[shanusmagnus]

This is one of those moments that makes me fall in love with the internet all over again.

I've thought about this idea (without knowing there was a term for it!) wrt aging in real life. So many people seem to become increasingly caricature as they get older. The guy who likes woodworking and European travel becomes the embodiment of woodworking and European travel. It's all he talks about. His kids roll their eyes at Thanksgiving -- there dad goes again. Etc.

I've been playing around with metaphors, trying to get the flavor of this. I like the one about multiplying two vectors together, where small vector elements shrink, larger vector elements get (relatively) bigger. The vector becomes a more exaggerated version of what it was. And it makes intuitive sense: he spends more time wordworking, wordworking activities crowd out non-wordworking activities, his social engagements intersect wordworking, more of his friends become woodworking friends, and slowly the gravity of his internal world pulls everything in that direction. Nothing sinister about it.

I thought: how would you prevent such a thing? And should you?

Anyway, I'm rambling. But I would welcome any further pointers that could enrich my thinking about this idea.

[Bakary]

As you age, the rewards you get from social conformity become less and less important because your social role starts to be squeezed in general. Pop culture stops catering to you as much, you are less likely to multiply intimate partners or discover new friends or change your circle to a great extent, though obviously this is a vague trend and there are tons of exceptions to this.

From your own perspective, you have less of an interest in pursuing entirely new projects because the horizon of good experiences from those gets shorter, and as you have said you also gravitate more experience towards the things you have pursued, which unlocks other experiences on its own.

Orson Scott Card once said that Asimov was one of the few writers who kept improving in old age, because most others would fall into the trap of indulging in their eccentricity and assuming that the image people had of them was already set in stone.

I'd say it's helpful to always keep a slight distance, even from things that become increasingly foundational to your life. True bitterness comes when you cease to believe that new generations are actually capable of enjoying their things the same way you did yours in your youth. As long as you don't lose your capacity for theory of mind or refuse to believe that time goes on, you'll be fine.

[r3trohack3r]

> you are less likely to have multiple intimate partners

Fun fact: STDs are common in young adults and in 55+ communities - the reason behind this is left as an exercise for the reader.

https://www.aarp.org/health/conditions-treatments/news-05-20...

[smegger001]

simple 55+ no longer have children at home (if they ever had them), menopause has removed the fear of unexpected pregnancy, divorces have already happened if they were going to and death has started claiming partners from devoted couple meaning you have a large number of financially secure single people with time on their hands.

[reaperducer]

STDs are common in young adults and in 55+ communities - the reason behind this is left as an exercise for the reader.

According to my mother, is because nobody in her retirement village is afraid of getting pregnant anymore.

[iancmceachern]

I can confirm, my sister manages a retirement home.

[julianeon]

Here is a simpler explanation:

When you are younger, you have a community of people and friends who push, pull, and otherwise shape you.

When you are older, there is no community. That’s an oversimplification, but it’s close enough.

So there’s no pushback about “hey man, that’s enough about your hobby.” There’s no influence to curb any parts of your personality. It’s just you, instead of being in a health community, living in a kind of void, in between your interactions w others.

Now it’s true there are people (say, your parents) who continue to exert influence. But it’s like the number of people actively involved w you falls from 100, to like 5. In terms of true peers who are your age - they number may very well fall to 0. So the amount of eccentricity, or really indulgence of personal preference above every other consideration, skyrockets.

[thematrixturtle]

> Orson Scott Card once said that Asimov was one of the few writers who kept improving in old age

I'd like to believe this was true, but much of Asimov's late works, particularly the final "Gaia" sequels to Foundation, were terrible.

The sheer breadth of his output (which went way beyond robot scifi) is impressive though.

[Bakary]

Sadly, I don't recall the exact words or source, but it was 'improving' in the sense of continually experimenting.

I agree that a lot of late Asimov isn't as great as some of his foundational (heh) works.

[racl101]

> I've thought about this idea (without knowing there was a term for it!)

I used to call it the "Kramer Effect", much like you, without knowing it was called Flanderization and was using it in the early 2000s to describe my displeasure with the character Joey from Friends.

Joey went from kind of low intellect to full retard by the end of the show and very inexplicably.

[xhevahir]

I don't think Kramer is a good example of this. The Simpsons characters, and I suppose most Friends ones as well, gained depth (or at least the audience's affection) over the course of several seasons, whereas Seinfeld stuck to its original formula of, "No hugging, no learning." Kramer was never supposed to take on interesting dimensions like the Flanders of the nineties did.

[blowski]

Ross also became more and more neurotic.

[rzzzt]

So why didn't you call it Joey Effect? Did Kramer also go through the exaggeration process throughout the series?

[racl101]

There's many Joeys but there's only one Kramer. lol

[KaoruAoiShiho]

Just spend a week on tvtropes.org and you'll instantly become a better writer I think.

It's not to say that tropes are bad but it's important to use it as a repository of easily accessible writing mistakes so you can quickly learn from the past and contextualize them for your own synthesis.

[ALittleLight]

I don't think tropes are mistakes. In fact, looking at tvtropes you see lots of examples from the most popular and successful movies, TV shows, books, etc.

If you're a writer you should be trying to say something new, but you shouldn't try to make everything new. People would be confused and put off by something that was violating and subverting every trope in fiction, but they would be amused by something that subverts one or two tropes in an interesting way. And subversion isn't even necessary to be good fiction, you could imagine a well executed work that isn't pioneering, but is still quite satisfying.

[tehf0x]

There's a trope for that! https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Administrivia/TropesA...

[messe]

> Just spend a week on tvtropes.org and you'll instantly become a better writer I think.

Maybe, but from my experience I find the more time I spend on browsing through tvtropes in a certain week, the more I overthink my writing and get absolutely fuck all done.

Don't get me wrong, it's worthwhile to understand tropes, but its not going to make you a better writer instantly. And repeated exposure to an attention-sucking site like tv-tropes doesn't help. It'll maybe make you a slower more methodical writer, but that's not necessarily a good thing. You can always fix quite a bit in editing.

[derefr]

Don’t go there for the tropes; go there for the examples. Look up the things you’re thinking of doing, and then consume the media where people are saying that thing was done well. It’s like reading highly-cited journal papers, for fiction.

[dllthomas]

Just spend an hour on TV Tropes and you'll realize you spent a week on TV Tropes.

[paulmd]

is there a trope for this?

[krapp]

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/JustForFun/TVTropesWi...

[katamarimambo]

tvtropes is fun, but it's the cultural analysis equivalent of overfitting a model.

[kcplate]

My father in law used to describe this as “the older you get, the more you are boiled down to your true essence”

[cmehdy]

As time goes you might find your eigenvectors. Sometimes it takes a change of norms, sometimes it takes a change of bases. But things might be simpler when you live your eigenvectors :)

[shanusmagnus]

Thank you for yes-anding the linear algebra metaphor :)

After I wrote the original comment, I started thinking, even if you accept that hobbies / skills / preferences are a vector, what is the model where it makes sense to multiply vectors together? Then I thought, what if every time people encountered each other there was a kind of vector multiplication, about the salient aspects of their vectors? And this resultant "encounter vector" served to motivate the encounter, and potentially update each person's original "personality" vector? And day-to-day life could sometimes result in self-multiplication, depending on what you're doing.

That seemed fruitful, though obv very incomplete. I mention it in case you want to return volley :)

[cmehdy]

There might be some tricky bits to that: most people's domains aren't going to be the same and the projections will result in empty results. In some cases a few bases are shared and there's something to work with, in other cases it might be possible for one party to find.. I guess some homomorphism, that would enable some projections to be non-null.

It could be the case that it's not the usual way things go however, and instead of finding a perfect transformation instead an imperfect one loses some of the information (for example if you and I were to have this exchange in a language where one of us isn't comfortable and the other is). And I guess there's also the question of what to do with the resulting projections we get when we do get some.. are they part of feedback loops around the measure of engagement between people, perhaps? Can the measure of that projection become actionable in any meaningful way to either party? etc.

[matsemann]

Do you need to prevent it? I think it's related to optimal stopping / the secretary problem.

In the beginning, you explore. Later, you exploit by doing more of the things you found fruitful.

[shanusmagnus]

It's a good question. My take is that the quote from one of the sibling comments -- where someone's dad talks about aging as 'boiling down to your own true essence' -- is actually wrong. I think there's a lot less 'true essence' and a lot more path dependency. In my example, is woodworking and European travel true essence? I suppose it's possible, but I don't think so. I think it could have just as easily been something completely different.

If all else were equal, it might be fine to pick something you like and just exploit the hell out of it till death. But I don't think all else is equal. Perspectives on the world, skills, knowledge, versatility, resilience -- an anti-caricature penalty on all this stuff seems good in a whole bunch of ways, even if I concede that you might be leaving some unexploited fun on the table.

Like I said, I am open to being argued out of this opinion; but that's where I am so far.

[Karrot_Kream]

I think it depends on the person and there's no good answer. For some folks it will be sticking with what they know and trying to "exploit" it as deep as possible, while for others it will be "exploring" as wide as possible trying everything out, and for everyone else it'll be some mix of both.

To counter the anti-caricature penalty, there's also the stereotype of the older person that never found something to anchor them in life. This stereotype of an older person never found a hobby, friends, community, or partners and travels from place to place constantly searching and consuming. Most people are probably in the middle and most people relative to themselves probably become more focused with age.

[shanusmagnus]

I like this framing. The sweet spot would be finding a balance between having enough to cohere / give purpose / motivate, but not enough to capture all activity. So you'd want to monitor the situation and course-correct depending on what was happening.

And, like you said, some people would be happy being totally captured by woodworking / European travel, and wouldn't see it as a problem. And maybe some people would be happy in the anchorless, 100% drifting way, although I personally am suspicious of that -- if you have to choose, being a caricature is probably better than being completely un-anchored.

[chasd00]

The stopping problem is a big part of it but I think also the older you get the less concerned you are about social conformity. You just do the things that make you happy regardless of what the young people think.

[galangalalgol]

Of you want to generalize a medel you need smaller batch sizes with more varied nature. Maybe that applies somehow to people?

[xattt]

> how would you prevent such a thing? And should you?

I once had a chat with an exec-level nurse. Don’t remember how it came up, but she mentioned that growth comes with leaving a practice area once the butterflies in your stomach leave and comfort sets in. Her experience was this came at about a 5-year cadence. My experience so far is this advice was spot on.

[pabs3]

Sounds like a memetic black hole.