List of underrated risks? - Less Wrong Discussion

List of underrated risks?

Thu, 31 May 2012 06:59:06 +1000

Submitted by yttrium • 12 votes • 49 comments

As everyone here knows, it would be a stupid idea to switch from airplanes to cars out of safety/terrorism concerns: Cars are a much more risky means of transportation than airplanes. But what other major risks are there that many people systematically undervalue or are not even consciously aware of?

The same can be asked for chances.

49 comments

nyan_sandwich on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T09:31:26.551512+10:00

Let's turn this around.

What opportunities are you missing by overrating risks? I am almost certain you are not socially courageous enough. Hanson always goes on about missed opportunities from FDA being too strict.

Humans in general are pretty risk averse. Which means the threat of missed opportunities is actually a lot larger than other threats!!! When I realized this, it was a big moment. I haven't compiled it fully yet, but it has really improved things over the last few weeks.

torekp on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T11:43:11.803896+10:00

I am almost certain you are not socially courageous enough.

Nyan, you the man! Seriously, I did like your other thread, and like it even more now that I see this context.

nyan_sandwich on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T11:59:50.644534+10:00

Nyan, you the man!

Thanks, that makes me happy!

Seriously, I did like your other thread, and like it even more now that I see this context.

I assume you mean my affection protocol. You'll have to explain the connection, I don't get it.

(is it just that your model of me is good enough to notice that I was nervous as fuck about that post and had to remind myself of about this courage idea and fall back on decision theory multiple times?)

khafra on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-01T00:58:13.126813+10:00

(is it just that your model of me is good enough to notice that I was nervous as fuck about that post and had to remind myself of about this courage idea and fall back on decision theory multiple times?)

That's the way I read it. It takes a brave man to announce to a room full of valued acquaintances that he'd like a hug; non-hugging is an equilibrium with a first-mover penalty, even if it turns out to be suboptimal.

army1987 on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T20:27:36.492193+10:00

What opportunities are you missing by overrating risks? I am almost certain you are not socially courageous enough. Hanson always goes on about missed opportunities from FDA being too strict.

Maybe, more than “overrating risks”, that's another instance of the ethical injunctions for which people wouldn't push a fat man off a bridge to save five people chained on a railway.

buybuydandavis on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T10:18:12.293604+10:00

Funny, I just realized the same thing.

And spending a lot of effort on avoiding the bad stuff doesn't just mean you miss out on good stuff either. By failing to take advantage of opportunities, you leave yourself more vulnerable to bad things that wouldn't have been a threat if you had taken advantage of earlier opportunities.

And yes, the Federal Death Administrators are killing us with all their "protection".

nyan_sandwich on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T10:24:24.959850+10:00

Federal Death Administrators

This is great! I'll have to use tha-

People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation... When, today, you get into an argument about whether "we" ought to raise the minimum wage, you're executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed... Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back - providing aid and comfort to the enemy.

Excuse me. My politics detector went off.

buybuydandavis on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T11:53:36.816839+10:00

Oh noes! Not politics!

Jesper_Ostman on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-01T00:02:38.957616+10:00

Possible examples: Taking part in paid medical experiments. Selling kidney.

nyan_sandwich on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-01T01:49:42.960410+10:00

Selling kidney.

This is after I die (or cryopreserve)? Or before? How much money?

Vaniver on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-01T03:31:50.860503+10:00

It is currently only legal in Iran, where prices wouldn't be enough to cover the plane ticket out there. I recommend against it for Americans or Canadians until it becomes legal here.

MartinB on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T07:38:45.772472+10:00

Murder rates are usually overestimated, while diseases and accidents are underrated. Due to availability bias thing that happen regularly are concerns, things that are superrare, but might kill many people if are ignored.

JoshuaZ on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T09:45:04.308317+10:00

Also intentionality matters- actions which have intent behind them are more salient. This helps make murder seem more likely. I wonder if cultures that believe that diseases are caused by demons or spirits are more likely to overestimate the risk of disease? This might be hard to test because those cultures are going to be ones generally without modern medicine and have higher disease rates. Maybe look at religious groups that strongly believe that sin causes disease?

NancyLebovitz on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T14:58:40.525513+10:00

The classic example is that WW1 gets a lot more attention than the Spanish flu, even though WW1 killed about 35 million people, and the flu killed between 50 and 130 million. On the other hand, the war made a huge political difference, so it might not just be a matter of intentionality.

army1987 on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T20:29:34.607766+10:00

I'd be surprised if the WW1 didn't make the Spanish flu's job easier, anyway.

Luke_A_Somers on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-01T00:27:43.193336+10:00

In a history of humans (which, being a story, is mainly about choices), WW1 would stand out more prominently than the Spanish flu simply on account of the relative importance of individual prominent choices to the affair.

MartinB on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T18:00:22.595831+10:00

Both also targeted different groups. The flu got old, very young, poor people while the war involved more men of working age. Its weird though that the flu was left out of my history teaching.

NancyLebovitz on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T21:56:07.302875+10:00

Nitpick: The old had some resistance to the disease.

