Hacker News Reader

Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

It mostly is. The biggest gains are in childhood. Aldo consider that you’re looking at figures for England and Wales, which isn’t necessarily representative.

The largest contribution to improving life expectancy is measured by reductions in child mortality. The factors that drove those improvements (infection control, improved hygienic practices, food quality, regulation of food and drug purity, medicine) benefited everyone, but had the biggest impact on the old and young. In the 1850s, 8,000 infants died annually from adulterated milk alone.

I think of my own journey. In 1824, 200 year ago Spooky23 would have died 20 years ago, a half blind cripple. 2024 Spooky23 is healthy with no back issues and god willing a few more decades.

View on HN

From the nice graph at: 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.

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.

>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.

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.

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!

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

> It mostly is. The biggest gains are in childhood.

The life expectancy of a 60-year old going from 74.4 to 84, or a 70-year old from 79.1 to 85.9, is significant and meaningful. Not as much as a newborn's LE going from 41.6 to 81.1. But far from "pretty stable in the 70s-80s range for most of human history."

Also, recent life-expectancy increases have come from adult morality reductions [1].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3000019/

How are "74.4 to 84" and "79.1 to 85.9" "pretty far from" the "70s-80s range"?

> adult morality reductions

LOL

Reply on news.ycombinator.com