As someone well past "peak" fluid intelligence at this point, I always hate reading research like this. "Crystallized intelligence" and "emotional intelligence" are the consolation prizes no one really wants.
I'd rather we instead perform research to identify how one might reverse the decline of fluid intelligence...
Strongly disagree.
Crystallized intelligence lets me see analogies and relations between disparate domains, abstract patterns that repeat everywhere, broadening my vision from a blinkered must-finish-this-task to a broader what-the-hell-is-this-world-I'm-in. I'm old enough to realise life is finite. Nothing satisfies like understanding.
Emotional intelligence lets me actually behave more like what I know a sane person should behave like. It lets me see I don't have to act on every passing whim and fancy, which are more like external noise than something of an essential expression from my inner self (which is a culturally-instigated fantasy). It lets me see how I'm connected to everyone else and everything in the world. Why I shouldn't stuff my own pockets at everyone else's expense. Why making other people unhappy ultimately makes myself unhappy. It wouldn't have been that hard to spot if I hadn't been caught up in fluid intelligence feats of strength.
These are the real rewards of middle age, not anyone's consolation prizes.
That said, I respect your right to disagree. But I feel this particular way.
If you can't figure out how to use accumulated knowledge and advanced people skills by your late 30s, then maybe you weren't so rational or adaptable to new situations in the first place. Things may not click for me like they did when I was 25, but I usually see right away when I have relevant knowledge to solve a problem or when I know someone who can help.
I'd gladly trade in some of the fluid intelligence I have left for more emotional intelligence.
I'm only half joking. I think it's notable that chess players tend to peak in their mid to late thirties. But that's only looking at world class players who have reached something relatively close to their genetic potential for the understanding we have today. It's entirely possible for 'regular' humans to continue seeing major improvement well past 40. I know that some players have achieved the GM title in their 50s and 60s. These were already strong players beforehand, but maintaining the level of play to get those norms and ratings is a very significant task for anybody.
It's entirely possible that these observations are 100% consistent with the reported observations and analyses, but if so then those analyses don't really matter in the way that we intuitively think they'd matter.
At the end, I agree with you, but for a different reason. My fluid intelligence is still doing well, but my newly acquired “crystallized” and “emotional” intelligence are just good to let me understand why people want to write existential horror stories. Hell, I now realize that some of the dark stuff I didn’t want to touch with a long pole three years ago are in fact escapism to a rosier parallel universe. I liked myself better when I was sixteen years old and I couldn’t understand that boy one year older than me who said he despised our prisons of flesh. May you be doing well Y.P., and if you happen to stumble upon this paragraph, know it took me 25 years to see what you saw so clearly.
”Across both model weightings, humans appear to reach their peak in cognitive–personality functioning between the ages of 55 and 60.”
In humans, intelligence manifests as memory, spatial and verbal reasoning, pattern recognition, etc. What is so interesting about IQ and g (the general factor) is that all of these abilities trend together. A score in one area is a good prediction of the score in another area. There is no reason why that must be the case a priori, and LLMs are a great example of an intelligent system which is much better at recalling information than it is at reasoning.
Human aging doesn't seem to affect all of these abilities uniformly. e.g. Everyone seems to complain about memory the most (and that matches my experience), but I've been pleasantly surprised how well neuroplasticity and pattern recognition have held.
In the meantime, humans would still need to do the reasoning.
I played a whole lot of video games myself. It’s nice to look back at would i could have achieved with my current perspective but that’s kind of the point of this.
In my 20s, I could learn a programming language in a weekend by reading a book. I could write code fast. I could figure out bugs. I felt so fast and so smart.
In my 40s and 50s, I looked back at that guy with some amusement. Sure, I didn't type as fast. But I spent a lot less time debugging because I wrote it right the first time, because I could just see what the right thing do to was. Net result was that I produced working code in less time. 48 might have been my peak year.
Speak for yourself. I'd happily retroactively trade a dozen IQ points back in my 20s for emotional intelligence. I'd be much happier.
Youngsters know no patterns so they can't match new events to known ones. Oldsters know that most seemingly new stuff is not really new, it's just the same old stuff, so they reduce the cost of thinking and reject the noise by adding the new unlabeled event to an existing cluster rather than creating a new noisy one. That's wisdom. But that's also a behavior that will inevitably increase as we age and our clusters establish themselves and prove their worth.
So aren't those two forms of intelligence less about a difference in brain physiology and more about having learned to employ common sense?
Isn't it about accumulated human capital (aka social networks) and experience more than anything else?
I chose a random domain (philosophers writing their seminal work) and found that most wrote them in their 40s. Kant wrote the critique of pure reason at 57 years old!
Sure we can generate syntactic and semantic descriptions endlessly but to use software as an example, we made a lot of the same things that look different only in the symbols used.
Ansible and Chef. Terraform and Pulumi. Ruby and Python. Windows and Linux. Burger shack 1, burger shack 2. They all solve the same problem.
Being able to generate semantics endlessly does not upend our daily patterns and routines. Life on Earth is pretty obvious.
Aside from the lack of randomization, you have obvious validity problems. The interpretation of nebulous words like "reasoning" as being accurately measured by e.g. accuracy on Raven matrices (construct validity?) and younger participants having been primed by recent test-taking experience while real-world reasoning skills aren't really reflected - it's all quite specious.
Real-world decisions are value-laden and constraint-laden! "Intelligence" does not mean "maximizing abstract pattern detection". If you keep your brain active with a wide range of creative, interesting problems, you will be fine apart from neurodegenerative diseases, which have real effects.
Where I worry is that these papers will be used to justify ageism. Looking through these comments, there's quite a lot of positions being bandied around that I've heard justify some truly atrocious hiring/firing decisions before, and we need to be cognizant of the reality that age alone is not an indicator of success or failure for a given role or task. It's helpful to keep looking into this, but we also need to be aware of our own biases.
As a seasoned citizen myself (55), what I've experienced is that ageism seems to be more about having common points of view and cultural references. It is similar to how several studies show that people tend to hire others just like themselves despite actual credentials. This is the challenge with age, race, culture, and even sex.
I do like that this paper shows that I will be just coming off my peak of power at 65 and that all I need to know is what 6-7 means so I can talk to my younger colleagues. :)