Does the news reflect what we die from?
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
Happy to answer more questions people might have about methodology or the analysis in the original study.
I can guess what you'll find: What's chosen for reporting is news or otherwise noteworthy events. Traffic accidents may be a cause of death, but that doesn't make them either news or noteworthy. Traffic jams and their causes are an everyday occurence, even if the cause involves someone being driven off in an ambulance.
- comparison of the share of deaths to the share of google searches;
- comparison of google searches to the media coverage of deaths.
Would it be possible for you to generate those two?
> But is there evidence that such a disconnect exists between what we see in the news and what is reality for most us?
is an interesting one, particularly in this case. The leading cause of death for African American males 15 - 35 in 2015 was homicide according to CDC statistics. It seems that’s a very important news worthy focus, especially with respect to policy debates that shape the way US cities are run. Even including caveats in your report would bring an important and nuanced view. I’m curious as to why this was not discussed.
The short answer for why we didn't do it is that I didn't realize this until after we finished the project. This was for a university data science project, and we were working on limited time.
Perhaps these examples are too similar to get a good distribution but if news organizations are all covering basically the same items perhaps there is an opportunity for differentiation. The google search trends shows that what people are interested in knowing doesn't match what media is interested in telling.
I'd like to see a similar graph with different media outlets from around the world.
I think the strong similarity is an artifact of our data collection process, rather than reflecting some very deep truth about the similarity of the two sources. Or of sources in general. My priors are that the distribution should have looked more different, but I just didn't do extra verification at the time.
Since 'newsworthy' is synonymous with 'unusual', we end up thinking rare things are actually common, since we only cover rare things in the news.
Consider "road incidents". Search is disproportionately higher than deaths - we are definitely interested! But news coverage is extremely low, because what is newsworthy about any specific road incident? It's more naunced than "the news reflects what's interesting".
Or maybe NYT and The Guardian are just missing out on a big area of reader interest, and they could increase engagement by running more stories about road incidents!
Perhaps then we could get a different handle on the issues that face us, especially that face the elderly, and be more responsive.
So I am not sure you'd be getting a significant new insight into major causes.
On the Greek island of Ikaria for example[1], we know that people regularly live to be 90 years old and that even at that age they remain incredibly social and physically active.
[1] http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20171116-the-greek-island-wi...
Perhaps not always conscious, because they need their jobs and their jobs are to fill a 24 hour cycle with news.
And nobody wants to hear about cancer and heart disease, it bums them out.
while lots of outlets do are manipulative, it's the concept itself of news that shift the reporting bias here.
Glaring omission is deaths from airplane crashes. I would guess that is the most disproportionately covered of any cause of death.
I'm also skeptical of the data on drug overdoses. Seems like the opioid epidemic is pretty well-covered these days but listed as only .4% of "Media Coverage" and 1.3% of searches.
1 death is a tragedy, 1 million death is a statistic. Nuclear falls into the first one, coal into the second.
For me, the most likely way I have of dying is a car hitting me. Heart disease is not an issue for me as I exercise every single day and eat, and cancer is not a concern as I do the above and anything else will not affect it significantly.
If only it were that simple. Yes, exercise greatly decreases the risk of certain things as a healthy body is just that much more resilient. However, please get yourself checked at your regular 10k, 20k, 30k miles. Life happens in funny ways. Don't be an edge case. Also, if you live in California, you have to be super careful of all the cancer causing things that are only known to the state of California.
According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, iatrogenesis is the third largest cause of death in the United States after heart disease and cancer.
Iatrogenic. What is that word? Is it a disease, an accident, or something you get from smoking?
In fact iatrogenic means inadvertent death caused by a doctor or a hospital.
Why don’t they just say that? I guess it isn’t exactly in medicine’s best interests to put it in simple language that anybody can understand.
It’s pretty effective all said and done.
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
https://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Documents/2017-DCA15SS002-B...
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/12/11/18135976/gun-d...
They're not an inconvenience at all, and I'm not opposed to them in any way. It takes 20 seconds to go through them, and all the officer does is ask you if you've had anything to drink or have used any "wacky tobaccy"[1] recently, shine a flashlight into the car to check for open drinks (and presumably, use his nose too), then let you go.
