4 ms·

From the nice graph at: https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Life-expectancy-by-age-in-the-UK-1700-to-2013_1350.png https://ourworldindata.org/images/pub

From the nice graph at: https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Life-expectancy-by-age-in-the-UK-1700-to-2013_1350.png https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Life-expectancy-... In 1850 a 0 year old would expect to live to 41.6 years. A 5 year old would expect to live to 55.2. If we waved a magic wand and let all infants survive past childhood with nothing else changed in 1850 life expectancy would still be 27 years lower than it is today. Or put another way you'd have the same life expectancy as someone in South Sudan or Somalia.

Spooky23 2y ago
Sounds like we mostly agree, save some pedantry. Nobody waved a wand. The contaminated milk that killed infants killed adults too - alcohol and milk were alternatives to unsafe water. Public health, medicine and other factors improved things. We don’t really have great stats from before the 19th century. Was 1850 a nadir in life expectancy? I’m not sure - but I suspect it varied by region and rural/urban conditions. 1750 NYC wasn’t as gross as 1850.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  >Sounds like we mostly agree, save some pedantry. If by pedantry you mean that I'm not ignoring the cause of 70% of the improvement in life expectancy in the last 200 years then sure.
  - Jweb_Guru 2y ago
    Indeed, this conversation is a good illustration of the damage that Bayesian statistics have done to the "educated" populace. Not that they're inherently bad--it's just a different statistical approach, and it's generally good not to assume a universal background, that everything is normal, etc.--but by telling people it's fine to question statistical conclusions because the distribution might be different, it liberates certain people from ever having to actually change their minds based on new information, because they can just posit a different distribution that satisfies their own biases.
    - Spooky23 2y ago
      Yes, bunch of ignorant beasts we are. It’s totally reasonable and statistically sound to use statistics from Victorian England as the sole proxy for the pre-modern human race. /s
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - _yb2s 2y ago
      I realize this is a bit of a "no true Scotsman" but what you are talking about is a gross misuse of Bayesianism- where your own biases are incorrectly treated as extremely strong evidence. I am partial to using unform priors over all possibilities, and then just adding in the actual evidence for which you can actually quantify its quality/strength. Your "prior" for a new situation is constructed by applying the data you already had previously to a uniform prior- not by fabricating it from whole cloth via your biases. In practice this may be impossible for humans to do in their heads, but computers certainly can!

Spooky23 2y ago

Sounds like we mostly agree, save some pedantry. Nobody waved a wand. The contaminated milk that killed infants killed adults too - alcohol and milk were alternatives to unsafe water. Public health, medicine and other factors improved things. We don’t really have great stats from before the 19th century. Was 1850 a nadir in life expectancy? I’m not sure - but I suspect it varied by region and rural/urban conditions. 1750 NYC wasn’t as gross as 1850.

llm_trw 2y ago
>Sounds like we mostly agree, save some pedantry. If by pedantry you mean that I'm not ignoring the cause of 70% of the improvement in life expectancy in the last 200 years then sure.
- Jweb_Guru 2y ago
  Indeed, this conversation is a good illustration of the damage that Bayesian statistics have done to the "educated" populace. Not that they're inherently bad--it's just a different statistical approach, and it's generally good not to assume a universal background, that everything is normal, etc.--but by telling people it's fine to question statistical conclusions because the distribution might be different, it liberates certain people from ever having to actually change their minds based on new information, because they can just posit a different distribution that satisfies their own biases.
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    Yes, bunch of ignorant beasts we are. It’s totally reasonable and statistically sound to use statistics from Victorian England as the sole proxy for the pre-modern human race. /s
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - _yb2s 2y ago
    I realize this is a bit of a "no true Scotsman" but what you are talking about is a gross misuse of Bayesianism- where your own biases are incorrectly treated as extremely strong evidence. I am partial to using unform priors over all possibilities, and then just adding in the actual evidence for which you can actually quantify its quality/strength. Your "prior" for a new situation is constructed by applying the data you already had previously to a uniform prior- not by fabricating it from whole cloth via your biases. In practice this may be impossible for humans to do in their heads, but computers certainly can!