Everyone dies and everyone knows that everyone dies. I’m not really interested in how I’m going to die of old age, but what I have to worry about today to avoid an early death.
I think there’s probably still a difference in media reporting and probability but i’m guessing younger people 20-30 are most likely to die from vehicle accidents, accidents, suicide and drugs? I’m not sure though and I don’t have any evidence.
Cancer at #2 is more age-related. But that too is fairly preventable. Roughly 50% of cancers are thought to be related to poor lifestyle choices.
Point being - these are major causes of early death.
The best you can do is concierge care, but that only expedites primary care everything in the US is about specialists.
If you have access to the best healthcare you definitely don’t wait in the same queues. You have direct access to the specialists, often at the best teaching hospitals too.
If you have Medicare, good luck.
I have concierge medicine. I have two specialist appointments scheduled both take about 3mo.
I can see my PCP within 1 day. That is good. I can have blood drawn within 1 day. That's good.
Specialists, no advantage. This makes it not overly valuable, but what do you expect for 8k extra for year (on top of very good health care)?
I don't know how to access a higher tier of health. Perhaps at 100M+ of net worth it appears. IDK.
Meanwhile, my Mom waited months on Medicare for a heart eval due to arrhythmias.
Whatever plan you have, it doesn’t sound top tier?
This didn’t require high net worth, just a better plan through an employer - or you’re in an area with low specialist populations? Or some sort of low priority on a triage schedule?
If you have mm net worth, the specialists come to you - quickly - unless you really need the .001% specialist. and chances are you they don’t and it’s not worth it.
But even Kaiser had no issues giving less than a week access for anything important.
Living what is called a "low-risk" lifestyle (don't drink, don't smoke, maintain healthy weight, avoid junk food) results in an average life expectancy of 90 (93 for women, 87 for men), compared to being in the top 1% which results in a life expectancy of 87 (86 for men, 88 for women).
The overall average life expectancy in the U.S. is 78 (76 for men, 81 for women).
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4866586/
https://www.abom.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Impact-of-He...
2. It’s possible they are major causes of early death, but I can’t figure that out from the article and it would be nice if the article provided that information.
Chances are, one of the three is going to happen. The longer you live, the more the first two are likely.
Death by misadventure is possible at any point however!
I can tell you're quite young :-)
Old age is pretty broad, and you really need to start worrying at some point in your 40s. Although death due to these is rare at that age, you'll likely end up knowing 1-3 people who will die of these at that age. And a lot more in the 50s.
There's a huge difference between dying in your 60s (perhaps right before retirement), and dying in your 80s. Lumping all of these people into "old age" is likely a byproduct of the same biases that cause journalism to not report on it.
Uh... it absolutely is? Not sure what you're trying to say here. All progressive diseases, including heart disease (cancer too) are going to be "age related" simply because they take time to develop.
And plaque-related heart disease, the big killer, takes a long time to develop. The statistics are really clear here. People under 30 simply don't die of congestive heart failure absent one of a handful of very rare disorders. It starts to show up in middle age and really takes off after 70.
They are preventable, sure. They are "early" deaths in that the sufferer would die before something else got them. But they absolutely skew toward the elderly. Heavily.
Diet and exercise reduces the risks of a lot of health related deaths.
It really is simple math for most people. Reduce your calories, limit your salt, and eat more vegetables.
Same for stroke, kidney disease, diabetes, cancer. Those all usually hit older ages and have an age-related component, the risk of them at any age group is reduced by diet and exercise. Those two things can be true.
Of course there are outliers in each.
Age is the primary factor and health is generally the secondary factor. Both contribute.
If you have a heart attack at age 50 but with lifestyle intervention (or PCSK9 loss-of-function genetics) you instead would have had it at age 90, then "primarily age-related" is an insufficient claim in this thread.
There's some dissention as to whether this actually helps lengthen life for most people (the salt myth). You shouldn't ignore your doctor, but neither should you blindly accept poor science.
