Fields Medalist Timothy Gowers reasons about medical risks.
The risk of death is put at one in a thousand, and this is where things get interesting. How worried should I be about a 0.1% risk? How do I even think about that question? Perhaps if my life expectancy from now on is around 30 years, I should think of this as an expected loss of 30/1000 years, or about 10 days. That doesn’t sound too bad — about as bad as having a particularly nasty attack of flu. But is it right to think about it in terms of expectations? I feel that the distribution is important: I would rather have a guaranteed loss of ten days than a 1/1000 chance of losing 30 years.
I found on this site that the average risk of death in the UK for a man between 45 and 54 is 1/279, much higher than 1/1000.
Shudder. The United States has 74,000 troops deployed in Afghanistan.. In 2011, 418 Americans died while deployed in Afghanistan. So roughly 1/180 chance of dying in Afghanistan if you're deployed there for a year. Being a man in your early fifties is not quite as dangerous as working in Afghanistan, but it's in the same ballpark.
Also, I had a nightmare last night where my mom decided to risk swimming on a beach that had a 1 in 170...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.