4 ms·

Cause of death stats are difficult to interpret because people have to die of 'something'. Is cause of death 'drinking and driving' or was it 'drove into a pole

Cause of death stats are difficult to interpret because people have to die of 'something'. Is cause of death 'drinking and driving' or was it 'drove into a pole at 60mph' or was it 'blood loss' or was it 'medical term for heart stopped beating'. If you wanted to play with stats you could claim any one of these things.

strogonoff 2y ago
Cardiac arrest ← blood loss ← impact with a pole at 60 mph ← drunk driving ← [insert the actual root cause] Sadly, that extra step up the causality ladder tends to meet furious resistance from most natural-scientifically-oriented people. It could be as simple as “lack of will to live due to losing a partner in old age”, for instance—one of a variety of conditions with absent motivation to do things that correlate with not dying, or indeed to not do things that inversely correlate with such, therefore trivially leading to death via whatever first available mechanism (drinking to DUI to accident, or smoking to inflammation to cancer, or lack of sleep to chronic inflammation to cancer, and so on). The particular mechanism itself is not the most interesting part, and if the principle is right then eliminating each pathway is going to be a game of whack-a-mole draining healthcare resources while failing to accomplish the presumed goal (happy continued existence of a person).
- red-iron-pine 2y ago
  but-for analysis suggests that the drunk driving is the root cause. "but why where they drinking and driving!?" could range from carelessness to chronic mental health issues and addition. too many to pin down, and not direct causes; indirect at best. drunk driving killed them
  - strogonoff 2y ago
    Not really. “But why” can be asked at any point in the chain (“but why did the blood loss occur?”), so it’s not a useful differentiator. The problem is that there’re seemingly no ready clear-cut one-size-fits-all solutions with root causes, while there are some we can use to alleviate the downstream mechanisms of harm (e.g., drunk driving bans, chemotherapy), so we prefer to address those instead. When all you have is a hammer and all that. It doesn’t show that such root causes can’t be helped, only that the topic is perhaps not being investigated as actively (it doesn’t lend itself to the traditional approaches used in natural sciences, and rather than treat it as a difficult challenge it’s easier to label it as too vague, not scientific enough, or beyond an arbitrary physicality line).

strogonoff 2y ago

Cardiac arrest ← blood loss ← impact with a pole at 60 mph ← drunk driving ← [insert the actual root cause] Sadly, that extra step up the causality ladder tends to meet furious resistance from most natural-scientifically-oriented people. It could be as simple as “lack of will to live due to losing a partner in old age”, for instance—one of a variety of conditions with absent motivation to do things that correlate with not dying, or indeed to not do things that inversely correlate with such, therefore trivially leading to death via whatever first available mechanism (drinking to DUI to accident, or smoking to inflammation to cancer, or lack of sleep to chronic inflammation to cancer, and so on). The particular mechanism itself is not the most interesting part, and if the principle is right then eliminating each pathway is going to be a game of whack-a-mole draining healthcare resources while failing to accomplish the presumed goal (happy continued existence of a person).

red-iron-pine 2y ago
but-for analysis suggests that the drunk driving is the root cause. "but why where they drinking and driving!?" could range from carelessness to chronic mental health issues and addition. too many to pin down, and not direct causes; indirect at best. drunk driving killed them
- strogonoff 2y ago
  Not really. “But why” can be asked at any point in the chain (“but why did the blood loss occur?”), so it’s not a useful differentiator. The problem is that there’re seemingly no ready clear-cut one-size-fits-all solutions with root causes, while there are some we can use to alleviate the downstream mechanisms of harm (e.g., drunk driving bans, chemotherapy), so we prefer to address those instead. When all you have is a hammer and all that. It doesn’t show that such root causes can’t be helped, only that the topic is perhaps not being investigated as actively (it doesn’t lend itself to the traditional approaches used in natural sciences, and rather than treat it as a difficult challenge it’s easier to label it as too vague, not scientific enough, or beyond an arbitrary physicality line).