
Why so many celebrities have died in 2016 - ohjeez
http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-36108133
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MicroBerto
The biggest and scariest issue is that all of these celebrities are going
completely unreplaced.

I am a fan of rock and heavy metal, and it is clear that rock stardom is
literally dying off. The days of filling American arenas with rock concerts
are quickly coming to an end, and that deeply saddens me.

Where are the twenty-something kids with attitude who will replace a band like
AC/DC? Is Justin Beiber the best we could do? It's pathetic. Even a guy like
Bon Jovi... Who is next in that line?? Seems like nobody. It's depressing.

This is why I'm going to as many shows for bands like Iron Maiden as possible
right now. When it's over, rock and roll may truly be dead.

This is one of those moments where I realize I'm getting old. I never
understood life extention and the quest for immortality. As things change,
eventually they leave you behind. Find me a 90+ year old who really cares to
stay. And that's how I'm going to feel when rock and roll dies.

~~~
hbosch
Rock and roll lives on in a much more potent, pure form in basements and
bookstores and independent venues all over the world. Arena rock is dead,
because it's bland, diluted, and controlled by corporations.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
It's possibly ( I won't generalize there so I disagree ) bland and diluted
now, but this was not always so. The death of radio and the rise of the CD are
always my usual suspects for why any sort of musical monoculture failed.

"Basements, bookstores and independent venues" dooms the practitioners to
being hobbyists.

~~~
hbosch
>"Basements, bookstores and independent venues" dooms the practitioners to
being hobbyists.

Do you prescribe this theory to hacker culture as well?

~~~
ArkyBeagle
That's slightly different because hacker culture creates a public commons that
practitioners can use to make money. It is not clear to what extent this
actually happens.

Perhaps EDM works like how hacker culture works. I just don't know much about
that . But for more traditional musicians it seems harder to... monetize the
work. But this was probably always true - it was not uncommon for touring
musicians in the radio era before TV to take on sponsors. The span in which
people were sustained mainly by record sales was pretty brief.

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endymi0n
MUCH more likely than the original shallow fluff piece:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion)

~~~
coldtea
The link you sent is about an effect that occurs with random sequences.

Neither the baby boom, nor the huge growth of the media industry (radio, TV,
recorded media, etc) after the fifties are "random".

And then there's the fact that the earlier real stars we have now (as opposed
to merely people famous in the past but already forgotten) are in their 70s
and 80s (e.g. the 60s and 70s musicians and actors etc, all still quite
relevant for modern audiences thanks to vinyl, VHS, tape, TV, CD, DVD and
cable distribution, and --something previous generations lacked until
recently-- instant access to all their works and news from the streaming,
YouTube and the web).

This is no clustering illusion, it's the inevitable combination of life
expectancy + tons of people becoming stars en masse with unprecedented global
distribution at more or less the same time that sees them now in an advanced
age.

~~~
shalmanese
The magnitude of increase can't be explained by demographic factors. It's far
more likely that this is mostly due to a statistical blip with only a minor
contribution from everything else.

~~~
coldtea
The magnitude of the peak for 2016 isn't what's important.

The steady yearly increase is what's important.

------
sandebert
Surprisingly often I find myself thinking about poker in everyday life (even
while not playing poker, that is). And surprisingly often I find something I
learned in poker is also applicable in life outside the game. In this case,
the concept of _variance_ comes to mind. Basically that values (for instance
number of deaths of celebrities) are spread out. Sometimes there are more, and
sometimes there are less. And that's just how it is, it doesn't automatically
mean there's a trend change either way.

Lots of pages out there to read about it, here's one that might give more
insight than my comment:
[http://www.thepokerbank.com/strategy/other/variance/](http://www.thepokerbank.com/strategy/other/variance/)

~~~
derefr
Or, from another field: it might look like some stock investors are "hot" or
"cold", but that doesn't mean that investing with a currently-"hot" investor
will give you any better odds. The variance in the market is high; sometimes
people get a streak of wins without that being any more than luck.

(Some people, like Warren Buffet, do more; but if you know enough about their
strategies to differentiate between the people getting lucky and the people
"playing smart", you know enough to do your investing yourself.)

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yeldarb
I can believe that the long-term trend is upwards but the demographic
reasoning seems like it should apply on the scale of decades not years. It
doesn't explain why 2016 would be worse than 2015 or 2014.

This year is likely just an outlier.

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stretchwithme
The year I was born, nobody that I knew died. Slowly, but surely that number
started to rise, as I got to know about more people.

And now with the Internet making us aware of so much of what's going on and
who's doing it, that trend is amplified.

And the more one focuses on that trend, or how long ago something happened,
the older one feels.

Which is another reason that living in the moment is often a very good thing.

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jcoffland
Lots of "unimportant" people die every day.

~~~
copperx
About 100,000 of them, to be more precise.

Your comment made me want to revisit Feynman's Letter:
[http://www.lettersofnote.com/2015/10/do-not-remain-
nameless-...](http://www.lettersofnote.com/2015/10/do-not-remain-nameless-to-
yourself.html)

------
sod
Maybe there are just more and more people with each generation
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population)

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Aelinsaar
Prince doesn't really fit into that model, being 57, although maybe there's
some modification for being a male of african-american descent? Congenital
cardiovascular issues, and whatnot.

~~~
jtolmar
Not all individual celebrity deaths have to fit the model for the phenomenon
to show up, though. The proposed model just has to be one of the largest (or
spikiest) components. As long as people who die for other reasons are fairly
constant, they don't prevent the spike from showing up.

~~~
Aelinsaar
Of course, I was just wondering if Prince could be made to fit this model,
despite seeming to deviate from it.

