Measuring how deadly our daily activities are
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
And I dislike measuring the micromorts per population, it should be divided by those people actually going swimming/surfing, just like riding x miles with a motorcycle increases your risk of dying by y micromorts, going swimming for a hours should be increasing your mms by b.
"It’s important to be aware, however, that being based on population-level data, the micromort is not a measure of your personal risk. For example, the risk calculation for fatal shark attacks is based on the average risk across the whole population.
So it effectively estimates a risk based on the assumption that all Australians swim in the deep ocean a similar number of times per year. But if you live in Alice Springs, you would not expect your risk of being killed by a shark to be the same as for a surfer who lives on the coast. Similarly, if you only wade in water up to your knees and don’t swim in deep water, your personal risks would be different."
I always find it super silly when people apply population data to themselves. There's always much better data to go on if you know a bit about the individual.
(1 death / 100,000 jumps) x (3 million jumps / 350,000 jumpers) x (350,000 jumpers / 313 million people)
The last two terms give us the prior P(jump) ~= 0.01 and the first is the conditional probability P(death | jump) ~= 0.0001. The non-skydiver's risk factor is, of course, zero while the skydiver's risk is about 100x greater than that of the average person (who doesn't actually exist). As you can see, the population measure isn't very informative for either group.
But wouldn't it make sense to group people who are risk aware together?
Like 90% of a population will live risk free lifes, and only 10% have high risk.
I mean, depending how risk friendly 10% of the population are, they could screw up the result and then it seems all people of that population are crazier than most of them really are...
Out here in California, most people never go more than ankle deep in the water if that. Those who do surf usually only do it occasionally, in very un-sharky places.
How many people really surf regularly in sharky places like Ano Nuevo, Russian River Mouth, Bolinas, and so forth? My guess is that you should probably be dividing the number of shark attacks by something measurable in the thousands, not 36 million.
Whatever that number is, it's still damn unlikely. But still, if you're in the habit of surfing in known shark feeding grounds while dead seals are floating around, I don't think shark attacks divided by the total population of California is a good reflection of your risk.
https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
This method is meaningless, as it assumes the risk of dying by shark attack is constant regardless of your behavior (e.g., daily swim in chummed waters vs never entering the water).
The wikipedia article does a better job of micromort-per-unit-of-exposure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
e.g., Travelling 17 miles (27 km) by walking (accident) = 1 micromort
But it still doesn't account for differing risk levels, like walking on an indoor track vs walking in city traffic.
And it doesn't include shark attacks.
Obviously, your real risk is lower in most places, but dramatically higher if you live in sub-Saharan Africa.
https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/resources/pdf/fsp/cdc_malaria_do...
The fear of running into Kangaroos is real. Hitting an 80kg buck at 70km/hr looks like this:
- https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/5037959035
- https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/5037959047
Roo ran into me. Ran up an embankment. I've been in other situations where the kangaroos (multiple) are window level travelling along roads at speed. Chance of kangaroo-related death is there.
Assuming the probability of dying in each activity is independent, planning to do a 7000-micromort activity A and then (after appropriate recovery time) an 8000-micromort activity B is not an overall activity with 15000 micromorts of risk. (The math is close enough when talking about single-digit micromorts, but it doesn't work in general.)
Pr(dying when doing A followed by B) = Pr({doing A and dying} or {doing A and surviving and then doing B and dying}) = Pr(doing A and dying) + PR(doing A and surviving and then doing B and dying) = 7000 / 1000000 + (1 - 7000 / 1000000) * 8000 / 1000000 = 14944 / 1000000
The larger the risks or the longer the series of events, the less accurate the assumption of linearity. This also doesn't take into account the fact that dying in extreme activities is not independent; by failing to die in A, you've demonstrated some small amount of survival fitness.
For example, playing Russian Roulette once is about 166667 micromorts. Playing it 6 times is 1 mort of risk, but the probability of dying after 6 plays is not 1. (It's 1 - (5/6)6, or about 2/3.)
Frequentist approach like this micromort unit ignores conditional probability.
> sitting on a chair (due to the likelihood of falling off it) increases your risk of death by approximately 1.3 micromorts.
Is this per day? Per hour? Per year? How does this compare to laying down? Standing up? Walking around?
1 micromort for 10K km of air travel, and 1.3 micromorts for sitting in a chair in your own home.
Considering all the standing, sitting, stairs, ramps, overheads, etc. we do while traveling, this must be referring ONLY the the flying portion of flying... very misleading.
It also points to another problem with this sort of data. While there are certainly deaths in challenging whitewater, a lot of canoeing deaths involve combinations like alcohol+no PFDs+cold water at night.
Then you have decreased your risk by more than 50%. So using the articles methods, you will be exposed to less than 200 micromorts.
Servicing your motorcyle and having taken a motorcycle saftey course just once also increases your liklihood of survival.
Another key part of the dangers are where you ride, being more likely to die in the CBD than anywhere else, and likely related, just under 50% of accidents are caused by other motorists than the rider. Many riders seem to think it's skewed much more toward cars being at fault, it's useful to know that's not the case.
A final tidbit I recall is that the biggest risk group is 40-60 year old, returning riders. Not younger new riders as you might have expected.
The interesting part of all of that though is knowing such broad stats can not truly reveal your personal risk factor, and that there is a lot you can do to help your cause.
How does lack of a piece of paper increase your chances of dying?
I was interested in riding a motorcycle once, but I found that even if I assumed I was at the safest end of the spectrum, my risk was still many times that of driving. And the comparison is not apt because many of the risk factors I mitigate on a motorcycle I also mitigate in a car, for e.g., by being a careful driver, minimizing the amount of driving I do, driving slowly, and never driving drunk. So it's not like the motorcycle has become safer relative to the car. It's just that both skew less risky for me.
So I decided I would not do it. Maybe when I'm older and other risk factors are more pressing.
Cool!
> I do not agree that a less powerful bike makes you safer (I only rode sports bikes btw).
You don't need to agree. It's a statistical fact that power and danger are associated. May not be causal. Probably isn't, in fact.
He has some good stuff on this for more everyday activities like drinking beer, being 5kg overweight for a day and smoking a cigarette and things.
Humans as a whole are irrational when it comes to fear because their fear is almost never proportional to the actual risk. We're afraid of the one-in-a-million occurrences, but not the one-in-one-hundred. We don't (yet should) fear the mundane and the superficial. Humans always strive to be rational, so why are we so irrational when it comes to fear?
And yet, arguably this is also simultaneously a perfectly rational reaction to fear. Think about it. If humans were hard-wired to be completely rational when it comes to fear, i.e. our fears are proportional to the risks involved, we would be unable to function in our daily lives. We'd be paralyzed by fear from the moment we wake up. We wouldn't drive cars, or step into bathtubs, or eat fatty hamburgers. The explanation as to why humans are afraid of shark attacks, but not driving can be as simple as this: it allows us to exist.
Is it really rational to do those things? I put a non-slip mat in my tub, eat less meat, and generally avoid driving if at all possible. I'm certainly not unable to function nor continually paralyzed with fear, but my risks of death from some very common causes are greatly reduced.
Higher in Middle East, but I lack precise enough death data for those countries.
That said, instead of frequentist approach a bayesian one would be more relevant. This would allow including fuzzy participation data like never, once per year, once per week, daily etc.