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Superannuated Scientists Still Productive
An anonymous reader writes "Modern corporations seem to have devalued older scientists. They are all to happy to have their veteran employees, scientists included, take an early retirement so that they can be replaced by younger people who expect fewer benefits and will work for lower pay. Thomas Kuhn, philosopher of science and author of the influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, believed that revolution in science was forged only by younger scientists. Some older studies of small academic groups seemed to show that scientific productivity peaks at middle age and declines thereafter. A newer study of 13,680 university professors found that scientific productivity still increases up to age 50, and it then stabilizes from age fifty to retirement for the more industrious researchers. When 'high impact' publications are considered, researchers older than 55 still hold their own. A recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that the majority of Nobel Laureates in Chemistry from 1901 to 1960 did their prize-winning work by age 40. After 1960, chemistry laureates were more likely to have done their prize-winning work after age 40."
Ultimately it'll be up to the company to decide whether an older researcher is worth it, even after reading the new data. I personally think it would be.
Obligatory Futurama reference.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
I think this paragraph is misquoting Kuhn. New ideas that overcome existing theories do not necessarily come from younger scientists. It has more to do with investment in a particular theory, regardless of age.
Smart people are still smart when they grow up...
With something like chemistry, unlike say mathematics or some parts of computer science that can be done independently, in the present day to make real advances you need a lab, and who has a lab is closely tied in with things like academic promotion. I don't have a link to statistics handy, but I recall reading that the average age at which people become professors in the sciences has increased drastically, as the PhD has gotten longer (from an average of 4 to 6-7 years), and even after that, people now typically do multiple postdocs before becoming professors. So you may not even be settled into your own lab, free to pursue you own research agenda, until late 30s or early 40s. That would tend to mean that most advances come from people >40 independently of mental acuity, because they run all the labs!
Now you might say, you can still do groundbreaking work as a grad student or postdoc, and this does happen, but the credit usually goes to the senior scientist, not the grad student or postdoc in the lab doing the synthesis. So in practice it's very difficult to win a Nobel Prize without first becoming a principal investigator with your own lab, because you won't really get the credit for it even if you do do something groundbreaking.
I'd be interested in seeing a version of this study adjusted for academic position. Are tenured faculty over 40 more productive than the few tenured faculty who are in their 30s? Or are we comparing 45-year-old tenured principal investigators with 35-year-old postdocs? My hypothesis is that the older-scientists-are-productive effect is mainly due to older scientists having more senior academic positions.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
When did 40-55 become "superannuated"?
Do I get to wear a cape?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Kuhn, philosopher of science and author of the influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, believed that revolution in science was forged only by younger scientists.
That's not what he said. Kuhn's views were subtle and complicated. He argued that revolutions in science occur for a variety of reasons, and that scientists switch from paradigm to paradigm and that one cause of switches is older scientists who are set in their ways retiring or dying. This is only one aspect of Kuhn's model. He didn't claim that revolutions were started by younger scientists. If one hasn't read the book I strongly recommend that people do so. Kuhn is an excellent writer. He's wrong on a lot of issues, but is generally wrong for interesting reasons. Of course, it doesn't help matters that we have people repeatedly giving inaccurate summaries of what he argued for.
Science and engineering are quite mature fields and don't change very quickly. The stuff you learn serves you well for a long time. Our best engineer just retired this year. He was stationed at Rolls Royce, a couple of Universities and then here. Amazing guy. He's in his 60s now and says that he can feel that he's less able to remember things and keep everything organised in his head the same way that he used to, but he was still supremely capable when it comes to deconstructing problems and solving them using "the literature", or figuring out his own equations by graphics a bunch of data in a spreadsheet.
