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The statistics don't actually tell you YOUR risk. They tell if the risk a population has on average collectively. Your personal risks could be much higher or l

The statistics don't actually tell you YOUR risk. They tell if the risk a population has on average collectively. Your personal risks could be much higher or lower, and quantifying them is basically impossible. It only makes sense to use the "average" risk level for reasoning if the sampled population is particularly representative of you, which is vanishingly unlikely due to the "curse of dimensionality". It makes a lot of sense to decide public policy of how driving should be managed based on those statistics, but is hilariously inappropriate to base your decision to get in a car and drive based on them.

whatshisface 4y ago
>It makes a lot of sense to decide public policy of how driving should be managed based on those statistics, but is hilariously inappropriate to base your decision to get in a car and drive based on them. Driving and surgery both involve a lot of risks you can do nothing about, making statistics (selected for your demographic, of course) the most you can know. Statistics are not a good way to predict whether one's self will buy a red shirt or a green shirt (when you can know exactly what you will do because you are deciding), but you have no say in whether or not your anesthesiologist will guess the right dose or whether your surgeon will put the sutures in exactly the right positions to stop a post-op bleed. The same goes for most accidents, which are called "accidents" because culpable negligence is actually pretty rare.