• Godort@lemmy.ca
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    10 hours ago

    More than half of these people are over 30. None are younger than 25.

    All of the founding fathers save for Adams and Washington were younger than this when the declaration of independence was signed.

      • arrow74@lemmy.zip
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        48 minutes ago

        Why? It’s not like you get smarter in your 20s if you have a higher life expectancy. Potentially living to 85 doesn’t give you more expirence. Im your 20s you have about 20-29 years of life expirence and knowledge regardless of how old you live.

      • Denjin@feddit.uk
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        4 hours ago

        Life expectancy is largely a measure of infant and juvenile mortality.

        The founding fathers for example:

        • John Adams - 90

        • Samuel Adams - 81

        • Ben Franklin - 84

        • Alexander Hamilton - 49

        • John Hancock - 56

        • Patrick Henry - 63

        • John Jay - 83

        • Thomas Jefferson - 83

        • Richard Henry Lee - 62

        • Robert Livingston - 66

        • James Madison - 85

        • George Mason - 66

        • Robert Morris - 72

        • Peyton Randolph - 54

        • Roger Sherman - 72

        • George Washington - 67

        • James Wilson - 55

        If you picked a random group of well off Americans today I don’t think the ages when they died would look much dissimilar to this.

      • TheRealKuni@piefed.social
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        8 hours ago

        If you survived childhood, there was a decent chance you’d live to your 60s, IIRC. Obviously disease and injury were more dangerous, but childhood killed off those most likely to succumb to disease.

        • Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net
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          8 hours ago

          Yup. Infant mortality was such a large problem before modern medicine and vaccine science that the sheer number of deaths before the age of 5 reduced the mean average live expectancy by half of the mode average.

          And this, children, is why learning how to properly interpret math and statistics is important. Numbers can, in fact, lie unless you know exactly what those numbers represent.

          • Frog@lemmy.ca
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            5 hours ago

            i wonder if someone calculated life expectancy without including infant mortality.

            • Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net
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              5 hours ago

              Eh, not really but kinda. The available recorded data for that information is scarce and not a complete picture. Some studies were done but they are centered on things like “expectancy of tenants/landowners” for example, not the overall picture. It’s a complicated topic and I don’t fully understand it myself.

              Though, what I do know, is that through other methods of anthropological and archeological research methods, like examining bones, we are able to prove that people generally lived into their 50s-60s.