Advocay sleight of hand

Funny Numbers

The employer asks the applicant for an accounting job, "How much is 2+2?'' ''How much do you want it to be?" he replies. Hired on the spot. An outfit named Sixwise.com sucked me in with this trifle: The Six Most Feared but Least Likely Causes of Death My own number one entry would be a Hillary Clinton presidency,  but this is theirs: Airplane crashes: Some 30 million Americans describe themselves as "anxious" flyers. What makes them anxious is the fear of dying in a plane crash. What's the actual risk of being involved in a fatal airline accident? According to Arnold Barnett, a statistical expert in the field of aviation safety, it's once every 19,000 years--and that is only provided the person flew on an airplane once a day for 19,000 years! That's a pretty convincing argument against flying angst.  Here's another. Being murdered: According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one person is murdered about every 60 seconds worldwide, and in 2000, an estimated 520,000 people were murdered in the world. Although this sounds like a lot, let us put things into perspective: In 2000, over 6 million people died of cancer. The others were Shark attacks, Falling to death, Terrorist attack, and Natural disasters - all shown to be statistically rare, and not worth the extra stomach acid. Then they move to what I suspect was the motivation behind this bit of fluff ...  Actual Leading Causes of Death (and why aren't you doing something about these?!).  I'm sure you've already guessed what they are ... Tobacco (435,000 deaths, 18.1 percent of total U.S. deaths), Fast Food  and physical inactivity (400,000 deaths, 16.6 percent), and Incidents involving firearms (29,000) ... .  Note that in the first examples world rates are used, but U.S. rates for the second category, which is sloppy to say the least.  Second, if tobacco caused  435,000 deaths, which they peg as 18% of all U.S. deaths, that means only 2,500,000 people died in this country (is this study from 1812?).  This whole deal smells like yesterday's fish.  A little investigating yielded the source for these numbers ...  The Journal of the American Medical Association! Even if I'm somehow misreading the data (and you're sure to tell me if I am), there is still the matter of them dismissing 520,000 murders as trivial in comparison to 6 million cancer deaths, but somehow finding relevancy in 29,000 ''Incidents involving firearms''  deaths (what's cloaked in that term?).  What we have here are issue advocacy numbers, generated to serve a market.  They find their way into print and television news reports, web sites, congressional hearings, and Al Gore's brain where they drive people nuts.  Is there anyone you can trust anymore?  No there is not, not blindly anyway. But then there never was.  The stakes are just higher now, because we've allowed too many people to have dominion over us.  That's a whole other issue.