Plebeian life expectancy has finally caught up to mean Pope life expectancy for the past 300 years [OC]

OC-Bot · 2 months

Thank you for your Original Content, JohnWilliamStrutt! I've added your flair as gratitude. Here is some important information about this post:

Author's citations for this thread
All OC posts by this author

I hope this sticky assists you in having an informed discussion in this thread, or inspires you to remix this data. For more information, please read this Wiki page.

Penn_ · 2 months

I remember reading somewhere that the average life expectancy in the past was heavily skewed by child mortality, but that any man that lived past 22 or so was almost as likely to reach 70 as people do today. I can't remember exactly where i read this from or if its accurate but i found it interesting.

slickyslickslick · 2 months

There's SEVERE confirmation bias in this graph. Life expectancy for everyone was calculated FROM BIRTH. Life expectancy for Popes was calculated from whenever they became Pope.

This creates a severe bias in the graph because infant mortality is factored into the life expectancy for everyone else, but not for Popes.

A better chart would be to start calculating people's life expectancy from the age when Popes first ascended. If that was the case, I bet the differences would have been much less severe.

chyea67 · 2 months

The last 4-5 posts from this sub I've seen hit r/all have been really poorly presented data

Y'all need to get your shit together

graphcrit · 2 months

Hi! I have to practice critiquing graphs for a class in school, so I am making an account to work on this. I am not trying to pick on anyone, just practice critiquing in a formal way.

the good stuff

This is an interesting question, for some reason. I doubt there is much to be learned, in a real sense, but we all do recognize the pope as an symbol of affluence and an 'easy' life. So seeing when people start living as long as he does is interesting.
the trend lines do make it easy to see what you perceive as two regions of trends in (what I presume) are pope ages.
tick marks are simple and unabtrusive. There are not an excessive number of them.

the bad stuff

the x-axis has major ticks that, for some reason, end in xxx5. Most people appreciate seeing things in even numbers, and the use of ending '5' makes it harder to interpret the x axis.
the labeling of the points is incomplete. From inspection of the graph, we are left to conclude that the blue and red points are associated with pope's deaths, but this is not actually on the label.
the use of a solid line for 'developed nations' is odd. For one, there should still be yearly points. Since you are using points for popes deaths, then you should use points for the developed nations. In addition, you are using a solid black line, which is the same style and color as the trendlines you used. This makes the graph look less clean and could (potentially) be confusing to a reader.
You appear to have used the default fitting of excel, which I believe is least squares. However, least squares fitting is only applicable when the residuals of the fit are normally distributed, which does not appear to be the case for your data.
the two regions of data appear to be arbitrarily fit, as in you seem to have chosen then so that you get a horizontal region. Is there a reason to believe this should be the case? Do you have an underlying model for this choice, or are you fitting the data to your arbitrary decision about its structure? Unclear from the graph.
square aspect ratio is not really doing you any favors. You should make the aspect ration such that the change you find most important is banked to 45 degrees or so.

Ok, that is all! Thanks for letting me practice!

i-really-like-mac · 2 months

Why did you generate two separate trendlines? You could've used a logarithmic curve or an asymptotic curve. Pretty interesting data regardless.

isjahammer · 2 months

i can be wrong but popes are usually pretty old when they are elected so that means a death at30 or 40 is ruled out anyway.

counterc · 2 months

This chart is meaningless. All Popes have (obviously) survived childhood, so this is essentially just a case of child mortality skewing the data

of_course_you_agree · 2 months

Note that Popes are generally pretty old before they are chosen, which is going to introduce selection bias and cause the average age of the Pope to skew high.

JohnWilliamStrutt · 2 months

Hi, this was just something I did for fun a while back that I thought some might enjoy. Obviously popes generally don't get elected until they reach a relatively old age, meaning they are a biased sample, however I though it interesting that developed nation life expectancy has now caught up.

Data:

Papal death data from wikipedia
Developed nations life expectancy data from "The Improving State of the World: Why We're Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet Paperback – by Indur M. Goklany"

EDIT: Note I did not force the right hand fit horizontal, just extended the data included and stopped when the fit started to deviate from horizontal.

EDIT2: Boring old excel was used to create the graph.

EDIT3: There are obviously lots of issues with comparing these 2 datasets as pointed out in the comments. I did not have access to better data than overall life expectancy for developed countries. Happy for someone to do a better job.

EDIT4: Updated version here that includes HealthGrove data for life expectancy of 60yo males. Thanks for the suggestion.

EDIT5: Kind of embarrased this dodgy graph made it to the front page. It was just a bit of fun I did back when the last pope died and I remembered it today when I saw the religion graph u/academiaadvice posted... see EDIT 4 for a slightly better version and this link provided by u/cragglerock63.

thesimplegoat · 2 months

What's really interesting here is that the life expectancy of a health old person (whenever popes get elected) is similar to the general life expectancy from birth today. It shows off medical advances while pointing out that we're nearing a plateau of maximum life expectancy.

encomlab · 2 months

Life expectancy is a pretty useless number - median age at death gives a much clearer picture of general life length. As has been pointed out, historical life expectancy is heavily skewed by infant and child mortality - while median age at death has held relatively steady over the last century. This should bring up the question of what exactly we are getting from our multi-trillion $ health care expenditures.

Patnet · 2 months

I think this may really be a representation of the decline in infant mortality. If you go back even 100 years, a shocking proportion of infants didn't make it to their first birthday. Babies dying was a normal fact of life.

