Do we really live longer than our ancestors?

>On the other hand, because I live in rural Japan and am only really friends with the people who live near me, almost all of my friends are over 70 (I'm 50).

I'm in a pretty similar situation ... guess from your profile that it's OK to hook up with you by email ?

That's not what selection bias is -- that's just an accurate reporting of what you see around you. It would be selection bias if you additionally claimed that this must be the case elsewhere too.

Is this a good metric though? It seems to me that (1) once you get cancer, you always have cancer, and (2) if nothing else kills you, cancer does. So maybe a better metric would be, the lifespan of people with cancer?

Unfortunately I don't have data either, but I do have a hypothesis that may or may not end up surviving scrutiny when the relevant data becomes available. If someone can refute these ideas, please contribute.

The ultimate cause: demographics changed.

The recent decades have seen native populations reduce their fertility in the US. This is analogous to ecological succession of pioneering species colonizing barren land building up new soils by quickly flourishing and in turn crowded out in competition as other species take hold in niches opened by the pioneers laying a rich framework however being unsuccessful at sustaining dominance due to the energetic and fitness costs of extreme adaptation in resource poor environments that are unable to be useful traits relative to other species that can quickly capitalize on existing infrastructure when there's no need to divert capacity to build anew when resources become abundant. Today when applied to populations of humans in the US, the same principal goes under names like "white flight" as fleeing urbanization to recreate past conditions that were more favorable in competition strategies, "gentrification" when enclaves of urban areas decay and are then susceptible to recolonization efforts, and "immigration" to relieve bottlenecks in reproduction and the resulting scar of exposed barren land and poor nutrient circulation in the ecosystem that are caused by pioneer individuals stockpiling reserves without reinvesting in reseeding efforts.

Heart disease is typically a progressive terminal stage of diabetes and other metabolic disorders that intertwine risk factors such as poor nutrition, excessive calorie consumption and resulting unhealthy body fat percentages, alcohol abuse, cigarette use, and high stress. Looking closure at the medical literature, I'd actually reconsider the idea that statins produce beneficial health outcomes, but I won't get into that in this comment.

The point here is that in heart disease being the cumulative effects over a lifetime and diabetes as a _leading_ (not trailing) indicator of population risk for heart disease, what you're really seeing is the transition of health since WW2 when war rationing forced the agricultural and food processing industries to change course in providing massive amount of calories at low cost and effective propaganda and marketing to ensure sustained demand when the war was over to not shock the economy back into depression. Heavily processed foods like spam, American cheese, and canned/dried foods are technological means to make food supplies go further with less waste and higher caloric density. Add in things like pushing cigarette consumption heavily after the war and you get the perfect storm that kills off a large percentage of the lower class baby boomer generation early in life by around the 1980s. What's left since then are the middle and upper class baby boomers whose children reproduce in far lower numbers, being replaced with immigrants. Those immigrants come here with very different cultures regarding food consumption, nutrition, and healthcare that for a period of time did decrease the incidence of influence of the cultural epidemic of war-era food technology.

Usually after one generation though, immigrant families transition to the already establish cultural expectations and shift dietary and consumption patterns. Therefore you get the next surge of diabetes as the form of the next incarnation of the cycle. In a few decades you'll see another recurrance in more prevelent heart disease.

Some people might still think these are good things. I think "questionable at best" is a good summary.

On the surface, we like to say how we're providing care and have their best interests in mind as they "age well" and as we repay the debt of elders who took care of us so dutifully for years.

But in reality, the main usage is to get rid of very burdensome, cantankerous, and irresponsible leeches who because they left their children with a sense of hatred will not give in to the idea of putting up with their crap ever again, so let them rot all drugged up in a coma where they cannot escape as they watch TV in a urine-soaked room and play bingo every Wednesday night until they die off.

It's more a short-term fix for us though, a pretty typical American form of cutting off the nose to spite the face since national spending is sprialing out of control from dealing with the old and will become a larger economic problem. Ironically, it does force the hand of the young in later years once filial laws come back in full swing enforcement who will end up saying enough is enough and euthanasia legalization legislation will come swooping in to deal with this.

You can assure me, but it won’t be true. Source: lifted at least five days a week for years and was deeply insomniac the whole time

In developped countries the cost (mental, economical, physical) of caring for parents drive away children, and where there was two to three siblings decades ago, in these day and age single childs are plenty.

That is either because we're not actually living longer as a species or there is a hard limit on how long humans can live.

Notice how I explicity said the word _designing_ and not something like 'calculating' which would misleadingly characterize such a scheme as something that is objectively derivable from verifiable information with valid uncertainty bounds and without the potential for advocating policy with dubious constructed data.

