[pulse7]

If "no magic is needed", then why don't you - or someone else - name, say, 5 more such groups/chunks with their exact characteristics? It seems that it is not that easy to find them... and yet someone found such a group in Loma Linda...

[Niksko]

It's much easier to find a group of Adventists that have an above average lifespan because Adventists form a community. People with blue eyes or people who are left handed who live in the same county don't all know each other and discuss their statistically insignificant longevity

[aziaziazi]

Doesn’t county or town/cities (doesn’t know the diff in US) counts for "communities", and aren’t those separated in groups while doing national stats? The dice rolling groups are obviously here and have probably been surveyed many time, didn’t they?

[SideQuark]

> If "no magic is needed",

I just gave you the math showing such groups are common, with no need for anything special. It's simply math. It as simple as: if I flip a coin long enough, I can find a run of 10 heads, or 100 hears, or a trillion heads.

The number of Americans and the number of ways to organize them is large enough that, just by chance, there will be many that have a 10+ years lifespan for no other reason than we simply have zillions of ways to split people into groups.

The math I presented give you the direction to compute such things. Learn enough math to solve the expected number of such groups, and you will be surprised.

To show one such group is anything other than statistical chance takes far more science and study and analysis than just saying "Look group has desired thing Y all we have is to repeat what the group did!"

> It seems that it is not that easy to find them

It's trivial to find such groups - medicine finds them all the time. Pick any medical result X that is expected to add Y years to life, pick some population center, pick those in the center with the habits/genetics in the study, and voila, you get yet another mystical group with magical life properties.

Except it's not magic. And it will happen with certainly without there being any underlying cause simply due to statistics. Medicine tries to remove the pure randomness of the result and demonstrate a causual relationship, but that is hard and not always done. They do this extra work because they know that stuff like the above happens so often purely randomly.

Simple example: [1] claims (I have not dug into the study, but it is likely well done) that 8 habits (eat healthy, exercise, good body weight, not too much alcohol, not smoking) would add 20ish years to life expectancy. So, go to a big city, find those in this group, and you'll get likely several thousand of them.

And now woo hoo! 24 years!

And for special effect, pick the subset that intersects yet another silly variable, say has red hair, or was bullied as a child, and now you too can get headlines that will spread like this one: "The 8 traits that make readheads live 20 more years!" "Bullied kids can do this one simple trick and outlive their tormentors!"

But this is simply nonsense. There is science, there is causality, and there is statistics, and not being able to disentangle them leads lots of people to post voodoo as if it's not simply random chance.

[1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/8-healthy-longevit...