What Americans die from vs. what the news reports on
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
Almost everybody will eventually die from one of this laundry list of items if they get old enough, regardless of where they live.
And regarding reporting, how many times can you write the same thing "american's are fat"? Or are you supposed to cover every heart attack on a news story?
Whereas murders and school shootings and such, can each have their own, big or small story.
At worst, the US has like 2x the obesity rate (and related deaths) compared to a place like Germany or France. But there's hardly any scarcity of news reports around health issues like obesity, or cancer either. Health coverage, health scares, health influencing, health fads, health supplements, diets, etc, are a trillion dollar industry.
Not all countries have such big homicide rates - most western countries have like 1/5th or less. And in most western countries a "school shooting" is nothing a person should even have to think or plan about, and schools don't ever need metal detectors, or to have to plan around such things.
>And in most western countries a "school shooting" is nothing a person should even have to think or plan about, and schools don't ever need metal detectors, or to have to plan around such things.
School shootings are still very much a thing where I live (finland), last one being just last year. A country with no guns and supposed to be one of the happiest in the world still experiences them
The metal shell of most vehicles also protect the occupants from lightning strikes.
Not about those in cities averted by lighting rods.
Fun fact: lightning rods are called air terminals.
No sane society would be comforted by the fact an active mass murdering act is "just twice as bad" as some natural phenomenon.
There's always a rental truck or a ton of fertilizer for the Cains of today.
Compared to the rate of defensive gun use appears to be worthwhile.
In reality, while it is nowhere near as bad as in the US, but there are school shootings and similar issues on a semi regular basis across Europe. Guns are still guns and humans are still humans unfortunately
Once a decade at most in most countries. Usually less than that.
Compared to what in the US, once a month?
Yes, guns are still guns and humans are still humans, but it's not nearly comparable.
Finland is about the same size of say Minnesota, and Minnesota hasn't had a major school shooting since August
Definitely not as bad as the US though, I acknowledge that, but people tend to paint it in black and white terms when the reality is messier
Shootings per million people 0.22 in Europe vs. 8.68 for the US, 40x difference. Deaths, US has 1111 and Europe 662, more than half of which happened in what's more accurately described as an organized terrorist attack rather than a school shooting (the Beslan school siege [1]).
Your comment is definitely trying to play down the reality in one giant whataboutism effort.
A terrorist attack where the anti-terrorist special forces used tanks and thermobaric missiles against the school premises, killing many hostages in the process and giving plenty of warning to the terrorists to kill even more. A horrific event all around.
That seems also like what you're saying?
Edit: It is true that in the UK this is pretty much unheard of since handguns were banned after Dunblane (it is literally impossible to get a handgun legally, Team GB pistol shooters have to train abroad).
So yes to be fair that kind of very extreme approach does seem to work so far
I don't think numbers are published for mainland GB, but it's likely less than a thousand - perhaps even just a few dozen. The Home Secretary has to authorise the licence, and they're limited to people with a verifiable active threat against their life.
(There are more in Northern Ireland as a legacy of the troubles - 2,924 in 2012, probably closer to 2,000 now. The rules are a little more lax, with the PSNI Chief Constable being sufficient for sign-off.)
A PPW firearms certificate allows a handgun of up to 9mm/.38 calibre, and up to 50 rounds of ammunition.
But none have been used in a school shooting, of course.
Also worth pointing out for non UK people: you can still legally licence shotguns (relatively easily) and some kinds of rifle (not so easily). Shotguns are somewhat common in the countryside but other guns (even rifles) are quite rare
I'd honestly expect most PPW holders in GB to be prison officers. There'll be a few wealthier folk in NI as a hangover from the troubles - business owners who refused to pay protection money, high court judges who sat on prominent terrorist trials, that sort of thing.
But the criteria are much the same as those for being afforded police protection, so your actual billionaires and dukes would almost certainly opt for that instead if they were under that sort of threat.
That's why I didn't say you were factually wrong but that you're trying to play down the reality in one giant whataboutism effort. Whataboutism is all misdirection and deflection rather than factually wrong statements.
I do not see evidence that the approach works. There were very few school shootings (or any shootings, really) before the handgun ban too. There are only two on this list that predate the handgun ban: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
The UK has a lower per capita level of knife murders than the US too so its not just access to guns that is an issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_stabbings_in_the_...
The last school shooting was the Dunblane Massacre in 1996, which led to gun law changes, removing rights to have handguns and various semi-automatic weapons.
I'm not sure how many occurred before then, but the total number of mass shootings in the UK is low. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_... to get a feel for how rare this sort of attack is in any setting here in the UK.
So for the last 25 years we've had no school shootings. I believe the US as a whole has had >300 shootings so far this year, with >300 victims.
> Minnesota hasn't had a major school shooting since August
There is an emerging and more frequent problem with religious terrorism though (people driving cars into crowds, shooting up concerts, etc). A problem created for absolutely no reason by stupid encouragement of mass immigration.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azores_Summit
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_International_Transitiona...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent_of_households_with_gun...
https://www.k12dive.com/news/school-shootings-2024-near-reco...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-17/us-school-shootings-2...
As you can see your number of 13 makes no sense, there were 200-300 students shot (!)
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-17/us-school-shootings-2...
Next day we drove with a tank through a forest.
Compared to other EU countries Finland is pretty easy going when it comes to guns.
Do you know the difference between 1% and 99%? Once every 10 years vs. once every year?
A desert with a single tree vs. a forest with a dead tree, a lake on a continent vs. an island in the ocean.. are those the same things to you?
You assume young people will vote for other people like them rather than whoever they think would actually run the country best for the long term? You must be an old person.
It is very reasonable to think that our attention (in the form of editorialized reporting, or funded initiatives) is being spent on actual material problems affecting most people, and this article is claiming this is a gap here... which I, and maybe many others think is valuable.
> how many times can you write the same thing "american's are fat"?
Until its less of a problem? Like any difficult problem in the world, you can keep coming at it from different ways, use the latest / most effective tools of the day, look for new opportunities, etc, etc.
1- That "cancer/strokes/heart problems" happens is hardly news, despite "killing more people" than other things reported. Especially since almost everybody old enough eventually suffers such health problems.
2- Despite their little newsorthiness, they're still covered in a big way, and there are huge industries around their awareness.
3- Homicide is inherently more newsworthy than "people get heart attacks". And even more important to cover where those crimes happen disproportionately compared to other comparable countries.
> Until its less of a problem?
As if the problem with people being fat is that there's not enough reporting of them being fat?
Why is homicide inherently more newsworthy than "people get heart attacks"? It completely depends on how much homicide is happening, how many heart attacks are happening, and what we as a society think is reasonable for either fatality. Given how few people are dying with homicides, how many people are dying from a preventable disease -- which is what the main article here says -- I think there can absolutely more attention put on the preventable disease. Particularly at a moment in time when funding for healthcare by the government is being dramatically reduced.
That people die from heart disease and cancer, especially when they get older, is common knowledge. That's what makes it less newsworthy versus a local homicide story that is not common knowledge.
The question about "what should be reported on more" is really about "which thing is worth spending more resources / attention / publicity" on, and I personally would put that towards a preventable disease that far too many people are dying of.
No, but you can spend a bit more time on coverage of new findings/research regarding the causes, initiatives and scientific progress towards treatment etc. Sure it isn't sexy but I think there is enough sensationalism to go around to fund some sensible reporting.
(And yes I'm aware chartr exists)
Until it's fixed. I don't think I need to tell you how many times they will write "[politician bad] regardless of the truth to it.
>there's hardly any scarcity of news reports around health issues like obesity, or cancer either.
Follow the money. Obesity is double, but" fitness" is a billion dollar industry. The message is never "eat less calories and stop subsidizing high fructose corn syrup", it's "buy this new MAGIC pill" or "get swole at the gym near you for $50/month (don't worry you can't cancel easily)" or "try this new diet plan with food we send to you".
Cancee is definitely more news hype though. Any little breadcrumb of progress is another package of "have we finally cracked the code to cancer?!" (Betteridge's law applies here). It is exciting stuff but not how the news frames it.
The article addresses your point with: "A newspaper that constantly covers heart disease and kidney failure would be a boring one that soon goes out of business."
The last paragraph is about whether or not the bias matters, and I find the conclusion particularly interesting: "But there’s one final reason why this bias matters. It makes it hard for us to understand how causes of death are changing over time."
At the same time, total death factors are not that interesting. Everyone of us will die one day, and it might be assigned to various organs failing first.
What matters more is causes of death as a function of age:
For sure, urprising, notable, and scary. But it seems especially for random causes that we can not control, why should we worry about those?
In contrast, death causes which are semi-fully controllable should concern us greatly.
E.g., just don't smoke is a virtual guarantee of extra 5-20 healthy years (and a greater difference if you're in the ~1/3 having the genetic makeup susceptible to cancer from smoking). Seems we should be very concerned and work hard to avoid smoking, vs random death from a helicopter falling on us?
At a population level maybe... but if you (and your family/friends if you want to consider that too) already don't smoke, there is not much to do? I don't have to work hard to avoid smoking because I am not interested in doing it to begin with, and it is not like cigarettes jump out of bushes and ambush you.
Helicopter crashes aren't common, but traffic violence is mostly treated as normal in the US, and deaths are often brushed off as an unavoidable "accident" with little or no punishment for the perpetrator, or serious consideration of systematically redesigning streets or vehicles to make these deaths less likely. This is something that I cannot "simply" avoid like smoking is.
Reduction in the speed limit and enforcement with traffic cameras, changes in street design, etc
Per the site traffic fatalities, including pedestrian, were the 2nd lowest level in recorded history for the first three months.
Reporting n more people died from heart disease every day isn't news.
The NYT's motto is "all the news that's fit to print". The job of a news source is to report on stories that are A) new and B) noteworthy.
Sure they're sensationalist to gather more clicks. But even if they weren't, this skew wouldn't change.
I get what the article is trying to say, and they did call this out, but it's still a bit silly to do an entire data analysis to prove that newspapers primarily report on stories that are... newsworthy.
True. But reporting that there’s been a 50% increasing in heart disease in the 30-50yo cohort in the last 20 years probably is (or should be) notable.
There's an old saying in newsrooms: nobody cares about a dog bites man story. Everyone will read a man bites dog story.
"this week, the county had X births and Y deaths. the median age rose slightly to Z."
