The secret to living to 100 years old: Don't listen to the advice of long-lived people

When interacting with people who have lived to be 100, even 110 years old or more, people often ask questions in a rather cliché and boring pattern such as: " What did you do to be able to live as long as you did?" So?"

Surely, some interesting and unexpected answers will appear and attract attention. For example, eating fish and chips regularly every Friday. Or drink a glass of strong wine every day. Eat bacon every breakfast. Or constantly indulge in wine and chocolate.

While reporting on long-lived people is often a popular topic, asking questions like the one above is relatively pointless and does not help us understand why some people live so long. In an article for CNN, author Brady Elliot from the University of Westminster in the UK argues why it is pointless to seek the "secret" of longevity from long-lived people.

The survivor stereotype can give us an inaccurate view of how a person achieves a long life. (Source: CNN).

He points out that during the second world war, Allied statisticians tried to apply their skills to minimize the number of bombers shot down by enemy fire. By studying the damage patterns of bombers returning from each mission, they created a statistical map of the most frequently damaged aircraft parts and recommended the addition of good armor, Expensive for these areas.

The solution is simple, right? However, that's when another statistician named Abraham Wald came into the picture. He took the exact opposite view, pointing out that the planes studied had all returned alive from each mission, despite suffering heavy damage. But what about the ones that didn't come back?

Wald argued that armor should be added to the undamaged areas on all aircraft that successfully returned. Any aircraft hit in these undamaged areas, he said, would likely have crashed, unable to return to base for inspection.

Survivor bias

The phenomenon that Wald takes a stand against is called survivorship bias, or the cognitive and statistical bias created by taking into account only factors that are present, which ignores elements that have "not survived".

Try applying the survivor stereotype to your research on secrets to living a long life and you'll quickly see the absurdity. Imagine a group of 100 people, all of whom have smoked their entire lives.

As a group, people who smoke regularly are more likely to die earlier from cancer, lung disease or heart disease. But within this group there will still be one or two people who buck the trend and live to be 100 years old.

Now imagine journalists surrounding one or two of these lucky people, on their 100th birthday, with the classic question we all know: “What do you think is the secret of your long life?”

“Smoking a pack of cigarettes a day,” would probably be the answer of the long-lived character.

It may sound absurd, but survivorship bias exists everywhere in society. We all have probably heard the story of a famous actor or business person who succeeded in overcoming adversity. They worked hard, believed in their goals and succeeded. But we never, or very rarely, read the other story of people who tried, dedicated themselves, but in the end did not succeed.

To be honest, writing or telling stories about failure is not a good media topic. But this contributes to the survivor bias: we mostly hear about success stories, never about failures.

This stereotype applies and shapes our perception of architecture (most of us only know about great buildings from a certain period), to finance (we often hear examples of people who have succeeded making risky investments, those who failed will not sell books or self-help courses) and career plans (you may have heard successful people say that how they dropped out of school and became rich, but did not know how many others did the same and failed).

Brady Elliot says he has worked with many older adults, including the very elderly. He and his university colleagues are studying people over 65 who maintain unusually high levels of exercise into old age and remain in excellent health.

They are exceptional examples of older people who are still faster and stronger than Elliot, despite being almost twice his age. But despite knowing that lifelong exercise was linked to good health in old age, Elliot's team was unable to draw a concrete conclusion about which led to which. It may be that being active in exercise protects long-lived people from serious diseases such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease. But it's also possible that these people still exercise and maintain good health into old age because they never had cancer, diabetes or heart disease earlier in their lives.

There may also be some unidentified third factor that scientists still have to figure out, to understand the mechanism that enables so many people to not only live long lives but also maintain the ability to exercise for good health. good healthy.

Correlation often does not lead to the same cause and effect relationship. This point is frequently reminded to students doing scientific research. Our brains often see similar patterns between two variables and assume they are related in some way. But often, like survivor bias, we won't look at enough of the input data so we'll "discover" a connection where there really isn't one at all.