I would want to limit it by social security retirement age. I don’t really know any 70 year olds who are “all there.”
This is just tech people being tech people, as always.
Being incredibly sharp isn’t enough for the most demanding job in the US government. We are talking international diplomatic trips with jet lag, situation room in the middle of the night military operations, basically being on-call 24/7 for any major event.
Joe Biden would have been 86 upon his last year in office if he won the election this year. That’s barely 4 years before my grandmother decided she couldn’t clean her own house and cook for herself anymore and moved to an independent living facility. That’s someone who had no other job besides cooking and cleaning for herself. And she’s a member of the gender that lives longer. And she’s one of the older people in the independent living community! She’s lucky to not have transitioned to assisted living.
The odds of dying as an 81 year old in any given year are 1 in 15. If you’re older than 85 your odds are 1 in 7.
An 81 year old president is someone who has basically a coin flip probability of dying before the end of their term.
You are almost certainly wrong, but it's also possible that your thereness measurement scale is still calibrated to the briefest and least knowledgeable period of your life.
I intend this charitably.
"But global IQ is an amalgam of different kinds of intelligence, the most popularly studied being fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence which together—along with abilities called working memory and processing speed—are combined to yield global or Full Scale IQ. Fluid intelligence or fluid reasoning (abbreviated Gf) reflects the ability to solve novel problems, the kind that aren’t taught in school, whereas Crystallized intelligence or crystallized knowledge (Gc) measures learning and problem solving that are related to schooling and acculturation. And they have very different aging curves.
Gc averages 98 at ages 20-24, rises to 101 by ages 35-44, before declining to 100 (ages 45-54), then 98 (55-64), then 96 (65-69), then 93 (70-74), and 88 (75+).
The decline with age in Gf—solving novel problems—is even more precipitous. Gf peaks at ages 20-24 (100), drops gradually to 99 (25-34) and 96 (35-44) before starting a roller coaster plunge to 91 (45-54), 86 (55-64), 83 (65-69), 79 (70-74), and 72 (75+).
These values are just averages for the entire US population of adults, with the mean IQs for each age higher for more educated individuals. But the same rate of decline across the age range seems to occur for all adults, on average, whether they are semi-skilled workers or university professors. "
When it comes to solving novel problems, the population of 81 year olds is more than two standard deviations worse than the population of 22 year olds. Alternately, the average 81 year old is poorer at solving novel problems than 95% of 22 year olds, and the average (100-IQ) 22 year old is better at solving problems than 95% of 81 year olds; I am including the 22 year olds that you rarely meet because they are silo'd off in a special needs caretaking system.
There is an EXTREMELY PRONOUNCED decline of global IQ with age LONG before dementia, that it is almost completely verboten to admit exists because it combines our fear of our own mortality with our fear of a corporeal self with our fear of being alone with our fear of being useless with the minimum baseline of respect for our elders. Nobody wants to say, or be forced to admit, "I am not as smart or capable as the man I used to be," and many of us would rather eat a bullet or put our fist through someone's face, but it is true nonetheless. By the time any of us have the authority to start forming conventional wisdom (eg, writing textbooks, or doing interview shows, or helping our children raise our grandchildren), this story is not one we want to tell others or ourselves, and so most people cannot accept it.
The user interface for a president to influence the operation of a country is people and relationships. The president doesn't need to solve novel problems, they need to select the right people to identify, prioritise and solve problems (occasionally novel but probably mostly boring and universal human problems), bounded by political constraints.
I guess there is also a major performance element to the role, where "thinking on feet" is very important. Probably something like "IQ" is very helpful with that.
That being said, I really hope we'd all agree a high IQ president would be favorable to a low IQ president.
I know that I was far more capable when I was younger. I have gained wisdom but that wisdom wouldn’t help me if I was fighting jet lag on a global diplomatic mission aboard Air Force One.
I know that my retired parents who are still intelligent shouldn’t work a day job. They can barely operate Google Maps let alone be commander and chief to the most technologically advanced military in the world. And they’re about 10 years younger than Joe Biden.
The president is a very special role that requires a lot of stamina. It’s also a role where there’s only one in the whole country. The travel schedule alone is extremely difficult.
