6 ms·

I remember seeing this article awhile back. Really made me realize that sometimes simple, trivial things that everyone takes as fact really cannot be trusted.

I remember seeing this article awhile back. Really made me realize that sometimes simple, trivial things that everyone takes as fact really cannot be trusted. The notion that Coco the gorilla could do sign language was another one that stuck with me. Anyways, I think the best evidence 'against' Jeanne is that no other super-old person simply looked (both outwardly and physiologically) like someone 20 years thier junior. All the medical evidence points to her not actually being the age she claimed she was. I'm of the opinion the 2nd place woman is also not legitimate. She probably just lied about her age so she could marry and then lived incredibly long. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Knauss https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Knauss

dredmorbius 5y ago
There's the observation that the one modern social phenomenon that's been most strongly associated with a reduction in the number of superannuated persons in a population is accurate demographic recordkeeping. See, e.g., https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/08/06/are-supercentenarians-mostly-superfrauds/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/08/06/are-superc... Source paper: "Supercentenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1
- xdennis 5y ago
  This is like the UFO observation: camera sensors have improved, but UFO videos stay the same (low details and ambiguous).
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    That raises a possible / probable principle for discerning between rare observations on the one hand and unjustified ones on the other, and a chief limitation of empiricism. Empiricism rests on the assumption that the Universe and phenomena in it are fundamentally observable. Which means that phenomena generate some kind of interaction with their surroundings. Observability is depenent on the frequency, strength, certainty (as opposed to ambiguity), of those interactions. There's a strong association between the sensibility of phenomenon (our ability to see, hear, smell, feel, or taste it directly) and its believability, though also with recordability. "Capturing something", on film, tape, audio, or other sensing devices, is key to demonstrable proof. (In its absence we're mostly limited to testimony or second-hand accounts. Durer's Rhinocerous is a wonderful example of a second-hand account, visualised in detail. It's almost dreamlike, startlingly accurate in some particulars, oddly off in others.) Empiricism does most poorly with rare or hard-to-sense phenomena. Literal black swans, neutrinos, the interior of the Earth, subatomic particles, the boundaries of the Universe, interiors of stars, black holes and neutron stars (massive, but not very emissive). Or the very long ago (think evolution and geology). Epidemiology and statistical methods for rare and distributed events. Various sensing, visualisation, microscopy, telescopy, tomographic, and other methods. Even in cases of very difficult-to-sense phenomena, though empiricism tends to improve in its resolving capability with time and improvement of methods. And where those capabilities improve, rare-but-real phenomena are more revealed over time. The distant (or small, or remote in time, or hard to percieve) becomes clearer. Presumed-extinct species are found. Hidden structures within the Earth are visualised, and correlated with other events (see the evolution of the concept of plate tectonics, one of my favourite instances). Where the phenomenon is not real, though ... it either decreases in prevalence (mostly in the case of frauds), or in the case of "edge-of-perception" sensing, in which random noise is mistaken (or hallucinated) as actual, remains roughly constant over time. Spellling all this out, I'm all but certain there's an established concept built around this (or several). Though it seems a useful heuristic in determinng likely validity or falsity of phenomena given enhanced sensing or recording capabilities. UFOs have remained frustratingly ellusive. Meteorites have become stunningly compelling. Footage of accidents, abuses of power, or casual racism are now starkly evident (if often undeterred by the fact of video). And so on.
