or “Imagine what your life would have been like had you been born just 300 years ago - as an average person living in the 1700s.” and then you go on to state “And 300 years is nothing—an absolutely miniscule amount of time in the hundreds of thousands of years of human history.” but in reality the 1700s were an unusually hellish time and things were better for the average human in most parts of history (or—something like that. I’m not a historian; I just know about common misconceptions)
Ah, thanks for pointing these things out! I didn’t realise either of these things—admittedly, I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to research the historical facts for this. A lot of these points were taken from some top posts on Quora on a thread about progress over the past few centuries, and I was (perhaps naively) hoping that crowdsourced info would give me fairly accurate info. Anyway, I was thinking of writing a more detailed article about human progress at some point, so I’ll definitely try to do a bit more research and take these points into account—thanks for flagging my errors/sloppiness!
I agree that the life expectancy statement may be a bit misleading, but it is factually correct. Life expectancies at older ages have also gone up significantly (if less dramatically). The points Jess is making all seem correct qualitatively even if there are factual errors.
Our world in data has some good graphs on this. Their other presentations also do a good job of showing how much life has improved over the past several hundred years.
Alice, it’s an evocative wedding speech not a Science publication! - I don’t think this is a helpful or charitable response!
I don’t think the life expectancy of 35 is even wrong. Yes, infant mortality of 30% is contributing but noone’s arguing that infant mortality is a good thing. And even if you don’t die an infant, your life expectancy is going to be perhaps 55, which is still a lot less than the 70 or so years that we might expect to live!
This is not a particularly accurate portrayal.
e.g. “Your life expectancy is around 35.” is a myth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions
or “Imagine what your life would have been like had you been born just 300 years ago - as an average person living in the 1700s.” and then you go on to state “And 300 years is nothing—an absolutely miniscule amount of time in the hundreds of thousands of years of human history.” but in reality the 1700s were an unusually hellish time and things were better for the average human in most parts of history (or—something like that. I’m not a historian; I just know about common misconceptions)
Ah, thanks for pointing these things out! I didn’t realise either of these things—admittedly, I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to research the historical facts for this. A lot of these points were taken from some top posts on Quora on a thread about progress over the past few centuries, and I was (perhaps naively) hoping that crowdsourced info would give me fairly accurate info. Anyway, I was thinking of writing a more detailed article about human progress at some point, so I’ll definitely try to do a bit more research and take these points into account—thanks for flagging my errors/sloppiness!
I agree that the life expectancy statement may be a bit misleading, but it is factually correct. Life expectancies at older ages have also gone up significantly (if less dramatically). The points Jess is making all seem correct qualitatively even if there are factual errors.
Our world in data has some good graphs on this. Their other presentations also do a good job of showing how much life has improved over the past several hundred years.
Alice, it’s an evocative wedding speech not a Science publication! - I don’t think this is a helpful or charitable response!
I don’t think the life expectancy of 35 is even wrong. Yes, infant mortality of 30% is contributing but noone’s arguing that infant mortality is a good thing. And even if you don’t die an infant, your life expectancy is going to be perhaps 55, which is still a lot less than the 70 or so years that we might expect to live!