5 ms·

Pure nonsense. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v2 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v2 “Supercentenarian and remarkable age records

by JackFr 4y ago

Pure nonsense. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v2 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v2 “Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud”

SideQuark 4y ago
That paper has not been published, despite being posted several years, and the top comment under it seems to supply a decent counter claim with evidence. My guess is it's not as accurate as to support your claim of "pure nonsense."
- JackFr 4y ago
  You make a fair point, but the problem is, I read the article. And it is utter bullshit, published in a fourth tier journal by a non-scientist with something to sell. “Blue zone”, “power 9”, “vitality compass” — please spare me. This is pure pseudo-scientific crap.
  - ChrisLomont 4y ago
    SJR ranked the journal in the top third - not great, but not "fourth tier." And it got published, unlike your rebuttal. It's also got 170+ citations, none of which I found to claim to debunk the paper. Many of those citations are in good journals. Do you know any papers published in good journals rebutting this one? Maybe you should carefully write up your objections and publish that. You certainly are going to great lengths to claim it's crap.
    - biophysboy 4y ago
      It’s also super common to use memorable names and phrases in scientific literature/presentations. It’s common in my field (biophysics). I don’t know why “blue zone” is so pseudoscientific.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    > spare me Communicational style comes from environment, inclination, choice and target, and may suggest but not prove (low) quality of content. Many are irritated e.g. by the style (apparently very frequent in the USA), in articles and books, using the pattern "John one day left the house and a number of things happened; he had graduated there and does this for a living. Now, the science" - odd conflations of narrative and data following the sequences of a novelist instead of theoretical structures: nonetheless, they do frequently have juice to extract.
- jquery 4y ago
  I bet it’s a bit of column A, a little of column B. Healthy diets and lifestyles will earn you a few extra years, and fraud gets you the rest of the way.
_yb2s 4y ago
Your posted article highlights a really great statistical principle that I also discovered on my own owning a really rare car: if someone (company) claims to have parts in stock, it was most likely due to a database error, not the actual parts, because the probability of having the parts was so low. Reports of highly improbable events are probably not true in general. That seems to explain incredible longevity also- if it basically doesn't actually happen, then instances of it are therefore actually instances of error/fraud.
- tempestn 4y ago
  These are examples of Bayesian reasoning. Although in this case the paper's authors did attempt to account for such errors.
- rtpg 4y ago
  But there are loads of people who hit 100. The random google search talks about 450k centenarians. 100 years ago is 1922. Perhaps the 100 year old person in the 70s is hard to believe, but 1922 is well into major bureaucracy existing, and where it is harder to just make up a person. There are of course loads of stories of identity fraud and the like, but by the time you would want to execute the fraud (I guess in your 40s?) you're looking at trying to do ID fraud in the 1960s. For the super extreme cases, it maybe feels worth trying to pull this trick off. But at one point we have confirmed that getting to 100 is a thing.
  - jrumbut 4y ago
    I believe the idea is that many of those records were destroyed or distorted during WW2.
    - ChrisLomont 4y ago
      Compare to the total number of records, very, very few were destroyed in WW2. It's not like every building on the planet were burned down. And lots of people have their own records in family bibles/other books. Modern genealogy sites (and even general web searches) have (and still are) digitizing old records, news papers, graveyards, and lots of other historical records, and this data is being fed into all sorts of databases/AI/analysis tools, making really precise records of giant family trees possible, with original photos, handwritten notes, census data, and on and on. So there's likely a better, more accurate records of all of this, back hundreds of years, aggregated than ever before. I know in my case, it doesn't take long now to trace parts of my family back 400-500 years into ancient France (I'm in the US). The number of original records I can see is astounding. It's only getting better. And it's pretty easy statistically to count % of people making age 100 in countries or regions where records are very, very good, get a good model of how that works, including as many relevant variables as people want to study, and use that to get a good estimate of how many are in places where records are poorer quality. That is how science is routinely done.
TimTheTinker 4y ago
I was a 4th generation Seventh-day Adventist myself. My great grandparents and grandparents all lived very long lives, and so did many people we knew. For them, living a physically healthy life is part of their religion, and it does increase longevity. My family left when I was a teenager, and I never looked back -- but I'm writing to say that at least the Loma Linda site isn't nonsense.
- elevaet 4y ago
  Does exercise play an important role in Seventh-day Adventist healthy living, or is the healthy lifestyle more about diet, and not smoking/drinking/drugs?
  - iamthejuan 4y ago
    Yes. Following NEWSTART. Nutrition, Execise, Water, Sunlight, Temperance, Air, Rest, and Trust in GOD. See: http://www.faculty.umb.edu/alexandrine_noel/AlexINFO/newstart.htm http://www.faculty.umb.edu/alexandrine_noel/AlexINFO/newstar... Many testifies being healed from cancer as well, I know some personally who are following these principles.
gpderetta 4y ago
This is what I commented last time this rebuttal paper made the rounds on HN: While I've also conjectured in the past that at least a good chunk of extreme supercentenarians are due to anagraphical errors if not outright fraud, I do not think that the paper support the thesis well. For starter they do not have a global model, it seems that they handpicked different statistics for different areas that support their thesis (they do not even show anything concrete for Japan). Regarding Sardinia, their numbers seem actually wrong: looking at the raw Istat data the numbers for 55 year life expectancy for the Sardinian provinces seem in line with the rest of Italy (95-96%) putting Sardinia somewhere in the middle of the (quite tight) Italian distribution. It is possible that the researcher averaged the data over a longer period of time that I bothered to look, but the paper doesn't discuss the methodology. Their fitting, p value not withstanding, also seem a bit adventurous; the fact that all and almost only Sardinian provinces are extreme outliers should have been a tell. The rest of the Italian provinces are in a tight uniform cluster. Sardinia, except for a very brief period in the mid 2010s,has only 4 provinces, so it is possible that messed up their data extraction (they show 8 provinces). Also Sardinia is not particularly poorer than the rest of Southern Italy and actually has a lower crime rate (which they suggest but not outright state is a factor). A better paper would probably try to build a single model for Japan, Italy and US using actual mortality, crime and poverty rates.

