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NancyLebovitz comments on New Year's Prediction Thread (2012) - Less Wrong
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gwern, a nitpick on "So I applied this heuristic: what does the existence of an 130 year-old in 2025 imply about people in 2011? Well, if someone is 130 in 2025, then that implies that are now 116 years old (130-(2025-2011)). Then I looked up the oldest person in the world: Besse Cooper, aged 115 years old."
It's quite plausible that records will turn up within the next 13 years to show that someone is 116 years old now.
Is it? Could you name some previous instances where records turned up in the past few decades for a supercentenarian where the new claim was accepted and didn't look like a scam?
Fair enough. I haven't heard of any cases-- I was just going on a hypothesis that records tend to be incomplete, and more so further back.On the other hand, incomplete records means that proof that a record is solidly attached to a person is also hard to come by.
And further, the older you are, the more likely you are to be noted for being old. There are multiple studies and institutions dedicated to studying centenarians, and the more time passes, the less likely they will to have missed a genuine candidate. So at this point, you should expect that anyone claiming to be 116 to be fraudulent, or unverifiable at best (especially given the well-known tendency of humans to make up their age or lose a year - one interesting bit in Farewell to Alms was a short discussion of how historians estimate literacy in the deep past by statistically checking how many cemeteries or other memorials claim someone died at a suspiciously round age, and the more statistical irregularity, the less literacy and good record-keeping).