An important fact is that Americans also think that crime, and specifically violent crime, are on the rise. This is contrary to actual data. So the question are "does news distort our views?" and "does news make us feel more unsafe than we actually are?". Certainly the answer to both is "yes"
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/08/29/the-link-...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/652763/smaller-majorities-say-c...
Just in my household alone, we've been victim of 4 assault+ attacks in the past 5 years. Two resulted in arrests, zero resulted in charges.
Is that normalized in data from 20 years ago?
Finally the same reasons that cause underreporting today existed in the past.
1. Not reporting low level crimes feeling as it has no point.
2. Criminals not reporting when they are the victims of a crime out of fear.
3. When the victim takes the matter of into their own hands
I'll even suggest that due to racism and lack of accountability in the past it's possible more criminal complaints were ignored compared to today.
They use FBI data for reported crimes as well as BJS data which interviews people and ask them if they have been the victim of a crime.
It's probably worth taking a minute or two to read their short explanation as I think it is not what people are assuming.
If you don't know how to evaluate that how can you claim there's a massive under reporting of violent crime?
The last crime I was the victim of was having my car broken into around 2003. I didn't report it but I was angry. Something bad happened to me through no fault of my own and nothing I could have done reasonably would have prevented it.
There are emotions involved and I'm sure for a while I felt as though crime was everywhere and I would be the victim again.
> Something bad happened to me through no fault of my own and nothing I could have done reasonably would have prevented it.
It shouldn't happen period. Effectively, at least in the USA, we've given up on this kind of crime and just expect it. Most people take the POV it is their fault (they left something visible in the car). That's BS. You are not responsible for the thief's actions. The thief is. Period!
There are places in the world where this mostly doesn't happen at all. (Japan, Singapore). You should be able to leave stuff in your car and not have it be stolen.
We, as a society, have given up on even trying to enforce this in any way shape or form AFAICT. My belief is, most of this type of crime is by just a few people repeating the same crime. Honeypots would catch those and lower the numbers by 90-95% IMO.
I asked chatgpt about why low level crime is low in Japan and it gave three interesting reasons.
1. Collective culture - basically focusing the harmony of society over the self. Not doing things that would harm others.
2. Fear of shame by others if caught
3. Communities are against anti social behavior
Assume these are correct for low levels crimes. Does this sound like America? We are a country where the freedom to be an asshole has high value. Individualism and personal freedom are over community.
Think about loud cars, it provides personal pleasure at the expense of others.
I also think about how much HOAs are hated (though some support them obviously because they exist*).
There's also a movement against empathy, another reason you might not want to cause harm to others.
Of course, it applies both ways. We should not trust the reports of violent crime going up in the late pandemic era. The politics of "Defund the Police" suggests that this was a deliberate tactic.
> Just in my household alone, we've been victim of 4 assault+ attacks in the past 5 years. Two resulted in arrests, zero resulted in charges.
Second, you have reported those, so they have been recorded and accounted for in this data.
If you click a few of the links on the Pew site you'll land here[0]
| The FBI publishes annual data[1] on crimes that have been reported to law enforcement, but not crimes that haven’t been reported.
| BJS, for its part, tracks crime by fielding a large annual survey of Americans ages 12 and older[2] and asking them whether they were the victim of certain types of crime in the past six months. One advantage of this approach is that it captures both reported and unreported crimes.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-...
[1] https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crim...
[2] https://bjs.ojp.gov/data-collection/ncvs
[Side note]: In [0] you will also notice that they mention that the FBI changed the definition of rape in 2013. The former definition was limited to women, specifically vaginal penetration, and "forcible". In 2013 this expanded to include vaginal and anal, remove sex, and removes "forcible". Also to note that the MeToo movement started in 2006 and gained full attention in 2017. There's a commonly held belief that the rate of reporting substantially increased due to the change of definition and the greater public attention given to the subject. Believe that or not, but this is context needed to evaluate that data.
My anecdote would suggest there’s no crime, but we know that’s not true and why we have statistics.
Not sure you can do much with that in a discussion/argument when there is no proof of that provided other than a personal anecdote.
Edit: Actually maybe I misread it, they are saying its always been flawed. But still the general point of the thread still holds I think.
One proxy for crime statistics is homicide. Any other stat can be juked, but homicide cannot because bodies stink. To someone who was insisting to me that the UK crime rate has increased over time, I pointed out that it was possible, but unlikely. Homicide is at a multi decade low in absolute numbers, and much lower in per capita numbers. That’s likely to be correlated with violent crime.
So in the case of the UK both homicide and violent crime have followed a gentle downwards trend line, and we can trust the first line completely. Therefore, the second is likely to be true.
Did it convince the guy I explained this to? No it did not. “You don’t live in a rough area like I do”. Ok then.
Think about how afraid people were of kidnappings in the 90s, or drugs in halloween candy, etc. All overplayed, and in the case of halloween candy, a complete fabrication.
It's gotten much worse with social media. Whereas you'd normally only get your hit of "the world is on fire" once or twice a day at your favorite news station now you can get it 24/7/365.
"When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right."
-Jeff Bezos https://lexfridman.com/jeff-bezos-transcript/#chapter6_amazo...
What is the context or background for this statement? It's completely insane to think something like this
> It's pretty wild for a random HN user to label one of the top 10 most successful technology leaders of our time as "insane"
Here, let me go. I think it is insane that Elon Musk took so much ketamine that he kept peeing his pants and then kept telling people about it. I think it is insane he's been promising that FSD is <2 years away for the past decade.
Given two sets of data: The statistics and your anecdotal evidence.
The probability of anecdotal evidence being correct must be lower than than the anecdotal evidence being incorrect when it conflicts with the statistics since the statistics come from anecdotal evidence.
Therefore, all other things being equal, if you are presented with data that conflicts with your anecdotal evidence the data has the higher probability of being correct.
After all nothing is more trustworthy than statistics. They should never be conflated with lies or damned lies.
You shouldn't trust your perception, and shouldn't trust statistics. You should question both.
My personal perception can be right as well as statistics the issue is when I use my own limited experience to generalize.
Why would these be in conflict unless you take your personal experience and draw a conclusion beyond that?
>After all nothing is more trustworthy than statistics. They should never be conflated with lies or damned lies.
Why can't I trust statistics if they are sometimes lies?
It's not a dig against math or statistics. It's a dig against the people using statistics. What do you do when, statistically, the majority of statistics you're given are lies, wrong, irrelevant, misleading, or out of context? You ground yourself in direct experience.
Even simple events are difficult to evaluate. One podcaster I've listened to for a decade had an issue on a flight. He bumped into a passenger in front of him and words were exchanged. Eventually he was deplaned by the pilot. In his telling of the story, it was completely outrageous and unwarranted. But obviously to others involved, he was completely in the wrong, enough to be deplaned.
So no, "direct experiences" are definitely filtered.
For another example, my daughters feel unsafe walking alone at night in my city's downtown area. Whereas I, walking at the same time in the same area, don't feel any danger at all. Every human experience is mediated by our past history.
Also by others who may have an agenda.
What's more likely. That a person is afraid of walking alone in your city at night because of a personal experience (like being the victim of a crime) or what they heard from other people?
We can redefine this with more statistical language. The claim would then be "When the likelihood of a sample is low, the sample is likely correct." Which is nonsense.
It is worth noting when you continuously are getting low likelihood samples, but the usual conclusion is that you have biased sampling. Maybe the model is bad, but in some sense that's not so different.
Let's go back to normal language. Anecdotally, a HN user might think a $100k/yr salary is not very much. But the data suggests that it is. Is the anecdote right?! No, we are just biased because we're comparing incomes in tech and often around the Bay area.
I think it is no surprise that one of the richest men in the world is out of touch. He is, by definition, a statistical anomaly. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Let's redefine it with this language:
"When statistics are used as PR, data gathering is a joke, state and police competence is cratering, and direct experience and observation tells you things are getting worse, things are getting worse".
The problem is the claim doesn't distinguish biased sampling from a biased model. The former is far more likely.
Just ask yourself which is more likely: "my experience is abnormal" or "everyone is experiencing the same thing I am"? In your friend group the latter might be more likely because you're similar locally and culturally. But across the state? Across the country? Across the globe? No, you'd be crazy to think experiences are typical. There's way too many variables at play and even if we were clones we should expect differences.
So no, it doesn't make sense
Mitigation matters.
This misreasoning or misrepresentation is at the heart of a lot of nonsense to do with interventions and effects. See COVID and what not.
It is very hard to measure crime rate given exposure.
And finally rates do not matter much. What matters is interventions and policy in reaction to each observation. People feel that each murder not resulting in back propagation through policy intervention space to update the weights to prevent it from happening. Instead only narrative space weights are being updated.
The idea that rare events below some threshold on a per capita per year basis must be ignored is pushed around too and people can see through it.
How much has spend on crime cameras gone up over the last few decades and how do you factory that into crime data? How have people moved? We don't have contact rates for people and criminals so it's all very hard to estimate.
Just because many basic people simply can not study rare events without getting upset doesn't mean we should not do so and try to drive the rate of bad things happening to zero.
It's particularly bad in the UK where rates are actually up yet the media seems to always pick some dimension where arrests or crimes are down and push that. People no longer trust the data process let alone the reasoning behind most media reports. They might not be able to describe it but they can feel it.
I get irritated about this as it's the same contact process and susceptibility problem in epidemiology and yet some how politicized the other way.
> What is important is crime rate given exposure
There's tons of sites that show this to varying degrees, here's a few[0,1,2]. Crime is actually fairly localized. This is either entirely surprising or unsurprising to people. That the difference can be just a few blocks. There's quite a bit of research on the topic, and crime is even the main topic of Steve Levitt, that guy from Freakanomics.
But I'm not sure this is really all that related to the topics. Considering that crime is localized and that victims follow a power distribution (a few people are victims to many crimes while a lot of people are victims to few/no crimes) then that only ends up highlighting the distortion even more.
> What matters is interventions and policy in reaction to each observation
[0] https://crimegrade.org/crime-map/
Exposure to what?
> What matters is interventions and policy in reaction to each observation
Responding to individual incidents usually produces terrible legislation. It's hard to get legislators and the public to back off and stop demanding harmful and expensive reprisals, to instead do something that actually works.
e.g. the very successful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_Reduction_Unit
Is it contrary to actual data, or is crime that doesn't get to the point of homicide (so violent attacks, burglaries, shoplifting, petty crime, etc) conveniently under reported, and people have seen nothing come out of reporting it (if police ever comes to begin with) and has given up even trying to get anything done about it?
Sorry, just a pet peeve.
