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PhilGoetz comments on Safety can be dangerous - Less Wrong Discussion
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Good point. Assume an exponential distribution of deaths/hurricane, and a symmetrical error (eg., a predicted category 3 storm is equally likely to come out category 2 or category 4), and the optimal response would be to treat the predicted category 3 as if it would be category 4. This would lead us to usually have more deaths from evacuation than from the hurricane for less-destructive storms; this would be more than made up for on the occasions when they turned out to be more destructive. So the Rita evacuation may not have been an error.
Probably not a good heuristic, since category 2 storms are four times more common than category 4 storms. Not sure how much this affects the calculations, but FWIW.