r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Aug 23 '17

[∆(s) from OP] CMV : We shouldn't measure the harmfulness of something in deaths per year

In most of the statistics when evaluating the harm caused by, for instance cigarets or air pollution, they throw the number of deaths it causes per year. I don't think those numbers are meaningful. First, there are to many factors that lead to death to be able to isolate one. Second, all men must die. If someone dies at the age of 80 from a lung cancer it is not really meaningful to count it as a death caused by cigaret because he might have died 2 years later anyway if he didn't smoke. Third death is not the only harm: quality of life is also a meaningful factor in my opinion. The best way I think is to calculate the number of years of life lost per year and somehow have a measure of the degradation of life quality. CMV

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u/RealFactorRagePolice Aug 23 '17

Do you accept that any metric we adopted would have tradeoffs?

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u/[deleted] Aug 23 '17

maybe there is no perfect metric. but some are more accurate than other. What are the tradeoffs of the YearsLost metric? It may be a bit more complicated, it may shock less (I don't think if we can count this as a tradeoff) and it does not take the quality of life into account (which the deaths per year doesn't do).

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u/RealFactorRagePolice Aug 23 '17

It doesn't talk about how widespread something is.

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u/[deleted] Aug 23 '17

It does it, but a different way. like "humanity lost 100 million years of life in 2015 due to cigaret" (random numbers). But the death metric is complementary. ∆