But then again, I'm a white male, and certain minorities might have worse experiences.
[1] That's a new one that I heard just a few days ago.
Quoting Wikipedia[1],
The minimum sentences are:
For a first offence, a $1000 fine and a 12-month driving prohibition, For a second offence, 30 days of jail and a 24-month driving prohibition, and For a third or subsequent offence, 120 days of jail and a 36-month driving prohibition.
If no one is hurt or killed, and the prosecutor is proceeding by summary conviction, the maximum sentence is 18 months of jail. If no one is hurt or killed, and the prosecutor is proceeding by indictment, the maximum sentence is 5 years of jail.
If another person suffers bodily harm because of the offence, the maximum sentence is 10 years in jail.
If another person is killed because of the offence, the maximum sentence is a life sentence.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impaired_driving_in_Canada#S...
Why not? Which of your rights are they infringing on by doing these routine checks?
It's not like they're free to do anything they want. The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that during a RIDE check, they can only check for sobriety, and any other searches or questioning will result in the charge being dismissed (unless the evidence of a crime is in plain view, like a gun on the dashboard).
Here's a great summary:
R.I.D.E. stands for “Reduce Impaired Driving Everywhere.” It is an Ontario sobriety program that was established in 1977 with the purpose of reducing the number of tragic accidents and injuries resulting from impaired driving. The R.I.D.E. program has a narrow and specific mandate, which is to detect and deter drunk drivers. Conversely, R.I.D.E cannot be a tool for arbitrarily detaining individuals without reasonable grounds and in violation of their rights under the Charter. In fact, there have been many instances of criminal proceedings where charges were dismissed because officers over-stepped their legal mandate in the course of administering a R.I.D.E. check.
The R.I.D.E. program provides police officers with the legal right to perform planned roadside checks to identify and charge drivers who are under the influence of alcohol. The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled in favour of R.I.D.E. as a justification for stopping and checking drivers. In this regard, R.I.D.E. is unique as it gives officers the right to briefly detain and question driver even if there are no grounds or probable cause for believing that a driver is over the legal blood alcohol limit, impaired or has committed any offence. However, while executing the R.I.D.E. program, police are not authorized to perform other criminal investigations or searches, unconnected with the purpose of R.I.D.E. There are many exceptions to this rule, for example, if illegal drugs or other contraband are in plain view in the vehicle.
From https://www.kruselaw.ca/blogpost/the-ride-program-and-your-r.... The whole page explains it all very clearly.
either more cops at night, or an AI/radar camera to alert cops when it sees a car driving erratically.
This is in a midwestern U.S. state.
The laws may or may not be strong in theory, but even if they are strong they are not applied consistently. The courts are failing to protect the public from people who present a clear danger to the public.
This person, for example, is white. I am 100% sure that if he was not white he would be dealt with more harshly (and more appropriately, in this case).
- Start with educating your drivers properly. As a German the US process of acquiring a driver's license looks like thinly-disguised rubber stamping.
- Rethink your roads, signals, and what surrounds them. Use modern techniques that make pedestrians and drivers safer.
The above two should get you from about 7.3 road deaths per billion vehicle kilometers to somewhere in the ballpark of Germany (4.2). Maybe even better than that since some of the planning and signals here still suck...
Finally you're just driving way too much. This becomes obvious when comparing road deaths per 100k inhabitants: just 4.1 in Germany vs 12.4 in the US. Yup, that's a 200% difference. Public transport anyone?
Canada is also doing better on those statistics, but I don't know much about how to acquire Canadian driver's licenses or what their road planning looks like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
From [0]
Total Deaths 2016: 2,744,248
Unintended Injuries 2016: 161,374
From [1], a breakdown of those unintended 161,374 injuries above:
Accidental Poisoning and exposure to noxious substances: 58,335
Motor Vehicle: 40,327
Fall: 34,673
Accidental hanging, strangulation, and suffocation: 6,610
Accidental drowning and submersion: 3,786
Accidental exposure to smoke, fire and flames: 2,730
Dividing the 40,327 motor vehicle from the 2,744,248 deaths gets you 1.47%, way less than the 7.68 shown in the interactive chart.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2017/019.pdf page 1
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr67/nvsr67_05.pdf page 34
Even if that's true, how can the masses be expected to make informed political decisions on things like healthcare funding vs. war on terror funding if they're constantly being terrorized by the news about a negligible threat while ignoring much greater immediate threats?