  - fiftyacorn 5y ago
    Or ghosts
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      Pretty much anything now seen as paranormal activity. Though I've been trying to come up with counterexamples --- thins previuosly thought fantastical or unlikely now known to be real. I'd illustrated a bloggish version of my comment above with Albrecht Durer's Rinocerous --- he'd drawn that from second-hand reports (and a poor-quality sketch). It's clearly not right, but it's also not entirely wrong, and the mix of "details captured well" with "where did that come from" is fascinating. Lightning sprites are another that comes to mind, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(lightning) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(lightning)
      - lovemenot 5y ago
        Albrecht Durer's Rinocerous: nice. I never saw it before. Looks like someone said it was armoured so Durer went to the local armoury for inspiration. Puts me in mind of a Deep Dream image. https://deepdreamgenerator.com/ https://deepdreamgenerator.com/ A good story about the duck-billed platypus, which was believed apocrophal for a long time. https://gizmodo.com/legendary-cryptids-that-turned-out-to-be-absolutely-rea-5814976 https://gizmodo.com/legendary-cryptids-that-turned-out-to-be...
        dredmorbius 5y ago
        Duck-billed platypus is an excellent example, as well as the class of instances: cryptids. Thanks. And yes, Durer's image is one that just grows on you. I've known of it since I was a child. It just keeps getting better. There is some Deep Dream feeling about it --- being told that there's something there, so you find it regardless of whether or not it actually is. Try staring at a field of raw static for a while. (This used to be easier when television was an analogue broadcast, I'm not sure what the easiest source is now. Inkblots are another possible option.)
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  HN discussion of the biorxiv paper on Aug 6, 2019 (227 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625547
joshuaissac 5y ago
> I'm of the opinion the 2nd place woman is also not legitimate. She probably just lied about her age so she could marry and then lived incredibly long. From that link: > The 1891 directory records that the 1890 US census listed Sarah D. Clark as age 10, which is roughly consistent with a September 1880 birth date.
- rscoots 5y ago
  Yea, looks like that source came out Dec 2019 which is after I first looked into this. Very interesting & well written write up! Even though Wikipedia says "Better source needed" for whatever reason. The author still casts a good amount of doubt on her claim though, and even assuming the existing evidence is correct she still couldve been 116 it says. But yea as long as you don't have birth certificates or baptism records I guess that would always be true.
astrange 5y ago
> Really made me realize that sometimes simple, trivial things that everyone takes as fact really cannot be trusted. One I've noticed is "Einstein was super smart" when a simpler theory is "Einstein didn't cite prior work so everyone thought he did it."
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  Einstein was a patent clerk. A patent office is basically a library of ideas. So he was paid to study ideas in detail day after day for years. Likely some of his ideas on relativity came from train scheduling patents frequently requested at the time since railroad companies were going pan-European. FYI: Elite VCs pay people to basically do what Einstein did: study new ideas and trends all day. There are a few US market intelligence companies like 451 Group that can write mind-blowing reports. (Their early Android predictions report delivered at one of the O'Reilly Conferences proved to be very accurate.)
- perl4ever 5y ago
  >One I've noticed is "Einstein was super smart" when a simpler theory is "Einstein didn't cite prior work so everyone thought he did it." What prior work? Most of the discussion about Einstein's theories not being original and not being credited seem to relate to his first wife, I thought.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

