Hey Kyle, nice post. Cool to see another new writer here sharing interesting content to read :)
My fiancée has a lot of fear related to driving. She didn’t start learning until later in life - and even after learning, didn’t need to drive much, living in the city. She had this belief that it was silly to be afraid of driving, and I feel like I was the only one telling her that everyone ELSE was crazy, and she was reacting appropriately. We all got habituated to it as teenagers, before we could conceive of our own mortality. (I also recall an old story where a blind adult was given sight, and nearly had a heart attack when they saw how closely cars were passing each other on the roads).
To your point about risks and dangers - yes, the statistics are scary, but in each activity we have different levels of risk-control. When flying, we control 0% of the outcome, so we can’t mitigate the risk. But when driving, if you don’t drink, text, or drive a poorly maintained vehicle, you can significantly reduce your risk of mortality. Add in things like choosing non-highway routes, avoiding speeding, and picking safer vehicles. Perhaps the more appropriate metric to compare is irreducible risks. If behaviors are evidence, a disturbing number of people seem to accept the cost of increased mortality in order to text while on the highway - if I behave differently, my statistic should be better.
Oh, and another thing to add to your hourly death rate counter is the cost of, like, having a sedentary life. It’s hard to calculate that in terms of how “afraid” you “should” be, but when you add up the expected values I suspect things like my habit of not making my heart work hard most days, or eating too many potato chips, are costing me more life than driving to the store.
Hey Matt, thanks for your comment! It’s a good point that understanding the risk of driving can significantly reduce the odds you crash, by staying vigilant
I actually regret not explicitly comparing things like eating a McDonald’s cheeseburger and skipping exercising for an entire day to the stuff I compared here. I didn’t know exactly how to compare them, but since then I’ve found DALYs! It’s a metric that says how much you’re cutting down your life on average from an activity, weighted so good years are better than years where you’re paralyzed.
The best data I’ve found is that skipping working out and staying sedentary for an entire day is as bad as Skydiving! Eating a single unhealthy meal is 6x less risky, according to DALYs, than missing exercise, which puts it around skiing for a full day. Very interesting result — it’s vitally important to exercise and not just sit around all day it seems.
Good to see that an occasional bad meal isn’t all that additive, heh. With exercise too, there are stacking debuffs if you never do it, which is also potentially hard to account for in models. You might be interested in this - https://iterintellectus.substack.com/p/minimum-viable-muscle-the-least-you
(whoops, didn’t realize that is paywalled now. But it basically says like, get your heart pumping hard twice a week, walk 30 mins every day, and do some basic resistance training. The point was more that it takes a vanishingly small amount of time compared to the gain in QOL it purports to provide).
1) The human instinct of fear isn’t calibrated to the actual risk.
2) Some humans enjoy the sensation of fear/excitement, but don’t want the actual risk.
It’s like an artificial sweetner of risk, all the sensation, none of the chance of things actually going wrong.
Not that fear=risk is the right evolved response anyway. Fear only makes sense in situations where an active response reduces the risk. Fear gets your heart beating for the sort of risks you can run away from.
I was intrigued that rock climbing was only 25x less dangerous than driving. I bet that factoring in some standardized metric for injury (something more specific than dying) might make the danger more clear. Many people get horribly injured from car accidents, but do not die. I would count something like breaking your arm rock climbing as the bar for a rock climbing injury.
Hey Kyle, nice post. Cool to see another new writer here sharing interesting content to read :)
My fiancée has a lot of fear related to driving. She didn’t start learning until later in life - and even after learning, didn’t need to drive much, living in the city. She had this belief that it was silly to be afraid of driving, and I feel like I was the only one telling her that everyone ELSE was crazy, and she was reacting appropriately. We all got habituated to it as teenagers, before we could conceive of our own mortality. (I also recall an old story where a blind adult was given sight, and nearly had a heart attack when they saw how closely cars were passing each other on the roads).
To your point about risks and dangers - yes, the statistics are scary, but in each activity we have different levels of risk-control. When flying, we control 0% of the outcome, so we can’t mitigate the risk. But when driving, if you don’t drink, text, or drive a poorly maintained vehicle, you can significantly reduce your risk of mortality. Add in things like choosing non-highway routes, avoiding speeding, and picking safer vehicles. Perhaps the more appropriate metric to compare is irreducible risks. If behaviors are evidence, a disturbing number of people seem to accept the cost of increased mortality in order to text while on the highway - if I behave differently, my statistic should be better.
Oh, and another thing to add to your hourly death rate counter is the cost of, like, having a sedentary life. It’s hard to calculate that in terms of how “afraid” you “should” be, but when you add up the expected values I suspect things like my habit of not making my heart work hard most days, or eating too many potato chips, are costing me more life than driving to the store.
Hey Matt, thanks for your comment! It’s a good point that understanding the risk of driving can significantly reduce the odds you crash, by staying vigilant
I actually regret not explicitly comparing things like eating a McDonald’s cheeseburger and skipping exercising for an entire day to the stuff I compared here. I didn’t know exactly how to compare them, but since then I’ve found DALYs! It’s a metric that says how much you’re cutting down your life on average from an activity, weighted so good years are better than years where you’re paralyzed.
The best data I’ve found is that skipping working out and staying sedentary for an entire day is as bad as Skydiving! Eating a single unhealthy meal is 6x less risky, according to DALYs, than missing exercise, which puts it around skiing for a full day. Very interesting result — it’s vitally important to exercise and not just sit around all day it seems.
Good to see that an occasional bad meal isn’t all that additive, heh. With exercise too, there are stacking debuffs if you never do it, which is also potentially hard to account for in models. You might be interested in this - https://iterintellectus.substack.com/p/minimum-viable-muscle-the-least-you
(whoops, didn’t realize that is paywalled now. But it basically says like, get your heart pumping hard twice a week, walk 30 mins every day, and do some basic resistance training. The point was more that it takes a vanishingly small amount of time compared to the gain in QOL it purports to provide).
Isn’t the whole point of a roller coaster.
1) The human instinct of fear isn’t calibrated to the actual risk.
2) Some humans enjoy the sensation of fear/excitement, but don’t want the actual risk.
It’s like an artificial sweetner of risk, all the sensation, none of the chance of things actually going wrong.
Not that fear=risk is the right evolved response anyway. Fear only makes sense in situations where an active response reduces the risk. Fear gets your heart beating for the sort of risks you can run away from.
I was intrigued that rock climbing was only 25x less dangerous than driving. I bet that factoring in some standardized metric for injury (something more specific than dying) might make the danger more clear. Many people get horribly injured from car accidents, but do not die. I would count something like breaking your arm rock climbing as the bar for a rock climbing injury.