Things that have a probability of something like one in a million. Includes many common ways to die that don’t involve doing anything most people would regard as especially risky. For example, these stats suggest the odds of a 100 mile car trip killing you are somewhere on the order of one in a million.
I am not entirely sure about this, since I have made a similar mistake in the past, but If I am applying my relatively recent learning of this correctly, I think technically it suggests that if 1 million random people drive 100 miles, one of them will probably die, and based on a quick check of top causes of car accidents, we would also expect that person to be at least one of: Distracted, Speeding, Drunk, Reckless, in the Rain, Drowsy etc...
And if you are currently an undistracted, alert, sober driver who is following all traffic rules in dry weather, your chances of an accident during this particular drive are notably lower (Although I don’t know if they are low enough for driving to be safer then a plane because I don’t have sufficient statistics on that.)
Edit: Actually I think I’m still insufficiently clear. Technically, we wouldn’t be able to expect that they had at least one risk factor without knowing the overall prevalence of those risk factors in the overall population. Admittedly, I did include ‘Speeding’ as a risk factor and my understanding is that speeding is quite common, (and I did include an etc. to include other non listed risk factors, which would also increase the chance of at least one of them being true) but I haven’t actually run the numbers on my expectation above either.
This fits with what I’ve read, though I’d point out that while we get our share of anti-drunk driving and now anti-texting-while-driving messages, most people don’t seem to think driving in the rain, driving when they’re a bit tired, or being a bit over the speed limit are particularly dangerous activities.
(Also, even if you’re an exceptionally careful driver, you can still be killed by someone else’s carelessness.)
And if you are currently an undistracted, alert, sober driver [...], your chances of an accident during this particular drive are notably lower.
Lower maybe. But they are still in the order of 1:10^6.
The border between the categories 1:100, 1:10^6 and 1:10^10 is—well—no border but continuous. The categorization into three rough areas expresses insufficient experience with all the shades in between. I don’t mean that offensively. Dealing with risks appears to be normally done by the subconscious. Lifting it into the conscious is sensible but just assigning three categories will not do. Neither will do assigning words to more differentiated categories like in Lojban
( http://lesswrong.com/lw/9jv/thinking_bayesianically_with_lojban/ ).
Real insight comes from training. Training with a suitable didactic strategy. One strategy obviously being to read the sequences as that forces you to consider lots of different more or less unlikely situations.
What I am missing is a structured way to decompose these odds. 1:10^6 for a car accident in a 100 mile drive is arbitrary in so far as you can decompose it into either a 10 meter drive (say out of the parking lot) which then immediately moves the risk formally into the latter category. Or alternatively dying in a car accident in your life time which moves it into the first category.
I am not entirely sure about this, since I have made a similar mistake in the past, but If I am applying my relatively recent learning of this correctly, I think technically it suggests that if 1 million random people drive 100 miles, one of them will probably die, and based on a quick check of top causes of car accidents, we would also expect that person to be at least one of: Distracted, Speeding, Drunk, Reckless, in the Rain, Drowsy etc...
And if you are currently an undistracted, alert, sober driver who is following all traffic rules in dry weather, your chances of an accident during this particular drive are notably lower (Although I don’t know if they are low enough for driving to be safer then a plane because I don’t have sufficient statistics on that.)
Edit: Actually I think I’m still insufficiently clear. Technically, we wouldn’t be able to expect that they had at least one risk factor without knowing the overall prevalence of those risk factors in the overall population. Admittedly, I did include ‘Speeding’ as a risk factor and my understanding is that speeding is quite common, (and I did include an etc. to include other non listed risk factors, which would also increase the chance of at least one of them being true) but I haven’t actually run the numbers on my expectation above either.
This fits with what I’ve read, though I’d point out that while we get our share of anti-drunk driving and now anti-texting-while-driving messages, most people don’t seem to think driving in the rain, driving when they’re a bit tired, or being a bit over the speed limit are particularly dangerous activities.
(Also, even if you’re an exceptionally careful driver, you can still be killed by someone else’s carelessness.)
I don’t think most people believe that driving when they’re very tired is especially dangerous.
Lower maybe. But they are still in the order of 1:10^6.
The border between the categories 1:100, 1:10^6 and 1:10^10 is—well—no border but continuous. The categorization into three rough areas expresses insufficient experience with all the shades in between. I don’t mean that offensively. Dealing with risks appears to be normally done by the subconscious. Lifting it into the conscious is sensible but just assigning three categories will not do. Neither will do assigning words to more differentiated categories like in Lojban ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/9jv/thinking_bayesianically_with_lojban/ ).
Real insight comes from training. Training with a suitable didactic strategy. One strategy obviously being to read the sequences as that forces you to consider lots of different more or less unlikely situations.
What I am missing is a structured way to decompose these odds. 1:10^6 for a car accident in a 100 mile drive is arbitrary in so far as you can decompose it into either a 10 meter drive (say out of the parking lot) which then immediately moves the risk formally into the latter category. Or alternatively dying in a car accident in your life time which moves it into the first category.
So why is it that a 100 mile drive was chosen?