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Comment by throwoutway | Hacker News Reader

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throwoutway·

Which is about the same rate that airlines lose luggage. (Unrelated comparison but analogies can help)

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I've experienced an airline losing my luggage, but I haven't experienced death yet.

Maybe I'm immortal :)

Literal survivorship bias :-D

Maybe you've flewn more times than you lived from 30-40

That's a fairly deceptive analogy though. Many people check baggage a lot more (or less) than once per year.

That’s exactly the opposite of why it’s an unrelated analogy (which was stated). People live days of their lives far more often than they check baggage. Death is not a once per year risk. The risk of losing luggage per day or per hour of traveling is much higher than the risk of dying per hour/day of living.

>Death is not a once per year risk.

It absolutely is in the context of a discussion of annualized mortality rates.

My point was a response to the statement that baggage checking happens more than once per year. Life also happens more than once per year, and in fact it happens more often than checking baggage, right?

It’s misleading to annualize these stats because the participation rates per hour and per day are very very different. This is why sports risk is usually calculated in participation hours and not annualized, to prevent such misleading comparisons.

You are comparing it with the risk of dying in an year. That is a once per year risk.

It’s not a once per year risk, it’s an average. And you agree that changing the choice of time window for averaging will dramatically change the results, don’t you?

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