I am curious as to how would one go at estimating a given person’s chance of dying within a particular time frame. I mean there should be a baseline based on age and sex, and then compounded by things like smoking, driving, dangerous occupations. I’m fairly sure one can find life expectancy for a lot of combinations of the above, but I am not quite sure how to go about estimating chance of death.
For example, let’s estimate for me. A white male California resident, 23 years old, non-smoking. One approach would be to see how many 23-year old white males in California die in a given day vs. how many there are total. That shouldn’t give me a figure that is entirely far off. How would I go about finding this info however?
Any ideas?
Well, you could wiffle through this site: http://www.nsc.org/lrs/statinfo/odds.htm
Get a food taster and sell your motorcycle.
Well, while my interest is purely academic, I am a little offended you automatically presume I want to make my own chances better rather than someone else’s chances worse.
US mortality table from Wikipedia along with instructions.
Kind of like what Ben Stiller did for a living in “Along Came Polly”.
Your chances of dying are 100%. It’s just predicting when that might happen which is the hard part.
Old joke at the firm I used to work for:
Did you here about the actuary who insisted on being buried in Isreal? Because it has the highest known incidence of resurrection from the dead.
I was going to say this.
-Scotandrsn, son of an actuary
I think that this is probably the most fun way to find out: http://community.sparknotes.com/sparktests/index.epl 
Food for thought: My department emailed us all that we had a bomb threat earlier in the day, but it was not considered serious enough to send us all home. Did they ask me? :dubious: Of course not. I guess I could already be dead, especially considering the fact that most of the decision makers I know couldn’t find their ass with two hands… :eek:
If you ever figure it out, let us know what your chances of dying are… I’m interested to know because I’m a white male, 23, non-smoker, and live in DC.