Fladmas
Clive ThompsonI always find this chart by Hannah Ritchie -- of Our World In Data -- deeply informative of how disjointed is our sense of personal risk
Gilles DePemig 
Actually, wait, they're not!
The media figures are from 1999 to 2016, before ozempic and its peers were released
@clive Ah, correct!
Todd Miller@clive Fascinating
Right?
People -- and media -- seem to focus with roughly-correct proportionality to cancer
But they wildly under-focus on heart disease ...
... and wildly over-focus on terrorism, homicide, and suicide -- particularly the media sources
adehnert
Twotired@clive Skip the Xitter link and go straight to the referenced article here: https://ourworldindata.org/causes-of-death
(Edit: apparently doesn’t include the chart shown in the Xitter post).
I actually went originally to that piece, and went through the deck of slides ... I wanted to direct link to the graphic
but I couldn't find it
I wondered if Ritchie had made it as a special one-off just to post on xitter
(maybe I just ... missed it? is it actually there?)
@clive You appear to be correct. I just assumed it would be, but I can’t find it either. Apologies.
jdliechtyIn case it hasn't been mentioned already, on the Wayback Machine:
woe2you@clive Uncommon causes of death are "man bites dog" while the common ones are "dog bites man". Rarity is newsworthy.
yeah true enough
culpaplex
fuminghumanist@clive This is interesting. But it also just kind of makes sense. People being murdered, and terrorist attacks, are outliers. They are less common and therefore more noteworthy. Very few people are going to click to read an article about every individual who dies of cancer, heart disease, or diabetes.
ToddZ ⓋOutliers are newsworthy, exactly. Also, fear sells, and we tend to be more scared of things that can be suddenly inflicted by others (violence) vs. what we self-inflict (health.)
See also: people more scared of statistically safer air travel than of car travel ("but *I'm* a good driver...")
yes, precisely
Nicole ParsonsIs heart disease really self-directed though?
America is a nation designed by the fossil fuel industry to use cars for everything.
Koch Network fights initiatives like walkable cities, bike paths, & public transit.
The industry fomented "white flight" to the suburbs & got the middle class to give up billions in now-valuable real estate in inner core cities.
They funded anti-lockdown covid disinformation & back to the office narratives to keep people commuting
I was generalizing, yes, based more on perception than details.
The political and environmental climate is an external threat to health. But it's the everyday situation that most of us were born into.
We've been taught it's on us to self-help, via "food pyramids" and "Presidential Youth Fitness Programs" and commercialized individual remedies -- diets & workouts & medications -- in our faces at every ad break.
Agreed. The weaponization of "personal responsibility" narratives are pernicious.
As longevity studies have shown over & over, society plays a significant role in health determinants.
There are group solutions needed to group problems of health.
One of these is the "work until you drop" ethos promoted by billionaires, no retirement, no sick days, no work from home, no long weekends, no vacations.
yeah, also terrorism and homicide involve human intent and human activity, which holds understandable intrigue
that said, it doesn't quite explain the gulf between cancer and heart disease ... I gotta think about why that difference is so big
@clive I was thinking that gulf might be due to all the foundations, research developments, and the seeming randomness of cancer. "Finding the cure for cancer" is its own trope. We already, pretty much, know the "cure for heart disease" is diet, and other lifestyle choices. Cancer is simply more sensational than being scolded to eat better and exercise more.
yeah, that’s a really good point!
and also, the things that improve heart health are things people tend to not want to do lol
Benjamin Braatz@clive @fuminghumanist Might also be that not all articles about health improvement, fitness, … in general which also help against heart and respiratory diseases were counted as being specifically *about* heart disease, while trying to find a cure for cancer or studies on things causing cancer are rather specific topics more easily counted as about cancer.
Karl PetterssonIt is documented here. I suspect one factor is that keywords used for heart disease are too few and unspecific (e.g. they do not include “heart attack”, “angina”, “cardiac disease”). The string “cancer” is probably most often included in articles about specific cancers, so you do not have the same problem there. (By the way, why that block-matching function, instead of regexes?)
https://github.com/owenshen24/charting-death-analysis/blob/main/FinalProject.ipynb
@clive @fuminghumanist And the “road incidents” label is just wrong for reported causes of death (the dictionary cdc_to_news maps *all* accidents to “Car Accidents”).
