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Comment by acscott | Hacker News Reader

My grandpa who still legally drives turned 100 last year. He loves to eat meat (rare to raw), rich foods, and wanted to share with me his stash of liver pate in the refrigerator on my last visit. When I asked him about how he could hook me up to connections while he bragged about his successes he replied "They're all dead!!!". He's said that happiness is a racket and myth; that success is different for each person; that you should never say you are sorry; that you should put your track shoes on early, run like hell, and never look back. There's more. But I think, the long-lived, are not the best sources of information on how to live long.

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> I think, the long-lived, are not the best sources of information on how to live long.

Yes, my great grandmother died at 101, smoked until 90, and generally didn't have much positive to say in her final years (she may have been suffering from dementia or other old age related disease).

I agree, advice from the long lived doesn't seem particularly useful when compared to scientific study

> But I think, the long-lived, are not the best sources of information on how to live long.

Daniel Kahneman has a similar sentiment about successful people turned self help gurus.

You're not wrong, but I bet their genes are.

It's a simple two-step process:

1. Have good genes.

2. Don't have bad genes.

If I can do it, everybody can!

> But I think, the long-lived, are not the best sources of information on how to live long.

That's a mighty fast conclusion there, young shot! Given that historically, "most of the people were wrong most of the time", combined with the fact that most centenarians seem to live and advise entirely against widespread modern beliefs about mental nutritional medicinal and social health, all leads to the very real possibility that they're in fact inadvertently on to something.. =)

It is probably just random. Out of seven billion people some of them will make it over 100 years old. People do win the lottery, after all.

I think we will see more of centurians as health keeps on getting better and natural and artificial selections do their things.

natural selection does not play a role past reproductive age. If you die at 50 or 130 (for the vast majority who do not bear children in their 50s or later), your chances of propagating your genes to the next generation are the same.

This is definitely wrong, in general. The current consensus for why menopause may be adaptive is kin selection acting through grandparents' contribution to their grandkids' lives. (ie that the decline in fitness of hypothetical new children past a certain age makes indirect contributions to descendants' fitness relatively more useful than continued reproduction).

i stand corrected!

I think this is a tautology.

Health getting better doesn't necessarily mean a longer life. Sure there's a strong correlation, but it's not a tautology.

What's amazing is that there's not more variation between people's lifespan out of seven billion.

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