If you've ever thought p-hacking was a riot in academia's social sciences bullshitting, wait until you read through stuff like this with think-tanks coming up with whatever numbers are necessary to justify a policy to secure more funding to shroud misinformation in a thin veil of perceived scientific validity to people who feel comforted if you just put on a white coat. Not only does it go through "careful rexaminations" of methodology with new versions every year tweaking subtle but fundamental things like "we used to assume uniform distributions of births across the entire year on v.5 and as of v.6 now we decided to assume a proprietary non-uniform distribution that flucuates per year (and our policy objectives...) because there were wars that changed reproductive strategies that we conveniently forgot to account for that last year and the error cascades through to every successive year's death risk. Stay tuned for v.7!"

On top of that and pretty much a direct consequence of this so called 'research' being complete bollocks, is that none of this junk is ever peer-reviewed. Couldn't even clear that hurdle.

Sorry to ruin your parade but the statistics accessible via think-tanks and public governments are a complete fabrication. Want to see actual life expectancy tables? You need to buyout a multi-national insurance conglomerate that has survived the test of time with financial crises and political cycles, peeking into actuary tables without the gimmicks of literal data engineering. I highly doubt you, nor anyone here, would ever get close to these secrets. And even then, the usual business model of such corporations that can attain that large of a risk pool and _could_ identify these stats are usually incentivized to profit from regulatory capture rather than the public-face tagline of accurately predicting the likelihood of risk to perfectly balance premiums against claims and extract profit from investing on the float.

[0] https://www.mortality.org/Public/Docs/MethodsProtocol.pdf

There's a lot of these scenarios that are well documented, anything from the loosely defined and often poorly understood epigenetics processes, but also the signaling regulation of cell growth and death, resulting changes with hormesis, acclimatization, availability/scarcity of nutrients, hormones, pharmaceuticals, viruses, and even mental state.

(1) is typically the largest factor of all that listed, with experiments showing repeatedly that 'genetic markers' specifying risk for heart disease, cancer, etc all vastly improve with a reduction of excess body fat and elimination of recreational drug usage such as excessive alcohol and cigarettes.

And as for (4), definitely a trump card is not taking a dump in your drinking water supply without reasonable recycling treatment. Many people tend to associate the medical industry as responsible for the supposed improved living conditions of modern developed countries. However, if you look at the repeated succession stages of colonialization throughout the past several hundred years, it's obvious that when people in underdeveloped countries stop shitting in their food and water, illness and resulting death plummet until a few generations later when economically enforced diets and 'sensible medical care' are in full effect leading to a rebound of misery.

So they invented and clinically tested Intermittent Fasting? Trendsetters! ;-D

I don't disagree with you, but here's my point - they weren't eating Cheesy Poofs and Mac and Cheese, they were eating... greens, legumes, root vegetables, etc. Whatever was local and seasonal or that they could preserve using salting or canning. In this regard, even if there was scarcity, what they were eating was likely better for them than what much of our population calls food today.

There was still a significantly lowered life expectancy in adulthood due to disease, hunger, violence, childbearing, accidents.

See for example John Graunt's life table of Tudor period Londoners:

http://www.stat.rice.edu/stat/FACULTY/courses/stat431/Graunt...

Only 25% (!) of Londoners survived until age 27. More than a third of adults who lived to 27 died before age 37. In modern London you can neglect pestilence as almost a rounding error within overall life expectancy, but in some ages of London-past pestilence was the dominant term.

Not just the children, but women too, mothers specifically. Child birth was very risky until only recently. Since they also had a lot more children the risk was really high.

To me, it just seems like an (admittedly difficult) engineering problem that we're likely to make a lot of progress on. I'm currently studying biology and it's pretty amazing what humans have discovered in the last ~100 years about how the body works at the atomic level.

As a meta-point, I find it fascinating how nearly completely divergent our bayesian priors are (I think our chances of counteracting all of those forces you mentioned are, on a long enough timeline and assuming we're not destroyed and we have sufficient energy, greater than 90%).

For example, telomere shortening is already being worked on. Look up Bioviva science, they have made first human experiments and results look very promising.

I think people just got used to being fatalist in this regard, because it is psychologically easier than to tackle this problem.

Also, there's some debate about whether that line means the obvious (maximum lifespan of around 120 years), or whether it's actually saying that people have 120 years left until the great flood comes. Most people (and me personally as well) think the former but the latter does make some sense as an interpretation in context. Well, except for the fact that it does mark a point in the Bible where people's reported lives stopped being ridiculously long.

Or, if we map 120 <== 969 that's ≃ a factor of 8 shorter life for other notables of that era.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment