DanielLC comments on Measuring lethality in reduced expected heartbeats - Less Wrong

5 Post author: chaosmage 03 January 2014 02:14PM

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Comment author: DanielLC 04 January 2014 04:44:22AM 4 points [-]

Micromort measures the probability of dying. Reduced expected heartbeats measures the reduced lifespan. You cannot convert between them.

For example, it might be that smoking one cigarette and driving one mile both are one micromort, but smoking doesn't kill you for a long time while driving kills you immediately. Thus, driving reduces expected heartbeats by more.

I'd consider reduced expected lifespan much more useful. Although I don't see why you're measuring it in heartbeats instead of seconds or minutes or something.

Comment author: Metus 04 January 2014 08:46:55AM 0 points [-]

This is another thing that just came to my mind: You have to distuingish between how the survivor's distribution of lifetime looks like, as stated in your example with driving. Some die very young, but most live. With smoking however you can reasonably say that they reduce their lifespan proportionally, in addition to some risk to die very young. I know of no good way to visualise this.