OK, so 42k injuries/9k deaths is sobering, but does it justify wearing a driving helmet? I've been curious about this topic and also walking helmets for a while and now that I have my own car again (ironically, given the datasets here, an old 2000 car), the topic of reducing car risks is also of some personal relevance. I'm going to give a stab at a quick and dirty decision analysis here to get an idea of how the case for driving helmets look.

First, we want to convert the absolute numbers to a probability of injury/death per mile driven:

• in 2001, Americans drove 2,569,980,000,000 in "millions of vehicle-miles" or 2.57 trillion vehicle-miles (trillion is correct here, compare https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M12MTVUSM227NFWA or https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2014/06/how-much-do-americans-drive/ )

• in 2001, the American population was 284,970,000 (note that injuries/deaths also happen to people who are not the driver, and most people spend a fair amount of time in a car, one way or another), so that's an average annual mileage of 9,018 which sounds pretty reasonable So:

• deaths: 8819 / 2569980000000 = mortality risk of 3.431544214e-09 per mile driven

• injuries: 42000 / 2569980000000 = injury risk of 1.634253963e-08 per mile -total risk of either mortality or injury of 3.431544214e-09 + 1.634253963e-08 = 1.977408384e-08 (we just sum, since the CDC numbers seem to be mutually exclusive)

So if you drive 5000 miles (roughly what I currently drive per year), then you have a risk of death or injury of 5000 * 1.977408384e-08 = 9.88704192e-05.

For mortality, we could say the expected loss this year for our 5k driver who is 30 years old is ~50 years at the usual \$50k/QALY, without discounting, would be 5000 * 3.431544214e-09 * (50 * 50000) = \$42. That's just the first year, while 30yo, and each year the loss shrinks since you get closer to death; a quick hack to sum the series to get a total expected loss with discounting at the usual 3%:

R> sum(sapply(seq((80-30), 0), function(t) { 5000 * 3.431544214e-09 * t * 0.97^t * 1.0 * 50000 }))
# [1] 420.5466717

Injuries is more difficult. Browsing through a few papers on TBI and QALYs, I find QALY/life-expectancy losses from TBI in juveniles: "Measuring the Cost-Effectiveness of Technologic Change in the Treatment of Pediatric Traumatic Brain Injury", Tilford 2007 The estimates are kind of shocking - TBI is a very serious problem. (Not too surprising after looking at "Quality of Life After Traumatic Brain Injury: A Review of Research Approaches and Findings" and some of the citations in "Is aggressive treatment of traumatic brain injury cost-effective?" Whitmore et al 2012, or when I remember that a lot of military veteran dysfunctionality is probably due to TBI.)

Preference-weighted health outcomes in children who survived a TBI hospitalization were reported from a cohort of children admitted to 10 pediatric intensive care units (PICUs) that were located nationally. Subject inclusion criteria followed the inclusion criteria for estimating survival probabilities and required that the child be less than 18 years of age and admitted to the PICU with a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-defined TBI^13^ that required either endotracheal intubation or mechanical ventilation. An initial description of these outcomes and construct validity has been reported elsewhere.^9^ Scores ranged from 0.09 to 1.00 at 3 and 6 months after discharge from the ICU, but mean scores increased from 0.51 to 0.58 between the two periods...Recent work on life expectancies after TBI suggests that life expectancy will differ significantly depending on the functional outcome of the patient after hospital discharge.^20,21^ Patients with moderate disabilities were found to have a 4-year reduction in life expectancy, whereas patients rated as extremely severe were found to have a life expectancy only 50% of the population average.^22^ A study of children and adolescents after TBI also found substantial reductions in life expectancy when severe functional limitations were present.^23^ For a child aged 15 years, life expectancy was an additional 14.9 years if the child was not mobile, 34.2 years if the child had poor mobility, and 54.8 years if mobility was fair or good...Hospital charges for pediatric TBI patients increased to a maximum of \$19,000 and then fell to approximately \$13,000...On average, children who required an ICP monitor used approximately \$18,600 worth of services in the immediate period after discharge. Service costs decreased by approximately 50% between the 3-month follow-up interview and the 6-month follow-up interview. Assuming that service use declines linearly over time, the average cost per patient is approximately \$35,750 in the first year after discharge from the PICU.

