Are there studies that compare media coverage with surveys on how people think we die?
> Two kinds of bias were identified: (a) a tendency to overestimate small frequencies and underestimate larger ones, and (b) a tendency to exaggerate the frequency of some specific causes and to underestimate the frequency of others, at any given level of objective frequency
Humans are intuitively better at it. For example, it would be impossible to predict something like 911 event with such frequentist analysis.
Also impossible to predict some sort of nuclear disaster terrorist act that never happened before and could take a million lives.
Another thing to keep in mind is the "missing life" (dying young) and quality of life after disease. That's why something like Alzheimer's seems a lot worse than heart disease.
I'm super stoked to see this project getting some more traction!
I was responsible for the visualizations / the scraping, so I'm happy to answer any questions people might have about the whole process.
^_^
That said, it seems like the modern short news cycle has edged out attention being paid to long term trends (kidney disease mortality prevalence was surprising to me as well).
I actually find this pretty funny as overrepresentation of certain causes of death is something I've been talking about to friends and family for years, and I was actually recently thinking to compile some data on it. Hilarious that another Owen beat me to it!
One thing I've been meaning to write about for a while is terrorism specifically. I was thinking of writing something refuting the idea of "so few people die of terrorism because we spend so much, if we spent less it'd be a massive problem." Is that something you've thought of at all?
Have you thought of using this data for anything else? Maybe writing some blog posts about the data or looking at a wider range of publications and comparing them for which are more "accurate" in their articles on death?
I think there are more nuanced views that are worth expressing, as some commenters have already pointed out, for example, looking at years of life lost (i.e. controlling for age of death).
While I think the data we got was in broad strokes representative, I'd be curious to see what it looks like in other countries, as I'm wondering if cultural bias plays a large role.
I'm not too sure if I'll write many more blog posts exploring this dataset in the future; the data is all there on GitHub, though, if anyone else wants to play with it. :)
I briefly looked at all the charting libraries on this list here: https://hackernoon.com/9-best-javascript-charting-libraries-...
If I were doing this project over again, I'd probably use [Chartist](https://gionkunz.github.io/chartist-js/) as out of all the libraries I looked at, it seems to be the easiest to get up and running.
While charts.js is a little more interactive, it was a little painful to get up and running.
The time slider is just an input slider some jQuery I wrote that dynamically loads up a new dataset and calls the redraw function in charts.js to load up a new chart.
Overall, as someone with entry-level experience in both manipulating data and web development, I found the overall process to be a little rough at first, but it got a lot better once I got the hang of the library.
In total, the entire website took me about a week, with 2 hours of work every day. So something like 15 hours, total?
The charting library I used (charts.js) didn't come with an easy way to have a time axis, so I rigged up some stuff with JQuery and a slider.
I guess something that could have helped with accessibility would have been a dropdown box instead to select the years.
Are you saying that dying of heart disease and cancer are over-diagnosed? Why does that matter in the context of this analysis? It's a comparison between CDC data and news coverage -- any "over-diagnosis" (or under-diagnosis) should be reflected in all datasets equally, so it doesn't really effect the overall review.
https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_dea...
EDIT: Take the data from the above table multiply the deaths by the number of "years of life lost" (65 minus the mid-range age for each column) and ignoring the 65 and older age group and I think you might see a better correlation with news coverage.
A reasonable expectation for news coverage would be that coverage is proportional to deaths weighted by years of HealthSpan lost.
That cannot be exactly right. But coverage of loss of GrimSpan is a separate issue. If hip replacements and cataract operations are reducing the GrimSpan by increasing the HealthSpan that is a happier story than better infection control at Alzheimer's units increasing the GrimSpan. It is hard to state an expectation about news coverage of loss of GrimSpan
I care about gun violence and knew it was overreported, but it blew my mind to find out that there are about twice as many deaths per year from just asbestos are there are gun homicides. I wonder how many other misconceptions there are? (Total gun deaths is much higher due to suicide and accidents)
Gun suicides matter, but we might address those very differently from homicides.
