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Comment by reasonattlm | Hacker News Reader

Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome. The effects of those two are very large, the effects of everything else comparatively small per decades of animal and longitudinal human studies.

Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense. The weight of evidence suggests that, if anything, ingested antioxidants have a net negative effect on long term health. But there's money to be made keeping up the lie:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/03/attempting-to-add...

Lastly, beware of pseudo-pop-science that opens with one person's story. People manage to survive cancer without treatment all over the world; one story is not remarkable and tells us nothing. In general the whole blue zones thing has little to no value in any serious consideration of health and longevity: it's about on the same level of credibility as diet fads.

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If there's one thing I wish I could do to improve HN, it would be to detect this sort of middlebrow dismissal algorithmically.

Unsophisticated people read an article like this and think: Gosh, I better eat honey for breakfast! People a little more sophisticated think: Hey, this is anecdotal evidence! Yeah, we know that. But is that the most interesting thing one can say about this article? Is it not at least a source of ideas for things to investigate further?

The problem with the middlebrow dismissal is that it's a magnet for upvotes. The "U R a fag"s get downvoted and end up at the bottom of the page where they cause little trouble. But this sort of comment rises to the top. Things have now gotten to the stage where I flinch slightly as I click on the "comments" link, bracing myself for the dismissive comment I know will be waiting for me at the top of the page.

> "If there is one thing I wish I could do to improve HN it would be to detect this sort of middlebrow dismissal algorithmically."

Do you have some data that we could use to play with? That sounds like a nice problem to solve.

You already have the data I'd use: the text of the comments.

If anyone wants to try to train a filter to detect this sort of comment, I'd be very interested to see the result.

>You already have the data I'd use: the text of the comments.

Wouldn't that require real AI though? I thought for a minute that NLP (Natural Language Processing, not the other meaning(s) of the acronym) might help, but then thought that it may not work for cases where the comment is quoting another comment. Note: I'm not at all an expert in any of those fields, just interested.

Sounds like a job for Sentiment Analysis [1]. Modern systems are pretty good at discerning negative from positive comments.

You could probably find a way to mark negative and positive comments. Whether the resulting algorithm would be fine-grained enough to semi-reliably mark 'middlebrow dismissal,' I really don't know. Actually, as somebody who has worked on that stuff in the past, I don't think it would be very easy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis

Hadn't heard of it; thanks for the link.

Thanks for the link.

Agreed I don't think it would be an easy task, but I wonder how would perform a "bag of word" approach.

Harder part as I see it would be to categorize the comments on middlebrow dismissal / Not dismissal. It seems like we would be spending more time preparing the data than in the algorithm itself.

Welcome to statistics/data science/machine learning.

The hardest part is always getting the data into usable form. Its not as much fun as fitting models, but its definitely the majority of any role where people pay you to do this kind of stuff.

There's a lot of good research on forums (pm me if you want a bibliography i collected for a previous role), and short texts have become a bigger deal post Twitter. I completely agree with pg on the somewhat annoying nature of comments such as the GP.

Hey... Thanks for the offer! How can I contact you? I didn't know we can pm users over here.

I did have worked with ML before but mostly with images which are (IMHO) way easier to put in a format depending on the problem.

My email is obsfuscated in my profile. Should be pretty clear, conditional on your humanity.

Bing Liu is one of the researchers working on this. I've discussed Amazon review fraud detection with him. http://www.cs.uic.edu/~liub/

I'll consider that a challenge...

To any that have experience getting comments data from HN -- what's the fastest, most polite way to do this? And am I correct in remembering that there's some aggressive rate-limiting for crawling the site?

Don't crawl the site, please. The place to get data is the HNSearch API.

There's a database(quite old) of HN posts and comments here:

http://www.btscene.eu/details/2240774/Hacker+News+Database+o...

Any plans to try to get a dataset for supervised ml? Perhaps collect the top 4 comments from all front page threads and post a survey on HN asking HNers to rate those comments for skepticism/dismissiveness?

It might be easier to investigate submissions first and filter at this level if a trend is discovered. That is, a certain type of submission might attract a certain attitude of comment.

