I would have preferred this article ended with a function that was scientifically validated which gives anyone the odds of dying in N months from now with a confidence value based on which variables you can, and cannot, answer. Apparently this possible.

One person I knew well was a Ph.D. in Statistics. He taught at Purdue in Statistics and got a well paying job for the CDC to predict when a person would die and spent some numbers of years on this. He said he quit his job after he found that he (they) could indeed do this, as he said to me, predicting to day. The highest probably day of death for anybody. He was so disturbed by this that he quit and turned his work to predicting product failures for large companies because it was not so depressing. And, the same methodology made him a lot more money too. (P.S. I taught both undergrad and grad statistics back when, but my Ph.D. was Experimental Psychology).

But, Robert, can you find out if there is an Excel macro, say, that is a page answering questions about yourself, or someone else, say a President of the USA, or a relative, which then gives you the "curve of predicted death" starting today and into the future until, say, you are dead with a probability of 99.999%. It would have those variance bars around the expected values. I would expect at least 100 questions (of which you may only be able to give answers maybe to 30 or so and this will affect the variance around every day going forward.)

I want this code and questions to be open source and free. However, I would pay a subscription fee to a monthly update. So the free version could be last month's best guess which itself would age, motivating me to buy the subscription.

I suspect my friend could have given me this, and I suspect, Robert, you could get his (or their) Q&A and equation out of CDC...at least an old one by a FOIA request. But I have other things to do. Can you go try to find out who has this. My friend wouldn't give it to me. He said it was too depressing and he signed something that said he couldn't. (Was it classified by somebody in our Gov't???).

That said, it would have been a great thing for this article or a new one. Again, the questions and the actual equations. The function would be:

MyDeathCurve[DayFromNow, ProbabilityofDying, Standard Deviation] = dayIdiefromNow(DayFromNow, QuestionAnswers[question,answer,confidence]) . In Excel anybody can write a simple script that would, for example, take that macro and get the answer for, say, the next month, or year, or five years. Most important, anybody can see the factors that best predict the day you will die and get some good science when people with the knowledge notice a missing factor and just add to it under public discourse. Imagine a new holiday: the day after the day in your future when you pass say a 90% probability of being dead. Sort of an inverse birthday party. A celebration.

Or, imagine a let's all answer these questions party to see who at the party is most likely to die in the next six months! And least. (It is probably a subset of the questions that the party host picks for whatever reason).

Or is this something that the Life Insurance Companies are hiding? Can you find this out? It would be nice to know, too. If my friend wasn't lying, and I have no reason to believe he was, this exists. Can you find it and make it available? It might even exist in twenty places, of which I know of NONE. P.S. can you please also right an article after investigative reporting into the Life Insurance Company possible secrets?

I just feel like I am being lied to by the evil overlords. And your article didn't give me more confidence about that. Sadly.