Category Archives: Evidentialism
Fare Thee Well…Weirdly
This is the entirety of the most intriguing site on the internet, www.micromorts.rip. I didn’t even know .rip was an option, cuz I’d have been all under that.
Micromorts
💀 We are all going to die 💀
Dying! It is what humans do. We do, however, attempt to delay this end for as long as possible. We continue to make horrible decisions around risk and death.
We can use micromorts to help track how risky an activity is and compare it to other activities. This will help us understand what is dangerous and what isn’t.
From wikipedia:
“A micromort (from micro- and mortality) is a unit of risk defined as one-in-a-million chance of death Micromorts can be used to measure riskiness of various day-to-day activities. A microprobability is a one-in-a million chance of some event; thus a micromort is the microprobability of death. The micromort concept was introduced by Ronald A. Howard who pioneered the modern practice of decision analysis.”
For instance, living one day at age 20 is 1 micromort, running a marathon is 7 micromorts, and riding a motorcycle for 60 miles is 10 micromorts. We can easily see that riding a motorcycle is more dangerous than running a marathon.
The following is a collection of activities and the micromorts of each activity. You can than compare, understand risks and then make decisions.
Activity | Micromorts |
---|---|
Mountaineering Ascent to Mt. Everest | 37932 |
Mountaineering in the Himalayas | 12000 |
Being infected by COVID19 | 10000 |
Being infected by the Spanish flu | 3000 |
Mountaineerin Ascent to Matterhorn | 2840 |
Living in US during covid19 pandemic (July 2020) | 500 |
Getting out of bed (age 90) | 463 |
Base Jumping (per jump) | 430 |
First day of being born | 430 |
Giving birth (caesarean) | 170 |
Giving Birth | 170 |
Scuba diving (Trained) per year | 164 |
Giving birth (Vaginal) | 120 |
Getting out of bed (age 75) | 105 |
Giving Birth | 80 |
Night in Hospital | 75 |
Living in NYC during Covid19 (March 15 to May 9) | 50 |
Giving Birth | 50 |
Using Heroin | 30 |
serving in the U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan throughout 2010 | 25 |
Playing American Football | 20 |
Getting out of bed (under age 1) | 15 |
Ecstasy (MDMA) | 13 |
Going for a swim (Drowning) | 12 |
General Anesthetic (Emergency Operation) | 10 |
Riding a motorcycle (60 miles) | 10 |
Skydiving (per jump) (genera) | 10 |
SKydiving (US) (per jump) | 8 |
Skydiving (UK) (per jump) | 8 |
Hang gliding | 8 |
Running a Marathon | 7 |
Living in Maryland during Covid19 Pandemic (March 15 to May 9) | 7 |
Getting out of bed (age 45) | 6 |
Scuba diving (Trained) per dive | 5 |
Rock Climbing (per climb) | 3 |
Living 2 months with a smoker | 1 |
Walking 20 miles per day (Accident) | 1 |
Traveling 230 miles per day by. car. (accident) | 1 |
Traveling 1000 miles per day by plane(accident) | 1 |
Traveling 1000 miles per day by. train (accident) | 1 |
Eating 1000 bananas | 1 |
Spending 1 hour in a coal mine | 1 |
Eating 40 tsp of peanut butter | 1 |
Eating 100 char broiled steak | 1 |
One day alive at age 20 | 1 |
Skiing (per day) | 0.7 |
Horseback Riding | 0.5 |
Kangaroo Encounter | 0.1 |
Pick an Atom, Any Atom
Evidentialism Factslap: There are more ways to arrange a deck of cards than there are atoms on Earth.
Think of your last card game – euchre, poker, Go Fish, whatever it was. Would you believe every time you gave the whole deck a proper shuffle, you were holding a sequence of cards which had never before existed in all of history? Consider how many card games must have taken place across the world since the beginning of humankind. No one has or likely ever will hold the exact same arrangement of 52 cards as you did during that game.
It seems unbelievable, but there are somewhere in the range of 8×1067 ways to sort a deck of cards. That’s an 8 followed by 67 zeros. To put that in perspective, even if someone could rearrange a deck of cards every second of the universe’s total existence, the universe would end before they would get even one billionth of the way to finding a repeat. This is the nature of probabilities with such great numbers. Though a long-time blackjack dealer might feel like they have shuffled thousands of cards in their lifetime, against a number this big, their rearrangements are irrelevant. There are simply too many ways to arrange 52 cards for any randomly organized set of cards to have repeated itself.
Don’t believe it? Consider how many ways you can order a deck of just four aces.
As you deal out the deck, each subsequent position in the row has one fewer card to select from. So the first spot has four options, the next spot has three, and so on until one card remains. This mathematical pattern can be used to calculate how many ways a set of things can be organized by multiplying these numbers together.
This literally exciting calculation is denoted by an exclamation mark and is called a factorial. As a rule, factorials multiply the number of things in a set by consecutively smaller numbers until 1. Since there are 4 cards in our mini-deck, there are 4 factorial or 4! numbers of ways it can be arranged, which equals 24. While this might not seem like a particularly large number, by the time you get to 52! (or 52x51x50 … ) you get a number with 68 total digits – an integer much larger than all the atoms estimated to be on Earth.
Now you might say, wait, 52 cards arranged in order from least to greatest cannot possibly be unique; you’ve probably even done it several times in your life playing Solitaire. And you’d be right. Card games tend to order decks in common ways, so you need to shuffle really well (about seven times using the “riffle” method) before you’re holding any deck which is truly one-of-a-kind