I might bet that upvotes to middlebrow dismissal would be highly correlated with downvotes to the article itself, if we had downvotes to articles. In fact, I believe that these comments rise to the top because people are downvoting the article vicariously, by upvoting a rebuttal, however vacuous. In order to confirm this hypothesis, though, you'd have to collect data by implementing a downvote button on articles -- though it would not necessarily have to do anything in article-ranking terms ;)

(That might introduce a confounding factor, though--namely that by alleviating people's urge to downvote the article by giving them a [nonfunctional] button to do just that, people might stop upvoting the dismissive comments. Hmm....)

It's been a while since I've coined a new term on HN, but I think now is as appropriate a time as ever:

cargo cult skepticism.

edit: ~10 previous results on Google. :-/

Or you could just reference William Golding.

http://www.smartercarter.com/Essays/Thinking%20as%20a%20Hobb... It's "Grade-two thinking".

Skepticism is also the wrong name for this ideology. Genuine skeptics would direct their doubt against the leading dogma of the age, whereas this ideology seeks to comfortably reinforce it. Historically, its true name – as I believe you pointed out here once – is positivism.

No, it's a fine name:

cargo cult skepticism is to skepticism like cargo cult science is to science. (Which is to say: it isn't)

I'm always conflicted about interesting comments which link to something I read and learn from, but which are needlessly insulting. The grandparent linked to FightingAging.com and I read the article and clicked on some of the links and found it informative, though not convincing. But I cringe when he says, "Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense."

So do I upvote because I learned something from his comment, or downvote because his tone degrades the quality of discourse on Hacker News? Clearly pg says "downvote", and I often do, but I'm always on the fence about it.

I've noticed this too. It's a vicious hit-and-run attack on a thread's discussion that presumes only the empirical viewpoint is worth considering. It often trainwrecks the thread into intellectual pissing contests, rather than discussing subjects with fellow human beings.

Removing karma entirely might help. Too many people treat it as a vanity metric, and game it.

> only the empirical viewpoint is worth considering

So what other viewpoints are there?

I would be far more interested in a discussion about how we could identify the factors that lead to a community that doesn't appear to be following the aging and health norms of other communities rather than just saying "the article is stupid and isn't worth reading".

> I would be far more interested in a discussion about how we could identify the factors that lead to a community that doesn't appear to be following the aging and health norms of other communities rather than just saying "the article is stupid and isn't worth reading".

OK, I don't think we're using 'empirical' in the same way, then. 'Empirical', the way I've always seen it used, just means 'evidence-based' or, more verbosely, 'based on observed facts and not purely theory or philosophy'.

In particle physics, the fine structure constant is an empirical constant: We don't know how to derive it from any theory that doesn't include it already; if we want to have the correct value for the fine structure constant in a theory, we have to explicitly put in the value we know from experiment, that is, the value we derive empirically. Compare this to the value of the acceleration due to gravity between two objects of known mass: We can compute this value, derive it from a theory, called the theory of universal gravitation. We don't have to physically construct an apparatus and perform an experiment every time.

Frankly, it seems that you're tired of people being dismissive based on an imperfect knowledge of a set of specific formal and informal fallacies they came across once.

No, we aren't using the word empirically differently. I'm just saying that the interesting conversations revolve around where to look, not whether to look or not.

"Empirically" there is something interesting on that island. I'd love to hear ideas of what it could be, along with ways to test those ideas. The former without the latter is how snake-oil gets sold, but shutting down all conversation because snake-oil could be sold doesn't move us forward.

Really, it's intellectual pedanticism at it's finest.

It's amusing that people are so worried about being correct (and others being correct) on the Internet. Insisting on only talking about empirically measurable things is not a fail-safe way to raise the S/N ratio of a site; it just dulls the topics to those we already know well.

Meanwhile, it potentially rules out threads on things that we're still trying to discover the inner workings of: nutrition, aging, sleep, and many others. Those topics are extremely interesting because they can veer into uncharted intellectual territory. And we may only have anecdotes to go on. Quelle horreur!

We use empirical evidence to talk about things we don't fully understand all the time. That's what theoretical physics is, in fact.

> I'm just saying that the interesting conversations revolve around where to look, not whether to look or not.

And we find out where to look based on empirical evidence most of the time.

> shutting down all conversation because snake-oil could be sold

This has nothing to do with empirical evidence.

And we find out where to look based on empirical evidence most of the time

-- This is most often not true.

