6 ms·

I am convinced that Jeanne Calment was actually two people. She is a fairly strange outlier in the record of the oldest people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li

by lacker 5y ago

I am convinced that Jeanne Calment was actually two people. She is a fairly strange outlier in the record of the oldest people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe... The oldest person on record is Jeanne at 122, then one 119, then one 118, then the next seven are at 117, then the next thirteen are at 116. She's just an extreme outlier from the rest of the distribution. Also, in the 25 years since Calment, the distribution of subsequent extremely old people has seemed unchanged. Nobody has gotten any closer to Calment, although we've had far more people in the 114-117 range. It all points to a faked data point.

kzrdude 5y ago
How can we be sure it's not a natural outlier?
- fungiblecog 5y ago
  From the evidence presented in this article
  - beaner 5y ago
    It's evidence, not certainty.
  - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
    But there is no evidence in the article, only speculation and poorly done Bayesian statistics.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
When this hypothesis first came out, I remember looking into it a lot, specifically looking into the rebuttals from Western European researchers that poo-poo'ed the Russians' theories. I remember the thing that struck me was how defensive without evidence the rebuttals sounded to me. I mean, the rebuttals kept pointing out how there was all this documentary evidence to show that Jeanne Calment was 122, but of course all of that documentary evidence would still exist if it were actually evidence from her mother. I never found any convincing rebuttals of (a) the sheer outlier-ness of Jeanne's age, nor any of the more suspicious actions like some of the burned documents from her family. FWIW I think the jury is definitely still out, but I would take the "Jeanne was 2 people" bet 9 ways to Sunday if it could be proven with DNA evidence.
- thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
  That defensive without evidence thing happens even in physics and mathematics. If they were right, we wouldn't have set theory or elementary particles. Emotions, pride and incentives don't conform to science's venerable image.
- boudin 5y ago
  The same way the accusation of fake record do not provide evidence though, it's just theories.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Yes. But their probabilistic weight differs. You don't have a conclusive proof either way, but on one side you have an extreme outlier event that puzzles the medical science, and on the other you have a garden variety white-collar crime with obvious motive. I know what I'd bet on.
    - lovemenot 5y ago
      >> you have an extreme outlier event ... It's an outlier sure, but how extreme is unclear. France being a developed nation (say 5 - 10% of global population at the time). Jeanne being upper middle-class (again say 5% of France). How many with the potential to live a much longer life did not do so because they lacked Jeanne's social advantages? Or did actually live long, but were not documented. If we could model these premature deaths and fit them into the curve, how much less extreme would Jeanne appear to be?
      - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
        What you are proposing is basically exactly what the researchers did in their paper, just comparing the data looking at people who were already supercentenarians, not the whole population at large, and found that Calment was a widely improbable outlier even just among this group.
    - gpderetta 5y ago
paulpauper 5y ago
The second oldest is 119, 100% verified. 122 is not that inconceivable . Just an extra 3 years. Especially if the distribution is fat tailed .
fridif 5y ago
Out of the literal billions upon billions of people who have walked this earth, you consider an age gap of 3 years to be an "extreme outlier"? We're not talking about a decade difference, really. I think there's better evidence out there than just this point. Look at how far the human record has progressed for the fastest marathon run by a human-- it's now faster than a horse!
- ekianjo 5y ago
  Aging accelerates with age. So yes, several years more when you are close to 120 matters.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    >Aging accelerates with age Does it in all cases? I don't have the source, but I know I've read the claim that some of the people who live exceptionally long seem to have "stopped aging" in the sense that their risk of death, while high, leveled out to a constant.
    - ekianjo 5y ago
      Seems a very dubious theory since mortality over time looks like an exponential curve.
      - perl4ever 5y ago
        The number of people surviving would be an exponentially declining curve if the mortality rate was constant, wouldn't it? Isn't it like a radioactive element with a half-life?
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      This is called late life mortality deceleration, it is well proven in insects, but controversial in humans and mammals in general. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late-life_mortality_deceleration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late-life_mortality_decelerati... We would need more and more reliable data in order to give a definite answer.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
evandijk70 5y ago
It is definitely not that surprising, even at the end of the tail of a Gaussian distribution. Below some R-code to generate a sample of 100 million normals, distributed with a mean of 70 and a standard deviation of 8. I don't know if there is a way to calculate the extremes of a sample of normals, but it is definitely not evidence of fraud on its own. x=rnorm(1e8,mean=70,sd=8); x=sort(x); print(tail(x)) [1] 112.9213 112.9481 113.3819 113.7021 113.9032 116.7363
jbotz 5y ago
One of the reasons that the statistical oddity of Jeanne Calumet as an outlier may not mean much is that maybe the main reason she doesn't have much competition is simply that there aren't many alleged super-centenarians with good documentation. There may well be quite a few other people who lived to 120+ but they can't prove it and so nobody talks about them. I know of a woman in my town in rural Brazil who claimed to be 124 before she died, but she had no documentation and here even today there are quite a few people without birth certificates! Now that people over 110 were all born in the 20th century more and more actually can be verified, so the gap is beginning to close. A lot more people seem to be living into their 110s, but it's really hard to say how much of that is due to people's better health and better health care for the very aged, and how much is simply due to the increased verifiability.

