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 mi

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.