Yeah, that always happens. There's people that think you should only eat fruit or that coffee enemas are the way to perfect health.
But the fact remains that there are multiple studies with strong links of higher sodium intake to heart attacks. Further, globally pretty much all major medical organizations (especially in countries with well functioning health systems) agrees on limiting salt intake.
There will always be a few studies that show that "actually you should eat 20g of salt a day!" and to me, that is the bad science.
The medical consensus by both studies and the experts is that you should limit salt. Telling someone "but those studies were all bad" doesn't convince me that the counter studies are good, but instead convinces me that the counter studies were likely flawed. If there were more studies that reinforced the bad studies, that might be something to talk about. But as it stands, we have just a noisy minority (suspiciously selling books...) that is making a claim without the significant studies to back their media tours.
You could spend your whole life as the pillar of the community with time for everyone and without an enemy in the world, to live a whole 100 years. Along the way you might have made hundreds of friends and given so much to the world. However, you aren't going to make the news.
Meanwhile, a five year old that gets to meet an nasty brutal end could be in the paper for weeks, with the whole town turning out for the funeral and the whole nation taking note. The five year old would not have lived long enough to 'achieve' anything beyond potty training, yet many words could be written about them.
This is just how the world works. The thing is though, there has been much progress in recent decades on what works for longevity. It is not complicated, you just have to eat mostly plants, get about mostly with your own feet, say hello to people, stay away from the toxic chemicals and keep the old grey cells busy. Accident and communicable disease permitting, you should be able to live longer than your ancestors ever did, with a better 'healthspan'.
If you look at the adverts that pay for the news, everything is working against you. They want to get you to be car dependent and wasting lots of money on highly processed food that slowly gets you. Even by watching the news, you are spending time that could be spent in the company of actual human beings.
If the news was to report on what people do die from, as in the non-communicable diseases that go with car dependency and a high-fat diet devoid of fibre, then they would not be 'advertiser friendly'.
Except the majority of people in the US at least aren't healthy. So why are we elevating that question to be something that should be discussed nightly when it doesn't affect most people (as shown by death rates by cause)?
That's still a specific choice with wide ranging implications. Not saying we should or shouldn't report on it, but saying your question has pretty deeply ground assumptions on "importance". And it is not a given.
The news isn't supposed to be representative cross-section of reality. If it was, 99.9% of the newscast would be "most people went to work today, fed their family, went home and slept." The news is there to tell you the outliers of today's events.
But I think one thing is for sure -- they're not a public health raw data reporting system. There is nothing newsworthy about "heart disease" written on death certificates of people dying in old age. This is a fact more appropriate for a health class.
What I mean is that the time of "timely deaths" can be influenced by human action. If most people die of cancer and heart disease, we should work on avoiding an early death from these causes.
If we can add 2 years of time to our "timely" death of heart disease by eating better, we should do so instead of worrying about terrorism.
The statistics on the left hand in the article, unfortunately, have conflated preventable deaths with unpreventable deaths. While some of them made people preventable, we really have no clue how many. However, every single non-preventable death is included in that column. Talk about bias...
There is a whole section in the article about that.
The article insinuates that we don't care about heart disease, because heart disease is boring and common.
But death is a lot more complicated of an issue to society than this. Society expects that a young healthy person in the prime of their life is going to be around for their family and their friends. Other people are probably counting on them to still exist tomorrow. By contrast when an elderly person has been suffering on their deathbed with dementia for 10 years, and dies of heart disease, it's so much different situation for society, that person may not have many friends or family left, and they may not be able to interact with them, even if they are alive for another year. And the friends and family they have left may have been going through the grieving process for years already.
Society does not see all deaths as equal things no matter the circumstance. And so it's silly for this article to pretend that the only thing different between any of these deaths is the cause listed on the death certificate.
People hit by cars are no less dead.
It is not news that people die. Everybody dies. You who are reading this is going to die. I am going to die. Every person you have ever heard of and not heard of is going to die.
Terrorism and homicide are not natural causes of death, and naturally upsetting and naturally newsworthy.
