9 ms·

Odds of Dying

RupertEisenhart 6y ago
I feel the need to point a finger at the gun death rate, and also point out that many suicides are probably gun deaths too [0] (not in the trivial sense of suicide by firearm, but that many of those suicides would not have happened without the availability of guns). [0] httpss://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/risk/
- ta8645 6y ago
  If guns truly facilitate suicide then it's good that they are available to those who want them. But it would be more compassionate if we had a less gruesome method we could make available to people.
  - spicyusername 6y ago
    And it would be even more compassionate if we created society that didn't induce people to kill themselves in the first place.
    - hypertele-Xii 6y ago
      Is that viable in reality though? Your body is a society of cells, each one prepared to kill itself upon malfunction. If a cell fails to suicide, it will be killed by other cells specifically patrolling for malfunctioning cells to kill. If that fails, we call it cancer, and the whole body dies of it. Apparently societies must retain the ability to induce parts of them to kill themselves, or risk total annihilation.
    - ta8645 6y ago
      Sorry that's a utopian dream and we are cursed to instead live in the real world. Sometimes suicide is the most humane decision someone can make for themselves. And true compassion comes by actually supporting someone in that situation, not condemning them or "society".
  - jvanderbot 6y ago
    This is an easy story to tell, but is not always supported by evidence. People who would not otherwise kill themselves are more likely to given available means. Many studies around golden gate jumpers, the oven suicide wave in London, and other easy means which increase rates refute the idea that a person plans to die and then seeks the means. (Good discussion in Talking to Strangers). If the availablility of guns causes people to become suicidal is it still ethical to allow them to carry out the act?
    - ta8645 6y ago
      I guess I just do not believe guns cause people to become suicidal. I knew two people who committed suicide with the help of doctors. Both were considered and practical decisions given the pain and suffering they were enduring with no hope of reprieve. Both were very grateful to not have to resort to a gun. It was very hard to accept and I wanted them to stay in this world for longer, but it was their choice and ultimately not my place to enforce my choice on them. I think they were just more brave than me. There are definitely cases of people who lived healthy long lives after failed suicide attempts, but all such statistics embody the literal definition of survivorship bias.
hyko 6y ago
No, these are not your risks of dying by selected causes; this is a population study. “Hey, statistically the odds of dying on a motorcycle are Lower than driving a car!” buys motorcycle
- nickt 6y ago
  Invests in high speed rail as per... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26746487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26746487 (Interesting these are on the front page at the same time)
- rantwasp 6y ago
  hah. i’m gonna buy a dog
- fnord77 6y ago
  I'm confused by this. ELI5?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - auspex 6y ago
    These aren’t your specific odds. Like you’re not 1:6 chance for dying of heart disease.. but across the entire population 1:6 people will die from it.
  - ddeck 6y ago
    If 1 person rides a motorcycle and 10000 people drive cars, then the absolute risk of motorcycle accidents will of course be lower, but that doesn't mean they are lower for the person riding the motorcycle vs an average car driver.
    - carlmr 6y ago
      This is also called the base rate fallacy. As soon as you put it into relation to the base rate you get a more useful number for your own decisions. For example if the numbers are stated as above (1:10000 ratio in people driving motorcycles to people driving cars), you have to multiply the risk of motorcycling by 10000 to get it to the same level as the risk of driving. If you look up the numbers there are 8.3 million motorcycles registered in the US. While there's a total of 273 million registered vehicles (this includes motorcycles). I used 2018 numbers for both, to make them comparable. https://www.iihs.org/api/datastoredocument/bibliography/2181 https://www.iihs.org/api/datastoredocument/bibliography/2181 https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicles-in-the-united-states-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicle... The number stated in the odds is also for all vehicles I assume since motorcycles are motor vehicles. This leads us to 8.3/273~3.04% of the vehicles on the road in the US are motorcycles. That means that you have to compare 1/899 / 3.04% to the 1/107 figure. I.e. lifetime chance of death with motorcycle is roughly 3.66% and chance of death with any motor vehicle is 0.93%. This of course still ignores details like how often people use their motorcycle (usually fewer kms than in cars), which roads they use (more dangerous but fun country roads instead of highways), etc. but it gives you at least a ballpark estimate that using a motorcycle will up your risk by about a factor of 4x vs any motor vehicle (any including motorcycles). Also you can only die once, so if you're a heavy smoker you probably lessen your risk of motorcycle death considerably.
jtchang 6y ago
And here I am looking down the list for the odds of not dying. Dammit.
- thyrsus 6y ago
  Look at the social security mortality tables. Where it says you have a 10% chance of dying in a particular year of life, you have a 90% chance of living. Pro tip: don't be 120 years old ;-)
neolog 6y ago
https://xkcd.com/795/ https://xkcd.com/795/
ekianjo 6y ago
Opoid overdose is pretty high... Yet barely makes the news.
- mr_toad 6y ago
  c.f. terrorist attacks, which always make the news, but don’t even rate a mention in the top causes of deaths.
  - rhn_mk1 6y ago
    Those are not "top causes", as they are labeled "selected" without any indication how.
