[HN Gopher] Supercentenarian records show patterns indicative of... ___________________________________________________________________ Supercentenarian records show patterns indicative of errors and pension fraud Author : bookofjoe Score : 322 points Date : 2023-04-04 16:16 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.biorxiv.org) (TXT) w3m dump (www.biorxiv.org) | [deleted] | steveBK123 wrote: | Some stuff is less damning than it sounds for example - | "supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on the first of the | month and days divisible by five" | | One of my parents comes from a poor rural area of Europe where | well into the 60s, it was normal to have a "real" birthdate & an | "official" birthdate. This was because the government only issued | birth certificates in the nearby city, and being poor & rural, it | took time to get there by bus, etc. | | So I have aunts & uncles with real-official birthdate deltas of | up to 2 weeks. | | I'd imagine that going back to 1900s or 1880s, when travel was | more difficult, who knows. Further, it is possible that the | office in some of these areas for registering births was only | open certain days of month/week, the further back you go, etc. | | Maybe they only went into the city on market days when they had | other business, on the first Monday of the following month. | | Don't discount superstition and people registering births on | nearest special days like saints days, etc. | | Some of these abnormalities get lost to time. Many of my family | didn't realize they had a real-official birthdate gap until 30+ | years later when their mother told them. | elevaet wrote: | Another thing that happens is being born in a place that does | birthdays on a lunar calendar, and then immigrating to a place | that uses gregorian/solar, and needing to come up with a | birthday in the new system. | chaostheory wrote: | Official and real birthdays is a thing in Asia too. Many | boomers base their birthdays on Asian calendars instead of the | Gregorian one. Another issue is related to buying immigration | related identification. | 01100011 wrote: | Wife's grandma recently died in her mid 90s. No one in the | family actually knew how old she was. In many developing | nations, such recordkeeping was often oral and unreliable. | raldi wrote: | The key question is, are living people born in 1923 more or | less likely to be born on the first of the month than dead | people born in 1923? | whyenot wrote: | What do you think that will tell you? For example it seems to | me that people born in more rural area a century ago are both | less likely to have accurate birth records, and less likely | to have good access to health care. There are probably many | other covariates that would need to be controlled for. | darth_avocado wrote: | My dad is 4 years younger than his age on paper. He had no | birth certificate when he was born and when he was finally | being put in school, being home schooled so far, was able to | answer questions like a 3rd grader. So the school decided to | put him in 4th grade and just made up his birth year (dad's | family knew the date but that would make him ineligible for 4th | grade). | jefftk wrote: | The school couldn't tell from looking at him that he was | closer to Kindergarten-aged (5) than 4th grade (9) !? | [deleted] | darth_avocado wrote: | The school didn't care. They didn't want him to repeat | grades if he already knew everything. They were focussed on | his development than arbitrary restrictions around age. | SoftTalker wrote: | OK, but physical development is important too. Middle | school would be rough as a 9/10 year old. He was 14 | graduating from high school? | ptero wrote: | The "elementary/middle/high school" distinction might | have been virtual. My grandfather told me that most rural | school in his time, including the one he went to, had | several grades in a single room. Occasionally a single | room for all students. | | For "elementary" grades it would be primarily by function | (can read? can write? can count?) rather than age. And it | would not be uncommon to have an old kid from a poor | family sit with little kids at the "cannot read" table. | | In this setup jumping a grade could be as simple as | sitting at the next table. Can read -- go there. Can | count -- one more step. Physical development came from | carrying water, herding cattle, bringing and splitting | firewood, etc. outside of school. | kortilla wrote: | What would happen if he committed a crime at the paper age of | 19 and he was actually only 15? Would they retroactively | update the birth record? | schiffern wrote: | >My dad is 4 years younger than his age on paper | | What a coincidence, me too!! | | Going forward, this is now my official excuse... | steveBK123 wrote: | While not as extreme, many of the real-official birthdays | straddle month end / month starts. | | In one case it kicked someones birthdate to a new calendar | year and his pension kicks in a year later as a result. | | They always joke the donkey was slow and cost him an extra | year of work. | [deleted] | adamc wrote: | My parents both started college in 1939 at the age of 16. | Being promoted to grades beyond your age cohort was | apparently not so uncommon then. | steveBK123 wrote: | Yup, you read all sorts of stuff about kids graduating | college at 18, etc. I'd imagine the further back you go, | the higher the variance between best/worst education level | in a given age cohort.. so school officials would just | promote kids up a few grades if they were too smart. | adamc wrote: | Had a friend in grad school who was 15 when he entered... | had his doctorate by 21. | hgsgm wrote: | How many years did he spend in college? Seems like he | rushed for no reason and then slowed down. | vkou wrote: | Rushing through the middle-to-high-school curriculum is | easy. Very, very little novel information actually gets | taught over the ~200 hours that make up a school course. | | Rushing through undergrad is possible if you do nothing | but grind homework and study and read. | | Grad school _requires_ you to spend hours and hours in a | lab, ass-in-seat, doing research. You 're no longer | competing with beer pong champions. Unless you're an | absolute genius at finding the right direction to solving | a novel problem, you're not going to get dramatically | better results than your peers. And even if you are, you | might be unlucky, and end up wasting a lot of time going | down the wrong rabbit-hole. | lumost wrote: | Utility of being fast drops off in grad school. You can | be a course master - but then you have to work. Working | also means convincing others who are often going to look | at a 15 year old skeptically. | dan-robertson wrote: | I think there was also more variety in the structure of | the school system. Eg maybe most people leave school at | 14 and university starts at 16/17. | eurasiantiger wrote: | They also had the authority to do so with little to no | oversight. | dsfyu404ed wrote: | When I entered college (this century) they had all the | freshman in my orientation group sitting in a lecture | hall and the lady doing the "how not to die partying and | related stuff" lecture asked if anyone in the ~100 person | lecture hall was under 16. One person raised their hand. | aftbit wrote: | I went to high school with a girl who graduated at age 15 | or 16. She was only a few months older than me, but was in | senior year when I was a freshman. She also graduated | college by 19 IIRC. I graduated high school in 2009 so this | is not just some pre-WWII phenomenon. | colonwqbang wrote: | Interesting, but this should be easy to control for in a | statistical study. E.g. suppose 20% of people generally have | strange looking official birth dates, but 50% of | supercentenarians do. | rovolo wrote: | This isn't a good control if the record accuracy depends on | the age of person. | | Imagine if you're trying to find medical fraud and you find | out that a lot of supercentenarians have cancer. You try to | control by comparing them to the average, and | supercentenarians have higher rates of cancer than normal. Is | that fraud, or does age lead to higher cancer rates? | nomel wrote: | > and being poor & rural, it took time to get there by bus, etc | | My naive assumption is that they might be concentrated around | Friday, or Saturday, or some other more "convenient" day. | goodcanadian wrote: | I had a great aunt (died before I was born) who believed her | birthday was two months later than it actually was. The date | that everyone believed to be her birthday was exactly 9 months | after her parents wedding (her real birthday only seven months | after). | | I had another great aunt (who I did know) whose drivers license | said she was ten years younger than she actually was. They just | took you at your word without verifying when she got it. | forinti wrote: | That's true. I know some old timers who were born in one place | but registered later somewhere else. | | This issue was even more pronounced in South America because of | the distances. | eviks wrote: | Did they not allow reported dates in the certificate in the | part of the world? Theoretically you could have issued the | certificate in April recording the correct date of birth in | January | jrumbut wrote: | People weren't as concerned with record keeping back then, | these things were just gonna grow mold and feed mice in a | drawer somewhere unless someone was trying to annul a | marriage (for consanguinity) or argue over an inheritance. | | Then the modern administrative state sprang up very fast and | the generation born in the late 19th or early 20th century | was caught in the middle. | steveBK123 wrote: | And in many areas of Europe the official papers for birth, | death and marriage were held by churches for a long time | before being taken over by the state. | | On the other side of my family, a family member made a | records request re: ancestor born say around 1880 and the | official government response was that the papers had been | at a church long burned down and paperwork lost. | steveBK123 wrote: | No, it was government bureaucracy that was serious enough to | only issue papers for the date on which you appeared.. | | but not serious enough to have staff distributed across the | rural areas to actually be accessible to people outside the | big cities.. | | It's easy to mandate things that are easily enforceable | (date=today only legal birth cert). Doesn't mean its a useful | mandate. | docandrew wrote: | This could be ruled out as the explanation by looking at | deceased records as well - if people who died around the age of | 30 in the 1950s, 40 in the 1960s etc. also all had curiously | "round" birthdays then we could chalk up the fraud to poor | recordkeeping instead. I'd be kind of surprised if such a | coincidence hadn't been previously noted though, surrounding | discussion of the "birthday paradox" for instance. | e40 wrote: | My grandma, born circa 1900, had a birthday of Feb 14. She | _loved_ Valentines Day. The cakes she would make for that day, | and other goodies... so good. My mom and I are sure she chose | that day. Her parents both died when she was 8-10. Consumption. | gifnamething wrote: | You're just arguing in favour of birth dates being unreliable. | neaden wrote: | To +- a few weeks, not years. | detrites wrote: | There are other traditions in some parts of Europe, such as | assigning a newborns birthday as that of a child previously | deceased. (Obviously possibly years away.) So, there may be | additional explanations given we already have several here. | FeteCommuniste wrote: | Unreliability on the scale of weeks would be rather less | significant than years or decades. | gifnamething wrote: | Only if you're planning on telling the truth | nomel wrote: | You're making the odd assumption that the clerk at the | counter was able to, or cared enough, to backdate the | birth certificate, and that there was an intentional lie, | from the parents. This suggests an extreme naivety of the | role/important of birth dates, 90 years ago. | steveBK123 wrote: | yes, thats exactly what I am arguing. that is - pointing out | weird numeric improbabilities in birth dates is not damning | in terms of strictly indicating pension fraud. they are | unreliable as recently as 60 years ago, and certainly were | even more unreliable 100+ years ago. | vintermann wrote: | But what's the scale of this problem? If only 1 in 100 have | curiously round birthdates, that's not a problem. If 1 out | of 2 have curiously round birthdates, it will still be | suspicious if 100% of supercentenarians had it. | | I don't quite understand why it would be a problem for | birth certificates. Surely the date of birth noted on them | doesn't have to be the date they're first printed? | steveBK123 wrote: | The point of my story was that, yes, in this poor | European country as recently as 1960.. people were | regularly registering children weeks late, and the | government would only issue birth cert where date=today. | Which is why all of my aunts & uncles have a real & | official birthdate which don't match. | | This was happening in a place & time where there were | telephones & buses. It was simply inconvenient to get to | the city immediately, so people went when they had the | next opportunity, and presented opportunity to "choose a | birthdate" by when they appeared. | | This is only 1 particular example in 1 place of weirdness | of official birth dates. | | Imagine areas of the world a little further back when | travel would have been by foot or horse. Given that this | was happening even in a somewhat developed place & time, | all sorts of stuff could be happening elsewhere for | random, benign, non-pension-fraud related reasons. | tsimionescu wrote: | > I don't quite understand why it would be a problem for | birth certificates. Surely the date of birth noted on | them doesn't have to be the date they're first printed? | | I don't think people cared (or care even today) what is | the date written on the birth certificate. And if the | state really cares, they won't accept some date they're | being told: using the current date is safer. | int_19h wrote: | This could describe why birthdays are concentrated on a | particular day of the _week_ , but what place would have market | days or something similar running on a cadence that | consistently falls on _days of month_ divisible by 5? | Tade0 wrote: | My maternal grandparents are in their mid 90s, my paternal | grandfather passed away a week before her 97th birthday. | | _A lot_ can happen within a century and there 's usually hardly | anyone alive to confirm some facts. My paternal grandmother's | birth certificate was gone before the end of WW2 and when asked | she would give an age six years younger - initially it was to | prevent a scandal because not only was my grandfather of lower | status (Pah! "Just" a doctor! Scandalous, I daresay!), he was | younger. | | As for my maternal grandparents their age is confirmed by their | marriage certificate(would be harder to obtain one with this date | as a younger person), children in their late 60s and living | siblings of my grandpa, of whom there are seven. | sseagull wrote: | Family history is funny like that. I have a few (usually | female) ancestors who, according to censuses, just don't age at | quite the same rate as other people :) | | I find it kinda charming. Gives some insight into who they are, | and that fear of aging is a pretty universal feeling. | tasty_freeze wrote: | My grandmother was born in 1899 in Ireland, and moved to the | USA in 1920. In the early 1980s, she came clean: "I don't want | to spend eternity with a lie on my gravestone. I was born in | 1894." | Tade0 wrote: | I only learned the truth right after she passed away and my | father was free to discuss this - the year was 1911, not 1917 | - clouded by two wars' worth of lost records. | Y_Y wrote: | It's not so bad, a headstone engraving will usually be gone | after a couple of hundred years. | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | I know some experts have poo-poo'ed the theory that Jeanne | Calment's daughter impersonated her ( | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Scepticism_rega... | ), but I don't find their arguments convincing. I'm not saying | it's settled, but I think the evidence strongly points to her not | being as old as she says, and I think the "experts" downplay the | evidence for the switch theory too strongly, even if it is | largely circumstantial: | | 1. The age gap between Calment and the next oldest person is the | strongest evidence. It's very, very hard to ignore this. | | 2. As outlined in this article, there is a strong economic motive | for the swap. | | 3. I think there is other evidence (e.g. some of the photos) that | wouldn't be that strong on their own, but just add to the weight | of the other, stronger pieces of evidences that there was a swap. | paulpauper wrote: | _1. The age gap between Calment and the next oldest person is | the strongest evidence. It 's very, very hard to ignore this._ | | The age gap is is just a few years. not inconceivable at all. | [deleted] | neaden wrote: | I was initially prone to believeing this, but the more I looked | into it the more I realized how little sense it would make. | | For your points: 1. This was the thing that initially made me | skeptical, but it's just not enough to say. Sure living 3 years | more then anyone else is pretty unlikely, but at the same time | it's not proof. 2. The swap would have had to happen so early, | when Yvonne was just 34 years old she would have had to | impersonate her mother, pretend to be married to her father, | and fool everyone in the small town she lived in. That is just | not a credible thing. And the alleged payoff to avoid taxes | doesn't seem big enough to be worth the immense effort that | this swap would have had to go through. 3. Photos are fairly | worthless for these sorts of things. Different angles, | lighting, camera techniques all can make people look very | different. | | At the end of the day I find the alleged swap to be less | believable then someone just living a long time | neaden wrote: | I'm replying to myself to lay out the timeline of Yvonne's | death, since that is when people claim this switch happened. | So first Yvonne's husband Joseph requested leave from the | military and was granted it because his wife was sick, we | have the record of that from the military. There is a picture | of Yvonne at a sanitarium for TB patients around this time | period, further establishing she had TB and was ill. Then the | priest administered last rights and Yvonne died. There was a | funeral mass that many people attended and a viewing of the | body at the family home. This is in newspapers from the time. | There are no accounts of Jeanne being ill in this time | period. | | So for this switch to have happened we would have had to have | the daughter sick, then the mother secretly gets sick just in | time for the daughter to recover. The mother dies and they | come up with this plan to dodge taxes, even though presumably | it would be risky and Joseph could lose his position as an | officer in the army if they are caught. They get the town's | doctor, priest, and newspapers to go along with the fraud. | All of this to avoid a tax of about 6% of Jeanne's wealth, a | considerable sum but do you really think it would be worth | all the risk? At the end of the day, because of her status as | the world's longest living person Jeeanne's life has been | studied mroe then any other supercenturginarian, and no one | has ever found proof that anything happened. We have census | records from multiple decades, marriage and childbirth | records with the government and church, and multiple mentions | in newspapers. | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | > and fool everyone in the small town she lived in. | | As others have pointed out, I think that is absolutely the | wrong way to think about this. Yvonne Calment (or Jeanne) | died in 1934. It's quite possible/likely that originally they | were only trying to deceive the tax authorities. I also | wouldn't discount how the chaos, upheaval and destruction of | WWII (Arles was bombed heavily) would have made it easier for | Yvonne to more "publicly" impersonate Jeanne in later years. | BobbyJo wrote: | When you impersonate someone, you don't have to fool | everyone, you only have to fool your mark. No one else is | likely to know or care what you're doing. | neaden wrote: | You think in a small town if someone's mom died and they | started pretending to be her and pretending their dad is | their husband people wouldn't think that was weird and talk | about it? | rosywoozlechan wrote: | Purely speculating for entertainment, but the switch | could have started it for the reason of obtaining | benefits, and not a thing shared with others, by the time | she got to be old enough to be famous for it, had been | going on for so long nobody cared or was alive at the | time to remember maybe? | neaden wrote: | We have records of the daughters funeral in the towns | newspapers. It was well attended and there was a viewing | of the body afterward. Many people would have had to have | been fooled/in on it from the very beginning. | jrumbut wrote: | No, but they might think it was pension fraud and be | unwilling to report their neighbors (even posthumously). | | That seems unlikely, but we only have the one case of | someone living that old vs many cases of unreported | pension fraud so if we're assigning a prior to both I | would say it's reasonable to assign a probability of | pension fraud to be at least as high as the probability | of her being truly that age. | neaden wrote: | First off the allegation isn't pension fraud, it's | inheritance tax dodging. Or sometimes it's claims about | tuberculosis that don't make sense. Secondly as I have | said the whole swap thing has been investigated by | multiple people, all who came to the conclusion that no | swap took place. Furthermore since the people saying it | was a swap are the ones making a claim and have literally | 0 evidence, at a certain point you just have to accept | that a woman lived slightly longer then anyone else. | cissou wrote: | At first you just "pretend" to the taxman. You only start | pretending publicly when all the people who could | confound you are dead. | neaden wrote: | But many people who were younger then her remember her | during that time period that you say she was only | pretending for the taxman. All of these claims are coming | from people who live in another country and never did any | investigatory field work in the area. Everyone who | actually did the interviews and on the ground | investigation came to the conclusion that there was no | swap, and that the alleged swap wouldn't have made any | sense. | btilly wrote: | It is worthy of note that until she was in a nursing | home, at a claimed age of 110, "Jeanne Calment" avoided | any publicity about her claimed age. For example she | refused the local mayor's congratulations when she | "turned 100" - instead newspapers wound up running a | story about someone turning 95. | | She literally waited nearly 50 years after the claimed | switch, after she was in a new environment, with new | people, without the people who would have most easily | challenged it, to publicize her claim. This is _exactly_ | what we would expect from someone who was trying to hide | a fraud. | | Search for "Publicity (lack of)" in | https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/rej.2018.2167 for | more details on that. | codemac wrote: | Small towns have a more closed circle form of gossip | jobigoud wrote: | > Sure living 3 years more then anyone else is pretty | unlikely, but at the same time it's not proof. | | The previous record at that point was 116 years, that's a 6 | year gap. If you look at the distribution now it follows a | fairly nice curve, except for that one far outlier. | | > fool everyone in the small town she lived in | | If I recall correctly they were living in a remote location | and didn't meet with a lot of people. | neaden wrote: | It is an outlier, but as someone who works with data I can | assure you that outliers happen all the time. That is just | life. | | They lived in an apartment above their business, a drapery | store, so in the center of town pretty much. They also had | servants who would have had to be in on the switch. | goodcanadian wrote: | Also, even if you take the position that the age gap is so | statistically unlikely as to be impossible[1], it tells you | nothing about where the error is. It does not imply a swap. A | swap is one possibility, but extraordinary claims require | extraordinary evidence, and I don't see any credible evidence | of a swap having occurred. Isn't it more likely that her age | is simply wrong by a few years? | | [1]Really, in statistics, extraordinarily unlikely is not the | same thing as impossible. | deanCommie wrote: | All the discussion makes it seem like the difference would be | of 20 years or something. | | But she died at 122. There are 63 people who lived at least | 115. I would say if it's reliable that humans can live up to | 115, it's not a huge difference to my mental model on longevity | if they CAN'T (yet) live to 120. | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | Look at the list of longest living women: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe. | .. | | If you look at, say, the top twenty, the gap between each | woman tends to be on the order of weeks to a few months. The | gap between Calment and the runner up is over _3 years_. | Statistically, this is a giant chasm for continuous data like | this. | joshuahedlund wrote: | Reminds me of Usain Bolt's 100m dash records, when he would | shave a tenth of a second off a record crowded with | incremental millisecond differences.