
Micromort - georgecmu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
======
sien
The Micromort concept is explored thoroughly and very enjoyable in the book
'The Normal Chronicles' by David Blastland and Michael Spiegelhalter. It's
well worth checking out.

Blastland was one of the creators of the excellent 'More or Less' on the BBC
that looks at how numbers are used and mostly abused by the media, politicians
and everyone else.

Spiegelhalter is a prof of stats.

The book addresses a number of the criticisms that have been leveled at the
concept in comments here. They also talk about the 'microlife' which is what
you get by exercising or whatever. They also acknowledge the problems with
these ideas as well.

~~~
ColinWright
Er, it's _David_ Spiegelhalter. He's a friend/colleague of mine.

While on the subject, "More or Less" is quite a good program, and fun to
participate in.

~~~
sien
Ha, Sorry, thanks for that.

Say hello to David/Michael, he does a great job!

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SatvikBeri
The Wikipedia article claims air pollution from living in New York or Boston
is 30 times worse than the risk from living with a smoker, though that was in
1979. Presumably air pollution has become much less severe since then. Does
anyone know the figure today?

~~~
bodyfour
These days people vastly overestimate the risk of second-hand smoke. Based on
the numbers in this article living with a smoker is equivalent to smoking a
pack of cigarettes every _two years_. i.e. not much.

Second-hand smoke does have some health consequences -- for instance poor air
quality is strongly linked to childhood asthma. It's also certainly considered
a nuisance by most people.

Anyway, I'm not surprised at all that living in a polluted city would expose
you to far more danger than a smoker at home. 30x sounds fairly reasonable.

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gbog
It should be noted that used in Thinking Fast and Slow context this micromort
induce can be used to show how much we human have very hard time grasping low
probability events.

All the lottery and insurance business is just a scam against us taking
advantage of this miss computation of micro risks.

~~~
batiudrami
Insurance isn't a scam. You pay a little extra to ensure that you can get the
money before you would have saved it (assuming you put your entire ensurance
premium into savings) in the event that you (or your family, in the case of
life insurance) need it. Sure, in infinite (or sufficiently high) number of
lives/events, you'll always end up behind, but that doesn't mean it's a scam.

~~~
gbog
Do you agree that we are very bad at evaluating very low probabilities (below
.1%)?

Then how much would you bet on the hope that insurance companies are not
taking advantage of this psychological weakness for their benefit?

~~~
batiudrami
I agree with both your points there, but disagree with the premise that
insurance is a scam - the insurance companies provide a valuable service, and
they charge what people will pay - the way any reasonable business is going to
behave.

From there, it's up to you to determine whether it's worth it. I personally
don't have health insurance (though I live in a country with universal
healthcare), but I have 3rd-party car insurance in case I accidentally drive
into someone's Lamborghini, and it was fortunate that my girlfriend's dad had
life insurance so that her mum had some money after he passed away prematurely
last year. Just because money is being made doesn't mean it's a scam.

~~~
aaron695
But why are you worried about driving into a Lamborghini and not the fact it
would mean you've had a car accident and you could be dead?

This to me is where our perceived realities differ with real life.

Spending the money on defensive driving and/or car safety makes much more
sense, but we can only see the future where the accident happens (And we
survive) not all the accidents we can stop.

I have no idea about your girlfriends father and what happened but I'd prefer
to spent money on not dieing than paying for what happens if I do.

~~~
ygra
non-lethal car accidents happen more often than those with casualties. And
they often are fairly expensive, especially if you manage to involve more than
your own car. That's not to say that you shouldn't drive carefully (and I
guess your insurance company certainly raises the price once you start driving
into other cars twice a month).

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andrewvc
A lot of this seems weird. If I imbibe 0.5 liters of wine exactly once in my
life I doubt there's any effect. Same for 2 cigarettes. For a lot of things
there are thresholds that must be crossed before any effect is created.

~~~
jlgreco
It seems pretty clear that, to come up with these numbers, they took mortality
figures from people with lots of exposure, divided their exposure down into
small chunks, and assumed that everything scaled linearly.

I mean really, 1 hour in a coal mine and you get black lung? Absurd. Would 1
minute in a coal mine be 1/60th of a micromort? Would 1 second in a coal mine
be 1/3600th of a micromort? Of course not, and of course not. Black Lung is
caused by long term exposure.

You are not rolling a million-sided die every hour you are in a coal mine.

~~~
deletes
The statement >>1 hour in a coal mine and you get black lung<< is completely
wrong.

By staying in a coal mine for 1 hour you increase the chance of death by 1
micromort, that by definition means if you did that for about a million times
you would very probably die. If the average life expectancy is about 613000
hours, and if you spend every living hour in a coal mine you would still live
every other lifespan.

