I think it's working as intended. The year is simply a randomly chosen year not related to the density of births in that year. It would be a boring tool if it actually chose "random year based on random birth" because almost every choice would be from 1900 onward...
That’s not what it says on the tin though. “Drawn at random from everyone who has ever lived” means years will not be uniformly distributed.
This is a case where I think they should change the wording as opposed to the functionality. I like that it's a random year regardless of population density.
But as other have noted it's almost certainly not just a random year.
I do think the cleanest and most fascinating interpretation is what the title says "One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived" which clearly is about random people and has nothing to do with the year.
But I think experientially, the preferred feeling for a user is a random deep dive into the circumstantiality of different eras and different geographies than our own, rather than a true-to-life re-rolling that would constantly turn up 20th and 21st century outcomes. So the spirit of it is probably closer to the random year idea, but it's literally not random year, but maybe randomly something else, like eras however designated.
If the implementation was correct it wouldn’t be hard to let the user choose either option.
Yes, many births would be within the last 200 years but it’s still very different to be a man born in the year 1950 in New York vs a woman in 1950 in rural China.
That would certainly be easier at this point, but I like the “random human life” idea more.
I’ve reflected in the past about how lucky I am to have been born where I was, when I was, and be given the abilities that I have. Sure there are plenty of people that were luckier, but also a lot who were less lucky, most of whom are dead.
Should we call this a cargo cult
"random" != "uniformly random", if you want to be pedantic.
But "is far more likely to fall near the present" = "is far more likely to fall near the present". The author makes the claim about probability distribution themselves, then does the opposite.
You're right, yet I agree with the website's approach. The goal of this site is to educate users about how people lived, not educate them about stats. IMO. I would have chosen the same algo.
It's clear to me that an even bigger HC crowd would howl "Oh, how boring, look at him choosing pretty much only still alive people" if he had done the 'uniformly random" selection. C'mon!
Notice the log scale on the year axis. There is far more probability mass during older years because of that.
Log scale should only affect how the years are displayed on the chart, not how they are sampled.
The site covers a 300,000 year span, so a randomly chosen year would average ~150,000 BCE, which definitely isn't happening.
The skew towards the present isn't as stark as that. World population has exploded in the past couple of centuries, but it hasn't been high for very long. 1900 to present only covers ~11% of all births.
1900 to 2026 is 127 years (inclusive), so 0.04% of the year range available, yet it only has 11% of all births. That's certainly a skew, although I suppose subjective whether or not that's stark. At a >3x order of magnitude, it's certainly significant though.
You could definitely call it stark, but the comment I replied to suggested that it would be well over 50%.