If there is only one role to fill it’s logical to be selective. Why hire an 80 year old when there are a dozen qualified 50 year olds who are physically better equipped to handle the rigors of the job?
The president is the commander in chief of the military. The military forces retirement at a certain age, why don’t we do that for the president?
Let’s not forget that the American president is a massive presence as a global figure that impacts the whole world. If they die in office, get ill, misspeak, etc, it negatively impacts the entire nation if not the world.
Biden accidentally calling Zelensky “Putin” in public was an example of something that could have been a disastrous foreign relations blunder if Zelensky or other allies to Ukraine were less understanding and took offense.
Maybe, but I know a lot of 20ish year olds that aren’t all there either.
Being president is supposed to be a really special job. And there’s only one role to fill, so there’s no reason not to be highly selective. It should have more stringent requirements than jobs like airline pilot.
Joe Biden is older than radiocarbon dating (so we can't be sure exactly how old he is).
[it was an idea for a novelty website: things Biden is older than; including all the common computer stuff, but also ejector seats, SCUBA aqualungs, basic oxygen steelmaking, Velcro, the float glass process by which all common flat panes of glass are made, hairspray, spray paint, hovervrafts, LASERs, microwaves, mass production of Penicillin...]
That’s why I purposely linked to the official US government Actuarial Table.
Biden is 81.
The statistics state that an 81yo will only live 7-more-years.
When a presidential term (4-years) is more than half of your remaining life, the margin of error to die while in office is extreme high.
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Another way to look at it is …
The min age for POTUS is 35yo.
The Actuarial Table state that a 35yo will live 40-more-years (to age 75).
Then set age 75 to be the max age
he's showing signs of having trouble doing a good job
Presidential age limit restricts mostly the right of the people for who to vote for. If you can't trust your people to distinguish candidates abilities to perform their duties, maybe a different political system altogether would be more appropriate. Now, when media start covering up, maybe the problem also lies elsewhere
President is only semi democratically decided as a courtesy.
That aside, if there's an issue with age, its having a foundation and reference points that are disconnected and out of touch.
Small but important note, you picked life expectancy for males, not all individuals. For females the life expectancy at birth is over 79 years. The average life expectancy for someone in the US without specifying their sex at birth is north of 76 years. And life expectancy is trending upwards and has for a long time as we eliminate more early mortalities.
Sadly, that is not true in the US.
It's the only developed country where life expectancy is going down quite a lot.
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-lif...
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/21/cdc-us-life-expecta...
And possibly that the negative growth looks to have been a relatively short outlier.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/uni....
The SSA, CBO, and the Census Bureau all predict life expectancy to rise over the next 30 years.
Think of the many who through their 80s were cogent, even masterful. Examples include Warren Buffett, John Searle, Hubert Dreyfus, George Soros, Henry Kissinger, Clint Eastwood, and with women it’s probably even more common, and we can look to Nancy Pelosi, or indeed my own grandmother. Whatever memory slowdown there may be is compensated for by depth of experience.
Then there are those who lose it in their sixties.
In many ways it seems that ageism is one of the last acceptable prejudices.
In Biden’s case, I was struck by the difference in him before and after his son Beau’s death. It seemed like he never recovered. Charisma gone. Eyes turned beady and body stiff. Despite that he was an active and successful president (should be admitted no matter one’s politics), though unpopular.
The guy’s in his 90s and still does broadcasting for the NBA and is as sharp as you can be.
You’d never suspect he’s a person in his 90s while listening to it.
If you wanted to limit it by "life expectancy" you'd want to limit it by the statistical expected remaining years of life at the candidate's current age.
For example, while the overall life expectancy in the US is around 73, for an individual at age 50 it's around 80[1].
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK62591/
Edit: Even if you pick the "right" life expectancy it's still pretty weird. You want the candidate to "only" have a hypothetical 50% chance of dying due to old age before their last day in office?
Then imagine something like COVID-19 happens again. Now a candidate on the cusp of being ineligible is suddenly ineligible because the latest life expectancy statistics shifted?
There's a reason political systems tend to prefer boring and predictable arbitrary limits.