Kontextmaschine

21st June 2023

Post reblogged from left unity with 537 notes

triviallytrue:
triviallytrue:
Anyway for any other billionaires out there looking for high risk vacations costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, in change for $10k I will take time off from my job and google publicly available info about the company to compile a dossier of how likely you are to bite it. I will even knock a couple thousand off the price tag if you pinkie promise not to drag your kids along
For reference, US citizens drive an average of around 15k miles a year and the US has a death rate of around 1.5 fatalities per 100 million miles driven, so assuming you’re statistically average your odds of dying in a car crash in one year are about 15,000 * 1.5 / 100,000,000, or close to 1 in 400.
Conversely, a little over 6000 people have climbed everest and over 300 people have died on it, so your risk there is more like 1 in 20.
With the power of easily googleable statistics and back-of-a-napkin math, you too could avoid dying in a really stupid, expensive way
Because people are naturally not great at reasoning with probabilities, especially when it comes to matter of life and death, I propose the adoption of a new measurement, the U.S. passenger mile fatality expected value equivalent (USpmfEVe), which is much simpler and more intuitive. At 0.57 deaths per 100,000,000 passenger miles in the U.S., that puts a single sure death at approximately 1.75e8 USpmfEVe.
For example, skydiving is equivalent to 440 miles per jump and whitewater rafting is about 1200 miles per trip. Hopefully this has helped someone reason about risk.