Whitmore et al 2012 reports similar QALY estimates for adults; for example, QALY drops from 1 at #5 (healthy) to 0.63 at #4 on the Glasgow Coma Scale (concussion-like: "Opens eyes spontaneously / Confused, disoriented / Flexion/withdrawal to painful stimuli"), and 0.26 at #3. Details on estimates:

Life expectancy for Glasgow Outcome Scale (GOS) score categories 4 and 5 were obtained from 2001 US vital statistics.^2^ We assumed a GOS status of 4 had no adverse effect on life expectancy. Diminished longevities associated with GOS scores of 3 or 2 were calculated according to formulas derived from survival studies of these patients' mortality rates.^4,10,11,13^ Appendix Table 1 shows the expected years of life for each of the 4 age categories studied. Aoki and associates1 elicited utilities of different GOS states from 140 medical professionals, using the routine gamble approach. Their results are shown in Appendix Table 2. Quality-adjusted life years (QALYs)—and costs—are discounted at 3% per year of life. It is assumed that future rewards and costs are valued less than immediate ones, and routine practice is to discount them at 3% or 5% per year.^8^ As an example, a 20-year-old can expect to live, on average, 58^12^ years. If he or she remains in perfect health (utility = 1), that translates to 28.21 QALYs, with discounting. Appendix Table 3 illustrates the number of expected QALYs associated with a given age and GOS score.

So Whitmore et al 2012 finds that a healthy 20 year old's expected (discounted) QALYs of 28.21 drops to 17.77 if he is hit hard enough to trigger a #4, which at \$50k again is a huge lifetime loss of \$522,000. For the 40yo, the same calculation is \$436,500. Splitting the difference gives me a \$479,250. The losses get worse with more severe Glasgow Coma Scales, where #1 effectively equals death. Since I'm not sure how TBIs break down by Glasgow rating, I can't do an overall expected value but whatever it is, it must be >\$479,250 since that was the least damaging scenario Whitmore considered. So the expected loss from a TBI injury but not death is \$479k (ignoring the immediate medical costs since those will generally be paid by other people like insurers or the government); now we again need to compute the probability of a TBI injury each year and sum the series:

R> sum(sapply(seq((80-30), 0), function(t) { 5000 * 3.431544214e-09 * t * 0.97^t * 0.63 * 50000 }))
# [1] 264.9444032

So a quick estimate of the net present expected loss caused by TBI death or injury while in a car over a lifetime for a 30yo is -\$685. Or to put it the other way, we should be willing to pay up to \$685 to reduce our car TBI risk to zero.

OK, so 42k injuries/9k deaths is sobering, but does it justify wearing a driving helmet? I've been curious about this topic and also walking helmets for a while and now that I have my own car again (ironically, given the datasets here, an old 2000 car), the topic of reducing car risks is also of some personal relevance. I'm going to give a stab at a quick and dirty decision analysis here to get an idea of how the case for driving helmets look.

First, we want to convert the absolute numbers to a probability of injury/death per mile driven:

• in 2001, Americans drove 2,569,980,000,000 in "millions of vehicle-miles" or 2.57 trillion vehicle-miles (trillion is correct here, compare https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M12MTVUSM227NFWA or https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2014/06/how-much-do-americans-drive/ )

• in 2001, the American population was 284,970,000 (note that injuries/deaths also happen to people who are not the driver, and most people spend a fair amount of time in a car, one way or another), so that's an average annual mileage of 9,018 which sounds pretty reasonable So:

• deaths: 8819 / 2569980000000 = mortality risk of 3.431544214e-09 per mile driven

• injuries: 42000 / 2569980000000 = injury risk of 1.634253963e-08 per mile -total risk of either mortality or injury of 3.431544214e-09 + 1.634253963e-08 = 1.977408384e-08 (we just sum, since the CDC numbers seem to be mutually exclusive)

So if you drive 5000 miles (roughly what I currently drive per year), then you have a risk of death or injury of 5000 * 1.977408384e-08 = 9.88704192e-05.

For mortality, we could say the expected loss this year for our 5k driver who is 30 years old is ~50 years at the usual \$50k/QALY, without discounting, would be 5000 * 3.431544214e-09 * (50 * 50000) = \$42. That's just the first year, while 30yo, and each year the loss shrinks since you get closer to death; a quick hack to sum the series to get a total expected loss with discounting at the usual 3%:

R> sum(sapply(seq((80-30), 0), function(t) { 5000 * 3.431544214e-09 * t * 0.97^t * 1.0 * 50000 }))
# [1] 420.5466717

Injuries is more difficult. Browsing through a few papers on TBI and QALYs, I find QALY/life-expectancy losses from TBI in juveniles: "Measuring the Cost-Effectiveness of Technologic Change in the Treatment of Pediatric Traumatic Brain Injury", Tilford 2007 The estimates are kind of shocking - TBI is a very serious problem. (Not too surprising after looking at "Quality of Life After Traumatic Brain Injury: A Review of Research Approaches and Findings" and some of the citations in "Is aggressive treatment of traumatic brain injury cost-effective?" Whitmore et al 2012, or when I remember that a lot of military veteran dysfunctionality is probably due to TBI.)

Preference-weighted health outcomes in children who survived a TBI hospitalization were reported from a cohort of children admitted to 10 pediatric intensive care units (PICUs) that were located nationally. Subject inclusion criteria followed the inclusion criteria for estimating survival probabilities and required that the child be less than 18 years of age and admitted to the PICU with a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-defined TBI^13^ that required either endotracheal intubation or mechanical ventilation. An initial description of these outcomes and construct validity has been reported elsewhere.^9^ Scores ranged from 0.09 to 1.00 at 3 and 6 months after discharge from the ICU, but mean scores increased from 0.51 to 0.58 between the two periods...Recent work on life expectancies after TBI suggests that life expectancy will differ significantly depending on the functional outcome of the patient after hospital discharge.^20,21^ Patients with moderate disabilities were found to have a 4-year reduction in life expectancy, whereas patients rated as extremely severe were found to have a life expectancy only 50% of the population average.^22^ A study of children and adolescents after TBI also found substantial reductions in life expectancy when severe functional limitations were present.^23^ For a child aged 15 years, life expectancy was an additional 14.9 years if the child was not mobile, 34.2 years if the child had poor mobility, and 54.8 years if mobility was fair or good...Hospital charges for pediatric TBI patients increased to a maximum of \$19,000 and then fell to approximately \$13,000...On average, children who required an ICP monitor used approximately \$18,600 worth of services in the immediate period after discharge. Service costs decreased by approximately 50% between the 3-month follow-up interview and the 6-month follow-up interview. Assuming that service use declines linearly over time, the average cost per patient is approximately \$35,750 in the first year after discharge from the PICU.

Whitmore et al 2012 reports similar QALY estimates for adults; for example, QALY drops from 1 at #5 (healthy) to 0.63 at #4 on the Glasgow Coma Scale (concussion-like: "Opens eyes spontaneously / Confused, disoriented / Flexion/withdrawal to painful stimuli"), and 0.26 at #3. Details on estimates:

