So that’s totally true. If you get information about lives, you expect to be halfway through lives, if you get information about years lived, you expect to be halfway through years lived. I never really thought about how you can just get years lived from population, so you don’t do anything weird like first learning about the number of lives and then throwing it away.
I guess it’s just the implicit comparison of the merits of these two very minimal sets of information, on a subject about which we have lots of better information, that makes it a bit awkward for me.
So that’s totally true. If you get information about lives, you expect to be halfway through lives, if you get information about years lived, you expect to be halfway through years lived. I never really thought about how you can just get years lived from population, so you don’t do anything weird like first learning about the number of lives and then throwing it away.
I guess it’s just the implicit comparison of the merits of these two very minimal sets of information, on a subject about which we have lots of better information, that makes it a bit awkward for me.