4 ms·
Fully agree. Most people use life expectancy at birth to believe that everyone died in their 30s in ancient times, even though these numbers are skewed because
by mihaic 4y ago
Fully agree.
Most people use life expectancy at birth to believe that everyone died in their 30s in ancient times, even though these numbers are skewed because of huge infant mortality.
Introducing something like life-expectancy at birth, 5, 10, 20, 40 years would paint a much better picture, but it takes hard work and a belief that your audience is not stupid.
- blackoil 4y agoIt is even more complicated. eg. to understand state of healthcare using life-expectancy at 20 or 40 may provide wrong info. Because it ignores fact that most of the sick and weak individuals have already died by then.
- mihaic 4y agoYeah, you get more information the more data point you explicitly define. The challenge is reaching a compromise between "easy to explain" and "captures a lot of information". Depending on your audience, you probably want to expose more granular data, but for the laymen I think multiple points all on the same function is they best compromise, since you just need to explain one simple function and 4-5 well picked values for that function.