Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

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Something extremely interesting is looking at life expectancy in the past. I assume you, like most people, think people probably just tended to start dropping dead around 40, if not earlier. In reality, people tended to live comparably long to modern times, if they made it to adulthood. It's just that infant mortality was way higher. If one guy dies in childbirth, and another dies at 80 - you have a life expectancy of 40.

You can find evidence for this in numerous ways. For instance studies looking at classical Greeks 'of renown', found a median life expectancy was 70, and average life expectancy was 71.3. [1] Even in the Bible one finds numbers that match up basically exactly, 'Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.' You can also find things like the minimum age for Roman Consuls being 42 years, and so on endlessly.

And all of this was in an era when there were no vaccines, no knowledge of germs or how disease spread, and when cutting edge medical science had to do with balancing the 4 humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile) with some sort of an elemental association of air/water/fire/earth with each. Eating well and exercising can indeed take you extremely far, because it damn sure wasn't their healthcare doing it. That said modern medicine has basically been a miracle worker for childhood survival, but once you make it to adulthood - your body is strong enough, or can be made strong enough, to get you most of the way to your expiration date.

[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18359748/

> people probably just tended to start dropping dead around 40, if not earlier. In reality, people tended to live comparably long to modern times, if they made it to adulthood

That’s not really true, though. As recently as ~1900 the likelihood of dying in your 20s or 30s was many times higher than now. Various infectious diseases were a huge risk at any age (even if the old/young severely disproportionately affected). Tuberculosis alone was a huge and killed massive amounts of young people every year, just consider how many artists, writers etc. died from it in the 20s/30s/40s and how it was a constant theme in fiction throughout the 1800s. Other currently easily treatable illnesses, malnutrition and/or dietary deficiencies resulted in a significant reduction in QoL even if they didn’t kill directly.

> For instance studies looking at classical Greeks 'of renown', found a median life expectancy was 70, and average life expectancy was 71.3

That’s mainly survivorship bias. Also I don’t think it’s actually true at all..

There were a few geographic pockets were average life expectancy if you survived childhood was close to that due to favorable climatic conditions, low population densities and abundance of resources/land (e.g. colonial New England) but for most of the population even in the most developed European societies that wasn’t the case.

Absolutely agreed on the dietary and other issues, and I think that largely ties into this point well. It wasn't survivorship bias because nearly all of the Ancient Greeks we know of would still have gone down in history whether they had died at 40 or at 80. But there is one major bias. Nearly all were upper class with ready access to the base necessities for a healthy life - clean food, clean water, basic sanitation (toilets/baths), and the ability to avoid the impacts of war.

I think you'll find that if you choose nearly to any comparable sample with similar access, near to regardless of the time era, you will again find life expectancy comparable to modern times. For instance here it is for the ten most famous Founding Fathers (data from GPT for convenience, so hallucinations are possible, but it matches up with my knowledge as well) :

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George Washington 67 Acute epiglottitis

Thomas Jefferson 83 Natural causes (suspected kidney disease)

John Adams 90 Natural causes

Benjamin Franklin 84 Pleurisy

James Madison 85 Congestive heart failure

Alexander Hamilton 47 Gunshot wound (duel)

John Jay 83 Stroke

James Monroe 73 Heart failure and tuberculosis

Samuel Adams 81 Tremor, possible Parkinson's disease

Patrick Henry 63 Stomach cancer

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The average age at death, excluding Alexander Hamilton, was 78.8, for people born from ~1700 to 1750! But yeah, like you mentioned - a major issue with is the masses at large were living in crowded unsanitary conditions while and eating/drinking unclean food, often while working dangerous jobs. So I think biasing our sample to the upper class of times past is quite beneficial because now a days even the poor have relatively widespread access to these 'luxuries', so we are more able to compare just life with and without modern medicine/knowledge.

> once you make it to adulthood - your body is strong enough, or can be made strong enough, to get you most of the way to your expiration date.

Yes, if you are male. Different story for women who give birth.

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