a big difference in math and physics, but wouldn't matter as much in e.g. poetry.
It doesn't have more horsepower, a 25 year old brain has a lot more gaps in its knowledge that is skipped over, whereas the 45 year old brain has more to connect and consider.
There may be hope for me yet according to this, but at the moment, I really have no fucking clue what to do.
My early thirties were filled with great ideas for startups. My early fourties are filled with depression that I'm past my prime, don't have the energy, risk tolerance, or money to do a startup, and don't have money to go back to school, so it really doesn't matter what my passion is. Somehow I still need to find a passion and change, though, because my death is impending. Maybe my fifties will be the realization that I am who I am and I'm fine just being bad at everything.
Just because you find a passion, doesn't mean you have to spend money on it. There are an insane amount of free learning resources online (in tech/dev, which I'm assuming what your pro background is). Similarly, I'm seeing an increasing number of bootstrapped startups (they just don't make as much noise as the funded ones).
My twenties were about realizing and coming to terms with the fact that there are people who are smarter, more clever, and more knowledgeable than me. My thirties are about figuring out how to work with these people as much as possible. I do feel that I'm late to the game on this. If I got over my ego earlier and/or had a more collaborative mindset I'd be in a better spot.
Keep looking for that passion. But don't do it alone. Once you find it, it'll be with a group of people "better" than you to help you figure out what to do with it. :)
Who would have thought? That in your late thirties, you have gained experience, knowledge, contacts, maybe even a degree of financial support, all of which lend towards the formation of breakthrough ideas. Now, where is my prize?
Its common sense that universal health care and higher taxes for everyone is a great idea. Depending on who you ask its also common sense that universal health care is a ridiculous concept and no one wants to pay for other people's hospital visits.
Actually, strictly speaking I do live in France at the moment, so your bizarre implication is actually true - but I did just move here 7 days ago.
Anyway, yes people do complain about the NHS in general, for all sorts of reasons, but I'd wager that most people don't complain about the fact that we have the NHS, and realise that it's actually really great compared to the situations in countries which don't have universal healthcare. Just a clarification, really.
Everyone complains about the NHS, but NHS runs yearly surveys about how pleased people are with various parts of the service, and it consistently shows about 2/3 or more are satisfied with most of the NHS services and NHS as a whole. Some exceptions, and there was a huge, temporary dip in 2011 (coinciding with massive spending squeeze), but overall NHS is one of those things everyone complains about because a) everyone cares about health, and a large proportion of us is in contact with NHS every year; b) there's always tension between how much we're willing to spend and how much we want - you can always spend more on healthcare.
The best evidence for the depth of support for the NHS, in my eyes, is that the Conservatives fought tooth and nail against establishing it. But within a year or so after it was introduced, they realised they'd never get elected again ever if they kept arguing to have it dismantled, as the NHS has consistently had vastly higher public support than either they or politicians in general have. So today they're resigned to cutting spending and increasing private provisioning of services within the NHS.
I'm a Polish guy with US passport who spent many, many years in the USA and my feeling is as follows: In the US people complain about one single thing regarding the healthcare - cost. In Poland they'll complain about long waiting lists, not enough doctors, not sufficient care, basically everything is worse than in the US - except the cost.
I for one don't think that the major objective of healthcare system is not to bankrupt people. Its main objective is to safe life. I wish more people would be worried about saving lives more than money.
Most countries with socialized healthcare systems that I am aware of actually has a longer life expectancy than the USA. This is true for Canada, Germany, Norway, etc.
I do not know if life expectancy is a measure for quality of health care, but it is at least an indicator of how good the general health is.
On a personal note I would say that my experience with the US health care system has left a lot to be desired, and I experienced the care as better in my native Norway. That said, my girlfriend is a doctor and her health plan seems a lot better so my experience can be anecdotal.
> Most countries with socialized healthcare systems that I am aware of actually has a longer life expectancy than the USA. This is true for Canada, Germany, Norway, etc.I do not know if life expectancy is a measure for quality of health care, but it is at least an indicator of how good the general health is.
I agree. Actually Poland which is 2nd world country really, has better life expectancy that USA! However, this doesn't mean that Polish healthcare system is superior to American. This means that if all you do whole life is eating, stressing out at work, having no friends with family 2 time zones away, and zero exercise - even the best healthcare system in the world won't help you. So while I agree that people live longer in most civilized places than in the US, I still claim that the US healthcare system as long as money isn't a major concern for you - it is just the best system in the world, period. But even they can't help you if you have been on McDonald's diet foe the past 20 years and the most exercise you do is 10 meters from home to car.
> On a personal note I would say that my experience with the US health care system has left a lot to be desired, and I experienced the care as better in my native Norway. That said, my girlfriend is a doctor and her health plan seems a lot better so my experience can be anecdotal.
Not sure how good they would be about it in Norway, but in the US they diagnosed me with Ehlers Danlos type 2 in a matter of weeks while in Poland literally dozens of doctors I visited didn't know what's going on. In my particular case, where the condition in from 1 in 3,000 to 1 in 50,000 the major incentive to find out what's wrong with me for the doctors was really fear for me suing them. Again, money in this system really works both ways. I said my insurance company, you test me genetically for ehlers danlos or I sue your ass. They paid $6k for testing and I was tested positive. From perspective now I think that in Poland some doctors at least knew or suspected my condition but had no incentive to do anything. And money or loosing it is a great incentive.
Yes, I agree that the USA is the best healthcare system for people with money and/or great insurance.
I do not know which insurance is great and how many people has access to this. I do however know that when I tried to read my plan, the legalese was so dense that it such as well have been written i Japanese.
My University of California at Davis group insurance plan costs $500 per quarter, and that rate is given for a pool of generally healthy young students. Do you know what a startup person has to pay for a great health care plan? Is a obamacare plan good?
> Actually Poland which is 2nd world country really, has better life expectancy that USA!
Which is easy to explain the US also being just a 2nd world country. The difference is that the US standards are falling and the other 2nd world countries are mostly rising.
I wish Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, NASA, Boening, Goldman Sachs, et, etc were from Poland. Only 1 st world economy can dominate economically rest of the world. That the voters don't agree on free lunch doesn't make them automatically 2nd world country.
>Depending on who you ask its also common sense that universal health care is a ridiculous concept and no one wants to pay for other people's hospital visits.
I wish that I could have a breakthrough this year, at the age of 27 my life's mission was to make it before turning 30 and times running out and I'm super anxious that I have not had much success.
In conceptual fields, such as math and physics, the big breakthroughs happen young. Werner Heisenberg was 27 when he came up with the Uncertainty Principle, and Einstein was 26 when he discovered relativity.
In fields where progress is primarily empirical, such as biology, the big breakthroughs tend to happen later. Alexander Fleming was 42 when he discovered penicillin and Jonas Salk was 40 when he invented the vaccine for polio.
This distinction can be extended to artists. To write a great empirical novel, one rich in observed life experience, one must live a long time, and therefore Tolstoy was 41 when he wrote War and Peace. But to write a novel where one demonstrates new techniques for grammar and structure and pacing (a novel noteworthy for conceptual innovation) then one will be young, and therefore Hemmingway was only 26 when he wrote The Sun Also Rises.