Am I Old?
In this podcast, we're discussing old age and when, exactly, it befalls us. Do we simply wake up one day absent of youth? Or can we estimate its proximity by certain metrics, such as daily medication or number of grandchildren? We take a look at how old age has been historically codified, and reason why it might not be just a number. A few things we mentioned in this podcast: - The Sorites Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox - Mortality in England and Wales: past and projected trends in average lifespan https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/articles/mortalityinenglandandwales/pastandprojectedtrendsinaveragelifespan - Perception of when old age starts has increased over time https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/apr/22/when-old-age-starts-perception-study - Cognitive Engineering: Seven Ages: First Puking and Mewling https://soundcloud.com/aleph-insights/seven-ages-first-puking-and-mewling For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email podcast@alephinsights.com
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph
Speaker B:and this week we're discussing being old. Nick. Well, so a couple of weeks ago, as I do perhaps four or five times a year, I put on contact lenses. I think I was going to the cinema or something. I thought, well, you know, I want to see better. So I put contact lenses in, looked in the mirror and there was this wrinkly old man looking back at me. Well, not quite. I didn't look that different to normal, but tragically, I noticed that I had some grey hairs, which I just had never noticed with my glasses on. And I thought, is that it? Am I now an old person? Which made me then think, well, actually, does it happen on a particular day? Is there a day when you're suddenly an old person? And are you basically young until you become old? So are you a young person and then the next day you're old? And can we be very precise about that and let, you know, so that they can maybe develop an app or something to let you know if you're old now. It's just a yes or a no, that sort of thing. So there's a whole bunch of questions there about what, how you know when you're old. Because I mean, I've got to be honest, I don't, I don't like the idea. No disrespect to old people. I don't want to be one of them yet.
Speaker C:Yeah. I don't think it's up to you though, sadly.
Speaker A:That's part, yeah, perception. Yeah. I've got a few anecdotes around this. A couple of things that makes me think of a few years ago, I was having a disagreement with my boss at the time. I think I was about to turn 40. And I was like, Oh, here we go, middle age. And he said, No, no, you've been middle aged a long time. I was like, Well, hold on. Why? What makes you say that? And he says, Well, my son, who's a teenager, he definitely thinks you know, someone who's 35 is middle age. And my immediate thing was, well, first of all, in my own mind, I'd always thought 40 boom, middle age. That's it. Right. Always. Even when you were like 10. Yeah. I've always been of that opinion. Okay. Not about being old, but certainly middle aged. Right. And so you're in your 40th birthday, you wake up, you're middle aged. So first of all, that was well known. It starts at 40 as far as I'm concerned. But second, I don't give a toss what your teenager thinks, you know, why? Why he's the why is he the arbiter of you know, what's old and what's not right? And the second thing that I've noticed recently in the last couple of years is how frustrated my children are around me when I'm trying to change stuff on the TV. And they just get they get really impatient with me. And this feels too familiar. Yeah, yeah, mine get annoyed with me because I
Speaker B:have to have the volume slightly louder than what they want it at. Well, mine get annoyed. And they get annoyed if I can't hear what they've said the first time. And they accuse me of being deaf, like it's a personality failing. When in fact, it's not, you're just old. Well, exactly. So
Speaker C:yeah, Peter, where are you in this whole debate on on being old? Well, I think in the vernacular term of old, I don't think it's up to you. It's how people perceive you as your age. You're only as young, you're only as old as you feel. Yeah. So only as old as the behaviours you have as well. You get very youthful, older people. You do. Because they remain active, they remain sort of cognitively active and engaging. And then you get very old, old people who sort of a bit more isolated, closed off and don't really do things that... You get quite old young people as well. Yeah, you get old young people. So I think you can stave off age, this old, this oldness. By acting like a twat. Yeah, not necessarily. I think you can pull it off in a graceful way. I think it's hard. But yeah, I think it's up to other people how old you seem really that matters the most.
Speaker A:So, I mean, do we have, I mean, beyond saying it's up to other people. Yeah, can we get more objective? Do we have a definition?
