(no subject)

[moominmolly]

From the NurtureShock article Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today:

Here’s a Twilight Zone-type premise for you. What if surgeons never got to work on humans, they were instead just endlessly in training, cutting up cadavers? What if the same went for all adults – we only got to practice at simulated versions of our jobs? Lawyers only got to argue mock cases, for years and years. Plumbers only got to fix fake leaks in classrooms. Teachers only got to teach to videocameras, endlessly rehearsing for some far off future. Book writers like me never saw our work put out to the public – our novels sat in drawers. Scientists never got to do original experiments; they only got to recreate scientific experiments of yesteryear. And so on.

Rather quickly, all meaning would vanish from our work. Even if we enjoyed the activity of our job, intrinsically, it would rapidly lose depth and relevance. It’d lose purpose. We’d become bored, lethargic, and disengaged.

In other words, we’d turn into teenagers.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Comments

Re: Bad statistics

[harimad.livejournal.com]

The more you generalize, the less you know.

This makes sense to me, but the rest of what you say seems to be more along the lines of "life expectance at birth is a very general measure that hides a lot of variation and therefore isn't very exact." Which is different than "life expectancy at birth has no statistical validity" which is how I interpreted your original statement.

Similarly, the standard "life-expectancy at birth" is useful only for whole-population averages,
I was talking about whole populations so, er, where's the problem?

Re: Bad statistics

[ectropy.livejournal.com]

LEaB is bad statistics because it takes an average of two separated datasets - it's a bimodal distribution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimodal), and the "average" is not representative of a typical person.

If, in pre-modern times, the true life expectancy was 30 (that is, most people could be expected to live until 30 but not much longer), then that puts humans (with steady food supply, language and the ability to negotiate, medical practices) at worse than wild chimpanzees (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee#Anatomy_and_physiology)! How did this discrepancy arrive? Because we don't count the mortality of young chimps in the same group as the expected lifespan of grown chimps, which gives a better indicator of how long a grown chimp is likely to live.

Mostly, see Life Expectancy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy) and note the distinction that even in the Upper Paleolithic, life expectancy for an adult was 54 years old. But you only get that number if you exclude infant mortality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality).