A handy technique for evaluating situations is this: how many mistakes am I away from death/injury? If I drive without a seatbelt, I've put myself 1 accident away in many cases.
My Scouts are young, and love to climb things. I tell them, I know you're strong and skilled. But a loose rock or slippery foothold puts you at risk anyway. So wear the harness - now it takes two mistakes to kill you (e.g. loose rock + badly rigged harness). The risk goes down drastically.
So put some non-skid floor mat in your shower, or a chair as advised in this thread. The mis-step no longer carries the same risk.
Sometimes you hear things that instantly change your views on the world.
I have to say that this above post, in about 10 seconds of reading it, has completely changed my views on assessing risk.
The idea of quantifying risk by counting the number of mistakes you are away from catastrophic failure is an excellent way to visualize risk. It's a simple way to calculate risk, and an even easier way to teach my kids. Thank you.
In the climbing example as presented, you should be at least three mistakes away from injury. The belayer should check the climber's harness and knots before allowing the climber to climb. Naturally the climber should check that the belayer's harness is fastened securely and that the belay device is rigged properly before climbing too.
Realistically, there are still several single points of failure in the system:
1) The space between the belayer's ears
2) the rope if it has become damaged since it was flaked and inspected or gets cut while catching a fall. Yes, that happened, though not to me [1].
3) The protection on the wall, due to improper use. although depending on how high you are, the next piece down might still keep you off the deck.
4) The harness itself, although barring invisible damage this should be caught by the belayer/climber him/herself and the cross check.
5) The protection on the wall due to gear failure.
The above are listed in what I would consider descending probability, although 2 and 3 are pretty close, with 3 probably jumping 2 in trad climbing. I would rate the probability of 5 being negligible barring manufacturing defects, the prevention and possibly detection of which is probably outside the expertise of virtually all climbers.
Moral of the story: safety is complicated. (edited to add) I'd believe that trying to get people to apply a simple model of "how many mistakes" is better than none, but I wonder to what extent it reduces safety by making people complacent about having done a risk analysis when the system is too complicated to be analyzed that way.
This is reminiscent of Benjamin Graham's "margin of safety" idea in investing. Get yourself in a position where you think the stock you want to buy is cheap and certainly worth buying. Then buy it if it only if it becomes even cheaper.
Put yourself in a position where you think you are unlikely to get hurt by a single mistake, and then insert an additional layer. So really it should be three :)
Reminds me of skydiving statistics. Something like 1 in 1000 chutes fail, so you pack two. The chance of both chutes failing is 1/1,000,000. Consider the fact that most skydiving accidents are due to human error and you can expect an accident roughly once every 100,000 jumps or more, which it turns out is pretty accurate.
That's a good metric. You can make it slightly more involved by not only counting mistakes, but also when those mistakes would have to occur.
For the climbing: The loose rock can occur while you are distracted. But you can tie up the harness at your leisure and with friends checking.
From a software development perspective, that's also why automated testing is better than manual testing. You can write the automated tests when you have time, and they will work even when you are under stress.
This is a bit of an aside, but I have to say this: even as a young person, take falls very seriously. I was 22 or so when I slipped in the shower. I was falling to the side and was going to hit my head, so I decided to twist so that I'd fall flat on my back, figuring I'd be fine. Well, I was, until a few hours later, when I started having chest pain and my left arm went numb and started getting shooting pains.
Thinking it was a heart attack, I went to the ER and was told I was fine, and it was probably just a pinched nerve from the fall. Three years later, the pain hasn't stopped -- the chest pain isn't so bad these days usually, but my left arm is almost continually numb and, well, the body doesn't really get used to the pins-and-needles feeling. If I had taken it more seriously, had a CT scan taken at the time, etc, it may have been caught early. Unfortunately, now that so much time has passed, doctors are at a loss as for what's going on.
I'm still finding new doctors and doing my own research into what's going on, but this process has been excruciating. So, please, if you have a fall: go to the doctor, and have them do a real examination immediately. When I went, they focused on my heart and didn't even so much as look at my neck or my shoulder; had I gone after the fall, they may have figured out what it was, and I wouldn't be in pain years later.
I some similar problems along with significant pain, also caused by falls (and a fairly serious injury that compounded things).
I had pain for years, until I stumbled onto a combination of things that completely resolve the issues as long as I stick to them.
I'm telling you in case they help. If nothing else it shouldn't hurt anything.
In order of importance:
1. Develop & maintain significant muscle mass, specifically in my upper & lower back. I'm not a huge musclehead by any stretch, but I can do 20+ pull-ups (not chin-ups) in a row and deadlift over 350 lbs. This had the biggest impact, and if I stop working out, the pain/symptoms come back. It literally took me years to get here, but is completely worth it to live pain/numb free. Health/aesthetics benefits are nice too.
2. Active Release Therapy - this broke up scar tissue that I had, may not be applicable to you.
3. Fish Oil Supplements - acts as a natural anti-inflammatory
4. Vitamin D/sunshine - Not sure if it's just because the sun & vitamin D makes me feel better overall, but I feel like it makes a small difference.
It does not even have to go that far: I was 26 when I was having a silly argument with my SO, and I tripped over while putting trousers on and fell forward. I had the bad reflex of putting my hands in front of me, but not fast enough so that my hands folded backwards, damaging wrist ligaments and cartilage.
Immediately examined by a doctor and a number of x-ray shots done, one of my left arm bone was slightly fractured which I was told will heal jsut fine, but cartilage had suffered permanent damage, that will only get worse with time. I had the habit to do regular Aikibudo wrist exercising (it helps prevent RSI), and this helps a lot in maintaining a status quo by strengthening ligaments and muscles, thus protecting the joint itself.
While I'm usually not in pain, I happen to be at seemingly random times, and I know what is the cause and that it will only get worse with time (it already does and I'm only 0x20)
Sounds like a herniated disc in your neck. Given the time frame it seems stable -- but the only way to fix it is probably years of difficult physiotherapy or surgery (and then physiotherapy).
I fell on my tailbone delivering papers in the icy winters of Canada when I was about 10 years old. My tailbone still occasionally acts up 17 years later.
I suspect whiplash from the fall caused trigger points in your neck and shoulders. I've had similar issues caused by RSI and stress. I highly recommend giving this book a try:
In the derivatives world, there's a saying for trying to bet against highly unlikely events with catastrophic risk for small gains: "picking up nickels in front of a steamroller." The issue is when you pick up enough nickels and watch for the steamrollers vigilantly first few times, you grow complacent and think that you are the master of nickel pickers and steamrollers are slow mofo's. You try to pick more nickels and linger longer in front of incoming steamrollers.
See debacle of Long Term Capital Management. Options trader take profit/loss as soon as a humble target is hit. It's as in life, the biggest loss is the complete loss of your physical capital which takes you out permanently of the game. Gamblers focus on the potential profits and get high on how their luck evaded fate in one nick of time, traders focus on preservation of capital.
Looking at the 2011 prelims "Accidents (unintentional injuries)" comes in at #5 with 122,777 deaths and Intentional self-harm (suicide) is at #10 with 38,285. Assault (homicide) is no longer in the top 15.
Also, Assault (homicide) by discharge of firearms is 11,101 with all other Assault (homicide) totaling 4,852. To give some context to the Assault (homicide) numbers, "Accidental poisoning and exposure to noxious substances" totals 33,554 deaths or about 3x the Assault (homicide) firearm number or 2x the total.
Looking at the stats and what kills us, we spend a lot of time looking at the stuff that is actually going down versus the stuff that is increasing.
It's important to remember that causes of death are often also activities which carry utility and even outright life-saving capability.
Accidental poisoning, for example, is often due to exposure to cleaning chemicals and drugs which have massively reduced illnesses and deaths. Spending more to make them less accessible may actually be self-defeating, in that it could well cause more deaths than it prevents, by making it harder to get and use those things for their intended purpose.
Further, many of the more prominent killers in society have already been the subject of safety campaigns. Cars are massively safer today than they were in the 70s and earlier, as a direct result of safety research and societal effort. As returns on such efforts have been diminishing for some time, the next dollar of safety research or societal effort is quite likely to impact more net lives when directed at a "lesser" killer that hasn't been the subject of as much study.
One must keep those two considerations in mind, when making judgements about whether we're spending an undue amount of time and money on a given threat.
Simply looking at a stack-rank of 'killers' isn't enough.
It’s also important to remember that the total rate of death is constant at 1 death/person. Some death types going down will automatically result in others going up, so an increase or decrease in one type might not necessarily mean that the risk has changed.
I guess the goal is to reduce the deaths we can do something about.
Strangely not mentioned at all, so I'll put it here: Jared Diamond is the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, his most famous work. It addresses the question of how and why European societies were able to advance themselves so much farther ahead of all other civilizations. There is also an excellent four-part series streaming on Netflix.
Especially since the TSA actually accomplishes almost nothing in preventing deaths. All a terrorist about to be discovered at the airport security gate would have to do to complete his deadly mission would be to detonate his bomb right then and there. It would cause people to fear airports and security gates and mess up the whole system. Terrorism is all about sowing fear that the government can't protect you. The TSA just shifts some of the risk from the airplane to the airport. You can't security check everything in life. Better to figure out why people want to detonate bombs in the first place and solve that problem. But symbolic solutions are so much easier.
I am a little skeptical of this idea. We should spend no money fighting one threat until all greater threats (as measure by deaths/year) have been eliminated? I think rather we should spend money proportionally.
And I do not think that we should completely ignore the fears of irrational people. If our citizens are unhappy because they fear something, it is worth some expense to set them at ease. Though perhaps a careful placebo would be most fitting
Speaking specifically about fall risk in older people: if you want to ensure a high quality of life when you're older, maintain strong muscles through exercise. This may seem like a no brainer, and yet almost nobody actually does it.
Balance and strength are highly dependent on exercise. Even fairly old people can maintain very good balance and strength if they don't let their muscles deteriorate through inactivity.
Being frail in old age is not inevitable. A sedentary person after age 50 loses something like 5% of muscle mass annually. But that same person can boost their muscle mass 20% in a single year if they just get serious about strength training, and then slow the deterioration to 1 or 2% thereafter. Run the numbers, it makes a dramatic difference in outcomes.
Mortality Data on Falls from the CDC shows the increase in risk as Americans age - and that is the direction of our demographics:
Cause of death (based on ICD-10, 2004) Falls (W00-W19)
All ages 26,009
Under 1 year 10
1-4 years 24
5-14 years 28
15-24 years 211
25-34 years 299
35-44 years 493
45-54 years 1,283
55-64 years 2,011
65-74 years 2,988
75-84 years 7,249
85 years and over 11,412
Not stated 1
The takeaway for programmers: every time you write a statement, the odds that you're introducing a bug are quite small, but you do this a lot, so the odds guarantee you will introduce a bug. The guys at NASA who came to TX/RX in Houston used to treat soldering defects as a statistical certainty. You empirically determine your solder failure rate, count the solder joins in the project, then look for your predicted number of failures. When they told me this, a light went off in my head. Why don't all programmers do this?
Think of it like this: if someone paid you $100 to take 2 steps balancing on a rail, you're certain to be able to do it. How about going 100 times as far for $10,000 over a 1000 foot drop? As they say: Quantity has a quality all its own.
Nothing against New Guineans, but the notion of attributing not sleeping under a dead tree to their specific culture is funny. It's basic risk management of anyone who camps frequently in the backcountry. In fact many learn the 4 W's of concern when picking a campsite- Wind/Weather, Water, Wildlife, and Widowmakers (i.e. a falling tree branch)
I think you missed his point. He wasn't trying to establish that New Guineans somehow "invented" the idea of not sleeping under a dead tree, merely that the author wasn't personally tuned to the risks of being under trees until he spent time with the people there. That's all.
Heaven forbid an author write from his experience, and use a vivid illustration, instead of consulting the Compendium Of Facts Of What Every Person Knows and choosing the blandest and most local example.
I see someone on a motorcycle, and I think "idiot". I've known 7 people in my life who have had motorcycle accidents. One has had 2. He broke his neck in one of them. A couple spilled their bike on uneven pavement. A guy I met in college was like doctor House (dead bone in his leg causing great pain). Another guy was thrown 60 feet when he was rear-ended by a truck. And the last 2 are a father and son. The father has brain damage that destroyed his marriage. Go ahead and have your midlife crisis. I'll be in my car. I might die in a horrific accident someday, but a fender bender won't turn into road-rash and a concussion.
Author doesn't understand how statistics/probabilities work and it ruins the article.
If you roll a dice six times, you have no guarantee to get a six. Each time you roll the dice, you have 1/6th chance of getting a six and this doesn't change no matter how many times you roll.
If you roll a dice six times, you have around 66,51% (1-(5/6)^6) chance of getting six at least once.
For the same reason, if you have 1/1000th chance of dying under the shower, and you take 5,000 showers, you won't die 5 times...
You will have 1-(999/1000)^5000 chance of dying, that 99,32%. That's not 1. So you won't die 5 times.
You're apparently the one who doesn't understand how statistics/probability works. You're correct about his chance of dying once, but there's also a chance of dying twice, a chance of dying 3 times, etc. The expected value of the number of times he would die is 5000(1/1000), or 5.
If you replaced "deaths" in your post with "coin flips", this becomes obvious. I'll repeat your post with some different numbers so you can see how absurd your argument is.
If you have a 1/2 chance of flipping heads and you flip 10 coins, you won't get 5 heads.
You will have 1-(1/2)^10 of flipping heads, that [sic] 99.902%. That's not 1. So you won't get 5 heads.
See how that doesn't make sense?
Now, obviously a real person can't die more than once, but if you think he was mistaken about that then his supposed error has more to do with biology than statistics. Any reasonable reader would understand that it was just his rhetorical way of describing a large number of independent statistical events. If it helps, think of it as a population of 5000 equally-careless people taking 1 shower each, not a single person taking 5000.
That's a relief, I prefer only dying once. Pedantic silliness aside, it was clearly an illustration of how frequency can amplify small probabilities to near-certainties, evidenced by the repetitive use of the one-in-a-thousand statistic.
I'm willing to bet that Jared Diamond understands statistics. He just understands that most of the people reading his article don't. The inaccuracy doesn't affect the article so it's better to be more clear than completely inaccurate.
> Life expectancy for a healthy American man of my age is about 90. (That’s not to be confused with American male life expectancy at birth, only about 78.)
It's interesting that Diamond literally describes the survival function[0], which is usually thought of as E[X|x>=a], but then conflates this with the expected value in the next breath.
I'm confident he understands the difference, but the notion of the survival function is so easy to understand without the underlying statistics (as he explains in two sentences), and provides a much more useful way of conceptualizing statistics. (Expected values of binomial distributions, on the other hand, are highly useful mathematically but difficult to conceptualize without the underlying statistics).
For those equally concerned, there are "shower chairs" that you can get that greatly reduce the risk of falls. Since my SO had her amputation it was the only way she could take a shower. However I've found it to be pretty convenient as well.
One of the reasons falls are so fatal for old people is because elderly people in our society rarely stay active. Look at cultures like the Chinese, where you so elderly women up in the morning doing Taichi, or working out on those weird outdoor gym sets in the rest of the day. Maintaining strength and flexibility during old age helps mitigate damage from falls a lot.
Physical deterioration is often a self-fulfilling prophecy,
The real reason falls are so fatal for the elderly is because the victims become immobalized, causing them to become less active. After a fall, many elderly people are bed-ridden which causes a whole host of greater health problems which are the actual killers.
But then good health and daily activity are the best ways of preventing falls, (along with balance training and physiotherapy, especially after a surgery or stroke) so yes it is a cycle as you say.
I don't agree with it being primarily a cultural thing though. Daily exercise is an individual choice. There's a guy in my new building who I see all the time, he just walks to the end of the hall and back many times each day. Each lap probably takes him 10 minutes. But he chooses to stay active, even in very old age.
the life expectancy at birth for China in 2011 was 73.47 years (CIA World Factbook (2011 estimates)) compared with 78.37 for the U.S and 80.05 for the UK.
So one reason that all those old Chinese people may appear so mobile is that they aren't quite as old as you might expect.
Angband(the roguelike) is an excellent teacher of the point made in the article.
The game is quite long and if you die you have to start over from the beginning. You can also be killed in one turn if you are unlucky and not careful. The only way to win is to lower the risk to die at each turn sufficiently that you can play through the 100 000 turns or so that it takes to win.
Playing it has really given me perspective on risks in a similar way to the author of the article. In real life you end up doing some things a lot of times and then the risk has to be damn low.
Seriously showering 365 times/year is, while normal in the US, really pretty bizarre and definitely decadent. Put on some deodorant, shower every other day and this guy could cut down his risk massively. And save colossal amounts of water!
Does he sweat regularly? Play sports? If not, in the winter, shower twice per week. Doing otherwise is really falling into one of the weirdest forms of American prissiness.
In general I shower when my wife tells me I need to. On average that means every 2-3 days. How strange and wasteful would it be if someone washed their car every single morning regardless of whether it was dirty or had even been moved from the garage that day! (I work from home so the analogy frequently works)
I know he's making a broader point about risk but if you want to get over some crazy warped American perceptions to improve your life and the world, obsessive showering is as good a one as getting over delusions of risk of terrorist attacks.
> Put on some deodorant, shower every other day and this guy could cut down his risk massively
Yeah, if by "massively" you mean he'll only be expected to have a possibly-fatal fall twice instead of five times.
Your post is extremely ignorant. It not only offensively and incorrectly ascribes daily showering to "prissiness" and "obsessiveness" (as if that's the reason I shower every day, instead of, you know, wanting to smell nice, look nice, and feel refreshed), it also claims that this is an American phenomenon (I'm Canadian, and many/most people I know shower daily. The ones I know who don't, smell). It also assumes all people are the same. Personally, I'd feel pretty sorry for your wife if you smell like I do after not showering that morning.
It's no more "bizarre" than the Japanese are bizarre for using those funky toilets with built-in bidets. Cultures may be different. Let them be different without judging, and without projecting.
In general I shower when my wife tells me I need to.
I'm not here to judge you or your lifestyle, but if I were to rely on my significant other to tell me when I needed to shower, I would feel as though I was taking advantage of their good will. I want to take care of myself and be attractive for them, not use them as a smell-o-metre.
This varies significantly from person to person. For me after 30-48 hours so I start getting itchy, my hair and face get obviously oily, and I start to smell. And that's assuming I'm not being very active.
Reminds me a lot of Nassim Taleb's focus on payoff/cost (expected outcomes) vs probability. If the possible costs are high enough, it makes a lot of sense to take precautions. Hardly rocket science - seat-belts, hand-rails, smoking etc.
I initially thought this was going to be about long-term health risks of showering every day. I've heard that long hot showers are bad for the skin and/or hair, is that true? Or might they be bad for the body in other ways?
(But good piece nonetheless, Jared Diamond is brilliant.)
It's common knowledge in Australia that you don't pitch your tent under a tree, alive or dead. I imagine that's because Eucalyptus trees have a habit of dropping large limbs without warning (it's an adaptation to survive droughts).
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|13 years ago|reply
My Scouts are young, and love to climb things. I tell them, I know you're strong and skilled. But a loose rock or slippery foothold puts you at risk anyway. So wear the harness - now it takes two mistakes to kill you (e.g. loose rock + badly rigged harness). The risk goes down drastically.
So put some non-skid floor mat in your shower, or a chair as advised in this thread. The mis-step no longer carries the same risk.
[+] [-] kjackson2012|13 years ago|reply
I have to say that this above post, in about 10 seconds of reading it, has completely changed my views on assessing risk.
The idea of quantifying risk by counting the number of mistakes you are away from catastrophic failure is an excellent way to visualize risk. It's a simple way to calculate risk, and an even easier way to teach my kids. Thank you.