Unless the authors of the article want the news to make headlines that people die of natural causes, then we can only interpret it that they want to tone down deaths by homicide and terrorism and try to paint those happenings as "no big deal". Which might very well be the cause among the sick dimension of top academia.
But of course that won't happen because nurturing the fear is the point, it's how they control people.
The news in a vacuum can actually be quite misleading and I too believe people should realize that it is not the ‘whole’ truth.
Feel free to substitute "Officer Jones" for any other occupation.
A very large fraction of news comes from media relations people at the organizations being reported on. Good news agencies will get context from another organization.
Great news agencies will sometimes do the kind of digging that makes leaders of large organizations uncomfortable. The costs in time, money, and reputation (even when you get it right) mean that even the very best news agencies can only report a small fraction of stories in depth.
If I know something about what is in the paper, it’s rare that the paper is correct. It’s almost always missing some critical piece of information, or wildly misrepresenting the situation to attempt to simplify it to the point your average person will read the article.
You can get a false sense of how common, dangerous, etc something is by the frequency of reports from a news outlet. What they are saying is true, but how relevant that is to the average person can be far from the truth.
A perfect example of this. I've seen here on HN people worried about crime on public transit (any crime, from murder to petty theft). Specifically citing the terrible crime problems of NY and CA transit. Yet when you actually look at the numbers, you see the crimes per day are closer to 1 or 2 while the travelers per day are in the millions. Meaning it's a literal 1 in a million event that you'll be the target of crime on public transit.
News outlets lie to you not by telling false stories but rather by weaving false narratives around the stories. "Crime is out of control" is the false narrative, but it's backed by real stories of crime, sometimes horrific.
Crime hysteria seems like it gets people, who are unlikely to be victims of crimes but more likely to have outsize political influence, involved in law enforcement policy. Without being forced to dogfood the results of their own advocacy, you end up with policing rules written by people who rarely are forced to interact with police, and who are very scared of crime that never happens to them.
So when there is a multi-year trend in crime, it means that where and when the crimes are happening have to change multiple times to adapt to people's changing behaviors. And if you don't keep up on how that changes, your chance of getting robbed goes up quite a bit. This is why you don't tend to see crime yourself (unless there is mental illness involved), it tends to happen where there are fewer eyeballs.
I knew quite a few people who have been the victim of violent (and random) crime. Each time it happened where other's couldn't see it. But its nice that you lived in a part of town where you never had to learn this type of street knowledge. Not everyone is so lucky.
For an important issue that is covered ad nauseum, sure.
For an issue that was hot today but not next week, I hard disagree. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45585287
One simple example: The FBI raided my friend's workplace. All the news reported the business as having shut down permanently. Yet my friend worked there for at least 4 years! He said they shut down for a few days max.
For smaller stories, talk to people involved, and you'll get an idea of how inaccurate they can be.
For the rest (which may be close to the majority), I'm saying "No".
> There's also no alternative as it's great for this one situation you had insight but the vast majority of people don't.
I've had insight in a number of unrelated events that were covered by journalists. Each time they get important details wrong.
There is an alternative. Don't trust the articles on these stories.
Still, despite the fact that they can be sued for lying by the people they are lying about, I'm sure they find plenty of ways to bend the truth while still technically telling it.
I suppose that calls into question why we trust any media source that we can't directly verify ourselves as an authority. It's all very confusing to me, to be honest and I simply don't know what to do about it. Not being able to trust information is maddening.
While news media is an acceptable source, proper peer-reviewed journals and other scientific publications are preferred. People would do well to remember Wikipedia is NOTNEWS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...).
Yeah basing articles on scholarly books is good, but not every topic will be covered and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AThe_deadline_is_no...
Wikipedia is arguably worse than the sloppiest news slop the media machine can manufacture. It's lawless, it's been shown majority of articles are written and edited by a single cabal of people, and it's also been shown a distinct bias towards one side of the political aisle.
