[HN Gopher] Supercentenarian records show patterns indicative of...
___________________________________________________________________
Supercentenarian records show patterns indicative of errors and
pension fraud
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 322 points
Date : 2023-04-04 16:16 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.biorxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.biorxiv.org)
| [deleted]
| steveBK123 wrote:
| 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.
| elevaet wrote:
| 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.
| chaostheory wrote:
| 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.
| 01100011 wrote:
| 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.
| raldi wrote:
| 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?
| whyenot wrote:
| 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.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| 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).
| jefftk wrote:
| The school couldn't tell from looking at him that he was
| closer to Kindergarten-aged (5) than 4th grade (9) !?
| [deleted]
| darth_avocado wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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?
| ptero wrote:
| The "elementary/middle/high school" distinction might
| have been virtual. My grandfather told me that most rural
| school 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 an old 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.
| kortilla wrote:
| 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?
| schiffern wrote:
| >My dad is 4 years younger than his age on paper
|
| What a coincidence, me too!!
|
| Going forward, this is now my official excuse...
| steveBK123 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| adamc wrote:
| 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.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| 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.
| adamc wrote:
| Had a friend in grad school who was 15 when he entered...
| had his doctorate by 21.
| hgsgm wrote:
| How many years did he spend in college? Seems like he
| rushed for no reason and then slowed down.
| vkou wrote:
| 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.
| lumost wrote:
| 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.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| 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.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| They also had the authority to do so with little to no
| oversight.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| 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.
| aftbit wrote:
| 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.
| colonwqbang wrote:
| 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.
| rovolo wrote:
| 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?
| nomel wrote:
| > 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.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| 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.
| forinti wrote:
| 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.
| eviks wrote:
| 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
| jrumbut wrote:
| 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.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| 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.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| 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.
| docandrew wrote:
| 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.
| e40 wrote:
| 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.
| gifnamething wrote:
| You're just arguing in favour of birth dates being unreliable.
| neaden wrote:
| To +- a few weeks, not years.
| detrites wrote:
| 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.
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| Unreliability on the scale of weeks would be rather less
| significant than years or decades.
| gifnamething wrote:
| Only if you're planning on telling the truth
| nomel wrote:
| 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.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| 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.
| vintermann wrote:
| 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?
| steveBK123 wrote:
| 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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > 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.
| int_19h wrote:
| 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?
| Tade0 wrote:
| My maternal grandparents are in their mid 90s, my paternal
| grandfather passed away a week before her 97th birthday.
|
| _A lot_ can happen within a century and there 's usually hardly
| anyone alive to confirm some facts. My paternal grandmother's
| birth certificate was gone before the end of WW2 and when asked
| she would give an age six years younger - initially it was to
| prevent a scandal because not only was my grandfather of lower
| status (Pah! "Just" a doctor! Scandalous, I daresay!), he was
| younger.
|
| As for my maternal grandparents their age is confirmed by their
| marriage certificate(would be harder to obtain one with this date
| as a younger person), children in their late 60s and living
| siblings of my grandpa, of whom there are seven.
| sseagull wrote:
| Family history is funny like that. I have a few (usually
| female) ancestors who, according to censuses, just don't age at
| quite the same rate as other people :)
|
| I find it kinda charming. Gives some insight into who they are,
| and that fear of aging is a pretty universal feeling.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| My grandmother was born in 1899 in Ireland, and moved to the
| USA in 1920. In the early 1980s, she came clean: "I don't want
| to spend eternity with a lie on my gravestone. I was born in
| 1894."
| Tade0 wrote:
| I only learned the truth right after she passed away and my
| father was free to discuss this - the year was 1911, not 1917
| - clouded by two wars' worth of lost records.
| Y_Y wrote:
| It's not so bad, a headstone engraving will usually be gone
| after a couple of hundred years.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I know some experts have poo-poo'ed the theory that Jeanne
| Calment's daughter impersonated her (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Scepticism_rega...
| ), but I don't find their arguments convincing. I'm not saying
| it's settled, but I think the evidence strongly points to her not
| being as old as she says, and I think the "experts" downplay the
| evidence for the switch theory too strongly, even if it is
| largely circumstantial:
|
| 1. The age gap between Calment and the next oldest person is the
| strongest evidence. It's very, very hard to ignore this.
|
| 2. As outlined in this article, there is a strong economic motive
| for the swap.
|
| 3. I think there is other evidence (e.g. some of the photos) that
| wouldn't be that strong on their own, but just add to the weight
| of the other, stronger pieces of evidences that there was a swap.
| paulpauper wrote:
| _1. The age gap between Calment and the next oldest person is
| the strongest evidence. It 's very, very hard to ignore this._
|
| The age gap is is just a few years. not inconceivable at all.
| [deleted]
| neaden wrote:
| I was initially prone to believeing this, but the more I looked
| into it the more I realized how little sense it would make.
|
| For your points: 1. This was the thing that initially made me
| skeptical, but it's just not enough to say. Sure living 3 years
| more then anyone else is pretty unlikely, but at the same time
| it's not proof. 2. The swap would have had to happen so early,
| when Yvonne was just 34 years old she would have had to
| impersonate her mother, pretend to be married to her father,
| and fool everyone in the small town she lived in. That is just
| not a credible thing. And the alleged payoff to avoid taxes
| doesn't seem big enough to be worth the immense effort that
| this swap would have had to go through. 3. Photos are fairly
| worthless for these sorts of things. Different angles,
| lighting, camera techniques all can make people look very
| different.
|
| At the end of the day I find the alleged swap to be less
| believable then someone just living a long time
| neaden wrote:
| I'm replying to myself to lay out the timeline of Yvonne's
| death, since that is when people claim this switch happened.
| So first Yvonne's husband Joseph requested leave from the
| military and was granted it because his wife was sick, we
| have the record of that from the military. There is a picture
| of Yvonne at a sanitarium for TB patients around this time
| period, further establishing she had TB and was ill. Then the
| priest administered last rights and Yvonne died. There was a
| funeral mass that many people attended and a viewing of the
| body at the family home. This is in newspapers from the time.