[0] | | [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_metres#All- | time_top_25_men | oh_sigh wrote: | The reality is even more amazing than the graph lets on, | because Usain has never failed a drug test, whereas the 4 | people directly to his left have, and the 5th person | suspiciously missed enough drug tests to be temporarily | banned. It's only when you get to Bromell and Kerley | whose times are at the very top of the chart that you see | times that come from clean runners. | kevinmchugh wrote: | I'm reminded of the long jump record: | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_long_jump_world_r | eco... | | There's only one in-competition jump better than Bob | Beamon's in the last 55 years | dmurray wrote: | Of the 25 who made it to 116, 10 made it to 117. | | Of the 10 who made it to 117, 4 made it to 118 and 3 of | those made out to 119. | | So the data are roughly consistent with a 40% chance of | living another year at the age. That compounds to a 6% | chance of living 3 more years. Two of the 119-year-olds | dying within a year and one of them living 3 years is | completely consistent with this model. | deanCommie wrote: | Sure, I understand, I'm just saying the story of "Calment | is a fraud" and "All Supercentenarians are frauds" is just | a very different story. | jquery wrote: | Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The | extraordinary evidence simply isn't there, there's too much fog | in which _some thing_ could have happened where the daughter | assumed the identity of her mother, for whatever reason. It | could 've been taxes, could've been something temporary that | turned into something permanent. Hell, maybe she was a bored | housewife and thought that cosplaying as a grandma would be | fun. I'm sure she had a grand old time as a "90 year old" that | was able to act like a spritely 60 year old. | | I simply don't believe she was the oldest, although I do | acknowledge there is a very slim possibility of it being true. | | This is a scenario where science fails us, I think. Social | scientists have "proved" she was the oldest with "99% | accuracy". But Bayesian statistics would pose the question, "if | the odds of being the world's oldest person are 1 in 5 billion, | and you took a test that was 99% accurate that confirmed you | were the oldest, what are the odds of you being the oldest if | the test is positive?" It turns out the odds of you being the | oldest person are still astronomically unlikely... you have | better odds of winning the PowerBall than of being the world's | oldest person. | neaden wrote: | The extraordinary claim here is that a 34 year old woman | would impersonate her mother for decades, including living | with her father, and no one would ever notice or say | anything. Your perspective is like arresting anyone who wins | the lotto for fraud, because it's more likely that they would | cheat then just happen to guess the right numbers. | kevinmchugh wrote: | > including living with her father, | | Mother and daughter lived side by side in the same building | with their husbands. After the daughter passed and the | grandson married he took that apartment, so Jeanne and her | son-in-law cohabitated. Whichever explanation you choose | you have to say that they were a close family who really | liked their apartments. | pcrh wrote: | Your Bayesian estimations make no sense. When the alternative | is that it is the daughter who survived to 98 (which is | already old) rather than the mother surviving to 122, the | question should be phrased as "if you are older than 98 what | is the probability that your age is 122". | ars wrote: | I know that lots of people would discount this, but it's | interesting to note that Jewish tradition holds that the | maximum lifespan for a person is 120 years. | | And Calment is the only person that might have exceeded this. | To me that's another bit of evidence toward the impersonation | theory. | masklinn wrote: | > 2. As outlined in this article, there is a strong economic | motive for the swap. | | Which one? We're not talking about Sogen Kato here, we're | talking about Jeanne Calment. | | Calment's daughter is supposed to have died in 1934, did the | swap happen then? But there was no economic motive _at all_ , | the Calment family was part of the city's wealthy upper class | and french social security was only introduced in 1945. | | So what else, did the Calment's daughter fake her death somehow | (despite her father, mother, husband, and son remaining public | figures), then take over after the primary financial coup, the | sale of the apartment to the notary in 19 _65_ , after what | would have been the death of her husband and son both? | | Not to mention the notary's _strong_ incentive to uncover such | a fraud: the flat was purchased in annuities, he ultimately | paid twice the value of the flat (and waited 20 years before | being able to use it, when Calment finally moved to a | retirement home). | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | No, the economic incentive was not pensions, it was avoidance | of death duties. It is precisely because Calment's family was | wealthier that this motive is stronger: | | https://yurideigin.medium.com/jaccuse-why-122-year- | longevity... | anonymouskimmer wrote: | Could a 59 year old's body be substituted for a 36 year | old's body? If not, what did they do with the supposed | daughter's body? | crote wrote: | Sure, why not. It's not like you are trying to swap a | 70-year-old with a teenager. If the family ages | gracefully, it is definitely possible. | tyingq wrote: | Avoiding inheritance taxes, or distribution of a will that | might not have favored the daughter? | masklinn wrote: | There was only a daughter. | tyingq wrote: | You can will things to anyone, any entity. | neaden wrote: | I don't believe that is true in France, or at least not | back then there were laws about minimum inheritances. | siera wrote: | Not in France. French civil law on inheritance is much | more strict than common law. For example, you cannot | disinherit your children. | tyingq wrote: | Interesting. Can you partially disinherit them, but | donating some large sum to a charity in the will, for | example? | vidarh wrote: | Depending on the number of children, at least half the | estate will go to them, rising to up to 3/4 for more | children. | mlcrypto wrote: | At this point I'm willing to believe any theory that the | "experts" are scrambling to to hide | GalenErso wrote: | > 1. The age gap between Calment and the next oldest person is | the strongest evidence. It's very, very hard to ignore this. | | That doesn't mean her record isn't legit. Michael Phelps won 23 | Olympic gold medals. The most decorated Olympian after him won | 9. | | There can be a big gap between the top performer and the second | best performer. I'm sure a professional statistician would like | to chime in. | roflyear wrote: | There's lots of people alive not an incredible amount | shooting for swimming world records. | ianferrel wrote: | "Number of Olympic medals" is a very poor analogous concept | here, because it's not a directly measurable and variable | trait, it's a complex tail-end derivative of several factors. | | If you looked at "swimming speed", for example, which is the | simple directly measurable thing, you would find that while | Phelps is faster than other swimmers, , he is only a tiny bit | faster than the next fastest swimmer, not 2.5 times faster | than the next fastest swimmer. | saalweachter wrote: | It depends on whether "living longer" is a continuous | trait, I suppose. | | I could imagine there being 20 or 30 genetic factors that | affect your longevity, like whether you are susceptible to | lung cancer from smoking. | | Having a particular trait is a binary, which introduces the | possibility for steps in the distribution; each slice of | the population with a particular number of longevity | factors has a certain distribution of actual lifespans that | add together to form the observed life span, but the | distribution of how many people have each distribution | could decrease sharply; perhaps millions of people have 24 | factors and produce centenarians, thousands have 25 factors | and produce 110+, and dozens have 26 factors and produce | 120+. | | Such a model is entirely made up, pulled from my ass, but | it is also quite