Brotherzed comments on The Affect Heuristic - Less Wrong
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Comments (65)
The way you're summarizing the "disease" study mangles what was described in the abstract, even though the abstract makes your own point. I haven't checked the rest. I went digging for the abstract:
The way you described it --
Crucially, your verbiage as-is provides Group A with a 12% total population mortality rate, and Group B with a 24% case fatality rate, and those are incommensurable. I'm assuming you meant to say the information was presented to two separate groups, maybe too generously there too. The original study very explicitly specifies mortality rate for both figures. I.E. 24.14 out of 100 to be fatal for the whole population (for a cancer, and not expressed as a % - different priming effects on some).
If you got that past all of us, I think it shows there are chinks in our armor as well. I wouldn't deny that the affect heuristic is real, but the way you present the information doesn't pass my smell test.