by JackFr 4y ago

SideQuark 4y ago

That paper has not been published, despite being posted several years, and the top comment under it seems to supply a decent counter claim with evidence. My guess is it's not as accurate as to support your claim of "pure nonsense."

JackFr 4y ago
You make a fair point, but the problem is, I read the article. And it is utter bullshit, published in a fourth tier journal by a non-scientist with something to sell. “Blue zone”, “power 9”, “vitality compass” — please spare me. This is pure pseudo-scientific crap.
- ChrisLomont 4y ago
  SJR ranked the journal in the top third - not great, but not "fourth tier." And it got published, unlike your rebuttal. It's also got 170+ citations, none of which I found to claim to debunk the paper. Many of those citations are in good journals. Do you know any papers published in good journals rebutting this one? Maybe you should carefully write up your objections and publish that. You certainly are going to great lengths to claim it's crap.
  - biophysboy 4y ago
    It’s also super common to use memorable names and phrases in scientific literature/presentations. It’s common in my field (biophysics). I don’t know why “blue zone” is so pseudoscientific.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > spare me Communicational style comes from environment, inclination, choice and target, and may suggest but not prove (low) quality of content. Many are irritated e.g. by the style (apparently very frequent in the USA), in articles and books, using the pattern "John one day left the house and a number of things happened; he had graduated there and does this for a living. Now, the science" - odd conflations of narrative and data following the sequences of a novelist instead of theoretical structures: nonetheless, they do frequently have juice to extract.
jquery 4y ago
I bet it’s a bit of column A, a little of column B. Healthy diets and lifestyles will earn you a few extra years, and fraud gets you the rest of the way.

