Odds of Dying | Hacker News Reader

Odds of Dying

injuryfacts.nsc.org

I found this way of thinking - where you pool risks across the entire population - never particularly useful.

For example, the risk of drowning, here quantified as "1 in 1,128" is actually pretty much 0 for people who don't go swimming, and probably vastly higher for people who frequently swim in lakes.

Similarly, your risk of getting eaten by a shark - as miniscule it may be in the grand scheme of things - is profoundly higher when you're actually in the water somewhere in South Africa or Australia.

So in order to truly understand risks, one really needs to take one's personal setup and situation into account..

Yeah, these are the odds if you have no other information about the person. They vary drastically between different people.

Well I guess it's presented poorly by saying "your" odds. Those numbers are for everyone as a whole, the likelyhood of any person dying amongst everyone else by a specific cause. Not a specific individual's odds.

Isn't there some use to knowing which of these statistically likely deaths may be applicable to you?

I feel the need to point a finger at the gun death rate, and also point out that many suicides are probably gun deaths too [0] (not in the trivial sense of suicide by firearm, but that many of those suicides would not have happened without the availability of guns).

[0] httpss://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/risk/

If guns truly facilitate suicide then it's good that they are available to those who want them. But it would be more compassionate if we had a less gruesome method we could make available to people.

And it would be even more compassionate if we created society that didn't induce people to kill themselves in the first place.

Is that viable in reality though?

Your body is a society of cells, each one prepared to kill itself upon malfunction. If a cell fails to suicide, it will be killed by other cells specifically patrolling for malfunctioning cells to kill. If that fails, we call it cancer, and the whole body dies of it.

Apparently societies must retain the ability to induce parts of them to kill themselves, or risk total annihilation.

Sorry that's a utopian dream and we are cursed to instead live in the real world. Sometimes suicide is the most humane decision someone can make for themselves. And true compassion comes by actually supporting someone in that situation, not condemning them or "society".

This is an easy story to tell, but is not always supported by evidence. People who would not otherwise kill themselves are more likely to given available means. Many studies around golden gate jumpers, the oven suicide wave in London, and other easy means which increase rates refute the idea that a person plans to die and then seeks the means. (Good discussion in Talking to Strangers). If the availablility of guns causes people to become suicidal is it still ethical to allow them to carry out the act?

I guess I just do not believe guns cause people to become suicidal. I knew two people who committed suicide with the help of doctors. Both were considered and practical decisions given the pain and suffering they were enduring with no hope of reprieve. Both were very grateful to not have to resort to a gun.

It was very hard to accept and I wanted them to stay in this world for longer, but it was their choice and ultimately not my place to enforce my choice on them. I think they were just more brave than me.

There are definitely cases of people who lived healthy long lives after failed suicide attempts, but all such statistics embody the literal definition of survivorship bias.

For the curious, the causes listed on the site seem to cover about 44% of all deaths. So there are other significant ways to die as well...

Or a very long tail...

Examples of common causes left out: nephritis, stroke, diabetes, alzheimer’s, septicemia.

Source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1P5b9GdVsNx3DPywLluwE...

like suicide at 1:88

Ironically the link is dead for me - access denied by Cloudflare. Will I ever see a side of Cloudflare that'll make me hate it a little less? They give me more grief then all the other CDNs combined.

And here I am looking down the list for the odds of not dying. Dammit.

Look at the social security mortality tables. Where it says you have a 10% chance of dying in a particular year of life, you have a 90% chance of living. Pro tip: don't be 120 years old ;-)

I'm surprised the the amount of deaths due to "poisoning" ... does anybody know where I can learn more about this?

Edit: I found a Glossary on the site, which states that poisoning "Includes deaths from drugs, medicines, other solid and liquid substances, and gases and vapors. Excludes poisonings from spoiled foods, Salmonella, etc., which are classified as disease deaths."

TIL you are more likely to be struck by lightning than to die in a plane crash.

1 in 10 million flights end in crash if you take top tier airlines.

So I guess if one takes 100 flights, then odd of ending up in plane crash over life time is 'only' 1 in 100,000.

If you take a lot of flights on less safe airlines, it can dip to 1 in thousands pretty quickly.

Is the reasoning here correct?

1 in ~10 million seems to be the average risk of an american to die from air plane, so, in your lifetime (100 years, if you live to 100 - average lifespan is 80 it looks like), that goes up to 1-(9,999,999/10,000,000)^100 ~ 1 in 100k

Since that number is about the average risk of an american to die (and not the risk per flight), using it to calculate the risk per flight is erroneous

I think?

Actually the 1 in 10 million figure I used is based on number of fatal crash per flight. I thought it was roughly 1 in 10 million flights ending in fatal crash, but that was couple years ago. It's actually more like 1 in 3.7 million flights. so if you take 100 of those flights, I figured the odds would be 1 in 37,000.

Anyway, happy to be corrected.

You might be right, but from cursory look [1] [2], there were 300 fatalities / 5000 millions passenger ~ 1 / 17 millions for 2019

so your probability of dying from one flight (all of the world considered - way lower for US afaics) looks to be 1 in 17 millions in 2019

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263443/worldwide-air-tra... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/564717/airline-industry-...

No they're using the gambler's fallacy, each flight you take is unaffected by any flight you've taken previously. Flying a load of times isn't reducing the denominator.

Flying increases Cancer risk because of Cosmic Radiation. Solar Flares while flying are extremely dangerous.

Isn't gambler's fallacy more about expectation of future result skewing based on past outcome?

If there's a very dangerous airplane ride that results in 10% of all flights ending in crash, if you take that plane 10 times, wouldn't you expect 1 crash on average?

