Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: nyrisa
We interpret odds and risks according to what we HOPE will happen, and according to what fits with what we want to do.
You may do that. In fact, most probably do that. Which does not translate into eliminating choice. Protecting the population from itself can only be accomplished by a totalitarian state. And it deprives the person of individual responsibility. I think one could even go so far as to say that a lot of the ills in society are because people are pampered in this way, isolated from the decision-making process and the consequences of their actions.
Take cricket. If you've ever done the math, you know a cricket ball packs a wallop. It can easily break your arm. So in the beginning, people paid attention to the ball, taking the risk-aware approach to it. At some point, someone came up with the brilliant idea of adding helmets and other protective gear. Then people started feeling safe. So they stopped paying attention to the ball. It doesn't help much that you're wearing a helmet with a 1 inch clearing to your skull when the ball puts a 2-3 inch dent in it.
quote:
I personally don't want to end up being one of the 0.6% of the population who has HIV.
Who does? Then again, do you drive a car? Would really suck to be one of those in the population who are in a serious car crash. Have electricity? Would not want to be one of those who get electrocuted, or die in an electrical fire. How about pregnancy? If I were a woman, I'd hate to die in childbirth. But it's all a matter of risks: awareness, mitigation and tradeoff.
Projected long-term survival rate for the individuals of a population is 0%
What you get to do, is throw the dice. To take calculated risks, and do a balancing act between having a life and simply living. In the end, all you're really changing, is what the coroner's report will list under "cause of death" (picking your risks), and how long it will be until your next of kin get to put you in the ground (mitigating them and rolling the dice). Oh, and whether they remember you as someone who did everything to avoid dying but failed in the end, or as someone who was not afraid to live.
It may not be your thing, and it isn't mine, either. But all of us make choices.
quote:
(Aswad, I used a statistic from your post, but only in reference to how I interpret it on my gut level, not in argument, etc. Please excuse me if I interpreted it incorrectly.)
No problem. The interpretation was close enough. A simple breakdown goes like this:
Statistics are not a crystal ball. You can get HIV the first time someone got a defective condom, or you can spend your life in a continuous orgy of unprotected sex with HIV-infected people without getting it. What statistics tell you, is your level of risk, as determined by examining large numbers of cases.
This is why I said "flip of a coin".
There is an element of chance to it, always. Such is the reason we call it a risk. But after giving 750.000 (my previous figure was misstated) blowjobs to random strangers, an impressive feat in its own way, there is a flip-of-a-coin (fifty-fifty) chance that you will have contracted HIV. Doing it once puts it at one in 1.5 million, which is slightly more likely than winning the first price in a large lottery with a single ticket.
As you say, people tend to think of vanishingly small odds (and sometimes even much greater odds) in terms of "it won't happen to me", which is wrong. It probably won't, but if it does, that sucks. Shit happens. But you could have been hit by a car, too. So, there's no more or less to complain about. You knew the odds, you took them, you lost. It happens. To correct slightly for how people often don't get that, I simplified it to how many times you have to do it to get to a fifty-fifty chance.
(Well, technically, I fudged it, as I couldn't be bothered to calculate the cumulative probability, but it's close enough and starts from real figures; anyone who takes their risk evaluation off an Internet forum without doing some checking on their own will be nominated for the Darwin awards eventually, in any case.)
Hope this clarifies. 
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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