How to live to 100: Don't take health advice from centenarians

It’s a cliche of reporting on people who reach 100 years of age, or even 110, to ask them some variation of the question: ‘What did you do to live this long?’ Inevitably, some interesting and unexpected answer is highlighted. While a popular news story, this is a relatively meaningless question that doesn’t help us understand why certain people have lived so long. Let me try to explain why, via beautiful buildings, fighter pilots and statistics. In the second world war, Allied statisticians were applying their skills to minimising the number of bombers being shot down by enemy fire. Survivorship bias is everywhere in society. This bias applies to our perceptions of architecture, to finances, and to career plans. While we know that lifelong exercise is associated with unusually good health into older age, we can’t directly say one causes the other yet. Correlation does not equal causation. That point is hammered home relentlessly to students in science degrees.