Sure, media reporting is biased towards things that are sensationalist.
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:
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"
>There is massive under-reporting of violent crime across many decades. How can we evaluate that?
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.
There is enough reason to believe that police departments do not record crime appropriately. Goodhart's law applies everywhere. If you are tasked with lowering a particular crime in your area, the fastest way to do it is to under-report it. Here is a podcast where a former NYPD officer alleges as such: https://pca.st/jSka
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.
I've had my car broken into 6 times (reported 3), my car itself stolen once, 5 bikes stolen (reported 3).
> 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.
Honeypots would only work if the criminals are sentenced to long prison terms which is costly.
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.
I’m sorry your family have been a victims of violent crime. I’ve never been a victim of a violent crime, though I did have my car broken into over 20 years ago.
My anecdote would suggest there’s no crime, but we know that’s not true and why we have statistics.
People always claim statistics are inaccurate when the statistics contradict their subjective experience or sincerely held belief.
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.
Crime is often hyper localized. In some areas of some cities, crime may be going up while the overall rate of the city or country is going down. These intensive areas can also change over time. I am not aware of any analysis of the localization of crime and how it changes over time. There are a lot of choices to be made in doing that analysis, but if a reasonable local analysis across a country did that and found that in all localities crime went down, then that would seem reasonable to dismiss that guy's actual experience. The localization should probably on the neighborhood level, maybe on the order of 1000 people instead of 10000 or more.
Which is why I didn’t deny his subjective experience. I only disagreed with him extrapolating his local experience to the whole country. His area might have become rougher, but the UK as a whole is seeing less crime.
While it's a tragedy that's happened to you the FBI posts yearly crime statistics. The numbers are verifiably true. Violent crime is at it's lowest point in decades. Even war zones like Memphis are on downtrend (though still terrible relative to other places in the US). The news absolutely lies to keep people afraid because fear sells.
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.
Yeah I think it would be good to cross-check all government statistics against polls from groups such as Gallup, to get a sense of what's being reported.
Since statistics are gathered by cities and aggregated at the state then federal level it protects against a small number of bad actors from manipulating the data.
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.
> 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.
First, I'm sorry that that has happened to you. Personally I feel that that is unacceptable. You have every right to be upset and I'm personally not a fan of the police. No doubt they have a tough job, but they actually do need to do their jobs and actually focus on more impactful crimes. But that is orthogonal to this discussion.
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.
And in the next paragraph
| 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.
So they are comparing two different sources which measure in two different ways. They are quite clear that this data isn't perfect, but at the end of the day, how can it be? We have to do the best with what we have available, right? But I would say that using both of these shows that due diligence is being done.
[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.
What is important is crime rate given exposure. Not crime rate.
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.
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
This I agree with the most. Certainly we haven't been doing a great job at this and I think it is a more effective discussion to have. Though this too can get heated and myopic very fast. People love to assume that there are clear and simple solutions but do not take the time to recognize that if they were so simple they probably would be used. If they are simple it is even simple for the incompetent. But I think a lot of people are unwilling to admit that topics like crime are exceptionally complicated. I'm not sure why, it is a problem we've been unable to solve across thousands of years of human civilization. Clearly it isn't an easy problem to solve.
> What is important is crime rate given exposure. Not crime rate.
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.
People who don't watch the news are uninformed. People who watch the news are misinformed. The news lies. In many subtle and not so subtle ways; due to incompetence, bias, misguided good intentions, politics, money, and evil conspiracies.
>An important fact is that Americans also think that crime, and specifically violent crime, are on the rise. This is contrary to actual data
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?
You just repackaged the “but my feelings” movement, when your quote with its context says the exact same thing as others above said, that it’s probably the news. When a customer calls you, that their mouse doesn’t work, and you figure out that they cut its cord, and you apply this quote, it doesn’t mean that the problem is that they cannot cut the cord, but that they want a wireless mouse. You applied this as they would want to have a cord which can be cut with scissors.
You guys are really missing the point (responding to all the critics below, not just you). If you all had actually listened to the entire interview linked above instead of posting a hot take you would understand that it's not about "feelings". Rather it's evidence that the data is likely measuring something wrong or irrelevant, or not being gathered correctly. Thus a deeper factual and qualitative analysis is required.
Yes, I reflected exactly to that with everything. And that analysis was done many times before, and the results were that the problem was news… that’s why your response is about feelings, because the interview is exactly about what you tried to contradict.
Direct experiences are unfiltered. Statistics are often used to lie and deceive.
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.
And direct experience is usually very very flawed in perception. Look into "eyewitness" testimony and how often people's perceptions are extremely flawed and easily manipulated.
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.
>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?
The context is right there in the link. Listen to the whole interview, you might learn something. 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", lol.
I labeled the statement insane not the person. It's also a common slang to call an opinion insane without it being taken to a level of seriousness that you implied.
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.
> 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"
It should probably happen more often.
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.
Jeff Bezos is a morally bankrupt oligarch; that does not, depending on who you ask, make him insane, but it does mean that I will interpret what he says through the lens of a sociopath who is used to hearing from sycophants.
Hero worship is pretty bad in tech circles. Just because Bezos has managed to win at the money game, doesn't mean he's a good person. He's pretty sociopathic. I know several people who worked with him very closely in the beginning years of Amazon and they tell stories...
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)_/¯
>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.
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".
I think you missed my 3rd paragraph (counting the one line).
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.
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.
Yes we all die. Yes a lot of those deaths could be delayed.
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.
Despite all the failings of the press, I am now wondering: is it the least bad we could have?
(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).
To me it's interesting that (a) most people die of old age, and (b) the leading cause of death is essentially preventable (heart disease being highly lifestyle related) or else plausibly curable in the future (I certainly hope we'll see progress on cancer in my lifetime).
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.
>> I certainly hope we'll see progress on cancer in my lifetime).
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 :)
> the reality is quality of life at 90+ is a lot worse than in your 20s or 30s.
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.
While it's true that preventing cancer means you're likely to die in a few years of heart disease, and preventing heart disease means you're likely to die in a few years of cancer, solving both will add dramatically more than both effects combined to both life and healthspan.
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.
Standard engineering. You fix the thing that breaks the system first. Fix that, the next bug appears. Rinse, repeat.
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.
In general the problem is that when humans enter well into senescence, at some point your body just stops working altogether and it's at that point that basically anything that happens to you next will kill you. Or sometimes it will be nothing at all, and your heart will simply stop in your sleep one night.
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.
now that i think about it... i think it'd be interesting if the news did a little blurb on 'demographics' along with their reports of other numbers like weather and stock prices.
"this week, the county had X births and Y deaths. the median age rose slightly to Z."
That and I suspect death where which is random and shocking is much more concerning then deaths that are maybe attributable to semi controllable lifestyle factors.
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?
> 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.
Factors you have control over would be more useful to focus on than inevitable things. I could excuse the media if it focused on things with useful advice on how to reduce your risk in that area.
This kind of thing does tend to get reported. But that one study outcome summarising many lives becomes one article (one blip, one news cycle), while every individual homicide can get its own article.
Right and not just that it's new, it's that it's noteworthy.
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.
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:
https://flowingdata.com/mortality/