That was very much not the case historically; you can Google numbers yourself but the percentage of childhood deaths prior to modern medicine was truly shocking.
It also seems to indicate that, with some thought and care, a meaningful impact (both at individual and societal levels) is possible by altering our lifestyles to be healthier.
There's no single points of failure: as you get older, everything just starts wearing out and failing.
If you cure heart disease and cancer, then others will just take their place: strokes, respiratory disease, Alzheimer's disease, falls.
And even if you do extend your lifespan, the reality is quality of life at 90+ is a lot worse than in your 20s or 30s.
You don’t think we have been doing this already? Car safety improved, general violence, death by food poisoning, etc. Now we have contacts, knee replacement surgery, meniscus surgery, widespread information on fitness for the elderly, etc.
You have many specialized fields slowly improving. The top focus changes as the previous top problems get solutions.
This is why when somebody dies 'of old age' it's often not like you can just seem them slowly drifting away day by day. Rather they seem to be in perfectly good health, for their age at least, and then 2 weeks later, they're dead.
All my grandparents lived well into their 90s (mediterranean lifestyle + modern medicine), and all of them would’ve chosen euthanasia had it been an option (they phrased that in various ways - essentially something along the lines of “if God could bring me home now it’d be good”).
It’s been a sobering thing to experience and it leaves me hoping that if I’m ever in their position, that option will be available to me somehow.
Those really are the big two - as the graphs in the article show, the next biggest things are much smaller and much less likely to get you, which means you live a lot longer and healthier.
Good news. You already have :).
Firstly, it's worth pointing out that "cancer" is not really 1 thing. There are lots of different conditions that are cancer, but they are different in many ways. For example lung cancer is pretty bad because your body needs lungs to function. Whereas say a melanoma on your foot is easier for your body to cope with (because your organs are all working.)
Some cancers are easily removed via surgery, some are not.
Likewise chemotherapy is a term covering a lot of different drugs and drug combinations. Advances in this space, matching doses, and drugs, to cancers have progressed enormously over the last couple decades. Some (although very much not all) cancers are now curable.
The most critical part of cancer survival is how early you catch it. But cancers are mostly asymptomatic so unless you "go looking" it's likely they'll be advanced before detection.
The biggest progress with cancer is thus regular screening. Especially for the most common ones. Prostate cancer for example is a simple blood test. How many of us are doing that every 6 months?
Cancer will always be with us. The causes are diverse, and often unexplainable. But we have made huge strides in early detection, as well as treatments. No doubt there will be more strides to come.
So let me be the first to turn your hope into reality :)
And this is why people die from very preventable diseases. News have a social duty to inform the public, when that part is removed all that is left is sensationalist and partisan pieces. And the pubic takes bad decision in their lives based on anecdotal data.
> Everyone of us will die one day
To have so many overweight 40-somethings with sedentary lives is treating live as having no value. People will die some day, but they should be able to enjoy the time that they are alive. Asking people to give up a healthy live because "they will die some time" is just helping big corporations that milk people out of their lives with fatty food, stressful working environments, polluted air, etc.
Do not give up, live is worth living and getting people the information to live good lives is very important.
However I'd argue that it's not as simple as "blaming the news". Health education starts as children, and continues throughout life.
Secondly, focusing on just the 2 primary causes for a moment (heart disease and cancer), its not like there's a shortage of education.
People (for the most part) completely understand the issues around these. Smoking is bad. Drinking is bad. Exercise is good. Eat less sugar. Eating home prepared (real) food is better than industrial food.
In other words the outcomes of bad choices are well understood and very well passed on via education. And information today has never been more accessible.
I don't think the news adding a running count of cancer deaths would make the slightest difference.
As evidence I introduce Covid, where we did literally have a death count every day. And not some "20 years from now" result, but the "got sick on Monday, dead today" count.
Population responses in different countries was diverse. In the US the partisan resistance was notable. The death count there also notable.
Culturally (some) US citizens are distrustful of education. Most are in the "my personal freedom" camp. Telling someone that smoking kills triggers the "I'm free to do what I want" response.
I agree people could improve their own lives easily. They already known how. They (mostly) choose not to do so.
News is an incredibly bad vehicle for anything involving public responsibility. News platformed Andrew Wakefield.
(I do recognise I'm pattern matching to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds, but I don't say this is the best that could ever be if an all-knowing all-powerful being did it, just the best that could be done in practice by the first primates to cross over the threshold of inventing movable type).
In the USA, for sure. But news can be and are informative and helping in other places.
TV stations are out to make money, not to inform society. All their programming, news included, is designed to attract eyeballs, hence money, and sadly sensationalist and titillating stories is what most people want to see.
Inform about what? Would you tune in to hear a daily report about how many old people people died of cardiac issues today? I doubt the breakdown here is different for NPR. Or BBC, or whatnot.
It's not a failure of capitalism, it's just what we crave.
It's really that simple.
- All newscasts featured crime more than anything else ("if it bleeds it leads").
- All newscasts had a local feel-good story.
- All newscasts had weather (although East Coast and Midwest stations spent more time on it).
- All newscasts had a local sports update
But what was most interesting was what they spend the rest of their time on:
- In New York, it was mostly financial news.
- In Los Angeles it was mostly entertainment news.
- In San Francisco it was mostly tech related news
- In Chicago it was often manufacturing related.
That homework was really what drove home for me that the news is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching after that.
People “want” all sorts of conflicting and even mutually exclusive things.
It would be just as true to say people “want” in-depth, factual understanding of things that are relevant to their lives.
The real optimization function is what you say later on: eyeball time.
Eyeball time, as anyone with a social media account can tell you, is hardly related to what a person comprehensively wants though.
This is not true.
They actually want Option A and they also actually want Option B.
Picking Option B does not imply the desire for Option A is false or illegitimate, it implies that people hold many authentic yet contradictory desires simultaneously and make tradeoffs (often regrettable ones) between them.
If you create a system that gets people to pick Option B consistently, you have not revealed the insincerity of their desire for Option A. You have built a system that compels people to act against their own legitimate desires for their own lives. In a media/social media context, this compulsion is often consciously designed in the audience.
if you “manage”/editorialize your algorithm to remove these, you’ll be outcompeted in audience share by someone who doesn’t.
I dropped off social media for similar reasons. I didn’t want the outrage of others and hype algorithms dictating what I’d spend time thinking about or reacting to. I wanted to be in control more.
Tech in SF may actually be the biggest sector, since tech is so big and prevalent, but it certainly wasn't in the 90s.
>is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching after that.
As opposed to what? They report on what they think the people that are watching or could watch want to hear about.
This is the same as any business that sells what customers will buy.
Cherry picking is when you select examples that are not representative of the whole to win an argument.
How is the news doing this?
I’m curious at how many Millennials and younger actually watch the news with any consistency. My sense is it’s mostly older folks that still get their info from TV.
I feel like the right lesson to take from this is that all data sources are coming from a certain perspective and motives, and so you can choose what you want to care about.
Perhaps you don't care about any of that, which is a fine and normal choice. But "this source is biased so I won't consume it" leads, really, to consuming nothing (EDIT: if you go too deep down this route). I think that consuming varying grains of salt is helpful in the general case.
("This source is biased in a specific way that makes me disregard this person's credibility on topics I care about" is a subtly different argument that is valid of course)
> - In Los Angeles it was mostly entertainment news.
> - In San Francisco it was mostly tech related news
> - In Chicago it was often manufacturing related.
Crazy how well this coincides with the type of billboards you expect to see everywhere in these cities.
Interesting. So who is cherrypicking all the "Israel hostages" nonsense flooding my news feeds?
I mean, duh. Los Angeles has 263 sunny days in a year. Mentioning weather there is only worthwhile when it's not the assumed kind. Actual rain, if and when it happens, causes traffic jams.
I believe a better chart would be weighted by life expectancy loss. For example if a 12yo gets murdered society considers it a much more significant loss than a 90yo having a heart attack.
Similarly your level of safety in a city is more a function of the rate of random crime vs. the often cited city's overall murder rate. This difference explains why some cities that feel safe actually have a high homicide rate and vice-versa. In some cities crime is unpredictable whereas in others it is more confined to areas where visitors rarely travel.
All you're saying is that the news coverage is a reflection of the biases people have (like the one above).
Biases become a problem if a person has one and doesn't take it into account when making a decision. The news is making the coverage decision not the person with the bias unless you count an indirect viewership loss that may occur.
Honestly that's what people watch the news for. What are external factors that they were previously unaware of that might impact their lives (or weekends)? Most (not all) people are aware of the dangers posed by heart disease. They're not watching the news to learn about something they're already aware of.
I might be beating this horse to a second death, but there's a section of road near where I live that's dangerous, and we all know it's dangerous. It's not newsworthy. If another section of road collapsed and introduced a new danger, then that's newsworthy. News is newsworthy because it's new and unfamiliar. If something is reported on that's old and unfamiliar, then that's a documentary. If it's new and familiar, then that's a paradox. Or maybe a fun anecdote at a party.
Clearly not enough people know it’s dangerous or how dangerous it is, or one of them would do something about it
I think this is the whole point of the article. The news does not cover reality as it is, it selects information that is noteworthy and drives clicks/views/engagement/ad revenue.
This is why the news has been shown to increasingly misrepresent reality:
But dying from a criminal act? It’s undeserved and arguably more easily preventable than grand lifestyle changes across the whole population. If a felon with 50+ arrests murders someone, a “quick” adjustment in laws could prevent it in the future
I would also like to stop gang violence but this often means “throwing the book” at gang members, which is often disliked by many activists.
I myself live in a safe area of a major city, and there are gang murders in my neighborhood occasionally. It makes my relatives and friends ask how I can live here. But a grown man shot in his car at 3am over a drug deal doesn’t make me feel that less unsafe, and I have kids here
Gang membership is skewed younger and often includes "children" (depends on definition) 14+. Makes it a little tricky about lifestyle choice when dealing with minors.
If you google this you will find plenty of examples that made the news, and not all of them do.
https://abc13.com/post/houston-police-increasing-patrols-7-y...
Here is an article including two such examples. One kid was sitting down eating dinner and the other was sitting in a car. They were both shot totally incidentally during shootouts they had nothing to do with.
If so, I do not know how to tell you that this sounds insane..
That homicides make the news much more than car accidents, and stray bullets make the news at all, is kinda the point of the article.
The fact is that if there are guns around, there is a little bit of danger especially if they are loaded. Stricter gun laws tend to produce less gun violence and accidents.
