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.
I did a statistical analysis and you are correct. The issue seems to be that crude birth rates from around 500CE and earlier are overestimated significantly. The bad source seems to be Kaneda & Haub, "How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?", where they assume a flat crude birth rate of 80 for all BCE dates. The probability distribution is just a function of pop and CBR, so it results in significantly decreasing mo…
Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
111–120 of 305 posts
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#112[dead]
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#113I had this idea for forever. Thank you for making it!
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#114This 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.
There are more statistical issues. I drew a person from 1984, living in Germany and recalculated their life several times. In almost all cases, their mother died while they were in their thirties, often both parents. This is simply far from reality.
I picked my own age and location. My life expectancy is apparently 59, my friends average 4.3 children, and 9% of my cohort died as infants.
Yeah, not even close. Neat idea, needs real numbers.
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#115This 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.
That's sort of boring though, we generally know what it's like to live near the modern day already.
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#116The life template kinda breaks down if you land in a modern era which makes me think it's probably equally as silly sounding to apply it to a hypothetical life from 10k years ago.
But I guess it's inevitable when you try to paint individual lives through pure statistics.
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No ads. Not asking for anything except your attention, and then delivering an outcome that is fascinating and honestly, far beyond what a person would be incentivized to build before AI tooling. I don't think I agree. There were plenty of interesting side-projects on the internet before AI. I'm not sure why AI means that people don't need to support their creations with ads. Sure, it probably took fewer human-hours…
> There were plenty of interesting side-projects on the internet before AI. This is a strawman. The original point was "the economics ... have changed" I read this as, it's much easier to spin up a project of this scale even non-monetized, and more people are able and willing to do so.
The site was registered a month ago. If it ever actually gets and stays popular, see if it has no ads then. The economics of personal interest sites didn't change in the sense that they're any harder to make now compared to the mid-90s. The economics that changed is the Internet now has billions of users and attention being monetized can make you a lot richer now than then. It's very hard for people to see an opportunity to become a multi-millionaire by clicking a button but then not do it because they'd rather maintain a slightly better experience for their audience.
It's, of course, not even loading right now, which gets at the other problem with this "economics" framing. The biggest expense in running an actually popular website isn't creating and publishing the first version. It's paying for the infrastructure to serve a meaningful proportion of the entire world. This is clearly not a static site. It's presumably doing some computation on the server side to draw from all these hundreds of different probability distributions that works well enough for a few dozen simultaneous requests but not thousands. There might even be some kind of perverse anti-economics going on here where thought devoted upfront to efficiency and architecture might have made this far more scalable, but the "publish the first thing that passes a basic sanity check" vibe-slop ethos doesn't usually get you that.
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We might recognize that the economics of making such a fascinating and artful experiment like this have completely changed. And this is not limited to software development. In just a few years, the economics of delivering healthcare, education, entertainment and legal services are going to change completely. Transportation is changing as we speak. In a decade Physical AI will completely change the economics of manu…
In 10 years? I predict that healthcare, education, legal services and transporation won't change in a meaningful way at all. People will go to a doctor, kids will attend school and aim to graduate, legal services will still be done by lawyers and decided in court. Transportation will still depend largely on what exists right now or is being built right now. There won't be self-driving cars in every city, only in a fe…
> In 10 years? I predict that healthcare, education, legal services and transportation won't change in a meaningful way at all.
"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." -- Bill Gates, in The Road Ahead.
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#119I am really happy to live in the modern age. It is quite amazing to think that people are facing cardiovascular disease and cancer instead of random parasites nowadays. Modern medicine is such a miracle.
> instead of random parasites nowadays Maybe MAHA will bring this back, like they did measles.
I was thinking along the same lines as I was going person to person in the app. It made me more disgusted at MAGA and MAHA. These guys are living in modern times with access to things that people back then couldn't even possibly dream of. The thing that really drove it home is the life expectancy of the people that came up in the draw. Most died by their 30s and some even before their 30s, most never knew their parents as they died when people were single digits of age, and they were forced to live very simple life with simple foods and conveniences.
So much of what we have has been brought to us thanks to ubiquitous fuel, ubiquitous technology, and institutions that took centuries to form and solidify. All of this built on the backs of people who sacrifiec and sometimes did horrendus things to allow us to be in the places we are. There's just so much hubris and misunderstanding of what they have been given in their lives that they don't appreciate. Pissing all this away is fine to them. Yes, I get it...they didn't get the same quality of life as their parents did(who came of age in an abberation).
What they don't realize is that it could get much worse. Many of them may not even live to see how bad it could get. This is so frustrating, and it just increases my disrespect for them.
Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
#120rolled a random human and got... myself?? statistically wild. turns out i'm just a guy. weirdly humbling