I find myself very interested in the conclusions offered by sbunny8-logic, in which the individually-determined arbitrary frequency of an action factors into its absolute risk calculations.
Off the top of my head…I make grilled chicken at least once a week; it’s easy, relatively cheap, and delicious. Estimating 300 calories each time I eat it (double breast plus a few calories for seasonings, etc.), it adds approximately 16,000 calories to my annual intake.
On the other hand, I hardly ever eat at Long John Silver’s, because Long John Silver’s is fucking terrible. I only go there when somebody drags me, which happens approximately once a year. When I do go, I get the Two Chicken Plank meal, which comes in at 710 calories.
Using sb8-logic, I can therefore conclude that homemade grilled chicken is 22.5 times more fattening than getting chicken from Long John Silver’s. Clearly, I need to start eating more fast food; I’d slim down in a heartbeat!
You couldn’t be more wrong.:smack:
For example…
Nowadays, that gasoline is expensive, your main concern when driving is “how much is gonna cost me”.
But, a few years ago, when oil was 30$ a barrel, what you really worried about was “how much time is gonna take me”.
Back in the topic.
The time factor is important because our time in this world is limited.
In my question, let’s say that the professional driver, in his working day, has enough time for one trip, from city A to city B.
At the same time, the airline pilot will go back and forth several times. Who knows… maybe 3 or 4 times.
In other words…
it will take the bus driver 4 days to cover the distance that the pilot covered in 1 day.
Or, in other words…
bus driving prevents the driver from being exposed to more dangers, according to “the deaths per distance” logic. Because, according to this logic, the further you travel, the more dangers you face.
As a conclusion…
it seems to me that “deaths per distance” is equally important as “deaths per time”.
Not taking them both in account makes the comparison unfair.
You are focusing on one aspect of what I said while ignoring another. The comparison here is not a question of should I do more of this or less of that. The question is, IF you stopped doing this one thing, what would you replace it with?
So, fine, let’s take your example. Imagine Roland has a change of heart and decides to stop eating home-cooked grilled chicken (HCGC for short). Old Roland used to eat HCGC once a week and LJS once a year. What is New Roland going to do? Will New Roland continue eating LJS only once per year and simply decide to go hungry the other 51 weeks? If that’s the case, then YES New Roland would decrease his caloric intake. But if New Roland starts eating at LJS every single week, then obviously, NO, New Roland would not end up losing weight.
But are those realistic alternatives? I don’t think they are. It seems much more likely to me that New Roland would eat something else on those 51 days, not LJS. Maybe New Roland would start eating Mac & Cheese on those days. Until we know what that something else would be, we can’t reasonably compare whether it was a good idea to stop eating HCGC.
Now back to the subject of flying. If you, Roland, woke up one day and (for whatever reason) said “Hmm I’ve decided that I will never fly on an airplane ever again.” would that decision make you more safe or less safe? My point is that, before we can answer that question, we first need to know what you intend to replace your flying with. Will you simply decide to stay home? Or will you drive your car instead? Or will you reduce the number of trips that you make per year?
The bus discussion brings up another point. It doesn’t make sense to take car crash data and apply it to buses.
On an average day, millions of people drive two or three miles back and forth to work, and millions more drive to the grocery store and back, and millions more get on the freeway and drive from one city to another. Some of them will crash and die. Suppose we take all those miles, add them up, and then divide the number of deaths into the billions of miles driven and find… the average is 15 deaths per billion passenger miles.
So if we fill up 100 buses with 60 people each and send those 100 buses on a trip from Seattle to New York to Orlando to LA and back to Seattle, racking up 10,000 miles x 100 buses x 60 people we have a total of 60 million passenger miles. According to the 15 deaths per billion rule, we would expect 1 person to die.
Obviously that’s a silly application of statistics.
The number of car crashes on the way to the grocery store tells us very little about the number of bus crashes on the way to New York. Highway driving is safer than city driving, that’s what they taught us in Driver’s Ed. Plus, putting 60 people on a bus doesn’t make it 60 times more dangerous than 1 person in a car. On the contrary, the bus is safer because the drivers is better trained and required to take rest breaks or let another driver take over.
On a similar note, most airplane crashes occur during takeoff or landing. The long boring part in between is less dangerous. When you quote deaths per billion miles, you’re assuming that a 1,000 mile airplane flight is exactly twice as dangerous as a 500 mile flight.
