Splitting the expected outcome of a risk 2 ways, “life or death”, often leads to unsatisfying reasoning about risk taking. Sometimes splitting the expected outcome 3 ways: “health, life incapacitated and in agony, death” yields more satisfying explanations.
Covid is especially characteristic of this risk split in that while the expected risk of death from infection in a young and otherwise healthy person is relatively low, the risk of unknown and potentially extreme long-term health complications from infection is relatively high.
The incapacitation/agony possibility makes these calculations extremely subjective: some people might value a year of their own life spent bed-bound or in horrible pain as highly as a year in good health, while others might not. When calculating for others, things tend to go badly wrong if we assume that their relative values for incapacitation/agony versus health match our own (in either direction—opponents to life-saving treatments for the disabled and opponents to right-to-die laws are both prone to this projection), but when calculating for ourselves we can more safely use our own values.
I agree that pruning down the list of expected outcomes is a simplification. However, it seems like the badness is dominated by the outcome of dying enough where the other outcomes become negligible, and thus such a simplification is appropriate.
For example, suppose we use $100k as the value of a post-singularity year, 100k years as the expected post-singularity lifespan, and 10% as our chance of reaching the singularity. Those assumptions give us a value of life of $1B, which makes the death component of the EV calculation of driving -$25k. Now compare that to the injury component. For a lifelong injury, maybe it reduces the value of life from $200k to $100k, and you expect to live another 50 years. So the injury costs $5M versus death costing $1B. Getting permanently injured would have to be many, many times more likely than dying in a car accident for it to start becoming non-trivial next to the death component, with these assumptions.
I hold the impression that in car crashes, injuries are vastly more common than deaths. When I seek actual statistics on this, I’m surprised by how little reporting of non-fatal injury statistics is readily available online compared to fatal injury statistics.
Wikipedia claims that “In 2010, there were an estimated 5,419,000 crashes, 30,296 deadly, killing 32,999, and injuring 2,239,000.”, but the citation leads to this page, which doesn’t appear to offer injury statistics. So I’m not sure where they actually got their 2.2 million injuries per 33 thousand deaths numbers from.
injuryfacts.nsc.orgclaims that in 2019, there were 39,107 deaths in motor-vehicle crashes, and 4.5 million “medically consulted injuries”.
So if we trust either of those sources (which both claim to be derivations of NHTSA data), the rates are somewhere in the millions of injuries per tens of thousands of deaths kind of ballpark.
The other question here is whether injuries are permanent. I expect that any injury worth recording will have at least some long-term effect on the recipient’s quality of life, based primarily on having had a too-minor-to-report injury in a collision over a decade ago which still causes occasional pain that I wouldn’t experience without it, and also from conversations with others about the lasting effects of various “fully recovered” injuries. In trying to find any data about outcomes classified as disability, I see this and this making claims about some stats on injury-related disability, but sadly neither appears to cite any actual studies.
So, if we assume that most injuries severe enough to report cause some long-term change to quality of life, I would indeed call getting injured “many, many times more likely than dying” when it comes to modern car accidents.
Of course, all that the more reputable of this data shows is that injuries are probably something to take seriously. For those who’d value a year of life with occasional or constant pain significantly below a year without, injuries are a more relevant concern than for those who’d value the years similarly.
Suppose we use the assumptions I made in my previous comment of death costing $1B and injury costing $5M. And suppose we ballpark it and say that injuries are 100x more likely than death. That makes it more like $1B to $500M. However, that is assuming all injuries cost $5M, and that seems high. It assumes that a) it is a permanent injury and b) it cuts the value of life fully in half. I’d ballpark it at more like maybe $1M on average. In which case it’s more like $1B to $100M.
But this is comparing injury costs to the $1B number for the value of life, which you could argue is high. If you disagree with the $1B number, then injuries seem like they might be important. For example, if we forget about the whole life extension thing and use the assumption of $10M for the value of life and $1M for the value of avoiding injury, with injury being 100x as likely as death, the injury component becomes the bigger factor.
But this extra injury stuff probably doesn’t change driving from “worth it” to “not worth it”. So the crux of the question still does seem to revolve around how much you value life.
I just looked into injuries some more. The CDC says that for every 1 person killed, 8 are hospitalized and 100 are treated and released from the emergency department. Call it 1:10:100.
In the treated and released case, let’s say the cost of the injury is $1k. And let’s normalize things with death costing $1B. Since this injury is 100x more likely than death, we can say it costs $100k. Even if it were 1000k more likely than death it’d only cost $1M next to the $1B, so it seems like we can call this negligible and forget about it.
In the hospitalized case, suppose it causes issues lasting 50 years and costs you $100k/year (in utility). That’s $5M. Because it’s 10x more likely than death, call it $50M. But that’s still a good amount smaller than the $1B. And it was with conservative assumption of every person who is hospitalized ends up with a lifelong injury that causes significant distress. In reality it might be closer to $1M than $50M. So relative to death it also seems negligible. And perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t seem like it’s enough to outweigh the convenience of driving.
