5 ms·

Because otherwise a car crash in a small town would be equivalent to a major terror attack in NYC, or Jack the ripper could be considered a minor offender compa

Because otherwise a car crash in a small town would be equivalent to a major terror attack in NYC, or Jack the ripper could be considered a minor offender compared to a modern day involuntary manslaughter. There is a time and place for normalized statistics, but for some situations, loss of life is something that matters. Edit: I got the arrow of time mixed up in the jack the ripper example, but you get the idea.

mistermann 5y ago
An illustration of lies, damn lies, and statistics?
gruez 5y ago
>Because otherwise a car crash in a small town would be equivalent to a major terror attack in NYC You can probably adjust for this using some sort of statistical significance test. However, without actually doing the test I'll go on a limb and say that the world's population wasn't small enough in 1918 that this phenomena (ie. n being too small) would skew the results.
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  World population in 1920 was presumably somewhere between 1.6bn and 2bn: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat... so 4-5x smaller than now.
  - gruez 5y ago
    Right, but that's not small enough to make a difference. To go to the extreme, if your population size was 100, and some guy died of the flu, that's a 1% death rate! That doesn't actually mean the death rate of the flu is actually 1%, because you don't know whether that guy just happened to die because your group was unlucky, or that the death rate is 1%. As your population size gets bigger this becomes less of a problem. For instance, if your population was 1,000,000 and 10,000 died of the flu you can be fairly certain the death rate is actually 1%. With that in mind, you can intuit that the difference between between 1.6bn and 2bn (1920) and 7 billion (today) is negligible, although feel free to quantify this with actual calculations.
    - rich_sasha 5y ago
      Ah if it’s just about significance (I thought you were arguing about rate of death being negligibly different) then agreed, little difference. In this kind of scenario, errors decrease like 1/sqrt(sample size) so quadrupling the sample size leads to halving the error (which was tiny to start off with). If 1 out of 20 die of flu, the frequentist 1 sigma error is roughly 5% too, so same order of magnitude as the probability estimate. Different story with a hierarchical Bayesian model etc.
hbn 5y ago
No one is saying loss of life doesn't matter, but if we're wanting to figure out "which disease is deadliest," the result should help you in your answer to the question "if you had to get one of these 2 diseases, which would you rather?" Factoring in population and age is absolutely important to knowing how deadly a disease is. There's other factors too that may bump in favor of the 1918 flu being less deadly, like the improvements with modern medicine. But JUST comparing 2 numbers is not a valuable metric on its own.
- phreeza 5y ago
  I don't know if "if you had to get one of these 2 diseases, which would you rather?" is really a meaningful question across centuries. The main treatment for Spanish flu was aspirin (!), and many previously very deadly diseases are now trivially treatable with antibiotics. The question I was thinking about is more along the lines of "how terrible an event in world history is this", and I think there it is absolutely fair to look at absolute numbers, and absolutely expected that more terrible events will happen as population increases.
beardyw 5y ago
Or to put it another way, there is no such thing as a fraction of a human life.

mistermann 5y ago

An illustration of lies, damn lies, and statistics?

gruez 5y ago

>Because otherwise a car crash in a small town would be equivalent to a major terror attack in NYC You can probably adjust for this using some sort of statistical significance test. However, without actually doing the test I'll go on a limb and say that the world's population wasn't small enough in 1918 that this phenomena (ie. n being too small) would skew the results.

rich_sasha 5y ago
World population in 1920 was presumably somewhere between 1.6bn and 2bn: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat... so 4-5x smaller than now.
- gruez 5y ago
  Right, but that's not small enough to make a difference. To go to the extreme, if your population size was 100, and some guy died of the flu, that's a 1% death rate! That doesn't actually mean the death rate of the flu is actually 1%, because you don't know whether that guy just happened to die because your group was unlucky, or that the death rate is 1%. As your population size gets bigger this becomes less of a problem. For instance, if your population was 1,000,000 and 10,000 died of the flu you can be fairly certain the death rate is actually 1%. With that in mind, you can intuit that the difference between between 1.6bn and 2bn (1920) and 7 billion (today) is negligible, although feel free to quantify this with actual calculations.
  - rich_sasha 5y ago
    Ah if it’s just about significance (I thought you were arguing about rate of death being negligibly different) then agreed, little difference. In this kind of scenario, errors decrease like 1/sqrt(sample size) so quadrupling the sample size leads to halving the error (which was tiny to start off with). If 1 out of 20 die of flu, the frequentist 1 sigma error is roughly 5% too, so same order of magnitude as the probability estimate. Different story with a hierarchical Bayesian model etc.

hbn 5y ago

No one is saying loss of life doesn't matter, but if we're wanting to figure out "which disease is deadliest," the result should help you in your answer to the question "if you had to get one of these 2 diseases, which would you rather?" Factoring in population and age is absolutely important to knowing how deadly a disease is. There's other factors too that may bump in favor of the 1918 flu being less deadly, like the improvements with modern medicine. But JUST comparing 2 numbers is not a valuable metric on its own.

phreeza 5y ago
I don't know if "if you had to get one of these 2 diseases, which would you rather?" is really a meaningful question across centuries. The main treatment for Spanish flu was aspirin (!), and many previously very deadly diseases are now trivially treatable with antibiotics. The question I was thinking about is more along the lines of "how terrible an event in world history is this", and I think there it is absolutely fair to look at absolute numbers, and absolutely expected that more terrible events will happen as population increases.

beardyw 5y ago

Or to put it another way, there is no such thing as a fraction of a human life.