"Traveling 10 or 20 miles by bicycle"
They only assume the accidental nature of riding a bike and ignore the health benefits. A good article highlighting this http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/06/13/bicycling-the-safe...
Micromort
11–20 of 102 posts
Re: Micromort
#12A lot of this seems weird. If I imbibe 0.5 liters of wine exactly once in my life I doubt there's any effect. Same for 2 cigarettes. For a lot of things there are thresholds that must be crossed before any effect is created.
Can you prove that?
If a million people each smoke two cigarettes in their lifetimes, it's not impossible that one of them might suffer a cigarette-related health detriment.
Re: Micromort
#13Holy crap. I live in NYC, where I walk everywhere, drink, and fly several times per year. Apparently I'm screwed.
Yep. We all are. Sure is fun in between though.
Re: Micromort
#14The idea of scaling probabilities (by 10^6) misses the point. Log scales are better at revealing orders of magnitude! How about dbMorts instead?
I have always struggled with log/db, can you explain your proposed system?
Re: Micromort
#15"Traveling 10 or 20 miles by bicycle" They only assume the accidental nature of riding a bike and ignore the health benefits. A good article highlighting this http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/06/13/bicycling-the-safe...
Hence the 'accident' written in brackets next to it.
Re: Micromort
#16"Traveling 10 or 20 miles by bicycle" They only assume the accidental nature of riding a bike and ignore the health benefits. A good article highlighting this http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/06/13/bicycling-the-safe...
Furthermore each listed risky activity should be balanced with the micromort risk of not doing it.
For example suppose I take a plane, then ride a bike to go hiking for a week with friends. Maybe this trip will save me many micromort from health and mental perspectives. Having a deeper friendship is certainly also a net positive.
Re: Micromort
#17http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis
We're done here.
Re: Micromort
#18It should be noted that used in Thinking Fast and Slow context this micromort induce can be used to show how much we human have very hard time grasping low probability events.
All the lottery and insurance business is just a scam against us taking advantage of this miss computation of micro risks.
Re: Micromort
#19So is 1 mort a guaranteed death or a [edit:] 1 - 1/e chance of death?
Re: Micromort
#20A lot of this seems weird. If I imbibe 0.5 liters of wine exactly once in my life I doubt there's any effect. Same for 2 cigarettes. For a lot of things there are thresholds that must be crossed before any effect is created.
Why do you assume there must be a threshold?
If you had two identical groups of a million people each and one group received 0.5 liters of wine per person, would you really be shocked that the group that got the wine had a single extra death?