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Comment by HeinzStuckeIt | Hacker News Reader

Wow, TIL. I had assumed that Warren Beatty was suffering from dementia due to his great age and his retirement from cinema. I had no idea he was still making media appearances.

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You assume he has dementia because he’s old and retired?

There seems to be a popular view nowadays that most old people grow to be senile (just look at any online discussion of old politicians for example). This is not the case!

Old people do lose mental capacity just as they lose strength etc, dementia is a more extreme thing.

Sad as it is, when stars from classic Hollywood stop being visible but are still known to be alive at a highly advanced age, dementia is often the case. Gene Hackman, Gene Wilder, and Jack Nicholson are notable cases, and I just assumed Beatty was similar.

Do you think perhaps there is a sample bias because old actors who retire and don't have dementia don't get written about?

By the time the actors I mentioned were written about as having dementia, many film fans had already assumed they were dealing with dementia precisely because they were no longer being written about or seen in the media much. Such speculation about Jack Nicholson, for example, was rife on film forums well before those paparazzi images appeared.

Right, but that’s probably because they read stories that go back to people who knew the actors. There’s a well-oiled gossip machine.

Lots of old actors who don’t have dementia retire, there just aren’t stories about how they don’t have dementia.

Or possibly, actors who still have their faculties tend to keep acting, even into advanced age. Not sure if that's true, but even the perception of that being true could lead to these kinds of assumptions.

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