Noah Davis considers his chances of dying today:
First, some of the obvious risks. I have to take the subway to Harlem later tonight. In 2012, 55 people died on the tracks (up from eight in 2011), but there were 1,654,582,265 total riders. That’s about one death for every 30 million riders and about one death per week. I might take a taxi back from Harlem. Seventy-three people lost their lives in traffic accidents in New York City in 2012, which, while tragic, is a low number considering there are more than 27 million taxi rides alone in a single year. That doesn’t include the number of regular cars, livery cabs, buses, etc. Odds of dying in a traffic fatality today are well into the millions to one. It’s actually considerably more dangerous to walk, as 148 pedestrians died in 2012, but that is still extremely unlikely. Biking would be another risk, with 18 cyclists dying in 2012, but biking is actually getting safer as awareness grows. …
Odds of dying in a given year from choking on food are one in 370,035. Multiple that by 365 and I have a roughly one in 135 million chance of dying today from choking on food. But, again, I’m kind of dumb that way and have a history of choking, so let’s bump it up to one in 100 million. Still not likely.
Earlier this year his colleagues interviewed the authors of The Norm Chronicles, a book calculating the risk of everyday scenarios:
What people mean when they say something’s risky is also often packed with other values and preferences for things like a feeling of control (at the wheel of a car rather than as a passenger in a plane, for example). On top of which, their own behavior can make, say, crossing the road, more or less risky than the current average probabilities of being run over. So risk is also contingent. For these and other reasons, a large part of people’s sense of risk has to be subjective. In fact, we’d go so far as to say that objective risk for an individual, thought of as an independent property of the world out there, doesn’t exist. We prefer to think of risk as typically more like an uncertain bet on a horse using scraps of imperfect information mixed with your own judgment: the horse might come in, or it might not….
The Dish 