I'm not necessarily trying to resurrect a "zombie thread" or anything, but I was watching a discussion on one of those "talking head" shows tonight and (false) results of this study were quickly mentioned in order to bolster a (frankly, weak) talking point.
Anyway, so I searched to see if there was a thread here about it (I wasn't around back when it was discussed here) and found this.
A few things about it are interesting to me:
1) That it was yet another example of a misleading "scientific" claim that the media ran wild with without ever checking to see if the actual results (or their sloppy interpretation of it) in the actual study was actually even correct (that's a lot of actual actuallys).
We know now that the specific claim (i.e., mortality rate among middle-aged white men is on the rise) was, indeed, quite incorrect.
2) After the OP, several people credulously (and understandably) accepted the claims in the article and posted their own hypotheses for explanations for the supposed results.
That's fine. That's what people do. We want to come up with explanations for things. But, I think this is a somewhat cautionary tale in the importance of verifying "facts" before accepting them.
Then, as quoted above, Rob posted evidence which showed that the way the results were reported by the media were, indeed, incorrect and misleading. However, nobody paid any attention to that and people continued to post about why they agreed with the claimed results in the OP.
In fact, there was another recent article (also by Gelman) discussing how wrong those reports were:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...hen-the-legend-becomes-fact-print-the-legend/
It turned out, though, that (a) the trends in death rates among men was much different than women, and, in fact, (b) after adjusting for age composition (the “middle-aged” category in the United States has had an increase in average age during the past two decades as the baby-boom generation has moved through), the death rate among middle-aged white men has actually decreased during the past few years.The comparison with other ethnic groups and other countries still seems strong — Case and Deaton’s main findings hold up — but it’s just wrong to report that middle-aged white men are dying off. No matter how you slice it, it’s white women who are having the problem
Gelman continues:
They’re talking about an increase in mortality among middle-aged white men, even though it’s the women, not the men, who’ve seen an increase in death rate. But the erroneous statement fits so well with the pundits’ narrative of white male distress, it’s no surprise that it keeps popping up. When an apparent fact is so consistent with everything else you think you know, it’s hard to shake loose from it.
Indeed.
Hell, like a lot of you, I was a bit concerned when I first heard about the study. But, at the time, like many if not most of us, I didn't take the time to investigate it further (I had way too much going on at the time). Thank God for the skeptics and other interested parties out there who do help us all out by digging deeper into such things.
We're a pretty smart bunch here (mostly
) with some pretty sharp critical thinkers but this a good reminder that we're all very susceptible to
confirmation bias.
