Reply to Did my Wife LIE about how long cats will live?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]She most likely told the truth and inadvertently lied, and the difference is what is known as actuary science.  Take a look at an actuarial table.  I don't have one for cats, but here is one for people:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Excerpt_from_CDC_2003_Table_1.pdf

You can see on this table, that the life expectancy at birth is 77 years.

Yet, if you look up a 67 year old person on this table, they are expected to live another 17.6 years, ie until 84.5

How can that be, especially since medicine has improved so much since that retiree was born?  Shouldn't the baby live much longer than someone born in 1944?

The answer, which you can read on the table is this.  The life expectancy for someone who has already made it to their 67th birthday is greater than that of an average newborn baby, because the baby faces 67 years in which anything could happen to shorten his life.

So if your wife tells you that cats usually live 12-14 years, that is true.  But what you really care is how many more years an 8-15 year old cat can expect to live.  You and I both know that 15 year old cat is not staring death in the face.  [b]He made it 15 years, and so he could live a lot longer[/b].[/quote]

OMG! Are you serious? I hope not! Does that mean that someone who is 92y old will not die anytime soon? [/quote]

It means that they have a decent chance of living to the next year, and once they are 93 they have a decent chance of living to the next year.  Eventually everyone dies but this is the difference between "What are my chances (at birth) of living to 93?" vs. "I'm 92, what are the odds I will see my next birthday?"

It's a conditional probability.  If you like to think in football terms, a probability is "What are the odds that the Redskins will win the Superbowl?"  (0.00005%)  A conditional probabilitiy is "What are odds that the Redskins will win the Superbowl, given that they just won the NFC championship?" (50%, er, 20% but still much better).[/quote]

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