| There are no accounts of Jeanne being ill in this time
| period.
|
| So for this switch to have happened we would have had to have
| the daughter sick, then the mother secretly gets sick just in
| time for the daughter to recover. The mother dies and they
| come up with this plan to dodge taxes, even though presumably
| it would be risky and Joseph could lose his position as an
| officer in the army if they are caught. They get the town's
| doctor, priest, and newspapers to go along with the fraud.
| All of this to avoid a tax of about 6% of Jeanne's wealth, a
| considerable sum but do you really think it would be worth
| all the risk? At the end of the day, because of her status as
| the world's longest living person Jeeanne's life has been
| studied mroe then any other supercenturginarian, and no one
| has ever found proof that anything happened. We have census
| records from multiple decades, marriage and childbirth
| records with the government and church, and multiple mentions
| in newspapers.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > and fool everyone in the small town she lived in.
|
| As others have pointed out, I think that is absolutely the
| wrong way to think about this. Yvonne Calment (or Jeanne)
| died in 1934. It's quite possible/likely that originally they
| were only trying to deceive the tax authorities. I also
| wouldn't discount how the chaos, upheaval and destruction of
| WWII (Arles was bombed heavily) would have made it easier for
| Yvonne to more "publicly" impersonate Jeanne in later years.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| When you impersonate someone, you don't have to fool
| everyone, you only have to fool your mark. No one else is
| likely to know or care what you're doing.
| neaden wrote:
| You think in a small town if someone's mom died and they
| started pretending to be her and pretending their dad is
| their husband people wouldn't think that was weird and talk
| about it?
| rosywoozlechan wrote:
| Purely speculating for entertainment, but the switch
| could have started it for the reason of obtaining
| benefits, and not a thing shared with others, by the time
| she got to be old enough to be famous for it, had been
| going on for so long nobody cared or was alive at the
| time to remember maybe?
| neaden wrote:
| We have records of the daughters funeral in the towns
| newspapers. It was well attended and there was a viewing
| of the body afterward. Many people would have had to have
| been fooled/in on it from the very beginning.
| jrumbut wrote:
| No, but they might think it was pension fraud and be
| unwilling to report their neighbors (even posthumously).
|
| That seems unlikely, but we only have the one case of
| someone living that old vs many cases of unreported
| pension fraud so if we're assigning a prior to both I
| would say it's reasonable to assign a probability of
| pension fraud to be at least as high as the probability
| of her being truly that age.
| neaden wrote:
| First off the allegation isn't pension fraud, it's
| inheritance tax dodging. Or sometimes it's claims about
| tuberculosis that don't make sense. Secondly as I have
| said the whole swap thing has been investigated by
| multiple people, all who came to the conclusion that no
| swap took place. Furthermore since the people saying it
| was a swap are the ones making a claim and have literally
| 0 evidence, at a certain point you just have to accept
| that a woman lived slightly longer then anyone else.
| cissou wrote:
| At first you just "pretend" to the taxman. You only start
| pretending publicly when all the people who could
| confound you are dead.
| neaden wrote:
| But many people who were younger then her remember her
| during that time period that you say she was only
| pretending for the taxman. All of these claims are coming
| from people who live in another country and never did any
| investigatory field work in the area. Everyone who
| actually did the interviews and on the ground
| investigation came to the conclusion that there was no
| swap, and that the alleged swap wouldn't have made any
| sense.
| btilly wrote:
| It is worthy of note that until she was in a nursing
| home, at a claimed age of 110, "Jeanne Calment" avoided
| any publicity about her claimed age. For example she
| refused the local mayor's congratulations when she
| "turned 100" - instead newspapers wound up running a
| story about someone turning 95.
|
| She literally waited nearly 50 years after the claimed
| switch, after she was in a new environment, with new
| people, without the people who would have most easily
| challenged it, to publicize her claim. This is _exactly_
| what we would expect from someone who was trying to hide
| a fraud.
|
| Search for "Publicity (lack of)" in
| https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/rej.2018.2167 for
| more details on that.
| codemac wrote:
| Small towns have a more closed circle form of gossip
| jobigoud wrote:
| > Sure living 3 years more then anyone else is pretty
| unlikely, but at the same time it's not proof.
|
| The previous record at that point was 116 years, that's a 6
| year gap. If you look at the distribution now it follows a
| fairly nice curve, except for that one far outlier.
|
| > fool everyone in the small town she lived in
|
| If I recall correctly they were living in a remote location
| and didn't meet with a lot of people.
| neaden wrote:
| It is an outlier, but as someone who works with data I can
| assure you that outliers happen all the time. That is just
| life.
|
| They lived in an apartment above their business, a drapery
| store, so in the center of town pretty much. They also had
| servants who would have had to be in on the switch.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| Also, even if you take the position that the age gap is so
| statistically unlikely as to be impossible[1], it tells you
| nothing about where the error is. It does not imply a swap. A
| swap is one possibility, but extraordinary claims require
| extraordinary evidence, and I don't see any credible evidence
| of a swap having occurred. Isn't it more likely that her age
| is simply wrong by a few years?
|
| [1]Really, in statistics, extraordinarily unlikely is not the
| same thing as impossible.
| deanCommie wrote:
| All the discussion makes it seem like the difference would be
| of 20 years or something.
|
| But she died at 122. There are 63 people who lived at least
| 115. I would say if it's reliable that humans can live up to
| 115, it's not a huge difference to my mental model on longevity
| if they CAN'T (yet) live to 120.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Look at the list of longest living women:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe.
| ..
|
| If you look at, say, the top twenty, the gap between each
| woman tends to be on the order of weeks to a few months. The
| gap between Calment and the runner up is over _3 years_.
| Statistically, this is a giant chasm for continuous data like
| this.
