8 comments

[ 7.5 ms ] story [ 34.2 ms ] thread
World's older person dies? Why does this keep happening?! This trend is frightening.
They're dying due to selection bias.
Please. The worlds oldest person dies every couple of weeks. The next oldest person is 114 now, I don't give that person much longer to live and I'm not in any way knowledgeable about their state of health, it simple statistics.
(comment deleted)
Thanks to simple statistics (and the biological immortality old age endows), any given world's oldest person has an expected incumbency of about two years.
Yes, but somehow that does not hold. These 'oldest person in the world dies' reports are coming with quite a high frequency.

It may have something to do with their newfound status, all the excitement around being the oldest person in the world can't be too good for the health of the oldest person in the world.

To increase the frequency a bit further there is the 'oldest person', the 'oldest female' and the 'oldest male' (this doubles the number of reports).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_people

This year alone there have been three such reports.

It's also a fact that someone has to be the oldest, who it is is not that important.

Just like the tallest tree in the forest is not very significant, it's just another way to look at the bell curve, there will be a few short trees and a few of them will be tall, most of them will be in the middle.

[citation needed]

This is doubtful. If this woman had lived a month longer, that would have extended the gap between her and the death of the oldest person before her by a month.

You know how often we hear about this, and yet everybody cares. I just don't get it.