The mean age was 27.18 years. Quartiles (25%, 50%, 75%) were 21, 25, and 30. 90% of us are under 38, 95% of us are under 45, but there are still eleven Less Wrongers over the age of 60....The mean for the Singularity question is useless because of the very high numbers some people put in, but the median was 2080 (quartiles 2050, 2080, 2150). The Singularity has gotten later since 2009: the median guess then was 2067.
So the 50% age is 25 and the 50% estimate is 2080? A 25 year old has a life expectancy of, what, another 50 years? 2011+50=2061, or 19 years short of the Singularity!
Either people are rather optimistic about future life-extension (despite ‘Someone now living will reach age 1000: 23.6’), or the Maes-Garreau Law may not be such a law.
Or we have family histories that give us good reason to think we’ll outlive the mean, even without drastic increases in the pace of technology. That would describe me. Even without that just living to 25 increases your life expectancy by quite a bit as all those really low numbers play heck with an average.
Or we’re overconfident in our life expectancy because of some cognitive bias.
Even without that just living to 25 increases your life expectancy by quite a bit as all those really low numbers play heck with an average.
I should come clean, I lied when I claimed to be guessing about the 50 year old thing; before writing that, I actually consulted one of the usual actuarial tables which specifies that a 25 year old can only expect an average 51.8 more years. (The number was not based on life expectancy from birth.)
The actuarial table is based on an extrapolation of 2007 mortality rates for the rest of the population’s lives. That sounds like a pretty shaky premise.
Why would you think that? Mortality rate have, in fact, gone upwards in the past few years for many subpopulations (eg. some female demographics have seen their absolute lifespan expectancy fall), and before that, decreases in old adult mortality were tiny:
life extension from age 65 was increased only 6 years over the entire 20th century; from age 75 gains were only 4.2 years, from age 85 only 2.3 years and from age 100 a single year. From age 65 over the most recent 20 years, the gain has been about a year
(And doesn’t that imply deceleration? 20 years is 1⁄5 of the period, and over the period, 6 years were gained; 1⁄5 * 6 > 1.)
Which is a shakier premise, that trends will continue, or that SENS will be a wild success greater than, say, the War on Cancer?
I didn’t say that lifespans would necessarily become greater in that period, but several decades is time for the rates to change quite a lot. And while public health has become worse in recent decades in a number of ways (obesity epidemic, lower rates of exercise,) a technologies have been developed which improve the prognoses for a lot of ailments (we may not have cured cancer yet, but many forms are much more treatable than they used to be.)
If all the supposed medical discoveries I hear about on a regular basis were all they’re cracked up to be, we would already have a generalized cure for cancer by now and already have ageless mice if not ageless humans, but even if we assume no ‘magic bullet’ innovations in the meantime, the benefits of incrementally advancing technology are likely to outpace decreases in health if only because the population can probably only get so much fatter and more out of shape than it already is before we reach a point where increased proliferation of superstimulus foods and sedentary activities don’t make any difference.
Right, my point is that SENS research, which is a fairly new field, doesn’t have to be dramatically more successful than cancer research to produce tangible returns in human life expectancy, and the deceleration in increase of life expectancy is most likely due to a negative health trend which is likely not to endure over the entire interval.
I would interpret “the latest possible date a prediction can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the person making it”, “lifetime” would be the longest typical lifetime, rather than an actuarial average. So—we know lots of people who live to 95, so that seems like it’s within our possible lifetime. I certainly could live to 95, even if it’s less than a 50⁄50 shot.
One other bit—the average life expectancy is for the entire population, but the average life expectancy of white, college educated persons earning (or expected to earn) a first or second quintile income is quite a bit higher, and a very high proportion of LWers fall into that demographic. I took a quick actuarial survey a few months back that suggested my life expectancy given my family age/medical history, demographics, etc. was to reach 92 (I’m currently 43).
Is the mean age for everyone who answered the age question similar to that of those who answered both the age and singularity questions?
I think I remember estimating a bit lower than that for the singularity—but I wouldn’t have estimated at all were it not for the question saying that not answering was going to be interpreted as believing it wouldn’t happen at all.
So the 50% age is 25 and the 50% estimate is 2080? A 25 year old has a life expectancy of, what, another 50 years? 2011+50=2061, or 19 years short of the Singularity!
Either people are rather optimistic about future life-extension (despite ‘Someone now living will reach age 1000: 23.6’), or the Maes-Garreau Law may not be such a law.
Or we have family histories that give us good reason to think we’ll outlive the mean, even without drastic increases in the pace of technology. That would describe me. Even without that just living to 25 increases your life expectancy by quite a bit as all those really low numbers play heck with an average.
Or we’re overconfident in our life expectancy because of some cognitive bias.
I should come clean, I lied when I claimed to be guessing about the 50 year old thing; before writing that, I actually consulted one of the usual actuarial tables which specifies that a 25 year old can only expect an average 51.8 more years. (The number was not based on life expectancy from birth.)
The actuarial table is based on an extrapolation of 2007 mortality rates for the rest of the population’s lives. That sounds like a pretty shaky premise.
Why would you think that? Mortality rate have, in fact, gone upwards in the past few years for many subpopulations (eg. some female demographics have seen their absolute lifespan expectancy fall), and before that, decreases in old adult mortality were tiny:
(And doesn’t that imply deceleration? 20 years is 1⁄5 of the period, and over the period, 6 years were gained; 1⁄5 * 6 > 1.)
Which is a shakier premise, that trends will continue, or that SENS will be a wild success greater than, say, the War on Cancer?
I didn’t say that lifespans would necessarily become greater in that period, but several decades is time for the rates to change quite a lot. And while public health has become worse in recent decades in a number of ways (obesity epidemic, lower rates of exercise,) a technologies have been developed which improve the prognoses for a lot of ailments (we may not have cured cancer yet, but many forms are much more treatable than they used to be.)
If all the supposed medical discoveries I hear about on a regular basis were all they’re cracked up to be, we would already have a generalized cure for cancer by now and already have ageless mice if not ageless humans, but even if we assume no ‘magic bullet’ innovations in the meantime, the benefits of incrementally advancing technology are likely to outpace decreases in health if only because the population can probably only get so much fatter and more out of shape than it already is before we reach a point where increased proliferation of superstimulus foods and sedentary activities don’t make any difference.
Which is already built into the quoted longevity increases. (See also the Gompertz curve.)
Right, my point is that SENS research, which is a fairly new field, doesn’t have to be dramatically more successful than cancer research to produce tangible returns in human life expectancy, and the deceleration in increase of life expectancy is most likely due to a negative health trend which is likely not to endure over the entire interval.
I would interpret “the latest possible date a prediction can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the person making it”, “lifetime” would be the longest typical lifetime, rather than an actuarial average. So—we know lots of people who live to 95, so that seems like it’s within our possible lifetime. I certainly could live to 95, even if it’s less than a 50⁄50 shot.
One other bit—the average life expectancy is for the entire population, but the average life expectancy of white, college educated persons earning (or expected to earn) a first or second quintile income is quite a bit higher, and a very high proportion of LWers fall into that demographic. I took a quick actuarial survey a few months back that suggested my life expectancy given my family age/medical history, demographics, etc. was to reach 92 (I’m currently 43).
Is the mean age for everyone who answered the age question similar to that of those who answered both the age and singularity questions?
I think I remember estimating a bit lower than that for the singularity—but I wouldn’t have estimated at all were it not for the question saying that not answering was going to be interpreted as believing it wouldn’t happen at all.