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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.
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
Don't tell that to the "I hate anyone over 35" crowd.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I have long argued that the first social crisis the Boomer generation (full disclosure: I'm a member) will precipitate will not be their effect on Social Security or Medicare; it will be that the US private sector is unable or unwilling to provide meaningful employment for the Boomers who want/need to continue working into their late 60s and 70s.
There is no maximum age, although hires and employees can get weeded out by the "must lift 40 lbs box" or "stand for long periods of time" requirements that pop up routinely even for office work. You've probably heard jokes about geriatric Walmart greeters, but many Americans work well into their 60's and beyond. The earliest you're eligible for Social Security is 62 with reduced benefits, or 65-67 with full benefits (the eligibility depends on birth date, born after 1960 and you must be 67). Since Social Security doesn't pay that much many Americans work longer, or work longer because retirement is unappealing. My uncle didn't retire from trucking until his early 70's despite having to unload the semi himself, and that's after doing that job for 40 years and having a bad back, bad shoulder, and a hip replacement. My mom (68) and an aunt (70) are still office workers. Farmers also tend to hang on, in the USA 40% of them are age 55+ and every farmer out there knows some crazy old bastard still at it deep into their 80's.
More on topic, for scientists and retirement there's a big difference between those who work in academia and those who work in private enterprise. For the latter, unless you've moved up very high in the corporate ladder you're going to retire in your 60's, assuming you haven't gotten canned and replaced with a younger, cheaper scientist. For academic scientists there's tenured professors and then there's everybody else. Postdocs either find an industry job, quit science, or move up to an academic staff science job (tenure track jobs account for much less than 1%). Academic staff scientists either transition to industry, quit science, or are forced into retirement when their professor boss retires/can't get grants. Tenured professors rarely retire. Eventually they get demoted to Professor Emeritus, typically with restrictions on their ability to recruit grad students. There will be pressure on them to downsize their lab from the university and their department, but some can continue for many years winning grants and employing postdocs, techs, staff scientists, and undergrads. Eventually their lab will shrink in numbers and they may be reduced to a tiny space nobody else wants, or just an office. I know several professors who worked/are working into their 80's with reduced lab personnel and/or space, and have heard of a few who went into their 90's. Ernst Mayr never retired, instead going out feet first at 100.