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| Reminds me of Usain Bolt's 100m dash records, when he would
| shave a tenth of a second off a record crowded with
| incremental millisecond differences.[0]
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_metres#All-
| time_top_25_men
| oh_sigh wrote:
| The reality is even more amazing than the graph lets on,
| because Usain has never failed a drug test, whereas the 4
| people directly to his left have, and the 5th person
| suspiciously missed enough drug tests to be temporarily
| banned. It's only when you get to Bromell and Kerley
| whose times are at the very top of the chart that you see
| times that come from clean runners.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| I'm reminded of the long jump record:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_long_jump_world_r
| eco...
|
| There's only one in-competition jump better than Bob
| Beamon's in the last 55 years
| dmurray wrote:
| Of the 25 who made it to 116, 10 made it to 117.
|
| Of the 10 who made it to 117, 4 made it to 118 and 3 of
| those made out to 119.
|
| So the data are roughly consistent with a 40% chance of
| living another year at the age. That compounds to a 6%
| chance of living 3 more years. Two of the 119-year-olds
| dying within a year and one of them living 3 years is
| completely consistent with this model.
| deanCommie wrote:
| Sure, I understand, I'm just saying the story of "Calment
| is a fraud" and "All Supercentenarians are frauds" is just
| a very different story.
| jquery wrote:
| Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The
| extraordinary evidence simply isn't there, there's too much fog
| in which _some thing_ could have happened where the daughter
| assumed the identity of her mother, for whatever reason. It
| could 've been taxes, could've been something temporary that
| turned into something permanent. Hell, maybe she was a bored
| housewife and thought that cosplaying as a grandma would be
| fun. I'm sure she had a grand old time as a "90 year old" that
| was able to act like a spritely 60 year old.
|
| I simply don't believe she was the oldest, although I do
| acknowledge there is a very slim possibility of it being true.
|
| This is a scenario where science fails us, I think. Social
| scientists have "proved" she was the oldest with "99%
| accuracy". But Bayesian statistics would pose the question, "if
| the odds of being the world's oldest person are 1 in 5 billion,
| and you took a test that was 99% accurate that confirmed you
| were the oldest, what are the odds of you being the oldest if
| the test is positive?" It turns out the odds of you being the
| oldest person are still astronomically unlikely... you have
| better odds of winning the PowerBall than of being the world's
| oldest person.
| neaden wrote:
| The extraordinary claim here is that a 34 year old woman
| would impersonate her mother for decades, including living
| with her father, and no one would ever notice or say
| anything. Your perspective is like arresting anyone who wins
| the lotto for fraud, because it's more likely that they would
| cheat then just happen to guess the right numbers.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| > including living with her father,
|
| Mother and daughter lived side by side in the same building
| with their husbands. After the daughter passed and the
| grandson married he took that apartment, so Jeanne and her
| son-in-law cohabitated. Whichever explanation you choose
| you have to say that they were a close family who really
| liked their apartments.
| pcrh wrote:
| Your Bayesian estimations make no sense. When the alternative
| is that it is the daughter who survived to 98 (which is
| already old) rather than the mother surviving to 122, the
| question should be phrased as "if you are older than 98 what
| is the probability that your age is 122".
| ars wrote:
| I know that lots of people would discount this, but it's
| interesting to note that Jewish tradition holds that the
| maximum lifespan for a person is 120 years.
|
| And Calment is the only person that might have exceeded this.
| To me that's another bit of evidence toward the impersonation
| theory.
| masklinn wrote:
| > 2. As outlined in this article, there is a strong economic
| motive for the swap.
|
| Which one? We're not talking about Sogen Kato here, we're
| talking about Jeanne Calment.
|
| Calment's daughter is supposed to have died in 1934, did the
| swap happen then? But there was no economic motive _at all_ ,
| the Calment family was part of the city's wealthy upper class
| and french social security was only introduced in 1945.
|
| So what else, did the Calment's daughter fake her death somehow
| (despite her father, mother, husband, and son remaining public
| figures), then take over after the primary financial coup, the
| sale of the apartment to the notary in 19 _65_ , after what
| would have been the death of her husband and son both?
|
| Not to mention the notary's _strong_ incentive to uncover such
| a fraud: the flat was purchased in annuities, he ultimately
| paid twice the value of the flat (and waited 20 years before
| being able to use it, when Calment finally moved to a
| retirement home).
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| No, the economic incentive was not pensions, it was avoidance
| of death duties. It is precisely because Calment's family was
| wealthier that this motive is stronger:
|
| https://yurideigin.medium.com/jaccuse-why-122-year-
| longevity...
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Could a 59 year old's body be substituted for a 36 year
| old's body? If not, what did they do with the supposed
| daughter's body?
| crote wrote:
| Sure, why not. It's not like you are trying to swap a
| 70-year-old with a teenager. If the family ages
| gracefully, it is definitely possible.
| tyingq wrote:
| Avoiding inheritance taxes, or distribution of a will that
| might not have favored the daughter?
| masklinn wrote:
| There was only a daughter.
| tyingq wrote:
| You can will things to anyone, any entity.
| neaden wrote:
| I don't believe that is true in France, or at least not
| back then there were laws about minimum inheritances.
| siera wrote:
| Not in France. French civil law on inheritance is much
| more strict than common law. For example, you cannot
| disinherit your children.
| tyingq wrote:
| Interesting. Can you partially disinherit them, but
| donating some large sum to a charity in the will, for
| example?
| vidarh wrote:
| Depending on the number of children, at least half the
| estate will go to them, rising to up to 3/4 for more
| children.
| mlcrypto wrote:
| At this point I'm willing to believe any theory that the
| "experts" are scrambling to to hide
| GalenErso wrote:
| > 1. The age gap between Calment and the next oldest person is
| the strongest evidence. It's very, very hard to ignore this.
|
| That doesn't mean her record isn't legit. Michael Phelps won 23
| Olympic gold medals. The most decorated Olympian after him won
| 9.
|
| There can be a big gap between the top performer and the second
| best performer. I'm sure a professional statistician would like
| to chime in.
| roflyear wrote:
| There's lots of people alive not an incredible amount
| shooting for swimming world records.