Nobody joining a gang is making a rational reckoning of the risk/reward of getting caught by the police, partly because they don't plan to get caught and partly because the much larger risk is getting killed.
And the people getting arrested and prosecuted are primarily not the people calling the shots or driving recruitment of new members.
The best way to put a dent in gang violence is to disrupt gang recruiting, and one of the better ways to do that is to improve societal safety nets so joining a gang is less attractive.
Sure, throwing the book doesn't get you 100%. But am I supposed to believe that increasing the penalty for doing the wrong thing doesn't decrease the frequency of the wrong thing? Having everyone you know in your crime circle being in jail vs. roaming free certainly has an effect on your decisions to join/stay.
Yes. There is substantial evidence that increasing the severity of punishment does not reduce crime rates.
For example: https://www.academia.edu/download/55552845/the_economics_of_...
Then how would you explain El-Salvador? They went from the homicide capital of the world in 2015 to the 8th safest place in the world [1] in less than a decade. And "all" that they did was dramatically bumped up the penalties for gang membership, round up gang members, and threw them in militarized prisons as opposed to the typical gang reinforcement retreats. Crime dramatically plummeted and you ended up with a president with an approval rating upwards of 90%.
From my perspective in modern times we've trialed both soft and hard systems on crime. The soft systems in general have had very poor results except in places that already had no issues with crime (e.g. Norway), whereas the hard systems have demonstrated phenomenally positive outcomes. Places like the US have a major problem with things like privatized prisons that create a commercial incentive for incarceration, but I think these are tangential to the topic.
[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/650516/global-safety-starts-sli...
But back to the actual thread: the majority of gang violence is against other gangs. This is unlike other high-crime areas (for example, places with high rates of carjacking) where criminals are targeting people just moving through the area.
I think perceptions of criminality is a very important metric because it controls for the possibility of numbers being juked. If everybody thinks crime is going up, but the numbers say it's going down, then it's possible there's some sort of collective delusion. But it's also possible that the numbers are being juked, or that various biases (like declines in rates of reporting) are driving a numeric decline in crime even as crime rates climb.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/696152/homicide-rate-in-...
That’s a wild idea. Collective perception is juked by default. You’re basically trying to use vibes as a check on data.
Of course you're right that subjective experience will be biased, but it will usually be biased in a relatively fixed way. And so changes in this overtime create arguably the most valuable measurement that exists. Like during the previous administration, trying to brow beat people into believing that the economy was awesome because 'look at these totally-not-fake numbers' was just so dystopic.
So for example, we tend to overestimate threats rather than underestimate them. Yet in El Salvador we now have the overwhelming majority of people (at the 8th highest rate in the world) say they feel safe walking alone at night. That is just an extremely informative datum. I'd also add that people's actions are based on their perceptions. Gallup hits on this in a reasonable way in that survey linked earlier:
---
"In our uncertain world, it’s not enough to make sure that people are safe. They also need to feel safe. When people feel safe, they devote time and energy to learning opportunities and to their relationships with their families, communities and workplaces.
Feeling safe fosters trust in these relationships. This trust forms a foundation for collaboration, cooperation and social development, which makes communities more resilient to challenges such as natural disasters, economic downturns, political conflicts or health crises like the recent pandemic."
---
is it though? Crime has been with us since the dawn of civilization. It's easier to tell a story in which crime is personalized and framed as preventable but in reality there's always new modes of crime, new criminals, always the incentive for people to steal when they can, and so on.
When societies manage to "stomp out" crime they're no less brutal than when they attempt to stop a pandemic. I think what a society frames as aberrant is just a reflection of the kind of public morality they endorse. A society of pirates probably thinks scorbut is more undeserved than being punished for theft.
I don't think this is necessarily true. Because when trying to stamp out a pandemic, everybody was negatively affected. When trying to stamp out crime, it's overwhelmingly suspected criminals that are affected. Not long ago El-Salvador had literally the highest homicide rate in the world and was just a domestic war-zone. It's now rated as the 8th safest country in the world [1].
What did they do? Dramatically bump up the penalties for gang membership, round up gang members, and throw them into militarized prisons. Their President now has a 90%+ approval rating, and is one of the most well regarded leaders in the world. Obviously there's a 'First they came for the Communists, And I did not speak out, Because I was not a Communist...' type concern here. But in this case, it seems that first they came for the criminals, crime plummeted, and everybody lived happily ever after.
And again there are also completely reasonable human rights concerns, but the thing I think people often disregard in this calculus is the human rights of the literally 99% of people who were previously being terrorized, killed, robbed, and so on by the 1% of people. They have obviously rounded up some people who are innocent and they are making efforts to resolve that, and I hope those who are truly innocent receive fair compensation for the distress. But if one views human rights as a net (gains, versus losses), then El Salvador is vastly more humane than it was in the past.
[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/650516/global-safety-starts-sli...
Yeah, I guess crime is trivial to fix if you automatically get a life sentence at the gulag for having a tattoo or mouthing off at an authority figure (for certain definitions of crime).
A country headed by devils cannot, by definition, be humane.
---
Actually you just sent me down a rabbit hole watching videos of modern El Salvador. Here [1] is a great one with some dude just interacting with the locals, and discussing the changes. Lol, I seriously want to go there now. It looks like an amazing place to visit.
And indeed as soon as he died there was a widespread movement of 'De-Stalinization.' For some more fun context - this is also the era that Gorbachev grew up in which is probably what planted the seed in him for disdain of the Soviet System that he would eventually play a key role in collapsing.
Entrenched authoritarianism does not tolerate dissent. This should not come as a surprise. And I don’t have my citations on hand, but I’ve read a number of articles where Salvadorans express the same sentiment: ratings are inflated because people are scared to speak out.
On top of that, the government is horribly corrupt, capturing small fry while letting the big fish swim away: https://www.propublica.org/article/bukele-trump-el-salvador-...
And the justice system has been weaponized against activists, journalists, and opposition groups: https://www.icij.org/inside-icij/2025/06/at-least-40-journal...
I’m sure this is more than acceptable to some of those not currently in the government’s crosshairs. Unfortunately, there is no off-ramp for this flavor of authoritarianism. Bukele will remain dictator and El Salvador will no longer be a democracy.
Duterte was arrested this year by order of the International Criminal Court.
I want to add something here about Duterte's current poll ratings, after his arrest, but I have no idea which news sources are actually reliable. The first few "sources" I tried looking at had both AI-generated adverts (the "look at this gentle bear climbing on beds in the maternity ward!" kind) between each paragraph, and pre-AI slop (kawaii IQ tests) on the sidebar, so I don't trust them.
The effects in El Salvador have been so dramatic that you can immediately reject most tales that try to undermine it on a macro level. For instance if it were true that they were only capturing small fries while letting the big fish run unchecked, you wouldn't see this dramatic decline in criminality. The gangs are being completely dismantled. If the gang leaders are or were working as collaborators then that's great! Make people even less motivated to even think about joining gangs when the leaders themselves might be snitches.
I could go into detail about why Putin is popular, but it requires treking back to the 'wild nineties'. I'd love to discuss that if you're interested, but I think it's somewhat tangential to what we're talking about.
I wonder if that's achieved by actual crime reduction or just by arresting journalists who try to report crime.
Although it would be an interesting chart. But the distinction between what is noteworthy/newsworthy and what actually kills is precisely the point of investigating this topic.
So if you wanted to improve your diet and lifestyle, it makes more sense to first pull the major levers that avoid or postpone your most likely killers before you, say, worry about food dyes.
Yet not even our new HHS seems to understand that.
Age is not evenly distributed across the population. You could just break this down into age brackets and show a chart for each bracket.
> I believe a better chart would be weighted by life expectancy loss.
The original data does have adjusted statistics similar to this:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db521.pdf
> Similarly your level of safety in a city is more a function of the rate of random crime vs. the often cited city's overall murder rate.
Accidental death is the #3 cause of death. Your level of safety is primarily down to your own actions. Ladders are the most dangerous piece of equipment commonly owned. Murder and random crime are a minor fraction of this category. Suicide is twice as common as murder.
> crime is unpredictable
Types of crime maybe. Location of crime? Almost completely predictable.
But luckily, unlike wealth inequality, age inequality is decreasing. Fewer people have little of it and more people have more of it than ever before in this country.
Odd this article doesn't even mention it.. well actually apparently its "4x over-reported"
An overwhelming majority of deaths were the elderly. Weirdly so. Kids (outside of pre existing conditions) were basically immune, better off than the flu.
The “life expectancy loss” metric was much different than raw numbers.
Now that you have elected a tyrant, who wants to destroy everything that made America special, I don’t think you should really be allowed to own guns. The premise for that right has been invalidated. We are living through a demonstration of its failure.
Why should you be allowed to own a gun? What is the rationale for that right? Because as far as I can tell Americans have proven that they never deserved it.
The constitution does not talk about self-defence. The constitution does not talk about hunting. The constitution does not talk about sports shooting. The constitution talks about protecting freedom, and instead you have voluntarily surrendered it. You don’t deserve guns and you don’t deserve freedom. You deserve nothing.
Basically: If something is in the news, it's rare enough that you don't have to worry about it. Once the news stops reporting on it, that's when you worry.
The news in a vacuum can actually be quite misleading and I too believe people should realize that it is not the ‘whole’ truth.
Feel free to substitute "Officer Jones" for any other occupation.
A very large fraction of news comes from media relations people at the organizations being reported on. Good news agencies will get context from another organization.
Great news agencies will sometimes do the kind of digging that makes leaders of large organizations uncomfortable. The costs in time, money, and reputation (even when you get it right) mean that even the very best news agencies can only report a small fraction of stories in depth.
If I know something about what is in the paper, it’s rare that the paper is correct. It’s almost always missing some critical piece of information, or wildly misrepresenting the situation to attempt to simplify it to the point your average person will read the article.
You can get a false sense of how common, dangerous, etc something is by the frequency of reports from a news outlet. What they are saying is true, but how relevant that is to the average person can be far from the truth.
A perfect example of this. I've seen here on HN people worried about crime on public transit (any crime, from murder to petty theft). Specifically citing the terrible crime problems of NY and CA transit. Yet when you actually look at the numbers, you see the crimes per day are closer to 1 or 2 while the travelers per day are in the millions. Meaning it's a literal 1 in a million event that you'll be the target of crime on public transit.