MartinB on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T17:58:25.799404+10:00

Maybe look at religious groups that strongly believe that sin causes disease?

In developed countries they just get treatment secretly.

JoshuaZ on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-01T00:00:54.735911+10:00

Probably that's true for some of them, but it is likely not the case for many others. Part of the evidence otherwise is that there have been a variety of laws and court cases in the US about whether parents can refuse necessary medical care for their children. See for example here.

Jesper_Ostman on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-01T00:24:49.164115+10:00

In general: an unhealthy lifestyle. In the relevant context the overwhelming majority of people die of diseases when relatively old (and not accidents or violence).

Other than that: suicide is often underrated - it is often the main non-disease cause of death for males.

(Eg when checking the stats for my own demographic I had about a 6.55% risk of death the next 30 years. Out of this some 10% were from suicide, 5% from accidents and only 1.5% from infectious diseases but over 50% from malignant neoplasms and circulatory system diseases.)

Useful statistics: http://www.deathriskrankings.com/default.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1 Some useful tips: http://longevity.about.com/od/liveto100/tp/Avoid-The-Top-Five-Killers-Of-Older-Men.htm

D_Malik on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-01T01:22:48.257697+10:00

You will completely forget around two hours of your life every single night if you don't learn dream recall. And that time will be largely wasted if you don't learn lucid dreaming.

(I know, there's lots of new age bullshit at that link, and in lucid dreaming generally. But no matter how much you cringe at the word "dreamsign", lucid dreaming is a very useful tool if you can spot and dismiss the garbage.)

TheOtherDave on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-01T04:38:08.728704+10:00

My SWAG is that if I tried to recall every minute of the last 24 hours, I'd have a <10% success rate, and about 30% of what I did recall would be confabulated. If I tried to recall every minute of the last 240 hours, I'd have a <1% success rate. In that context, worrying about forgetting two hours I spend sleeping isn't really my highest priority.

Viliam_Bur on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-01T20:55:26.996380+10:00

lucid dreaming is a very useful tool if you can spot and dismiss the garbage

Could you provide some examples about how exactly it can be useful? What difference did it make in your life? (Providing "insights" is valuable only if you really acted on them later.)

D_Malik on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-03T16:31:14.102397+10:00

This book has lots of examples in chapters 8 and 9 and maybe 7 and 10.

Some ways lucid dreaming has improved my own life:

It's helped me come up with good ideas for high school creative writing assignments. So far I've acted on three of these, with very good results.
It's helped me to practice better social skills and get over social anxieties.
I used it to practice piano back when I played piano.
Back when I took a first aid class, I used it to practice those techniques and to get over the emotions that can make first aid hard.
I've tried to use it to understand math and other abstract things better. This hasn't worked extremely well (it turns out that seeing in four spacial dimensions is hard), but maybe you're more awesome than me in that respect.
It has generally been an awesome experience.

And there's a lot more that I haven't used it for. You can practice skills like sports or juggling or cooking or magic tricks or fistfights. You can ask questions and get back answers from a part of yourself whose answers you can't predict. You can stop nightmares. You can relive memories more vividly than you can in waking life. You can do all the awesome, irresponsible things that you would otherwise want to do IRL, like driving cars way too fast or playing computer games. You can build and walk through memory palaces.

But I'm sure people here can come up with even cooler things to do. Lucid dreaming is a massive hole in the limitations of ordinary life, where there are massive completely-unexplored areas, and most of the people doing the exploration have been superstitious irrational idiots. I'm a bit worried that people here will reject it simply because it seems on the surface like the wrong sort of weird.

MixedNuts on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-02T02:03:05.196781+10:00

I'm worried about schizophrenia and other nasty delusions. Should I be?

D_Malik on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-03T16:56:54.750264+10:00

Probably not. Here is an article about it, though the writer seems a bit overconfident.

MixedNuts on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-03T22:01:34.538569+10:00

The article lacks sources. This seems to be a "no evidence it can hurt, because we haven't looked", not a "no evidence it can hurt, look at this study".

JoshuaZ on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T07:33:11.237042+10:00

In general, the risks to look for in this sort of context are risks that are routine, which causes them to fade into the background. So cars are a really good example because the accidents are routine and the size of any incident is small. A variety of illnesses may fall into this category also: For example, diabetes has serious long-term problems and can have fatal complications. 5-10 percent the US has diabetes.

Cotton swabs are sometimes cited as highly dangerous when used for ear cleaning.Example. It is clear that the danger is underestimated, but the correct level of danger is still very low, on the order of 20 people in the US having a serious ear problem as a result each year (same source). So this is an example where the risk exists and people don't realize it, but the risk is small enough that this doesn't matter.

army1987 on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T20:31:52.063892+10:00

Cotton swabs are sometimes cited as highly dangerous when used for ear cleaning.Example. It is clear that the danger is underestimated, but the correct level of danger is still very low, on the order of 20 people in the US having a serious ear problem as a result each year (same source). So this is an example where the risk exists and people don't realize it, but the risk is small enough that this doesn't matter.

