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Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

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Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

#41

"You have died of Dysentery [on the Korean Peninsula in 3064 BCE at 2 months old]" I was actually a bit surprised since it also said I was exclusively breastfed which seems to be fairly protective against diarrhea. I have a feeling this didn't account for all the joint probability distributions...

I died at 1 in Mesopotamia in 3966 BCE of dysentery.

Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

#43

Now this is fun vibe coding. A fascinating way of reckoning with our cosmic luck. On "only the first roll counts" rules, I rolled a girl who died at 8 months from a respiratory infection in the Indus valley, in 7785 BCE (9,810 years ago). I rolled again, of course, but at that point it feels like fishing for a best case scenario. But I at least got someone from the North China Plain in 75 BCE who lived to 74 and had…

on my 6th only the first roll counts roll, i got a boy born near Nairobi in 36,112 BCE that lived to 70

probably like 5% of humanity has his genes now. that was fun vibe coding

Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

#45

Has anyone managed to roll a life later than ~600CE?

Yes, but I definitely think the probabilities are off - the explanation, which I agree with, states "a random birth is far more likely to fall near the present."

But it appears to be drawing much more uniformly from the years than you'd expect given the probability curve (population curve) pictured.

Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

#46

> You have drawn a boy, born in the Korean Peninsula in 3394 BCE > Life expectancy at birth: 28 yrs > Died before age 5: 42% > Died before age 15: 50% i knew life expectancy was obviously lower, but those stats were a bit eye opening. unfortunately, died at 3 from an accident.

I do wonder if that life expectancy is dragged significantly down by all the ways you can die early on in life, so that it's not so much that 28 years is an old age for the time as it is a function of all things that prevent you from getting to old age. And so if you went to a town square or market in that time (if it's a time that had such a thing), perhaps it might still be perfectly normal to see people in their 3…

That's exactly what happens.

The life expectancy of a person who lives to 18 increases dramatically across the board.

You even see this today. If you live to 70, you can expect to live 14 to 17 more years. So to about 84 on the short side and 87 on the long side.

However, make it to 75, your life expectancy is 11 to 14 years. Which is 86 on the short side and 89 on the long side.

Basically, the longer you live, the longer you should live, but eventually the range collapses. And that's because people come in under the average all the time. Some people die at 71. And those people stop getting counted when determining life expectancy at 75.

Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

#47
This is neat, but I don't think it's actually drawing the year from the correct probability distribution - "a random birth is far more likely to fall near the present" is correct, but in 5 "random" choices, only one was from anywhere near modern day.

Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

#48

"You have died of Dysentery [on the Korean Peninsula in 3064 BCE at 2 months old]" I was actually a bit surprised since it also said I was exclusively breastfed which seems to be fairly protective against diarrhea. I have a feeling this didn't account for all the joint probability distributions...

Strangely, I too, died in the Korean Peninsula at 8 months old, but circa 6000 BCE.

Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

#49

> You have drawn a boy, born in the Korean Peninsula in 3394 BCE > Life expectancy at birth: 28 yrs > Died before age 5: 42% > Died before age 15: 50% i knew life expectancy was obviously lower, but those stats were a bit eye opening. unfortunately, died at 3 from an accident.

I think the model has an unusual preference for the Korean Peninsula before Christ. A number of commenters, including myself, draw from this area and period.

Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

#50
"A girl was born in 1276 BCE, on the Deccan Plateau, near present-day Hyderabad... She lived on a labourer's wage"

Wage labor didn't exist yet and the cited source is for labor history between 1500CE and the present. The AI illustration also doesn't make any sense for the period.

This is the genuinely bad kind of slop because it's pretending to be semi-factual.

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