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Comment by decebalus1 | Hacker News Reader

> Is there a way to measure “Life expectancy of people most similar to you”?

Wow.. whenever someone asks me why the US doesn't have humane social services and still regards drug addiction as a crime in need of punishment, I'll point them to this comment.

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I don't get why this is a big deal.

We already serve up content based on people similar to you or making similar choices as you, why not health forecasts?

If I eat healthy, exercise, get the proper amount of sleep and am not addicted to drugs, why not show me how other people with similar habits as me are doing, instead of averaging in people who treat their body like a dumpster?

Showing me the life expectancy averaged across an entire country of 300 million doesn't motivate me to do anything. There is nothing I can do that will make any impact on that number. By this logic we should show life expectancy as the average of the entire planet, that would be the best wouldn't it? No.

Showing people an accurate life expectancy however, could motivate them to make changes to their lifestyle or stay the course if they are happy with it.

I don't know, maybe people just have negative knee-jerk reactions to anyone proposing individualist sentiments.

> Showing me the life expectancy averaged across an entire country of 300 million doesn't motivate me to do anything.

This is not the point of life expectancy statistics. It's not to motivate people. And It's not about you. Just because you're thinking it's about you and that it's not relevant to you to be put in the same bucket with others proves my point.

This is an intentionally nation-scale barometer which is used to asses the Human Development Index. It's more tied with Income inequality than with your diet and exercise regimen.

What is your point exactly? That I don’t care about other people because I’m more concerned about myself? How is that unusual? Seems like most people are that way.

None of those reasons the life expectancy decreased had anything to do with income inequality. Nobody died from an accident or Alzheimers because rich people got more money. Please don't use this as an excuse for whatever pet issue you want.

I didn't state what the reason for decreased life expectancy was. I only said 'it is more tied do X' (see 1) than his individual parameters.

1. http://jech.bmj.com/content/59/2/158

Even if you are drug-free now, you could have a procedure in couple years and become addicted to opioids during recovery. Many people who are suffering from the opioid epidemic were prescribed these drugs.

But that's even more reason to split out the stats. It would be very good to know that the average life expectancy for opioid users is much lower before I consider taking them.

Life expectancy if you get the surgery and medicate with pot: 80 years.

Life expectancy if you get the surgery and use the opioids: 60 years.

That seems immeasurably more useful than a national average alone which only can be used for political talking points.

That's not a matter of splitting out stats, because the information gathered doesn't support that. That kind of research does get done, but it's expensive, time consuming, and only really possible when alternatives have been fairly widely applied for enough years to have good data to support meaningful analysis of expected lifetime (and may still, even then, be misleading I'd treatment protols for either drug have evolved significantly over the period.)

So you won't find them for all the options of interest, and you emphatically won't find them for emerging options (including pot, which hasn't been even quasi-legal long enough to support good data.)

But it is something worth working toward in the future yes? Perhaps when we have massive amounts of data.

Sure, though (and this is usually reflected in research that it includes it now), lifespan alone for alternatives isn't the only or necessarily most important piece of comparative information; relative risks of other conditions even if they are non-fatal and other quality-of-life concerns are important, too. For aggregate purposes when we aren't comparing path risks but looking at overall status, the patallel is merely statistics on the incidence of various conditions and effects with quality-of-life impacts, which is currently done separately from life expectancy.

Calm down.

It's a reasonable question. Is there life expectancy data for different segments of the population?

Welcome to America. This is the typical rhetoric going around in the Bay Area

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