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The Tragic Data Behind Selfie Fatalities
- tracker1 11y agoAnd all of them Darwin Award nominees...
- wookasz 11y agoRight? They say tragedy. I say natural selection.
- oh_sigh 11y agoEvery death is natural selection. You are stupid.
- alblue 11y agoNo, not every death is natural selection. In fact, most of them aren't since the majority of deaths worldwide are either age related or age related illnesses. Natural selection is random processes that weed out certain traits (biological, physical, social) before those have been passed on to the next generation. This typically means before the entity has had time to reproduce. If you have deaths after reproduction then the traits can still be passed down genetically. Though the longer post birth maturation period can still have an effect. The deaths reported in the original article were all removing stupid people from the world; thanks to their actions the average level of the stupidity of humans has decreased slightly. Their deaths should act as a warning to try and reduce further stupidity in the world; though some humans are especially bad at learning from other's mistakes.
- drdeca 11y agoUnless the person became infertile, why would death by old age not be considered part of natural selection? The people who die of old are are unable to have more children, because they are dead. They are also unable to further contribute to the fitness of their descendants. A person's reproduction isn't just whether they did or not, but how much they did. when people use language like "thanks to" when talking about evolution, I think it attaches too much of a value thing, such that people sort of smuggle in the idea that a thing that happens is good, by hiding it in the description saying that it happens. Natural selection is, in its respectable form, about what is, not about what ought. That's not to say one can't say related things about what ought, but I think one should be sure to clearly express when one is doing one versus when one is doing the other.
- oh_sigh 11y agoHave you ever studied this field at all? > In fact, most of them aren't since the majority of deaths worldwide are either age related or age related illnesses. Have you ever heard of the grandmother hypothesis? Just because an organism is done directly reproducing its genes doesn't mean that it can't help its descendants successfully reproduce their genes. Please do some reading on a topic before pontificating on it.
- civilian 11y agoThis is an economics website--- shouldn't we be looking at the rate of selfie deaths? Over 1 million selfies are taken a day[0], so your death rate of dying while taking a selfie is 28deaths (in 2015) / 360million (seflies taken in 2015). Each selfie has a 1 in 12,857,142 chance of causing you death. I'm pretty meh about it. These are people chasing glory and fame. Taking extreme selfies is probably safer than going to war or becoming a kingpin. [0] http://stylecaster.com/beauty/selfies-infographic/ http://stylecaster.com/beauty/selfies-infographic/
- greydius 11y ago> Each selfie has a 1 in 12,857,142 chance of causing you death That's assuming every selfie has an equally likely chance of causing death, which I think we can all agree is not the case. But yeah, it's extremely difficult for me to muster any compassion for people that befall the horrible consequences of their own stupid decisions. To paraphrase the late, great Bill Hicks: "They were assholes. I'm glad they're dead."
- oh_sigh 11y agoBeing stupid doesn't make you an asshole. You sound like more of an asshole than any random person dying because they did something stupid.
- tamana 11y agoIt's not an economics website. It's an advertising website for a company that builds web scraper tools.
- savanaly 11y ago>To an alarming degree, selfie deaths seem to plague India. Here, 19 individuals — 40% of all selfie-related fatalities — met their demise. This can’t solely be attributed to India’s large population (China, by contrast, has only one reported death). Two comments based on that quote alone: 1) These numbers are ridiculously low. You can find 50 people dying worldwide every year from X-related fatalities where X is just about anything. 2) They acknowledge a crucial fact in their second sentence, that they aren't bothering to correct for population or selfie-frequency in any of the demographics they compare (across countries in this case). Of what use are the numbers, then? May as well compare non-price-level-adjusted prices of goods across countries.
- mturmon 11y agoThey seem to have done the research by Google news stories, presumably with English-language queries. Much of the media in India is English language, but little in China. Shorter: GIGO. That chart had no business in the article.
- em3rgent0rdr 11y agoRight. And they seemed to make a big deal about male vs female selfie deaths, but I don't think there is enough data here for statistical significance.
- unfamiliar 11y ago> May as well compare non-price-level-adjusted prices of goods across countries. Which is done on a regular basis and nobody seems to have a problem with it. "Oh my god, someone in India is earning only $10 a day!"
