4 ms·

I have an obligation to deboonk this meme wherever I see it. I apologize for my self-righteous zealotry, but I have no choice. When we hear about average life

I have an obligation to deboonk this meme wherever I see it. I apologize for my self-righteous zealotry, but I have no choice. When we hear about average life expectancies of the days of yore, infant mortality is almost always factored into this calculation. The truth is, if a human made it past infancy, their life expectancy approached 65+. So, when speaking of cavemen or Ancient Egyptians or whatever, when we hear "average life expectancy of ~30", or "most of us died before 30", it's technically and semantically correct when including all those babes that died in their first year or two of life, but it's misleading and thus not very useful. I don't know if it's historians and anthropologists trying to be cute or pedantic or what, but I wish this meme would just die, because it paints a deceptive portrait of the past.

jacobsimon 4y ago
This is a great breakdown of stats on life expectancy over time including child mortality: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy Life expectancy has improved a lot in general, but less dramatically at old ages.
Syonyk 4y ago
> ...because it paints a deceptive portrait of the past. I assume this is at least partly deliberate, because it's a major part of what has been termed the "Religion of Progress," in which the history of humanity, when you squint hard enough and ignore most of the actual history, is a "rising line from the caves to the stars." Life in the past must be worse than life today in every reasonable way you can describe it, and life in the future must be better than today, because this is what's demanded by the current myths. The problem, of course, is that any moderately in depth study of the history of humanity demonstrates that this absolutely hasn't been the case, outside the effects of the industrial revolution from the past 250 years or so - which, as is now becoming rather obvious, has some serious downsides as well as the assorted miracles it's produced. And the focus of some of the (if not brightest, at least best paid) members of society on tricking other people into staring at a bunch of tiny flickering dots for as long as they possibly (while the world is literally burning around them) can doesn't seem like the sort of thing that's going to be considered particularly well in the future. Not that we should be praising it right now. JM Greer has done some solid writing on the "Religion of Progress" concept, and it's just depressing how often you see life and history crammed into that mold, because it's the way we've been trained to think of the world. It's also going to be responsible (or is being responsible) for a lot of mental anguish when reality refuses to deliver what we think the future ought to be. Humans won't go to the stars. We probably won't ever have flying cars, Jetsons-style. Etc.
- trgn 4y ago
  I hope we never have flying cars. Regulars cars are already crap technology that degraded our cities and countryside, spewing noise and exhaust everywhere. Flying cars is just doubling down on that. Crap technology to paper over the limitations of another crap technology.
dahart 4y ago
Nice to meet someone on the same train, I sometimes get on my high horse too. My brother is an anthropologist, and he’s the one that corrected my high-school mis-impression, and educated me that longevity for humans who live to be at least 20 has been around 80 years for all of known history. There are writings from thousands of years ago talking about 80 year olds. I honestly don’t think it’s the anthropologists, but I’m not sure where it comes from. Some kind of cultural misunderstanding of averages, and maybe for some people just a touch of belief than anything before fifty years ago was the dark ages and cave-people. So, my favorite distinction is between “life expectancy” (which is a misleading average that includes early mortality) and “longevity”, which is what people often really mean, the typical length of life of someone who doesn’t die early of some kind of accident or disease while young. Longevity is the word to use for living to a ripe old age and to factor out infant mortality. If you want to be really triggered, take a look at the graph at the bottom of this article by Ray Kurzweil: https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns That is so wrong and so completely and intentionally misleading (note how it leaves out known data points from the mid 1900s and from before 1850, and how the article is intentionally conflating longevity and life expectancy) that it has convinced me that Kurzweil is a charlatan and I can’t trust a single thing he’s written. It’s a bummer because I really enjoyed his keynote on double exponential growth and eventual immortality at Siggraph one year. Fun ideas but now I see he and the other eternal life pseudo scientists are selling snake oil.
dymk 4y ago
Go stand downwind a fire for a few years and let me know how your lungs feel.

jacobsimon 4y ago

This is a great breakdown of stats on life expectancy over time including child mortality: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy Life expectancy has improved a lot in general, but less dramatically at old ages.

Syonyk 4y ago

> ...because it paints a deceptive portrait of the past. I assume this is at least partly deliberate, because it's a major part of what has been termed the "Religion of Progress," in which the history of humanity, when you squint hard enough and ignore most of the actual history, is a "rising line from the caves to the stars." Life in the past must be worse than life today in every reasonable way you can describe it, and life in the future must be better than today, because this is what's demanded by the current myths. The problem, of course, is that any moderately in depth study of the history of humanity demonstrates that this absolutely hasn't been the case, outside the effects of the industrial revolution from the past 250 years or so - which, as is now becoming rather obvious, has some serious downsides as well as the assorted miracles it's produced. And the focus of some of the (if not brightest, at least best paid) members of society on tricking other people into staring at a bunch of tiny flickering dots for as long as they possibly (while the world is literally burning around them) can doesn't seem like the sort of thing that's going to be considered particularly well in the future. Not that we should be praising it right now. JM Greer has done some solid writing on the "Religion of Progress" concept, and it's just depressing how often you see life and history crammed into that mold, because it's the way we've been trained to think of the world. It's also going to be responsible (or is being responsible) for a lot of mental anguish when reality refuses to deliver what we think the future ought to be. Humans won't go to the stars. We probably won't ever have flying cars, Jetsons-style. Etc.

trgn 4y ago
I hope we never have flying cars. Regulars cars are already crap technology that degraded our cities and countryside, spewing noise and exhaust everywhere. Flying cars is just doubling down on that. Crap technology to paper over the limitations of another crap technology.

dahart 4y ago

Nice to meet someone on the same train, I sometimes get on my high horse too. My brother is an anthropologist, and he’s the one that corrected my high-school mis-impression, and educated me that longevity for humans who live to be at least 20 has been around 80 years for all of known history. There are writings from thousands of years ago talking about 80 year olds. I honestly don’t think it’s the anthropologists, but I’m not sure where it comes from. Some kind of cultural misunderstanding of averages, and maybe for some people just a touch of belief than anything before fifty years ago was the dark ages and cave-people. So, my favorite distinction is between “life expectancy” (which is a misleading average that includes early mortality) and “longevity”, which is what people often really mean, the typical length of life of someone who doesn’t die early of some kind of accident or disease while young. Longevity is the word to use for living to a ripe old age and to factor out infant mortality. If you want to be really triggered, take a look at the graph at the bottom of this article by Ray Kurzweil: https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns That is so wrong and so completely and intentionally misleading (note how it leaves out known data points from the mid 1900s and from before 1850, and how the article is intentionally conflating longevity and life expectancy) that it has convinced me that Kurzweil is a charlatan and I can’t trust a single thing he’s written. It’s a bummer because I really enjoyed his keynote on double exponential growth and eventual immortality at Siggraph one year. Fun ideas but now I see he and the other eternal life pseudo scientists are selling snake oil.

dymk 4y ago

Go stand downwind a fire for a few years and let me know how your lungs feel.