However, if you look at the date ranges for what is arguably the most important graph in the post: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/10/Causes-of-death-v...
They run from 1999-2016 for both the news organizations, and from 2004-2016 for the Google searches. 9/11 happened in 2001, so of course there were going to be lots of articles about that, and less searches if you exclude that time period.
The deaths were selected from 2016 alone, which is maybe reasonable, but then why select articles from a range of years elsewhere? Certainly there were more deaths in 2001 from terrorism than any other year in this range, so excluding it from some things while including it in others seems like an act of Hanlon if nothing else.
https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism
Particularly outside North America:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-terrorism-fatal...
I imagine people know heart disease is a huge killer but they also know they can make lifestyle changes to prevent it and they know what those changes need to be.
It's not about what we have control over, but what we have information about. Informed consent is the bedrock of western society, from the enlightenment period. I suspect fear mongering (and terrorism) is effective precisely because westerners are trained to define unknowns and mitigate danger.
Some go so far as to be outraged that someone hasn't preternaturally predicted how an unknown could have been dealt with.
Terrorism is especially terrifying in this regard because if left unrestrained, I think it is pretty intuitively obvious that there is no realistic bound on the amount of deaths that it would cause. The lack of deaths is not a function of desire on the part of terrorists to cause death, but just their ability to do so.
In some ways this is similar to the reaction to nuclear power -- even though practically speaking it is very safe, if it were to go wrong, it could got wrong on a scale that is not really possible for almost any other source of energy. Regulations and safety practices can go a long way towards mitigating this, but the tail risk remains a huge unknown, not in the probability sense, but in the negative impact sense.
I don't necessarily agree. Terrorists are people with a point to make who view violence as the preferable way to make it (usually out of desperation).
Numbers are pretty much never the point (any more than companies set out to kill as many people as possible with pollutants). The symbol is what's important. The world trade center. Mosques. Gay bars. All representative of what the attacker views as a corrupting influence on society in their own worldview.
I think you rebut this one yourself - terrorism has a natural limit in the ability of terrorists to launch attacks. Not a hard limit, a statistical limit, but important none the less.
It is important to recognize the order of magnitude of the probability of the risk. At CERN they don't publicize that there is a long-tail risk of causing the destruction of the world because the probability, though non-zero, is exceedingly tiny (and people freak out, unable to think about tiny probabilities.)
Also the limited number of willing terrorist attackers.
I believe terrorism generally creates more terrorism, so the limit you suggest would be amplified by the ability of terrorists to create more terrorists. However, I would interested in seeing some hard stats on this.
See: Black Swan/Antifragile
But creating and operating a bomb requires expertise, that all terrorist lack.
[1]http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/06/what-a-nuclear-attack...
There are about 8.6 million people living in NYC.
NYC would have to be nuked and fully repopulated about once every 7 years to match the death rates of heart disease and cancer.
The limit is not “natural”. The limit is at least partially because we are excessively vigilant about terrorism, and put measures, effective and ineffective, in place to anticipate and prevent terrorism. The far reaching and extensive nature of those measures is a result of the same risk calculus that I describe here, and is a manifestation of the same phenomenon that the research linked here found.
For example, ISIS was busy setting up their caliphate, and if we had not defeated them militarily, they'd have their own little hellhole nation to run.
The amount of death such regimes can inflict on their own people is pretty significant.
It doesn't even require death squads or anything like that; I was at one of Sadam's palaces and remarked to an Iraqi that the pools were empty. Well, it turns out, once Sadam fell, the water was redirected back to the local tribes.
Because to punish recalcitrant tribes, Sadam would just cut off their water.