| ianferrel wrote:
| "Number of Olympic medals" is a very poor analogous concept
| here, because it's not a directly measurable and variable
| trait, it's a complex tail-end derivative of several factors.
|
| If you looked at "swimming speed", for example, which is the
| simple directly measurable thing, you would find that while
| Phelps is faster than other swimmers, , he is only a tiny bit
| faster than the next fastest swimmer, not 2.5 times faster
| than the next fastest swimmer.
| saalweachter wrote:
| It depends on whether "living longer" is a continuous
| trait, I suppose.
|
| I could imagine there being 20 or 30 genetic factors that
| affect your longevity, like whether you are susceptible to
| lung cancer from smoking.
|
| Having a particular trait is a binary, which introduces the
| possibility for steps in the distribution; each slice of
| the population with a particular number of longevity
| factors has a certain distribution of actual lifespans that
| add together to form the observed life span, but the
| distribution of how many people have each distribution
| could decrease sharply; perhaps millions of people have 24
| factors and produce centenarians, thousands have 25 factors
| and produce 110+, and dozens have 26 factors and produce
| 120+.
|
| Such a model is entirely made up, pulled from my ass, but
| it is also quite compatible with our discrete genetics, and
| would be perfectly compatible with large gaps at the end of
| the distribution.
| masklinn wrote:
| > "Number of Olympic medals" is a very poor analogous
| concept here, because it's not a directly measurable and
| variable trait, it's a complex tail-end derivative of
| several factors.
|
| As if extreme longevity is not a complex tail-end
| derivative of several factors?
| grandinj wrote:
| One is rank data, the other a continuous variable. Two
| very different sub-fields of statistics apply to the two
| kinds of data.
| ianferrel wrote:
| Well, so is swimming speed. I may not have the
| statistical terminology correct, but the difference is
| that "age" and "swimming speed" are directly measurable
| continuous aspects of reality, while "# of olympic medals
| is some kind of discretized derivative of others.
|
| Imagine that instead of measuring "age" we measured
| "number of days person was the oldest person in the
| world". You'd get wildly divergent results for the latter
| that would be more like the olympic medal count.
|
| Or if we determined how wet or dry a climate was not by
| measuring "annual rainfall" but, like "number of minutes
| per year in which more rain was falling here than other
| places".
| chongli wrote:
| Yeah, plus swimming is anomalous in and of itself due to
| the large number of very similar events.
|
| I'm sure we'd see sprinters like Usain Bolt win a lot more
| medals if there were events like "100m in sandals, 100m on
| grass, 100m barefoot" to go along with the usual 100m race.
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| A better analogy would be Usain Bolt's 0.11 gap in the 100m
| world dash record[0]
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_metres#All-
| time_top_25_men
| ihaveajob wrote:
| The size of the data sample is massively different. Only a
| few thousand people have earned any Olympic medals, so
| variance is expected to be higher than in the "years lived"
| metric, where we have literally billions of data points.
| masklinn wrote:
| And Calment did not live twice as long as the runner-up, so
| the variance is indeed much lower in the "years lived"
| metric.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| One thing I would highlight, because this is what I've seen
| the French experts in this situation do, is look at each
| piece of evidence in isolation and say "Ha, this alone
| doesn't prove it."
|
| And, to that point, I agree, it doesn't prove it (and, to
| clarify, I don't think the controversy is proven one way or
| the other). But I think it's wrong to look at each piece of
| evidence by itself - it's the totality of all the evidence
| that makes me extremely skeptical of the overall claim. E.g.
| if the age gap was the only piece of evidence, it wouldn't
| alone lead me to believe there was a swap, but all the
| evidence that Novoselov and Zak present together have
| convinced me of their theory.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Taking each word of your comment alone and not in relation
| to the other words around it I find that you're talking
| complete nonsense!
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > 1. The age gap between Calment and the next oldest person is
| the strongest evidence. It's very, very hard to ignore this.
|
| This is in fact a very weak evidence, that only appears to be a
| strong one because of a common epistemological mistake, let me
| explain:
|
| The odds of such an age difference are extremely small
| _according to a certain model_ of how people age, such a model
| has proven to be pretty accurate for the majority of the
| population, but that says nothing about the outliers. For
| biological entities like humans, one only need a single
| exceptional mutation or pathology to be a super-human of some
| sort, not fitting into the model at all. In fact, the tallest
| man in history is also a statistically impossible outlier, yet
| there 's no doubt about his existence and actual height, he
| just happened to have a rare condition that caused him to grow
| up to a disproportionate height. (And if you grabbed a Guinness
| book of records, you'll find these kinds of things in almost
| every category related to human anatomy or physiology).
|
| Confusing the models with reality is a very common mistake in
| the history of science, often committed by people having a math
| background instead of a physics one, but not only. A very
| famous example is how French explorer Dumont d'Urville was
| ridiculed when he described the rogue waves he witnessed in the
| Indian Ocean, because such a wave would be statically
| impossible. It turned out that the physical model of waves at
| the time was just too simplistic, as rogue waves do in fact
| exist (and AFAIK we're still looking for a proper model
| explaining the phenomenon entirely).
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| The current, known, oldest living dog is almost 1.5 years older
| than the second oldest. The current one is also still living,
| so could exceed this number.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_living_dogs
|
| Proportionately this compares quite favorably to Calment, being
| about double her spread from the next oldest human.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| If you think the data for humans is marginal, just imagine
| what it is for dogs. I absolutely don't think some "list of
| oldest dogs" is in any way exhaustive given that the vast,
| vast majority of dogs worldwide don't have accurate records.
| wjholden wrote:
| Maybe this works like a reversed Poisson distribution?
|
| In running races, it's not uncommon for the winner to be
| minutes ahead of the runner-up, who is only seconds ahead of
| the 3rd. After they cross the finish line, several more cross
| soon thereafter, and then the bulk of the runners come
| streaming in steadily. Eventually, the bulk of the runners
| pass the line and we start to see stragglers who were far
| behind the group, trickling in one by one slowly.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| The gaps in the ages of longest-living dogs are quite large,
| however: the second-oldest dog is in turn almost two years
| older than the third, there's four years between #4 and #7
| (with the exact gaps between #4-#7 unclear, but there should
| be at least two gaps of >1 year). This strongly suggests the
| gap can be attributed to sparsity of data.
|
| The gap between Calment and #2 is over 2.5x the next largest
| gap in the records (1 year 80 days between #4 and #5).
