Friday, August 20, 2010

Odds that you'll die from...

I found this through Sentient Developments; don't know what the source is:

(Click to enlarge, as usual.)

I wonder what assumptions were made in calculating those odds in terms of, for example, age. The odds that you'll die from different causes are very sensitive to age; when you're 96, for example, and if we don't know anything else about you, the most likely cause of your death is pneumonia. What age were those odds calculated at--0? 30?

Another nitpick: the probability that you'll die from smallpox is not zero. It's extremely, negligibly, vanishingly small, essentially zero, zero for all practical purposes etc., but not zero. Outside the abstract realm of mathematics and logic, there is no such thing as a probability of zero or one. The probability that next Thursday, the Sun will turn into a giant pink unicorn, is not zero.

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