I wouldn't trust Wikipedia any more than anything Rupert Murdoch owns. Perhaps slightly less, because at least in theory Murdoch can be held accountable for fake news and Wikipedia is powered entirely by fake news and accountable to literally no one.
For example, a government story that can be baselined by an audit, report or some proceeding is usually more reliable than a scoop.
The stuff that got printed in the news was at times just plain false. Stuff that anyone in our town could easily confirm to be false. A reporter would hear something wrong, or interview one person who misspoke, and (s)he would never fact check. Eventually those inaccuracies would end up not just in Wikipedia, but in books written by experts on the case in hand.
Even recently, my company has been in the news a lot (negative news). You'll get stories where anonymous employees are telling journalists things about changes in the company. A lot of it is flat out wrong.
The point here isn't that the media is accurate or not. The point is they focus on the attention grabbing events not the important ones. There are basic metrics about the world which completely invalidate many political beliefs of both parties. Those are rarely if ever reported.
For example: - only 7% of the US economy is involved in international trade - renewables have a .1 (10%) capacity factor which means anytime they are used for baseload, they will never pay back the carbon produced in their manufacturing - Mississippi's per capita GDP is about the same as Germany's
Facts like these are rarely reported because they show how irrelevant most of what is reported truly is. That's the point.
If you cite a news article a person should be able to use that to locate additional sources.
My general guideline is: the higher up the news hierarchy (local, metro, regional, national, international) a personal risk is, the less you should worry about it. Car crashes barely make the local news most of the time, they're worth some attention and care. Airliner crashes make massive headlines, not worth worrying about. The news is very informative here, you just have to understand what it's really saying.
> The phrase man bites dog is a shortened version of an aphorism in journalism that describes how an unusual, infrequent event (such as a man biting a dog) is more likely to be reported as news than an ordinary, everyday occurrence with similar consequences (such as a dog biting a man.)
* get exercise (literally any amount is great)
* don't eat more than you should (avoid being overweight)
I wish we could do the same with Cancer.
California proceeded to elevate the signal-to-noise ratio so high on Cancer however, and it got scooped up in advertising there really is not any really good general advice. Every couple of years theres various trends or crusades for some minority substance that is never scientifically compared to outcomes or risk. Nearly everything could cause cancer, but the nearly everything also wont. Maybe it's just too broad?
Cancer is quite broad. Many of the risk factors such as obesity overlap with heart disease but a lot of patients are still going to randomly get hit regardless of whether they were exposed to certain substances.
Or am I the only one feeling about it this way?
I suspect what may be happening is that we have some very sick, elderly people with only weeks to months to live who catch COVID and die. Those deaths may still be counted as COVID deaths.
[Citation missing.]
I don't know what country you're referring to, but there's ample data that it's highly partisan in the USA, and you, too, might be misinformed. In particular, the political left wildly overestimates the lethality of Covid (both historically and in the present). See, for example [1]. Other sources [2,3] reporting on the same data also validate the overall partisanship, but unfortunately don't show the correct answer in a way that makes it easy to see the pattern.
[1] https://www.allsides.com/blog/partisan-divide-among-republic...
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-misinformation-is-dis...
[3] https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat...
https://wisqars.cdc.gov/pdfs/leading-causes-of-death-by-age-...
Personally, the "poisonings" between 15 and 35 are what I most care about as a parent.
People should be raving and screaming for faster rollout of self-driving cars. If self-driving cars were an experimental drug undergoing a clinical trial, they would cancel the trial at this point because it would be unethical to continue denying the drug to the control group.
People should be raving to get rid of cars, period. Proper mass transit is always a better option.
Just because cars become self-driving doesn't mean that they are not a negative externality.
That's assuming it'll meaningfully reduce the rates of child deaths due to automobiles.
You know what will reduce the rate of child fatality due to automobiles for sure and to an even higher degree? Massively reducing the odds kids and automobiles mix. How do we do that? Have more protected walkable and bikeable spaces. Have fewer automobiles driving around. Design our cities better to not have kids walking along narrow sidewalks next to roads where speed limits are marked as 40 but in reality traffic often flows at 55+.
