[HN Gopher] What Americans die from vs. what the news reports on
___________________________________________________________________
What Americans die from vs. what the news reports on
Author : alphabetatango
Score : 281 points
Date : 2025-10-14 18:40 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ourworldindata.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (ourworldindata.org)
| eawgewag wrote:
| Excellent post, and thank you for sharing.
| daft_pink wrote:
| I think this would be more useful if compared early death
| statistics to news reporting.
|
| 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.
| kulahan wrote:
| Avoiding an early death is a lifelong commitment to health.
| Knowing what the greatest dangers are helps direct your actions
| in support of that.
| bell-cot wrote:
| There's quite a bit available about that. Search for "Years of
| Life Lost" or "Years of Potential Life Lost". Or for a quick
| start -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_of_potential_life_lost
| rybosworld wrote:
| I get what you're saying but on the flipside, heart disease is
| primarily not age-related. Something like 80%-90% of cases are
| preventable through lifestyle choices. And it's the number one
| cause of death.
|
| 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.
| bad_haircut72 wrote:
| I wonder what has a bigger impact on longevity, lifestyle
| choices or being a multi-millionaire with access to the best
| healthcare.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Despite their wishes, most people won't become
| millionaires. The part you _can_ control is your own
| lifestyle. For the average person, this means your
| lifestyle will have more impact on your longevity than
| wishful thinking about one day being a multi-millionaire
| who can hire doctors to fix the problems you created by
| being sedentary, eating poorly, and overindulging on
| alcohol or other substances.
| viccis wrote:
| Wonder which is more realistic, address the horribly
| unhealthy eating patterns that are drilled into US citizens
| as soon as they start eating school lunches (if not
| before), or make all of us multi-millionaires with access
| to the best healthcare.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| If you're a news agency, promise your viewers that if
| they just get angry enough then that free healthcare will
| be coming soon and then show them an ad from McDonalds
| and Eli Lilly.
| recursive wrote:
| You should also weight those with how practically
| attainable they are.
| HardCodedBias wrote:
| Being a "multi-millionaire with access to the best
| healthcare" in the US means that you sit in the same queues
| as everyone else.
|
| The best you can do is concierge care, but that only
| expedites primary care everything in the US is about
| specialists.
| lazide wrote:
| Hahaha, huh?
|
| 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.
| HardCodedBias wrote:
| I don't know what you think "direct access to
| specialists" is.
|
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| Like Stanford pulmonologist in less than a week for an
| asthma eval.
|
| 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.
| Maxatar wrote:
| Just doing a quick check on this, lifestyle choices
| slightly edges out net worth.
|
| 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...
| nradov wrote:
| Lifestyle choices have a far larger impact on average. The
| big gains in lifespan (and healthspan) come from delaying
| the onset of chronic disease rather than treating it after
| it occurs.
| daft_pink wrote:
| 1. Death isn't preventable. We will all die, so if you
| prevent one cause of death in old age, you will just die of
| another cause of death. Sure it might extend your life a
| little bit, but I feel it's entirely rational to seek out
| information on causes of immediate death as more relevant
| than causes of long term death. The probability of living
| much older than 100 is virtually nil. Probably good to have
| information on both though.
|
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| Would you rather die by heart attack, cancer, or
| misadventure?
|
| 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!
| slg wrote:
| Although we should remember that "old age" is long. Someone
| can die at 72 from heart disease and people might just call
| that dying of old age when that person could have easily
| lived another decade or two if they made different
| lifestyle choices. That would be more of an "early death"
| than a centenarian dying in a car accident. The suddenness
| is irrelevant.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > We will all die, so if you prevent one cause of death in
| old age, you will just die of another cause of death.
|
| 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.
| ajross wrote:
| > heart disease is primarily not age-related
|
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| Fatal heart disease is in fact primarily age related.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Age and health feed into a ton of the top killers.
|
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| Stipulate that, and fatal heart disease is still in fact
| primarily age related.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Right. But what age it happens at can (often) be shifted.
|
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| The claim was "heart disease is not primarily age
| related". This is a thread about causes of death. If we
| interpret that claim as "fatal heart disease is not
| primarily age related", it's straightforwardly false.
| cogman10 wrote:
| And I did not dispute your claim, I added to it.
|
| Age is the primary factor and health is generally the
| secondary factor. Both contribute.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Though age also indexes the area under the curve of
| lifetime exposure to the risks, so it becomes a trivial
| claim to say that it's age related since it's one of the
| two axes.
|
| 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.
| robocat wrote:
| > limit your salt
|
| 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.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > There's some dissention
|
| 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/
| Theodores wrote:
| Most lives can be summarised with a birth certificate and a
| death certificate. For most people, everything that happens
| between birth and death is not newsworthy by any stretch of the
| imagination. I count myself in this demographic and this does
| not mean I live a totally dull and boring life!
|
| 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'.
| some_random wrote:
| What's an early death though? A 98 year old dying of prostate
| cancer probably isn't, and a 19 year old dying of heart failure
| probably is, but what about a 55 year old lifetime smoker dying
| of lung cancer? If a terminally ill 80 year old chooses to end
| their own life, is that an early death?
| constantcrying wrote:
| The idea that this is some form of bias is bizarre. The question
| people are asking isn't "why do people die", it is "why do
| healthy people die". The answer to the former is obvious, the
| answer to the later is informative about the world we live in.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| > why do healthy people die
|
| 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.
| rozab wrote:
| This is not a good rebuttal since it still does not explain why
| terrorism gets 20,000 times more representation than accidents
| (which are mostly road traffic accidents).
| bell-cot wrote:
| Um, yes? Whatever proper-citizen platitudes 80% of people might
| give when asked "why do you watch the news?" questions, the "if
| it bleeds, it leads" reality was obvious back when Rome was still
| a one-horse town.
| kube-system wrote:
| Absolutely insane that this article doesn't recognize that there
| is a human interest difference in untimely death, and poor health
| and old age.
|
| 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.
| hydrogen7800 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| Some level of editorializing is always going to be needed to
| distinguish signal from noise, but to be clear, the point of
| cable news is to tell you that everything is on fire, all the
| time. And that's not because it's some sort of normative ideal,
| but rather that the skinner machine figured out that humans
| watch that stuff more than something more representative of
| reality.
| kube-system wrote:
| There are a lot of valid criticisms of the modern news media
| landscape.
|
| 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.
| glimshe wrote:
| Your argument makes sense, but also ignores that people's
| perception of relative risk is greatly influenced by the news.
| You indirectly created a bag called "timely death" as if it
| were "non postponable death".
|
| 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.
| kube-system wrote:
| It's not the responsibility of news organizations to educate
| people. Health education should probably come from our
| educational institutions.
|
| 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...
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| > Absolutely insane that this article doesn't recognize that
| there is a human interest difference in untimely death, and
| poor health and old age.
|
| There is a whole section in the article about that.
| kube-system wrote:
| It gets close to dancing around my point, but the article
| actually doesn't mention old age at all.
|
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| That section implies that news sources report on this because
| otherwise customers wouldn't be entertained enough to keep
| paying. The piece doesn't really engage with the argument
| you're responding to.
| ludvig_tech_v1 wrote:
| Well said, i was looking for someone who felt like i did after
| reading the article.
| Pxtl wrote:
| But when the outliers create an impression that is a falsehood
| - like that cities are intrinsically dangerous because of
| extreme levels of violent crime because violent crime is what
| gets reported?
|
| People hit by cars are no less dead.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| The premise of the article is incredibly stupid into a super-
| dimensional level of stupidity unheard of before.
|
| 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.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| The premise of the article is that this kind of reporting has
| actual policy effects. You just just missed their point because
| of your disdain for their "super-dimensional level of
| stupidity".
| gdulli wrote:
| We definitely should adjust coverage of homicide (by either
| tone, volume, who knows) until people are no longer
| disproportionately living in fear of it or in fear of cities.
|
| But of course that won't happen because nurturing the fear is
| the point, it's how they control people.
| mk_chan wrote:
| This is very important to write on. A lot of people believe news
| is worth consuming for the truth and often cite it as a primary
| source of information. News producers may not necessarily lie but
| they cherry pick to maximize reach and that content plays on
| peoples belief that what they see on the news is all the
| information you need.
|
| The news in a vacuum can actually be quite misleading and I too
| believe people should realize that it is not the 'whole' truth.
| whycome wrote:
| It's kinda dumb that Wikipedia still treats newspapers as some
| sort of ultimate truth. I've noticed a couple incidents
| recently where the news just literally had the facts wrong and
| the Wikipedia article for the related topic ended up in this
| weird limbo until the news stories were updated despite more
| relevant sources being available.
