gwern comments on New Year's Prediction Thread (2012) - Less Wrong

20 Post author: gwern 01 January 2012 09:35AM

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Comment author: gwern 31 December 2011 10:58:07PM 5 points [-]

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).