"Rigorous and objective" (if at first...)

[Tim May]

On Saturday, November 17, 2001, at 12:48 PM, John Young wrote:

> If you're over 30-35 all your best stuff was done in the old
> days. After that age you may think you're capable of good
> work but that's just the voice of experience taking the place

This depends on whether one is entering a new field, amongst other 
things. And it depends on the field.

Richard Feynman, for example, was innovating in many areas well into his 
60s.

> Newbies scare the shit of of oldies, seeing in them
> certain disrespect, ridicule, erasure. Even when
> newbies try their damnest to learn from the oldies
> the venerable farts can't bear to be used as
> stepping stones -- as if they never did that, and
> are not now robbing the newbies under guise of
> disdaining them.

There's a difference between newbies when a field is new and newbies 
when a field is old. When the Cypherpunks list started, many of us/them 
were newbies, regardless of our clock ages. (I was 40 in 1992, thus 
either disputing or reinforcing your "30-35" point, depending on your 
outlook.)

Some newbies to our list have contributed important ideas. I remember 
when Lucky Green first started appearing, circa 1994-5. He went from 
having little background to being one of our most important essayists 
and actual crypto company contributors. And there's David Molnar, a 
student at Princeton when he arrived.

It's true that I've seen nothing but "Look at me, I'm such a smart grad 
student!" comments from some of our recent newbies. And comments from 
lawyer newbies and law student newbies.

> Meanwhile the Net geezers are agoing sclerotic
> heading boards and advisory panels, doing nothing
> challenging, burnishing each others' reputations,
> fencing what they thieve from students and prowling
> the Net for easy pickings.

True for some, not for others. I mentioned Feynman. John von Neumann was 
another. Many examples of people contributing more or less continuously 
into late life. The "move into management" is common in all industries, 
all institutions, so many of them end up sitting on panels and boards, 
attending special events, and genearlly being distracted from the 
singlemindedness they could have in their 20s.

One of my long-term programming heroes is Dan Ingalls,  the guy who 
invented BitBlt (for windowing systems) and did most of the actual 
development of Smalltalk. He's still in the thick of things and is 
contributing mightily. I recently had a chance to spend a few days with 
him and with other pioneers (Don Knuth, Gordon Bell, John McCarthy, 
etc.) and they are still doing creative things. Admittedly, for 
fundamental ontological reasons, the things that made their careers when 
they were young ("history gets written by the winners") were more 
earth-shaking than the things they are now doing. I say "ontological" 
because this is wired-into the structure of how we perceive the 
world--most people never make any substantial discoveries, a few make 
one discovery, and far fewer make more than one. For those who haven't 
made a significant contribution by age 30 or 35, they probably get 
shuffled off into jobs where future contributions are even less likely. 
So we tend to see precisely those people who contributed early on, 
sometimes more than once.


--Tim May
"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any 
member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to 
others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient 
warrant." --John Stuart Mill