(None of this means major powers necessarily ought to be getting involved in all these areas; the point is that terrorists aren't just killing people for kicks, they have a reason for the things they do and there are consequences when they're successful.)
If by behavior we can reduce heart disease and cancer by half, that extends far more lives than eliminating terrorism, homicide and suicide entirely. Even the tail risk of terrorism is on the order of 10^4/year, while heart disease plus cancer is 10^6. So adjusting for tail risk, the focus of coverage on violence remains disproportionate.
There's a more substantial tail risk in global warming, nuclear war, infectious disease or SMOD. If the coverage of those was proportional to their tail risk they would crowd out most other news.
I assume you’re calculating the tail risk of terrorism based on backtesting, and ignoring the fact that preventing terrorism is a disproportionately high priority of the governments of the world. The extent and scope of measures taken cannot be ignored when talking about the impact.
Yes global warming has tail risk; it doesn’t show up in this analysis because it isn’t causing deaths, but I think the level of coverage is pretty high considering the low death toll.
Similarly nuclear war - especially during the Cold War, thermonuclear weapons had killed fewer people than falling pianos, yet for some reason was very high on people’s mind.
Paging @nntaleb.
The primary motivation behind terrorism, is as the name suggests, not material violence but psychological damage and attack on the nerve centers and political systems and ideologies of targets. The physical violence is only secondary and a tool. So to evaluate terrorism in terms of body count, and not generated fear, is quite myopic.
It also of course ignores that systems aren't uniform and can take blows at any point with equal consequence. Terrorism at a political focal point of 10k people can collapse a nation state a thousand times as large, ask Franz Ferdinand and Europe. The effects aren't linear.
It's quite frightening to see how shallow and superficial the analysis of people has become who are apparently in charge of our institutions, because this thinking is extremely prevalent.
The interpretation that we should not discuss certain causes of death as much was only added in this thread. The only implication discussed in the article seemed to be "Perhaps we should provide more context".
I would say that people dying from outlier events is newsworthy because they are outliers, not that we should cover events in the proportion of their occurance in real life. That'd be awfully dull.
As an example
https://www.cdc.gov/healthequity/lcod/men/2015/white/index
VS
https://www.cdc.gov/healthequity/lcod/men/2015/black/index.h...
That is, if you are a Black Male in the US between 15 and 35, yes homicide is how you are more likely to go. And that news becomes very important to Black mothers, fathers, grandparents. The real — as in US government stats — on infant and maternal mortality are also worse than many Caribbean countries.
My takeaway is that there are different “world”s within countries — especially for marginalized groups where the country doesn’t have the will or resources for a safety net.
This is because the key driver of what the mainstream media reports is how well a given topic will increase the bottomline.
Pardon the editorial, but this is what passes for journalism currently. Sadly the media drinks their own Kool Aid, believes their own press releases, and continues to trumpet its own importance, even when the data/evidence consistently tells otherwise.
Counterpoint: there are news sources that don't have a profit motive, e.g. BBC News. They still do this same kind of reporting. For them, it's not about their bottom line. So... what is it about?
All those aside, it's naive to think the BBC doesn't track ratings, do market research, etc. They might not have a traditional purely financial bottomline but they still have a bottomline, as well as someone to report to about results, etc.
They also suffer from the "two-sides" problem. They'll get a scientist who's spent their life studying climate change, then on the other side someone who says "It's a hoax". That's not investigative journalism.
People need to be aware that media coverage is disproportionately focused on certain causes of death.
Instead of
<likelihood of thing being in the news> = f(<probability of dying from thing>)
It's more like:
<likelihood of thing being in the news> = f(<probability of dying from thing>) * g(<scariness of dying from thing>)
If you think about it, I'm actually more likely to accidentally ingest a legal pad.
It's one of the oddities of modern Western societies that you can end up in jail for donating to what you think is a liberation movement in another country, but when the New York Times and The Guardian are making money by doing the second part of terrorism in their home countries, nothing happens.
1-Don't write a headline as a question 2-Don't write a headline with a question that can be answered "no".