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

anyhumanever.com

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

#151

Post by lr4444lr »

Her farthest journey was a day's walk, to a nearby market town.

I think this is what boggles my mind most about antiquity: the vast majority of people rarely ventured much past where they were born (unless they did a likely once in a lifetime religious pilgrimage which took the better part of a year).

Seeing as most other people didn't venture further either, you really got to know the people around you very well. Common life limitations simply precluded much travel. The only foreigners you saw were either invading hordes, or traders who were constantly on the road.

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

#152

Post by janalsncm »

I think this would be cool if it actually worked as intended. This simulation doesn’t even draw birth years correctly.

The right way would be to bucket people by something like 1 million. Everyone in the bucket has the same sex, birth year range, and location range. Then draw a bucket uniformly and infer the details.

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

#153

Post by knappa »

no_multitudes wrote: post #145

I drew a woman born in 715 CE in the Yangtze Basin. It claims that 96% of women were married, the average age of marriage was 18, and 44% of women died before age 15. Clearly these facts can't all be true simultaneously. The firt citation for marriage data is listed as "Hajnal (RH31)", but links to a seemingly unrelated WorldCat search. The second citation is to "Kaplan (RH03)", which I was able to track down on sci-…

The first part likely is just an artifact of an unwritten common assumption. That is, it's probably 96% of women, who lived to adulthood, who were ever married.

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

#154

Post by no_multitudes »

knappa wrote: post #153
no_multitudes wrote: post #145

I drew a woman born in 715 CE in the Yangtze Basin. It claims that 96% of women were married, the average age of marriage was 18, and 44% of women died before age 15. Clearly these facts can't all be true simultaneously. The firt citation for marriage data is listed as "Hajnal (RH31)", but links to a seemingly unrelated WorldCat search. The second citation is to "Kaplan (RH03)", which I was able to track down on sci-…

The first part likely is just an artifact of an unwritten common assumption. That is, it's probably 96% of women, who lived to adulthood, who were ever married.

Maybe, but I doubt it. The vast majority of the sources, including the two listed for this claim, are listed as "attributed", meaning "A model (Opus or Fable) claims that this is what the cited source says. In my spot checks, I've found these claims to be accurate; still, since it's just a model claiming that author x says y, there's a nonzero chance that it's a hallucination."[1]

I couldn't track down the first source, but the second source goes over something completely different. Maybe Claude accurately remembered the first source when it was stolen during the training process, but forgive me if I'm skeptical. Feel free to track it down yourself and let me know. Otherwise, I will assume it is an LLM hallucination.

(Also, given my background knowledge of the Tang dynasty, I would be surprised if the average marriage age was as high as 18!)

[1]https://anyhumanever.com/sources

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

#155

Post by davedx »

no_multitudes wrote: post #145

I drew a woman born in 715 CE in the Yangtze Basin. It claims that 96% of women were married, the average age of marriage was 18, and 44% of women died before age 15. Clearly these facts can't all be true simultaneously. The firt citation for marriage data is listed as "Hajnal (RH31)", but links to a seemingly unrelated WorldCat search. The second citation is to "Kaplan (RH03)", which I was able to track down on sci-…

I draw a man in China in 1819, and it said he "died of the war in Oman" without any explanation of how that could have happened. What a load of crap

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

#157

Post by janalsncm »

butlike wrote: post #148
janalsncm wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not what it says on the tin though. “Drawn at random from everyone who has ever lived” means years will not be uniformly distributed.

This is a case where I think they should change the wording as opposed to the functionality. I like that it's a random year regardless of population density.

That would certainly be easier at this point, but I like the “random human life” idea more.

I’ve reflected in the past about how lucky I am to have been born where I was, when I was, and be given the abilities that I have. Sure there are plenty of people that were luckier, but also a lot who were less lucky, most of whom are dead.

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

#159

Post by eks391 »

wat10000 wrote: post #135
gradus_ad wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's working as intended. The year is simply a randomly chosen year not related to the density of births in that year. It would be a boring tool if it actually chose "random year based on random birth" because almost every choice would be from 1900 onward...

The site covers a 300,000 year span, so a randomly chosen year would average ~150,000 BCE, which definitely isn't happening. The skew towards the present isn't as stark as that. World population has exploded in the past couple of centuries, but it hasn't been high for very long. 1900 to present only covers ~11% of all births.

1900 to 2026 is 127 years (inclusive), so 0.04% of the year range available, yet it only has 11% of all births. That's certainly a skew, although I suppose subjective whether or not that's stark. At a >3x order of magnitude, it's certainly significant though.

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

#160

Post by rkagerer »

no_multitudes wrote: post #145

I drew a woman born in 715 CE in the Yangtze Basin. It claims that 96% of women were married, the average age of marriage was 18, and 44% of women died before age 15. Clearly these facts can't all be true simultaneously. The firt citation for marriage data is listed as "Hajnal (RH31)", but links to a seemingly unrelated WorldCat search. The second citation is to "Kaplan (RH03)", which I was able to track down on sci-…

This is exactly the kind of reckless inaccuracy I've come to expect from AI.
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