Talk:List of oldest living men/@comment-258494-20200121153621

Greetings,

Perhaps one day the GRG can add an "Oldest Living Man" list. That is something that we are strongly considering.

However, even if we did, I think it's clear that Mr. Albano Andrade is nowhere near the second-oldest living man at this time, so I agree that it's good to not rank him at this time.

We need to separate the concepts of "validation" from "ranking". Validation involves officially confirming the age of one individual person (analogous to confirming the height of a tree in a forest). Ranking involves validation plus data coverage (with trees, for example, a LIDAR scan of a forest can document every high point in the forest, not just one or two). It's not enough to simply validate here or there; there needs to be an assessment of how the datapoint fits with the other data points. We can see from this list that there is a significant number of cases between Chitetsu Watanabe and Albano Andrade and no rational analyst would see these datapoints as "1 and 2".