Does something like this seem to you to be a reasonable rule of thumb, for helping handle scope insensitivity to low probabilities?
There's a roughly 30 to 35 out of a million chance that you will die on any given day; and so if I'm dealing with a probability of one in a million, then I 'should' spend 30 times as much time preparing for my imminent death within the next 24 hours as I do playing with the one-in-a-million shot. If it's not worth spending 30 seconds preparing for dying within the next day, then I should spend less than one second dealing with that one-in-a-million shot.
Relatedly, can you think of a way to improve it, such as to make it more memorable? Are there any pre-existing references - not just to micromorts, but to comparing them to other probabilities - which I've missed?
It may be 'best' to use decision theory - but I've found that it can take more time trying to figure out what a decision theory says about an everyday choice than that choice makes a difference of. So I'm hoping that some variation of this rule-of-thumb allows for a reasonable compromise - while it doesn't always apply, the cases where it does allow you to reap most of the benefits that applying a full-fledged decision theory would, while requiring significantly less mental processing time.
Or maybe it's not useful that way at all - in which case, I'd like to find that out here if I can, before I start relying on it too heavily.