gwern comments on Effects of Castration on the Life Expectancy of Contemporary Men - Less Wrong

15 Post author: Fluttershy 08 August 2015 04:37AM

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Comment author: gwern 23 August 2015 05:36:28PM *  2 points [-]

If there were such a mortality bias where the procedure kills the weaker, then unless native Egyptian surgical skills in the late 1800s are much better than Chinese surgical skills, I would again expect that to produce excess longevity in Egyptian eunuchs and not the Chinese/Korean eunuchs (which is the opposite of what we seem to observe).

Comment author: Lumifer 24 August 2015 02:43:53AM *  0 points [-]

That was a general point about eunuch longevity studies, not specifically about the Egyptian ones. I expect the techniques in Egypt and China to have beeen similar.