Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

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Which of these scenarios is more likely:

* The government is paying claims for people who are 150 years old.

* The database is using 150 year olds as a sentinel value for a missing data.

Given that the people making the claims for the former are reportedly young people (who thus have less experience with the quality of data in actual databases), who are outsiders and thus have not had training on the actual data entry procedures for the database in question, I find it extremely plausible that they made a search term for old claimants, claimed it as clear fraud, and never realized (or even bothered to ask) that it could just be a sentinel value. Especially given Musk's history of contempt for experts who tell him he's wrong, I don't think Musk's explanation that it's fraud holds up to any scrutiny, even given a lack of knowledge of the particulars of the database in question.

> The government is paying claims for people who are 150 years old.

This more likely than you think, likely enough, in fact, that it has already been confirmed to have happened in multiple countries [1]. The problem of fraud and data corruption is widespread enough that it is hampering longevity research [2][3]

    [1] https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-blue-zone-distraction
    [2] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000148
    [3] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3

But in none of those cases, the claimants are registered as 150 years old. E.g., you might as well argue that since tax evasion is a thing, social security fraud probably is too. The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise.

No, it's not likely at all.

Yes, beneficiary fraud is likely--if you said that hundreds of people were drawing Social Security for people who are deceased, I would believe you. But the reason we know this occurs is because we periodically audit the databases to find cases where deaths were unreported.

A claim of 150 years old would be older than the oldest verified age for the past 30 years. Saying that the SSA merely failed to notice the claimant's death is thus tantamount to saying that the SSA has never audited its database for unreported deaths in at least the past 30 years, despite welfare fraud being a salient political issue at multiple times in that timeframe.

> * The government is paying claims for people who are 150 years old.

...and that no-one has noticed for the ~40 years they'd presumably be unlikely to be alive given that living past 110 is vanishingly rare despite audits, etc., until Elon and his Special Boys turned up.

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