  - fastball 6y ago
    Yes, though that's a bit apples and oranges. Being killed by someone else with deliberate intent is not scary because it's the most common, it's scary because you have absolutely no control over it. Where as overdosing on opioids is something you have a hand in.
    - kwhitefoot 6y ago
      > Where as overdosing on opioids is something you have a hand in. But not as much control as one might like to think.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  Depends who you are. Drug overdoses usually only make the news if the person is famous.
beefield 6y ago
For the curious, the causes listed on the site seem to cover about 44% of all deaths. So there are other significant ways to die as well...
- unFou 6y ago
  Or a very long tail...
- Empact 6y ago
  Examples of common causes left out: nephritis, stroke, diabetes, alzheimer’s, septicemia. Source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1P5b9GdVsNx3DPywLluwE-YwAMLuEhhUEg_T64SV4uTU/edit https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1P5b9GdVsNx3DPywLluwE...
- handojin 6y ago
  like suicide at 1:88
jf 6y ago
I'm surprised the the amount of deaths due to "poisoning" ... does anybody know where I can learn more about this? Edit: I found a Glossary on the site, which states that poisoning "Includes deaths from drugs, medicines, other solid and liquid substances, and gases and vapors. Excludes poisonings from spoiled foods, Salmonella, etc., which are classified as disease deaths."
Aeolun 6y ago
TIL you are more likely to be struck by lightning than to die in a plane crash.
- pcurve 6y ago
  1 in 10 million flights end in crash if you take top tier airlines. So I guess if one takes 100 flights, then odd of ending up in plane crash over life time is 'only' 1 in 100,000. If you take a lot of flights on less safe airlines, it can dip to 1 in thousands pretty quickly.
  - Nabati 6y ago
    Is the reasoning here correct?
    - totony 6y ago
      1 in ~10 million seems to be the average risk of an american to die from air plane, so, in your lifetime (100 years, if you live to 100 - average lifespan is 80 it looks like), that goes up to 1-(9,999,999/10,000,000)^100 ~ 1 in 100k Since that number is about the average risk of an american to die (and not the risk per flight), using it to calculate the risk per flight is erroneous I think?
      - pcurve 6y ago
        Actually the 1 in 10 million figure I used is based on number of fatal crash per flight. I thought it was roughly 1 in 10 million flights ending in fatal crash, but that was couple years ago. It's actually more like 1 in 3.7 million flights. so if you take 100 of those flights, I figured the odds would be 1 in 37,000. Anyway, happy to be corrected.
        totony 6y ago
        You might be right, but from cursory look [1] [2], there were 300 fatalities / 5000 millions passenger ~ 1 / 17 millions for 2019 so your probability of dying from one flight (all of the world considered - way lower for US afaics) looks to be 1 in 17 millions in 2019 [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263443/worldwide-air-traffic-fatalities/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/263443/worldwide-air-tra... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/564717/airline-industry-passenger-traffic-globally/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/564717/airline-industry-...
baby 6y ago
If these were lottery odds we’d all be pretty fucking happy...
csense 6y ago
The "Gun Assault" category needs more breaking down. How many of those were innocent people -- i.e. store clerks shot by robbers, spouses shot for infidelity, victims of serial killers, murdered victims of child predators, and so on -- and how many were "asking for it" -- i.e. they were a criminal whose victim shot them in self-defense, it was gang-vs-gang violence, they got shot in a drug deal gone bad, they were shot by police or armed guards (presumably while resisting arrest or threatening a victim with imminent harm), they were soldiers who were killed in battle, and so on. Likewise with the "Opioiod overdose" situation. How many of those were medical mistakes, like the doctor wrote X milligrams and the nurse accidentally put X grams in the IV instead, or a patient forgot whether they'd taken today's pills, accidentally took an extra dose and died from it, or unknowingly got prescribed multiple drugs that all contained opioids, or happened to have an allergy to opioids and died of anaphylactic shock? How many were "asking for it" -- deliberately swallowing too many pills in a suicide attempt, or taking illegal street pills / injections created by unknown persons, containing unknown substances at unknown potency?
fab1an 6y ago
I found this way of thinking - where you pool risks across the entire population - never particularly useful. For example, the risk of drowning, here quantified as "1 in 1,128" is actually pretty much 0 for people who don't go swimming, and probably vastly higher for people who frequently swim in lakes. Similarly, your risk of getting eaten by a shark - as miniscule it may be in the grand scheme of things - is profoundly higher when you're actually in the water somewhere in South Africa or Australia. So in order to truly understand risks, one really needs to take one's personal setup and situation into account..
- cortesoft 6y ago
  Yeah, these are the odds if you have no other information about the person. They vary drastically between different people.
- Galaxity 6y ago
  Well I guess it's presented poorly by saying "your" odds. Those numbers are for everyone as a whole, the likelyhood of any person dying amongst everyone else by a specific cause. Not a specific individual's odds.
- noahatwi 6y ago
  Isn't there some use to knowing which of these statistically likely deaths may be applicable to you?
chalcolithic 6y ago
Ironically the link is dead for me - access denied by Cloudflare. Will I ever see a side of Cloudflare that'll make me hate it a little less? They give me more grief then all the other CDNs combined.

