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Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

Wow, terrorism really is overrepresented compared with how we die these days. I wonder if that's some kind of evolutionary echo of a more violent time when a leading cause of death for most humans was regional strife. We're apparently still pretty interested in who's out there somewhere, scheming to come and kill us.

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> Wow, terrorism really is overrepresented compared with how we die these days.

How many people do you know that were killed or injured in a terrorist attack? Second order? Same question for {murdered, illness, natural cause}. Compare magnitudes.

I knew a person whose brother in law was killed in 9/11 and another guy whose best friend was shot down in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. Trouble is I really can't compare it to the scads of relatives of friends who have undoubtably died of cancer or heart disease, because those just aren't the kind of stories people swap on a fishing trip.

> when a leading cause of death for most humans was regional strife

What leads you to believe that was ever a major cause of death for more than a tiny handful of people? It would seem the hardships of living before modern medicine and (any) agriculture would have killed far more people. Given how expensive/risky it was to collect food, why would any group of folks risk most of their healthy, strong brood to wage regional conflict? If they lost, all of them would lose by virtue of losing the most capable members of the society.

I think the fears of terrorism is less about how many people it kills, as how unsafe it makes people feel.

And how useful that feeling is to manipulate for media companies.

It’s right there in the name.

i am one of those people who think that we should allocate resources against causes of death in close proportion to the number of lives claimed. my guess is that many other engineering types also take this position.

recently however, i have come to worry that this position lacks empathy. especially in light of recent mass shootings in the US, i am forced to consider that some types of deaths have far worse second order effects than others. if ten people die on different days out in the woods, ten sets of family and friends are devastated. tragic, but if ten students are killed at school in the same day, it seems that the lasting damage is far more severe and widespread.

to some extent you can say that's just because people are emotional/irrational and they are blocking optimal allocation, but maybe the optimal solution does need to take into account how people feel about things. maybe things like terrorism and mass shootings are actually a lot more harmful than the numbers suggest.

The issue is more that due to highly asymmetric reporting, people wrongly estimate what the risks to themselves and loved ones are. This means that we don't act rationally in our own interests, to best avoid harm. I think most parents would care more about road safety, carbon monoxide poisoning, mental health, etc. than about terrorism or school shootings, if they were aware of the statistics.

Ok but that's just the definition of fear. There's no reasoning behind those feelings.

Yeah, and people likewise discount the deaths caused by cancer and heart disease because these are diseases of old age. People generally think humans aren't supposed to live forever, so they see old people dying of these diseases as "natural".

"Natural" perhaps. "Not really possible to prevent" is something like a steelmanned version of it; maybe something like an artificial heart could keep people alive, but maybe such people's bodies are usually worn down enough that the best medicine in the world couldn't keep 90% of them alive for 5 more years.

This brings me to the question: What are the data on deaths in certain age brackets? If, say, media coverage was proportional to the number of people under 18 or under 25 who died, or perhaps some sum of "f(age(person))" where e.g. f(under 18) = 1, f(18-25) = 0.9, f(65+) = 0.01... then that would be a very striking result. (I guess if the smallest weight is 0.01, then no disparities exceeding 100x, such as the terrorism ~4000x disparity, can be explained.)

Edit: Well, here we go. https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_dea...

Unintentional Injury is cause #1 for ages 1-44. Suicide is #2 for 15-34, #3 for 10-14, and less for higher ages. Homicide is #3 for 15-34 and 1-4 (!), and #4 for 5-14. Cancer is #2 for 5-14 and 35-44, #4 for 1-4 and 15-34. Congenital Anomalies is #1 for <1, #2 for 1-4, and #3 for 5-9. Terrorism isn't listed, although if it were counted it might go under homicide. Heart Disease is #5 or less for 0-34, and #3 or higher starting at 35+.

If you figure that the news media only cares about young people, it goes some distance towards explaining matters...

It wouldn't make much sense for the news to report on things which were not newsworthy. That people die from very typical things people always die from just isn't news.

But people have always died from violence. It's hardly news.

Fewer people die to violence now than they ever did. That’s what makes it news.

So by the argument, the more terrorism kills, the less it should be reported?

I think it's clear it's not due to its infrequency that it's reported on so much.

Are you sure about that? I haven't actually lived through the Troubles in England, but my understanding is that while terrorist acts were obviously reported by the news, there was much less hysteria than for today's much rarer terrorist events.

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