How do I calibrate my perception of risks to reality when my intuition is so swayed by experience?
Convert the risk to expected number of minutes of life lost. You can get this number from micromort numbers, which are easy to find for many activities, together with your best estimate of how many years you have left to live. I find this a much more intuitive way of processing risk (Edit: which I got from Paul Christiano).
For example, let’s say that I think I have about 20 years left to live (because of AI timelines). Then a micromort is 10 expected minutes of life lost. According to Wikipedia, skydiving costs 9 micromorts per jump so I lose 90 expected minutes of life every jump. Also according to Wikipedia, motorcycling costs 1 micromort every 6 miles so I lose about 2 expected minutes of life per mile I spend motorcycling.
There are additional considerations; if you saw a man die in a motorcycle accident you might be sufficiently traumatized by the experience that your ability to handle a motorcycle decreases, substantially increasing your risk of getting into an accident. So I think in that situation you would be correct to not want to ride a motorcycle ever again, but sort of because you got trapped into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
For example, let’s say that I think I have about 20 years left to live (because of AI timelines). Then a micromort is 10 expected minutes of life lost. According to Wikipedia, skydiving costs 9 micromorts per jump so I lose 90 expected minutes of life every jump. Also according to Wikipedia, motorcycling costs 1 micromort every 6 miles so I lose about 2 expected minutes of life per mile I spend motorcycling.
An interesting conclusion here is that if you save more than 2 minutes per mile (going 15 mph instead of 10mph, for example) of time sitting in traffic by riding a motorcycle instead of driving a car, the number of not-sitting-in-traffic minutes of your life actually increases by riding your bike.
Though note that the above calculation assumed that your risk of dying in a motorcycle crash while weaving through stopped traffic is not higher than 1⁄6 micromorts per mile. Also note that if your expected life span is 60 years, you now need to save 6 minutes per mile to “break even”, which is unlikely—if traffic is moving that slowly (remember that this is based on the average speed across the entire trip) you’re probably better off walking.
Woah, this is a neat consideration I hadn’t considered!
(I am a below-average driver in general, so am unlikely to take any action based on this even after thinking about it more carefully, but the notion that this is a tradeoff to consider is still super neat)
Convert the risk to expected number of minutes of life lost. You can get this number from micromort numbers, which are easy to find for many activities, together with your best estimate of how many years you have left to live. I find this a much more intuitive way of processing risk (Edit: which I got from Paul Christiano).
For example, let’s say that I think I have about 20 years left to live (because of AI timelines). Then a micromort is 10 expected minutes of life lost. According to Wikipedia, skydiving costs 9 micromorts per jump so I lose 90 expected minutes of life every jump. Also according to Wikipedia, motorcycling costs 1 micromort every 6 miles so I lose about 2 expected minutes of life per mile I spend motorcycling.
There are additional considerations; if you saw a man die in a motorcycle accident you might be sufficiently traumatized by the experience that your ability to handle a motorcycle decreases, substantially increasing your risk of getting into an accident. So I think in that situation you would be correct to not want to ride a motorcycle ever again, but sort of because you got trapped into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
An interesting conclusion here is that if you save more than 2 minutes per mile (going 15 mph instead of 10mph, for example) of time sitting in traffic by riding a motorcycle instead of driving a car, the number of not-sitting-in-traffic minutes of your life actually increases by riding your bike.
Though note that the above calculation assumed that your risk of dying in a motorcycle crash while weaving through stopped traffic is not higher than 1⁄6 micromorts per mile. Also note that if your expected life span is 60 years, you now need to save 6 minutes per mile to “break even”, which is unlikely—if traffic is moving that slowly (remember that this is based on the average speed across the entire trip) you’re probably better off walking.
Woah, this is a neat consideration I hadn’t considered!
(I am a below-average driver in general, so am unlikely to take any action based on this even after thinking about it more carefully, but the notion that this is a tradeoff to consider is still super neat)
This is really cool! Thank you for sharing. I think micromorts will significantly help my intuition.