I understand that even the most intuitive & seemingly "self-evident" truths need scientific research studies to be conducted to solidify our understanding & prove our assumptions, but I'm still always a little taken aback by the way science journalism presents these obvious (albeit valuable) confirmations as if they're surprising discoveries.
My own little proof of this is that my dog has gone from sleeping on the stairway landing, to sleeping by the bedroom door, to sleeping next to the bed, to sleeping under my side of the bed. As he has aged and lost flexibility and sensory acuity he looks to me more and more for comfort and direction. Still loves to chase a ball - just takes a bit longer to bring it back :)
I believe (maybe someone has a study on this) one of the main drivers of changing social habits among humans is the ratio of dopamine / cortisol. When we're younger dopamine releases happen more frequently, we feel energized, ready to take risks and are optimistic. As we grow older the ratio of cortisol releases increases, making us anxious, risk averse and depressed in our outlook. Might be similar for these deer.
As you get older things hurt. The wear and tear one has put on their bodies adds up.
For an extreme example, look at professional athletes. Drew Brees still had the desire and drive to play, but his right shoulder had simply given out. The final result of an injury over a decade ago. He cannot throw right handed anymore.
A lot of these guys require knee replacements after they retire. Permanently disfigured fingers and toes. Etc.
So would it be fair to say that the increase in cortisol is also a protection mechanism? Since older bodies are less able to heal injuries the cortisol increase acts to prevent behavior that might damage them?
I'm saying that it's quite possible not related to cortisol at all. Or possibly you have the cause and effect backwards. Because of all the wear and tear, we become more cautious about certain activities, which causes more stress, which then causes us to produce cortisol.
to be fair, op is correct that the majority of people that get replacements fall in the sedentary demographic and don't have a history of intense physical activity. metabolic issues and pro-inflammatory factors, not mechanical stress, are for many people the primary driver of osteoarthritis and soft tissue issues more generally.
But people who play professional sports do get joint replacement at a higher rate than even the general population.
Just because there are more of the "general population" doesn't mean that the subset that are "professional athlete" isn't doing it at a higher percentage.
And there are other, non-extreme, things that also wreck the body. Working in the trades: plumbers, electricians, HVAC, construction, etc. will often leave you with bad backs and bad joints.
And yes, living your life at the extremes is going to have extreme effects on your body. Sedentary is the other extreme of professional athlete.
But even still, as things hurt more, we will be more cautious about endangering ourselves. Or even wondering if we are capable. If I can't walk without a limp, I'm sure as hell not running from danger. That's not cortisol driving our behavior, that's our behavior driving our cortisol.
I don't think anyone disputes that high-level sport can make you more vulnerable to particular msk issues than people who have led a less physically extreme existence. Overuse is a real thing! The relationship between cumulative load and tissue health is more complicated than you acknowledge, however. High cumulative load over life can be protective. Professional marathoners frequently have better knee health than sedentary people, yes, but also age-matched recreational runners, which is not what you'd expect if extreme load was straightforwardly harmful in the way you seem to think it is.
Regarding your comment on cortisol. Plausibly the relationship between cortisol and behaviour here is bi-directional, as is common with hormones. High testosterone influences me to go to the gym and my workout influences my testosterone, etc.
N == 1, but when I bought a Garmin watch and started doing 10 000 steps every day, all my lower limb joint problems disappeared in two months or so. Nowadays I don't even know which knee used to hurt worse (I am 45).
Mind you, I wasn't completely sedentary before, but I guess that Garmin made me move about 40 per cent more.
We don't really know if its from "wear and tear" or from steroid abuse which weakens bones and ligaments, artificially high bodyweight, injuries during practice and in the gym.
>Yet, longitudinal findings vary across younger, middle-aged, and older adults. Psychological distress decreases over time among younger adults (although only until age 33 for weekly reports), remains stable in midlife, and is stable (monthly) or slightly increases (daily and weekly) among older adults. For negative affect, levels decrease over time for younger and middle-aged adults, and only increase for the oldest adults for daily and monthly affect
Young people are told they can do anything, which actually leads to unhappiness as experience their limitations through trial and error. By the time one is in their mid-thirties, you know your limits, know what you're good at, and what brings you joy, so you stop wasting your time on the unnecessary (* excluding the super-genius VC masters of the universe growth mindset hackers among us).
Well I'm nearly 60 and I don't think I know what I'm good at.
I know what I'm good at of the things I've tried, but there's so much I haven't tried.
I'm pretty sure there are things I'd be better at than what I do, but I'm good enough at what I do to earn a pretty good living so that is what I do. I also realize that I'm in a field where even mediocre ability is outlandishly well rewarded, and I try to keep that in mind. There are a lot of people working harder than I do and better and what they do than I am but who are earning a lot less.
I've also accepted that I'll never be able to try everything, and there are some roads I didn't take when I had the chance that are now permanently closed off.
If we can just last a bit longer, you and I, age extension tech may give us an additional 20 to 30 years of healthy living.
If that happens, then in that 30 year period.. anything could happen! More age extension tech, perhaps! Or copying minds to silicon. And if we get that, then it gives time to figure out the reverse.
We're so close to potential immortality. It's as if we're in a desert and we smell water. Is it a mirage, or a lake??
> As we grow older the ratio of cortisol releases increases, making us anxious, risk averse and depressed in our outlook. Might be similar for these deer.
With the exception of reduced risk acceptance, my anecdotal experience is that a generalized sense of anxiety seems more present in people a few years younger more than older. I'd guess that if surveyed on different causes or topics of anxiety, you'd see a few spikes in certain predictable areas up to about age ~42 maybe, with a more significant gap between there and ~70
I assume a lot of this has to do with the deterioration of health. When I adopted kittens, the shelter paid to have them "fixed" (sterilized) for free but one was slightly too young for the procedure. A couple of weeks later, he got the surgery and his personality changed drastically for about a week or less. I was afraid it would be a permanent change, but he clearly just didn't feel good and that cleared up with time. I assume aging is a slower version of that just based on observation of older family members and the limited decades that I've experienced firsthand. If you feel physically bad, of course your attitude will change.
Interesting, I hadn't read this before but it's exactly what I have observed with my cats. They have gotten dramatically more comfortable with people as they have gotten older. I have often wondered what spurred such a significant change, and didn't realize it was the aging itself.
Indeed. My cats used to religiously hang out in the basement on top of shelving that sits by two ground level windows. Those windows gave them the opportunity to interact with neighborhood cats walking around and there were smudges all over them from trying to fight them through the glass. Nowadays I rarely see them down there anymore as they prefer to simply lounge on upper floor window sills.
> "This [lack of movement] indicates there might be some kind of competitive exclusion going on: Perhaps more energetic, younger deer with offspring to feed are colonizing the best grazing patches."
sounds like ageism in the job market (joking).
i think there is always a simple thing behind motivation. hunger, violence, greed...humans just good at hiding the naked truth.
That's another thing with humans: massive diversity. Some are 10x stronger than others for example, or 10x better memory. There's such a wide variety. I wonder if any other species is as varied. I think this variation, combined with the ability to socially cooperate (language) makes us naturally evolved for the efficient division of labour. A group with diverse abilities has a few superstar specialists in each field who can lift the whole group via cooperation. The ability to cooperate shifts the risk:reward ratio of the species for this kind of risk-taking.
In most other species the weaker, less able individuals are brutally weeded out by predation or starvation. Humans don't do that anymore so you see a lot wider variation in strength, beauty, ability, etc.
Disagree. We are much less diverse than many other species.
We are a social species so we pay more attention to one another. We are also pattern-seekers. Combine these traits and we have humans seeing magnified differences in other humans.
Recently I was struck by the fact that some people have an internal monologue and others don't, and some people can see vivid images in their mind and some can't see anything at all. These seem like very dramatic differences to me.
I'm skeptical that we are less diverse than other species. In a herd in nature, exposed to the wild, exposed to predators and food scarcity, there is not much room for diversity: you must be able to survive. In human society, on the other hand, we live in an artificial environment insulated from those risks, and where any number of skills are sufficient for survival: you can be funny, musical, logical, artistic, patient and caring, mathematical, strong, good at fighting etc.
Humanity went through a genetic bottleneck about 70K years ago. As a result, there is more genetic diversity in a troop of chimpanzees than in all of the employees of Google.
So it depends how you define "diversity". I can see how from your view (range of life choices) humans today are more diverse than most species. However, if you go back not so long ago, there are species of ants with more worker roles (40+)than your typical midieval village.
Physiologically we seem to be fairly consistent (especially given our relative complexity to a lot of other animals). Mentally? There's an incredible variety of aptitudes both in direction and magnitude. I suspect part of this might just be that we're a relatively 'new' species, and neurologically we've evolved so fast that the results are still a little random.
Regarding relative physiological complexity, I would argue that we are physiologically as complex as any other large, omnivorous mammal. There is nothing special about humans in that regard.
Our randomness might actually be adaptive given the complexity of our societies. There is nothing close among other animals.
Yeah but selective evolution lags behind right now by what, 10,000 years if not more? What I mean our selected traits are stil mostly from hunters/gatherers/early farming era.
Those survival risk were and in some places still are present, stronger would simply have higher survival chances compared to weaker. Those skills you list wouldnt matter that much 4000 years ago in most cases, not on survival level.
There's definitely some research around "hyperbolic discounting" and "dynamic/time inconsistency" that would disagree with this conclusion. There are many examples where we prefer a lesser short term payoff.
