7 ms·

Because of slowly but steadily improving equipment, training, nutrition, medical treatment. Why didn't I get a heart attack in my 50s like both grandfathers and

Because of slowly but steadily improving equipment, training, nutrition, medical treatment. Why didn't I get a heart attack in my 50s like both grandfathers and my dad? Sure, I exercise a little (but I should do more, lose some more weight etc). But I also have magic statins and also take daily coated aspirin and some other things that weren't available in 1980 for my ancestors. Why didn't I get lung cancer like some family members? Because I never freaking smoked. The same ideas should apply to athletes.

justinator 6y ago
Diseases of Affluence don't regularly affect elite athletes in their 20's. I would say that because of affluence in our culture, we actually have elite athletes. I come from a long line of artichoke farmers, but hell if I've ever grown one myself. Taking a few months off to climbs mountains as fast as I can to set some record is something I can do because I've broken free from my generational toiling.
jacques_chester 6y ago
> Because of slowly but steadily improving equipment, training, nutrition, medical treatment. The simplest predictor is "how many people practice a sport?" Insofar as fitness for a particular athletic trial follows the central limit theorem, larger samples will open the door to more spectacular outliers. The relationship between total participants and the time it takes for a record to fall shows up in sport after sport. The other factor is: new PEDs that are forbidden but difficult to detect at a given point in time. These affect some sports more than others. Periodically records in these sports are "reset" through administrative twiddling. For example, every 20 years or so Olympic Weightlifting weight classes get changed, meaning all the old records are essentially obsoleted.
- majormajor 6y ago
  Even if the number of new entrants to a sport per year stay constant, I think you'd expect records to continually fall as the cumulative sample over time gets larger and larger. That said, yeah, them falling more rapidly is also helped by the training/equipment/nutrition/drugs/etc improvements.
  - jacques_chester 6y ago
    The training, equipment etc improvements themselves follow population. More natural and designed experiments, more alternatives available, more accumulated know-how and theory. But any given combination of factors is itself part of the athletic trial. The Soviet Russian system of weightlifting carefully husbanded the outstanding weightlifters they had to work with and so selected for athletes who responded well to that training. The Bulgarian system was based on masses of warm bodies, enormous drug regimens and ruthless elimination upon injury. It selected for athletes who responded well to drugs and weren't injury prone. Afficionados of the sport argue constantly about which is "better", since both turned out world record upon world record. But such a debate was beside the point: an athletic system selects whatever it is set up to select for. The rest of the effect is then down to numbers.
  - gwern 6y ago
    Yes, you'd expect records to always keep falling given a fixed distribution, but it will slow down fast. The expected maximum of _n_ random samples is roughly log(n) in size (formulas: https://www.gwern.net/Order-statistics https://www.gwern.net/Order-statistics ), so you need to increase dramatically to noticeably increase the maximum. Or to put it another way, since a record is defined as 'beating all previous samples', the chance of the next sample setting a record is always 1/n. So if you have m entrants per year adding to that total n, the probability is always positive, but it quickly becomes very small.
sbierwagen 6y ago
Note that, in persons who haven't had a heart attack, daily aspirin does reduce heart attack risk in exchange for risk of major bleeding. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6439678/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6439678/ Its effect on mortality, then? A wash. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M15-2113 https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M15-2113 >Clinical trials of aspirin in patients without cardiovascular disease have inconsistently demonstrated improvements in cardiovascular outcomes, with potential benefits countered by increased risks of clinically significant bleeding. The uncertain role of aspirin in primary prevention of cardiovascular events is reflected in contrasting recommendations offered by guideline bodies. The overall effect of this uncertainty has been a decline in aspirin prescribing for primary prevention over the past 5 to 10 years.
- NotSammyHagar 6y ago
  I have heard that risk, of bleeding. But people in my family tend to be killed by heart problems, not by bleeding. So it seems to me like the right trade off. As far as I know, none of my ancestors died from bleeding related issues.

justinator 6y ago

Diseases of Affluence don't regularly affect elite athletes in their 20's. I would say that because of affluence in our culture, we actually have elite athletes. I come from a long line of artichoke farmers, but hell if I've ever grown one myself. Taking a few months off to climbs mountains as fast as I can to set some record is something I can do because I've broken free from my generational toiling.

jacques_chester 6y ago

> Because of slowly but steadily improving equipment, training, nutrition, medical treatment. The simplest predictor is "how many people practice a sport?" Insofar as fitness for a particular athletic trial follows the central limit theorem, larger samples will open the door to more spectacular outliers. The relationship between total participants and the time it takes for a record to fall shows up in sport after sport. The other factor is: new PEDs that are forbidden but difficult to detect at a given point in time. These affect some sports more than others. Periodically records in these sports are "reset" through administrative twiddling. For example, every 20 years or so Olympic Weightlifting weight classes get changed, meaning all the old records are essentially obsoleted.

majormajor 6y ago
Even if the number of new entrants to a sport per year stay constant, I think you'd expect records to continually fall as the cumulative sample over time gets larger and larger. That said, yeah, them falling more rapidly is also helped by the training/equipment/nutrition/drugs/etc improvements.
- jacques_chester 6y ago
  The training, equipment etc improvements themselves follow population. More natural and designed experiments, more alternatives available, more accumulated know-how and theory. But any given combination of factors is itself part of the athletic trial. The Soviet Russian system of weightlifting carefully husbanded the outstanding weightlifters they had to work with and so selected for athletes who responded well to that training. The Bulgarian system was based on masses of warm bodies, enormous drug regimens and ruthless elimination upon injury. It selected for athletes who responded well to drugs and weren't injury prone. Afficionados of the sport argue constantly about which is "better", since both turned out world record upon world record. But such a debate was beside the point: an athletic system selects whatever it is set up to select for. The rest of the effect is then down to numbers.
- gwern 6y ago
  Yes, you'd expect records to always keep falling given a fixed distribution, but it will slow down fast. The expected maximum of _n_ random samples is roughly log(n) in size (formulas: https://www.gwern.net/Order-statistics https://www.gwern.net/Order-statistics ), so you need to increase dramatically to noticeably increase the maximum. Or to put it another way, since a record is defined as 'beating all previous samples', the chance of the next sample setting a record is always 1/n. So if you have m entrants per year adding to that total n, the probability is always positive, but it quickly becomes very small.

sbierwagen 6y ago

Note that, in persons who haven't had a heart attack, daily aspirin does reduce heart attack risk in exchange for risk of major bleeding. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6439678/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6439678/ Its effect on mortality, then? A wash. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M15-2113 https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M15-2113 >Clinical trials of aspirin in patients without cardiovascular disease have inconsistently demonstrated improvements in cardiovascular outcomes, with potential benefits countered by increased risks of clinically significant bleeding. The uncertain role of aspirin in primary prevention of cardiovascular events is reflected in contrasting recommendations offered by guideline bodies. The overall effect of this uncertainty has been a decline in aspirin prescribing for primary prevention over the past 5 to 10 years.

NotSammyHagar 6y ago
I have heard that risk, of bleeding. But people in my family tend to be killed by heart problems, not by bleeding. So it seems to me like the right trade off. As far as I know, none of my ancestors died from bleeding related issues.