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > This strongly suggests the gap can be attributed to
| sparsity of data.
|
| Another hypothesis is that life, or genetic luck, tends to
| be harder on dogs than humans. Most dogs are dying as
| middle aged dogs, not as elderly dogs.
| Murfalo wrote:
| Conspiracy-theorist goggles on... this is also fraud?! (I
| have no evidence, just pointing out the possibility)
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Yeah, I think we've all considered that. Accurate record
| keeping for pets is worse than for humans.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| how do you know? I'm pretty sure that record keeping for
| dogs in Denmark is more accurate than record keeping for
| much of the world's human population, especially when you
| consider going back 100+ years for those humans.
|
| The oldest dog is evidently Portuguese. Not sure what
| that country's record keeping for dogs is like.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Significant numbers of dogs are feral, or of uncertain
| age and origin when adopted.
| duskwuff wrote:
| And it's much easier to pass off one dog for another
| similar-looking one. There's substantial reason to
| suspect this may have happened with the current record
| holder for world's oldest dog ("Bobi"), for example --
| IIRC, some of the photos show some sudden, inexplicable
| changes in coat patterning...
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| thank you for answering my question of how you know a
| condition that you are familiar with from your country
| holds sway the world over.
|
| So anyway, in Denmark this is the standard
| https://www.hunderegister.dk/home dogs are tracked pretty
| well here.
|
| A human born 100 years ago would have been born in 1923,
| I'm pretty sure the records keeping of dogs in Denmark
| since 1993 (when the register was established) is better
| than a lot of humans 100 years ago.
|
| But sure, many of the dogs we had in the U.S nobody knew
| what age they really were. I am however unconvinced that
| just because nobody knows what ages dogs are in one
| region that nobody anywhere knows what ages dogs are.
|
| There is another factor about the age of dogs that
| pertains as well which is that basically the oldest dog
| anyone knows is definitely knowable all of someones life,
| of multiple people's lives in the same region actually.
|
| Obviously nobody knows what age a dog is if adopted when
| grown but I wouldn't be saying the dog is 23 years old if
| I've only known it for 20 years, I would say it is at
| least 20 years old because that's how long I've known it.
| In this I can't help but feel I'm much like most people.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > thank you for answering my question of how you know a
| condition that you are familiar with from your country
| holds sway the world over.
|
| Individual countries, even ones as populous with humans
| as China or India, or as populous with dogs as the US,
| don't matter for the total aggregate of record keeping.
| The record keeping status of an individual country is
| just an anecdote. It's the plural of a super-majority of
| the human or dog populations that become data.
|
| > but I wouldn't be saying the dog is 23 years old if
| I've only known it for 20 years
|
| People are arguing in this thread that this exact
| scenario happened as a conspiracy between multiple humans
| for Calment.
|
| It's true that these conspiracies could exist, whether
| for humans, or for dogs. Bad record keeping could make it
| easier for dogs. Bad record keeping would also make it
| easier for a very long lived dog to not be recorded
| (though this is much less likely, as dogs over the age of
| 20 are something to remark on, and feral dogs generally
| don't live nearly that long).
| gifnamething wrote:
| >experts have poo-poo'ed the theory
|
| Because the experts are in a joke, pseudo-scientific field in
| which the most prominent person is the man who verified her age
| with laughably poor methods and has a vested interest in not
| being proven wrong.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| For me one of the strongest bit against this is that her
| daughter would have had to pull the wool over everyone in their
| towns eyes, or they would have had to have been in on it too.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| The time between the first Calment death and Calment becoming
| notable is long enough - over 50 years - that it's plausible
| that people who were in on the scam/aware of the assumption
| of the mother's identity had already died. Especially since
| ww2 happened in the interim
|
| Raffray is the biggest sticking point in this fwiw - he had
| time and incentive to debunk Calment's age, and had some
| preexisting relationship with her before they entered their
| contract.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| How easy is it to win a world particular world record by
| _such_ a commanding margin past a cluster of runners-up?
| Easier than pulling the wool over a town 's worth of people's
| eyes?
| makemoniesnow wrote:
| Don Bradman in Test cricket. His career average was 99.94.
| Next best is 61.87, and there are over 17 other guys over
| 55.00.
| lovemenot wrote:
| There are I guess fewer than 10,000 Test cricketers. It's
| a low n compared to the entire human population.
|
| Furthermore, the population of cricketers is not sampled
| randomly, but by selectors
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Usain Bolt and Magnus Carlsen have both better than #2 by
| more than the gap between #2 and #10. Of course, there are
| allegations that Bolt may not be competing fairly.
| mabbo wrote:
| Would she?
|
| After the mother's death, she keeps going about her life as
| usual, goes by her original name, does all the normal things
| she did before. On official documents she lists her mother's
| name but around friends or neighbours goes by whatever they
| want to call her. Maybe a lot of the neighbours know what's
| going on, but hey, we all want to avoid taxes, right? So it
| goes.
|
| And gradually she starts going by the other name instead.
| People nod and understand if she corrects them. And
| eventually everyone around her that might prove otherwise
| dies off, moves away, or loses contact. Decades go by. Soon
| everyone remembers that older spritely woman who's always
| been around here.
|
| Any photos or evidence that might prove her story false, well
| they go missing. The ones that confirm it stick around.
|
| This is how all legends start, really.
| spiderxxxx wrote:
| retire and collect a pension quite early, and go about your
| life.
