/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.10613817]

30 years old, been 10 years removed from highschool

Someone told me going back to college and getting my math + CS degree is a waste of time since you rapidly start to lose fluid intelligence at 27.

Is this true?

[Anonymous No.10613843]

>>10613817
Yes, but it just means it will be harder. The thing is, if you have a high IQ at 25 you will have a more developed base of crystalized knowledge to draw on no matter what. Your every day experience has forced you to create mental models and patterns of thought that are helpful. Those models and patterns stay, but developing new ones get progressively more difficult as you age past 25.
Luckily though, most patterns of thought built from every day life can be adapted via the process of metaphor to apply to new concepts. A new algorithm might be similar to how you navigate through a city for example. You can use the knowledge base that a high IQ created for you to ease the generation of new models via metaphor oriented modification.

Will it be as easy as an 18 year old going into college? No. Can you still do it better than lower IQ peers? Absolutely.

[Anonymous No.10613862]

>>10613817

You won't have any trouble until you get into proving theorems in Abstract Algebra and Complex Analysis, all of which requires a level of Mathematical maturity that some people can't break properly comprehend.

But you could definitely do CS if you go to a college that isn't that impacted.

[Anonymous No.10613868]

>>10613843
What if I have been smoking weed since 14. Even if I quit not, am I royally fucked?

[Sage No.10613873]

It's never too late. It's all just studying hard forl ong time until you've mastered it. What's that saying? 10000 hours to master something? Well if you focus and commit yourself, it's still possible at any age.

[Anonymous No.10613874]

>>10613868
Could have done some damage, how's your long term memory?

[Sage No.10613877]

>>10613868
That may be a problem. How often?

[Anonymous No.10613878]

>>10613868
Stop putting silly excuses in front of you and do the grind.

[Anonymous No.10613880]

>>10613874
Pretty good actually
I like math and I am good at it, I am just worried that me being 30 is going to be a huge detriment to doing well at university. And I'm also worried that even if I quit now, the 15 years of smoking weed has permanently damaged my brain processing powers

[Anonymous No.10613883]

>>10613817
>>10613868
See >>10613878
Sit on your ass and get to work.

[Anonymous No.10613884]

>>10613880
Your probably okay, but you're not going to learn math if you get high frequently.

[Anonymous No.10613889]

>>10613880
go for it
>>10613884
wrong
>t. mathematician smoking daily for past 10 years

[Anonymous No.10613950]

>>10613817
It's a waste of time because you're too old, not because you lose intelligence.
You're going to be unemployable when you finish it, having to compete with people that finished it 10 years before you.

[Anonymous No.10613957]

>>10613950
>employers care whether someone is 34 or 22
This is a very old way of thinking and is not relevant in todays tech world

[Anonymous No.10613963]

>>10613950
>hurr durr 34 year olds fresh out of college are unemployable
What kind of company do you own Mr?

[Anonymous No.10614020]

>>10613957
>tech world
IT is the second most ageist industry after porn/modeling. He would just get rejected for "bad cultural fit" even if he manages to fool someone about his age initially by omission.
In general, going to university for BS after 30 demonstrates extremely poor planning capability which alone is enough to make that person an absolute last choice regardless of the job.

After 30 life is mostly set in stone, the only possible way out is to start a company. To think otherwise is delusion. At best he would end up with student debt at ~35 working as code monkey for low pay, realistically not be able to find a job at all.

[Anonymous No.10614021]

>>10613950
>people who go to college right after highschool have an advantage over people who spend 10 years saving for college and self-paying
Do people actually believe this?

[Anonymous No.10614024]

>>10614020
All they care about is having skilled workers. If you can prove you are a competent programmer, getting a job is easy.

[Anonymous No.10614028]

>>10614020
>In general, going to university for BS after 30 demonstrates extremely poor planning capability
Paying for college instead of going into debt shows poor planning?

>After 30 life is mostly set in stone, the only possible way out is to start a company. To think otherwise is delusion.
We live in the 21st century grandpa

[Anonymous No.10614041]

>>10614020
When it comes to code monkey pajeet tier jobs, ya your right.

However, the demand for skilled competent programmers in cutting edge technologies and companies is higher than the availability.

If your smart enough to show you are a competent programmer/developer and not some code monkey, age is irrelevant.

[Anonymous No.10614109]

>>10614041
>However, the demand for skilled competent programmers in cutting edge technologies and companies is higher than the availability.
Wrong. There's a global oversupply that's increasing very fast. American shortage isn't going to last 4 years.
>a competent programmer/developer and not some code monkey
Competent - at what? Creating a gui app just 10 years ago most likely meant QT, or WPF, today it means Electron, which made creation several times faster and easier at the cost of runtime. Machine learning 10 years ago meant carefully choosing an algorithm and probably implementing some yourself. Today it means copy pasting someone's tensorflow code from github likely along with a pretrained network. Web development has become a trivial chore due to frameworks and packages for everything, it's just dull manual labor. Average developer today doesn't even know what O(n^2) means, and has no need to know. I could go on.
Hardware has become so fast/cheap, along with bandwidth and ease of on demand procurement that performance is a complete non-issue for pretty much all normal businesses, meaning no one cares about optimal design.

Yes there's the 1% that actively requires some thinking, the people actually creating all these tools, ai researchers, robotic startups, 3d game engines, hft, or superscale web services like facebook or netflix. They have zero problems with finding people as there's an overabundance of skilled people that feel underutilized.

[Anonymous No.10614142]

>>10614109
All wrong

[Anonymous No.10614146]

>>10614109
>there is no need to people beyond code monkeys
>proceeds to list code monkey jobs

[Anonymous No.10614198]

>>10614146
What's your point? That's how 99% of all dev jobs look, only results matter and same results no longer require skill, but they did in the past. I actually worked on a speech to text engine, hmm, dsp with emphasis on performance, all that. Today "development" consists of downloading DeepSpeech from github for near state of the art results, at best you have to retrain it on your own data.

List something that still requires thinking and is in common demand outside of 1% I listed.

[Anonymous No.10614268]

>>10614198
Any job worth more than 150k a year

[Anonymous No.10614296]

>>10614268
nice "example" you can probably get that doing react in a vc funded sf startup.

[Anonymous No.10614319]

>>10614198
Any advice for someone looking to get into AI?
Dbl Major math and comp sci, been programming for 8 years.
I kind of see all the shit you're saying happening around me but I can't break into the industry to find where I would fit. Don't want to do bs work.

[Anonymous No.10614337]

>>10614319
No particular recent knowledge, but I saw a good post about it recently
https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/bi2caq/d_masters_to_industry_learnings/

few years ago I would have said get into the top 10% on kaggle and top 10 into at least one-two competitions but apparently it lost its importance and popularity. Still, doing some competitions can't hurt
https://www.kaggle.com/competitions

[Anonymous No.10614417]

>>10614198
Anon, you seem to know your shit. I'm a 23 yo math freshman. Is there still hope for me?