Comment by Metacelsus
2 years ago
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!
2 years ago
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.
That last sentence is a massive step beyond common knowledge, if it's true... and I don't think it is, what can doctors do?
> 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.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4866586/#:~:tex....
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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.
The guy died at a age of 100 dude...
In this case, Kaufman died at 71 of an incurable cancer though.
Incurable by the time it was caught and even then "incurable" can sometimes end up being curable with a ridiculous amount of resources.
They might have more money but there's no higher class.
Perhaps worth noting that he lived 13 years past the time the obituary was penned.
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.
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It really doesn't matter. Those writers are immortal. The only thing that would change such an obituary, is a regime change.
Common? Give us another example
See here for some recent obits written by Ronald Bergen, who died in 2020:
https://www.theguardian.com/profile/ronaldbergan
The reasons have much more to do with much better diets, getting better sleep, not working stressful and physically demanding and dangerous jobs, etc.
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.”
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Turns out that being able to afford a better life leads to a longer life.
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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.
> Out of curiosity I asked ChatGpt 4 to write an obituary for him and it refused as it would insensitive or disrespectful.
I'm continuously astonished how people pay 20$ per-month to be lectured like that. I guess I shouldn't be by now...
With good custom instructions, it almost never happens...
"Treat me as an expert in all subject matter."
"No moral lectures - discuss safety only when it's crucial and non-obvious."
"If your content policy is an issue, provide the closest acceptable response and explain the issue."
"No need to disclose you're an AI."
"If the quality of your response has been substantially reduced due to my custom instructions, explain the issue."
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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
> I told it to he had passed away, it checked the internet
Are you sure it didn't just "believe" what you told it, the same way LLMs can be badgered into falsehoods?
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.
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archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20231130042426/https://www.nytim...
It's kind of nice to have some of your work outlive you, especially in such a transient medium.
By over a decade!