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Comment by epivosism | Hacker News Reader

Noticeably long lifespans. I realize it's hard to quantify this but just eyeballing it, for a group of 10 people who got famous before age 50, born that far back, to have four members break 90 seems unusual - including wartime or other disease-related deaths.

The fact that IQ tests can predict longevity is interesting.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC30556/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lothian_birth-cohort_studies

John von Neumann=54, Paul Erdős=83, Eugene Wigner=93, Leó Szilárd=66, Edward Teller=95, Theodore von Kármán=82, John Hersányi=80, John G. Kemeny=66, Paul Halmos=90, George Pólya=98

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Does that control for income? I'd imagine a good bit would be explained by that.

I'd imagine the main thing is genetics and way of living. One of my grandpas lived to almost 100 and he's always been poor. Very, very poor

Kind of shocking this has been downvoted. I guess it is finally daytime in the US...

These kinds of threads always go downhill around that time

That's a pretty prejudiced thing to say

Sadly, it has been my experience

No offense intended, I'm an Eastern European who has lived in the US for almost 3 decades now, and as prejudiced as it may sound, most Americans don't deal well with accepting reality that conflicts their own internal worldview. It's almost as if a big chunk of Americans haven't been taught conflict, disagreement, or a minimal tolerance of an opposing viewpoint.

I'm American. What you say isn't wrong for most people I know. I don't know too many non-Americans well enough to say if it expands past our little country.

I think "some" poverty for people born in the first half of the 20th century is correlated with long life spans.

People didn't eat much and had healthier food (more veggies because those were cheaper), spent a lot of time outdoors or doing physical work. They got the good stuff of the "olden times", but still reaped a lot of the benefits of modern medicine especially in their late years.

I am worried my generation won't live as long as my grandparents' on average.

> am worried my generation won't live as long as my grandparents' on average.

I worry more that my generation will work longer in order to have a drawn out period of ill health before death.

I want to maximise Quality Adjusted Life Years. I am as yet unsure on how to compare a working year to a retired one in that metric.

eg. Work to 60, retire, die at 75 after a short illness sounds far better to me than work to 70, die at 90 after 10 years of illness and being in care.

Maybe come age 60 I will have a different view!

Same with my grandpa, has to do with calorie-rich food like meat was only consumed maybe once a week, on Sunday. Meat was a luxury, they ate mostly potatoes, bread and thick veggie soups.

I remember mine eating raw pig fat (home made) straight out of the jar. Just fat with a little bit of bread. That was back in the early 90s when "fat" was considered an enemy and my relatives would jump on him for doing so.

So yeah. Income might be a good indicator for health in some parts of the world. But the irony of poor people having better health than the rich is not lost on me. They just couldn't afford the "good stuff" from the market

It's incredible both our posts have been downvoted. I am struggling to understand what's so offending about what we've said.

This is absolutely correct. For hundreds of years the poor "peasants" have eaten healthier than royalty. Pretty sure there's a research paper floating somewhere around HN about it (Victorians and their health). I grew up on and still eat rendered fat and crackling sandwiches, because a) crazy delicious, and b) crazy healthy (pig lard is by far all-around healthiest fat). My grandma raised pigs, chickens, geese, turkeys, ducks, etc. We grew up in Eastern Europe, we ate meat on a regular basis (several times a week) as well as everything else that we grew or that grew in the wild around us. She lived through both world wars and lived to be 99.

IQ predicts income too.

n: 10, sum: 807, min: 54, max: 98, mean: 80.700000, median: 82.5, sd: 14.507086

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