Odds of Dying

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/

by agnosticmantis • 5 years ago

49 52 5 years ago

injuryfacts.nsc.org

hyko• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Invests in high speed rail as per...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26746487

(Interesting these are on the front page at the same time)

rantwasp• 5 years ago

hah. i’m gonna buy a dog

fnord77• 5 years ago

I'm confused by this. ELI5?

auspex• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

neolog2• 5 years ago

More people drive cars than motorcycles so there are more car deaths than motorcycle deaths.

mod• 5 years ago

The chances that an average human dies from a thing.

Many of these are not risks for individuals, like narcotic overdoses or motorcycle deaths, because they don't do that thing.

jtchang• 5 years ago

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

thyrsus• 5 years 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 ;-)

neolog2• 5 years ago

https://xkcd.com/795/

ekianjo• 5 years ago

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

mr_toad• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Those are not "top causes", as they are labeled "selected" without any indication how.

fastball• 5 years 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.

TheSpiceIsLife• 5 years ago

Depends who you are.

Drug overdoses usually only make the news if the person is famous.

beefield• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Or a very long tail...

Empact• 5 years ago

Examples of common causes left out: nephritis, stroke, diabetes, alzheimer’s, septicemia.

Source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1P5b9GdVsNx3DPywLluwE...

handojin• 5 years ago

like suicide at 1:88

jf• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

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

pcurve4• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Is the reasoning here correct?

simonebrunozzi• 5 years ago

Interesting. I took ~1,000 flights in my life (more than half of which in just 6 years, when I used to work at AWS as a tech evangelist).

This means that my chance of dying in a flight crash were ~1/10,000th, or 0.01%.

Not high, but not insignificant.

RupertEisenhart• 5 years 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/

ta86453• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

And it would be even more compassionate if we created society that didn't induce people to kill themselves in the first place.

jvanderbot• 5 years 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?

baby• 5 years ago

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

csense• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Yeah, these are the odds if you have no other information about the person. They vary drastically between different people.

Galaxity• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Isn't there some use to knowing which of these statistically likely deaths may be applicable to you?

chalcolithic• 5 years 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.

Odds of Dying

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