It guess the risk very strongly depends on how you use them, so the risk for the population in general is not a terribly useful figure by itself.

Dolores1984 on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T09:09:43.194154+10:00

When a doctor first bugged me about it, I looked it up, and decided that I would much rather take that extremely small risk than have to deal with water in my ears every day.

arundelo on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T15:26:11.505128+10:00

I tend to pace and to multitask, but I decided a few years ago (and have stuck to the decision pretty well) that whenever I was sticking something pointy in my ear I would stand still and give it my full attention.

MartinB on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T18:14:17.124723+10:00

Oh, also usually ignored are things that happen to almost everyone. EY's weekly baseballbat bashing. Lifestyle interventions do reduce health risks to some degree but are commonly ignored.

CronoDAS on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-01T17:59:54.915776+10:00

Changing lifestyle is hard.

Andy_McKenzie on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-01T17:03:45.328904+10:00

EY's weekly baseballbat bashing

explain?

CronoDAS on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-01T17:59:30.317227+10:00

How To Seem (And Be) Deep

At another point in the discussion, a man spoke of some benefit X of death, I don't recall exactly what. And I said: "You know, given human nature, if people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing. But if you took someone who wasn't being hit on the head with a baseball bat, and you asked them if they wanted it, they would say no. I think that if you took someone who was immortal, and asked them if they wanted to die for benefit X, they would say no."

MartinB on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-01T18:09:13.509738+10:00

As written by CronoDAS. If most people get a debilitating disease by age X it would be widely accepted as unavoidable. Used to be the case with losing teeth in old age, still is with dementia and aging. Basically a comparison of the own experience to the common experience of your peers.

John_Maxwell_IV on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T15:17:12.260748+10:00

In the course of my Internet wanderings, I've been surprised by the magnitude of the risks of schizophrenia and stomach cancer (which seems to be easily preventable with H. pylori eradication).

wedrifid on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T18:48:57.172504+10:00

In the course of my Internet wanderings, I've been surprised by the magnitude of the risks of schizophrenia and stomach cancer (which seems to be easily preventable with H. pylori eradication).

Is this information actionable? That is, is there anything obvious that I should be doing that I am not doing regarding these risks?

John_Maxwell_IV on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-01T05:00:50.935501+10:00

Think carefully before using psychoactive drugs heavily, especially psychedelic drugs during prime onset years for schizophrenia?

Get tested for H. pylori at your next doctor's visit and have eradicated if it's present?

gwern on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-01T05:36:33.358181+10:00

Think carefully before using psychoactive drugs heavily, especially psychedelic drugs during prime onset years for schizophrenia?

I've looked at schizophrenia and LSD as well as modafinil. In neither case did I find much negative evidence, although what there was seems worse for LSD than modafinil, as one would expect.

wedrifid on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-01T06:20:52.868930+10:00

Get tested for H. pylori at your next doctor's visit and have eradicated if it's present?

Is this something a doctor will typically do when requested to, without either symptoms or risk factors present?

John_Maxwell_IV on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-01T10:00:22.835940+10:00

Your guess is as good as mine. I'm not sure why you seem to think I'm an expert on the risks I mentioned. As far as I can tell no one else in this thread is getting this sort of treatment :(

wedrifid on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-01T10:18:13.264082+10:00

Your guess is as good as mine. I'm not sure why you seem to think I'm an expert on the risks I mentioned.

You had mentioned them and I was taking the opportunity to soak up whatever information you had been able to glean - and whatever any observers happen to be aware of. Since you are aware of the risks and I hadn't even heard of the bacteria in question you are more likely to know about how to correctly implement the knowledge.

As far as I can tell no one else in this thread is getting this sort of treatment :(

Is being treated as a tentative expert unpleasant for you? I usually expect people to enjoy being treated as most-likely-to-be-knowledgeable. It's flattering.

On a technical note. No, I've been questioning Kevin, Gwern and khafra in approximately the same manner. If you are referring to the downvote of the great-grandparent I have no idea why that was there. I upvoted. Your response gave what information you knew and did so tentatively so as to allow correct calibration on the reliability of the knowledge contained therein. The appropriate response, and something that should be at about +2 unless it turned out to be grossly wrong.

John_Maxwell_IV on List of underrated risks?

2012-06-01T10:36:36.289751+10:00

Fair enough.

buybuydandavis on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T10:13:06.283201+10:00

Venous thromboembolism.

Had my DNA scanned, and I noted that their average lifetime risk for this was 12%, which is pretty high for a life threatening condition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venous_thrombosis

Jayson_Virissimo on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T22:28:15.009115+10:00

I'm at 12.8% risk for venous thromboembolism and the average (for "men of European ethnicity") is 12.3%.

RichardKennaway on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T23:17:02.574715+10:00

Surely the difference is below the noise level of whatever data were used to get these figures? I make it about 0.16 millibits of Kullback-Leibler divergence, and upwards of 10,000 data points to have any chance of seeing the difference experimentally.

timtyler on List of underrated risks?

2012-05-31T09:54:47.491118+10:00

Relevant book: Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear.