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Lumifer comments on London LW CoZE exercise report - Less Wrong
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Comments (26)
No, because in CoZE psychological discomfort is the price you pay for advancing towards a deliberate goal.
I don't know why OP goes to bars -- maybe he does have a goal, or maybe he just does it because that's what guys are supposed to do. In the latter case "don't do it, then" is good advice.
Could be, but only if you control the outcome (the amount of pain and long-term damage to your body). If you can't control it, as in e.g. a bar fight, it looks like a really unreasonable idea to me. You get a broken bottle shoved into your face and you lose an eye, or you wake up in a couple of day with brain trauma and find yourself to be considerably stupider...
I think it's reasonable to assume that he does have some goal, such as "hanging out with my friends who enjoy spending time in bars". Or even just "it's what guys are supposed to do and I don't want to take the status hit".
It's possible that he's asking for advice on doing something that he doesn't really want to do, but your post came across like you were just assuming that was the case.
Are you really assessing the dangers rationally here? Every possible activity involves some risk of long-term harm.
Yes, but that "some" risk can be very different.
Consider white-water kayaking. In case #1 you drive with friends to some rapids near a city, with good cell reception in the area, and proceed to run the rapids. Is there risk? Sure. How much? Not that much. If necessary friends will pull you out of the water and drive you to the hospital or will be able to call an ambulance, etc.
Now, in case #2 you take your kayak and go solo on a multi-day trip down a white-water river that runs through a wild roadless area. Is there risk? Sure. How much? A LOT.
Which of those examples do you think the risk level of starting a bar fight is more similar to?
Neither, really. My point is that your estimate of the damage you will suffer in a bar fight is highly uncertain. Maybe you'll just get shoved out of the door with zero damage. Or maybe you'll get a cracked skull and go into coma.
Basically you can't manage your risk.
Sorry, how is this different from going kayaking, even in the safest way available? In either case you can calculate statistically what the risks are, and you can take some actions to make some of the risks smaller, but there's a pretty clear lower bound, a minimum risk to doing the activity at all.
The difference is not in the lower bound, the difference is in the plausible upper bound.
The theoretical upper bound is the same everywhere -- a comet lands on your head, done. But the plausible upper bound for a bar fight is pretty high. Not that I have much personal experience, but it's probably possible to dig out police/hospital statistics on the outcomes of bar brawls.
Keep in mind, it's not the risk of you going into a bar and, by chance, becoming entangled in a scuffle. It is the risk of damage conditional on you starting a fight.
I meant there's a lower bound however much you take steps to reduce the risk. You seem to be talking about uncertainty about the odds.
The idea that going to a bar and starting a fight is obviously a terrible idea because you might be seriously injured seems like a cached thought from here. Given the relative frequencies of bar fights and serious injuries, it doesn't seem remotely plausible that they're all that dangerous.
Not quite. Damage is a continuous random variable. You can construct an estimated distribution for this variable. This distribution is bounded on the left by zero (we'll ignore fights healing you e.g. by knocking out a bad tooth) and is bounded on the right by death. Within these limits our estimated distribution can be narrower (you're more certain about how much damage you will sustain) or wider (you're less certain).
I am saying that damage from a bar fight has a wide distribution.
Do you have data on the frequencies of serious injuries conditional on the fact of a bar fight?
<nitpick>In countries which don't allow euthanasia, in principle you could end up stuck into a condition worse than death.</nitpick>
I doubt there's any direct data about the safety of bar fights.
The yearly incidence of facial fractures in Finland is 80/100000, which is quite high. Half of fhose are caused by violence. Significant majority of that violence has something to do with alcohol. There are several other serious injury types mostly associated with violence, and this is only one of them.
ISTM that most bar fights are interrupted by other people getting in the way/pulling the fighters apart and trying to calm them down (at least where I am -- may be different in other parts of the world). If so, premeditated fights might be more dangerous than average.
I believe it depends on the bar.
It depends on who you are with and what bar it is (as well as your physical fitness, and other things) -- much like in the kayak case.