_yb2s 4y ago

Your posted article highlights a really great statistical principle that I also discovered on my own owning a really rare car: if someone (company) claims to have parts in stock, it was most likely due to a database error, not the actual parts, because the probability of having the parts was so low. Reports of highly improbable events are probably not true in general. That seems to explain incredible longevity also- if it basically doesn't actually happen, then instances of it are therefore actually instances of error/fraud.

tempestn 4y ago
These are examples of Bayesian reasoning. Although in this case the paper's authors did attempt to account for such errors.
rtpg 4y ago
But there are loads of people who hit 100. The random google search talks about 450k centenarians. 100 years ago is 1922. Perhaps the 100 year old person in the 70s is hard to believe, but 1922 is well into major bureaucracy existing, and where it is harder to just make up a person. There are of course loads of stories of identity fraud and the like, but by the time you would want to execute the fraud (I guess in your 40s?) you're looking at trying to do ID fraud in the 1960s. For the super extreme cases, it maybe feels worth trying to pull this trick off. But at one point we have confirmed that getting to 100 is a thing.
- jrumbut 4y ago
  I believe the idea is that many of those records were destroyed or distorted during WW2.
  - ChrisLomont 4y ago
    Compare to the total number of records, very, very few were destroyed in WW2. It's not like every building on the planet were burned down. And lots of people have their own records in family bibles/other books. Modern genealogy sites (and even general web searches) have (and still are) digitizing old records, news papers, graveyards, and lots of other historical records, and this data is being fed into all sorts of databases/AI/analysis tools, making really precise records of giant family trees possible, with original photos, handwritten notes, census data, and on and on. So there's likely a better, more accurate records of all of this, back hundreds of years, aggregated than ever before. I know in my case, it doesn't take long now to trace parts of my family back 400-500 years into ancient France (I'm in the US). The number of original records I can see is astounding. It's only getting better. And it's pretty easy statistically to count % of people making age 100 in countries or regions where records are very, very good, get a good model of how that works, including as many relevant variables as people want to study, and use that to get a good estimate of how many are in places where records are poorer quality. That is how science is routinely done.

TimTheTinker 4y ago

I was a 4th generation Seventh-day Adventist myself. My great grandparents and grandparents all lived very long lives, and so did many people we knew. For them, living a physically healthy life is part of their religion, and it does increase longevity. My family left when I was a teenager, and I never looked back -- but I'm writing to say that at least the Loma Linda site isn't nonsense.

elevaet 4y ago
Does exercise play an important role in Seventh-day Adventist healthy living, or is the healthy lifestyle more about diet, and not smoking/drinking/drugs?
- iamthejuan 4y ago
  Yes. Following NEWSTART. Nutrition, Execise, Water, Sunlight, Temperance, Air, Rest, and Trust in GOD. See: http://www.faculty.umb.edu/alexandrine_noel/AlexINFO/newstart.htm http://www.faculty.umb.edu/alexandrine_noel/AlexINFO/newstar... Many testifies being healed from cancer as well, I know some personally who are following these principles.

gpderetta 4y ago

This is what I commented last time this rebuttal paper made the rounds on HN: While I've also conjectured in the past that at least a good chunk of extreme supercentenarians are due to anagraphical errors if not outright fraud, I do not think that the paper support the thesis well. For starter they do not have a global model, it seems that they handpicked different statistics for different areas that support their thesis (they do not even show anything concrete for Japan). Regarding Sardinia, their numbers seem actually wrong: looking at the raw Istat data the numbers for 55 year life expectancy for the Sardinian provinces seem in line with the rest of Italy (95-96%) putting Sardinia somewhere in the middle of the (quite tight) Italian distribution. It is possible that the researcher averaged the data over a longer period of time that I bothered to look, but the paper doesn't discuss the methodology. Their fitting, p value not withstanding, also seem a bit adventurous; the fact that all and almost only Sardinian provinces are extreme outliers should have been a tell. The rest of the Italian provinces are in a tight uniform cluster. Sardinia, except for a very brief period in the mid 2010s,has only 4 provinces, so it is possible that messed up their data extraction (they show 8 provinces). Also Sardinia is not particularly poorer than the rest of Southern Italy and actually has a lower crime rate (which they suggest but not outright state is a factor). A better paper would probably try to build a single model for Japan, Italy and US using actual mortality, crime and poverty rates.