Speaker C:Well, yeah, a few definitions of old age. So I think that's very much the sort of perceived old age is like if how people perceive you, give you a sort of a subjective, qualitative label of your old ageyness. But others include like this arbitrary one, so chronological age. You could put a marker in the sand and say, yeah, when you're 65 or when you're 70, you're old. It seems not terribly useful, but it's like that's how the kind of bureaucratic world works, right? So, you know, you collect your pension at whatever is 65.
Speaker B:I think they move it around. They move it around. Yeah, it's like the retirement. I think we got rid of a retirement age, but it used to be, it was 60 for women and then they made it the same or something. Isn't it 67 now for men or something? I don't know. Women demanded equality, so they did it by raising the retirement age. It's like, no, that's not what's supposed to have happened. Yeah, so there's, yeah, so that's. Sorry, just by the way, the retirement age, let me get this straight. That's the age at which firms can say you, we're no longer employing you. You can't do that anymore, but I think that's when they, you could just be forcibly retired at that age. I think that's the significance of that age. I don't think it was not illegal to work beyond the retirement age or anything like that.
Speaker C:Okay. Other suggested definitions. So mortality rates is possibly something a bit more useful. So economist John Chauvin, who I hadn't previously heard of, have you heard of him? I know, I haven't. He suggested that you should define old age by mortality rate. So you pick, again, you have to. When you die, you're old. You have to pick, you have to pick. The day before you die. For your given age range, what's your expected mortality for that age? So again, the problem is you then again have to pick an arbitrary level. So if you say, well, we'll define old age as having a 5% chance of dying in that year. Right. Then that's possibly where you're old or 10% or 1%, whatever it is. Still suffers from the same problem. Suffers from the same problem. You're just shifting the arbitrary selection down the road a bit. That's potentially more useful because that that would give you a yardstick though. Like if you, when you're, I don't know what the figures are, but say when you're 60, you've got a 2% chance of dying. That might drive your behaviour a bit. You might say, well, actually, maybe I should start taking a bit, being a bit more careful.
Speaker B:Au contraire, taking more drugs. It's much more extreme sports. Yeah. Become one of those annoying old people. Well, you're losing less lifespan.
Speaker C:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So that's probably useful because that would help drive.
Speaker B:Yeah. Well, the good thing about that is at least it's objective. That carries the changes in mortality over and means that, you know, an old person from 100 years ago is going to be a different age to an old person now, but defines it in terms of a annual chance of dying. Yeah. Which plausibly is more important in terms of thinking about whether someone's old, I guess, I guess. Yeah. Anyway, carry on. Another sort of related is. Well, actually, sorry. No, I will finish that. It surely has to be certain things that you die of, like, like in, you know, in the Victorian era, you're much more likely to die of an accident, for example. Get run over by a horse. Yeah. In which case you're, you know, we wouldn't probably, that shouldn't factor in. We should remove those from the data, I think. Yeah. Should be people who die of kind of diseases.
Speaker C:Yeah. Well, if you just picked overall mortality rates, that would do that for you, wouldn't it?
Speaker B:Well, except for I think your chance of dying, you know, in a given year of, you know, a kind of random thing 200 years ago is probably higher than your chance of dying at the age of 80 now. You know, I that's that's all I just sort of feel like it feels to me like there are certain things that there are certain age related disorders that we count as fair game for you to be old. But, but certain things like, you know, I feel like we should take dying in a car crash out. So young men are more likely to die in their 20s or late teens, early 20s.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:You know, then, then they're less, then they're kind of less likely to die for a long time until they get old. So it sort of feels like, well, are we saying that they're older as a teenager because they're more likely to die? Are they overall more likely to die? Yeah, I think that you've got a higher chance of dying. I think the highest chance is when you're like zero. And then then there's a sort of goes up as you're a teenager and goes down again, I think.
Speaker C:Well, I think that I think you could, I could think I could weather that concept of you're, you're fractionally older when you're a teenager than you are in your 20s.
Speaker B:Yeah, let's run with it. Complete redefinition of the concept.
Speaker C:Another one related is prospective age. Basically, this is how, what's your expected remaining years to live? What percentage of expected life left? This is the countdown time.
