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William_Quixote comments on Summary and Lessons from "On Combat" - Less Wrong
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I think this is a good post and I upvoted it. That said, I do want to present an alternative view. Rather than aiming to boost life expectancy by increasing your odds of survival given a life threatening situation, aim to reduce your odds of being in a dangerous situation in the first place. In the amount of time it would take you to arrange one round of paintball you could probably check detailed crimes stats for several neighborhoods including things like time of day.
That's not an either-or choice, you can do both.
You can do both, but both take effort, and one may be more rewarding than the other. Assuming that the share of effort you want to spend on improving your life expectancy is finite, that there aren't any diminishing returns in play, and that you've factored in any tradeoffs, it makes sense to devote your effort exclusively to the more rewarding option.
All those assumptions are more or less questionable, but the one about tradeoffs looks the weakest to me; all else equal, I'd expect measures aimed at increasing the survivability of dangerous situations to be more fun and less financially and hedonically cumbersome than measures aimed at staying out of them, but probably less effective for the effort. But someone with a martial arts habit would say that, wouldn't he?
Not in the presence of uncertainty about probabilities and payoffs, and uncertainty is certainly present :-)
The diminishing returns are also there, of course.
That probably all depends. Advice to not take midnight walks in downtown Detroit isn't all that cumbersome -- avoidance is usually cheap and easy. There are certainly exceptions, though, and training for danger has important side benefits: increased general self-confidence, plus upping the macho factor for guys.
Unless you're in the habit of packing your own parachutes without training or taking midnight walks in downtown Detroit, avoidance may be easy but it's certainly not cheap. The middle-class habit of buying homes in the burbs instead of closer to work is perhaps the most obvious and largest-scale avoidance behavior that I can think of, and it's enormously costly in both money and time.
Nowadays that's driven more by schools than by crime, but in any case the context is relevant -- which training for dealing with danger can you offer as an alternative? :-/
I am also not sure it's costly in money -- the market reflects demand and as demand shifts so do prices. If the limited resource that you want is the one everyone wants, it's always going to be expensive.
I think that is an insightful alternative and I think I overlooked it simply because it feel so normal/obvious to me. I'm naturally risk averse and I'd say that I have long since taken all the not-so-low hanging fruit of risk avoidance (neighborhood, car, certain sports, drugs and other health risks...). This seemed just obvious for me as a youth - but it did cause some social exclusion (which I didn't feel bad about as I had family and some friends).
See also http://lesswrong.com/lw/lx4/summary_and_lessons_from_on_combat/c68w for context.