@dredmorbius@toot.catOf Risk, Traffic Accidents, and Giant Flaming Meteors of Death
...The question of risk, and risk pricing has been on my mind. In particular, the difficulty in portraying the significance of small, contained, individual risk vs. global, catastrophic, highly correlated, and/or existential risk. This is a distinction which is poorly captured in much discussion....
Here's the fallacy: the risk of you dying is not in fact the equivalent risk. The asteroid impact risk is one of everyone on Earth dying, or possibly, all life on Earth. That is, the comparison is of two entirely different outcomes.
[This is] the false equivalence of a risk affecting one person vs. the entire human race (or planet)....
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6vh47p/of_risk_traffic_accidents_and_giant_flaming/
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@mdhughes@appdot.net@dredmorbius Well, that's just a weird comparison since the odds are so very different. Every year, one has around a 1/1e60 chance of dying to a dinosaur-killer asteroid impact, but an 11.18/1e5 chance of dying in a car crash, nuclear war's hard to estimate but under 1/100, probably not lower than 1/1000, given that we've survived 70 years of not having one (99%^70 = 0.4948386596).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year
️ @mdhughes@appdot.net@dredmorbius So risking species extinction with nuclear war is really really stupid. You can't kill everyone with cars, so they're just personally stupid. There's almost no chance of species extinction from a dinosaur killer, except in the very long run, so getting off-planet's a good idea but decades or centuries is plenty of time if we don't nuke ourselves first.
@dredmorbius@mdhughes The fallacy of composition / false equivalence elements are key. Not the associated numbers.
️ @mdhughes@appdot.net@dredmorbius (typo: 1e10 for 60 million years, not 1e60, I should read what I toot)