> Convincing a million 20-year-olds to sleep an unnecessary hour a day is equivalent, in terms of their hours of wakefulness, to killing 62,500 of them.
I thought specifically about how to phrase the last sentence in order for it to be only about facts rather than accusing anyone and the “convincing a million 20-years-olds” appears clearly to be just a thought experiment to me.
For what it’s worth, I baulked at that sentence too. If you want to avoid the extra connotations, you could phrase it more like ”...will cause them collectively to forgo 62,500 lifetimes’ worth of waking hours”. (Hopefully something less clunky than that, though.)
edit: to clarify, my issue was with the comparison, not with the implied blame. Although you explicitly claim equivalence only ‘in terms of their hours of wakefulness’, to me as a reader it seems like you are doing one of two things with that sentence: either suggesting that causing a million 20-year olds to sleep an extra unnecessary hour per day is, in terms of overall badness, somewhere in the ballpark of killing 62,500 of them; or making the comparison for no good reason other than rhetorical shock value, knowing that it is technically defensible due to the qualifier (‘in terms of their hours of wakefulness’), but only because that allows you to brush over the differences between extra sleep and premature death.
For what it’s worth, I baulked at that sentence too. If you want to avoid the extra connotations, you could phrase it more like ”...will cause them collectively to forgo 62,500 lifetimes’ worth of waking hours”. (Hopefully something less clunky than that, though.)
edit: to clarify, my issue was with the comparison, not with the implied blame. Although you explicitly claim equivalence only ‘in terms of their hours of wakefulness’, to me as a reader it seems like you are doing one of two things with that sentence: either suggesting that causing a million 20-year olds to sleep an extra unnecessary hour per day is, in terms of overall badness, somewhere in the ballpark of killing 62,500 of them; or making the comparison for no good reason other than rhetorical shock value, knowing that it is technically defensible due to the qualifier (‘in terms of their hours of wakefulness’), but only because that allows you to brush over the differences between extra sleep and premature death.