Life expectancy for Glasgow Outcome Scale (GOS) score categories 4 and 5 were obtained from 2001 US vital statistics.^2^ We assumed a GOS status of 4 had no adverse effect on life expectancy. Diminished longevities associated with GOS scores of 3 or 2 were calculated according to formulas derived from survival studies of these patients' mortality rates.^4,10,11,13^ Appendix Table 1 shows the expected years of life for each of the 4 age categories studied. Aoki and associates1 elicited utilities of different GOS states from 140 medical professionals, using the routine gamble approach. Their results are shown in Appendix Table 2. Quality-adjusted life years (QALYs)—and costs—are discounted at 3% per year of life. It is assumed that future rewards and costs are valued less than immediate ones, and routine practice is to discount them at 3% or 5% per year.^8^ As an example, a 20-year-old can expect to live, on average, 58^12^ years. If he or she remains in perfect health (utility = 1), that translates to 28.21 QALYs, with discounting. Appendix Table 3 illustrates the number of expected QALYs associated with a given age and GOS score.

So Whitmore et al 2012 finds that a healthy 20 year old's expected (discounted) QALYs of 28.21 drops to 17.77 if he is hit hard enough to trigger a #4, which at \$50k again is a huge lifetime loss of \$522,000. For the 40yo, the same calculation is \$436,500. Splitting the difference gives me a \$479,250. The losses get worse with more severe Glasgow Coma Scales, where #1 effectively equals death. Since I'm not sure how TBIs break down by Glasgow rating, I can't do an overall expected value but whatever it is, it must be >\$479,250 since that was the least damaging scenario Whitmore considered. So the expected loss from a TBI injury but not death is \$479k (ignoring the immediate medical costs since those will generally be paid by other people like insurers or the government); now we again need to compute the probability of a TBI injury each year and sum the series:

R> sum(sapply(seq((80-30), 0), function(t) { 5000 * 3.431544214e-09 * t * 0.97^t * 0.63 * 50000 }))
# [1] 264.9444032

So a quick estimate of the net present expected loss caused by TBI death or injury while in a car over a lifetime for a 30yo is -\$685. Or to put it the other way, we should be willing to pay up to \$685 to reduce our car TBI risk to zero.

I was extremely extremely dedicated to it back in middle/high school. Actually, it was pretty much all I cared about (not an exaggeration). This may or not be crazy... but I wanted to be the best player who's ever lived. That was what I genuinely aspired and was working towards (~7th-11th grade).

This was me, but more like 6th-9th grade.

Off the top of my head, I think the main benefits I got out of playing competitive basketball were: 0. Physical fitness. 1. Ambition and competitiveness. 2. Something fun I do occasionally now. 3. Hard to describe mental skills related to practicing shooting form.

Elaboration on 1: I think it's really awesome how much "excellence porn" there in sports. You can go on youtube, and see tons of motivational videos. I wish there were the equivalent for intellectual domains. The closest you get is Paul Graham's essays for startups.

Elaboration on 3: Practicing shooting feels similar to meditation. I'm trying to pay close attention to tiny details of A. how my body is moving, B. Whether that feels like a good motion/shot or bad motion/shot C. How the ball actually moves. Furthermore, there's metacognition to see how your shot/motion changes when you're playing less close attention to it (e.g. when you're actually playing a game. Or, if you were focusing on improving your form in your legs, and then you switch to focusing on your form in your arms, you may notice that your leg form degrades again. Furthermore, you notice that leg-form and arm-form are not independent, and that there are local optima and that sometimes you have to get worse in order to get better.).

There's a lot more I could say, but I'll leave it at that for now.

I've also been disappointed to see that people heavily reach for players in the draft, effectively saying "I disagree with all of the experts".

This can be a good strategy. I've played in leagues where the winners have won largely because they chose players before the experts projected they should go.

Following the consensus will likely yield the highest average performance over a span of several seasons, but the experts get it wrong sometimes. If you can pick the overachievers in any given season, it can yield a championship.

I no longer play sports (unless it's mandated by work), unless you count grappling on occasion.