[+] [-] mauvehaus|13 years ago|reply
Realistically, there are still several single points of failure in the system:
1) The space between the belayer's ears 2) the rope if it has become damaged since it was flaked and inspected or gets cut while catching a fall. Yes, that happened, though not to me [1]. 3) The protection on the wall, due to improper use. although depending on how high you are, the next piece down might still keep you off the deck. 4) The harness itself, although barring invisible damage this should be caught by the belayer/climber him/herself and the cross check. 5) The protection on the wall due to gear failure.
The above are listed in what I would consider descending probability, although 2 and 3 are pretty close, with 3 probably jumping 2 in trad climbing. I would rate the probability of 5 being negligible barring manufacturing defects, the prevention and possibly detection of which is probably outside the expertise of virtually all climbers.
Moral of the story: safety is complicated. (edited to add) I'd believe that trying to get people to apply a simple model of "how many mistakes" is better than none, but I wonder to what extent it reduces safety by making people complacent about having done a risk analysis when the system is too complicated to be analyzed that way.
[1] http://www.redriverclimbing.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=132...
[+] [-] gfodor|13 years ago|reply
Put yourself in a position where you think you are unlikely to get hurt by a single mistake, and then insert an additional layer. So really it should be three :)
[+] [-] aqme28|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eru|13 years ago|reply
For the climbing: The loose rock can occur while you are distracted. But you can tie up the harness at your leisure and with friends checking.
From a software development perspective, that's also why automated testing is better than manual testing. You can write the automated tests when you have time, and they will work even when you are under stress.
[+] [-] daeken|13 years ago|reply
Thinking it was a heart attack, I went to the ER and was told I was fine, and it was probably just a pinched nerve from the fall. Three years later, the pain hasn't stopped -- the chest pain isn't so bad these days usually, but my left arm is almost continually numb and, well, the body doesn't really get used to the pins-and-needles feeling. If I had taken it more seriously, had a CT scan taken at the time, etc, it may have been caught early. Unfortunately, now that so much time has passed, doctors are at a loss as for what's going on.
I'm still finding new doctors and doing my own research into what's going on, but this process has been excruciating. So, please, if you have a fall: go to the doctor, and have them do a real examination immediately. When I went, they focused on my heart and didn't even so much as look at my neck or my shoulder; had I gone after the fall, they may have figured out what it was, and I wouldn't be in pain years later.
Hope this cautionary tale helps someone!
[+] [-] seestheday|13 years ago|reply
I had pain for years, until I stumbled onto a combination of things that completely resolve the issues as long as I stick to them.
I'm telling you in case they help. If nothing else it shouldn't hurt anything.
In order of importance:
1. Develop & maintain significant muscle mass, specifically in my upper & lower back. I'm not a huge musclehead by any stretch, but I can do 20+ pull-ups (not chin-ups) in a row and deadlift over 350 lbs. This had the biggest impact, and if I stop working out, the pain/symptoms come back. It literally took me years to get here, but is completely worth it to live pain/numb free. Health/aesthetics benefits are nice too.
2. Active Release Therapy - this broke up scar tissue that I had, may not be applicable to you.
3. Fish Oil Supplements - acts as a natural anti-inflammatory
4. Vitamin D/sunshine - Not sure if it's just because the sun & vitamin D makes me feel better overall, but I feel like it makes a small difference.
Edited to clean up paragraphs
[+] [-] lloeki|13 years ago|reply
Immediately examined by a doctor and a number of x-ray shots done, one of my left arm bone was slightly fractured which I was told will heal jsut fine, but cartilage had suffered permanent damage, that will only get worse with time. I had the habit to do regular Aikibudo wrist exercising (it helps prevent RSI), and this helps a lot in maintaining a status quo by strengthening ligaments and muscles, thus protecting the joint itself.
While I'm usually not in pain, I happen to be at seemingly random times, and I know what is the cause and that it will only get worse with time (it already does and I'm only 0x20)
[+] [-] KVFinn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GigabyteCoin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dwbutler|13 years ago|reply
http://www.triggerpointbook.com/
[+] [-] noname123|13 years ago|reply
See debacle of Long Term Capital Management. Options trader take profit/loss as soon as a humble target is hit. It's as in life, the biggest loss is the complete loss of your physical capital which takes you out permanently of the game. Gamblers focus on the potential profits and get high on how their luck evaded fate in one nick of time, traders focus on preservation of capital.
