The ones that do stopped being taxi drivers.
I was going to make the same wisecrack, but in seriousness I assume they're counting elderly retired taxi drivers as taxi drivers even if they stopped working years before their deaths.
Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
101–110 of 305 posts
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#102Taxi Drivers: The mean age at death is approximately 67.8 years. General Population: in the same dataset, life expectancy averaged 74 years. The average age at which patients are typically diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease is 79. People in these jobs don't live long enough on average to get diagnosed, at the same rate. The same effect will happen in any job that lowers your life expectancy.
They are likely studying individuals that retired without getting fatally stabbed or shot on the job.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that not even a double digit percentage of taxi drivers' careers are ended due to violent attacks. Taxi driver doesn't even appear in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics top 20 most dangerous jobs.
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#103before or after massive use of navigation apps?
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#104> London cabbies must memorize more than 25,000 streets within a 6-mile radius of Charing Cross, a challenge known as “The Knowledge” that takes three to four years. What the hell. I passed all the test for driving cabs in Stockholm, Sweden. I had to memorize 20 regions in the city. I wonder if this requirement applies to all taxi drivers, including Uber.
It seems common for taxi drivers to form a government-sanctioned cartel in order to limit the amount of competition. In the US this traditionally took the form of local taxi medallion systems, where there was a hard quota on how many taxis could be in the city. London's barrier to entry, unlike ours, at least guarantees a level of competence, even if it's excessive.
At least in the US, Uber and Lyft basically went around the taxi cartels. I'd assume that it wasn't easy for that to happen in Sweden though.
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
As the paper points out that's accounted for in the analysis, because shockingly enough to most internet commentators researchers know that they need to control for confounding variables https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-082194
Always insane to me how people will just read the headline of an article and point out "flaws" based on what they assume the article says
You actually read the link ?
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#106Taxi Drivers: The mean age at death is approximately 67.8 years. General Population: in the same dataset, life expectancy averaged 74 years. The average age at which patients are typically diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease is 79. People in these jobs don't live long enough on average to get diagnosed, at the same rate. The same effect will happen in any job that lowers your life expectancy.
That's very interesting but why do taxi drivers have a job that lowers life expectancy? Is it because they're sitting too much? Or because they're inhaling CO from cars too much? Or staying inside (the car) too much? Or is it just stressful? For from the look of it it doesn't look like an exceptionally hard job (btw a brother of mine did years of "VTC": "Vehicule de Tourisme avec Chauffeur" , basically high-end taxis…
It’s a very sedentary job, pretty much by definition.
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#107Taxi Drivers: The mean age at death is approximately 67.8 years. General Population: in the same dataset, life expectancy averaged 74 years. The average age at which patients are typically diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease is 79. People in these jobs don't live long enough on average to get diagnosed, at the same rate. The same effect will happen in any job that lowers your life expectancy.
Ah, the typical cheap HN reaction to a paper, along with "correlation is not causation", and as usual, for things already factored in into it.
Hilarious, because accounting for this stuff is drilled into your head when you study the softer sciences (like psychology) even as an undergrad.
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could imagine taxi drivers have fewer fatal/grave road accidents than the average person or at most slightly more. They tend to drive in cities, are more trained, can't drink or do drugs on the job. For London only 1 taxi driver has died in a traffic accident since 2020.
If you drive more you are more likely to be in an accident, that's just how roads and accidents work. Sure they might be better and per unit of time they drive they must have miniscule amount of accidents. But if there's a 0.001% chance per hour driven, then over enough hours a few accidents are inevitable.
They don't just add more hours of driving they replace a small amount of risky hours for a lot of hours of low risk if they change location/job.
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#109> London cabbies must memorize more than 25,000 streets within a 6-mile radius of Charing Cross, a challenge known as “The Knowledge” that takes three to four years. What the hell. I passed all the test for driving cabs in Stockholm, Sweden. I had to memorize 20 regions in the city. I wonder if this requirement applies to all taxi drivers, including Uber.
No, it’s a licensed black cab thing. London has had mini cabs as well for many decades who didn’t need to study anything and were not even licensed till about 20 years ago. However, their downside is they have to be prebooked and can not be hailed on the street. Apps count as booking and not hailing I guess.
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#110One of the first things to go with Alzheimer's is spacial mapping in the brain so this makes sense. Your exercising daily a part of the brain that is involved.
In addition there's the social component of driving - you may not always want to talk to a Taxi driver but many people do. And ambulance drivers are often socializing with their colleagues
Driving also has a mix of reaction time based skills and hand eye and hand foot coordination. Overall it's pretty complicated.
Writing this I'm realising the final "Turing" test for AI might actually be just replacing the average Taxi driver. Can it drive a car, choose a route dynamically based on day and traffic and weather, and have a conversation with a wide variety of people and topics all at the same time ?