Speaker B:It's like, how long have you got left? Because of course, the horizon, your expected lifespan goes forward as you get older. Yeah. And you only ever reach it the moment you die, I suppose. Like, if you're falling off a building, suddenly your, your expected lifespan. The horizon comes in really quick. But I, yeah, so I, I like that one. Yeah. So what would that be? I think, I think you, if you're like, it's really, I mean, I think if you're 70, like, even then you can expect to live to be 90 or something. I think it's like surprising, which is quite a long time.
Speaker C:Yeah. But this also suffers from the arbitrariness. Like when you draw the line, is it, is it like when I've got 10 years left or 15 or 20 or whatever, that's the, you still have to pick a sort of boundary. And I think Nick's going to discuss about the problem of it being like a pile of sand in a bit. But the, and then finally is perception. And that's what we talked about before is like, how old do you feel? How old do people think you are?
Speaker A:Yeah. I mean, I actually quite like this perception one. Because, yeah, it cuts through all this complicated, you know, analysis stuff. You're old if people think you're old. Yeah.
Speaker B:But I feel like that's too subjective, like people must be basing that on something. Yeah, exactly. So I looked at, I was interested in this idea, which I think is very popularly believed, that in the past, old people were younger. The idea that, well, in the Victorian age, you know, when the life expectancy was sort of, you know, 50, you would be an old man at the age of 40. I think this is, I think this is a popular perception that that must be what people thought. You know, oh, if you're, you know, if you live to be 40, you're like an old, grizzled, bent. Well, I have looked into this, and I can't find any evidence that this is true. And I, in fact, have got reasons to think it is.
Speaker C:There's a very good YouTube video from Vsauce about how people, older, you know, previous people.
Speaker B:Old people seem like old people. Yeah, look older.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B: ind some quotes from like the: Speaker A:And, you know, I think we do have to mention Shakespeare. Right. The Seven Ages of Man. Exactly. So going back, you know, 500 years, whatever. I mean, that feels like it fits right now. Yeah. His model.
Speaker B:And the Seven Ages. What have we got? Infant puking and mewling.
Speaker A:So we've got the mewling puking infant. We've got the reluctant school boy. We did do a podcast about Seven Ages of Man. Yeah, it's quite good actually. We've got the reluctant, yeah, people should listen to that. School boy. So you've got the reluctant school boy. Then you've got the young lover with his, in the canner's mouth. Then you've got the, is it the full cape on middle aged fat bloke?
Speaker B:Yeah, I think that we've missed one out. There's the justice, I think. The justice, I missed it. The pantaloon, then the old man, and then finally, like, senescence. But I think, you'd say that's roughly 10 years apiece, I think. I think you're looking, you know, the lover, 20s, school boy, 10s, teens, you know. So again, yeah, probably we're talking 70 or so years.
Speaker A:And they're immediately kind of identifiable and recognisable, it feels. So, okay. End of podcast. That's it.
Speaker B:We've done it. No, I mean, it hasn't really sold anything. But I think what I just want to put to rest the idea that the concept of old is kind of relative to your life expectancy.
Speaker A:Yeah, okay. And actually, is the issue not so much, you know, it might be the case that 90% of observers would agree that this person is old and that person isn't, right? And that's one thing. But it's another thing. It's, you know, the whole sand, whatever it's called, that, you know, is when is that tipping point? And maybe the answer is, well, there's some, you know, there's some buffer zones.
Speaker B:Yeah. So, yeah, so I look, there is, I found a study quite recently, actually. But I think the Journal of Aging Studies or something. I forget the name of the journal, but was looking at what people, when people think at different ages, when people think old is. Now, do you know the famous definition of an alcoholic, which is someone you don't like who drinks more than you? Well, it applies to age. Apparently, at 65, people say that 75 is old. And I would imagine, I actually haven't got read the full article, but I would imagine you could roll that forward. And but it's interesting that 65-year-olds don't say, oh, yeah, old starts at 60. Because I would tend to think along those lines. But I'm sure when I'm 65, I will be thinking, well, I'm still young.
Speaker A:I'm still strapping.
Speaker B:I mean, my granny, who was a classic old lady, little old lady, she had a shopping basket. She wore a headscarf. She had a perm. She was an absolute stone cold classic granny. She used to see, like, women perhaps 10 years older than her and go, oh, look at that old biddy over there. And she was probably about 60 because old people were younger then. But anyway, yeah. So I think it's a difficult thing to grab hold of this concept of when you're old. But it does exist, right? We agree it exists, but it's very hard to say what it actually means. And for a thing that we use all the time, for a concept we're constantly employing, I feel like we need to do more work. So it needs to be formalized. Yeah, well, let's get our shovels. Go to Aleph Insights. It's ass.
Speaker A:Yeah, OK. So look, what's next? How do we tackle this?
Speaker C:What do you want to talk about? So you mentioned the seven ages of man. I think they've become a bit more squeezed towards the top end. Yeah, plausible.
Speaker B:You've got kidults till their 50s, you know, wearing sort of skinny jeans.
Speaker C:Yeah, lots of people, sort of the millennials and the generation Xs are looking this way, settling down later, right? So their lover phase lasts longer and they're not getting married and having kids until they're in their 40s. So the lower one's being stretched and the upper ones are being squeezed at the top end. And I think that's sort of economic, really. People have got more free time, more money.
Speaker B:Millennials think they haven't, by the way.
Speaker C:Well, millennials think they haven't, but life's never been better, right? So they don't have to, so they don't. And also, like, retirement used to be like, oh, well, retirement's just like the next step before death, because if you've been working in a factory.
Speaker B:Yeah, but if you're a policeman in a film, it definitely is.
Speaker C:Yeah, yeah, because you were physically worn out. You were knackered and basically you'd expire soon after leaving the institution. But nowadays, retirement is seen as like an opportunity for all the fun stuff. The beginning of the third age. Yeah, people go and buy caravans and start going on big holidays. And they've no longer got the kids hanging around. They're free again, so you can kickstart your life again. So I think that plays into this perception where, you know, after the lover phase, your mature phase gets pushed into your 60s, 70s, possibly even 80s if you're really fit and healthy. So, yeah, that's what I think is driving that stuff. Yeah, interesting.
Speaker A:And also just stretching out that middle age bit whenever that falls is maybe, I don't think this is contradicting what we said earlier about health. Maybe is a 60-year-old healthier now and more physically able than they were 100 years ago or two?
Speaker B:I'd say that's indisputable, but mainly because of medical advances.
Speaker A:Yeah, so that's the case. Then you can get your Lycra out and there's no problem wearing your Lycra when you're 65. Get it out, off I go, you know. So it stretches out that bit as well, I think. All right.
Speaker B:Are we ready for the old-ometer? No. So I just wanted to say that, I mean, this is a common class of problems called the Sorites paradox. Ah, yes. Very old kind of paradox, I think, proposed by this Greek guy. Yeah. The Sorites means heap. And the idea is that a single grain of sand, not a heap, right? Ton of sand, that's a heap. But if you, and if I add one grain of sand to a heap, to a pile of sand, it can't change it from not a heap to a heap, right? No one would think that. Likewise, you know, if you're young yesterday, you must be young now. You can't just stop being young one day and, you know, when you were the day before. Likewise with, so, you know, by that, the logic of the Sorites paradox is, well, you can never get old because if you're not old on Monday, you can't suddenly be old on Tuesday, right?
Speaker A:I mean, sorry, I presume this, I mean, you studied logic, right? Or whatever this falls under.
Speaker B:Yeah, metaphysics.
Speaker A:Yeah, OK. Which is that maybe it's just approaching the problem in maybe not quite the right way. And this maybe ties into when we talked about neatness, which is that maybe we're framing the whole thing wrong, which is we know that there's a category of things that is X and there's a category of things of Y. Yeah. And we're a little bit too hung up on that. And we're sort of, you know, we're falsely putting lines on stuff because it's nice. It's neat. It helps us understand it. And there's much about the stuff that does fit nicely. But the problem is when we do come to the edges of that, well, maybe we need to abandon this idea of edges and stuff. And that removes the whole problem.
