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Comment by ks2048 | Hacker News Reader

ks2048

People are way off in their estimates of all sorts of things. I think many use "20-30%" as a generic "kind of small amount".

See this graphic that made the rounds recently (e.g. 1% are transgender, people thought 21%. 6% are military veterans, people thought 40%, etc).

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/tky94p/ame...

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1% was higher than I’d have guessed for transgender people.

It turns out the figures are rounded in that graphic because the source article [0] (posted by another commenter) has it at 0.6% (which is likely rounded too).

Interesting when you consider how much certain topics seem to dominate current political discourse.

[0] https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-m...

A quote I’ve seen going around but not verified conveys that outsized attention quite well: “There are more people with measles right now than there are transgender college athletes”.

Is this quote an example of making the issue seem larger than it is? Measles ”feels” very common although at any one point I guess not that many people have it, but many see it in their family or remember experiencing it. So it feels like a large number. Saying that there are less people in some group does not make it sound that small. Why not say there are under 100 poeple or whatever the number approximately is?

Measles are not common nor were common for decades. There are simply not many people who have seen it.

There were also no deaths from measles for 10 years, because, well, not enough people had measles.

I mixed diseases. English is not my first language. Just checked from wikipedia that it has 20 million yearly cases and assumed it was the mostly harmless kids disease we all had (which is vaccinated against now also I learnt). Anyway why use 20 million cases against 44 athletes (number which might not be correct, but maybe in the ballpark)?

Chickenpox? Also not to be confused with smallpox...

That’s it, sorry for the confusion everyone. I stand corrected.

There is rapidly spreading outbreak of measles which makes news right now - 250 cases. Measles are that rare now

It is super contagious, so yes, prior vaccines everyone got it. Mortality is 1-3 in 1000 of sick. Plus some people get deaf and some get brain damage (dunno how many now).

So, nowadays super rare, used to be normal and harmless is not a word I would use for someone that kills 1-3 in 1000 kids.

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