- wtbob 11y ago> Polls have shown that 30% of all photographs taken by 18 to 24 year-olds are selfies — so the average age here (21) doesn’t come as much of a surprise: it makes sense that the demographic taking the most selfies also perishes the most in the process. That's sloppy writing. 18-24–year-olds might be taking the most selfies, but that statistics doesn't support that.
- andrewclunn 11y agoWait, falling coconuts? How is that not the headline?
- mikesickler 11y agoI was surprised by the champagne corks figure.
- ryporter 11y agoThat's what I thought, too, but it's apparently an urband legend. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_coconut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_coconut
- throwaway_xx9 11y agoNo, it's not an urban legend. Commercial properties prune their palm trees regularly to avoid falling coconuts. Though I worry more about jacktrees. Their melons can weigh over 100 pounds!
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- wodenokoto 11y agoprobably because its a trope on TIL on reddit.
- wodenokoto 11y agoprobably because its a trope on TIL on reddit.
- js2 11y agoI want to know more about the drownings.
- ianferrel 11y agoI would guess that they're basically the same as the first category: people falling off of things. Just that they fall into water (and either can't swim or maybe hit their head on the way down).
- jetskindo 11y agoIn other words, there are very low risk of death while taking selfies.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Jedd 11y ago> In general, India has a very high drowning fatality rate. > Each year, 86,000 people drown in the country, roughly 20% > of all drowning deaths worldwide. Isn't India roughly 20% of world population anyway, making this number entirely consistent & unremarkable?
- krick 11y agoExactly. And all the article itself is example of marvelous statistics: it's not really useful to know how many people died while taking a selfie or how many selfie-deaths were caused by running in front of a train. Implication is that it's about "selfie-taking trend is dangerous", but it's not. Much more interesting would be to compare how many death, caused by extremal activities were accompanied by taking a selfie — it's quite possible, that people die of running in front of a train as much as they did before, they just take selfies while doing it now.
- anuragbiyani 11y agohttps://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/
- stevewilhelm 11y agoOn a similar note, I recall noting that the all of the Independence Day fireworks injury articles I saw last July reported male victims.
- em3rgent0rdr 11y agoAccidental deaths from Erotic Asphyxiation exceed those from Plane Crashes and Selfies combined.
- jacquesm 11y agoThe difference is that now we have proof, but there is no way of knowing if the 'selfie' (I hate that word) was the cause or not. It's a bit like blaming 911 for the death of people dying while calling that number.
- SeanDav 11y agoOT: > "In march of 2014, a young man posed for a selfie atop a boxcar. Diverted, he was unaware of the 35,000-volt livewire just beside him." These articles always quote high Voltage numbers as being dangerous. It is not the Volts that are particularly dangerous, but the amps. A static shock you get from a carpet or doorknob etc can be as much as 25,000 Volts and you barely notice it. A 100 Volt shock with 50 amps behind it can kill you very easily.
- CPLX 11y agoWhile your story is true, I think it's fair to say that "X,000+ electrical transmission cable" has a 1:1 correlation with "electric cable strong enough to kill you".
- Ma8ee 11y agoThe higher the voltage the higher the current through the body. Now the exact resistance of a person varies enormously, in particular if we take into account things like rubber boots or if the person managed to ground herself. But as long as the system can deliver it, the current through the body will be 250 times higher when the voltage is 25000 V than when it is 100 V. Now a very low current through the heart might kill you, so with a little bit of bad luck or stupidity you'll die from a 100 V source. Like you are replacing a lightbulb in an old fixture with one wet hand resting the other one on the kitchen sink. 25000 V will almost certainly kill you. The moisture outside you rubber boots probably has low enough resistance to let a deadly current through your body. The exception is of course the static shocks. Here you are saved by the extremely low total charge. To summarize, yes it is the current that kills you, but it is the voltage that matters.
- theoh 11y agoNot to mention the fact that, for example, high frequency AC is pretty harmless at any voltage because (waves hands) the current travels over the surface of the body... Or something.
- herbig 11y agoAuthor writes a whole article extrapolating uninformed claims from a single wikipedia article. No sources listed likely because it would be too obvious that no real research was done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_selfie-related_injuries_and_deaths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_selfie-related_injurie... Priceonomics is usually higher quality than this. This feels more like a quick college term paper.
- mdonahoe 11y agoI'm guessing the biggest subcategory is car crashes while taking a selfie, but I didn't see it specifically mentioned in the article. How were car accidents not at the top of the accidental death list?