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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

#281

Post by aswegs8 »

saalweachter wrote: post #128
wat10000 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you be a little more specific? https://www.prb.org/news/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-... puts the halfway point at over 2,000 years ago, so you'd expect less than 50% probability of getting a random year that's not BCE. "A random birth is far more likely to fall near the present" is true in relative terms; the timeline on the web site goes back 300,000 years and you're very likely to get something in the…

The stat I keep in my back pocket is that you can roughly divide the total time lived by humans (the integral of population over time) into three tranches, with one third of human experience being before the dawn of agriculture, and one third being after 1600. (Related fun fact: WWII was about 1% of human experience, based on the back of the envelope that ~50% of the world experienced "being at war" for nearly a deca…

Something seems off. This source says: https://www.prb.org/news/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-...

before 8000 BCE: ~9.0 billion births, 8% 8000 BCE–1650 CE: ~85.4 billion, 73% after 1650: ~22.6 billion, 19%

Looks also different to OPs website

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

#282

Post by mcv »

magneticnorth wrote: post #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.

Yeah, it feels it might be a bit skewed to produce interesting results. My first attempt, despite a life expectancy of 31 and a 34% chance to reach 40, lived a glorious 65 years.

Then again, my next two attempts died at 4 months and 4 years. But they were both from before 1000 AD. So maybe it's just the year that's skewed. But the fourth reached 65 and was from before 1000 AD. Only 1 in 4 was from after 1000 AD.

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

#283

Post by Matumio »

lr4444lr wrote: post #151

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. Co…

I think it's the other way around. Without the cultural norms around impersonal markets, you have to rely on your extended family network or clan for everything, because there is no trust otherwise. This is what keeps you from traveling. If you were trying to trade with a far-away stranger, why should they not just rob you instead? Nobody is around to punish. And for all they know, you were just as likely trying to poison them rather than make a fair trade.

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

#284

Post by Perenti »

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 noticed the figures seemed odd. The causes of female mortality are just plain wrong. The top two causes of female death post-puberty were domestic violence and childbirth related. Neither are listed in the "top mortality" table.

Slop.

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

#287

Post by stratocumulus0 »

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-…

It generated me an Anatolian farmer from the 19th century who spoke... Ottoman Turkish. It's like taking a peasant Briton from the 1200s and claiming that they spoke French, because it was an official language of the country back then. (Ottoman Turkish was an artificial literary register which was incomprehensible to most of the population.)

I hope that the author learns from the comments in this thread that dry encyclopedic data does not define reality.

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

#288

Post by greatpatton »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #193
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-…

James was born on the British Isles, near Boulogne-sur-Mer, in 2009 CE. James's table is mostly oat and barley bread, pork and dairy, and cabbage and peas, with apples in season, and coffee and sugar as well. He is literate. Odd for a gen-z person in Britain. I doubt he’d eat a lot of cabbage, and I have no idea when the “season” for apples is as they are always in the supermarket and there aren’t any orchards near w…

Wow, I didn't know that they relocated Boulogne-sur-Mer from France to the other side of the channel. Thanks for the heads-up! I'm driving there in a couple of weeks and I'll plan for the tunnel accordingly. :)

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

#289

Post by underneath_the_ »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #166
logicallee wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>exadurates this word is usually spelled exaggerate (yes, with two g's.)

> yes, with two g's The reason there are two Gs is that the first one is assimilated from a D. The etymological structure of the word is ex-ad-gero,¹ "from-toward-carry". This happens for everything. Compare accelerate [ad-celero] / accommodate [ad-con-modus] / impossible [in-pot-s-ibilis] / intelligent [inter-leg-ents]. (Note that a doubled consonant in Latin is pronounced differently from a single one, as is still…

I think exaggero is a denominative, derived from the noun agger 'pile' (itself a nominalisation of aggero i.e. "what is brought"). As such it took the default (productive) first conjugation. You can see a similar effect in English denominative which takes the productive past tense suffix -ed in highlighted, not *highlit.

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

#290

Post by nonameiguess »

assumed_throwaw wrote: post #176
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 am genuinely puzzled as to why this kind of vibe-coded site are so popular on HN. I consider the crowd here to be much smarter than I am, which is why I enjoyed the links that were shared and the discussions that followed. The website is pretty, but the statistics and stories are the main point. Yet we are being fed hallucinated false claims, and somehow, that doesn't seem to be a problem... I don't understand why…

There's a bigger problem I hope you become aware as you read more here. First, very smart people are not smart about everything. Second, nearly nobody is smart when it comes to understanding the limits of human understanding. We're bad at epistemology and probability and data collection. Primarily rural settlements from thousands of years ago did not keep accurate birth, death, and marriage records of everyone who was ever born. We can reasonably estimate very broad trends over centuries, but for a specific place in a specific year, we can't say with single-digit precision what the probability is that any random person would have been married ever or died at some particular age of some particular cause. Even now, that is very hard in many places and we use range estimates greater than a full percentage point.

That is the more important point here. Too many are arguing over whether a human researcher might have given more accurate estimates than an LLM. They may have made something more obviously internally consistent, but some facts, including a vast many historical facts, are unknowable. Hopefully, a human would say that and provide a disclaimer that these are best estimates meant for entertainment, not as a source of facts, but I don't think that's the most important point. The most important point is that readers should understand that without needing the disclaimer. Go ahead and spot check citations, but even before doing that, you need to know that no primary source knows the exact percentage of women born in 715 in the Yangtze Basin who ever married or their average age when they did. If anyone, human or LLM, makes such a claim, you should have a very high prior they're bullshitting you and demand to see how they know.

I recall trying to do simple geneaology research and my dad's side of the family drying up very quickly. Mexico didn't even have a census until 1895. The only records before that are church records, most of which didn't survive until the present day, and most of those were never digitized and aren't searchable.

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