dredmorbius 5y ago

There's the observation that the one modern social phenomenon that's been most strongly associated with a reduction in the number of superannuated persons in a population is accurate demographic recordkeeping. See, e.g., https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/08/06/are-supercentenarians-mostly-superfrauds/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/08/06/are-superc... Source paper: "Supercentenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1

xdennis 5y ago
This is like the UFO observation: camera sensors have improved, but UFO videos stay the same (low details and ambiguous).
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  That raises a possible / probable principle for discerning between rare observations on the one hand and unjustified ones on the other, and a chief limitation of empiricism. Empiricism rests on the assumption that the Universe and phenomena in it are fundamentally observable. Which means that phenomena generate some kind of interaction with their surroundings. Observability is depenent on the frequency, strength, certainty (as opposed to ambiguity), of those interactions. There's a strong association between the sensibility of phenomenon (our ability to see, hear, smell, feel, or taste it directly) and its believability, though also with recordability. "Capturing something", on film, tape, audio, or other sensing devices, is key to demonstrable proof. (In its absence we're mostly limited to testimony or second-hand accounts. Durer's Rhinocerous is a wonderful example of a second-hand account, visualised in detail. It's almost dreamlike, startlingly accurate in some particulars, oddly off in others.) Empiricism does most poorly with rare or hard-to-sense phenomena. Literal black swans, neutrinos, the interior of the Earth, subatomic particles, the boundaries of the Universe, interiors of stars, black holes and neutron stars (massive, but not very emissive). Or the very long ago (think evolution and geology). Epidemiology and statistical methods for rare and distributed events. Various sensing, visualisation, microscopy, telescopy, tomographic, and other methods. Even in cases of very difficult-to-sense phenomena, though empiricism tends to improve in its resolving capability with time and improvement of methods. And where those capabilities improve, rare-but-real phenomena are more revealed over time. The distant (or small, or remote in time, or hard to percieve) becomes clearer. Presumed-extinct species are found. Hidden structures within the Earth are visualised, and correlated with other events (see the evolution of the concept of plate tectonics, one of my favourite instances). Where the phenomenon is not real, though ... it either decreases in prevalence (mostly in the case of frauds), or in the case of "edge-of-perception" sensing, in which random noise is mistaken (or hallucinated) as actual, remains roughly constant over time. Spellling all this out, I'm all but certain there's an established concept built around this (or several). Though it seems a useful heuristic in determinng likely validity or falsity of phenomena given enhanced sensing or recording capabilities. UFOs have remained frustratingly ellusive. Meteorites have become stunningly compelling. Footage of accidents, abuses of power, or casual racism are now starkly evident (if often undeterred by the fact of video). And so on.
- fiftyacorn 5y ago
  Or ghosts
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Pretty much anything now seen as paranormal activity. Though I've been trying to come up with counterexamples --- thins previuosly thought fantastical or unlikely now known to be real. I'd illustrated a bloggish version of my comment above with Albrecht Durer's Rinocerous --- he'd drawn that from second-hand reports (and a poor-quality sketch). It's clearly not right, but it's also not entirely wrong, and the mix of "details captured well" with "where did that come from" is fascinating. Lightning sprites are another that comes to mind, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(lightning) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(lightning)
    - lovemenot 5y ago
      Albrecht Durer's Rinocerous: nice. I never saw it before. Looks like someone said it was armoured so Durer went to the local armoury for inspiration. Puts me in mind of a Deep Dream image. https://deepdreamgenerator.com/ https://deepdreamgenerator.com/ A good story about the duck-billed platypus, which was believed apocrophal for a long time. https://gizmodo.com/legendary-cryptids-that-turned-out-to-be-absolutely-rea-5814976 https://gizmodo.com/legendary-cryptids-that-turned-out-to-be...
      - dredmorbius 5y ago
        Duck-billed platypus is an excellent example, as well as the class of instances: cryptids. Thanks. And yes, Durer's image is one that just grows on you. I've known of it since I was a child. It just keeps getting better. There is some Deep Dream feeling about it --- being told that there's something there, so you find it regardless of whether or not it actually is. Try staring at a field of raw static for a while. (This used to be easier when television was an analogue broadcast, I'm not sure what the easiest source is now. Inkblots are another possible option.)
dredmorbius 5y ago
HN discussion of the biorxiv paper on Aug 6, 2019 (227 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625547

joshuaissac 5y ago

> I'm of the opinion the 2nd place woman is also not legitimate. She probably just lied about her age so she could marry and then lived incredibly long. From that link: > The 1891 directory records that the 1890 US census listed Sarah D. Clark as age 10, which is roughly consistent with a September 1880 birth date.

rscoots 5y ago
Yea, looks like that source came out Dec 2019 which is after I first looked into this. Very interesting & well written write up! Even though Wikipedia says "Better source needed" for whatever reason. The author still casts a good amount of doubt on her claim though, and even assuming the existing evidence is correct she still couldve been 116 it says. But yea as long as you don't have birth certificates or baptism records I guess that would always be true.

astrange 5y ago

> Really made me realize that sometimes simple, trivial things that everyone takes as fact really cannot be trusted. One I've noticed is "Einstein was super smart" when a simpler theory is "Einstein didn't cite prior work so everyone thought he did it."

redis_mlc 5y ago
Einstein was a patent clerk. A patent office is basically a library of ideas. So he was paid to study ideas in detail day after day for years. Likely some of his ideas on relativity came from train scheduling patents frequently requested at the time since railroad companies were going pan-European. FYI: Elite VCs pay people to basically do what Einstein did: study new ideas and trends all day. There are a few US market intelligence companies like 451 Group that can write mind-blowing reports. (Their early Android predictions report delivered at one of the O'Reilly Conferences proved to be very accurate.)
perl4ever 5y ago
>One I've noticed is "Einstein was super smart" when a simpler theory is "Einstein didn't cite prior work so everyone thought he did it." What prior work? Most of the discussion about Einstein's theories not being original and not being credited seem to relate to his first wife, I thought.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]