I feel the need to point a finger at the gun death rate, and also point out that many suicides are probably gun deaths too [0] (not in the trivial sense of suicide by firearm, but that many of those suicides would not have happened without the availability of guns). [0] httpss://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/risk/

ta8645 6y ago
If guns truly facilitate suicide then it's good that they are available to those who want them. But it would be more compassionate if we had a less gruesome method we could make available to people.
- spicyusername 6y ago
  And it would be even more compassionate if we created society that didn't induce people to kill themselves in the first place.
  - hypertele-Xii 6y ago
    Is that viable in reality though? Your body is a society of cells, each one prepared to kill itself upon malfunction. If a cell fails to suicide, it will be killed by other cells specifically patrolling for malfunctioning cells to kill. If that fails, we call it cancer, and the whole body dies of it. Apparently societies must retain the ability to induce parts of them to kill themselves, or risk total annihilation.
  - ta8645 6y ago
    Sorry that's a utopian dream and we are cursed to instead live in the real world. Sometimes suicide is the most humane decision someone can make for themselves. And true compassion comes by actually supporting someone in that situation, not condemning them or "society".
- jvanderbot 6y ago
  This is an easy story to tell, but is not always supported by evidence. People who would not otherwise kill themselves are more likely to given available means. Many studies around golden gate jumpers, the oven suicide wave in London, and other easy means which increase rates refute the idea that a person plans to die and then seeks the means. (Good discussion in Talking to Strangers). If the availablility of guns causes people to become suicidal is it still ethical to allow them to carry out the act?
  - ta8645 6y ago
    I guess I just do not believe guns cause people to become suicidal. I knew two people who committed suicide with the help of doctors. Both were considered and practical decisions given the pain and suffering they were enduring with no hope of reprieve. Both were very grateful to not have to resort to a gun. It was very hard to accept and I wanted them to stay in this world for longer, but it was their choice and ultimately not my place to enforce my choice on them. I think they were just more brave than me. There are definitely cases of people who lived healthy long lives after failed suicide attempts, but all such statistics embody the literal definition of survivorship bias.

