Re:Micromort
by im3w1l on Friday June 19, 2020 @11:44AM
(#23575577)
I think a better way is to say that 500 millimort + 500 millimort = 1000 millimort like normallly. And then say that you can't add millimorts of successive events to get the millimorts of the sequence.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
That doesn't make sense to me: 500 millimorts means "50% chance of death." 1000 millimorts means "100% chance of death." Flipping a coin twice doesn't guarantee that you got heads.
Re:Micromort
by keeganpoppen on Friday June 19, 2020 @10:12PM
(#23580940)
his point is that the problem is not that you can never add millimorts together, but rather people try to add them together when the two things being added are correlated. i can add the millimorts of playing russian roulette once w/ the millimorts of playing 5 more rounds with the same gun just fine.
I think you have it backwards. The addition fails hardest when things are independent - which is true of most millimort risks in these tables. Smoking a cigarette and riding a motorcycle are totally uncorrelated in terms of how they cause death, so adding their millimorts naively won’t work at all.