Conscious thought is terribly inefficient. Most 'looking' is instinctive, or intuitive. That's not to say it has not been educated or modified by empirical data at some stage. But this illusion of such hyper-rationality is worth avoiding.

What is interesting (sometimes) is to hear other people's intuition and prioritization as the evaluate what to look for. This is typically what seperates out class in real world performance. This can be considered "framing" done loosely. when, why and where people create a box (in which to think, in the manner you are suggesting above).

To the parent's point, it's often times boring to disregard an interesting framing (out of hand) because of a technical flaw. Similarly, there is endless boredom to be had reading articles with reasoned logic in flawed or boring frames (ie, those which exclude or impugn the interesting bits).

We see this alot in the media, now, because its part of the PR spin game. The formula is to put bounds around the problem that suit your desired result. Journalists also often due this due to ignorance of a technical subject matter. We also see this as part of the fairness doctrine -- every story needs 'two sides' so a (often false) dichotomey is cookie cutter textbook inserted into every 'analysis'. ect.

"how we could identify the factors that lead to a community that doesn't appear to be following the aging and health norms of other communities"

How do you propose to do this while avoiding empirical evidence?

And the way to game it is by posting "middlebrow dismissals".

As a poster I am often surprised by what gets upvoted. Everyone surely can see this: negativity is rewarded. It only reinforces in my mind that "karma" means little anymore.

You can get karma just by being dismissive. Look at the tone of some of the posters who consistently jump into the top spot, thanks to their "karma". I get tired of seeing those same monikers over and over^1; the comments are often rubbish. No matter how articulate and cogent their commetns may have been in the past, no one is 100% consistent; we should not have to read _everything_ they say. But it doesn't matter if they are on the mark from day to day because they get a top spot no matter what they contribute, based on accumulated karma. You are forced to read what they've said, no matter how silly it is.

1. Unless you need to contact someone, I find usernames and profiles to be about as useful as karma (=not very), but I doubt many others would share my view. My interest is in quality comments that offer useful information, not "reputations". People with great "reputations" often make some very dumb comments. Judging the quality of a comment by the author's username instead of its content is a fool's game. It's also a basis for the HN algorithm.

Solution: Get rid of voting. Order the comments randomly.

I've never understood the point behind anonymous voting.^1 What value does it add?

1. But some people, think of them what you will, have tried to use voting as a way to be more convincing when pandering to advertisers, e.g., Facebook "Likes".

Assuming we were the intelligent, high brow readers you would hope would be reading your forum, then wouldn't we be smart enough to see that voting adds nothing, except a source of amusement (as the silliest comments or those from random members with "high karma" rise to the top)? Intelligent people do not need a "karma system". They can take in all available information and separate the wheat from the chaf on their own. (No need for someone else, someone else's algorithm, to manipulate the order of comments.)

I'm not commenting on this article specifically (not least because I haven't read it), but there are plenty of articles that deserve little more than "middlebrow dismissal".

Very likely one could find plenty of more interesting things to say about those articles. One can find interesting things to say about anything. But if an article is about an attention-grabbing subject, is superficially plausible, but is just plain unsound in the sort of way the grandparent of this comment is alleging, the "middlebrow dismissal" -- predictable as it is for the cognoscenti -- may still be the most useful thing there is to say about it, and a comment thread that didn't have "please note, this is probably wrong in the usual way" near the top of it would be a bad and misleading one.

If HN is worse off for being full of middlebrow dismissals, the real problem may not be the middlebrow dismissals but the articles that provoke them.

There are many articles that should be dismissed, but when every time I click on the comments, I know somebody will be saying something negative about the article (and usually something fairly obvious and uninteresting), then I can't help but agree with PG that there is intellectual snobbery rather than real, interesting discussion happening.

You don't get many points for interesting. You get points for cynicism and negativity.

What I find interesting is that I often learn/gain or notice something from these middlebrow dismissal comments. I am not saying they are all good - but many here make legitimate, logical and scientific points. With the rise of blogging and other open/free channels of self publishing, these comments are often necessary rebuttals to the overhyped tones present in many articles.

Every dismissive comments not a "middlebrow" comment. There are some people here with some really great knowledge. I love the "highbrow" dismissals because that's when I learn something new.

What the article itself deserves is a minor issue.

