Hacker News Reader

Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

Some stuff is less damning than it sounds for example - "supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on the first of the month and days divisible by five"

One of my parents comes from a poor rural area of Europe where well into the 60s, it was normal to have a "real" birthdate & an "official" birthdate. This was because the government only issued birth certificates in the nearby city, and being poor & rural, it took time to get there by bus, etc.

So I have aunts & uncles with real-official birthdate deltas of up to 2 weeks.

I'd imagine that going back to 1900s or 1880s, when travel was more difficult, who knows. Further, it is possible that the office in some of these areas for registering births was only open certain days of month/week, the further back you go, etc.

Maybe they only went into the city on market days when they had other business, on the first Monday of the following month.

Don't discount superstition and people registering births on nearest special days like saints days, etc.

Some of these abnormalities get lost to time. Many of my family didn't realize they had a real-official birthdate gap until 30+ years later when their mother told them.

View on HN

My dad is 4 years younger than his age on paper. He had no birth certificate when he was born and when he was finally being put in school, being home schooled so far, was able to answer questions like a 3rd grader. So the school decided to put him in 4th grade and just made up his birth year (dad's family knew the date but that would make him ineligible for 4th grade).

While not as extreme, many of the real-official birthdays straddle month end / month starts.

In one case it kicked someones birthdate to a new calendar year and his pension kicks in a year later as a result.

They always joke the donkey was slow and cost him an extra year of work.

The school couldn't tell from looking at him that he was closer to Kindergarten-aged (5) than 4th grade (9) !?

The school didn’t care. They didn’t want him to repeat grades if he already knew everything. They were focussed on his development than arbitrary restrictions around age.

OK, but physical development is important too. Middle school would be rough as a 9/10 year old. He was 14 graduating from high school?

The "elementary/middle/high school" distinction might have been virtual. My grandfather told me that most rural schools in his time, including the one he went to, had several grades in a single room. Occasionally a single room for all students.

For "elementary" grades it would be primarily by function (can read? can write? can count?) rather than age. And it would not be uncommon to have a much older kid from a poor family sit with little kids at the "cannot read" table.

In this setup jumping a grade could be as simple as sitting at the next table. Can read -- go there. Can count -- one more step. Physical development came from carrying water, herding cattle, bringing and splitting firewood, etc. outside of school.

That's a more severe version of what my child had in elementary school. To keep classes the right size, they would have a few 1st grade classes and a few 2nd grade classes and one 1st/2nd shared classroom. Repeat for each of the following years. My child was always put in the younger half of the shared classroom. After 3rd grade the principal invited them join the regular 5th grade class and skip 4th grade altogether.

This arrangement is by design in some teaching styles, like Montessori. Unfortunately the Montessori schools in my area aged out after Elementary, would've loved to keep my daughter in that kind of environment.

Middle school isn't a universal thing, a lot of places have just elementary (~1-7), and high (~8-12) school.

And the grades mix/don't mix on their own volition at lunch and recess, anyways.

There was less "authority" back then. If you showed up to a school in the 1930s, they'll put you in some class. There won't be any serious paper work, no questions about where you are coming from or if you were residing near the school. The authority was manifested by the teachers/school itself rather than the state.

To give you a better perspective, if you were traveling back then, border control will be the only deciding body of whether you make it or not. Nowadays, you only show up at the border if the "State" has determined that you are admissible. Border control still has a say in the matter but that's power is getting smaller and smaller.

It's a paradox, because while the bureaucracy has increased and ossified, there was a lack of accountability back then. If the teacher of that school decided that you are inadmissible, you are pretty much out of option.

Finally, here is an excerpt from Wikipedia to show you how much things have changed:

> During World War I, European governments introduced border passport requirements for security reasons, and to control the emigration of people with useful skills. These controls remained in place after the war, becoming a standard, though controversial, procedure. British tourists of the 1920s complained, especially about attached photographs and physical descriptions, which they considered led to a "nasty dehumanisation".[19] The British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act was passed in 1914, clearly defining the notions of citizenship and creating a booklet form of the passport.

