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If 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 th
by maest 6y ago
If 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.
- keeganpoppen 6y agoit's not a criticism of the measure, it's a (correct) criticism of people using averages in misleading/wrong ways. though i'm actually a big fan of this unit (e.g. as an expression of the relative risks of various activities), it's clear from the comments section that when people are presented with a simple number they tend to treat the underlying reality that it reflects as simple too. this is FAR from the only domain where people reduce complicated things to scalars, and then do atrocious, hideous, unspeakable things to those scalars (take standard deviations, %changes over time, and the like), and then make claims about reality based on the results of those mathematical perversions (i take particular aim at the social sciences here. sorry. they certainly don't have a monopoly on statistical innumeracy, but their domain is just more rife for this sort of abuse).