What the HN discussion deserves, though, is different. We as a community can do much better than that. We do, sometimes. We can more often.

Perhaps a challenge for anyone who feels that an article really must have a middlebrow dismissal---

Limit your dismissal to a few sentences, then follow on with a paragraph or two of thinking that goes beyond the dismissal into areas of thought sparked by the subject of the article. What bigger picture might it factor into? What underlying phenomenon may be behind it? What additional understanding can it add for us as a community?

I certainly won't try to speak for pg, but one thing to keep in mind is that this is a good way to approach topics if you're trying to come up with new ideas that have big potential. Merely pointing out the existing problems is the first step. Take the next few as well.

I'd been thinking about this. It's true that sometimes an article is so obviously mistaken that the most valuable comment would be one that pointed out how. But such articles are fairly rare here. Ideally comment threads in which the top comment was a dismissive one would be proportionately rare. Whereas now they're almost like background radiation.

It would be interesting to do some sentiment analysis on comments and look at the statistics of dissmissive/approving top comments and all comments in general in HN threads.

I agree, but I'm not sure that there is any other way to establish positive discourse -- for most posts there are the enthusiasts and the middlebrow detractors, and virtue may often only appear after both of these positions are raised and discarded in favor of an hopefully Aristotelean mean. This is also to say that appropriate discourse depends largely on the context (i.e. what has already been said on the topic), and not simply on a single right answer (as in the sciences).

I think the way to solve this is by better education and reinforcement. Wouldn't hurt to place a prominent link in the top nav like"better commenting" that went to a page with explanations and examples of good and bad. Perhaps have it up there one week per month.

Could anyone with access to HN comments voting data execute something similar to the SQL query below and evaluate the results?

The idea is to use past voting correlation with other users to sort the comments.

  declare @userId int;
  select @userId = UserId
  from users
  where Username = 'pg';

  /* Let's calculate expert table first. We will use it to rate comments later. */
  select
	v2.UserId,
	sum(v1.Score * v2.Score) as VotingCorrelation
  into #expert
  from CommentVotingLog v1
  inner join CommentVotingLog v2
	on v2.CommentId = v1.CommentId
  where v1.UserId = @userId
  group by v2.UserId;

  /* Now we can rate comments against #expert table: */
  select
	c.CommentText,
	(select sum(v.Score * e.VotingCorrelation)
	from CommentVotingLog v
	inner join #expert e
		on e.UserId = v.UserId
	where v.CommentId = c.CommentId
	) as Rating
  from Comment c
  where c.ArticleId = 4692598 -- or another article that's discussed
  order by Rating desc;

I assume CommentVotingLog table has CommentId, UserId of the voter, and Score that voter gave to the comment: +1 for upvote or -1 for downvote)

I also assume that CommentVotingLog table has at least one record for every comment -- the author of that comment gives Score = +1 to that comment.

These queries don't have "freshness" adjustment (older comments had higher change to get upvoted, so their rating should be somewhat downgraded).

How about a "middlebrow dismissal" link to complement the flag link?

Of course, it doesn't need to be called "middlebrow dismissal" but there is nothing better for determining if something is or isn't middlebrow dismissal than users.

TBH, the flag link could be more powerful/useful by asking people to explain why they are flagging something. Later on you can release the categorized flagged post dataset for others to train an algorithm against. If someone is willing to spend the time to click on flag, they are demonstrating that they care about post/comment quality and that is itself a good indicator that they'd be willing to spend the time to tell you exactly why they are flagging something.

In all honesty, if this is what bugs you the most about HN comments, then that mostly means that HN is doing remarkably well, given its population increase.

2 years ago, many HNers were predicting that HN's growth would inevitably turn it into yet another Reddit or 4chan. Instead, the consistent top comment is what you call the "middlebrow dismissal". Really, that's not so bad, compared to the top comment on $ANY_OTHER_SITE,_REALLY. Just scroll down to the next!

(that said, I found your complaint insightful: in fact, I realise now that I've been guilty of the odd middlebrow dismissal myself)

> in fact, I realise now that I've been guilty of the odd middlebrow dismissal myself

This isn't as bad as you think it is. This kind of dismissal is a bit like adolescence; you engage in it as a part of mental growth. Every strong thinker has gone through it at some point, and probably regresses to it with some frequency. You hopefully grow past it, but you do go through it.

