Hacker News Reader

Comment by andkenneth | Hacker News Reader

And as always, when problems get solved, other problems get revealed. We didn't even really know about cancer until life expectancies got to the point where dying in your 30s is a tragedy instead of being fairly normal.

View on HN

I don’t think dying in your 30s has been normal in the Western world anytime In the last 500 years. Remember all those life expectancy mean statistics were heavily dragged down by the huge infant mortality stats.

If your comment was more talking about the Stone Age or something, I apologize for misinterpreting :)

Infant and mother mortality stats.

The idea that most people more than ~120 years ago died in their 30s or 40s is a popular misconception. LEAB (Life expectancy at birth) used to be in the mid-30s, but this was largely due to a bimodal distribution of deaths: a large number dying during childbirth, infancy, or early childhood, and a lot at more typical old age (60-70, still a bit lower than is common in much of the west today, but you get the idea). If you made it past puberty, there were pretty good odds of you making it to old age.

Aside from infant morality, don't forget the massive death load from things like accidental death, famine, and maternal mortality.

E.g. from Wikipedia, female life expectancy from age 15 in Britain in the 1400-1500s century was 33 years (so reaching 48 years of age).

...and also bubonic plague.

100%. I carried this misconception after high school and college and was surprised to learn it’s completely wrong. There’s a name for the old-age end of the bimodal distribution: longevity. Longevity is the natural lifespan of people who don’t die of any early mortality factors. Most people who have the misconception are accidentally conflating life expectancy with longevity. A few unscrupulous peddlers of false hope, like Ray Kurzweil for example, intentionally conflate life expectancy with longevity to reinforce the misconception. As I was learning about longevity I started talking to my anthropologist brother about it, and he was like, oh yeah, people who don’t die from war or disease or infection have always lived to be about 80 years old for all of known history. He mentioned there’s plenty of written evidence from, e.g. Socrates’ day, and also lots of human remains that support it from ten thousand years ago.

Well we have a lot less disease and infection now!

This is why life expectancy has gone up, while longevity has mostly remained unchanged (for at least thousands of years). Longevity represents the best we can do, and life expectancy can’t exceed longevity. Life expectancy will asymptotically approach longevity as medicine improves.

I think it's worth noting that we (in the west) have a lot less of most diseases and infections now, stuff like polio, plague, malaria.

I don't suffer from delusions that we have accurate data on conditions like obesity and T2D going back to the middle ages, but we have seen incidence rates of these kinds of disease explode upwards over the last century.

I'd be interested in more detailed data broken down by disease over time.

Cancer was first documented around 3000 BC, and has been studied for a long time. https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cncr...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com