compatible with our discrete genetics, and | would be perfectly compatible with large gaps at the end of | the distribution. | masklinn wrote: | > "Number of Olympic medals" is a very poor analogous | concept here, because it's not a directly measurable and | variable trait, it's a complex tail-end derivative of | several factors. | | As if extreme longevity is not a complex tail-end | derivative of several factors? | grandinj wrote: | One is rank data, the other a continuous variable. Two | very different sub-fields of statistics apply to the two | kinds of data. | ianferrel wrote: | Well, so is swimming speed. I may not have the | statistical terminology correct, but the difference is | that "age" and "swimming speed" are directly measurable | continuous aspects of reality, while "# of olympic medals | is some kind of discretized derivative of others. | | Imagine that instead of measuring "age" we measured | "number of days person was the oldest person in the | world". You'd get wildly divergent results for the latter | that would be more like the olympic medal count. | | Or if we determined how wet or dry a climate was not by | measuring "annual rainfall" but, like "number of minutes | per year in which more rain was falling here than other | places". | chongli wrote: | Yeah, plus swimming is anomalous in and of itself due to | the large number of very similar events. | | I'm sure we'd see sprinters like Usain Bolt win a lot more | medals if there were events like "100m in sandals, 100m on | grass, 100m barefoot" to go along with the usual 100m race. | joshuahedlund wrote: | A better analogy would be Usain Bolt's 0.11 gap in the 100m | world dash record[0] | | [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_metres#All- | time_top_25_men | ihaveajob wrote: | The size of the data sample is massively different. Only a | few thousand people have earned any Olympic medals, so | variance is expected to be higher than in the "years lived" | metric, where we have literally billions of data points. | masklinn wrote: | And Calment did not live twice as long as the runner-up, so | the variance is indeed much lower in the "years lived" | metric. | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | One thing I would highlight, because this is what I've seen | the French experts in this situation do, is look at each | piece of evidence in isolation and say "Ha, this alone | doesn't prove it." | | And, to that point, I agree, it doesn't prove it (and, to | clarify, I don't think the controversy is proven one way or | the other). But I think it's wrong to look at each piece of | evidence by itself - it's the totality of all the evidence | that makes me extremely skeptical of the overall claim. E.g. | if the age gap was the only piece of evidence, it wouldn't | alone lead me to believe there was a swap, but all the | evidence that Novoselov and Zak present together have | convinced me of their theory. | Y_Y wrote: | Taking each word of your comment alone and not in relation | to the other words around it I find that you're talking | complete nonsense! | littlestymaar wrote: | > 1. The age gap between Calment and the next oldest person is | the strongest evidence. It's very, very hard to ignore this. | | This is in fact a very weak evidence, that only appears to be a | strong one because of a common epistemological mistake, let me | explain: | | The odds of such an age difference are extremely small | _according to a certain model_ of how people age, such a model | has proven to be pretty accurate for the majority of the | population, but that says nothing about the outliers. For | biological entities like humans, one only need a single | exceptional mutation or pathology to be a super-human of some | sort, not fitting into the model at all. In fact, the tallest | man in history is also a statistically impossible outlier, yet | there 's no doubt about his existence and actual height, he | just happened to have a rare condition that caused him to grow | up to a disproportionate height. (And if you grabbed a Guinness | book of records, you'll find these kinds of things in almost | every category related to human anatomy or physiology). | | Confusing the models with reality is a very common mistake in | the history of science, often committed by people having a math | background instead of a physics one, but not only. A very | famous example is how French explorer Dumont d'Urville was | ridiculed when he described the rogue waves he witnessed in the | Indian Ocean, because such a wave would be statically | impossible. It turned out that the physical model of waves at | the time was just too simplistic, as rogue waves do in fact | exist (and AFAIK we're still looking for a proper model | explaining the phenomenon entirely). | anonymouskimmer wrote: | The current, known, oldest living dog is almost 1.5 years older | than the second oldest. The current one is also still living, | so could exceed this number. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_living_dogs | | Proportionately this compares quite favorably to Calment, being | about double her spread from the next oldest human. | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | If you think the data for humans is marginal, just imagine | what it is for dogs. I absolutely don't think some "list of | oldest dogs" is in any way exhaustive given that the vast, | vast majority of dogs worldwide don't have accurate records. | wjholden wrote: | Maybe this works like a reversed Poisson distribution? | | In running races, it's not uncommon for the winner to be | minutes ahead of the runner-up, who is only seconds ahead of | the 3rd. After they cross the finish line, several more cross | soon thereafter, and then the bulk of the runners come | streaming in steadily. Eventually, the bulk of the runners | pass the line and we start to see stragglers who were far | behind the group, trickling in one by one slowly. | naniwaduni wrote: | The gaps in the ages of longest-living dogs are quite large, | however: the second-oldest dog is in turn almost two years | older than the third, there's four years between #4 and #7 | (with the exact gaps between #4-#7 unclear, but there should | be at least two gaps of >1 year). This strongly suggests the | gap can be attributed to sparsity of data. | | The gap between Calment and #2 is over 2.5x the next largest | gap in the records (1 year 80 days between #4 and #5). | anonymouskimmer wrote: | > This strongly suggests the gap can be attributed to | sparsity of data. | | Another hypothesis is that life, or genetic luck, tends to | be harder on dogs than humans. Most dogs are dying as | middle aged dogs, not as elderly dogs. | Murfalo wrote: | Conspiracy-theorist goggles on... this is also fraud?! (I | have no evidence, just pointing out the possibility) | anonymouskimmer wrote: | Yeah, I think we've all considered that. Accurate record | keeping for pets is worse than for humans. | bryanrasmussen wrote: | how do you know? I'm pretty sure that record keeping for | dogs in Denmark is more accurate than record keeping for | much of the world's human population, especially when you | consider going back 100+ years for those humans. | | The oldest dog is evidently Portuguese. Not sure what | that country's record keeping for dogs is like. | anonymouskimmer wrote: | Significant numbers of dogs are feral, or of uncertain | age and origin when adopted. | duskwuff wrote: | And it's much easier to pass off one dog for another | similar-looking one. There's substantial reason to | suspect this may have happened with the current record | holder for world's oldest dog ("Bobi"), for example -- | IIRC, some of the photos show some sudden, inexplicable | changes in coat patterning... | bryanrasmussen wrote: | thank you for answering my question of how you know a | condition that you are familiar with from your country | holds sway the world over. | | So anyway, in Denmark this is the standard | https://www.hunderegister.dk/home dogs are tracked pretty | well here. | | A human born 100 years ago would have been born in 1923, | I'm pretty sure the records keeping of dogs in Denmark | since 1993 (when the register was established) is better | than a lot of humans 100 years ago. | | But sure, many of the dogs we had in the U.S nobody knew | what age they really were. I am however unconvinced that | just because nobody knows what ages dogs are in one | region that nobody anywhere knows what ages dogs are. | | There is another factor about the age of dogs that | pertains as well which is that basically the oldest dog | anyone knows is