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Thanks for the comments! I've updated the syllabus according to the ones you left this morning.

Regarding policy obstacles for technical issues, I think this is a good thing to focus on. I've included some of that in my separate list of discussion points, but it would be good to look into that more.

WillNickols3y1

Thanks for the questions!

Yes, "average" means "mean" throughout.

I calculated those estimates with a LOTUS (population weighted average) approach: multiplying the population's probability of dying at each age by that age itself and taking the sum of those products from ages 0 to infinity. In practice, I took the sum of the products from ages 0 to 1 million because the probability of living past 1 million was so low in these models that there was no contribution to the sum that was more than R's round-to-zero threshold.

And though none of these m... (read more)

Linch

CW: Frank discussion of suicide Sorry I still think you aren't taking the selection effects seriously enough. By selection effects I'm mostly thinking that a relatively small fraction of people will be selected out from the population, and then aggregate suicide rates will drop. Put another way, if you haven't killed yourself in 200 years of good health, would be weird to start now. There's at least two lines of reasoning for this: * rational suicide hypothesis. If people kill themselves for rational reasons, that is, because they correctly estimate that the net pleasure vs suffering balance in their future isn't worth it, you might expect the people who correctly believe this for idiosyncratic reasons (eg their brain chemistry/neural circuits are unusually predisposed to ennui or depression) to self-select out of the population via suicide first, and the people remaining to have more stable preference for life. * irrational suicide. To the extent that people kill themselves for irrational reasons (eg impulsivity, cognitive distortions that limit rational estimations of future well-being), you might also expect those factors to be concentrated in a relatively small fraction of the population, such that after several hundred years of age, the (living) people remaining will on average be less impulsive and more rational about affective judgments. I would not be surprised if there are similar things going on for homicide. Certainly people's proclivities to homicide varies with age today.

WillNickols3y3

Thanks Max, you make a good point about differentiating between exponentials, Paretos, and log-normals. It does seem like log-normals are the norm when it comes to these skewed distributions, especially with things like world income. Still, keeping an open mind as to which of the skewed distributions best fits the data can hopefully make these models more robust.

You mentioned the challenges of distinguishing between these heavy-tailed distributions, and I would only add that this challenge increases when viewing these outcomes as interval... (read more)

WillNickols3y2

Really interesting, thanks for pointing this out!

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