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MartinB comments on How to avoid dying in a car crash - Less Wrong
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On a related note, stocking canned food [so that you can remain indoors] for the event of high mortality pandemic (e.g. flu) can easily be order of magnitude more effective than reducing your risk of traffic accident all way to zero.
A high mortality pandemic has probability of one in few hundred years historically, higher if you scale for the population size, higher still if you scale for the pig and poultry farms. The death rates can approach 10% or more.
The problem with the risks that are global, is that anyone who wears seatbelt is vindicated of the accusation of paranoya once every few minutes by a preventable traffic fatality, whereas anyone who stocks up food for pandemic, is vindicated once a hundred years. People tend to act on things to avoid being blamed for ineptitude rather than to preserve themselves.
This by the way goes for safety engineering of anything that's big and few, like nuclear power plants, and natural disasters, like tsunamis.
Is there a systematic write-up of these ideas? We might start to put them in the wiki.
Stocking up food is also great to sit out short term problems with the local infrastructure. Like blackouts or massive snow.
No idea about systematic write up, I posted some on that in general.
Much of risk of homicide, for example, may be in the small fraction of futures where the society collapsed, while only a small part is in the business as usual futures.