[+] [-] protomyth|13 years ago|reply
Looking at the 2011 prelims "Accidents (unintentional injuries)" comes in at #5 with 122,777 deaths and Intentional self-harm (suicide) is at #10 with 38,285. Assault (homicide) is no longer in the top 15.
Also, Assault (homicide) by discharge of firearms is 11,101 with all other Assault (homicide) totaling 4,852. To give some context to the Assault (homicide) numbers, "Accidental poisoning and exposure to noxious substances" totals 33,554 deaths or about 3x the Assault (homicide) firearm number or 2x the total.
Looking at the stats and what kills us, we spend a lot of time looking at the stuff that is actually going down versus the stuff that is increasing.
[+] [-] roc|13 years ago|reply
Accidental poisoning, for example, is often due to exposure to cleaning chemicals and drugs which have massively reduced illnesses and deaths. Spending more to make them less accessible may actually be self-defeating, in that it could well cause more deaths than it prevents, by making it harder to get and use those things for their intended purpose.
Further, many of the more prominent killers in society have already been the subject of safety campaigns. Cars are massively safer today than they were in the 70s and earlier, as a direct result of safety research and societal effort. As returns on such efforts have been diminishing for some time, the next dollar of safety research or societal effort is quite likely to impact more net lives when directed at a "lesser" killer that hasn't been the subject of as much study.
One must keep those two considerations in mind, when making judgements about whether we're spending an undue amount of time and money on a given threat.
Simply looking at a stack-rank of 'killers' isn't enough.
[+] [-] brudgers|13 years ago|reply
In other words, the person you are most likely to kill with a gun is yourself.
[+] [-] RyanMcGreal|13 years ago|reply
We need to be careful: maybe things that are going down are going down because of how much time we have spent looking at them.
[+] [-] mfsch|13 years ago|reply
I guess the goal is to reduce the deaths we can do something about.
[+] [-] jessedhillon|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nathan_long|13 years ago|reply
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/the_comparativ...
But I like the OP's more practical point: personal attention to normal activities that are actually risky, based on a realistic view of those risks.
[+] [-] davidroberts|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sopooneo|13 years ago|reply
And I do not think that we should completely ignore the fears of irrational people. If our citizens are unhappy because they fear something, it is worth some expense to set them at ease. Though perhaps a careful placebo would be most fitting
[+] [-] ef4|13 years ago|reply
Balance and strength are highly dependent on exercise. Even fairly old people can maintain very good balance and strength if they don't let their muscles deteriorate through inactivity.
Being frail in old age is not inevitable. A sedentary person after age 50 loses something like 5% of muscle mass annually. But that same person can boost their muscle mass 20% in a single year if they just get serious about strength training, and then slow the deterioration to 1 or 2% thereafter. Run the numbers, it makes a dramatic difference in outcomes.
[+] [-] brudgers|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stcredzero|13 years ago|reply
Think of it like this: if someone paid you $100 to take 2 steps balancing on a rail, you're certain to be able to do it. How about going 100 times as far for $10,000 over a 1000 foot drop? As they say: Quantity has a quality all its own.
[+] [-] hammock|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GiraffeNecktie|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ahoyhere|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skittles|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shin_lao|13 years ago|reply
If you roll a dice six times, you have no guarantee to get a six. Each time you roll the dice, you have 1/6th chance of getting a six and this doesn't change no matter how many times you roll.
If you roll a dice six times, you have around 66,51% (1-(5/6)^6) chance of getting six at least once.
For the same reason, if you have 1/1000th chance of dying under the shower, and you take 5,000 showers, you won't die 5 times...
You will have 1-(999/1000)^5000 chance of dying, that 99,32%. That's not 1. So you won't die 5 times.
[+] [-] sparky_z|13 years ago|reply
If you replaced "deaths" in your post with "coin flips", this becomes obvious. I'll repeat your post with some different numbers so you can see how absurd your argument is.