Gang-related violence... I'm not sure why I'd exclude that? They're human beings. The term also is very unevenly applied and laws meant to target "gang-related violence" have a tendency to burden minorities more heavily. (See also: "terrorism")
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/magazine/how-do-you-defin...
A prime example is the American public's irrational fear of terrorism, which translates to pouring unfathomable amounts of tax dollars into the unending "war on terror". Meanwhile heart disease/cancer silently kills 1.1 million Americans every year.
The same thing could be said for the gun control narrative being pushed by the media and politicians. If gun deaths are classified as homicides and using CDC numbers, they account for less than 1% of deaths.
However, looking at the same data on the site for the Guardian and NYT, it looks like the wild west out there and homicides are the leading cause of death next to cancer.
If useful, I did a similar analysis, but just for the NY Times vs WHO/CDC (I manually tagged an year of articles by cause of death vs. this article's ability to see across many years):
In 2015-6, the deaths that are most covered are a tiny fraction (<1%) of the way we die: https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html
You can also extend the analysis to see how death coverage varies by region (those who are culturally similar to us get more coverage):
How Media Fuels our Fear of Western Terrorism: https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html
All deaths are not equal. Most of old people die naturally from an heart failure or cancer, that the natural process of death. Homicides and accidents are not natural but common. Terrorism is an exception, that's why it so much covered.
100 old people dying from cancer do not worth 1 minute of press coverage, a family killed by a truck in a christmas market a bit more.
You are inundated with positive coverage of cars all over, they are vehemently supported in most pieces and comments. Pair that with;
Heart Disease 10.388 Under
Car Accidents 2.285 Under
Lower Respiratory Disease 3.520 UnderDoesn't that make sense? If diseases kill 1000x more people, they are not news -- they're same old, what has been going on since forever.
Now, if there a novel disease or epidemic, sure, that would get coverage.
[0] http://www.cuny.tv/show/sciencegoestothemovies/PR2006291
First, most people think their habits and diet are not leading them to a cardiovascular disease. Then, those conditions that primarily afflict a specific demographic. So it might not be as relevant to someone who is let's say, less than 40 years old.
You can't officially die of "old age" so if you avoid or survive everything else, eventually you are going die from cancer or heart disease. Problem is though, if you improve cancer treatment then more people will die of heart disease, and vice versa.
We really need a category for "died peacefully of advanced age", where we can try hard to increase the death rate.
A strong fourth estate is essential to the proper functioning of the constitutional democractic republic.
This category is actually the number one cause of death for ages 1-44. The numbers are fairly constant from ages 15 to 64 but the rate jumps up by a factor of 2.5 after age 65. Assuming that retirees are not just taking up sky diving, this is probably due to increased frailty and hospitalizations caused by falls.
https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_dea...
EDIT: It seems that in addition to car accidents, poisoning, overdoses, and falls, make up the vast majority of this category.
I'm guessing it's because your heart is on the left (unless you have situs inversus), so he's arguing movies treat a chest wound on the left as hitting the heart
How many people do you know that were killed or injured in a terrorist attack? Second order? Same question for {murdered, illness, natural cause}. Compare magnitudes.
What leads you to believe that was ever a major cause of death for more than a tiny handful of people? It would seem the hardships of living before modern medicine and (any) agriculture would have killed far more people. Given how expensive/risky it was to collect food, why would any group of folks risk most of their healthy, strong brood to wage regional conflict? If they lost, all of them would lose by virtue of losing the most capable members of the society.
recently however, i have come to worry that this position lacks empathy. especially in light of recent mass shootings in the US, i am forced to consider that some types of deaths have far worse second order effects than others. if ten people die on different days out in the woods, ten sets of family and friends are devastated. tragic, but if ten students are killed at school in the same day, it seems that the lasting damage is far more severe and widespread.
to some extent you can say that's just because people are emotional/irrational and they are blocking optimal allocation, but maybe the optimal solution does need to take into account how people feel about things. maybe things like terrorism and mass shootings are actually a lot more harmful than the numbers suggest.
I think it's clear it's not due to its infrequency that it's reported on so much.