3 ms·

Earlier comment: > Age has absolutely nothing to do with it. This comment: > Age is one variable in a very complex equation that influences your level of fit

Earlier comment: > Age has absolutely nothing to do with it. This comment: > Age is one variable in a very complex equation that influences your level of fitness. I appreciate your conceding that age is a major factor in health.

joe_the_user 9y ago
Well, one thing to consider is that age inevitable. Age is a factor in heart attacks but it's also simply a factor in dying from whatever cause. A statement like "age has nothing to do with whether you die prematurely from a heart attack in particular - fitness is the main factor" might be true even if age is a big factor in whether one dies of a heart attack at a given moment ... because it is a big factor in whether you are going at a given moment. Wake up older and you're more likely to die overall. Be unfit physically and engage in very vigorous exercise and a heart becomes n% more likely to be the way you die. Those might or might be deemed to two separate facts - ie "die prematurely of a heart attack" is itself pretty ambiguous, ha ha. Do statistics correctly is hard and describing statistical situations with everyday language is a hard problem on top of this original challenge.
bonesss 9y ago
> ...age is a major factor in health Tangential, but: I read a fascinating book about ageing and death from a doctor who worked with such things. My big takeway, from a systems perspective, was that we generally don't die because of a single component-level failure but rather as a collective systematic overloads that push failure throughout the body until a component dies (and so do we). Age makes our lungs, arteries, heart, organs, and the rest of it work sub optimally. Poorer lung function forces our hearts to work harder. Poor heart function causes our lungs to work harder. An unusual shock like shovelling pushes all components, which push each other, which is a great way to trigger failure modes. This looks a lot like what we see in complex systems over time. Age is biological-debt :)

joe_the_user 9y ago

Well, one thing to consider is that age inevitable. Age is a factor in heart attacks but it's also simply a factor in dying from whatever cause. A statement like "age has nothing to do with whether you die prematurely from a heart attack in particular - fitness is the main factor" might be true even if age is a big factor in whether one dies of a heart attack at a given moment ... because it is a big factor in whether you are going at a given moment. Wake up older and you're more likely to die overall. Be unfit physically and engage in very vigorous exercise and a heart becomes n% more likely to be the way you die. Those might or might be deemed to two separate facts - ie "die prematurely of a heart attack" is itself pretty ambiguous, ha ha. Do statistics correctly is hard and describing statistical situations with everyday language is a hard problem on top of this original challenge.

bonesss 9y ago

> ...age is a major factor in health Tangential, but: I read a fascinating book about ageing and death from a doctor who worked with such things. My big takeway, from a systems perspective, was that we generally don't die because of a single component-level failure but rather as a collective systematic overloads that push failure throughout the body until a component dies (and so do we). Age makes our lungs, arteries, heart, organs, and the rest of it work sub optimally. Poorer lung function forces our hearts to work harder. Poor heart function causes our lungs to work harder. An unusual shock like shovelling pushes all components, which push each other, which is a great way to trigger failure modes. This looks a lot like what we see in complex systems over time. Age is biological-debt :)