See how that doesn't make sense?Now, obviously a real person can't die more than once, but if you think he was mistaken about that then his supposed error has more to do with biology than statistics. Any reasonable reader would understand that it was just his rhetorical way of describing a large number of independent statistical events. If it helps, think of it as a population of 5000 equally-careless people taking 1 shower each, not a single person taking 5000.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tichy|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] chimeracoder|13 years ago|reply
It's interesting that Diamond literally describes the survival function[0], which is usually thought of as E[X|x>=a], but then conflates this with the expected value in the next breath.
I'm confident he understands the difference, but the notion of the survival function is so easy to understand without the underlying statistics (as he explains in two sentences), and provides a much more useful way of conceptualizing statistics. (Expected values of binomial distributions, on the other hand, are highly useful mathematically but difficult to conceptualize without the underlying statistics).
[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_function
[+] [-] EwanG|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IsaacL|13 years ago|reply
Physical deterioration is often a self-fulfilling prophecy,
[+] [-] peeters|13 years ago|reply
But then good health and daily activity are the best ways of preventing falls, (along with balance training and physiotherapy, especially after a surgery or stroke) so yes it is a cycle as you say.
I don't agree with it being primarily a cultural thing though. Daily exercise is an individual choice. There's a guy in my new building who I see all the time, he just walks to the end of the hall and back many times each day. Each lap probably takes him 10 minutes. But he chooses to stay active, even in very old age.
[+] [-] Angostura|13 years ago|reply
the life expectancy at birth for China in 2011 was 73.47 years (CIA World Factbook (2011 estimates)) compared with 78.37 for the U.S and 80.05 for the UK.
So one reason that all those old Chinese people may appear so mobile is that they aren't quite as old as you might expect.
[+] [-] symmetricsaurus|13 years ago|reply
The game is quite long and if you die you have to start over from the beginning. You can also be killed in one turn if you are unlucky and not careful. The only way to win is to lower the risk to die at each turn sufficiently that you can play through the 100 000 turns or so that it takes to win.
Playing it has really given me perspective on risks in a similar way to the author of the article. In real life you end up doing some things a lot of times and then the risk has to be damn low.
[+] [-] eagsalazar2|13 years ago|reply
Does he sweat regularly? Play sports? If not, in the winter, shower twice per week. Doing otherwise is really falling into one of the weirdest forms of American prissiness.
In general I shower when my wife tells me I need to. On average that means every 2-3 days. How strange and wasteful would it be if someone washed their car every single morning regardless of whether it was dirty or had even been moved from the garage that day! (I work from home so the analogy frequently works)
I know he's making a broader point about risk but if you want to get over some crazy warped American perceptions to improve your life and the world, obsessive showering is as good a one as getting over delusions of risk of terrorist attacks.
[+] [-] peeters|13 years ago|reply
Yeah, if by "massively" you mean he'll only be expected to have a possibly-fatal fall twice instead of five times.
Your post is extremely ignorant. It not only offensively and incorrectly ascribes daily showering to "prissiness" and "obsessiveness" (as if that's the reason I shower every day, instead of, you know, wanting to smell nice, look nice, and feel refreshed), it also claims that this is an American phenomenon (I'm Canadian, and many/most people I know shower daily. The ones I know who don't, smell). It also assumes all people are the same. Personally, I'd feel pretty sorry for your wife if you smell like I do after not showering that morning.
It's no more "bizarre" than the Japanese are bizarre for using those funky toilets with built-in bidets. Cultures may be different. Let them be different without judging, and without projecting.
[+] [-] abrichr|13 years ago|reply
I'm not here to judge you or your lifestyle, but if I were to rely on my significant other to tell me when I needed to shower, I would feel as though I was taking advantage of their good will. I want to take care of myself and be attractive for them, not use them as a smell-o-metre.
[+] [-] driverdan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timruffles|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajaymehta|13 years ago|reply
(But good piece nonetheless, Jared Diamond is brilliant.)
[+] [-] caf|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bambax|13 years ago|reply
Or, take fewer showers. You don't need to shower every day in winter, do you?