= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
army1987 comments on Rationality Quotes September 2012 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (1088)
Subway ad: "146 people were hit by trains in 2011. 47 were killed."
Guy on Subway: "That tells me getting hit by a train ain't that dangerous."
Wait, 32% probability of dying “ain't that dangerous”? Are you f***ing kidding me?
If I expect to be hit by a train, I certainly don't expect a ~68% survival chance. Not intuitively, anyways.
I'm guessing that even if you survive, your quality of life is going to take a hit. Accounting for this will probably bring our intuitive expectation of harm closer to the actual harm.
Hmmm, I can't think of any way of figuring out what probability I would have guessed if I had to guess before reading that. Damn you, hindsight bias!
(Maybe you could spell out and rot-13 the second figure in the ad...)
I would expect something like that chance. Being hit by a train will be very similar to landing on your side or back after falling 3 to 10 meters (I'm guessing most people hit by trains are at or near a train station, so the impacts will be relatively slow). So the fatality rate should be similar.
Of course, that prediction gives a fatality rate of only 5-20%, so I'm probably missing something.
There's the whole crushing and high voltage shock thing, depending on how you land.
Well, lightning strikes kill less than half the people they hit.
Lightning strikes usually do not involve physical impacts - I think "falling from 3-10 meters and getting struck by lightning" would be worse. In addition, the length of the current flow depends on the high voltage system.
This seems overwhelmingly likely.