definitely knowable all of someones life, | of multiple people's lives in the same region actually. | | Obviously nobody knows what age a dog is if adopted when | grown but I wouldn't be saying the dog is 23 years old if | I've only known it for 20 years, I would say it is at | least 20 years old because that's how long I've known it. | In this I can't help but feel I'm much like most people. | anonymouskimmer wrote: | > thank you for answering my question of how you know a | condition that you are familiar with from your country | holds sway the world over. | | Individual countries, even ones as populous with humans | as China or India, or as populous with dogs as the US, | don't matter for the total aggregate of record keeping. | The record keeping status of an individual country is | just an anecdote. It's the plural of a super-majority of | the human or dog populations that become data. | | > but I wouldn't be saying the dog is 23 years old if | I've only known it for 20 years | | People are arguing in this thread that this exact | scenario happened as a conspiracy between multiple humans | for Calment. | | It's true that these conspiracies could exist, whether | for humans, or for dogs. Bad record keeping could make it | easier for dogs. Bad record keeping would also make it | easier for a very long lived dog to not be recorded | (though this is much less likely, as dogs over the age of | 20 are something to remark on, and feral dogs generally | don't live nearly that long). | gifnamething wrote: | >experts have poo-poo'ed the theory | | Because the experts are in a joke, pseudo-scientific field in | which the most prominent person is the man who verified her age | with laughably poor methods and has a vested interest in not | being proven wrong. | Workaccount2 wrote: | For me one of the strongest bit against this is that her | daughter would have had to pull the wool over everyone in their | towns eyes, or they would have had to have been in on it too. | kevinmchugh wrote: | The time between the first Calment death and Calment becoming | notable is long enough - over 50 years - that it's plausible | that people who were in on the scam/aware of the assumption | of the mother's identity had already died. Especially since | ww2 happened in the interim | | Raffray is the biggest sticking point in this fwiw - he had | time and incentive to debunk Calment's age, and had some | preexisting relationship with her before they entered their | contract. | naniwaduni wrote: | How easy is it to win a world particular world record by | _such_ a commanding margin past a cluster of runners-up? | Easier than pulling the wool over a town 's worth of people's | eyes? | makemoniesnow wrote: | Don Bradman in Test cricket. His career average was 99.94. | Next best is 61.87, and there are over 17 other guys over | 55.00. | lovemenot wrote: | There are I guess fewer than 10,000 Test cricketers. It's | a low n compared to the entire human population. | | Furthermore, the population of cricketers is not sampled | randomly, but by selectors | sebzim4500 wrote: | Usain Bolt and Magnus Carlsen have both better than #2 by | more than the gap between #2 and #10. Of course, there are | allegations that Bolt may not be competing fairly. | mabbo wrote: | Would she? | | After the mother's death, she keeps going about her life as | usual, goes by her original name, does all the normal things | she did before. On official documents she lists her mother's | name but around friends or neighbours goes by whatever they | want to call her. Maybe a lot of the neighbours know what's | going on, but hey, we all want to avoid taxes, right? So it | goes. | | And gradually she starts going by the other name instead. | People nod and understand if she corrects them. And | eventually everyone around her that might prove otherwise | dies off, moves away, or loses contact. Decades go by. Soon | everyone remembers that older spritely woman who's always | been around here. | | Any photos or evidence that might prove her story false, well | they go missing. The ones that confirm it stick around. | | This is how all legends start, really. | spiderxxxx wrote: | retire and collect a pension quite early, and go about your | life. | greatpatton wrote: | you still have the problem to fool the official at death | time. Making people believe that the mother's body was the | body of the daughter. Death certificate were not signed out | of nowhere even in 1934. There is a picture of her on | wikipedia when she was 70 in 1945, she doesn't look like a | 47 years old person, by any metrics. | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | > Death certificate were not signed out of nowhere even | in 1934. | | Actually, the curious thing in this case is it kind of | was: | | "Curiously, her death certificate was issued on the basis | of testimony of a sole witness, a 71-year-old unemployed | woman (i.e. not a doctor or nurse) who "saw her dead"" | | https://yurideigin.medium.com/jaccuse-why-122-year- | longevity... | jquery wrote: | Well, either something like that happened... or she won a | lottery with a 10 billion to 1 chance. My money is on the | former. I've read enough stories about people assuming false | identities to understand there's a number of ways to pull | something like that off. | amluto wrote: | Whoa, watch out for a very common statistical error. For | any particular property with a 10 billion to 1 chance, the | probability that it applies to someone living is quite | high. If you have a group of properties, each with an | independent 10 billion to 1 chance, the probability that | someone living has one of these properties is very high | indeed. | | The fallacy of thinking that winning a lottery is rare is | common and has horrible effects like sending innocent | people to jail on a regularly basis. For example, if you | search Clearview AI for someone who is a 99.99% match for a | surveillance picture of someone committing a crime, you | should expect tens of thousands of matches. If the AI | really did its job, it would return many hits along with a | prominent warning that, with very high probability, any | given one of these people did not commit a crime! | | And, of course, someone always wins the lottery, since | that's the whole point. | lovemenot wrote: | Similar example leading to false imprisonment: | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Clark | | >> Sir Roy Meadow, who testified that the chance of two | children from an affluent family suffering SIDS was 1 in | 73 million. He had arrived at this figure by squaring his | estimate of a chance of 1 in 8500 of an individual SIDS | death in similar circumstances. The Royal Statistical | Society later issued a statement arguing that there was | no statistical basis for Meadow's claim, and expressed | concern at the "misuse of statistics in the courts".[3] | btilly wrote: | There is little evidence that she ever spent much time at her | official address. Living in remote villas, as she mostly did, | and simply going by "Madame Calment", as she apparently also | mostly did, few would have paid attention to her given name | or any discrepancy between that and official records. | | When her extraordinary claims of old age became famous many | decades later, well, have you ever seen family members | arguing what really happened many decades ago? Doubts would | have been hard to sustain. | | https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/rej.2018.2167 digs | into this a bit. | canjobear wrote: | Also she had her personal documents and photos burned, a | damning piece of evidence which is mentioned without comment | here: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Age_verificatio... | masklinn wrote: | There is nothing damning about it? Half of HN would | immediately start throwing paper into the BBQ if the city | requested access to personal documents. | sct202 wrote: | I'm just imagining having to turn over my google photos or | emails to a government archivist, and I would for sure tell | someone to sanitize it before giving it over. | vintermann wrote: | If my records are over a hundred years old already, I | hope I'll be far enough past embarrassment that I'm able | to say "Take it, it belongs in a museum" | TylerE wrote: | But ALL family photos too? That smells rotten. | gopher_space wrote: | It's not an uncommon occurrence after a nasty divorce or | a death. It smells less rotten when you learn that people | generally regret doing it to some extent. Box full of | memories into the fire in a fit of rage/grief. | vidarh wrote: | I do