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Comment by mninm | Hacker News Reader

"We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off."

It always fascinates me how much my world view and the world view of those around me is based on the exceptional and not the mundane. The news outlets report the news assuming that the audience knows what's normal. When the news is used to become informed about the world many people come away with a skewed impression of reality. I am of the opinion that people would be better served by news reports that provide context to explain why the news is in fact news.

Here's some context I find interesting:

According to the CDC:

Americans murdered per year: 16,121

Americans killed in car accidents per year: 33,804

Americans killed by smoking related diseases per year: 480,000

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_...

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Can putting those numbers side-by-side in such a way mislead people on the social impact of those events?

Murder is rare, but it has a very high impact on society and the surrounding people. It creates an environment of stress and fear. Car accidents do the same to a much lesser extent. Smoking related diseases are somewhat more expected, they aren't so sudden. People have time to adjust, receive medical attention, and so on.

When you put the numbers together it feels like we should tackle the causes of the largest number of deaths first, then work our way to the fewest. But I don't think that is beneficial, or even a rational approach to improving our society.

You could use those numbers argue for ignoring mass shootings: i.e., there are so few related to other causes of death. But it fails to take into account just how many people they effect and how much it twists society (e.g., having schools perform lockdown drills with 5-year-olds who don't understand why they have to hide in a closet [1]).

I don't think we have a good measure to use to compare murders, to car accidents, to death by disease. As raw quantities they skew our perception and priorities. As pure numbers they fail to indicate to us the impact they could have on our society.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/rehearsing-for-death...

The negative effects of mass shootings are largely because people don't understand the risks. So I think they'd go away if we realized they didn't matter.

You're right though that smoking shouldn't be top. Everbody dies of something but we can't save all old people from old age diseases forever.

That's right, but the negatives are presently having a large impact on society. There is a balance to be struck, but it's something that viewing the raw numbers can obscure.

Non-domestic terrorism seems like a good counter-example, where we have gone too far in an attempt to eliminate it: a huge financial and societal undertaking (e.g., the TSA, the justified mass-surveillance, the increase in public fear) for relatively few deaths.

> You're right though that smoking shouldn't be top. Everbody dies of something but we can't save all old people from old age diseases forever.

The CDC disagrees. If you click through the last link in the post above they list in great big bold letters "Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death." The key word being "preventable". You're right in that there is little value in worrying about unpreventable causes of death but, please, don't make the mistake of thinking smoking is by any means unpreventable. Also, it's worth pointing out that smoking including second hand smoking kills people of all ages

Smoking causes all sorts of harm besides "old age diseases" the happen to "old people." Smoking related deaths and disease effect all ages including fetuses as well as quality of life.

> Murder is rare, but it has a very high impact on society and the surrounding people.

How do you know? What metrics are you using to form this opinion? Or are you using the same gut impression that the article alludes to and the GP specifically states?

By my math each murder could affect 10 people as to leave them in a state equivalent to death and still not come anywhere close to the impact as smoking.

Let me put it another way. Odds are that you've never known anyone that was murdered but there is a pretty damn high you've known someone that died from smoking. BTW, the number of people who die from second hand smoking alone dwarfs the number of people who are murdered.

I'm just using my gut impression. Sorry for not being more clear.

My main point was that seeing the raw numbers may also present a skewed perception of the how impactful those deaths were on society. Especially when you see them side by side, and one looks so much more "important" than the others by virtue of being an order of magnitude larger.

You might be right that a death from smoking related disease is more impactful on society than a murder, I have no idea about that and my speaking about it probably confused the point.

I respect the general thrust of your position in that we as a society must evaluate things like death on all axes including social impact. But until thing like social impact become less nebulous and more quantifiable I will continue to base my opinions on the the "raw" numbers because at least I can compare apples to apples.

I'm not suggesting we ignore "raw" numbers. Just that we should realise they are not directly comparable, as they are not all measuring sudden or violent terminations of life.

They are directly comparable as they both measure preventable deaths. If some types of death weigh more heavily on society than others, if there is some sort of X factor to be considered then how do we determine what it is?

Should we say deaths from murders are 1.5x important as smoking deaths? 2.5x?

This line of reasoning, while a tad ghoulish, is important because decisions have to be made, governance has to be picked, and taxes have to be spent. If it turns out we have no rational systematic way of determining a multiplier I believe it's reasonable to go with the information we have which are the basic facts about what's killing us.

We may some methods for quantifying how impactful a death is. A brief search led me to [1, 2] which uses "years of potential life lost before 75 years (YPLL75)"

I think it's quite important not to treat all deaths as equal. It's just a gut feeling on my part, as I don't have the qualifications to make any serious statements about this. But I feel the long awaited death of an elderly relative is vastly less impactful than the sudden death of a child. I feel as though a murder has far more negative consequences for society than the death of a smoker from disease (one obvious one is the amount of resources that must go into finding and prosecuting, incarcerating the murderer.)

So when we compare ~16,000 murders to ~500,000 deaths from smoke-related disease, we also have to compare the toll of 16,000 murder investigations. Thousands of prisoners being entered into the prison system. Thousands of appeals and court cases. As well as the cultural and social impact of having so many humans bear witness to murder and the stress of sudden, violent, loss of loved ones; this is much harder to quantify but should not be ignored.

[1] http://uwphi.pophealth.wisc.edu/publications/other/measuring... [2] http://uwphi.pophealth.wisc.edu/publications/issue-briefs/is...

You absolutely should ignore mass shootings. Paranoia about terrorism has created the NSA and TSA, and all sorts of other nonsense. People watching airplane crashes on the news think that airplanes are incredibly dangerous and drive instead.

The raw numbers are important. People are actually surprised when you give them statistics like how rare murders actually are, or how rare shark attacks are, etc. That wouldn't be surprising if people already had an accurate model of the world. We should strive to inform people, not misinform them further. Knowing about the risk of auto accidents is far more important to the average person than knowing about the details of mass shootings.

The news actively misinforms people about risks. It creates irrational fears and behaviors. The "social impact" you are talking about exists because of the news misinforming people. It's an effect, not a cause. If the news reported on every traffic crash instead, mass shootings wouldn't have any impact on our society or people's behavior.

Maybe people living in such a society would be more likely to buckle their seatbelts, and less likely to own guns.

Our goal should absolutely be to minimize death and suffering. Everything else is secondary and subjective. We should strive to be more rational and consistent, not embrace our irrational fears of rare things.

I absolutely agree that the raw numbers are important and they are quantifiable way to assess risk. But I very much dislike that they are directly compared to each other. The social impact of murders seems so different to death by smoking related disease that a comparison of the two numbers could be meaningless in determining which one is more "important" to reducing total death and suffering. They both seem incredibly important, despite one being much larger.

> You absolutely should ignore mass shootings. Paranoia about terrorism has created the NSA and TSA, and all sorts of other nonsense. People watching airplane crashes on the news think that airplanes are incredibly dangerous and drive instead.

The problem is we don't ignore mass shootings or airplane crashes. We are not ignoring them right now and they are affecting us deeply. And maybe we will never be able to ignore them. If that is the case (and I'm not saying it is) then there may be benefit to solving such things which is larger than the numbers would have us believe.

> The news actively misinforms people about risks. It creates irrational fears and behaviors. The "social impact" you are talking about exists because of the news misinforming people. It's an effect, not a cause. If the news reported on every traffic crash instead, mass shootings wouldn't have any impact on our society or people's behaviour.

I'm not sure I agree. A mass shooting is vastly more terrifying than a traffic crash, and seeing every traffic crash would simply numb people to traffic crash reports — not terrify them. We are almost becoming numb to mass shootings, which is a scary thing in itself.

I believe the "social impact" would exist regardless of the news. Social media already does a better job spreading this information as-it-happens, and events which are terrible and random will continue to be propagated by the humans who witness them. We can't rely on humans not to speak about such things as a solution to reducing the terror they cause because it is unlikely to happen. It would be best to formulate a solution which accounts for this reality.

> Our goal should absolutely be to minimize death and suffering. Everything else is secondary and subjective. We should strive to be more rational and consistent, not embrace our irrational fears of rare things.

I agree with you but my position is just that there isn't a direct path from the raw numbers to how we should attempt to minimise death and suffering.

Aren't you falling prey to the exact problem being brought up?

You seem to be claiming murders have a bigger social impact than deaths by smoking. How can we know that's true? By what measure?

If we assume murdered people have on average the same number of social connections then 500000 smoking deaths have exactly 500k/16k more social impact than murders.

By focusing on the murders aren't we ignoring the much larger social impact?

Sorry, I didn't meant to get focused on the actual causes of death.

My main point is that the numbers are not directly comparable, and that is misleading. The numbers are not measuring the same thing; all deaths are not equal.

It's quite logical to think murder is vastly more impactful than smoking deaths. For instance: with murder you have the burden of a police investigation, a court case, possibly many appeals, jail time for the convicted. Maybe even the death penalty (which is incredibly costly). You also have families torn apart by sudden and unexpected grief, as well as the families of those who go to prison now having that burden.

Deaths from smoke related disease are signalled a long way off. People have time to prepare, and adapt to the passing of their loved ones. There is definitely social cost, but I don't think it's irrational to expect it to be much lower than the social cost of a murder.

But even if deaths from smoking related disease are more impactful than murder, my point still stands: the two quantities are not directly comparable.

You are correct that not all deaths are equal. Someone dying of cancer at 60 is losing maybe 20 years of life, while someone dying at 20 is losing their entire adult life. That's the concept of Quality Adjusted Life Years, which is sometimes used instead of just regular statistics.

But even so, the QALYs lost to smoking is orders of magnitude larger than that lost to murders. And car accidents don't discriminate based on age too much

>seeing every traffic crash would simply numb people to traffic crash reports — not terrify them. We are almost becoming numb to mass shootings, which is a scary thing in itself.

It's not numbness. It's just loss of interest/novelty. People aren't becoming numb to mass shootings, they just aren't as interesting or novel. They are still afraid of them. Emergency responders who see accidents every day still buckle their seat belts. More than the general population.

Anyway I am not saying that we can get the news to stop reporting on mass shootings or make people uninterested in them. I am saying that we can correct perceptions that they are more likely than other risks. We can educate people better. We can fight our own biases and strive to be more rational.

Context is dangerous to news & politics. Numbers are even more dangerous. So the likelihood of your wish coming true is almost nothing, at least in the mainstream news outlets. You'll get tons of context in long-format blogs and podcasts, where the purpose of the content is to educate. The primary purpose of media news is to make money, hence the bent toward entertainment more than anything.

Data from the FBI[1] lists information about murders, including weapon types, circumstances of the murder, relationship to the victim, etc. (2013 numbers)

Going through those numbers is enlightening and will augment your CDC data, which gives great context to overall death rates.

[1] https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/...

There are generational changes happening that are pretty profound. Younger generations don't trust the traditional media the same way older generations did, and are increasingly skeptical of the narratives being peddled by the media.

There's nothing inherently wrong with being profit driven (although it's not without its problems), the bigger problem is, I think, being advertising driven. Which sets up an incentive of maximizing viewership with the least costly content, irrespective of quality.

> The primary purpose of media news is to make money

My main news sources are: - CBC (Canadian crown corporation), - BBC (UK Royal Charter), - TVOntario (Ontario crown corporation), - Democracy Now! (independent non-profit), - PBS (independent non-profit), - crowd-sourced for-profit sites (HN, reddit)

I live in NYC, and it's always really strange to see how prevalent for-profit media is here when there are so many better options.

You think that the CBC isn't trying to make money? What are all the advertisements for then?

I'd have to agree with the other commentator on this, the BBC is hardly unbiased, it's under huge pressure to tow the conservative party line via threats to its funding and it's coverage is often populist (a lot of stuff about the royal family) and shallow, I gave up watching it years ago.

Channel 4 news is better, but still i despair at some of the trolling for soundbites that goes on, it's still about the best of the mainstream UK news channels.

Recently The UK Guardian, which i used to have a very high opinion of, got into quite a bit of trouble (with the readers) about it's biased coverage against Jeremy Corbyn's labour leadership campaign.

I imagine the US media is way worse, but in todays horribly co-opted world, sometimes the best you can hope for it to take a cross-sample of biased sources and somehow average it out in your head :(.

This is very important to realize about "the news". The conceit is that consuming the news will make you informed about the state of the world in the present, that is utterly false. It's a tiny soda straw view of some of the more exceptional things happening around the world at any given time. Actually educating people about the overall state of what's going on around the world is a much more difficult task which most news media organizations more or less avoid doing.

I disagree. I think that qualifying every single news report with statement about how it fits into larger global/national trends would be annoying at best. It's assumed that journalists report on things that are out of the ordinary. Of course this creates a generally macabre view of reality, but on the other hand do you want everything to sound like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-8FB6k8jik

You never heard of the "Man bites dog" rule in news reporting?

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