Speaker B:I mean, the thing is, though, like if we think it's true, let's just take the truth of the statement, phrase it is old, right? That's either true or false. And you must have in mind a meaning when you say the word old there. That's either true or false. Now, that means that there's some day where it's false and the next day it's true on the assumption that it can't flip back and forth. Once you flip over into it being true, you're old, then that is never going to switch off again. But people can reject. You can reject the concept. That's one of the just sort of basics. There's no such thing as old. It's meaningless because it doesn't have a boundary. So we should stop using the term. Or if you do use it, we'll just treat it as noise or something. Or you can just go out there and define a fixed boundary. So Peter looked at some examples of doing that, and we agreed it was sort of not very satisfactory. There's various, there's like multi-valued logic approaches, which I don't particularly like, but where you kind of go, well, it's half true that you're old when you're 50, and it's fully true when you're 80, and it's fully false when you're 20. That's one way of doing it. There's a position called epistemicism, which was actually my old philosophy tutor, Timothy Williamson, kind of invented. And that sort of says, it's a bit more complex than this, but it sort of says, well, there are boundaries. There is a day when you're old. It's just we don't know when it is. It's hard for us to find out. So we should assign some probability to the truth. Now, it is true. And whether it's true depends on, actually depends on linguistic usage. So the point is that we are using the word old in a certain way. We have some shared concept of what that is, and that shared concept must apply to you or not, but we're not actually sure, like we don't actually know what that concept is, and we haven't got clearly defined edge cases where we can go, right, that guy's old, and that guy a day before wasn't. But anyway, I mean, this is everywhere, this problem. You know, when are you tall? When is a tall person? When are you bald? You know, when are you rich? So many things that we use. There's so many concepts that we use all the time that have this vague character. And that's, you know, and often they're the things where we sort of find ourselves kind of having these sorts of debates, you know, and I think the logical positivist response, which would fall into the kind of, well, this word is meaningless camp, more or less says, well, you know, if we're arguing about definitions, right, we're not arguing about some fact about Fraser. We're just arguing about the definition of the word old. Who cares? If your concept of old includes him and mine doesn't, well, we don't disagree on any facts. We just, you know, we just disagree on the definition of the word. So does anything matter? I think the answer is it doesn't. Nothing really matters. Like, none of this really matters. When it matters, we do the Coghill response of sticking a number on it. We go, right, you're old when you're 65, then you get your pension. Like, so can you vote when you're 18? Like, any point at which it actually matters, because we have to decide whether you get this or not. That's where we just go, right, well, it's easy to measure, pick an arbitrary number, just go with it. I mean, obviously, it becomes, you know, can you get on this fairground ride? We just arbitrarily define tall to be above five foot six or whatever. You know, that's the, yeah, that's it really. So I'd say, you know, we're talking about this in the context of age, but it's a really universal philosophical problem, how you do vague things.
Speaker C:So going back to the sand problem, four is when it becomes a heap. Four grains. Four grains.
Speaker B:Yeah, but do they have to be stacked on top of one another?
Speaker C:Yeah, there's certain constraints.
Speaker B:If you put one grain in each of the corners of this room, that's not a heap.
Speaker C:No, no, they have to be stacked. They have to be in contact to stack. So that's one constraint, the other constraint. For that to work, they have to be of approximately the right size so you can arrange them.
Speaker B:You can't have a rock and two grains of sand, three grains of sand. So there is a quite interesting, I didn't mention it, an approach called hysteresis, which says it actually depends where you come from. So if you start with a heap and you remove sand, when it stops being a heap is a different place to if you start with nothing and you add sand. Like it's heapiness. It kind of inheres in it for longer. I like that idea. Yeah, which is quite a fun idea. Essential hysteresis. Yeah.
Speaker A:The interesting thing is if you stacked four grains of sand, one on top of the other, so it's just totally vertical, is that a heap? I don't know.
Speaker C:That just wouldn't work. I don't think they'd fall off. But I'm imagining you arrange three as a sort of triangle shape and then there's one on top.