Its insane to me there are neighborhoods less than a mile from associated public schools that have to have bus service because there is no safe path for them to walk. What a true failure of city design.
> . People are often far more anxious about flying than driving, even though commercial airline crashes are incredibly rare.
...surely can be explained, that if adjusted for non-impaired people and considering the survival rate for when an accident happens, the danger is much lower for cars.
The way the article phrases it, makes it sound like the fear is completely baseless.
No. This is false equivalence. You are far more likely to die in a car than you are in an airplane, full stop.
You are still far more likely to die riding in any normal passenger car in the US on public roadways than you are by taking any commercial air traffic, even if you limit it to instances where the driver of the vehicle the deceased was in was not impaired. And that's deaths, ignoring how many people are severely injured. Throw that into the mix and its absurd how much safer airline travel is.
Next: take a look at death and injury comparisons of highways to light rail and other public transit.
(warning: pdf) https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/api/public/publication/8135...
- All newscasts featured crime more than anything else ("if it bleeds it leads").
- All newscasts had a local feel-good story.
- All newscasts had weather (although East Coast and Midwest stations spent more time on it).
- All newscasts had a local sports update
But what was most interesting was what they spend the rest of their time on:
- In New York, it was mostly financial news.
- In Los Angeles it was mostly entertainment news.
- In San Francisco it was mostly tech related news
- In Chicago it was often manufacturing related.
That homework was really what drove home for me that the news is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching after that.
People “want” all sorts of conflicting and even mutually exclusive things.
It would be just as true to say people “want” in-depth, factual understanding of things that are relevant to their lives.
The real optimization function is what you say later on: eyeball time.
Eyeball time, as anyone with a social media account can tell you, is hardly related to what a person comprehensively wants though.
This is not true.
They actually want Option A and they also actually want Option B.
Picking Option B does not imply the desire for Option A is false or illegitimate, it implies that people hold many authentic yet contradictory desires simultaneously and make tradeoffs (often regrettable ones) between them.
If you create a system that gets people to pick Option B consistently, you have not revealed the insincerity of their desire for Option A. You have built a system that compels people to act against their own legitimate desires for their own lives. In a media/social media context, this compulsion is often consciously designed in the audience.
if you “manage”/editorialize your algorithm to remove these, you’ll be outcompeted in audience share by someone who doesn’t.
I dropped off social media for similar reasons. I didn’t want the outrage of others and hype algorithms dictating what I’d spend time thinking about or reacting to. I wanted to be in control more.
Tech in SF may actually be the biggest sector, since tech is so big and prevalent, but it certainly wasn't in the 90s.
>is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching after that.
As opposed to what? They report on what they think the people that are watching or could watch want to hear about.
This is the same as any business that sells what customers will buy.
Cherry picking is when you select examples that are not representative of the whole to win an argument.
How is the news doing this?
I’m curious at how many Millennials and younger actually watch the news with any consistency. My sense is it’s mostly older folks that still get their info from TV.
I feel like the right lesson to take from this is that all data sources are coming from a certain perspective and motives, and so you can choose what you want to care about.
Perhaps you don't care about any of that, which is a fine and normal choice. But "this source is biased so I won't consume it" leads, really, to consuming nothing (EDIT: if you go too deep down this route). I think that consuming varying grains of salt is helpful in the general case.
("This source is biased in a specific way that makes me disregard this person's credibility on topics I care about" is a subtly different argument that is valid of course)
I believe a better chart would be weighted by life expectancy loss. For example if a 12yo gets murdered society considers it a much more significant loss than a 90yo having a heart attack.
Similarly your level of safety in a city is more a function of the rate of random crime vs. the often cited city's overall murder rate. This difference explains why some cities that feel safe actually have a high homicide rate and vice-versa. In some cities crime is unpredictable whereas in others it is more confined to areas where visitors rarely travel.
All you're saying is that the news coverage is a reflection of the biases people have (like the one above).
