[owenversteeg]

Hello, Owen, from another Owen!

I actually find this pretty funny as overrepresentation of certain causes of death is something I've been talking about to friends and family for years, and I was actually recently thinking to compile some data on it. Hilarious that another Owen beat me to it!

One thing I've been meaning to write about for a while is terrorism specifically. I was thinking of writing something refuting the idea of "so few people die of terrorism because we spend so much, if we spent less it'd be a massive problem." Is that something you've thought of at all?

Have you thought of using this data for anything else? Maybe writing some blog posts about the data or looking at a wider range of publications and comparing them for which are more "accurate" in their articles on death?

[owenshen24]

Hm. The thing about costs is interesting. (That spending so much on terrorism is why we see so few deaths.) Evaluating counterfactuals is always hard. If I were to tackle it, I'd probably look at what we're spending the terrorism budget on, what the upper bound of deaths might be, and if it'd be reasonable to think that whatever counterterrorism measures we're taking could actually save that many lives.

I think there are more nuanced views that are worth expressing, as some commenters have already pointed out, for example, looking at years of life lost (i.e. controlling for age of death).

While I think the data we got was in broad strokes representative, I'd be curious to see what it looks like in other countries, as I'm wondering if cultural bias plays a large role.

I'm not too sure if I'll write many more blog posts exploring this dataset in the future; the data is all there on GitHub, though, if anyone else wants to play with it. :)