A question of odds.

[crfriend]

I'm going to posit a query here that folks have 30 seconds to reason through and answer. It's a science experiment.

I don't know how it's been in the countries to the east of "the Pond", nor how things are in the antipodes, but over here the only thing one hears on the radio is the Great Ebola Epidemic, assorted, mainly negative, political adverts, and ISIS. It's almost enough to make one turn the bloody thing off.

Here's the poser: Rank the following scenarios (which I have listed in no particular order) in order of probability:

Hitting the "Big Stakes" on the lottery.
Getting struck by lightning.
Contracting ebola.
Getting hit by a car driven by someone on a cell' 'phone.
Contracting ebola if you live in New York City or Dallas.
Being caught up in a terrorist attack.
Getting attacked by a shark. (Landlocked folks can ignore this one unless it piques your interest.)

I could add a few more for comic relief, but those'll do.

I am so tired of mass media whose main function, it seems, is to perpetually keep us all afraid.

Can you tell that I am not in a good mood tonight?

[Kirbstone]

Carl,
The one that stands out in order of probability is the traumatic encounter with someone driving while conversing on a cellphone. I've already witnessed some hairy close shaves due precisely to that.

Perhaps in the USA the next one just might be the terrorist one. The rest are way off the dial in terms of probability, including Ebola.
With lots of Catholic Medical missionaries abroad in Africa, Ireland have put up a firewall-like filter on returning ditto. That is also because we have a very noticeable African population resident here, mostly from countries other than the three affected regions, but you can't be too careful!
Tom

[john62]

Easy, number 1 getting hit by a car driven by someone doing something else instead of driving, as for the others very small probability of them ever happening for someone who works for themselves, does not know anyone famous and does not enter lotteries.

John

[MrNaturalAZ]

From most probable to least, my guesses are...

Car (by a huge margin - the remainder are harder to call)
Lightning
Shark
Ebola (anywhere)
Ebola (NYC or Dallas)
Lottery
Terrorist

That ranking may be subject to geographic bias and personal habits for each individual, but as a nationwide (USA) aggregate, I think I might be close, and probably planet-wide for earth as well.

[Jim]

Car
Lightning
Shark
Lottery
Terrorist
Ebola (anywhere)
Ebola (NYC or Dallas)

[partlyscot]

roughly,
1.hit by moron on cell phone
2 lightning
3 shark (assuming swimming in potential shark waters)
4 big lottery win
5 terrorist attack
6 ebola in NYC or Dallas
7 ebola

Don't know what the odds are, but that's the most likely to least likely

[Tor]

My order came out roughly:

Cell phone idiot
...
Lightning
Shark (I think overall; round about here I believe this tops lightning, quite possibly by a notable margin)
As for the rest, terrorist is rather unlikely, and I'm more concerned about the (potential) panic surrounding ebola and government response to it than ebola itself. NYC or Dallas would be more vulnerable to ebola directly, but I'm not ready to panic.

[crfriend]

Jim hit my ordering on the matter almost perfectly. Of note are the exponentially-declining odds involved.

Why is it, then, that we're exposed to an almost continual barrage of "information" and "news" regarding ebola -- when there are vastly more important things to worry about? The cynic in me thinks that the mass media are trying to keep the public off the scent of what's really rotten.

[trainspotter48]

Carl,
You've rumbled it!!

In the UK, the other presiding topic is obesity, and how we should all be doing more sport. Apparently other forms of exercise don't count.

[Sinned]

One that I would put right at the top of the list is:

Being knocked off my bike by some moron stepping off the kerb right in front of me without even looking either way or a car driver suffering from sudden failure of vision. ( How to be an immeasurably enormous lorry-type-thing and satisfy their Darwin award! )

Others in order:
4
2
The others take your pick as living 50 miles or so from the sea in a quiet city umpteen thousand miles from NY or Dallas they are all pretty much unlikely. The lottery definitely last as I don't buy lottery tickets.

BTW Crl, Comic Relief is a charity event on this side of the pond held every other year ( next one 13th March 2015 and based on a theme of red noses hence being also called Red Nose Day ) with Children in Need ( next one 14th November 2014 ). People do inane things like dressing up in silly clothes or sponsored abseiling off buildings. You know men have even been known to wear skirts and dresses!!!! They both raise millions of pounds for charity and great fun is had by a great many people.