@clive @fuminghumanist One might also find similar bias within media reporting about specific causes of mortality and morbidity.
E.g. articles on breast cancer may focus on young women out of proportion to the actual age distribution of the disease. Articles on sepsis often focus on meningococcal disease, which causes about 0.1 % of sepsis in Sweden (but can be rapidly progressive in teenagers and young adults).
@KarlPettersson @fuminghumanist
yep, good point!
Mike McCaffrey
bison ✅
Davva@clive
Ooft! That media coverage... No wonder folks are terrible at gauging risk
Ooft! That media coverage... No wonder folks are terrible at gauging risk
Wes Hardaker@clive Um, where are the sharks? Isn't their week coming up?
PeteIs the purpose of media to report on causes of death?
L'égrégore André ꕭꕬ@clive I wonder how much of the media charts' terrorism block is from the '99–'03 years not represented in search, cause I can imagine it's a not insignificant part.
skry@clive Here is a large version of the image with more-readable text: https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/c09ily/causes_of_death_in_usa_vs_media_coverage/
notsoloud@clive
I would like to see this chart, but with percentage of lost Quality Adjusted Life Years instead of percentage of deaths.
It would be a more realistic measurement of impact and bring suicides and accidents a bit more in line with press coverage.
Erik Haugen@clive I agree with have a disjointed sense of personal risk (sharks etc), but disagree that these charts have anything to do with it.
1) It makes a lot of sense for various reasons to search for [cancer] or [suicide], probably not as much [heart disease]. Instead, people would search for things like [lower cholesterol] – was that lumped in those tiny blue bars up there?
2) Some causes of death are more newsworthy than others, and rightly so. 30–40% of people dying from cancer has kinda just been the way it is for many decades. Everyone knows cancer is bad; there's going to be some news coverage of shifts in frequency or new treatments and preventative measures, but what else would you expect to be in the news?
I don't get this idea that we should be collectively wringing our hands about things in proportion to death risk. e.g. of course I want to spend more time in political debates talking about terrorism or homicide than I do about diabetes; that's obvious, right?
FWIW I spend time roughly proportional to the leftmost chart on each cause when talking to my doctor.
Sean@clive It’s interesting to explore #CausesOfDeath further, especially from a global perspective, here:
Dieu@clive If this is a game I guess cancer has won.
@clive As others have already said: It's *partly* understandable, maybe unavoidable. Everyone has to die of *something* eventually. So, an old person dying from a heart or respiratory disease or from cancer is not a news story in and of itself. A homicide or terrorist attack is.
I guess, the bigger problem is *how* the media coverage is done, if it helps inciting exaggerated panic and establishing policies that harm a lot of other peoples' rights while trying to prevent terrorism.
LovesTha🥧@clive News isn't meant to be the totality of education, it is meant to be the stuff that is new.
Daniel@clive excellent, je ne connais pas d'étude équivalente en France mais ça doit être très proche!
f. eickς@clive Media makes terrorism achieve its goals.
VHG 🇪🇺🇺🇦@clive this is eyeopening. Media distortion is a big issue.
Joe 
@clive, just shows:
Matters of the heart aren't taken seriously enough (explains why this world is in such a mess).
Matters of the heart aren't taken seriously enough (explains why this world is in such a mess).
Token Sane Person@clive So, looking at the Google bar, nobody ever died from looking at porn then.
tpaau@clive And the rights to privacy and self defense are still abused in countless countries in the name of counterterrorism...
Homem-Povo 
@clive So what you're saying is all those heart attacks are caused by media terrorism huh... Let me do a quick Google search
PolGM@clive interesting but questionable: survey 2016 vs google search 2004-2016 vs media coverage from 1999 - including the 9/11 event, which have had a huge impact
Whine Spectator@clive in my brain, this is just one american dying over and over again and these are the causes