"If there's one thing I wish I could do to improve HN, it would be to detect this sort of middlebrow dismissal algorithmically."

3 years ago, HN was great. Amazing in fact. What's changed in 3 years? Certainly not the system. The user base has changed, grown, degenerated into stereotypes and punch lines. There is an old saying that I believe succinctly explains what has happened: Garbage in, garbage out.

I keep seeing people writing about wanting to "improve HN." Every time I see this I think, are these people mad? It's dead Jim. He's been dead. We can all sit here and prod his body and make recommendations for how best to make his arm into a grappling hook or some such nonsense, but at the end of the day, the patient is STILL dead.

If there is one thing I would do to improve HN, it would be to write the death certificate and move on to finding or creating the next HN.

Also, I thought the article was excellent, albeit long.

> Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome. The effects of those two are very large, the effects of everything else comparatively small per decades of animal and longitudinal human studies.

You may have read a different article. As this article noted before even the first of so many page breaks:

"And in Loma Linda, Calif., we identified a population of Seventh-day Adventists in which most of the adherents’ life expectancy exceeded the American average by about a decade."

A full decade, within the same American safety net, is a tremendous difference. Born SDA myself, I can tell you that Loma Linda is not a hotbed of exercise and caloric restriction. (And the benefits are not localized to Loma Linda; the researchers hit upon SDAs there because the concentration in Loma Linda was high enough to show up on zip based data).

You say that anything other than these two makes a difference takes a mountain of evidence to overcome, well, we have that evidence. SDAs are generally just as sedentary and eat just as much as the average non SDA next door.

What SDAs in Loma Linda do differently: don't drink, don't smoke, take 24 hours away from stress each week, and to a large extent, avoid meat with an otherwise normal diet of grains, legumes, vegetables, fruits, and dairy.

So does it apply to all SDA's or just in Loma Linda. This reminds me of the best schools being small schools example, where governments tried to make schools smaller, ignoring the fact that the worst schools were small schools. How do you separate the data from the variance with such small groups?

Admittedly lack of smoking and reduced stressed are well studied factors: avoiding red meat can help, although entirely non-meat diets commonly hurt from inadequate amounts of iron and in some cases protein. Drinking in moderation can have health benefits however, so it seems strange to list it first, even though binging and alcoholism is terrible for life expectancy.

I actually tend to disagree with PG slightly (here comes massive downvotes). I find a lot of the moderate: gather more data approaches are in response to one or more wild leaps unsupported by data often on a single anecdote. We leap to causes quickly and badly. Testing our hypothesis with good data or at least many anecdotes (those of customers) is a great thing for start-ups. Being skeptical of conclusions from a single anecdote is useful: if you want to leap to those conlusions you'd do well to add other data or background supporting them.

Admittedly, the middlebrow dismissal is often worse than that: a call to ignorance rather than a call for more data. In that respect I agree that we should probably be dismissive of that dismissal.

> So does it apply to all SDA's or just in Loma Linda.

Applies all across the country. Scientists looked at just high school grads w/o college, or those with four year degrees. You could group by people with incomes above, or below, certain thresholds. You could throw out irregular church goers and only look at evangelicals or conservatives by denomination. SDAs consistently emerged as the longer living group, no matter how grouped.

And regardless of the slicing, the factors most indicative proved to be how closely the health plan is followed. Looking within the SDA group, and dividing by adherence to the health guidelines, found the differences there as well.

Unlike your sibling comment suggests, this was not a black swan.

> although entirely non-meat diets commonly hurt from inadequate amounts of iron and in some cases protein

This is a common misconception. It's remarkably easy to get more than enough iron and protein in a non-meat diet. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism#Protein and the next section for some specific food ideas.

SDAs have espoused vegetarianism since the 1800s, and have been focused on diet and health since the beginning. In fact, there's a good chance you ate food formulated by the Kellogg brothers this morning...

To quote Wikipedia:

Kellogg's was founded as the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company on February 19, 1906, by Will Keith Kellogg as an outgrowth of his work with his brother John Harvey Kellogg at the Battle Creek Sanitarium following practices based on the Seventh-day Adventist Christian denomination.

