4 ms·

> For example, you'll hear the advice from the 1% of people who survived drinking every day and who might even think it was good for them, and not the warning f

> For example, you'll hear the advice from the 1% of people who survived drinking every day and who might even think it was good for them, and not the warning from the 99% for whom it didn't work, or worse, who died from it. Let's use an example to understand. Let's say that 30% of the population fifty years ago drank and smoked, and 10% did neither. Say that if you drink and smoked, then your chances of living to a hundred years is 1%, but if you do neither then it is 10%. In that scenario, how likely is it that when you ask a centenarian they will be drinkers and smokers vs abstaining from both? How does it compare to the general population? Would you live longer than the general population by following the advice of the centenarians? Does it make sense now?

jraph 2y ago
> how likely is it that when you ask a centenarian they will be drinkers and smokers vs abstaining from both? I don't know but it doesn't matter. How do you know if you are speaking to the right person? And in any case, random old people will have a datapoint of one: themselves. If you need information, take it from good studies, controlled for bias and all that. Any opinion from a single person is worthless as an advice. Even an educated guess isn't good enough. Nobody actually knows why they're having a long life. If I eat vegetables, sleep well and exercise all my life and have a long life, I won't know if it actually helped and if I wouldn't have lived long without those things. Because I didn't try this alternative life. I can only assume it helped from studies we did on large numbers of people. Only data from a big population will help us find correlation, possibly causality (if not confounding factors). >Would you live longer than the general population by following the advice of the centenarians? You used a plural here. That's possible, for a significant number of centenarians, if you control for biases and memory failures. But that's what a scientific study is.
- david-gpu 2y ago
  If you can't do the simple math problem that was presented, what makes you so confident? Anyway, take care. I hope that the next time somebody takes the effort to help you understand something you will be more willing to learn.
  - jraph 2y ago
    You are assuming I'm wrong, you are right and you need to teach me something and I need to learn. It's incredibly messed up. Humility much? I disagree with you. It's not a question of I need to understand. It's a question of I need to be convinced you are right, which I'm not, I know what you want to say with your math but it has not changed this. You wanted to make me say that in your example, it's unlikely one will meet an old person with bad advice, and then that this advice won't matter too much anyway, but your numbers are made up and even if they were correct, this would still barely change my mind. So, yeah, I took a shortcut because whatever the result, this would change nothing. What's more, if you want to make a point, don't make me compute, especially if you already did the computation. I don't see the point of it. I'm not at school answering to a teacher. Moreover, if your point is that following advice from old people doesn't change things much, then what's the point of arguing for listening to old people's advice and how does it change the fact that it's bad or good advice? Take care too.

jraph 2y ago

> how likely is it that when you ask a centenarian they will be drinkers and smokers vs abstaining from both? I don't know but it doesn't matter. How do you know if you are speaking to the right person? And in any case, random old people will have a datapoint of one: themselves. If you need information, take it from good studies, controlled for bias and all that. Any opinion from a single person is worthless as an advice. Even an educated guess isn't good enough. Nobody actually knows why they're having a long life. If I eat vegetables, sleep well and exercise all my life and have a long life, I won't know if it actually helped and if I wouldn't have lived long without those things. Because I didn't try this alternative life. I can only assume it helped from studies we did on large numbers of people. Only data from a big population will help us find correlation, possibly causality (if not confounding factors). >Would you live longer than the general population by following the advice of the centenarians? You used a plural here. That's possible, for a significant number of centenarians, if you control for biases and memory failures. But that's what a scientific study is.

david-gpu 2y ago
If you can't do the simple math problem that was presented, what makes you so confident? Anyway, take care. I hope that the next time somebody takes the effort to help you understand something you will be more willing to learn.
- jraph 2y ago
  You are assuming I'm wrong, you are right and you need to teach me something and I need to learn. It's incredibly messed up. Humility much? I disagree with you. It's not a question of I need to understand. It's a question of I need to be convinced you are right, which I'm not, I know what you want to say with your math but it has not changed this. You wanted to make me say that in your example, it's unlikely one will meet an old person with bad advice, and then that this advice won't matter too much anyway, but your numbers are made up and even if they were correct, this would still barely change my mind. So, yeah, I took a shortcut because whatever the result, this would change nothing. What's more, if you want to make a point, don't make me compute, especially if you already did the computation. I don't see the point of it. I'm not at school answering to a teacher. Moreover, if your point is that following advice from old people doesn't change things much, then what's the point of arguing for listening to old people's advice and how does it change the fact that it's bad or good advice? Take care too.