Yes, I maintain a fantasy football team to practice statistical thinking (as opposed to actual statistics, at the moment) and because I found it ingratiates me with my colleagues. My workplace went from a den of geeks to regular Monday night football types in the space of months, so I switched from D&D to fantasy football.

It's safe to say I don't really have teams I root for (once upon a time it was Newcastle United, because I liked zebras as a kid) or sports I watch more than a few minutes of. Yet I'm interested in sports- now more than ever.

It's in the details. How does a tennis player improve his reaction time? How does handball transfer to boxing? How does the conditioning a football wide receiver employs differ from a midfielder's training in football? What are the steps coaches take to improve performance? When performance is at a peak, what's the best method for getting a group of people with adrenaline driving them to incorporate tactics into their play? Are tactics something you need to pay attention to? Sports provide a simple world with well-defined rules to explore the effect of competition on innovation.

If a team isn't maximizing play within those rules, that team should lose over time. There's a consequence for not paying attention to reality- especially in professional sports. If passing the ball in a particular way is bad form but it works and isn't against the rules, surely teams will eventually start doing it, and the game will have to be re-examined.

You can find a lot of these aspects in multiplayer virtual games, but the physical skills required for sports introduce a whole new element that's extremely interesting. Sure, Counter-Strike might raise your reaction time, but that's just your eyes and your hands. A squash player, now, she'll need to move her whole body.

I see the value in sports. I just don't find it fun to, actually, you know, play, due to skill mismatch. People are either way better or much worse. Unless it's capture the flag, paintball, or some other 'new' sport. The sports I do enjoy are one-on-one, but they carry a high risk of injury or are a heavy time sink.

I do wonder why people haven't come up with a better game- one that maximizes suspense and use of complex tactics.

But which sport has had the most rules changes over time? A cursory glance suggests the NFL, but I suppose I should make a note to crunch those numbers when I'm inclined.

One last thing. I think there might be a better way to structure professional teams to encourage drama. As the saying goes, you're just rooting for a jersey. Perhaps some sort of player buy-in to a team might change that. After all, city leagues, high school games, national, and even college sports make for more compelling stories.

Well...yes. I'm not sure what other interpretation of that makes much sense.

Recreational sports is fun! Unfortunately, for me and perhaps many other people, high school quite ruined that - no real friends, an obligation to play, shouting. I'd rather walk alone for hours. You really are in luck here, that it didn't make it worse for you.

Although badminton with someone you like might be still nice:)

I think the difference between playing and spectating sports gets glossed over in lots of "sports are dumb" conversations.

I do not care at all about watching other people play sports. It's super boring.

Playing sports ball with people you enjoy being around is quite rewarding.

If these extreme emotions are indeed useful, then maybe we should look to explicitly seek them out (depending on whether we think we're below the optimal level of the emotion in question).

• To generate the ups, maybe it'd be a good idea to hang out with friends, get drunk, and dream about ambitious ideas. Only focusing on the happy paths. Well, people already do this but I guess my point is that maybe it should be done more often and more explicitly.
• I'm not sure how the downs would be generated.

Thoughts on the usefulness of these emotions:

• I agree that the ups are useful (motivation, communicate your excitement...). There are downsides like overconfidence, but I think these downsides are usually outweighed by the benefits.
• As for the downs, my impression is that a lot of the time it just makes people lethargic and doesn't really motivate change. But then there are times when they do motivate change. It seems that people experience more than the optimal level of "downs". You could make the point that this is because people don't handle the downs well, but even if they were better handled I'm still bearish on the value of downs.
• (I spent over a year working on a startup that failed and went through these emotions.)

To anyone who hasn't seen it, Inside Out is a movie that is relevant to this talk about the usefulness of "ups" and "downs".

From their website, it looks like they'll be doing a lot of deep learning research and making the results freely available, which doesn't sound like it would accelerate Friendly AI relative to AI as a whole. I hope they've thought this through.

Edit: It continues to look like their strategy might be counterproductive. [Edited again in response to this.]