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katydee comments on The Zeroth Skillset - Less Wrong
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Noted, thanks for the feedback. I do happen to know many (10+) people who died for reasons that would have been avoidable had they or someone around them been more observant, so my impression is that I am correctly calibrated in this respect, but I can see why one might be skeptical.
Do you have an unusual occupation or something? I know of virtually zero accidental deaths in my circle of friends and acquaintances, so I'm wondering what's going on here.
katydee just knows a bizarre cross-section of the population in full generality. He tells fascinating stories about his weird friends at social gatherings. This doesn't surprise me at all about him in particular, but I don't think we should take it as strong evidence about people in general.
There's gotta be someone at the pointy part of the bell curve.
One way to alleviate skeptical would be to explain why you are unusual in this respect.
Until posting this, I didn't realize that I was particularly unusual in that respect; I thought having one or two people you know die every year was normal. Does this not happen for most people?
I don't think it started happening until I was past forty, and very few of them died as a result of accidents.
One other potential confound might be that I know lots of people.
My maternal grandfather died of a stroke when I was about 12 years old; my paternal grandfather died of cancer when I was 19. Those are the only people I knew personally who have died, and I think those numbers (and causes of death) are fairly typical for young people. I've seen lots more dead people, as a nursing student, including some who died of accidental/preventable causes, but I don't count that as evidence I can generalize from–it's a massively biased sample.
I know a number of people who have died in the past 3-4 years, but they all happened to be in the army at the time, so I would consider myself unusual in this respect.
I can only think of one person I know of who died because of a preventable accident. One serious accident comes to mind too. I'm 27, male and in Seattle.
Another approach would be to cite statistics about accident rates. I think at least death statistics from accidents are well recorded.