Years You Have Left to Live, Probably • Hacker News Board

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#61

Post by nilkn » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 5:35 PM UTC

If I've understood this correctly, the one main flaw this has is that the probability to live to your next birthday is dependent not just on your current age, but also the current year. In other words, if you're 30 right now, the probability you'd need to look up is "the probability to live to my next birthday at age 30 during year 2015". When you're 40, you'll want to look up "the probability to live to my next birthday at age 40 during the year 2025", which could very well be different from "the probability to live to my next birthday at age 40 during the year 2015".

Obviously, though, we don't know how this value will change in future years, so this isn't really a fault of the chart so much as it is an unavoidable limitation. Some sort of model could be introduced for predicting healthcare advances, but I doubt anyone can do so reliably enough to produce a net increase in accuracy here.

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#62

Post by sillysaurus3 » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 5:56 PM UTC

nilkn wrote: post #61

If I've understood this correctly, the one main flaw this has is that the probability to live to your next birthday is dependent not just on your current age, but also the current year. In other words, if you're 30 right now, the probability you'd need to look up is "the probability to live to my next birthday at age 30 during year 2015". When you're 40, you'll want to look up "the probability to live to my next birt…

During the early 1940s, if you were a young Russian male adult, the chance of living until 1946 was 2 in 3. Pretty strange time period. Each time you walked down the street, you could say "live, live, die, live, die, live, die, live, live" and be statistically correct.

It's true that a war isn't necessarily relevant

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#63

Post by terrn » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 6:07 PM UTC

I think about my own death daily, as a reminder to not take for granted this incredible opportunity of being alive in the universe. But I am still unnerved by this graph! I'm 33, and I'm old enough to know that time passes very very quickly. If I want to die well it is better to start preparing myself now; it may take a long time to get square with the truth that absolutely everything dies. 10 years from now or 1000 years from now, what difference does it make if I can't accept that I will cease to be in this form at some point?

Any hearsay over some technology that might exist to expand our lifetimes completely misses the point. There will never be an absolute end to death. Even the Sun will eventually explode, and even beyond that the universe itself will probably die in heat death. Where will we be then? At what point do we think that we will have "lived enough"? Why do we assume that if we only live longer that we'll somehow be more cool with being dead some day? Is there anything in our experience that suggests we're more OK with death the older you get?

Why talk about tomorrow - we can eat right now!

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#64

Post by pm24601 » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 6:26 PM UTC

I use curves like this as an anti-procrastination method.

"Hey, you have only 200 more months to live. Don't waste a month doing something stupid."

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#65

Post by Florin_Andrei » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 6:33 PM UTC

Running the simulation on fast, it's like those little marbles run out of gas after a certain limit and fall off. In my case the limit is somewhere in the 80s. After they hit that invisible barrier, very few continue to fly.

By comparison, there's a continuous trickle of marbles falling off randomly early.

So what I take from the simulation is that there are two main components: the random stuff that can take you out at any time, and then there's a more-or-less fixed amount of "gas" you have - when that one is gone, it's gone.

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#66

Post by ishi » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 7:05 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #55

reasonattlm wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think that will destroy the life insurance industry. In fact, I think it will help them. If I buy a life insurance policy for a 15 year old today, I pay them $X in order to receive $Y when the insured dies. If the insured lives for 70 years, the insurance company has 70 years to invest $X, in order to have $Y available when the insured dies. But if the insured lives 80 years, then the insurance company has 10…

The main problem if I understand correctly is with pensions. They have 10 more years to invest your money, but they also have to pay you for 10 more years... so the longer you live, the less they profit. Live long enough, and they will lose money. And if enough people live longer than expected, the insurance company could go bankrupt.

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#67

Post by jwildeboer » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 7:13 PM UTC

US only, what else ;-) I live in Germany and drink better beer and enjoy better food :-)

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#68

Post by lucaspiller » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 7:16 PM UTC

cosmorocket wrote: post #20

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

Hearing I'm older than 46% of the worlds population is pretty interesting. I'm only 27.

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#69

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 7:19 PM UTC

fredkbloggs wrote: post #52

> And I should probably look into life insurance. Why? What exactly is it that you think "life insurance" does? If there were a product that would reduce the variance in remaining life length, that might be interesting, but that's not what "life insurance" is. All it does is pay someone else some amount of money when you die, after you pay them some (usually increasing) amount each year while you're alive (with count…

[deleted]

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#70

Post by slg » Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 7:43 PM UTC

I remember reading somewhere on the internet about a person who had a decorative bowl in their house. This bowl was full of marbles. Once a week, they would take a marble out of the bowl and throw it away. Each marble was a week of their life. When they started this practice, they calculated their life expectancy and bought enough marbles for each week they were statistically expected to live. The idea is to give you the constant reminder that our time is limited, always running out, and shouldn't be wasted. The older you get, the less time you have, and the fewer marbles that are left in that bowl. If you are a typical HN reader, you likely have less than 3,000 marbles left.