Was 2016 especially dangerous for celebrities? An empirical analysis | Hacker News Reader

Was 2016 especially dangerous for celebrities? An empirical analysis

medium.com

61 pointsbrw1231 comments

This analysis seems to assume that the concentration of celebrities among the population is roughly fixed, which is weird. It clearly isn't.

The whole concept of mass market celebrity is largely the product of American post-WWII prosperity and the explosion of a consumer class. It was rare prior to 1950 and arguably peaked around the early 2000s, when mass media went into steep decline.

Most "celebrities" alive today would have been active (or the topic of public discussion) during that period. So should we really be all that surprised that, as the Boomer generation rapidly approaches peak mortality, celebs are also dying in greater numbers?

The article concludes that this year was a "once in a century" outlier. On the contrary, I predict an even more grim 2017. Regardless, this analysis is incomplete without at least a cursory discussion of the distribution of celebrity birth years. Line that up with an actuarial table and then tell me how anomalous 2016 was.

I think it's only going to get weirder in the future too as more and more is pumped in to the celebrity machine.

I was in a bookstore the other day and saw Anna Kendrick's memoir. I don't have anything against her at all, but she's a 31 year old actress who hasn't had a big role that produces her legacy, maybe in another decade or two, but now?

Every person of at least minor celebrity status comes out with a biography these days, and then goes on a big publicity tour on all the talk shows, and now there's more and more talk shows on more and more network, cable, and internet networks. There seems to be a whole industry centered around people in media reinforcing themselves to an absurd degree now.

Then again maybe we just forgot if this happened in the 70s and before and this has always happened, who knows!

The difference is that, as media has fragmented and people find increasingly diverse sources of news and entertainment, there are more niche celebrities and fewer mega celebrities.

Manufacturing a mega celebrity takes a certain degree of monopolization of attention. But the days of three-network-television and two-station radio markets are gone. We don't, as a society, watch and listen to the same stuff anymore. It started with cable in the 90s, but it's accelerated with the internet.

I don't know who Anna Kendrick is, but if she's anything like the rest of the "celebrities" I'm supposed to know, she's a Q-list reality show extra with a hyperactive agent. The internet has globalized and democratized the market for attention, which means greater competition, more niches, shorter shelf lives, and fewer monopolies.

While I agree that Anna Kendrick might not need a biography at 31, she definitely isn't Q list. Probably A list, maybe B if we're being picky.

Actually, she's quite different from that. For one thing, she can actually sing, and a fair few of her roles involve it.

My 5yo regards her as the definitive Cinderella, for instance.

Edit: Oh yes, and was the star of a movie that took $290m worldwide, from a budget of $29m.

It's not just the number of celebrities, it's the number of beloved celebrities. Prince, George Michael, Alan Rickman, David Bowie, Muhammad Ali, Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher in one year? That kind of clustering of groundbreaking, generation defining celebrity is what made 2016 seem especially rough.

Aren't celebrities, by definition, beloved?

No. Celebrities are, by definition, well known. To pull an example from the article, Ted Bundy certainly qualifies as a celebrity who would generally not be considered beloved.

Not at all....? They are simply famous; this includes infamous.

There's a scale. Worldwide decades-long musical genius, pop earthquake and 3h long live concert deliverer is not the same as one hit wonder or a le Kardashian fame fame.

I've been wondering if it isn't just that more celebrities have died (which I thought was unlikely), but that the celebrities dying are surprisingly young.

Like when Kirk Douglas eventually dies, the likely reaction will be, "Wait, he was still alive?!" But it seems we've had lots of celebrities in their 50's and 60's dying, which is young for rich people.

So maybe it's not death, just unexpected death. I think it hits home more for people when a young person dies, even if "young" in some cases is in their 50's.

Celebs are not the most healthy people. Having money can give you too much access to docs and prescription drugs (see prince). Many also have pasts involving non-prescription drugs. A decade of the wild life sticks with you forever.

George Michael and Carrie Fisher carried their burden too it seems. Fame mostly financed some drugs, but not everything was pink at the core.

One thing this doesn't necessarily account for is factors like population growth (particularly the the baby-boom) and the explosion of popular culture and celebrity notoriety through mass media. Are there simply considerably more people considered "celebrities" since say the 1950's than before?

I think that is accounted for in his trend line that you are correct, there is an increase. But what he shows is that the increase is beyond what should be expected.

His trend line is a linear one, so I don't believe it is accounting for anything other than previous death counts. Population growth and the expansion of celebrity through mass media would expect a more exponential curve. Life expectancy increasing may have also lead to a delay of seeing a more exponential uptick before now, but death always catches up eventually.

Anyways I don't have an answer just postulating that unless you would need to have a distribution of current (and past) celebrities and their ages as well to account for that factor. Something you could probably do with that Wikipedia analysis actually.

it doesn't feel like life expectancy changes would make such an impact, since it 'feels' like many of the celebrities died before life expectancy. i say feels because I haven't seen an age breakdown.

would it make sense to make many random draws of non-celebrities who died and compared the age of that group against the celebrity group?

I'd expect celebrity to be more "concentrated" for people born from 1920-1980, since the nature of mass media distribution naturally limited how many famous people there were. With the internet, attention has been fractured onto many smaller celebrities, though pop music still creates some very recognizable and controversial stars (Bieber, Kardashians).

Thanks for putting so succinctly what I rambled on about in my comment. This analysis is missing a distribution of celebrity ages.

I'd think that after a celebrity does, there would be an increase in the number of edits / length of an article. Wouldn't this skew the numbers, increasing the "celebrity" statistic for everyone that has died that year (and hence making the year seem more extraordinary than it is)?

It would be interesting to do the same analysis for 2015 and previous years, using wikipedia snapshots at the end of each year, and see if those years also appear extreme.

Why would that necessarily be true? After a celebrity dies, a short amount of text is expected to be added about the death, but beyond that, why would you expect the length to increase?

Generally increased media attention?

Heck, even the simple increase of eyes on article seems like it'd increase the edits. Then there is the potential for reporting on something to cause people to add / amend the relevant articles.

You can make the case for increasing the number of edits (although I doubt there's really that much of an effect; anyone who has to visit the Wikipedia page to find out about the person just died isn't likely to be someone who already has a vested interest in putting some information on that page), but my comment was arguing against the idea that the article length would increase (beyond the small amount of text regarding the celebrity's death).

That's a fair question, and I have no hard data to back it up. Seems to me like it would be true (as another poster said, mostly number of edits, due to increased attention), but of course my intuition could be wrong.

Still, since it plausibly could be a factor it is something that should be ruled out.

This analysis assumes that if I take measurements using Wikipedia regarding celebrities who died in 2005 now the results would be the same as if I had taken those same measurements in 2005. This is obviously not true. I would argue that the most recent year will always appear to have more deaths than normal using this analysis because more attention is paid to celebrities immediately following their death.

The simple fact that this analysis results in such extremely wild numbers for the chance of 2016's celebrity deaths occurring, shows that is probably flawed.

Here's another take on the same question from a group at MIT Media Lab: http://macro.media.mit.edu/2017/

The last two plots could be correlated with GDP. E.g. dips circa 2002, 2008, and 2011. If the author is reading this: Can you make your data available? Thanks!

I wonder if "a year" can be divided other than from Jan to Dec, in a way to that would cause even worse results.

Totally thought this was going to be about security breaches. (Also dangerous for celebrities I imagine -- though I guess it can be a career making breach for some)

Say goodbye to the boomer celebrities, and hello to the Trump years.

Honestly it all boils down to social media: These days you can easily be bombarded if some guy from a long-forgotten one-hit wonder band member died.

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