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Re:Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among p... by nn3 on Sunday January 02, 2022 @12:39PM (#29771088)
Maybe it's similar to the well known "more likely to be hit by a meteorite than to win the lottery" style statements. Obviously that's completely wrong: i've never heard of anyone being hit by a meteorite, but people win the lottery every month.

I'm not saying that they're actively lying, but it seems some assumptions in these frequentist's numbers are just not correct.

Re:Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among p... by LorenPechtel on Sunday January 02, 2022 @04:04PM (#29773855)
They're not lying. It's just meteorite kills are very clumpy.

I'm not a lottery player so I can't give a good estimate on the number of lottery winners, but for the major jackpots I'll guess many per year.

AFIAK we have no documented meteorite deaths--but it looks like the destruction of Sodom (of biblical fame) was a meteorite. While obviously we have no death toll it's obviously a *lot* of years of major lottery wins. The atmosphere stops most of the stuff but when something's big enough to get through it makes quite a boom. (Chelyabinsk was half a megaton but was high enough up the blast only caused harm by throwing broken windows at people. Tunguska, however was a few megatons and got low enough to be a city-killer. All it blew up was forest for probably zero deaths, but had it fallen 7 hours earlier the world would be a different place because it would have wiped out Leningrad.)

Re:Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among p... by nn3 on Sunday January 02, 2022 @04:23PM (#29774077)
AFAIK the Sodom story was pretty much debunked

https://retractionwatch.com/2021/10/01/criticism-engulfs-pap...

Re:Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among p... by LorenPechtel on Monday January 03, 2022 @03:57PM (#29786772)
Interesting! Pretty obviously some sloppy science but I'm not sure that's a debunk. For something in the Bible to turn out to be based on real events with religious overtones added. Religions are always poaching from history, to find some truth to a story in a religious work is not surprising, nor is it a confirmation of the religious aspects of it.
Re:Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among p... by irrational on Sunday January 02, 2022 @01:05PM (#29771523)
https://astronomy.com/news/2020/05/death-from-above-7-unluck...

Just last year a woman had just gotten out of bed when a meteorite came through her ceiling and hit her pillow where her head had been.

Re:Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among p... by nn3 on Sunday January 02, 2022 @01:19PM (#29771726)
I was actually aware of that story. But she wasn't hit, so it doesn't invalidate my statement.
Re:Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among p... by ehvatum on Sunday January 02, 2022 @01:09PM (#29771603)
There’s a confounding effect arising from the difficulty in comparing false negative rates between person-meteor-strike and person-lottery-jackpot. Whereas lottery-jackpot events are rarely misinterpreted as some prat dropping rubbish onto person, person-meteor-strike too often is.
Re:Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among p... by withinboredom on Sunday January 02, 2022 @01:03PM (#29771506)
A lot more people try to win the lottery than jump in front of meteorites.