News outlets lie to you not by telling false stories but rather by weaving false narratives around the stories. "Crime is out of control" is the false narrative, but it's backed by real stories of crime, sometimes horrific.
Crime hysteria seems like it gets people, who are unlikely to be victims of crimes but more likely to have outsize political influence, involved in law enforcement policy. Without being forced to dogfood the results of their own advocacy, you end up with policing rules written by people who rarely are forced to interact with police, and who are very scared of crime that never happens to them.
So when there is a multi-year trend in crime, it means that where and when the crimes are happening have to change multiple times to adapt to people's changing behaviors. And if you don't keep up on how that changes, your chance of getting robbed goes up quite a bit. This is why you don't tend to see crime yourself (unless there is mental illness involved), it tends to happen where there are fewer eyeballs.
I knew quite a few people who have been the victim of violent (and random) crime. Each time it happened where other's couldn't see it. But its nice that you lived in a part of town where you never had to learn this type of street knowledge. Not everyone is so lucky.
For an important issue that is covered ad nauseum, sure.
For an issue that was hot today but not next week, I hard disagree. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45585287
One simple example: The FBI raided my friend's workplace. All the news reported the business as having shut down permanently. Yet my friend worked there for at least 4 years! He said they shut down for a few days max.
For smaller stories, talk to people involved, and you'll get an idea of how inaccurate they can be.
For the rest (which may be close to the majority), I'm saying "No".
> There's also no alternative as it's great for this one situation you had insight but the vast majority of people don't.
I've had insight in a number of unrelated events that were covered by journalists. Each time they get important details wrong.
There is an alternative. Don't trust the articles on these stories.
Is trust binary?
I think that Republicans push mistrust of the media to eliminate any sources of information besides their own representatives
Not reading news that doesn't have a significant impact on your life is entirely reasonable.
The guy who got arrested in the other state for hacking into the DOD? It's totally reasonable not to bother knowing about it.
> I think that Republicans push mistrust of the media to eliminate any sources of information besides their own representatives
Ha! I was a news junkie in the Bush/Obama era. Getting busy in life finally cured me of that scourge, but I learned a lot of lessons. Long before Trump came on the scene I was an advocate of "There's no middle ground with the news - either go all in (time consuming) or mostly all out" - and while I didn't shout "Fake news!", it was my sentiment - you really can't trust much, and learning what you can trust will take years of aggressively analyzing the news and how it works - time most people don't have.
It was disconcerting that the person who got people to distrust the news was Trump.
Anyway, in case people think I'm advocating never trusting news: It ain't so. As I think I said elsewhere - one can find quality articles and quality journalists. You just can't do it as a casual hobby.
Our discussion was about trust in sources. The assumption is we need the information.
Also, this attitude allows suffering to occur as long as it doesn't affect the majority of the people.
The government can harm people that get its way and no one would care because it doesn't directly harm them
And my mission is to let people know they don't need 95% of the information they think they do.
But if they really need information about a particular topic/domain, they should put in the hours to find ways to verify what they read, and start ranking journalists by accuracy and integrity.
> Also, this attitude allows suffering to occur as long as it doesn't affect the majority of the people.
You're not wrong.
The flip side is that casual news reading allows quite a bit of suffering because people have a flawed model of the world due to their news perusals.
In fact, that's what this submission and many comments are pointing out. How much money is spent to fight terrorism (including invading countries to protect us from terrorists) vs heart disease prevention? Why do people believe the former is more worthy of spending money? If the news provided proportional coverage, we'd likely have spent a lot less money on the former.
There is no perfect middle ground.
The worse is that it's oftentime not even attributable to some malicious agenda, or gross incompetence of someone in particular. It's just how this industry functions.
Someone down the thread is asking "what's the alternative". The alternative is to admit that you are not informed beyond your immediate horrizon.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/10/i-have-no-facts-and-i-must-...
Still, despite the fact that they can be sued for lying by the people they are lying about, I'm sure they find plenty of ways to bend the truth while still technically telling it.
I suppose that calls into question why we trust any media source that we can't directly verify ourselves as an authority. It's all very confusing to me, to be honest and I simply don't know what to do about it. Not being able to trust information is maddening.
While news media is an acceptable source, proper peer-reviewed journals and other scientific publications are preferred. People would do well to remember Wikipedia is NOTNEWS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...).
Yeah basing articles on scholarly books is good, but not every topic will be covered and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AThe_deadline_is_no...
> In principle, all Wikipedia articles should contain up-to-date information. Editors are also encouraged to develop stand-alone articles on significant current events.
There clearly is editor and reader interest in making decent quality articles on major current events. Yes they may contain errors that the history book on topic won't contain, but I still think it's worth having. Just mind the things to avoid listed in WP:NOTNEWS and I think we will be fine
And I don't think everything will ever be covered in a book. There is not an infinite amount of scholars studying every random significant event. And those will probably use the same news articles as one of their sources anyway.
Wikipedia is arguably worse than the sloppiest news slop the media machine can manufacture. It's lawless, it's been shown majority of articles are written and edited by a single cabal of people, and it's also been shown a distinct bias towards one side of the political aisle.
I wouldn't trust Wikipedia any more than anything Rupert Murdoch owns. Perhaps slightly less, because at least in theory Murdoch can be held accountable for fake news and Wikipedia is powered entirely by fake news and accountable to literally no one.
For example, a government story that can be baselined by an audit, report or some proceeding is usually more reliable than a scoop.
The stuff that got printed in the news was at times just plain false. Stuff that anyone in our town could easily confirm to be false. A reporter would hear something wrong, or interview one person who misspoke, and (s)he would never fact check. Eventually those inaccuracies would end up not just in Wikipedia, but in books written by experts on the case in hand.
Even recently, my company has been in the news a lot (negative news). You'll get stories where anonymous employees are telling journalists things about changes in the company. A lot of it is flat out wrong.
The point here isn't that the media is accurate or not. The point is they focus on the attention grabbing events not the important ones. There are basic metrics about the world which completely invalidate many political beliefs of both parties. Those are rarely if ever reported.
For example: - only 7% of the US economy is involved in international trade - renewables have a .1 (10%) capacity factor which means anytime they are used for baseload, they will never pay back the carbon produced in their manufacturing - Mississippi's per capita GDP is about the same as Germany's
Facts like these are rarely reported because they show how irrelevant most of what is reported truly is. That's the point.
Facts like these influence your life far more than most of the things reported by the media. Yet you still want to use scare quotes because they don't match your personal opinions that are largely informed by mostly irrelevant things reported about. That's the problem being described by the article. You still don't seem to understand that.
If you cite a news article a person should be able to use that to locate additional sources.
My general guideline is: the higher up the news hierarchy (local, metro, regional, national, international) a personal risk is, the less you should worry about it. Car crashes barely make the local news most of the time, they're worth some attention and care. Airliner crashes make massive headlines, not worth worrying about. The news is very informative here, you just have to understand what it's really saying.
> The phrase man bites dog is a shortened version of an aphorism in journalism that describes how an unusual, infrequent event (such as a man biting a dog) is more likely to be reported as news than an ordinary, everyday occurrence with similar consequences (such as a dog biting a man.)
Everyone dies and everyone knows that everyone dies. I’m not really interested in how I’m going to die of old age, but what I have to worry about today to avoid an early death.
I think there’s probably still a difference in media reporting and probability but i’m guessing younger people 20-30 are most likely to die from vehicle accidents, accidents, suicide and drugs? I’m not sure though and I don’t have any evidence.
Cancer at #2 is more age-related. But that too is fairly preventable. Roughly 50% of cancers are thought to be related to poor lifestyle choices.
Point being - these are major causes of early death.
The best you can do is concierge care, but that only expedites primary care everything in the US is about specialists.
If you have access to the best healthcare you definitely don’t wait in the same queues. You have direct access to the specialists, often at the best teaching hospitals too.
If you have Medicare, good luck.
I have concierge medicine. I have two specialist appointments scheduled both take about 3mo.
I can see my PCP within 1 day. That is good. I can have blood drawn within 1 day. That's good.
Specialists, no advantage. This makes it not overly valuable, but what do you expect for 8k extra for year (on top of very good health care)?
I don't know how to access a higher tier of health. Perhaps at 100M+ of net worth it appears. IDK.
Meanwhile, my Mom waited months on Medicare for a heart eval due to arrhythmias.
Whatever plan you have, it doesn’t sound top tier?
This didn’t require high net worth, just a better plan through an employer - or you’re in an area with low specialist populations? Or some sort of low priority on a triage schedule?
If you have mm net worth, the specialists come to you - quickly - unless you really need the .001% specialist. and chances are you they don’t and it’s not worth it.
But even Kaiser had no issues giving less than a week access for anything important.
Living what is called a "low-risk" lifestyle (don't drink, don't smoke, maintain healthy weight, avoid junk food) results in an average life expectancy of 90 (93 for women, 87 for men), compared to being in the top 1% which results in a life expectancy of 87 (86 for men, 88 for women).
The overall average life expectancy in the U.S. is 78 (76 for men, 81 for women).
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4866586/
https://www.abom.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Impact-of-He...
2. It’s possible they are major causes of early death, but I can’t figure that out from the article and it would be nice if the article provided that information.
Chances are, one of the three is going to happen. The longer you live, the more the first two are likely.
Death by misadventure is possible at any point however!
I can tell you're quite young :-)
Old age is pretty broad, and you really need to start worrying at some point in your 40s. Although death due to these is rare at that age, you'll likely end up knowing 1-3 people who will die of these at that age. And a lot more in the 50s.
There's a huge difference between dying in your 60s (perhaps right before retirement), and dying in your 80s. Lumping all of these people into "old age" is likely a byproduct of the same biases that cause journalism to not report on it.
Uh... it absolutely is? Not sure what you're trying to say here. All progressive diseases, including heart disease (cancer too) are going to be "age related" simply because they take time to develop.
And plaque-related heart disease, the big killer, takes a long time to develop. The statistics are really clear here. People under 30 simply don't die of congestive heart failure absent one of a handful of very rare disorders. It starts to show up in middle age and really takes off after 70.
They are preventable, sure. They are "early" deaths in that the sufferer would die before something else got them. But they absolutely skew toward the elderly. Heavily.
https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/news/2023/numbers-know-healthy-hea...
Honestly I think you're interpreting "age related" differently than the upthread discussion. The point is to renormalize a cause of death to something like "lost years of life". So if you have a preventable death (from smoking, say) that kills people with on average 10 years of life left, that should be less notable than one (maybe homicide) that kills people with 60 years to go on average.
