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Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

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Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#31

Last autumn I was involved in working on a similar web app [1] for WorldBank which consumed its data sources. I think it should be more accurate as they at WorldBank collect the data from multiple sources and process it in a scientifically precise manner. You can enter country you live in, which can make a dramatic difference. [1] http://population.io

Very nice website.

Google also a site where you can graph the WorldBank data in a zillion ways; I'm shocked that I didn't know about it earlier:

https://www.google.co.nz/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9...

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#32
A nice visualization!

I was investigating this topic for some time and it turns out that the mortality curve is interesting: grows exponentially in time. In some sense, we start "aging" at the age of 6-8 y.o. (the safest age in Western countries). Plus, there is a bump of mortality in around 20, much more pronounced for males (accidents).

See e.g. https://plot.ly/~PiotrMigdal/11/mortality-rate-by-age-and-ge... And more info on the exponential growth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz%E2%80%93Makeham_law_o...

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#33

Nice UX, but the probability is probably wrong. I am in my 40s, so I'll give the current life expectancy stats about a 50% chance of being valid by the time I reach the age to die. But somebody who is 10 today, will likely have a life expectancy much longer than the 80 yeas. The entire curve will be pushed out. So for that person, I'd guess the probability of this being correct is closer to 10%.

> But somebody who is 10 today, will likely have a life > expectancy much longer than the 80 years Turns out there's a _highly_ developed and mature prediction market for this called life insurance, and they disagree with your assessment.

An industry that will be destroyed or bailed out when there is a large upward discontinuity in life expectancy trends thanks to advances in medicine. There is a very big change going on in medical research at the moment, shifting from not trying to treat aging as a medical condition to actually treating aging and its causes. The difference in outcomes will be night and day; some relevant technologies are transferring out of the lab and into startups even now. E.g. Gensight in France, Pentraxin Therapeutics Ltd in the UK, Oison Biotech and Human Rejuvenation Technologies in the US.

Anyway, pensions and life insurance will most likely be bailed out when the crash comes, and the expectation of this socialization of losses might explain some of what is observed there in the sense that they are not responding aggressively to the actuarial community's ever more strident warnings on the uncertainty of their projections. Also people are not particularly rational in their expectations about aging - see this for example, a survey of the actuaries who are the same time as warning that life expectancy predictions are increasingly uncertain due to medical advances in the works, still base their future expectations on what happened to their grandparents:

https://www.dovepress.com/longevity-expectations-in-the-pens...

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#35
Note that life expectancy is a statistical construct, an expected outcome if you lived through the period of technological development from a lifetime ago to now.

But you won't. You will be living through the period of technological development from now until an undefined future date, and we are in the early years of a great and sweeping revolution in the capabilities of biotechnology and medicine.

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The cautious majority believes that human life span will continue to increase, but only incrementally, much as it has done for the past few decades - both life expectancy at birth and life expectancy after 60, due to the continued introduction of new medical technologies. (Which proceeds far more slowly than it could, thanks to the heavy hand of the state). One faction of epidemiologists even argues for the possibility of a dip in overall life expectancy as present trends in obesity take their toll - to their eyes the consequences of being overweight look set to outweigh modest gains due to advances in medicine.

To my mind, arguing for incrementalism in any trend relating to medicine at the present time is choosing to go against the tide. The biotechnologies that underpin advances in medicine are going through a period of massive, revolutionary change. While it is true that organizations such as the FDA do pretty much everything short of shooting scientists to slow down and increase the cost of turning research into therapies, the rapid pace of progress in the life sciences will win through.

Allow me to put forward a historical analogy: standing in 2012 and arguing a case for gentle future changes in life expectancy over the next few decades, based on the past few decades, is something like standing in 1885 or so and arguing that speed and convenience of passenger travel will steadily and gently increase in the decades ahead. The gentleman prognosticator of the mid-1880s could look back at steady progress in the operating speed of railways and similar improvement in steamships throughout the 19th century. He would be aware of the prototyping of various forms of engine that promised to allow carriages to reliably proceed at the pace of trains, and the first frail airships that could manage a fair pace in flight - though by no means the equal of speed by rail.

Like our present era, however, the end of the 19th century was a time of very rapid progress and invention in comparison to the past. In such ages trends are broken and exceeded. Thus within twenty years of the first crudely powered and fragile airships, heavier than air flight launched in earnest: a revolutionary change in travel brought on by the blossoming of a completely new branch of applied technology. By the late 1920s, the aircraft of the first airlines consistently flew four to five times as fast as the operating speed of trains in 1880, and new lines of travel could be set up for a fraction of the cost of a railway. Little in the way of incrementalism there: instead a great and sweeping improvement accomplished across a few decades and through the introduction of a completely new approach to the problem.

This is one of many historical examples of discontinuities in gentle trends brought about by fundamentally new technologies. Returning to the medicine of the present day, there are any number of lines of work we could point to as analogous to the embryonic component technologies of an aircraft in 1885. They are still in the lab, or only being trialed, or still under development - but they exist in great numbers. There are the SENS technologies; a range of advanced applications of immunotherapy; targeting methodologies to safely destroy specific cell types; organ engineering; and others. Just because we can't see the exact shape of the emerging technologies that will be constructed atop these foundations doesn't make them any less likely to be created: great changes are coming down the line in medicine. The future is not one of steady and incremental progress.

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#37

The nature of the curve, with virtually no chance of death until about 65, with a strong dropoff after, should give rise to a fair bit of reflection. I'm the same as the author, a 34 year old male. For me, chances are pretty concentrated on me living a good few decades more. Which is ok, I can plan for that. I'll need a house to live in for the next 30 years, changing careers could be done, etc. I'm pretty unlikely t…

On the monetary side, that is fixed in part by social security here in the US. It pays out monthly as long as you are old enough and alive. A kind of "old age" insurance.

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#39

The nature of the curve, with virtually no chance of death until about 65, with a strong dropoff after, should give rise to a fair bit of reflection. I'm the same as the author, a 34 year old male. For me, chances are pretty concentrated on me living a good few decades more. Which is ok, I can plan for that. I'll need a house to live in for the next 30 years, changing careers could be done, etc. I'm pretty unlikely t…

> There's a 1/3 chance of not making it to 81. But then there's also a 20% chance of making it past 91. What do you do about that? You can't spend all your money now. But you can't not spend it, either.

Pensions and annuities, unlike private retirement savings in stocks and bonds, spread this risk out among many people. Your father could get about $650 per month guaranteed for life for every $100,000 he puts in an annuity today.

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#40

Could someone explain to me the necessity of the animation? A graph showing the probability distribution for each year would have been much better IMHO.

I think it is to reinforce the feeling of individual lives. You watch the ball scoot along to 38 years old and suddenly drop, and you recognize that sometimes it just gets cut short. When presented with just the probability distribution, it's easy to ignore the wings and focus on the mode.
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