hyko 6y ago

No, these are not your risks of dying by selected causes; this is a population study. “Hey, statistically the odds of dying on a motorcycle are Lower than driving a car!” buys motorcycle

nickt 6y ago
Invests in high speed rail as per... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26746487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26746487 (Interesting these are on the front page at the same time)
rantwasp 6y ago
hah. i’m gonna buy a dog
fnord77 6y ago
I'm confused by this. ELI5?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- auspex 6y ago
  These aren’t your specific odds. Like you’re not 1:6 chance for dying of heart disease.. but across the entire population 1:6 people will die from it.
- ddeck 6y ago
  If 1 person rides a motorcycle and 10000 people drive cars, then the absolute risk of motorcycle accidents will of course be lower, but that doesn't mean they are lower for the person riding the motorcycle vs an average car driver.
  - carlmr 6y ago
    This is also called the base rate fallacy. As soon as you put it into relation to the base rate you get a more useful number for your own decisions. For example if the numbers are stated as above (1:10000 ratio in people driving motorcycles to people driving cars), you have to multiply the risk of motorcycling by 10000 to get it to the same level as the risk of driving. If you look up the numbers there are 8.3 million motorcycles registered in the US. While there's a total of 273 million registered vehicles (this includes motorcycles). I used 2018 numbers for both, to make them comparable. https://www.iihs.org/api/datastoredocument/bibliography/2181 https://www.iihs.org/api/datastoredocument/bibliography/2181 https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicles-in-the-united-states-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicle... The number stated in the odds is also for all vehicles I assume since motorcycles are motor vehicles. This leads us to 8.3/273~3.04% of the vehicles on the road in the US are motorcycles. That means that you have to compare 1/899 / 3.04% to the 1/107 figure. I.e. lifetime chance of death with motorcycle is roughly 3.66% and chance of death with any motor vehicle is 0.93%. This of course still ignores details like how often people use their motorcycle (usually fewer kms than in cars), which roads they use (more dangerous but fun country roads instead of highways), etc. but it gives you at least a ballpark estimate that using a motorcycle will up your risk by about a factor of 4x vs any motor vehicle (any including motorcycles). Also you can only die once, so if you're a heavy smoker you probably lessen your risk of motorcycle death considerably.

jtchang 6y ago

And here I am looking down the list for the odds of not dying. Dammit.

thyrsus 6y ago
Look at the social security mortality tables. Where it says you have a 10% chance of dying in a particular year of life, you have a 90% chance of living. Pro tip: don't be 120 years old ;-)

neolog 6y ago

https://xkcd.com/795/ https://xkcd.com/795/

ekianjo 6y ago

Opoid overdose is pretty high... Yet barely makes the news.

mr_toad 6y ago
c.f. terrorist attacks, which always make the news, but don’t even rate a mention in the top causes of deaths.
- rhn_mk1 6y ago
  Those are not "top causes", as they are labeled "selected" without any indication how.
- fastball 6y ago
  Yes, though that's a bit apples and oranges. Being killed by someone else with deliberate intent is not scary because it's the most common, it's scary because you have absolutely no control over it. Where as overdosing on opioids is something you have a hand in.
  - kwhitefoot 6y ago
    > Where as overdosing on opioids is something you have a hand in. But not as much control as one might like to think.
TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
Depends who you are. Drug overdoses usually only make the news if the person is famous.

beefield 6y ago

For the curious, the causes listed on the site seem to cover about 44% of all deaths. So there are other significant ways to die as well...

unFou 6y ago
Or a very long tail...
Empact 6y ago
Examples of common causes left out: nephritis, stroke, diabetes, alzheimer’s, septicemia. Source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1P5b9GdVsNx3DPywLluwE-YwAMLuEhhUEg_T64SV4uTU/edit https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1P5b9GdVsNx3DPywLluwE...
handojin 6y ago
like suicide at 1:88

jf 6y ago

I'm surprised the the amount of deaths due to "poisoning" ... does anybody know where I can learn more about this? Edit: I found a Glossary on the site, which states that poisoning "Includes deaths from drugs, medicines, other solid and liquid substances, and gases and vapors. Excludes poisonings from spoiled foods, Salmonella, etc., which are classified as disease deaths."