Splitting the expected outcome of a risk 2 ways, “life or death”, often leads to unsatisfying reasoning about risk taking. Sometimes splitting the expected outcome 3 ways: “health, life incapacitated and in agony, death” yields more satisfying explanations.
Covid is especially characteristic of this risk split in that while the expected risk of death from infection in a young and otherwise healthy person is relatively low, the risk of unknown and potentially extreme long-term health complications from infection is relatively high.
The incapacitation/agony possibility makes these calculations extremely subjective: some people might value a year of their own life spent bed-bound or in horrible pain as highly as a year in good health, while others might not. When calculating for others, things tend to go badly wrong if we assume that their relative values for incapacitation/agony versus health match our own (in either direction—opponents to life-saving treatments for the disabled and opponents to right-to-die laws are both prone to this projection), but when calculating for ourselves we can more safely use our own values.
I agree that pruning down the list of expected outcomes is a simplification. However, it seems like the badness is dominated by the outcome of dying enough where the other outcomes become negligible, and thus such a simplification is appropriate.
For example, suppose we use $100k as the value of a post-singularity year, 100k years as the expected post-singularity lifespan, and 10% as our chance of reaching the singularity. Those assumptions give us a value of life of $1B, which makes the death component of the EV calculation of driving -$25k. Now compare that to the injury component. For a lifelong injury, maybe it reduces the value of life from $200k to $100k, and you expect to live another 50 years. So the injury costs $5M versus death costing $1B. Getting permanently injured would have to be many, many times more likely than dying in a car accident for it to start becoming non-trivial next to the death component, with these assumptions.
I hold the impression that in car crashes, injuries are vastly more common than deaths. When I seek actual statistics on this, I’m surprised by how little reporting of non-fatal injury statistics is readily available online compared to fatal injury statistics.
Wikipedia claims that “In 2010, there were an estimated 5,419,000 crashes, 30,296 deadly, killing 32,999, and injuring 2,239,000.”, but the citation leads to this page, which doesn’t appear to offer injury statistics. So I’m not sure where they actually got their 2.2 million injuries per 33 thousand deaths numbers from.
injuryfacts.nsc.org claims that in 2019, there were 39,107 deaths in motor-vehicle crashes, and 4.5 million “medically consulted injuries”.
So if we trust either of those sources (which both claim to be derivations of NHTSA data), the rates are somewhere in the millions of injuries per tens of thousands of deaths kind of ballpark.
The other question here is whether injuries are permanent. I expect that any injury worth recording will have at least some long-term effect on the recipient’s quality of life, based primarily on having had a too-minor-to-report injury in a collision over a decade ago which still causes occasional pain that I wouldn’t experience without it, and also from conversations with others about the lasting effects of various “fully recovered” injuries. In trying to find any data about outcomes classified as disability, I see this and this making claims about some stats on injury-related disability, but sadly neither appears to cite any actual studies.
So, if we assume that most injuries severe enough to report cause some long-term change to quality of life, I would indeed call getting injured “many, many times more likely than dying” when it comes to modern car accidents.
Of course, all that the more reputable of this data shows is that injuries are probably something to take seriously. For those who’d value a year of life with occasional or constant pain significantly below a year without, injuries are a more relevant concern than for those who’d value the years similarly.
Good points, maybe you’re right.
Suppose we use the assumptions I made in my previous comment of death costing $1B and injury costing $5M. And suppose we ballpark it and say that injuries are 100x more likely than death. That makes it more like $1B to $500M. However, that is assuming all injuries cost $5M, and that seems high. It assumes that a) it is a permanent injury and b) it cuts the value of life fully in half. I’d ballpark it at more like maybe $1M on average. In which case it’s more like $1B to $100M.
But this is comparing injury costs to the $1B number for the value of life, which you could argue is high. If you disagree with the $1B number, then injuries seem like they might be important. For example, if we forget about the whole life extension thing and use the assumption of $10M for the value of life and $1M for the value of avoiding injury, with injury being 100x as likely as death, the injury component becomes the bigger factor.
But this extra injury stuff probably doesn’t change driving from “worth it” to “not worth it”. So the crux of the question still does seem to revolve around how much you value life.
I just looked into injuries some more. The CDC says that for every 1 person killed, 8 are hospitalized and 100 are treated and released from the emergency department. Call it 1:10:100.
In the treated and released case, let’s say the cost of the injury is $1k. And let’s normalize things with death costing $1B. Since this injury is 100x more likely than death, we can say it costs $100k. Even if it were 1000k more likely than death it’d only cost $1M next to the $1B, so it seems like we can call this negligible and forget about it.
In the hospitalized case, suppose it causes issues lasting 50 years and costs you $100k/year (in utility). That’s $5M. Because it’s 10x more likely than death, call it $50M. But that’s still a good amount smaller than the $1B. And it was with conservative assumption of every person who is hospitalized ends up with a lifelong injury that causes significant distress. In reality it might be closer to $1M than $50M. So relative to death it also seems negligible. And perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t seem like it’s enough to outweigh the convenience of driving.