Comment by 300bps | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 300bps | Hacker News Reader

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These come up every day on reddit, and almost all of them turn out to be fake. There was a guy about two weeks ago that claimed to have Stage IV Pancreatic Cancer at age 24. He got thousands of upvotes, got a celebrity from the band Blink 182 to tweet to him, etc. Exposed as fake because he used someone's actual identity he found on Google who did not have cancer.

This line is an incredible clue that it is fake:

>I do not want to go into details about the disease. I do not want to go into the particularities of my life. And because time is short, there will be no comments, no contact address.

Hard to prove false when literally no information is given.

These two lines are interesting though:

>I am 58 years old and I never will 59. I will die in 2013.

>Yesterday, I had the whole life ahead of me. Thirty or forty years, at least. Today thirty days.

Either he's losing track of his lies, he's bad at math or he has unrealistic expectations about life expectancy. If a 58 year old had "thirty or forty years, at least" ahead of him that means that he was expecting to live to "at least" 98 years old.

EDIT: Here are links to Day 2 and Day 3 translations.

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=fr&sl=fr&tl...

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=fr&sl=fr&tl...

I read the original and his style is impressionistic where he'll readily exaggerate something for effect. I'm French from France and these exaggerations put me in trouble here in Quebec where people are way more literal.

I'll give you a few example: "Can I steal this from you?" => "I'm certain you are OK with me borrowing this for 2 minutes.". "Buy enough beer for 3 dozen people" => "We're 6 but we really want to have a good time."

I live in Quebec and I'm not that literal. In fact your first example is funny because I just realized that I always say "steal" when I want to borrow something.

I heard that idiom in English just a few days ago. One friend asked another, "Can I steal that book for a minute?" The other replied, "Yes, let me just hide it first." It stuck in my mind because I don't think I've heard that usage of "steal" very often, or that degree of quick-wittedness among my friends!

Research on aging is making significant progress. We will know things in 20 years that we can't imagine now. Therefore, a 58 should expect to live past 100 if he or she is in good health now.

Well, if we take historical trends as any kind of indication, not quite. E.g. according to Google's life expectancy charts, if we take the period 1992 - 2012 (20 years), and take 3 good, developed countries (USA, UK, Canada), life expectancy has gone from mid 70s to low 80s in that period. On average, about 1.9 years added every decade, and that would lead us to something like 84 years by 2032. The very high numbers we're used to hearing are fairly wild extrapolations of this trend for the next 90 or so years, for newborns today.

Of course, the trend could accelerate, but it could also easily plateau (or even reverse in an extreme case, perhaps due to environmental influences). Current trends don't seem to show 100-year average life expectancy before 2100.

* Edit: this was combined stats for men and women. For men, you can subtract a few years, and for women, add a few. Also, I realise I'm just linearly extrapolating the data, but it's not like the data shows some kind of exponential growth; if anything, it's flattening out.

Life expectancy changes with age -- a 60yr old man should live to 81, a 70yr old man should live to 86.

This is important because I don't think that life expectancy for a 60yr old has changed dramatically ... it's just infant care is better, so fewer people die <5 yrs old, and that raises the long term average too.

This might suggest that your estimate is too liberal — not too exciting. On the other hand, we are working hard, as a society, on some gnarly medical issues, and it's possible we'll make a huge break through and figure out how to deal with obesity, heart disease, or cell aging and totally change the situation over the next few decades.

And Zeno stirred...

There's one thing missing from your analysis: the life expectancies calculated this way include all deaths; someone who is 58 has managed to avoid some pretty dangerous parts of life, for example:

1. They did not die during their first year of birth. About 6 babies in 1000 die during the first year of birth in the US. 2. They did not die as a youth from depression or driving their car into a tree.

That being said, this histogram (logarithmic scale) suggests that one's odds of living to 100 are still somewhat low: http://www.benbest.com/lifeext/number.jpg

Most of the advances in life expectancy were achieved by reducing infant mortality. In Miedeval Britain average life expectancy was 30. Very misleading though. If you made it to adulthood your life expectancy was 64.

I've never seen anyhing to back up your assertion. Do you have a source for your life expectancy prediction?

Source for historic life expectancy: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

Also isn't it funy how incredible things are always "20 years away"? You might want to rewatch the movies 2001 and 2010 to see where many people thought we would be technologically over a decade ago.

You're right about life expectancy statistics, but I wasn't talking about that. I was talking about research into aging.

"Do you have a source for your life expectancy prediction?"

I can't get to it now, as I'm sitting on it. In other words, I'm not a biologist and I was making a wild guess. I was trying to make the point that our life expectancies may be significantly longer than we think because they are partly the product of medical knowledge that does not exist now but will be created during our lives. But I should not have used a specific number.

Well here's a source that contradicts your prediction:

http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

According to that, a 58 ear old male in 2009 can expect to live to 80. That link represents the best information we have available today. Could there be some miracle cure for aging in the next 20 years? Probably not but maybe. Will it help the person who is 78 when it is discovered? Almost definitely not - the aging damage has been done!

I think there's an easy answer. He's heard of people living to 100. He's human, thus overly optimistic, and assumes he'll live until 100. I don't think that can be called a lie. Just a flaw in human logic.

I think most of your clues are inconclusive, but I don't care one way or another. I'm just going to sit back, relax and hope that the emotions I feel from this blog are less real than the actual blog. Because that is what a story is, and one way or another this man is telling a story.

> Either he's losing track of his lies, he's bad at math or he has unrealistic expectations about life expectancy.

Hey, you forget how health care is so great in France :p

not sure what is wrong with a life expectancy of 88 or 98 years of age.

Because that's much higher than average life expectancy. A male 58 year old in 2009 could expect to live to 80.

Source: http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

Well, how do you know that the person in question is average?

At the age of close to 60 I'd assume that you would have some indications of whether you'd live short or past the average life expectancy. Obviously with no guarantees...

It is an 8 year difference...that's hardly material, especially if you consider that people from France are known to exaggerate slightly for effect.

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