Aeolun 6y ago

TIL you are more likely to be struck by lightning than to die in a plane crash.

pcurve 6y ago
1 in 10 million flights end in crash if you take top tier airlines. So I guess if one takes 100 flights, then odd of ending up in plane crash over life time is 'only' 1 in 100,000. If you take a lot of flights on less safe airlines, it can dip to 1 in thousands pretty quickly.
- Nabati 6y ago
  Is the reasoning here correct?
  - totony 6y ago
    1 in ~10 million seems to be the average risk of an american to die from air plane, so, in your lifetime (100 years, if you live to 100 - average lifespan is 80 it looks like), that goes up to 1-(9,999,999/10,000,000)^100 ~ 1 in 100k Since that number is about the average risk of an american to die (and not the risk per flight), using it to calculate the risk per flight is erroneous I think?
    - pcurve 6y ago
      Actually the 1 in 10 million figure I used is based on number of fatal crash per flight. I thought it was roughly 1 in 10 million flights ending in fatal crash, but that was couple years ago. It's actually more like 1 in 3.7 million flights. so if you take 100 of those flights, I figured the odds would be 1 in 37,000. Anyway, happy to be corrected.
      - totony 6y ago
        You might be right, but from cursory look [1] [2], there were 300 fatalities / 5000 millions passenger ~ 1 / 17 millions for 2019 so your probability of dying from one flight (all of the world considered - way lower for US afaics) looks to be 1 in 17 millions in 2019 [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263443/worldwide-air-traffic-fatalities/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/263443/worldwide-air-tra... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/564717/airline-industry-passenger-traffic-globally/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/564717/airline-industry-...

baby 6y ago

If these were lottery odds we’d all be pretty fucking happy...

csense 6y ago

The "Gun Assault" category needs more breaking down. How many of those were innocent people -- i.e. store clerks shot by robbers, spouses shot for infidelity, victims of serial killers, murdered victims of child predators, and so on -- and how many were "asking for it" -- i.e. they were a criminal whose victim shot them in self-defense, it was gang-vs-gang violence, they got shot in a drug deal gone bad, they were shot by police or armed guards (presumably while resisting arrest or threatening a victim with imminent harm), they were soldiers who were killed in battle, and so on. Likewise with the "Opioiod overdose" situation. How many of those were medical mistakes, like the doctor wrote X milligrams and the nurse accidentally put X grams in the IV instead, or a patient forgot whether they'd taken today's pills, accidentally took an extra dose and died from it, or unknowingly got prescribed multiple drugs that all contained opioids, or happened to have an allergy to opioids and died of anaphylactic shock? How many were "asking for it" -- deliberately swallowing too many pills in a suicide attempt, or taking illegal street pills / injections created by unknown persons, containing unknown substances at unknown potency?

fab1an 6y ago

I found this way of thinking - where you pool risks across the entire population - never particularly useful. For example, the risk of drowning, here quantified as "1 in 1,128" is actually pretty much 0 for people who don't go swimming, and probably vastly higher for people who frequently swim in lakes. Similarly, your risk of getting eaten by a shark - as miniscule it may be in the grand scheme of things - is profoundly higher when you're actually in the water somewhere in South Africa or Australia. So in order to truly understand risks, one really needs to take one's personal setup and situation into account..

cortesoft 6y ago
Yeah, these are the odds if you have no other information about the person. They vary drastically between different people.
Galaxity 6y ago
Well I guess it's presented poorly by saying "your" odds. Those numbers are for everyone as a whole, the likelyhood of any person dying amongst everyone else by a specific cause. Not a specific individual's odds.
noahatwi 6y ago
Isn't there some use to knowing which of these statistically likely deaths may be applicable to you?

chalcolithic 6y ago

Ironically the link is dead for me - access denied by Cloudflare. Will I ever see a side of Cloudflare that'll make me hate it a little less? They give me more grief then all the other CDNs combined.