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ike comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013) - Less Wrong
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I think that a 99% probability would be the same as 100% for this purpose. A “doubt of death” is considered as strong as a definite death in general. In the war zone example, I think (with a little less confidence) a 10% would work the same. You simply don't take into account the potential benefits, when weighed against an action that you must do that will cause a death. On the other hand, the person being requested is allowed to sacrifice their own life (or a 10% chance of doing so) to save others. I'll have to think about your last case a little more.
What if you just need to do ordinary driving, where there's a fraction of a percent chance of death?
If you couldn't do things which had any chance at all of killing innocent people, then you wouldn't be able to drive, or do to a lot of normal things. There's probably some non-zero chance that the next time you turn on your computer it will trigger a circuit fault that causes the building to burn down an hour later.
I think there's a point where the number is low enough that it can become insignificant, but I'm pretty sure it's less than 10%. There's a concept of what considered a "normal risk".
Incidentally, since you mentioned it, there have been attempts by some Rabbis to ban driving for that reason. I'm unable to find a better source currently, but see: this. Some (current ones) have also suggested that one shouldn't drive for pleasure, but only where there's an actual need.
I thought about that your last case earlier, and decided it would also not be allowed. You need to consider each person separately. This person will have a 10% chance of being killed due to your action, which forbids it.
Part of the rationale for the rules (I think), is valuing each moment of life, so, for example, someone is considered a murderer if they kill someone who would die anyway in an hour. So causing the person to die earlier, is worse than letting them die later with everyone else.
Okay, here's another question: Instead of being one person who drives and has a small chance of killing someone, you're running a big company with a lot of drivers..
If two people drive, the chance of killing someone is about twice that of when one person drives. if a lot of people drive, the chance may add up to enough that it is over your threshhold for insignificant. So is it immoral to run a company that uses a lot of drivers, because statistically the chance of death over many drivers is too large, even though each individual driver is okay?
What if instead of running a company you're collecting taxes, and collecting taxes costs some people some "moments of life" (since they have to work longer to pay the taxes)? Most people would say that this is okay because the taxes benefit society, but if you aren't permitted to balance the loss to the individual against the gain to someone else, you can't use that reasoning.
Or what if you're running a country and you need to decide whether to have laws that put people in jail? Because of inevitable human error, you'll be putting more than one innocent person in jail. (Even if you don't know which person is the innocent one.) If you're not willing to say "It's okay to make innocent people lose some 'moments of life' as long as it helps others more", how can you justify having jails?
Huh. Presumably they would also frown upon any similarly risky activity, like climbing, swimming or even living near Gaza borders, where one might get killed by a rocket.
Do you non-negligibly risk killing other people while swimming or climbing? It was said upthread that only killing innocent people counts, so killing yourself doesn't count ^W^Wcounts ^Wdoesn't count ^W^WScrew you Euathlos!
See this about Gaza.
I don't think climbing or swimming are as dangerous as driving. There is an obligation for a father to teach their son to swim, mentioned in the Talmud.
They're a couple orders of magnitude riskier, actually. It's tricky to make a direct comparison because the risk of driving is usually expressed over distance traveled, while sports is usually measured over number of sessions, but if we assume a typical day's driving is about 50 miles (80 km), then we're looking at 0.1 micromorts per session, as opposed to 17 for swimming or 3.1 for rock climbing.
(I'm not totally sure I trust that swimming estimate. The one for rock climbing aligns with my intuition, although there's a lot of variance within the sport -- bouldering is comparatively safe, while attempting the world's highest peaks is absurdly risky by sports standards. I did know one guy who died in a shallow-water blackout and none who died climbing, for whatever that's worth.)
[ETA: The estimate for swimming turns out to be bogus. See below.]
I'm not sure I trust these estimates -- or, rather, I don't think I find them useful. The main problem is that the probabilities involved are all strongly conditional.
Consider swimming in a hotel swimming pool with a lifeguard watching and long-distance swimming alone in the ocean. Both are "swimming" but these two activities are radically different from the risk perspective. Similarly, you can do "climbing" in the climbing gym and you can do "climbing" in the Himalayas.
Sure, there's a lot of variance involved. But there are more and less safe driving habits, too, and I'll bet the variance is about as high. The point isn't to demonstrate that one practice is under all conditions more or less safe than another, it's to compare their average dangers as they're actually practiced. And that clearly favors driving. It's a profoundly bad idea to look at a set of statistics like this and say "oh, the ones that look inconvenient to me were probably doing something unsafe, they don't count".
On the other hand, these statistics don't take health benefits from being physically active into account, which could potentially give ammunition for a much stronger critique -- though given ike's comments, I'm not sure it'd be a valid critique in the context of Jewish law.
I bet less. Yes, you can practice defensive driving, but if you're on the road in the traffic there is only so much you can do to avoid the idiot who is both in a hurry and needs to send that text message right now. You don't have much control over external factors. But in swimming you often do -- it's pretty hard to drown if you are swimming in a pool with others watching.
Yes. Therefore if you know you practice in way that's different from the average, the probabilities change for you.
I wasn't thinking about defensive driving, I was thinking of driving thirty miles over the limit while not wearing a seat belt and texting your girlfriend about the awesome fight you just saw in the pub.
The link you gave puts car deaths above swimming in the second diagram. It doesn't say that the sporting numbers are measured by session. (Except for the BASE jumping, hang-gliding, scuba diving, canoeing, or rock climbing). My own research (the first three links from Googling "risk of car accident death") puts car accidents consistently higher than swimming deaths.
http://www.livescience.com/3780-odds-dying.html: 1-in-100 lifetime car death , 1-in-8,942 swimming death.
http://www.riskcomm.com/visualaids/riskscale/datasources.php: 1 in 17,625 one year car occupant death rate (based on 2002 data), 1 in 83,534 one year drowning death overall, 1 in 452,738 one year drowning death in swimming pool
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/how-scared-should-we-be/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0: 1 in 84 lifetime car deaths, 1 in 1,134 swimming deaths.
I believe that's because people drive much more than they swim, and the risk communication scale uses, say, your second numbers, and the comparison the link author gave converted that from annual to per-act.
I was trying to show that the swimming estimate wasn't per session. 1 in 56,587 is close enough to 1 in 83,534 that they're probably measuring the same thing, namely yearly deaths, in which case (assuming most swimmers swim more than 20 times a year, which I think is reasonable), the per-session risk for driving is more than that for swimming.
You're right, it's not per session -- but it isn't per year either. On closer examination it looks like they're calculating the risk of death over the ten years surveyed (unless the 31 deaths reported are annualized, which I don't think they are), which is an absolutely terrible bottom line -- but fine, it makes the annual risk of death 1 in 566,000. I also notice that the population estimate is identical to that for running and cycling, so it's probably some sort of very crude estimate of Germans involved in sports. Ugh. At least the climbing stats look more reliable.
Incidentally, an annual risk of death of 1 in 566,000 and a hundred sessions per year (two a week with time off for good behavior) gives us a per-act risk of 0.017 micromorts, about equal to driving four miles in a car.
Those numbers look like general population numbers (and since it looks like a lot of drowning deaths are due to ineptitude, it seems unclear to me whether the yearly risk for frequent swimmers is higher or lower than for non-frequent swimmers). Instead of 'all drowning,' the 1 in 83,534 number, one should probably use the 'in swimming pool' number, which is 1 in 452,738.