In my country (Croatia), post WW2 schools in rural areas were one man band. You had professor / teacher and he was in charge about anything and everything in the school. Also, note that some (if not majority) of kids were malnourished, so an older child could look like "properly developed" much younger kid.

Those schools existed for two reasons: a) to teach kids how to read and write and some very basic math b) find ones with potential and connect them with benefactor to sponsor theirs more advanced education

My parents both started college in 1939 at the age of 16. Being promoted to grades beyond your age cohort was apparently not so uncommon then.

Yup, you read all sorts of stuff about kids graduating college at 18, etc. I'd imagine the further back you go, the higher the variance between best/worst education level in a given age cohort.. so school officials would just promote kids up a few grades if they were too smart.

I think there was also more variety in the structure of the school system. Eg maybe most people leave school at 14 and university starts at 16/17.

When I entered college (this century) they had all the freshman in my orientation group sitting in a lecture hall and the lady doing the "how not to die partying and related stuff" lecture asked if anyone in the ~100 person lecture hall was under 16. One person raised their hand.

I assume that was the "don't sleep with this person" warning. Way to feel welcomed to college.

Yup. The lady doing the lecture asked this person what month they were born before making it explicit.

Mean for sure but between the 15yo in question being a woman in a college environment and this only happening in front of 1/10th of 1/4th of the undergraduate student body I doubt it was of any practical hindrance.

Had a friend in grad school who was 15 when he entered... had his doctorate by 21.

How many years did he spend in college? Seems like he rushed for no reason and then slowed down.

Utility of being fast drops off in grad school. You can be a course master - but then you have to work. Working also means convincing others who are often going to look at a 15 year old skeptically.

Rushing through the middle-to-high-school curriculum is easy. Very, very little novel information actually gets taught over the ~200 hours that make up a school course.

Rushing through undergrad is possible if you do nothing but grind homework and study and read.

Grad school requires you to spend hours and hours in a lab, ass-in-seat, doing research. You're no longer competing with beer pong champions. Unless you're an absolute genius at finding the right direction to solving a novel problem, you're not going to get dramatically better results than your peers. And even if you are, you might be unlucky, and end up wasting a lot of time going down the wrong rabbit-hole.

Grad and post doc students are also often at the mercy of Professors and other academics who significantly slow you down even if you are an absolute genius. My professor guided me away from my core interests multiple times towards their interests by not providing the right mentorship even though they could. Then finally I found my calling and finished my thesis, I had to spend months rewriting it again and again even if my findings and the science behind it didn't change. Having to write unnecessarily dense paragraphs was apparently required. (I am not a genius by any means, just sharing what happens in academia)

You're describing grad school in the sciences for doctoral candidates. For other types of graduate education such as master's degree programs in public policy, international relations, or business administration it's totally possible to rush through if you can handle the load and can make the required course schedules line up.

I think he started college at 12 or maybe 13.

It was in physics. Maybe that played a part.

They also had the authority to do so with little to no oversight.

I went to high school with a girl who graduated at age 15 or 16. She was only a few months older than me, but was in senior year when I was a freshman. She also graduated college by 19 IIRC. I graduated high school in 2009 so this is not just some pre-WWII phenomenon.

I was 16 when I graduated high school not even 10 years ago. And IIRC I had a classmate who was 15.

EDIT: Almost forgot: I did skip a year during elementary, not sure about her case.

>My dad is 4 years younger than his age on paper

What a coincidence, me too!!

Going forward, this is now my official excuse...

What would happen if he committed a crime at the paper age of 19 and he was actually only 15? Would they retroactively update the birth record?

The key question is, are living people born in 1923 more or less likely to be born on the first of the month than dead people born in 1923?