Speaker B:So it's a very small tetrahedron.
Speaker C:Tiny tetrahedron. Yeah.
Speaker A:What about if you, yeah.
Speaker B:Now we're thinking like philosophers. I like it.
Speaker C:Yeah, go on, what about if what? Well, you could, I mean. For me, the heapiness though. It's got to be verticality. It's got to look. But also the heapiness, if you're heaping sand, there's a sort of haphazardliness to heaping.
Speaker B:Right. Whereas you can't get tower of sand is clearly that's been put there using very careful micro engineering. Except if you did it enough.
Speaker C:If you put sand in a damp sand in the bucket and turn it into a sandcastle, that's not a heap. No, it's not really a heap, is it? No, because there's more deliberate. It's more engineered than a heap. Whereas if you just get a handful of sand and drop on the floor, that's a heap. Right. So, yeah.
Speaker B:Yeah, I think there's some concept that the grains of sand need to have individuality. Whereas in a sandcastle, they're actually part of a bigger whole. Yeah.
Speaker A:So what you're saying is if you've got a heap of people, they're alive, by the way. A heap of people, right. And you turn them upside down, they fall down, then that, yeah, that is, then they're old. That's what you're saying. I've got it. Got it now.
Speaker C:But if you get a bucket of dry sand and try to make a sandcastle, you know how when you lift the bucket, it all flows out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a heap.
Speaker B:But before you've lifted the bucket, is it at that point a sandcastle?
Speaker C:Yes, I think so. Yeah, I think so.
Speaker B:I think we've solved a thousands of years old philosophical problem. Nailed it. Right, next. Take that, ancient Greeks.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, because actually I was going to say, yeah, a binding feature would be handy. You know, well, water, we've done it there. All right. I liked some of those arguments you were saying, the philosophical ones that I like. I liked your teacher's argument and the logical positivism. Of course, there'll be all sorts of, you know, it'd be interesting to think about and talk about more. We don't have time. I've got to stop talking about the rebuttals today. But anyway.
Speaker B:Well, see, I think we can do a bit of Aleph Insights framework development here. That's why that bucket of spade is there. Well, so I think a good way around this kind of problem is to just to create a sort of essentially a list of yes, no criteria. So we take a complex idea like old, which feels like it encompasses loads of different things. And you find an uncontroversial set of features which apply to old people and a set of features which apply to young people. And you go, well, none of these are like the be all and end all. None of them are like necessary or sufficient, but they're a set of indicators. And then we get something which is more. It's better than just having one indicator. You know, are you above or below 60? And it's but it's but it's more well defined than just saying, are you old? Let's just ask five people. I like this.
Speaker A:Yeah. And one of the things it can do is it can bring in some subjectivity into one if you want it into some of the criteria.
Speaker B:An audit trail. Yeah.
Speaker A:For the eventual number.
Speaker B:Exactly. And we can argue about what should be in there.
Speaker A:But yeah, we got. Yeah. I think you still might end up with the same problem, which is there's a line somewhere.
Speaker B:Well, that's why I've tried to go for things which are absolutely uncontroversial. Right.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:So I'm intrigued. Are you guys ready to do to do this? Only six questions. Is this the old-ometer? This is the gerontometer. Yeah. The gerontometer. We're about to hop onto it. Okay. So every question you will get a number from naught to two. Right. Zero, one, two. Yeah. So just get ready. Write down this as a list of numbers. Okay. So career. Not yet started. Zero. Have a job. One. Retired. Two. Descendants. None. Zero. Children. One. Grandchildren. Two. Mobility aids. Walking sticks. Those little buggies. None. Zero. One. One. More than one. Two. Regular medication. Right. None. Zero. Weekly. One. Daily. Two. I don't like this. House. Renting. Zero. Owning. One. Assisted living. Two. Finally, hair. Normal. Zero. Grey. One. Bald. Two. This is utterly stupid.
Speaker C:Including facial hair?
