Cambridge Ideas - Professor Risk
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as a short, fun introduction to micromorts and thinking about risk.
What it is
David Spiegelhalter, Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk, uses statistics to weigh everyday risks such as bacon sandwiches and cycling. The six-minute piece introduces micromorts as a way to compare the risk of dying.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2013 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec cjy · 2013-08 · on “Micromort”
Here is great video by Cambridge Ideas about the risk of dying from various activities (measured in micromorts): [this video] The professor's conclusion is that one of the biggest risks is being too cautious.
Recommends beejiu · 2016-03 · on “Cambridge professor on how to stop being manipulated by misleading statistics”
There's a fun video he created with Cambridge University a few years ago, called "Professor Risk". Worth a watch (6 minutes) [this video] Takeaway from the video "I've come to the conclusion that one of the biggest risks is being too cautious."
Cites shagie · 2022-12 · on “Rogue antibody and mystery pathogen behind AstraZeneca blood clots: study”
The advantage of using micromorts is that they're units that can be added and directly compared. As a populace, we tend to be rather bad at doing fractions and percents - things like mpg - going from 34 to 50 mpg is less of a savings than having a vehicle go from 18 to 28 mpg for the same distance traveled. Consider the problem: you must either do X (1/200 chance of death) or YZ (Y has 1/300 chance of death, Z has 1/300 chance of death). Reworded this becomes: you must either do X (5 micromorts) or YZ (Y is 3.3 micromorts, Z is 3.3 micromorts). And now you've got things that are easier to compare and work with in a scale that we can think about. Most people are doing things on the scale of 0