mattmns said:Well I thought I had a write-in vote, but it was not exact. I will vote just to make you happy, although my choice would be much higher [tex]1: \infty [/tex] or so.
BicycleTree said:Also, "people statistically favor death from obesity as opposed to death from terrorism" is no conclusion of mine.
Careful, watch his original wording. He's trying to get you to compare deaths due to terrorism to ALL other forms of death, which would include other forms of homicide, casualties of war, negligence, natural disasters, suicide, famine, disease, inattention to your health, a genetic predisposition, a chronic ailment since childhood, occupational injury, etc. He has not asked about preventable vs non-preventable, nor has he asked you to compare the value of any individual life; he has asked you to determine how to allocate funds for preventing one cause of death vs. EVERY other cause of death. He has not provided any reasonable answer choice to fit with his question, indeed, has not even provided a reasonable explanation for the options he chose to include. He is also not asking about newsworthiness of the deaths, yet we all know his agenda is to use this poll to justify his statements on newsworthiness, which is what most of us saw through the moment this poll appeared.mattmns said:Well, you cannot do anything to prevent terrorism, you can, however, not smoke, eat healthy, etc.
Oh, here's something that's confusing. Here you define your ratios as Y:X but your poll says X:Y. Which is it?BicycleTree said:If you have the ability, through distributing money and manpower, to save x lives from terrorists or y lives from other causes, how great does the ratio y:x need to be before you are undecided which group of lives to save?
Agreed. And he's done it all through very tricky wording so as to entrap you no matter what you do. He sets up a ratio under the pretense that it's to allocate money and manpower, as if you're voting based on ratio of fund allocation, but then goes on to say that it's actually a ratio of lives to determine all-or-nothing efforts to save those lives, which of course is contradictory to his claim that this is a real-life situation that people have to face in allocated funding, because in real life, it's not all-or-none, you can choose to allocate proportions of funding according to relative risk of death and projected benefit of saving lives. For example, you can decide that all the money in the world won't stop someone from over eating, but with money and manpower, you can fight terrorists. Or, you can decide that some money into obesity research, some money into police forces, some money into anti-terrorism task forces, etc...will make a dent into each of those. Or you can prioritize and say terrorism is an immediate threat that we need to stop now before it gets worse, obesity is a gradual threat, so we can postpone funding that until we deal with the immediate threat, or this particular problem isn't claiming many lives, so we should put greater funding toward something claiming more lives. Yet, NONE of this goes toward the newsworthiness of any form of death.Knavish said:This is what you are prodding us to say; why else would the poll be skewed like this? You're basically asking us how many obesity-related deaths it takes to be equivalent to a terrorist-related death. And that's a sick, sick question. Nobody wants to weigh lives.
First, if you read the question and the answer choices carefully, you'll see it's not a valid question because it is heavily biased in a single direction. Second, it's not just an issue of timing, but the context of BTs remarks leading up to this poll.Physics is Phun said:I don't see what is wrong with this thread at all. It is a very valid question. The timing might be not have been the greatest but it is still a very reasonable thought problem.
To understand the sentiments being expressed, you'll need to follow the train of argument from the thread on the London explosions (note BT's comments and the responses he received): https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=673668#post673668I am quite surprised that most of you are acting so hostile to BT. It is a perfectly reasonable question that, especially given the anonimity of the internet, should be anwserable truthfully by everone.
The only bias in the poll is that it does not include ratios greater than 10:10, which you have agreed is a negligible bias.a clearly biased poll
Maybe nobody has the right, but the fact is that some people have the power. There are cases where some people have to make that kind of choice.kaos said:It seems to me that this poll is starting to look dubious. it is almost as if one can assign a value or watever to anothers life. NO ONE has that RIGHT.
BicycleTree said:You would rather that such comments be made far away from what they are relevant to? If I am saying that excessive regard is being paid to a certain topic, where else to place that comment than in a discussion of that topic?
BicycleTree said:Edit: Brewnog, the difference between this and other focuses of attention is that this one is highly political and therefore important.
BicycleTree said:And you know, I have asked a question recently.
There is no problem with the amount of discussion that the question of the amount of discussion of terrorist actions with low body count is receiving is receiving. The way you phrased it, that seemed to be what you were referring to; possibly you misinterpreted what I said.So what's the problem with the amount of discussion it received then?
Now you say:BicycleTree said:..that non-nuclear terrorism is insignificant compared to larger, curable problems such as obesity..
BicycleTree said:..there are reasons--terrorism being a cause much out of the victim's control being one of them--to view deaths from terrorism as somewhat more important than deaths from other causes..
The assumption about uncontrolled deaths is that an "other death" is often a preventable death."Other deaths" are deaths to cancer, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer's, accidents, pneumonia, etc.