genealogy. Of the family members that were born that | long ago, we have pictures of maybe 1/4. It's not at all | certain that "all family photos" amounted to much. | jquery wrote: | It doesn't damn her as a person, but if you're gonna claim | to have won the lottery twice in a row, I think you had | better have the receipts or people can safely assume you're | either lying or confused. | troebr wrote: | Jeanne Calment was a famous French supercentenarian (died in 1997 | at 122), and there were suspicions around her age: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Scepticism_rega... | [deleted] | ilamont wrote: | _The woman widely recognised as the longest-lived human in | history may have stolen her identity as part of an elaborate tax | evasion scheme, a group of researchers have claimed._ | | https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/world-oldest... | ilamont wrote: | _In 1965, Raffray, a lawyer in the southern French city of Arles, | thought he had hit on the real-estate version of a sure thing. | The 47-year-old had signed a contract to buy an apartment from | one of his clients "en viager": a form of property sale by which | the buyer makes a monthly payment until the seller's death, when | the property becomes theirs. His client, Jeanne Calment, was 90 | and sprightly for her age; she liked to surprise people by | leaping from her chair at the hairdresser. But still, it couldn't | be long: Raffray just had to shell out 2,500 francs a month and | wait it out._ | | https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/nov/30/oldest-woman... | westcort wrote: | Taken another way, imagine a future where dramatically longer | human lifespans are possible. Assuming there was fraud here, | normal-lifespan individuals could pretend to be a single | individual for an even greater period of time. | | Even with current technology, foundations can carry on a person's | wishes far into the future. Imagine if a personalized large | language model were developed to reliably predict an individual's | future verbal utterances. Could a large language model trained on | a large enough corpus of data predict the next thing a living | person would do or say? If so, could there be an option to | transfer personhood to the language model after that person's | death? | | Before judging this as impossible, think of how well our voices | can be replicated by AI. As Stephen Wolfram has pointed out, this | process must necessarily entail modeling the part of the cerebral | cortex that produces speech. | hobo_in_library wrote: | Best would be to see such an LLM being put in charge while the | person is still alive, and then laugh every time the person is | frustrated with a decision the LLM decided to take. | jedberg wrote: | This is actually really fascinating. If only humans had rings we | could measure! | | To me the biggest finding is the lack of people 90-99 in the same | areas. Where are the supercentarians coming from with a lack of | 90+ pipeline? | nearbuy wrote: | Supercentenarians are people over 110 (centenarians are over | 100). Only about 1 in 100,000 people live this long. Around 1 | in 5 people live to 90. An order of magnitude more | supercentenarians than average (through fraud or error) | wouldn't make a noticeable difference in the number of people | living 90-99, even assuming all supercentenarians were once | counted as being 90-99. | jedberg wrote: | Yes I understand that, but if you are saying some area is a | "blue zone" where people tend to live longer, you'd expect an | outsized number of 90-99 (and 100-109) for the same reasons | that there are 110+, if those reasons are related to the | geography (which is the claim with blue zones). | anonymouskimmer wrote: | Wouldn't even geographic blue zones be subjected to | geopolitical and economic shocks? These events would | disproportionately impact people by age cohort. | kevinmchugh wrote: | This is my thought. Someone who's 110 had a different | reality in front of them at age 20 than someone who's 90. | nearbuy wrote: | My understanding is the original authors of the blue zone | study didn't actually check the number of people aged | 90-99. They did look at life expectancy though, which was | slightly higher for the blue zones. Not sure how to square | that with the new finding of fewer people living 90-99 | years. | londons_explore wrote: | After a person has died, I suspect science could measure their | age pretty accurately with enough effort. | | For example, there are certain cells that don't multiply after | birth (eg. some nerve cells). One could presumably date carbon | atoms in their DNA... | | Or parts of the body that don't regenerate - like tooth enamel. | | I suspect with the right type of imaging, you'd probably find | 'tree rings' in things like fatty deposits in arteries too. | dontlaugh wrote: | Even cells that don't multiply still accept nutrients. Pretty | much no atoms in our bodies stick around for too long. It's | why carbon dating largely measures the time an organism died. | anonymouskimmer wrote: | Mineral deposits in our bodies (teeth and bones) are pretty | good. | | In non-replicating cells DNA would be pretty good too. Some | of it gets replaced as repairs occur, but most of it would | not. I'm not sure that carbon dating would be very accurate | over the lifetime of a person (though specific events could | cause specific sorts of deposits in bones during the | occurrence of those events). And even if it was, | radioactive carbon, either because of damage, or because of | electrochemical effects, would probably be replaced in DNA | more frequently than non-radioactive carbon, as long as the | organism was alive, even in non-replicating cells. | btilly wrote: | People have looked for such things. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetic_clock describes the | best one found. | | But, unfortunately, all the ones we know of can be skewed by | environmental factors. And it is likely that the exact same | environmental factors which make someone live longer will | also make them appear younger than they are. Which makes them | particularly unreliable exactly for the oldest people on | record. | pcthrowaway wrote: | I agree we could find markers of age, but I think they'd be | nothing like tree rings, which are created by the freeze-thaw | cycles and the fact that they are fixed in one place and | exposed to the elements in ways humans are not. | | Although, that begs the question, if a potted tree were to be | placed on a cruise ship, which always sails to warm weather, | would it fail to develop rings? | jedberg wrote: | Trees in tropical climates don't have rings because they | grow year round. If you took a tree that normally has rings | to a climate where it would not be exposed to hot and cold, | the tree would either die or not have rings: | | https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/how-climate- | works/tree-... | user070223 wrote: | apperantly Dodo birds has marking on the bones[0] which | researchers interpert it as time they struggled to find | resources (simillar to tree where you move between wet and dry | season). I guess one could cross reference times of femine to a | skeleton with known lifetime to see if it shows up in humans as | well. | | [0] https://youtu.be/Juci-kAqjes?t=219 | dukeofdoom wrote: | Life expectancy is going down for Americans, despite far fewer | smokers. | kijin wrote: | There's probably nothing malicious about most cases of missing or | strangely uniform birth dates. In many parts of the world over a | century ago, people simply didn't bother with accurate records. | | For example, both my grandpa and grandma had two birthdays each, | in two different calendar systems, that pointed to wildly | different points in time. Nobody remembered exactly when they | were born. My other grandma was recorded as being four years | older than she thought she actually was, and nobody knows the | truth, either. My father's birth was filed with the authorities | _several years late_ , though the document itself pointed to the | correct date. My family's not from some sort of jungle, either. | All of this happened in a highly bureaucratized, highly literate | society. | | Go back a few more decades and one could easily imagine "She was | born in the spring, in the year of the great flood" becoming | "Let's just say she was born on April 1, and when was the flood? | I mean the second one after Steve became king" when modern | record-keepers demand a specific date. We're trying to see more | precision in the data than anyone ever