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Human lifespan has increased since ancient times, but not by that much. The idea that adults died at 30 is absurd, but persists everywhere anyway, mostly becaus

Human lifespan has increased since ancient times, but not by that much. The idea that adults died at 30 is absurd, but persists everywhere anyway, mostly because it flatters us in the present. Look: a lot of sensational stuff about history is in fact bullshit. I recently read an article that demonstrated to my satisfaction that the whole "Easter Islander chopping down the last tree" idea is in fact fantasy and that rats, not people, ended up deforesting the place. Isn't it a shame that such a poetic example of the hubris of man ends up not actually being true? In reality, the past was pretty much like the present, and people today are pretty much like those of the past. Theories that rely on our ancestors being somehow obviously stupid or short-lived or morally deficient fall short of explaining the real world. If you actually read the first-hand accounts of people from ancient times, you'll find, well, people, with all the usual insecurities and foibles and temptations that exist today. (See the beautiful and sensitive correspondence between Eloisa and Abelard.) To risk making a broader point: I reject the whig-historical attitude in which the development of humanity is some kind of inexorable progression from an awful past to a benevolent present. In reality, the only progress is scientific --- physical laws, with numbers, that you write down and that work via math. Everything else is just a matter of fashion and taste, and there's no guarantee that our descendants will agree that what we consider "progress" is in fact good and right.

