> Likewise a correct fact and not an opinion. And newsworthy because driving right now is more likely to get me killed, and that's something I'd like to know.
"lethal" here means more deaths per mile traveled. that might be because roads everywhere are less safe, or it might mean that a greater fraction of total miles are being driven on inherently unsafe stretches of road (with the same local fatality rates as before the crisis). fatalities include pedestrian deaths as well. maybe there is increased risk for pedestrians but not for drivers. the article doesn't say. there's certainly not enough information to say whether you personally are at greater risk driving.
Uh... the detail you're asking for is literally in the text of the article. I still don't understand why you don't think that headline is an accurate summary.
And in any case... I don't understand your criticism at all. If there are more deaths per mile traveled, then every mile driven is on average "more lethal", by definition. So if I drive to the same place I (in the sense of an average "I" across all drivers) am more likely to die. QED.
Basically, you're just criticizing grammar by conflating my use of "I" with me personally and not the abstract reader I clearly intended. Do you make similar quibbles about the abstract use of "you" or "one", or the royal "we"?
I think the argument going on here in the comments is evidence enough that the title is evidence enough that it's misleading. some of that is just HN's special brand of pedantry, but some people are raising valid points.
> And in any case... I don't understand your criticism at all. If there are more deaths per mile traveled, then every mile driven is on average "more lethal", by definition. So if I drive to the same place I (in the sense of an average "I" across all drivers) am more likely to die. QED.
my criticism is that the average deaths per mile doesn't imply anything about your risk on a typical trip for you. for one thing, the excess deaths could all be pedestrians, and the deaths per mile for drivers could be the same. in particular "So if I drive to the same place I (in the sense of an average "I" across all drivers) am more likely to die." is not implied by the information in the article, because a very possible explanation for the increased rate is that people are not driving to the same places.
let me try to construct a counterexample from my life. in normal times I drive 20 miles each way on the interstate to commute to work. once or twice a week, I drive a mile to the grocery store through a dense urban area. for the sake of the example, let's just assume the interstate has much fewer deaths per mile than city streets do (pretty sure this is true, but don't want to bother looking up a source). I, like many other people, no longer commute to work, but I still buy groceries once or twice a week. so a far greater fraction of my miles are on high-risk stretches of road. the average risk I expose myself to per mile is indeed higher, but this doesn't imply that driving to the grocery store is any more dangerous than it was before. in other words, it is a fact, but not a particularly meaningful one. it shouldn't influence your behavior.
reporting averages without some context or explanation is not very useful and people who aren't familiar with statistics are going to draw all kinds of unsupported conclusions. another random example: I live in a Very Dangerous City if you go by the overall murder rate. but if you dig into where the murders happen, they are tightly clustered in certain areas. I'm no more likely to get shot in my neighborhood than I would be in williamsburg.
> the average risk I expose myself to per mile is indeed higher, but this doesn't imply that driving to the grocery store is any more dangerous than it was before.
It doesn't mean it doesn't either. Someone would need to do the science to show it either way, and that hasn't happened.
I don't see how you get from there (which you could have said in like 5% of the prose as "the variables aren't independent") to your point that the news media shouldn't ever report on scientific results if there is the possibility of a confounded variable.
The standard you want applied would effectively mean that the media can't report on experimental science at all. So I'm going to go back to my original supposition that what you really WANT is for the media not to report on inconvenient facts, and you're hiding behind scientific pedantry to make the case.
> Likewise a correct fact and not an opinion. And newsworthy because driving right now is more likely to get me killed, and that's something I'd like to know.
"lethal" here means more deaths per mile traveled. that might be because roads everywhere are less safe, or it might mean that a greater fraction of total miles are being driven on inherently unsafe stretches of road (with the same local fatality rates as before the crisis). fatalities include pedestrian deaths as well. maybe there is increased risk for pedestrians but not for drivers. the article doesn't say. there's certainly not enough information to say whether you personally are at greater risk driving.