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Comment by fire_lake

1 year ago

Longevity is a poor metric anyway - we need to emphasize quality * years

The two are greatly correlated, so at a population level it's a distinction without a difference. There's no population of people all living to be 100 but spending their 90s on a respirator.

The distinction matters for individual health decisions, and for comparing different interventions, where you can extend someone's life at the cost of their quality of life.

In theory that is a reasonable distinction (and that type of trade-off can come up in very specific situations like treatment of terminal disease in elderly people) but in terms of lifestyle choices there is currently no known difference between lifestyle choices that increase expected longevity and lifestyle choices that increase expected quality years.