8 ms·
Micromort
- _dwt 6y agoI think about this sometimes from a slightly different angle - not the "expected value" number of deaths, but rather the (utilitarian?) math of actions which affect a huge number of people a little bit each. If you waste, say, 5 minutes each of a million people's time, in some sense that's almost 10 years of life lost. I think about this a lot when there are discussions about whether performance matters any more in software.
- dang 6y agoSee also, from 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6266462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6266462 and from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10571077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10571077 and a day later, the unfortunately unnoticed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10584488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10584488.
- Symmetry 6y agoThe first thing I did back in February with the Coronavirus was figure out how much coming down with it would increase my yearly exposure to micromorts (it doubled it). That was good for figuring out how afraid I should be compared to other sources of danger in my life.
- buhhh 6y agoThat's great and all but did you also consider your impact on others? Also, I sincerely doubt you were able to get an accurate picture of risk in February.
- Enginerrrd 6y agoThere are ways to figure that out based on average infection chains and risk, and I've done this for flu. But you couldn't do that now with available information. The value you'd get is highly dependent on the R_naught (which you can get a reasonable guess of right now) and the percentage of the population which ultimately gets infected. (Which is a much more uncertain value.)
- Symmetry 6y agoOh, I wasn't really thinking about my impact on others until I was considering whether to go to MODEX early in March. But early estimates of SARS-2 lethality from February have stood up pretty well even if we didn't understand many of the mechanisms at the time. For instance at the time I was very worried about Covid-19's effect on the brain and had no idea that clotting could be an issue.
- teeray 6y agoThat is an interesting limitation of micromorts in this context—-they’re kind of statistically focused on the individual. I wonder if there’s some similar measure where we could basically treat everyone as slightly radioactive. Entering an enclosed space would reduce the maximum separation of everyone and increase the minimum possible exposure (and by consequence, everyone’s chance of death). Since we’d then have a useful quantity to measure and track, we could then do accounting with our risk of death by COVID-19 (i.e. “I’m not going to the store today because I’m over my exposure limit for the week”)
- jjice 6y agoHow did you go about calculating that? Did you just use the deaths / population measure that the Wikipedia article mentions, or was it trickier than that? Sounds like a "fun" way to calculate risk.
- biolurker1 6y agoYou operated on completely unknown information. Still now we have ni clue about long term consequences even on very mild cases
- clairity 6y ago"doubled" sounds ominous. twice tiny is still tiny. for instance, flying 100 times/year (100 times tiny risk) is hardly riskier than flying once (tiny risk). most people don't even give that risk a second thought. many common events can double risks (or more).
- JNRowe 6y ago[only kinda related, but...] Micromorts feature a fair amount on Tim Harford's excellent More or Less¹ show. It strikes me that people who like the micromort as a topic would probably find the podcast generally interesting too. Edit: After following dang's links to previous micromort discussions I see that other people will bring up More or Less in these threads too ;) 1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd
- JamesBarney 6y agoAlso see the related concept for life expectancy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microlife https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microlife
- vorpalhex 6y agoThe value here I mostly see is comparative - would you rather smoke N cigarettes or have Y steaks? That kind of tradeoff comparison tends to be what people are better at, and is what tends to modify my own behavior the most.
- dandare 6y agoI was surprised to see that 1 cigarette equals to about 140 charcoal-broiled steaks. From this point of view, you should never ever in your life worry about eating charcoal-broiled steak.
- abathur 6y agoUnless you don't smoke, I guess? :)
- Dick_Snitzel 6y agoQuoting: 'Did you also consider your impact on others?' Cos: 'Stress results...often... in a kind of enviousness'? (-;
- cortesoft 6y agoOr you should REALLY worry about smoking cigarettes.
- kubanczyk 6y agoI hate the units which you cannot easily add: 10 micromorts + 10 micromorts = 19,999999 micromorts 500 milimorts + 500 milimorts = 750 milimorts Playing russian roulette using a sixshooter loaded with 3 rounds is 50% chance of death. It's 75% if you do another try. "Adding" another try does not translate to "adding" the metric. It just adds confusion.
- anamexis 6y agoWhile that is annoying, I would argue this isn't an issue with the units, but just a fact about how probability works. Setting aside micromorts, you can't say a 50% chance of death + a 50% chance of death = 100% chance of death, either.
- kubanczyk 6y agoNah, it is a issue with units for me. Speaking primitively: % and ‰ look weirdly and add weirdly - they are easy to remember. But when some unit looks like a meter or gram (especially using the micro- prefix here), it should behave accordingly.
- periodontal 6y agoOf course, even your example units don't always behave like you want. For velocities, 150 megameters/second + 150 megameters/second ≈ 240 megameters/second.