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dsimms
The idea of scaling probabilities (by 10^6) misses the point. Log scales are
better at revealing orders of magnitude! How about dbMorts instead?

~~~
elnate
I have always struggled with log/db, can you explain your proposed system?

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tokenadult
The discussion here is interesting. One of the reasons I hardly ever submit
Wikipedia articles to Hacker News is that very few Wikipedia articles have
gone through enough thorough editing to be worth discussing among the
professionally edited sources submitted here. I'll note for the record, as a
Wikipedian, that the article talk page

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Micromort](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Micromort)

for the article kindly submitted here suggests that the article still needs A
LOT of work (as most Wikipedia articles doe) and that some of the statements
now in the article may be flat wrong, misrepresenting the micromort concept as
it was pioneered by Ronald A. Howard. See his presentation on microrisk
analysis

[http://ise.tamu.edu/isen627/Slides/25%20Life%20and%20Death.p...](http://ise.tamu.edu/isen627/Slides/25%20Life%20and%20Death.pdf)

for a possibly more sophisticated, exact, and accurate view of the issue.

The online mathematics lesson "Understanding uncertainty: Small but lethal"

[http://plus.maths.org/content/os/issue55/features/risk/index](http://plus.maths.org/content/os/issue55/features/risk/index)

is also good for practicing understanding of micromorts.

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s_baby
So per mile jets are only ~4 times safer than cars? That's a little
unsettling.

~~~
srl
That stat shocked me too, and from
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Statistics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Statistics),
it appears to be false. However, that table isn't sourced very well either.

Looking at the source, he seems to be lumping shorter plane rides in with the
long-distance (safer) ones. The danger is largely in takeoff and landing, as
far as I understand. I also can't tell if the source takes into account
private jets, which are less regulated and likely more risky than passenger
jets. I'd also imagine the statistic varies a lot of you limit yourself to
flights involving the US and our colonies[1].

Or the source could just be wrong - he could have mistakenly used the chance
of being involved in a crash, rather than the chance of dying. That would put
it in the right order or magnitude, I think.

[1] With all the "evil empire" rhetoric flying around lately...

~~~
mikeash
There are no reliable statistics for the safety of commercial air travel in
the US these days.

It's not for lack of trying. It's simply that commercial air travel in the US
is so safe that there isn't enough data to compile anything like a reasonable
risk figure. Prior to the Asiana crash, the last fatal airliner crash in the
US was in 2009, and there were no fatalities in 2008 or 2007.

So, yes, they're much safer than that number would imply, but it's hard to say
exactly how much.

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coin
"Traveling 10 or 20 miles by bicycle"

They only assume the accidental nature of riding a bike and ignore the health
benefits. A good article highlighting this
[http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/06/13/bicycling-the-
safe...](http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/06/13/bicycling-the-safest-form-
of-transportation/)

~~~
gbog
Furthermore each listed risky activity should be balanced with the micromort
risk of not doing it.

For example suppose I take a plane, then ride a bike to go hiking for a week
with friends. Maybe this trip will save me many micromort from health and
mental perspectives. Having a deeper friendship is certainly also a net
positive.

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beloch
If a day spent skiing raises your chance of dying by less than drinking half a
liter of wine, you're probably not very much fun to ski with!

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brokentone
Holy crap. I live in NYC, where I walk everywhere, drink, and fly several
times per year. Apparently I'm screwed.

~~~
cdcarter
As long as you aren't taking canoes!

~~~
BenoitEssiambre
Yeah WTF! I didn't realize canoes were so dangerous! That almost can't be
right.

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cjy
Here is great video by Cambridge Ideas about the risk of dying from various
activities (measured in micromorts):

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1PtQ67urG4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1PtQ67urG4)

The professor's conclusion is that one of the biggest risks is being too
cautious.

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AlexMennen
So is 1 mort a guaranteed death or a [edit:] 1 - 1/e chance of death?

~~~
colanderman
I think you mean 1-1/e (~= 1 - (1-10^-6)^(10^6)). But yes, the idea that you
can just divide a statistic sampled over thousands of events linearly to get a
meaningful statistic for one occurrence of the event is ridiculous.

~~~
AlexMennen
Yes, thank you.

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networked
Another death-related unit meant to provide perspective:
[http://www.raikoth.net/deadchild.html](http://www.raikoth.net/deadchild.html).

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drcode
Interesting that skydiving would only change the micromorts on the day of the
jump from 39 to 46.

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stcredzero
What you get when the villain of the Harry Potter books makes one million
horcruxes? (Or is it 20?)

EDIT: I wonder how much the micromort exchange rate is with "The Death of
Rats?"

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stuhood
La petite mort?

~~~
jacquesm
Hehe. Subtle.

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gametheoretic
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis)

We're done here.

