Longevity data is junk
Reading: ‘The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out’ – Ig Nobel winner Saul Justin Newman, The Conversation, 13 September 2024. Seen via a boost by Aegir.
I absolutely love this.
Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there’s the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records.
Brilliant work. I’ll just note this is about longevity in terms of years lived, and not in terms of “health aging”, so take that into consideration before you quit your Mediterranean diet.
The papers are:
- Supercentenarians and the Oldest-Old Are Concentrated into Regions with No Birth Certificates and Short Lifespans, pre-print, 2024.
- Supercentenarian and Remarkable Age Records Exhibit Patterns Indicative of Clerical Errors and Pension Fraud, pre-print, 2024.
- The global pattern of centenarians highlights deep problems in demography, pre-print, 2024.
You can watch the Ig Nobel award (from 1:08) delivered as a poem, and invoking the usual time keeping mechanism: