Absolutely. I'm in my 30s and haven't noticed any decrease in my ability to continue learning. It's definitely a challenge to discard your old mental models if/when they start to become hindrances, but far from impossible.
My Mom (nearly 60) went back to school last year to learn occupational therapy, and has been doing great. It's not rocket surgery by any stretch, but it's exactly the kind of retraining that's relevant to the article's assertion.
I had a guy in his late 70s in my accelerated Calculus II class this summer at a community college (power series, curve arc length, determining convergence/divergence, etc.) -- with a class full of students from second-tier schools. He was one of the few students to ace every test and exam.
It's possible it might be more about willingness than ability, I have come across older people that probably would have been capable of similar things given the will but have essentially thrown in the towel, happy where they are and aren't willing to put in the effort.
I have 30 years of experience in software development, with a computer science degree from the University of Illinois. I applied for a position at SEOmoz a few months ago. No phone screen interview. The CEO's comments seem to imply a very selective criteria was used to hire, and that it took them months. We don't know what criteria was used by SEOmoz to hire those candidates. I found his comments regarding older people slower to learn new stuff "enlightening".
Heh. Yeah, I guess if you a priori assume that anyone over 29 isn't going to be hired, you're necessarily going to have a much longer search for a new hire...
It's definitely a challenge to discard your old mental models if/when they start to become hindrances, but far from impossible.
I think this is actually the most important skill one develops by constantly reading up and playing with new technologies and languages. Just as mathematics is as much about learning to reason about things as it is about the particular theorems you prove, learning about technologies and languages and ideas is constant exercise for your brain to absorb new models and reconcile them with ones it has already internalized. Discarding old ones isn't a big deal, because you've been doing that almost continuously anyway. But, like everything else in this discussion, it requires a certain amount of willpower and ability not to take one's own comfortable position for granted.
It's just patently absurd. First of all, a person who is 35 expects their body to live until they are 80 but throws in the towel on learning new skills because their brain is broken? And what about the requirement that the president be at least 35...if he/she isn't able to learn new skills? And then, most importantly, where's the data? I don't observe that people in their 30s and 40s have trouble picking up new skills.
My Professional & continue education Python course has 30 people in it and I'd say that the average age is mid-30s. My friend and I, at 25 and 23, are the youngest in the class.
(Why are my friend and I so young and are re-training? Well, we got out of college and realized that our English & Biochemistry majors suck.)
Original quote for reference: "but for workers in their 30s, 40s and older, learning new skills is extremely challenging (humans simply don’t learn as well or as quickly as they get older)."
Apparently the author realized his mistake and redacted this from the blog post. Kudos.
I'll make a tangentially related assertion that I think is a bit more defensible: people tend to become increasing resistent to training in new skillsets as a function of their age.
Like you, I think they are perfectly capable; the problem is motivation. The longer someone has been doing something, the more it becomes a comfortable habit. Not just in economic skillsets, but in most everything, people will rabidly defend comfortable habits, to the point of declaring that society should be forced into steady state if that is what will keep them comfortable. Every human interest story we hear of someone who saw their industry vanish out from underneath them, and then they indignantly plant their feet and declare that we must bring their industry back is an example of this.
We become resistant to change, but I do not really believe this is an inevitability of age; I think it is something that we societally accept from older people far more than we do from young people. They've worked hard their whole lives, they deserve us subsidizing the comfort they now deserve as a result. Young people haven't worked hard for long enough yet, and so they not only don't deserve comfort, but we should steal away the comfort they do have to pass to the older generation that has earned their stripes.
Accusations fly in all directions, each group screaming to the other that they are the entitled ones, and that all this group wants is fairness and consideration. It's ridiculous; they are all caught up in a sense of entitlement, and all participate in an economic system that fundamentally doesn't care what they think they deserve. No matter who you are, you will never get what you think you deserve; best leave this sense of deservedness at the door, and realize there is a large random component to all of life's happenings.
You might not deserve, in some existential sense, to lose ten straight poker games holding a flush or better, but the worst thing to do if you do is get indignant and either declare the game is rigged, or try to rig it yourself.
So, agree with Vivtek; people in their 30s are more than capable of learning new things. But capability is orthogonal to willingness, and along that vector I think we have a lot of motivating to do.
