[Houshalter]

You absolutely should ignore mass shootings. Paranoia about terrorism has created the NSA and TSA, and all sorts of other nonsense. People watching airplane crashes on the news think that airplanes are incredibly dangerous and drive instead.

The raw numbers are important. People are actually surprised when you give them statistics like how rare murders actually are, or how rare shark attacks are, etc. That wouldn't be surprising if people already had an accurate model of the world. We should strive to inform people, not misinform them further. Knowing about the risk of auto accidents is far more important to the average person than knowing about the details of mass shootings.

The news actively misinforms people about risks. It creates irrational fears and behaviors. The "social impact" you are talking about exists because of the news misinforming people. It's an effect, not a cause. If the news reported on every traffic crash instead, mass shootings wouldn't have any impact on our society or people's behavior.

Maybe people living in such a society would be more likely to buckle their seatbelts, and less likely to own guns.

Our goal should absolutely be to minimize death and suffering. Everything else is secondary and subjective. We should strive to be more rational and consistent, not embrace our irrational fears of rare things.

[interpol_p]

I absolutely agree that the raw numbers are important and they are quantifiable way to assess risk. But I very much dislike that they are directly compared to each other. The social impact of murders seems so different to death by smoking related disease that a comparison of the two numbers could be meaningless in determining which one is more "important" to reducing total death and suffering. They both seem incredibly important, despite one being much larger.

> You absolutely should ignore mass shootings. Paranoia about terrorism has created the NSA and TSA, and all sorts of other nonsense. People watching airplane crashes on the news think that airplanes are incredibly dangerous and drive instead.

The problem is we don't ignore mass shootings or airplane crashes. We are not ignoring them right now and they are affecting us deeply. And maybe we will never be able to ignore them. If that is the case (and I'm not saying it is) then there may be benefit to solving such things which is larger than the numbers would have us believe.

> The news actively misinforms people about risks. It creates irrational fears and behaviors. The "social impact" you are talking about exists because of the news misinforming people. It's an effect, not a cause. If the news reported on every traffic crash instead, mass shootings wouldn't have any impact on our society or people's behaviour.

I'm not sure I agree. A mass shooting is vastly more terrifying than a traffic crash, and seeing every traffic crash would simply numb people to traffic crash reports — not terrify them. We are almost becoming numb to mass shootings, which is a scary thing in itself.

I believe the "social impact" would exist regardless of the news. Social media already does a better job spreading this information as-it-happens, and events which are terrible and random will continue to be propagated by the humans who witness them. We can't rely on humans not to speak about such things as a solution to reducing the terror they cause because it is unlikely to happen. It would be best to formulate a solution which accounts for this reality.

> Our goal should absolutely be to minimize death and suffering. Everything else is secondary and subjective. We should strive to be more rational and consistent, not embrace our irrational fears of rare things.

I agree with you but my position is just that there isn't a direct path from the raw numbers to how we should attempt to minimise death and suffering.

[greggman]

Aren't you falling prey to the exact problem being brought up?

You seem to be claiming murders have a bigger social impact than deaths by smoking. How can we know that's true? By what measure?

If we assume murdered people have on average the same number of social connections then 500000 smoking deaths have exactly 500k/16k more social impact than murders.

By focusing on the murders aren't we ignoring the much larger social impact?

[interpol_p]

Sorry, I didn't meant to get focused on the actual causes of death.

My main point is that the numbers are not directly comparable, and that is misleading. The numbers are not measuring the same thing; all deaths are not equal.

It's quite logical to think murder is vastly more impactful than smoking deaths. For instance: with murder you have the burden of a police investigation, a court case, possibly many appeals, jail time for the convicted. Maybe even the death penalty (which is incredibly costly). You also have families torn apart by sudden and unexpected grief, as well as the families of those who go to prison now having that burden.

Deaths from smoke related disease are signalled a long way off. People have time to prepare, and adapt to the passing of their loved ones. There is definitely social cost, but I don't think it's irrational to expect it to be much lower than the social cost of a murder.

But even if deaths from smoking related disease are more impactful than murder, my point still stands: the two quantities are not directly comparable.

[Houshalter]

You are correct that not all deaths are equal. Someone dying of cancer at 60 is losing maybe 20 years of life, while someone dying at 20 is losing their entire adult life. That's the concept of Quality Adjusted Life Years, which is sometimes used instead of just regular statistics.

But even so, the QALYs lost to smoking is orders of magnitude larger than that lost to murders. And car accidents don't discriminate based on age too much

>seeing every traffic crash would simply numb people to traffic crash reports — not terrify them. We are almost becoming numb to mass shootings, which is a scary thing in itself.

It's not numbness. It's just loss of interest/novelty. People aren't becoming numb to mass shootings, they just aren't as interesting or novel. They are still afraid of them. Emergency responders who see accidents every day still buckle their seat belts. More than the general population.

Anyway I am not saying that we can get the news to stop reporting on mass shootings or make people uninterested in them. I am saying that we can correct perceptions that they are more likely than other risks. We can educate people better. We can fight our own biases and strive to be more rational.