aaron695 8y ago
>Human lifespan has increased since ancient times, but not by that much. The idea that adults died at 30 is absurd, but persists everywhere anyway, mostly because it flatters us in the present. This is bollocks, and not what the article is talking about anyway. There's a good 20 year difference in life expectancy for a 20 year old between countries still. http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/your-life-expectancy-by-age http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/your-life-expectancy-by-a... And between these days and the olden days - https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/articles/howhaslifeexpectancychangedovertime/2015-09-09 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde... The past was a awful awful place, everyone was in slave/war type conditions and simple scratches killed.
barrkel 8y ago
There's an unjustified leap from the concerns of individuals in their daily lives to the concerns of society as a whole in your post, and it casts a severe political shadow over your post. Individuals out of sight of the state or their overlords may have similar experiences in different ages, but there are also people who don't exist near the median who are persecuted to different degrees; not to mention that wealth distribution can also be radically different. These are also differences between modern societies, and may thus easily be inferred for past societies too. And your free choice of society today is not arbitrarily based in fashion or taste. Consider telling Oscar Wilde that there's been no progress since his day, and he was merely a victim of fashion!
- michaelscott 8y ago
  I think parent's point is that the "progress of society" is subjective and not necessarily absolutely "good" or "evil". The Aztecs were technologically very advanced to the benefit of their people, but ritually practiced vast human sacrifice. The progress is also not necessarily linear; Oscar Wilde would've no doubt preferred ancient Greece to his own time, about 2000 years later, when it comes to their attitude toward social progression. The sciences, by contrast, do tend to show unequivocal progress because they're essentially our growing understanding of the universe.
  - barrkel 8y ago
    I don't accept that justice is subjective. Some societies are objectively more just. I agree that progress is not linear. Science also: people forget things, and are sometimes wiped out and their records lost.
    - wilsonnb2 8y ago
      Why do you think some societies are objectively more just, and what definition are you using for "just"?
- Balero 8y ago
  "Consider telling Oscar Wilde that there's been no progress since his day, and he was merely a victim of fashion!" This logic breaks down because it's not an inexorable march forward. However there were a number of societies pre-victorian Britain, in which homosexuality was fully accepted. Such as ancient Greece and at times Rome, and some pre-Roman Celtic societies. Had their been progress between 0CE and 1900CE? Scientifically and economically, absolutely! Culturally? Well we don't watch people kill each other in the coliseum, or collect the heads of our enemies. OP's point is that all of this cultural 'progress' is just the fashion of the times and that there is no easy to discern linear progress like in science.
walterstucco 8y ago
Life expectancy on average for a society of hundred of millions and the potential life for an individual are two completely separated concepts Yes, we had the potential to live 80 years even 2 thousands years ago. Was it common? No.
J-dawg 8y ago
> The idea that adults died at 30 is absurd, but persists everywhere anyway, mostly because it flatters us in the present. I always thought the idea persists just because people don't instinctively understand averages. (I agree with the rest of your comment though).
- dalore 8y ago
  There were more child deaths certainly which brought down the average considerably. But if you survived childhood the life expectancy wasn't that much different. And that's why using the average to compare is bad.
  - aalleavitch 8y ago
    The post above still shows this to be false, even accounting for child mortality. And what exactly do you imagine the quality of life was like for people in a society with massive child mortality? To say that the past was anything but a terrible place to live is to blind yourself to horrific realities about the way people have lived up until now. To imagine life was much like it is today is a massive anachronism, based often on one’s ignorance of the details of life in past societies that one pastes over with their own situation.
    - dalore 8y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy Going back as far as we can the life expectancy in the Paleolithic era if you made it to 15 was 54 years. Not far off from today's standard.
      - newen 8y ago
        What. U.S. life expectancy from birth is around 78.
  - taeric 8y ago
    Isn't this really only true for men? Child birth was not necessarily fatal in all cases, but it was a major event that had many more risks than we acknowledge nowadays. Even something simple like a plugged duct leading to mastitis could have been a death sentence not all that long ago.
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
> The idea that adults died at 30 is absurd, but persists everywhere anyway, mostly because it flatters us in the present. Spot on. This type of pride seems to prevent people from learning some lessons from the past. However I see difference across modern societies in how much people are aware of the past.
DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago
The absence of fear from a sky god is not a maths problem, that's intellectual progress.
- aleksei 8y ago
  There is an abundance of fear from a sky god around the world. And to think that everyone in the past was a true believer in the supernatural is to miss GP's point entirely.
  - aalleavitch 8y ago
    There’s almost no comparison in how willing people were to violate human rights in the past versus now. To say there has been little measurable progress is to ignore how truly horrible of a place the past was.
    - aleksei 8y ago
      I'll give you that I'm glad a large portion of the world is living the best life of basically anyone that came before us, but then I didn't say there hasn't been progress. I meant (perceived) religious inclination is a poor metric for progress. As for willingness to violate human rights, I was first going to agree but I'm not actually sure that's the case, at least if you take into account the social environment. That is, I don't think the historical average Joe really wanted to violate human rights more, but he may have been forced to, as would we if put in the same circumstances. But that's probably what you mean by the progress we enjoy.
- setr 8y ago
  It's more likely a different belief system; I doubt most people believe in mathematics because they can derive from sound foundations arbitrary formulas, but rather that an authority (public education) told them this is the way things are and can be done, and doing it this way has worked out so far, and trusting the mathematician (or more likely for the common person, the engineer implementing it) usually works out (sometimes it won't, and they'll tell you they made a mistake in their predictions and come back with a correction). We advanced like an organism, improving in culture and knowledge as a group, but not on the individual scale. There's a reason the educated are just as susceptible to cargo-culting, trend-chasing and bandwagonning as anyone else; the primary difference is that the number of people capable of operating as authoritative figures for the educated is more limited. At best their education protects them in their own field, in the fashion of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. As a group we might have improved, but individually we still follow false gods and idols. We pretend they're not, and while ours might be somehow better than our predecessors (more predictive power, for one), they certainly don't come from a better basis.
MarkMc 8y ago
> Human lifespan has increased since ancient times, but not by that much. This graph suggests that a 20-year-old in 1850 would on average expect to live another 40 years, while a 20-year-old in 2015 would expect to live another 60 years: https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-by-age-in-the-UK-1700-to-2013.png https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Life-e... That's an increase of 50%, which I would say is remarkable. Would people in ancient times have lived significantly longer than people in 1850? If not, human lifespan has increased a great deal since ancient times.
- rjkennedy98 8y ago
  The real misunderstanding is how big an impact modern medicine has had. Public health efforts, better nutrition, ect have had a much bigger impact on lifespan than medicine.
  - naravara 8y ago
    >Public health efforts, better nutrition, ect I suspect almost ALL of this can be attributed to having plumbing that magically flushes your waste away, having people wash their hands after using the bathroom, and women being fed well enough to survive childbirth. It's astonishing how much morbidity happened in the past just because water sources would get contaminated by people bathing or excreting into them. Apparently even a crazy amount of deaths in childbirth were attributable to bad hygiene/sanitation. Once you correct for those three almost everything else looks like a little sliver. The presence of antibiotics is the only things that even come close in its impact. If we wanted to have a comparable additional impact today we'd need to accomplish something like wiping out all the disease-carrying insects (mosquitoes, tsetse flies, etc.)
- lucideer 8y ago
  > That's an increase of 50% ... from an arbitrary starting point of 20. Why 20? What I mean is, if you're 50, it's an increase of 200%, which you could say is even more remarkable except that it can't be as it's the same statistic?
aalleavitch 8y ago
I disagree entirely. The “people only lived to 30” notion is based on a misunderstanding about infant mortality rates which were massive. In the 1950s my nephew with CF would’ve had a life expectancy of weeks. In the modern day, he may very well live a full life. Stephen Pinker, while I disagree with him on a lot of things, has a couple of books that are essentially collections of every way that we can quantifiable show that the present is a better place to live than the past. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now
xbmcuser 8y ago
I am from a 3rd world/developing country my maternal grandfather died at the age of 42 from a disease that is easily curable today. He was from a rich family that could afford the best healthcare of the time. Today a poor man can get cured of the same disease so life expectancy has gone up. But it is an avg more people are surviving to an older age

