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I really wish that journalists would learn some 3rd grade maths before writing anything with numbers in it. How does the life expectancy vary by "more than 20
by JohnGB 9y ago
I really wish that journalists would learn some 3rd grade maths before writing anything with numbers in it. How does the life expectancy vary by "more than 20 years" when the difference between the counties with the highest (85) and lowest (67) life expectancies is 18 years?
- suneilp 9y agoIt's called sensationalism. Thanks for pointing it out. Really dislike that kind of bs.
- mikeyouse 9y agoYou should be more diligent if you're going to be so snarky... 85 wasn't the highest life expectancy. WaPo noted three adjacent counties with very high life expectancy and captioned the graphic, "Summit, Pitkin, and Eagle Counties, each at more than 85 years." Their actual values were 86.83 years, 86.52 and 85.94 years. Oglala Lakota County had a life expectancy of 66.81. Lo and behold, 86.83 - 66.81 is more than 20 years. From the source article: > Counties were combined as needed to create stable units of analysis over the period 1980 to 2014, reducing the number of areas analyzed from 3142 to 3110. In 2014, life expectancy at birth for both sexes combined was 79.1 (95% uncertainty interval [UI], 79.0-79.1) years overall, but differed by 20.1 (95% UI, 19.1-21.3) years between the counties with the lowest and highest life expectancy. Pretty cool data viz here: https://vizhub.healthdata.org/subnational/usa https://vizhub.healthdata.org/subnational/usa