5 ms·
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
by 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 agoAging 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 agoSeems a very dubious theory since mortality over time looks like an exponential curve.
- perl4ever 5y agoThe 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 agoThis 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.
- blobbers 5y agoYeah, that’s exactly the point. Billions of people with thousands (millions?) dying each day, leads to a pretty continuous curve, not one with gaps at the tail.
- vidarh 5y agoWould you not expect gaps at the tail if the likelihood of survival past that point is non-zero but low enough and the population being fed into it is small enough? There are tens of millions of people dying each year, but there single digit numbers of 110+ year olds dying each year. You would expect discontinuities and variations from small random events. A single person slipping in a shower would be enough to mess up that curve.
- oblio 5y ago> Yeah, that’s exactly the point. Billions of people with thousands (millions?) dying each day, leads to a pretty continuous curve, not one with gaps at the tail. Many, many of those billions don't have their ages tracked correctly.
- barrkel 5y agoYou should expect more variance at the tails of a distribution because the numbers are much lower.