| patates wrote:
| Newspapers are usually correct with the facts when they do
| report on a story. It's usually the "which truths get picked
| and which not" part that gets tricky. Wikipedia makes its own
| compilation, so citing facts out of newspapers doesn't sound
| too bad.
| csours wrote:
| More concretely, a newspaper (or other media) will use
| facts like "Police Media Officer Jones stated that ....".
| It is factually correct that Officer Jones stated "....".
| Whether Media Officer Jones' statement is correct and
| comprehensive, that is another matter.
|
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| I think you and I have had wildly different experiences.
|
| 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.
| Zarathruster wrote:
| On a related note, everyone should know about Gell-Mann
| amnesia:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
| jacobr1 wrote:
| That is the technicality here. Bullshit is getting
| spewed, but in most cases, direct falsehoods aren't gett
| reported. If you quote someone saying something untrue,
| the paper didn't present a falsehood, same with bias,
| omission, emphasis and misleading narratives or framings.
| If you avoid stating facts and just cite sources, you can
| maintain, that the media outlet didn't lie. But only in
| the limited technical sense of direct commission.
| cogman10 wrote:
| This is the important part of a media diet.
|
| 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.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Transportation crime fear is compounded by another issue:
| "scary people." I've personally never witnessed a crime.
| But I've seen plenty of people that raised my hackles,
| usually they seem intoxicated or are exhibiting some kind
| behavior that may indicate mental illness. Are they going
| to get up and stab me? Probably not, but it sure seems
| like it could happen, and it sometimes (though rarely in
| terms of transite miles) does happen. I can
| intellectually dismiss other low prevalence issues in a
| way that it is hard to do with public transit,
| viscerally.
| underlipton wrote:
| I know you meant "became wary" when you wrote "raised my
| hackles", but that phrase means "to (visibly) upset or
| arouse one's anger," which I'm sure is not what you
| meant. But it does speak to a large part of the problem:
| people becoming overly engaged with something that they
| should probably just acknowledge and be aware of, without
| changing their behavior significantly.
|
| 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.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| I think you are missing a few things about crime in a big
| city. People don't want to be victims of crime. So when
| crime rises, people adapt their behavior to adjust for
| that. People will stop going out at night in certain
| neighborhoods for example. They also stop reporting
| certain types of crime, like property crime.
|
| 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.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Newspapers are usually correct with the facts when they
| do report on a story.
|
| 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.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| They said usually. There's also no alternative as it's
| great for this one situation you had insight but the vast
| majority of people don't.
| BeetleB wrote:
| And I'm saying it's "usually" only for major stories that
| have continued coverage.
|
| 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.
| 0xEF wrote:
| I don't know for certain, but I believe it's because
| newpapers (aka "The Press") are at risk of libel or slander
| charges if they don't get their facts straight. That may also
| be a US-centric thing, too, I am not sure. To put a pin on
| it, we want to believe that the possibility of punishment for
| misrepresenting facts imposes some level of accountability on
| a print publication.
|
| 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.
| willdr wrote:
| Recent Wikipedia articles are kind of an oxymoron; Wikipedia
| by design is meant to be a tertiary source, downstream of
| both news media but also mainstream scholarship. The problem
| is that it's "an encyclopaedia anyone can edit" -- and that
| inherently means a rush to create or update articles when
| news outlets publish something novel.
|
| 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_Wikiped
| ia_is_no...).
| jowea wrote:
| I find the source collating of Wikipedia helpful for recent
| events. That's when you're going to get most editor
| interest to improve the page and readers to consume it.
|
| Yeah basing articles on scholarly books is good, but not
| every topic will be covered and https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/Wikipedia%3AThe_deadline_is_no...
| willdr wrote:
| Not every topic will be covered _yet_. While *The
| deadline is now* is an essay, *WP:NOTNEWS* is policy --
| and inherent in an encyclopedia.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Wikipedia isn't aiming for an objective truth. That barely
| exists, but a common understanding. See this essay: https://e
| n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_Wikipedia_cannot...
| stuffn wrote:
| > It's kinda dumb that Wikipedia still treats newspapers as
| some sort of ultimate truth.