Speaker B:Yeah. I mean, basically, do you have at least one grey hair? Okay. This is so baldest. So I'm just calculating it for me. And then... Okay. So Fraser, what's your score? Seven. Seven. I'm a four, Peter. Six. It works. It doesn't work. Peter's come out as older than me. So that means it totally works. Is he mentally older than me? Yeah, he's a bit older than the original.
Speaker C:Peter, tell us where you got some big numbers from. I daily take thyroxine.
Speaker B:Ah, okay. Yeah. So that's the two, isn't it? Right off. And then I guess you've got everything except mobility aids, you've got one. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's fair enough. Yeah, that's good. Well, so I'm the youngest. Yeah, but hold on, hold on, hold on. Both physically and emotionally. Hold on.
Speaker A:Well, no. But yeah, I think... Now you're just quibbling, Fraser. I think...
Speaker C:I think what you're quibbling over is there are criteria that you would include that Nick hasn't included that you think are important.
Speaker A:Well, I just don't like this whole bald thing for a start. But I think the medication thing is an interesting one, because I also take a daily medication. But I take my ADHD stuff. But because of that, I also have to take some blood pressure stuff, which is quite oldie to take.
Speaker B:Yeah, I mean, I think whether you like it or not... But it has only started in the last few years. Yeah, exactly. Peter, when did you start on the thyroxine? 20 years ago or something? 20 years ago, yeah. So there you go. By and large, kids don't have to take daily medication. By and large, old people do. So I'm afraid... Sorry, lads.
Speaker A:But also, actually, it can be tweaked a bit, which is you can sort of do stuff. Can you... Do you take stuff that is related to sort of somehow aging for the medication? Or maybe that's all... You're just seeing... You're complicating it. Am I just trying to find a way out of this as well? I'm afraid...
Speaker B:Fraser, not only did you get the highest score, you are, in fact, according to the old-fashioned, years-based method of working out who's oldest, the oldest. I feel that I'm trying to find a hole to get out of here.
Speaker A:I can't find it. Well, I'm trying to give you one. Go on. Actually, I've got one. But you go for it.
Speaker C:So I think we can dilute our old scores, our old numbers, by adding more criteria that we would score well on. This could be a base... The classic ones are like, you see TikToks and videos saying things like, oh, if you can stand on one leg for two minutes, you're not old. If it's going to be something physical, I'm fine. Physical things. So, you know, you and I could probably do quite a decent number of push-ups. Yeah, this is not looking good for Nick. Yeah, greater than 10 push-ups, you get zero, and then some sort of scale. Standing on one leg, can you stand on one leg for five minutes? Yeah, yeah, yeah, no problem. I'll tell you why this doesn't work. No, no, no, no. OK.
Speaker A:You've had... Another one is...
Speaker C:Basically, pick something you're good at and put that in.
Speaker A:No, but I'll tell you why that... But also, I use really trendy language. OK. It is violating... Hold on, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Speaker B:No, it is important. It's important. Well, so is what I'm saying. It isn't because... And you'll realise why when I just give the response, right? Which is simply that I have chosen things that are unequivocally true of old people and unequivocally not true of children, right? No children are grey or bald. Old people are. Well, actually, no. So, whereas things like, can you do 20 press-ups? There are 10-year-olds who can't do that. There are 20-year-olds who can't do that. But there are 80-year-olds with great head of hair. Well, all right. I think you just need to say this whole hair thing out and then I'll stop. But the thing is, I don't think it's very age-related. It's not very age-related. Like, how fit you are, it's not as age-related as these indicators here, which... Like, do you get 10-year-olds with grandchildren? No. Do you get 80-year-olds with grandchildren? Yes. That's the whole design philosophy.
