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ChristianKl comments on Harper's Magazine article on LW/MIRI/CFAR and Ethereum - Less Wrong
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So, I have noticed that I am overhygienic relative to the general population (when it comes to health; not necessarily when it comes to appearance), and I think that's standard for LWers. I think this is related to taking numbers and risk seriously; to use dubious leftovers as an example, my father's approach to food poisoning is "eh, you can eat that, it's probably okay" and my approach to food poisoning is "that's only 99.999% likely to be okay, no way is eating that worth 10 micromorts!"
I think rating eating a dubious leftover as 10 micromorts comes from not taking numbers seriously. If you really think it's in that order of magnitude I would like to see the reasoning behind it.
The base rate of death due to food-borne illness in the US is 10 micromorts a year; there's a conversion from 'per year' numbers to 'per act' numbers, the issue of how much comes from food starting off bad and how much comes from food going bad, and the issue of how good you are at detecting a pathogen risk by smell/sight, and I fudged all three as coming out to 1 when combined. (You could also add in the risk of days lost to sickness in terms of micromorts, instead of separate units, but that would probably be unnecessarily confusing.)
The real point, though, was to demonstrate how you can agree on facts but disagree on values; even if we both put the same probability on the risk of death, one of us is moved by it and the other isn't. (As well, I have a specialized vocabulary specifically targeted at dealing with these tiny risks of death that he doesn't use as much.) That's what 'overhygienic' means to me: "look at how far they're willing to go to avoid death!"
The AIDS risk of unprotected sex at a one-night stand is also a risk on the order of 10 micromorts and quite many people do care about it. (For values such as infection risk at 0.1% if the person has AIDS and 1% of the population having AIDS)
But there no good reason to believe that there's agreement on facts. Plenty of people do believe that being overhygienic leads to an increase in allergies and isn't healthy.
I don't think that's reasonable. It seems to me like all those factors are under 1.
The highest of the factors in the US seem to be Salmonella, Toxoplasma gondii and Listeria. All bacteria that you can kill if you cook your food. The forth factor is Norovirus and there I'm not even sure that food going back is an usual way of food getting poisoned. It's rather about uncleanness.
I don't think that most people who are overhygineic are that way because they follow a rational strategy but because of emotional driven fear of uncleanness.