|
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| My father in law was a fixture in the city newspaper coverage
| for many years. The facts are usually reliable or refined as
| a story develops. The narrative is not -- as the people
| talking to reporters always have an axe to grind, be it ego,
| resentment, moral outrage, revenge, etc. Bigger stories are
| usually better if there's some baseline.
|
| For example, a government story that can be baselined by an
| audit, report or some proceeding is usually more reliable
| than a scoop.
| BeetleB wrote:
| This has been a problem since Wikipedia's existence. I've had
| the (mis)fortune of personally knowing people who were
| charged with serious crimes - serious enough to garner
| nationwide attention.
|
| 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.
| tchalla wrote:
| Wikipedias aim is to collect information not tell us the
| truth. It's a mirror not a light. News articles are a source
| of information because they can be verified. For every claim
| where news articles have gotten wrong, there are 100x times
| "relevant sources" getting it wrong.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| What should they do instead? Any source can wrong.
|
| If you cite a news article a person should be able to use
| that to locate additional sources.
| wat10000 wrote:
| News is, by definition, unusual. If you consume it to learn
| about unusual events then it can be alright. If you use it to
| build a picture about common events, you're going to end up
| with a completely upside down picture.
|
| 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.
| amiga386 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog
|
| > 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.)
| exabrial wrote:
| With heart disease, we've narrowed it down to pretty much:
|
| * 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?
| nradov wrote:
| For heart disease, effective prevention in some patients
| requires medication such as statins. Exercise and diet are a
| great start but not always sufficient due to genetics.
|
| 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.
| kakacik wrote:
| Covid has 2.2%? Now thats some serious number for 2023. Not
| doubting, just feeling that we went through seriously traumatic
| event as whole mankind, and it feels like subconsiousness is
| pushing it into distant dream-like story compared to what it
| actually was and how recently.
|
| Or am I the only one feeling about it this way?
| jansan wrote:
| The data seems flawed. Also the number at the left chart for
| homicide with <1% is technically correct, but with the actual
| number at roughly 0,007% it seems like a bit of an
| exaggeration.
| nradov wrote:
| Determining primary cause of death is often somewhat
| subjective. Almost everyone listed as a COVID-19 death had
| other serious co-morbid medical conditions. If a deceased
| patient had heart failure and type-2 diabetes, and also tested
| positive for SARS-CoV-2, then what killed them in the end? Hard
| to say. (Same issue applies to influenza etc.)
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| For a while, if a person had COVID within the previous month,
| any subsequent death counted as COVID. Recover from COVID and
| jump out of a plane without a parachute? COVID. I believe that
| doesn't happen much anymore, at least I hope.
|
| 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.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| >For a while, if a person had COVID within the previous
| month, any subsequent death counted as COVID. Recover from
| COVID and jump out of a plane without a parachute? COVID. I
| believe that doesn't happen much anymore, at least I hope.
|
| [Citation missing.]
| buellerbueller wrote:
| A HUGE amount of the population in my quickly-regressing
| country don't believe that COVID was the killer that it in fact
| was. Most people don't talk about it because as with everything
| (NFL halftime shows, restaurant logos, etc) in my quickly-
| regressing country, COVID is a topic that inflames passions.
| timr wrote:
| > A HUGE amount of the population in my quickly-regressing
| country don't believe that COVID was the killer that it in
| fact was.
|
| 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...
| maypeacepreva1l wrote:
| Journalism is being attacked by the right, by the left and now
| this seems like a new passive aggressive way to discredit them.
| News by definition is something not commonplace, IMO not at all
| surprising that the more uncommon the death is, more newsworthy
| it becomes.
| some_random wrote:
| If journalists deliver an inaccurate view of the world through
| their work, they should be criticized for it.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I too always thought it was common knowledge that a lot of
| people die from disease but much fewer die in obscure ways that
| are reported on.
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| The news revolves around "new" stuff, not reporting things people
| generally know. At young and even middle ages, people dying of
| anything is highly unusual and skews more towards some of the
| unlikelier causes compared to the breakdown of all deaths. And
| it's general knowledge that the elderly commonly succumb to heart
| disease and cancer. I love the site and the article is
| interesting with good data but I don't think the premise of this
| article was quite right.
| pixl97 wrote:
| But by not reporting on things people generally know they end
| up with skewed knowledge of what they think they know. Thinking
| that you're going to die of an unlikely cause is generally
| wrong since it's unlikely, yet talking to younger people that
| are newsies and they are more likely to think they will die of
| such rare things.