Obviously computing technology changes a bit quicker, but I still think that there are still concepts that serve you well and that don't really change in amongst all the other fads that come and goes. Interface and languages have been changing, and everything is getting more powerful, but we've not had any really new concepts since the internet. Virtual machines, parallel processing and thin client "cloud computing" style stuff have been around for decades, but people like to pretend that it's all shiny and new and that your experience becomes completely useless every couple of years..
which is totally what she said
I can't think of a scientist or philosopher of science nowadays that actually agrees with many of Kuhn's conclusions. Even Kuhn himself backed off of them to some extent. Sadly, the only time Kuhn is even trotted out anymore is by post-modernists and advocates of quack science to try to denigrate actual scientists.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Thomas Kuhn was wrong at my sense, the picture he made is one of his time. What is happening isn't related to a productivity peak at age X and a decrease after that. A scientist having made its reputation is less likely with age to risk it at the risk to lose everything. Older scientists are just becoming prudent in research subjects and investigations they want to make. But, they are still productive and clever peoples. Younger scientists on the other end have about nothing to lose early in their career and are then much more likely to do silly things and try risky avenues. Which sometimes pay and sometimes don't pay. And went it don't pay, we said they are learning. When the old scientist is doing sometime that doesn't pay, we say he is declining. Life is a bitch!
It is sad to read old dogs are shoot after a entire life dedicated to make their employer rich and famous and the world better.
Achille Talon
Hop!
It's true that younger researchers, myself included, tend to have a lot of ideas that can be tested and worked on. We put a lot of those on the back burner until you get tenure, that idea for a new programming language or a testing operating system or whatever, you just don't try and do that until you're secure, that's not until your mid 30's usually. My boss is about 38, and the moment he got tenure he shifted from one area of computer science into computer games, and now does research there. How 'high impact' it is I will let others to decide (unless he wants to pipe in with his own feedback...) but we do good work overall, and have a few best paper awards and so on. But now that he has tenure his managerial responsibilities are going up, and his direct time spent doing research goes down. Without him overseeing the whole programme though, we wouldn't have a programme at all, and that includes a couple of PhD researchers a couple more MSc's,, and god knows how many undergrads.
Once someone gets up to around 50 they start to know what they don't know, and they start to run out of a lot of radical new ideas of their own they can test. But they know enough about what *is* going on, and how the work is done that they can recognize, support, guide and even lead really high impact work, even if the genesis of the idea wasn't purely their own, or if they didn't have enough staff to do it before.
The thing with giving scientists early retirement is that a lot of them will continue to work for you, or for a local university or the like, and they will maintain their contacts with you. You get less work done in that scenario, or at least less immediately valuable work one, but you still get some, and it's now largely paid out of a different pocket book.
Another ageism fundamentally disproved again with observation. As our population ages and has longer life expectancy it should be logical as well that productive individuals don't stop being productive at some specific point in their lives. While old age and treachery will always overcome yourht and skill, we have to get people out of the mindset that age or superannuated age doesn't mean a loss in productivity except in possibly physical activity. Just don't shove us into the grave sooner than necessary please.
Now get off my lawn you damn kids.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I see no sign that they've considered the impact of reputation on publishing. Their graphs seem to show exactly what I would expect from cronyism. Publishing rises steadily as profs work to secure tenure, then drops off (but not as fast as you might otherwise expect, because reputation secures easier publishing).
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Since the low hanging fruits of fundamental science have basically been found already, it just require more time to get the knowledge required to find some new place to dig. Statistically, you will also fail more often the more advanced the subject with less chance of bonus side effects, requiring again more time on average to produce something significant.
Just imagine the amount of knowledge and experience required just to be a simple peon on the LHC, and that only where it starts nowadays. Until we have the technology to imprint knowledge in the brain, invent some revolutionary knowledge processing technology (like an AI that could provide human with the same knowledge processing power as computer did for computation processing power), there is not workaround to the limitation of the brain. You need more experience, even if, by the time you have it, you are not longer at your brainpower peak.
..that it's in our best interests, as a society, to have legions of unemployed scientists out there with a grudge against those fools at the academy...
that people skilled in math tend to retain those skills in old age? Same goes for any science (since you can't get away from Math if you're doing real science; heck, even social science needs complex statistical analysis).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
First, there isn't a whole lot to see as you won't get access to the tunnels with a running beam line. What you do get is a presntation from the tour guide. Ours was a semi-retired CERN researcher, probably in his seventies who was a doctor of physics and a former professor.
It seems that CERN has a number of these "hangers-on" who may no longer be doing much work there, but still have some access and contribute. Even looking after visitors is useful work and it was very clear that he was still in full communication with his former colleagues whilst talking about the neutrino experiments.
See my journal, I write things there
Older People Still Capable Of Working, But Nobody Cares. Employers Still Looking For Teenagers With 5-10 Years Of Experience.
