Tell HN: DanBC has died

I'm in Gloucester as well and had no idea.

The number of people who would cry at my death is ~13 (immediate family including in-laws). Within that, the number of people who would be deeply affected is 5 (kids, spouse, parents). Aside from them, the number of people who would think "wow, weird" on hearing of my death is maybe a couple dozen, and the number within that who would think of me for >20 seconds more than a year from my death is probably less than half dozen.

It doesn't bother me that these numbers are "small."

I've thought about that myself, and came to the conclusion that in my case the answer will most likely be no. I can't say I'd be too disappointed though, being missed by a handful of friends and family would already signal a life well lived.

I will miss Dan's comments, and this community was better for his participation.

I'm sure it brings Alexander the Great a lot of comfort knowing he is remembered. I say, enjoy life without optimizing for what happens after you're dead.

I can only speak for myself of course, but arguments can be great. Some of the best discussions of my life have been on hn with people who are open-minded, curious, and respectful. In my opinion, this is a great reminder to be those things.

To be clear, I'm not implying that you weren't those things, just making a personal observation.

[dead]

Tildes has a remembrance post for Dan: https://tildes.net/~talk/1iv0/remembering_danbc

On some podcast a longevity doctor asked the host to estimate how much longer the average person would live if we eliminated/cured cancer.

The answer was about three years. Eliminate heart disease? Another three years. Eliminate both? About five years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori

The problem of controlled cellular growth in a multicellular organism is a really hard problem that evolution has spent billions of generations on, and any cell in any of the dozens of systems that keeps the human body going can potentially escape the normal cell cycle control process and go out of control, leading to cancer. (edit: the fact that so many people lead full lives without coming down with cancer is more remarkable from this view, it's one of the miracles of life).

While the ability to treat cancer using modern technology (especially if it is detected relatively early) has made vast advances, we're also surrounded by and exposed to a wide variety of molecules that can, especially in high concentrations, inflict damage on the cellular control system (a whole lot of proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, cofactors, etc.) and while that damage may be somewhat random in nature, if it happens to hit a key sequence in the cell control DNA you get a cancer cell. You can greatly reduce the prevalance of such carcinogenic mutagens in the food, air, water and soil with suitable regulations but this cuts into profit margins for the producers of various commodities and products who in turn lobby governments to eliminate said regulations (which to be fair may not have been well-designed or implemented).

Yes there are genetic factors which may increase one's cancer risk but these are very complicated and often overemphasized by those who dont't want to see clean air, water, soil, food etc. regulations implemented.

Because if nothing else gets you, cancer risk rises as you get older. At some point it gets you, I guess.

You become a lot more aware of it as you get older, and what you see to some degree depends a lot on your socioeconomic status. A big part of it is that we've made so much progress when it comes to heart disease. Most people who go to my hospital are on public insurance, and they're dying more frequently from lifestyle-related diseases (like T2DM which leads to hypertension, chronic kidney disease, and congestive heart failure)

https://www.clubvita.net/us/news-and-insights/top-charts-23-...

Cancer (outside behavior related cancer like lung cancer) is on the rise.

In spite of better treatments, a twenty year old today is more likely from cancer while in their twenties than at any time before. Each younger age cohort has an increase risk of cancer, and at younger ages.

Cancer deaths overall are still going down though, as the smoking generation still alive goes out.

probably because it's the first, second, or third leading cause of death in every country, depending on how you slice it up, killing about a quarter of everyone

To be a little more precise, roughly 1 in 6 deaths are due to cancer. It’s the second leading cause after heart diseases, which are 1 in 3.

I have two people in my direct circle get and have stage4 lymphoma and adult leukemia this year at the time of their initial diagnosis. Does seem like it is on the rise from my perspective.

Because they are.

TL;DR: Because today, people are regularly living long enough to get it. It's often a good sign to have higher cancer rates -- societies with higher cancer rates are richer, happier, and live longer than those with lower cancer rates.

I mean, cancer is bad. But it's a good sign for society if lots of people die of cancer -- they tend to hit the elderly. Historically, about 80 percent of people who die of cancer are over 50, and that's fairly constant. (Interestingly, the share of cancer deaths that are in people over 70 have been rising, from about 36 percent to 49 percent - that's as a portion of the total.)[1]

The ranking for prevalence of cancer is higher income countries, upper-middle-income countries, lower-middle-income countries, and finally with the lowest rates low-income countries. Since the world is getting richer, it stands to reason that it's likely there will be higher cancer rates (of course, it's not guaranteed; it's possible being European makes you more likely to get cancer, which would explain the higher rankings of high-income countries, which are often European, but not lead to higher numbers elsewhere).[2]

This is borne out individually. Countries with the lowest rates of cancer tend not to be great places to live. Our World In Data has three countries[2] tied for the lowest cancer rates (0.1 percent), Niger, Chad and Benin, which have life expectancies of 62, 53, and 60[3][4] and had happiness scores (self-reported life satisfaction) of 4.56, 4.47, and 4.38 (out of 10; for reference, the world average is 5.27, with numbers for individual countries ranging from 7.74 to 1.72) respectively.[5] The full list of countries with a prevalence of cancer below 0.5 percent is as follows: Niger, Chad, Benin, Gambia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Mali, Yemen, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Cote d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Liberia, Angola, Guinea, Cameroon Guinea-Bissau, Nigeria, East Timor, Tajikistan, Mozambique, Senegal, Togo, Papua New Guinea, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Oman, Sudan, Nepal, Kenya, Mauritania, Maldives, Bhutan, South Sudan, Ghana, Vanuatu, Equatorial Guinea, Bangladesh, Tanzania, Solomon Islands, Sao Tome and Principe, Eritrea, Malawi, Rwanda, Laos, India, Uganda, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Djibouti, Congo, Botswana, Zambia, Kiribati, Lesotho, Algeria, Gabon, Mongolia, Eswatini, Morocco, Comoros, Honduras, Haiti, Samoa, Zimbabwe, Guatemala, Turkmenistan, Myanmar, Kyrgyzstan, Marshall Islands, Namibia, Philippines, Egypt, Cambodia, Indonesia[2]

The happiest of those is Guatemala, at 6.29, and a prevalence of 0.4 percent. But most of them are much less happy. To take a random example (I used random.org to randomize the list and chose the top one and the top six, excluding Sao Tome which had no happiness data), Uganda is at 4.37, and the average of Uganda, Comoros, Turkmenistan, Yemen, and Bhutan is 4.41, nearly a point below the world average.

Life expectancy is no better; again doing Uganda, Comoros, Turkmenistan, Yemen, and Bhutan, Uganda had a life expectancy of 62.7 years, and the average of them is 66.2, almost 5 years below the world average of 71 (range of typical life expectancy is from 85.9 to 52.5).

Okay, so life expectancy and happiness are both lower for countries with lower rates of cancer, seemingly. What about those with higher rates?

Well, those with cancer rates up to or including 3 percent are as follows: Monaco, Bermuda, Italy, France, Netherlands, Finland, Germany, United States, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Denmark, Portugal, Greece, Croatia, Spain, Estonia, Canada, Norway, Andorra, United Kingdom, Slovenia, Belgium, Iceland, Switzerland. Monaco comes in at the top, with 5.9 percent with some type of cancer.

Monaco has a life expectancy of 85.9 years, the highest. In the world. There was no happiness data available for it or the runner-up Bermuda, but Italy ranked itself at 6.32.

Of the top five countries in life expectancy that show up on the cancer list at all (Monaco, not Hong Kong or Macao, Japan, Australia, Switzerland, Malta), all of them but Malta show up on the list, and Malta just misses the cutoff (2.9 percent). In happiness (Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Israel), Sweden and Israel aren't ranked. Sweden just misses the cutoff at 2.9 and Israel is at 1.6 percent but has a notably much younger population than any of the others.

Again using random.org and taking the top one and then the follow-up four, Monaco came in at number one (data already covered and missing happiness, so excluded), followed by the US, Switzerland, Iceland, Australia, and Italy. The US has a life expectancy of 77.2 years. The average for the five is 82.26, so if it were a country it would be number 21 globally and over TEN YEARS above the world average of 71, above even the Oceanian average (the highest) of 79.4; for happiness, the US is number 18 worldwide excluding ties, ranking itself at 6.72; the average is 6.938, meaning if it were a country it would come in number fourteen including ties and almost two points above the world average of 5.08.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-deaths-by-age

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-with-...

[3] Rounded to the nearest whole number

[4] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy

[5] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/happiness-cantril-ladder

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Microplastics?