[ExI] The post-antibiotic era

[BillK]

On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 11:56 PM, Anders Sandberg  wrote:
> My best estimate is around 0.1% chance per year. Over a 70 year lifespan,
> that means a total risk of 6.7%. This means it beats things like
> cerebrovascular disease, accidents, influenza, and liver disease as a
> potential cause of death. It is just that it likely either happens or it
> doesn't, unlike most of the others that have ongoing mortality.
>
> Note that from an individual perspective antibiotics resistance is likely
> about as big threat as a nuclear war to your health. It is just that from a
> global perspective nuclear wars are much worse, since they cause massive
> correlated death and damage.
<snip>
>

I am rather doubtful about how to use stats and percentages concerning
mortality risks.
Nobody gets 6% pregnant or 6% dead.

I appreciate that for large-scale national budget planning, policy
should aim to get the best return for the money spent. (Apart from the
usual political considerations of popularity, re-election and profits
for allies).

A lifetime risk of 6.7% for nuclear war sounds OK. But if you are
talking to a 60 year old politician, he is very likely to reason that
80% of his life is already over and reduce pro-rota the risk for him
personally.

When you talk to somebody about the risk of death from specific
causes, they don't really care about a national 5% rate. The rate
doesn't mean that everyone gets 5% of the disease. It means that 5% of
the population get 100% of the disease and for 95% of the population
the statistic doesn't apply. Where death is concerned people want to
know the risk as it applies to themselves. Are they likely to be in
the 5% fatality group?

The same applies to car accidents. If you don't drive, ignore it.
Obesity. If you are slim and watch what you eat, ignore it.  Etc. etc.
And of course, men can ignore the health risks of childbirth, just as
women can ignore the risk of prostate cancer.

This is not using the availability heuristic to reason incorrectly.
For each individual this is correct reasoning, because some risks just
don't apply to them.

So people are more concerned about the steady ongoing mortality risks
that happen every day, because they are more likely to encounter them,
and they want the likely risks reduced first.
And encountering MRSA in a hospital stay, is beginning to loom very
large in the likelihood scenario.

If you want people to pay attention to huge but very rare risks, I
think you need to convince them that it is likely to affect them in
their lifetime. (That's why climate change has been generally ignored.
People thought they would be dead long before it became a serious
problem).
The other way of dealing with rare risks is just to spend a small
amount of money steadily over a very long time and hope that a
solution is developed before the rare event happens. This seems to be
the option being adopted for asteroid strikes.


BillK