Imagine you have a randomly distributed age population. When you break it into groups (especially small groups), you will ALWAYS find a group with the largest average lifespan. Depending on what your average group size is, their lifespan can easily be several standard deviations higher than the overall average.

"Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome."

Not accurate. Smoking takes about 10 years off life expectancy, which is thought to be the reason why hispanics have a longer life expectancy than non-hispanic whites in the US. Mental illness takes another 10 - 15 years off life expectancy. Being religious adds a couple years to life expectancy, as does social belongingness in general.

> Mental illness takes another 10 - 15 years off life expectancy

"Mental illness" is a pretty broad category. Can you offer a source for this?

Have been thinking about this and wondered about suicide. Assuming you count 100% of suicides as relating to mental health related deaths (which I personally don't), it wouldnt take too many young people taking their lives to lower the population average lifespan. However alone suicide wouldn't take that many years off the average.

The research I've read seemed conclusive that what you eat is as important or more important as how much. Intuitively it makes sense that giving you body the correct building blocks would make it healthier and that's definitely not just a function of quantity. And from what I've read the science supports it as well. Here's a relevant book about it:

http://www.amazon.com/Anticancer-New-Way-Life-Edition/dp/067...

> Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense.

Well, it is nonsense if you look at it as the sole source of longevity.

But get a diet rich in antioxidants. Add low saturated fat intake. Continuous, low level, healthy exercise. Plenty of fresh vegetables. Low-stress lifestyle. Sense of belonging. All that stuff. Then you reach a tipping point and things start to improve suddenly.

The secret of longevity is probably an all-of-the-above type of thing.

I agree that beneficial factors are synergistic, and that without this kind of positive synergy unusual longevity is unlikely.

The problem is that such factors are different for each individual. It is a conceit of medical research that generally positive factors can be identified easily. People are quite diverse genetically and biochemically, this is behind the argument for getting a genetic test to identify tailor made drug prescriptions. However, biochemical diversity pales in comparison with psychological diversity.

It is utter foolishness to recommend a wide circle of friends to naturally introverted people, for instance, and, in my opinion, borders on a kind of psycho-normative health fascism, let alone the constant recommendations to "believe in a higher power" to live longer.

In fact, it seems to me that a common feature of interviews with very long lived people is a touch of grouchiness and a refusal to go along with the the received wisdom.

The other problem with blue zones is, they could just be a statistical blip. It's especially bad when you try to identify things like centurions, or spontaneous remission of cancer - things which are rare are the most prone to statistical blips.

I think you mean centenarians. Centurions were Roman foot soldiers.

Still, statistically unlikely ;)

Centurions were the petty officers of the legion. There was one for every manipel or about 80 legionaires.

Could you explain what you mean by "statistical blip"? It seems odd to say that, I mean, wouldn't it imply that there's interference from improper measuring, or interference from variables gone unnoticed, or interference from variables that are irrelevant? I'm probably reading it wrong, but it seems such a bizarre thing to say.

It could be a sample size effect. There are all these old people there, but how many? It may have nothing to do with the island, they may all have just been lucky and had a streak of heads in the coin flip game. This is especially likely since the researchers are looking all over the world for these small pockets of longevity.

Why don't you ever hear about these things in larger areas? Certainly different countries have very different lifestyles. What's different is that bigger regions have a smaller chance of a freak streak of long lived individuals as a proportion of the population (though as an absolute value, you'll probably find more).

I suspect "blue zones" will regress to the mean after these individuals in the study die, but you can never be sure. If they don't, maybe the islands do have an effect (or maybe they started to attract immigrant older people seeking longevity).

What I mean is, Poisson distributions don't look like normal distributions if lambda is low - there's a long tail.

There's about 500,000 centenarians (thanks bitwize for the spelling) in the world. That's about 0.01%. In a town of 10,000, that's an average (lambda) of 1. About 36% of such towns will have no centenarians, 36% will have one, 18% will have 2, 6% will have 3, 1.5% will have 4, and there's a long tail with 5 (0.3%), 6 (0.05%) or more.

It doesn't seem logical that most towns will have 0 or 1 centenarians, and some will have 5 or more, but it's just the way the numbers work.

If you pick a higher lambda (for example, the number of 50 year olds) it looks like a normal distribution. If some place has 2X the number of 50 year olds, there will be a good reason. If you pick a higher lambda (the number of people who survive incurable cancer) it looks even wackier, and it's very hard to draw conclusions.

