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lmm comments on London LW CoZE exercise report - Less Wrong
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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>
<counter-nitpick>Damage is bounded on the right by death.</counter-nitpick>
We are not talking about quality of life here.
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.