Precocity-longevity Effects In Sport
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Investigations into the precocity-longevity hypothesis (PLH) have suggested that early high career achievement has a negative impact on the longevity of eminent persons (i.e., presidents, prime ministers, etc.) and professional baseball players. PURPOSE: Our purpose was to further examine the relationship between precocious achievement and lifespan differences in athlete populations; in particular, we considered different statistical approaches (e.g., survival vs. correlation) on this relationship. METHODS: The effects of debut age on longevity were examined in National Basketball Association (NBA) and Canadian-born National Hockey League (NHL) players. Both alive and deceased players were investigated using descriptive, correlation, regression, and survival analyses, also controlling for debut age, playing position, years played, and death age. RESULTS: Descriptively, median lifespan for early achievers was higher than it was for late-achievers in NBA players who debuted between 1947-1979 (N = 1847; 83.5 y vs. 81.5 y). In a subsample of deceased players from the 1940s and 1950s (n = 377), age of entry was positively correlated with age of death (r = 0.26, p < .001), and was a significant predictor of lifespan [F(1,376) = 27.04, p < .001]. Further, in Canadian-born NHL players who died between 1917-2010 (n = 937) debut age (M = 23.09) was correlated with death age (M = 68.27; r = .071, p < .001). Alternatively, the use of Kaplan-Meier and Cox regression survival analyses did not support the PLH in the NBA [1947-1979 debut; χ2 (1, N = 1847) = 2.53, p = .11], even after adjusting for playing position and decade of playing debut (Hazard Ratio: 1.06, 95% Confidence Interval: 0.86-1.32), nor in the ice-hockey sample [1917-1986 debut; χ2 (1, N = 2971) = 2.35, p = 0.12], after adjusting for playing position and years played (HR: 0.91, 95% CI: 0.79-1.05). CONCLUSION: These data suggest that the type of statistical analysis influences support for the PLH. Future analytical strategies must be exceedingly cautious in circumventing potential biases when testing this hypothesis in both athlete (e.g., National Football League) and eminent samples (e.g., Nobel Prize recipients).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".