What do you think that will tell you? For example it seems to me that people born in more rural area a century ago are both less likely to have accurate birth records, and less likely to have good access to health care. There are probably many other covariates that would need to be controlled for.

That’s not what the abstract said. It said “the first of the month and days divisible by five”. So 1, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30.

Also, human birthdays aren’t evenly distributed. People tend to have sex around holidays and cluster somewhat. Late August through Early October are popular, and April and May less so.

So the statistical significance of the “round number” no doubt exists, but may not be as significant as it sounds to normal modern people in Western society. My grandfather, for example, was reported to the authorities 8 weeks as his country of birth had a poll tax… in his country baptism records are more accurate than civil birth records.

My comment applies to each of these abnormalities.

If that's the cause, then you'd expect to see the same patterns in all birth records of people born in 1923 who died, for example at the age of 50 in 1973, as you would in those from the same cohort who are still alive today.

So if you took samples of birth records for people born in 1923 who died in 1953, 1963, 1973... and so on, does the pattern hold? If these patterns of birth records are indeed evidence of fraud, you would expect to see a difference for people born in 1923 who are still "alive" today and those who died last century.

You see similar patterns in many populations with the convergence to even numbers.

Typically, it’s old people struggling with memory or folks who immigrated. In the United States, there are >10,000 jurisdictions issuing vital records, many of which are less than reliable.

Fraud is a strong word and inaccurate connotation. Are people lying about their age to scam pension or other benefits? Sure. But that is just one of many frauds in this area. Folks will fail to report deaths, steal the identities of dead children or any number of things.

My great grandmother was from a rural poor area.

She only knew that she was born in the spring in "the year of the big flood" which neither she nor local records could identify.

When we brought her to city hall, the just asked us what birthday she wanted and she picked her favorite number in her favorite month in spring and we guessed a year which was probably +/- 2-3 years correct.

Lots of bad data with lots of human bias.

did you look at the time interval plots in the actual article? you can't explain these phenomena inoccuously...

I had a great aunt (died before I was born) who believed her birthday was two months later than it actually was. The date that everyone believed to be her birthday was exactly 9 months after her parents wedding (her real birthday only seven months after).

I had another great aunt (who I did know) whose drivers license said she was ten years younger than she actually was. They just took you at your word without verifying when she got it.

>This was because the government only issued birth certificates in the nearby city, and being poor & rural, it took time to get there by bus, etc.

I guess I don't see the connection.

Why wouldn't it take a week to get the certificate for most people, and why wouldn't the authorities distinguish the birth date from the filing date?

In the US, the sort of birth certificate I have seen - from less than a hundred years ago - has three dates: Born on, Date filed, Date issued. The last two might be the same, but different from "Born on".

People who were born in the 19th century, on the other hand, may not have any documentation at all. I don't know the details, but I remember it being mentioned that nobody knew exactly how old my grandmother was, least of all herself.

I'm not sure it was a matter of transportation or poverty necessarily - just that everything wasn't controlled by documentation back then. Somewhere I think I read that passports weren't a thing until some time in the early 20th century. Maybe it changed because of WWI?

I think the implied missing detail is that there was, or was perceived to be, a requirement to register a birth in a timely manner - currently in the UK there is a requirement to register a birth is within 42 days (6 weeks), but I have in my head that at some point it was two weeks.

Therefore people might be tempted to lie, saying that the babe was born within the registration deadline.

Or it was just that in the time between the birth happening and being registered they forgot the exact date, and either rounded it themselves, or it was done by the official registering the birth due to imprecise data ("When was the baby born?" "Two and a half weeks ago").

Wife's grandma recently died in her mid 90s. No one in the family actually knew how old she was. In many developing nations, such recordkeeping was often oral and unreliable.

> Some stuff is less damning than it sounds

This takes the paper at face value and I would suggest the paper is misleading. For example, the paper says...

> However, alternative explanations for the distribution of remarkable age records appear to have been overlooked or downplayed.

