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Member (Idle past 507 days) Posts: 3645 From: Indianapolis, IN Joined: |
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Author | Topic: People are being booted out of their jobs at 50 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: ...and that's why people are getting kicked out of their jobs at 50, why there is little to no job security anymore, why benfits and training are minimal, and customer service is generally poor among most industries.
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: You know, I thought I would point out that this just isn't usually the case in the equestrian world. The best and brightest riders are generally in their thirties when they really start to win lots of important events or world championships and make their nation's olympic team. Similarly, the sport horses themselves are usually at their best in their early to mid teens. Most of the truly great riders, particularly in dressage, have been extremely competative well into their forties and fifties. The sports that have the jumping are a bit more dangerous so you don't see many fifty year olds doing that, but even then, it's fairly usual to see people in their 40's winning. Believe me, professional riders are generally just as fit as anybody doing any other generalized sport. Oh, and horse sports are the only one in which women and men compete on a completely equal basis.
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: Well, I think that at least part of this is ageism. Zhimbo, my very handy live-in research Psychologist, tells me that for tasks that do not require genious-level mental ability or peak physical skill and conditioning, older is better. Now, there is the economic issue of companies wanting to pay people less, but they may often be pushing out very valuable workers who really do a better job overall than their younger replacements. Older workers have interpersonal and leadership skills and experience that young workers have yet to develop. Many, many, many companies underestimate the detrimental long-term effect of high turnover on their service to customers, internal morale and willingness of their staff to care about the company, lack of cohesion and a sense of team/family among the staff, and new-worker training costs. ABE: Now that Zhimbo has woken up a bit more this morning, he tells me that in tests of basic cognitive abilities, older people do better than younger people on tests of knowledge (no surprise there). In tests of working memory, processing speed, and other basic, fundamental cognitive skills, there is no appreciable difference between younger and older people until the older group gets to around age 60. There is, however, enormous variation in individual abilities within each group. This message has been edited by schrafinator, 05-10-2005 08:34 AM
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: You don't know what the research says, and even if I can present you with lots high quality evidence that contradicts what your personal opinion, based upon anecdotal evidence, is, you plan to refuse to accept it. How very creationist of you, Percy. I am truly shocked.
quote: I have noticed no decline in my memory, and I am 37. Now, I could be tested and find out that I do have a decline in memory. Since in this discussion you seem to value anecdotal, personal evidence much more than controlled studies, I get to say that you are wrong based upon my own impression that I have not experienced any memory decline.
quote: ...and all of these things tend to be very, very heavily biased by confirmation bias. I don't have time this morning to go through your whole list and present you with research that shows you where you are wrong, although I might not bother if you are just going to declare it all bogus. Are you interested in looking at any of the research, or not?
quote: Remember, I am not talking about genious-level cognitive abilities, nor performance requiring peak physical condition. I am talking about members of the general population that never make any big splash in any mental or physical arena.
quote: According to the research on basic cognitive abilities, there are no appreciable differences. I guess you are just going to ignore that evidence?
quote: What about this scenario involves "basic cognitive abilities?"
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: Well sure, eventually they will. Two decades from now I'll be almost 60. But that's not what we're talking about, is it? Unless I am mistaken, you are claiming that people at 40 are significantly impaired at basic cognitive abilities compared to 20 year olds. Things like short term memory, problem solving (didn't you say you were great at problem solving, though?), the ability to learn new things, etc. The consensus of the scientific Cognitive Psychology community is that your assesment just isn't accurate. The differences between groups are very small compared to variation within groups.
quote: ...but not at the age you are claiming. There is very little difference between 40 year olds and 25 year olds on basic cognitive tasks. A statistically significant difference, yes, but a very small one. Let me repeat; there is enormous variation within groups compared to between groups. Here's a nice graph:
Here's what Zhimbo has to say on the matter:
Sorry for the poor quality - this is an enlargement from a scan of a copy...the red line is mine. Figure taken from Baltes & Lindenberger, 1997, Psychology and Aging, v12, 12-21. The scale is "Intellectual Ability Composite"; it's based on 5subscales (perceptual speed, reasoning, memory, knowledge, and fluency) from a total of 14 standardized tests. This is from a large ongoing study of aging; the study is an ongoing longitudinal study but this data is cross-sectional. All subscales show similar overall patterns, so the composite is formed from consistent subscales, and isn't some freakish average of wildly different curves. This is, in my opinion, representative of the mainstream view ofcognitive aging. There is evidence for continual decline in nearly all cognitive measures throughout adulthood, but the decline is VERY shallow when it starts and then the decline gradually accelerates. Past 70 or so (which I've marked with a red line) is definitely well into the decline, although there is certainly still large variation even at this age. For instance compare the left half of the graph with the right. Fromthe left half, one might be tempted to conclude that there's no meaningful variation of intellectual ability with age at all. Now, these aren't measures of on-the-job performance. I'm lessfamiliar with attempts at "real world" measures of performance and competence, although I believe they're out there. My actual impression- long since removed from actual reading of the empirical literatue -is that lab tests of cognition exagerrate differences between age groups, as deficits can often be offset by experience and/or compensatory strategies. quote: You are absolutely correct that the research could not taking something into account. But couln't it be the case that your anecdotal, personal impressions of yourself and the people around you are maybe not 100% accurate and are probably pretty strongly influenced by confirmation bias, since I doubt you are rigorously following any sort of experimental protocol in your recording of the "subjects" in your "observations"? I mean, what are you basing your claims on other than anecdotal evidence? There are all sorts of reasons why people in the 40-50 age group would begin to do poorly at work. For example, people who have smoked, eaten poorly and been sedentary their whole lives start to get chronic health problems, men often get divorced at this time in their lives and also tend to get depressed and isolated after divorce, etc. All of these things have nothing to do with chronological age-related metal decline but may be correlated with that particular age group's work performance.
quote: OK.
quote: But, why do you think you know this, really? Is it just your general impression combined with your personal report, or is there some more reliable, more carefully gathered data to support your gut feeling? I mean, how is this any different from someone saying, "Oh, Christian marriages are much more successful and less prone to divorce than any other kind.", and then when we show them research and statistics that shows that Christians actually have the same or higher divorce rate than other groups, they just say, "The research is wrong."?
quote: Yes, the research clearly indicates that after adolescence, it becomes much more difficult to learn new languages. The problem you have with this claim is that language aquisition is pretty much unique WRT cognitive function. We don't learn anything else the same cognitive way that we learn language. It's also not that learning languages is just "harder" past adolescence; the way a person's brain learns language past adolescence is fundamentally different. There are no other abilities that are cognitively similar to language aquisition, so your reference to other abilities is not valid.
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
"Important" in what regard?
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: Well, sure. If you can actually do the job just as well or better than as someone 10 or 20 years younger than you, but the hiring authority erroniously believes that all people your age are in significant mental decline, that's not good. Of course, remember that there are lots of other factors, such as physical and mental health, etc., which could significantly affect someone's hireability/work performance and are associated with someone's age group but are unrelated to age-related mental decline. This is also true WRT the descision to get rid of an employee due to their getting older.
quote: I think that discrimination based upon false information is always something best avoided if at all possible. Just as it is illegal to refuse to hire or fire women because "they all get PMS", it should be illegal to fire or not hire older workers because "they all are significantly behind younger workers in basic cognitive abilities."
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: That's it. The world is going to end. Percy is a Creationist.
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: But hey, Percy said that he wants the companies he invests in to be slaves to the bottom line, so this is how people get treated when all that you care about is money and not people.
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