My original comment was in reference to the OP's comment:
> I’m not really interested in how I’m going to die of old age, but what I have to worry about today to avoid an early death.
My point was just that heart disease is primarily not caused by natural aging (the 80% of cases).
Diet and exercise reduces the risks of a lot of health related deaths.
It really is simple math for most people. Reduce your calories, limit your salt, and eat more vegetables.
Same for stroke, kidney disease, diabetes, cancer. Those all usually hit older ages and have an age-related component, the risk of them at any age group is reduced by diet and exercise. Those two things can be true.
Of course there are outliers in each.
Age is the primary factor and health is generally the secondary factor. Both contribute.
If you have a heart attack at age 50 but with lifestyle intervention (or PCSK9 loss-of-function genetics) you instead would have had it at age 90, then "primarily age-related" is an insufficient claim in this thread.
There's some dissention as to whether this actually helps lengthen life for most people (the salt myth). You shouldn't ignore your doctor, but neither should you blindly accept poor science.
Yeah, that always happens. There's people that think you should only eat fruit or that coffee enemas are the way to perfect health.
But the fact remains that there are multiple studies with strong links of higher sodium intake to heart attacks. Further, globally pretty much all major medical organizations (especially in countries with well functioning health systems) agrees on limiting salt intake.
There will always be a few studies that show that "actually you should eat 20g of salt a day!" and to me, that is the bad science.
The medical consensus by both studies and the experts is that you should limit salt. Telling someone "but those studies were all bad" doesn't convince me that the counter studies are good, but instead convinces me that the counter studies were likely flawed. If there were more studies that reinforced the bad studies, that might be something to talk about. But as it stands, we have just a noisy minority (suspiciously selling books...) that is making a claim without the significant studies to back their media tours.
Unfortunately the link you chose is crappy. It is a qualitative study debunking the claim "some researchers have propagated a myth that lower sodium might increase the risk of CVD, This article analyzes the eight articles as a case study" (paraphrased). Too little salt is not the issue, why would that paper be useful?
The clear advice is to lower salt intake, but from what I can tell statistical data doesn't show that doing that actually lengthens life. Admittedly, cause and effect is difficult science, even in well funded large population studies. Correlations and case studies are much easier science.
Personally I don't have a horse in the race because I have a relatively low salt intake: I don't like the taste of over-salting and I also try to avoid high-salt foods because they are often crappy industrial foods (correlation).
I did google for papers before making my original comment, but I struggled to find any papers I liked. I remember that one paper in particular was a meta-study: I really really hate those.
Edit: I asked Gemini, and it referenced this paper: https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2016.07.745 which seems fairly balanced: the first sentence is a soft "The relationship between lower sodium intake and total mortality remains controversial". I did a couple more follow-on prompts and Gemini referenced results from Britain lowering salt in processed foods "A 36\% decrease in mortality rates from stroke and ischemic heart disease (heart attacks) during the period of the salt reduction program.". https://g.co/gemini/share/42637d5a2dfb I feel embarrassed rereading my prompts since they show my ignorance and other problems, but the eventual AI results are interesting. Asking the right questions is hard...
A habit (or habits) that slowly damages your body and significantly shortens your life span is quite different from the natural march of aging that eventually gets us all.
Heart disease is the same as smoking in 80% of cases. The other ~20% are primarily genetic and much harder to avoid.
https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/news/2023/numbers-know-healthy-hea...
not true. it is age related
dying at 85 from heart disease isn't the result of lifestyle choices, but dying at 50 from heart disease most likely is
You could spend your whole life as the pillar of the community with time for everyone and without an enemy in the world, to live a whole 100 years. Along the way you might have made hundreds of friends and given so much to the world. However, you aren't going to make the news.
Meanwhile, a five year old that gets to meet an nasty brutal end could be in the paper for weeks, with the whole town turning out for the funeral and the whole nation taking note. The five year old would not have lived long enough to 'achieve' anything beyond potty training, yet many words could be written about them.
This is just how the world works. The thing is though, there has been much progress in recent decades on what works for longevity. It is not complicated, you just have to eat mostly plants, get about mostly with your own feet, say hello to people, stay away from the toxic chemicals and keep the old grey cells busy. Accident and communicable disease permitting, you should be able to live longer than your ancestors ever did, with a better 'healthspan'.
If you look at the adverts that pay for the news, everything is working against you. They want to get you to be car dependent and wasting lots of money on highly processed food that slowly gets you. Even by watching the news, you are spending time that could be spent in the company of actual human beings.
If the news was to report on what people do die from, as in the non-communicable diseases that go with car dependency and a high-fat diet devoid of fibre, then they would not be 'advertiser friendly'.
I can’t say it’s anymore serious or traumatizing than earthquake, fire, or tornado drills I grew up on.
"Active shooter drills in schools are associated with increases in depression (39%), stress and anxiety (42%), and physiological health problems (23%) overall, including children from as young as five years old up to high schoolers, their parents, and teachers. Concerns over death increased by 22 percent, with words like blood, pain, clinics, and pills becoming a consistent feature of social media posts in school communities in the 90 days after a school drill. "
https://everytownresearch.org/report/the-impact-of-active-sh...
You always try to react to high-probability, high-impact events (traffic accidents at pickup) with rules, controls and people. You may have rules to high-probability, low-impact events (running in the hallway). Low probability, high-impact events are important as well because the stakes are high. Shooter drills and fire drills fall into that category.
As a society, the United States has decided that the value of allowing easy access to firearms is such that risk of marginal people using them to murder children is ok. We've accepted that by default. Depending on how you count, there are several dozen to several hundred school shooting incidents every year.
It would be irresponsible not to have a protocol to protect the lives of children in school, and tbh, the kids accept it as part of life. Those of us who remember a more innocent time are more horrified.
I haven't followed this issue super closely, and based my previous statements on our experience - I have school-aged children and our lockdown drills are not anything like this and are very child focused. It's really about understanding what the staff and children need to do.
So I've started talking to friends recently about their weight and how excess body fat significantly contributes towards numerous cancers.
It's been interesting.
The last group I brought it up with steered the conversation towards "all bodies are beautiful bodies" which is true but ... GAH! ... basically the entire western world is in denial about health and diet.
The corporations are fueling this fire, partly I'm sure through steering mainstream media to avoid certain talking points.
How many of you here actually knew that being overweight contributes to dozens of early onset cancers? Be honest.
You can't survive on alcohol, chips and cigarettes... but because people seem to be able to do that for a few decades, everybody just shrugs off health and thinks "I'll be fine".
I really don't think that's true. If anything corporations heavily push thin, fit bodies most places you look.
Have you ever compared the clientele who shop at Costco and your local health food store for example?
Pretty much all of the food that they sell (aside from the fresh produce and flash frozen fruit/veggies) is woefully unhealthy... addictive... and in quantities that only an early 20th century Catholic family should be buying.
A pack of 16 croissants, anyone? How about 32 mini croissants filled with chocolate and sugar? Fresh baked!
Even the "healthy" (looking) "food" they make in their Deli is horrible for you. Everything comes out of a bag and it's all just a repackaging operation, basically.
Humans are like Goldfish. Give them more food and a bigger tank and watch them grow, baby!
Source: Worked for Costco.
Because they have an actor and an object, both with identities, they inherently have stories, which are the product that the news media ultimately produces.
It's harder to tell a story about someone (or even many people) dying of heart disease because there is no "doer".
Assuming no agenda and honest representation of known facts, this will already bias coverage. But since we know many news outlets have agendas and don't honestly represent known facts, this tendency is amplified further.
Old people dying of heart disease or cancer or whatever is not actionable. Sure, we can do lifestyle changes, but eventually old people have to die of something and its in one of those buckets anyways.
I wonder why they didn't start with automobile accidents or driving drunk!
"Almost half of cancer deaths are preventable" -- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02355-x
600,000 people die of cancer per year, 40,000 people die in automobile accidents. Focusing on 40,000 automobile accidents to the exclusion of focusing on 300,000 preventable cancer deaths does not math.
I would say less than heart disease related ones.
To policy makers, well, terrorism is actionable but so is diabetes. And that while diabetes accounts for a far larger number of deaths.
So I think there is real asymmetry if we look at the data from an “actionable” perspective.
Also people don't really "see" diabetes, news don't show picture of sick livers, people don't understand the science of it. Terrorism is easier to represent compared to diabetes.
Also people believe that we can stop being a terrorist. But we can't decide what happens in our liver.
Another big difference is that you can fight terrorism with the military, but not diabetes. So it's less entertaining and less "concerning".
These stupid trucks are literally killing us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo
Looking it up, there are around 500 homicides each year in England and Wales, and around 30 of them involve guns. In 2023 there were 22 gun deaths total. (For comparison, in the same year the US had 46,700).
Now compare that to the number of shows broadcast every day in the UK that have murders. I think a single BBC murder mystery show has more deaths than the entirety of the country, let alone a single Guy Ritchie film.
It's not just the news media which warps people's perceptions. I bet the same survey in the UK would be similarly skewed.
This has been a thing since forever. I remember in the 80s the complaints about violence in media. That's not going to change. And sensationalist headlines have been part of news since its first inception.
What really needs to change is the education system so that people are able to differentiate reality from media, news and video games.
Even then, I'd much rather a family member be stabbed and survive than be shot and killed. You're way more likely to survive a stabbing attack than a gunshot. Gunshots are consistently more lethal than stabbings. And you're extremely less likely to die as a bystander to a stabbing than as a bystander to a shooting.
How many school mass stabbings happen in the UK annually? How many school shootings happen in the US every month? We've had around 30 school shootings in the US so far in 2025, and we've only just started the fall semester!
Fun fact, school shootings currently are about 1/10th of what they were in the 90s when I was in school.
Look, I don't really care about this issue. It just annoys me that people lie with stats about it. Its the kind of behavior that degrades people's faith in experts, journalism and institutions.
There have been over 90 instances of reported discharges around school grounds so far in 2025. Around 30 resulted in injury or fatality. Which, remember, we're still have a good bit of school for 2025 left.
I don't know where you're getting the 90s comparison from. Everywhere I look the statistics show it's worse now than it was then. There was a leak around '92 but it leveled off for a while.
https://ballotpedia.org/United_States_school_shootings_and_f...
Even then, it's an extremely weak argument to me. You might as well be arguing "we've had lead in the gasoline for decades". It happened in the past as well, so why change it. Maybe we should do something to address the issue instead of just continuing to accept it.