> We're good at focusing on our long-term greed and hunger over short-term greed and hunger.
If that were true, the modern world centered around consumerism wouldn't exist. We wouldn't have the obesity epidemic, environmental degradation or the genocide of dozens of native nations. Feels like short-term thinking where it's at.
> think there is always a simple thing behind motivation. hunger, violence, greed...humans just good at hiding the naked truth
our very emotions, instead of being some ineffable magical thing, can be described as monomaniacal neural nets trained via a genetic algorithm to optimise for survival and reproduction based on a dataset from the palaeolithic and earlier. greed, jealousy, lust, even the beatified versions like love and grief, are explainable this way.
people don't like it when you explain that sort of thing though. they prefer to believe it's all magical.
We could even argue that we are good at thinking we are in control of our own thoughts.
If you haven't looked into it already I recommend Blindsight by Peter Watts followed by the short story The Colonel and Echopraxia.
They talk a lot about human consciousness and it's importance or lack thereof.
With an actually original and scary alien contact (related to the topic at hand), scary non cringe hard scify vampires (also related), in my opinion really good prose and in general high density of interesting concepts per page.
With bonus real life papers at the end that extrapolated could explain the ideas presented in the books.
I'm gonna stop because I'm far past the point that Watts should pay me ad money.
I would tell you to donate/buy it if you like it but maybe if he feels the pressure in his bank account he finally writes the next one. jk please pay him, he deserves it.
Between blindsight and anihilation I recovered my passion for reading after years of not doing it.
And It's been a year since I read it and I still think about it often. I have some backlog I wanna go through first but I feel a reread is due already.
If we’re neural nets, shouldn’t 12,000 years of post paleolithic experience be enough to have more modern emotions?
All you’re doing is forcing people to choose something other than magic. You could name almost anything and they’d have to choose it over magic since magic doesn’t exist.
> If we’re neural nets, shouldn’t 12,000 years of post paleolithic experience be enough to have more modern emotions?
As far as I can tell humans are already able to survive and reproduce to the limits of what the physical human form is capable of. Optimization can only optimize so much. Where do you see "paleolithic" emotions being a limiting factor that leaves room for further optimization? What "modern" emotions do you envision to improve on those metrics?
Human emotions do not appear to be cohesive from person to person, so it seems the generic algorithm is still doing its thing, but if the mutations are no more effective than the "paleolithic" emotions with respect to survivability and reproduction, there isn't much evolutionary pressure to see them become dominant.
Well the parent was saying our emotions are 10k-2.5m+ years old, but I claim society is exponentially more complex since agriculture. Either our emotions have kept pace or they haven’t. If they have, then the Paleolithic nature of our emotions makes no sense. And if they haven’t, it takes away from the neural net idea.
Things like accepting a surgeon and anesthesiologist putting us into suspended animation and opening our hearts we have learned to not freak out about. Or that a single person could nuke the entire planet including our families and we go about our lives. I propose those are recent learned emotional responses. Nevethertheless, it still seems too slow to compare it to a neural net.
The parent stated that the neural net is trained with a genetic algorithm that seeks to maximize survivability and reproduction. Of which I posit we have optimized as far as it can take it. People have shown to already survive and reproduce to the greatest extent of what appears to be the limits of physical form as we understand it.
So, if we have reached the limits of survivability and reproducibility, only further hindered by other biological processes, what pressure on the generic algorithm would there be to see new traits start to become dominant? If you effectively stop training the NN, you wouldn't expect inference to change.
Perhaps the advent of modern contraception will eventually reveal some mutation that is advantageous enough to overcome the modern setback we've seen in reproduction, bringing to light a different emotion/set of emotions that become dominant. But, realistically, we're only talking a few generations of training on that change to the state of the universe. That's nothing for a genetic algorithm. GA-based training methods are not very efficient with respect to training speed even on computers, and worse in real life when a single generation takes ~30 years to spawn the next.
the medial prefrontal cortex literally reaches into the hypothalamus to inhibit the more primal emotions. people with damage in that area or who are tired and at their wits end, often revert back to earlier, more primitive emotions. it seems like you equate neural nets with artificial neural nets. there is no back propagation in natural selection. it's a genetic algorithm.
> If we’re neural nets, shouldn’t 12,000 years of post paleolithic experience be enough to have more modern emotions
does that mean you believe the Coelacanths should have evolved feet by now?
evolution does not work that way. usually new structures are laid out on top, new behaviours come about that can override older ones at certain times and at other times, "instinct" takes over, and an old program is running again.
That’s sounding much more biological than a neural net now. Neural nets are much quicker to adapt to new parameters. Coelacanths and humans aren’t. Which was my point if 12,000 years isn’t enough whereas neural nets are rapidly changeable, maybe we can’t do this equivalence in calling humans neural nets.
