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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/was-jeanne-calment-the-oldest-person-who-ever-lived-or-a-fraud?
Interesting article—among other things, I think it kind of illustrates how the idea that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” can be misused:
When I pushed Zak about the inconsistencies in his theory, he became annoyed. “You misunderstand the whole thing about the validation of extreme age,” he said. “Everybody agrees that the burden of proof in extreme age is on the claimant and the validators, not on the skeptics.”
Except that when one claim is that Jeanne Calment lived to be over 120 years old, never moved from the city of her birth and thus can be pretty easily tracked through the local archives; and the other claim is that she died in the 1930s and her daughter Yvonne began impersonating her? In a small city where lots of people knew both women by sight? It’s the second claim that’s the extraordinary one.
Interesting article—among other things, I think it kind of illustrates how the idea that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” can be misused:
When I pushed Zak about the inconsistencies in his theory, he became annoyed. “You misunderstand the whole thing about the validation of extreme age,” he said. “Everybody agrees that the burden of proof in extreme age is on the claimant and the validators, not on the skeptics.”
Except that when one claim is that Jeanne Calment lived to be over 120 years old, never moved from the city of her birth and thus can be pretty easily tracked through the local archives; and the other claim is that she died in the 1930s and her daughter Yvonne began impersonating her? In a small city where lots of people knew both women by sight? It’s the second claim that’s the extraordinary one.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-12 05:04 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2020-02-12 07:17 pm (UTC)From:I can't read the article, because The New Yorker's website is stubbornly refusing to accept my quite valid login; is the conspiracy theory part of the attraction of the second explanation?
no subject
Date: 2020-02-12 08:54 pm (UTC)From:I think some statistician demonstrated that apparently high numbers of centenarians tend to cluster in rural and low-tech places not because the lifestyle there is healthier, but because the record-keeping is spottier; but give it another century of modern record-keeping and women keeping their own names after marriage, we should be able to get a truer picture, with fewer false examples, but also fewer that might be true but that we have to throw out because we can’t be absolutely positive. At which point we’ll be able to say with a bit more confidence whether 122 years is truly impossible or just really really unusual.
Shorter version of the article:
A few people (mostly a Russian mathematician) claim to have debunked Jeanne Calment’s apparent 122-year lifespan: their theory is that when her daughter Yvonne died in 1934, it was actually Jeanne who died, and Yvonne then impersonated her mother for the rest of her life. And yeah, at first “identity fraud” sounds way more likely than “the same individual lived for over 120 years.” Except that in this particular case, the individual lived in a relatively small city, was a member of one of the more prominent and well-to-do (and possibly resented*) families, and never took a long trip abroad or became a recluse, so there’s no obvious window of time when a substitution could have been made; an extant photo of Jeanne and Yvonne shows they looked more like sisters than like mother and daughter, but they didn’t look identical.** So arguing for an identity switch gets you into Moon-landing-conspiracy territory, where not only the whole Calment family and their servants and store employees, but anyone who knew them or lived in the neighbourhood, would have had to be a dupe or a co-conspirator.
Motive is also a problem – the initial suggestion was that the family wanted to conceal the matriarch’s death to avoid inheritance taxes, but somebody looked at property rolls and ran the numbers and said “the tax was 6% and they don’t seem to have been hurting for cash, why go to that much risk and trouble?” Zak apparently then switched to a hypothesis that Jeanne had died of tuberculosis and the Calments feared rumours of illness would scare customers away from their store, but Yvonne’s cause of death is recorded as tuberculosis, which would be the worst-ever cover-up for tuberculosis…
* One local mentions that her grandfather, who would have been alive at a time when he could reasonably have known both Jeanne and Yvonne by sight, was also a Communist with no great liking for the haute-bourgeoisie, and that if he’d noticed anything suspicious, he’d have happily denounced her.
** One thing I did notice in the article is that a mayor of the city who met with her around the time of her hundredth birthday mentions that she wore a grey suit and a hat with a veil. Typical enough old-fashioned daytime formalwear for the 1970s, but I’d have expected the hoax side to latch onto that as evidence of a disguise, and they don’t. Personally, even though veils on hats did make a comeback in the 1930s, around the time of the purported Jeanne/Yvonne switch, I’ve never seen any from the photos of that period that would have been terribly effective as a disguise at close quarters.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-12 09:40 pm (UTC)From:Thank you! I like the point of the super-documented gold standard skewing the potential statistics.
So arguing for an identity switch gets you into Moon-landing-conspiracy territory, where not only the whole Calment family and their servants and store employees, but anyone who knew them or lived in the neighbourhood, would have had to be a dupe or a co-conspirator.
That's what I was wondering about. Conspiracy theories are attractive to people not just because they reaffirm some (often prejudiced) construction of the world but because they confer the ego-boost of secret knowledge, of knowing how the world really works while all the sheeple around you just nod and swallow the Kool-Aid. That can make people cling to some absolutely garbage positions just because no one wants to be wrong or, worse, have to admit that maybe other people aren't gullible idiots after all.
Your icon is terrific.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-13 12:26 am (UTC)From:I tend to think of it as people getting so caught up in proving a thing is possible they don’t stop to think about whether or not it’s plausible. Which I guess is much the same as what you said above.
I wonder if, in this case, how much of it is us having a different view of how identity is customarily proven. We use ID documents and serial numbers a lot more often than in the last century, and there are more centralized databases, etc. But maybe because more people need IDs issued, the apparatus that generates them is larger; and less business is done face-to-face, so if you are able to steal a cc or social-security number, you’re in like Flynn. In the article, the thing that finally convinces the reporter there was no hoax is when she looks at the record of a property sale from 1931, signed by Jeanne (who allegedly was already tubercular and replaced by Yvonne for public appearances), the local notary, and the purchaser; and she notices the notary is the same official who notarized Yvonne’s marriage certificate a few years earlier, and Jeanne’s marriage certificate, years before that. I suppose I could potentially go to one of Toronto’s ServiceOntario offices and get a driver’s license issued with my picture and someone else’s name, if I had a copy of their birth certificate and whatever other evidence I’d need to convince the clerk; but this would have been closer to someone in a small town rolling up to the one local DMV, where the chief clerk goes to the same church as her family, and trying to pass yourself off as your own mom. And if you succeed in tricking or bribing them, there are still dozens of other people you’ll have to convince.
ETA— otoh I’m kind of willing to suspend some of my disbelief for Obvious Disguises in pre-18th-c settings, because (a) no electric lights, (b) fewer eyeglasses.
ETA2— Meanwhile: https://mooncustafer.tumblr.com/post/190798255655/embed
no subject
Date: 2020-02-13 05:32 am (UTC)From:I think that can definitely be a factor. I just tend to think of conspiracy theories as more pernicious than other kinds of beloved-but-ass-backwards theories, so my view of their motives is probably more jaundiced.
I wonder if, in this case, how much of it is us having a different view of how identity is customarily proven.
And maybe thinking that the past was stupider.
ETA2— Meanwhile
That is on point!