Originally Posted by
njkayaker
You mean, if I roll a dice many times, it would not be "more likely" to hit a six that it would be doing it once?
I mean that you are just as likely to roll a six on your first roll as you are on your 1,000 the roll. If you rolled a 6 3 times in a row you still have the same chance of rolling a six on your next roll as you did on the previous rolls.
Originally Posted by
njkayaker
The cumulative risk certainly increases on an individual basis. For very-rare events, the cumulative risk remains very small, which means that one cannot "predict" that a person will die by any particular means (but no one is making such a "prediction".)
I will agree that life time odds of dying by an event is greater then the yearly odds (Ref:
http://www.baltimorespokes.org/artic...61207130021353 ) but what we do as individuals has very little effect on the total number that die in a given year by a given cause.
Originally Posted by
njkayaker
Well, no. Sometimes you roll a six the first time. Anyway, it's certain that "exposure" had something to do with the death. If he hadn't been bicycling, he would not have had a bicycling accident.
(There certainly is an experience/skill component to the risk level. Which is what I suppose you are alluding to. And which no one is denying.)
The problem is this is not like a single dice throw it' s more like throwing a problematic location die, somebody doing something stupid die, experience in avoiding accidents die, car being in the wrong place at the wrong time die, time of day/week/year die and all of these have to roll a six simultaneously. Not to mention that there is only a set number of throws per year. So ya you have a point if we start accumulating years but within a given year there is not much one individual can do to increase or decrease total fatalities per cause per year. I don't care how many times you stand under a tree in a thunderstorm or if you are always inside, you are not going to change the number of fatalities by lightning in a given year.
The next issue is if they are not biking then what? Taking the car? Here are MD's odds of dying:
Fatalities: Population
Cars 394:2,351,561 reduced 1:5,968
Bikes 7:842,359 reduced 1:120,337
Collateral damage of cars 213 so adding that in we have:
Cars 607:2,351,561 reduced 1:3874
It comes down to we all live life, whether in a car or on a bike, car deaths correlate to car millage and cycling deaths are just basically flat with no coloration that we can determine. So no mater what I do on a bike, my odds of dying in any given year is 1:120,337 which is better then if I drove and if I drove I stand a chance of increasing the total fatalities which makes the chance of someone dying even easier then before.