After reading through the original blue zones work and this paper, they didn't make a case that alternative explanations were overlooked or downplayed.

For example, when they did the blue zones work they had to spend a lot of time making sure the data was good and many places were dismissed for bad data. This paper puts a lot of focus on bad data. No kidding.

The paper puts a lot of time into covering bad data in the US. But, then doesn't take the time to point out any issues with the US blue zone.

In a place like where Sardinia Italy they call out things like the murder rate being high and a low survivability rate to 55. Except it doesn't look at people in different age groups where "blue zones" tend to be going away as younger generations eat a different diet.

There are levels to the analysis that are missing which makes the conclusions a bit misleading.

Another thing that happens is being born in a place that does birthdays on a lunar calendar, and then immigrating to a place that uses gregorian/solar, and needing to come up with a birthday in the new system.

My grandma, born circa 1900, had a birthday of Feb 14. She loved Valentines Day. The cakes she would make for that day, and other goodies... so good. My mom and I are sure she chose that day. Her parents both died when she was 8-10. Consumption.

This could be ruled out as the explanation by looking at deceased records as well - if people who died around the age of 30 in the 1950s, 40 in the 1960s etc. also all had curiously “round” birthdays then we could chalk up the fraud to poor recordkeeping instead. I’d be kind of surprised if such a coincidence hadn’t been previously noted though, surrounding discussion of the “birthday paradox” for instance.

That's true. I know some old timers who were born in one place but registered later somewhere else.

This issue was even more pronounced in South America because of the distances.

Did they not allow reported dates in the certificate in the part of the world? Theoretically you could have issued the certificate in April recording the correct date of birth in January

People weren't as concerned with record keeping back then, these things were just gonna grow mold and feed mice in a drawer somewhere unless someone was trying to annul a marriage (for consanguinity) or argue over an inheritance.

Then the modern administrative state sprang up very fast and the generation born in the late 19th or early 20th century was caught in the middle.

And in many areas of Europe the official papers for birth, death and marriage were held by churches for a long time before being taken over by the state.

On the other side of my family, a family member made a records request re: ancestor born say around 1880 and the official government response was that the papers had been at a church long burned down and paperwork lost.

A huge amount of documentation was lost in WW2 as well.

No, it was government bureaucracy that was serious enough to only issue papers for the date on which you appeared..

but not serious enough to have staff distributed across the rural areas to actually be accessible to people outside the big cities..

It's easy to mandate things that are easily enforceable (date=today only legal birth cert). Doesn't mean its a useful mandate.

This could describe why birthdays are concentrated on a particular day of the week, but what place would have market days or something similar running on a cadence that consistently falls on days of month divisible by 5?

Random guess, that works out to 1.4 times per week, annually. So maybe something like Friday 9-5, Sat 10-2 hours could explain it?

You're just arguing in favour of birth dates being unreliable.

To +- a few weeks, not years.

There are other traditions in some parts of Europe, such as assigning a newborns birthday as that of a child previously deceased. (Obviously possibly years away.) So, there may be additional explanations given we already have several here.

Unreliability on the scale of weeks would be rather less significant than years or decades.

Only if you're planning on telling the truth

You're making the odd assumption that the clerk at the counter was able to, or cared enough, to backdate the birth certificate, and that there was an intentional lie, from the parents. This suggests an extreme naivety of the role/important of birth dates, 90 years ago.

yes, thats exactly what I am arguing. that is - pointing out weird numeric improbabilities in birth dates is not damning in terms of strictly indicating pension fraud. they are unreliable as recently as 60 years ago, and certainly were even more unreliable 100+ years ago.

But what's the scale of this problem? If only 1 in 100 have curiously round birthdates, that's not a problem. If 1 out of 2 have curiously round birthdates, it will still be suspicious if 100% of supercentenarians had it.