intended to record. No | wonder we find artifacts. | QuercusMax wrote: | The part about birthdates being on first of the month or | divisible by 5 seems pretty weak to me. Records weren't great | back then and many very old people may not actually know their | true birthdate. | hackeraccount wrote: | You'd have to compare with a control group. If being 100+ was | strongly correlated with having a birthdate on the first of the | month or such then... maybe be suspicious. | gifnamething wrote: | >Records weren't great back then and many very old people may | not actually know their true birthdate. | | Exactly why they can't be trusted! | saveferris wrote: | There is some statistical thing about fraud and the frequency | of certain numbers being made up. I don't recall it | specifically but made up amounts, dates, number have certain | clusters of numbers vs what normally occurs. | | edit; didn't get all that was in my head out :-) So, it could | be made up or support the fact that actual docs or good record | keeping weren't a thing. | actinium226 wrote: | I think you're thinking of Benford's law: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law | | It's pretty strange, basically if you have a document with a | bunch of numbers (say, some company's quarterly report), look | at the leading digit of all the numbers. For some reason, | numbers with a leading digit of 1 show up more often than | those with a leading digit of 9 (i.e. 1,234,567 is more | likely that 987,123). | | You'd think there wouldn't be any particular pattern in the | leading digit, I mean why should there be? But observational | data seem to suggest a pattern. | | So Benford's law can be used as a leading indicator of fraud. | If you apply it to a quarterly report and there's an | unusually high distribution of 8's, for example, then while | you can't be certain that it's fraud, it might be flag to an | inspector/regulator to take a closer look. | automatic6131 wrote: | It's pretty obvious, really. A quick little sketchproof; | say you have a metric, like headcount, revenue, expenses - | whatever. These tend to grow exponentially-ish over time. | When that's the regime, the number spends 1/3rd of it's | time between 1 and 2 of its leading digit, and 2/3rds | growing from 2 to the next power of 10. Similar logic | applies if you're counting things that follow any power law | - population of cities etc. Wherever you have a power law | distribution, Benford's law applies. | | But when humans enter data, they tend to fake numbers with | a uniform distribution - to appear more random. That's how | you catch it. | nebalee wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law | saveferris wrote: | thanks, could not remember it and my google fu was poor | trying to look for it :-) | int_19h wrote: | That's exactly the point - it means that someone "guessed" the | date. But if they guessed the day, the year isn't reliable, | either, especially at these time scales. | | Here's an example of how a similar principle can be used to | observe electoral fraud: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Russian_legislative_elect... | twblalock wrote: | If you are going to make up a fake birthday and you think you | might have trouble remembering it, picking a nice round number | might make it easier. | lb1lf wrote: | In Norway, the authorities had a problem with our SSN | equivalent a few years ago - for decades, it had been SOP to | assign any immigrant with unknown birth date the birth date | January 1st. | | Eventually, they ran out of valid SSNs for Jan 1st births in | some years. (The number is on the form DDMMYY XXXYY, where | XXX is assigned sequentially and YY are control digits.) | | Hence, for any given date the system can accommodate 1000 | people, plenty in a country with some 1000 births a week. | Until you start assigning a certain date to people with | unknown DOB, that is. They are now assigned a random date. | regularfry wrote: | In the absence of that sort of SSN, it has a higher impact | than you'd think. It comes up enough in the UK to be | something we have to plan around. | | It's a particular problem in refugee communities, | especially where there may be common names. No certificate, | often. What happens is that the first time they need to | know their birthdate is when they have interaction with a | healthcare system, and the doctor (or the admin staff), | when told "Oh, some time in 1931, I think", puts "1/1/1931" | into the records. | | All it takes is two of "Samuel Goldstein, born 1/1/1931" in | the same suburb and you've got a serious risk of | misidentification when one of them has a heart attack and | turns up in an ambulance. Misidentification of patients | might be relatively uncommon, but the danger when it | happens is severe. | initramfs wrote: | The pessimist in me thinks, the longer one lives (in their 90s | and 100s), the more this database analysis could discriminate | using this algorithm, and flag healthy, retired centenarians from | getting benefits, hopefully not putting a freeze to their | accounts or causing any stir to their peaceful retirement. | mannyv wrote: | This article is amusing because some countries don't have a good | way of notifying institutions about deaths (like the SS death | master file)...and there are lots of issues associated with dying | (taxes, inheritance, loss of benefits, etc). | | In those countries they just don't report the death, sometimes | for decades. I used to joke that the government should have a | celebration of centenarians and see how many of them actually | show up. | PaulHoule wrote: | I used to kid that I couldn't get a security clearance because | I had relatives in Eastern Europe collecting social security | for dead people. | civilized wrote: | The SS death master file has been broken for a decade now. | Institutions that need death information have to work with | private vendors that aggregate data from a variety of sources. | mannyv wrote: | Yeah, once states were able to opt-out (due to | medical/privacy issues) it basically stopped being a | canonical reference. But it's still pretty good for the most | part. | meetingthrower wrote: | Ah yes, anybody remember the lovely insurance companies who had | PERFECT data for stopping annuity payments, but somehow | couldn't find the records to pay life insurance claims? | cperciva wrote: | _I used to joke that the government should have a celebration | of centenarians and see how many of them actually show up._ | | IIRC a version of this happened a while back in Japan; the | mayor of a town decided to visit some of the oldest residents, | only to find that none of them were still alive. | davidgerard wrote: | (2020) | rundmc wrote: | 2023 will see the return of Tontines to the US and eventually the | rest of the world courtesy of https://tontine.com. | | Screening out those that would cheat their fellow members is part | of our mission. | | In this respect, AI is just as likely to be a friend than an | enemy. | pharrington wrote: | Older countries have better records? | [deleted] | docandrew wrote: | It would be funny if all the hype about "Mediterranean Diet" and | longevity was just due to pension fraud in those areas. | shaky-carrousel wrote: | A healthy diet not only makes you live longer. It also makes | the experience less miserable when you reach an old age. That | reason alone should be good enough. | kepler1 wrote: | I wonder if a lot of things in society are going to require some | kind of physical in-person proof because of our inability to | distinguish fake from real at some point soon. | francisofascii wrote: | My wife's grandmother lived to 110. There was never any doubt | about it. She knew what year she was born. Her mother had lived | to 99. | HideousKojima wrote: | My great grandmother died a month shy of her 110th birthday. | The main reason I don't doubt it was true is that my grandma | (her daughter) is in fantastic health despite being the same | age as my grandpa who is in fairly poor health, so there's | definitely something in my great grandma's genes that seems to | aid longevity. Unfortunately it's looking like my dad got a | decent amount of my grandpa's genes instead of my grandma's in | that regard, so I'm doubtful I'll be so lucky haha. | jandrese wrote: | It has long been noted that the oldest people in the world are | clustered in countries that didn't keep paper birth records. | [deleted] | cwmma wrote: | or might have had something happen to the records ( _cough_ | japan _cough_ ) ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-04-04 23:00 UTC)