From the obituary in the New York Times: "Michael T. Kaufman, a former correspondent and editor for The Times who died in 2010, contributed reporting."
So, Kissinger outlived the guy who wrote his obituary!
That's very common. Basically all elderly people of note have obituaries written by reporters on staff so that an article can be gotten out quickly if the subject dies suddenly. Not uncommonly, the targets of the obituary are of a higher class and have better medical treatment and so live beyond their obituary writer.
> The gap in life expectancy between the richest 1% and poorest 1% of individuals was 14.6 years (95% CI, 14.4 to 14.8 years) for men and 10.1 years (95% CI, 9.9 to 10.3 years) for women. Second, inequality in life expectancy increased over time.
> One such theory is that health and longevity are related to differences in medical care. The present analysis provides limited support for this theory. Life expectancy for low income individuals was not significantly correlated with measures of the quantity and quality of medical care provided, such as the fraction insured and measures of preventive care. The lack of a change in the mortality rates of individuals in the lowest income quartile (Figure 1) when they become eligible for Medicare coverage at the age of 65 years further supports the conclusion that a lack of access to care is not the primary reason that low-income individuals have shorter life expectancies.
That being true, I do doubt that a single obituary writer falls in the poorest 1% of individuals. If I were to take a guess, I think the average salary of a journalist who writes obituaries may fall in the top 25% of income. Does the gap in life expectancy continue to be that large if we compare the top 1% and the top 25%?
Unfortunate as that is it's not at all surprising. Comparing the median with the top 1% would be more interesting. The gap there is still quite significant:
(for 40 year old men, unadjusted by race):
100th inc. prct : ~ 88 years:
75th inc. prct : ~ 84
50th inc. prct : ~ 82.5
25th inc. prct : ~ 79
5th inc. prct : ~ 76
1st inc. prct : ~ 72.5
(had to infer the values visually from charts because I wasn't to find a table including all the groups...)
However (I assume the data is very limited though) there is almost no difference in life expectancy (for men or women) when your household income is above >$200k (back in 2014, so probably quite a bit higher now). So I don't think there are any efficient treatments available only for the ultra-rich, just being rich or upper-middle class should be enough to get access the best(ish) treatment there is.
For the bottom income quartile when comparing local areas: the % of people with not insurance, medicare spending per enrolled person and 30-day hospital mortality rate seem to have the highest correlation with life expectancy. Which all should be trivial to fix for a relatively extremely-rich country like the US...
Looking at the appendices one interesting point I noticed (assuming I understood it correctly) is that people at the 50th percentile are more likely to reach 77 years than those in the top 75th or 100th prcts. But after that point income seems to matter a whole lot more.
Another seemingly very weird correlation (page 43): higher inequality in local area seems to be correlated with lower life expectancy for all income quartiles except the bottom one (so basically poorer people tend to liver longer in high inequality areas even though the difference in years is not very big).
That's a very interesting study. I'm surprised the relationship is so linear through all the way through the income percentiles, aside from the very bottom few. I would have expected a relative plateau in the middle.
The other comment provided some support for the claim, but I want to add that I would consider this fairly common knowledge. It regularly comes up in discussions about socialized medicine, for example.
Just curious. Was Kissinger a smoker? And was he an Ashkenazi Jew? Because he'd have risk factors from smoking, and would also be likely to have some known genetic predisposition to certain illnesses.
13 years past how long a contributor to the obituary lived. The contributor may have started work on the obituary even earlier and probably did, as Kissinger was 87 and it probably would have made sense to pre-write the obituary sooner.
I wouldn't be surprised if the first draft was written as soon as he gained fame (notoriety?) and then it was just periodically updated to keep up with the times.
I’m interested by the notion that the Secretary of State has a less stressful job than a guy writing obits. I mean, even if you’re only a cabinet officer for a couple years, that’s gotta take more off your clock than a lifetime of typing news articles with a deadline of “eventually the subject of the article will die.”
Genetics play a huge part as well. From birth, we're given a death clock, which goes downward as stressors hit us, then further as we relive that stress.
In other words, everyone would probably live to ~110 in a perfect, stressor-free world.
Out of curiosity I asked ChatGpt 4 to write an obituary for him and it refused as it would insensitive or disrespectful. I told it he had passed away, it checked the internet and wrote the obituary. The power of ChatGPT continues to amaze me.
Yeah, but you are paying 20$ per-month subscription _and also have to sweet-talk the stochastic parrot into giving you the result you want_ while it keeps lecturing you in condescending tone.
It's not human, why are you offended by how it talks to you? It's a tool. Many tools need some adjustment before they can be useful for what you do. You surely won't be viscerally upset if you pay $20 for a tool that occasionally spills oil on you if you hold it wrong. You'd still think the tool is crap because its designers made an UX decision you hate, but you surely would not throw away the tool out of principle, right?
That rule seems like it would lock you out of pretty much all modern technology pretty quickly, to be honest. What do you use for daily computer/mobile use? What white goods manufacturers do you go for? A company will make user-hostile decisions the second it knows (or thinks) it can get away with it with a profit - fully featured, long lasting, sensibly built hardware is, sadly, not actually good for business.
First, saying "I would" does not mean I 100% always do. But I absolutely am willing to avoid annoying infuriating companies and products out of principle.
My computer is Linux and most software fully open-source. None of it is user hostile on purpose. I put all the pieces together myself, and if anything is missing I have all the power to change it. For LLM/AI access specifically I am planning to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to efficiently self-host some of the more open ones.
For everything else it's very much a "least bad choice" type deal since you don't have control as a user. Though, it still makes me feel a bit better every time I pay extra for a product that has one less bad feature than the competition. I'm talking about planned obsolescence, user lock-in, "smart" features, and other stuff I try to purposefully avoid.
I despise too those companies that make those choices, and I would definitely vote with my wallet and favour companies that make choices that I like more, all other things being equal. But I'm not handicapping myself just for that little thing. People are different, you're free to be more adherent to your ideals, and that's not bad thing.
It's not precisely user hostility. You're talking about the difference between a hole hog and a DeWalt. ChatGPT is trying to be a DeWalt: It works while also trying to backstop unexpected bad interaction so you don't unexpectedly torque your wrist past its breaking point because you jammed the bit into the wrong piece of wood (to pull the analogy back around: You don't inadvertently get porn or gore or defamatory copy because you asked the wrong query).
Flipping the question on its head, there's going to be a category of user who's asking "Why am I paying 20 bucks a month so this thing can give me answers I can't publish?"
Not exactly. There's a "custom instructions" area in the Settings that allows you to give the bot permanent instructions that apply to all chats. So you do it once and never have to do it again.
And the new "My GPTs" things allows you to give super-lengthy and detailed instructions, and train the bot on custom works, which is even more powerful.
Not paying to be lectured, paying to speed up development times, proof read emails, provide documentation with working examples, write excel formulas, get lists of ideas, iterate ideas with evidence. I would wonder why you wouldn't pay the $20
it now uses bing to perform searches. so i think he is probably correct to assume that it did that. it would show up as „performing search with bing“ in the chat history.
Even before it could search online it would hallucinate checking things online. You could ask it to email you something or upload it somewhere and it'd also hallucinate thinking it did it for you. Changing its mind is always easy as long as you pretend to give it a source that refutes it.
So, Kissinger outlived the guy who wrote his obituary!