4 ms·

A 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 a

A 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 ago
Some 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 ago
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.
- _pferreir_ 13y ago
  The 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 ago
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?
- jlgreco 13y ago
  I 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.
  - eli 13y ago
    I'm not sure I buy that, but either way you're not visualizing it quite right: both groups go on to have regular lives... it's just that one group drank an additional 0.5 liters [1]. Like you said, death by alcohol is a cumulative risk, so that means each and every drink must raise your risk a teensy tiny amount. How about this way: you agree that if you drink enough alcohol it will kill you, right? So you could surely find someone who almost drank themselves to death. Perhaps they got liver disease and came very very close to dying, but survived. So there must be a line somewhere. Given a huge enough pool of people, it should be possible to find someone who came so close to death that a single extra drink could have killed them. ([1] It's a thought experiment. The two groups lead otherwise identical lives besides the additional alcohol.)
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      You are assuming a linear relationship between alcohol and risk of death. There is absolutely no reason to think that.
      - eli 13y ago
        What would you propose instead? Isn't it obvious that alcohol can cause certain fatal diseases in proportion to consumption?
        jlgreco 13y ago
        You mean what sort of relationship between alcohol and death do I propose? One that isn't a neat mathematical line for sure, particularly since it seems possible that moderate amounts of alcohol are actually beneficial. If the relationship were linear, then you could spread that 500 milliliters out over 100 days and see the same effect, which is plainly ludicrous. The rate of alcohol consumption plays a large role, a single binge can kill you, slow and steady drinking can plausibly extend your life. A single extra drink is also going to do way more harm to a long-term alcoholic than it will to a young healthy Mormon; that Mormon is at absolutely no chance at getting cirrhosis, the risk to the alcoholic is non-zero. The relationship between alcohol and mortality is something that you could probably fill damn near half a medical library with. "half a liter is a micro-mortality" is silly oversimplified nonsense. It might work for radiation exposure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model) but it is nonsense for alcohol.
jlgreco 13y ago
It seems pretty clear that, to come up with these numbers, they took mortality figures from people with lots of exposure, divided their exposure down into small chunks, and assumed that everything scaled linearly. I mean really, 1 hour in a coal mine and you get black lung? Absurd. Would 1 minute in a coal mine be 1/60th of a micromort? Would 1 second in a coal mine be 1/3600th of a micromort? Of course not, and of course not. Black Lung is caused by long term exposure. You are not rolling a million-sided die every hour you are in a coal mine.
- deletes 13y ago
  The statement >>1 hour in a coal mine and you get black lung<< is completely wrong. By staying in a coal mine for 1 hour you increase the chance of death by 1 micromort, that by definition means if you did that for about a million times you would very probably die. If the average life expectancy is about 613000 hours, and if you spend every living hour in a coal mine you would still live every other lifespan.
bnegreve 13y ago
Yes, and I believe that's a limit of the concept. If you smoke 2 cigarettes on one day, chances are that you are actually a smoker and therefore you fall in the category of people that are more likely to die from cancer. The actual impact of the cigarettes you have smoked isn't really taken into account here, it is the fact that you are likely be a smoker that increases the number of microdeath.
fragsworth 13y ago
A counterpoint - the first cigarette you smoke is probably the riskiest one, if you factor in the long-term likelihood of becoming addicted to cigarettes.
biofox 13y ago
If you consider the underlying mechanisms, it becomes clear. Cigarette smoke contains mutagens. For those who are genetically predisposed, it might only take a single point mutation (change of a DNA base pair) in a single oncogene to cause a tumour. So while unlikely, there is no need to suppose a threshold. In low quantities of a toxin, up-regulation of repair mechanisms can sometimes improve outcomes (i.e. hormesis), but the risk of damage to critical genes still exists.

lukifer 13y ago

Some 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 ago

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.

_pferreir_ 13y ago
The 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 ago

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?

jlgreco 13y ago
I 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.
- eli 13y ago
  I'm not sure I buy that, but either way you're not visualizing it quite right: both groups go on to have regular lives... it's just that one group drank an additional 0.5 liters [1]. Like you said, death by alcohol is a cumulative risk, so that means each and every drink must raise your risk a teensy tiny amount. How about this way: you agree that if you drink enough alcohol it will kill you, right? So you could surely find someone who almost drank themselves to death. Perhaps they got liver disease and came very very close to dying, but survived. So there must be a line somewhere. Given a huge enough pool of people, it should be possible to find someone who came so close to death that a single extra drink could have killed them. ([1] It's a thought experiment. The two groups lead otherwise identical lives besides the additional alcohol.)
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    You are assuming a linear relationship between alcohol and risk of death. There is absolutely no reason to think that.
    - eli 13y ago
      What would you propose instead? Isn't it obvious that alcohol can cause certain fatal diseases in proportion to consumption?
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        You mean what sort of relationship between alcohol and death do I propose? One that isn't a neat mathematical line for sure, particularly since it seems possible that moderate amounts of alcohol are actually beneficial. If the relationship were linear, then you could spread that 500 milliliters out over 100 days and see the same effect, which is plainly ludicrous. The rate of alcohol consumption plays a large role, a single binge can kill you, slow and steady drinking can plausibly extend your life. A single extra drink is also going to do way more harm to a long-term alcoholic than it will to a young healthy Mormon; that Mormon is at absolutely no chance at getting cirrhosis, the risk to the alcoholic is non-zero. The relationship between alcohol and mortality is something that you could probably fill damn near half a medical library with. "half a liter is a micro-mortality" is silly oversimplified nonsense. It might work for radiation exposure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model) but it is nonsense for alcohol.

jlgreco 13y ago

It seems pretty clear that, to come up with these numbers, they took mortality figures from people with lots of exposure, divided their exposure down into small chunks, and assumed that everything scaled linearly. I mean really, 1 hour in a coal mine and you get black lung? Absurd. Would 1 minute in a coal mine be 1/60th of a micromort? Would 1 second in a coal mine be 1/3600th of a micromort? Of course not, and of course not. Black Lung is caused by long term exposure. You are not rolling a million-sided die every hour you are in a coal mine.

deletes 13y ago
The statement >>1 hour in a coal mine and you get black lung<< is completely wrong. By staying in a coal mine for 1 hour you increase the chance of death by 1 micromort, that by definition means if you did that for about a million times you would very probably die. If the average life expectancy is about 613000 hours, and if you spend every living hour in a coal mine you would still live every other lifespan.

bnegreve 13y ago

Yes, and I believe that's a limit of the concept. If you smoke 2 cigarettes on one day, chances are that you are actually a smoker and therefore you fall in the category of people that are more likely to die from cancer. The actual impact of the cigarettes you have smoked isn't really taken into account here, it is the fact that you are likely be a smoker that increases the number of microdeath.

fragsworth 13y ago

A counterpoint - the first cigarette you smoke is probably the riskiest one, if you factor in the long-term likelihood of becoming addicted to cigarettes.

biofox 13y ago

If you consider the underlying mechanisms, it becomes clear. Cigarette smoke contains mutagens. For those who are genetically predisposed, it might only take a single point mutation (change of a DNA base pair) in a single oncogene to cause a tumour. So while unlikely, there is no need to suppose a threshold. In low quantities of a toxin, up-regulation of repair mechanisms can sometimes improve outcomes (i.e. hormesis), but the risk of damage to critical genes still exists.