WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING

Ever wonder why people’s perception of the incidence of crime, terrorism, kidnapping and other violent acts is often much higher than the reality? … Social media’s algorithms tend to lump us into buckets and feed us information that more or less conforms to what we’ve previously showed an interest in. Doing this across millions of people has meant dividing and polarizing populations into nonoverlapping views of reality . ... As a result, when inaccurate information infects one of these echo chambers — for example, that kidnapping is on the rise or that vaccines cause autism — there are few checks on its spread . ...

The end result is systems that, whatever their makers’ intent, are highly optimized to make us believe things that aren’t true. Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc. (parent of Google and its YouTube division) along with a few other tech companies, have built history’s biggest, farthest-reaching and most profitable delusion machine.

Christopher Mims, The Wall Street Journal

One of the greatest terrors of women’s lives is breast cancer, which accounts for 1 in 30 female deaths a year, yet 1 in every 4 female deaths stems from heart disease. As nonprofit fundraising literature repeats ad infinitum, more women die of heart disease than all cancers combined . ... In truth, heart disease has become a victim of its own success. Yes, 90 percent of all heart attacks are preventable — but more than 735,000 Americans annually still suffer one . ...

Worst case, there’s always a transplant at the end of the road, right? Not necessarily. Heart donors are scarce. In one of those dark public health coincidences, the near universal use of seat belts caused a precipitous drop in automobile deaths — and in turn, hearts for those in need. The number available for transplant has remained static at 2,500 a year, while the number of people waiting for a heart at any given time is at least 3,000. Waiting times, which can be fatal, are growing.

Mimi Swartz, The New York Times