Too Good to be True

During the lunch I talked with my friends about winning the lottery, making precise prediction, and all those that will be too good to be true. Miracles, nonetheless, should always be interpreted doubly cautiously when they seem too extreme to be true. That may not be the kind of advice most of us want to hear. But that doesn't make it any less the truth.

This reminds me of the story that Oscar winners were found to live longer than their less successful peers. Alas, what a wonderful world, in which winning the Academy Award adds to your longevity, giving four extra years of life!

Few years after publication of this too-good-to-be-true finding in a renowned medical journal, another closer look at the illusory statistics makes us re-think. As a matter of fact, the original analysis measured the survival from performers’ day of birth, instead of counting from the time when they won the award (or entered the contest). In other words, this gives them an inbuilt survival advantage by crediting the winner’s life-years before winning toward survival subsequent to winning; the winners simply had to survive long enough to win the award.

As a corollary, the same can be said of winning the Nobel Prizes, which are never awarded posthumously. Longevity can therefore be as important a factor as ingenuity in winning a Nobel. For example, the German physicist Ernst Ruska, who invented the electron microscope in 1932, had to wait for more than half a century before he was honoured with a Nobel Prize in 1986.