The island where people forget to die

This reminds me of something I've noticed lately.

I spend every Saturday afternoon, and most Sunday afternoons, taking 2-3 hour naps. They are great for decompressing and relaxing. I actually enjoy them a lot more than the normal sleeps I get at night. There's something very satisfying about waking up and finding out that it's still the same day!

On a related note, most of my friends who complain about being "stressed out" never spend their weekends actually relaxing. Instead, they rush from one activity/event to another, drive from location to location. Then when the weekend is over they say in dismay, "I can't believe it's Monday already." My guess is that if they spent their weekend being laid back, the weekend would feel a lot longer and they would be re-energized before the next week starts.

Solution: Get rid of voting. Order the comments randomly.

I've never understood the point behind anonymous voting.^1 What value does it add?

1. But some people, think of them what you will, have tried to use voting as a way to be more convincing when pandering to advertisers, e.g., Facebook "Likes".

Assuming we were the intelligent, high brow readers you would hope would be reading your forum, then wouldn't we be smart enough to see that voting adds nothing, except a source of amusement (as the silliest comments or those from random members with "high karma" rise to the top)? Intelligent people do not need a "karma system". They can take in all available information and separate the wheat from the chaf on their own. (No need for someone else, someone else's algorithm, to manipulate the order of comments.)

  Another health factor at work might be the unprocessed nature of the food they 
  consume: as Trichopoulou observed, because islanders eat greens from their gardens 
  and fields, they consume fewer pesticides and more nutrients. She estimated that the 
  Ikarian diet, compared with the standard American diet, might yield up to four 
  additional years of life expectancy. 

Oh boy, 4 years.

Eureka. You've done it. You've found the secret to eternal life.

  She also pointed out a preliminary study of Ikarian men between 65 and 100 
  that included the fact that 80 percent of them claimed to have sex regularly,
  and a quarter of that self-reported group said they were doing so with 
  “good duration” and “achievement.” 

If you had asked me the same question in middle school, I would have said that I was having all sorts of sex too.

  Although unemployment is high — perhaps as high as 40 percent — most
  everyone has access to a family garden and livestock, Parikos told me.
  People who work might have several jobs. Someone involved in tourism,
  for example, might also be a painter or an 
  electrician or have a store. 

This is a common pattern in the very poor. When you don't have any savings, you can't afford any interruptions in your income stream. Consequently, they're forced to be jacks of all trade, master of none. This makes it impossible to specialize in any one field, and lack of income means they can't make any capital investments.

  "When everyone knows everyone else’s business, you get a feeling of 
  connection and security. The lack of privacy is actually good, because
  it puts a check on people who don’t want to be caught or who do 
  something to embarrass their family."

I'd hate to be homosexual here, or be a member of any kind of minority group.

Anyway, the effect is almost certainly due to a "small study effect" sampling bias. In a tiny population (one island) a handful of exceptions (164 people over 90) massively affects the average lifespan. There's no randomization or blinding at all: observational studies like these are exquisitely sensitive to methodology errors, especially when examining small effects.

Hey... Thanks for the offer! How can I contact you? I didn't know we can pm users over here.

I did have worked with ML before but mostly with images which are (IMHO) way easier to put in a format depending on the problem.

So does it apply to all SDA's or just in Loma Linda. This reminds me of the best schools being small schools example, where governments tried to make schools smaller, ignoring the fact that the worst schools were small schools. How do you separate the data from the variance with such small groups?

Admittedly lack of smoking and reduced stressed are well studied factors: avoiding red meat can help, although entirely non-meat diets commonly hurt from inadequate amounts of iron and in some cases protein. Drinking in moderation can have health benefits however, so it seems strange to list it first, even though binging and alcoholism is terrible for life expectancy.

I actually tend to disagree with PG slightly (here comes massive downvotes). I find a lot of the moderate: gather more data approaches are in response to one or more wild leaps unsupported by data often on a single anecdote. We leap to causes quickly and badly. Testing our hypothesis with good data or at least many anecdotes (those of customers) is a great thing for start-ups. Being skeptical of conclusions from a single anecdote is useful: if you want to leap to those conlusions you'd do well to add other data or background supporting them.