Humans are notoriously bad at understanding risk, and perceptions of danger can vary wildly depending on how the possibility is presented. (David Spiegelhalter recently published an excellent review paper on this topic, and it's a great read even for non-statisticians.) The media has an influence here: wall-to-wall coverage of rare, geographically-contained events like terrorist attacks inflate our sense of risk, especially compared to common, widespread factors like disease or accidents.
YourCauseOfDeath.com presents risk in a very simple way. It chooses a random cause of death and presents it to you. It doesn't correct for factors like sex, age, or medical history: it just rolls a random number and presents causes at a rate according to their actual prevalence. (I assume the data come from the CDC, so it probably does assume you live in the USA.) Click through a couple of times and see what you get:
The creator of the site, Clara Bever, mentioned in a talk yesterday that while "terror attack by Muslim extremist immigrants" is in fact one of the possible causes of death the site may show you, the risk is so low that it's never actually been shown to a visitor of the site since it went live in January 2017.
That's all from us here at the blog for this week. We'll be back on Monday with more -- see you then!