What Americans Die From Vs. What the News Reports On
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The article compares the leading causes of death in the US to the types of deaths most commonly reported in the news, highlighting a discrepancy between the two, with discussion centering around the implications and reasons behind this disparity.
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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.
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.
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!
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.
https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/news/2023/numbers-know-healthy-hea...
Honestly I think you're interpreting "age related" differently than the upthread discussion. The point is to renormalize a cause of death to something like "lost years of life". So if you have a preventable death (from smoking, say) that kills people with on average 10 years of life left, that should be less notable than one (maybe homicide) that kills people with 60 years to go on average.
My original comment was in reference to the OP's comment:
> 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.
My point was just that heart disease is primarily not caused by natural aging (the 80% of cases).
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.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9174123/
Unfortunately the link you chose is crappy. It is a qualitative study debunking the claim "some researchers have propagated a myth that lower sodium might increase the risk of CVD, This article analyzes the eight articles as a case study" (paraphrased). Too little salt is not the issue, why would that paper be useful?
The clear advice is to lower salt intake, but from what I can tell statistical data doesn't show that doing that actually lengthens life. Admittedly, cause and effect is difficult science, even in well funded large population studies. Correlations and case studies are much easier science.
Personally I don't have a horse in the race because I have a relatively low salt intake: I don't like the taste of over-salting and I also try to avoid high-salt foods because they are often crappy industrial foods (correlation).
I did google for papers before making my original comment, but I struggled to find any papers I liked. I remember that one paper in particular was a meta-study: I really really hate those.
Edit: I asked Gemini, and it referenced this paper: https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2016.07.745 which seems fairly balanced: the first sentence is a soft "The relationship between lower sodium intake and total mortality remains controversial". I did a couple more follow-on prompts and Gemini referenced results from Britain lowering salt in processed foods "A 36\% decrease in mortality rates from stroke and ischemic heart disease (heart attacks) during the period of the salt reduction program.". https://g.co/gemini/share/42637d5a2dfb I feel embarrassed rereading my prompts since they show my ignorance and other problems, but the eventual AI results are interesting. Asking the right questions is hard...
A habit (or habits) that slowly damages your body and significantly shortens your life span is quite different from the natural march of aging that eventually gets us all.
Heart disease is the same as smoking in 80% of cases. The other ~20% are primarily genetic and much harder to avoid.
https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/news/2023/numbers-know-healthy-hea...
not true. it is age related
dying at 85 from heart disease isn't the result of lifestyle choices, but dying at 50 from heart disease most likely is
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.
Even if you could ban all news in an effort to make everybody live as enlightened hackers with disregard to worldly matters, you would still find that homicide is news which spreads like wildfire through word of mouth. It has been like this for hundreds of thousands of years.
I think it's very lame of you and other people to try to call it "living in fear". Wouldn't you like to know about for example a wave of robberies or burglaries happening near to where you live? Living in fear is when you are worried about things on the other side of the world, and such. Local news is not fear mongering. It is structured delivery of information which would have been delivered as gossip anyway.
Not to mention that news exposure helps the police finding dangerous criminals or finding more witnesses. For example serial rapists commonly use the same method with various random victims who are not aware of each other. Once the police and prosecution can connect several victims to the same perpetrator, they will have a very strong case.
Of course you will scoff at all this, since you personally might not have been the victim of violent crime, and therefore couldn't care less. But other people haven't reached that level of rational elevation yet.
That's the thing: the (brown/poor) drug dealers that the local media tend to report on are typically not the majority of drug dealers. They're just the ones that are picked up by the police. Thats the whole point of the article we are all commenting on.
Your kids are more likely to be enticed into drugs by their friends, not by some rando on a street corner.
>Living in fear is when you are worried about things on the other side of the world, and such.
That's merely one type of living in fear.
>Local news is not fear mongering.
"The Haitian immigrants are eating the neighborhood cats and dogs". Yup, definitely not fear mongering.
>It is structured delivery of information which would have been delivered as gossip anyway.
Local news = gossip. This is not the dunk you think it is.
>Not to mention that news exposure helps the police finding dangerous criminals
Seems like a stretch
>For example serial rapists commonly use the same method with various random victims who are not aware of each other.
For known occurrences, I'd expect the police to be more aware of the full details than the local media, if only by sheer numbers. Cops probably outnumber local crime beat reporters by at least a factor of 10.
>Once the police and prosecution can connect several victims to the same perpetrator, they will have a very strong case.
Leaves out the whole suspect identification part of the process.
>Of course you will scoff at all this, since you personally might not have been the victim of violent crime, and therefore couldn't care less. But other people haven't reached that level of rational elevation yet.
I.e., living in fear. It's certainly less irrational than, say, someone who has not been a crime victim, I'll give you that. I'm sorry that you were a victim of violent crime, as your comment implies, but in all statistical likelihood the (local) news would not have prevented your victimization.
Just a hundred years ago, they were unheard of. Our lifestyle and diet is what is killing us and some very big drinks and food companies have everything to gain from that. They are not natural deaths.
The news in a vacuum can actually be quite misleading and I too believe people should realize that it is not the ‘whole’ truth.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
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.
Is trust binary?
I think that Republicans push mistrust of the media to eliminate any sources of information besides their own representatives
Not reading news that doesn't have a significant impact on your life is entirely reasonable.
The guy who got arrested in the other state for hacking into the DOD? It's totally reasonable not to bother knowing about it.
> I think that Republicans push mistrust of the media to eliminate any sources of information besides their own representatives
Ha! I was a news junkie in the Bush/Obama era. Getting busy in life finally cured me of that scourge, but I learned a lot of lessons. Long before Trump came on the scene I was an advocate of "There's no middle ground with the news - either go all in (time consuming) or mostly all out" - and while I didn't shout "Fake news!", it was my sentiment - you really can't trust much, and learning what you can trust will take years of aggressively analyzing the news and how it works - time most people don't have.
It was disconcerting that the person who got people to distrust the news was Trump.
Anyway, in case people think I'm advocating never trusting news: It ain't so. As I think I said elsewhere - one can find quality articles and quality journalists. You just can't do it as a casual hobby.
Our discussion was about trust in sources. The assumption is we need the information.
Also, this attitude allows suffering to occur as long as it doesn't affect the majority of the people.
The government can harm people that get its way and no one would care because it doesn't directly harm them
And my mission is to let people know they don't need 95% of the information they think they do.
But if they really need information about a particular topic/domain, they should put in the hours to find ways to verify what they read, and start ranking journalists by accuracy and integrity.
> Also, this attitude allows suffering to occur as long as it doesn't affect the majority of the people.
You're not wrong.
The flip side is that casual news reading allows quite a bit of suffering because people have a flawed model of the world due to their news perusals.
In fact, that's what this submission and many comments are pointing out. How much money is spent to fight terrorism (including invading countries to protect us from terrorists) vs heart disease prevention? Why do people believe the former is more worthy of spending money? If the news provided proportional coverage, we'd likely have spent a lot less money on the former.
There is no perfect middle ground.
The worse is that it's oftentime not even attributable to some malicious agenda, or gross incompetence of someone in particular. It's just how this industry functions.
Someone down the thread is asking "what's the alternative". The alternative is to admit that you are not informed beyond your immediate horrizon.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/10/i-have-no-facts-and-i-must-...
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.
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...
> In principle, all Wikipedia articles should contain up-to-date information. Editors are also encouraged to develop stand-alone articles on significant current events.
There clearly is editor and reader interest in making decent quality articles on major current events. Yes they may contain errors that the history book on topic won't contain, but I still think it's worth having. Just mind the things to avoid listed in WP:NOTNEWS and I think we will be fine
And I don't think everything will ever be covered in a book. There is not an infinite amount of scholars studying every random significant event. And those will probably use the same news articles as one of their sources anyway.
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.
Facts like these influence your life far more than most of the things reported by the media. Yet you still want to use scare quotes because they don't match your personal opinions that are largely informed by mostly irrelevant things reported about. That's the problem being described by the article. You still don't seem to understand that.
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.
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.
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.
For example, a government story that can be baselined by an audit, report or some proceeding is usually more reliable than a scoop.
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...
I just showed you that a) there's a large misconception about the lethality of the virus, and b) people on the left side of the US political spectrum tend to systematically exaggerate the threat. In particular "the killer it in fact was" is often not a factual statement, but a partisan exaggeration of reality.
https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/study-finds-large-gap-in-...
There are studies that show the the "far right" (since you insist on interpreting this in a partisan lens) have a much higher death rate, after the introduction of covid-19 vaccination rates. IU'm going to make a wild assumption here: the far left and the far right want to avoid death at roughly equal rates. I interpret the finding above as a partisan underestimation of the lethality of covid.
80% of republicans believed (according to Gallup) that COVID death rates were falsely inflated. Only 47% of Republicans believe that COVID is more deadly than seasonal influenza, whereas 87% of democrats did.
Again, you refute a thing I didn't claim.
Hospitalization is upstream of death. You don't just get the virus and fall over dead. More to the point, to the extent that one group incorrectly believes that risk of hospitalization is higher than it is, it reflects their overall incorrect belief that the mortality of the virus is higher than it is.
> There are studies that show the the "far right" (since you insist on interpreting this in a partisan lens) have a much higher death rate, after the introduction of covid-19 vaccination rates.
No, there aren't. You're referring to this study [1], which was conducted in two states (Ohio and Florida), and was overgeneralized on NPR, MSNBC and other left-wing media outlets.
The study ran only until December 2021, and found an overall excess death rate of 2.8% for republican voters, which was 15% higher than the excess death rate for democratic voters, according to their model (in other words, democratic voters had an excess death rate of ~2.4% during the same period). The claim you're making extends only from the May-December period of 2021, where they found a roughly 8% difference in excess death rates between parties, on a baseline of approximately 25%.
In other words: both parties saw excess death rates of approximately 25%, and the "republican" part of the set was 8% higher [2]. But when you look at the data by state [3], there's hardly any difference for Florida, so this study is really describing a difference only in a subset of Ohio voters.
Again, you've probably been misinformed about what you think you know. When you actually look at the data, the results are far less dramatic than reported in the media.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37486680/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/t...
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37486680/#&gid=article-figur...
https://wisqars.cdc.gov/pdfs/leading-causes-of-death-by-age-...
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.
The least you can do here is be honest about the conversation that is being had. It would be appreciated.
I also would recommend flying in a small plane at least once, the small additional risk is worth the experience.
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.
Tech in SF may actually be the biggest sector, since tech is so big and prevalent, but it certainly wasn't in the 90s.
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.
> - In Los Angeles it was mostly entertainment news.
> - In San Francisco it was mostly tech related news
> - In Chicago it was often manufacturing related.
Crazy how well this coincides with the type of billboards you expect to see everywhere in these cities.
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.
I mean, duh. Los Angeles has 263 sunny days in a year. Mentioning weather there is only worthwhile when it's not the assumed kind. Actual rain, if and when it happens, causes traffic jams.
Interesting. So who is cherrypicking all the "Israel hostages" nonsense flooding my news feeds?
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)
if you “manage”/editorialize your algorithm to remove these, you’ll be outcompeted in audience share by someone who doesn’t.
>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 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.
Clearly not enough people know it’s dangerous or how dangerous it is, or one of them would do something about it
Personally, the "poisonings" between 15 and 35 are what I most care about as a parent.
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