Biases become a problem if a person has one and doesn't take it into account when making a decision. The news is making the coverage decision not the person with the bias unless you count an indirect viewership loss that may occur.
Honestly that's what people watch the news for. What are external factors that they were previously unaware of that might impact their lives (or weekends)? Most (not all) people are aware of the dangers posed by heart disease. They're not watching the news to learn about something they're already aware of.
I might be beating this horse to a second death, but there's a section of road near where I live that's dangerous, and we all know it's dangerous. It's not newsworthy. If another section of road collapsed and introduced a new danger, then that's newsworthy. News is newsworthy because it's new and unfamiliar. If something is reported on that's old and unfamiliar, then that's a documentary. If it's new and familiar, then that's a paradox. Or maybe a fun anecdote at a party.
I think this is the whole point of the article. The news does not cover reality as it is, it selects information that is noteworthy and drives clicks/views/engagement/ad revenue.
This is why the news has been shown to increasingly misrepresent reality:
But dying from a criminal act? It’s undeserved and arguably more easily preventable than grand lifestyle changes across the whole population. If a felon with 50+ arrests murders someone, a “quick” adjustment in laws could prevent it in the future
I would also like to stop gang violence but this often means “throwing the book” at gang members, which is often disliked by many activists.
I myself live in a safe area of a major city, and there are gang murders in my neighborhood occasionally. It makes my relatives and friends ask how I can live here. But a grown man shot in his car at 3am over a drug deal doesn’t make me feel that less unsafe, and I have kids here
Although it would be an interesting chart. But the distinction between what is noteworthy/newsworthy and what actually kills is precisely the point of investigating this topic.
So if you wanted to improve your diet and lifestyle, it makes more sense to first pull the major levers that avoid or postpone your most likely killers before you, say, worry about food dyes.
Yet not even our new HHS seems to understand that.
Age is not evenly distributed across the population. You could just break this down into age brackets and show a chart for each bracket.
> I believe a better chart would be weighted by life expectancy loss.
The original data does have adjusted statistics similar to this:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db521.pdf
> Similarly your level of safety in a city is more a function of the rate of random crime vs. the often cited city's overall murder rate.
Accidental death is the #3 cause of death. Your level of safety is primarily down to your own actions. Ladders are the most dangerous piece of equipment commonly owned. Murder and random crime are a minor fraction of this category. Suicide is twice as common as murder.
> crime is unpredictable
Types of crime maybe. Location of crime? Almost completely predictable.
Odd this article doesn't even mention it.. well actually apparently its "4x over-reported"
Take the hep b vaccine as an example. ". . . if a child gets infected with hepatitis B in the first 12 months of life, their chance of going on to develop cerosis or liver cancer is about 90%." (Dr. Paul Offit in Beyond the Noise #82: Jumping without a net https://youtu.be/7pxJb7ANWkc?si=EflkB6VaOx6onP5D)
Right now, the CDC recommends the birth dose of the vaccine. And yet the ACIP (CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices) is expected to delay the birth dose of the hep B vaccine following the president's statement in September that the vax is unnecessary and therefore be delayed to age 12.
I would expect the media to be talking about this. According to the Hepatitis B Foundation, "Hepatitis B, the world’s leading cause of liver cancer, continues to impose a staggering, but preventable, burden on individuals and healthcare systems alike. Without widespread prevention and early intervention, the U.S. is projected to spend more than $44.8 million by 2050 on hepatitis B-related care." (https://www.hepb.org/assets/Uploads/Cost-of-Hep-B.pdf)
So we have a practice that can prevent the cancer, save money, and improve lives and the government may totally ignore science and change the vax schedule. Dr. Offit did say in the video that he expects doctors to still provide the vaccine to patients and counsel parents on the need for it.
If a major news network reports that ACIP delays the first dose to 12, will they also interview experts? Will parents, grandparents, social workers, early learning professionals, policy wonks, and legislators know to ask questions, have the time or capacity to deal with this at the state level?
I would like to believe in people. It's getting harder and harder (on a population level).
