8 ms·
Micromort
- s_baby 13y agoSo per mile jets are only ~4 times safer than cars? That's a little unsettling.
- srl 13y agoThat stat shocked me too, and from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Statistics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Statistics, it appears to be false. However, that table isn't sourced very well either. Looking at the source, he seems to be lumping shorter plane rides in with the long-distance (safer) ones. The danger is largely in takeoff and landing, as far as I understand. I also can't tell if the source takes into account private jets, which are less regulated and likely more risky than passenger jets. I'd also imagine the statistic varies a lot of you limit yourself to flights involving the US and our colonies[1]. Or the source could just be wrong - he could have mistakenly used the chance of being involved in a crash, rather than the chance of dying. That would put it in the right order or magnitude, I think. [1] With all the "evil empire" rhetoric flying around lately...
- mikeash 13y agoThere are no reliable statistics for the safety of commercial air travel in the US these days. It's not for lack of trying. It's simply that commercial air travel in the US is so safe that there isn't enough data to compile anything like a reasonable risk figure. Prior to the Asiana crash, the last fatal airliner crash in the US was in 2009, and there were no fatalities in 2008 or 2007. So, yes, they're much safer than that number would imply, but it's hard to say exactly how much.
- eli 13y agoConsider how much time the typical person spends in a car versus a plane; of course there are many more car deaths.
- tyoma 13y agoThe numbers were from 1979; air travel has gotten considerable safer since then. Then again, so have automobiles.
- SatvikBeri 13y agoThe Wikipedia article claims air pollution from living in New York or Boston is 30 times worse than the risk from living with a smoker, though that was in 1979. Presumably air pollution has become much less severe since then. Does anyone know the figure today?
- tankenmate 13y agoIndeed, the EPA has steadily increased the stringency of particulate matter (PM) standards over the years (these have an impact on car/engine design and fuel (sulphur and nitrogen content)); you can find more information here: http://www.epa.gov/pm/ http://www.epa.gov/pm/
- bodyfour 13y agoThese days people vastly overestimate the risk of second-hand smoke. Based on the numbers in this article living with a smoker is equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes every two years. i.e. not much. Second-hand smoke does have some health consequences -- for instance poor air quality is strongly linked to childhood asthma. It's also certainly considered a nuisance by most people. Anyway, I'm not surprised at all that living in a polluted city would expose you to far more danger than a smoker at home. 30x sounds fairly reasonable.
- brokentone 13y agoHoly crap. I live in NYC, where I walk everywhere, drink, and fly several times per year. Apparently I'm screwed.
- cdcarter 13y agoAs long as you aren't taking canoes!
- Zoomla 13y agoif you can swim and you aren't in the middle of the ocean you are ok...
- harrytuttle 13y agoDidn't NY flood a while ago?
- BenoitEssiambre 13y agoYeah WTF! I didn't realize canoes were so dangerous! That almost can't be right.
- ISL 13y agoYep. We all are. Sure is fun in between though.
- dsimms 13y agoThe idea of scaling probabilities (by 10^6) misses the point. Log scales are better at revealing orders of magnitude! How about dbMorts instead?
- elnate 13y agoI have always struggled with log/db, can you explain your proposed system?
- andrewvc 13y agoA 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.
- lukifer 13y agoSome of these fall into the old correlation-causation trap. People who wear leather jackets are more likely to get into motorcycle accidents, but putting on a jacket alone doesn't change your likelihood of an accident. There's also contexts missing from many of the other statistics: where you drive and the kind of car affects the mortality rate of driving, for instance. The micromort is still a useful concept in specific controlled conditions (radiation exposure), or as a first approximation of quantifying risk, but the general statistics should definitely be taken with many grains of salt.
- ISL 13y agoCan 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.
- _pferreir_ 13y agoThe question is whether that person would suffer from that same problem anyway, due to some other cause. This is where statistical significance comes in.
- eli 13y agoWhy 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?
- jlgreco 13y agoI would be shocked to see any statistically significant[1] difference. The things about alcohol that kill you are cumulative. 3 drinks isn't going to kill your internal organs, not even 1 in a million times. [1] I would be shocked if, give two groups of a million, both groups had the exact same number of deaths in a predetermined time period. 1 death difference between two groups that large is pure background noise.
- coin 13y ago"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-safest-form-of-transportation/ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/06/13/bicycling-the-safe...
- elnate 13y agoHence the 'accident' written in brackets next to it.
- gbog 13y agoFurthermore 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.
- gametheoretic 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis We're done here.
- gbog 13y agoIt 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.
- eli 13y agoI gladly pay my life insurance premium because I want to know my loved ones will be taken care of. It's not a scam. I fully intend to pay in more than I get out of it (I hope!!). Lottery isn't really a scam either if you derive pleasure simply from playing the game.
- gbog 13y agoYes but a fair insurance would be the exact price of the risk leveled among insured, plus a small processing fee. There should be not one penny left for luxurious offices or prestigious ads or art mecenat. Lottery pleasure is empty. Play poker with friends, you may loose money but at least you get friends. The problem pointed in Kahneman book is that we are irrational, and (AND) it's usually the less irrational among us who win.