[dillon]

As one of the late-night comedians said "An American man has a higher probability of marrying a Kardashian than of contracting Ebola."

[Milfmog]

Jim hit my ordering on the matter almost perfectly. Of note are the exponentially-declining odds involved.

I'd almost go with that, but believe you may have significantly over estimated the risk of shark attack (I still blame the movie "Jaws" for that!). I guess it depends to a large degree who you identify the probability based on average over what population and what constitutes suffering from one of the items. For instance do we average across all humanity or just the USA? Or do we only use the population that could be exposed to an event (for instance discount those who do not go near the sea from the risk of shark attack or those who never buy lottery tickets from the potential of winning?).

If we go with the total population approach there are indisputably more lottery winners world wide each year than there are shark fatalities (that is typically less than 10 per year worldwide - see this wikipedia article I won't pretend these figures are validated and reliable but they are certainly consistent with numbers I have seen reported regularly in the scuba diving world). Even if we look at the reported shark attacks rather than the fatality numbers the headline figure only rises to around 80 per annum worldwide (of course there will be unreported attacks too).

Why is it, then, that we're exposed to an almost continual barrage of "information" and "news" regarding ebola -- when there are vastly more important things to worry about? The cynic in me thinks that the mass media are trying to keep the public off the scent of what's really rotten.

Just the mass media? Or is it that our leaders* want to keep us scared because it ids far easier to get their self-serving legislation enacted by keeping people scared so that it can be justified as a security / safety issue?

Have fun,


Ian.

* In the old day it used to be called an aristocracy - these days we have the same thing, still driven by the thirst for money and / or power, although birth is (slightly?) less important.

[skirtyscot]

Why is it, then, that we're exposed to an almost continual barrage of "information" and "news" regarding ebola -- when there are vastly more important things to worry about? The cynic in me thinks that the mass media are trying to keep the public off the scent of what's really rotten.

Because it's new! The media always seek something new to keep themselves in a job and to keep those with a short attention span (including themselves of course) amused.

Also it is a big problem in the most-affected countries, so it's newsworthy. My experience of the news in the USA is that foreign stuff gets very little coverage. So if American news is reporting on something in a region of Africa without oil or US military interests, it must be very important!

But the cynic in you is right. The really bad stuff going on all the time in our own countries is buried far from view.

As for your little list, it's far too difficult to rank them. Distorted perception of risk, selective news reporting, etc.

[crfriend]

As for your little list, it's far too difficult to rank them. Distorted perception of risk, selective news reporting, etc.

Indeed, and that was part of the thing. I went from a very real problem -- and one that is chronically unreported -- and downwards into things with such a low probability that it did become tough to "rank" them simply because they are so infrequent. The intent was not to downplay the threat that any particular disease plays in a fairly localized area (e.g. ebola) but rather to point up just how rare most of these things are -- and how the probability curve works.

In looking at the National Weather Service (USA) page a few moments ago I see that there are, on average, 51 fatalities from lighting strike in the US per year. 30,000 to 40,000 still die per annum on the US highways, and no reporting is ever done about how many of those were distraction-related (the US cell' 'phone companies spend a lot of money to keep the problem buried), but if we take a very rough guess and posit that 10% have some form of distraction involved we still have a better-than-two-orders-of-magnitude difference between getting killed on the road to getting killed by lighting.

A look at a list of shark attacks yields a number that's statistically equal to the number of lightning fatalities. (That came out of Florida. I wonder if Skip had anything to do with that before he passed.)

Big winners at the lottery are similarly rare -- and when those happen, they do get news coverage (which amounts to advertising) -- at maybe six or eight per year in the US.

Then there's the latest crisis -- ebola. Whilst the symptoms are truly horrific, and the disease has a very high mortality rate, as we learn more about it we learn how to stop its spread and limit the infection-rate. Perhaps better hygiene and sanitation in the places that it's prevalent would be a good thing, but that's not really part of the local culture. To date, one individual has died in the US from ebola; 30,000-odd die per annum in the US from influenza-related problems -- and that never gets reported. Like deaths on the highway, it's unremarkable -- unless you, or a loved one, are the one who draws the short stick.