- bjourne 6y agoI wonder how many micromorts a shotgun to the head would be. A million? Ten million? A hundred million? And what would the LD50 of micromorts be? 500k?
- advisedwang 6y agowell 1 million is guaranteed death, so I would expect a likely-fatal event to be just under that.
- BenjiWiebe 6y agoYou can't survive a shotgun blast to the head. Most of your head will be mist.
- BenjiWiebe 6y agoA shotgun blast to the head is guaranteed fatal, so that would be 1 million micromorts (guaranteed death).
- slyall 6y agoPeople survive self-inflicted shotgun blasts. I understand because they flinch as they fire and the shot is not "head on". A notibil eexample is from the 1990 Judas Priest lawsuit. "[] placed a 12-gauge shotgun under his own chin and proceeded to fire the weapon, dying instantly. [] followed, but survived the self-inflicted gunshot wound with a severely disfigured face"
- lifeformed 6y agoIt's probably easier to think about how rare it'd be to survive a shotgun blast to the head. Maybe one a million chance? It's happened before. So perhaps 999,999 micromorts.
- hankchinaski 6y agothis is an interesting take on covid and how it's put into perspective with other things using micromorts https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/well/live/putting-the-risk-of-covid-19-in-perspective.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/well/live/putting-the-ris... from NYT: Converting this to micromort language, an individual living in New York City has experienced roughly 50 additional micromorts of risk per day because of Covid-19. That means you were roughly twice as likely to die as you would have been if you were serving in the U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan throughout 2010
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoAnd Bill Gates and I have an average net worth in the billions of dollars. Point is that we know Covid has very different risk profiles based on who you are. Saying "That means you were roughly twice as likely to die as you would have been if you were serving in the U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan throughout 2010" probably underestimates your risk if you live in a nursing home, but it vastly, vastly overestimates your risk if you're 20 and in good health.
- cheerlessbog 6y agoPresumably there is a similar range of risks among those deployed to Afghanistan.
- maddyboo 6y agoSee also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpsons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpsons_paradox
- maest 6y agoIf you're interested in your own, personal, risk, then you can keep applying factors relevant to your situation and get a more refined estimate. I don't see that as an issue with the measure. Moreover, average micromort increase in a population is a useful metric, in the same way GDP is a useful metric, even if your individual productivity is very different.
- Lio 6y agoIt's all very well talking about million to one chances but if you're a fan of Terry Pratchett's Discworld you'll know they almost always happen!* * https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Million-to-one_chance https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Million-to-one_chance
- hirundo 6y agoDoes anyone remember the scifi short story where the whole economy is based on micromort credits? E.g. a nice dinner might be 2 micromorts. To pay for it you stick your finger in a device that does absolutely nothing 999,998 times out of a million, and kills you the other 2 times. Since everyone starts with the same number of credits, I suppose that's a sort of equity.
- sterlind 6y agoThere was an episode of Sliders where you can withdraw however much money you want from an ATM, but each dollar is a ticket in a euthanasia raffle to keep overpopulation down. A little different from micromorts though.
- gxon 6y agoInteresting. I've recently been thinking of something similar as a form of population control in a post-aging world. Rather than individual resource consumption, every time you reproduce, you jump forward in the euthanasia line. I suspect this would not work very well. There's got to be some more formal line of research or thought about population management in a post-aging world.
- hirundo 6y agoCould you give any government the power to euthanize innocent people and trust them to use it for only that one narrow purpose?
- gxon 6y agoLike I suggested, it's highly problematic. But what are the alternatives if people stop dying of old age? If the birth rate is even marginally higher than the very small death rate, we eventually over populate. The only way to resolve that is some kind of culling mechanism. War, starvation, and disease are what usually happens to humanity when resources get too constrained. But now we have nukes.
- 6y ago
- ixtli 6y agoThis was featured in a lovely QI bit from years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Brsn5Z_uVKk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Brsn5Z_uVKk (Featuring trevor noah before he became internationally famous!)
- GreeniFi 6y agoNot to be confused with _petite mort_ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_petite_mort https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_petite_mort
- devmunchies 6y agoIt would be more interesting to break these down. Example, "Travelling 6 miles (9.7 km) by motorbike (accident) = 1 micromort" That can be broken down to motorcycle on the freeway (light traffic) vs congested city vs N traffic lights vs curvy mountain roads, riding around sunset, etc. Knowing how dangerous something is in aggregate is not as useful as the specifics.
- gxon 6y agoThis is a problem for both the people who are and are not interested in participating in extreme behavior. Those who are will more likely have a false sense of lower risk than their actions would subject them to. Those who aren't might be scared away by a larger value than they would actually be subject to. This could even become a self fulfilling prophecy where activities with high average micromorts will only attract people more willing to engage in risky behavior, thus inflating the tail of extreme behavior that causes most of the mortality, increasing the activity's average micromorts over time.