Looks like I'm wrong judging by the other comments, that'll learn me to not make comments on things I'm not sure about...

It’s not the gambler’s fallacy since they’re treating each flight as an independent event:

Probability of dying on one flight: 1/10,000,000

Probability of surviving one flight: 1-1/10,000,000 = 9,999,999/10,000,000

Probability of surviving 100 flights: (9,999,999/10,000,000)^100

Probability of not surviving 100 flights: 1-(9,999,999/10,000,000)^100 ~ 1/100,000.

I don’t know if the initial assumption of 1/10,000,000 survival rate is accurate, but the math is correct.

And when you have a probability that’s very small, you can skip all that and approximate by multiplying the probability by the number of events: 1/10,000,000 * 100 = 1/100,000. That’s thanks to the binomial approximation.

Interesting. I took ~1,000 flights in my life (more than half of which in just 6 years, when I used to work at AWS as a tech evangelist).

This means that my chance of dying in a flight crash were ~1/10,000th, or 0.01%.

Not high, but not insignificant.

Your comment reminded me of the post here:

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travelbuzz/1108116-what-chan...

"A one in 10,000 chance of dying in a plane crash in your lifetime is a not trivial probability.

I used to work for a consulting company with over 10,000 employees, many of whom traveled constantly for years on end, and, sure enough, when the AA plane to the Dominican Republic crashed in Queens, NY, one of the company's employees was on board. It was bound to happen sooner or later."

:-(

No, these are not your risks of dying by selected causes; this is a population study.

“Hey, statistically the odds of dying on a motorcycle are Lower than driving a car!”

buys motorcycle

Invests in high speed rail as per...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26746487

(Interesting these are on the front page at the same time)

hah. i’m gonna buy a dog

I'm confused by this. ELI5?

These aren’t your specific odds. Like you’re not 1:6 chance for dying of heart disease.. but across the entire population 1:6 people will die from it.

If 1 person rides a motorcycle and 10000 people drive cars, then the absolute risk of motorcycle accidents will of course be lower, but that doesn't mean they are lower for the person riding the motorcycle vs an average car driver.

This is also called the base rate fallacy. As soon as you put it into relation to the base rate you get a more useful number for your own decisions.

For example if the numbers are stated as above (1:10000 ratio in people driving motorcycles to people driving cars), you have to multiply the risk of motorcycling by 10000 to get it to the same level as the risk of driving.

If you look up the numbers there are 8.3 million motorcycles registered in the US. While there's a total of 273 million registered vehicles (this includes motorcycles). I used 2018 numbers for both, to make them comparable.

https://www.iihs.org/api/datastoredocument/bibliography/2181

https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicle...

The number stated in the odds is also for all vehicles I assume since motorcycles are motor vehicles. This leads us to 8.3/273~3.04% of the vehicles on the road in the US are motorcycles.

That means that you have to compare 1/899 / 3.04% to the 1/107 figure. I.e. lifetime chance of death with motorcycle is roughly 3.66% and chance of death with any motor vehicle is 0.93%.

This of course still ignores details like how often people use their motorcycle (usually fewer kms than in cars), which roads they use (more dangerous but fun country roads instead of highways), etc. but it gives you at least a ballpark estimate that using a motorcycle will up your risk by about a factor of 4x vs any motor vehicle (any including motorcycles).

Also you can only die once, so if you're a heavy smoker you probably lessen your risk of motorcycle death considerably.

Cancer victims are usually older than motorcycle accident victims. The effect works in the other direction: riding a motorcycle prevents cancer death in heavy smokers!

I mean it will be both, but I guess you're correct that the reverse effect will be larger.

More people drive cars than motorcycles so there are more car deaths than motorcycle deaths.

The chances that an average human dies from a thing.

Many of these are not risks for individuals, like narcotic overdoses or motorcycle deaths, because they don't do that thing.

https://xkcd.com/795/

Opoid overdose is pretty high... Yet barely makes the news.

c.f. terrorist attacks, which always make the news, but don’t even rate a mention in the top causes of deaths.

Those are not "top causes", as they are labeled "selected" without any indication how.

Yes, though that's a bit apples and oranges. Being killed by someone else with deliberate intent is not scary because it's the most common, it's scary because you have absolutely no control over it.

Where as overdosing on opioids is something you have a hand in.

> Where as overdosing on opioids is something you have a hand in.

But not as much control as one might like to think.

Depends who you are.

Drug overdoses usually only make the news if the person is famous.

If these were lottery odds we’d all be pretty fucking happy...

The "Gun Assault" category needs more breaking down. How many of those were innocent people -- i.e. store clerks shot by robbers, spouses shot for infidelity, victims of serial killers, murdered victims of child predators, and so on -- and how many were "asking for it" -- i.e. they were a criminal whose victim shot them in self-defense, it was gang-vs-gang violence, they got shot in a drug deal gone bad, they were shot by police or armed guards (presumably while resisting arrest or threatening a victim with imminent harm), they were soldiers who were killed in battle, and so on.

Likewise with the "Opioiod overdose" situation. How many of those were medical mistakes, like the doctor wrote X milligrams and the nurse accidentally put X grams in the IV instead, or a patient forgot whether they'd taken today's pills, accidentally took an extra dose and died from it, or unknowingly got prescribed multiple drugs that all contained opioids, or happened to have an allergy to opioids and died of anaphylactic shock? How many were "asking for it" -- deliberately swallowing too many pills in a suicide attempt, or taking illegal street pills / injections created by unknown persons, containing unknown substances at unknown potency?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com