But if you want to institute good policy that reduces these numbers, mischaracterizing those incidents is a bad way to do it. And on this issue, the track record of those gathering the data is terrible. I'm not pulling these tactics from nowhere, these are all things that specific surveys have done to manipulate the data. And if you do that, you clearly don't care about reducing the number of shootings.
I'm sorry, but why does this matter in the end? We're still talking about students being injured and killed in schools by shootings during school hours. Do you think the parents really care that much in the end if the shooter was affiliated with the school or not? You're needlessly splitting hairs. Nobody should be discharging guns anywhere around schools. No student should be worried about getting shot in school. It's absolutely insane to me you're suggesting "but what if the shooter was unaffiliated?" Absolute insanity.
I do agree, it's frustrating there's dozens of different definitions of "school shooting". It would be nice if there were good, solid, government statistics in this regard. But one party has consistently fought against the government having a standardized method of reporting and studying such incidents. I wonder which party.
You know what though? Most of the developed world doesn't have to worry about the myriad of different definitions, because for all those definitions the yearly average is damn near zero, not 30 or 90 or whatever.
* get exercise (literally any amount is great)
* don't eat more than you should (avoid being overweight)
I wish we could do the same with Cancer.
California proceeded to elevate the signal-to-noise ratio so high on Cancer however, and it got scooped up in advertising there really is not any really good general advice. Every couple of years theres various trends or crusades for some minority substance that is never scientifically compared to outcomes or risk. Nearly everything could cause cancer, but the nearly everything also wont. Maybe it's just too broad?
Cancer is quite broad. Many of the risk factors such as obesity overlap with heart disease but a lot of patients are still going to randomly get hit regardless of whether they were exposed to certain substances.
Terrorism is even worse because there’s the perception that murder is mostly something that happens to gangsters and drug dealers while terrorism could happen to the average suburbanite minding their own business.
But also terrorism has more potential - say if they got their hands on a dirty bomb or released a viral pathogen - and that’s more terrifying to people as well. It’s the same with nuclear energy: on average coal kills a lot more, but in an absolute worst case scenario nuclear would overtake the total coal death toll.
The news isn't supposed to be representative cross-section of reality. If it was, 99.9% of the newscast would be "most people went to work today, fed their family, went home and slept." The news is there to tell you the outliers of today's events.
But I think one thing is for sure -- they're not a public health raw data reporting system. There is nothing newsworthy about "heart disease" written on death certificates of people dying in old age. This is a fact more appropriate for a health class.
What I mean is that the time of "timely deaths" can be influenced by human action. If most people die of cancer and heart disease, we should work on avoiding an early death from these causes.
If we can add 2 years of time to our "timely" death of heart disease by eating better, we should do so instead of worrying about terrorism.
The statistics on the left hand in the article, unfortunately, have conflated preventable deaths with unpreventable deaths. While some of them made people preventable, we really have no clue how many. However, every single non-preventable death is included in that column. Talk about bias...
There is a whole section in the article about that.
The article insinuates that we don't care about heart disease, because heart disease is boring and common.
But death is a lot more complicated of an issue to society than this. Society expects that a young healthy person in the prime of their life is going to be around for their family and their friends. Other people are probably counting on them to still exist tomorrow. By contrast when an elderly person has been suffering on their deathbed with dementia for 10 years, and dies of heart disease, it's so much different situation for society, that person may not have many friends or family left, and they may not be able to interact with them, even if they are alive for another year. And the friends and family they have left may have been going through the grieving process for years already.
Society does not see all deaths as equal things no matter the circumstance. And so it's silly for this article to pretend that the only thing different between any of these deaths is the cause listed on the death certificate.
People hit by cars are no less dead.
Except the majority of people in the US at least aren't healthy. So why are we elevating that question to be something that should be discussed nightly when it doesn't affect most people (as shown by death rates by cause)?
That's still a specific choice with wide ranging implications. Not saying we should or shouldn't report on it, but saying your question has pretty deeply ground assumptions on "importance". And it is not a given.
I wish we treated this like the outright emergency it is.
I see what I consider, I guess spin, on reports on oakland. Like:
* Violent crime rose between 2018 and 2023, though it was lower than the peak in 1992.
What does it matter if it was worse in 1992? To the people leaving in Oakland say from 2010 to 2023, it's going up. They don't care if it was worse in 1992. That's irrelevant data to try to make you feel better about the fact that things are getting worse. They care that they are less safe than before.
There's a buncn more but the point is, it's possible crime all over is down and crime in places many people live is up.
On the other and, there's not much I can do about crime and it massively affects my day-to-day life, far more than cancer and heart disease. It determines where I want to live, what activitives I'm willing to do, where I can hangout safely, what precautions I have to take, etc...
16 year olds rarely die of cancer or heart attacks. But they can and do die of homicide. Probability of death at 16, according to SSA[1] is 6/10,000 and the remaining life expectancy in 59 years. School shooting, gang violence, and general homicides take a lot more of life off from people than "old age" diseases.
Though incidence of heart diseases going up in late youth and early adulthood. But they still don't hold a candle to homicides.
https://baltimoretimes-online.com/news/2024/05/10/johns-hopk...
"When I’m 33, I’ll quit – I don’t want to be a rock star all my life.” - Mick Jagger
Also, I've never seen a hypen used in 'planning ahead' before.
Its more like AI has made content from accounts created after 2022-2023 difficult to trust even more than the previous error of bots. Its like how nuclear tests made all steel not sourced from shipwrecks have too high of radiation to be used for high sensitivity radiation detectors
If I get alzheimers or dementia and there's no cure at that point.. yeah I'm out
i wish God were real and listening to this; he would smite you dead rite here rite now for your arrogance, mortal
But if people starts to behead teachers (as it’s happening in my country : France) for religious reasons, I want to know.
Yea, even if it represents a few deaths here and there.
Because I am willing to consider the possibility that it’s telling of a shift in my society that will have consequences down the road.
Significance of events are not necessarily correlated to how many people die from it.
Also different countries set up different priorities. France for example is talking quite a lot about « feminicide » (how many women are killed because they are women). In France, it was 137 in 2024. Is it a lot? Probably not for a population of 70 millions. Can we significantly decrease the number? Probably not.
But people and media are still talking about it. And even if this specific number do not improve, it does spark debate about related topic, which is sometimes a good thing.
However, about 1000 people a week die in car accidents which almost never makes the news. I doubt the majority of those are either elderly or non-preventable. I feel this should get attention but never does.
Standard American Diet (high carb, high sugar, high corn syrup, high processed) -> high visceral fat deposits -> Type 2 diabetes -> tissue glycation -> heart disease
So I think you need to look at "early" deaths, since those are the ones that are in theory "preventable". I'm not sure where to draw the line in terms of age -- maybe 65?
We then start to see a much clearer picture of the deaths that we actually care about, and the ones that we can potentially do something about to minimize.
While it would be nice for those who are 80 to live until they are 90, I'd argue that it's much more important to help those who are 50 live until they are 80.
In the UK the figure appears to be much lower if I have understood the ONS report correctly (link to spreadsheet top right).
I'm wondering at the disparity and where it comes from. Real or an artifact of definitions in use when certifying deaths?
https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...
(scroll down in the spreadsheet for the figures for all people in England and Wales, the first table is non-residents only)
https://www.replicahq.com/post/the-average-american-adult-tr...
In the UK, an average car travels 19 miles per day
https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/cheap-car-insurance/average-car...
Traffic accidents dominate the fatal accidents category
Part of this is that Americans drive far greater distances, but even adjusted for distance, the US has about twice the deaths per km.
- The UK had an estimated death rate of 4.7 road fatalities per billion vehicle miles travelled in 2024 [1]
- The US had an estimated 12.6 road fatalities per billion vehicle miles travelled in 2023 [2]
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...
[2] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
I, therefore, think a slightly different question would be more interesting/telling: 'What Americans who read the news reports die from vs what the news reports on'
This would demonstrate any gap between informing people of things which are relevant to them vs hyperbole.
Personally, the "poisonings" between 15 and 35 are what I most care about as a parent.
Shark attacks and lightning strikes are dramatic but they don't seem to bias as much. Rare diseases have the potential to be sensationalist too.
Terrorism almost never makes the news where I live; the closest is assassinations, especially linked to political figures.
If there was a movement against some sugar tycoon, I bet diabetes deaths would suddenly top the news. I'd be interested in how often Tesla accidents are covered by the news.
Media tends to be paid by politics too. Here, nearly every major newspaper has been bought out by political parties. We're seeing the same with digital media, like with Twitter and TikTok recently. It's an efficient way to convert money into social power.
https://wisqars.cdc.gov/pdfs/leading-causes-of-death-by-age-...
A pet peeve of mine is the fact that any word can now be an emotion. "Informed" is not an emotion. It's is a state you reach on your way to a base emotion that is dictated by what you've just been informed about.
It would be interesting to have a form of media which attempts to report on reality in direct proportion to occurrences instead, but it wouldn’t draw attention so very few would use it.
People should be raving and screaming for faster rollout of self-driving cars. If self-driving cars were an experimental drug undergoing a clinical trial, they would cancel the trial at this point because it would be unethical to continue denying the drug to the control group.
People should be raving to get rid of cars, period. Proper mass transit is always a better option.
Just because cars become self-driving doesn't mean that they are not a negative externality.
That's assuming it'll meaningfully reduce the rates of child deaths due to automobiles.
You know what will reduce the rate of child fatality due to automobiles for sure and to an even higher degree? Massively reducing the odds kids and automobiles mix. How do we do that? Have more protected walkable and bikeable spaces. Have fewer automobiles driving around. Design our cities better to not have kids walking along narrow sidewalks next to roads where speed limits are marked as 40 but in reality traffic often flows at 55+.
Its insane to me there are neighborhoods less than a mile from associated public schools that have to have bus service because there is no safe path for them to walk. What a true failure of city design.
1. voters mark paper ballots 2. observers from all parties watch the counting 3. results are tallied publicly
Yes, this is very much feasible; and no, this is not the right domain to be ingeniously efficient and cost sensitive. US being the richest country in the world or some such, etc..
Take the hep b vaccine as an example. ". . . if a child gets infected with hepatitis B in the first 12 months of life, their chance of going on to develop cerosis or liver cancer is about 90%." (Dr. Paul Offit in Beyond the Noise #82: Jumping without a net https://youtu.be/7pxJb7ANWkc?si=EflkB6VaOx6onP5D)
Right now, the CDC recommends the birth dose of the vaccine. And yet the ACIP (CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices) is expected to delay the birth dose of the hep B vaccine following the president's statement in September that the vax is unnecessary and therefore be delayed to age 12.