Speaker A:I have a sneaking regard for your list and your criteria. I quite like them, apart from one of them. Yeah, but also, I use, like, really cool language that the kids love. You're using cool language. I use... Look at my clothes. Look, I'm just so in with the kids. I think you're way off on this. Yeah. So, actually, to finish us off, actually, I've got the perfect rebuttal to everything you're saying, which is I, and I'm overly proud of this, like, people always think I'm much younger than I actually am. Yeah. And all sorts of... Old people, those ones, they think I'm younger than I am. But young kids, even, and the worst lot of all, the teenagers... They think you're one of them. Yeah, well, I'm, you know... Hello, fellow kids. Thanks to your cool language. Yeah, I think it's probably what it is, you know, and my zesty outlook. Because of your riz. Yeah, that's what it is. Yeah, my riz. Yeah, I'm really rizzy, I am. Last year, when I was at a water polo tournament in Holland, and the reason why that's relevant is because I'm wandering around in skimpy little trunks the whole time. I was talking to these youths, and when I told them my age, at the time I was 50, they were astonished. And they thought I was, they said, I thought, 35. That's what they thought, 35. Right. And...
Speaker B:This reminds me of that old joke.
Speaker C:You've been dining out on that.
Speaker B:Middle-aged woman, I get told I've got the body of a 20-year-old. Man, well, you've got to give it back because you're ruining it. Yeah, there we go.
Speaker A:I can't help but feel I'm holding on to this little bit of refuge too hard, I feel, too tightly. Look, question to round us off. When was the first time you thought to yourself, hmm, I might be old?
Speaker C:In my teenage years, I was frequently accused of being an old man in outlook, and sort of the way I behaved, so.
Speaker B:Yeah, but because you're a teenager, you know you're not, so you're kind of okay with it. Yeah. The problem is when you carry on thinking, oh, I act a bit older than I am. And then suddenly you realise you're acting like an old person, you are one. Yeah. Yeah, but did you, no, but after that, like, was there a moment where you thought, oh, shit, I'm not as young as I used to be?
Speaker C:Not really. Good for you. Not really. Although, when my back started really giving me problems in my early 20s, I started feeling old then. Because, yeah, it was.
Speaker B:Yeah, back problems is, I mean, I haven't put that down, but it's a good one, isn't it? Yeah.
Speaker A:So, mine is, someone first took the piss out of me for being old, was I turned 22. Okay, it was my 22nd birthday. And that's because I was living in Spain. And it was the people I was, I knew there, but they were all 18, 19-year-old exchange students. And you thought you were kind of fitting in with them. Yeah, I thought I was hip to what was going on. Yeah, when you're 18, 22-year-olds are like. They're all sniggering about you behind your back. I know, I know. As old guys. But look at them now in their late 40s. Ha, ha, ha.
Speaker B:Lol. Yeah, are they told they have the body of a 35-year-old? Thank you, Nick. In their freezer? Thank you, Nick. Okay, what about you? Well, I remember, I actually, I was 18, and I'd always, I always comforted myself that I didn't have my dad's hairline. Because I had a really square hairline. And my dad used to say to me, you're lucky. I always had a widow's peak, he said, you know, when I was your age. And now he was receding with a bald spot. And I was like, oh, yeah, thank God. I won the genetic lottery there. And I washed my, soon after going to university, I washed my hair, combing it in the mirror. And suddenly there were two gaps either side. And I was like, oh, no, you know. So that was a bit of a, but then when I was about, I was about, I was late 20s. And I was in Crouch End. And I was carrying a picture. And I tried to get past these youngsters who were in front of me. And they obviously didn't perceive that I was behind them. And I just thought, well, instead of asking him to move, I just walked around them and carried on. And one of them shouted after me, oi, old man. I thought, what? I'm in my late 20s, you little shit.
Speaker C:I've got a very similar anecdote. So I used to cycle to work. And this is one of the first, early 20s, one of my first proper jobs. I used to cycle to work. And one of the routes I go through, I go down a particular road. And for some reason, I think I was coming back early. So I was meeting all the school kids coming out of school. And I was coming along the road 15, 20 miles an hour or so. Quiet little residential road. And two girls just ran out in front of me. And then I nearly hit them. So I just said, watch out. You know, not being trying to be, just trying to get a friendly warning to them. And they just shouted back at me, oi, fuck off, granddad. Yes, but I was early 20s.
Speaker A:There we are. Terrifying. Well, there's the divinity of truth. We've discovered it. We've nailed it. We've defined it. OK. All right. We'll stop there. Thanks, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer, being here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph. Until the next time. Goodbye.