aaron695 8y ago

>Human lifespan has increased since ancient times, but not by that much. The idea that adults died at 30 is absurd, but persists everywhere anyway, mostly because it flatters us in the present. This is bollocks, and not what the article is talking about anyway. There's a good 20 year difference in life expectancy for a 20 year old between countries still. http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/your-life-expectancy-by-age http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/your-life-expectancy-by-a... And between these days and the olden days - https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/articles/howhaslifeexpectancychangedovertime/2015-09-09 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde... The past was a awful awful place, everyone was in slave/war type conditions and simple scratches killed.

barrkel 8y ago

There's an unjustified leap from the concerns of individuals in their daily lives to the concerns of society as a whole in your post, and it casts a severe political shadow over your post. Individuals out of sight of the state or their overlords may have similar experiences in different ages, but there are also people who don't exist near the median who are persecuted to different degrees; not to mention that wealth distribution can also be radically different. These are also differences between modern societies, and may thus easily be inferred for past societies too. And your free choice of society today is not arbitrarily based in fashion or taste. Consider telling Oscar Wilde that there's been no progress since his day, and he was merely a victim of fashion!

michaelscott 8y ago
I think parent's point is that the "progress of society" is subjective and not necessarily absolutely "good" or "evil". The Aztecs were technologically very advanced to the benefit of their people, but ritually practiced vast human sacrifice. The progress is also not necessarily linear; Oscar Wilde would've no doubt preferred ancient Greece to his own time, about 2000 years later, when it comes to their attitude toward social progression. The sciences, by contrast, do tend to show unequivocal progress because they're essentially our growing understanding of the universe.
- barrkel 8y ago
  I don't accept that justice is subjective. Some societies are objectively more just. I agree that progress is not linear. Science also: people forget things, and are sometimes wiped out and their records lost.
  - wilsonnb2 8y ago
    Why do you think some societies are objectively more just, and what definition are you using for "just"?
Balero 8y ago
"Consider telling Oscar Wilde that there's been no progress since his day, and he was merely a victim of fashion!" This logic breaks down because it's not an inexorable march forward. However there were a number of societies pre-victorian Britain, in which homosexuality was fully accepted. Such as ancient Greece and at times Rome, and some pre-Roman Celtic societies. Had their been progress between 0CE and 1900CE? Scientifically and economically, absolutely! Culturally? Well we don't watch people kill each other in the coliseum, or collect the heads of our enemies. OP's point is that all of this cultural 'progress' is just the fashion of the times and that there is no easy to discern linear progress like in science.

walterstucco 8y ago

Life expectancy on average for a society of hundred of millions and the potential life for an individual are two completely separated concepts Yes, we had the potential to live 80 years even 2 thousands years ago. Was it common? No.

J-dawg 8y ago

> The idea that adults died at 30 is absurd, but persists everywhere anyway, mostly because it flatters us in the present. I always thought the idea persists just because people don't instinctively understand averages. (I agree with the rest of your comment though).

dalore 8y ago
There were more child deaths certainly which brought down the average considerably. But if you survived childhood the life expectancy wasn't that much different. And that's why using the average to compare is bad.
- aalleavitch 8y ago
  The post above still shows this to be false, even accounting for child mortality. And what exactly do you imagine the quality of life was like for people in a society with massive child mortality? To say that the past was anything but a terrible place to live is to blind yourself to horrific realities about the way people have lived up until now. To imagine life was much like it is today is a massive anachronism, based often on one’s ignorance of the details of life in past societies that one pastes over with their own situation.
  - dalore 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy Going back as far as we can the life expectancy in the Paleolithic era if you made it to 15 was 54 years. Not far off from today's standard.
    - newen 8y ago
      What. U.S. life expectancy from birth is around 78.
- taeric 8y ago
  Isn't this really only true for men? Child birth was not necessarily fatal in all cases, but it was a major event that had many more risks than we acknowledge nowadays. Even something simple like a plugged duct leading to mastitis could have been a death sentence not all that long ago.

eeZah7Ux 8y ago

> The idea that adults died at 30 is absurd, but persists everywhere anyway, mostly because it flatters us in the present. Spot on. This type of pride seems to prevent people from learning some lessons from the past. However I see difference across modern societies in how much people are aware of the past.

DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago

The absence of fear from a sky god is not a maths problem, that's intellectual progress.

aleksei 8y ago
There is an abundance of fear from a sky god around the world. And to think that everyone in the past was a true believer in the supernatural is to miss GP's point entirely.
- aalleavitch 8y ago
  There’s almost no comparison in how willing people were to violate human rights in the past versus now. To say there has been little measurable progress is to ignore how truly horrible of a place the past was.
  - aleksei 8y ago
    I'll give you that I'm glad a large portion of the world is living the best life of basically anyone that came before us, but then I didn't say there hasn't been progress. I meant (perceived) religious inclination is a poor metric for progress. As for willingness to violate human rights, I was first going to agree but I'm not actually sure that's the case, at least if you take into account the social environment. That is, I don't think the historical average Joe really wanted to violate human rights more, but he may have been forced to, as would we if put in the same circumstances. But that's probably what you mean by the progress we enjoy.
setr 8y ago
It's more likely a different belief system; I doubt most people believe in mathematics because they can derive from sound foundations arbitrary formulas, but rather that an authority (public education) told them this is the way things are and can be done, and doing it this way has worked out so far, and trusting the mathematician (or more likely for the common person, the engineer implementing it) usually works out (sometimes it won't, and they'll tell you they made a mistake in their predictions and come back with a correction). We advanced like an organism, improving in culture and knowledge as a group, but not on the individual scale. There's a reason the educated are just as susceptible to cargo-culting, trend-chasing and bandwagonning as anyone else; the primary difference is that the number of people capable of operating as authoritative figures for the educated is more limited. At best their education protects them in their own field, in the fashion of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. As a group we might have improved, but individually we still follow false gods and idols. We pretend they're not, and while ours might be somehow better than our predecessors (more predictive power, for one), they certainly don't come from a better basis.

MarkMc 8y ago

> Human lifespan has increased since ancient times, but not by that much. This graph suggests that a 20-year-old in 1850 would on average expect to live another 40 years, while a 20-year-old in 2015 would expect to live another 60 years: https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-by-age-in-the-UK-1700-to-2013.png https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Life-e... That's an increase of 50%, which I would say is remarkable. Would people in ancient times have lived significantly longer than people in 1850? If not, human lifespan has increased a great deal since ancient times.

rjkennedy98 8y ago
The real misunderstanding is how big an impact modern medicine has had. Public health efforts, better nutrition, ect have had a much bigger impact on lifespan than medicine.
- naravara 8y ago
  >Public health efforts, better nutrition, ect I suspect almost ALL of this can be attributed to having plumbing that magically flushes your waste away, having people wash their hands after using the bathroom, and women being fed well enough to survive childbirth. It's astonishing how much morbidity happened in the past just because water sources would get contaminated by people bathing or excreting into them. Apparently even a crazy amount of deaths in childbirth were attributable to bad hygiene/sanitation. Once you correct for those three almost everything else looks like a little sliver. The presence of antibiotics is the only things that even come close in its impact. If we wanted to have a comparable additional impact today we'd need to accomplish something like wiping out all the disease-carrying insects (mosquitoes, tsetse flies, etc.)
lucideer 8y ago
> That's an increase of 50% ... from an arbitrary starting point of 20. Why 20? What I mean is, if you're 50, it's an increase of 200%, which you could say is even more remarkable except that it can't be as it's the same statistic?

aalleavitch 8y ago

I disagree entirely. The “people only lived to 30” notion is based on a misunderstanding about infant mortality rates which were massive. In the 1950s my nephew with CF would’ve had a life expectancy of weeks. In the modern day, he may very well live a full life. Stephen Pinker, while I disagree with him on a lot of things, has a couple of books that are essentially collections of every way that we can quantifiable show that the present is a better place to live than the past. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now

xbmcuser 8y ago

I am from a 3rd world/developing country my maternal grandfather died at the age of 42 from a disease that is easily curable today. He was from a rich family that could afford the best healthcare of the time. Today a poor man can get cured of the same disease so life expectancy has gone up. But it is an avg more people are surviving to an older age