Part of it is that more concentrated events are easier to do something about.
By some way of contrast, fixing the diffuse deaths from car accidents requires re-licensing the entire population with stricter training, a metric f*$#-ton of road re-design, etc. Even if you could muster the political will to make it happen it'd be a colossally expensive endeavor. Plus, the fact that people are willing to to voluntarily engage with the roads as-is on a daily basis suggests that people are comfortable with that level of risk.
I personally think it's worth making our roads safer, but my opinions don't keep that from being a hard problem, and most of that hardness comes from its diffuse nature.
Contrast that with plane accidents. In some sense, we're lucky this was a cargo plane. This could have just as easily been 3 days worth of car accident deaths, and the only reason air travel is anywhere near as safe as the status quo is because of intense scrutiny of events like this, making the entire system safer over time.
This is a legitimate question and you shouldn't be getting voted down.
There's a"phase diagram" that can be used to model and estimate the "newsworthiness" of deaths.
Roughly speaking:
The sum of the value[1] of the individuals dying at one time[2] determines how newsworthy the incident[3] is.
[1] You can estimate the value of a person by summing the expected income for their remaining life. This may need some "tweaking" in some circumstances. For example, soldiers are an expense to governments, not a tax revenue stream. Alternatively, pretend their annual salary is interest payments on some asset. At, say, 5% this means multiplying their salary by 20x to estimate their "worth". This is why Israel exchanges hundreds of Palestinian prisoners for dozens of their citizens. This why you've never even heard of most civil wars in Africa, even though they often kill far more than, say, the war in Gaza or Ukraine.
[2] "At the same instant" is more newsworthy than a "statistic". One overturned bus killing a bunch of kids makes headlines, the greater number of traffic accidents nation-wide on the same day... not so much.
[3] A cause, especially an intelligent one such as murder, war, terrorisms, etc... is more newsworthy than air pollution, traffic, old age, bad diets, etc... People like to tell stories, they want to attribute things to an agent. Non-agentic things feel inevitable, even if they're actually easily fixed.
The scale of the kinds of death you cited are typically personal. The actual act of the death has a local scope. It tends to be cordoned off and lacks spectacle in the sense that it doesn't produce tons of rampant collateral damage. Further, in most of those situations, there's some semblance of having autonomy and the possibility of personal choice and escape.
Not so with flight. Airplanes are a massive scale transportation system that has way more passengers than operators, and we rescind basically all control to those few operating experts to keep us safe. Couple that with the fact that, in most cases airplane accidents have breadth of collateral damage, and you have a perfect storm of human fear. Not only is it a system which we have no hope of controlling or escaping (in the case of accidents), it is super dramatic, comparatively rare, and thus eye catching.
People's fear of the lack of control is only second to their fear of the unknown.
For that matter, the massive nuclear reactions going on in the sun every second, the tiniest fraction of which fuels all the things that you mentioned earlier is even more important. "The same thing happened today that happened yesterday" isn't news. That's why the sun isn't the headline every day.
Discussion forming (25 points, 7 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45816963
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Title needs to update... it is now 4.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45816963
[flagged]
Part of it is that more concentrated events are easier to do something about.
By some way of contrast, fixing the diffuse deaths from car accidents requires re-licensing the entire population with stricter training, a metric f*$#-ton of road re-design, etc. Even if you could muster the political will to make it happen it'd be a colossally expensive endeavor. Plus, the fact that people are willing to to voluntarily engage with the roads as-is on a daily basis suggests that people are comfortable with that level of risk.
I personally think it's worth making our roads safer, but my opinions don't keep that from being a hard problem, and most of that hardness comes from its diffuse nature.
Contrast that with plane accidents. In some sense, we're lucky this was a cargo plane. This could have just as easily been 3 days worth of car accident deaths, and the only reason air travel is anywhere near as safe as the status quo is because of intense scrutiny of events like this, making the entire system safer over time.
Unusual things interest us. A plane crash is unusual. The other things you listed are not unusual.
Because nobody gives a shit about the ordinary.
Cargo planes dont usually fall put of the sky in blazing fireballs.
Its a spectacle, people like spectacles, good or bad.
Even if no one died in this incident, its novelty is what makes it so interesting.
This is a legitimate question and you shouldn't be getting voted down.
There's a"phase diagram" that can be used to model and estimate the "newsworthiness" of deaths.
Roughly speaking:
The sum of the value[1] of the individuals dying at one time[2] determines how newsworthy the incident[3] is.
[1] You can estimate the value of a person by summing the expected income for their remaining life. This may need some "tweaking" in some circumstances. For example, soldiers are an expense to governments, not a tax revenue stream. Alternatively, pretend their annual salary is interest payments on some asset. At, say, 5% this means multiplying their salary by 20x to estimate their "worth". This is why Israel exchanges hundreds of Palestinian prisoners for dozens of their citizens. This why you've never even heard of most civil wars in Africa, even though they often kill far more than, say, the war in Gaza or Ukraine.
[2] "At the same instant" is more newsworthy than a "statistic". One overturned bus killing a bunch of kids makes headlines, the greater number of traffic accidents nation-wide on the same day... not so much.
[3] A cause, especially an intelligent one such as murder, war, terrorisms, etc... is more newsworthy than air pollution, traffic, old age, bad diets, etc... People like to tell stories, they want to attribute things to an agent. Non-agentic things feel inevitable, even if they're actually easily fixed.
This seems incredibly reasonable!
I think there might be some kind of "underdog" component missing, since it feels somewhat wrong to frame that under "cause".
I think it has to do with scale and control.
The scale of the kinds of death you cited are typically personal. The actual act of the death has a local scope. It tends to be cordoned off and lacks spectacle in the sense that it doesn't produce tons of rampant collateral damage. Further, in most of those situations, there's some semblance of having autonomy and the possibility of personal choice and escape.
Not so with flight. Airplanes are a massive scale transportation system that has way more passengers than operators, and we rescind basically all control to those few operating experts to keep us safe. Couple that with the fact that, in most cases airplane accidents have breadth of collateral damage, and you have a perfect storm of human fear. Not only is it a system which we have no hope of controlling or escaping (in the case of accidents), it is super dramatic, comparatively rare, and thus eye catching.
People's fear of the lack of control is only second to their fear of the unknown.
For that matter, the massive nuclear reactions going on in the sun every second, the tiniest fraction of which fuels all the things that you mentioned earlier is even more important. "The same thing happened today that happened yesterday" isn't news. That's why the sun isn't the headline every day.