I am often mistaken for younger than my actual age (31), and naturally I’m flattered. But I don’t get a swollen head about it, because I have a theory that most people “look younger than their age.”
How is this possible? Well, presumably people’s assessments of what any given age looks like are based on their previous observations of people who were that age. My idea of “what a 50-year-old looks like” is based on all the 50-year-olds I’ve met. But of course, the people I’ve met who were 50 then are all older than 50 now. This wouldn’t matter if standards of health and nutrition remained the same over time. But in fact, health and nutrition continue to improve year by year, which means that people who are 50 now probably look better than people who were 50 a decade ago looked at that time. The current 50-year-olds have had greater access to new means of preserving youth. Thus, my age assessments are biased downward systematically, unless I make a special effort to take into account improvements in preservation technology.
As evidence for my proposition, I could rely on the fact that it’s so rare to hear about someone overestimating another person’s age. But that phenomenon could result from people’s desire not to hurt each other’s feelings. So to test my hypothesis, we would need to conduct a study in which people were asked to guess ages of people in photographs or on video. The first test would check to see if the difference between age guesses and actual ages is negative and statistically significant. The second test would look to see if older people, whose observations of people stretch back further into the past, are more inclined to underestimate someone’s age than younger people.
Friday, September 19, 2003
Youth Creep
Tuesday, September 16, 2003
Heap Big Smoke
“Someone is either a smoker or a non-smoker, there's no in-between. The trick is to find out which one you are and be that.”I always liked that line, but I thought the answer was supposed to be philosophical or psychological -- you know, discovering your true preferences and embracing them or something. But it turns out the answer might be genetic. A recent Israeli study purports to show that smokers with low levels of a particular enzyme are 5 to 10 times more likely to get lung cancer than smokers with high levels of the enzyme. If the study’s results are confirmed, you may eventually be able to take a blood test to find out whether you’re a born smoker or not. (But before you smokers get too excited, you should know that even the smokers with high levels of the enzyme were much more likely to get lung cancer than non-smokers. And then there are all those other health conditions, like emphysema.)
- Robin Williams in “Dead Again”
Monday, September 15, 2003
Anecdotes and Antidotes
Radley linked my defense of him versus Al Giordano, saying (among other things) that “empirical evidence is always preferable to anecdotes.” Giordano responds in the comments box, saying (also among other things) that “[Radley] based [his] claim exclusively on polling data (which, after all, is no more or less than the science of collecting anecdotal information from many people at once).”
At this juncture, I think it would be useful to consider the meaning of “anecdotal.” The definition is “Based on casual observations or indications rather than rigorous or scientific analysis.” The very nature of an anecdote is that it is a particular instance observed in an idiosyncratic fashion. When you start collecting a large number of anecdotes in a systematic fashion, they cease to be anecdotes and become a data set.
Now, it’s true (as Giordano emphasizes) that polls and surveys can be very misleading. So perhaps something is wrong with the surveys Radley cites, which indicate that poor people in the developing world actually like globalization. Maybe the wording of the questions was biased. Maybe the sampling method didn’t generate representative samples of the populations. But it seems awfully strange to dismiss the results of such surveys, which at least attempt to be scientific, on the basis of a handful of observations with no consistent sampling method. Even if we accepted Giordano’s strange notion that a poll is nothing more than a collection of anecdotes, does it make sense to reject the clear results of a large sample of anecdotes (38,000, in fact) in favor of the unclear results of a smaller sample of anecdotes generated largely via undocumented collection methods?