I couldn't get past "They are all to happy". YOU. HAPPY! Now! DO IIIIIITTTTT! Everybody!
I have colleagues of all ages. Each have their advantages.
What really makes people productive ad higher ages is continuous will to keep learning.
One of my colleagues just turned 70 yesterday and I'd take him any day over the 45-50 year olds at my first employer, as they hadn't learned a new thing in the last 20 years, while the guy who could be my father learned Python last year.
Keep learning!
Asimov wrote the same thing at the age of 70.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
Things used to be simpler. Really. For any given field, there is many times as much information as there used to be.
A couple of hundred years ago, someone could be a scientist and a philosopher and a gentleman. He could make discoveries in physics, chemistry and math. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphry_Davy
Now, it takes a lifetime to become familiar with a reasonable portion of one field. The old guys are productive because they know more than the younger scientists. They become unproductive when they run out of energy.
We used to think that the brain developed by weeding out connections. We thought that mental decline started in the twenties. Thanks to modern neurology, we know that the brain may continue to develop as we age. It's a matter of "use it or lose it". If a scientist keeps working hard, he will be every bit as intelligent and, therefore, productive as his younger counterparts.
The Nobel Prize is never awarded posthumously and it often takes deacdes for a discovery to achieve wide enough acceptance to be awarded the prize, so it's never going to be awarded to someone who does their prize-winning work late in life and doesn't live long enough for it to be accepted.
Profit margins and nothing else.
They dont care about product quality, innovation or anything other than how much more did we make this next quarter...
If they can hire young fools for less pay and abuse them, they are happy with the substandard product they get out of them. It had a higher profit margin.
Yes Kids. your PHD in physics is a joke compared to the old fart that has actually worked in the field for decades after he got his PHD. He does in fact know more than you do.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I have found that once the professor has tenure, his output is reduced to having his name added to papers he didn't have much input on and classes taught by grad students. Age isn't the issue.
The difference between old and young scientists is experience and knowledge. Because of these, the old have a cognitive bias against new information, and the young have a bias against old information. So of course it is easier for the young to think of new ways of doing things. But let's not forget that the old ways are not just random, they have reason and meaning.
So the conservative says 'we will not tolerate you fucking up this shit' and the liberal says 'we will not tolerate your fucked up shit'. Both have their point, but how it actually should work out is dependent on the exact matter at hand. If the modern corporation wants to replace people, it should have a clear idea what problem it is trying to solve. The current submission seems to be about using Kuhn to justify getting rid of experienced people for the short-term benefit on the bottom line. This is just plain doing it wrong. By the practical effect, I would call it in-house outsourcing.
FCKGW 09F9 42
So how they count/calculate the productivity of a professor? phd students included? Don't you think that the productivity depends more on the size of your group (aka the number of slaves) rather than on the personal skills?
One of the reason the older scientists are still productive is they can spell and use grammar correctly.
If Slashdot is any indication, modern science must be full of mis-uses of "their, there, and they're" and other lovely bits of broken grammar people don't seem to learn in school any more.
Damned kids, get off my lawn.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If scientific productivity stops increasing at age 50 as the article says, but salaries of older scientists are almost certainly higher the older and more experienced they are this is really saying you should get rid of older scientists who are providing less productivity per dollar spent on them as the years go on. This data doesn't defend older scientists but shows that companies are wise to get them to take early retirement. (These aren't my opinions, just what is the obvious result of the data provided)
The reality is that science advances in small, incremental steps, building on prior knowledge and theories. But that doesn't make a good story for Hollywood or for people who want to make a name for themselves. It is much more exciting (and self-serving) to claim that one is a super-hero who revolutionized some sort of technology. It appeals to those who crave hero-worship. The dot-com era was just awful in terms of marketing people trying to spin technology for the masses and really dd a terrible disservice for science everywhere. The overwhelming flood of bogus patents claiming that trivial combinations of existing ideas were somehow novel inventions is just one consequence of this mindset.
The wealth of human knowledge is very large at this time. It takes time, lots of time, in order to actually learn enough of what mankind currently knows before one can even get to the edges of current human knowledge and actually figure out something which has not been figured out before. That means that scientists who are really figuring out new facts & theories will have to be older simply in order to have enough time to learn enough of what is already known so that they are actually at the edge.
When I was a graduate student at Yale my advisor was a dude by the name of John Fenn. Very energetic and not at all ready to retire at 70. However he was forced into retirement and smaller lab spaces because of ageist university policies. At 70 or so he completed work on a GC-MS technique that won him a share of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
That technique was key to the development of protease inhibitors.
That's what I was thinking.
School districts routinely apply pressure on the veteran teachers so they'll quit or retire early. Then they can hire multiple new teachers straight out of college for the same price.
Is this a good idea? Well the veteran teachers know how to control the classroom, how to discipline the kids, and have a lifetime of experience about what works and what doesn't. The Melinda & Bill Gates Foundation found that veteran teachers always had kids with the best scores and the most positive classroom experiences.
The new teachers have no skill, no experience, beyond a brief stint of student teaching. Frequently the experience is difficult and there's a high turnover rate of new teachers that give up after 1-3 years.
In the end, school districts have one priority: saving money. If this negatively impacts education, so be it -- the administrators have very little contact with the schools and are more interested in climbing the ladder. To them, getting rid of a good expensive teacher to get several poor teachers is a good move and something they'd boast about.
Ageism is a terrible thing. Disclaimer: My parents are two retired Teacher of the Year recipients who both taught high school for over 30 years each and saw a lot of good talent come and go. Their experience was the same despite my mom teaching in a upper-class yuppie school district and my dad teaching in a poverty-stricken lower-class school district.
The only real difference is that rich parents tend to be able to pull enough strings to get administrators to retain the very best veteran teachers, but that doesn't happen as often as it should.
I liked his data showing that older scientists are still productive. What I did not see was his data showing that they are being pushed out in great numbers. Are companies truly pushing them out in greater numbers (as a percentage of population) or does it just seem that way because there are more people in the 40+ age bracket? This is all coming down to economics. What are senior scientists doing to justify the higher pay they usually demand? There is only so much room at the top of the org chart. As your career progresses you have to produce more/better work product. Your alternatives are to work for less, or be "flushed" out.
The idea that the only indicator of a scientists' value is some measure of "scientific productivity" is fundamentally braindead. I'd say their value may well be in guiding their young team, providing sage advice, and otherwise mediating things where the young ones may lack the social or political skill. There's no way to measure it only looking at the published output, and quite likely no way to quantify it at all without conducting extensive interviews with people who actually work under/next to those old "farts".
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Most companies don't give a damn about experience or seniority or anything else. Most managers will look at the math and say "3 junior scientists at x salary is worth far more than 1 senior scientist at 3x salary" regardless of who the scientists are and what they've accomplished.
At least if research organizations are run like software development organizations.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
1) Nobel Prizes can only be awarded to LIVING scientists.
2) Nobel Prizes can be awarded decades after the work in question
3) If you do the work at 60 and the award is 20 years afterwards you start to lose scientists and its unseemly to give an award to someone who is not in their prime.
Come ON people! In 1900 the average life expectancy of a male in the U.S.A. was only 46 years for Pete's sake. No wonder on average most of the 'BIG' work was done before age 40. In 1940 life expectancy was 60 years, and in 1960 it was 66. Considering that even 50 years ago, as people approached these ages many were in nowhere near as good good health as people are today when approaching end of life, so they likely weren't productive at anything in the last few years (back then smoking was advertised as good for your health... heavy bacon and eggs was a 'healthy' breakfast, exercise was not part of the urban or the new 'drive everywhere' suburban vocabulary, etc etc. etc.).
Now we have a life expectancy of over 80 years old in some countries like Canada and some Western European countries. Heck even in the U.S. with it's criticized health care system the average age is over 77.5. And to top it off, people are in much, much better health all the way to within a couple of years of the end. I see people who are in their 70s now-a-days who like folks who were in their 60s or younger a few decades ago. Mind you there are still people living unhealthy life styles, but they are the ones who are keeping the life expectancy averages lower than they could be (i.e. they die earlier than they should).
For a good example of how modern health care keeps us "younger" as we age, look at the Afghan girl (in a Pakistani refugee camp) that was on the iconic front cover of National Geographic in 1984. And then how she looked in 2002. When she was maybe 13, 14, or 15 she captured the worlds attention with her stunning eyes and the photo became one of the most viewed in the world. They went back in 2002 to find her. She had gone back to Afghanistan and had 4 children (one had died by then... life expectancy...) and even though they figured she was between 26 and 29 then (even she wasn't sure) she looked like a 45 or 50 year old woman, maybe older in Europe or North America. Interestingly and sadly, the average life expectancy in Afghanistan today is the same as what it was in America in 1900. Think about it.
