Humans peak in midlife: A combined cognitive and personality trait perspective

I'm a layman to this jargon, but are 'crystallized intelligence' and 'emotional intelligence' in any actual sense 'intelligence'? I can't see how these terms mean anything other than judgement, experience, maturity etc, which are already good enough labels for this stuff. Can anyone explain what these flashier new terms offer over them?

> Fluid intelligence, which peaks near age 20 and declines materially across adulthood [...] while fluid intelligence may decline with age, other dimensions improve (e.g., crystallized intelligence, emotional intelligence)

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...

> Yet, human achievement in domains such as career success tends to peak much later, typically between the ages of 55 and 60. This discrepancy may reflect the fact that, while fluid intelligence may decline with age, other dimensions improve (e.g., crystallized intelligence, emotional intelligence).

Isn't it about accumulated human capital (aka social networks) and experience more than anything else?

This is pretty silly. Your memory obviously gets a little worse as you age, with most of the noticeable decline coming in very late age. But the artificial measures/definitions of things like "fluid" intelligence are mostly useless. Just pulling up one of the studies cited in the article which is supposed to measure the "reasoning" aspect of "fluid" intelligence, presents a huge host issues immediately [1].

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.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30211596/

Reading the abstract it would seem a good reason for positions in government like the President to be restricted to ages 40-65.

this is interesting from an actuarial perspective. we spend a lot of time modeling cognitive decline in the tail of life, but we rarely quantify the optimal intersection of processing speed and seasoned intuition. that midlife 'peak' is likely the most undervalued data point in professional liability modeling.

Whoop!

Still in the game :-)

Fluid intelligence is the confidence you feel at trivia night in the third round

Is this a "How to lie with statistics" paper, where investigator-selected parameters for the weighted average determine the result?

The best is yet to come!