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> Let's say it would collapse with 100% certainty randomly in the next three years, and you're in the danger area for 2 minutes, with a 20% chance of fatality

Or how about let's say it would collapse with 100% certainty randomly in the next three years, and a school bus with twenty kids in it drives over the bridge twice a day, with each child facing a 20% chance of fatality.

‘I probably won’t be the one who dies when it collapses’ is a terrible metric for whether or not we should try to mitigate the risk of a bridge collapse.



School buses are never a useful way to think about risk. You might not be intending it, but this is a cheap manipulation technique.

Bridges sometimes fail catastrophically, with risk to life. Modeling risk is a necessary way to consider the costs of mitigation.

Leaving aside the poor helpless babies, what metric would you suggest?


School buses are an excellent way to think about risk if you are a school transportation planner. I was trying to give you an example of someone who might make a different risk calculation than an individual.




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