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Luke_A_Somers comments on Is a Purely Rational World a Technologically Advanced World? - Less Wrong Discussion
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If we were purely rational, then we could be trusted a lot more with dangerous technologies. The tough case is when anyone smart enough to invent something big is made rational, and ordinary/dumb people are as they are. So let's suppose just inventors are rational.
Motor vehicles are not that dangerous, compared to their benefits.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0922292.html
The peak death rate by motor vehicle peaked at 269 per million in 1970. The motorization of ambulances alone saves far more than one in a thousand.
Further helping, we'd have had seat belts and air bags and crumple zones, forward radar auto-brake, automatic lane centering, etc. much sooner. And, for that matter, we'd have been working on efficiency and alternate energy sources, thereby mitigating the other drawbacks.
We probably wouldn't have dismantled our light rail system, too.
Interesting. I had always thought about cars being among the most dangerous things ever (them being the leading cause of death for people my age, sex and country), but I had never thought of looking at the flip side.
Another way to look at it: are they more dangerous than horseback riding?
A lot of people who used horse-powered travel in the late 19th century used carriages and the like. Taxis with horses were pretty common. So a direct comparison to the dangers of horseback riding may be not called for. On the other hand, horses also created a highly unsanitary environment due to horse excrement and urine. I don't know how much that impacted disease substantially. I'd expect it not to have that large an impact, but I'm not sure even what the first steps would be in making an estimate for that.
Correlating recorded disease rates with recorded horses per capita would be a place to start, though of course there are many confounding factors.
Probably. On the other hand, it'd be quite impractical for most people in a several-million-inhabitant city to have a horse.
This is a good statistic and I am pleased to have learned it.
How many of those ambulance uses are of fairly old people? A lot of motor accidents occur for a fairly young cohort, so I'm not sure this is a great comparison. Still, the basic point seems strong.
Can you expand on your logic for this? Light rail has heavy upkeep costs.
I personally would have died at 20 without ambulance motorization, for instance, and I don't think I'm a 1 in 4000 outlier. Appendicitis doesn't always happen at a convenient time, nor is it always recognized promptly. Right there I'd guess we're talking over one in a thousand.
As for light rail, it does have costs. So do buses. The numbers I can find on buses put them ahead only wherever there is no existing rail system.
I would have been at least permanently brain-damaged, if not dead, without fast ambulances. Rapid response is the difference between recovering from a stroke and, well, not.
Yeah, the first thing I thought was to compare QALYs rather than number of lives, too. But then I thought that ambulances are more useful for ‘sudden’ emergencies such as accidents than for ‘slower’ ones such as cancer, and then maybe a higher fraction of ‘lives saved by ambulances’ are young, otherwise healthy people than apparently obvious.