Original

Does something like this seem to you to be a reasonable rule of thumb, for helping handle scope insensitivity to low probabilities?

There’s a roughly 30 to 35 out of a million chance that you will die on any given day; and so if I’m dealing with a probability of one in a million, then I ‘should’ spend 30 times as much time preparing for my imminent death within the next 24 hours as I do playing with the one-in-a-million shot. If it’s not worth spending 30 seconds preparing for dying within the next day, then I should spend less than one second dealing with that one-in-a-million shot.

Relatedly, can you think of a way to improve it, such as to make it more memorable? Are there any pre-existing references – not just to micromorts, but to comparing them to other probabilities – which I’ve missed?

Leave a Reply