So this whole notion of looking back and making judgements about what we should expect our productive ages to be is utter horseshit. Because of advances in medicine, better food, and better life style in general, the only way to determine when someone is less productive is when they are less productive. To arbitrarily say that after 50 you aren't able to think anymore is something that someone who doesn't think to begin with would say. No matter how old they are. We live far longer, and healthier lives. Therefore our productive years are far longer. That is the bottom line.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Firstly, this over-generalization of scientific productivity by age group is completely irrelevant unless we are having some age group contest. Scientists do extremely specific work, none of which is ambiguous. Specificity is part of the craft. A scientist who is ambiguous about their research hasn't gotten anywhere.
Secondly, the nature of research and publication, as well as their cycles, are vast and highly dependent on the scientific community that surrounds that research, as well as the environment in which that research is being done. For example, imagine a Physics professor at an ivy league university, and compare him with a chemist that works in a lab at a giant corporation. Most universities conducting research are open and public, aiming for advancement in the field. Most corporations conducting independent research are secretive, aiming for patents and advancement in their respective markets. Scientific productivity is as much the result of a community or group as it is the product of any one man's talent or inspiration.
Finally, these inferences into how the behavior of a young scientist differs from an old scientist are stereotypical, and would only contribute to prejudice at best. Any scientist with real talent would most likely be aware of it, and it is that awareness that matters more than any age bracket. Scientists know when they are on to something. They tend to believe strongly in their work, regardless of age. That belief is what is important and it can be measured.
This is hasn't been my experience. I've worked in a half dozen or so labs. Physics, chemistry, engineering - in academic labs, in a national lab, and have collaborated very closely with the research labs of an industry consortium of including 3M, Corning, P&G, and so forth. In every instance the older scientists direct the broad research goals, but have very little worthwhile input into the actual science. They haven't been all that creative or helpful. And the overall research goals are usually pretty obvious targets. From my experience, the life cycle of a scientists is they work hard when young and make a mark, then move up in the organisation structure until they are doing little more than managing a group of young scientists - and take credit for their work, of course.
46 & 2
Totally agree. And i think it applies to Engineering as well. At my first job, I worked in an Engineering group with some grey hairs and am still stoked on the stuff I learned from the older guys. They help bring perspective to a group and I think it's important to have a mix of young and old, just like it's good to have a mix of cultures in a team. It hampers group think and makes people look outside their own paradigm.
After an interview with an older Unix guy at my last job (engineering team at a web marketing company), my manager said "he won't fit the culture. He's just too old" about a guy in his 50s that was by FAR the strongest candidate we interviewed. Everyone else already on the team was int their 20s, arrogant, and lacking in skillz/understanding of the stuff they were working on. I had already seen some red flags, but that was the last straw. I starting looking for a new job the next day... And now that company is in deep doodoo, needless to say I'm not surprised.
Summary: it's the quality of the researcher that determines whether or not they can do significant research throughout their lifespan.
Younger people have more energy and more drive, but someone of a powerful intellect and insight is going to generate useful material for the whole of his or her life.
This isn't limited to science. Great composers, writers, artists and philosophers tended to be productive for the whole of their lives.
Futurist Traditionalism
Is it even legal to work that long in the US? I don't think that one can work in a full time job past the age 68 where I live (and no, it's not Greece. We still have our AAA-rating. ;) ) and even that's more than it used to be. Most people retire somewhere between 61 and 65 though there are some professions (such as firefighters) where people have to retire or start doing less straining work (e.g., become a fire safety inspector) earlier.
I think that the rationale is somewhat similar as it is when it comes to child labor. There are some anecdotal cases where the individual really does want to work and it's still in their (and everyone else's) best interest that they do so... but there's just a shitload of problems that occur if 75-year old people are kept in the workforce.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that modern science is usually done by a group of scientists rather than people working alone. I guess that older scientists are more likely to hold an administrative position allowing them to have a team, lab or a bunch of grad students working for them.