People don't always research what's important to their beliefs. I'd even go so far as to say it's more common than not that a person hasn't adequately researched their beliefs, whatever they are. So she might not have even read the book she got this belief from.
Also, people have very different conceptions given vague data. So your interpretation of her beliefs is absurd, as religious scripture is ambiguous. Or more accurately, it doesn't matter whether it is ambiguous or not, as people will make that decision regardless of the ambiguousness of the original text.
Assumptions: I think a lot of what we "know" is going to be wrong. It's just a thing which seems likely to me. Not in a "things fall up now" sort of way, though a little of that, since the laws of physics have been revised quite a bit, and I don't see that trend stopping. But more in a "We were pretty much crazy to think these things" way. You know about alchemy's position politically today, and how some of the church's actions were perceived? Some things which we consider important today are going to be treated like that.
History: We'll be better at this. Assuming historians haven't mysteriously vanished as a profession, I think we're going to know more about history in the future, and knowing more about the present in the future. As a collective, I mean, not every individual.
Screwing the world up: Will happen a lot less. We gained raw power in the last 500 years, we're going to learn wisdom now. Or die. That's a possibility, its been discussed. But I'm assuming we survive.
Culture: Will have finally recovered from British expansionism. There will be lots of strong local cultures again.
Government: Will be competent. And not vitriolic. I'm predicting a break from history again.
Population: Will be ignored. Won't be a problem.
Tech: People will get what they want here. Even if what they want is something they've never heard about. And if they don't want it, that will stop it. We got the atom bomb because we wanted to kill people. That will happen less. No flying cars, but maybe hover-boards. Lots of the stuff that we usually relegate to philosophy, or say that is impossible to know, and won't affect anything even if we know it will be known and become part of science. And we'll be better, way way way better, at biology and ecology.
Intelligent Aliens: Will be found, will be relevant to some people's careers, but won't be all that important. Not the main driver of events.
Planet: Will be better, much better. Things will turn around here. People will care about it. The majority doesn't really care about it now, except in a kind of abstract way as it relates to government. But they will care about it later.
Intelligent Aliens: Will be found within a hundred years, won't be important until at least 200 years in.
>History: We'll be better at this. Assuming historians haven't mysteriously vanished as a profession, I think we're going to know more about history in the future, and knowing more about the present in the future. As a collective, I mean, not every individual.
Pretty much a given.
>Screwing the world up: Will happen a lot less. We gained raw power in the last 500 years, we're going to learn wisdom now. Or die. That's a possibility, its been discussed. But I'm assuming we survive.
Not entirely convinced. Keeping the world a place humans can live in, sure, but maybe people will just get more comfortable with accelerating change. My perception is it's the older generation that cares more about preserving the environment, both natural and artificial. When you can synthesize any kind of organism you like, who cares if a bunch of existing species go extinct?
>Culture: Will have finally recovered from British expansionism. There will be lots of strong local cultures again.
Unlikely in this age of instant communication. I think we might see lots of subcultures, but globally distributed, in a way that's already happening to some extent with the likes of, well, HN.
Could you explain what you mean by "statistical blip"? It seems odd to say that, I mean, wouldn't it imply that there's interference from improper measuring, or interference from variables gone unnoticed, or interference from variables that are irrelevant? I'm probably reading it wrong, but it seems such a bizarre thing to say.
What I mean is, Poisson distributions don't look like normal distributions if lambda is low - there's a long tail.
There's about 500,000 centenarians (thanks bitwize for the spelling) in the world. That's about 0.01%. In a town of 10,000, that's an average (lambda) of 1. About 36% of such towns will have no centenarians, 36% will have one, 18% will have 2, 6% will have 3, 1.5% will have 4, and there's a long tail with 5 (0.3%), 6 (0.05%) or more.
It doesn't seem logical that most towns will have 0 or 1 centenarians, and some will have 5 or more, but it's just the way the numbers work.
If you pick a higher lambda (for example, the number of 50 year olds) it looks like a normal distribution. If some place has 2X the number of 50 year olds, there will be a good reason. If you pick a higher lambda (the number of people who survive incurable cancer) it looks even wackier, and it's very hard to draw conclusions.
What I'm saying is, it's hard to draw conclusions when you are looking at rare events, because there can be so much variation.
Thank you for that explanation. I believed you had said that studying what was different for centenarians - or similar biological anomalies - in a blue zone was quite possibly useless, but it seems that wasn't the case.
It could be a sample size effect. There are all these old people there, but how many? It may have nothing to do with the island, they may all have just been lucky and had a streak of heads in the coin flip game. This is especially likely since the researchers are looking all over the world for these small pockets of longevity.
Why don't you ever hear about these things in larger areas? Certainly different countries have very different lifestyles. What's different is that bigger regions have a smaller chance of a freak streak of long lived individuals as a proportion of the population (though as an absolute value, you'll probably find more).
I suspect "blue zones" will regress to the mean after these individuals in the study die, but you can never be sure. If they don't, maybe the islands do have an effect (or maybe they started to attract immigrant older people seeking longevity).