Basically: If something is in the news, it's rare enough that you don't have to worry about it. Once the news stops reporting on it, that's when you worry.
I can’t say it’s anymore serious or traumatizing than earthquake, fire, or tornado drills I grew up on.
"Active shooter drills in schools are associated with increases in depression (39%), stress and anxiety (42%), and physiological health problems (23%) overall, including children from as young as five years old up to high schoolers, their parents, and teachers. Concerns over death increased by 22 percent, with words like blood, pain, clinics, and pills becoming a consistent feature of social media posts in school communities in the 90 days after a school drill. "
https://everytownresearch.org/report/the-impact-of-active-sh...
You always try to react to high-probability, high-impact events (traffic accidents at pickup) with rules, controls and people. You may have rules to high-probability, low-impact events (running in the hallway). Low probability, high-impact events are important as well because the stakes are high. Shooter drills and fire drills fall into that category.
As a society, the United States has decided that the value of allowing easy access to firearms is such that risk of marginal people using them to murder children is ok. We've accepted that by default. Depending on how you count, there are several dozen to several hundred school shooting incidents every year.
It would be irresponsible not to have a protocol to protect the lives of children in school, and tbh, the kids accept it as part of life. Those of us who remember a more innocent time are more horrified.
Looking it up, there are around 500 homicides each year in England and Wales, and around 30 of them involve guns. In 2023 there were 22 gun deaths total. (For comparison, in the same year the US had 46,700).
Now compare that to the number of shows broadcast every day in the UK that have murders. I think a single BBC murder mystery show has more deaths than the entirety of the country, let alone a single Guy Ritchie film.
It's not just the news media which warps people's perceptions. I bet the same survey in the UK would be similarly skewed.
This has been a thing since forever. I remember in the 80s the complaints about violence in media. That's not going to change. And sensationalist headlines have been part of news since its first inception.
What really needs to change is the education system so that people are able to differentiate reality from media, news and video games.
1. voters mark paper ballots 2. observers from all parties watch the counting 3. results are tallied publicly
Yes, this is very much feasible; and no, this is not the right domain to be ingeniously efficient and cost sensitive. US being the richest country in the world or some such, etc..
A pet peeve of mine is the fact that any word can now be an emotion. "Informed" is not an emotion. It's is a state you reach on your way to a base emotion that is dictated by what you've just been informed about.
Old people dying of heart disease or cancer or whatever is not actionable. Sure, we can do lifestyle changes, but eventually old people have to die of something and its in one of those buckets anyways.
I wonder why they didn't start with automobile accidents or driving drunk!
"Almost half of cancer deaths are preventable" -- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02355-x
600,000 people die of cancer per year, 40,000 people die in automobile accidents. Focusing on 40,000 automobile accidents to the exclusion of focusing on 300,000 preventable cancer deaths does not math.
I would say less than heart disease related ones.
To policy makers, well, terrorism is actionable but so is diabetes. And that while diabetes accounts for a far larger number of deaths.
So I think there is real asymmetry if we look at the data from an “actionable” perspective.
In US the number is larger than drug overdoses. Over 100k preventable deaths a year attributable to anti-vaccine hysteria/conspiracy theories.
Standard American Diet (high carb, high sugar, high corn syrup, high processed) -> high visceral fat deposits -> Type 2 diabetes -> tissue glycation -> heart disease
I'd _like_ to blame the reader -- inferring anything about how common something is based on how often it's reported is unreasonable. But readers do make that inference, and writers shouldn't pretend they don't know it.
And for most of us nowadays it's not about articles and writers. It's about eight-second video clips on TikTok and creators. So I don't have any hope that we'll become better informed.
It would be interesting to have a form of media which attempts to report on reality in direct proportion to occurrences instead, but it wouldn’t draw attention so very few would use it.
TV stations are out to make money, not to inform society. All their programming, news included, is designed to attract eyeballs, hence money, and sadly sensationalist and titillating stories is what most people want to see.
eawgewag•4h ago