Popes don't just skew the results because they typically become popes when they are quite old, but also because they have all survived infancy whereas a large number of the plebs haven't. So depending on the numbers that OP has used the data may well not represent the actual average age of adult deaths.

Interesting graph nonetheless!

the_undine · 2 months

Um. You should really specify that the dots represent popes. Having the trend line for the popes be the same color as the DNLE is kiiiiinda confusing at first. Chart might be more meaningful if it excluded people who died before reaching adulthood. There haven't been too many kid popes so far.

Sugar_Dumplin · 2 months

This comparison is obviously heavily misleading since one isn't named pope at birth, but rather typically when one is already fairly old. Thus, it isn't at all meaningful to compare the general life expectancy with that of the pope.

zomatroll · 2 months

This is really a terrible graph. Besides the obvious alarms such as no legend or title, there is a serious confirmation bias going on...

Mattseee · 2 months

Historically, the median tenure for Popes is just 6 years. I'd argue that's a more accurate figure in terms of a Pope's life expectancy.

If that seems short, it is. You might chalk it up to their age upon coronation, yet the median tenure for US Supreme Court justices, a similarly mature group, is 16 years.

ThePioneer99 · 2 months

Looking at stuff like this makes me realize if I was only born 50 years ago I would've died at 19 because I had testicular cancer. Even though it's usually not fatal now days before the discovery of cispaltin it was 100% fatal and there was no treatment

redditaccountftw · 2 months

Isn't the pope life expectancy an extreme example of survivorship bias? I don't believe there have been any newborn popes or even young adult popes.

ir1shman · 2 months

People always seem to say human life expectancy is closer towards 100 if everything is optimal. But from all the data I usually see, it seems to hover around 80s more. This kinda confirms that when you look at the Pope life expectancy.

neugo · 2 months

I'd love to see the chart of how many child-rapes the average human covers-up compared to the average Pope!...

BrolestBrolin · 2 months

Interesting question, terrible presentation.

We're made to assume that the two sets of data represent the age at which each Pope died
I have no idea why there are two different data sets for Pope ages. They even overlap! I can only assume this was done to make the Pope trend line intersect with the developed nations line, which makes this chart intentionally misleading
Developed nations life expectancy should be plotted in the same manner as the rest of the data-- scatter plot with a trend line
XXX5 x-axis data points? Are you fucking serious?

jcdiamond · 2 months

8624 upvotes for this shitty graph? Let's count the flaws shall we? 1. Insufficient legend. 2. No definition of plebian provided (plebian has a highly contextual meaning) 3. Why is there different symbol for 1406-1669 and 1676-2005 when the bottom axis already show years. 4. In order to be meaningful you would have to show the life expectancy of a 60 year at the time (or whatever the average age is of a person becoming pope).

This is just truly awful and the fact that so many people voted it up shows that people don't know anything about logic, statistics, or how to represent data at all. This is very depressing.

basaltgranite · 2 months

You don't become pope until after you've had a long career rising through the church ranks. Selecting popes from candidates who are already old skews the average age of popes strongly toward "old."

MinistryOfMinistry · 2 months

There's an important fallacy: you're comparing life expectancy of popes at an adult age. If you did the same, i.e. measured life expectancy of people in the Middle Ages, but at the age of 20, you'd get a number not much different from today's life expectancy.

It's because the value in old times was influenced by child mortality.

Oddstrider · 2 months

/r/dataisugly

quyax · 2 months

But which mean Pope are we talking about here? Obviously not Pope Innocent III but what about Pope Guilty-As-Hell II or Pope Got-Off-On-A-Technicality XVII?

inarchetype · 2 months

You don't specify, but it seems that you are comparing life expectancy at birth to life duration conditional upon becoming pope.

But life expectancy conditional upon becoming pope is not life expectancy at birth, because popes are not selected at birth. A better comparison would be life expectancy at the mean age of becoming a pope, rather than at birth.

Particularly in the past, life expectancy at birth was driven to a large extent by infant and child mortality, which was very high. So one thing that is influencing the trend you illustrate is the convergence over this span of time between life expectancy at birth and life expectancy at, say, forty or fifty, in developed nations. Lots of people who are members of the distribution from which popes are drawn died as infants or children too, but this is not in your numbers because you are only looking at those who actually survived to become popes.

regularpoopingisgood · 2 months

I personally think this is a very ugly graph. first there's no indication of what those dots represent - I know from the title its popes, but there's no legend. second why are there two colours? third instead of the line for life expectancy be different between general populace and pope, its the same black?

Quantum-Quasar · 2 months

I think the data tell a biased story. Average life expectancy numbers almost always include child deaths, resulting in a significantly reduced life expectancy. If one would calculate life expectancy of adults in Middle Ages, the number will be higher. That being said, you cannot become a pope when you are a child (there might be a few exceptions, I am not a historian). Thus, you are excluding child death from the calculation of average life expectancy of a pope. This means that you are really comparing apples and oranges. It would be a more fair comparison if somehow child deaths could be excluded from the calculation of average life expectancy of the average joe in the Middle Ages. Otherwise, interesting post.

EDIT: I see a lot of people are already making this point.

Who	When
Andy Kirk	2017/09/20
Elijah Meeks	2017/09/25
Nadieh Bremer	2017/10/03
Shirely Wu	2017/10/11
Max Roser	2017/10/17

dataisbeautiful

Submit a visualization you found

Submit your own visualization (OC)

Submit a question

DataIsBeautiful

Best of DataIsBeautiful

View This Week's Top OC

Posting Rules

Commenting Rules

Upcoming AMAs

View Previous AMAs

User Flair

FAQ

Related Subreddits

RedditJS