= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
FrameBenignly comments on Wear a Helmet While Driving a Car - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (116)
$50k a year times 40 years equals $2 million. He's maybe overestimating the price he's willing to pay, but he's also overestimating how much people typically value their lives at. You're also using a really high estimate for number of hours in the car. 3 x 365 x 60 = 32,850 miles per year.
I did not say $50k a year, I said $50k over a lifetime ($1.1k times around 40-50ish years, since you spend many of the early ones strapped in and driving tends to decline in old age; and honestly I don't want to project out past 2060 as it is).
I don't think that is extreme. As I said, I commuted that much for 4 years, and my dad spent most of his career with a 2h+ commute just for work, never mind all the other driving entailed in suburban life. Americans drive a lot.
No, $2 million is median household lifetime earnings if they work for a typical 40 years which is way below the $40 million he's estimating.
Also, you just named two examples of outliers and suggested they were representative of your entire experience. Just glancing at estimates, most are between 10000 and 15000 miles per year as typical for Americans. Europeans are probably lower.
Also, Nick overestimated average driving speed which means he's even further overestimating the cost of not wearing a helmet. I calced it at around $50 per year; $.20 per hour.
Why are you assuming an average speed of 60mph? Most people's commutes have a lot more traffic than that.
Also, 336560 is 65,700 not 32,850.
The average person spends something like 1hr/day in a car, and travels an average of 13476 miles/year which gives us more like 36 mph.
The original estimate which gwern based his analysis on used a speed of about 60 mph, which is necessary to use when reversing the calculation back into miles. I would agree average speeds are probably lower.
Edit: I just noticed my calculation was wrong. I'm not sure where I got 32850 from. It's more like 60 something thousand. Whoops.
Sorry, I'm not seeing where gwern uses 60mph?
He's making a calculation using hours based on an analysis originally written in micromorts per mile. He has to convert from miles to hours to do that. He uses the estimate you gave him which assumed 57.5 mph to be exact to make that conversion. I used 60 as a rough approximation. To calculate the miles he's using for his analysis, I have to use the same estimate. It's an unstated assumption gwern makes to get to $50k in a lifetime. A lower average speed would make Nick's argument stronger and gwern's cost estimate lower.