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Holocaust Paradox: Long Lives for Those Who Survived

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Re: Holocaust Paradox: Long Lives for Those Who Survived

#31
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caloric restriction (extreme dieting) is well known to increase lifespan. Intermittent fasting shows tentative promise.

Would a too extreme diet do permanent harm, or is our body used to bouts of near starvation? The survivor bias makes sense, those that would have died at 65-75 years maybe died then when tested by the hardships.

fasting creates autophagy which is a real positive benefit.

Re: Holocaust Paradox: Long Lives for Those Who Survived

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a recent story about how the inmates in the camps received the best healthcare available in German society at the time. That would certainly explain why so many years later we still hear about "new" survivors. I’d love a link to this “recent story” which sounds distressingly like a very old and discredited claim of Holocaust deniers.

Unfortunately, a quick peek through GP's post history does suggest that's quite possibly their source.

"race is genetic", "Why are white men the only source of trouble", "Saudi Arabia donates to clinton"

Yups, all trademark comments of a wandering soul trying to "humanize" the holocaust. Please don't let HN become reddit

Re: Holocaust Paradox: Long Lives for Those Who Survived

#33
Too many unknowns. For example holocaust survivals received yearly reparations from Germany (not only death camps survivals but even displaced ones). Did it help them somehow, less financial stress? It sure helped my grandmother I believe. What about Gulag system survivals, do we see the same effect?

Re: Holocaust Paradox: Long Lives for Those Who Survived

#34
post #24
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caloric restriction (extreme dieting) is well known to increase lifespan. Intermittent fasting shows tentative promise.

This is just a guess, but I'd expect that most people who survived the camps did not decide to continue afterwards to eat like they were still there. Wouldn't that limit the longevity benefits?

It’s possible that a long starvation period has induced lower life time caloric intake just not on the same levels, it could be that the period alone was enough to induce some epigenetic changes I don’t know why it’s being downvoted it could potentially be a cause behind this discrepancy.

Re: Holocaust Paradox: Long Lives for Those Who Survived

#35
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caloric restriction (extreme dieting) is well known to increase lifespan. Intermittent fasting shows tentative promise.

Would a too extreme diet do permanent harm, or is our body used to bouts of near starvation? The survivor bias makes sense, those that would have died at 65-75 years maybe died then when tested by the hardships.

>Would a too extreme diet do permanent harm

Yes, which is why anorexia is so harmful, and why early intervention for anorexia is so important.

Re: Holocaust Paradox: Long Lives for Those Who Survived

#37
The most observed behavior among the longest lived is radical independence. It isn't wild to suggest surviving a holocaust death camp would make a person more independently minded. Conversely, most people take this for granted while craving conveniences at every turn.

I learned to program JavaScript more confidently on my first Afghanistan deployment. Being able to work offline without references or tools was important when I was constantly on the move. Even to this day portability and performance are the things I value most in an application. Most other JavaScript developers I have encountered in the real world need a mountain of third party libraries and frameworks with a fixed internet connection for the simplest of things.

Re: Holocaust Paradox: Long Lives for Those Who Survived

#39
post #4

Kind of obvious but can it be simply a selection bias? The weakest died in the camps, the survivors would be the healthier, stronger, and therefore have a longer life expectancy than average.

This is called survivorship bias, not selection bias.

Survivorship refers to people that engaged in an activity with a chance of "survival" (which could mean actual life or death situations, or things like interviews, school applications, etc.) and did survive have a biased view towards the probability of surviving that activity - usually overestimating the chances of "survival". A classic example is that you might not want to trust it when a professor in a competitive says success in the field is likely with hard work - sure, the professor may have worked hard and succeeded but he's biased towards his own experiences, and is likely not making an honest assessment of the chances of success. Survivorship bias is a form of selection bias: the "survivors" are essentially selecting their own experiences over that of the general population.

Whereas selection bias is when some external factor causes analysis to be focused on a specific subset of the broader population. For instance, survey responses reflect the selection bias of people who were willing to take that survey. Reviews on user-generated review sites are biased towards the people that felt strongly enough to leave a review. The example in this post is selection bias. This is not the opinions of views of individual survivors as in survivorship bias. Rather the study is inherently limited to selecting those that were healthy and fit enough to survive the Holocaust.

Re: Holocaust Paradox: Long Lives for Those Who Survived

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is called survivorship bias, not selection bias.

Survivorship refers to people that engaged in an activity with a chance of "survival" (which could mean actual life or death situations, or things like interviews, school applications, etc.) and did survive have a biased view towards the probability of surviving that activity - usually overestimating the chances of "survival". A classic example is that you might not want to trust it when a professor in a competitive…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

>Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. It is a form of selection bias.

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