| greatpatton wrote:
| you still have the problem to fool the official at death
| time. Making people believe that the mother's body was the
| body of the daughter. Death certificate were not signed out
| of nowhere even in 1934. There is a picture of her on
| wikipedia when she was 70 in 1945, she doesn't look like a
| 47 years old person, by any metrics.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Death certificate were not signed out of nowhere even
| in 1934.
|
| Actually, the curious thing in this case is it kind of
| was:
|
| "Curiously, her death certificate was issued on the basis
| of testimony of a sole witness, a 71-year-old unemployed
| woman (i.e. not a doctor or nurse) who "saw her dead""
|
| https://yurideigin.medium.com/jaccuse-why-122-year-
| longevity...
| jquery wrote:
| Well, either something like that happened... or she won a
| lottery with a 10 billion to 1 chance. My money is on the
| former. I've read enough stories about people assuming false
| identities to understand there's a number of ways to pull
| something like that off.
| amluto wrote:
| Whoa, watch out for a very common statistical error. For
| any particular property with a 10 billion to 1 chance, the
| probability that it applies to someone living is quite
| high. If you have a group of properties, each with an
| independent 10 billion to 1 chance, the probability that
| someone living has one of these properties is very high
| indeed.
|
| The fallacy of thinking that winning a lottery is rare is
| common and has horrible effects like sending innocent
| people to jail on a regularly basis. For example, if you
| search Clearview AI for someone who is a 99.99% match for a
| surveillance picture of someone committing a crime, you
| should expect tens of thousands of matches. If the AI
| really did its job, it would return many hits along with a
| prominent warning that, with very high probability, any
| given one of these people did not commit a crime!
|
| And, of course, someone always wins the lottery, since
| that's the whole point.
| lovemenot wrote:
| Similar example leading to false imprisonment:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Clark
|
| >> Sir Roy Meadow, who testified that the chance of two
| children from an affluent family suffering SIDS was 1 in
| 73 million. He had arrived at this figure by squaring his
| estimate of a chance of 1 in 8500 of an individual SIDS
| death in similar circumstances. The Royal Statistical
| Society later issued a statement arguing that there was
| no statistical basis for Meadow's claim, and expressed
| concern at the "misuse of statistics in the courts".[3]
| btilly wrote:
| There is little evidence that she ever spent much time at her
| official address. Living in remote villas, as she mostly did,
| and simply going by "Madame Calment", as she apparently also
| mostly did, few would have paid attention to her given name
| or any discrepancy between that and official records.
|
| When her extraordinary claims of old age became famous many
| decades later, well, have you ever seen family members
| arguing what really happened many decades ago? Doubts would
| have been hard to sustain.
|
| https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/rej.2018.2167 digs
| into this a bit.
| canjobear wrote:
| Also she had her personal documents and photos burned, a
| damning piece of evidence which is mentioned without comment
| here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Age_verificatio...
| masklinn wrote:
| There is nothing damning about it? Half of HN would
| immediately start throwing paper into the BBQ if the city
| requested access to personal documents.
| sct202 wrote:
| I'm just imagining having to turn over my google photos or
| emails to a government archivist, and I would for sure tell
| someone to sanitize it before giving it over.
| vintermann wrote:
| If my records are over a hundred years old already, I
| hope I'll be far enough past embarrassment that I'm able
| to say "Take it, it belongs in a museum"
| TylerE wrote:
| But ALL family photos too? That smells rotten.
| gopher_space wrote:
| It's not an uncommon occurrence after a nasty divorce or
| a death. It smells less rotten when you learn that people
| generally regret doing it to some extent. Box full of
| memories into the fire in a fit of rage/grief.
| vidarh wrote:
| I do genealogy. Of the family members that were born that
| long ago, we have pictures of maybe 1/4. It's not at all
| certain that "all family photos" amounted to much.
| jquery wrote:
| It doesn't damn her as a person, but if you're gonna claim
| to have won the lottery twice in a row, I think you had
| better have the receipts or people can safely assume you're
| either lying or confused.
| troebr wrote:
| Jeanne Calment was a famous French supercentenarian (died in 1997
| at 122), and there were suspicions around her age:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Scepticism_rega...
| [deleted]
| ilamont wrote:
| _The woman widely recognised as the longest-lived human in
| history may have stolen her identity as part of an elaborate tax
| evasion scheme, a group of researchers have claimed._
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/world-oldest...
| ilamont wrote:
| _In 1965, Raffray, a lawyer in the southern French city of Arles,
| thought he had hit on the real-estate version of a sure thing.
| The 47-year-old had signed a contract to buy an apartment from
| one of his clients "en viager": a form of property sale by which
| the buyer makes a monthly payment until the seller's death, when
| the property becomes theirs. His client, Jeanne Calment, was 90
| and sprightly for her age; she liked to surprise people by
| leaping from her chair at the hairdresser. But still, it couldn't
| be long: Raffray just had to shell out 2,500 francs a month and
| wait it out._
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/nov/30/oldest-woman...
| westcort wrote:
| Taken another way, imagine a future where dramatically longer
| human lifespans are possible. Assuming there was fraud here,
| normal-lifespan individuals could pretend to be a single
| individual for an even greater period of time.
|
| Even with current technology, foundations can carry on a person's
| wishes far into the future. Imagine if a personalized large
| language model were developed to reliably predict an individual's
| future verbal utterances. Could a large language model trained on
| a large enough corpus of data predict the next thing a living
| person would do or say? If so, could there be an option to
| transfer personhood to the language model after that person's
| death?
|
| Before judging this as impossible, think of how well our voices
| can be replicated by AI. As Stephen Wolfram has pointed out, this
| process must necessarily entail modeling the part of the cerebral
| cortex that produces speech.
| hobo_in_library wrote:
| Best would be to see such an LLM being put in charge while the
| person is still alive, and then laugh every time the person is
| frustrated with a decision the LLM decided to take.
| jedberg wrote:
| This is actually really fascinating. If only humans had rings we
| could measure!
|
| To me the biggest finding is the lack of people 90-99 in the same
| areas. Where are the supercentarians coming from with a lack of
| 90+ pipeline?
| nearbuy wrote:
| Supercentenarians are people over 110 (centenarians are over
| 100). Only about 1 in 100,000 people live this long. Around 1
| in 5 people live to 90. An order of magnitude more
| supercentenarians than average (through fraud or error)
| wouldn't make a noticeable difference in the number of people
| living 90-99, even assuming all supercentenarians were once
| counted as being 90-99.
| jedberg wrote:
| Yes I understand that, but if you are saying some area is a
| "blue zone" where people tend to live longer, you'd expect an
| outsized number of 90-99 (and 100-109) for the same reasons
| that there are 110+, if those reasons are related to the
| geography (which is the claim with blue zones).
