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I find there's something fishy about talking of "millions of people dying from pollution". It raises a simple question that isn't easy to answer: what do we me

by slibhb 5y ago

I find there's something fishy about talking of "millions of people dying from pollution". It raises a simple question that isn't easy to answer: what do we mean when we say someone died of something? Under what circumstances do we say that? If someone gets hit by a car, they were killed in a car accident. If an 80 year old dies of cancer, cancer killed them, but it's a little different than a car accident (and also different than a 15 year old dying of leukemia). Even more different is something, like pollution, that is a factor in someone's death. When it comes to pollution, I think a better framing would be to talk about pollution lowering life expectancy. That seems more honest unless these people are choking on smog and asphyxiating.

retrac 5y ago
A similar argument can be made about cigarettes and lung cancer. One cannot point at a tumour, even in a heavy smoker, and say with certainty "well, that's from the smoking", as opposed to air pollution, or just bad genetic luck. (Or quite possibly a synergy of all three.) When you look at it statistically, it's like what you say, smoking lowers your life expectancy on average. Yet if you took two large and matched cohorts, one smoking and one non-smoking, after 50 years the smoker population would be much smaller than the non-smoking. On the population level, I think it's reasonable to attribute those missing people to having died from smoking, even though individually we can't say much.
dTal 5y ago
The way these things are usually talked about is "QALYs" - quality adjusted life years, which count time spent with debilitating chronic conditions less. If lost QALYs / average lifespan > 1 million, then characterizing it as "millions of people dying from pollution" is probably not unfair. It's worth noting however that this kind of accountancy can lead to mathematical conclusions that make us uncomfortable - e.g. it is better to murder a child than to cause everyone in the world to wake up 1 second late (3 times better in fact) since the total lost time to everyone exceeds the expected lifespan of the child.

by slibhb 5y ago

retrac 5y ago

A similar argument can be made about cigarettes and lung cancer. One cannot point at a tumour, even in a heavy smoker, and say with certainty "well, that's from the smoking", as opposed to air pollution, or just bad genetic luck. (Or quite possibly a synergy of all three.) When you look at it statistically, it's like what you say, smoking lowers your life expectancy on average. Yet if you took two large and matched cohorts, one smoking and one non-smoking, after 50 years the smoker population would be much smaller than the non-smoking. On the population level, I think it's reasonable to attribute those missing people to having died from smoking, even though individually we can't say much.

dTal 5y ago

The way these things are usually talked about is "QALYs" - quality adjusted life years, which count time spent with debilitating chronic conditions less. If lost QALYs / average lifespan > 1 million, then characterizing it as "millions of people dying from pollution" is probably not unfair. It's worth noting however that this kind of accountancy can lead to mathematical conclusions that make us uncomfortable - e.g. it is better to murder a child than to cause everyone in the world to wake up 1 second late (3 times better in fact) since the total lost time to everyone exceeds the expected lifespan of the child.