Resources on Preventing Catastrophe?

[TopHatFox]

Any of you ever run across a book, documentary, or other media detailing statistics of what mental, medical, geographical, political, or other calamity kills or hurts them? It'd be super interesting to compare what people fear compared to what actually does damage/kills in large numbers.

It'll also be useful to learn about resources about calamity prevention, though I suppose that could be anything from reading Beyond Backpacking for hiking/walking, or Effective Cycling for bicycling, or any other number of how-to book for [insert activity].

So, for example, this article is interesting: https://www.healthaliciousness.com/arti ... -death.php

[Sclass]

I still flip through my Boy Scout manual from the 1980s. For healthy young people, water safety is a very big deal. I know it sounds silly but if you follow the Boy Scout dogma you can stay alive. Maybe not sane but alive nonetheless.

I like the free booklets at the DMV for car and motorcycle safety. Motor vehicles are an omnipresent danger we just don't think about...even if you're a pedestrian.

[Lemon]

If you are still interested this is a pretty cool interactive dataset form the global burden of disease study.

Link Here http://vizhub.healthdata.org/gbd-compare/

Data more reliable the more developed the country is (naturally).

You can search by region on cause of death, years lived with disability and Disability adjusted life years (DALYs).

DALYs are not a perfect measure by any stretch however.
There is also information on the main site, but this is pretty.

[ducknalddon]

I like the free booklets at the DMV for car and motorcycle safety. Motor vehicles are an omnipresent danger we just don't think about...even if you're a pedestrian.

Yes, 32,000 road deaths a year in the US, 90% of them vehicle occupants.

[jennypenny]

I have this argument with people all of the time. DD goes to a college far away and has to fly back and forth. My friends always wonder if I worry about her safety since she's flying all the time. I try to explain that she's MUCH safer in airports and on planes than their kids who are driving hours back and forth to school, but I get blank stares. I had a similar argument last year when DS's class took a field trip to Manhattan. I suggested that they take the train (the station is in our town), but the other parents insisted on taking a bus because they said it was safer.

Statistics and risk management should be part of the math curriculum in school.

[daylen]

Take a look at the life contingency tables that actuaries make.

[BRUTE]

I try to explain that she's MUCH safer in airports and on planes than their kids who are driving hours back and forth to school, but I get blank stares.

but terrism

[Sclass]

Statistics and risk management should be part of the math curriculum in school.

Beat me to the punch. Exactly, people need to learn some stats and read Taleb. Too many people using emotion in their gut feel for how the world works. The math tells a different story.

It's amazing how many narratives there are out there that just cannot stand up to some simple probability analysis.

[BRUTE]

because humans learn so much in school

[jacob]

Statistics and risk management should be part of the math curriculum in school.

Noooooo!!!!

If that happens, all discussions about statistical risk will get overrun by nonsense arguments from a mass of people whose depth of understanding obtains from the brutal combination of now being able to approximate the correct spelling of a bunch of technical terms well enough for google to figure out the correct spelling of the term; and their confident belief that reading the first few results of such a google search means they've done their research.

I mean, see what happened to politics, finance, climate science, evolution, ... and undergraduates in general!