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Wouldn't even geographic blue zones be subjected to
| geopolitical and economic shocks? These events would
| disproportionately impact people by age cohort.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| This is my thought. Someone who's 110 had a different
| reality in front of them at age 20 than someone who's 90.
| nearbuy wrote:
| My understanding is the original authors of the blue zone
| study didn't actually check the number of people aged
| 90-99. They did look at life expectancy though, which was
| slightly higher for the blue zones. Not sure how to square
| that with the new finding of fewer people living 90-99
| years.
| londons_explore wrote:
| After a person has died, I suspect science could measure their
| age pretty accurately with enough effort.
|
| For example, there are certain cells that don't multiply after
| birth (eg. some nerve cells). One could presumably date carbon
| atoms in their DNA...
|
| Or parts of the body that don't regenerate - like tooth enamel.
|
| I suspect with the right type of imaging, you'd probably find
| 'tree rings' in things like fatty deposits in arteries too.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Even cells that don't multiply still accept nutrients. Pretty
| much no atoms in our bodies stick around for too long. It's
| why carbon dating largely measures the time an organism died.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Mineral deposits in our bodies (teeth and bones) are pretty
| good.
|
| In non-replicating cells DNA would be pretty good too. Some
| of it gets replaced as repairs occur, but most of it would
| not. I'm not sure that carbon dating would be very accurate
| over the lifetime of a person (though specific events could
| cause specific sorts of deposits in bones during the
| occurrence of those events). And even if it was,
| radioactive carbon, either because of damage, or because of
| electrochemical effects, would probably be replaced in DNA
| more frequently than non-radioactive carbon, as long as the
| organism was alive, even in non-replicating cells.
| btilly wrote:
| People have looked for such things.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetic_clock describes the
| best one found.
|
| But, unfortunately, all the ones we know of can be skewed by
| environmental factors. And it is likely that the exact same
| environmental factors which make someone live longer will
| also make them appear younger than they are. Which makes them
| particularly unreliable exactly for the oldest people on
| record.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I agree we could find markers of age, but I think they'd be
| nothing like tree rings, which are created by the freeze-thaw
| cycles and the fact that they are fixed in one place and
| exposed to the elements in ways humans are not.
|
| Although, that begs the question, if a potted tree were to be
| placed on a cruise ship, which always sails to warm weather,
| would it fail to develop rings?
| jedberg wrote:
| Trees in tropical climates don't have rings because they
| grow year round. If you took a tree that normally has rings
| to a climate where it would not be exposed to hot and cold,
| the tree would either die or not have rings:
|
| https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/how-climate-
| works/tree-...
| user070223 wrote:
| apperantly Dodo birds has marking on the bones[0] which
| researchers interpert it as time they struggled to find
| resources (simillar to tree where you move between wet and dry
| season). I guess one could cross reference times of femine to a
| skeleton with known lifetime to see if it shows up in humans as
| well.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/Juci-kAqjes?t=219
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Life expectancy is going down for Americans, despite far fewer
| smokers.
| kijin wrote:
| There's probably nothing malicious about most cases of missing or
| strangely uniform birth dates. In many parts of the world over a
| century ago, people simply didn't bother with accurate records.
|
| For example, both my grandpa and grandma had two birthdays each,
| in two different calendar systems, that pointed to wildly
| different points in time. Nobody remembered exactly when they
| were born. My other grandma was recorded as being four years
| older than she thought she actually was, and nobody knows the
| truth, either. My father's birth was filed with the authorities
| _several years late_ , though the document itself pointed to the
| correct date. My family's not from some sort of jungle, either.
| All of this happened in a highly bureaucratized, highly literate
| society.
|
| Go back a few more decades and one could easily imagine "She was
| born in the spring, in the year of the great flood" becoming
| "Let's just say she was born on April 1, and when was the flood?
| I mean the second one after Steve became king" when modern
| record-keepers demand a specific date. We're trying to see more
| precision in the data than anyone ever intended to record. No
| wonder we find artifacts.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| The part about birthdates being on first of the month or
| divisible by 5 seems pretty weak to me. Records weren't great
| back then and many very old people may not actually know their
| true birthdate.
| hackeraccount wrote:
| You'd have to compare with a control group. If being 100+ was
| strongly correlated with having a birthdate on the first of the
| month or such then... maybe be suspicious.
| gifnamething wrote:
| >Records weren't great back then and many very old people may
| not actually know their true birthdate.
|
| Exactly why they can't be trusted!
| saveferris wrote:
| There is some statistical thing about fraud and the frequency
| of certain numbers being made up. I don't recall it
| specifically but made up amounts, dates, number have certain
| clusters of numbers vs what normally occurs.
|
| edit; didn't get all that was in my head out :-) So, it could
| be made up or support the fact that actual docs or good record
| keeping weren't a thing.
| actinium226 wrote:
| I think you're thinking of Benford's law:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law
|
| It's pretty strange, basically if you have a document with a
| bunch of numbers (say, some company's quarterly report), look
| at the leading digit of all the numbers. For some reason,
| numbers with a leading digit of 1 show up more often than
| those with a leading digit of 9 (i.e. 1,234,567 is more
| likely that 987,123).
|
| You'd think there wouldn't be any particular pattern in the
| leading digit, I mean why should there be? But observational
| data seem to suggest a pattern.
|
| So Benford's law can be used as a leading indicator of fraud.
| If you apply it to a quarterly report and there's an
| unusually high distribution of 8's, for example, then while
| you can't be certain that it's fraud, it might be flag to an
| inspector/regulator to take a closer look.
| automatic6131 wrote:
| It's pretty obvious, really. A quick little sketchproof;
| say you have a metric, like headcount, revenue, expenses -
| whatever. These tend to grow exponentially-ish over time.
| When that's the regime, the number spends 1/3rd of it's
| time between 1 and 2 of its leading digit, and 2/3rds
| growing from 2 to the next power of 10. Similar logic
| applies if you're counting things that follow any power law
| - population of cities etc. Wherever you have a power law
| distribution, Benford's law applies.
|
| But when humans enter data, they tend to fake numbers with
| a uniform distribution - to appear more random. That's how
| you catch it.
| nebalee wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law
| saveferris wrote:
| thanks, could not remember it and my google fu was poor
| trying to look for it :-)
| int_19h wrote:
| That's exactly the point - it means that someone "guessed" the
| date. But if they guessed the day, the year isn't reliable,
| either, especially at these time scales.
|
| Here's an example of how a similar principle can be used to
| observe electoral fraud:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Russian_legislative_elect...
| twblalock wrote:
| If you are going to make up a fake birthday and you think you
| might have trouble remembering it, picking a nice round number
| might make it easier.
| lb1lf wrote:
| In Norway, the authorities had a problem with our SSN
| equivalent a few years ago - for decades, it had been SOP to
| assign any immigrant with unknown birth date the birth date
| January 1st.
|
| Eventually, they ran out of valid SSNs for Jan 1st births in
| some years. (The number is on the form DDMMYY XXXYY, where
| XXX is assigned sequentially and YY are control digits.)
|
| Hence, for any given date the system can accommodate 1000
| people, plenty in a country with some 1000 births a week.
| Until you start assigning a certain date to people with
| unknown DOB, that is. They are now assigned a random date.
| regularfry wrote:
| In the absence of that sort of SSN, it has a higher impact
| than you'd think. It comes up enough in the UK to be
| something we have to plan around.
|
| It's a particular problem in refugee communities,
| especially where there may be common names. No certificate,
| often. What happens is that the first time they need to
| know their birthdate is when they have interaction with a
| healthcare system, and the doctor (or the admin staff),
| when told "Oh, some time in 1931, I think", puts "1/1/1931"
| into the records.
|
| All it takes is two of "Samuel Goldstein, born 1/1/1931" in
| the same suburb and you've got a serious risk of
| misidentification when one of them has a heart attack and
| turns up in an ambulance. Misidentification of patients
| might be relatively uncommon, but the danger when it
| happens is severe.
| initramfs wrote:
| The pessimist in me thinks, the longer one lives (in their 90s
| and 100s), the more this database analysis could discriminate
| using this algorithm, and flag healthy, retired centenarians from
| getting benefits, hopefully not putting a freeze to their
| accounts or causing any stir to their peaceful retirement.
| mannyv wrote:
| This article is amusing because some countries don't have a good
| way of notifying institutions about deaths (like the SS death
| master file)...and there are lots of issues associated with dying
| (taxes, inheritance, loss of benefits, etc).
|
| In those countries they just don't report the death, sometimes
| for decades. I used to joke that the government should have a
| celebration of centenarians and see how many of them actually
| show up.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I used to kid that I couldn't get a security clearance because
| I had relatives in Eastern Europe collecting social security
| for dead people.
| civilized wrote:
| The SS death master file has been broken for a decade now.
| Institutions that need death information have to work with
| private vendors that aggregate data from a variety of sources.
| mannyv wrote:
| Yeah, once states were able to opt-out (due to
| medical/privacy issues) it basically stopped being a
| canonical reference. But it's still pretty good for the most
| part.
| meetingthrower wrote:
| Ah yes, anybody remember the lovely insurance companies who had
| PERFECT data for stopping annuity payments, but somehow
| couldn't find the records to pay life insurance claims?
| cperciva wrote:
| _I used to joke that the government should have a celebration
| of centenarians and see how many of them actually show up._
|
| IIRC a version of this happened a while back in Japan; the
| mayor of a town decided to visit some of the oldest residents,
| only to find that none of them were still alive.
| davidgerard wrote:
| (2020)
| rundmc wrote:
| 2023 will see the return of Tontines to the US and eventually the
| rest of the world courtesy of https://tontine.com.
|
| Screening out those that would cheat their fellow members is part
| of our mission.
|
| In this respect, AI is just as likely to be a friend than an
| enemy.
| pharrington wrote:
| Older countries have better records?
| [deleted]
| docandrew wrote:
| It would be funny if all the hype about "Mediterranean Diet" and
| longevity was just due to pension fraud in those areas.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| A healthy diet not only makes you live longer. It also makes
| the experience less miserable when you reach an old age. That
| reason alone should be good enough.
| kepler1 wrote:
| I wonder if a lot of things in society are going to require some
| kind of physical in-person proof because of our inability to
| distinguish fake from real at some point soon.
| francisofascii wrote:
| My wife's grandmother lived to 110. There was never any doubt
| about it. She knew what year she was born. Her mother had lived
| to 99.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| My great grandmother died a month shy of her 110th birthday.
| The main reason I don't doubt it was true is that my grandma
| (her daughter) is in fantastic health despite being the same
| age as my grandpa who is in fairly poor health, so there's
| definitely something in my great grandma's genes that seems to
| aid longevity. Unfortunately it's looking like my dad got a
| decent amount of my grandpa's genes instead of my grandma's in
| that regard, so I'm doubtful I'll be so lucky haha.
| jandrese wrote:
| It has long been noted that the oldest people in the world are
| clustered in countries that didn't keep paper birth records.
| [deleted]
| cwmma wrote:
| or might have had something happen to the records ( _cough_
| japan _cough_ )
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