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Comment by aaronblohowiak | Hacker News Reader

but the risk is independent. so once you do the N+1 time safely, you are back to N and your next time is _also_ just an N+1.

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True but it would be incorrect to assume that you can safely keep basejumping every day in a year, just because you haven’t died in the last 50 days. Eventually the stats say you will be 87% likely to have an accident when you consider your choice at the beginning of the year. It might be day 20 or day 300, but you won’t know what case you end up in. The chance of your next jump being your last is always the same, but that doesn’t decrease the risk of repeated trials.

Not exactly. If you've done it 50 days without an accident, your current chances of the accident happening in the remainder of the year are NOW less than 87%.

If you've made it Jan 1 to July 1 months without an accident, the chances of you making it to Dec 31 are now better than they were on Jan 1 -- because now they are just the chances of you making it six months, not a year.

The chances of flipping 6 heads in a row are 1/64. But if I've already flipped 3 in a row... the chances of flipping three _more_ heads in a row is 1/8, the same as always for flipping 3 heads in a row. The ones that already happened don't effect your future chances.

I meant to say starting a new year after the 50 past days, I see that wasn’t clear though.

Yes, but when you make a plan to find an acceptable cumulative future risk, planning to do it once a week for the rest of your life is planning to expose yourself to significantly more risk than doing it twice a year for the rest of your life.

You might still die in one of the next 20 instances. But you've added a lot more not-dead time in between them!

Saying "I can do one more with minimal added risk" every single time after not dying is true and yet pointless, because it's not a given that "minimal added risk" = "not dying." It's survivorship bias to not think frequency doesn't affect the cumulative odds of your future planning solely because you've already done a lot of trials.

Risk is independent of prior events, habits are not - I think that was what the anthropologist story is about

The risk is independent but the marginal enjoyment isn't. You don't get double the satisfaction from climbing twice as much.

Continuing to do something regularly doesn't ever mean you're just going to do it once more.

Psychologically, behaving in a certain way makes it more likely that you'll behave in the same way in the future. That's an integral idea underpinning justice systems.

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