What I'm saying is, it's hard to draw conclusions when you are looking at rare events, because there can be so much variation.

Thank you for that explanation. I believed you had said that studying what was different for centenarians - or similar biological anomalies - in a blue zone was quite possibly useless, but it seems that wasn't the case.

To a certain extent they can be, however generally speaking the very tops of this set tend to have both good luck, good genes and good lifestyle. It's hard to get to right near the very top of lifespan without all three, and the population from which we select centrenarians is extremely large. Statistical blips (good luck or unmeasured factors) can be relevant, even highly relevant, but unless you're overlooking very important things it's extremely unlikely to rise to the top without favorable outcomes in other factors.

So maybe we observe things that are 95% of optimal instead of the best genes in the data set. Or maybe we observe diets that have 90% of the performance of optimal diets. We still learn a hell of a lot.

By optimal I mean best-performing in terms of life expectancy from among the total data set (people) not just among centrenarians.

Not to mention the fact, that the man could've been simply misdiagnosed. It was 60s after all...

It's possible but not so likely, the 60s was not the Middle Ages. In any case, he was clearly very sick when he returned to the island and eventually felt better, became strong and lived into his 90's. Not that that proves anything in itself. It's just a journalistic device to illustrate the point of the story which is that people on this island do live a remarkably long time and that it's worth asking why this is so.

>It's possible but not so likely

There are a lot of people, so it's pretty likely that a handful will be misdiagnosed with terminal illnesses, but never find out they were misdiagnosed. Those handful are the ones you'll hear about.

After all, you aren't going to read the amazing story of the guy who was given nine months to live, and then died nine months later.

But on the other hand, if someone is diagnosed with a terminal disease and somehow has a very unlikely recovery that's also disporportionatly likely to make the news. Though we shouldn't dwell too much on the quality of the diagnosis, the fact that we have news organizations filtering our data should make us skeptical about the link between the island and his apparent recovery.

The odds of a random person being misdiagnosed are quite low. The odds of a person diagnosed with a terminal disease who goes into spontaneous remission having been previously misdiagnosed are quite a lot higher.

I agree. I thought it was obvious from the first part of the article that the man was misdiagnosed.

It was 1976 and he claims 9 other doctors confirmed the diagnosis.

He probably told each successive doctor that n-1 doctors diagnosed him this way. The last 3 may have just agreed with the first 6 without performing much diagnosis.

It's always possible of course, but from the article:

As he recalls, nine other doctors confirmed the diagnosis.

So if true, chances of a misdiagnosis are pretty slim.

He also recalls being 5 years older than his birth certificate says.

That's not uncommon on less urbanized parts of the world. But yeah, we can't tell for sure.

Yup, my mother doesn't now her real birthday, and she was born in '57 in Bosnia & Herzegovina.

The verdicts of 10 doctors of the same field, in the same era about the same patient are not exactly independent variables.

This cannot be stressed strongly enough, and yet is completely ignored (or worse, actively contested) by just about everyone.

Most people assume that something that has passed a "peer review" process has been reviewed independently by several people, and is thus more likely to be true. While the people do not collaborate, this is NOT independence in the statistical sense, and thus the likelihood of being is not as high as one would expect.

And the many examples of 50-year old accepted wisdom being utterly wrong (e.g. about eggs, cholesterol, salt, monetary easing, saturated fat, ...) seem to fall on deaf ears. At least from my experience.

I would speculate that the main reason of his recovery was associated with life style. Sometimes we underestimate the effect of stress in our lives.

I just came back from the doctor today because a lesion on my foot and the doctor told "funny things happens on your skin because of stress"

And anecdotes about remission can be really dangerous. I've seen people who had spontaneous remission while taking some quack remedy and then parade their story around to convince people not to do evidence-based treatments.

the studies linked to there specifically address antioxidant supplements which you then change into dietary antioxidants as if they are the same thing. They are not. Supplements doing nothing is the norm. It says relatively little about the presence of the same things in a diet. Example: fiber.

> anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity

I've seen claims that having few friends shows up in mortality worse than than a pack-a-day smoking habit. Of course that's all hand-wavy statistical controls, but then again so is the stuff on exercise and calories.

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