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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

#121

Post by senordevnyc »

rc5150 wrote: post #70
Perz1val wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many random parasites has modern medicine removed from you? Likely you never even had one. It's not just medicine, we also have abundant, safe food, clean water and warm housing

>we also have abundant, safe food, clean water and warm housing for now

Yes! I think it’s really easy for us to take for granted the long list of incredible things we take for granted. Every time I hear someone lament how horrible the world is today, I wonder when they’d rather have been born. Especially as a random human like this.

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

#124

Post by aand16 »

throwawayk7h wrote: post #107
yummypaint wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The x-axis being log scale by default visually exadurates the effect if you are thinking about it in terms of area under the curve. This confused me also.

They should have scaled the probability curve by the derivative of log(time).

Why?

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

#125

Post by logicallee »

yummypaint wrote: post #69
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.

The x-axis being log scale by default visually exadurates the effect if you are thinking about it in terms of area under the curve. This confused me also.

>exadurates

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

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

#126

Post by BubbleRings »

bentt wrote: post #68
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, there was a time when the internet was mostly interesting side projects, if you go back far enough (the mid 1990s, say).

It’s true. It feels like that age may be revisiting us. Makes me happy to see stuff like this which isn’t upselling something.

Yes indeed. What do we know about how this was created and how long it took? Before I look into it, I’m going to guess:

One experienced developer with extensive anthropology experience, probably a PhD, working with Claude Code and Claude Cowork, full time over a two month period. Or somebody with limited dev experience over four months.

Anyway, sad that all the first comments were complaints… what a wonderful project!

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

#127

Post by gradus_ad »

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.

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...

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

#128

Post by saalweachter »

wat10000 wrote: post #76
riazrizvi wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay step away from the waving hands and read the source material.

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 decade.)

The distribution of human lives versus years lived by humans will skew earlier, because infant mortality was absurd for the first two tranches, with something like 50% of people dying before the age of five, so it will be more like 40-40-20 over those time periods.

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

#129

Post by troyvit »

satvikpendem wrote: post #115
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.

That's sort of boring though, we generally know what it's like to live near the modern day already.

I think it'd be cool to compare a modern day life in rural Ethiopia to what I'm used to.

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

#130

Post by elteto »

thoman23 wrote: post #56
xiaoyu2006 wrote: post #38

I 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.

This will mostly self-correct. Nature really doesn’t give a fuck about ideology.

Just vaccinate yourself and your kids and listen to the advice of real doctors.

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