I don't quite understand why it would be a problem for birth certificates. Surely the date of birth noted on them doesn't have to be the date they're first printed?

The point of my story was that, yes, in this poor European country as recently as 1960.. people were regularly registering children weeks late, and the government would only issue birth cert where date=today. Which is why all of my aunts & uncles have a real & official birthdate which don't match.

This was happening in a place & time where there were telephones & buses. It was simply inconvenient to get to the city immediately, so people went when they had the next opportunity, and presented opportunity to "choose a birthdate" by when they appeared.

This is only 1 particular example in 1 place of weirdness of official birth dates.

Imagine areas of the world a little further back when travel would have been by foot or horse. Given that this was happening even in a somewhat developed place & time, all sorts of stuff could be happening elsewhere for random, benign, non-pension-fraud related reasons.

But your example doesn’t fit the pattern of days divisible by 5 so it’s irrelevant.

The 5th of January is equally likely to be on any day of the week including weekends. Simply delaying + office days etc don’t get you that pattern it only shows up if people are filling in arbitrary dates.

Further if people are filling in arbitrarily dates +/- N years or even months that’s going to dramatically increase the number of officially extremely old deaths. Aka far more people die at 100 than 107. So randomly add or subtract a few years and on official paperwork you might lose one person who actually died at 107, but then add 2 people who actually died at 100 but officially died at 107.

> I don't quite understand why it would be a problem for birth certificates. Surely the date of birth noted on them doesn't have to be the date they're first printed?

I don't think people cared (or care even today) what is the date written on the birth certificate. And if the state really cares, they won't accept some date they're being told: using the current date is safer.

Why would the state trust their citizens so little? Where I come from births were registered by (Lutheran) priests for hundreds of years, and they had no problem accepting and noting the birth date the parents provided. Why would they not trust it, why would parents lie?

A friend named his daughter Andrea and registered her... before she was born. There was some benefits that expired at the end of the year.

At that time, there was no easy way to know the fetus' sex, so he chose female in a hunch and used a name that is female in Spanish, but male in other languages, so he could later allege an error.

She was born in January, a couple of weeks later than the certificate.

My in law was born on the 29th of February but registered on March 2 because parents thought it was bad luck to be born on Feb 29 and they were busy on March 1.

That was in Italy in 1968.

My polish father, born in 1954 was registered 13 months later, I don't remember the reason though.

Interesting, but this should be easy to control for in a statistical study. E.g. suppose 20% of people generally have strange looking official birth dates, but 50% of supercentenarians do.

This isn't a good control if the record accuracy depends on the age of person.

Imagine if you're trying to find medical fraud and you find out that a lot of supercentenarians have cancer. You try to control by comparing them to the average, and supercentenarians have higher rates of cancer than normal. Is that fraud, or does age lead to higher cancer rates?

The parent suggested controlling by the date of birth of all people born same year. I.e. if only 20% of all people born in 1900 have DOB registered on the first of month, but 50% of supercentenarians born in 1900 have DOB at the beginning of the month then something is fishy. The records accuracy should be same.

Yes, exactly. The question is if having a DOB on the first of the month grants mystical longevity. This can be answered regardless of the general accuracy of birth records.

That is a decent control, though I think that finding "all people born in 1900" is probably more difficult than you'd imagine. I propose adding "who died 20-30 years ago" because that will make it easier to find comprehensive data. You would need to make sure your survey isn't biased towards people who were notable enough at age 90 to be included, because living past 100 makes people notable in a different way.

> and being poor & rural, it took time to get there by bus, etc

My naive assumption is that they might be concentrated around Friday, or Saturday, or some other more "convenient" day.

That isn't less damning than it sounds. Whether it was overt or 'accidentally' (as in your case) the data is still unreliable, which is the point.

Official and real birthdays is a thing in Asia too. Many boomers base their birthdays on Asian calendars instead of the Gregorian one. Another issue is related to buying immigration related identification.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com