- shock-value 13y ago> plus a small processing fee Okay, but small is relative. For example, an insurance company has to pay for investigators, the number of which would likely scale linearly with customers. Nice offices and an advertising presence are also likely necessary to entice and maintain customers, probably more-so an an industry like insurance in which there aren't many tangible differentiators between competitors (see Coke vs Pepsi). I don't see why insurance should be any different than any other industry regarding these issues and also the existence and legitimacy of profits (assuming they weren't derived from fraud).
- gbog 13y agoIt is different in this that you can't evaluate the price of the thing you buy. It's like contemporary art if you will, but art is more obviously a scam, while insurance have an aura of solidity and serious.
- AlexMennen 13y agoSo is 1 mort a guaranteed death or a [edit:] 1 - 1/e chance of death?
- gibybo 13y agoNeither. 1/e would require that they all be independent random events which is not true in the general case (and mathematically 1/e would only be an approximation anyway). 1 would require that they be entirely dependent, which is also not true in the general case.
- AlexMennen 13y ago2 micromorts does not mean 2 separate risks, each of which has a 1 in 1 million chance of killing you. It means a single risk that has a 1 in 500 thousand chance of killing you. Similarly, it would be absurd to define 1 mort as the combination of 1 million separate risks, each of which has a 1 in 1 million chance of killing you. Whether 1 mort is guaranteed death or 1 - 1/e chance of death (my previous mention of it being 1/e was mistaken) is a property of how we define the unit to work, not a property of how correlated 1 million separate risks happen to be. Definitions that give answers other than 1 - 1/e or 1 don't make any sense. > mathematically 1/e would only be an approximation anyway If we're going with the definition that treats micromorts as independent, then it would make sense to define a mort as exactly a 1 - 1/e chance of death, and a micromort as a 1 - e^(-10^(-6)) chance of death, rather than a 10^-6 chance of death, but the difference is smaller than the degree of risk that we can measure or care about, so the difference is inconsequential, and it would still make sense to describe a micromort as a 10^-6 chance of death.
- colanderman 13y agoI think you mean 1-1/e (~= 1 - (1-10^-6)^(10^6)). But yes, the idea that you can just divide a statistic sampled over thousands of events linearly to get a meaningful statistic for one occurrence of the event is ridiculous.
- AlexMennen 13y ago
- stcredzero 13y agoWhat you get when the villain of the Harry Potter books makes one million horcruxes? (Or is it 20?) EDIT: I wonder how much the micromort exchange rate is with "The Death of Rats?"
- tokenadult 13y agoThe discussion here is interesting. One of the reasons I hardly ever submit Wikipedia articles to Hacker News is that very few Wikipedia articles have gone through enough thorough editing to be worth discussing among the professionally edited sources submitted here. I'll note for the record, as a Wikipedian, that the article talk page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Micromort http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Micromort for the article kindly submitted here suggests that the article still needs A LOT of work (as most Wikipedia articles doe) and that some of the statements now in the article may be flat wrong, misrepresenting the micromort concept as it was pioneered by Ronald A. Howard. See his presentation on microrisk analysis http://ise.tamu.edu/isen627/Slides/25%20Life%20and%20Death.pdf http://ise.tamu.edu/isen627/Slides/25%20Life%20and%20Death.p... for a possibly more sophisticated, exact, and accurate view of the issue. The online mathematics lesson "Understanding uncertainty: Small but lethal" http://plus.maths.org/content/os/issue55/features/risk/index http://plus.maths.org/content/os/issue55/features/risk/index is also good for practicing understanding of micromorts.
- cjy 13y agoHere is great video by Cambridge Ideas about the risk of dying from various activities (measured in micromorts): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1PtQ67urG4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1PtQ67urG4 The professor's conclusion is that one of the biggest risks is being too cautious.
- drcode 13y agoInteresting that skydiving would only change the micromorts on the day of the jump from 39 to 46.
- beloch 13y agoIf a day spent skiing raises your chance of dying by less than drinking half a liter of wine, you're probably not very much fun to ski with!
- sien 13y agoThe Micromort concept is explored thoroughly and very enjoyable in the book 'The Normal Chronicles' by David Blastland and Michael Spiegelhalter. It's well worth checking out. Blastland was one of the creators of the excellent 'More or Less' on the BBC that looks at how numbers are used and mostly abused by the media, politicians and everyone else. Spiegelhalter is a prof of stats. The book addresses a number of the criticisms that have been leveled at the concept in comments here. They also talk about the 'microlife' which is what you get by exercising or whatever. They also acknowledge the problems with these ideas as well.
- ColinWright 13y agoEr, it's David Spiegelhalter. He's a friend/colleague of mine. While on the subject, "More or Less" is quite a good program, and fun to participate in.
- sien 13y agoHa, Sorry, thanks for that. Say hello to David/Michael, he does a great job!
- _pferreir_ 13y ago+1 for 'More or Less'. I am a regular listener. As for the book, I believe the correct title is "The Norm Chronicles".
- ColinWright 13y agoDid you hear the More or Less on juggling? That was me.
- stuhood 13y agoLa petite mort?
- jacquesm 13y agoHehe. Subtle.
- networked 13y agoAnother death-related unit meant to provide perspective: http://www.raikoth.net/deadchild.html http://www.raikoth.net/deadchild.html.