I would expect the media to be talking about this. According to the Hepatitis B Foundation, "Hepatitis B, the world’s leading cause of liver cancer, continues to impose a staggering, but preventable, burden on individuals and healthcare systems alike. Without widespread prevention and early intervention, the U.S. is projected to spend more than $44.8 million by 2050 on hepatitis B-related care." (https://www.hepb.org/assets/Uploads/Cost-of-Hep-B.pdf)
So we have a practice that can prevent the cancer, save money, and improve lives and the government may totally ignore science and change the vax schedule. Dr. Offit did say in the video that he expects doctors to still provide the vaccine to patients and counsel parents on the need for it.
If a major news network reports that ACIP delays the first dose to 12, will they also interview experts? Will parents, grandparents, social workers, early learning professionals, policy wonks, and legislators know to ask questions, have the time or capacity to deal with this at the state level?
I would like to believe in people. It's getting harder and harder (on a population level).
Combining the pool of babies born to mothers with and without hep b for determining risk factors is pretty dishonest. It is done to pad the revenues of large pharma companies. There is a non-zero increase in risk from getting any medicine. We weigh those risks against what the medicine is for. For babies born to mothers without hep b, the best choice is to not vax, for less lucky babies its in the vax category. Ignoring this doesn't improve outcomes. Risk is just complex.
All I can offer in response is what Dr. Offit said: "In 1991 there were roughly 30,000 in children less than 10 years of age who got hepatitis B in this country. Half of them got it from their mothers. The other half got it from relatively casual contact um with from people who had chronic hepatitis B virus and didn't know it. How many people in the US are infected with hepatitis B virus? Do we know? Yes. So it's tens of thousands every year. And then in terms of how many are chronically infected, about a little over 2 million."
I recognize that big pharma has a ton of problems and questionable practices. But Dr. Offit's statement "The other half got it from relatively casual contact um with from people who had chronic hepatitis B virus and didn't know it." suggests that being born to moms w/o hep B is not without risk particularly given the outsize risk for cancer.
Given that at least half and up to two-thirds [0] of those infected don't know they are, baby may be in contact with a person infected who does not take precautions to prevent transmission.
For example, we do want terrorism over-represented relative to old-age-deaths. However, a responsible and self-aware media would really attempt to counteract 'availability bias' -- e.g. that due to the human mind what is repeated we tend to assume is actually more prevalent. But we don't have wise institutions at the moment.
The more general problem is that it is hard to quantitatively demonstrate the ways in which media fails at fulfilling its complex societal role, because it is a qualitative failure in general, although we can poke at it's edges for sure (e.g. fearmongering language probably has gone up, as has polarization on both sides of the aisle, and the amount of information-free 'babbling and speculating' in the immediate aftermath of some event has likely gone up over time).
I'd _like_ to blame the reader -- inferring anything about how common something is based on how often it's reported is unreasonable. But readers do make that inference, and writers shouldn't pretend they don't know it.
And for most of us nowadays it's not about articles and writers. It's about eight-second video clips on TikTok and creators. So I don't have any hope that we'll become better informed.
„The second insight is how similar the distribution of coverage is between the three media outlets. While there are some differences (Fox News was a bit more likely to mention homicides, for example, while the NYT did the same for terrorism), these are much smaller than we might expect. While right- and left-wing media might differ in how they cover particular topics, what they choose to write or talk about is similar.“
These stupid trucks are literally killing us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo
> . People are often far more anxious about flying than driving, even though commercial airline crashes are incredibly rare.
...surely can be explained, that if adjusted for non-impaired people and considering the survival rate for when an accident happens, the danger is much lower for cars.
The way the article phrases it, makes it sound like the fear is completely baseless.
No. This is false equivalence. You are far more likely to die in a car than you are in an airplane, full stop.
The least you can do here is be honest about the conversation that is being had. It would be appreciated.
I also would recommend flying in a small plane at least once, the small additional risk is worth the experience.
You are still far more likely to die riding in any normal passenger car in the US on public roadways than you are by taking any commercial air traffic, even if you limit it to instances where the driver of the vehicle the deceased was in was not impaired. And that's deaths, ignoring how many people are severely injured. Throw that into the mix and its absurd how much safer airline travel is.
Next: take a look at death and injury comparisons of highways to light rail and other public transit.
(warning: pdf) https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/api/public/publication/8135...
Or am I the only one feeling about it this way?
I suspect what may be happening is that we have some very sick, elderly people with only weeks to months to live who catch COVID and die. Those deaths may still be counted as COVID deaths.
[Citation missing.]
I don't know what country you're referring to, but there's ample data that it's highly partisan in the USA, and you, too, might be misinformed. In particular, the political left wildly overestimates the lethality of Covid (both historically and in the present). See, for example [1]. Other sources [2,3] reporting on the same data also validate the overall partisanship, but unfortunately don't show the correct answer in a way that makes it easy to see the pattern.
[1] https://www.allsides.com/blog/partisan-divide-among-republic...
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-misinformation-is-dis...
[3] https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat...
I just showed you that a) there's a large misconception about the lethality of the virus, and b) people on the left side of the US political spectrum tend to systematically exaggerate the threat. In particular "the killer it in fact was" is often not a factual statement, but a partisan exaggeration of reality.
https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/study-finds-large-gap-in-...
There are studies that show the the "far right" (since you insist on interpreting this in a partisan lens) have a much higher death rate, after the introduction of covid-19 vaccination rates. IU'm going to make a wild assumption here: the far left and the far right want to avoid death at roughly equal rates. I interpret the finding above as a partisan underestimation of the lethality of covid.
80% of republicans believed (according to Gallup) that COVID death rates were falsely inflated. Only 47% of Republicans believe that COVID is more deadly than seasonal influenza, whereas 87% of democrats did.
Again, you refute a thing I didn't claim.
Hospitalization is upstream of death. You don't just get the virus and fall over dead. More to the point, to the extent that one group incorrectly believes that risk of hospitalization is higher than it is, it reflects their overall incorrect belief that the mortality of the virus is higher than it is.
> There are studies that show the the "far right" (since you insist on interpreting this in a partisan lens) have a much higher death rate, after the introduction of covid-19 vaccination rates.
No, there aren't. You're referring to this study [1], which was conducted in two states (Ohio and Florida), and was overgeneralized on NPR, MSNBC and other left-wing media outlets.
The study ran only until December 2021, and found an overall excess death rate of 2.8% for republican voters, which was 15% higher than the excess death rate for democratic voters, according to their model (in other words, democratic voters had an excess death rate of ~2.4% during the same period). The claim you're making extends only from the May-December period of 2021, where they found a roughly 8% difference in excess death rates between parties, on a baseline of approximately 25%.
In other words: both parties saw excess death rates of approximately 25%, and the "republican" part of the set was 8% higher [2]. But when you look at the data by state [3], there's hardly any difference for Florida, so this study is really describing a difference only in a subset of Ohio voters.
Again, you've probably been misinformed about what you think you know. When you actually look at the data, the results are far less dramatic than reported in the media.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37486680/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/t...
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37486680/#&gid=article-figur...
In US the number is larger than drug overdoses. Over 100k preventable deaths a year attributable to anti-vaccine hysteria/conspiracy theories.
That's why gross deaths aren't a great measure. Lost expected years of life remaining is much better. Its why we morn the loss of a child so much more than a grandparent.
It is not news that people die. Everybody dies. You who are reading this is going to die. I am going to die. Every person you have ever heard of and not heard of is going to die.
Terrorism and homicide are not natural causes of death, and naturally upsetting and naturally newsworthy.
Unless the authors of the article want the news to make headlines that people die of natural causes, then we can only interpret it that they want to tone down deaths by homicide and terrorism and try to paint those happenings as "no big deal". Which might very well be the cause among the sick dimension of top academia.
But of course that won't happen because nurturing the fear is the point, it's how they control people.
Even if you could ban all news in an effort to make everybody live as enlightened hackers with disregard to worldly matters, you would still find that homicide is news which spreads like wildfire through word of mouth. It has been like this for hundreds of thousands of years.
I think it's very lame of you and other people to try to call it "living in fear". Wouldn't you like to know about for example a wave of robberies or burglaries happening near to where you live? Living in fear is when you are worried about things on the other side of the world, and such. Local news is not fear mongering. It is structured delivery of information which would have been delivered as gossip anyway.
Not to mention that news exposure helps the police finding dangerous criminals or finding more witnesses. For example serial rapists commonly use the same method with various random victims who are not aware of each other. Once the police and prosecution can connect several victims to the same perpetrator, they will have a very strong case.
Of course you will scoff at all this, since you personally might not have been the victim of violent crime, and therefore couldn't care less. But other people haven't reached that level of rational elevation yet.
That's the thing: the (brown/poor) drug dealers that the local media tend to report on are typically not the majority of drug dealers. They're just the ones that are picked up by the police. Thats the whole point of the article we are all commenting on.
Your kids are more likely to be enticed into drugs by their friends, not by some rando on a street corner.
>Living in fear is when you are worried about things on the other side of the world, and such.
That's merely one type of living in fear.
>Local news is not fear mongering.
"The Haitian immigrants are eating the neighborhood cats and dogs". Yup, definitely not fear mongering.
>It is structured delivery of information which would have been delivered as gossip anyway.
Local news = gossip. This is not the dunk you think it is.
>Not to mention that news exposure helps the police finding dangerous criminals
Seems like a stretch
>For example serial rapists commonly use the same method with various random victims who are not aware of each other.
For known occurrences, I'd expect the police to be more aware of the full details than the local media, if only by sheer numbers. Cops probably outnumber local crime beat reporters by at least a factor of 10.
>Once the police and prosecution can connect several victims to the same perpetrator, they will have a very strong case.
Leaves out the whole suspect identification part of the process.
>Of course you will scoff at all this, since you personally might not have been the victim of violent crime, and therefore couldn't care less. But other people haven't reached that level of rational elevation yet.
I.e., living in fear. It's certainly less irrational than, say, someone who has not been a crime victim, I'll give you that. I'm sorry that you were a victim of violent crime, as your comment implies, but in all statistical likelihood the (local) news would not have prevented your victimization.
Just a hundred years ago, they were unheard of. Our lifestyle and diet is what is killing us and some very big drinks and food companies have everything to gain from that. They are not natural deaths.