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BlueSun comments on The Zeroth Skillset - Less Wrong Discussion
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I don't mean to be rude but as an FYI:
Lowers my confidence of the post. Almost everyone I know has a story about how they almost died except for a moment of abnormal cunning or pure luck; yet I know few people who have died for reasons that would have been avoidable had they or someone around them been more observant. This suggests to me (since not everyone can be above-average observant or lucky) that in most of those stories, they didn't have as high of a chance of death as they thought they did. It's certainly possible that it's not the case with you, but I'd prefer to either see the specific stories or maybe just use a less extreme example in the post. Or maybe it's just me and no one else is bothered by it.
There's a problem with that idea.
(I don't know anyone who died because they where hit by a car while crossing a street, but this doesn't mean that looking for cars before crossing a street is pointless.)
This case is different in an important way. Most people will go inside during a thunderstorm and check for cars before crossing a street, so avoiding these risks doesn't require an unusual degree of vigilance. katydee is claiming that unusually good situational awareness is frequently a decisive factor in avoiding death or serious injury. If that's true, then we should expect to hear about people dying due to inadequate situational awareness fairly often because most people don't have above average situational awareness.
However, I think this is possibly explained by the fact that people with good situational awareness are far more likely to place themselves in situations were good situational awareness is required.
I took "good situational awareness" to mean 'a level of SA unusual among readers of this posts', which I guess is a lower standard than 'unusual among the population', e.g. because of this.
Special case of situational awareness: I read a discussion among martial arts students of whether they'd ever found their art useful. About half of them said they'd been avoided getting hurt from falling. (Sorry, no cite, but it was on usenet.)
http://kojutsukan.blogspot.com.au/2010/12/can-martial-arts-falling-techniques.html may be a useful starting point for further research.
Thanks very much.
Note that falling safely when expecting to be thrown is not the same as landing safely when falling unexpectedly. The latter is probably a special skill, not specifically trained for in martial arts. Here is some discussion:
I don't actually think that's thanks to situational awareness but rather from drilling breakfalls a lot.
Noted, thanks for the feedback. I do happen to know many (10+) people who died for reasons that would have been avoidable had they or someone around them been more observant, so my impression is that I am correctly calibrated in this respect, but I can see why one might be skeptical.
Do you have an unusual occupation or something? I know of virtually zero accidental deaths in my circle of friends and acquaintances, so I'm wondering what's going on here.
katydee just knows a bizarre cross-section of the population in full generality. He tells fascinating stories about his weird friends at social gatherings. This doesn't surprise me at all about him in particular, but I don't think we should take it as strong evidence about people in general.
There's gotta be someone at the pointy part of the bell curve.
One way to alleviate skeptical would be to explain why you are unusual in this respect.
Until posting this, I didn't realize that I was particularly unusual in that respect; I thought having one or two people you know die every year was normal. Does this not happen for most people?
I don't think it started happening until I was past forty, and very few of them died as a result of accidents.
One other potential confound might be that I know lots of people.
My maternal grandfather died of a stroke when I was about 12 years old; my paternal grandfather died of cancer when I was 19. Those are the only people I knew personally who have died, and I think those numbers (and causes of death) are fairly typical for young people. I've seen lots more dead people, as a nursing student, including some who died of accidental/preventable causes, but I don't count that as evidence I can generalize from–it's a massively biased sample.
I know a number of people who have died in the past 3-4 years, but they all happened to be in the army at the time, so I would consider myself unusual in this respect.
I can only think of one person I know of who died because of a preventable accident. One serious accident comes to mind too. I'm 27, male and in Seattle.
Another approach would be to cite statistics about accident rates. I think at least death statistics from accidents are well recorded.