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| The leading cause of death up to early 40s is still accidents
| so a fixation on heart disease and cancer might send the
| wrong message too
|
| https://wisqars.cdc.gov/pdfs/leading-causes-of-death-by-
| age-...
| tptacek wrote:
| The dubious unstated premise of this piece is that,
| "newsworthiness" notwithstanding, all causes of death are equally
| impactful on society. But that's not true. Violent crime and
| terrorism are destabilizing in ways heart disease and cancer are
| not. Independent of the prurient interests of the news audience,
| there can be strong arguments for giving outsized coverage to
| homicide.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| To _ensure_ they 're destabilising?
| tptacek wrote:
| I mean, maybe? To engage seriously with the argument, you'd
| have to account for iatrogenic effects of media intervention.
| That's an established concern, first with suicidality and
| increasingly with mass shooters. But you'd also have to
| consider that poorly covering events that are certain to
| percolate through the public consciousness might do worse
| things than covering them accurately. It's a tough question!
| lostmsu wrote:
| Raw data website for people who are interested in getting their
| own opinion: https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa-cause-of-
| death-by-ag... Discuss here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45584294
|
| Personally, the "poisonings" between 15 and 35 are what I most
| care about as a parent.
| d_burfoot wrote:
| A big chunk, perhaps the majority, of the "Accidents" are from
| cars. Another infographic I observed recently showed that, for
| children, the risk of death due to traffic accidents was greater
| than all other risks _combined_.
|
| 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.
| bsder wrote:
| > People should be raving and screaming for faster rollout of
| self-driving cars.
|
| 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.
| vel0city wrote:
| > People should be raving and screaming for faster rollout of
| self-driving cars
|
| 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.
| nicgrev103 wrote:
| Just because I read about more murder than cancer, in the news,
| doesn't make me think that more people are murdered than die of
| cancer.
| preommr wrote:
| I disliked the whole article, but as a quick tangent, the
| following:
|
| > . 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.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| >...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
|
| No. This is false equivalence. You are far more likely to die
| in a car than you are in an airplane, full stop.
| aeternum wrote:
| This is an overgeneralization. You are far more likely to die
| in a C172 airplane than you are in a modern car.
| vel0city wrote:
| First, one doesn't need to be impaired to die from a drunk
| driver. Only ~60% of the people who die in DUI accidents are
| the impaired driver. You can do everything right, but you're
| constantly surrounded by people making mistakes. You are not
| alone on the road. And even then, nearly 70% of traffic
| fatalities did not involve _any_ impairment!
|
| 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...
| neuralRiot wrote:
| In 2024 4 deaths by shark bite were registered globally and
| 700000 deaths from heart diseases in the US alone, yet we don't
| have a "hearth week" on Discovery channel. Fear sells.
| izzydata wrote:
| I think we should have a heart week. I'm sure they could make
| this scary in order to promote cardio.
| jedberg wrote:
| Way back in the 90s, I had a hacked satellite dish. This meant
| that I could get local channels from across the USA. My roommate
| used this for a school assignment. He looked at how much time
| local news spent on each topic, categorized by city. Here is what
| he found:
|
| - 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| Yes, it's filtered, but to a substantial degree it's because
| that's what the audience wants. If they make money on ads and
| that revenue depends on eyeball time, then they will want to
| maximize eyeball time. An exception would be a news org that
| was funded differently. However that bias while different,
| would still be present because you only have so many hours in a
| day and thus can only present things of interest.
| estearum wrote:
| What someone "wants" is a complicated question.
|
| 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| Yes, people have ideas of what they would do, read and
| listen to in ideal form. That's what they tell themselves
| they would want. Reality or practice tells us what they
| idealize isn't realized by those people. They actually seek
| something different --often what they are presented in the
| news, in food, etc. Sometimes there are things that shift
| behavior (like physician tells them they need to change
| dietary customs or their psychologist suggests getting out
| of an echo chamber)
| estearum wrote:
| I'm taking issue with the suggestion that people's
| actions to pursue Option B means they don't _actually
| want_ Option A.
|
| 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.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| the issue is that this is what people want to watch and so it
| is even worse for algo feeds.
|
| if you "manage"/editorialize your algorithm to remove these,
| you'll be outcompeted in audience share by someone who doesn't.
| rubyfan wrote:
| _> That homework was really what drove home for me that the
| news is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching
| after that._
|
| 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.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Those last ones reflect the dominant employment sector in each
| city, right? That seems like what you'd want to see given a lot
| of viewers will be involved in that kind of news or want
| updates on it?
| jedberg wrote:
| Not exactly. It's the dominant _outlier_. Entertainment is
| not the largest sector in LA, but it 's the most unique.
| Finance isn't the largest sector in NYC, but again the most
| unique.
|
| Tech in SF may actually be the biggest sector, since tech is
| so big and prevalent, but it certainly wasn't in the 90s.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| So news reports on crime, positive stories, weather, sports,
| and the dominant industry in the local area.
|
| >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?
| vict7 wrote:
| I was fortunate enough to grow up without cable television. Any
| clip I see from Fox/CNN is usually a bunch of inauthentic,
| ignorant talking heads that I wouldn't even trust to tell me
| the weather.
|
| 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.
| puttycat wrote:
| One of the most informative and eye opening articles I found on
| HN. Thanks for posting.
| aeternum wrote:
| Charts like this are misleading because they don't take age into
| account. It's not really noteworthy that old people die of heart
| disease and cancer.
|
| 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.
| j-bos wrote:
| Agreed, this would make for a great standard in mortality
| metrics.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > For example if a 12yo gets murdered society considers it a
| much more significant loss than a 90yo having a heart attack.
|
| All you're saying is that the news coverage is a reflection of
| the biases people have (like the one above).
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| Or they report on what they think people would be interested
| in. I suppose that's a bias but it's an suspicious use of the
| word.
|
| 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.
| jakeydus wrote:
| Agreed. I think the newscaster joke in arrested development
| was a solid demonstration of this point. For those who
| don't know it, the showrunners would frequently insert a
| news clip of the same reporter summarizing whatever silly
| plot was going on, ending with: "What this means for your
| weekend, at 10."
|
| 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.
| tidbits wrote:
| City Nerd made a good video on how crime statistics often
| incorrectly compare to a cities overall safety:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m4jG1i7jHSM
| giantg2 wrote:
| You could also just cap it 49 or 54 years old. A lot of medical
| research does this when looking into things like cancers. It
| gives a pretty good indication of whats going on during early
| and prime year without as much longevity bias or 'old
| age/natural causes' deaths skewing the data. If you make it
| fully age weighted then you might adjust away things like
| murder for the 35+ crowd, or overinflate things like SIDS,
| drowning, and childhood cancers.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| > Charts like this are misleading because they don't take age
| into account. It's not really noteworthy that old people die of
| heart disease and cancer.
|
| 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:
|
| https://www.nber.org/papers/w32026
| jowea wrote:
| I believe homicide rate is frequently cited simply because it's
| the only crime rate that is remotely reliable. Other crimes get
| underreported but it's hard for the police to ignore a body
| with a gunshot wound.
|
| 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.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| On the other hand, you're most likely to die of heart disease,
| yet the interventions needed push heart disease well into old
| age should start as young as possible.
|
| 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.
| themafia wrote:
| > Charts like this are misleading because they don't take age
| into account
|
| 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.
| susiecambria wrote:
| Even if we accept that Americans want to be more and better
| informed as they say they want to, I don't believe that the
| desire actually means that they are better informed. People have
| limited bandwidth and issues are complicated.
|
| 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).
| B-Con wrote:
| Bruce Schneier said something (multiple times in his books, blog,
| etc) that really stuck with me as a young adult.
|
| 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.
| thaw13579 wrote:
| It would be great to have a similar analysis for elementary
| school-aged children. Many schools are using "crisis simulation"
| of active shooter events in an effort to prepare for them (and
| presumably reduce the risk of death). While good natured, I think
| it's ultimately just needlessly traumatizing children, since
| school shootings account for <0.1% of deaths. While school
| shootings are devastating and sadly on the rise, the media
| greatly exaggerates the risks in people's minds. By the numbers,
| the biggest mortality risks for children are drowning and
| automobile injuries while unbuckled, both of which can be trained
| without inflicting psychological harm.
| antonymoose wrote:
| How are they training your children? For mine, it's basically
| just "teacher gives a signal, barricade a door, hide in a
| strongpoint."
|
| I can't say it's anymore serious or traumatizing than
| earthquake, fire, or tornado drills I grew up on.
| thaw13579 wrote:
| A summary from the Everytown report "The Impact of Active
| Shooter Drills in Schools"
|
| "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...
| mothballed wrote:
| Nobody wants to hear the kids are dead because the moron
| parents forgot to lock their own pool gate or because they got
| wasted behind the wheel. They want to hear the evil inanimate
| objects or drug dealers did it, someone other than the parents.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Risk management is on a scale.
|
| 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.
| thaw13579 wrote:
| We of course should prepare and have protocols to protect
| children in these scenarios, but there are better and worse
| ways to go about it. I essentially believe it's okay to leave
| young children blissfully ignorant of low probability / high
| impact harms (there are many that are equally likely to
| school shootings that we ignore). Lockdown protocols and
| training seem fine to me, if they are sufficiently abstract,
| but there is an emerging trend of "crisis simulations" which
| involve people posing as shooters, simulating gunfire sounds,
| and staff / students posing as shooting victims, etc. I think
| adults can handle this kind of realism, but there is evidence
| for harm in young children.
|
| https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2301804
| russellbeattie wrote:
| Earlier in the year I was watching yet another series about a
| British mob. There were so many murders on the show, I wondered
| how many _actual_ homicides there are in the UK every year.
|
| 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.
| rupellohn wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog
| programmarchy wrote:
| Exactly what came to mind for me as well. Information is a
| difference that makes a difference.
| musha68k wrote:
| Aside from cryptographically sound and open source end to end
| verifiable options there is one simple alternative still used in
| many other countries and jurisdictions:
|
| 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..
| ynx0 wrote:
| wrong thread
| musha68k wrote:
| thanks %
| polishdude20 wrote:
| "When asked what emotions the news generates, "informed" was the
| most common response."
|
| 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.
| thelastgallon wrote:
| The article misses the most important point. Its not just the
| numbers, but whats preventable/actionable vs whats not. One of
| the easiest things (and the #1 cause) that we can work on is
| automobile accidents: Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause
| of preventable death for people aged 5-22, and the second most
| common cause for ages 23-67
|
| 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.
| 3abiton wrote:
| Pretty much this, and to add what does not impact our rights.
| Take freedom of speech for example, self sensoring can lead to
| a safer albeit "less fulfilling" life, compares to a one where
| you dissent against the government (saudi arabia, turkey, etc
| ...)
| thelastgallon wrote:
| Dumb Ways to Die, so many dumb ways to die:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJNR2EpS0jw
|
| I wonder why they didn't start with automobile accidents or
| driving drunk!
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> Old people dying of heart disease or cancer or whatever is
| not actionable
|
| "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.
| hashstring wrote:
| Hm, but to news readers, how actionable are terrorism-related
| deaths really?
|
| 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.
| Stevvo wrote:
| Surprised to see such large numbers for COVID-19. In EU
| countries, where most everyone is triple vaxxed, deaths from
| COVID-19 are less than 0.1%.
|
| In US the number is larger than drug overdoses. Over 100k
| preventable deaths a year attributable to anti-vaccine
| hysteria/conspiracy theories.
| simonjgreen wrote:
| I'm surprised at 1 in 50 deaths being suicide
| IndrekR wrote:
| Funny thing is, that news, by definition, are written about
| things that are newsworthy. Newsworthy things are not common, but
| exceptional and rare. Thus one shall not worry too much about the
| news as those things practically never happen in everyday life.
| umvi wrote:
| Even "29% heart disease" can be misleading since it could be a
| 3rd or 4th order death. A big chunk of "heart disease" is likely:
|
| Standard American Diet (high carb, high sugar, high corn syrup,
| high processed) -> high visceral fat deposits -> Type 2 diabetes
| -> tissue glycation -> heart disease
| drmath wrote:
| I wish almost every news article came with a statistics section.
| If you must, go ahead and write that article about a particular
| murder or traffic accident or drug trial or earthquake. But if
| you don't include statistics on similar events over time,
| geography, demographics, etc, you're misleading more than
| informing.
|
| 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.
| AaronAPU wrote:
| News and media in general are about anomalies because that is
| what draws attention. It's news because it's "new" in that sense.
|
| 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.
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