by lacker 5y ago

kzrdude 5y ago

How can we be sure it's not a natural outlier?

fungiblecog 5y ago
From the evidence presented in this article
- beaner 5y ago
  It's evidence, not certainty.
- WastingMyTime89 5y ago
  But there is no evidence in the article, only speculation and poorly done Bayesian statistics.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

When this hypothesis first came out, I remember looking into it a lot, specifically looking into the rebuttals from Western European researchers that poo-poo'ed the Russians' theories. I remember the thing that struck me was how defensive without evidence the rebuttals sounded to me. I mean, the rebuttals kept pointing out how there was all this documentary evidence to show that Jeanne Calment was 122, but of course all of that documentary evidence would still exist if it were actually evidence from her mother. I never found any convincing rebuttals of (a) the sheer outlier-ness of Jeanne's age, nor any of the more suspicious actions like some of the burned documents from her family. FWIW I think the jury is definitely still out, but I would take the "Jeanne was 2 people" bet 9 ways to Sunday if it could be proven with DNA evidence.

thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
That defensive without evidence thing happens even in physics and mathematics. If they were right, we wouldn't have set theory or elementary particles. Emotions, pride and incentives don't conform to science's venerable image.
boudin 5y ago
The same way the accusation of fake record do not provide evidence though, it's just theories.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Yes. But their probabilistic weight differs. You don't have a conclusive proof either way, but on one side you have an extreme outlier event that puzzles the medical science, and on the other you have a garden variety white-collar crime with obvious motive. I know what I'd bet on.
  - lovemenot 5y ago
    >> you have an extreme outlier event ... It's an outlier sure, but how extreme is unclear. France being a developed nation (say 5 - 10% of global population at the time). Jeanne being upper middle-class (again say 5% of France). How many with the potential to live a much longer life did not do so because they lacked Jeanne's social advantages? Or did actually live long, but were not documented. If we could model these premature deaths and fit them into the curve, how much less extreme would Jeanne appear to be?
    - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
      What you are proposing is basically exactly what the researchers did in their paper, just comparing the data looking at people who were already supercentenarians, not the whole population at large, and found that Calment was a widely improbable outlier even just among this group.
  - gpderetta 5y ago

paulpauper 5y ago

The second oldest is 119, 100% verified. 122 is not that inconceivable . Just an extra 3 years. Especially if the distribution is fat tailed .

fridif 5y ago

Out of the literal billions upon billions of people who have walked this earth, you consider an age gap of 3 years to be an "extreme outlier"? We're not talking about a decade difference, really. I think there's better evidence out there than just this point. Look at how far the human record has progressed for the fastest marathon run by a human-- it's now faster than a horse!

ekianjo 5y ago
Aging accelerates with age. So yes, several years more when you are close to 120 matters.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  >Aging accelerates with age Does it in all cases? I don't have the source, but I know I've read the claim that some of the people who live exceptionally long seem to have "stopped aging" in the sense that their risk of death, while high, leveled out to a constant.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    Seems a very dubious theory since mortality over time looks like an exponential curve.
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      The number of people surviving would be an exponentially declining curve if the mortality rate was constant, wouldn't it? Isn't it like a radioactive element with a half-life?
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    This is called late life mortality deceleration, it is well proven in insects, but controversial in humans and mammals in general. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late-life_mortality_deceleration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late-life_mortality_decelerati... We would need more and more reliable data in order to give a definite answer.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

evandijk70 5y ago

It is definitely not that surprising, even at the end of the tail of a Gaussian distribution. Below some R-code to generate a sample of 100 million normals, distributed with a mean of 70 and a standard deviation of 8. I don't know if there is a way to calculate the extremes of a sample of normals, but it is definitely not evidence of fraud on its own. x=rnorm(1e8,mean=70,sd=8); x=sort(x); print(tail(x)) [1] 112.9213 112.9481 113.3819 113.7021 113.9032 116.7363

jbotz 5y ago

One of the reasons that the statistical oddity of Jeanne Calumet as an outlier may not mean much is that maybe the main reason she doesn't have much competition is simply that there aren't many alleged super-centenarians with good documentation. There may well be quite a few other people who lived to 120+ but they can't prove it and so nobody talks about them. I know of a woman in my town in rural Brazil who claimed to be 124 before she died, but she had no documentation and here even today there are quite a few people without birth certificates! Now that people over 110 were all born in the 20th century more and more actually can be verified, so the gap is beginning to close. A lot more people seem to be living into their 110s, but it's really hard to say how much of that is due to people's better health and better health care for the very aged, and how much is simply due to the increased verifiability.